Žižek Now! or, a (Not So) Modest Plea for a Return to the Political

Review of Jamil Khader and Molly Anne Rothenberg, eds., Žižek Now: Current Perspectives in Žižek Studies. Malden: Polity, 2013.

At the precise midpoint of Slavoj Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject stands a trenchant critique of the contemporary “post-political” landscape. According to Žižek, postmodern post-politics doesn’t so much “merely ‘repress[ ]’ the political, trying to contain it and pacify the ‘returns of the repressed,’ but much more effectively ‘forecloses’ it” by “emphasiz[ing] the need to leave old ideological divisions behind and confront new issues, armed with the necessary expert knowledge and free deliberation that takes people’s concrete needs and demands into account” (198). Under this model, the State, claims Žižek, is “reduc[ed] . . . to a mere police-agent servicing the (consensually established) needs of market forces and multiculturalist tolerant humanism,” the result being that “[i]nstead of the political subject ‘working class’ demanding its universal rights, we get, on the one hand, the multiplicity of particular social strata or groups, each with its problems . . . and, on the other, the immigrant, ever more prevented from politicizing his predicament of exclusion” (199-200). Such a state of affairs, Žižek concludes, speaks precisely to “the gap that separates a political act proper from the ‘administration of social matters’ which remains within the framework of existing sociopolitical relations,” for “the political act (intervention) proper is not simply something that works well within the framework of the existing relations, but something that changes the very framework that determines how things work.” Indeed, “authentic politics,” Žižek insists, is “the art of the impossible—it changes the very parameters of what is considered ‘possible’ in the existing constellation” (199).
 
As one of the most recent installments in Polity’s ever-expanding “Theory Now” series, Jamil Khader and Molly Anne Rothenberg’s Žižek Now makes good on its promise to offer the latest perspectives in Žižek studies across multiple disciplines, from German idealism, materialism, and religion to ecology and (surprisingly enough) quantum physics. Much like its subject, whose work, as Khader emphasizes in the book’s introduction, spans “a dizzying array of topics,” rubbing seemingly disparate disciplines against one another in a way that “does not produce a totalizing synthesis of opposites but rather allows for articulating the gaps within and between these fields through the Hegelian method of negative dialectics” (3), Žižek Now is eclectic to the core—a testament to both Žižek’s incredibly wide range as a thinker and his incredibly broad appeal throughout academia (and beyond). Yet despite this disciplinary eclecticism, the strongest essays in Khader and Rothenberg’s collection are united by a common thread: a focus on, and furtherance of, Žižek’s aforementioned plea for a return to the political.
 
Exemplary in this regard are the contributions of Todd McGowan, Verena Andermatt Conley, Erik Vogt, and Khader. McGowan’s essay, “Hegel as Marxist: Žižek’s Revision of German Idealism,” constitutes the best treatment to date of Žižek’s call for a Hegelian critique of Marx as opposed to the standard Marxian critique of Hegel.[1] At the heart of McGowan’s chapter is the irreducibility of antagonism for Hegel. As McGowan points out, for Žižek, the fundamental difference between Hegel and Marx is that whereas the latter based his entire political project on the belief in a future overcoming of antagonism, the former posited antagonism as the very “ground of social relations” (47) and “the foundation of politics” (48). This, claims McGowan, is why the more unabashedly Marxist/communist Žižek has become in recent years, the more Hegel has come to displace Lacan as the figure most crucial to his thinking (47), for, according to Žižek, it is only by “confront[ing] the inescapability of antagonism” that subjects can “free themselves from the power of authority and from corresponding relations of domination” (48). Hegel is thus for Žižek “the political thinker par excellence,” for he “tear[s] down all the false avenues of escape that promise freedom from the alienation that accompanies an antagonistic social structure,” insisting that “[t]here is no future free of antagonistic struggle, but only a present always enmeshed within that struggle” (49). The result of this Hegelian critique of Marx, McGowan demonstrates, is not a rejection of Marxism but, on the contrary, a more “stringent” (48), “anti-utopian” Marxism, one “much less hopeful” (49) yet ultimately “more revolutionary . . . than Marx himself [was] able to advance” (48) insofar as it posits revolution as permanent and perpetual.[2]
 
