How Zizek Got Pwned

A response to Slavoj Zizek's "FROM MAGA TO MEGA: AFTER TRUMP'S VICTORY"

Slavoj Zizek is known for two things: his theory of Hegelian-Lacanianism, and writing a lot of books.

He is often accused of repeating himself, with some going so far as to say that he has been rewriting the same book since his first. Perhaps that is why he can write so many! Nevertheless, he has maintained his relevancy because people (including myself) enjoy his character: he is outrageously entertaining, never neglects humor, and through his deep study of modern thought has forged a method for analyzing pretty much anything in a way that produces new insights.

He is essentially a journalist doubling as a systematic philosopher, and so we respect his right to keep on churning out his reams of theory-stand-up, his rollicking glee-taking in the “utter chaos under heaven,” as one of his idols, Mao Zedong, put it.

Sometimes he rollicks too hard. In 2016, the great Marxist endorsed Trump for U.S. President. This was of course a pyrrhic endorsement: he reasoned that with the rise of Trump would come the downfall of the liberal order, allowing for far-left politicians to arise. He also took a less-than-xenophilic stance on the Refugee Crisis. His colleagues did not find these ideological transgressions to be quite as amusingly creative as he did, and according to him retaliated in the form of stripping him of numerous writing gigs in prominent places.

Since then, he has become a bit more Serious in his reporting. There was the pandemic, when he could have taken the bad-boy offer to write against the lockdowns like fellow leftist theorist Giorgio Agamben (who remains in infamy to this day for it).

Instead, he would celebrate a doctor who tricked refuseniks into taking the COVID shot without their knowledge, advocate for stricter lockdowns that would bring Western governments more power, and paint quite a busybody, anti-theoretical picture of what we ought to be doing during quarantine. Read how he concludes his book Pandemic! released in March 2020 (!!):

The fact that, in the UK, more than 400,000 young, healthy people volunteered to help those in need as a result of the virus, is a good sign in this direction. […] My first rule here is: this is not the time to search for some spiritual authenticity, to confront the ultimate abyss of our being. […] [you should] fully assume all small rituals, formulas, quirks, and so on, that will help stabilize your daily life. […] And, on the subject of movies and TV, gladly succumb to all your guilty pleasures […] “everybody works day and night from their home office, participating in video conferences […] nobody knows if there will be vacations again and if there will be money.” […] I cannot imagine a better description of what one should shamelessly call a non-alienated, decent life, and I hope that something of this attitude will survive when the pandemic passes.

Really? Don’t go out and protest? Don’t reject the coming World-State? Don’t dig into the financial data and try to uncover the real reason behind this lockdown?—just wear a mask and take care? This was quite shocking at the time to hear coming from someone who had always mocked committees, prided himself on rebellious anti-sociality, and advocated for thinking over doing. Notice also with what relish he entertains the idea of the pandemic lasting forever: a communism born out of restrictions, of having-not, of huddling in place, of watching shows, of caring for the Other.

Then there was the war in Ukraine, where he could have attacked the West for imperialism, as was the standard line of the hard-left, or attacked its woke establishment for engaging in shameless war profiteering, as was the line on the right. Instead, he went solidly for the middle, donning his proverbial Ukraine Flag pin and telling Zelensky to “give ‘em hell.”

The atonement still not over, he now believes that the return of Trump could bring on the downfall of proper civilization (—which he apparently now supports):

This new world will appear as a new normality, and in this sense, Trump’s reign may well bring about the end of the world as we know it—the end of what was most precious in our civilization.

What is this precious jewel of ours? The “radical emancipatory legacy” of Europe. What does this boil down to, in concrete terms? He says it is

what Hegel called Sittlichkeit, the set of unwritten customs and rules which concern politeness, truthfulness, social solidarity, women’s rights, etc.

Keep in mind that Zizek—while briefly attempting to play the latest version of the pretending-Biden’s-economy-was-good game—permits the possibility that “the economy will remain stable and perhaps even bloom, tensions will be attenuated, and life will go on” under Trump.

On the other hand, Kamala lost fair and square:

I see the main reason for her defeat in the fact that Trump stood for politics; he (and his followers) acted as engaged politicians, while Kamala stood for non-politics.

Zizek is here miming Badiou, whose work is a perpetual stage play/math equation pitting the non-political administrative state against the political (but entirely fictitious) radical Maoist militants (in Zizek’s rough handling of this LARP, Trump occupies the Maoist slot). But Zizek is wrong: Kamala has politics, while contemporary communists do not. Kamala’s politics—racialism, genderism, transgenderism, culture war, NATO spending—are the only forms of left-wing politics that can exist in the post-industrial landscape.

But Zizek still insists that “communism” is possible:

Kamala was designated by Trump as worse than Biden—not just a Socialist but even a Communist. To confuse her stance with Communism is a sad index of where we are today—a confusion clearly discernible in another often-heard populist claim: “The people are tired of far-left rule.” An absurdity if there ever was one.

