The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike

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Lionel Trilling's Essays (How lucky my Dad was to have studied with Trilling in the late forties at Columbia!)

Trilling's Sandbags: Lionel Trilling's Critical Essays
By Stefan Collini

This article appeared in the December 22, 2008 edition of The Nation.
December 3, 2008



There is, for many of us, something vaguely oppressive about the thought of having to reread Lionel Trilling now. His elegant periods, always in danger of sliding into sonorousness; his confident, familiar invocation of the great names of modern European thought and literature; his cultivated superiority to all that might be tainted by provincialism or pragmatism, which, he concedes with the stoical air of the dutiful mourner at a funeral, amounts to most of American life; and above all, that elusive but pervasive note that runs through his prose--the note of a mind taking stock of its resources and finding that they are, despite their fragility, adequate to its tasks. We can't help feeling that we should be improved by reading Trilling, and this feeling itself is inevitably oppressive.

The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society
by Lionel Trilling
Buy this book

The Journey Abandoned: The Unfinished Novel
by Lionel Trilling
Buy this book


The previous paragraph, as will have been evident to those familiar with Trilling's writing, deliberately blends characterization with homage and pastiche. His liberal use of the first-person plural to suggest a community of the like-minded was a much criticized mannerism, as was his unembarrassed recourse to cultural name-dropping as a substitute for argument. Then there was the too ready suggestion of rereading, signaling his great storehouse of literary experience. And finally, there was the characteristic structure of a Trilling sentence, with the clauses queuing up to make their restraining or amplifying comment on their predecessors. The blending of homage and pastiche in my tribute may be expressive of the ambivalence Trilling excites. We, I might imitatively say, admire him; we may even sense that we need him; yet it remains true that we have ever so slightly to brace ourselves for a prolonged spell in his company. Reading him keeps us up to the mark, but we can't help but be aware that the mark is set rather higher than we are used to.

All this may seem puzzling to those for whom Trilling is little more than a name, especially those who have grown up since his death, in 1975. It may be hard to understand why he was, a couple of generations ago, one of academia's most cherished culture heroes, one of the few saints of modern literary criticism. It may be harder still to make the case for why Trilling, in his antique, mannered way, might matter now. But if so, there can be few better places to start than with a reconsideration of his most celebrated book, The Liberal Imagination (first published in 1950), reissued with a brief, deft introduction by Louis Menand, thought by some to come as near as anyone can to being Trilling's successor today.

The scale of the book's success on first publication seems scarcely credible today. It belonged, after all, to a genre most present-day publishers shun as utterly unsalable. It was a collection of essays; the essays had all been previously published in some form; and perhaps most unpromising of all, they were essays in literary criticism. Yet the hardcover sold an initial 70,000 copies, and then the paperback a further 100,000. Menand remarks that the volume "made literary criticism matter to people who were not literary critics," which is true enough but may understate its reach. A similar work that sold, say, 20,000 copies would already be doing that. The Liberal Imagination made Trilling's version of literary criticism matter to a readership that was in search of something more than criticism, perhaps more than literature itself. His essays spoke to a cultural or political moment in a way that is now hard to reconstruct and surely impossible to repeat. But why does it seem unimaginable that any work by a literary critic might have a similar impact now? Has "the culture" changed too much? Has "literary criticism"? Have "we"?

Trilling, we should begin by remembering, was a native of a peculiar and distinctive territory just off the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. Born in New York in 1905 to first-generation Jewish immigrants, he spent almost his entire life in Manhattan and was as closely identified with the peculiar hothouse intellectual life of that skinny island as any avatars of Bloomsbury or the Latin Quarter ever were with that of their own geographically circumscribed milieus. He was Columbia, man and boy, and perhaps no figure better represented that university in its heyday in the first couple of decades after 1945. But he was also, from his earliest adult years, a contributor to the serious end of the literary and intellectual journalism that has thrived so abundantly in that fertile cultural soil. In his early 20s, exploring his Jewishness, he wrote for The Menorah Journal; in his early 30s, sharing in a broader political radicalism, he became a stalwart of Partisan Review (once it had sloughed off its initial Stalinist identity); by his early 40s, cultivating his critical voice, he was one of the contributors most sought after by all the leading journals of opinion, including The Nation, as well as by the premier literary-critical journals like The Kenyon Review. The sixteen essays collected in The Liberal Imagination were mostly revised versions of pieces that had appeared in these last three periodicals, all initially published between 1940 and 1949.

