Adam Kirsch has an extraordinary takedown of Slavoj Zizek at The New Republic, and this is the first of a few things I’ll say about parts of it. So:
the passage in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle where Zizek discusses the ideological function of Nazi anti-Semitism: "one could say that even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews had been true (that they exploited the Germans, that they seduced German girls, and so forth . . . ) their anti-Semitism would still have been (and was) pathological, since it repressed the true reason why the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position." Why this need to keep open, as if for the sake of argument, the possibility that the Jews really were guilty of all the things of which the Nazis accused them? Why, when Zizek returns to this same line of reasoning in Violence —"even if rich Jews in the Germany of the 1930s ‘really’ exploited German workers, seduced their daughters," and so on—are there quotation marks around "really," as though the truth or the falsehood of Jewish villainy were a question to be postponed until it can be given fuller consideration?
Now, I am no expert on Zizek. (I did not know, for example, that he "deplores ‘one of the great postmodern motifs, that of the Real Thing towards which one should maintain a proper distance.’" Didn’t even realize the ethic of due distance was one of the great postmodern ‘motifs’.) But Kirsch is unafraid to call Zizek a fascist, and on that basis I think there’s an answer to his string of questions about Zizek’s flirtation here with antisemitism. Zizek wants to purify Nazi fascism by explaining how it could be more perfectly fascist. In order to do so, he points — rightly, I daresay — to the possibility that the Jews were necessary to the Nazis because of a failure of the fascist imagination. The argument, I think, would run like this: the Nazis needed the Jews as an excuse for fascism; there were no other practical alternatives. Philip Rieff, I think I’m fair in saying, agrees, but only insofar as he argues that the Shoah was an attempt to exterminate God, and that it was impossible to attempt to murder God without murdering the Jews. In that manner, there were no practical Nazi alternatives to antisemitism because there were no theoretical alternatives. To seek the extermination of the Jews is to admit the existence of God.
This Zizek does not want to have to do; this is imperfect, inadequately imaginative fascism:
"To be clear and brutal to the end," he sums up, "there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering’s reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: ‘In this city, I decide who is a Jew!’ . . . In this city, it is we who decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency."
Zizek, in other words, wants it to be true in some way that the Nazis really could have decided who was a Jew and who wasn’t. Fascism fails if it cannot force Jew — and thus Gentile! — to become ‘Jew’. Zizek’s contention is that this failure results from the very unimaginativeness involved in actually beginning with the Jews — e ven if it were entirely justified epistemologically to do so ! This is a gruesome inversion of Arendt, for whom the existential epistemology of really great politics could have kept peace between Nazi and Jew even if, ontologically, there was such a thing as a master race. Zizek’s pure fascism is a tyranny over ontology itself, an elevation of violence over the Real Thing. Violence ceases, thus, to be a thing; it becomes merely a void, an uncertain and uncanny ‘certain space’. As Kirsch puts it, Zizek
has begun to articulate a new rationale for revolution, one that acknowledges its destined failure in advance. "Although, in terms of their positive content, the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery," he explains, "at the same time they opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations." He adds elsewhere: "In spite of (or, rather, because of ) all its horrors, the Cultural Revolution undoubtedly did contain elements of an enacted utopia." The crimes denoted not the failure of the utopian experiments, but their success. This utopian dimension is so precious that it is worth any number of human lives.
To continue is to confront Rorty’s theory of the strong poet with Zizek’s purified fascism, but that’ll have to wait.
