A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Slavoj Žižek

MA 02155, 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-13: 978-1-5095-4119-5

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

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Žižek, Slavoj, author.

      Title: A left that dares to speak its name : 34 untimely interventions / Slavoj Žižek.

      Description: Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA : Polity, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references. | Summary: “With irrepressible humour Slavoj Žižek dissects our current political and social climate, discussing everything from Jordan Peterson and sex ‘unicorns’ to Greta Thunberg and Chairman Mao. This is Žižek’s attempt to elucidate the major political issues of the day from a truly radical left position”-- Provided by publisher.

      Identifiers: LCCN 2019027646 (print) | LCCN 2019027647 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509541171 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509541188 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509541195 (epub)

      Subjects: LCSH: Right and left (Political science) | Communism. | Social history--21st century. | World politics--21st century.

      Classification: LCC JA83 .Z59 2020 (print) | LCC JA83 (ebook) | DDC 320.53/2--dc23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027646 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019027647

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      Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been 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: politybooks.com

Introduction: From the Communist Standpoint

      This book brings together my (substantially rewritten) most recent interventions in the public media. They cover the entire panoply of topics that aroused public attention, from economic turmoil to the struggle for sexual emancipation, from populism to political correctness, from the vicissitudes of Trump’s presidency to the ongoing tensions in and with China, from ethical problems raised by sexbots to the Middle East crisis. The concluding supplement contains fragments from two polemics I was engaged in. The collected interventions are untimely because their premise is that only a communist standpoint provides the appropriate way to grasp these topics. So why communism?

      Signs abound that our global situation calls increasingly for such a standpoint. Apologists of the existing order like to point out that the dream of socialism is over, that every attempt to realize it turned out to be a nightmare (just look at what goes on in Venezuela!). However, at the same time, signs of panic grow everywhere: how are we to deal with global warming, with the threat of total digital control over our lives, with the influx of refugees? In short, with the effects and consequences of this same triumph of global capitalism? There is no surprise here: when capitalism wins, its antagonisms explode.

On the one hand, signs of anti-Enlightenment madness multiply everywhere. In Koszalin, a city in northern Poland, three Catholic priests have burned books they say promote sorcery, including one of the Harry Potter novels, in a ceremony they photographed and posted on Facebook: they carried the books in a large basket from inside a church to a stone area outside, where the books were set alight as prayers were said and a small group of people looked on.¹ An isolated incident, yes – but if we put it together with other similar incidents, a clear anti-Enlightenment pattern emerges. For example, at the 106th Indian Science Congress in Punjab (in January 2019), local scientists made a series of claims, among them: Kauravas were born with the help of stem cell and test tube technologies; Lord Rama used “astras” and “shastras,” while Lord Vishnu sent a Sudarshan Chakra to chase targets. This shows that the science of guided missiles was present in India thousands of years ago; that Ravana didn’t just have the Pushpaka Vimana, but had 24 types of aircraft and airports in Lanka; that theoretical physics (including the contributions of Newton and Einstein) is totally wrong, gravitational waves will be renamed “Narendra Modi Waves,” and the gravitational lensing effect will be renamed the “Hashvardhan Effect”; that Lord Brahma discovered the existence of dinosaurs on earth and mentioned it in the Vedas.² This is also a way to fight the remnants of Western colonialism, and the book burning in Poland can be viewed as a way to fight Western commercialized consumerism. The conjunction of these two examples, one from Hindu India and the other from Christian Europe, demonstrates that we are dealing with a global phenomenon.

While we are sinking deeper and deeper into this madness (which coexists easily with a thriving global market), the real crisis is approaching. In January 2019, an international team of scientists proposed “a diet it says can improve health while ensuring sustainable food production to reduce further damage to the planet. The ‘planetary health diet’ is based on cutting red meat and sugar consumption in half and upping intake of fruits, vegetables and nuts.”³ We are talking about a radical reorganization of our entire food production and distribution – so how to do it? “The report suggests five strategies to ensure people can change their diets and not harm the planet in doing so: incentivizing people to eat healthier, shifting global production toward varied crops, intensifying agriculture sustainably, stricter rules around the governing of oceans and lands, and reducing food waste.” OK, but, again, how can this be achieved? Is it not clear that a strong global agency is needed with the power to coordinate such measures? And is not such an agency pointing in the direction of what we once called “communism”? And does the same not hold for other threats to our survival as humans? Is the same global agency not needed also to deal with the problem of exploding numbers of refugees and immigrants, with the problem of digital control over our lives?⁴

      Communist interventions are needed because our fate is not yet decided – not in the simple sense that we have a choice, but in a more radical sense of choosing one’s own fate. According to the standard view, the past is fixed, what happened happened, it cannot be undone, and the future is open, it depends on unpredictable contingencies. What we should propose here is a reversal of this standard view: the past is open to retroactive reinterpretations, while the future is closed since we live in a determinist universe. This doesn’t mean that we cannot change the future; it just means that, in order to change our future we should first (not “understand” but) change our past, reinterpret it in such a way that opens up toward a different future from the one implied by the predominant vision of the past.

Will there be a new world war? The answer can only be a paradoxical one. If there is to be a new war, it will be a necessary one. This is how history works – through weird reversals as described by Jean-Pierre Dupuy: “If an outstanding event takes place, a catastrophe, for example, it could not not have taken place; nonetheless, insofar as it did not take place, it is not inevitable. It is thus the event’s actualization – the fact that it takes place – which retroactively creates its necessity.”⁵ And exactly the same holds for a new global war: once the conflict explodes (between the US and Iran, between China and Taiwan), it will appear inevitable, that is to say, we will automatically read the past that led to it as a series of causes that necessarily caused the explosion. If it does not happen, we will read it in the same way that today we read the Cold War – as a series of dangerous moments where the catastrophe