It was during that decade that Trilling secured his academic career and began to build a scholarly as well as literary-journalistic reputation. In the late 1920s and right through the '30s, he had struggled to make ends meet with a series of temporary or part-time appointments, held back by the economic circumstances of the Depression, his failure to finish his PhD and his being Jewish. But in 1938 he finally completed the dissertation, and its publication in 1939 as Matthew Arnold brought immediate recognition as well as appointment as an assistant professor (at 34). Trilling became the first Jew to obtain a permanent position in Columbia's English department, and thereafter his promotion was relatively rapid. A short book on E.M. Forster followed in 1943; the choice of Arnold and Forster as subjects indicated deeper intellectual and political affinities as well as a lifelong Anglophilia.

Trilling brought academic authority to his forays into literary journalism, though his learning was by no means confined to English literature. The names he invokes so freely in his essays tend to be continental European more often than English, and many of them were not writers of "literature" in any narrow sense. In common with others of that loose grouping known as the New York Intellectuals (such as Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg and, slightly later, Irving Howe), Trilling drew upon Romantic and post-Romantic literature and thought, and especially his intense engagement with European Modernism, in his efforts to shame parochial Americans and redress the narrowness of radical politics. His range, as well as his name-dropping, are most strikingly illustrated by the opening pages of the essay in The Liberal Imagination titled "Freud and Literature." By the second page there has already been mention of Diderot, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Goethe and Shaw; the next page brings Rousseau, Blake, Wordsworth, Burke, Coleridge, Arnold and Schiller; followed on the next by Mill, Shelley, Schlegel, Sand, Ibsen, Tieck and Stendhal; and quite soon thereafter by Dostoyevsky, Poe, Baudelaire, Nerval, Rimbaud, Proust, Eliot, Kafka, Mann and Joyce. Most of his essays do not attempt to mass the cultural cavalry on this scale, but his writing always implies that he is on familiar terms with the great names of the Old World who could be called upon to make up for the failings of the New.

Trilling explains in his "Preface" that his essays are linked by their concern with "the ideas of what we loosely call liberalism, especially the relation of these ideas to literature." Notoriously, he nowhere defines what he means by his rather idiosyncratic use of "liberalism." Occasionally, he suggests a lineage stretching back to Bentham and Mill; more frequently he associates the term with the broadly radical or progressive political impulse prominent in American life in the 1930s and into the '40s; later he would claim that he had chiefly had in mind the fashionable enthusiasm for Stalinism. Perhaps his most interesting, as well as illuminating, comment on the subject comes in his essay, "The Function of the Little Magazine"; he appears to be glossing his sense of "liberalism" when he writes: "Our educated class has a ready if mild suspiciousness of the profit motive, a belief in progress, science, social legislation, planning, and international cooperation, perhaps especially where Russia is in question."

However, as the cumulative effect of the essays comes to be felt, the target expands until it seems to be the narrowness of practically any politics that is being chided and corrected. Trilling takes his place in the long line of cultural critics, Arnold pre-eminent among them, but stretching from Coleridge and Carlyle to Eliot and Leavis (to cite only some of the most obvious names), who have sought in literature an antidote to the mechanical and instrumental tendencies of political and economic reason--literature understood as (in Trilling's much-quoted phrase) "the human activity that takes the fullest and most precise account of variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty." The character (and presumably much of the impact) of The Liberal Imagination comes from his use of the genre of the critical essay to dramatize this conflict and to gesture toward some of the ways our sense of "variousness, possibility, complexity, and difficulty" is extended and given content by great writers, above all by the novelists of the previous 150 years.

In these essays Trilling writes as a literary critic, but so much of what he writes is not literary criticism, at least not in any of the stricter forms of that activity made familiar by Eliot, Empson and the New Critics. The essay in the collection that is sometimes referred to as Trilling's most extended exercise in close reading, on Wordsworth's "Immortality Ode," is still far from being any kind of New Critical exercise in the detection of tensions and paradoxes in the verbal texture of the poem. Its energies are focused on the attempt to identify and translate "what the poem says," and so even this, his most purely exegetical essay, concludes by telling us that the "Immortality Ode" is about "something common to us all, the development of the sense of reality." Even here, and a fortiori in the more discursive essays, literary criticism serves the purposes of moral instruction. More generally, it is striking how little he quotes compared with most critics; nor does he have a great deal to say about the formal properties of particular literary works. "The moral life" is really Trilling's home turf. Quite a lot of his writing is a kind of natural history of the moral life, a characteristic that comes most clearly into view in his last book, Sincerity and Authenticity (1972).

