Living the Dream: On Slavoj Zizek and Wokeness
In this essay, Roberts takes aim at Slavoj Zizek's recent essay in Compact Magazine
For the most part, I tend to avoid philosophers that are alive. Few things are more disappointing than a living philosopher. As Nietzsche warned us, one only finds a human being who has put their confessions into atonal lyrics we call 'theories'. Close examination of our most famous living philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, reveals this to indeed be the case. Beyond the pop cultural chicanery most of his statements ring hollow -- and serve to support the elite’s dreaming, rather than empowering our waking lives to resist hegemony.
Philosophers' confessions often require a narrative to be spoken; were they spoken crudely or truthfully, we would see them neither as just, nor beautiful, nor true. In the time of the Ancients, the philosophers were more honest; they appealed directly to the mythology of their culture. It is to Asclepius that Socrates gave his last dying breath, and one cannot forget the stories of Plato, whose dialogues are more like catalogs to the divine of the Pantheon. Marcus Aurelius and Seneca each have their reverence for the Gods, as did Cicero, Plotinus and Hypatia. From there, philosophers consistently borrowed from culture and religion to speak their confessions; the medieval philosophers were never without a theology, the Enlightenment philosophers never without a metaphysics, and the modern philosophers never without a theory of language or economics. Any purported philosopher within these ages who did not adhere to this model tended to be exiled or ignored, if not also imprisoned--a caged freak or urban legend to be gawked at long after their time, often a demon turned into some kind of forgotten saint.
In our postmodern era, there is no philosopher who is without a psychoanalytic theory--either explicitly or implicitly. We don't accept philosophers without this psycho-babble; or we see their works as incomplete. It is through their psychoanalytic narratives, often woven in with this or that philosophical thought, that we hear the confessions of the philosophers of our days. As has almost always been the case, the philosopher attaches themselves to the religion of their day like a remora on the side of larger fish. In our era, the religion most ascendant is psychoanalysis, and the most colorful of its remoras is a Slovenian philosopher named Slavoj Zizek.
Slavoj Zizek's appeal is waning, but the trajectory of his arc is still quite clear to us. A figure after our own hearts, Slavoj Zizek realized--consciously or not--that our zeitgeist wasn't Hegel or Lacan or Marx, but pop culture; Coca-Cola, Kinder Eggs, and Starbucks. What do we enjoy the most from his Pervert's Guide To movies; the discussions of Lacan or the demonstration of his insights through Full Metal Jacket and commercials for Coca-Cola? Do we really care about the objet petit a, or do we await Zizek's jokes about Mongol warriors having their balls dusted? The absolute brilliance of Slavoj Zizek resides in finding a way to turn intellectualism into fandom. This method developed universal appeal, and masses of copyists: in some circles the posture of the day involves watching movies so you can interpret them for your friends, showing insight that appears intellectual.
Unlike Counterpunch's Gabe Rockhill, I am not going to have nightmares over this. I won't pitch a fit, in quasi-socialist gab, and claim Zizek is some agent of capitalism. Zizek is not the court jester of capitalism, secretly tricking us into enjoying the evils of capitalism. He is the idiot of McLuhan's global village, perhaps true in intention about being against capitalism, but whose circus act--full of 'don't be afraid', 'and here I provoke you', and hand waving like a magician--has served as an escape for those who assume they are intelligent or philosophical. It is the tendency of the philosopher to desire a place to get lost in--they call it abstraction or pontificating, I call it daydreaming with pretensions. Nietzsche's idea of the future philosopher, the philosopher 'of the dangerous perhaps', seems to have become the philosopher of the performative 'what if the opposite were true?'.
Slavoj Zizek has always been something mildly interesting to me, like a panda on an obstacle course. Where people try to treat him as a grand theorist or attempt to dismiss him as a mere cultural critic, I have always seen Zizek as a cultural vaudevillian, a brand with a fandom. Like Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Zizek spawned an army of disciples--Zizekians of one kind or another. Our virtual spaces are strewn about with 'Hegelian-Lacanian-Marxists', speaking in idiosyncratic jargon, each with their own fawning over Hegel, Lacan, Marx…and Zizek. I despise them as much as I despise the Petersonians, with their Jungian-Nietzschean-Christian song of unresolved daddy issues and knuckle-dragging 'morality'. Like Jordan Peterson, Slavoj Zizek is not only a philosopher, or a priest of psychoanalysis--he is a brand. Like a televangelist, he does not express his theories, he sells them.
