The Deadly Jester

Brilliant review, and much needed. I suspect that much of Zizek's success in certain circles is simply due to a certain conformism -- at one point, the guy was crowned the king of intellectual cool, and whoever should dare to find fault with him knows s/he will be accused of just not having the brains to understand the maestro's ingenuity.

"The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror--especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, ...the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult." Surprise, surprise. I don't know what it is with Lefty fascination with these revolutionaries, why they're enamored of Che and the Palestinian revolutionaries. Must be some juvenile, knee-jerk reaction that wants to throw off the Man's power strictures. Lefties, get over yourselves.

People like Zizek were once liquidated by the hundreds under the very regimes which he allegedly ... hmmm...espouses? No, that isn't quite the word - spotlights rather, or, limelights so that he himself, Zizek!, in all his Zizekatude might have a proper foil from which his zany intellectualism will appear legitimate. I think we must at least be grateful to liberal democracy for making Zizek possible. But this is indeed the role of the holy fool at court, is it not? To put the regime up to a distorting mirror in order to keep it honest. This is just as Kirsch puts it: Zizkek as the court jester, which is the holy fool's western counterpart - a further dialectical stage, as Zizek might put it, on the way to our current era in which there are neither kings nor courts in which jesters may appear, but in their place stand liberal democratic monoliths upon the darkling vale of post-history. Behold! There is Zizek lampooning in the place where the jester once stood.
I learned quite early that any serious intellectual romance with Zizek is doomed to end in a melodramatically tragic denoument, either by drowning (in the flood of his verbiage), or hanging (by the noose of his illogic), or gunshot (by the impact of his hyperbole). Wedded bliss notwithstanding, the man is definitely good for more than a couple one-night stands in your brain, if only to lend it some levity.

Where is Mark Lilla when we need him most. He would have done a proper and deserved hatchet job on Žižek. Why such a pseudo-sophisticated nutcase gets so much attention is something a good psychoanalyst might be able to figure out.

Really excellent article, a brilliant unmasking of that disgusting man. Well done, Adam Kirsch & Leon.

Zizek has always struck me as someone who lives in a world of words. In a world of words the words you use need only define and defend other words.

Theoretically, of course, you can justify practically anything.

Also, Zizek's revolutionary brio glorifies the sort of violence that makes children disappear. When he speaks of tumult and terror, what happens to the kids? to the babies and the infants? Is it just too bad they have to be maimed and murdered as well for the radical cause?

On the other side, however, Zizek exposes the pain and suffering that goes on day in and day out in this global economy. Capitalism reduces just about everything to the bottom line. Those who labor for the that bottom line, however, almost never see much coming back to them. Instead, they are used and then expediently exposed of when the CFO finds someone who, in order to survive or raise a family, will work for even less.

george walton

If anyone is guilty of torturing anything, it's Zizek: the man guilty of performing countless unanesthetized lobotomies on undergraduates and English departments.

Stupid. These people are so stupid it is shocking. We don't need to "review" them anymore, we need to call them stupid. This is so tragic. What happened to our institutes of higher learning? We have a world-wide economic crisis and a whole moment of so called intellectuals on the left espousing the ideals of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao. It is dangerous and for the "lefties" to not to see this truly underscores their stupidity.

This Zizek is a type specimen of the kind of unworldly silliness that infects and degrades academia like a terminal drug habit.

Whether or not you criticize it, this kind of attention only legitimizes it. If it were not for the unfortunate fact that this kind of bilge is represented as serious thought to our young people it would not be worth our time.

Whoa... this is the worst review I have ever seen. It seems that the most common and probably most correct criticism of Zizek's work is that it is unintelligible to the public or at least to those that have not read much of his work. All through out this review there are glaring mis-characterizations and obvious ignorance to everything that stands behind his work. This review is just a seven page ad hominem rant, with hilarious statements such as: "Zizek, too, feels this longing for the Real." Seriously? Are you people joking, it is almost as if no one has even read to understand, only looked for phrase that are jarring and despicable to your ideological frameworks. Zizek gave an anecdote once, about how on his office door he has a picture of Stalin on it. It isn't there because he praises him like an idol (if you have read anything, you will realize that he despises Stalin, Lenin and Mao. What he admires in Lenin was his inital "spirit" of the Revolution, not what the Revolution was and what he ALWAYS advocates is constant responsibility for the actions of humanity - so because he is a Marxist and Stalin, Mao and Lenin mobilized behind that thought, he does not reject them and displace responsibility like some child, he instead radically accepts it), it is there to separate those he wants to talk to with those he doesn't want to talk to, essentially an ignorance and intelligent test that apparently the author nor any of the other commentators here would pass. There once was a time where I thought there was some divine hope within humanity, a hope which, interestingly enough, can be found very prominently within Zizek's work. A hope, that Zizek would say, for the masses to mobilize against the ideological machine that brainwashes us all. But, articles like this have only taught me one thing: ignorance and blind faith in ideological apparatuses is so strong that it will never be overcome. Hurray for the end of humanity, or at least the death of Hope. What a joke.