Addressing a position of Žižek’s that many on the left find problematic is Verena Andermatt Conley, who examines Žižek’s recent forays into ecology, the most famous of which remains his ten-minute segment on the topic in Astra Taylor’s 2008 film Examined Life, in which he not only predicts that ecology will become “the new opium of the masses,” but likewise insists that the proper means of confronting our ongoing ecological crises is not to return to nature but, rather, “to cut off even more our roots in nature” and “become more artificial.” While such a brash call for an “ecology without nature” has led Žižek to be all but dismissed as a rational voice by many ecocritics across the humanities, Conley suggests that Žižek’s “eco-chic” is simultaneously not as iconoclastic as it may at first appear (she cites similar critiques of nature by Gregory Bateson, Michel Serres, Stephen J. Gould, and Deleuze and Guattari), yet also precisely where one should locate the true revolutionary potential of his increasingly strident calls for a return to communism.[3] Indeed, as Conley would have it, the backdrop for Žižek’s segment in Examined Life—a garbage dump—is entirely apropos, for Žižek identifies the “new global slums” of Latin America and Southeast Asia, those “zones of excluded populations” that lie “outside the state in areas that are indicated on official maps as blanks” (123) and whose inhabitants the global capitalist system has relegated to the trash heap, dismissing them as “the animals of the globe” (“Nature” 42), as one of the “few authentic ‘evental sites’ in today’s society” (“Nature” 40-41) from which the true resistance to late-capitalism will emerge. As Conley notes, Žižek maintains that the “slum collectives” that have begun to form in these zones constitute “the new proletarian position of the twenty-first century” (123), a proletariat that has the potential to generate “new forms of social awareness” not recuperated by capitalist ideology and which will ultimately become “the germs of the future” (“Nature” 42).[4] “Germ” is the operative word here, for it speaks to the type of apocalypticism with which Žižek has been flirting as of late—a sort of viral “divine violence” from the ground up, as it were.[5] Conley thus concludes that, for Žižek, the global slums figure as sites of a quite literal communist ecology, a point no better underscored than by his assertion, whilst discussing the threat of global warming, that “when our natural commons are threatened, neither market nor state will save us, but only a properly communist mobilization” (Living 334).
 
But perhaps the most important contributions to the volume are Erik Vogt’s and Jamil Khader’s long-overdue inquiries into Žižek’s relevance for postcolonial studies. Given Žižek’s marked hostility toward postcolonial tropes like “subalternity,” “hybridity,” and “multeity,” all of which are reflective of the identitarian logic underwriting postcolonial praxis, such belatedness is in some respects not at all surprising. Indeed, one need only cite Žižek’s recent quip that “[p]ostcolonialism is the invention of some rich guys from India who saw that they could make a good career in top Western universities by playing on the guilt of white liberals” (Engelhart) to understand why there hasn’t been much work done on Žižek and postcolonialism. Yet, as Vogt and Khader both demonstrate, a dialogue between the two has considerable upside for both.
 
