To the Real Left

“The Courage of Hopelessness – A Year of Acting Dangerously," By Slavoj Žižek, 2018

This book on the year 2016 is part of Žižek’s long search for the ‘emancipatory project.’ Žižek always likes to take both sides of an argument, in order to sound wise and strew quotes.  After that tease, he comes down on one side or the other.  Here he takes on capital and debates various theorists like Stiglitz, Chomsky and Piketty or trade pacts like TISA & TTIP, while applauding Jeremy Rifkin’s ‘collaborative commons’ and the subversive role of some new technology.  

If Intellectuals Could

Included is a long analysis of the Greek situation and the politics of Syriza.  Žižek tries to answer the question of what radical left government’s do when elected in a corrupt capitalist state while under immense international financial pressure.  He suggests a position between Syriza and the Left Platform.

Žižek gets in some clever praise for the concept of bureaucracy. He follows with a commentary on the re-adoption of Confucianism by the Chinese Communist Party in their attempt to enforce social discipline.   This is part of a discourse on destructive religion, Zionism, Islam and its dialectical successor, atheism. 

Žižek’s other targets are the cultural relativism and political correctness pervasive on the liberal-left.  He specifically focuses on transgender rights, using a class / Lacanian analysis.  He also goes into the issues raised by right and left populism in Europe and the U.S., such as Trump, Le Pen and Sanders  He calls for a radical Left vision of a universalist and united Europe.

In retrospect, Žižek is a man who dined at the banquet table of Marxism, then claimed he didn’t swallow.  So he calls himself a Lacanian Hegelian and rejects dialectical materialism.  He is critical or bored with present or former workers’ states and considers himself part of a liberatory communist project.  He argues against the platform of multi-culturalism and pure identity politics promoted by neo-liberals, as well as the Alt-Right, which also upholds an opposite method of identity politics.   Instead he favors a class perspective.  In the process, he’s an idea factory, such as when he examines odd human events in the news.  A good mind stretch for those in a political rut!

Other books by Zizek reviewed on the blog below:  “Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?”, “First As Tragedy, Then as Farce,” “Living in the End Times” and "Violence."  Also reviews of books by Piketty and Chomsky.  Use blog search box, upper left.

And I bought it at May Day Books!  You can too…

Red Frog

January 19, 2019