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Slavoj Žižek. Living in the End Times
LIVING IN THE END TIMES
Contents
Introduction: “The Spiritual Wickedness in the Heavens”
I Denial: The Liberal Utopia. Against the Tartar-Lovers
Legalists Versus Confucians
No Castes Without Outcasts
Legal Luck, or, the Loop of the Act
The Utopia for a Race of Devils
Coda: Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion
Interlude 1. Hollywood Today: Report from an Ideological Battlefield
What Does the Joker Want?
The Sad Lesson of Remakes
Les non-dupes errent
The Price of Survival
2 Anger: The Actuality of the Theologico-Political. Thinking Backwards
“Nothing is forbidden in my faith”
“I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”
Guevara as a Reader of Rousseau
Slap Thy Neighbor!
The Subject Supposed Not to Know
Interlude 2. Reverberations of the. Crisis in a Multi-Centric World “The Jew is within you, but you, you are in the Jew”
Zionist Anti-Semitism
China, Haiti, Congo
Europe : US = Kant : Hegel?
3 Bargaining: The Return of the. Critique of Political Economy “Dare to win!”
In Defense of a Non-Marxist Marx
Why Masses Are Not Divided into Classes
The Labor Theory of Value Revisited
From Hegel to Marx . . . and Back
Proletarians or Rentiers?
Interlude 3. The Architectural Parallax
Postmodernism and Class Struggle
The Incommensurability
The Envelope . .
. . . of the Class Struggle
Spandrels
4 Depression: The Neuronal Trauma, or, the Rise of the Proletarian Cogito. Cogito Against Historicism
The Freudian Unconscious Versus the Cerebral Unconscious
The Libidinal Proletariat
Interlude 4. Apocalypse at the Gates. My Own Private Austria
The Ubuism of Power
Welcome to the Anthropocene
Versions of the Apocalypse
5 Acceptance: The Cause Regained. In 1968, Structures Walked the Streets: Will They Do So Again?
Signs From the Future: Kafka, Platonov, Sturgeon, Vertov, Satie
Violence Between Discipline and Obscenity
The Infinite Judgment of Democracy
The Agent
Afterword to the Paperback Edition: Welcome to Interesting Times!
Freedom in the Clouds
The Non-Interpellated Subject
Earth, a Pale Mother
The Animal Gets a Whip
China’s Frozen Past and Bright Future
Why Truth Is Violent
Mountain High, River Deep
Leitkultur? Yes, Please!
Why the Idea and Why Communism?
Index
Отрывок из книги
LIVING IN THE END TIMES
1 Denial: The Liberal Utopia
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Traditionally, each basic form of liberalism necessarily appears as the opposite of the other: liberal multiculturalist advocates of tolerance as a rule resist economic liberalism and try to protect the vulnerable from unencumbered market forces, while market liberals as a rule advocate conservative family values, and so on. We thus get the double paradox of the traditionalist Rightist supporting the market economy while ferociously rejecting the culture and mores that economy engenders, and his counterpoint, the multiculturalist Leftist, resisting the market (though less and less so, it is true, as Michéa notices) while enthusiastically enforcing the ideology it engenders. (Half a century ago, the symptomatic exception was the unique Ayn Rand, who advocated both market liberalism and a full individualist egotism deprived of all traditional forms of morality concerning family values and sacrifice for the common good.) Today, however, we seem to be entering a new era in which it is possible for both aspects to be combined: figures such as Bill Gates, for instance, pose as market radicals and as multiculturalist humanitarians.
Here, we encounter the basic paradox of liberalism. An anti-ideological and anti-utopian stance is inscribed into the very core of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives itself as a “politics of the lesser evil,” its ambition is to bring about the “least worst society possible,” thus preventing a greater evil, since it considers any attempt to directly impose a positive good as the ultimate source of all evil. Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst of all political systems, with the exception of all the others, holds even better for liberalism. Such a view is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature: man is a selfish and envious animal, and if one attempts to build a political system appealing to his goodness and altruism, the result will be the worst kind of terror (both the Jacobins and the Stalinists presupposed human virtue).40 However, the liberal critique of the “tyranny of the Good” comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, gradually replicates the very features of the enemy it claims to be fighting against. The global liberal order clearly presents itself as the best of all possible worlds; its modest rejection of utopias ends with the imposition of its own market-liberal utopia which will supposedly become reality when we subject ourselves fully to the mechanisms of the market and universal human rights. Behind all this lurks the ultimate totalitarian nightmare, the vision of a New Man who has left behind all the old ideological baggage.
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