Agreeing, then disagreeing with Žižek, then agreeing in the end

I’d never heard of Peter Sloterdijk and, if I’m honest, I won’t jump on the next video starring him. He has a great voice, but I wasn’t too overwhelmed by his philosophical elan. Žižek, on the other hand, was his typical self, full of fire and tangents and interest connections.

He also told a few jokes: one was about about being in a gulag, where the food is terrible, but on Sundays, you get a special treat: a second plate! It’s kind of a riff on the old saw of “I have two complaints: the food is terrible…and the portions are too small,” although it’s a bit reversed, in the sense that everyone knows that the food is terrible in the gulag, but that the cynical staff “rewards” good prisoners with double-rations of the terrible food. Are they being cynical? Or are they just following the societal edict that “more is always better”? That’s the joke.

Another joke was more straightforward. It’s about a woman who is sleeping with her lover while her husband is out drinking. The lover hears a key in the door and wants to stop, to run away. The wife tells him to relax, that her husband will be so drunk that he won’t even notice. They lie there while the husband stumbles into the room, undresses and falls into bed. The wife is in between her husband and her lover. After a minute, the husbands asks ‘either I’m so drunk that I’m seeing six feet, or there are three people in this bed!’ His wife coolly answers that he’s drunk, if he would just get up and look at the bed from the doorway, he would see that there are only four feet in the bed.

Peter Sloterdijk & Slavoj Žižek | Festival INDIGO 2023 by Cukrarna (YouTube)

There are some interesting bits throughout, but my ears perked up about ¾ of the way through the discussion.

At 01:30:00, Žižek says,

“How often—that’s the problem today, with political correctness and so on—are they aware the extent to which their apparent criticism of racism and so on and, especially, feminism is secretly patronizing? For example, I spoke with Africans there […] who told me that, for them, the most refined form of Western liberal racism is, when there are big crimes in Africa, like the Rwanda slaughter, immediately, the western-left reaction was: this is just an effect of colonialism. No? He said ‘F&%k you! You don’t even allow us to be bad. Even when we are evil, it must be an effect [of something you’d done before].‘

“Or you know what is another form of racism here? When some immigrants or whoever, and I’m open towards them, bla bla, do something horrible…it’s always ‘they’re not guilty. It’s how we treat them.‘ … there are conditions.

“Yeah, but so are we [under conditions imposed by society]! The implicit presupposition of that is that there are primitive people who are conditioned by circumstances, but we whites should be blamed because we are nonetheless, in some sense, free.

“You know, that’s why I never trust this white-people’s self-humiliation, you know? Like, we shouldn’t assert our identity. If Indians dance their dance, it’s freedom. If you in a German village or me here in Slovenia, dance, it’s neofascism or whatever.

“You know what? Apparently, I humiliate myself, but secretly I adopt the universal position. My self-humiliation is false. It’s the same with #metoo, with all that stuff. Do #metoo ideologists even know, do they even talk to real women about their problems?”

That is, we only assign agency to ourselves, because we are … better. The other benighted souls are capable only of following and reacting to what we’ve done to them. We, who are free and thinking creatures, are responsible for our crimes—and theirs.

I like this line of argument, but you also have to wicked honest about what’s actually still happening in some of those countries. You can blame Israel 100% for their crimes, while still acknowledging that they had and continue to have a lot of help and support. The warlords in so many countries are home-grown and they are exhibitors of native agency (rather than only foreign agency being allowed), but many of their actions are enabled and enhanced by external support.

They got to where they are because the way has been made easy internally. The Iraqi people had Saddam Hussein, not because they really wanted him, but because he was given a tremendous amount of money and weaponry to fight Iran. If there’d been no interference, perhaps the Iraqi people would have been better able to yank on his chain.

So, yes, current events should have overriding importance, rather than arguing about who did what when 20, 30, 40 years ago. It can be important as context, but the ongoing crimes belong to those perpetrating them. And the solutions to those crimes will come from evaluating the situation as it is, not how it could have been or should have been in the past. What the situation used to be between Ukraine and Russia 40, 50, 60, 70 years ago doesn’t matter. Ditto for Israel and Palestine. What the situation is now is more relevant.

But, before we can truly discuss agency for the societies running these countries, we do have to be brutally honest about the context, the guardrails within which they’re allowed to move. Many people in international agencies and governments are only allowed to move upward, to remain in power, to exist at the behest of the U.S. Cross any lines, and your budget is retracted, or support is given to your enemies and opponents. It’s that simple.

Žižek is right that it is not only people in other countries who lack agency. I just read an excellent article about war crimes in which the U.S. didn’t feature at all. It was truly well-written. But it completely elided the greatest war criminal of them all.

The author probably didn’t even notice. The author…she is ultimately responsible for the content of her article, but it was decades of propaganda that hemmed in the degree to which she would be able to report on something like war crimes in a serious manner.

I think we have to dedicate ourselves to carefully examining the context and determining to what degree a country, or government, or agency, is truly even capable of being responsible.

One final example, perhaps. Imagine an adult who’d been apprehended for stealing food. But that adult had also been locked out of their apartment, night after night, by their roommate, who dominates them in every way. Should we consider the crime of stealing food outside of this context? We have to acknowledge that there isn’t a level playing field.

Of course, people are responsible for their crimes, but we can’t ignore the external influences. It doesn’t rob them of agency! They could have not done crimes. But we have to consider the degree to which other crimes influenced them, pressured them to be in a situation in which doing crime was perceived to be the only way out.

