It is Slavoj Žižek who I have to thank for much of my interest in philosophy — and perhaps most of my intellectual outputs. A chance encounter with his books “Living in the End Times” and “The Parallax View,” which I painstakingly inched my eighth-grade self through, sparked my interest in his other works, which naturally led me to follow his references back in time to the great philosophers of the modern age. I have found his writing, in all of its haphazard glory, wonderfully compelling. It was the triumph of my high school career when I slogged my way through “Less Than Nothing,” the thousand-page pile of contradictions that I had grown to resent sitting on my bookshelf. I have come to measure my intellectual worth by my ability to understand the arguments in his longer work (currently very little, previously not at all). It pains me, then, to castigate him for his recent article about modern political culture, but in some sense, I feel my relationship with him puts me in a strong position to try to understand not just what he is wrong about but how such a luminary could fall for such obvious intellectual pitfalls.
The primary subject of my ire is his essay, published just this past week, which I stumbled upon completely by chance. Its title, “Wokeness Is Here To Stay,” perhaps did not alarm me as much as it should have. Žižek’s philosophy can be characterized as orthodox, almost traditionalist, for his love of Hegel, Lacan (and to a lesser extent Freud), and of course Marx. His persona in the public consciousness, on the other hand, one which I would contend is deliberately cultivated, is that of a Diogenean provocateur, an iconoclast but not a self-serious one. It is this side of him that seems to inform his articles, public lectures, and the more accessible aspects of his intellectual work. Thus, it did not surprise me to read that he had picked a title sure to get clicks and raise eyebrows. I had grown accustomed to one of his favorite tricks, picking aspects of culture considered outside the scope of formal philosophical analysis, and tearing into them with a sense of joy (in one lecture he discusses Kung Fu Panda — in another, the particular structure of toilets across Europe providing an ultimate retort to the concept of a post-ideological postmodernist world). In most cases, the points he makes are ultimately salient, and more importantly, serve as an amusing but nonetheless (perhaps resultantly) effective introduction to some element of his broader philosophy.
This was more or less my expectation diving into his latest essay, and at first glance, “Wokeness Is Here To Stay” follows the same formula. He begins with the current political turmoil in Scotland over trans rights, touches on some other contemporary political issues, and eventually concludes the piece with some allusion to Freud and Lacan. However, this cursory reading would be fundamentally incorrect. Even ignoring the structural differences which lie beneath the surface (this I will return to), there is a sense of bitterness within the piece that seems difficult to square with his usual tone. This is to say nothing of the content of his argument, which is my primary concern.
Žižek is not engaging in some semiotic analysis of the arguments surrounding the recent political controversy around trans rights in Scotland, nor is he truly linking them to much else. At the end of the day, Žižek is just engaging in policy debate with the thinnest veneer of his philosophical method, and he is, regrettably, completely wrong. Žižek has fallen for the panic surrounding trans healthcare that has seemed to infect the entirety of liberal intelligentsia in the past decade. His usual skepticism is here reserved only for a regurgitation of the usual concern trolling. He writes:
“Puberty blockers were administered to almost all children sent for assessment at Tavistock, including to autistic and troubled youngsters, who may have been misdiagnosed as uncertain about their sexuality. In other words, life-altering treatments were being given to vulnerable children before they were old enough to know whether they wanted to medically transition. As one of the critics said, ‘a child experiencing gender distress needs time and support—not to be set on a medical pathway they may later regret.’”
This passage begs the question: does Žižek, in all his intellectual capacity, even know what puberty blockers are? His use of quotations here is particularly revealing, as he does it frequently in the piece, and confirms what was already suggested. Indeed, had he read the Guardian article he cites, he might have even been able to remedy the paragraph quoted above. The line above the one he cites reads, “Cross-sex hormones are only prescribed from the age of 16 and experts say puberty blockers do not cause infertility.” We therefore can’t even give the Slovenian the benefit of intellectual laziness. This is dishonesty, pure and simple, and a dangerous form at that.
