First they called me a joker, now I am a dangerous thinker

I happen to think that Zizek is at least interesting, if rarely right, on many topics, but on Buddhism he’s just incoherent (at best). What was it that somebody said about Derrida – “not even wrong.” On p.27 of”The Monstrosity of Christ” (at least he gets credit for provocative titles!) he mentions the New Age idea that Zen Buddhism cuts straight to the core of spiritual experience, while bypassing any “institutional and dogmatic mediations.” And then, with no explanation whatsoever , we get “The reason for this shift of accent from religious institution to the intimacy of spiritual experience is that such a meditation is the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism.”

At which point, trying very hard to be civil, I respond WTF?!

I suppose it could be argued that the unstated warrant for this rather surprising claim is in the quote that JH cites above, but I don’t think that this can be what he means by “the intimacy of spiritual experience.”

He also argues “Buddhism bad” in either Parallax View or Defense of Lost Causes”, largely rehashing arguments that he’d made earlier in (I think) “On Belief”. In those texts, though, I don’t recall him linking Buddhism to Capitalism, but rather making the “Zen doesn’t provide any moral basis for rejecting atrocities” claim. (Which may be true – I’m not claiming expertise here – but doesn’t seem to lead to any basis for preferring Xtianity or Islam over Zen, as both have frequently been read as actually providing a moral ground for atrocities.)

I’m not sure many people in the west can actually comprehend eastern religions, they just fain to do so. Zizek is not saying anything about Buddhism itself, he is only speaking about how it is experienced in the west. I’m not sure he is wrong on that one. A great discussion on the problems of resolving eastern and western philosophies, for people from the west, with a great quote from Jung (on eastern religion in the west): http://www.pandalous.com/topic/resolving_eastern_and

Zizek breaks violence into objective and subjective categories. So Hitler was subjectively violent (violence against persons) where Gandhi was objectively violent because he actually changed political institutions.

Zen is “the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism” because it advocates a detachment from the reality of what you are doing. So that during the day you bankrupt the global financial world and destroy the lives of thousands and then you can go home and meditate yourself free of all guilt.

Zizek “doesn’t seem to lead to any basis for preferring Xtianity or Islam over Zen, as both have frequently been read as actually providing a moral ground for atrocities”

He has referenced Torquemada as a western example of the same idea here. Mainly that in both the East and the West members of the warrior class could engage in the highest spiritual and cultural expressions and then turn around and torture and butcher by the hundreds. Zizek’s point is that their spirituality was exactly what allowed them to keep their psyche intact after a hard day of hacking peasants into little bits.

Today’s multinational corporate CEO is our modern Zen warrior.

Today’s multinational corporate CEO is our modern Zen warrior.

It’s a bit strange to claim that CEOs need Zen to do whatever they do, when the far majority of CEOs does not actually use Zen in any way.

Yeah, Zizek’s got weird beliefs about violence. It is, as the peasant said to the king, about the violence inherent in the system.

(as far as i can tell Zizek is very clever but not very useful.)

“Yeah, Zizek’s got weird beliefs about violence. ”

No he hasn’t. He just likes to use the word sometimes in a completely idiosynchratic way to bait opponents. He is a clown, a troll.

‘Though Gandhi didn’t support killing, his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer.’

For what it’s worth, that is not, in actual fact,true.

Actually, Hitler often said he intended to leave India to the British, at least when he was in a mood to talk about talks. Arguably, his actual policies with regard to France and its empire suggest he might even have done so.

It’s not trolling if you’ve got tenure.

‘Like the rest of the Congress leadership, Gandhi knew that attendance at the London conference would be political suicide. Congressmen would be forced to follow an agenda set by the British and they were certain to return home with far less than they demanded. Moreover, and this galled, Congress would have to sit alongside other ‘representatives’ of India, most notably the princes. They were forthrightly denounced by Gandhi as ‘pawns’ created and used by the British.” (Lawrence James p. 524).’

‘It’s not trolling if you’ve got tenure.’

Translated into Latin, this should probably be the official motto of all Universities.

Yeah, the link I gave has more along the same lines.
Including scepticism about professed British concern for the untouchables – a big bone of contention with the high-caste representatives of the Congress.
Zizek claims a similar concern in the interview.

As far as the negotiations go, it boils down to two things. Was Labour sincere in its professed sympathy with the oppressed classes? Was it capable of delivering its end of any bargain?
Ramsay MacDonald isn’t a great source of reassurance on either question.
Kind of like Ehud Barak, when you come to think of it.

(As far as I understand SZ’s dialectic, it seems equivalent in logic to the following proposition: “This orange is really orange. It is more of a vegetable than this carrot.”)

Well, I am willing to read more than a few lines by Chomsky, but I would never read more than a snippet of SZ. I read his stuff like I read advertisements.

@noen

‘Zen is “the ideological form that best fits today’s global capitalism” because it advocates a detachment from the reality of what you are doing. ‘

ummmm. no it doesn’t. the exact opposite, in fact. zen buddhism – there is no such thing as ‘zen’ – advocates a total immersion in what you’re doing, while at the same time a detachment from using it as a way of burnishing your self-image. which pretty much makes it utterly anti-capitalist, if you accept that one of the engines underlying the captalist programme is everyone’s belief that you are enobled by material accomplishment and accumulation, much like traditional fetish objects are supposed to bestow qualities on you.

the notional separation of ‘zen’ (or ‘meditative accomplishment shorn of any moral context) from ‘buddhism’ is one that was flighted by d.t. suzuki and others in the 1930’s in japan. it served to allow them to argue for japanese exceptionalism and imperial ambition. in this, zizek is correct, but he’s only correct because he’s resting his famous laurels squarely on brian victoria’s work in Zen At War. unfortunately, he’s only resting his ass on it, and that’s obviously been a poor way for him to absorb brian victoria’s work, which covers the aftermath of those attempts and the full re-integration of zen/chan/dhyana into the buddhist moral framework. that framework invalidates “…detachment from the reality of what you are doing” and “…destroy(ing) the lives of thousands and then (going hiome to) meditate yourself free of all guilt.”

if zizek had done any more than browse the new age section of local bookstore, he’d know stuff like this, but he’s a pop-star, so knowing shit isn’t necessary. he’d also know that the american fascination with zen (and with theravada buddhism, which arguably went further than zen) started with the notion of meditation as technique, but avoided the mistake of believing the technique was context-free. both streams of western buddhist practice flowing from these sources have specifically embedded themselves in the moral framework of buddhism.

for some reason people seem to be fascinated by his capacity for juxtaposition, as though juggling cliches and bored mis-assessments – which is all he ever does – were some kind of intellectual event. but honestly, juggling cliches is pretty low-rent way to make a living, as titillating as the article titles it generates are.

d

Zizek is the Houellebecq of the academy.

In the West, Buddhism is the new predominant ideology.

Zizek has an important point here. I have often felt sympathy for the Christians here in America, imagining how they must feel in a culture so saturated in Buddhism. Especially, think of how sad their children must feel on Losar, when the dakinis come to all the other houses to deliver treats. Or, for adults, the inconvenience when work stops for the solemnities of Bodhi Day, and their need to tolerate the ubiquitous images of mythical characters like Avalokiteshvara on his supposed birthday.

Thanks to Daelm ; your comment is what I was hoping to learn from this thread – exactly where SZ’s analysis of Buddhism falls short. I’m reminded of Sarah Kay’s comment on his early forays into Christian theology – something along the lines of “Zizek writes on theology without showing any signs of having read any.”

