Name: First As Tragedy, Then As Farce
Rating: 3.083333333333333 (12 reviews)
ISBN: 9781844674282

Slavoj Žižek

From the tragedy of 9/11 to the farce of the financial meltdown.

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

Donald

Zizek is entertaining and worth reading for his wit and occasional insight, but I disagree with his approach (and certainly his conclusions) almost completely.

To pick one thing, I think he is absolutely wrong to understand the great horrors of the 20th century, Nazism and Stalinism, to be best characterized by Auschwitz and the gulags, respectively. This is the popular narrative, but it perversely gives the Russian and German regimes 'too much credit'. Auschwitz and the gulags were real and horrible, but Nazism and Stalinism ought to be understood via Treblinka and the intentional starvation of peasants in Ukraine.

His reduction of the Soviet horror to the gulags and purges, rather than the intentional starvation of millions in the 1930s, is one of the convenient lies he uses to build his defense of 'Jacobin-Bolshevism' and voluntarism generally. 

From the book: "Our most elementary experience of subjectivity is that of the "richness of my inner life": this is what I "really am", in contrast to the symbolic determinations and responsibilities I assume in in public life (a father, professor, etc). The first lesson of psychoanalysis here is that this "richness of inner life" is fundamentally fake: it is a screen, a false distance, whose function is ,as it were, to save my appearance, to render palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic identity. One of the ways to practice the critique of ideology is therefore to invent strategies for unmasking this hypocrisy of the "inner life" and its "sincere" emotions. The experience we have of our lives from within, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves in order to account for what we are doing, is thus a lie - the truth lies rather outsie, in what we do."

At some point, we should read Zizek through Zizek and realizes his provocations are the substance of his ideas. He hedges his bets (see his discussion of the Cultural Revolution re: Naomi Klein's 'Shock Doctrine'), but his gross Leninism isn't hidden at all. Going from the quotation above, should we not look at Zizek's actual political career in Slovenia as who he 'really' is?

First As Tragedy, Then As Farce

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