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Slavoj Žižek

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Mistake

On page 247, when Prof. Zizek speaks of the architecture in communist Albania, there are two mistakes I would like to point out. First, the number of bunkers build by the regime for military purposes is 700,000 and secondly, the population of Albania (as of 2010 when the book was written) was 3.1 million people.
- Elian Gjini

In response to Living in the End Times by Slavoj Žižek

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Communism, Christianity and Capitalism.

Zizek often speaks of giving to the Devil what belongs to the Devil when it comes to Capitalism. I hold that even the Devil was surprised with the victory of Capitalism over 20th centaury Communism.
Was Communism not exactly the great effort of the Devil to sell us Heaven without Emancipation?

The Devil must have been terribly surprised to see that Capital was worshiped rather than his fake Heaven, 20th centaury communism. It is also then not surprising that for Christians (the emancipated) the final frontier, the final enemy is surprisingly enough not the Devil but Capital, money. Remember what Jesus said: You cannot have two masters; otherwise you will hate the one and love the other, you cannot serve Mammon and God. But hating money is still a sign of divided interests, still hating the one and loving the other. So… there will be no blood for Capitalism, the fight does not exist for Christians; they are emancipated even from this! They are already socialists and where they go, goes socialism. Like Jesus said to the emancipated: Don’t look around to see and find the Kingdom of God, it is close to you, even in you. For those who wish to see rioting revolutionaries as a means to the end of Capitalism, Christianity would be of little interest because even with regards to the fight against Capitalism, Christianity is totally subversive; there will be no blood! I mean the man died! He bled! It is done.

In response to The Fragile Absolute by Slavoj Žižek

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Did Zizek read Leon Battista Alberti (1404-1472)?

When Zizek says that there remain only two teories that still show and practice the engaged notion of the real: marxism and psicoanalisis, I started to wonder if he had read Alberti. I consider that this humanist from the Renaissance developped a theory that practices and engages a notion of the real in many of his books including De re aedificatoria. So if Zizek read him, I would like to know why he doesn´t consider his theory as so.

In response to In Defense of Lost Causes by Slavoj Žižek

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Fetishization and Reification, Human Constants or the Particular Products of Capitalism?

Grappling with Marx's theoretical dilemma on whether class struggle is the product of capitalism, coterminus with it or its condition, Zizek suggests that this same dilemma illuminates the difference between Lukác's History and Class Consciousness and Adorno & Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, wherein he latter authors "cut [the] link" (that Lukác maintains) between fetichization and reification on one hand and captitalism on the other, considering them products of "instrumental reason" (e.g. using people as a means to an ends), "...which functions as a kind of a priori of thewhole of human history but no longer rooted in any concrete historical formations. The over-arching totality is thus no longer that of capitalism, or commodity production : capitalism itself becomes one of the manifestations of instrumental reason." (p. 204)

This problem is resolved if we merely extend our notion of "human history" to go back to Pleistocene (hunter-gatherer) times and follow it through the agricultural revolution and the dawn of civilization, viz. citification, the creation of cities. Hunter-gatherer cultures are dominated by scarcity of the means of survival. There is a social hierarchy, but it is not based on possessions, because most daytime activity is devoted to the search for food. Once agriculture is discovered, however, a few milenia after the last glacial maximum around 12,000 years ago, there is surplus production, permitting substantial population grown and eventually leading to the establishment of cities, around six or seven thousand years ago. With surplus production comes the accumulation of wealth, the creation of classes (workers, owners, priests, etc.), the establishment of chiefdoms and then city-states, and finally conquest, as some city-states covet the resources of their neighbors, devote a certain amount of their surplus to military materiel, and gobble up their neighbors.

It is an abstract nicety to call the motivations for these appropriations "instrumental reason." They could also be called greed, covetousness, or imperial arrogance. In any case, they only arise when there is surplus, and the first sustained surpluses in human history (starting at least 40,000 years ago and not 5,000 years ago) come with the invention of agriculture.

Capitalism from this perspective is merely a concentration, institutionalization, mechanization, and acceleration of organizations based on technological advances and greatly expanded populations, to produce exponentially more surplus value and its resultant accumulation, and finally engendering the inequality and suffering that we are so familiar with, and which motivated Marx to deconstruct it.

So Adorno & Horkheimer had the right intuition; they simply lacked the expanded perspective in pre-history to concretize it.

In response to Living in the End Times by Slavoj Žižek

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How does theology enlist the service of historical materialism? What is this service?

I have a quote from Zizek I’m having a little trouble with. Its this one: Today, when the historical materialist analysis is receding, practiced
as it were under cover, rarely called by its proper name, while the
theological dimension is given a new lease on life in the guise of the
“postsecular” Messianic turn of deconstruction, the time has come
to reverse Walter Benjamin’s ﬁrst thesis on the philosophy of history:
“The puppet called ‘theology’ is to win all the time. It can easily be
a match for anyone if it enlists the service of historical materialism,
which today, as we know, is wizened and has to keep out of sight.” The trouble I’m having is with “if it enlists the service of historical materialism,” That is to say I dont understand in what way this service is enlisted, or for that matter, what it is. Can anyone help me?

In response to The Plague of Fantasies by Slavoj Žižek

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