But – a qualified defense of SZ: I’ve seen High School students become attracted to the larger world of “theory” through Zizek. You don’t have to buy the totality of his edifice to see that he’s on to something with his analyses of (eg) Capitalism and Ideology. This can be a scales-falling-from-the-eyes experience for teens, and can allow the teacher/mentor to lead them to the other theorists that make similar points in more rigorous ways. (And before anyone points out that I’m clearly talking about smarter-than-the average -bear students, I’ll absolutely concede that point.)

And lastly, even given that he’s wrong in a number of very important ways about Zen Buddhism, I’ll contend that there is some value (again, especially for younger students) in at lest broaching the idea that a meditative process can have geo-political implications.

One thing that was always weird to me about Zizek is that whenever he starts talking about Asian religion, he starts spewing the exact same shit that colonialist scholars did in the 19th century – “Hinduism” and “Buddhism” lack ethics and are entirely world-denying. You see similar problems in his writings on Paul with the characterization of Judaism – and Badiou is even worse on this.

There may be an underlying philosophical point that has some sort of merit, but for a religion scholar reading Zizek on anything but Christianity is like travelling a century back in time. (Zizek’s semi-Christian theology is reasonably interesting.)

(On Zizek and Judaism, he returns to the same crap about Judaism as a “legalistic” religion that needs a notion of the transcendent, which he links to “the event” of the crucifixion. Then he draws an equation between Greco-Roman religion and Hinduism. It’d be embarrassing if it weren’t so pernicious.)

Dog pile, meet circle jerk.

Not a defense exactly, but one of the comments from the Edit Room:

I read this interview on Sunday and I am sorry to report that the journalist has taken some serious liberties with Zizek’s responses. I can say this because I was present for the interview. While I understand the constraints of newspaper journalism and their problems with space, the journalist has here presented Zizek’s answers in such a way that they seem arbitrary and silly. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but I want to clarify that this was not the case. Zizek, though controversial and provocative, gave a detailed response to each question, explaining all his comments, contextualizing them. More importantly, if memory serves me right, the answer about Gandhi and Hitler has been completely misquoted. Zizek said, (at more than one event in New Delhi) the exact opposite of what this report has printed. He DID NOT say “his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here,” he in fact said the opposite, that the paradigm shift that Gandhi wanted required an inherent violence. I don’t agree with what Zizek said, but in any case, it was not what has been reported. I am deeply disappointed with the way this interview has been manipulated and printed.

http://blogs.widescreenjournal.org/?p=1757

I didn’t realize it, but the above is actually from Kuhu Tanvir, one of the editors of the WSJ (and not just some “commenter”).

If Zizek was worth engaging with, we would see engagement with his ideas and what he says, instead of the blanket dismissal which is what we do see. In fifty years he will be forgotten.

At best, he shows that academics, too, can be amusing, who talk an awful lot like your uncle who smoked a little too much back in the day. (Any guesses about what he’s referring to with “violence that is done repeatedly”?)

I might guess that, among the people who don’t see anything wrong with getting your knowledge about Buddhism from the New Age shelf at the airport bookshop, he is assumed to be satirizing others who “probably” think Christianity really is a monstrosity. How could a civilized nation like France give tenure to someone who really thought that. No, there’s nothing wrong with “us,” it’s all because of infection from Buddhism usw.

I wasn’t defending him Alex, I was just giving my understanding as best I could. I’m just a lay person trying to understand a few things and sort of kinda sometimes agree with Zizek when I imagine that I understand him. Zizek is my gateway drug.

But I stand by what I originally said. Zizek’s conception of violence is taken from Walter Benjamin. Here is Zizek’s reply to this question:

Here is how my text goes on: ‘Nazism was not radical enough, it did not dare to disturb the basic structure of the modern capitalist social space (which is why it had to invent and focus on destroying an external enemy, Jews). This is why one should oppose the fascination with Hitler according to which Hitler was, of course, a bad guy, responsible for the death of millions–but he definitely had balls, he pursued with iron will what he wanted. … This point is not only ethically repulsive, but simply wrong: no, Hitler did not ‘have the balls’ to really change things; he did not really act, all his actions were fundamentally reactions, i.e., he acted so that nothing would really change, he stages a big spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order could survive.’

In this precise sense of violence, Gandhi was more violent than Hitler: Gandhi’s movement effectively endeavored to interrupt the basic functioning of the British colonial state.”
—
About Zen
“ummmm. no it doesn’t. the exact opposite, in fact. zen buddhism – there is no such thing as ‘zen’ – advocates a total immersion in what you’re doing, while at the same time a detachment from using it as a way of burnishing your self-image.”

That may be the correct Buddhist dogma, I don’t know, but I doubt that most people’s casual understanding is so deep. For many people outward forms of religiosity can serve as an emotional buffer between what you imagine you are doing, good works, versus what you are actually doing, keeping the machine well greased.

Not a defense exactly, but from Kuhu Tanvir:

“I read this interview on Sunday and I am sorry to report that the journalist has taken some serious liberties with Zizek’s responses. I can say this because I was present for the interview. While I understand the constraints of newspaper journalism and their problems with space, the journalist has here presented Zizek’s answers in such a way that they seem arbitrary and silly. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but I want to clarify that this was not the case. Zizek, though controversial and provocative, gave a detailed response to each question, explaining all his comments, contextualizing them. More importantly, if memory serves me right, the answer about Gandhi and Hitler has been completely misquoted. Zizek said, (at more than one event in New Delhi) the exact opposite of what this report has printed. He DID NOT say “his actions helped the British imperialists to stay in India longer. This is something Hitler never wanted. Gandhi didn’t do anything to stop the way the British empire functioned here,” he in fact said the opposite, that the paradigm shift that Gandhi wanted required an inherent violence. I don’t agree with what Zizek said, but in any case, it was not what has been reported. I am deeply disappointed with the way this interview has been manipulated and printed.”

http://blogs.widescreenjournal.org/?p=1757

Maybe here’s a little of the defense that Alex was asking for…

Bianca Steele states that we see blanket dismissal of Zizek’s ideas. That’s certainly true in the context of this thread; I don’t think there’s much disagreement that, as (inter alia) DivGuy and daelm have pointed out, Zizek is badly out to lunch on Buddhism.

But the engagement with Zizek’s ideas takes place in other areas of his corpus. Sarah Kay, Jodi Dean, and Adrian Johnston have all written books on Zizek which engage sympathetically, but by no means uncritically, with what I’ll contend are the important ideas in his work. I realize that a (somewhat) Lacanian critique of Capitalism doesn’t originate with Zizek (and certainly requires denying Chomsky’s claim that Lacan is nothing more than a charlatan), but it does seem to me to be useful. (Useful, in this instance meaning “having explicative power.” Similarly, I find myself sufficiently unsettled by his claim that whining about the evils of capitalism is what we do in order to avoid taking responsibility for actually confronting it, to think that that argument might have something to it.

If we were to judge every thinker by his/her weakest work, the pantheon would get pretty bare pretty fast. (The next question at this point, of course, is whether the weakest/worst work can be jettisoned from the corpus or (see Heidegger, Martin) whether it’s an intrinsic part of the whole (Zizek on Heidegger in Lost Causes, was, I thought, rather good, by the way), and it seems to me that everything that Zizek says on Buddhism can be safely ignored without creating tension with his other work.

