ZIZEK: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (Part I)

The photos I had seen of him were confirmed as he took the stage and began speaking and waving his hands frantically: Slavoj Zikek is a sweaty, schlubby, whirling-dervish of a man. Zizek is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He’s considered a sort of maverick philosopher/public intellectual and is sometimes described as the “Elvis of Cultural Theory” or “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.” I would add that he’s definitely a genius and funny as hell.

Back when I was a philosophy major at Grinnell College and casting about for a senior thesis topic, my advisor, himself a Nietzsche scholar, told me that Zizek was probably someone I’d be interested in. He described Zizek as a showman, the darling of ivory tower savants, who traveled the world doing intellectual magic tricks involving Lacanian psychoanalysis and current events. I wasn’t a huge fan of Psychoanalysis, so I went the opposite, “post-structuralist" route, deciding to write the thesis on French iconoclasts and decidedly anti-Oedipal philosophers Deleuze and Guattari.

I never really got around to reading Zizek’s stuff, until, three years later, I picked up his new book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, which deals with our current financial crisis and—gasp!—calls for a new form of Communism. Also, in a turn of luck, Zizek happened to be speaking at New York City’s Cooper Union Hall only a few days after I bought the book. When my girlfriend and I got to Cooper Union, the line for the event was snaking for blocks around the building, leading me to realize that we weren’t the only ones in NYC excited about a sweaty communist! Zizek gave a wide-ranging and impassioned talk to a packed house of mostly young people on a range of topics from Starbucks to a documentary about rape and genocide in the Philippines, from the humbling of Alan Greenspan to the shamelessness of Silvio Berlusconi. Zizek blasted from topic to topic, never missing a beat, making connections, humorous asides, and hard-hitting assessments. There was a sincere urgency to his presentation; Zizek really wanted us to catch his drift and time was of the essence. He wasn’t helped by the event’s getting cut short by what I found out later was a bomb threat.

So, what was so urgent about Zizek’s message? Why would somebody make a bomb threat on this silly, sweaty Slovenian professor? For the answers, I had to turn to the book because frankly, the talk was somewhat of a blur that couldn’t quite materialize in my brain. In this first post, I’d like to begin a review of Zizek’s most compelling arguments from First as Tragedy, Then as Farce.

As a start, how about the title? Tragedy? Farce? Is this Shakespeare? What does it have to do with the image that takes up the front and back covers of the book: one of those illustrations from an in-flight brochure that shows passengers bracing for a sudden impact. What part of the plane crashing is farce?

The blurb on the back helps us out a little, mentioning “the old one-two punch of history: the jab of tragedy, the righthook of farce.” It reminds us that “[i]n the attacks of 9/11 and the global credit crunch, liberalism died twice: as a political doctrine and as an economic theory.” So is Zizek taking aim at both the liberal political theory embodied in Locke’s right to life, liberty and (private) property and economic liberalism i.e. free market capitalism? Is liberalism a.k.a. democracy + capitalism a.k.a the American Dream really dead?

Zizek offers up several servings of tragedy and farce. We can read 9/11 to be the tragedy (when do we hear that fateful numerical combination without the word “tragedy”?) and the financial meltdown of 2008 as the farce. The latter is a kind of farcical replay of the former; indeed Zizek notes the similarity of President George W. Bush’s language when dealing with both events. There were constant reminders of the danger to the America way of life, invocations of the need to take rapid, decisive action, and a call for a partial suspension of American values (liberty in the case of 9/11, equality in the case of the financial crisis) in order to secure them. There is also a kind of external/internal dichotomy here, where tragedy came from an exterior threat (foreign terrorists) while the farce came from an internal threat (the greed-fed rot at the core of our own economy).

Alternately, tragedy and farce come from a quote from Karl Marx that Zizek is using, where Marx corrects Hegel: “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great events and characters of world history occur, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Zizek seems to be saying that we live in farcical times where our current political regime, referred to as “the modern ancien régime” is merely the clown of a world order whose real heroes are already dead. To illustrate what he means here, Zizek refers to Kierkegaard who said that we humans can never be sure that we believe in something. Instead we only believe that we believe. Thus, if applied to our political leadership: “the formula of a regime which ‘only imagines that it believes in itself’ nicely captures the cancellation of the performative power (symbolic efficiency) of the ruling ideology: it no longer effectively functions as the fundamental structure of the social bond”. Zizek asks us if we aren’t today in this very situation? He wonders whether today’s “preachers and practitioners of liberal democracy do not also ‘imagine that they believe in themselves,’ in their pronunciations.”

Are the ideals of democracy coupled with economic liberalism really dead? Has it all become one giant farce? Has anyone turned on Fox News lately? Anyone turned on CNN or almost any news outlet, and wondered whether the stern anchors, the plucky correspondents or the screaming pundits were simply joking? Glen Beck crying because he loves America so much? Lou Dobbs clamoring on about the validity of our president’s birth certificate? Many others tune in to Comedy Central’s The Daily Show for a truer take on what’s going on in the world. All of this plays out over the backdrop of two wars, an economy on the brink of disaster, and an ever-present climate crisis.

Tragedy and farce are certainly apt descriptors for what is going on in our world today. The questions perhaps are: how did we arrive at this tragedy and how do we escape from it? My next post will deal with the former question, which I think is addressed in Zizek’s chapter on ideology. The escape plan is somewhat dealt with in Zizek’s chapter entitled: “The Communist Hypothesis,” (at least he’s got a hypothesis!) which I will tackle later this month.