Note on Zizek

A lengthy debate here on Slavoj Zizek. The ostensible occasion for this debate was that someone had chosen to isolate a random piece of Zizek's prose as an example of 'question begging'. The passage came from Zizek's LRB article (see below). Now, my first thought was, of course a short article like this will beg (and provoke) questions, so what? Certainly the piece doesn't involve 'question begging' in the strict logical sense ("A democracy is where a democratic process of decision making etc"). But perhaps the obvious point is that 'question begging' is typically not a direct property of a text or speech but a function of the relation between speaker/ audience or text/ reader. So, at university, we had a lecturer who was keen to draw attention to how certain texts were 'true to human nature'. Now for us, with our newly worked through theoretical approach, this presupposed precisely what we were 'interrogating' (as we liked to say). But plug this same lecturer into a different context, Cambridge in the 1930's, the begged questions obediently disappear, and lecture glides effortlessly into the audiences' set of preoccupations. Similarly, unplug a liberal lecture from its intended audience and its suddenly shot through with outrageous and inexplicable assumptions that take for granted what its audience has long since debunked, discarded or at least started to unpick.

It's now the case that ZIzek has an interested and sizeable audience - even among the readers of the LRB - who do not need a promising argument first re-routed through yet another critique of liberal democracy; they can get off the ground without this diversion. They begin from a place outside familiar Liberal assumptions and do not need to have terms like hegemony, 'ideological imaginary' etc explicated. This is no more or less scandalous than people whose default position is within such a Liberal framework. Indeed, to assume that such a framework is the normative and natural starting point that any argument must embark from is, to me, not only begging a very big question indeed, but a patently ideological move.

But perhaps there is also something performative about Zizek's method, and his 'interested and sizeable' audience has partly been produced by Zizek himself: intransigently forcing his audience to read as if liberal democracy were not simply self-evident and hegemonic, in order to understand where he's coming from, the reader finds that somewhere along the line his faith in the reigning assumptions has disappeared.

c also Cprobes. [I forgot to add that my impression with some of the Zizek debate was of people feeling a ('liberal'?) duty to read Zizek, but - clearly aggrieved at this - looking to trip themselves up over the first (invented) obstacle. These obstacles (or defenses) fell into two familiar categories: it's 'nonsense' or practiced charlatanry vs its just old left stuff dressed in new clothes. Either it has no content or its' content is all too familiar. ]