Trotsky, Gramsci, and Lukacs stood farthest from the "narcissism of the lost cause," and they are not the ones that Zizek has in his mind. I don't know whom Lacan had in mind, but Zizek's object of criticism is probably those with whom he is most familiar -- Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe and the like on the theoretical front, and liberals on the political front (the sort of liberals who would turn Gramsci on his head, stripping him of his passion for socialist revolution and making him out to be a theorist of an endless war of positions in electoral and cultural politics).
At 8:07 PM +0530 11/28/02, Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
> >This is what made Lenin the politician of the 20th
>>century - the century of the passion of the real"
>
>This is hardly complimentary to Lenin. If he were alive, he may
>completely disassociate himself from the 20th century!
Perhaps -- but, only a couple of years into the twentieth-first century, and we are already in an endless preventive war, global deflation, and no counter-force to reckon with! WWLD? ;->
At 8:07 PM +0530 11/28/02, Ulhas Joglekar wrote:
> >From the blurb:
>
>"Zizek is convinced: whatever the discussion-the forthcoming crisis of
>capitalism, the possibility of a redeeming violence, the falsity of liberal
>tolerance-he believes that Lenin's time has come again"
>
>This doesn't read like a death sentence at all.
This is what Zizek says:
***** Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin - to repeat Lenin is to accept that "Lenin is dead," that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. 68 To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was "in Lenin more than Lenin himself." To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities. Today, Lenin appears as a figure from a different time-zone: it's not that his notions of the centralized Party, etc., seem to pose a "totalitarian threat" - it's rather that they seem to belong to a different epoch to which we can no longer properly relate. However, instead of reading this fact as the proof that Lenin is outdated, one should, perhaps, risk the opposite conjecture: what if this impenetrability of Lenin is a sign that there is something wrong with OUR epoch? What if the fact that we experience Lenin as irrelevant, "out of sync" with our postmodern times, impart the much more unsettling message that our time itself is "out of sync," that a certain historical dimension is disappearing from it?69 If, to some people, such an assertion appears dangerously close to the infamous Hegel's quip, when his deduction why there should be only eight planets circulating around the Sun was proven wrong by the discovery of the ninth planet (Pluto): "So much worse for the facts!", then we should be ready to fully assume this paradox.
<http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm> *****
Take it for what it's worth. -- Yoshie
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