Don't Cancel Zizek (UNLOCKED)

I don't agree with my friend Slavoj Žižek about everything but he's an insightful thinker. I have nothing but contempt for attempts to denounce him as a philosophical lightweight or neoliberal stooge.

It tells you something about what analytic philosophy is like that I’ve seen analytic philosophers devote substantial amount of time to fretting about whether “analytic philosophy” is even a well-defined category. My take, for the record, is “not really.” The phrase gestures in an “oh, you know what I mean” sort of way at a bunch of stuff like this:

“Analytic” philosophers tend to put a heavy premium on clarity and precision. We enjoy disambiguating vague terms, coming up with clever counterexamples to plausible-sounding generalizations, and thinking about the structures of arguments. We’re more likely to have well-informed opinions about Saul Kripke’s theory of proper names than about Derrida’s approach to grammatology.

The contrasting category is supposed to be “continental” philosophy, which is confusing on multiple levels. First, the word “analytic” suggests a mode of philosophical investigation while “continental” refers to a region of physical space—the European continent. Second, to the extent that there’s something we can coherently refer to as the “analytic” tradition, most of the major early figures in that tradition started on that continent—people like Frege, Wittgenstein, Popper, and (as the name would suggest!) everyone in the Vienna Circle.

Oh, and if there’s one philosophical current in particular that these early “analytics” were rebelling against, it was Hegelianism. But these days there’s a thriving little sub-tradition of analytic Hegelians. So it’s all confusing.

But when I call someone an “analytic philosopher” or a “continental philosopher,” being real about this, you know what I mean.

And Slavoj Žižek is “continental” philosophy incarnate. His work blends insights from Lacanian psychology, Hegelian idealism, and Marxist materialism. He loves peeling back the layers of meaning in Hitchcock films while riffing about all of the above, and he’s equally at home talking about Stalin’s purges or interpreting Althusser or weighing in on last week’s political developments in the United States or arguing with devotees of “object-oriented ontology.” While analytic philosophers often ape the hard sciences by sorting themselves into thinly-sliced areas of specialization, Žižek wades into everything.

My own academic background is as “analytic” as they come. And I don’t agree with every item on the very long list of Žižek’s political and cultural and philosophical opinions—far from it, in some cases. But I’ve never doubted for a second that he’s an interesting and insightful thinker and commentator. Recent attempts to discredit him leave me cold.

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I’ll pause here and awkwardly do the full-disclosure thing.

I’m writing about a friend. Not, like, the kind of friend you call when you want to have a long conversation about your divorce or anything, but the man’s been on my show a bunch of times and we always talk for as long off-air as on- and if I see him in person he jovially tells me to go fuck myself—this is, trust me, the way he communicates with people he likes—and then we wander off to grab dinner. So I’m biased. I don’t like seeing people trash my friends.

But I can also say in all honesty that my feelings about him haven’t changed much one way or the other since he first came on my radar, many years before I’d so much as exchanged an email with him. Anyone who spent much time talking about either movies or politics with me in, like, 2013 probably heard me start a sentence or two with, “An interesting thing Žižek says about that is…”

We’ll get to all that. But let’s start a little earlier in the story.

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People who hate me online—and trust me when I say that there are more people than you’d think you who devote more time and energy than you would imagine to hating me online—often assume that, as a well-known denizen of the Ivory Tower, I was probably educated at Harvard or Yale. As a matter of fact, I went to Lansing Community College. As a high school student, I’d enjoyed the “skipping class and getting high with my friends” parts of life too much to have much time for the homework parts, and I barely graduated.

At LCC, I ended up taking a bunch of liberal-arts electives and surprising myself by actually enjoying school. Eventually I transferred to a small liberal arts college you’ve never heard of in Grand Rapids and I ended up double-majoring in History and Philosophy since those were the classes I liked the most. This was a small enough place that they had exactly two full-time philosophy profs and one of them retired halfway through my time there, so I ended up taking pretty much everything that either of them offered every semester I was there.