In his most recent fire sale, Zizek has decided to try to sell us on Wokeness and its supposed evils. In the face of being asked about identity politics, one might be able to separate people into two categories; those who dislike identity politics not because of the identities involved but because of the politics that makes a mockery of it, and those who couldn't care less about the politics involved, but despise the identities it's centered on.
And Zizek has shown he stands with the latter.
In his rise to prominence, Zizek has taken up a position where he can offer his brand as a form of protection or as capital to others--as he has done with members of what is pitifully called 'left media'. Like Jean Paul Sartre in the last century, Zizek is shared for the credibility and fame he can lend. Whether he is coherent or not, whether he has something to say, is irrelevant. And 'left media' can do little else but use him consistently; they are a group of bogarts, surrounding an ever diminishing blunt, in search of a high.
This foray into 'left media', be it appearing on Give Them an Argument or writing for Jacobin, has led to the recent events surrounding this vaudeville. In this case, Slavoj Zizek decided to write for Compact--the Catholic-fad magazine for the snotty cad-trads and the Latter Day Saints of 'Family Matters' Marxists. I usually do not entertain this magazine; if I wanted to handle a rag soiled by unused brain cells, I'd ask to assist on a lobotomy at a nearby hospital. However, I was unable to escape the wave of cheers and jeers, the denunciations and excuses, shrieks and squeals about his essay, titled 'Wokeness is Here to Stay'. Like hearing something tossing around in the dumpster out back, I could not help myself; I was curious. I wanted to see what was in the dumpster.
What I found was fairly pitiful--this essay was so slapdash I could have confused it for a Reddit post. As a performance, it was on par with a drunken priest giving a sermon that ends with the guzzling of the blood of Christ, before twisting an ankle going down a few steps. However, I can't say that I was too terribly surprised by this article--both in form and content. You see, Slavoj Zizek is afterall a philosopher--which means that, despite his pop cultural references, his preoccupation is with things that aren't real or, at least, only live in thoughts. The thoughts of our porcine species, as it roots about stardust, are at best moments of clarity and at worst delusions; which means, in the median, they are merely illusions. And it is here in the shadows of our animal minds that philosophers play. They tell you this shadow represents ideology, and that one over there is the Big Other, and that one in the corner is the secret Christianity you ought to follow. To play with our thoughts is fun, sometimes. If done well, we call it teaching. But, in Zizek's case, it is a mere game--one which he has turned against us time and again.
Consider: I can still remember Slavoj Zizek's debate with English author and essayist Will Self back in 2016. I can remember, even then, the Zizek fandom dismissing Will Self's concerns about Zizek's inability to answer simple questions that were quite focused on his (then new) book, The Courage of Hopelessness. That debate, while not the first I had seen Will Self participate in, was the first time I ever encountered Slavoj Zizek. I remember laughing along with Self, whose 'ironic' disposition toward Zizek frustrated the philosopher. I remember noting the way Zizek would retreat into explanations that were stunted or presented a form of misdirection. But I remember, most of all, Will Self's admonishment of Zizek towards the end, when he noted:
"One of the problems, it seems to me, with the socialist project--as I've already said--is that people are not engaged in modes of social production…so how are these people supposed to find each other, how are they to join in a movement of some kind; all of that seems startlingly absent from your thinking to me." (56:24-56:45)
To this, Zizek's response was to say that he believes in miracles--which is perhaps the emptiest answer this side of claims of seeing Bigfoot. He might as well have said he trusted the aliens to come down and side with the proletariat, or that we should rely on exorcism to battle COVID; although, frankly, America has relied on less in the latter case. But we are getting into the weeds here, where miracles don't exist but 'naive ethical dilemmas' exist; moral dilemmas, like supporting marginal communities in the face of governmental and social oppression. This absence in regard to such realities has haunted Zizek's work ever since his encounter with Self; more so than the spectre of communism or the spirit of Hegel. It is here, in his essay on wokeness, that this absence has finally come to a head--a head, apparently, that lacks any brain activity.
Zizek begins his essay with a portent, presented with all the panache of an unpracticed puritan. He tells us that '[s]ome claim that "wokeness" is on the wane' (who claims? and always with the quote marks) but that we are deceived. It is, he says, 'gradually being normalized, conformed to even by those who inwardly doubt it'--one gets the near mind-dulling feeling that this confession has little to do with anyone but Zizek. Who is conforming despite doubt? Where is it being normalized? But it is never in the interest of the puritan to bring receipts. Like the mother who goes to an adult toy shop just to find offensive paraphernalia or the right wing commentator who goes to a drag show just to 'reveal' its insidious nature, one might ask of Zizek; how do you know this?