Trilling's use of literature for the purposes of moral pedagogy, and the drawbacks of such an exercise, are notably illustrated in his celebrated essay on Henry James's The Princess Casamassima. The novel is not normally regarded as one of James's finest, and Trilling does not sufficiently attend to the details to be likely to convert any resistant reader to a more positive view. Yet he manages to deploy aspects of James's tale to underwrite a probing, at times moving, meditation on the moral or human limitations likely to attend upon any overzealous commitment to radical political change. The novel might be said to dramatize--or at least, more creakingly, to stage--the conflict between the claims of culture and social justice, and its portrait of those who pursue the latter by extreme (anarchist) means is far from flattering. Tough-minded progressives scorned the book accordingly as an example of the inherently reactionary tendency of James's elaborate filigree work and his lack of attention to the "realities" of social and political conditions. In his essay, Trilling triumphantly turns the charge of "unrealism" on its head. The novel, he argues, provides "a brilliantly precise representation of social actuality." But it does more than this, and more (and other) than its radical critics ever do: it understands and captures the essence of tragedy, the irresolvable conflict of fundamental values. This he calls, in a favored phrase, "moral realism." It is "the informing spirit of The Princess Casamassima and it yields a kind of social and political knowledge which is hard to come by." It is not clear that this rather flawed James novel is actually as good as Trilling needs it to be to sustain his larger case, and this is not the only instance where one wonders whether Trilling's magnificent moral edifice has not been built on rather shaky literary foundations. Nonetheless, the essay, moving out from literary criticism, becomes a powerful secular sermon.

Writing that is this high-toned is also high-risk. At times Trilling's characteristic emphasis on ethical education can seem out of proportion to the literary subject matter, banging the drum too loudly in order to disguise the lack of rewarding melody. Consider, for example, his explanation of why Huckleberry Finn is a "subversive" book: "No one who reads thoughtfully the dialectic of Huck's great moral crisis will ever again be wholly able to accept without some question and some irony the assumptions of the respectable morality by which he lives, nor will ever again be certain that what he considers the clear dictates of moral reason are not merely the engrained customary beliefs of his time and place." One response to this might be to say that anyone capable of this kind of "thoughtful" reading is not likely to be a prisoner of social convention in the first place, and vice versa. The passage risks both patronizing the imagined reader and imputing an unrealistic power to Twain's book. In such passages, the adjective "moral" appears overworked, now indicating the merely conventional social codes, now referring to the wider human vision offered by the critic.

The half-dozen best pieces in the volume are among Trilling's most admired writings, and justly so: "Reality in America," "The Princess Casamassima," "Huckleberry Finn," "Manners, Morals, and the Novel," "The Kinsey Report," "The Meaning of a Literary Idea"--these are all essays that stay in the reader's mind and work there more fruitfully than do whole books by most other critics. But if, to recommend him to a new generation of readers, one wanted to take a representative example of Trilling at work, one could hardly do better than the rather slighter essay on F. Scott Fitzgerald, the bulk of which appeared as a review in The Nation in 1945.

Fitzgerald may at first seem a surprising enthusiasm, but the basis for it becomes clear in the first paragraph, in which Trilling invites us to admire "the moral force of the poise and fortitude which marked Fitzgerald's mind." The essay proves to be yet another example of Trilling's propensity to use literary criticism as a vehicle for ethical reflection. Fitzgerald, we are told, "really had but little impulse to blame, which is the more remarkable because our culture peculiarly honors the act of blaming, which it takes as the sign of virtue and intellect." A casual reading of this sentence might suggest the perspective of a relaxed post-Freudian moralist, pardoning all because understanding all; but it is in fact Trilling who, characteristically, is adopting the more strenuous position. Real "virtue and intellect," he is suggesting, require something at once more discriminating and less immediately gratifying than the slack disposition to confirm one's self-righteousness by so readily apportioning blame.

