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Wednesday, September 08, 2004

(6:09 PM) | Adam Kotsko:

Zizek's Hegelism

It's not that I disagree with this post from Matt at Pas Au-Delà -- honestly, I don't. I'll agree that "[h]is style is one of habitual overstatement and polemic," and perhaps even that "he hasn't even begun to read Derrida." I'd take exception to this, however:

Zizek refuses to separate the most ruthless violence (that done by the postmodern neo-Nazi) from the culture of 'liberal tolerance' and 'diversity.' Radical fanaticism goes hand in hand with neo-liberal democracy.

The blockquote Matt provides does not seem to me to prove that Zizek "refuses to separate" the two. Here it is:

"One should link Rancière's notion of post-politics to the notion of excessive, non-functional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life, proposed by Balibar: a cruelty whose manifestations range from 'fundamentalist' racist and /or religious slaughter to the 'senseless' outbursts of violence by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideological reason...The neo-Nazi skinhead's ethnic violence is not the 'return of the repressed' of the liberal multiculturalist tolerance, but directly generated by it, its own concealed true face."

He is not saying the two phemomena are identical or that "normal" liberal/tolerant behavior is as morally unacceptable as neo-Nazi violence -- he's saying the two stand in a certain kind of relationship. You might not agree with the relationship Zizek sets up between them, but it seems to be a plausible argument as far as I can tell -- at least not outright ridiculous, or fanatical, or even all that uncommon.

And this brings me to my point, a point that has been bothering me as I sit and read Zizek's ~~Tribute to Hegel~~ For they know not what they do on the train. For all Zizek's insistence on the inadequacy of the standard postmodern reception of Hegel as this totalitarian demon, is not Zizek's own procedure in defending Hegel a "performative" demonstration of the validity of the postmodern critique? Is not Zizek's insistence that not only has everyone got Hegel wrong, but that the most interesting part of everyone's argument is ultimately Hegelian -- is this not the ultimate proof that Hegel defuses all attempts at difference, sublating them into the same? Derrida, Kierkegaard, Marx, Deleuze and even Wittgenstein come in for this same treatment: they are dispicable for when they critique Hegel, and they secretly are Hegel when they don't.

So, returning to the post that prompted this little Zizekian interlude, does not Matt prove himself to be very Zizekian when he...? (I started that little sentence as a joke, but now that I think about it, we might check what Matt does with Zizek vis-à-vis Derrida toward the end of his own post.)

In short, Matt, thanks for blogrolling us, and thanks to whoever clicked over from there and alerted me to Pas Au-Delà's existence.

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(Adam Kotsko has asserted the moral right to be identified as the author of this post.)