“our definition of violence inherently supports the status quo.”

And if the status quo demands a certain level of both subjective and institutional violence would supporting that also be a kind of violence?

The truth value of whether or not Gandhi did prolong the Empire isn’t really what Zizek is referring to. His comment goes to Gandhi’s intent, which was to interrupt the smooth functioning of the British empire. Gandhi acted where Hitler merely reacted. Seems pretty straight forward to me.

The claim that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler because he was proposing a radical change in the social structure makes sense in terms of Zizek’s philosophy.

Not on Earth though.

Not on Earth though.

This depends entirely on whether one is willing to allow Zizek his peculiar definition of the term “violence” (or at least the “additional” and non-standard definition of that term). I believe that Zizek defends this usage (indirectly and implicitly) by arguing that his writing benefits from an excessive or provocative register because this makes his formulations harder to co-opt (I’m trying to turn up an exact quotation on this and failing). In that sense, at least, he is a troll or a self-publicist or a jester or whatever. But, simultaneously, Zizek is clearly on to something: what he says about Hitler (quoted @ 44) is really on the money, I think. Even if it is basically cultural criticism rather than political philosophy.

colonialist jingoisms like “all that is solid melts into air”

? That’s a quote from Karl Marx!

“from Kant & Hegel to Deleuze & Critchley use “Buddhism” as a kind of shorthand for some idiosyncratic Western perspective ”

Kant and Hegel see Buddhism as Western? That would be…odd.

I thought Zizek must be entirely joking in this article because what he says *is* funny. It is absurdly wrong and so over the top–most dangerous philosopher in the West! Gunfight at the OK corral! But now that I read these comments I am wondering if it is possible for him to make a joke at this point in his career.

If this thread has achieved nothing else, it has at least planted the seed for a new internet ‘phrase’:

Puppy Kicking.

Which hopefully will replace the tiresome ‘to Fisk’. At least amongst puppy kickers. Of which I am proud to be one, in this particular context, at least.

#60: indeed, I find myself wanting to say “good lord, man, perhaps you are right to say that Zizek has a woefully inadequate conception of Buddhism based on nothing more than a few magazine articles, never having consulted a primary source before making his slipshod arguments against a simulacrum of his own devising. But hell, man, have you looked at your own criticisms of Zizek!“

@58 You’re right, Kant’s not good example (even if he a Chinaman from Koeningsburg).

@59 Not as Western in origin, but as satisfying the description of some term in their own philosophical framework (being-within-self in the pursuit of nothingness as end, maybe).

Zizek breaks violence into objective and subjective categories. So Hitler was subjectively violent (violence against persons) where Gandhi was objectively violent because he actually changed political institutions.

Wait, so Hitler didn’t change any political institutions?

And that’s the oddest use of “subjective” and “objective” I’ve ever seen. Since it’s Zizek who’s made up a new definition of “violent”, I would’ve said the “subjective”/”objective” distinctions should be the other way round – there was nothing “subjective” about the violence of the Holocaust.

Zizek likens himself to a cliche. He’s a gadfly. No need to cite Plato’s Apology of Socrates. It sounds good for the hoi polloi. Next we’ll hear that he suffers unfair and unjust ridicule or critique, but that it is better to be a Socrates unsatisfied than a pig satisfied.

Zizek is amusing, says many profound things, points to all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, and is all around likable–but for what? Leninism, Stalinism, etc. One wonders if his Lacanian joke in the mirror isn’t inspired by the perverse reflection of himself, but rather by the lines of coke waiting to be snorted.

If Zizek wants to defend his advocacy of violence on Heideggerian grounds (a dubious project to begin with), he may as well begin to deal with Heidegger himself. He won’t do this. Why? His structuralist Lacanism melded with Marx but somehow different from Althusser is strangely more gentlemanly (Zizek may call it scientific) than that. Zizek is all pyrotechnics (and god bless him for it), but he merely becomes a leftist version of Bellow’s Ravelstein as a consequence.

Zizek is what happens when a decent education is mixed with a total disregard for clarity of thought or purpose; and possibly large quantities of dope. He’s more a sort of psychedelic taxonomist, than a philosopher. His “real”, and it’s categories, are a perfect example of this.

“In defence of petty swipes: this is a comment thread. Personally I treat it as one step above a bar conversation. I try to be polite, but if I have to read the literature before I contribute, well count me out.”

I agree entirely. While I am here to learn, part of what I’m learning is to express myself in a clear, and hopefully useful, manner. That would be difficult in a climate of constant worry over whose bailiwick I’m trespassing into.

“Not even wrong” is attributed to Wolfgang Pauli. I don’t think anyone knows which unfortunate young physicist was the target of that remark. (The attribution is probably authentic, even though the exact context has been lost — the quote appears in Sir Rudolf Peierls’s biography of Pauli, and he was careful to distinguish between real and apocryphal Pauli stories.)

@73

According to someone upthread? I don’t mean to come across as a Zizek apologist, but if this thread’s criticism of Z’s use of the term “Buddhism” is supposed to demonstrate that Zizek is a leftist Ayn Rand, then perhaps as other candidates for the Chopra/Rand treatment we should include Hegel (who knew, let’s face it, jack shit about actual Buddhism but had no problem lecturing on the subject) , likewise Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and any number of modern theorists who employ “American Buddhism” and “European Buddhism” to describe not the fact that we all celebrate Losar (as the “thread winning comment” upstream would have you believe), but rather a certain nihilism that has disrupted political engagement from the left.

Should Zizek be ranked amongst the greatest thinkers of all time? Of course not. Should he be so casually dismissed as a Rand or a Chopra? This ToI interview hasn’t convinced me of it.

“is it really too much to ask for substantive criticisms of his ideas”

No, it is not. See Fredric Jameson’s review of “The Parallax View” in the LRB.

“I cannot conclude without explaining my hesitant apprehensions about Žižek’s project. Clearly, the parallax position is an anti-philosophical one, for it not only eludes philosophical systemisation, but takes as its central thesis the latter’s impossibility. What we have here is theory, rather than philosophy: and its elaboration is itself parallaxical.”

“Yet theory was always itself ‘grounded’ on a fundamental (and insoluble) dilemma: namely, that the provisional terms in which it does its work inevitably over time get ‘thematised’ (to use Paul de Man’s expression); they get reified (and even commodified, if I may say so), and eventually turn into systems in their own right.”

“My occasional fear is, then, that by theorising and conceptualising the impossibilities designated by the parallax view, Žižek may turn out to have produced a new concept and a new theory after all, simply by naming what it is probably better not to call the unnameable.”

That does seem to me to accurately describe what he is about as well as why he gets the reaction he does from academia. Meh… I liked Pervert’s Guide, that was quite good.

But at that point we’re doing so much work ourselves we may as well start from scratch with more promising base material.

I mean, some old commie’s opinions on the modern left’s timidity are not hugely interesting, especially given his general clownishness.

So Jameson and and Jameson’s Zizek have fessed up to a problem that Tocqueville spoke of nearly contemporaneously with Marx. Except Jameson and I guess Zizek will have nothing to do with politics–

“As far as politics is concerned, it seems to me that Žižek’s lesson is as indispensable as it is energising. He believes (as I do) that Marxism is an economic rather than a political doctrine, which must tirelessly insist on the primacy of the economic system and on capitalism itself as the ultimate horizon of the political situation (as well as of all the other ones – social, cultural, psychic and so forth). Yet it was always a fundamental mistake to think that Marxism was a ‘philosophy’ which aimed at substituting the ‘ultimately determining instance’ of the economic for that of the political. Karl Korsch taught us eighty years ago that for Marxism the economic and the political are two distinct and incommensurable codes which say the same thing in radically different languages.”

