CSULA ENGL 560: Spring 2013

From "Nihilism" to "Justice"

            The selection from Zizek's In Defense of Lost Causes is fascinating, insightful, frustrating, and surprising.  Above all, I found it intellectually exciting.  However, I want to explore the main outlines of his argument because I believe it has some problems, avoiding his interesting digresssions, like those on science, Christianity, and free will.  One of the main arguments that underlies his discussion is that "there are no background coordinates of our world" -- that is, there is no "Big Other" (God, Nature, or any creative, ordering principle) (445).  Reality is "a meaningless chaotic manifold" (444).  Nietzsche said much the same about reality, denying God and order, but ended up positing a kind of "Big Other" -- the will to power.  Zizek makes a similar move, denying one thing, on the one hand, and positing something else, rather obliquely, on the other.  The end of absolute nihilism can only be suicide or selfish hedonism.  As Yvor Winters said to Robinson Jeffers, if he really believed it was better to be a rock than a human being, he should kill himself.  Zizek turns out not to be an absolute nihilist.

            Throughout the selection, Zizek returns to various forms of "an anonymous Fate beyond social control" (459).  These include the process of capitalism, the development of science and technology, the destructive natural processes set in motion by human beings.  As Marx and Engels observed of capitalism, "All that is solid melts into thin air, all that is holy is profaned."  Science and technology (with genetic engineering, cloning, and nanotechnology) has shown that there is no natural order, no human nature, no Nature at all.  The study of evolution demonstrates that there is no evolution as a progressive development.  Rather, species have evolved because of "catastrophes" and "broken equilibria" (442) Any equilibrium is secondary; disequilibrium is primary. 

            The concern to prevent the runaway destructive natural processes from destroying the earth and the human race -- ecology -- Zizek identifies as "the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism" (439).  Although ecology purports to attempt to change humans' relationship to the earth, it is actually resistant to change and has "the anti-totalitarian post-political distrust of large collective acts" (440).  Thus, ecology is a false alternative which does not fundamentally challenge capitalist hegemony.  While dwelling on catastrophe, it hopes deep down that it will not really happen, and in this it is reinforced by our common sense, which is habituated to everyday reality and does not believe this reality can be disrupted (445). 

            Zizek, at moments, challenges these anonymous, seemingly uncontrollable processes.  He resists the absolute authority of science.  He discusses "the way science functions as ... an ideological institution" which provides certainty and stamps out or marginalizes "heretics" (446).  He expresses discomfort with tinkering with the human genome or attempting to create a synthetic cell.  Instead of deeming 90 percent of the human genome "junk DNA," he wonders if this "junk" is important and we just don't understand how life works  -- how "an 'infinite' (self-regulating) organic structure arises" (441).  He also balks at seeing the human being as completely empty and without agency, as a "blind circuit of neurons" (446). 

            Given such challenges, we might expect Zizek to offer some replacement "Big Other" or at least some principle for action.  And he does this in a rather sly way.  Zizek argues that the various forms of the "Big Other" stop us from acting in the face of possible destruction.  The Big Other as a "'reified' social system" or a natural process cannot be stopped because it has become an unconquerable reality -- an In-itself (453).  This reification of abstract processes comes about through prosopopoeia.  Through personification, the processes -- whether capitalist development, scientific progress, or natural processes -- become objective realities.  However, he makes sure to defend Hegel's "objective Spirit."  This Spirit is objective and real, independent of individuals, but it is not related to a "collective or spiritual super-Subject"(454).  There is no collective Subject beyond individual human beings.  But the objective spirit is related to individuals in so far as it is the "presupposition of their activity" (454). 

            His sly move occurs rather abruptly at the end of the chapter as a rationale for action. The ecological challenge should be met by reinventing and reviving what Zizek ironically calls the "'eternal Idea' of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice" and later "egalitarian terror" (460, 461).  Since there is no Big Other for Zizek, but rather a "meaningless chaotic manifold," he is not positing this Justice as an In-itself, a reality.  But, we can suppose, we should act as if this Justice existed, fully conscious that it is an invention.  Furthermore, if we act as "a people" with "large-scale collective decisions," are we not also reinventing the "collective or spiritual super-Subject"? (461, 454). Will this subject act with reference to a Hegelian "objective spirit"?  And most important for the implementation of his proposals, if the collective Subject and Justice are inventions, who will define them and, therefore, make the collective decisions?  The "terror" is presumably necessary, according to Zizek, in order to avert catastrophe and save human lives.  In the process of administering justice through terror, some people will have to receive "ruthless punishment" and perhaps die in order for the majority to be saved.  Is Zizek, then, promoting a kind of totalitarian utilitarianism?