Post by rmarks1 on Jul 1, 2018 20:16:24 GMT -5
This is the first time I heard of this fellow. If the author of this article is correct, Slavoj Žižek is the philosopher of terror and mass murder.
Bob
Žižek has, however, proposed specific solutions in the past. His clearest statement of how humanity might escape capitalism appears in “Robespierre or the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror,” an essay published over a decade ago.
“Our task today,” Žižek writes in that essay, “is to reinvent emancipatory terror.” One cannot achieve true liberation without wanton violence, because “as Saint-Just put it succinctly: ‘That which produces the general good is always terrible.’” When Žižek elaborates on this idea his language is uncharacteristically lucid. He believes there come points in human history (France 1789, Russia 1917) when the masses awaken to their status as brutalized and degraded creatures, when extraordinary leaders (Robespierre, Lenin) recognize the critical importance of the times and take charge of said masses, when there arises an opportunity, at last, to shatter the systems that oppress us (feudalism, capitalism), and in those moments — in those precise moments — we must decide: Should we embrace “revolutionary-democratic terror?”
Žižek argues that we should, and that we must: During the moment of revolutionary fervor, passivity is tantamount to complicity with the forces of reaction. Anyone who does not participate in the terror is fit for elimination. To create a better world, destroy capitalism, and bring about liberation, one should not be reluctant to employ pitiless methods of political action. Those unwilling to inflict slaughter on behalf of revolution are “sensitive liberals” who long for “revolutions which don’t smell of revolution.” Such people want freedom without violent struggle, and for Žižek such a position is morally bankrupt: One must accept terror “as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed.”
Žižek in this essay is somewhat exceptional. Unlike other (perhaps more reserved) radical thinkers, Žižek makes the connection between utopianism and terrorism explicit: He demands utopia at the expense of terror despite knowing full well that utopia is unobtainable. Indeed, Žižek himself acknowledges that the Jacobin, Bolshevik, and Maoist utopian experiments failed utterly to bring about Communist bliss, yet he is willing nevertheless to encourage similar undertakings in the future. One more revolution, one more outburst of emancipatory terror, and we will finally arrive at the truly “just” society. He therefore contradicts himself when he says that he wants a revolution only so that the brutalities of capitalism can be washed away in the carnage. One comes to realize that he is not opposed to brutalities as such; he only objects to brutalities that he perceives to be caused by “the system.” When atrocities are committed for “correct” (i.e. Communist) causes, he morphs into their foremost intellectual apologist.
And yet, in my view what makes the Žižek phenomenon truly remarkable is not that he openly advocates the mass murder of civilians, not that he is taken seriously by the Western academic establishment (he has 100,00 citations on Google Scholar), not that despite all his writing on Stalinism he cannot muster an unambiguous moral condemnation of Stalin’s butchery. It is, rather, that the terror he endorses is ultimately nihilistic. If utopia is impossible, then any society born after a terrorist uprising is bound to be flawed in some way. Certain classes of people will continue to be excluded from the “benefits” of the revolution — Jews in the former Soviet Union are one obvious example. If Žižek will stop at nothing until full and perfect equality is attained, and if he sanctions terrorism to attain that perfect equality, then he must (and to be fair he does) endorse a perpetual cycle of revolutionary terror to achieve that which cannot be achieved. Seduced by the aesthetics of revolution rather than committed to a serious pursuit of justice, Žižek’s philosophy collapses under the weight of its incoherence.
www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/slavoj-zizek-fashionable-revolutionary/
“Our task today,” Žižek writes in that essay, “is to reinvent emancipatory terror.” One cannot achieve true liberation without wanton violence, because “as Saint-Just put it succinctly: ‘That which produces the general good is always terrible.’” When Žižek elaborates on this idea his language is uncharacteristically lucid. He believes there come points in human history (France 1789, Russia 1917) when the masses awaken to their status as brutalized and degraded creatures, when extraordinary leaders (Robespierre, Lenin) recognize the critical importance of the times and take charge of said masses, when there arises an opportunity, at last, to shatter the systems that oppress us (feudalism, capitalism), and in those moments — in those precise moments — we must decide: Should we embrace “revolutionary-democratic terror?”
Žižek argues that we should, and that we must: During the moment of revolutionary fervor, passivity is tantamount to complicity with the forces of reaction. Anyone who does not participate in the terror is fit for elimination. To create a better world, destroy capitalism, and bring about liberation, one should not be reluctant to employ pitiless methods of political action. Those unwilling to inflict slaughter on behalf of revolution are “sensitive liberals” who long for “revolutions which don’t smell of revolution.” Such people want freedom without violent struggle, and for Žižek such a position is morally bankrupt: One must accept terror “as a bitter truth to be fully endorsed.”
Žižek in this essay is somewhat exceptional. Unlike other (perhaps more reserved) radical thinkers, Žižek makes the connection between utopianism and terrorism explicit: He demands utopia at the expense of terror despite knowing full well that utopia is unobtainable. Indeed, Žižek himself acknowledges that the Jacobin, Bolshevik, and Maoist utopian experiments failed utterly to bring about Communist bliss, yet he is willing nevertheless to encourage similar undertakings in the future. One more revolution, one more outburst of emancipatory terror, and we will finally arrive at the truly “just” society. He therefore contradicts himself when he says that he wants a revolution only so that the brutalities of capitalism can be washed away in the carnage. One comes to realize that he is not opposed to brutalities as such; he only objects to brutalities that he perceives to be caused by “the system.” When atrocities are committed for “correct” (i.e. Communist) causes, he morphs into their foremost intellectual apologist.
And yet, in my view what makes the Žižek phenomenon truly remarkable is not that he openly advocates the mass murder of civilians, not that he is taken seriously by the Western academic establishment (he has 100,00 citations on Google Scholar), not that despite all his writing on Stalinism he cannot muster an unambiguous moral condemnation of Stalin’s butchery. It is, rather, that the terror he endorses is ultimately nihilistic. If utopia is impossible, then any society born after a terrorist uprising is bound to be flawed in some way. Certain classes of people will continue to be excluded from the “benefits” of the revolution — Jews in the former Soviet Union are one obvious example. If Žižek will stop at nothing until full and perfect equality is attained, and if he sanctions terrorism to attain that perfect equality, then he must (and to be fair he does) endorse a perpetual cycle of revolutionary terror to achieve that which cannot be achieved. Seduced by the aesthetics of revolution rather than committed to a serious pursuit of justice, Žižek’s philosophy collapses under the weight of its incoherence.
www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/slavoj-zizek-fashionable-revolutionary/
Bob