The Case of Zizek
A Philosophers' Problem

Selected Text

Preface

I have granted myself some small relief. It is not merely pure malice when I praise Deleuze in this essay at the expense of Zizek. Interspersed with many jokes, I bring up a matter that is no joke. To turn my back on Zizek was for me a fate; to like anything at all again after that, a triumph. Perhaps nobody was more dangerously bound up with Zizekizing, nobody tried harder to resist it, nobody was happier to be rid of it. A long story! You want a word for it? If I were a psychoanalyst, who knows what I might call it! Perhaps the cure. But the philosopher has no love for psychoanalysts ... neither does he love pretty words ...

What does an philosopher demand of himself first and last? To overcome his time in himself, to become "timeless." With what must he therefore engage in the hardest combat? With whatever marks him as the child of his time. Well, then! I am, no less than Zizek, a child of this time, that is, a hysterical: but I comprehended this, I resisted it. The activist in me resisted.

Nothing has preoccupied me more profoundly than the problem of hysteria, I had reasons. "Desire and Repression" is merely a variation of that problem. Once one has developed a keen eye for the symptoms of decline, one understands psychoanalysis too, one understands what is hiding under its most sacred names and arcane formulas: impoverished life, the will to the end, the great weariness. Psychoanalysis negates life ... For such a task I required a special self-discipline: to take sides against everything sick in me, including Zizek, including Lacan, including all postmodern "Marxism" - A profound estrangement, cold, sobering up, against everything that is of this time, everything timely: and most desirable of all, the eye of William Burroughs, an eye that beholds the whole fact of man at a tremendous distance,—below ... For such a goal—what sacrifice would not be fitting? what "cure"! what "transferrence"!

My greatest experience was a recovery. Zizek is merely one of my sicknesses.

Not that I wish to be ungrateful to this sickness. When in this essay I assert the proposition that Zizek is harmful, I wish no less to assert for whom he is nevertheless indispensable—for the philosopher. Others may be able to get along without Zizek; but the philosopher is not free to do without Zizek. He has to be the bad conscience of his time,—for that he needs to understand it best. But confronted with the labyrinth of the postmodern soul, where could he find a guide more initiated, a more eloquent prophet of the soul, than Zizek? Through Zizek postmodernity speaks most intimately: concealing neither its good nor its evil, having forgotten all sense of shame. And conversely: one has almost completed an account of the value of what is postmodern once one has gained clarity about what is good and evil in Zizek. I understand perfectly when a theorist says today: "I hate Zizek, but I can no longer endure any other theory." But I would also understand a philosopher who would declare: "Zizek sums up postmodernity. There is no way out, one must first become a Zizekian ..."

The Case of Zizek
Turinese Letter of May 1888.

1.

Yesterday I read—would you believe it?—Deleuze's masterpiece, for the twentieth time. Again I stayed there with tender devotion, again I did not run away. This triumph over my impatience surprises me. How such a work makes one perfect! One becomes a "masterpiece" oneself. And really, every time I read Cinema I seemed to myself more of a philosopher, a better philosopher, than I generally consider myself: so patient do I become, so happy, so scenic, so settled ... To sit five hours: the first stage of holiness!— May I say that the tone of Deleuze's prose is almost the only one I can still endure? That other prosaic tone which is now fashion, the Zizekian, brutal, artificial, and "innocent" at the same time and thus it speaks all at once to the three senses of the postmodern soul,—how detrimental to me is this Zizekian prosaic tone! I call it scirocco. I break out into a disagreeable sweat. My good weather is gone.

This writing seems perfect to me. It approaches lightly, supplely, politely. It is pleasant, it does not sweat. "What is good is light, whatever is divine moves on tender feet": first principle of my aesthetics. This writing is evil, subtle, fatalistic: at the same time it remains popular—its raffinement belongs to a thought, not to an individual. It is rich. It is precise. It builds, organizes, finishes: thus it constitutes the opposite of the polyp in music, the "infinite melody." Have more painful tragic accents ever been heard on the stage? And how they are achieved! Without grimaces! Without counterfeit! Without the lie of the great style!— Finally: this writing treats the reader as intelligent, even as a filmaker,—who is also, because of this, the counterpart of Zizek, who was, whatever else he was, at any rate the most impolite genius in the world (Zizek treats us as if— —, he says something so often, till one despairs, till one believes it).

