Оглавление
Slavoj Žižek. A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name
CONTENTS
Guide
Pages
Dedication
A Left that Dares to Speak Its Name. Untimely Interventions
Introduction: From the Communist Standpoint
Notes
1 200 Years After: Is Marx Alive, Dead, or a Living Dead?
Notes
2 Why Secondary Contradictions Matter: A Maoist View
3 Nomadic Proletarians
Notes
4 Should the Left’s Answer to Rightist Populism Really Be a “Me Too”?
Notes
5 When Unfreedom Itself Is Experienced as Freedom
Notes
6 Only Autistic Children Can Save Us!
Notes
7 They Are Both Worse!
Notes
8 A Desperate Call for (T)Reason
Notes
9 Democratic Socialism and Its Discontents
Notes
10 Is Donald Trump a Frog Embracing a Bottle of Beer?
Notes
11 Better Dead than Red!
Notes
12 “There Is Disorder Under Heaven, the Situation Is Excellent”
13 Soyons Réalistes, Demandons l’Impossible!
Notes
14 Catalonia and the End of Europe
15 Which Idea of Europe Is Worth Defending?
Notes
16 The Right to Tell the Public Bad News
17 It’s the Same Struggle, Dummy!
Notes
18 The Real Anti-Semites and Their Zionist Friends
Notes
19 Yes, Racism Is Alive and Well!
Notes
20 What Is To Be Done When Our Cupola Is Leaking?
Notes
21 Is China Communist or Capitalist?
Notes
22 Venezuela and the Need for New Clichés
Notes
23 Welcome to the True New World Order!
24 A True Miracle in Bosnia
25 For Active Solidarity, Against Guilt and Self-Reproach
Notes
26 Sherbsky Institute, APA
Notes
27 Welcome to the Brave New World of Consenticorns!
Notes
28 Do Sexbots Have Rights?
Notes
29 Nipples, Penis, Vulva … and Maybe Shit
Notes
30 Cuarón’s Roma: The Trap of Goodness
31 Happiness? No, Thanks!
Notes
32 Assange Has Only Us to Help Him!
Notes
33 Is Avital Ronell Really Toxic? Yes, it’s really about power!
Two general concluding remarks on the Ronell case
34 Jordan Peterson as a Symptom … of What? The art of lying with truth
A reply to my critics
A concluding note on my debate with Peterson
Notes
POLITY END USER LICENSE AGREEMENT
Отрывок из книги
To Alain Badiou, my absolute friend.
Signs abound that our global situation calls increasingly for such a standpoint. Apologists of the existing order like to point out that the dream of socialism is over, that every attempt to realize it turned out to be a nightmare (just look at what goes on in Venezuela!). However, at the same time, signs of panic grow everywhere: how are we to deal with global warming, with the threat of total digital control over our lives, with the influx of refugees? In short, with the effects and consequences of this same triumph of global capitalism? There is no surprise here: when capitalism wins, its antagonisms explode.
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To be a communist today means that one is not afraid to draw such radical conclusions, also with regard to one of the most sensitive claims of the Marxist theory, the idea of the “withering away” of the state power. Do we need governments? This question is deeply ambiguous. It can be read as an offshoot of the radical leftwing idea that government (state power) is in itself a form of alienation or oppression, and that we should work toward abolishing it and building a society of some kind of direct democracy. Or it can be read in a less radical liberal way: in our complex societies we need some regulating agency, but we should keep it under tight control, making it serve the interests of those who invest their votes (if not money) into it. Both views are dangerously wrong.
As for the idea of a self-transparent organization of society that would preclude political “alienation” (state apparatuses, institutionalized rules of political life, legal order, police, etc.), is the basic experience of the end of really-existing socialism not precisely the resigned acceptance of the fact that society is a complex network of “subsystems,” which is why a certain level of “alienation” is constitutive of social life, so that a totally self-transparent society is a utopia with totalitarian potentials. It is no wonder that today’s practices of “direct democracy,” from favelas to the “postindustrial” digital culture (do the descriptions of the new “tribal” communities of computer hackers not often evoke the logic of council democracy?) all have to rely on a state apparatus – i.e., their survival relies on a thick texture of “alienated” institutional mechanisms: where do electricity and water come from? Who guarantees the rule of law? To whom do we turn for healthcare? Etc., etc. The more a community is self-ruling, the more this network has to function smoothly and invisibly. Maybe we should change the goal of emancipatory struggles from overcoming alienation to enforcing the right kind of alienation: how to achieve a smooth functioning of “alienated” (invisible) social mechanisms that sustain the space of “non-alienated” communities?
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