Critique Zizek's socialism and totalitarianism if you want - his "rehabilitation" of Stalin makes me sick. He undoubtedly understands himself to be providing a dialecitcal position, but it's still disgusting.
However, if you're going to criticize Zizek you better have some basic grasp of his Hegelian/Lacanian lingo/oreintation, and Kirsh clearly doesn't. Throughout this review complicated ideas like the Real, pathology, and the Virtual are thoroughly trampled. (For instance, "the Real" is not Kantian noumena - things in themselves. (just as the central message of Buddhism is not 'everyman for himself.') I'm delighted to see this review here, and I love reviews of philosophical texts from people who aren't themselves philosophers, but there is a certain responsibility that comes with this - a responsibility to understand, not just react - that Kirsch doesn't measure up to.
Zizek is a totalitarian but he's not a statist. He wants to politicize the economy for the proletariat - not for the dictators. To some, this is a distinction without a difference (or just a slippery slope) but a good book review presents the author fairly. Kirsch really just wants to swim against what he takes to be the fashionable left. The irony is that there is no philosopher more opposed to the fashionable left, more opposed to multiculturalism/historicism/relativism than Zizek.

Are you seriously accusing Zizek of antisemitism?

Despicable? Zizek would no doubt take that as a real compliment. Articles like these are for those looking for an excuse to avoid really having to think. Thought sounds to them too much like freedom...

The case of this 'deadly jester' is nothing more, or less, than another arrogant man falling victim to his own empty rhetoric. He has made a successful career out of it, but after a decade, two or three, and the coterie of eager fans hanging on one's witticisms and well placed quotes of other notable men, everybody runs out od ideas and things to say. That he can not stop is the combined matter of economics and human nature.

However, what irked me personally in this review is the endless recitations about communism that display as much depth and knowledge as a schoolboy could have on the matter of women. Zizek actually grew up in a communist country, Mr. Kirsch didn't. I grew up in the same country as Mr. Zizek, although a later generation, which means that I benefited from much more prosperous environment than the post-war era when he was born. It was a decent country. Not without corruption, bad management, demagogy..- wait, why does this sound universal? What it did have over many other countries, however, is that it didn't raise its children in the shadow of a deeply hypocritical class system.

And while I support denouncing nonsense, especially that of ideological and religious types, it is very disheartening to see it perpetually promoted in other forms everywhere you turn.

Almost fifty years ago, Walter Kaufmann identified the fundamental deficiency underlying and vitiating the basic exegetical strategy employed by Kirsch in his critical review of Zizek: Kirsch fails to recognize that "[t]he writings of Hegel and Plato [or any philosopher worthy of the title] abound in admittedly one-sided statements that are clearly meant to formulate points of view that are then shown to be inadequate and are countered by another perspective. Thus an impressive quilt quotation could be patched together to connivence gullible readers that Hegel [for instance] was--depending on the 'scholar's' plans--either emphatically for or utterly opposed to, say, 'equality.' But the understanding of Hegel [or, again, any philosopher] would be advanced ever so much more by citing one of his remarks about equality [or whatever the issue might be] in context, showing how it is a step in an argument that is designed to lead the reader to a better comprehension of equality and not to enlist his emotions either for it or against it." (From Shakespeare to Existentialism, 'The Hegel Myth and Its Method,' pg. 99)

I will give one example of how Kaufmann's observations apply to Kirsch's review. At one point, near the beginning of his review, Kirsch claims that, according to Zizek, "fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but 'in a curious inversion,' he characteristically observes, 'religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today's society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.'" Yes, these are Zizek's own words (from 'On Violence'), but in order for their meaning to be properly understood (which, of course, is an indispensable precondition for their being properly assessed; one is not in a position to affirm or deny a claim if he doesn't even know what it means in the first place), they must be situated within the context in which he wrote them.

The point Zizek was trying to make was very specific, and not at all the sort of sweeping characterization of fundamentalism that Kirsch, through his selective quotation, misrepresents it as being: Zizek's point was not that fundamentalism in general, in all respects, has become a place "from which one can deploy critical doubts about today's societies", but that it can be viewed as such in one very particular respect.