Even more egregious is his first cultural object of analysis, with which he opens the article, which is somehow even more callous and ever the more histrionic. It would be hard to miss it, too, as the editors of Compact thankfully created a nice pull quote that follows you as you scroll the page (just in case you haven’t gotten thoroughly primed for his argument yet). It reads: “We have a person who identifies itself as a woman using its penis to rape two women.” He is referring to the case of Isla Bryson, whose conviction makes her the first ever trans woman in Scotland convicted of rape and served as a Rorschach test for everyone with “concerns” about trans people. Here, Žižek is just wrong on the basic facts, misrepresenting the timeline of Bryson’s transition. More troubling is his use of essentializing language and further histrionics to try to inflame the reader (the phrase “penis-having rapist in prison with captive women” comes to mind). His insistence on misgendering Bryson, first simply as ‘he’ and then more troublingly as ‘it,’ suggests that Žižek sees respecting trans identity as something discretionary and contingent on good behavior. Žižek is, in this article and to put it lightly, transphobic. More than just that, though, he is boring, unoriginal, dishonest, and lazy. He writes nothing in his takes on trans people that I couldn’t get from similar screeds in The Guardian or The New York Times.
You would be forgiven for thinking that Žižek might finally talk about philosophy at this point, but you would, unfortunately, be wrong. The next portion of the article is even longer, and even less interesting — it is pretty much shilling for another article in Compact magazine. He summarizes it and then restates its conclusions, folding it into his purportedly broader point about how the wonderfully nebulous “wokeness” is a new secular religion of the left. This point isn’t new — it’s the sort of thing you hear all the time in American conservatism. It’s an echo of the fundamentalist Christian argument that atheism is a religion with science as its god, which is to say that it is not an argument to be taken seriously. He briefly flirts with a more nuanced argument, saying: “To be clear: There is a kernel of truth in this. Those who are brutally oppressed can’t afford the deep reflection and well-elaborated debate needed to bring out the falsity of liberal-humanist ideology.” However, this brush with making a reasonable point is short lived, and Žižek quickly sets this aside and positions himself as the arbiter of those whose oppression entitles them to talk about it: “Those who appropriate the role of the leaders of the revolt are precisely not the brutalized victims of the racist oppression. The woke are a relatively privileged minority of a minority allowed to participate in a top quality workshop of an elite university.” Perhaps, if one were in the mood to entertain this thought, there could be an interesting argument about who leads movements and what social privileges might get them to such positions, but this is not Žižek’s point. He is instead interested only in bemoaning the results of one particular class at one particular school, implicitly suggesting that this happens a lot and in a lot of places, and that maybe this whole racial justice thing has gone too far. Once again, Žižek fails to even be incorrect in a way that might be interesting or novel.
Finally, more than halfway through the article, Žižek introduces psychoanalysis. The college course which devolved into cannibalistic persecution is, supposedly, the manifestation of the superego. However, our relief is short-lived, because herein lies the structural innovation in the article. Take Žižek’s favorite toilet: while introducing it as an object of analysis requires projecting his philosophy onto it, ultimately this system is flipped, and the toilet instead becomes a tool to prove his philosophical point about the nature of ideology. Alas, here there is no inversion, and Žižek is forever applying and reapplying allusions to his ultimately insipid argument about how annoyed he is by wokeness. Instead of philosophy, we get yet more examples of the vague cultural force called Wokeness that seemingly haunts Žižek’s mind:
“A series of situations that characterize today’s society exemplify perfectly this type of superego pressure, like the endless PC self-examination: Was my glance at the flight attendant too intrusive and sexually offensive? Did I use any words with a possible sexist undertone while addressing her? And so on and so on. The pleasure, thrill even, provided by such self-probing is evident.”
Perhaps if Žižek cannot help but question every interaction he has with a flight attendant, the first priority for psychoanalysis might not be society but rather himself. For this example, he even fails to supply a flimsy anecdote as he has before (further evidence that maybe he just needs to calm down a little on planes). Next, Žižek brings up Salman Rushdie, who he describes as “denounced for unnecessarily provoking Muslims and thus (partially, at least) inviting the fatwa condemning him to death.” But denounced by whom? He says nothing. Instead he gestures, hoping the reader will just nod along to this baffling assertion. Perhaps my view is limited, but since the stabbing attack on Rushdie, I have seen nothing but hagiographies of him in the press.
Particularly troubling as well is another line in this passage, which truly severs any tether that might have remained between Žižek and reality within the article:
“The black woke elite is fully aware it won’t achieve its declared goal of diminishing black oppression — and it doesn’t even want that. What they really want is what they are achieving: a position of moral authority from which they may terrorize all others, without effectively changing social relations of domination.”