Vogt’s essay is a comparative reading of Žižek and Fanon illustrating that, while not identical, their conceptions of violence nonetheless “converge in a trenchant critique regarding the perceived dissimulation of the systemic, objective violence central to the capitalist (neo)-colonialist system” (140)—an objective violence against which both Žižek and Fanon advocate subjective violence (including self-violence). Though he doesn’t mention divine violence by name, Vogt seems to have this Benjaminian concept in mind when he likens Žižek’s “pleas” for violence to both Fanon’s insistence upon “the necessity of (political) violence, of the violent traumatic shattering of particular ideological predicaments,” and his “definition of (transformative) political violence as [in Žižek’s words] ‘the “work of the negative,” . . . as a violent reformation of the very substance of the subject’s being’ ” (143).[6] Vogt here draws an implicit link between Žižek and Fanon by highlighting the latter’s Hegelian insistence upon the need for consciousness to “lose itself in the night of the absolute, the only condition to attain to consciousness of self” (Fanon 133-34). As Vogt notes, for Fanon, this “tarrying with the negative,” as Hegel would put it, takes the form of “losing [him]self in négritude”—an immersion intended “not to assert or retrieve some (lost) stable racial-cultural self-identity, but rather to take the first steps toward a radical political challenge of racist-colonial oppression” (144). Such a challenge takes the form of a subversive “over-identification with the fantasy of négritude,” an overidentification which, “[b]y bringing to light in a literal manner the unspoken assumptions and rules tacitly organizing négritude as (fantasized) past (and future) collective identity,” not only helps to undermine the colonial hegemony, but, just as important, “makes it possible for the colonized intellectual to realize that the desire for cultural and racial recognition on the basis of appeals to a ‘re-discovered African culture’ is . . . grounded in the fetishism of cultural-racial identity . . . [and] in the fixation of the black and/or African subject as sublime object of an anti-colonial or even ‘postcolonial’ ideology that is nothing but a kind of inherent transgression with regard to the colonial system” (145).[7] Vogt ties this point to Žižek’s anti-identitarianism, claiming that against the “particularist and differentialist logics” undergirding “multiculturalist doxa”—logics according to which “victimized identities are per se politically ‘emancipatory’ once rights will have been conferred upon them”—both Fanon and Žižek insist that the postcolonial subject “be politicized in such a manner so as to become heterogeneous to any post-political demand for integration, to any valorization of one’s particularity in the existing state of things.” Only this, Vogt concludes, can give rise to “a postcolonial egalitarian collective . . . founded upon an unconditional universalism” (152).
 
Khader’s essay is more critical of Žižek than Vogt’s. Khader’s main argument is that if, following Žižek, “repeating Lenin” is indispensable to achieving a truly revolutionary act today, one that would make it possible to begin (re)imagining viable alternatives to democratic state capitalism, then “postcoloniality should (retroactively) be considered one of those causal nodes around which a Leninist act is formed” (161).[8] Khader delves into how Lenin, following the 1914 crisis and his disenchantment with the Second International, began identifying not the Western working class but, rather, the “hundreds of millions” in the colonies as the primary subjects of the (inter)national liberation movement. As he explains, though Lenin never abandoned his belief in the revolutionary potential of the Western proletariat, he increasingly came to “locate[ ] the language of hope and messianism that characterizes socialist internationalism in the postcolonial field of possibilities” (166), a fact borne out by later texts such as Imperialism (1916), The State and Revolution (1917), and, most obviously, the writings collected in the posthumously published The National Liberation-Movement in the East (1957)—texts whose references and examples are “mostly drawn not from Russia but from anti-imperialist national liberation movements in India, Ireland, China, Turkey, and Iran” (167). Influenced by Third World Marxist activists and intellectuals such as the Indian M. N. Roy and the Muslim Mir Said Sultan-Galiev, the later Lenin would go on to proclaim that “the awakening to life and struggle of new classes in the East (Japan, India, China) . . . serves as a fresh confirmation of Marxism” (33: 233), and that “[w]orld imperialism shall fall when the revolutionary onslaught of the exploited and oppressed workers in each country . . . merges with the revolutionary onslaught of hundreds of millions of people [in the colonies] who have hitherto stood beyond the pale of history, and have been regarded merely as the objects of history” (31: 232). This last line is particularly telling, for its anticipation of the rejection by postcolonial peoples of their status as “objects of history” speaks to the type of revolutionary subjectivity of which Lenin increasingly believed them capable. And yet, as Khader points out, for all the emphasis he places on repeating Lenin, Žižek, insofar as he “represents the postcolonial as both an ideological supplement to global capitalism . . . and its excremental remainder,” fails to follow Lenin in “imagin[ing] the subject of postcolonial difference as a genuine locus of the revolutionary act,” as “a subject-for-itself,” “opting instead for envisioning a true revolution emerging only from a Europe-centered ‘Second World’ ” (162). Contra Žižek, Khader concludes that the best way to go about reactualizing Lenin today is by “[s]hifting the focus from the October Revolution to the history of postcolonial revolutionary experimentation,” the latter of which he believes “more productive for thinking through not only the practical difficulties of constructing a revolution, but also the ultimate end of revolution” (170).
 