My last semester, I took a class called “Contemporary Philosophy.” What that really meant was “Contemporary Continental Philosophy.” We started with Nietzsche and then we read a bunch of people like Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray. This was a capstone course for philosophy majors, so it was run like a graduate seminar. Students had to take turns leading discussions of different readings. When it was my turn, the reading I pulled was the first part of Derrida’s book The Gift of Death. And I could not make heads or tails of what I was reading. I ended up, essentially, making something up and pretending that I thought it was what Derrida meant. When no one—not my fellow students and not the prof—called me on it, when no one said, “c’mon Ben what are you talking about, he doesn’t say that,” it was hard not to think about the Emperor’s New Clothes.

And when I went to grad school, I ended up drifting toward the most “analytic” kinds of philosophy imaginable. In my MA program, I studied with Quentin Smith, who was pretty much analytic metaphysics incarnate. I did philosophy of logic with Otávio Bueno for my PhD. I wrote my dissertation on the Liar Paradox, which is the logical puzzle about whether sentences like this one are true or false:

(1) The sentence marked (1) in Ben Burgis’s Substack essay “Don’t Cancel Zizek” is not true.

If you really want to know what I think about that, you can read my academic monograph from Springer—Logic Without Gaps or Gluts: How to Solve the Paradoxes Without Sacrificing Classical Logic—but the point is that this is about as far as you could possibly get from the kind of philosophy where you’re interpreting Hitchock through the lens of Lacan and Hegel.

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I first ran into Žižek’s writing in 2008. I spent a couple months that summer splitting an apartment with a bunch of people in San Francisco—the rent, as they say, is too damn high—and one of my housemates had a copy of Slavoj’s book On Violence. I spent an afternoon with it and, while a claim or two might have struck me as a little silly, overall I was entranced. This wasn’t like trying to read Derrida. This made me want to read more.

Fast forward a few years and his 2012 film The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology was playing at the campus theater at my university. I went to it with some grad student and junior professor friends, “analytic” types all, and like everyone else in the group I loved it. Part of that’s about Žižek’s personality, of course, and the movies he picks to illustrate his points, but a lot of it’s that the specific points he uses them to make were interesting and thought-provoking and—a crucial point from my perspective—everything he was saying, no matter how playful or provocative, emerged from an underlying commitment to understanding and transcending our late capitalist hellscape. In one of the funniest moments in the movie, Žižek is just riffing on the way that the supreme horror of the 2011 riots in London for many commentators seemed to be that people were consuming products without paying for them. Imagine!

He seemed cynical and frustrated about the enormity of the task but I actually liked that—it made me feel like he was thinking seriously about it. So for example there’s a point in the movie where he talks about the Prague Spring and says that even if Brezhnev hadn’t sent Soviet tanks to crush the experiment in liberalization, probably either Czechoslovakia would have slid back into being a “normal” authoritarian Communist country or it would have been absorbed into the capitalist world. As someone who desperately wants to believe that there are nearby historical forks where we could have had something better than either of those options, I found the thought depressing, but it did make me think harder about just how difficult it would be for a better form of socialism to get a foothold in the world. Thinking about that is probably one of a few things that pointed me toward the kind of perspective I have now about socialist strategy—that you can’t just have a zero-to-sixty rupture, that you have to build up working-class power through an extended process of struggling for reforms within the current system before you can break from it and have any hope of landing where you want to land.

Žižek’s work has also pushed me to think harder about how a better socialism would even work. Several years after I stepped out of that campus theater on a humid night in Florida, thinking about whether there was a scenario where the Prague Spring lasted into 1969 or 1970, I ran into a Žižek lecture online called “A Plea for Bureaucratic Socialism.”

There, he pushes back against the idea that a desirable version of a socialist future would be the sort of radically horizontalist utopia where everything that’s decided by bosses—or by blind market forces—right now enters the sphere of mass politics and every point has to be decided democratically. We want more economic democracy than we have under capitalism, sure, but how much more?

At one point in the lecture he points out that he doesn’t want to go to mass meetings to oversee the management of things like the water, gas, and electrical systems. He wants his relationship to these things to be never having to thinking about them. A big part of the point of socialism, after all, is to give everyone more leisure time to pursue whatever projects they want to outside of their economic lives. That benefit is lost if life after capitalism is consumed with endless democratic deliberation.