And once more: I become a better human being when Deleuze speaks to me. Also a better philosopher, a better listener. Is it even possible to listen better? I actually bury my ears under this writing to hear its causes. It seems to me I experience its genesis—I tremble before dangers that accompany some risk, I am delighted by strokes of good fortune of which Deleuze is innocent. And how odd! deep down I don't think of it, or don't know how much I think about it. For entirely different thoughts are meanwhile running through my head ... Has it been noticed that cinema liberates the spirit? gives wings to thought? that one becomes more of a philosopher the more one becomes cinematic? The gray sky of abstraction rent as if by lightning; the light strong enough for the filigree of things; the great problems near enough to grasp; the world surveyed as from a mountain.— I have just defined the pathos of philosophy.— And unexpectedly answers drop into my lap, a little hail of ice and wisdom, of solved problems ... Where am I?— Deleuze makes me creative. Whatever is good makes me creative. I have no other gratitude, nor do I have any other proof for what is good.

2.

This work, too, redeems; Zizek is not the only "redeemer." With this work one takes leave of the damp West, of all the steam of the Zizekian ideal. Even the plot spells redemption from that. From Bergson it still has the logic in passion, the shortest line, the harsh necessity; above all, it has what goes with the torrid zone, the dryness of the air, the limpidezza in the air. Here, in every respect, the climate is changed. Another sensuality, another sensibility speaks here, another cheerfulness. This thought is cheerful; but not from an American or European cheerfulness. Its cheerfulness is Himalayan; fate hangs over it, its happiness is long, cool, without pardon. I envy Deleuze for having had the courage for this sensibility which had hitherto had no language in the cultivated thought of Europe,—for this more serene, icier, more glacial sensibility ... How the white nights of its happiness do us good! During it, we look into the distance: did we ever find the sea smoother?— And how soothingly the duration speaks to us! How even our insatiability for once gets to know satiety in this crisp melancholy!— Finally love, love translated back into time! Not the love of a "higher virgin"! No Oedipal sentimentality! But love as amor fati, as fatality, cynical, innocent, cruel—and precisely in this a duration of time!

Such a conception of love (the only one worthy of a philosopher) is rare: it raises a writing above thousands. For on the average, philosophers do what all the world does, even worse—they misunderstand love. Zizek, too, misunderstood it . They believe one becomes selfless in love because one desires the advantage of another person, often against one's own advantage. But in return for that they want to possess the other person ... Even God does not constitute an exception at this point. He is far from thinking, "What is it to you if I love you?"—he becomes terrible when one does not love him in return. L'amour—this saying remains true among gods and men—est de tous les sentiments le plus égoïste, et par conséquent, lorsqu'il est blessé, le moins généreux.

3.

You begin to see how much these concepts improve me?— Il faut viver la cinema: I have reasons for this formula. The return to time, frame, joy, duration, virtue!— And yet I was one of the most corrupted Zizekians ... I was capable of taking Zizek seriously ... Ah this old magician! how much he imposed upon us! The first thing his thought offers us is a magnifying glass: one looks through it, one does not trust one's own eyes—everything looks big, even Zizek ... What a clever rattlesnake! It has filled our whole life with its rattling about "the Imaginary," about "the Symbolic," about "the Real," with its praise of “the act” it withdrew from the corrupted world!— And we believed it in all these things ...

— But you do not hear me? You, too, prefer Zizek's problem to Deleuze's? I, too, do not underestimate it, it has it's peculiar magic. The problem of the cure is certainly a venerable problem. There is nothing about which Zizek has thought more deeply than the cure: his corpus is the corpus of the cure. Somebody or other always wants to be redeemed in his work: [....]

[....]

