Revolutionary Nostalgia?

An interview with Zizek in today's Guardian. Speaking of Zizek, here's something I posted as a comment elsewhere:

“‘Lenin’ is not the nostalgic name for old dogmatic certainty; quite the contrary, the Lenin who is to be retrieved is the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which the old co-ordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to re-invent Marxism – take his acerbic remark apropos of some new problem: “About this, Marx and Engels said not a word”. The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to repeat him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today’s constellation. The return to Lenin aims neither at nostalgically re-enacting the “good old revolutionary times”, nor at an opportunistic-pragmatic adjustment of the old programme to “new conditions”, but at repeating, in the present worldwide conditions, the Leninist gesture of reinventing the revolutionary project in the conditions of imperialism and colonialism… “Lenin” stands for the compelling freedom to suspend the stale existing (post-)ideological co-ordinates.. in which we live.. “

In a sense (as Zizek acknowledges) he reduces Lenin to little more than the name ‘for a certain revolutionary stance’. And it is this stance, rather than the contents and costumes of the Russian Revolution, that Zizek wants to find again. His ‘nostalgia’, he would doubtless insist, is for this stance and for the space of possibilities opened up by the revolution rather than the ensuing actuality. Needless to say, many would reject this distinction.

What particularly appeals (to Z) about Lenin is his refusal to wait for the right ‘objective historical situation’ to come along for revolutionary intervention, as though revolutionary initiative lay with ‘History’. This is an illusion (the illusion of the Big Other). Instead, Lenin demonstrates how we must fully assume this initiative ourselves, and in so doing precisely transform the very ‘objective conditions’ that others passively await.

(Zizek: “such a position of the objective observer (and not of an engaged agent) is itself the main obstacle to the revolution")