[lbo-talk] the courage to do nothing

shag carpet bomb shag at cleandraws.com
Sun Feb 12 06:25:19 PST 2012


The Zizekian posture is one in which the only heroic thing to do in dark times is do nothing while dreaming of "an absolute, cataclysmic revolutionary act of violence." Thus, the hero constantly raises a hand and says "NO! NOt this! No! Not that either!", a politics of endless deferral while dreaming of deliverance from dark times, fantasizing The Subject of History that will mete out revolutionary violence.

"Zizek counsels us to do nothing in the face of the objective, systemic violence of the world. We should 'just sit and wait' and have the courage to do nothing. The book ends with the words, 'Sometimes, doing nothing is the most violent thing to do'. True enough, but what can this possibly mean?

Let me briefly turn to the governing concept of Zizek's recent work, the parallax, and what is purportedly his magnum opus, The Parallax View.[4] The concept of parallax is a way of giving expression to, at its deepest, the radical non-coincidence of thinking and being. Such is Zizek's metaphysics. If Parmenides and the entire onto-theological tradition that follows him, famously recovered by Heidegger, claims that it is the same thing to think and to be, then Zizek disagrees. Between thinking and being, between, in his parlance, the ticklish subject and the tickling object, there exists a radical non-coincidence, a constitutive lack of identity. Such is, of course, nothing more than the teaching of Lacan and the parallax view is the expression of the pas-tout, the not-all that circles around the traumatic kernal of the Real.

In the conclusion to The Parallax View (pp.375-85), although it is suggested throughout the book, Zizek claims that the parallax view opens onto a politics, what he calls - echoing Badiou - a subtractive politics, expressed in the figure of Melville's Bartleby, who reappears as the hero in the closing pages of Violence.(pp.180-83) What interests Zizek in Bartleby is his insistent 'I would prefer not to', where Zizek places the emphasis on the 'not to' or the 'not to do', on Bartleby's impassive, inert and insistent being, which hovers uncertainly somewhere between passivity and the vague threat of violence. So, at the level of politics, it is ultimately the politics of Bartleby's smile, of his 'not' that Zizek wants to oppose to other forms of thinking about politics. Which other forms? Well, mine for example, but we'll come back to that.

At the core of Zizek's relentless, indeed manic, production of books, articles and lectures is a fantasy, I think, what my psychoanalyst friends would call an obsessional fantasy, a very pure version of the obsessional fantasy. On the one hand, the only authentic stance to take in dark times is to do nothing, to refuse all commitment, to be paralyzed like Bartleby. On the other hand, Zizek dreams of a divine violence, a cataclysmic, purifying violence of the sovereign ethical deed, something like Sophocles' Antigone.

But Shakespearean tragedy is a more illuminating guide here than its ancient Greek predecessor. For Zizek is, I think, a Slovenian Hamlet, utterly paralyzed but dreaming of an avenging violent act for which, finally, he lacks the courage. In short, behind its shimmering dialectical inversions, Zizek's work leaves us in a fearful and fateful deadlock, both a transcendental-philosophical deadlock and a practical-political deadlock: the only thing to do is to do nothing. We should just sit and wait. Don't act, never commit, and continue to dream of an absolute, cataclysmic revolutionary act of violence. Thus speaks the great obsessional.

As Hamlet says, 'Readiness is all'. But the truth is that Zizek is never ready. His work lingers in endless postponement and over-production. He ridicules others' attempts at thinking about commitment, resistance and action - people like me and many others - while doing nothing himself. What sustains his work is a dream of divine violence, cruelty and force. I hope that one day his dreams come true.

<http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/39>http://www.nakedpunch.com/articles/39 -- http://cleandraws.com Wear Clean Draws ('coz there's 5 million ways to kill a CEO)



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