Tuesday, September 14, 2004
(7:05 PM) | Adam Kotsko:
Can there be a decent Left?
From Slavoj Zizek, For they know not what they do, in his concluding section:In the face of the apparent worldwide triumph of liberal-capitalist ideology, it would be far more productive to recall Hegel's dictum that a political movement gains victory the moment it splits. The movement of liberal democracy's triumph, the moment when its external adversay, incarnated in the Communist "Evil Empire," disintegrated, is in itself (and will soon become also "for itself") the moment of confrontation with its immanent limit: its own weaknesses can no longer be exculpated by means of a comparison with "Them." In the West as well as in the East, we are already witnessing new political movments which are "events" in the sense elaborated by Alain Badiou: emergences of something that cannot be integrated into the existing ideological frameworks, signs of the New the pathbreaking character of which is attested by the very fact that they do not know what they are signs of and therefore often take refuge in the language of the past; it suffices to mention the Green movement.This is what I read on the train. I typed it in for two reasons: I thought it was good, and I wanted to give something tonight, thought I fear I don't have any new thoughts at the moment -- at least nothing terribly pertinent.
The New can be recognized by the diverse forms of refusal to follow the updated formula of the categorical imperative: "Act so that your activity in no way impedes the free circulation and reproduction of capital!" Today, when the cracks in the facade of the worldwide greening of democracy render more and more visible its grey flesh of capital; when -- exemplarily in the former GDR [East Germany] -- democratic enthusiasm proves to be nothing more than a prelude to the integration of a new territory into the flux of capital, this effective force of deterritorialization which undermines all fixed local identities, this veritable rhizome of our time, psychoanalysis is more than ever charged with the task of delimiting the space of possible resistence to this circulation: new forms of hysterical refusal of the subject to assume the pre-ordained place in this circulation, new forms of the hysterical quesetion addressed to capital.
To find proper names for this New is the task ahead for Left thought. In fulfilling this task, the Left has no need to renounce its past: how symptomatic is today's forgetfulness about the fact that the Left was the "vanishing mediator" which gained most of the rights and freedoms today appropriated by liberal democarcy, starting with the common right to vote; how symptomatic is the forgetfulness about the fact that the very language by means of which even the mass media perceive Stalinism ("Big Brother," "Ministry of Truth," and so on) was the product of a leftist criticism of the Communist experience. Today more than ever, in the midst of the scoundrel time we live in, the duty of the Left is to keep alive the memory of all lost causes, of all shattered and perverted dreams and hopes attached to leftist projects....