To this, the most effective response is to appropriate a question from Žižek himself, from his famous debate with disgraced psychologist and fascist Jordan Peterson. Peterson had, throughout his career, railed against the so-called “Postmodern Neo-Marxists” who had infiltrated every last bit of academia and position of power. Žižek asked him the simple question that collapsed this conspiratorial worldview, and I field it here back at him: who is the black woke elite, and who are its members? His article suggests only one group as potentially being members, this being the group of undergraduates who derailed their Black Studies course, but surely Žižek is not so confused as to think that these students in particular have some grand social power or plot to publicly shame him for crudely complimenting the flight attendant. As much as this feels like a strawman, what else are we to draw from the half-finished arguments he gives us? The only alternative would be that the lack of clarity is intentional, that Žižek has chosen to pedal in the same vague conspiracism as his former adversary.
The end of the article continues on much the same, incorporating a Freudian dream to ultimately make the following closing argument: “The woke awaken us — to racism and sexism — precisely to enable us to go on sleeping. They show us certain realities so that we can go on ignoring the true roots and depth of our racial and sexual traumas.” An article with this conclusion would theoretically make this argument, but there is no real syllogism that leads up to this point. At the end of the day, if this was the argument he was actually advancing in the piece, I likely wouldn’t be writing this: the truth is that pretending that this is the point that was inevitably going to be arrived at is just another trick Žižek has played on us. If this were truly the point, surely Žižek would have made some differentiation between the always foggy “woke” and those actually fighting against the “true roots and depth of our racial and sexual traumas.” No such differentiation is given. This ending is a turn, meant to obscure the true reactionary nature of the piece and disguise it as the protestations of a good-intentioned leftist with concerns about the new directions of liberalism.
So, what’s the deal? How did Žižek come to write this? The answer lies in his misplaced desire to be oppositional. Ironically, he is guilty of the thing he accuses others of falling prey to within the piece, that of envisioning for himself an Other that haunts him. One line in particular stands out in demonstrating this point: “In short, what we have here is the worst combination of politically correct badgering with the brutal calculation of financial interests. The use of puberty blockers is yet another case of woke capitalism.” Here, Žižek is appealing to the seemingly perennial argument that originated in Janice Raymond’s 1979 “The Transsexual Empire,” the concept that the various procedures and therapies that transgender people choose to seek out represent a significant financial interest for pharmaceutical corporations. In doing so, he is able to recast those advocating for easier access to life-saving care not as fighting for some real material conflict over their bodies but instead as being on the side of capital and therefore nefarious individuals. It is this confusion about power, about who these movements benefit, that blinds him, and allows a man who has read Butler and Foucault to write:
“There is nothing ‘abnormal’ in sexual confusion: What we call ‘sexual maturation’ is a long, complex, and mostly unconscious process. It is full of violent tensions and reversals—not a process of discovering what one really is in the depth of one’s psyche.”
Much like the piece as a whole, it is his usual essentialism and transphobia wrapped in the thin veneer of his particular philosophical process. The ultimate result is Žižek’s stamp of approval on the wave of hysteria that has already damaged the material lives of trans people in the U.K. and U.S.
Žižek has seemingly slipped into the miasma of journalists and intellectuals eternally skeptical of social change, the ultimate irony coming from a man so critical of postmodern skepticism. This sort of writing does not become him. It turns his rich allusions to past thinkers into cover for bad arguments, his whimsicalness into bitterness. It’s a sad day for us and, in many ways, a sad day for Žižek. He’s at his best in his rich theoretical work and at his worst here, and you can feel, reading the essay, that he can tell, at least a little.
Before all those who decry Zizek fanboys rush to pounce on me — I haven’t read a single piece by Zizek other than this article of his , which I read to better situate myself, and I personally don’t really care about Zizek. So no, I’m not a massive Zizek fan personally rebuffed at some non-flattering article written about him.
“Perhaps, if one were in the mood to entertain this thought, there could be an interesting argument about who leads movements and what social privileges might get them to such positions, but this is not Žižek’s point. He is instead interested only in bemoaning the results of one particular class at one particular school, implicitly suggesting that this happens a lot and in a lot of places, and that maybe this whole racial justice thing has gone too far.”
This is a little unclear to me where you’re getting that he’s “interested only in bemoaning the results of one particular class at one particular school” when reading the original piece? unless that’s an implicit stance. (which, by the way, is more of a particular class at one particular summer programme, or one particular summer programme at one particular school, if we are to talk about slightly misleading language and inaccuracies)
another bone to pick — regarding the fatwa, you say:
“But denounced by whom? He says nothing. Instead he gestures, hoping the reader will just nod along to this baffling assertion. Perhaps my view is limited, but since the stabbing attack on Rushdie, I have seen nothing but hagiographies of him in the press.”