This is probably good in that it avoids the shameless pandering to Carl Schmitt of Derrida or Chantal Delsol without ever looking to Leo Strauss’s devastating critique of Schmitt in terms of the endless game of modern philosophers each trying to out-Machiavel the next.

Zizek is a silly captain Ahab on a ship of fools, and I guess Jameson wishishes to be First Mate Starbuck–or was that Gilligan!

Hitler’s balls sounds like the stupid line heard over and over again that Mussolini made trains run on time. The thing to be said about Nixon is that for all his ineptitude and paranoia he was one tricky son of a bitch–delivering hundreds of pizzas to Humphrey campaign was hilarious. Clinton may have been saccharine, but at least he had the ingenuity to use a cigar for sexual purposes. Bush may have been an obtuse abuser of executive power, but when he was a coke snorting hell raiser I bet he was fun to hang with. Obama may be a nerd from Harvard and Columbia using a brain trust to push through his “fundamental” transformation of America, but you know he can shoot a three pointer.

Stalin had balls too.

Wow, that’s interesting, so perhaps SZ has been hanging around with saloon-bar fascists all these years?

treilhard:

‘ For alex and the other puppy kickers, I think that the way in which Zizek uses “Buddhism” is going to disappoint anyone who is looking for a well-researched history of various Buddhist traditions, their teachings, or a comparative of their ethics. Instead, Z seems to be following a long tradition of the so-called continental theorists who, from Kant & Hegel to Deleuze & Critchley use “Buddhism” as a kind of shorthand for some idiosyncratic Western perspective (passive nihilism in the face of religious disappointment, for Critchley e.g.).’

humpty dumpty and alice:

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”
“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”
“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all.”

the question is whether you can simply appropriate words, creed, and categories willy-nilly and still make claims to analysis. the notion of a specific western type of nihilism that ‘Buddhism’ is meant to be shorthand for is nice – however, Buddhism already HAS an agreed-upon meaning, and qualities, and attributes. these specifically exclude the meaning that’s being imposed. if you’re interested in the history, the reason they specifically exclude it is because Buddhist philosophers and academics at Nalanda and Vikramashila universities fought tooth and nail to ensure that the prajnaparamita literature did not give rise to mere nihilism, as it might have if one glossed it. this took place around 1600 years ago, and the programme has continued to the present. it is, in fact, one of the engines of the modern Buddhist moral framework, something that’s vastly more complex than “everything vanishes into air’. for the Buddhist community in the west, and their transitional teachers in the east and west, these concerns are as alive today as then and this leads them to place an inordinate focus on the classical moral framework.the point i’m making is that – at best – what Zizek (and others) describe is a specific western idiosyncrasy that has little or nothing to do with Buddhism, other than the common use of some syllables to designate something. worse, the proponents of western Buddhism – that is, the very same people that Zizek (here and elsewhere) requires carry his definitions, repudiate them by the very nature of their engagement with Buddhism. so, what exactly is he talking about? and why should anyone care, since he obviously doesn’t care enough to know the basics of the concepts he introduces?

(dsquared, this is a view that i’ve been forming for a while – it’s not a reaction to this article, though this article may have forced me to clarify it.)

i agree with treilhard, quoted above – what he’s referring to is almost certainly “passive nihilism in the face of religious disappointment”. however, the term ‘Buddhism’ (meaning a tradition, a history of events, a body practices, a moral framework, innumerable texts and a very sophisticated ontology) doesn’t support that reading. nor if we move the goalposts a little, does the term, ‘Western Buddhism’, which actually explicitly guards against nihilism and works hard to remain aligned with the great moral programme of the last 1000 years. it’s not merely that he’s wrong – it’s that he’s wrong in easily correctable ways, that he never seems to have the intellectual curiosity to correct. we’re left with nothing but sloppiness, inept designations and loosely coupled, unsubstantiated conclusions. and so people defending Zizek in this thread have only been able to do so by arguing that HIS words mean something different to what YOUR words mean. that’s a really, really, really weak defense.

ziziek could as easily have made the following his thesis: “western culture has a strain of amoral nihilism in it. this strain is always trying to appropriate new forms and ideologies, as these are encountered.” but if he’d made that that thesis, he’s have noticed that evangelical Christianity (the permanent stain that can only be removed by the blood of the lamb, and which no good works can affect) is a both a greater and more current source of western nihilism in the face of immorality than anything else around. but everyone bashes evangelicals and it’s neither particularly controversial, or sufficiently impressive.

does it bother anyone else that the defence of Zizek always seem to turn on claims that what he means by a word is something other than what everyone else means? while I accept that this thread is a reaction to nothing more than a disputed interview, we’ve already discovered that ‘violence’ means something other than itself ‘Buddhism’ means something other than itself, and Hitler merely reacted, and we’ve learned nothing of any value, nothing new or insightful, by making those concessions. when does changing the language to sound cool start to pay off? or is it a game we all can play? Ghandi was a Robber Baron (in my special language).Walden was a violent, bloody revolution, not an excercise is self-sufficiency (in my special language).

how far do we go with this before we start to inlcude less academically visible nutters?

d

Oh, we’ve been here all the time, dear.

Buddhism actually has at least two meanings, one being that (set of) religion(s) orginating from India and other points east of Europe, the other whatever treehugging hippy New Age crap/guilt absorbing coping strategy for middlemanagers pablum that is being sold as “buddhist” or “zen-buddhist” in what’s increasingly inaccurately called “the west”.

If Zizek argues with definition two in his work, this is not some crazy idiosyncracy he thought up, but soemthing that’s long been used that way.

Assuming this is Schmitt the Nazi we’re talking about, is anyone in favour of his ideas, as opposed to willing to engage with them? Mind you, it sounds above as if some of us know some people who might be.

“What I’d like to know is, who has SZ been hanging around with to encounter the view that the important thing about Hitler was his balls … it’s certainly not a quality the British have been quick to grant him. ”

Quite. In fact it is commonly accepted among the British that Hitler didn’t even own a full set. It does seem that Zizek hangs aropund with some pecularly and unsavoury types.

Zizek is a punk troll.

Wait, that position is taken? Then what am I doing here?

And if Scandinavian heavy metal isn’t the very definition of “public intellectual”, I don’t know what is.

We’ve already had Hair Metal. What we need now is some Head Rock.

…there’s no point critiquing an inaccurate interview transcription.

True. So. … I wonder what Zizek would think of the new Vampire Weekend.

Is the song “Giving Up The Gun” a call to Violence?

Yay! Ponies!*

*A pony meaning “a sigh of exasperation”.

42: Extension of the Field of Struggle (translated as Whatever)—it was an uninspired rehashing of The Stranger.

Surely Whatever is a parody of The Stranger, rather than a rehash. The various scenes from The Stranger that are referenced in Whatever are all re-staged in a setting of such suburban banality as to undercut any existentialist pretensions, I would have thought.

105: I’d just say that probably the person who’s read the most Zizek in this thread (me) thinks this position is incorrect, as does Jameson in the above-posted review. Just to throw that out there.

