Alexander Ivanov. Rethinking "leftism"

Rethinking "leftism"
Alexander Ivanov

Publication date: July 23, 2003

Response to the book : Zizek Slavoj. Welcome to the desert of the Real/ lane. from English Artema Smirnova - M.: Foundation "Pragmatics of Culture", 2002. - 160 p.

I consider Zizek's book perhaps the most important in recent years. It's not often that we get a timely book by a timely thinker on a timely topic. And, importantly, a left-wing thinker - who is very critical of the European left-wing situation today. The greatest interest in this regard is not so much the reflection of the September 11th event, but rather the reflection of those stereotypes of leftist thought that began to dominate in the assessment of the September 11th event. Žižek writes directly about something that we have not yet encountered in Russia and that really exists firmly in the West - about the situation of the left nomenklatura . A huge circle of intellectuals has emerged who, as Žižek writes, criticize the authorities on the basis that no ideas of their criticism will ever be realized. They understand that they are an integral part of the system of global capitalism, that they are subsidized by this system, and their criticism of this system is controlled and taken into account in the logic of its development. We don’t yet have this kind of leftist nomenclature, but there is a danger of reproducing this type here: the type of registered leftist, leftist from the salon, recognizable down to the physiognomic details.

Regarding Žižek's account of 9/11, it seems important to me that he tries to think of the event as occurring within a global system. And in this sense, all existing options for choosing a position, which were formed within a year after this event, are unacceptable for Zizek. For him, the choice between bin Laden and Bush is unacceptable. Translating this into the Russian context (and Zizek is very well versed in the Russian context) - for him the choice between Barayev and Putin is unacceptable. That is, formulating the long-standing problem of self-determination for a critically thinking intellectual, Zizek proceeds from the fact that the intellectual must begin by criticizing the situations of choice that the current global system offers him. available to him at the moment This is the form of action . In this regard, Zizek makes a very interesting reference to the philosophy of Lenin, which he has been actively exploring lately. "The Philosophy of Lenin" is significant for him, of course, as the philosophy of Lenin politics , Leninist political decisions and political texts. Žižek emphasizes a very interesting postulate of Lenin’s political ontology: no political or cultural scene can be appreciated without your action within that scene. Without your action, the scene is underdeveloped . Hence the famous aphorism to which Lenin refers: “first you need to get involved in a fight, and then we’ll see.” That is, you first need to take an action - which is what Zizek calls for in his book, speaking about the rejection of those global dichotomies that “reality” imposes on the intellectual today. An attempt to build his ontology in a situation of imposing alternatives seems to him to be one of the actions available here and now .

One of the aspects of this building is connected with the fact that Zizek invites the left intellectual to pay attention to those elements of reality that were automatically given to the right in the structure of the left consciousness. For example, on national identity . He poses, in particular, the question of whether, in the current global situation, the search for Russian national identity is a possible ally of the critical intellectual? He gives an interesting example with the double meaning of many existential concepts in the Russian language, for example, “freedom” and “will”, “intellectual” and “intellectual”, etc. He says that in this gap, in this difference, there is a huge critical resource, the possibility of a critical distance in relation to the European right-wing discourse. In general, the interest and tact with which this thinker looks at what is happening in Russia, in Eastern Europe, in the countries of the former “second world” is extremely important for us. With the death of the Soviet Union, with the end of communism and anti-communism, the question arose anew for intellectuals about the sources of criticism of power, criticism of culture, etc. Meanwhile, the tradition of anti-Soviet-dissident criticism of culture, which prepared the bourgeois transformation in Russia in the 90s, still remains dominant.

Today in Russia we see a fairly complete bourgeois picture, a bourgeois scene in all spheres of culture, politics and economics. It seems unreasonable to me to talk about the fact that there is no civil society in Russia, because I proceed from the Marxist understanding of civil society as a society dominated by private property. It is not the society of beekeepers, not the society of beer lovers, not the society of ecologists that forms civil society today. Today, civil society is shaped by the global economy. There is no need to pretend that the beekeeping society makes decisions today. Decisions are made in the sphere of invisible actions of transnational corporations; they are the ones who today determine politics, economics, and the cultural sphere. Therefore, the reflection of civil society must change today - and Žižek offers the appropriate language for its development. Being well versed in the Russian situation, he gives a chance, first of all, to young Russian intellectuals to understand that anti-communist dissidence is ending. That old type of dissident resistance, the type of protest that has shaped the Russian cultural scene over the past forty years, is fading away - its energy is exhausted. A certain new situation must come, and is already coming, in which a critically thinking intellectual begins to revise and reevaluate the leftist history that unfolded in our country in the 20th century.

And the last theme that seemed extremely important to me in Žižek is the theme of freedom. The old reflection of freedom, still ancient, assumed that freedom is not reducible to freedom of choice. Freedom of choice, that is, liberally understood freedom, the condition of which is atomized individuality or subjectivity, is not, according to Žižek, the freedom that we should choose now. Many people knew that this was not freedom. For example, Styron, the author of the famous novel Sophia's Choice, where freedom of choice appears as the freedom that an SS man in Auschwitz offers to a young woman: who, her little son or daughter, would she like to send to the oven? He invites her to choose, and says that if she does not carry out this act of free choice, then both children will be burned in the crematorium. She chooses her daughter, and the rest of the story is about how she lives after this choice. So, even the ancient understanding of freedom, which Zizek actualizes, assumed that freedom is always freedom in a certain type of collectivity. This is the freedom of Socrates, who prefers hemlock in Athens - life outside Athens. Žižek writes very insightfully about the need to search for new collectivities, which alone will create for us that field of freedom where critical reflection is possible. Where possible, in particular, is the complex, traumatic overcoming of the alternatives offered by the system: these diabolical elections between bin Laden and Bush, between Putin and Barayev, between a war with the use of ultra-precise weapons in Afghanistan and the explosions of skyscrapers. A new collectivity is needed. What it is - Zizek does not give answers, but the fact that he suggests looking for it is very important.