When he goes on to begin a sentence with such an iteration of self-evidence as "In the equipment of the moralist and therefore in the equipment of the novelist," we know we are on home ground. Authoritative asides along the way reinforce the sense that we are in a rhetorical universe not afraid of wise saws and sententiousness: "The form, that is, is not the result of careful 'plotting'--the form of a good novel never is," or "What underlies all success in poetry...is the poet's voice." Nor is there any shrinking from the high notes in his praise of the "voice" of Fitzgerald the novelist: "It is characteristically modest, yet it has in it, without apology or self-consciousness, a largeness, even a stateliness, which derives from Fitzgerald's connection with tradition and with mind, from his sense of what has been done before and the demands which this past accomplishment makes." Trilling's own "voice" was perhaps neither so modest nor so free from self-consciousness, but otherwise the element of identification is surely clear. When, having quoted a longish passage, he says that it exemplifies "the habitual music of Fitzgerald's seriousness," the warmth of the commendation is palpable. But Trilling's prose also incorporates a recurring note of self-criticism: "I am aware that I have involved Fitzgerald with a great many great names," he writes at one point, catching himself, and changes the register. This is rather like what Arnold called Burke's "return upon himself," and such arrests are part of the appeal of Trilling's writing, a style expressive of his balanced, dialectical mind.

Later scholars have offered various explanations for the remarkable success of The Liberal Imagination. These explanations have included: Trilling's subtle blending of the authority of the academic scholar with the address of the freelance critic; the stage reached in the growth of an educated reading public not yet cut off from the accelerating specialisms of the universities; the cold war context in which even subtle or disguised critiques of Stalinism were assured of a ready welcome; the peculiar position of the New York Intellectuals in the cultural demography of the United States in these years, at once outsiders who intellectually outranked most insiders and insiders claiming the license of outsiders. But if for a moment we take an even wider view and consider the book's success in an international perspective, it is the prestige of literary criticism in these years, certainly in the United States and Britain, that seems such a remarkable historical phenomenon. What Randall Jarrell called "the Age of Criticism" may have stretched only from the late 1930s to the mid-'60s, at most--the decade after 1945 was its true heyday--but the activity enjoyed a remarkable standing among a bookish public eager to find guidance about life in the meditations of critics on irony in John Donne or self-realization in George Eliot, a public mostly not, or not yet, disposed to fret too much about the kinds of cultural homogeneity on which such acceptance of a narrow literary canon depended.

Reviewing The Liberal Imagination in The Hudson Review in 1950, R.W.B. Lewis shrewdly remarked that Trilling's "noble sadness" provided "sandbags for the will." The essays are marked, though not disfigured, by the pathos of stoicism, that slightly stagy bracing of the brow for a buffeting from an indifferent universe that had been raised to an art form by Arnold. In Trilling's sensibility, stoicism is the natural partner to tragedy, not the least of their value being the way they convict more cheerful or more optimistic sensibilities of existential shallowness. Another reviewer, Clifton Fadiman, writing in The New Yorker, spoke of the way Trilling rehabilitated "the Big Words that Hemingway's generation thought it had choked to death," and it's true that his readiness with terms like "love," "the imagination," "the will" and so on is one of the things that gives Trilling's prose an oddly archaic air. But the value that his work, early and late, speaks up for most convincingly is "intelligence" (he liked to quote, as have many since, the line of his Columbia teacher John Erskine on "the moral obligation to be intelligent"). In the 1930s and '40s, with radical progressivism in the ascendant among the intellectuals of Trilling's Manhattan, this entailed being a dissenter "from the orthodoxies of dissent." But although he could be allergic to the coerciveness of intellectual or political fashion, his was never the facile and purely reactive identity of the "contrarian." Rather, his critical essays enact the effort to see the topical and the transient through the optic of a rich, subtle cultural tradition that has attempted to take the measure of the divided and frustrated nature of human experience. The result is sometimes merely portentous--as when he says of the Kinsey report, with not quite enough self-irony, that "the best thing about the Report is the quality that makes us remember Lucretius"--but at its best his writing makes the critical essay seem like the genre in which a kind of wisdom is most naturally at home.

