The Pessimist Rearmed: Zizek On Christianity And Revolution

“A man whose whole family had died under torture, and who had himself been tortured for a long time in a concentration camp; or a sixteenth-century Indian, the sole survivor after the total extermination of his people. Such men if they had previously believed in the mercy of God would either believe in it no longer, or else they would conceive of it quite differently from before. I have not been through such things. I know however, that they exist; so what is the difference?”

- Simone Weil

“What combats doubt is, as it were, redemption. Holding fast to this must be holding fast to that belief. So what that means is: first you must be redeemed and hold on to your redemption (keep hold of your redemption) — then you will see that you are holding fast to this belief. So this can come about only if you no longer rest your weight on the earth but suspend yourself from heaven. Then everything will be different and it will be ‘no wonder’ if you can do things that you cannot do now.”

- Ludwig Wittgenstein

In the 1962 preface to Theory of the Novel, Georg Lukacs castigated his long-time opponent Theodor Adorno and other Western Marxists for succumbing to a sense of impotent resignation — as well as an aestheticist revulsion — at the administered world of Western capitalism and forsaking concrete political activity. They had given up the practical and demanding tasks of the revolution of the proletariat to take refuge in the “Grand Hotel Abyss,” where they could indulge in the rarefied pleasures of high art and culture while lamenting the catastrophes unfolding everywhere around them. The kind of commitment exemplified by Lukacs, on the other hand, which involved the embrace of and service to a “really existing socialist” regime, led in turn to accusations from his Western counterparts that he was a Stalinist. Nonetheless, it must be said that the fate of Marxist theory in the West and in the United States in particular to remain predominantly the preserve of upper-middle class intellectuals notably fails to diminish any of the harshness of Lukacs’s rebuke. A Marxism that has come to operate primarily in the sphere of culture without exercising any kind of significant influence in the arenas of politics and economics would testify to the seemingly limitless capacity of liberal democratic capitalism to defuse and integrate dissent. Reduced to postpolitical outbursts of cultural despair (or euphoric assertions of subversion, its speculative double), Marxist theory has managed to fit itself relatively smoothly into the liberal democratic marketplace of ideas, the shrill charges of sedition leveled by the pundits of the political Right notwithstanding. Indeed, these and other hostile commentators are fond of noting that Marxism and communism have been discovered to be bankrupt everywhere except for the literature and cultural studies departments of American universities.

The question of whether academic Marxists in their despair of praxis constitute a prophetic minority hastening to greet the Day of Judgment or are the lamentable trophies of an ideological system so briskly assured of its triumph that it converts its intellectual opposition into a prosperous career choice is one that ought to be resolved by battering the ivory tower into a stylite’s pillar. Or so the prolific Slovene theorist Slavoj Zizek would maintain, in a series of works starting with the publication of The Ticklish Subject in 1999. Zizek sets out to break the deadlock of a well-fed futility that paralyzes the academic Left with a distinctive Lacanian-Marxist approach that, to his credit, takes politics seriously as politics, refusing to repress its inescapable sacrifices and cruel dilemmas under an obfuscating discourse of cultural representation. The Marxism he espouses is the harsh, Leninist variety, and the path that he takes towards its revitalization is one which has been generally avoided by much of the political Left, the roots of communism in the Christian tradition. On the one hand, Zizek directs his most stinging criticisms at the academic Left and the pseudo-radicalism of post-colonial studies and multiculturalism, repeating the charge in several books that the willingness of the...