Rejected Book Review: Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations

The following book review has been rejected from the Nation magazine and the New Inquiry. The editors at the New Inquiry felt the piece was too “academic.” It was written last summer and finally finds a home on my own blog now.

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How a university professor in New Mexico is Complicating the Communist Hypothesis (A Review of Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations)

The argument I’m aiming at with this “review” of Adrian Johnston’s book on Badiou and Zizek is that, as we look back on the Arab Spring and ahead to the future of a Europe (and possibly an America) in the street resisting policies of austerity, we’d do well to consider the ideas of a professor working out of the Humanities department at the University of New Mexico. This might be something of a tough sell. Johnston has published several dense and academic books with titles like Time Driven: Metapsychology and the splitting of the drive and Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. His latest is titled Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations. Books like these often come across as unnecessarily complicated, perhaps even disingenuously so. But from Johnston’s perspective the very difficulty and complications his ideas and writings engender represent the strength of the ideas involved.

When I emailed him to ask for his take on the events of the Arab Spring, he responded:

The “events” in Tunisia and Egypt…mark turning points of no return–and this even if the medium-to-longer-term empirical aftermath doesn’t exhibit what we hope for in terms of some sort of steady historical “progress.” That is to say, even if new corrupt tyrants eventually replace the old ones, this cannot succeed at being simply a return to the past; the uprisings of the Tunisian, Egyptian, and other Arab peoples at least guarantee that if anything like the old order is reimposed, it will be seen as (and will see itself as) a brittle, fragile adversary vulnerable to challenge, disruption, and dissolution. Such shifts in perceptions of the nature/status of power matter immensely.

For Johnston nothing is easy. He is not a popularizer of what is being called “the communist hypothesis” but another producer of the knotty and at times bizarrely counter-intuitive concepts that, in the second decade of the 21st century, surround the communist idea. After all, Johnston eschews pragmatism and analytic philosophy in favor of what might be thought of as French shenanigans or, more charitably, an attempt to think the impossible.

And today nothing is more impossible, nor more necessary to think about, than the idea of a thorough going revolution.

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating…This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. –Walter Benjamin

Johnston presses Benjamin’s 1943 essay describing Paul Klee’s painting Angel Novus “into the service of conveying the oppressive, immobilizing pessimism hanging heavily in the air of the prevailing Zeitgeist,” and proposes that Benjamin’s pessimistic vision fits 21st century leftist thinking precisely. A dark and bloodstained arc of setbacks, failures, and defeats looms over us, and we might look to Benjamin’s description of the angel of history to discover the delicate balance between faith in the future and a stringent pessimism about the past that is needed if we’re to have a radically different future.

Benjamin’s essay can easily be misunderstood as merely cynical, but the key to his interpretation of Klee’s painting is in the separation between the wreckage at the angel’s feet and the storm that’s blowing from paradise. It is not the disasters of history that are moving the angel, but this storm called progress. Benjamin isn’t being sarcastic here, but as hopeful as he can be given that the angel will never see what’s coming. From Johnston’s perspective it is the angel’s very blindness to the future, the way in which revolutionary change appears to us as an impossibility that is most hopeful and encouraging.

Again, it is the way a revolutionary change for the better appears to us as impossible from within the current order that is the basis of Johnston’s radical politics, and in Johnston’s universe ideas such as freedom or hope are negative concepts:

Like freedom, hope, despite false ideological depictions of it in romanticized hues—freedom and hope often are celebrated as wonderful blessings to be treasured with pleasure—is, in reality, a painful burden. – Johnston, pg xv

For Johnston the first impossibility that shapes human freedom, the first concept that might be put to use in creating a new world order after the Arab Spring, would be the idea of the Oedipal subject. By exposing the limits of human consciousness, specifically by siding with the pessimistic and conservative figure of Freud, Johnston paradoxically aims at furthering the cause of human liberation. He defends the Oedipal subject of History from those who would argue for the reality of an unfettered and untroubled subject, and he opposes those who would argue for the primacy of an uncomplicated desire that can take on an infinite number of guise because he hopes to liberate us from liberation, or from what he called, in his first book Time Driven, “the unbearable burden of libidinal liberation.”

The epitome of the political act is revolution…and the paradigm of the genuine actor up to the task of such an act is the hero of tragedy, that is a self-sacrificing figure. Lacan connects the act to the tragedy of Oedipus and the possibility of killing one’s father, thus indicating that the act involves destroying the old paternal order and, in so doing, also undoing one’s own being as a subjectified individual. – Adrian Johnston, Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformation, pg. 151

Johnston’s argument is that an event like what happened on February 11th, 2011 in Egypt, is a revolutionary moment when the masses come to know that the big Other, a term lifted from Lacan’s structuralist version of psychoanalysis and that coincides with the superego, and which, for the French philosopher Alain Badiou is the same as the State, doesn’t exist. From Badiou’s Marxist perspective the State is a fragile and reactionary institution, and it is Badiou’s fidelity to the Oedipal subject as his starting point that supports his conclusion that the State doesn’t exist.