For most of his career, certainly its early decades, Trilling was reluctant to classify himself as a "critic" or, less appealing still, a "scholar": the self-image he craved and nurtured, in the face of an increasingly discouraging lack of achievement, was "writer," which meant, above all, "novelist." By the mid-1940s he had published several short stories, including the much anthologized "Of This Time, of That Place," and his one novel, The Middle of the Journey (1947). That book, essentially a "novel of ideas" about the demands of maturity in politics and personal life, received a rather grudging reception, with several reviewers opting for the predictable complaint that the heavy load of the "ideas" weighed down and eventually capsized the fragile narrative craft in which they were carried. Trilling never published another novel, and it has usually been assumed that the chilly reception of his firstborn deterred him from further efforts in the genre. But among his papers deposited at Columbia is the typescript of what seems to be the first third or so of an unfinished and untitled novel, apparently written shortly after he completed The Middle of the Journey. Geraldine Murphy has now edited this text for publication, giving it (alluding also to his wife Diana Trilling's memoir of their shared lives, The Beginning of the Journey, published in 1994) the title The Journey Abandoned.

The 154 printed pages are full of interest, testifying to Trilling's gifts as a social observer and recorder of the eddies and velleities of the inner life and to his difficulty in subduing his reflectiveness to the demands of adequately pacey and dramatic action. There are overtones of Forster and James in this story of the anxieties and temptations of the literary life--the expression of character through the niceties (and brutalities) of social exchange is one of its strengths. It is impossible to say what fate the completed novel might have assigned to its central protagonist--a variant on one of Trilling's favored types, "the young man from the provinces"--but the indications are that, with the follow-up to The Middle of the Journey, Trilling was struggling with a less directly political working-out of such characteristic themes as the corruption of ambition and the betrayals of desire.

For that reason, the appearance of this fragment may seem to support the view that Trilling's later career, with his fastidious disdain for the inevitable crudities of politics, signaled a move in an increasingly apolitical direction. Trilling clearly did become culturally more conservative, especially in reaction to the perceived excesses of the 1960s, but he surely remained too political an animal to countenance any aestheticist withdrawal. The obligation to be intelligent included being intelligent about politics, and he knew that a lofty disdain for the difficult business of managing the conditions of collective life was crassly unintelligent.

Some writers who invoke "complexity" are in practice as bleakly schematic as those they criticize. In their hands "complexity" just means "my simplicity rather than your simplicity." But that is not the case with Trilling. There is enough ambivalence and conflict in him to make the movement of his mind naturally dialectical. Diana Trilling later spoke of "the grave energy" of her husband's middle years, and that almost oxymoronic phrase nicely captures something about the stretched tension discernible not exactly "beneath" the polish of his Augustan periods but actually within them, preventing them from slipping into weakly mock-Augustan imitation. And this sense of him is deepened when we read in Diana Trilling's memoir about his anxieties and depressions, his long, drawn-out but inconclusive analysis, and the difficulties this effortlessly polished writer sometimes had in writing anything at all. Trilling, it seems, was a divided character, as would perhaps have to have been partly true of someone from his background who had turned himself into a facsimile of a courtly English gentleman at home in the tweedy world of Ivy League English departments in the 1940s and '50s. "The return of the repressed" would be an inaccurate as well as overdramatic figure to describe this tension, but Trilling's prose benefits from those moments when a more bohemian, Greenwich Village voice threatens to disrupt the donnish calm of the Morningside Heights seminar room.

One anxiety that only rarely surfaces in these essays becomes more visible in his work in subsequent decades, the anxiety that, in drawing back from expecting too much from politics, we might end up expecting too much from literature. This is not quite the view commonly associated with the later Trilling--namely, that in installing the masterpieces of modern literature in the curriculum, we routinize them and deprive the experience of reading them of its personally disorienting intensity. It is, rather, a more interesting "return upon himself" in which he raises doubts about the efficacy of what he had once seemed most eagerly to propose. Perhaps Trilling the writer intermittently felt the need to rescue the anarchic energies of literature, the purposeless purposiveness of the aesthetic impulse, from the worthy ambitions of Trilling the moral pedagogue.

"Mind," "culture," "the moral life"--these Big Words make us a little uncomfortable nowadays, and we have difficulty using them other than in a knowing, allusive way. But they are the notes that make up the habitual music of Trilling's seriousness. In allowing him the last word, I choose a passage from his great essay "Manners, Morals, and the Novel" in which he reaches for the highest of high notes and holds it, unwaveringly, for just long enough: "Some paradox of our natures leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion. It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination."



About Stefan Collini
Stefan Collini, the author of Common Reading: Critics, Historians, Publics, is a professor of intellectual history and English literature at Cambridge University. more...

SLAVOJ ZIZEK

The Deadly Jester

Adam Kirsch, The New Republic Published: Wednesday, December 03, 2008


In Defense of Lost Causes

By Slavoj Zizek


(Verso, 504 pp., $34.95)

Violence

By Slavoj Zizek

(Picador, 272 pp., $14)

I.

