Zizek speaks

Chris Burford cburford at gn.apc.org
Tue May 25 14:02:21 PDT 1999


At 20:21 24/05/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Slavoj Zizek will read from his new Verso book, The Ticklish Subject: The
>Absent Centre of Political Ontology, at Posman Books, 1 University Pl, New
>York (just north of Washington Sq Park), Thursday, May 27, 7 PM.
>
>Doug

I do not recall you commenting on the following passages from his article in the latest New Left Review. Are you in agreement with them? Or do I wholly misunderstand their significance?

Chris Burford

London

_____________________________________

"In the last decade, the West followed a Hamlet-like procrastination towards the Balkans, and the present bombing has effectively all the signs of Hamlet's final murderous outburst in which a lot of people die unnecessarily - not only the King, his true target, but also his mother, Laertes, Hamlet himself - because Hamlet acted too late, when the right moment had already passed.

So the West, in the present intervention which displays all the signs of a violent outburst of impotent aggression without a clear political goal, is now paying the price for the years of entertaining illusions that one could make a deal with Milosevic: with the recent hesitations about the ground intervention in Kosovo, the Serbian regime may, under the pretext of war, launch the final assault on Kosovo and purge it of most of the Albanians, cynically accepting bombing as the price to be paid."

<>

"... the protests atainst bombing by the reformed Communist parties all around Europe, including the PDS, are totally misdirected: these false protesters against the NATO bombing of Serbia are like the caricaturized pseudoleftists who oppose the trial of a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the result of social pathology of the capitalist system.

The way to fight the capitalist New World Order is not by supporting local proto-fascist resistances to it, but to focus on the only serious question today: how to build *transnational* political movements and institutions strong enough to constrain seriously the unlimited rule of Capital, and to render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances against the New World Order, from Milosevic to Le Pen and the extreme Right in Europe, are part of it?"



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