And what is that respect? Well, if you want a full understanding of it, I recommend doing what Kirsch failed to do: actually read Zizek's book (with a functioning intellect, employing basic reading comprehension skills). But, basically, it boils down to Zizek's contention that in contemporary western society, science provides people with "a refuge from uncertainties, promising--and in some measure delivering--the miracle of freedom from thought, while churches have become sanctuaries for doubt" (Zizek, quoting John Gray, pg. 81) In this respect--and only in this respect--Zizek goes on to claim that "[s]cience and religion have changed places: today, science provides the security religion once guaranteed. In a curious inversion ..." (and then the rest of the above-given quote that Kirch bastardized in his review; ibid.)

Now, one may very well disagree with the premise upon which Zizek bases this claim (i.e. the "curious inversion"); perhaps Zizek is totally wrong, or perhaps (as is more likely) he is partially right and partially wrong. But my point has nothing to do with whether Zizek is right or wrong; it's simply that if one disagrees with Zizek without (a la Kirsch) keeping this premise in mind, one is not really disagreeing with Zizek himself, but a straw man version of Zizek. Again, one isn't in a position to weigh in on the veracity of a claim if he doesn't even understand what the claim means, what it contends, in the first place.

This is just one example, which I have just selected for illustrative purposes, of how Kirsch repeatedly misreads Zizek in his review. Although the specifics change from case to case, Kirsch commits the same general mistake (really a sin against the act of reading itself) over and over again; almost every single one of his citations involves a passage that it patently torn out of its context.

Unfortunately, it would require dozens of pages for me to demonstrate this in detail; as can be seen above, it can take multiple paragraphs to rectify just one misimpression that Kirsch can create with a single sentence.

Here, we encounter a situation that bears an unfortunate resemblance to the one those on the left often find themselves facing when they debate the talking points of right wing hacks: every single one of the talking points involves a gross oversimplification of whatever the issue happens to be, and thus, in order to refute it, one must first respond by noting all of the complexities, nuances, subtleties, etc. that the hack's point has obscured. This, however, requires time, patience and effort--both on the part of the respondent and his or her audience (since its success is predicated upon their attention span extending beyond that required by a sound-bite)--whereas the hack's talking point requires none of those things. He can therefore get away with intellectual murder, since he can spout twenty talking points in the time it takes his respondent to finish taking apart a single one of them (and usually, the respondent won't even get that far, since his or her line of argument is interrupted by another one of the hack's talking points, which he or she will then need to respond to, and so on and so forth, the result of which is that he or she is unable to fully respond to any of the hack's points, thereby creating the appearance of the hack having won, since the respondent looks as if he or she was stumped by the hack's points).

Ultimately, there's not much point in engaging with such a hack, since he is not interested in a genuine debate of the issues, but in scoring ideological points in front of his audience. I suppose the same goes for Kirsch and his review--especially since the latter either resulted from A.) sheer lack of intelligence and/or inability to read properly, in which case there's no point in taking his review seriously, or B.) intentional misreading and a desire to misrepresent Zizek, in which case there is also no point in taking his review seriously. Perhaps the more interesting question to ask of Kirsch's review is: what sort of ideological points was he trying to score with his review? I suspect one of the primary points is one I often observe establishment-type ("moderate") liberal intellectuals trying to make: basically, he is trying to demonstrate his establishment/"moderate" bone fides, by saying, 'look at the terrible things this extremist, who claims the mantle of my side of the ideological spectrum, says about these issues [fundamentalism, terror, Communism, etc.], and look how adamantly I'm taking him to task, look how I'm tsk tsk-ing him at every point, look how I'm calling a spade a spade in regards to the moral shortcomings of his thinking, thereby demonstrating the moral merits of my own thinking! Look at me! Look at me! Look how 'reasonable,' 'common-sensical,' 'in the mainstream,' 'measured'--in short, 'moderate'--my positions and thinking are!'" For me, that's the subtext of a piece of writing like Kirsch's review. It has nothing to do with Zizek himself or his ideas themselves; Zizek and his ideas--or really, almost effortlessly created straw men versions of them --simply provide an easy target for Kirsch, in his attempt to "prove himself." In other words, Kirsch's review is not really about Zizek; it's about Kirsch himself.

Re: Zizek, I am convinced Alan Sokal will soon step forward and own up to his latest hoax: hiring an escapee from a Balkan lunatic asylum to pretend to be a philosopher, the better to the expose the oceanic emptiness of today's trendy academia.

