[lbo-talk] Zizek on Obama

Philp Pilkington pilkingtonphil at gmail.com
Sun Nov 16 10:13:40 PST 2008



>
>
> What's so attractive about Zizek's approach is the way it sprints past
> tedious arguments over what 'progressive' policies President Obama may
> or may not pursue -- indeed, it leaps over Obama himself to focus on
> potential psychological impacts.
>

I'd agree with your using the term "attractive" there, but I'd disagree with your conclusion. What's so toxic about Zizek's approach is that it appeals to the emotions of the reader. This is evident in all of his work - it is arguably how he's able to make Stalinist terror more benign, he "transcends" the reality, the torture, the enforced collectivisation, the purges, in short it "transcends" anything material about Stalinist politics and engage the reader on an emotional basis.

Zizek sets himself up as a "critic of ideology", but its a sham. What he does is pretend to criticise ideology, to show the underlying tendencies at work in mass culture, but then at the end of this critique he engages the reader time and again on an emotional/ideological level. In this particular case instead of simply pointing out that Obama's election was indeed an expression of discontent and a desire for change by a great many people he requests that, at a certain level, the observer takes part in the show...

Zizek's basic problem is that he allows his own spiritual beliefs - which I have no problem with - to contaminate his materialistic observations. There is nowhere else a more haphazard place to allow this contamination than in the sphere of political analysis...



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list