A brief note on Zizek etc

Enforced absence from the internet due to moving house and BT’s tardiness in installing a phone line. Last weekend attended the “Politics of truth” conference at Birkbeck. Very little to say that isn’t at Infinite Thought, including some excellent links (inc. PDF of Badiou’s talk).

On the Paris riots. Zizek: the riots contained “no pretence to any kind of positive vision”, “no particular demands, just a demand for recognition” & also referred to it as a “zero level protest which wanted nothing”. Meanwhile, the intellectuals were desperately trying to ‘translate’ these protests into their meaning. This line of argument, which he qualified later, seemed both wrong and self-contradictory. Why does a riot or ‘protest’ have to be about ‘demands’, particular or otherwise? Is not the implicit frame here a psychoanalytically informed one – Zizek's other characterisation of the riots as a ‘blind acting out’ would seem to suggest this.

But anyway, Badiou took the riots to entail the assertion “this country is my country but this state is not my state”. Why? “Because the only relation to this state is my relation to the police”. Riot creates a new visibility of the problem: ie the contradiction between country and state. State is not the state of the people but of something else.

Zizek wondered if this new visibility would immediately be appropriated by experts, no sooner raised than nullified, transformed into an old liberal problem of multi-cultural accommodation etc.

Incidentally, Zizek typically responds to a question with (something like) “ of course, my argument here is..” So, asked a question which contains a reference to irony, he’ll say “But my argument here is that irony is today the dominant form of ideology..”. But the ‘here’ is often not the place from which the question has been asked, but a point of terrain already mapped in advance by Zizek. That is, instead of arguing directly your point he invokes a pre-existing argument from Zizek the author.


Zizek’s actual paper was on populism. For populist politics, the flaw is never in the system as such, but has to do with an element – a corrupt oligarchy or egregious individual – not playing their role properly. The populist can always point to a “Them” who is the enemy. Anyway, K-punk has an excellent summary and response here. Just a random thought – I realised why Mr Christopher Hitchens had always underwhelmed me. Reading Hitchens, even in his ‘radical’ days, it always seemed to be a question of personnel not structure. It was Kissinger or Nixon or whomever, the venality of an individual, the indictment of some moral monster or ethical weakling. Now of course, he's found an altogether more monstrous enemy, and greeted it with 'exhilaration'.