The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, and: The Fragile Absolute, or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, and: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, and: Cosmopolitanism (review)

The Zizek industry is clearly a growth one as the three titles recently put out by Verso show. Two of them, The Ticklish Subject and The Fragile Absolute, came out in Wo Es War, a series edited by Zizek himself. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, the third one, features several interventions by Zizek and was published in the Phronesis series edited by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. All of them are part of a broader project of reinventing politics in the post-Cold War era—or the “global age”—in which, as Laclau and Mouffe acknowledge in the brief description of their series, old categories such as “Left” and “Right” seem, to many, fairly irrelevant. To paraphrase Zizek’s own marxian paraphrase in his “Introduction” to The Ticklish Subject, the specter of this age haunts Zizek and practically everybody else in these books, including, as one would expect, the contributors to Public Culture’s special topic issue, Cosmopolitanism. Regarding the latter, let me mention for now Arjun Appadurai’s essay “Spectral Housing and Urban Cleansing: Notes on Millennial Mumbai” (627–651). For, it seems to me, the critic gives us here, as he has in Modernity at Large, a balanced account of globalization as driven by capital but also by cultural “particularities” that take advantage of capital flows. In other words, one thing that I admire in Appadurai’s contribution—as well as in Mignolo’s “The Many Faces of Cosmopolis: Border Thinking and Critical Cosmopolitanism”—is the effort to read the global, an essentially ambiguous, multifaceted phenomenon. Unlike Appadurai and despite the intricate argument developed throughout hundreds of dense pages, Zizek seems to already know what globalization is all about. This prescience is not truly surprising given the predictable paradigm within which he operates—a paradigm of predictability, too, in that, chances are, his mix of Lacanian and marxist analysis “uncovers” invariably the logic of Capital.

The issues Zizek raises, though, are certainly pressing. I think he risks “misreading” them (unavoidably, perhaps? does he “know what he is doing”?) as to “identify” all over the place the long hand of Capital—an obsessing, absolute Signifier and Signified collapsed into both phenomenon and meaning thereof simultaneously. But he does a good job of underscoring the global urgency of the problems he brings to the fore. The Ticklish Subject’s objective, for instance, anachronistic as it may sound—“[t]his book thus endeavours to reassert the Cartesian subject” (2)—provides an opportunity to take not only on Hegel and Heidegger but also on Badiou, Balibar, Rancière, and Laclau, and it is through a critique of their work that Zizek distinguishes between a certain type of universality and “capitalist globalism.” What happens in Part II, however, is a “universalization” of capital—it turns out, American capital—as the agent of global society at the expense of any cultural considerations that might give us a more complicated and perhaps encouraging picture. As in the last section on the book, which takes to task risk theorists such as Beck and Giddens, this Part also develops, or rather assumes, not only a certain definition of globalism but also of postmodernism. This last one, along with “deconstruction,” “multiculturalism,” and its various struggles along gender, ethnicity, or race lines are seized as accomplices—and unwittingly so (“they do not know what they are doing”)—to globalist (read capital) expansion. Now, in his book, Zizek often refers to the unholy alliance between the extremities of the political spectrum...