There are other important, if less integral, essays in the volume: Adrian Johnston’s immanent critique of Žižek’s (mis)use of quantum physics as a means of furthering what Johnston elsewhere dubs Žižek’s “transcendentalist materialist theory of subjectivity”—a transcendental materialism which Johnston believes biological emergentism to be better suited for than quantum physics;[9] Joshua Ramey’s attention to Žižek’s counterintuitive definition of the “free Act” as ceremonial/formal in nature and his concomitant attempt to reconcile Žižek with Deleuze by way of Žižek’s understanding of the ontology of freedom as dependent upon the subject’s relation not to an open-ended future but, rather, a “pure past” (what Deleuze would call a “virtual” past)—a past pregnant with “unexplored potentialities” which the free Act of the subject can realize retroactively (85);[10] and, perhaps strongest of all, Bruno Bosteels’s critique of Žižek’s “perverse-materialist reading of Christianity” (66)—perverse not only in the sense that “on purely formal grounds, being a good materialist seems to run directly counter to the possibility of being at the same time a good Christian” (56), but also in that, in order to make his proposed marriage between Christianity and materialism wash, Žižek must distort the materialist critique of religion found, above all, in Marx and Freud, a distortion achieved by way of “highly selective readings, subtle displacements, and clever reversals” (69).[11] Though compelling in their own right, these essays are more self-contained and thus less indicative of where Žižek studies appears to be headed in the near future, at least with respect to the humanities in general.[12]
 
This is not to say that the other essays engage each other explicitly; however, they do speak to and resonate with each other in complex ways. Conley’s essay, for instance, would appear to absolve Žižek from the charge of Eurocentrism leveled by Khader, demonstrating Žižek’s (Leninist?) identification of subaltern slum-dwellers as the new proletariat.[13] This difference between Conley and Khader speaks to a broader tension throughout the volume concerning the figure of the Other. As McGowan stresses in his essay, Žižek’s critique of the so-called “ethical turn” in cultural studies and critical theory—a turn which many postcolonial theorists have participated in—is an extension of the Lacanian insistence upon the non-existence of the Other, at least in the sense of a self-identical, undivided Other entirely alien to the subject seeking to know it.[14] From this perspective, a postcolonial Žižek would appear to be a blatant contradiction in terms, for Žižek’s entire oeuvre stands in stark opposition to the “retreat into ontology” characteristic of much contemporary postcolonialist thought, which, as Timothy Brennan explains in his devastating critique of the identitarian logic driving critical theory today, posits subalternity not as “an inequality to be expunged but a form of ontological resistance that must be preserved—but only in that form: in a perpetually splintered, ineffective, heroic, invisible, desperate plenitude” (17).[15] To thus return to Khader’s essay, the ideal would be not for Žižek to catch up with postcolonial studies and embrace tropes such as “migrancy,” “nomadism,” “hybridity,” and “decentering”—tropes which, to again quote Brennan, a number of postcolonialists continue to uphold “not as contingent historical experiences but as modes of being . . . that political life should be based today on approximating” (139-40)—but for postcolonial studies to catch up with Žižek and divest itself of the identitarian-based “respect” for and “tolerance” of Otherness in favor of a true universalism buttressed upon a reinvigorated materialist critique of economic exploitation.[16] This, above all, is the thread that unifies the volume’s best pieces: an attention to Žižek’s universalist plea for a return to the political in the aftermath of its displacement by—if not outright abandonment in favor of—the ethical.
 
If, however, having reached the end of Khader’s penultimate chapter, it remains unclear to the reader that this is indeed the volume’s overarching focus, Žižek’s concluding essay, “King, Rabble, Sex, and War in Hegel,” should dispel any confusion, as it traverses (and expands upon) much of the territory covered by McGowan, Conley, Vogt, and Khader. With respect to Conley’s and Khader’s focus on Third World proletarianism, for instance, Žižek, in discussing Hegel’s theory of “concrete universality” alongside his treatment of the “rabble” (Poebel) in his Philosophy of Right, asserts that the rabble, the “excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it,” stands for “the (repressed) universality of the system” (189). As Žižek succinctly puts matters, “excess is the site of universality” (200), which is to say that “it is precisely those who are without their proper place within the social Whole (like the rabble) that stand for the universal dimension of the society which generates them” (189). In short, “the rabble is the universal as such” (190), and “the position of the ‘universal rabble’ perfectly renders the plight of today’s new proletarians,” among whom Žižek, echoing Conley’s and Khader’s essays, includes illegal immigrants, slum-dwellers, and refugees (197).
 