Last year the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek published a piece in The New York Times deploring America's use of torture to extract a confession from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who is thought to have masterminded the attacks of September 11. The arguments that Zizek employed could have been endorsed without hesitation by any liberal-minded reader. Yes, he acknowledged, Mohammed's crimes were "clear and horrifying"; but by torturing him the United States was turning back the clock on centuries of legal and moral progress, reverting to the barbarism of the Middle Ages. We owe it to ourselves, Zizek argued, not to throw away "our civilization's greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity." For anyone who is familiar with Zizek's many books, what was striking about the piece was how un-Zizekian it was. Yes, there were the telltale marks--quotations from Hegel and Agamben kept company with a reference to the television show 24, creating the kind of high-low frisson for which Zizek is celebrated. But for the benefit of the Times readers, Zizek was writing, rather surprisingly, as if the United States was basically a decent country that had strayed into sin.

He was being dishonest. What Zizek really believes about America and torture can be seen in his new book, Violence, when he discusses the notorious torture photos from Abu Ghraib: "Abu Ghraib was not simply a case of American arrogance towards a Third World people; in being submitted to humiliating tortures, the Iraqi prisoners were effectively initiated into American culture." Torture, far from being a betrayal of American values actually offers "a direct insight into American values, into the very core of the obscene enjoyment that sustains the U.S. way of life." This, to Zizek's many admirers, is more like it.

It also provides a fine illustration of the sort of dialectical reversal that is Zizek's favorite intellectual stratagem, and which gives his writing its disorienting, counterintuitive dazzle. Torture, which appears to be un-American, is pronounced to be the thing that is most American. It follows that the legalization of torture, far from barbarizing the United States, is actually a step toward humanizing it. According to the old Marxist logic, it heightens the contradictions, bringing us closer to the day when we realize, as Zizek writes, that "universal human rights" are an ideological sham, "effectively the rights of white male property owners to exchange freely on the market and exploit workers and women."

Nor does Zizek simply condemn Al Qaeda's violence as "horrifying." Fundamentalist Islam may seem reactionary, but "in a curious inversion," he characteristically observes, "religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today's society. It has become one of the sites of resistance." And the whole premise of Violence, as of Zizek's recent work in general, is that resistance to the liberal-democratic order is so urgent that it justifies any degree of violence. "Everything is to be endorsed here," he writes in Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, "up to and including religious 'fanaticism.'"




The curious thing about the Zizek phenomenon is that the louder he applauds violence and terror--especially the terror of Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, whose "lost causes" Zizek takes up in another new book, In Defense of Lost Causes--the more indulgently he is received by the academic left, which has elevated him into a celebrity and the center of a cult. A glance at the blurbs on his books provides a vivid illustration of the power of repressive tolerance. In Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, Zizek claims, "Better the worst Stalinist terror than the most liberal capitalist democracy"; but on the back cover of the book we are told that Zizek is "a stimulating writer" who "will entertain and offend, but never bore." In The Fragile Absolute, he writes that "the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred"; but this is an example of his "typical brio and boldness." And In Defense of Lost Causes, where Zizek remarks that "Heidegger is 'great' not in spite of, but because of his Nazi engagement," and that "crazy, tasteless even, as it may sound, the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not 'essential' enough"; but this book, its publisher informs us, is "a witty, adrenalinfueled manifesto for universal values."

In the same witty book Zizek laments that "this is how the establishment likes its 'subversive' theorists: harmless gadflies who sting us and thus awaken us to the inconsistencies and imperfections of our democratic enterprise--God forbid that they might take the project seriously and try to live it." How is it, then, that Slavoj Zizek, who wants not to correct democracy but to destroy it, has been turned into one of the establishment's pet subversives, who "tries to live" the revolution most completely as a jet-setting professor at the European Graduate School, a senior researcher at the University of Ljubljana's Institute of Sociology, and the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities?