Badiou, parroting Mao, says:

“It is resistance that is the secret of domination.”

And this means that the State’s domination can only materialize or come to be when it is resisted. The various ways that the masses, or the working classes, resist domination determine how the State functions. The State has no energy of its own. And while, on the one hand this is an indictment of the working classes as it exposes how those who are exploited are ultimately collectively responsible for their own exploitation, this indictment of the workers has the positive feature of recognizing mass or working class power.

Consider the massive international protests of February 15th, 2003 when between six and ten million people around the world took to the streets against the impending invasion of Iraq. The New York Times declared that the protests indicated that there was an emerging superpower and gave this second superpower the name “World Opinion.” But, from Badiou’s perspective, this designation of the masses as second in line, and the reduction of their power to opinion is proof that the protest against the War in Iraq did not constitute an Event and demonstrates the insidious recuperative power of the State and its apparatuses. The masses, according to Badiou, are not the world’s second superpower, but its only power. The superpowers in the World, whether the US, China, or Coca-Cola, only maintain control over the power of the masses by setting boundaries on action and relegating opposition to the level of opinion.

Johnston points out that the State’s power is always best maintained as a phantom, and that events often arrive that test the phantom known as the State, forcing it into the open and inciting it to excessive, compensatory, acts that reveal its impotence more than its strength.

“The photograph of the lone protestor facing the column of People’s Liberation Army tanks during the Tiannanmen Square happening in China epitomizes this effect whereby state power is strangely diminished at the very moment it displays itself in all its raw, ferocious strength.” -pg 40, Badiou, Zizek and Political Transformations, Johnston

An event is a moment when the people discover their own responsibility for the current social order, whatever that social order is. It is a moment that appears to be spontaneous, almost random, because it is not something dictated by the current order. An act that exposes the way the power structure relies on the dumb complacency of the masses. The paradox is that this relationship between the tanks and the protestors, this event wherein the power of the state is laid bare as merely unjustified brute force does not, in itself, liberate the people who are struggling. The State is exposed in its excesses, but the masses are also exposed. Their responsibility is shown to be an empty or meaningless fact. The masses in society are responsible for the power structure in the same way that the atoms in a chair are responsible for the solidity of a table. That is, the masses are only responsible as dumb complacent masses.

The question for Badiou and for Johnston is this: How does a working class consciousness emerge from an Event? And further, how is a new identity maintained after a self-destructive event?

Perhaps the answer comes in the last third of Johnston’s book where he takes up by the task of interrogating Zizek in an attempt to demonstrate how everyday activities and activism is still necessary if one is to establish a new way of living. Johnston turns Zizek against himself to show the limit of the purity of his thought.

On today’s market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol… And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare… – lacan.com, “A Cup of Decaf Reality,” Slavoj Zizek

Johnston suggests that the idea of a pure act or a revolutionary event can serve the same function as decaffeinated coffee. Fidelity to this pure event relieves one of ever acting toward it, especially as one can never know whether or not an event is occurring until after the fact. One has to wait and see what an events effects will be before one can really know. Rejecting political activity in the here and now because this activity remains within the coordinates of today’s political economy, waiting for an event or an act, this is somewhat like waiting for someone to say the magic word on the old Groucho Marx gameshow “You Bet Your Life,” something like hoping you’ll discover your own “Shazam” and miraculously transform into Captain Marvel. This kind of a politics based on revolutionary events is really a politics based on childish dreams, and just like the secret word on “You Bet Your Life,” waiting for this kind of event is just another part of the game we’re already playing.

Johnston concludes by suggesting that what Badiou and Zizek really have to offer our current age are new ways to think about the kinds of big changes that seem to be required. Both Badiou and Zizek clear the ground for something new in politics, there is much to be done but Johnston admits that “the danger is that the very analyses developed by Zizek in his assault upon late-capitalist ideology might serve to facilitate the sustenance of the cynical distance whose underlying complicity with the current state of affairs he describes so well.”

What Johnston hopes for instead is that, through an engagement with the ideas of Badiou and Zzek as opposed to a wholesale acceptance of those ideas, we might develop a’real revolutionary practice’ albeit one based solely on a pessimism about any ultimate authority or structure that guarantees our success in advance.

And this is how Johnston’s books are groping after his own kind of ‘Shazam’ but without magic or immortals, an act without actors, and an event without eternity.

Meanwhile history moves along, and the debris pile grows larger.