I guess my criticism was too raw and rude, so I will tone it down a slight bit.

This review is terrible, apparently the author of this article has never read any of Zizek's work. Some examples...

The discussion of the "Real" at the top of Page 3 is completely wrong. He doesn't want to "seize" the Real, he doesn't "long" for the Real. Maybe you should read his book "The Passion for the Real," about how the "longing" for the Real and the attempt at "seizing" the Real has caused pretty much EVERY ATROCITY KNOWN TO MAN.

"It makes sense, then, that the popculture artifact that speaks most deeply to Zizek... is The Matrix"

This is just hilarious. A short while ago there was a book with a series of articles and essays but people making philosophical sense from the Matrix. They asked Zizek to contribute to it, so he did. His contribution amounted to how stupid the Matrix is, how it failed to come even close to something worthy of praise and pretty much just mocked it at every turn. Again, please read before you make comments.

I'm done, have fun with your ignorance.

With all due respect, Adam, it's pretty clear that you have read (or, at least, understood) very little, if any of Zizek's body of work. I will not engage in flame wars over your politics or your interpretations of and responses to Zizek's theories; I aim only to point out several instances in which you are quite simply wrong in your characterisation of his views.

The fun begins with the very first paragraph, where you discuss Zizek's article about torture from last year. You attempt to stick Zizek with the view that torture should be legalised. This is not even remotely close to what he has advocated; in fact, when he discusses Dershowitz and other "honest opponents" of torture who say that it should be done through 'legitimate' channels, he strongly opposes this notion and says that, if and when torture is justifiable, it should still never be normalised, justified by being made 'legal.' Instead, the exceptional and horrible nature of the act must be retained by keeping it banned. That is, quite literally, the exact opposite of the position you insinuated Zizek might hold. I'm not sure where you see a contradiction between the 2007 article and his other works on torture, aside from the straw man claim you arbitrarily inserted into the former about the US being a fundamentally decent country; if you read the article, it's pretty clear that he is critical of status quo culture and ideology. Your comment about "humanizing" the US also demonstrates a lack of knowledge about Zizek, who is a devout anti-humanist. You then try to stick him with a vulgar Marxist view of trying to make contradictions _worse_ in order to expose the failures of the system. You miss Zizek's actual point about torture, which is that _these failures are already apparent_ in the contemporary debate surrounding the issue.

Next comes your whopper about Al-Qaeda. The quote you provide from Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle may indeed be pretty damning.... IF IT WERE ABOUT AL-QAEDA AT ALL, as you disingenuously implied. Zizek is ACTUALLY talking on that page about a Brazilian novel. What he is endorsing is the attempt to form utopian communities outside the domain of the state.

You then proceed to mash up a bunch of short, out-of-context quotes with no explanation in order to make Zizek sound even more ridiculous. I'm not going to bother hunting down every one of those quotes and explaining why your implied connotations are inaccurate, but it should go without saying that you can't accurately represent, say, Zizeks' views on Hitler in a sentence, and that _maybe_ he has a more nuanced theoretical point behind the notion of "essential" violence than "Hitler should have killed more people." If you've read any of his works discussing Nazism you already know what I'm talking about, and if you haven't then you're an idiot for trying to evaluate the legacy of one of the most prolific contemporary theorists based on a shoddy review that makes more references to other books and articles than it does to the book it's supposed to be reviewing and only actually discusses a handful of out-of-context arguments made throughout the book to use as straw men rather than attempting to trace the argument of the book as a whole or evaluate any of the headier theoretical claims. Zizek has been plenty explicit about the nature of his endorsement of things like Stalinism, Lenin's revolution, etc.; it's not a literal reproduction of the (obviously and horrifically failed) particular content of these historical events, but some formal aspect of them, some 'grain of truth' that is worth ferreting out.

I thought you might be on to a valid point highlighting the tensions between Zizek's theories and his own daily life practices. This is indeed a salient question for any to ask; how practical is a radical ontology if its foremost advocate seems largely unable to put it into practice in a meaningful way? However, this extremely complex issue instead became a vehicle for you to poke fun at Zizek's use of pop culture analogies. You seem to view them solely as comic relief, which may be part of why you understood so little of Zizek's work; he makes actual, serious arguments with those examples. He picks familiar, accessible content to make his arguments easier to follow and because he enjoys pop culture, not as some sinister plot to mask his radicalism (which is fairly obvious in all of his works).