>>> denounced by some guy with recognised authority in Islamic law — this seems pretty clear in the definition of what a fatwa is, and doesn’t need. And obviously, what the masses might think (with hagiographies and whatnot) does not necessarily align with whatever the person who issued the fatwa might think. (If my memory serves correctly, it was Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini, issued to Rushdie for blaspheming against Islam in The Satanic Verses. Terribly mid book, imo, but I suppose it gets you recognition from the Ayatollah.)
I see where you’re coming from overall and agree with some of your points, but it feels like other parts could have used a little more research on your part as well.
My last question — What does seeing Zizek as a Diogenes-like instigator do for your reception of his words or ideas? I think I’ve always been a little hesitant to put motives in the mouths of authors, especially when dead (which Zizek is not), because it detracts from whatever point they *might* be making and precludes us from seeing that point. I find a tinge of uncharitability within this article that I think I would be willing to link to that understanding of Zizek qua troll. (This, even though I agree with you that the original article seems to also be quite mid and flaccid. “I am not your enemy”, I suppose is what I’m trying to say.)
Thank you for your response. I would like to clarify and respond to a few of the points you lay out in your comment.
First, your point regarding the “one particular class at one particular school” argument I levy picks up on a moment of ambiguity in my writing. My intention is to draw attention to the way Zizek relies on anecdotal situations (which could be very reasonably analyzed as such) to implicitly suggest that this is the paradigm everywhere. While I do not have data (I doubt such data exists), my very confident guess would be that most programs on race do not turn out in the way that this particular one did. Thus Zizek would need to argue a reason why this example has relevance outside of the walls of the room it happened in, which he seems to gloss over. Instead there is just the vague implication that things like this are happening and we must be concerned about it.
With regards to your reading of Rushdie, I invite you to read this part of Zizek’s piece again. He is specifically denouncing a perceived hostility towards Rushdie in the western press (which he attributes to ‘wokeness’). This is the context from which I write, that the western press has written his praises. It would be absurd of me to suggest that the response to his work has been universally positive, considering the fatwa and stabbing.
To your last point re Diogenes. I point out this perception of him not as a lens through which to view him but to preempt against the defense that he is simply a provocateur. I argue that though he may be provocative in his essays and public lectures, he is nonetheless a serious philosopher whose ideas ought to make sense outside of their ability to provoke. In the case of this particular essay, I argue that his thesis is one born by a will-to-provocation and vague gestures at perceived societal ills, rather than a serious piece of analysis. That is to say, I can stomach or even enjoy some provocation, some political incorrectness or whatever you might call it in the pursuit of good philosophy, but here Zizek seems to be treating what was once the means as the end itself.
At first I admired Melanie for reading Zizek in 8th grade, but this particular polemic just reminds me of that annoying student who hyper-obsessively argues about semantics. It’s also a kind of break-up letter to a thinker she once admired, but maybe she should be thinking more for herself rather than hoping for Zizek to explain the world and align with her subjective, idiosyncratic politics. I’m glad Zizek spoke up and against wokeness. His point about wokeness combining PC badgering with capitalistic brutal financial cunning (in the form of cancel culture) is spot-on. I don’t think it’s Zizek who’s lost the plot — if you truly know him, he’s just being himself, as always. I think it’s Leftism that has lost the plot. Zizek writes, if you know his modus operandi, based on a Socratic style of conversing first about a topic and then basically capturing that in written words, like a Socrates and Plato in one. I think what he’s concerned about is wokeness as a mind virus — more damaging than covid, potentially — and as a way of thinking that is un-philosophical at best and fascistic at worst. (Keep in mind that Nazism is technically a far-left position: national socialism.) I used to lean politically Left but the Left no longer represents me, a working-poor individual who is just fine with his natural-born gender. Living in America, the only time I’ve gotten financial assistance, no strings attached, from the government has been from two Republican presidents: Dubya and Trump. The Left, once a champion of the working class and poverty-experiencing, is now a tool of liberal elite who seem unhealthily obsessed with gender-confused people, sanitizing/erasing history, and “saving” a world that is clearly beyond saving (thus Zizek advises an apocalyptic mindset). The Left has alienated me, simply. Conservatism, although it’s mutated over the years, is basically doing and calling for what it always has. So neither Zizek nor the political Right have lost the plot. Melanie Zelle has lost the plot, perhaps because she once thought she knew the plot to begin with. If you