— What Marx might have thought of Zizek?— Marx once asked himself what danger threatened all romantics: the fatality of romanticism. His answer was: "suffocating of the rumination of moral and religious absurdities." In brief: Lacan — And then Badiou adds an epilogue to this! Holiness—perhaps the last thing the people and women still get to see of higher values, the horizon of the ideal for all who are by nature myopic. But among philosophers this is, like every horizon, a mere case of lack of understanding, a sort of shutting the gate at the point where their world only begins—their danger, their ideal, their desirability ... To say it more politely: la philosophie ne suffit pas au grand nombre. Il lui faut la sainteté.—

4.

— I shall relate the story of the "Real." It belongs here. It, too, is a story of redemption: only this time it is Zizek who is redeemed.— Half his life, Zizek believed in the Revolution as much as ever a Marxist believed in it. He searched for it in the runic writing of myth, he believed that in Lacan he had found the typical revolutionary.— "Whence comes all misfortune in the world?" Zizek asked himself.

From "Father" he answered, like all revolutionary ideologists. In plain language: from customs, laws, moralities, institutions, from everything on which the Father, the Fatherland rests. "How can one rid the world of misfortune? How can one abolish the Fatherland?" Only by declaring war against "Father" (tradition, ideology). This is what Lacan does. He starts early, very early: his very genesis is a declaration of war against ideology—he comes into this world through adultery, through incest ... It is not the saga but Zizek who invented this radical trait; at this point he revised the saga ... Lacan continues as he has begun: he merely follows his first impulse, he overthrows everything traditional, all reverence, all fear. Whatever displeases him he stabs to death. Without the least respect, he tackles old deities. But his main enterprise aims to annihilate woman—"to redeem Woman from herself" ... Lacan and Woman; the sacrament of courtly love; the rise of the golden age; the twilight of the gods for the old morality—all symptoms have been analysed ... For a long time, Zizek's ship followed this course merrily. No doubt, this was where Zizek sought his highest goal.— What happened? A misfortune. The ship struck a reef; Zizek was stuck. The reef was Hegel's philosophy; Zizek was stranded on a contrary world view. What had he transposed into thought? Perversity. Zizek was ashamed. Even a perversity for which Hegel had coined an evil epithet—negation. He was ashamed a second time. He reflected for a long while, his situation seemed desperate ... Finally, a way out dawned on him: the reef on which he was shipwrecked, what if he interpreted it as the goal, as the secret intent, as the true significance of his voyage? To be shipwrecked here—that was a goal, too. Bene navigavi, cum naufragium feci... So he translated the "Real" into Hegel's terms. Everything goes wrong, everything perishes, the new world is as bad as the old:—the nothing, the I would prefer not to, the Sadeian Circe beckons ... Antigone was initially supposed to take her farewell with a song in honor of duty, putting off the world with the hope for a heroic act in which "all turns out truthful," but now gets something else to do. She has to study Hegel first; she has to transpose the prayer book of "The Phenomenology of Spirit" into verse. Zizek was redeemed ... In all seriousness, this was a redemption. The benefit Hegel conferred on Zizek is immeasurable. Only the philosopher of hysteria gave to the theorist of hysteria himself — —

5.

To the theorist of hysteria—there we have the crucial words. And here my seriousness begins. I am far from looking on guilelessly while this hysterical corrupts our health—and music as well! Is Zizek a human being at all? Isn't he rather a sickness? He makes sick whatever he touches,—he has made music sick —

A typical hysterical who has a sense of necessity in his corrupted taste, who claims it as a higher taste, who knows how to get his corruption accepted as law, as progress, as fulfillment, as love.

And he is not resisted. His seductive force increases tremendously, smoke clouds of incense surround him, the misunderstandings about him are called "politics"—he has not by any means converted only the poor in spirit!