Also interesting to see him being repeatedly crapped on by the same ‘radical’ wing of the CT comments section that defends Stanley Fish, Richard Rorty and ‘postmodernism’ to the death…

One day, I want to troll a thread on postmodernism and repeatedly say to the critics, “Well, that’s true for you, I guess — can’t we just get along?”

Personally, I like both Zizek and Fish. And zizek with fish.

No, he’s pretending to be Lenin, which is obviously just crazy…

Let me restate what I said below–“Zizek is amusing, says many profound things, points to all sorts of paradoxes and contradictions, and is all around likable—but for what? Leninism, Stalinism, etc. One wonders if his Lacanian joke in the mirror isn’t inspired by the perverse reflection of himself, but rather by the lines of coke waiting to be snorted.”

Zizek is an incredibly difficult thinker to read. After thinking I sort of understood Hegel’s Encyclopedia, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Right; Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, and Capital; Feuerbach’s Essence of Christianity; Barth’s Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, (to throw in something unmentioned); Heidegger’s Being and Time; Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents and Beyond the Pleasure Principle; Weber’s Politics and Science as a Vocation lectures; Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel; Bataillle’s Accursed Share, etc. , etc. Then we have Derrida, Foucault, Deleuze, Lyotard, Vattimo, Agamben, Negri, Habermas, etc.

We Americans (of whom I include myself at the end of the day) read this stuff through the easygoingness of Richard Rorty, but even John Rawls in Political Liberalism tells us it’s all contingent meaninglessness, and Judith Butler speaks of the possibilities of making ourselves while simultaneously Nancy Fraser reminds us of our historical determination. And then all sorts of “democratic” theorists from Chantal Delsol to Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe to Jean Luc Nancy tell us to embrace the “melee”–speaking of Carl Schmitt as one of many (but the most important) “choice” in the bazaar of choices.

Yes, Carl Schmitt provides a serious tonic to liberalism, but insofar as the friend and enemy cannot remember Book I of Plato’s Republic regarding why justice for one’s own is ultimately contradictory, Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction should be taken with much doubt (and not simply because of the actual history of the man).

Then along comes Zizek who wants to rewrite all of this (recent all things considered) history in terms of Lenin and Lacan. Lacan is surely one of the most difficult writers ever, and Zizek’s Hitchcockian interventions don’t help. While interesting on Hitchcock, I wonder if he sheds light on either Psycho or Lacan. Brian De Palma is probably a better interpreter of Hitchcock than Zizek–and I say this outside Jameson’s brief remarks on De Palma.

That said, Zizek is a real character. He dazzles–but as great as it is, it desires “charisma” in a way that is too much for me.

Ladies, please…

May I be rich in this thread?

Please.

Does anyone remember that time that Rich said he was going to keep a database of all the mean things he said and send it to potential employers? Good times.

Universes in which one is tempted to google “Holbo Kotsko Zizek” are universes that utterly deserve what’s hiding behind the link in 125.

125 is not so bad. This from Adam is one of the clearer and more interesting comments on Zizek’s Leninism that I’ve seen. I would cheerfully read lots more like it.

I can understand why debates with Jon H. get frustrating. (Like the schoolyard rules for debates with Zizek he proposes in 79, which are quite a contrast with the contortions of interpretive charity he puts himself through for Jonah Goldberg or the Volokh crowd. No friends on the left is the meta-principle at work, I guess.) I think we’d all be better served if Adam stopped arguing with Jon and instead just focused on explaining clearly to the rest of us the points he’s given up convincing Jon H. of.

Lemuel has a good point in 133, most certainly in the first two lines thereof.

I feel bad about the bit in parentheses already.

Yeah, looks like you got envious of John’s jouissance for a moment.

From Jonathan at 125’s link: I barely understand what is going on, since it always seems to me that every comment thread is simply the continuation of a previous debate, the stakes of which are largely invisible to those on its margins.

So, so true.

I did it. I clicked. I got as far as, “Obviously Lenin is a utilitarian because he’s happy to stack the bodies up like cordwood” before my eyes glazed over (Really? Lenin the Utilitarian? When did “peasant shrewdness” become identitified with the utilitarian calculus?).

At the very least, the post helped me clarify my priorities: I am now about to paint my cousins black & gold, and I have no plans of thinking about Zizek vis a vis Lenin vis a vis Kierkegaard until the Who Dats bring back a trophy (i.e. you probably won’t hear from me for another 43 years).

I just got back from my reading group. (We were discussing a couple recent pieces by Gerard Dumenil.) Hard not to be struck by the contrast between the norms of that kind of conversation and what goes on online. It would be almost inconceivably rude to behave, face to face, the way we all constantly do here.

Adam K.:

I’ve written a whole book of the same kind! And an above-linked article! And I’ve got two forthcoming articles!

I’d like to read the book, I really would. But given the rampart of books-that-need-to-be-read rising around this chair, it would be foolish to think that I likely will. Articles, ok … but they are presumably intended for specialists, which I in no way am. On the other hand, for better or worse, I do read this blog. And a lucid couple of paragraphs on how Zizek’s admiration of Lenin is based on seeing him as like Kierkegaard’s knight of faith is both manageable and *useful*, in a way that not much that one reads on blogs is. It’s something I will bring to whatever I next read on or by Zizek on Lenin. So while I can understand the temptation to say serious analysis is for books and articles, and blogs are for indulging one’s polemical impulses, I hope you’ll resist it.

It’s hard to articulate the what seems like very simple point I am trying to make: that there is a qualitative difference between saying something true, and pointing to something false, and the former contributes to something (what exactly? this is hard) in a way the latter doesn’t.

John H.:

Where have I put myself through contortions to defend Jonah Goldberg?

Hey, you read his book didn’t you?

Anyway, like I said, I shouldn’t have said that. But what I meant was you post a lot on him (and the Volokhs, etc.) and my impression was that most of those posts took the form not just of pointing and hooting, but asking, what serious point could this seemingly silly argument be making and what is my substantive disagreement with it. In contrast to your treatment of Zizek here. But rereading it seems my impression was wrong: you use Goldberg, like Zizek, mostly just as a punchline.

In general, what’s so weird about the idea that if someone seems to be not-so-serious, it’s ok not to take them seriously?

Nothing, insofar as not taking them seriously means ignoring them. But if you are going to take the trouble of criticizing someone’s arguments, there are universal argument-criticizing standards that come into play. But then, writing this I’m already a hypocrite. By the same standard one should respond to your posts when they’re useful or interesting (as they often are) and ignore them otherwise.

Eh, as far as I can the idea is to make Lenin sexy, and get away from that dull politics into the happy uplands of gestures and daring and risking it all and oh Lenin you’re so daring!

Because Zizek’s a crap politician.

Okay, I’ve pretty clearly violated said “never again” principle. Not letting these comments through moderation would be an act of mercy.

I really don’t understand the Fordism example at all. Is the argument that because in the 1920s particular modes of regulation were encouraged, some of which privileged efficiency over the revolutionary ideal, and therefore Bolshevism, in general and/or at its heart, is a utilitarian political program? By this same logic, because the Lenin endorsed the NEP, therefore Bolshevism is, in general and/or at its heart, capitalism. Is

In any case none of this helps explain what you mean by the quote I mentioned above: That it is “obvious” that Lenin is a utilitarian, because after all, he’s got bodies stacked like cordwood out back. Was Robespierre a utilitarian? Plekhanov? The Narodnya Volya? I fail to see the obvious connection between terror and utility- in fact, I would’ve thought almost the opposite would be true. Rabid attachment to a radical ideal, even when it seems horrific, has an element of “do justice, let the heavens fall” to it.