I gave up trying to finish your "review" after finding so many glaring mistakes on the first page. Zizek boldly makes many sweeping, controversial claims and it would not be difficult to write a piece that thoughtfully engaged him on one or more of these issues. Trying to discredit the man's tens of thousands of pages of writings with a 7-page review consisting largely of overblown rhetoric and out-of-context quotations is not helpful to you or your audience. You might as well try to summarise modern history on a napkin. 7 pages of Adam Kirsch misinterpreting Lacanian theory (do you even know who Lacan is?) is of no value to anyone.

If anyone is actually interested in knowing what Zizek does or does not believe, you should try reading some Zizek. He can be a tough read (as Adam discovered), but even if you disagree passionately with his politics, I'd wager his theoretical writings on the nature of being and subjectivity will still provide some food for thought. Anyone who takes such questions seriously should read Zizek, or another Lacanian, at some point without the hostile/ADD reading style employed by this reviewer.

Despicable ? Why bother despising someone who is merely laughable ?

Poorly done review - adding some heat (in the reductio ad hitlerum vein) but not much light on the Zizek phenomenon.

You can tell when a reviewer like Kirsch is hopelessly out of his depth when he manages to lump Freud and Marx together into a kind of Reductio ad Hiterlum hatchet job on "the academic left" in the guise of Slavoj Zizek.

The assertions about Walter Benjamin are laughable - I wonder if Kirsch has really read any of the books here, because there isn't anything resembling engagement with the ideas in them.

There is something afoot with this Zizek phenomenon when he rates a review in the New Republic but other than that there is nothing to learn from this piece.

Why would anyone waste 7 pages on this tripe?

Old Zizek has found a very nice way to make a living as he tries "tries to live the revolution most completely as a jet-setting professor at the European Graduate School, a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Institute of Sociology, and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities."

Seems like a pretty good gig to me. Tune the fool out and don't waste time criticizing him....its like responding to trolls.

:-)

Not that anyone cares what I think.....

Adam, the review was excellent.

That the European academic community actually embraces, nevermind employs, an philosphical fraud like Zizek is an embarrassment to their institutions. His need to invoke Ernst Nolte and other such racists and anti-semites in the extreme right and left fringes, is a clear sign of how pathetic Zizek really is.

Why couldn't have been born 50 years earlier so that could have enjoyed the loving embrace of Stalinism firsthand?

This is the best article I've read in The New Republic since Camille Paglia's hilarious review of the Presbyterian church's report on sexuality back in the 1990s. Many, many thanks.

The rather different review of the same book (pasted below) may be worth considering before rendering such extreme conclusions about Zizek's works. Below, Terry Eagleton on "In Defense of Lost Causes":

"The self-consciously outrageous case the book has to argue is that there is a “redemptive” moment to be plucked from such failed revolutionary ventures as Jacobinism, Leninism, Stalinism and Maoism. Žižek is by no means a champion of political terror: the Mao he offers us here, for example, is the mass murderer who mused that “half of China may have to die” in the Great Leap Forward, and who remarked that though a nuclear war might blow a hole in the planet, it would leave the cosmos largely untouched. His aim is not to justify such demented views, but to make things harder for the typical liberal middle-class dismissal of them. In pursuing this goal, the book offers us a wealth of political and philosophical insight; but it is not at all clear that it validates its central thesis."

Hmmm. Without meaning to be too "dialectical", it is worth acknowledging where Zizek _does_ have a point. The malaise he obviously appeals to -- some anti-liberal, proto-totalitarian sentiment -- must be real, or he wouldn't be so popular.

I don't know how to resolve the tension/dialectic/whatever between the local, constrained, conservative, restrained, continuous, etc. on the one hand, and the universal, radical, ruptured, total, etc. on the other. As a reformed protestant, I must admit that sometimes, I find the radical nature of Christianity disturbing (compared with, say, Judaism or even Catholicism).

But I don't think the standard anti-totalitarian response to Zizek is quite enough. Somehow, we have to acknowledge the evil of revolution without simply brushing aside the desire/need for overarching meanings worth fighting for, or perhaps more importantly, dying for. Maybe the messianic impulse should be confined to and fulfilled by the religious sphere, and we shouldn't hope for redemption through politics. But that seems to be cheapen both simultaneously.

Hopefully some political/philosophical genius will be able to come up with a good resolution, or already has.

Excellent.
I would like to translate and publish this article in my own language. But how can I get in touch with the author? intellectusagens@gmail.com

The notion that many young intellectuals dedicate today their undergraduate, graduate, and post graduate years to an analysis of an inconsequential buffoon is surely present in the back of their excellent minds. That they might also be the promoters of a dangerous joker is only now beginning to become clear. The fact that Zizek is a totalitarian elephant in a liberal china store was also quite obvious for a while. But that he may also be a repressed anti-semitic patient tended by a horde of Jewish academicians around the globe is a part of Kirsch’s achievement (despite of his occasional self-righteous and politically-correct tone).