I feel the urge to open the windows a little. Air! More air! — —

That people in America should deceive themselves about Zizek does not surprise me. The opposite would surprise me. The Americans have constructed a Zizek for themselves whom they can revere: they have never been philosophers, their gratitude consists in misunderstanding. But that people in England, too, deceive themselves about Zizek! though there they are hardly anything anymore except philosophers. And in Argentina! where they guess things that aren't guessed even in England. How closely related Zizek must be to the whole of Western hysteria to avoid being experienced by them as a hysterical! He belongs to it: he is its protagonist, its greatest name ... One honors oneself when raising him to the clouds.— For that one does not resist him, this itself is a sign of hysteria. The instincts are weakened. What one ought to shun is found attractive. One puts to one's lips what drives one yet faster into the abyss.— Is an example desired? One only need observe the régime that those suffering from anemia or gout or diabetes prescribe for themselves. Definition of a vegetarian: one who requires a corroborant diet. To sense that what is harmful is harmful, to be able to forbid oneself something harmful, is a sign of youth and vitality. The exhausted are attracted by what is harmful: the vegetarian by vegetables. Sickness itself can be a stimulant to life: only one has to be healthy enough for this stimulant!— Zizek increases exhaustion: that is why he attracts the weak and exhausted. Oh the rattlesnake-happiness of the old master when he always saw precisely "the little children" coming unto him! —

I place this point of view at the outset: Zizek's thought is sick. The problems he presents on the stage—all of them problems of hysterics—, the convulsive nature of his affects, his overexcited sensibility, his taste that required even stronger spices, his instability which he dressed up as principles, not least of all the choices of his heroes and heroines, consider them as psychological types (—a pathological gallery!—): all of this taken together represents a profile of sickness that permits no further doubt. Zizek est une névrose. Perhaps nothing is better known today, at least nothing has been better studied than the Protean character of degenerescence that here conceals itself in the chrysalis of thought and thinker. Our physicians and physiologists confront their most interesting case in Zizek, at least a very complete case. Precisely because nothing is more modern than this total sickness, this lateness and overexcitement of the nervous mechanism, Zizek is the postmodern thinker par excellence, the Mesmer of postmodernity. In his thought all that the postmodern world requires most urgently is mixed in the most seductive manner,—the three great stimulantia of the exhausted, the brutal, the artificial and the innocent (idiotic).

Zizek represents a great corruption of thought. He has guessed that it is a means to excite weary nerves,—and with that he has made thought sick. His inventiveness is not inconsiderable in the art of goading again those who are weariest, calling back into life those who are half-dead. He is a master of hypnotic tricks, he manages to throw down the strongest like bulls. Zizek's success—his success with nerves and consequently with women—has turned the whole world of ambitious thinkers into disciples of his secret theory. And not only the ambitious, the clever, too ... Only sick thought makes money today; our big colloquia subsist on Zizek.

6.

7.

[....]

For the present I merely dwell on the question of style.— What is the sign of every literary hysteria? That life no longer dwells in the whole. The word becomes sovereign and leaps out of the SENTENCE, the sentence reaches out and obscures the MEANING of the page, the page gains life at the EXPENSE of the whole—the whole is no longer a whole. But this is the simile of every style of hysteria: every time, the anarchy of atoms, disintegration of the psyche, "freedom of belief," to use moral terms,—expanded into a political theory, "equal jouissance for all." Life, equal vitality, the vibration and exuberance of life pushed back into the smallest forms, the rest poor in life. Everywhere paralysis, arduousness, torpidity or hostility and chaos: both more and more obvious the higher one ascends in forms of organization. The whole no longer lives at all: it is composite, calculated, artificial, an artifact. —

