Translated material
Philosophers against capital
Apology for refusal
Slavoj Zizek. Breaking device. Parallax vision. - M.: Europe, 2008.
Slavoj Zizek is an author for those who like it hot; a brilliant polymath and intellectual provocateur, a unifier of Lenin and Lacan, a researcher of mass culture and the “high” European tradition. It has been translated into Russian for a long time and in abundance, so that domestic intellectuals have a perfect idea of what to expect from Žižek.
In the new monograph, he does not disappoint expectations - before us is the same high-grade philosophical and cultural cocktail, mixed from several “eternal” Zizekian themes: the Big Other, pleasure and attraction, totalitarian ideology, the paradoxical relevance of Christianity, the prospects of dialectical materialism. Well, and so on: what Zizek writes about tends to slip away. Because he always writes, in essence, about the elusive, about what is almost impossible to keep on the horizon of consciousness.
The main ingredient of the cocktail this time was the concept of “parallax” borrowed from physics, that is, a change in the location of an object depending on the movement of the observer. Parallax becomes a very broad metaphor for Žižek, which is consistently used in reflections on philosophy, neurobiology, art and politics. The parallax gap begins to indicate the impossibility of combining two closely related perspectives in the description of a particular phenomenon. For example, the subjective feeling that a person has free will and the fact proven by neurophysiologists that any human decision is determined and objectively occurs earlier than it is realized.
Žižek's intellectual narrative develops in leaps and bounds: from pure speculation with constant psychoanalytic overtones through potholes of analysis of Wagnerian operas to hillocks of political declarations. In particular, several chapters are devoted to a comparative analysis of fascism and Stalinism and proof that the second was still a more acceptable and even necessary phenomenon: of course, from a “higher” philosophical point of view.
At the same time, Zizek’s chain of reasoning cannot be reduced to any specific “dry residue” of ideological theses - as in Zen Buddhism, the process here is more important than the result. However, at the end of the book the author gives a real recipe for revolutionary action, but here too, instead of a positive program, he puts forward a negative principle.
Slavo Zizek considers the only correct position in relation to the game of global capital to be a gesture of refusal: “I would prefer to refuse.” It is necessary to refuse participation in market competition, and from the game that social reality is an empty illusion, and even from any forms of charity in favor of third world countries. Only by standing on the other side of any practices legitimized by capitalism can one’s very pose undermine the self-confidence of neoliberal reality. This, according to Zizek, is the highest freedom available to man and his highest pleasure.
Apology for courage
Alain Badiou. Circumstances, 3: Directions of the word “Jew”. Cecil Winter. Dominant, meaning new Aryans. -- St. Petersburg: Academy of Cultural Research, 2008.
Alain Badiou. Circumstances, 4: What does the name Sarkozy refer to? -- St. Petersburg: Academy of Cultural Research, 2008.
The patriarch of European Maoism and, perhaps, the most famous living French philosopher, Alain Badiou, is a friend and like-minded person of Slavoj Žižek, but unlike the latter, his work is just beginning to come to Russia. Following the esoteric “Ethics,” the third and fourth parts of “Circumstances,” a series of pamphlets on pressing political topics, appeared in Russian. The publishers apparently decided that the first and second parts no longer correspond to the current agenda, so they did not translate them.
The third “Circumstances” is a selection of texts compiled by the author himself on the topic of the Holocaust and current Israeli politics; its goal is to deprive the word “Jew” of the truly global significance that Hitler gave it. And if this operation is carried out, then the militaristic policy of Israel, Badiou believes, will lose the last minimum of justification and the universal preaching of the Apostle Paul will be understood as the need to build a single Palestinian state without division into Arabs and Jews.
The fourth, closer in time of writing, “Circumstances” talks about the rise to power in France of Nicolas Sarkozy and what this phenomenon could mean for France itself, the world as a whole and - in particular - for the European left. Alain Badiou writes scathingly about Sarkozy and does not mince words. The election of the “rat man” as president is a symptom of the complete disorientation of the French, their voluntary renunciation of the right to their own opinion.
In this regard, Badiou writes about the socio-political “transcendental” of his homeland - Pétainism, that is, a moral crisis and capitulation to impersonal global trends coming from outside. In the case of Pétain himself it was German National Socialism; in the current situation it is neo-imperialist capitalism, accompanied by fear of an invasion of immigrants. Badiou proposes to honor and cooperate with immigrants, because they are now the embodiment of the Marxist “weak link”, the class that has an open view of what is happening in Europe. And the landmark that needs to be brought back into view is the legacy of May 1968 and, more broadly, what Alain Badiou calls the “communist hypothesis,” that is, the idea of the liberation of humanity that has existed at all times. Here he recalls the words of Jean-Paul Sartre that “every anti-communist is a bastard”: today this statement, according to Badiou, rings with renewed vigor.
The very practice of universal suffrage is subjected to merciless criticism. The only point of parliamentary democracy, which allows for the creation of a fiction of “common opinion,” is to serve the interests of capital, and this was best demonstrated when Sarkozy, after his election victory, first went to dinner with the financiers who paid for his election and took a stroll on the billionaire’s yacht . Spitting in the face of the poor and humiliated: this is, according to Badiou, the true face of the new European democracy, which no longer needs to maintain external decency. The next step of parliamentary neoliberalism will be the creation of a police-terrorist state, and this process has already begun...
There are different ways to resist the onset of dark times, but in any case it requires real courage. Badiou puts forward eight points that set the coordinates of that point, standing on which you can challenge everything, whose name is the generally random name of Sarkozy, this “very-little-Napoleon.”