From here Žižek brings the volume full circle by way of a discussion of Hegel’s insistence upon the necessity of war—a discussion that returns readers to McGowan’s essay. Countering the reading of Hegel as a conservative, Žižek makes the case for a revolutionary Hegel, a Hegel who understood war to be necessary precisely because “in war, universality reasserts its right against and over the concrete-organic appeasement in the prosaic social life” (201). Indeed, as Žižek sees it, this insistence upon the necessity of war is “the ultimate proof that, for Hegel, every social reconciliation is doomed to fail, that no organic social order can effectively contain the force of abstract-universal negativity.” Hence Hegel’s belief that social life is “condemned to the ‘spurious infinity’ of the eternal oscillation between stable civic life and wartime perturbations.” From this perspective, Hegel’s positing of war as perpetual is not a sign of his Hobbesian monarchism (though, as McGowan points out, Hegel, in the Philosophy of Right, did indeed embrace constitutional monarchy) or Burkean conservatism, but his radicalism, for “[t]his necessity of war should be linked to its opposite, the necessity of a rebellion which shatters the power edifice from its complacency and makes it aware of its dependence on the popular support and of its a priori tendency to ‘alienate’ itself from its roots” (201). And this, Žižek claims, thereby doubling down on McGowan’s redaction of his Hegelian critique of Marx, is why “Hegel is . . . more materialist than Marx,” for “[i]n asserting the threat of ‘abstract negativity’ to the existing order as a permanent feature which cannot ever be aufgehoben,” Hegel leaves “non-sublated” what “Marx re-binds . . . into a process of the rise of a New Order (violence as the ‘midwife’ of a new society).” Hence Žižek’s conclusion that the common understanding of Hegel is completely wrong, for “there is no final Aufhebung here”; on the contrary, the “regenerating passage through radical negativity,” the process of tarrying with the negative, “cannot ever be ‘sublated’ in a stable social edifice,” which is why, for Hegel, “the entire complex edifice of the particular forms of social life has to be put at risk again and again—a reminder that the social edifice is a fragile virtual entity which can disintegrate at any moment” (204).
 
More than anything else, the massive international demonstrations of the past few years, above all the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Arab Spring, signal that perhaps the world is ready to heed Žižek’s Hegelian plea for a return to the political. To quote Žižek himself on the protests in Egypt:
 

What affected me tremendously when I was not only looking at the general picture of Cairo, but listening to interviews with participants [and] protestors there, is how cheap [and] irrelevant all the multicultural talk becomes. There, where we are fighting a tyrant, we are all universalists. We are immediately solidary with each other. That’s how you build universal solidarity; not with some stupid UNESCO multicultural respect (“We respect your culture; you ours”). It’s the struggle for freedom. Here we have a direct proof that: (a) freedom is universal, and (b) especially proof against that cynical idea that somehow Muslim crowds prefer some kind of religiously fundamentalist dictatorship. . . . No! What happened in Tunisia, what [is] happen[ing] now in Egypt, it’s precisely this universal revolution for dignity, human rights, economic justice. This is universalism at work. (“Egypt’s”)

Žižek’s universalist optimism here aside, it remains unclear whether or not protests such as these will themselves constitute or help to sow the seeds (or spread the germs) of an “authentic politics”  that goes beyond mere “multiculturalist tolerant humanitarianism” and “changes the very framework that determines how things work.” What is clear, however, is that Žižek Now, a book far from a hagiography, doesn’t merely parrot Žižek’s plea for a return to the political; it also clarifies, challenges, and advances it.