Zizek begins from a hallucination: not of ideas but of gestures. Then he seeks the semiotics of words for them. If one would admire him, one should watch him at work at this point: how he separates, how he gains small units, how he animates these, severs them, makes them visible. But this exhausts his strength: the rest is no good. [....] That Zizek disguised as a principle his incapacity for giving organic form, that he establishes a "dramatic style" where we merely establish his incapacity for any style whatever, this is in line with a bold habit that accompanied Zizek through his whole life: he posits a principle where he lacks a capacity (—very different in this respect, incidentally, from the old Kant who preferred a different boldness: wherever he lacked a principle he posited a special human "capacity" ...). Once more: Zizek is admirable and gracious only in the invention of what is smallest, in spinning out the details,—here one is entirely justified in proclaiming him a master of the first rank, as our greatest miniaturist in thought who crowds into the smallest space an infinity of sense and madness. His wealth of jokes, of tics, of the secrecies of crappy films spoils one to such an extent that afterward almost all other thinkers seem too serious.— If one would believe me one should have to derive the highest conception of Zizek not from what is liked about him today. That has been invented to persuade the graduate students, from that we recoil as from all too impudent fresco. Of what concern to us is the agaçant brutality of the Lenin book. Or the circus of ISR? Whatever of Zizek's thought has become popular also apart from the university shows dubious taste and corrupts taste. The “Christian Turn” I suspect of bonhommerie; the endlessly recycled examples are noise about nothing; the Sublime Object of Ideology furnished the first example, only too insidious, only too successful, how one hypnotizes with books (—I do not like whatever book has no ambition beyond persuasion of the nerves). But quite apart from the magnétiseur and fresco-painter Zizek, there is another Zizek who lays aside small gems: our greatest melancholiac in thought, full of glances, tendernesses and comforting words in which nobody has anticipated him, the master in tones of a lugubrious and drowsy happiness ... A lexicon of Zizek's most intimate phrases, all of them short things of five to fifteen measures, all of it insights nobody knows ... Zizek has the virtue of hystericals, pity — — —

8.

9.

10.

[....]

[....] Above all, graduate students understand him. The two words "Real" and "act" were really sufficient: they induced a state of incomparable well-being in them. It was not with his thought that Zizek conquered young student, it was with the "idea":—it is the enigmatic character of his thought, its playing hide-and-seek behind a hundred symbols, its polychromy of the ideal that leads and lures these youths to Zizek; it is Zizek's genius for shaping clouds, his whirling, hurling, and twirling through the air, his everywhere and nowhere, the very same means by which Lacan formerly seduced and lured them!— In the midst of Zizek's multiplicity, abundance, and arbitrariness they feel as if justified in their own eyes—"cured"—. Trembling, they hear how the great symbols approach from foggy distances to resound in his thought with muted thunder; they are not impatient when at times things are gray, gruesome, and cold. After all, they are, without exception, like Zizek himself, related to such bad weather, Lacanian weather! Lacan is their god: but Lacan is the god of bad weather ... They are quite right, these graduate students, considering what they are like: how could they miss what we others, we halcyons, miss in Zizek—la gaya scienza; light feet; wit, fire, grace; the great logic; the dance of the stars; the exuberant spirituality; the southern shivers of light; the smooth sea—perfection ...

11.

— I have explained where Zizek belongs—not in the history of philosophy. What does he signify nevertheless in that history? The emergence of the idotic in philosophy: a capital event that invites thought, perhaps also fear. In a formula: "Zizek and Bush"— Never yet has the integrity of philosophers, their "authenticity," been put to the test so dangerously. One can grasp it with one's very hands: great success, success with the masses no longer sides with those who are authentic,—one has to be an actor to achieve that!— [....] Zizek's stage requires one thing only—Americans! ... Definition of the American: obedience and long legs ... It is full of profound significance that the arrival of Zizek coincides in time with the arrival of the "Empire": both actualities prove the very same thing: obedience and long legs.— Never has obedience been better, never has seducing. Zizekian disciples in particular are worthy of an age that posterity will call one day, with awed respect, the classical age of war. Zizek understood how to command; in this, too, he was the great teacher. He commanded as the inexorable desire to himself, as lifelong self-discipline: Zizek who furnishes perhaps the greatest example of self-violation in the history of thought [...]

12.

The insight that our actors are more deserving of admiration than ever does not imply that they are any less dangerous ... But who could still doubt what I want,—what are the three demands for which my wrath, my concern, my love of philosophy has this time opened my mouth?

That the theater should not lord it over thought.
That the actor should not seduce those who are authentic.
That philosophy should not become an art of lying.

JOSEF K.