Below is an expanded version of the comment I posted on Douglas Lain’s podcast about Gabriel Rockhill’s January 2 article in CounterPunch on Salvoj Žižek. Not that it has anything to do with anything, but above Rockhill’s article, when I read it, in the space of a rotating banner, there was an advertisement for the book Orgy of Thieves by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, with an endorsement by Vijay Prashad (“pickled in hatred but written in beauty”) and by Noam Chomsky (“indispensable for understanding this sad world”). See Gabriel Rockhill, “Capitalism’s Court Jester: Slavoj Žižek,” CounterPunch (January 2, 2023), https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/01/02/capitalisms-court-jester-slavoj-zizek/ and Sublation Media with Douglas Lain, “Why (Critiquing) Zizek Is Necessary,” YouTube (January 17, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIdNp6jJHyk.
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Gabriel Rockhill, a philosopher and cultural critic who teaches at Villanova University, wrote a hit piece on Slavoj Žižek that was published in January 2023 on the website CounterPunch. The article is more smear than scholarship, not unlike Michael Eric Dyson’s article against Cornel West, but with more insults and less concern for plausibility. The justification for it seems to be beyond Žižek, in Rockhill’s stated activism and among his activist peers, who encouraged Rockhill to publish his perception of Žižek as a Dr. Zhivago traitor of the revolution. For what it’s worth, many socialist parties have also criticized Žižek, and not because they’re involved in analytic theory, as Douglas Lain mentions with regard to Noam Chomsky in his podcast response to Rockhill.
Having read Žižek extensively, I can say that even tempered arguments against him in scholarly writing get him wrong, whether by mistake – Žižek’s complex presuppositions and meandering arguments are not easy to summarize – or by design – intentionally missing the point of his arguments. As examples of the latter, Rockhill misrepresents why it is that Žižek says Hitlerism was not a tragedy in the same way that Stalinism was. As well, Rockhill’s suggestion that Žižek endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 not only avoids the fact that Žižek would never endorse Trump, but also the fact that he was actually making the case for the way that neoliberalism drives authoritarian reaction and that something needs to be done to break that consensus. In 2016 and 2020 Žižek supported Sanders. This issue has been discussed more than adequately by Žižek in his online newspaper articles and also in an article by Leonie Ettinger in Platypus Review from 2017. After Sanders was pushed out of the nomination race in 2020, Žižek more or less recanted on his “I would vote for Trump” refusal to be backed into a pro-Clinton corner and kept a low profile, saying that he agrees with people like Chomsky that it’s better to vote for Biden than not vote at all. Why, as a socialist, didn’t Rockhill criticize him for that instead? Why also does Rockhill compare Žižek to people like Samuel Huntington and Henry Kissinger, with whom he has nothing in common.
Not to sound like a stan or anything, but Žižek towers above most scholars intellectually, and also, as has been noticed by almost everyone, in his spontaneous live interactions, which is one reason why Žižek is almost a household name. Obviously, we wouldn’t have Diet Soap if it wasn’t for Žižek. And why is this? Not because Žižek talks over people, as Rockhill says, but because he’s generous, interesting, entertaining, subversive and intelligent, all at the same time. He’s also more considerate of the people he engages with than many people give him credit for. I agree that it’s necessary to critique Žižek, just as it is to critique anyone who commands so much attention and has that kind of influence. But the critique should be critical, which requires that the critic describe adequately their subject and make contextually and intellectually relevant arguments. It’s somewhat redundant to say that we can and should critique Žižek, as Lain does, since Žižek has been on the hot seat since around 2000, almost never coming out of it for the worse, except maybe with the marmish Amy Goodman, who was too politically correct for his bad taste jokes.
When you’re hailed as the most dangerous philosopher in the West, like Gregory Peck in The Gunfighter, it’s inevitable that people are going to come after you. Daniel Tutt once said to me that he didn’t think that Žižek is the most dangerous philosopher in the West, but he didn’t say who was. Kojin Karatani? Bernard Stiegler? Žižek has been criticized by the best of them: David Harvey, Noam Chomsky, McKenzie Wark, Tariq Ali, Vivek Chibber, Walter Benn Michaels, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Yanis Varoufakis, Douglas Lain. Even fools have gone after him, like Simon Critchley, Thomas Moller-Nielsen, Will Self, Tyler Cowen, Roger Scruton, John Gray, Taryn Fyvek. On occasion, left pundits like Kyle Kulinski or Briahna Joy Gray comment on him, even in his presence, without having read him, just to get in on the hubbub. None of this has displaced the significance of his work and its importance in clearing the postmodern, pseudo-Marxist and pseudo-Lacanian cobwebs from academia at large.
