Zizek and Ecology

      I found Zizek’s overall argument quite interesting. He is right in that although we are aware of the realities of global warming, our common sense makes it difficult for us to believe that something catastrophic will ever occur. According to Zizek, part of the problem is that we assume that the “world is part of reality as an ordered and seamless Whole” (444). When we look outside and see the trees swaying in the wind and hear the birds chirping, we see the sublimity of nature, but as Zizek points out, we are blind to many of the ecological changes (and its affects) to the environment. Part of the essay briefly mentions the mysterious disease that caused a huge decline in our honey bees, although many of us may have heard something on the radio or on the local news regarding the problem, I don’t think most of us seriously thought about how this will directly affect our lives. Until it becomes a catastrophic event, we continue to move on without giving the problem a second thought. And, when something horrible occurs, the desire or urgency in finding a solution to the problem quickly declines. For some reason, we cannot seem to sustain the public’s interest long enough to contend with the ecological crisis we are faced with today. 

Zizek’s first call to action is to follow Dupuy who suggests that we should first submit to the idea of a possible catastrophe and “perceive it as our fate, as unavoidable, and then, projecting ourselves into it, adopting its standpoint, we should retroactively insert into its past (the past of the future) counterfactual possibilities...upon which we then act today” (459). But  how do we know which “doom” to submit to? There are numerous scientific arguments that suggest we should focus on one potential catastrophe over another, which are we to chose? Also, when he argues that we should then “mobilize ourselves to perform the act,” it sounds as if there is one act in of it self that would fix the problem. Now, I’m not at all an expert on the details of our ecological crisis, but it would seem necessary for us to take on multiple acts simultaneously in order to evoke some kind of substantial change to the natural environment. Even if we were to attempt to solve the problem “retroactively,” there is no guarantee that the solutions we would come up with would work. 

He ends his essay with Badiou’s theory, the “eternal Idea” of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice (460). The first part argues for a strict egalitarian justice. Initially, this sounds fantastic. If I was king of the world, I would consider it, but I would first need to understand its meaning. What would be its guidelines and who would be responsible in overseeing this kind of policy? Would it be an international collective body? If so, then more than likely the same world powers would intercede and exploit it to serve their own political agenda.