were once-happy with Zizek as a spokesperson for your politics, you never truly understand him, or philosophy in general. The thing she gets right is a brief comparison of Zizek to Diogenes, that early punk philosopher who antagonized Plato’s academy. Philosophers are not representatives of current culture wars, political stances, or violent ideologies. They are tour guides of human thought, taking us through the haunted house that is consciousness and thinking, with all its contradictions and ugly realities. Zizek follows the classic method of following truth where it leads: sometimes it ends up Left, sometimes Right, sometimes anarchist, sometimes Libertarian, and so on (as he likes to say). Trans people make up such a small percentage of the overall population, and are admittedly confused or feeling wronged about their natural gender, so they need time to figure themselves, and the world, out. To hinge one’s love or hate of a philosopher on such a singular issue is ridiculous. Lastly, I read an interesting book once, a true story about a small group of people shipwrecked off Saudi Arabia. However progressive or proto-woke they were, in a crisis situation, the author noticed how naturally and fluidly they fell into traditional gender roles: the men provided protection and hunted, and the women stayed at the shipwreck, the hearth. Since humanity is experiencing converging, multiple crises (and I don’t thinknthe trans debate is truly a crisis) as Zizek has noted, maybe what’s needed, as conservatives argue, is a return to traditionalism in order to get through. I also don’t think someone who flippantly changes their pronoun or even gender, say a woman to man, knows what it’s like to be a natural-born man: registering for Selective Service, a pressure to work and provide for a family, an expectation to be strong and silent and suppressive of feelings, etc. I do hope Melanie continues to be open-minded and open-hearted to Zizek, because he casts a wide net and is of great value to society. But if she wants to cancel him over a trendy hot button issue, well, she’d be in a crowded bandwagon. I am going to stay in Zizek’s corner, even though I disagree with him on issues both small and large.
Great Reply except this:
“maybe what’s needed, as conservatives argue, is a return to traditionalism in order to get through.”
Zizek argues that there is no going back.
Sorry but this is bullshit : (Keep in mind that Nazism is technically a far-left position: national socialism.) Check your history books.
Thank you for posting this. I think it’s important for people to understand what kind of absolute morons are supporting Zizek’s nonsense here. It’s people who have swallowed all manner of nonsense, without anything more than a shallow, propagandistic understanding of the issues at hand.
I’m a left wing trans woman and I absolutely support Zizek, and none of us think this shit about him, or left wing issues. This man is obviously some disconnected right wing goofball. I don’t know how you could honestly think this guy supports Zizek of you have any real understanding of Zizek’s Marxist background, but okay
“who is the black woke elite, and who are its members?”
Fantastically well said. The simple question of “who” seems to collapse much of today’s cultural analysis and criticism. It is nothing but buffoonery that a famous Marxist scholar cannot articulate a basic (let alone materialist) definition of “woke” or the woke elite. His usage of McWhorter’s work as a report of race relations in America relegates much of his analysis to the level of Bill Cosby. (Has anyone ever asked McWhorter about linguistics; the only field he holds qualifications to speak on? ) It is at times like these that I wonder if Zizek’s self-proclaimed label as a Marxist has only been instrumentalized to obfuscate accusations of social backwardness while allowing himself to participate in the (latest) liberal and (old) conservative high-brow discourses.
Perhaps Zizek’s article is reactionary, but is he entirely wrong? I think a key point he makes is that “sexual confusion is normal”, because it is! And it doesn’t matter whether a child is given hormone-blockers or hormones of the opposite sex: both stymie natural biological processes on the assumption that ‘clinicians’ and patients know best.
While I think the author makes valid points about Zizek’s lack of evidence, this is Zizek we’re talking about…. He’s not known for cogency or coherence. Another point I’d like to address is the accusation of resistance to social change. When considering the Scottish bill, we must remember that it calls for people to be able to change their legal sexual and/or gender identity without consulting a medical professional. This is dangerous and absurd. And don’t get me wrong, I support trans rights, which is exactly/precisely why I think the new bill should be subjected to skepticism and critique.
In regard to “wokeness”, I think both the author and Zizek are right. Yes, Zizek should have given more examples. But perhaps his critical assertion that “the woke elite don’t actually want change” hits the mark – that’s what makes it so potent and controversial. If students are graduating from top universities, they will most likely opt for reform instead of revolution – they’ll want change within the system, not an overthrow of the system itself. If you are surrounded by people destined to profit from capitalism and exploitation and oppression in all its forms, doesn’t it stand to reason that they’ll be less inclined to take more radical action?
