Slavoj Žižek, A Left that Dares to Speak its Name: 34 Untimely Interventions (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020). 290 pages, $19.95.
A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name is a collection of 34 essays written by the celebrity philosopher Slavoj Žižek that were originally published across different venues, space, and time. Alongside his Hegel in a Wired Brain and Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World, this is Žižek’s third book released in 2020. In this review I will focus on select entries across its five sections that are organized as follows: The Global Mess, The West, And the Rest, Ideology, and Appendix. Gathered here for your leisure, the collection serves as a handbook to Žižek’s recent doings, a gathering of his controversial position-taking and often hilarious ideological critique.
In his characteristic prose, the cultural theorist argues, in what is perhaps his most straightforward articulation yet, for the centrality of communism—a kind of Žižekian Maoism—as an analytic for reading contemporary global capitalism, politics, and culture, and as a political strategy for moving beyond today’s neoliberal quagmire. From his role as a European intellectual, Žižek advances critiques rooted in Marxism and psychoanalysis—as a major commentator and student of Hegel and Lacan—to understand the sociopolitical and libidinal preoccupations of varied commodities, events, and 21st century geopolitics. With a text as disparate as this and with history moving at such an accelerated pace, his insights range in their effectiveness, but in their sum, deliver various moments of conceptual clarity. His brief readings on anti-immigrant populisms are particularly valuable, as he reads the figure of Trump as a vulgar aesthetic, embodying an everyman’s masculinism that bonds both rich and poor through contradictory identifications with cheap ahistorical sloganeering: “Make America Great Again” (118). For Žižek, Trump’s political manners are not iconoclastic, he adds, but should be rather seen as the activation of a political unconscious now visible in its most clownish and crudest expression. In a useful comparison, Žižek writes that Trump is fundamentally no different than what in the U.K. is Theresa May’s “barbarism with a human face” (134). For Slavoj Žižek, Trump is a foil for illiberalism as usual. In his analysis, Trump is a symptom that reveals the nature of order today, one putrid and dangerously misguided, that in its chaos has created space for a new Left to emerge (e.g. for Žižek this rests in the admittedly “lite” Sanders campaign, and in new politicians like AOC) to advantageously steer the U.S. beyond its present frenzy, echoing the famous dictum attributed to Mao: “there is great disorder under the heavens—the situation is excellent.”
Following flurries of apocalyptic thinking aimed at jolting our political senses to move towards a communist horizon, Žižek likewise restates how the new Right often paints its own version of this very apocalyptic scenario for short-term, electoral, gains. For the U.S. Right, the apocalypse is one where hordes of Latino immigrants invade the nation (for Europe replace Latinos for Muslims) who will push society towards an interminable emergency from which civilization itself (i.e. Euro-Americanness) may never recover (23-25). This point returns throughout the text, demonstrating how anti-immigrant populists have casualized the fearmongering of the external intruder, a discourse clothed in partial truths of fascist origin, to justify what he refers to as “obvious absurdities” (272). Connecting to an earlier missive, Žižek offers the “nomadic proletarian” as a powerful contradiction that, like ecology in these end-of-earth times, must be engaged as a battleground over political and social meaning that in turn can form the new grounds for political mobilizations into the future. Here the work of young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg looms powerfully for Žižek in articulating a disobedient politics for the future (82-84). Writing before COVID-19, Žižek suggests that we maximize discrete instances of planetary crisis (that in turn also reveal a generalized crisis of humanity). By deploying the intensifying heatwaves, droughts, storms, earthquakes, and other “natural” disasters as an origin point for politics—and now, of course, the pandemic—this will, in his view, serve to popularize the idea that capitalism’s global unfolding is the root cause of the Earth’s polluted state and that “liberal freedom” is its ruse. For Žižek this is the only point of departure possible for a new planetary politics, a position that has been echoed by political ecologists and radical geographers for some time—though this call for “permanent” pandemic politics is a welcome reminder.
