I agree with Doug about the stupidity of 'hastening the 
contradictions', but it's not my reading of the Zizek article.

Zizek's first point is that when progressives respond to Bush's 
victory with despair/fear, they are throwing their lot in with 
the liberals.  He goes on to explain that Kerry was a false 
hope - in some ways, he would have been even worse.  He also 
notes the surprise among liberals that people could have voted 
for Bush despite the good intellectual and cultural elites 
opposing him, although Zizek doesn't explicitly criticise the 
elitism of this prejudice.

The point of confusion is where Zizek writes that Bush's victory 
will 'dispel the illusions' and that a Kerry victory would be 
a 'historical anomaly'.  I don't think that he means that things 
have to get worse for a progressive alternative to emerge. I 
think he means that progressives need to acknowledge their defeat, 
and the defeat of their ideas.  This interpretation is supported 
by the reference to Hegel saying that Napoleon needed to be 
defeated twice to be sure that it was a historical shift not a 
'one-off'. Only when defeat is faced can new and powerful 
progressive challenges emerge.

Zizek's points about democracy can also be taken two ways. I 
take him to mean that progressives shouldn't get caught up in 
deomocratic politics, they should challenge the system. But 
I'm sure that some will read it as meaning that we need a more 
inclusive democracy.

I tend to agree that a new vision of world order is emerging, 
but I see it more as an organising principle for what was 
already developing. It's amazing how quickly Clinton's 
aggressive 'humanitarian' wars have been forgotten, and even 
how Kissinger/Nixon have been recast as reasonable pragmatists, 
now that everyone is attacking the neocons.  I also reject 
Zizek's idea that Mercosur and the EU will be a pole of 
resistance.  Zizek is my hero, but he can be astonishingly 
silly sometimes. It's politically naive to praise the EU, and 
he seems to be hinting towards a realist (in IR terms) 
desire for a counterweight to US power - hardly appropriate 
for a progressive who wants to avoid being caught up in 
democratic struggles.

I don't know about being around the bend, but the problem I have 
with Slavoj is that he's a big wuss.  He makes a big political 
point by talking about Hegel and Napoleon and leaves us to work 
it out for ourselves rather than putting his own neck on the 
line by spelling it out. It's a kind of left-Straussianism that 
is deliberately ambiguous about questions bearing on immediate 
political issues.

--James


--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood@panix.com> wrote:
Dwayne Monroe wrote:

>I interpret it to be a variation on the old "hastening the 
>contradictions" theme.

I.e., the worse the better. Let's welcome being hated by three 
billion people, the privatization of Social Security, creationists 
on the bench, etc. It'll hasten the revolution!

No it won't.

Doug

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