Perhaps we should consider the context a bit? In the name of liberal democracy, this same journal enthusiastically supported the invasion of Irak. The review's author does not seem to be aware of facts as these, or rather he ignores the context of his own review. Thrashing Zizek seems a bit easy if you take the moral high ground from the beginning. But nowadays, american liberal democracy seems to be quite a deadly cause too. Perhaps Zizek does well in taking some critical distance from liberal democracy, risking fury as expressed by this review in the process?

This is a well-written piece, and something like this had to be written. It makes a good, single-minded, polemical case for taking seriously the distasteful elements of Zizek's writings. The virtue of something like this is that many fans of Zizek aren't quite as radical as he is. Many people want the sophisticated ideological critique (not to mention the entertainment) without being willing to affirm the positive alternative as unashamedly (shamelessly??) as he does. Or without being willing to decide whether he should be taken seriously after all. So I will be on the lookout for responses to this piece and I hope that some of them take it as seriously as Kirsch takes Zizek.

However, it would be very unfortunate if this serves as the final word for some people on Zizek. What Kirsch never ever raises (perversely) is whether there is anything at all to the psychoanalytic critique of ideology and the particular critique of capitalism. Just as fans of Zizek need to be pressed on whether the sophisticated critique leads so obviously to Zizek's normative alternatives, people frustrated by Zizek's terminology or repulsed by his indecency can't point to those features of his thought in response to the substantive aspects of his psychoanalytic critique of capitalism and popular culture.

The fact is that Zizek is (if repetitive and self-indulgent) one of the few genuinely interesting people writing these days and to reduce his project to unadulterated Stalinism, academic fascism and crypto-anti-Semitism. It seems like the point here in this piece is not to raise valid claims against Zizek and the Zizekians or to open a new chapter in the debate, but rather to close the book entirely, to give people cover for dismissing outright a very creative thinker. In this regard, this piece reminds me of the 2007 Paul Berman "expose" of Tariq Ramadan in TNR: forget the books, don't read the writings, what we have here is a antiliberal, quasi-fascist anti-Semite - case closed.

It's too bad, for Kirsch is a good writer and could have written a better piece. Alas, I suspect he was writing not so much for people that may have actually read Zizek (or been tempted to) but to an annoyed and perturbed non-intellectual audience.

I find it ironic that this article brings to mind the request made in a prayer repeated in my Lutheran church something along the lines of "Forgive us for sins which committed by the things that we have done and for those committed by the things that we have left undone."

One can easily see mote in the eyes of the Communists and Nazis and miss the logs in our own eyes. I haver read endless essays on poverty in Cuba being the result of Communism. Even the devastation of Hurricanes have been blamed on shoddy Communist building techniques.

But what of Haiti just a few miles away. No country represents the American project in South America more than Haiti. For close to two hundred years America has repeatedly, invaded occupied, defended and removed leaders in this nation. There is not an inch or a moment of Haiti that doesn't carry the mark of America. It is in Haiti where we see thousands of children starving and where tens of thousands are permanently retarded from malnutrition.

A person who has never experienced poverty may really believe that there is nothing worse than death. But there truly is. The people in New Orleans weren't just poor at the moment Katrina hit. These are people who have been poor for generations. People who never saw a day without poverty and fear since their ancestors where taken from Africa.

When Zizek talks about cruelty of the law I know what he is talking about. When I hear conservative Christians talk about taxes as being a form of theft and aid to the poor as being immoral, I know they are damning millions to the endless slavery of poverty.

Living in New Orleans one could see the utter ridiculousness of Bill Cosby like calls to personal responsibility. There were whole neighborhoods in New Orleans where one could walk to exhaustion without seeing a place of gainful employment. Places where the police never came when called, places where murders where not investigated, bullets flew with random regularity and bodies rotted in streets unmourned and unmoved. To blame the poor residents of this earthly hell for not being able to claw their way out is its own kind of holocaust.

I remember talking to a surgeon who had worked in Africa in fifties and sixties. He told me he had treated thousands upon thousands of people who he now knew had AIDS. But, because people were dying all the time of malnutrition an untold unknown diseases no one thought about the implications of these people dying.