None of this has made me not a socialist. But I do think that engaging with some of his points has made me a smarter socialist. And that does strike me as one of the things Left public intellectuals are for.

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By sometime in the spring of 2018, I’d developed an unhealthy obsession with Jordan Peterson. This was the height of Peterson-mania and I spent way, way too much time on social media arguing with friends from various stages of my life—someone I’d gone to school with, another person I’d spent time with at expat bars when I lived in South Korea, even a member or two of my extended family—who’d fallen under the Lobster Man’s spell. And that fixation was the immediate cause of my pivot to doing public-facing political work. In the first-ever video of me on YouTube, I’m giving a lecture debunking Peterson with the slightly ridiculous title Of Lobsters and Proletarians. When I started doing regular videos for Zero Books, Peterson was a frequent target.

So I was very excited to see Žižek debate Peterson in 2019—and unlike some of my friends and comrades on the socialist Left, I came away happy. Some of those friends essentially wanted Slavoj to rhetorically crush Peterson’s skull. He didn’t do that. What he did instead was present a vision of a better, more appealing vision of what leftists can be like—smart, funny, on the side of oppressed people but not the “woke moralist” caricature Peterson and his fans are reacting against. And the sheer gap in intellectual calibre between the two of them, even with Slavoj trying hard to be nice, did a lot to expose the shallowness and absurdity of Peterson’s schtick. At a certain point it felt like Slavoj was a professor trying to be encouraging to a student with a really poorly thought-out idea for a paper.

Peterson had already spent years complaining about the alleged plague of “postmodern neo-Marxists” in academia. The best moment in the debate was when Žižek asked in a friendly, non-confrontational sort of way if Peterson could give him an example or two of a “postmodern neo-Marxist” to make it a little clearer what they were even arguing about and Peterson looked down at his lap and fiddled with his hands—at one point literally hanging his head in frustration—as he failed to come up with even one name.

Nothing I’ve said should necessarily make you think Slavoj is the Left’s VIP. Maybe you’re more of a Noam Chomsky kind of guy. (Me too in some ways.) But he does very much strike me—as he did many years before I met him—as a valuable member of the team.

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Gabriel Rockhill disagrees in a piece that was published a couple of weeks ago in CounterPunch. He calls Slavoj “Capitalism’s Court Jester.” Last summer, Emanuele Saccarelli said much the same thing—he called him a “wolf in clown’s clothing”—in an article for the World Socialist Website. And, although it’s older than the current wave of anti-Žižekery, I should also mention the one Thomas Moller-Nielsen wrote a couple years ago for Current Affairs—What is Zizek For?

I won’t attempt anything like a point-by-point refutation of all of these guys, for a few reasons. Most obviously, I don’t disagree with every single thing they say. A lot of Moller-Nielsen’s piece, for example, is devoted to nailing Slavoj for the things he apparently gets wrong about quantum mechanics in his book Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. And hey, while I’m not personally in a great position to judge these things, Philosopher Doesn’t Properly Understand Quantum Physics is not a headline that would make me recoil with shock. Richard Feynman had a Nobel Prize in the subject and he infamously said that even most physicists don’t understand it. Sean Caroll, another theoretical physicist generally regarded as having a good head on his shoulders, wrote an op-ed a few years ago in the New York Times giving his colleagues a hard time for having given up on even trying to understand it. So I can see how there might be some room there for a writer who sees something interesting in the way he’s seen quantum mechanics explained to him—and wants to use what he got out of that explanation to ground a bunch of big sweeping metaphysical claims while also riffing about Lacan and Hegel—to get himself into trouble.

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. Finally, there are issues of day-to-day politics where we just flat-out disagree. Most obviously, my views on the war in Ukraine are vastly more Chomskyan than Zizekian—a fact of which, and trust me when I say this, Slavoj is very aware.

I have zero sympathy for a reactionary nationalist like Putin, and I think Russian imperialism is just as bad as the American kind, but I do worry a hell of a lot more than Slavoj seems to about superpower tensions and the possibility of World War III. And maybe I’m just a bit more of a hippy on issues of war and peace in general. I’d maybe add that his apartment in Ljubljana is less than a thousand miles west of the nearest Ukrainian border and I live about ten thousand miles to the west of that, so it’s maybe not a total mystery to me why our priorities aren’t identical.