A part of the answer has to do with Zizek's enthusiasm for American popular culture. Despite the best attempts of critical theory to demystify American mass entertainment, to lay bare the political subtext of our movies and pulp fiction and television shows, pop culture remains for most Americans apolitical and anti-political--a frivolous zone of entertainment and distraction. So when the theory-drenched Zizek illustrates his arcane notions with examples from Nip/ Tuck and Titanic, he seems to be signaling a suspension of earnestness. The effect is quite deliberate. In The Metastases of Enjoyment, for instance, he writes that "Jurassic Park is a chamber drama about the trauma of fatherhood in the style of the early Antonioni or Bergman." Elsewhere he asks, "Is Parsifal not a model for Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, with Laurence Fishburne in the role of Gurnemanz?" Those are laugh lines, and they cunningly disarm the anxious or baffled reader with their playfulness. They relieve his reader with an expectation of comic hyperbole, and this expectation is then carried over to Zizek's political proclamations, which are certainly hyperbolic but not at all comic.

When, in 1994, during the siege of Sarajevo, Zizek wrote that "there is no difference" between life in that city and life in any American or Western European city, that "it is no longer possible to draw a clear and unambiguous line of separation between us who live in a 'true' peace and the residents of Sarajevo"--well, it was only natural for readers to think that he did not really mean it, just as he did not really mean that Jurassic Park is like a Bergman movie. This intellectual promiscuity is the privilege of the licensed jester, of the man whom The Chronicle of Higher Education dubbed "the Elvis of cultural theory."

In person, too, Zizek plays the jester with practiced skill. Every journalist who sits down to interview him comes away with a smile on his face. Robert Boynton, writing in Lingua Franca in 1998, found Zizek "bearded, disheveled, and loud ... like central casting's pick for the role of Eastern European Intellectual." Boynton was amused to see the manic, ranting philosopher order mint tea and sugar cookies: "'Oh, I can't drink anything stronger than herbal tea in the afternoon,' he says meekly. 'Caffeine makes me too nervous.'" The intellectual parallel is quite clear: in life, as in his writing, Zizek is all bark and no bite. Like a naughty child who flashes an irresistible grin, it is impossible to stay angry at him for long.

I witnessed the same deception a few weeks ago, when Zizek appeared with Bernard-Henri Lévy at the New York Public Library. The two philosopher-celebrities came on stage to the theme music from Superman, and their personae were so perfectly opposed that they did indeed nudge each other into cartoonishness: Lévy was all the more Gallic and debonair next to Zizek, who seemed all the more wild-eyed and Slavic next to Lévy. Thus it was perfectly natural for the audience to erupt in laughter when Zizek, at one point in the generally unacrimonious evening, told Lévy: "Don't be afraid--when we take over you will not go to the Gulag, just two years of reeducation camp." Solzhenitsyn had died only a few weeks earlier, but it would have been a kind of betise to identify Zizek's Gulag with Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. When the audience laughed, it was playing into his hands, and hewing to the standard line on Zizek, which Rebecca Mead laid down in a profile of him in The New Yorker a few years ago: "Always to take Slavoj Zizek seriously would be to make a category mistake."




II.

Whether or not it would be always a mistake to take Slavoj Zizek seriously, surely it would not be a mistake to take him seriously just once. He is, after all, a famous and influential thinker. So it might be worthwhile to consider Zizek's work as if he means it--to ask what his ideas really are, and what sort of effects they are likely to have.

Zizek is a believer in the Revolution at a time when almost nobody, not even on the left, thinks that such a cataclysm is any longer possible or even desirable. This is his big problem, and also his big opportunity. While "socialism" remains a favorite hate-word for the Republican right, the prospect of communism overthrowing capitalism is now so remote, so fantastic, that nobody feels strongly moved to oppose it, as conservatives and liberal anticommunists opposed it in the 1930s, the 1950s, and even the 1980s. When Zizek turns up speaking the classical language of Marxism-Leninism, he profits from the assumption that the return of ideas that were once the cause of tragedy can now occur only in the form of farce. In the visual arts, the denaturing of what were once passionate and dangerous icons has become commonplace, so that emblems of evil are transformed into perverse fun, harmless but very profitable statements of post-ideological camp; and there is a kind of intellectual equivalent of this development in Zizek's work. The cover of his book The Parallax View reproduces a Socialist Realist portrait of "Lenin at the Smolny Institute," in the ironically unironic fashion made familiar by the pseudo-iconoclastic work of Komar and Melamid, Cai Guo-Jiang, and other post-Soviet, post-Mao artists. He, too, expects you to be in on the joke. But there is a difference between Zizek and the other jokesters. It is that he is not really joking.

