Though Cowards Flinch

I quite enjoyed watching Slavoj Zizek’s appearance on BBC Hardtalk, though I must confess I found the interviewer a little superficial, as well as occasionally being incapable of properly following up his own questions. Such as, in the video below (part 1 of 3), the interviewer quotes back to Zizek a statement from one of his books, about how the worst Stalinist repression was better than the best liberal democracy. Yet when Zizek goes off on a tangent about how ‘mysterious’ Stalinism is, compared to the brutality of fascism, the interviewer doesn’t pull him back.

On superficiality, in part 2 (0.34) the interviewer attempts to argue that far from demonstrating the weakness of the liberal-democratic-capitalist system, the recent catastrophes of the global War on Terror and the financial meltdown prove its resilience. This is of course nonsense, because in truth neither present a real challenge to that system.

The first ‘challenge’ is in fact symptomatic of the lack of a real challenge to the system. Terrorism is a result of impotent rage, of the inability to change whatever it is one opposes, rather than being a vibrant social movement with the ability to affect the life-processes of capitalism. The second ‘challenge’ is part of the capitalist economic cycle and will (probably, in the current context) result in the further consolidation rather than overthrow of ruling class power.

Overall, I thought the interview was enjoyable though. I liked that the interviewer was prepared to challenge the Euro-centrism of Zizek’s worldview. It is probably a fair point that in India or in China, the last decade has not been spent in obsession with the War on Terror, from the point of view of the average citizen. And Zizek hits back with excellent answers: the war on terror has direct relevance outside of newspaper scoops and the protest movement. In areas outside of the Arab world, it directly results in death and poverty.

Where Zizek goes a bit off is the analysis he iterates in First as Tragedy: the problems liable to challenge the capitalist world order are global environmental crisis or the harvesting of human bio-data etc. I think a lot of this is pretty extreme, and ignores more basic social forces at work in the global economy – such as the forced integration of whatever redoubts of ‘embedded liberalism’ are left into the sphere of American finance capital, and the effect this is having on working people in the relevant areas, and the forms of resistance being generated.

I’ve been meaning to do a review of First as Tragedy, so I’ll come back to all that in a future post. In the meantime, I enjoyed the interviewer bringing up Norman Geras’ objection to what Zizek said and though Zizek should have pasted this approach to the wall for all he was worth. In absence of that, you’ll have to settle for my take on the Geras criticisms. Or you could just watch part 3 of the interview instead.