I accept that Zizek should not be quoted as supporting the bombing.
I too also had some reservations about the apparent identification with "the West" and I assumed this reflected his position as a Slovene, accepting the logic of late 20th century European economic and social patterns.
I have little knowledge of him apart from the fact that he has Doug's regard. My impression from this piece is that underneath the way he plays with the subtleties of subjective surface phenomena, there is a more robust position.
He asks
>how to build *transnational* political movements and institutions
>strong enough to constrain seriously the unlimited rule of Capital
I am sure he does not think there is a simple or a simplistic answer to this, whereas I think we will only progress by starting to pose simplistic answers and then refine them in struggle (eg the Tobin tax). I obviously think the strategic perspective is a necessary one, which leaps over the limitations of fighting capitalism purely within the nation state.
Chris Burford
London
At 14:15 26/05/99 -0400, you wrote:
>Chris Burford wrote:
>
>>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?
>
>I asked Zizek about this when I talked with him last week. I said it
>sounded a bit too much like an endorsement of NATO for my taste. He swore
>it wasn't, and swore he opposed the bombing.
>
>I largely agree with the bottom half of what you quote. I don't like the
>first half so much, mainly because I get nervous when people talk about
>what "The West" should do. The term itself seems like a euphemism for a
>racialized imperialism, and I don't like the idea of "The West" intervening
>in other people's affairs.
>
>Doug
>
>>"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?"
>
>