But how could you write an article about anything, given that you don’t even exist? Nor does Zizek? NOR DO I?!

I read John’s article. He writes:

the clearest proof of Zizek’s confusion is the Brecht poem. The man who shoots the good man “suspends the law,” thereby bridging the gap “between the domain of moral norms and Faith, the unconditional engagement.” This is utter confusion. The poem is nothing but rational self-justification. … The executioner makes his speech because he is a consequentialist: the future good of the many necessitates present sacrifice of the few. Ordinary standards of decency have their justifications but are trumped by higher standards that will seem indecent to those who cannot apprehend their rationality. Yet Abraham, though he may be the father of faith, is not remembered as the father of utilitarianism.

The poem referred to is The Interrogation of the Good. The interesting thing about it, in light of what John says, is that the poem doesn’t actually say anything about “the future good of the many,” or about anything relating to the future at all. There’s nothing about why the execution is necessary or useful — it’s all about the ways in which the victim’s goodness wasn’t really good. People should read the poem and decide for themselves, but to me it seems absolutely clear that the victim is being executed because he *deserves it*, not because of the consequences of the execution, which are not even hinted at. The point is that what seemed like good qualities in private bourgeois life can really be very bad qualities in a revolutionary context, and merit punishment rather than praise. But the claim “you failed to think about the consequences of your acts, therefore you deserve to be punished” is not itself consequentialist. (What makes it work as a poem is that the lines in the end are quite sincere — the person’s good qualities really are good, and they aren’t negated or outweighed by his being a counterrevolutionary; they just don’t apply to the question of whether he deserves to be shot.)

Or again, John H. quotes Lenin in response to Western critics, ““Who wants to know—the statesmen who have just sent sixteen million men to their deaths?”, and glosses it as “Lenin is an arch-utilitarian. He acknowledges the a priori rationality of the proposition that the good should be maximized.” In the thread, he clarifies that he takes Lenin to mean that without the Revolution things would have been even worse. But to me, it seems obvious that this quote has nothing to do with consequences or counterfactuals — the point is just that these critics do not have the moral standing to judge the revolutionary government.

The larger point — which I can’t really articulate now — is that what if Zizek’s argument is that one becomes a revolutionary not because of any calculations about the useful effects that might be produced but because revolutionary politics seems like the only morally acceptable response to the society that we live in, that seems important and true. To be a communist is to be a good person in this world. Holbo says no, communists are monsters. Well, we are not going to resolve that here (or anywhere else, probably.) But if you don’t feel at least a little of that impulse, then maybe Zizek — and certainly Brecht — is just not going to make sense to you. That pre-analytic difference in experience or outlook might be why it seems to Adam Kotsko — as to me — that he’s made clear, convincing arguments where John Holbo genuinely can’t see any arguments at all.

Some people think of the Bolsheviks as in some sense spiritual ancestors, as profoundly heroic and admirable even if we would not want to imitate them in any concrete way.

It should be noted this is about as unbolshevik an idea as you could possibly have. Bolshevism is a tool, like a spade or a shovel. It isn’t for looking at, it is for using.

155, A-ha, yes, you should have said consequentialist. You really should have. Utilitarian is like the guy calculated before he acted; or found calculations important running up to actions. Not a lot of evidence for that. But I’m sure he preferred his actions to others because he thought they had better consequences. People like that always do.

In this sense you surely are right about putting lots of territory between him and Kierkegaard – the latter, at least conceptually, busied himself with the possibility of non-consequentialism (in real life that was a bit harder though).

Not being very much interested in Zizek & Lenin, I think I get John Holbo’s point: you shouldn’t go all romantic on Lenin (or even in the direction of somewhat romantic on Lenin) because he is in some way pure in his motivation to plot a course that led to what it led to. Or shorter: any real Leninist is a potential monster.

But on a mroe interesting note: given what is happening in liberal democracies nowadays, one is in need of a Kierkegaardian leap of faith to stick to defending it.

Saying “it’s dumb to romanticize Lenin” makes perfect sense. Saying “because it’s dumb to romanticize Lenin, I’m going to assume that you haven’t done so and then conclude that you somehow got Kierkegaard wrong because of that” does not make sense to me.

167- if that refers to what I said, I disclaim I ever said the second thing quoted.

Please, please stop. Every time I check in here I hope someone will have said something else funny, and I’m tired of the disappointment.

170- odd argument, certainly coming from a non-existent, but named, individual.

Hi..This is Ravi Padiyar from MP..Ujjain

I just wanted to make a point that the Times of India makes no contribution towards real journalism…

Gandhi that if you find a starving child and all that there’s around is meat than the child should be allowed to starve. He was after all a religious fundamentalist.

Zizek’s foibles and indulgences and bits of sharp observation are more interesting than yours, That’s all. Is there anyone worth reading in any other way? The best minds are 400 hitters and if Zizek hits 200 no one here would make it up to double A. All I’m reading here are librarians and bureaucrats arguing over their favorite writers. Write something that anyone other than your copains would read and I’ll be impressed.

If an open society but on questions and argument [the most important of which is: utility for what?] is attacked and puts its defense in the hands of an army run on standard military utilitarianism [meaning “Get it done!”] does that make the society itself is now founded on utilitarian principles?

I agree that the poem doesn’t literally expound a consequentialist philosophy in so many words, but I don’t see that there’s anything in it about all the ways in which the victims goodness wasn’t ‘really good’. Or any hint that the person deserved it, and that’s why it is happening. It’s a hard necessity. That’s the mood.

I don’t know what else to do but post part of the poem:

You cannot be bought, but the lightning
Which strikes the house, also
Cannot be bought.
You hold to what you said.
But what did you say?
You are honest, you say your opinion.
Which opinion?
You are brave.
Against whom?
You are wise.
For whom?
You do not consider your personal advantages.
Whose advantages do you consider then?

The speaker is not saying that good consequences will follow form the execution. He is saying that personal virtues are not virtuous if they are practiced without regarded for the larger system they are supporting or opposing. There’s really no other way to read it.

One thing that makes me sure I’m reading the poem rightly, Lemuel, is Brecht’s reputation as an unusually hard-nosed end-justifies-the-means kind of thinker. Try Googling “brecht utilitarianism” or “Brecht consequentialism” or “Brecht ends justify the means”.

Wow. Just wow. You are seriously saying that if a poem doesn’t seem to say you expect it to, based on received wisdom, you should ignore the text and just assume it fits with the writer’s “reputation,” backed up with a few Google hits. I think that is literally the worst way to read a poem I have ever heard of.

And by the way, when I pick up my copy of Brecht’s Collected Poems, To Those Born Later is the page it falls open to. But if you can’t hear the music, we’ll just have to talk about something else.

if a certain action “seems like the only morally acceptable response” to a situation (whether for utilitarian or generalized consequentialist or deonotological grounds) then we aren’t dealing with the sort of thing Zizek says we are: a Knight of Faith. Abraham isn’t the model of this leap of faith because killing his son for no apparent reason seemed like the only morally acceptable response to a situation that didn’t, apparently, call for son-killing. Zizek is reaching for an extreme of absurdism as a model for intervention in the political realm in which I, to the contrary, would prefer to seek morally acceptable lines of action.