That doesn’t mean I don’t think he’s wrong. It just makes me a little bit less likely to jump up and down denouncing him as a NATO stooge for having a different perspective.

Especially because I didn’t start paying attention to his work in February 2022.

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I can remember a time when popular critiques of Žižek, even ones emerging from within the socialist Left, tended to assail him for being too soft on capital-C Communist authoritarianism. That 2019 Thomas Moller-Nielsen piece in Current Affairs, for example, does a bit of that, calling attention to a “preposterous” and “worrying” line where Slavoj said that in a certain sense he prefers Stalinism to liberalism. (We’ll get back to that one in a minute!) But the more recent crop of denunciations take the opposite tack. They accuse him, essentially, of having been an anti-Communist Cold Warrior and a supporter of western imperialism all along.

The kernel of truth is that Žižek was a democratic dissident within Communist Yugoslavia, and even now his own scattered ideas about what a better future would look like are very unlike that system. One of the times I had him on my show, I pressed him on what the sort of lower-case c communism he talks about what look like on practice, and he endorsed the views of his friend Yanis Varoufakis—so I suppose if you want to know the details a good place to start might be Varoufakis’s utopian novel Another Now. But Slavoj had a lot of problems with the (ahem) Then he knew in Yugoslavia in the 80s. By the end of that decade, even though he still described himself as a Marxist in interviews, he went so far as to run for office on the Liberal-Democratic Party ticket.

The biggest smoking gun in the Rockhill piece is a line from an interview back then when Žižek seemed to accept neoliberal economic restructuring. That sounds pretty bad—or at least it does until we start to peer at literally any of the details.

In the tiny snippet of text quoted by Rockhill, Slavoj says he’s enough of a “pragmatist” to be willing to experiment with a “dose” of market reforms if they helped Slovenia out of its economic crisis. If you click through the link in Rockhill’s footnote to the interview itself, you’ll find that the last five sentences he said to the interviewer before the line about the “dose” were all about how Slovenian nationalists were demagogically trying to exploit the pain caused by way too much of those market reforms by scapegoating national minorities—a sentiment that would be very much at home in one of Žižek’s articles or interviews in more recent decades!—and the sentences immediately after the ones Rockhill quotes are all about how we shouldn’t let neoliberals take the question of how big a dose to administer outside of the sphere of ideological contestation. Even then, he worried about a descent into full-fledged “Thatcherism.”

Rockhill’s other citation on Young Žižek’s economic policies is even more misleading. He quotes two parts of sentences from an election debate in 1990 where Slavoj says something about “planned privatizations” and how “more capitalism in our case would mean more Social Security.” That sure sounds like he’s advocating more privatizations than were already taking place in Slovenia in 1990—and that he wanted more capitalism than the country already had. Right?

If you actually watch the fucking clip, you very quickly see that exactly the opposite is true. 1990-Slavoj seems to have resigned himself to the idea that there was no stopping the march toward capitalism in Slovenia, but he was desperately trying to at least slow down that march as much as possible, and staking out positions far to the left of the other candidates. The “more capitalism in our case would mean more social security” line comes in the context of him insisting that if Slovenia is compared not to Latin American countries but to its European capitalist neighbors, becoming more like them would mean having “more social security” for workers instead of just putting them out on the streets when companies are being restructured. He denounces “wild” privatizations and explicitly advocates the re-nationalization of companies that have already been privatized, saying that if at some point after that’s happened everyone deliberatively decides that privatizations are indeed needed in those sectors, they can at least be “planned” privatizations taking long-term “social and ecological” worries into account. He snaps back at another politician accusing him and his party of wanting to “turn everything upside down”—saying that it’s the mad push toward privatizing everything that’s turning things upside down, that what he’s advocating is a return to sanity.

I wouldn’t claim to be anything close to an expert on Slovenian politics in the early 1990s, but any remotely fair evaluation of the only two citations Rockhill gives us on Young Žižek’s economic proposals as a failed political candidate should lead us to conclude that he’s being wildly inaccurate in describing all of this to CounterPunch readers as if Slavoj and his party were on the vanguard of the neoliberal economic transition—and not the ones waving around their arms begging everyone else to slow down and think about what they were doing.

