Žižek, Slavoj
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Core ideas
Žižek opens with a joke-laden praise of American public television and of American intellectual diversity, admitting a "European arrogance," then recounts his career: after finishing his postgraduate studies in 1973 in Ljubljana he was due to become an assistant professor, but a hardline communist counter-offensive left him unemployed for six or seven years, until he was given a job at a marginal institute of social sciences, meant to keep him from students and public influence, where he still has what he calls a "permanent sabbatical." He describes himself as "misanthropic," unable to sing or dance, and says people think him extroverted and "half crazy." He attributes the "most dangerous philosopher in the West" label to his writing on violence, which was misread as sympathy for Stalinism, and to his critical stance on the policies of the state of Israel, while insisting that anti-Semitism is "the primordial zero-level form of ideology" (blaming outside intruders for social conflict). He argues, citing Anders Breivik, that there is an anti-Semitic "Zionism" (support for Israel combined with hostility to Jews at home), and worries that hardline Zionists could ally with such currents; he says how Israel treats the Palestinians will decide "whether they become just another state."
He says Stalinism remains a mystery: it was not a regime of fanatics killing ordinary people but a "suicidal regime" in which, at the climax of the terror in the mid-1930s, the most dangerous place was the Central Committee, and which "hated everybody, including each other." He differs from fascism, a regime of "bad guys who said they planned to do bad things and then... did it," and says the October Revolution had real emancipatory potential but that Leninism "had to become Stalinism," with no easy counterfactual. He describes himself as a communist only in the sense that communism is the name for the problems of the commons (ecology, intellectual property, biogenetics, the status of capitalism), not for any answers; the Leninist party "is certainly not the answer" and twentieth-century communism was "basically a fiasco." He also says capitalism is the most productive order in history, that China's privatisation (starting with small consumer industries) was more intelligent than Russia's (starting with banks and natural resources, producing "non-productive" oligarch capitalism), and that the rise of state capitalism in China and Singapore (Lee Kuan Yew's "capitalism with Asian values") threatens the link between capitalism and democracy; liberals should think seriously about how to save their freedoms.
On philosophy, he claims "the time of philosophy is coming" because new ethical dilemmas (abortion, biogenetics) cannot be solved by old wisdom, and philosophers can help us "ask the right questions" rather than provide ready-made answers: how a problem is formulated (ecology, racism, tolerance) is part of the problem. To Occupy Wall Street he says protesters should not "fall in love with themselves"; the true problem is "the day after," and he disagrees with Bill Clinton's demand for concrete demands, since the deadlocks are deeper. He calls the Arab Spring a positive, secular revolt for dignity and freedom, fears an "obscene pact" in Egypt between the Muslim Brotherhood and the army, criticises Western support for Saudi Arabia and the Libya intervention (he says the rebels' main military commander was reportedly an ex-al-Qaeda man), and says that while we can imagine the end of the world in disaster films, "we cannot imagine a small change in capitalism." He illustrates ideology with film readings (Titanic as a "reactionary" rich-girl story, Kung Fu Panda as ironic ideology that survives its own mockery), the story of Niels Bohr's horseshoe ("it works even if you don't believe in it") and Santa Claus, to show that beliefs function socially even when nobody believes in them. He ends by describing himself as a magician "who shows you the hat but the rabbit never comes out," says he likes honest conservatives who confront the deadlock rather than play with easy solutions, and denies having "dark terrorist plans."
Excerpts
“Philosophers can do something very important today. This is no less important than correct answers: they can allow us to ask the right questions. [...] The very way we formulate the problem is part of the problem.”
“The friend asked Niels Bohr, 'But what do you mean, aren't you a scientist, do you believe in this?' 'Of course I'm not crazy, I don't.' 'Then why do you have it there?' He said: 'Of course I don't believe in it, but I have it there because I was told that it works even if you don't believe in it.' That's unfortunately our ideology today.”
“My basic message was that they shouldn't fall in love with themselves. [...] The true problem is the day after: whether this will be translated into our daily lives, whether it really makes some changes. And for this there are no fast answers.”