Demanding the Impossible E-Book

Slavoj Zizek

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 179

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

Where are we today and what is to be done? Slavoj Zizek ponders these questions in this unique and timely book.  Based on live interviews, the book captures Zizek at his irrepressible best, elucidating such topics as the uprisings of the Arab Spring, the global financial crisis, populism in Latin America, the rise of China and even the riddle of North Korea. Zizek dazzles readers with his analyses of Hollywood films, Venezuelan police reports, Swedish crime fiction and much else. Wherever the conversation turns, his energetic mind illuminates unexpected horizons.

While analyzing our present predicaments, Zizek also explores possibilities for change. What sort of society is worth striving for? Why is it difficult to imagine alternative social and political arrangements? What are the bases for hope? A key obligation in our troubled times, argues Zizek, is to dare to ask fundamental questions: we must reflect and theorize anew, and always be prepared to rethink and redefine the limits of the possible.

These original and compelling conversations offer an engaging and accessible introduction to one of the most important thinkers of our time.

Leseprobe

Demanding the Impossible

Demanding the Impossible

Slavoj Žižek

Edited by Yong-june Park

polity

Copyright © Indigo Book company 2013

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-7985-3

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com

Contents

Acknowledgments

1  Politics and Responsibility

2  Obsession for Harmony / Compulsion to Identify

3  Politicization of Ethics

4  Means Without End: Political Phronesis

5  “May You Live In Interesting Times”

6  Communism: The Ethico-Political Fiasco

7  Who Is Afraid of a Failed Revolution?

8  Another World Is Possible

9  For They Know Not What They Do

10  Parallax View on Postmodern Globalization

11  The Public Use of Scandal

12  The Screen of Politeness / Empty Gestures and Performatives

13  Deadlock of Totalitarian Communism

14  The Subversive Use of Theory

15  Embodying a Proletarian Position

16  New Forms of Apartheid

17  Intrusion of the Excluded into the Socio-Political Space

18  Rage Capital and Risk-Taking Revolutionary Changes

19  Café Revolution

20  To Begin From the Beginning

21  The Fear of Real Love

22  Dialectic of Liberal Superiority

23  The Day After

24  The Universality of Political Miracles

25  Messianism, Multitude, and Wishful Thinking

26  Politicization of Favelas

27  Bolivarianism, the Populist Temptation

28  Violent Civil Disobedience

29  Legitimacy of Symbolic Violence

30  Gandhi, Aristide, and Divine Violence

31  No Moralization But Egotism

32  Possibility of Concrete Universality

33  Common Struggle for Freedom

34  The Impossible Happens

Acknowledgments

This book began as a part of the Global Humanities Project of Indigo Sowon, an educational center in Busan, South Korea. Founded in 2004, Indigo is a combination of book publisher, magazine, and bookstore, and also hosts international conferences. It seeks to provide a progressive, humanistic counterweight to the educational establishment, and to be an oasis of idealism and engagement (indigoground.net).

My first thanks are to the team of colleagues whose vision and hard work have made this project happen: Aram Hur, Youn-yeong Lee, Han-kyeol Yoon, Jin-jae You, and Dae-hyun Park, as well as Brian Palmer of Uppsala University (brianpalmer.org). I am immensely grateful to Slavoj Žižek, who invited our large team into his home over the course of two days. He is a person of astonishing energy and warmth, and we were left feeling that whatever his mind touches is electrified and made luminous.

My colleagues and I hope that the conversations in this book will prove enjoyable to the reader, and will spark lively discussions.

Yong-june Park

1

Politics and Responsibility

What is to be done for politics today? In the midst of radical changes – ecological catastrophes, fateful biogenetic mutations, nuclear or similar military-social conflicts, financial fiasco, etc. – where our commons are at stake, is there such a thing as the common good? To what extent is it useful to speak of the common good?

SŽ: For me, what is problematic is not the word “common” but the word “good.” Because the way I see it, from my European perspective, traditional aesthetics was directed toward some supreme Good. It could be God, humanity, the universe, etc.: we see this common good as a supreme substantial value that we should all have to work for. But for me, modernity begins with Descartes, and then with Kant – to be precise, with an ethics that is no longer an ethics of the common good. For example, in Kant, you find it is purely formal ethics: ethics of the moral law and so on. Here, ethics cannot be, in any way, politicized: politicized in the sense that you cannot simply presuppose some common good. Rather, it is a matter of decision. This is what I find problematic about the notion of the common good.

What is a common good today? OK, let’s say ecology. Probably most people would agree, even though we are politically different, that we all care about the earth. But if you look closely, you will see that there are so many ecologies on which you have to make so many decisions. Having said that, my position here is very crazy. For me, politics has priority over ethics. Not in the vulgar sense that we can do whatever we want – even kill people and then subordinate ethics to politics – but in a much more radical sense that what we define as our good is not something we just discover; rather, it is that we have to take responsibility for defining what is our good.

And, as many radical ecologists have pointed out, how much of ecology, which pretends to work for the good of nature, involves hidden political choices? When you say, for example, that the common good should be our Mother Earth, and that our planet should thrive – why should our planet thrive? Because we humans want it to, so that we can survive. Ecology, from my point of view, is the most egotistic, human-centered machine there is. Nature is crazy. Nature is chaotic and prone to wild, unpredictable and meaningless disasters, and we are exposed to its merciless whims – there is no such thing as Mother Earth. In nature, always, there are catastrophes, things go wrong, and sometimes a planet explodes.

What I want to show you is the fact that, if you look at this closely, when we refer to some higher common good, it is always, at least the way I see it, defined by our secret priorities. For example, people may say “Oh! We are constructing another big city and it will destroy nature. It is horrible!” And the usual response to this, even of many ecologists, is that “we should live in a more natural way, closer to the forest, and so on.” No! One ecologist, a friend of mine from Germany, whom I appreciate very much, told me that this kind of response is, ecologically, totally catastrophic. From an ecological standpoint, the best thing is this: there is a lot of pollution everywhere, so you pack as many people as you can into a big city; it is then very concentrated and there is much less pollution per capita so you can keep the large domains relatively clean. I don’t know if you are doing this in Korea, but somebody told me they are doing it in Japan. I think that large dirty cities where people live packed together are ecologically the best thing for nature. Again, there is another ecological idea, as we call it, which is that we should live in small self-sufficient houses with solar energy – people believe this is one way of living ecologically. But can you imagine how it would end up if the majority of people wanted to live like that? Everyone would be very spread out, and the forests would disappear. Ironically, this is related to the question of how much we can “safely” pollute our environment. So I am very distrustful of this view. Whenever something is proposed as being for the higher good, and we say we should transcend our egotism and work for it, we will always discover that we are already secretly doing just this.

What I like to suggest, based on my basic position, is not politics in the sense of what people usually associate with politics – such as cheap manipulation, corruption, power struggles, etc. – but politics in the sense of fundamental decisions about our life on earth, and collective decisions for which you have to take full responsibility.

2

Obsession for Harmony/ Compulsion to Identify

What do you mean by “full responsibility”? If the common good is a matter of decisions we have to make, precisely in the field of political struggle and ecological crisis, is this a term that embraces responsibility even for social reform or revolution?