Žižek is at his best when writing about Euro-American concerns. He is a useful thinker to engage as he moves between the lingering histories of Europe’s encounter with the world, and its post-European genealogies as in the United States and in Russia. This is the Slovenian’s bread and butter. As he ventures further from colonial metropoles however, Žižek becomes less convincing. I was particularly struck by his simplified account of femicide in Ciudad Juárez. These “post-paternal youth gangs,” as he calls them, are a result of the criminal capture of fatherless young men on the U.S.-Mexico border (221). Mexican serial killers in Ciudad Juárez stand-in as an explainer for toxic masculinity’s most extreme expression, that, for the Freudo-Marxist Žižek are a “macho reaction to a new class of independent working women” (222). While at face value this assertion appears true and partly captures Chihuahua’s troubles, it also advances a one-dimensional racialization of social actors wherein the transnational exploitation of these borderland communities is flattened and jettisoned, their subjection to capital—licit and illicit—a non-factor in the shaping of Juárez’s homicidal sociality.
Despite some of the book’s shortcomings that might in fact result from the short essay form, Žižek’s style remains inimitable. He has sparked much debate over the years, and the multiple topics that he engages here demonstrate a still-hungry thinker aiming to devour the latest piece of global culture with aims to decipher how political and economic leaders have all but guaranteed humanity’s destruction. As per his detours in Mexico, Žižek is at his best when he treats the contradictions at the heart of the Western world—the idea of Europe, the end of Europe, and its other puzzles—and less in his element when writing on the former colonized world such as Venezuela, or in analyzing, for instance, the character of Cleo from Alfonso Cuarón’s Roma (2018) using strict moralistic and ideological lenses contra popular reviews of the time. Žižek, perhaps unbeknownst to his audience, reads Cleo’s character and diegetic motivations as a deracinated subaltern despite her being embedded in, and in consistent tension with, Mexico’s racial caste system (241-242). Of course, his publics are wide and varied, yet this is one occasion where his descriptions inadequately capture the object of his critique, the cultural meaning of embodiment and social relations.
In Venezuela, for example, he equates the maneuverings of the anti-Chavista imperialist bloc with the insufficiently described popular mobilizations that sought to build, sustain, and find new forms to “institutionalize” Bolivarian Socialism. Here, Žižek falls into the trap of misrecognizing on-the-ground political experimentation, adopting instead a conservative reading of the state through traditional notions of institutionality. Misidentifying the project of communing in Venezuela, he passes over its very different objective: the making of political sociality through bottom-up radical collectives composed and guided by the motley underclasses. Later, in the saving grace of this piece, he shifts to thinking about the emergent grammars and metaphors that make possible liberatory projects—the “new clichés” that might describe the new society to thereby activate the creativity of the political imagination (196-197). In Venezuela, as political theorist George Ciccariello-Maher concretely demonstrates, Žižek’s “new clichés” were in fact available for analysis in the small-scale communes of hilly Caracas, in the barrios where the empowered poor continue to practice direct democracy and self-government (2016). It is in these instances that Žižek’s lenses feel dated and rather untimely. These now identifiable limits in Žižek miss the emergent terrains of politics that, unfortunately, make his views appear reductionist, arrogant, and Europhilic, as unable to grapple with situated difference or even prefigurative politics, instead observing them as regressive elements, as mere “symptoms.”
A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name is provocative, fun, and very readable. While there continues to be a sense of amusement when reading Žižek, the book feels a bit lopsided and at times unfocused, as if missing some concluding chapter that binds the entries beyond the introduction, “From the Communist Standpoint.” It would have been useful to have new writing that bookends the collection, and that restates Žižek’s radical left position, accounting for his sense of the global by tying together his reflections on India, Israel, Bosnia, China and more. Though we do have some exhilarating entries in the Appendix related to academic controversies in the age of #MeToo (e.g. Avital Ronell), this text does not offer a systematic account of the global capitalist dynamics, its discrete violences, and its accumulations, nor does it capture the realities of people living in worlds beyond the borders of Europe and its closer relatives (e.g. the U.S.). Notwithstanding some hesitations, Žižek continues to be an intriguing thinker, and this collection is worth reading. His relevance continues unabated as a polemicist, though in many circles, he also signals the waning of the European intellectual wielding European theory to understand today’s world as descended from Europe. To read Žižek, as it has always been, is a chaotic and sometimes disorienting interrogation into contemporary life’s reigning contradictions, where his writing is a cipher for the very disorders and antagonisms of our shared present. But, as Chairman Mao writes, “…antagonism is one form, but not the only form, of the struggle of opposites” (1937).
Jorge E. Cuélla
Dartmouth College
Hanover, New Hampshire
jorge.cuellar@dartmouth.edu