Footnotes

[1] Žižek’s call for a Hegelian critique of Marx runs throughout his work, but perhaps the best example is that found in the opening chapter of Tarrying with the Negative. Rehearsing the typical Marxist critique of Hegel, according to which the “reconciliation” between subject and substance achieved by way of “tarrying with the negative” is viewed as a reconciliation in the medium of thought only, one that signifies a resigned acceptance of irrational, perverted social conditions, Žižek goes on to propose that “after more than a century of polemics on the Marxist ‘materialist reversal of Hegel,’ the time has come to raise the inverse possibility of a Hegelian critique of Marx.” For contrary to the typical Marxist reading of Hegelian reconciliation as “the moment . . . when absolute subjectivity is elevated into the productive ground of all entities,” Žižek claims that, for Hegel, reconciliation instead designates an “acknowledgment that the dimension of subjectivity is inscribed into the very core of Substance in the guise of an irreducible lack which forever prevents it from achieving full self-identity” (26). It is this ontological crack in substance, so to speak—a crack best summed up by one of Žižek’s favorite Hegelian phrases, “substance as subject”—that McGowan’s essay is primarily concerned with.

[2] As Adrian Johnston, another contributor to the volume, puts matters elsewhere, Žižek’s Marxism, insofar as it rejects “Marx’s ‘fantasy’ of a post-revolutionary communist economic system,” can be characterized as a “Marxism deprived of its Marxism” (Badiou 112). For an extended meditation on the emancipatory political potential of the irreducibility of antagonism—an antagonism foregrounded not only by Hegelian dialectics but also, and perhaps more forcefully, by Lacanian psychoanalysis, in particular Lacan’s radicalization of the Freudian death drive—see McGowan’s Enjoying What We Don’t Have.

[3] Žižek appropriates the phrase “ecology without nature” from Timothy Morton. See Žižek, “Unbehagen in der Nature,” in In Defense of Lost Causes, 445.

[4] On the capitalist recuperation of forms of social awareness, see, for instance, Žižek’s critique of the type of “ethical capitalism” promoted by companies like Starbucks and TOMS Shoes. As Žižek notes, whereas in the 1980s and 90s, the logic of advertising was driven by “direct reference to personal authenticity or quality of experience,” in the 2000s, advertising has increasingly come to depend upon the “mobilization of socio-ideological motifs,” so that the experience now being sold to consumers is not so much personal as it is “that of being part of a larger collective movement, of caring for nature and for the ill, the poor and the deprived, of doing something to help.” As Žižek notes with regard to TOMS Shoes’ “One for One” policy, according to which, for every pair of shoes purchased, the company gives a pair of new shoes to a child in need: “the very relationship between egotistic consumerism and altruistic charity becomes one of exchange; that is, the sin of consumerism (buying a new pair of shoes) is paid for and thereby erased by the awareness that someone who really needs shoes received a pair for free,” so that “the very act of participating in consumerist activity is simultaneously presented as a participation in the struggle against the evils ultimately caused by capitalist consumerism” (Living 356).

[5] Žižek adopts the concept of “divine violence” from Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.” A greatly misunderstood concept, the advocacy of which has caused Žižek to be taken to task (most notoriously by Simon Critchley), divine violence is addressed at length in a number of Žižek’s recent texts, most notably: chapter six of Violence, “Divine Violence”; his introduction to Virtue and Terror, a collection of writings by Maximilien Robespierre, “Robespierre, or, the ‘Divine Violence’ of Terror”; and his afterword to the second edition of In Defense of Lost Causes, “What Is Divine about Divine Violence?” (which includes a riposte to Critchley).

[6] Vogt here quotes from Žižek’s discussion of Fanon in Žižek and Daly’s Conversations with Žižek, 121. For a “plea” for violence by Žižek other than that of the divine variety, see “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.”

[7] Overidentification is a concept that recurs throughout Žižek’s work, but perhaps the most illuminating example is that found in The Metastases of Enjoyment. Discussing the Slovenian post-punk band Laibach, a band noted for its “aggressive[,] inconsistent mixture of Stalinism, Nazism[,] and Blut und Boden ideology,” Žižek notes how Leftist intellectuals who supported the band assumed that they were ironically imitating totalitarian rituals—an assumption that left them with the uneasy feeling of “What if they really mean it?” “What if they truly identify with the totalitarian ritual?” “What if the public take seriously what Laibach mockingly imitate, so that Laibach actually strengthen what they purport to undermine?” This uneasy feeling, Žižek claims, is a result of “the assumption that ironic distance is automatically a subversive attitude”—a dangerous assumption insofar as the dominant ideological mode of our “contemporary ‘post-ideological’ universe” is that of “a cynical distance towards public values,” so that “far from posing any threat to the system,” ironic distance actual “designates the supreme form of conformism, since the normal functioning of the system requires cynical distance.” As Žižek concludes, from this perspective, “the Laibach strategy appears in a new light: it ‘frustrates’ the system (the ruling ideology) precisely in so far as it is not its ironic imitation, but overidentification with it—by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, overidentification suspends its efficacy” (71-72). I cite Žižek’s explanation of overidentification at length because it represents a crucial difference between him and Judith Butler, the latter of whom upholds performative “disidentification” as the ideal means of subverting ideological hegemony. As Žižek sees it, the practice of disidentification, insofar as it depends upon both irony and identity, is much more liable to cooptation by the ruling ideology.