Wokeness is not always wrong, of course, but it’s not always right either. And the trouble with wokeness is its claim to a monopoly on truth and justice – “we are right and you are wrong, we know better than you”. This position is dangerous. By positing a monopoly on these things, people fall for a trap as old as time, similar, in my mind, to what Lacan said about God and atheism: “If God exists, everything is permitted”.
The truth is that no one is innocent and we have all erred and “sinned”. (No, I am not a Christian). Our beliefs can blind us to the truth. It seems to me that discourse is increasingly prone to total ignorance of the other’s position – not for lack of intelligence, but lack of desire to be wrong. We all want to be right, no matter the cost.
Thank you for writing the article, it was quite thought-provoking 🙂
To stray away from philosophical analysis which I’m not good at and definitely not eloquent enough to lay out my position, oh my god are the comments here full of right wingers salivating over every single word of anti trans and traditionalist rhetoric.
One person said nazism is a left wing ideology. I don’t even have to explain how stupid that is.
Another said after a shipwreck people devolved to traditional gender roles. What a great observation….
If the world were a giant shipwreck where might makes right. I’m sure there’s no functional distinction between tribal societies where the importance of grueling physical labor far outweighs the importance of such labor today. How obvious do you need to make your biases when your ideal social order today revolves around the prototypical social order of the world a thousand years ago? How naive is it to believe that a world where survival is the only goal, where an absolute maximum of a few million people inhabit the entire planet should dictate the social order of a populace where the majority don’t engage in any of the same activities and the population has grown to 8 billion?
Whatever the case may be, Zizek has made a great piece of propaganda for the right with no empirical evidence at its core. I guess being transphobic is worth abandoning your beliefs and reasoning
Sad to see both Chomsky and Zizek fall from grace in the same month. Leftism desperately needs new intellectuals to fill the void.
Anyone can potentially be trans, for a variety of reasons, and so anyone who’s intellectually sincere should be permitted to opine on a subject that might affect anyone, as long as they do it respectfully.
However what almost universally characterizes online conversations on the topic hosted by trans advocates is a cultish behavior and psychology of yes-ism, albeit allowing for the finer minutiae contained within that yes-ism to be discussed. Thus any comparative discussion of the phenomenology of transracialism & racial dysphoria is considered absolutely verboten, notwithstanding the obviousness of the fact that millions of souls the world over experience significant psychological discomfort, even intense suffering, vis a vis their visible “racial” characteristics vs. how they feel internally.
Such people often directly and concretely identify with another visible “race,” and indeed feel something approaching a sort of nostalgie for a “lost” identity that seemingly somehow once was, but is no longer. Obviously this phenomenological encapturing or enchantment might well be pure subjectivism, but as a recurring phenomenological event who can say it is any less real than gender dysphoria?
Only Andrea Long Chu has seemingly dared to enter positively into an engagement with, perhaps even acceptance of, the philosophical, psychological, and ontological seriousness and significance of transracialism and, more to the point, racial dysphoria. Actually, I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if Ivy League philosophers and graduates of prestigious writing workshops eventually expatiate on this latter topic, but for the time being the MSM has judged it not quite yet opportune to have the appropriately pedigreed people elucubrate on it. As an intellectual commodity its ample circulation within the dominant fora of neoliberalism has not yet arrived.
Really well considered and well written piece.
The main problem of this piece is the failure to engage with where Zizek is coming from.
An example from Hegel:
Parmenides said there was no movement. This seems absurd to us. Diogenes then walked around the square, and was applauded by his pupil. Did not this precisely. contradict Parmenides? Didn’t just walking around prove that there certainly IS movement? Diogenes, in turn, beat his pupil. His point, was that immediate sense experience IS NEVER AN ARGUMENT against a philosophical statement. Parmenides “THERE IS NO MOVEMENT” is not some pub-crawling comment at 2. am, like so many other opinions. It is on the contrary what encourages you to think contra sense-experience. The first philosophical approach is to think: under which conditions could the statement be true or false. Think about the feeling, that which lover you get they all seem to leave you. In this sense, you one day realize: “There is no movement”. In other words, how come that I chose partners that eventually will leave. Far from merely contingency this points to a symptomatic behaviour, where I myself am complicit in all the external obstacles that constitute my being.