It’s true enough that, for all his residual theoretical commitment to Marxism, Slavoj’s political horizon in Slovenia in 1990-1 seem to have been limited to a gentler social-democratic kind of capitalism instead of the neoliberal hell he worried that his country was plunging into. Criticize that if you want. But do it in a way that acknowledges that he didn’t stop thinking and writing about these issues in 1991 and a great deal of what he’s said since then has been far more radical. And for God’s sake have the bare-minimum honesty to acknowledge that, at least judging by the debate clip that Rockhill himself dredges up, he was on the far left of mainstream Slovenian opinion on such issues at the time.

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Much of the rest of what Rockhill has to say about this subject is less of a generally socialist critique of Young Žižek than a specifically neo-Stalinist one. He’s mad that Yugloslav dissidents in the 80s had anything to do with the western-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom, for example, which doesn’t strike me as less dumb in any obvious way than getting mad at western leftists in more recent years for going on RT. And Rockhill objects—I swear I’m not making this up—to Young Žižek calling to dismantle Slovenia’s “political police” on the grounds that this was a socialist political police force. I’m tempted to just comment that refusing to disaggregate the issue of whether to support socialism from whether to support the kind of secret police forces that have existed in various state socialist regimes does very few favors to the socialist cause—and leave it at that.

But there is something else important to say, which is just this:

A robust commitment to civil liberties has always been part of Slavoj’s understanding of a worthwhile socialist project. (Mine too.) Obviously he was hostile to the “political police” in Communist Slovenia. But equally obviously he’s hostile to the abuses of the national security state in the capitalist West.

It’s telling that Rockhill drops a couple of misleadingly decontextualized quotes about economic policy from 1990-1 into his article without mentioning Slavoj’s support for Occupy Wall Street in 2011 or SYRIZA’s brief stand against EU austerity in 2015 or the two Bernie Sanders campaigns in 2016 and 2020 or his defense of Jeremy Corbyn—all of which are, one might think, relevant to the question of how he feels about neoliberalism.

It’s equally telling that Rockhill sprinkles his essay with ominous references to the CIA but he doesn’t see fit to mention Žižek’s relationship with the actors who have most infuriated the CIA and the rest of the American security state in this century. So Rockhill makes great hay, for example, of Young Slavoj writing for a magazine which was “accused of being backed by the CIA in a long and detailed report by the Yugoslav Communist Party.” (Really take a beat and think about that sourcing.) And while he was living abroad Young Slavoj was involved in the French chapter of a foundation that’s gotten money from other foundations, and if you peel away enough layers of funding you can arrive at the CIA—like a leftist version of Glenn Beck drawing connections on his whiteboard until he gets to George Soros.

I’m not sure what any of it’s supposed supposed to prove, but all in all word “CIA” appears 12 times in the article.

The words “Assange,” “Snowden,” and “Wikileaks” appear a grand combined total of 0 times.

Anyone who’s followed Žižek’s work in the last several years knows that he’s obsessed with these topics. So I have to say if you write a whole piece accusing the man of being in bed with Western interests and the national security state and you don’t even mention any of that, you’re not being serious.

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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. The biggest influence on how I think about these topics has been the Marxist analytic philosopher G.A. Cohen, about as un-Hegelian a Marxist as you can find.

When I listen to the parts about Lacan, I’m sometimes troubled by a sense that, while many of Slavoj’s claims sound interesting and even compelling, I’m not ultimately sure how to evaluate them. The analytic philosopher in me worries about trying to figure out what would even count as a relevant standard of evidence. That doesn’t mean I don’t find that stuff fascinating—it just means I’m a bit agnostic about what to think.

On day-to-day politics, we’re better aligned. For example, his advice to steer clear of the stupidities of the culture war while keeping a sense of perspective about how the greatest threat comes from the Right seems exactly correct to me. Even on issues that come up in his political commentary, though, we haven’t always seen eye to eye—I gave one particularly important example of that above.

At the end of the day, he’s someone I’ll eagerly read on just about any topic. I won’t always agree with his conclusions, but I’ll always learn something from engaging with what he has to say.