Imagine what thirty more years of research could have done, how many millions of lives could have been saved. The Utopians of turn of the century were willing to kill millions for Utopia. But we are willing to allow millions to live in earthly hell for generations, and the left Behind amongst are willing to damn the to an eternity in hell thereafter. How many would you be willing to kill to end the New Orleans and Haitis of the world? Having lived in New Orleans, I would have to say a lot- a whole lot.

I find it ironic that this article brings to mind the request made in a prayer repeated in my Lutheran church something along the lines of "Forgive us for sins which committed by the things that we have done and for those committed by the things that we have left undone."

One can easily see mote in the eyes of the Communists and Nazis and miss the logs in our own eyes. I haver read endless essays on poverty in Cuba being the result of Communism. Even the devastation of Hurricanes have been blamed on shoddy Communist building techniques.

But what of Haiti just a few miles away. No country represents the American project in South America more than Haiti. For close to two hundred years America has repeatedly, invaded occupied, defended and removed leaders in this nation. There is not an inch or a moment of Haiti that doesn't carry the mark of America. It is in Haiti where we see thousands of children starving and where tens of thousands are permanently retarded from malnutrition.

A person who has never experienced poverty may really believe that there is nothing worse than death. But there truly is. The people in New Orleans weren't just poor at the moment Katrina hit. These are people who have been poor for generations. People who never saw a day without poverty and fear since their ancestors where taken from Africa.

When Zizek talks about cruelty of the law I know what he is talking about. When I hear conservative Christians talk about taxes as being a form of theft and aid to the poor as being immoral, I know they are damning millions to the endless slavery of poverty.

Living in New Orleans one could see the utter ridiculousness of Bill Cosby like calls to personal responsibility. There were whole neighborhoods in New Orleans where one could walk to exhaustion without seeing a place of gainful employment. Places where the police never came when called, places where murders where not investigated, bullets flew with random regularity and bodies rotted in streets unmourned and unmoved. To blame the poor residents of this earthly hell for not being able to claw their way out is its own kind of holocaust.

I remember talking to a surgeon who had worked in Africa in fifties and sixties. He told me he had treated thousands upon thousands of people who he now knew had AIDS. But, because people were dying all the time of malnutrition an untold unknown diseases no one thought about the implications of these people dying.

Imagine what thirty more years of research could have done, how many millions of lives could have been saved. The Utopians of turn of the century were willing to kill millions for Utopia. But we are willing to allow millions to live in earthly hell for generations, and the Left Behind amongst are willing to damn the to an eternity in hell thereafter.

It seems to me that one finally has to make a point and be willing to be criticized for it instead of retreating into whatever rhetorical device happens to be most convenient at the moment. I've read bits and pieces in articles about Zizek and I don't know that I will ever make the time to read him because life is too serious to me to spend the time it would take to master someone whose goal in life seems to be always remaining plastic and unserious.

finally--i offered similar but not nearly as detailed criticism in an essay i wrote called "slow writing" which appeared on INSIDE HIGHER EDUCATION and will also appear in the JOURNAL OF SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING.
very helpful
why is it that the most totalitarian and authoritarian critics of america appeal so strongly to americans?
lindsay waters

This is a rhetorically brilliant invective, no doubt about that. But also, crucially, a genuine mis-reading of Zizek at so many junctures; or deliberately so. The latter seems to be the likelier, particularly in the passage insinuating his oh-so-thinly-veiled anti-simitic tendencies. The author disavows Zizek's calls for singularity and ruthlessness of affirmative reason and action, the reversal of what exposes the author claimed here, in genuine bad taste. It seems that Zizek's intellectual project has upset the right(ies) again.

Thanks for this article. Zizek's reliance on other peoples thoughts to frame his lack of thought is numbing, and I'm willing to listen long, but I know that I fundamentally disagree. I think of him as a Revolutionary Descartes, all are expendable and a revolution is in order for his centralized view to continue because no one exists but him.
Wouldn't it all be tragic if there really were other people though?

At last! A non-academic critique of Zizek that does not resort to accusing him of obscurantism or obfuscation but directly engages his work.

I'll have to check the sources you quote from, but I am very chilled by your analysis.

Boring. Seriously, I'm bored.

For all your thousands of words, this is still "sound-byte" journalism. You seem content to pick provocative sentences, even clauses, of a serious philosopher's work and then ridicule them as patently absurd. Sure Zizek's a bomb-thrower... but if you want to critique him, you ought to actually wrestle with the substance of his work.

This just comes off as more of the same, very juvenile journalism that TNR seems to be championing lately. I know the kids don't work for much...