[8] For Žižek’s case for “repeating”/“reactualizing” Lenin, see both his introduction and afterword to Revolution at the Gates, his edited collection of Lenin’s 1917 writings, and “A Leninist Gesture Today.”

[9] See Johnston’s Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Johnston’s essay is an installment in an ongoing debate between he and Žižek over the proper relation between philosophical and scientific materialism. Johnston’s (immanent) critique of Žižek’s position rests upon the latter’s recourse to quantum physics as “a universal economy qua ubiquitous, all-encompassing structural nexus” (104), a move which Johnston claims violates Žižek’s “ontology of an Other-less, barred Real of non-All/not-One material being” (111).

[10] For Žižek’s most extended “encounter” (as he puts it) with Deleuze, see Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences.

[11] As Bosteels notes, Žižek, in works such as The Fragile Absolute, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Monstrosity of Christ, contends not only that the “subversive kernel of Christianity”—its “atheist core”—is “accessible only to a materialist approach,” but, what’s more, that “to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience” (Puppet 7). Contra Žižek’s “dialectical reformulations and perverse reversals of Christianity in the name of a newborn materialism”—reformulations and reversals that “remain strictly speaking at the level of a structural or transcendental discussion of the conditions of possibility of subjectivity as such”—Bosteels upholds the work of the late Argentine Freudo-Marxist León Rozitchner, whose genealogico-historical brand of materialism “reconstruct[s] a history of the place of Judeo-Christianity in modern capitalist as well as pre-capitalist forms of subjectivity” (78) that reveals “the profound collusion between capitalism and Christianity” (77). In Bosteels’s estimation, Rozitchner’s work is paradigmatic of the type of materialism necessary to “expos[e] the extent to which the notion of political subjectivity,” even for thinkers as radical as Žižek, Agamben, Badiou, and Negri, “continues to be contaminated by Christian theology” (79).

[12] An exception may here be made for Johnston’s essay, the broader appeal of which for the humanities lies in its assertion that “biology, rather than physics, is the key scientific territory for the struggles of today’s theoretical materialists” (116)—a claim that would seem to be borne out by the recent neuroscientific turn in literary and cultural studies (especially among affect theorists).

[13] Khader likewise notes Žižek’s identification of the slums as “one of the principal horizons of the politics to come” (Defense 426) and their inhabitants as the instruments of divine violence (Žižek Now 162), yet he concludes that Žižek “inevitably renounces the capacity of these Other utopian spaces to affect a subversion of the whole edifice of the system” (164). One may want to qualify Khader’s conclusion by way of McGowan’s aforementioned attention to Žižek’s general anti-utopianism.

[14] Exemplary here is Žižek’s critique of Levinas. See, for instance, the aforementioned “Neighbors and Other Monsters.”

[15] As Brennan otherwise puts it, the “celebration of subalternity as such” characteristic of much postcolonialist scholarship “requires that no programmatic effort at ‘upliftment’ be permitted because the latter always smacks of intellectual and political arrogance” (257).

Brennan’s primary examples here are Dipesh Chakrabarty and Partha Chatterjee.

[16] Khader’s critique of Žižek is thus, like Johnston’s, immanent, for he takes Žižek to task not for his resistance to the identitarian logic driving much postcolonialist thought, but for the precise opposite—that is, for those moments in which Žižek (as he does with regard to Tibet, for instance) abandons the focus on economic exploitation and instead adopts “a culturalist rhetoric that invokes the same pseudo-psychoanalytic vocabulary for which he criticizes the postmodernist trend in postcolonial theory” (163).