These very basic philosophical first steps is what is utterly absent from the discussion around socalled ‘wokeness’, both its advocates and the reactionary others. Why isn’t anyone asking WHY iS THIS HAPPENING PRECISELY NOW? Could it be that the massive critique against norms and self-empowerment could really be the introduction of the new norm. There is nothing subversive in this. It’s near-comical (if not so tragical), so let’s call it near-comical-tragical – thus fully tragical-comical, to hear how your garden variety gender theorist or ‘woke’ theoretician (although woke is really nothing but critique of theory) that in some confused way are coming from Foucault have not even read Foucault themselves, and his entire warning against the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and ‘california ethics’. Why are all philosophical statements today reducible to ‘self-empowered’ hashtags? (my truth, my voice…). As Hegel would say, there is neither “mine”, nor “truth” in a voice (my truth!) that is constantly DECLARING itself to the public to be heard.
There is quite simply a gap between enunciation and enunciated in woke. And this is Zizek’s point: not that ‘woke’ has gone too far, but that it is there not to change anything. Tout que bouge, c’est ne pas rouge’ – and we could add, not only is everything that moves, is protesting, not really ‘red’, not emancipatory, but also it does not blush. It is PROUD of its own anti-intellectualism (my voice, my truth) – philosophy at the level of Versace (my house my. rules), and everything is more and more claustrophobic because everyone thinks the world is simply there own house, and how annoying other people are there.). This, I repeat, is Zizek’s point: ‘woke’ is not radical at all, it is a massive attempt to reduce thinking and to make sure that another generation goes entirely brain dead. If anyone from “woke” read history of philosophy they should check how ‘woke’ and ‘wake up’ is used by a philosophical thinker, I mean Heidegger, in his seminar on metaphysics from 1929-1930… Heidegger is clearly playing on the connotations of ‘wokeness used by the SA around the same time. Such a minimal auseinandersetzung (confrontation, tearing apart) is however impossible for woke-theoricians because it would demand a minimum of. thinking, that is a minimum of reading something that is not simply your boring immediate experience.
I don’t think citing Heidegger helps your argument, when he was prejudiced enough to believe in a Jewish world conspiracy (Weltjudentum).
Whataboutism like a Trump diehard. This today proves the commenters point. Some aspect of history was taught to you so that you can throw Heidegger out the window without actually processing anything. That’s exactly what is meant by “brain dead”. P.S. someone you know REALLY wants to hide Heidegger from you, and you should seek out why
The main problem of this piece is the failure to engage with where Zizek is coming from.
An example from Hegel:
Parmenides said there was no movement. This seems absurd to us. Diogenes then walked around the square, and was applauded by his pupil. Did not this precisely. contradict Parmenides? Didn’t just walking around prove that there certainly IS movement? Diogenes, in turn, beat his pupil. His point, was that immediate sense experience IS NEVER AN ARGUMENT against a philosophical statement. Parmenides “THERE IS NO MOVEMENT” is not some pub-crawling comment at 2. am, like so many other opinions. It is on the contrary what encourages you to think contra sense-experience. The first philosophical approach is to think: under which conditions could the statement be true or false. Think about the feeling, that which lover you get they all seem to leave you. In this sense, you one day realize: “There is no movement”. In other words, how come that I chose partners that eventually will leave. Far from merely contingency this points to a symptomatic behaviour, where I myself am complicit in all the external obstacles that constitute my being.
These very basic philosophical first steps is what is utterly absent from the discussion around socalled ‘wokeness’, both its advocates and the reactionary others. Why isn’t anyone asking WHY iS THIS HAPPENING PRECISELY NOW? Could it be that the massive critique against norms and self-empowerment could really be the introduction of the new norm. There is nothing subversive in this. It’s near-comical (if not so tragical), so let’s call it near-comical-tragical – thus fully tragical-comical, to hear how your garden variety gender theorist or ‘woke’ theoretician (although woke is really nothing but critique of theory) that in some confused way are coming from Foucault have not even read Foucault themselves, and his entire warning against the ‘repressive hypothesis’ and ‘california ethics’. Why are all philosophical statements today reducible to ‘self-empowered’ hashtags? (my truth, my voice…). As Hegel would say, there is neither “mine”, nor “truth” in a voice (my truth!) that is constantly DECLARING itself to the public to be heard.