Disappointing. I'm not a fan of Zizek, but was hoping for a more substantial critique than 7 pages of "Zizek means the shocking things he says, and these shocking things are so obviously wrong!" And it's stunning and pathetic that the reviewer resorts to charges of anti-semitism. Zizek is a problem, but this approach isn't helping.

God Forbid he should be critical of torture....and Jews! Speaking of which, which civilization are we clashing with anyway, Mr. Podhoretz?

However despicable Mr. Kirsch may find Mr. Zizek, at least Mr. Zizek carefully footnotes the references in his texts so that one may verify whether or not they correspond with the truth. Can the New Republic provide us with a proper citation for this In Defense of Violence that Mr. Kirsch refers to? Thanks.

Wow. Nice misreading, willful or otherwise, of Zizek's comments on Jews. Wow. Breathtaking.

As the proud holder of a bachelor's degree in English, I have to marvel at some of the comments on here. Hello, English degree? How the hell are you supposed to destroy democracy and lead the world to ruin with an English degree? Now, I predate post-modernism and French intellectual silliness, but still. From where I'm sitting, it's doctrinaire free-market capitalist hacks in economics departments across the land who have landed most of the cultural kill-shots over the last three decades. And Zizek? When he can write a coherent paragraph, then I might be willing to take him seriously. Until such a time, it's an impossible undertaking.

Thanks very much for this review of Zizek's writing. Having been digging through his ouvre, along with several other modern philosophers, I've become convinced that, while Zizek believes he is conducting a necessary intervention in the face of ascendant Capitalism, he is actually reverting to a critique of society that would have been appropriate to the divine right of kings (just as Lenin and Mao saw themselves as historically delivered to a time and place they must act bloodily), especially philosopher kings, who have the intellectual insight to see the real truth to which the masses are blind. That is his most anti-democratic argument and it is the most troubling element of his philosophy, which seems to reflect the temperament of late Continental philosophy on the whole, despite all the outcry among philosophers against Zizek.

Zizek's revolution could come at any price, as he repeatedly explains, which this article demonstrates is a horrible range of potential outcomes for society, because he feels it must come, as Robespierre felt he was destined to lead the cleansing of France in 1793. Messianic writers are always trouble, and it is clear that, sometimes, Zizek sees himself as Benjamin's angel, mangled though that metaphor may be. He wants to act.

Nevertheless, I value Zizek, because he conducts this ongoing attack. He keeps asking Capitalism to interrogate itself, though the degree of his outlandishness makes the value of his questions ever-diminishing in the face of the desire or need for celebrity in the society he critiques. A few less books per year and a discipline of conducting thorough self-critique rather than simply exploring everything that comes to mind through published writing would be good for Zizek and good for everyone else. The pace of his output makes critical responses difficult. The fact Zizek makes of himself a moving target creates a barrier to critique that would be useful for liberals and conservatives alike, who can agree that the more vile elements of Zizek's arguments are wrong, wrong-headed or simply personal flourishes that denote nothing about the philosophical issues raised by ascendant Capitalism.

A bitter academic, resentful of being marginalized by the currents of history, tries to create an audience for himself through sensationalism and by rehabilitating the most revolting and discredited ideas in human history. He gussies up his own native antisemitism in fancy, pseudointellectual garb, but guarantees himself the built-in audience antisemites who will always exist, in greater or lesser numbers.

And he falls for the juvenile but dangerous romanticism of violence and purity. What a simple, simple mind, so desirous of the infantile gratification of publicity.

This article needed to be written; but its author is so busy running through zizek's books for fascist or antisemitic soundbytes that he completely fails to engage the philosopher's ideas seriously. Not to mention a two paragraph interpretation of Walter Benjamin that frames him as an enlightenment progressivist? Are you serious? Have you ever read his work? There is a much more interesting phenomenon left unexplored in these 7 pages of neoliberal invective: why is it that this anti-postmodern/liberal/relativist strain of critique is so captivating to the intellectual left? A missed opportunity.

Posted by Thomas
"Boring. Seriously, I'm bored."

You are a bore, thomas. You wrestle with the Jew haters work.

Have fun.

Posted by Will Roberts
"Are you seriously accusing Zizek of antisemitism?"

Yes?

Posted by Goldstein
"God Forbid he should be critical of torture....and Jews! Speaking of which, which civilization are we clashing with anyway, Mr. Podhoretz?"

No, Goldstein's civilization. With Zizek as comandant all the Goldsteins will vanish.

"Can the New Republic provide us with a proper citation for this In Defense of Violence that Mr. Kirsch refers to? Thanks." Luther Blissett

No Luther get a copy and read it for yourself, cheapskate.