The implication that there is a true Left out there, that all Educated people should know about, is unfortunately too stale of a lie to pique anyone’s interest anymore. That is the real reason the Left is diminishing among all people across all indicators, despite everyone gathering to “hear it out” in the 2020 downturn.

The Left has no plan for civilization. I spent a long time looking for one, longer than any sane person should, and can confidently say they manifestly do NOT have an economic model to replace market capitalism with. Mankind has given them the mic for long enough, and they have declined to speak!

After all, Marx barely described what communism would look like, besides a passage in The German Ideology about more free time for fishing and another in the Critique of the Gotha Programme about how some vague apparatus he calls a labor “certificate” will replace the market.

Other than that, Marx simply called communism whatever is doing a good job at gnawing at capitalism’s foundations, regardless of identity or attributes:

Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things.

Zizek, too, scarcely describes this communist future. As we saw in his COVID book, the “real movement” is learning to love our tasks and chores, just as his friend Fredric Jameson wanted WWII-era military desk duty or floor mopping as a permanent form-of-life. This utopia sounds awfully similar to what millions in our time consider to be the suicide-inducing dystopia that awaits if we submit to the ‘Great Reset.’

Likewise, in a podcast during the same period (I forget which), Zizek said all that is needed is a tool that automatically and intelligently invests one’s money in the stock market and pays them dividends, which would serve as a UBI system. But open a Charles Schwab account and you’ll see such “Robo Advisors” already exist.

So communism is already here, in Zizek’s eyes: the Biden era was a communist revolution. And it was the lamest one anyone has ever had to live through.

By Zizek’s definition, the status quo is communist. But he insists that Kamala—the supporter of the status quo—is not a communist, nor does she even represent any political ideology. At the same time, Trump is almost too political; he is political to the detriment of politeness:

The contrast between Trump’s official ideological message (conservative values) and the style of his public performance (saying more or less whatever pops into his head, insulting others, and violating all rules of good manners…)

Is Zizek jealous that his shtick is being outdone? Is there another, better obscenity-caster on the scene, a large and boisterous uninvited guest of late liberalism, who plays both the Joker and the Batman, the filth of New York and the Taxi Driver come to redeem it? Here Zizek sounds like the late ‘stuffy’ traditional conservative Roger Scruton in his article lambasting a somewhat younger Zizek as the clown of Marxist theory, making dirty jokes to distract from his dangerous political agenda. That may have been true of that Zizek of yesterday, but certainly not this one:

The problem isn’t that Trump is a clown; it's that there’s a program behind his provocations—a method to his madness. Trump's (and others’) vulgar obscenities are part of their populist strategy to sell this program to ordinary people—a program which (in time) works against ordinary people: lower taxes for the rich; less healthcare; fewer workers’ protections… Unfortunately, people are ready to swallow many things if presented through obscene laughter or false solidarity.

But of course, this is not what Trump is going to do, which he knows because he mentioned already that his economy could flourish for all. He is here doing what he often does in this piece, which is to fling random Democratic talking points at the wall and see which will stick:

while acting as if he cares for ordinary people, [Trump] promotes big capital.

But of course, this is objectively what the Democratic Party is, and any good communist should know small capital is the greatest obstacle to the revolution, while big capital needs to be cultivated and nationalized. Trump is hated by big capital, which is solidly with the liberal order and the Koch Republicans, and he continues to embolden ordinary people to reject the credibility of specialists, for better or for worse.

With this piece, Zizek reveals himself to be, against all odds, a ‘deeply concerned’ fearmongering conservative!

He warns that Trump will bring the end of the enlightenment and the beginning of a 1,000-year barbarism. A less hysterical assessment would be that the post-Soviet liberal order (which, again, Zizek apparently now supports?...) has always been a blip of far-flung fantasy that was always going to be impossible to maintain forever. What is ending is not the Culture of Europe and Her Children, but the alien civilization that was artificially constructed from Social Security, GI bills, the mortgage system, college loans, plastic, and fertilizers, all of which have experienced enough half-lives to be devoid of value.

Anyway, the liberal democratic freedoms that we supposedly had were entirely rhetorical—something he, psychoanalyst of the Ideological, more than anyone else should know.

How did Zizek get pwned? In an old Moldbug essay, he joked that Richard Dawkins got himself "pwned” by not checking for the Unitarian theological underpinnings of his secular humanist theory. Likewise, underneath Zizek’s self-proclaimed love of dirty jokes is the stomach of a Christian babica.

I, for one, agree that the Trumpist barbarism is here. But Trump isn’t even the main character of what is happening. The main characters are the people his influence engenders: the grindset ‘hustlers’ of the post-pandemic, who love combat sports and building semi-scam companies in the shadow of the rusted husk of post-war social programs, public schools, and the “national community” of cable news, C-SPAN, and talk shows. They and the coming perspectivism they represent will dominate the culture of this century. While they are barbarians, a problem to be addressed elsewhere, they will never again allow society to be threatened by the ascetic dystopia of lockdown huddling.

And philosophers like Zizek will be seen as what they are: conservatives of the post-Soviet order, the last propagandists of the last man.