Here’s (what I think is) the idea: the persistence of a world of exploitation, imperialism, alienation and war is unbearable. Revolution is an absolute moral necessity. And yet, revolution is impossible. So we have to find a way conduct ourselves as if it were possible, without deluding ourselves about the facts of the situation. That’s the problem I see Zizek’s Lenin struggling with, and it seems like a very timely problem and also one with clear resonances with Kierkegaard. You say absurdism, I hear Mario Savio.

And that, to me, is what this whole debate is like. I’ve never been a huge Zizek fan. But I keep hearing you say “Zizek says X, which is obviously wrong and absurd,” and thinking, “X sounds totally reasonable to me. Maybe this Zizek guy is onto something after all.” So at least one good thing has come out of this, for me anyway — I’m much more inclined to think Zizek has something serious and important about Lenin than I was before. As a matter of fact, I just ordered his Lenin anthology on Amazon. So, thanks!

“Our task is to put the question bluntly. What is better? To ferret out, to imprison, sometimes even to shoot hundreds of traitors from among the Cadets, non-party people, Mensheviks and Soc1l1st-Revolutionaries, who “come out”… against Soviet power…? Or to allow matters to reach such a pass that Kolchak and Denikin are able to slaughter, shoot and flog to death tens of thousands of workers and peasants? The choice is not difficult to make…

Whoever has not yet understood this, whoever is capable of whining over the ‘iniquity’ of such a decision, must be given up as hopeless and held up to public ridicule and shame.” [“All out for the fight against Denikin!” 1919]

I guess that about settles it for me. Thanks for giving me a reason to reread my Lenin, John Holbo.

“He is saying that personal virtues are not virtuous if they are practiced without regarded for the larger system they are supporting or opposing. There’s really no other way to read it.”

“Yes. That’s because he’s a consequentialist, an ends-justify-the-means type-guy. That’s my point, anyway. The larger ‘system’ is the greater good. So what’s the objection to my reading?”

So the choice is between consequentialism and hypocrisy and you’re choosing hypocrisy.

“First they came for the communists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a communist; Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist; Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew… It’s better to wait.”

But don’t accuse me of dumbing things down, you’re doing too good a job of it yourself.

Zizek described the last section of a holocaust novel: Jews are being loaded on a train, packed in like cattle. The train goes east for 3 days in freezing temperatures; by the time it reaches its destination only a small group of children are left alive, kept warm by the bodies of the adults who had moved them to the center of the car. When the children are discovered the SS set the dogs on them. Two escape and run off in the snow. Of the two of them the younger one stumbles and the elder reaches back to help. He pulls him up as the dogs find them and attack.

How do justice to the fact of the crime and the inability to do anything but read or watch, how do justice to memory and at the same time to the moral imperative of hope? Zizek says the novel succeeds, but wonders how one could make the film. The easy solution to the ending is to freeze on the image of the clasped hands, but that makes hope too easy, protecting us from the real end. One answer would to freeze the frame but not the sound.
JR: “So idealism in the context of narrative.”
SZ “Yes!”

From my dinner with Zizek.
—

buh-bye

Having taken the sensible advice and not gone back to re-read the old threads, here being rehearsed in faded-to-irrelevancy form, it seems to me nonetheless that part of the problem is Holbo’s tendency to read by translating into his own terms. Lenin wasn’t an ethical philosopher, nor necessarily any sort of philosopher, let alone an academic one, but there are three kinds of academic ethics, de-ontic, utilitarian or virtue, and Lenin must be fit in somewhere. “Utilitarian” is an odd, fractured fit, to which only parts of Lenin’s writings (as a political actor) can be accommodated, but then, aha!, it’s consequentialism that is the relevant feature, which is conventionally a “utilitarian” feature. And thus that can have nothing to do with Kierkegaard’s reflections on faith and faithfulness, closely read.

But Kierkegaard’s reflections concern the *teleological* suspension of the ethical as the key determinant of “faithfulness”, (and the horror of the immoral sacrifice is contrasted with mere resignation, with the absurdity that requires the suspension of the ethical consisting in that neither of the contradictory aims of the action are renounced). Granted the issue is being transposed from the religious context of Kierkegaard to a secular political, if still vaguely “theological”, context, but is it really so far fetched and a violation of interpretive norms that an analogy can be drawn between the two? Especially considering that a) the absurdity of acting according to contradictory aims might not be avoidable, and certainly can’t be ruled out a priori, and b) that the “higher” end that would “justify” the violation of conventional moral norms in the status quo is not just a matter of the end “justifying” the means, but that the “end” aimed at is precisely difference from the proximate and available means and conditions, an otherwise than the prevailing order and economy of Being, which can’t be calculated securely from priors. The risk of “absurdity” in political action can’t be cleanly separated out from its hope.

And then just how are “systemic” considerations to be ruled out of ethical/political consideration, in favor of intentional considerations oriented toward the maintenance of the “integrity” of personal identity, as if that latter might not be what is questionable, as if it isn’t (adherence to) the system itself that kills, a la Dr. Stockmann. Why should the structural violence of the prevailing system of social relations, which conditions and contaminates all intentions and dispositions within its terms and ambit, be ruled out of consideration? By “definition”, then, were such “systemic” considerations ruled in, then all intentions would be impure and actions contradictory. Absurdity and non-self-identity would be inseparable from consideration of the political situation “ethically”, unless “ethics” are to be merely academic. It seems to me a more complex reading of the Brecht poem might be in order, other than a mere reflection on the “ends justifying the means”, even if political instrumentalism is a considerable component of Leninist thinking.

And lastly, why should a liberal preference for a morally tailored and guided politics be regarded as self-evident or unquestionably reasonable? What if politics rather concerns unavoidable conflict between differing and incommensurable moral codes and positions, which can’t be resolved and reconciled by “superior” moral reasoning? Which, furthermore, in fact, are structured as ideologies by extra-moral material and social conditions? What if any political “morality” must take account of its exposure to the amorality of the political, on pain of otherwise indulging in evasiveness and bad faith? The self-identity and “integrity” of the autonomous individual ego, which somehow has mastered its role and intentional dispositions within systems of collective action, is not necessarily the terminus ad quem of rationality per se, let alone its application to political questions. Comfortably ensconced professors in Singapore might think so, but others might be much differently situated. And retrospective narratives about calm seas after the storm has passed hardly suffice to answer questions about how precedents are to be evaluated and transposed with respect to the urgencies, exigencies and pressures of prospective action. (The example of Max Weber’s “ethics of responsibility” comes to mind here, as re-enforcing the very rationalization tendencies that he himself criticizes and bemoans, an instance of the absurdity involved in reproducing the status quo).

Treilhard, 182. The Denikin piece doesn’t have anything to do with his philosophy, he merely gives party organizations some talking points.

I don’t think there’s any controversy about his philosophy: it’s revolutionary marxism, slightly modified to fit the local/contemporary conditions. Capitalism achieved its highest and last stage, and it has nowhere to go but to be replaced by communism via revolution, dictatorship of the proletariat, industrial armies, all that. That required a vanguard party, to deal with all the complicated details; distributing talking points, among other tasks. All this development was inevitable anyway, he was just doing god’s work.

Is anything wrong with this interpretation? Is it still utilitarian?

I think that the Brecht poem becomes much more comprehensible if you imagine it addressed to a centrist Democratic senator.