No one—and certainly no philosopher—should be immune from criticism. If Thomas Moller-Nielsen had just written an article called Slavoj Žižek is Wrong About How to Interpret Quantum Physics, for example, or if Garbriel Rockhill had written one called Slavoj Žižek is Wrong About Ukraine—or even Slavoj Žižek is Wrong About Whether Socialists Should Support Secret Police Forces to Root Out Counter-Revolutionaries—it wouldn’t have bothered me. I would have agreed with some of these hypothetical articles and disagreed with others but it would have all struck me as fair game.

But there are two overarching things about all these attacks that do bother me. One is that these authors rely for much of their effect on either not knowing or pretending not to know how Žižek writes—that he revels in putting things in provocative and paradoxical ways when he first says them and then, often literally a sentence or paragraph later, explaining exactly what he means. So when he says the problem with Hitler was that he wasn’t “violent” enough, he’s not saying, as Rockhill bizarrely insinuates, that Hitler should have killed more people. In the same breath, he said that Gandhi was—to his credit!—”more violent” than Hitler. Does Rockhill think Žižek is crediting Gandhi with killing more people than Hitler? Or is it just maybe possible that he means something else?

Similar points apply to Moller-Nielsen’s citation of the “worrying” and “preposterous” statement about preferring Stalinism to liberal democracy. Does he know about Slavoj’s background as a dissident? If so, does that give him any pause?

You generally don’t have to read too many sentences past the initial provocatively counterintuitive formulations to get the explanation that, for example, a deeply flawed attempt to build socialism is preferable to regular pro-capitalist liberalism not in the sense that “political police” forces were a good idea after all but in the sense that Stalinism expressed, in however disastrously distorted a fashion, a radical impulse that we must now try to recover.

Or that Žižek uses the word “violence” expansively to talk about forcibly imposing your will on others—hence all the talk of taking seriously “objective” violence (destruction caused by structures of economic power resulting in people starving to death for example) and not just “subjective” violence (destruction directly caused by individual behavior like shooting someone in the head). Gandhi, in peacefully throwing off a deeply entrenched regime of British colonialism, was “more violent” than Hitler—who was murderously preserving the capitalist status quo—in the sense that he was imposing more extreme changes on the world.

Now, you might think that Žižek’s way of using the term “violence” is silly, or at least that we’d be better advised using the word in a narrower way than he does. Oren Nimni made exactly that argument in an old article for Current Affairs just called “Defining Violence” and I didn’t have the slightest problem with it—in fact, I thought he made a good enough point that I’ve assigned that article in a class or two over the years.

More generally, you might just think that Žižek’s whole style of presenting his views is flawed. Maybe you think everyone should always say exactly what they mean the first time without teasing things out through paradoxical provocations. Maybe everyone should just write and talk like, well, an analytic philosopher who writes for Jacobin. (Ahem.)

As it happens, I don’t think that. I think there’s value in both approaches and that a world of just Bens and no Slavojs would be a more boring one. But it’s not like I don’t get where the critique would be coming from.

My point is just this—if that’s your critique, say that. Don’t present decontextualized snippets of Slavoj’s counter-intuitive formulations, leave your readers in the dark about what the next paragraph or the paragraph after that one says, wag your finger a little about how shocking it all is, and call it a day. That’s just not an honest way to argue.

My other problem with these pieces is that the implied conclusion never seems to be “he’s wrong about this or that substantive point, he should change his mind about it” or even “he’s wrong about this or that methodological point, he should change his argumentation style.” It’s “he sucks so badly that he should just shut up and go away.”

And I’m sorry but from the bottom of my heart—fuck that.

I’m not even saying that from the perspective of some kind of universal principle about never writing anyone off. There are people in the world I do wish would just shut up and go away. Hell, there are whole cable networks full of people like that. But is Slavoj Žižek really in that category? You’d have to think there’s just nothing there and frankly even though I know I have friends who do basically do think that—he’s a controversial figure, opinions are going to vary even among people I like—I cannot for the life of me understand that perspective.

The point isn’t that I always agree with him. Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t.

The point is that he’s always interesting. He always makes me think.

I wish I could say the same about his critics.