But evidence and receipts be damned, Zizek continues: in a style reminiscent, to my mind, of Midge Decter's "Boys on the Beach", enumerating four different 'problematic' situations related to 'wokeness' (again, in quotations). We are told a horror story of a prisoner who, choosing to self identify as a woman, raped two women while in prison, supposedly leading to the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon. With a pull quote that has all the subtlety of a brick being tossed through a window, we are told '[w]e have a person who identifies itself as a woman using its penis to rape two women.'
We are told of a controversy at the Tavistock clinic over puberty blockers and the closing of its clinics, warned that '[t]he use of puberty blockers is yet another case of woke capitalism' before claiming this (and the resignation of Sturgeon) were 'a partial victory for "anti-woke" forces'. Forces. In a slip up that is near indistinguishable from terrible prose, we see that Zizek sees this as some kind of war between groups. A telling, disturbing parapraxis on the part of Zizek. Don't forget this--because Zizek certainly will.
Following these case studies, we are given a performance; with crocodile tears on display and sackcloth worn flamboyantly, Zizek recounts the experiences of activist Maryam Namazie and fellow Compact bien-pensant Vicent Lloyd. Quoting one disjointed, broken verse from John McWhorter’s 'Woke Racism' for an amateurishly poetic effect, Zizek recounts for us just how 'repeatedly and rudely' protesters were to Namazie and how 'this new cult' confronted Lloyd and 'ostracized' him.
These events sit as proof, to Zizek, of a 'trans lobby' and a 'woke elite'--where have we heard that accusation before?--which form an 'interest-group agitation and the compulsions of capital' which 'can also draw upon reserves of religious strength.' Curiously, the homiletics of our Hegelian psychoanalyst leaves out the state driven oppression of LGBTQIA+ people in the United States by conservative 'anti-woke' officials; to do so would have revealed his fears as merely speculative, whereas the fears of the LGBTQIA+ community he demonizes are real.
From here, we watch Zizek fly off into the nebulous speculum mentis of his psychoanalysis. But however hurried Zizek was to get to the familiar Lacan-based excuses, I found myself more concerned with the mess--of prose and prejudice--that he left behind. We can see that Will Self's criticism still holds, seven years later; not only does it still hold, it has changed from a mere absence to a pathology. Zizek, coming across alienation and lacking any theoretical perspective about how this is meant to be overcome, if not via 'miracles', precedes to follow the logic of miracles to its end; where there are no miracles, there must be sin, and where there is sin, there must be those responsible.
The trouble with Zizek's analysis is not its inaccuracy; it is fairly true that these events did take place. The trouble is that, with these facts at hand, Zizek invents a narrative so he can pin them on the 'woke' in general and the LGBTQIA+ community. Rape, disruptive students, and the mis-steps of a clinic are, sad to say, fairly common events that occur regardless of one's identity. Do Catholic priests and their rape and abuse of young boys ring a bell? How about the way the state government in Florida is shutting down and firing professors, while demanding the medical documents of students? How about the Proud Boys protesters who terrorize drag queens? In lieu of a response to what Sartre would call the 'seriality' of the world along various fault lines of prejudice, Zizek's only offer is to support some alienation over others.
And his choice, it seems, is to pin this alienation on marginal identities. And, by some miracle (dressed as an agent of the state, it seems), these identities will be moved out of the way and the alienation will ease.
Zizek ends his essay with a flight into Lacanian scripture. He tells us, with a solemn air, that wokeism is built on 'the superego structure', with institutions like Telluride acting as 'an institutional big Other'. From such a miracle-less world of Zizek's parti pris, Zizek leads us away from reality and its tergiversate nature and towards our dreams--perhaps the only place miracles ever actually happen. This reversion to dreams brought to my mind an aphorism by Karl Kraus, one of the earliest critics of psychoanalysis: the psychoanalyst picks our dreams as if they were our pockets. As I read through his Lacanian explanations, I kept feeling for my wallet.
Starting with a reference to Freud's An Interpretation of Dreams, Zizek tells us a story of a father who falls asleep keeping vigil over his dead son. In his dream, his son comes to him and says to him that he is burning. When the father awakens, the cloth on his son's coffin is on fire. From this straightforward story, Zizek reverts to Lacan's explanation: is there not 'more reality' in our dreams than in our waking life, a reality which startles us? As one works their way through this Lacanian twist on a Freudian twist of the mess Zizek had made, one merely wishes that these dreams were lucid rather than feverish.