I think this discussion of the Brecht poem is to some extent overthinking it. Was Stalinism consequentialist, deontologist, or based in virtue ethics? I think if you can answer that, you have your answer as to what ethical system the Brecht poem is coming from, as the worldview of it seems to me to be more Stalinist than anything. Brecht was quoted as saying of the victims of Stalinist purges that “the more innocent they are, the more they deserve to be shot”, and that poem strikes me as basically an artistic expression of that viewpoint. Whatever else the “good man” was, the important thing by the standards of the poem is that he is, in whatever sense, seen as not being on the same side as those who are to execute him, and this is all that is required to warrant his death. Everything else about him is considered entirely irrelevant, or relevant only to the extent that his “good” qualities are seen as making him even more deserving of death, since he wasn’t using those qualities in service to the right cause. The question of what his death is intended to accomplish is also essentially irrelevant, as it’s taken as axiomatic that revolutionary violence will bring about positive results.

This, as I say, seems like Stalinism to me more than anything, which would make sense given what Brecht’s politics were (even if he did have his qualms about it at times), and I don’t think this position can be pinned down as consequentialist, deontologist, or virtue ethic-based. One could probably make a case for any of them, but Stalinism was so fundamentally incoherent that I don’t think any of them really apply- likewise with regards to the ethical worldview of that poem. I think it’s a pretty nasty piece of work, myself (as was Brecht himself), but then, I think that there’s not much difference between Stalinism and Leninism (Treilhard’s quotations from Lenin at 182 aren’t even the worst of it- Molotov once said that Stalin was a mere lamb compared to Lenin), and that Zizek’s admiration of Lenin, however qualified, is on a moral and intellectual level not really different than admiration of Mussolini (or Stalin, for that matter) would be. (I’d comment further on Zizek’s idea of Buddhism, but the discussion has moved on and daelm and DivGuy said everything I would.)

“Also, why would you think that consequentialism is ‘conventionally’ a utilitarian feature. Rather, utilitarianism is a particular form of consequentialism, and not by convention. It’s conceptually necessary, unless you know better …”

Umm…, because I thought, as I read the earlier part of this thread, that why is Holbo insisting on “utilitarianism”, when what he means is “consequentialism”, which was later confirmed by your own “confession”. And, since the initial quote from Zizek has proven to be false, this thread amounts to commentary on argumentative/interpretive impasses, proximately between you and Adam K., but perhaps applying more generally to the broader issues involved. FYI I’ve never been a fan of Lenin, and have regarded Leninism as a deformation of Marxism, but it’s still worth reconsidering the historical precedents involved, rather than consigning them to “the enormous condescension of posterity”. I tend to regard Lenin as a Machiavellian political actor, and thus, yes, a “consequentialist”, and, yes, some of his putative aims, such as the industrialization of the former Russian empire by administrative fiat, had “utilitarian” features. But he wasn’t explicitly an ethical philosopher. On the other hand, it does little good to ignore the historical opposition that he faced,- and its own violence,- and, while regarding him in Kierkegaardian terms, as a “knight of faith”, might seem odd, circa 1920, (though the exemplary instance of Lukacs might make it more plausible), the main point about the “teleological suspension of the ethical”, in retrospect, at least, qualifies any strict instrumentalism. Your interpretative approach is “responsibly” choosing what it acknowledges and what it denies, which might be the “whole” point. At any rate, what Kierkegaard is concerned with, (though this might be an Adornian take), amounts to a negative version of “virtue ethics”, hence a kind of “consequentialism” other than utilitarian.

It strikes me as odd that you insist upon a poem as textual “evidence”, as if that were the only sort of evidence that would “count”. A poem is liable to be ambiguous, full of contradictory tensions, ironical, shifting in perspectives, etc. A poem is never a “statement”. In fact, the poem in question is an indication that Brecht, friend of Benjamin, for all his commitment to “crude thinking” and the stripping down/alienation of bourgeois sentiment, felt the reparative burden involved in commitments to political violence. Perhaps a way to look at the matter might be to consider literary productions by Sartre, in which the point-of-view of the condemned man is taken. That’s an equal absurdity in the “face” of a fascist executioner. Cui bono? Who and what gets to decide upon the “good”? And on the “level” on which it occurs?

“It’s radical human engineering and social surgery. Carving up the body politic violently to repair it and make a better body. It’s that sort of consequentialist view. The pain of the carving is justified by the greater good of the final formation. And that good is measured by how much it serves true human happiness and flourishing in the long run. (Geeze. I’m starting to sound like a Leninist.)”

Precisely. You and Brad DeLong, who’s at least a professed utilitarian, despite its contravention of the methodological canon of neo-classical economics. It’s not as if “social engineering” is avoidable within capitalist/industrialist modernity and its conceptions of “policy”, as suborning human agency. And it’s not as if “good people” aren’t dying, steadily, in ways large and small, in the “name” of some sort of authoritatively self-appointed “greater good”. It’s more a matter of who will claim the corpses and how they will name them.

anything radically non-consequentialist like that

Would a revenge killing be non-consequentialist? Well, suppose you asked the potential revenge killer, whose daughter has been killed, for a moral justification. He might say: “F*ck justification! The b****rd ruined my life, so I’m going to kill him!” This is not a non-consequentialist justification; it is not any kind of justification. Or he might say: “He took an innocent life, so he deserves to die, but he’s rich and well-connected, so he might escape punishment if I don’t kill him. I know there are good reasons in general for not taking justice into one’s own hands, but I just couldn’t bear it if he got off.” This again (“I couldn’t bear it”) is not a justification of any kind, consequentialist or other. Or he might say: “He deserves to die; why shouldn’t I administer the punishment?” Then we go over the (consequentialist) reasons for not taking justice into one’s own hands (nemo judex in causa sua; rules are the indispensable framework of social life, etc.), and ask if he has any argument for overriding them, If he does, they can only, I suggest, be consequentialist ones. I can’t conceive of any other kind, in this case or Lenin’s.

Can you or someone else offer a reason in either of these cases that doesn’t take the form of “You should/shouldn’t do this because the results will probably, on the whole and in the long run, be better/worse if you do”?

Treilhard, 182. The Denikin piece doesn’t have anything to do with his philosophy, he merely gives party organizations some talking points.

Hitherto the philosophers etc etc. The point of Marxist philosophy is that it distributes talking points, that it leads revolutions, that it makes the world a better place.

The problem with Zizek is not that he is a Marxist, or even a Leninist. It is that he is an astonishingly bad Marxist, and an astonishingly bad Leninist. Kotsko somewhere talks about a Democratic Senator as the good man of Brecht’s poem, but that’s nonsense. Neither Zizek nor Kotsko have any intention of actually going out and having a revolution.

I mean: “Revolution is an absolute moral necessity. And yet, revolution is impossible. So we have to find a way conduct ourselves as if it were possible, without deluding ourselves about the facts of the situation.” is nonsense, it’s anti-leninist, it’s utter shite. The revolution is not a moral necessity that can be impossible. That’s just not what the revolution is to Lenin. To Lenin, the revolution is a thing like electrification.

The Zizek project is a way to pretend you have a “commitment” to communism with doing anything “concrete”, but unfortunately, the bones of communism are concrete.

NOTE FROM THE MANAGEMENT: comments close automatically after a week and they just closed for this thread. I thought I could just open them up again – since folks are still commenting – but apparently not. Maybe I’ll start a fresh thread if folks want to keep it up. Apologies also to a few commenters who got stuck in the queue and only got turned on after the show was over. That was my oversight. – JH