henrymiller
Well-known member
With his edition of Lenin's 1917 writings and the long essay on Lukacs, not to mention his appeals to St Paul, Zizek has surely been trying to reintroduce the idea of activism into academic Marxism.
And yet here he is in 'Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle':
He's been taken to task for this here.
Recently he wrote in the Guardian of:
A neat way of pre-empting such critiques, but not without a certain truth, as he admitted.
Is this vacilation or yet another of these 'paradixocal formulations'? Zizek is a Marxist, which allows for little in the way of ambiguity on the key question of agency -- as Zizek himself has argued in his essays on the Bolsheviks.
What's the deal, then?
And yet here he is in 'Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle':
"Today's predicament is that, if we succumb to the urge of directly 'doing something' (engaging with the anti-globalist struggle, helping the poor), we will certainly and undoubtedly contribute to the reproduction of the existing order. The only way to lay the foundations for a true, radical change is to withdraw from the compulsion to act, to 'do nothing' * thus opening up the space for a different kind of activity."
He's been taken to task for this here.
Recently he wrote in the Guardian of:
"the 'prattling classes', academics and journalists with no solid professional education, usually working in humanities with some vague French postmodern leanings, specialists in everything, prone to verbal radicalism, in love with paradoxical formulations that flatly contradict the obvious. When faced with fundamental liberal-democratic tenets, they display a breathtaking talent to unearth hidden traps of domination. When faced with an attack on these tenets, they display a no less breathtaking ability to discover emancipatory potential in it."
A neat way of pre-empting such critiques, but not without a certain truth, as he admitted.
Is this vacilation or yet another of these 'paradixocal formulations'? Zizek is a Marxist, which allows for little in the way of ambiguity on the key question of agency -- as Zizek himself has argued in his essays on the Bolsheviks.
What's the deal, then?