One is dissuaded from commenting on Rockhill’s arguments directly and in any detail, in part, because it stoops to so much slander. Here’s Rockhill’s list of Žižek’s failings, all from this one, relatively short article: court jester, pessimist, anti-communist, pro-Nazi, theoretical grandee, genocidal, Eurocentric, xenophobic, top-tier pundit, pro-Trump, pro-war, arch-conservative, celebrity, junker, right-winger, poster child for the theory industry, reactionary, huckster, front man and Evel Knievel of the theory industry, seducer of young minds, intellectual offspring of Alain Badiou, repetitive, superficial, provocateur, bad at historical and materialist analysis (with, by the way, no mention of dialectical materialism), cheeky, purveyor of discursive sausage, shameless, unscholarly, charlatan, someone who came to fame by riding the rising tide of radical democracy – as like Elvis, who Rockhill says stole his music from Black communities, anti-worker opportunist, anti-Soviet informant, post-Marxist, postmodernist, commodifier of theory, accomplice of neoliberal revanchism, symbol of Marxism for the radlib intelligentsia, a red balloon floating whichever way the capitalist wind blows, mystery man from the East, caricature of the crazy Marxist, “the Borat of philosophy,” a phoenix publicly masturbating over the flames that destroyed Soviet-style socialism (namely, Stalinism), dialectical sophist, self-styled radical, snake oil salesman, slippery, elusive, erratic, contrarian, childish, evasive, naked, wunderkind who spirals out of discursive control, chameleonic, attention-seeking, disingenuous, tiresome, pseudo-intellectual, crass, self-promoting, with nothing to say, tom-foolish, dada dialectician, uncritical, culture industry whore, stooge of the company Abercrombie and Fitch whose clothing is produced in sweatshops, a peddler of cool culture, grifter, master of intellectual skullduggery, rehabilitator of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, stooge of CIA cutouts like the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, dissident defender of human rights, Reaganite, Thatcherite, anti-communist liberal, pluralist, pro-privatization neoliberal, capitalist ideologue, entrepreneur intellectual, toady of the West, dangerous careerist, Lacanian joker, puerile, advocate of mass murder, militarist, social chauvinist, eccentric, dirtbag performer, antisocial fanatic, histrionic, capitalist hireling, symptom of neoliberalism, cosplay commie, similar to Benedetto Croce and Steve Bannon in his Machiavellianism, idealist wag, death driven, rebel of the lost Leninist cause, pop philosopher, ignorant of political economy, superstructural, metaphysician (like Badiou), superstitious, anti-science, transcendental idealist, brand-managed philosopher, non-Marxist, insurgent anti-state and anti-party anarchist, Althusserian, scattershot, utopian socialist, subjectivist, Nietzschean, disdainful of the working class, contemptuous, petty-bourgeois, a theorist of desire, a player of conceptual games, sophist, radical aristocrat, narcissistic, self-indulgent, conservative, ostentatious, a living contradiction, scandalous, vain, recuperator, neoliberal prankster and, last but not least, pervert. The only thing Rockhill didn’t accuse Žižek of being is a satanist. Regardless of all of these fine put downs, what Žižek did in the 1990s and 2000s is get young leftist scholars off of postmodernism and later, make them aware of the limits of horizontalist movementism, which even Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri came around to criticizing for its auto-immune disorder when it comes to left organizing.
For all of the punching bag action that Rockhill packed onto his boilerplate of invective, most of it is easily contradicted, contextualized or dismissed. One can’t help but notice that his mobilization of Lacanian terms like the Real, desire and drive, all of these against Žižek, is intellectually off the mark, and so at least there is no pretence that it’s maybe worth knowing anything about Žižek, Lacan or Hegel, but this explains nothing of what all the fuss has been about all of these years, if only on the part of the misguided, like myself, who have engaged with his work. Whatever the scandal it may have generated, the complete lack of measure in Rockhill’s searing criticisms comes across like Hillary Clinton saying “no one likes him” about Bernie Sanders. This isn’t an accident. The piece, despite some obvious truths, is not scholarly and is unworthy of Rockhill’s more serious efforts. The intimation that Žižek is a hapless agent of the CIA, along the lines of Gloria Steinem, is muckraking at its lowest. So why bother? Is Žižek so much worse in this regard than Jacques Rancière and the few other contemporary critical theorists who have had an impact on political philosophy? (Incidentally, Žižek’s postscript to Rancière’s The Politics of Aesthetics, which Rockhill criticizes, is excellent and adds to Rancière’s work.) Who would take Rockhill’s article seriously? It sounds as though it’s meant to make impressionable leftist students – the kind that Rockhill says he was before he became a wizened leftist – steer clear of this Socratic harbinger of mental chaos. But Rockhill doesn’t say in his article what left project he himself champions. Materialism. Accurate history writing. The article therefore comes across as showy, the sort of thing discussed by Matt Taibbi in his book Hate, Inc. As it happens, Rockhill showed as much understanding of Zizek’s work and public statements as Taibbi did about Herbert Marcuse. But again, understanding is not the point of his attack piece. It’s about politics, we’re told.
