Alan Johnson takes Slavoj Žižek apart:
Žižek’s philosophy is, to be blunt, a species of linksfaschismus. This is true of its murderous hostility to democracy, its utter disdain for the ‘stupid’ pleasures of bourgeois life, its valorization of will, ruthlessness, terror and dictatorship, and its belief in the salvific nature of self-sacrificial death....
Of course, some will say Žižek is a jester and should not be taken seriously. That would be a mistake. As Bertrand Russell once said, never underestimate the power of nonsense. There is a milieu out there in which red has met brown, left has met right, a conversation has started up, and the interlocutors are discovering they have more in common than they thought. This hybridity is not without precedent. From the 1920s to the 1940s Fascism in France was, in Zeev Sternhell’s words, “neither left nor right” but both. Left and right were united in their hatred of what they called “the established disorder” of materialism, parliamentary democracy and bourgeois society, as well as in their mutual “distaste for the lukewarm,” and fascination with “the idea of a violent relief from mediocrity.” Žižek’s own fascination with the idea of violent relief – the call for offensive violence against the “bourgeois state” (“the whole structure … must be annihilated”) was explicit in “The Jacobin Spirit” as was his yearning to then wield “centralized state terror” for “an Eternal Truth” – is gradually acclimatizing the Left to enormity. His spiritualist voluntarism and brutal ethics of force, his commitment to Terror and Dictatorship for Absolute Truth, not to mention his metaphysics (and creepy aesthetics) of violence, pain and self-sacrificial death, are similarly “neither left nor right.” Žižek senses this, but he does not care – “if this be linksfaschismus, so be it!” Nor it seems, does the Left. It should.
Comments