Hamid Dabashi on Zizek's "Shoplifters of the World":
Whence the difference between these two perspectives: the Arab intellectual [Saidj Mustapha] morally invested and politically engaged, while his European counterpart morally aloof and politically pessimistic? One has everything to gain, a world to live; the other nothing to lose, having lost his world to worldlessness. The Algerian political scientist thrives on a visionary reading of a world that Zizek dismisses as already worldless. Why is Saidj Mustapha not afraid of a conspiracy between the Islamists and the generals? Why is Joseph Massad far more afraid of American neoliberals and neoconservatives than of Islamists? A world is unfolding right in front of Zizek’s eyes and he sees the world worldless, the Egyptian revolution suffocated, the Arab Spring lost. How and why is it that the Algerian intellectual celebrates precisely what the European philosopher mourns: the absence of party politics, the rise of a politics beyond clichés?
Zizek mourns worldlessness, and designates absolute Meaning as the cause of terrorism. He does not see the world that is unfolding right before him as a hopeful, purposeful, worldly, life-affirming world. This is because, just like Gaddafi, Zizek is stuck in his old ways. He cannot believe his eyes, he cannot believe what is happening to him: thathis world has ended, not the world; that he (embodying a European philosophy at the losing end of its dead certainties) lives a worldless world, not the world.
Zizek and Gaddafi are identical souls, sticking to the worlds they know, militantly, the world they are losing - defiant rebels banging at the Bab Aziziyeh compound of their habitat, a world that is either theirs or it will not exits: “Après moi, le déluge.” Barely begun, Zizek dismisses the Arab Spring and then mourns the loss of idealism among the shoplifters.It is in fact the European philosopher himself that is the gravedigger of history, having nothing to see, nothing to say, nothing to celebrate, because this history is not his history, is not History, for History has always been His, and not anyone else’s. It is quite a moment in History when the Hegelian cannot tell between signs of a disease (shoplifting and terrorism) as the thesis and the sights of a cure (the Arab Spring) as antithesis - giving it up to generals and Islamists. London riots and terrorism of one brand or another are the symptoms of a disease, of capitalism and its imperialist fighter jets running amok from the top to the bottom.
Arab Spring is the renewed ground zero of history, the sight of a world that is beginning to reveal itself, precisely at the moment when the European philosopher sees the world “worldless” because it is not his world - just like Colonel Gaddafi - a world in which he cannot imagine himself, for he has been imagining the world for everyone else. The Arab Spring is the opening horizons of a hope of emancipation, of a renewed reading of world, of worlds. But Zizek does not see it because this is not the world of his making, the visage and force of a world Hegel had delegated to pre-History, non-History. Zizek has already recited the obituary of the Arab Spring, while what appears as a worldless world to the European philosopher is a world he cannot fathom, as it is being inhabited by others he cannot not read.
More at: http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201183113418599933.html