In the sixties it was common for activists and countercultural types to attack luminaries like Theodor Adorno, Jacques Lacan, Alexander Kluge or Jean-Luc Godard, simply because they were deemed, reasonably enough, top dog. In the 90s it was par for the course to hate on Habermas. Žižek has in fact avoided the star treatment as best as he could, while still playing a role as a tireless public intellectual, similar to Jean-Paul Sartre or Cornel West. If he didn’t manage to escape the conditions of the spectacle, it’s not because he’s an attention whore, it’s because no one can, who isn’t simply happy to take safer academic routes. Certainly Rockhill himself isn’t avoiding the limelight by writing a piece like his. Žižek has withstood the brutality of the culture industry for more than two decades running. And he did this as a self-professed communist. Rockhill would like us to think that all of that, not to mention the dozens of books and hundreds of articles, has been pure deception, as though Žižek is some sort of Caligari. In the last few years, Žižek has been saying to his interlocutors that he is trying to provoke them and wants to be whipped. Should we indulge his provocations, as Rockhill has? Would it make an intellectual, or even social, difference? Freud had one insight on this that Lacan developed, which is the idea that people are often jealous of other people’s pleasures. Žižek clearly knows how to enjoy himself and this is evident in his work. Political puritans don’t like this. If so many people weren’t already trying to pretend Žižek never happened, Rockhill might come across more like a Martin Luther than a strange combination of Gabriel Malagrida and Leibniz.
The broader question, as Lain correctly states, is the kind of left project we want to engage in. The resources of the so-called old left were not only questioned and challenged by the postwar petty-bourgeois New Left and the counterculture, and by the socialists who opted into the bourgeois system, but by the postmodernists, many of whom consider themselves beyond left and right in one way or another, and this often having to do with subjectivity and culture. There is an affinity in this sector between autonomists and post-workerists, postmodernists who follow Foucault and Deleuze in particular, as well as post-structuralists of various sorts, where all of the above social justice causes and identity politics are defined in terms of difference politics. Much of the collectivist and new social movement left swims in that theoretical water. Žižek and a few other thinkers, Badiou especially, have effectively, because intellectually, challenged the social constructionism, discursive historicism and eclectic materialism of this postmodern left. Like it or not, that’s why in the 2000s they emerged as major intellectual contenders in left theory.
Because Žižek doesn’t approach politics as dogma, which would contradict his discourse, he’s an easy target for people whose materialism is as theoretically sophisticated as a cement mixer. A journalist I appreciate, Ben Norton, has similarly attacked Žižek on sectarian grounds. But Žižek’s not a pragmatist, he’s a Lacanian. Žižek’s vacillations on Cuba, Venezuela, China, Ukraine or Kurdistan, and so on, means that someone, like Rockhill, can’t demand of him something he’s not offering. Whether one does or doesn’t, however, brings them into the Lacanian Hegelian universe where Žižek lives. People who don’t want to go there are at a loss if they try to criticize him with something he would probably agree with anyhow, in general terms. Seeking to deny this loss, they attack Žižek at the level of political power, with ad hominem attacks and the sort of slumming that appeals to postmodern neo-bohemians who make the autotelic bourgeois subject of autonomy the strawman of their anti-normative fantasies.
So, like Obama said, “yes, we can,” critique Žižek. However, ad hominem attacks that stick like mashed potato or Campbell’s soup to a painting, or like immigrant refugees who are bused to Martha’s Vineyard, make the politicos into philistines. Such attacks don’t raise the stakes for the radical left, they take them down to the lowest – ostensibly popular – level. And that is conservatism, not radicalism. I appreciated Rockhill’s essay on the CIA and critical theory. To put Žižek into this pot, and this, despite Žižek’s take on the proxy war in Ukraine, which I don’t agree with either, simply makes too much out of too little and ignores what makes Žižek an important thinker. If nothing else, the international left owes an intellectual debt to Žižek and my sense is that Rockhill somehow knows this, which is why he stacked his hit piece with so much invective.