The Sunday News
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has been called in the Western media “the most dangerous philosopher in the West” and has haughtily described himself as “a monster” of thought.
Unapologetically Eurocentric and a believer that globalisation should have a “European face” and that “Europe must secure its survival as a world power” the Marxist and Lacanian psychoanalyst is presently in trouble to keep his Eurocentricism and also remain a credible philosopher and dispenser of fresh insights about the political and economic condition of the world.
True to Aime Cesaire’s 1955 observation that the Western civilisation in its imbrication in slavery, colonialism and racism has become indefensible in ethics and in reason Slavoj Zizek is failing to juggle a defence of Europe with telling convincing philosophical truths.
What will an intellectual celebrity such as Zizek keep Eurocentricism or credibility as a seeker after deep truths about the world, he cannot presently keep both. In his newest book of late 2016; Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and other Troubles with the Neighbours, Zizek tries to save Europe and also retain his constructed top position as a leading philosopher in the world.
To defend the idea of Europe and the entire West while keeping robust philosophical critique is a monumental task even for a comedian philosopher like Slavoj Zizek who has an uncanny ability to weaponise simple street jokes and pranks into philosophy and deep political reflection, if Freud Sigmund successfully elevated the interpretation of dreams into classic psychoanalysis Slavoj Zizek has excelled in promoting jokes into political philosophy.
Rebuffing the metaphor that the Western Empire is beyond salvation and that the West is comparable to an Emperor that is naked, Zizek commonsensically noted that the symbolism is a no brainer because after all we are all naked under our clothes.
Under the cover of his carefully crafted brand and image as the homeless clown philosopher, Zizek has gotten away with serious plagiarism and such offensive innuendos as that women are the symptom of man that should be enjoyed.
Minimising Zizek is no easy task as he has also provided some of the most troubling observations and arguments of the century such as how the richest capitalists of the world suddenly wish to die and be remembered more for their communist habits, how capitalism spends money that it does not have and has even borrowed from the future; it is Zizek who has forcefully argued that human beings and the planet, thanks to capitalism, are “living in the end times” as they are tittering towards annihilation, driven by a tragic death drive.
It is Slavoj Zizek arguing from the capitalist and democratic West who has noted that democracy is a shameless political harlot that has no problem co-existing with such evils as violence, social inequality, poverty and all sorts of fundamentalisms and still gets sold around the world as the best form of government.
Ironically, Zizek as a proud European who criticises Europe has been turned into a celebrity as he serves to validate that Europe is democratic and tolerant enough to live with open criticism, in trying to change the world he has worked over time to keep it the same.
Provincialising Slavoj Zizek
Led by combative Iranian intellectual Hamid Dabashi and Argentinean semiotician Walter Mignolo some scholars of the Global South have undermined Slavoj Zizek, asking him to stop pretending to speak for the world when he is dispensing propaganda for Europe and the West at large.
Dabashi used Zizek as an example to illustrate that Europeans cannot read; otherwise if they could read they would know more about the history and the people of the rest of the world beyond racist stereotypes.
Since that high voltage debate where Zizek was clearly clobbered out of his clownish composure and resorted to F-words and profanities, he has carefully tried to write of Rwanda, South Africa, Zimbabwe and other places of the Global South with a much more humanist tone than in the previous years.
Zizek used the death of Nelson Mandela to drop the argument that if the South African icon was a real hero the whole world wouldn’t be so happy about him, heroes are people who defeat their enemies, why were the enemies of Mandela so happy about him?
So glowingly has Zizek written about Libya and Muammar Gaddafi as a political prophet whose wise warnings to the West were foolishly ignored by world powers.
Slavoj Zizek’s new political sensibilities about and sympathies with the Global South may be a lesson learnt too late or too little too late but it is important to note how even intelligent defenders of the West are lately waking from their slumber and dropping the pretences to be world spokespersons and owning up to being provincial prophets who also have to gather the humility to learn about and from others.
Decolonial Zizek?
That the problem of refugees that are flooding Europe is connected to Western imperialism, military invasions of other countries and Western sponsored wars in the Global South is not a new argument, it is interesting that at last Zizek sees its truth and expresses it, joining thinkers like Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, Edward Said and others.
It is a liberating awakening for Zizek to come out and note that terrorism is helped and supported by forces and states in the West and outside.
Terrorism, Zizek has lately argued is a product of fundamentalists in the West and outside the West. Anti-Semites and Zionists present the same evil by different and even opposing names and so called Islamic fundamentalists are haters that use the name of Islam to push their hate while those that want refugees, exiles and immigrants flushed out of the West are also fundamentalists who hide behind the love of the West to practice inhumanity.
“Refugees” argues Zizek newly “are the price the world is paying for the global economy” and “colonial expansion.” It is with irony that Zizek explores other European thinkers such as Alain Badiou who still think that terrorists are disgruntled non-Europeans that wish to be Europeans but cannot and therefore hate and want to destroy Europe and the West.
Coming from Zizek it sounds like a joke that slavery and colonialism continue in the West and in the Global South given the exploitation in the work places and poor working conditions that black people endure in the present capitalist neoliberal hegemonic system in the world. To Zizek both Christianity and Islam suffer the underside of all religions, the propensity to turn beliefs into fundamentalisms and extremes.
Our “enemy” as the West, Zizek counsels, is not necessarily people that are evil out there but people “whose story we have not heard” or do not wish to know, people that might have been created by us in our violence, whom we hurt in the past and have come for their revenge.
The West must swallow pride and abandon denialism and join other parts of the world in fighting for political and cultural diversity and difference in the world, where people can be different together, not the present situation where Westerners want the whole world to be like the West.
That Zizek may only be saying the right things to keep his philosophical relevance in the world while still retaining his Eurocentric political beliefs cannot be easily dismissed, what is important however, is that voices of decolonial thinkers have at least forced the prophet of Eurocentricism into a new recognition of their old arguments.
When defenders of the West start echoing decolonial thinkers, even if it is opportunistic pretence, hope remains that one day imperialists will de-imperialise and colonialists will decolonise.
Cetshwayo Zindabazezwe Mabhena writes from South Africa: [email protected].
