This is a version of the comment I posted on Ben Burgis’ podcast about Gabriel Rockhill’s January 2 article in CounterPunch on Salvoj Žižek. See Ben Burgis, “Don’t Cancel Zizek,” benburgis.substack.com (January 15, 2023), https://benburgis.substack.com/p/dont-cancel-zizek; Give Them An Argument w/Ben Burgis, “Debunking the Hit Piece on Slavoj Zizek,” YouTube (January 20, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=guLlFzxHo7s. See also Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” CounterPunch (January 2, 2023), https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/02/capitalisms-court-jester-slavoj-zizek/.
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Ben Burgis did some good work in his substack piece “Don’t Cancel Žižek” debunking Gabriel Rockhill’s statement's about Slavoj Žižek’s political activity as a dissident before and after Yugoslavia’s de-communization, which accuse Žižek of being a neoliberal turbo-capitalist and CIA asset. Good on him. He also mentions that he doesn’t agree with all of Žižek’s political views. That’s fine, especially if one neverminds all of the self-promotion that comes with it and all the histrionic swearing. It would be nearly impossible for anyone to agree with everything Žižek says because the subject-object of Žižek’s discussions often changes while he’s making his arguments, or across articles and books, which is not to say that he’s simply inconsistent. Rockhill did notice that. This is not an accident and is a feature of Žižek’s method and Lacanian understanding of reality, which you can get a small inkling about in the few comments that were posted on the reddit thread about the Rockhill video on Žižek.
https://www.reddit.com/r/zizek/comments/105qk7l/gabriel_rockhill_why_slavoj_žižek_is_capitalisms/
When it comes to socialism, Burgis provides us with the response to the question Žižek used to ask at the end of his early interviews: “okay, so where is blood?” With this taunt Žižek was saying: For the sake of appearances, and leftist solidarity, let’s pretend that we don’t disagree on the important matters of theory and philosophy that I have just now discussed. Burgis does that, with the added bonus: Žižek is a personal friend of mine and I don’t like people like Rockhill attacking my friends.
When it comes to left theory, though, Burgis seems somewhat confused. He writes: “More generally, many of Žižek’s intellectual influences are not mine. I like my Marxist materialism without the Hegelian idealism he seems to want to mix back in, and I don’t have a lot of opinions one way or the other about Lacan.” He also says: “That doesn’t mean I don’t find that stuff fascinating – ‘paradoxical provocations’ - it just means I’m a bit agnostic about what to think.” He also writes: “When I listen to Slavoj talking about Hegelian philosophy, I don’t always agree with him. My own Marxism is, at its core, pretty much the boringly orthodox historical materialism of the Second International.”
This possessive, middle-class and contemporary way of thinking about one’s own Marxism (iMarx) seems to miss the point about why anyone would argue about anything, which is why Third International communists did not approach politics like debating club liberals and parliamentarians. Whether one focuses on the philosophical side of Marx or not, there is no Marxist materialism, no orthodoxy, and no historical materialism either, without dialectics. There is, however, bourgeois materialism, and calling it boring does not make it disarmingly more compelling – basic bourgeois. The problem there is that even bourgeois materialism has to tarry with idealism. The only materialism that doesn’t, supposedly, is a materialism that defines itself as preceding the break with metaphysics, as you get with the post-structuralist leftists who claim Spinoza and Leibniz as their anti-Marxist heroes.
Žižek did not mix dialectics back into Marxism, or, “seem to want” to do so, whatever that’s supposed to mean. What he did was rethink Hegelianism through the ideas of Jacques Lacan, with implications for Marxism. Yes, he more recently referred to his work as Marxist Hegelianism, instead of Hegelian Marxism, but this is a matter of focus, I would say, and this debate has been part of Frankfurt School critical theory since at least the 30s. Burgis’ defence of Žižek reminds me of what Žižek says about the Kinder Surprise Egg, the anti-metaphysical lesson: what Burgis likes about his friend Slavoj is the illusive surplus that you get for free ( the famous philosopher, the court jester with the good jokes, who was made in some Chinese Gulag society of the spectacle or whatever ) and not the shitty philosophy chocolate. Not the real Žižek, but the Žižek of the Real.