Here, square peg meets round hole; Zizek spends a paragraph trying to force wokeness (still undefined here) into a straightjacket of Lacanian limericks, where wokeness 'awakens us…precisely to enable us to go on sleeping'. To Zizek, the Real of the dream is more traumatic than reality itself, and so we escape into reality to avoid the Real. One gets the sense of whiplash, a completion that pains one with the fact that wherever you left, you returned to without progress. Where Zizek seemed to have begun with confession, and continued with confession, he has ended with confession; Zizek has turned to dreams in the face of this miracle-less reality, where his views and ideas have no answer. All he can ask of us is to turn to our dreams, which he pretends is our living reality, and live them, rather than waking life. He asks us, in essence, to embrace a spirituality that turns us inwards, towards our fears and prejudices--and away from the equally terrorizing reality.
Jean Paul Sartre, in his biography Saint Genet: Martyr and Actor, wrote while analyzing Genet's Miracle of the Rose that "the prisoner's dreams [are] the guard's spirituality". The prisoners of our alienated, serialized world--marginal identities--have a dream; a dream to be free to be themselves. They dream of a world where they can live to the fullest one can. They dream of a world where expression is not a crime, a sin, or piece of a political agenda. There are drag queens who wish for the freedom to act and dance without fearing the bullets of pathological right wingers. There are parents who wish not to fear for the life of their transgender children. There are whole families in the Black community--mothers, fathers, children--who want not to be the grist for the mill of our police state, who want their future not to look more and more like their pasts. There are Jewish families who are watching societies in the 'civilized' world reenact horrors they heard about from their ancestors. These are people whose experiences I, being who I am, cannot begin to fathom; I have lived a fairly charmed life, which is truly its own condemnation in a place like America. They have strength, they have tenacity--and they are tired, because they shouldn't need to be these things for so long.
These dreams have become the spirituality of soulless reactionaries like Zizek. You hear, constantly, the neverending white whine of reactionaries who tell you about their love of freedom, their belief in strength of character, in their belief in self-reliance and merit. They perform gospels to the notion of the individual, all alone in this cruel world, facing down its monsters and its devils and coming out as heroes. They fetishize, to the point of being pathetic, the idea that they are oppressed, that there is some larger conspiracy set against them. That the elites and the ruling class, whose ideology is always on their lips, have decided to look down and point an Olympic finger at them. They have seen it as necessary to adjust their fate with cruel obstacles, denying them their just desserts; all desserts except for millions of dollars, platforms, audiences, a spot on Tucker Carlson's show…
Their spirituality, held in limp hands and spoken out the side of their mouths, are the dreams of the marginal identities; dreams that are maligned by their feverish resentment and pathological prejudice. A spirituality that requires one to look away from reality, where it is clear that it is a lie. Their spiritualism requires guards who make sure that the minds that birthed the dreams they traffic for money are silenced by violence, by indifference, and by accusations of guilt by association. It is not the 'woke' who have imposed a superego on our society, but society that has imposed a superego on them; if this transgender person makes a bad joke or that Black woman speaks a little too 'rudely' or this lesbian couple adopts a child too eagerly, discipline by moralists comes not only for them, but for any community they associate with. What is all granola eating and careless mouthing of hymns to freedom for the spiritualists of the upper and new class is the muffled cries of those who have been condemned to only dream of those ideals.
Zizek doesn't get it; he is living the dream. It is just someone else's dream.
"They fetishize, to the point of being pathetic, the idea that they are oppressed, that there is some larger conspiracy set against them". Is that so? The entire paragraph prior to this statement you spend spiritualizing the suffering of transgender people, blacks, and jews for no apparent reason other than to bolster your argument. Allow me to quote from Zizek's subsequent article, Why Politics is Immanently Theological:
"what characterizes an authentic emancipatory thought is not a vision of conflict-free harmonious future but the properly dialectical notion of antagonism which is totally incompatible with the Rightist topic of the need for an enemy to assert our self-identity."
Zizek has repeatedly made explicit, including in the article from which you target him, that he does not pin the world's political woes on the typical rightist targets, but rather that there are those who sit in relative peace and comfort who take supposedly "uncritical" positions in defense of these targets merely as a easy position from which to attack their political enemies without actually engaging with their positions, as you have done with Zizek. Your lazy dismissal of him and Lacan are a silent admission of defeat on your part.