There is quite simply a gap between enunciation and enunciated in woke. And this is Zizek’s point: not that ‘woke’ has gone too far, but that it is there not to change anything. Tout que bouge, c’est ne pas rouge’ – and we could add, not only is everything that moves, is protesting, not really ‘red’, not emancipatory, but also it does not blush. It is PROUD of its own anti-intellectualism (my voice, my truth) – philosophy at the level of Versace (my house my. rules), and everything is more and more claustrophobic because everyone thinks the world is simply there own house, and how annoying other people are there.). This, I repeat, is Zizek’s point: ‘woke’ is not radical at all, it is a massive attempt to reduce thinking and to make sure that another generation goes entirely brain dead. If anyone from “woke” read history of philosophy they should check how ‘woke’ and ‘wake up’ is used by a philosophical thinker, I mean Heidegger, in his seminar on metaphysics from 1929-1930… Heidegger is clearly playing on the connotations of ‘wokeness used by the SA around the same time. Such a minimal auseinandersetzung (confrontation, tearing apart) is however impossible for woke-theoricians because it would demand a minimum of. thinking, that is a minimum of reading something that is not simply your boring immediate experience.
Crazy good article; I’ve been wanting a neat analysis and reconciliation of Zizek’s reaction with the real truth of his work for a while now. I wish there were more students like this and interested in this stuff at the other end of the trico . . .
Perhaps if left-wing thinkers are concerned with woke politics not being sufficiently anti-capitalist, maybe they should engage with marginalised groups as allies and try to unite some of the struggles in order to have more impact, instead of complaining about whether someone has the right to this or that identity. _Anti-Woke Left-Wing Thought: An Infantile Disorder_
You read Zizek so don’t have to, and for that, I am forever grateful. I was into reading Z two decades ago at the dawn of my (since aborted) grad school career. I was impressed at first because he was super-edgy and challenging the pomo status quo. Since leaving grad school, moving on to an unrelated career, and just getting on with life, I’ve come to the realization that Zizek is just a big gaslighter, flirting with anti-feminism, transphobia, antisemitism, etc., and when called out, retorts “Hey! Not me!” His endless screeds against “woke liberals” make him come off like that other has-been former left ally, Bill Maher. Yuck!
You cannot kill a true idea.
Nice effort just the same! Have you heard of “wu mao”? Are you paid at least 50 cents for these types of post or is it a labor of love for you?
Labor of love meaning that something inside you chains you to the ruling ideology so that lack of pay is no concern
I greatly admire this essay by Melanie Zelle. A self-confessed Zizek fanboy, she willingly, at great personal risk, enacts – nay, becomes – Zizek’s thesis in her targeted essay: the implacable superego, the force of nature so brilliantly described by Zizek that assures that wokeness will not wither but will embed itself ever more deeply into the perverse fulfillment that we humans derive from our failures. Zelle thus willingly embraces self-parody. She severely critiques the great man while simultaneously, resultantly proving him a genius. Further, Zelle reprises in a most unwoke fashion the ugly trope of the female scold, the female brandishing bitter, endless but meaningless criticism against her male betters. Without her supplying further bio, we are left to wonder if she intends us to take her for a self-hating cisgendered woman or a self-hating transgendered woman. Either way, it’s brilliant. Add to that concoction her unwoke resort to ageism, strongly implied by her pretense that Zizek, once great, is now over the hill, and I think we can all admit that Melanie Zelle has been up to the task. Through paradox and self-sacrifice she has celebrated her man as few could. My heartiest congratulations.
Poor reading comprehension?
“You would be forgiven for thinking that Žižek might finally talk about philosophy at this point, but you would, unfortunately, be wrong. The next portion of the article is even longer, and even less interesting — it is pretty much shilling for another article in Compact magazine. He summarizes it and then restates its conclusions, folding it into his purportedly broader point about how the wonderfully nebulous “wokeness” is a new secular religion of the left. This point isn’t new — it’s the sort of thing you hear all the time in American conservatism. It’s an echo of the fundamentalist Christian argument that atheism is a religion with science as its god, which is to say that it is not an argument to be taken seriously. ”
Pure rhetoric, I see no argument here, maybe you went to Zizek too early, and need to spend some time in Ancient Greece learning about the dialectic. Also, the NHS just revoked approval for Puberty Blockers because of insufficient research, and massive risks for children in puberty. Most agencies in the world, such as France, have banned it outright, because research shows they do more harm than good.
May I ask why it is you refer to Jordan Peterson as fascist? It would appear from my reading and viewing of him that he is the anti-thesis of fascist?
In fact his whole life project was centred around understanding the psychological dynamics which lead to fascism? He has a disdain for fascism, as predicated by his opposition to the C-16 bill (whether you agree with this sentiment or not the motivation is anti-fascist). If you think prescribing speech is not fascist (regardless of the reason) then I am very confused.
I understand he embodies and can easily be used to elicit the archetype of the oppressive father but careful listening reveals a deeply flawed man that nevertheless is desperate to see fairness in the world.