Slavoj Žižek tells the New Statesman’s Jonathan Derbyshire why he rejects mainstream political theory, why he supports Barack Obama, and why we need Marx more than ever:
… the Slovene’s avowedly “Leninist” provocations, and his hand-waving in the direction of the Jacobin Terror and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, are intended to unsettle and to question the sort of liberalism that dominates political theory in the west – especially in the English-speaking world. The recent fruits of his prodigious output, including a book on violence and a defence of “lost causes”, all tend in this direction.
When I spoke to Žižek on the telephone from New York, where he’d been giving a series of talks on the financial crisis and Barack Obama’s healthcare plan, I asked him what relation he thought his work has to the mainstream of normative, liberal political theory done in British and American universities…
“I’ve noticed how many of the people who consider themselves to be more radical than the liberal standard do not work in political theory proper but, as it were, hide themselves as literary critics or philosophers. It’s as if their radicalism is an excess which requires them to change genre.”
But what’s most significant about the academic left, in his view, is its abstract moralism, which he denounces as utopian, much as Marx and Engels denounced the early French socialists as utopian. “This excess of radicality concretely art iculates itself in some kind of general moralistic outrage. You get a kind of abstract, moralistic politics in which you focus on groups which are obviously underprivileged – other races, gays and so on – and then you explode in all your moralistic rage. This has to do with what you might call our cultural, post-political capitalism, in which the most passionate struggles are cultural ones. A large majority of the left doesn’t question liberal democracy and capitalism as such. In the same way that when we were young we wanted socialism with a human face, what a large part of today’s left want is capitalism with a human face.”…
What implications does such an account have for the actual practice of politics? “I am a Leninist. Lenin wasn’t afraid to dirty his hands. If you can get power, grab it. Do whatever is possible. This is why I support Obama. I think the battle he is fighting now over healthcare is extremely important, because it concerns the very core of the ruling ideology. The core of the campaign against Obama is freedom of choice. And the lesson, if he wins, is that freedom of choice is certainly something beautiful, but that it only works against a background of regulations, ethical presuppositions, economic conditions and so on. My position isn’t that we should sit down and wait for some big revolution to come. We have to engage wherever we can. If Obama wins his battle over healthcare, if some kind of blow can be struck against the ideology of freedom of choice, it will have been a victory worth fighting for.”…
Read the full piece here.
