What is that about, again, the Academy
and Chomsky and so on? Well with all deep Respect that I do have for Chomsky,
my first point is that Chomsky who always emphasises how one has to be
empirical, accurate, not just some crazy Lacanian speculations and so on… well
I don’t think I know a guy who was so often empirically Wrong in his
descriptions in his whatever! Let’s look… I remember when he defended this
demonisation of Khmer Rouge. And he wrote a couple of texts claiming: “no this
is western Propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as that.” And when later
he was compelled to admit that Khmer Rouge were not the nicest guys in the Universe
and so on, his defence was quite shocking for me. It was that “no, with the
data that we had at that point, I was right. At that point we didn’t yet know
enough, so… you know” but I totally reject this line of reasoning.
For example, concerning
Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have to photo evidence
of Gulag or whatever. My god you just have to listen to the public Discourse of
Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological
is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: even if we have no data about
their Prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have
a Regime which in the first two years (’75 to ’77) behaved towards itself,
treated itself, as illegal. You know the Regime was nameless. It was called
‘alka’ [?] an organisation – not Communist Party of Cambodia – an organisation.
Leaders were nameless. If you ask ‘who is my Leader?’ your head was chopped off
immediately and so on.
Ok, next point about Chomsky,
you know the Consequence of this attitude of his empirical and so on – and
that’s my basic difference with him – and precisely Corey Robinson and some
other People talking with him recently confirmed this to me. His Idea is today
that cynicism of those in Power is so open that we dont need any critique of Ideology,
you reach automatically between the lines, everything is cynically openly
admitted, we just have to bring out the facts of People. Like ‘this company is
profiting in Iraq’ and so on and so on. Here I violently disagree.
First,
more than ever today, our daily Life is Ideology. How can you doubt Ideology
when recently I think Paul Krugman published a relatively good text where he
demonstrated how this Idea of austerity: this is not even good bourgeois
economic theory! Its a kind of a primordial, common sense magical thinking when
you confront a Crisis “oh, we must have done something Wrong, we spent too much
so lets economise and so on and so on.”
My second point, cynicists are
those who are most prone to fall in to illusions. Cynicists are not People who
see things the way they really are and so on. Think about 2008 and the ongoing
financial Crisis, it was not cooked up in some crazy welfare state; social
democrats who are spending too much. The Crisis exploded because of activity of
those other cynicists who precisely thought “screw human rights, screw dignity,
all that matters is… and so on and so on”
So as to this ‘problem’ of are
we studying the facts enough I claim emphatically more than ever ‘no’ today.
And as to popularity, I get a little bit annoyed with this Idea that we with
our deep sophisms are really hegemonic in Humanities. Are People crazy? I mean
we are always marginal. No, what is for me real academic hegemony: its brutal,
who can get academic posts? Who can get grants, foundations, as so on? We are
totally marginalised here. I mean look at my position… “oh yeah you are a
mega-star in United States” well I would like to be because I would like Power
to brutally use it! But I am far from that. I react so like this because a
couple of days ago I got a letter from a friend in United States for whom I
wrote a letter of recommendation, and he told me “I didn’t get the job, not in
spite of your letter but because of your letter!” He had a spy in the committee
and this spy told him “you almost got it, but then somebody says ‘oh, if Zizek
recommends him it must be something terribly Wrong with him’”
So I claim that all these ‘how
popular we are’ is really a mask of… remember the large Majority of Academia
are these grey either cognitivists or historians blah blah… and you don’t see
them but they are the Power. They are the Power.
On the other hand, why are they
in Power worried? Because you know… don’t exaggerate this leftist paranoia Idea
that “we can all be recuperated” and so on and so on. No! I still quite naïvely
believe in the efficiency of theoretical thinking. Its not as simple as to
recuperate everything in. But you know there are different strategies of how to
contain us, I must say that I maybe am not innocent in this, because People
like to say about me “oh, go and listen to him, he is an amusing clown blah
blah blah” This is another way to say “dont take it seriously”.
But this is one of the
strategies. You know there are so many strategies to counteract and the proof
that we are not so impotent as innocent is how, did you notice how – against
you now [Douzinas] and against me – this old line of “oh these are crazy
half-clownish marginals” imperceptibly is more and more combined with the
opposite line “we are dangerous. we advocate Violence. we are preparing a new Holocaust
or whatever”. This is deeply symptomatic, this mixture of ‘we are powerless,
innocent clowns’ to ‘these guys are really dangerous preparing a new Terror’
and so on. Of course, my heart is with the second position, but that’s another
story…
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