At 01:35:25 he says about cancel culture

“If I were a rich billionaire who wants to destroy the left, I would support cancel culture. Why? Because the way it works: it’s permanent self-division. ‘I suspect isn’t what you said already…anti-feminist…’ It sabotages—blocks—any possibility of a larger coalition of solidarity. This is my problem.”

“I’m friendly with with the ex-vice president of Bolivia Alvaro Garcia Dilera. Bolivia. The left was there 12 years in power. The standard of ordinary people almost doubled. And they did it in such intelligent way that they didn’t scare the capital. That’s why, you remember two years ago there was a coup d’état. Then new elections which Morales forces won again. So I’m totally opposed to Cuba, Chavez, Venezuela, Nicaragua: they screwed it up. In Bolivia, they didn’t.

“So I see just particular hopes here and there. I’m very sorry: that’s why I like to define myself as a war communist. I think we are approaching some kind of a new emergency states. And what Europe is doing now—the world even more—is you know treat it like okay let’s change a little bit more 5% here tax so just that our life goes on the way it does. We are still doing small things in order to do nothing.

“By war communism—brutal term that I use with all the irony of course—I mean we have to prepare—with hope that it will not happen—to more global cooperation. It will be necessary. Imagine a stronger pandemic. Imagine stronger ecological catastrophes and so on. We will have to collaborate, otherwise we will really enter new feudalism—what Yanis Varoufakis, with whom I otherwise often don’t agree—predicts.

“I think to conclude […] that the problem today is not even any longer liberal capitalism or something else. Liberal capitalism is already gradually disintegrating. It is either something new or something where the world is moving spontaneously, which is much worse than [the] capitalism that we knew. My God, the third ‘Ich habe gesprochen.’ [from Winnitou/Karl May]”

“All these terms. You know what I hate in the left—I hope we agree—whenever they see something they don’t like, they call it fascism. Without any serious analysis, it’s a Schimpfwort, which prevents you to think.”

But, honestly, Žižek, Chavez also massively raised living standards and literacy rates. Bolivia had the luck that they were able to work a leftist scheme before the U.S. noticed that they had lithium deposits. That is, capital wasn’t particularly interested in their backward-ass country. Venezuela is another matter.

With Venezuela, capital retaliated immediately because it perceived social gain as shareholder loss. This is the same reason that the U.S. continues to batter Cuba to this day. They’re butt-hurt about lost profits. I think Žižek is being quite naive about how this all worked out—and why Bolivia was given a longer leash than Venezuela.

At 01:48:30

“[…] link between early development of Chinese Communist Party and fascism, there was a meeting just before Sun-ya Tsen—the founder of Chinese Republic blah blah modern China—met with young Mao Tse Dong—and this was 1945 Italy […]—and their conclusion was that we need West, but not in the individual way. The only thing that we can take from the West politically is fascism. We should learn to apply that kind of industrial development, but covered by a strong authority.

“I find this fascinating and there is a whole school now—not in China, that would be prohibited—who claim that that’s what in a soft way Deng Xiao Peng did: he turned China from a communist country to a new version of fascist country. By this I mean patriotic ideology plus industrialization and so on.”

At 01:54:00 he says

“I have a long analysis of my good friend Japanese Eco-Marxist Kohei Saito, who tries to argue for kind of a ecological self-limitation and so on. And second thing, I […] I’m just saying but you know how [much] nature was destroyed by humans even before modernity? Look at Iceland. I was there. They told me when the stupid Vikings arrived there in 7th, 8th Century it was full of forests. In 30, 40 years, it was gone—building the stupid Viking boats or whatever. So don’t so many already previous civilizations they ruined so many things. I know today, it’s something more special and so on, but you know what disturbs me with this new eco-feminists? They think that it is possible to slow down to some more balanced development and so on and so on. No. I think once we are in modernity we cannot step out it’s lost.”

Oh, I agree that our society seems to be pathologically incapable of reducing anything in any way, not one little bit. Some individuals can, but not as a group. I wonder, though, whether the consumerist and dog-eat-dog capitalist urge pounded into people’s heads every day has something to do with that inability? I find this argumentation somewhat lazy. Again, the has his contrarian observation, but he doesn’t explore it enough, I think. In fairness, it was a two-hour video and he’d spoken for long enough, but still, it’s…weak.

He, like so many others, speaks for the tippy-top of the first world, forgetting always how much 90% of the planet is forced to renounce every day. It’s not a question of stepping out of modernity—it’s a question of being forced out of it. As the Brits say, It don’t enter into it. I think the time is coming when exigencies will force the same choice on at least parts of the 10%.

Right now, it’s utterly inconceivable that I don’t have Internet, cellular data, water, electricity, heat, and a working server to tell the world what I think. I wonder how long it will take before climate change knocks hard enough on the door to take any of those things away. I bet the Empire’s military will fight like a demon to prevent that from happening. I am ensconced alee of the capitalist machine in which I live. I am protected by their greed, not my own.

At 01:51:20 he says,

“[…] would you agree with this beautiful […] temporal paradox formulated by some very good action theorist: yes, we decide for reasons but, retroactively, our decision creates reasons. We are never in this neutral position […] it’s like falling in love: I like your hair, whatever, but that’s why I fall in love with you. But only after I am in love, I see reasons.

“[…] you […] called something democratic non-totalitarian societies where information is available and you can decide and enact. Do you think we live in such a society? We don’t. Maybe even less than in some totalitarianisms where people nonetheless—you cannot say it publicly, but they know the truth. In China, they know they are controlled, they’re much less in illusion than us. Or, to repeat my old formula, the worst kind of unfreedom is the unfreedom which you experience as freedom.”

Good one. Way to end a two-hour discussion! In the end, we agree.