All We Žižek Sailors, We Are Rowing Home
by John Kendall Hawkins
It's looking grim.
If Slavoj Žižek says we're going down in the flood, and it's gonna be our fault, who am I to disagree? But that appears to be what the psycho-sexy philosopher is averring in his new collection of columns and opines, Mad World (OR Books, 2023).
Žižek is terror-fied of the oceanic waves of techno-populists coming our way, slopping at our shores, like plastic tampon applicators that should have never been flushed down the toilet, "a reminder of what men choose to forget," as TS Eliot said of the "strong brown god." I once saw such a wash-up of applicators on the shores of various isles in Boston Harbor, where Scorsese's mad thriller, Shutter Island, was filmed. Žižek reckons such techno-populism, resulting in the alt-Right clowns who washed up in DC on January 6 like bolshy Tea Party applicators, "signals the fragility of the entire system." Žižek goes,
This coincidence of the opposites (technological manipulation and populism) is based on the exclusion of the third: the liberal "free" subject who decides after rational deliberation. So yes, we are doomed.
Socrates has been made to walk the plank again. As if realizing how the Doom and Gloom could affect his book sales, Žižek adds a yeah-but:
There is no clear way out, but we should always bear in mind that the global capitalist system is even more doomed, approaching its apocalyptic end. The hopelessness is not ours when we are at the mercy of an undefeatable global capitalist machine; the hopelessness is in the very heart of this machine.
And that's how Žižek's book of Untimely Meditations begins. Already I'm needing dramamine.
When I last caught up with Žižek he was gloomin' and doomin' with his inimitable counterintuivity in a book about the pandemic, sub-titled Covid-19 Shakes the World. You wanted to add, you sensed he meant, like a madman shaking a dead geranium. (More vintage Eliot.) He worried about Sci-Tech rising out of the fog of fear like an oracle to answer questions we never meant to ask. Let alone from behind a mask. The danger of the MSM cardinals blowing smoke, electing Fauci, as high priest, in contradistinction to the wacky-tobacky alt Right set masquerading as MAGA dogmatists in search of a worn-out bone of contention; the danger emphasized by Fauci's sneaky role in enabling that Wuhan lab's gain-of-function research; the danger finally realized as whistleblowers ran to Rand Paul in Congress and painted Fauci as akin to The Gimp from Pulp Fiction.
This was disconcerting enough, but then Žižek worried about masturbation, which triggered a series of nervous events in my pants. He asked scary questions I didn't want to address: Why Are We Tired All the Time? And, Is Barbarism with a Human Face Our Fate? Barbarism with a human face -- suddenly, I'm thinking of the recent twin opening at the cinemas of Barbie and Oppenheimer. And there's Eliot again, Preludes:
Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.
One gets teary, in lieu of laughs these days. (And one sees how Eliot went from Missouri to Baudelaire, but wonders why he went Anglican. And then the lighting of the lamps.)
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