Like them, Zizek, who was born in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, in 1949, spent his formative years under communism. As an undergraduate, he acquired what would become a lifelong fascination with the work of Jacques Lacan; later he went to Paris to be analyzed by Lacan's son-in-law and heir, Jacques-Alain Miller, and to this day Lacanian ideas and terms form one of the foundations of Zizek's thought. His academic career was evidently sidetracked by communist bureaucrats who believed, no doubt correctly, that his eccentric brilliance would make him politically unreliable. In the 1980s, he was involved in establishing Slovenia's opposition Liberal Democratic Party, and he even ran for office, unsuccessfully, in the newly independent country's elections in 1990. It would be interesting to know more about Zizek's activities in this period, so as to understand how this erstwhile liberal democrat emerged as an idolator of Lenin and a contemptuous foe of liberal democracy.

For if Zizek benefits, practically speaking, from the repudiation of the communist dream, it is also his central grievance. Since he mixes high theory and low culture--one of his books, Enjoy Your Symptom!, is a primer on Lacan that illustrates his theories with examples from Hollywood movies--it is tempting to classify him as another postmodernist. But Zizek is quite capable of distinguishing between pop culture, which is the air we all breathe, and postmodern relativism, which he unequivocally rejects. His recent work, in fact, is strictly conservative in its hostility to the libertarian and improvisatory aspects of contemporary Western culture. His attitude toward homosexuality, for instance, is that of a mid-century Freudian: he regards it as a symptom of debilitating narcissism. In Violence, he suggests that homosexuality is a step on the road to onanism: "first, in homosexuality, the other sex is excluded (one does it with another person of the same sex). Then, in a kind of mockingly Hegelian negation of negation, the very dimension of otherness is cancelled: one does it with oneself." Transsexuals are even more threatening: "The ultimate difference, the 'transcendental' difference that grounds human identity itself, thus turns into something open to manipulation: the ultimate plasticity of being human is asserted instead." When it comes to the brave new world of contemporary bioethics, Zizek is as hidebound as any Catholic traditionalist.

Zizek suspects all these postmodernist twenty-first-century phenomena because his political program is, as he recognizes, a throwback to the political modernism of the twentieth century, with its utopian longing for a violent, total transformation of human society. Only this kind of revolution, he believes, is real politics. More: only in the violence of revolution do we touch reality at all. "The ultimate and defining experience of the twentieth century," he declares, "was the direct experience of the Real as opposed to the everyday social reality--the Real in its extreme violence as the price to be paid for peeling off the deceptive layers of reality." Zizek, too, feels this longing for the Real, and he recognizes that this puts him in opposition to his times, in which the Virtual does quite nicely. He deplores "one of the great postmodern motifs, that of the Real Thing towards which one should maintain a proper distance." He wants to close that distance, to seize the Real Thing.

It makes sense, then, that the popculture artifact that speaks most deeply to Zizek, and to which he returns again and again in his work, is The Matrix. In this film, you will remember, the hero, played by Keanu Reeves, is initiated into a terrible secret: the world as we know it does not actually exist, but is merely a vast computer simulation projected into our brains. When the hero is unplugged from this simulation, he finds that the human race has in reality been enslaved by rebellious robots, who use the Matrix to keep us docile while literally sucking the energy from our bodies. When Laurence Fishburne, Reeves's mentor, shows him the true state of the Earth, blasted by nuclear bombs, he proclaims: "Welcome to the desert of the real!"

When Zizek employed this phrase as the title of a short book about the September 11 attacks and their aftermath, he was not making an ironic pop reference. He was drawing an edifying parallel. Why is it, the communist revolutionary must inevitably reflect, that nobody wants a communist revolution? Why do people in the West seem so content in what Zizek calls "the Francis Fukuyama dream of the 'end of history'"? For most of us, this may not seem like a hard question to answer: one need only compare the experience of communist countries with the experience of democratic ones. But Zizek is not an empiricist, or a liberal, and he has another answer. It is that capitalism is the Matrix, the illusion in which we are trapped.

This, of course, is merely a flamboyant sci-fi formulation of the old Marxist concept of false consciousness. "Our 'freedoms,'" Zizek writes in Welcome to the Desert of the Real, "themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom." This is the central instance in Zizek's work of the kind of dialectical reversal, the clever anti-liberal inversion, that is the basic movement of his mind. It could hardly be otherwise, considering that his intellectual gods are Hegel and Lacan--masters of the dialectic, for whom reality never appears except in the form of the illusion or the symptom. In both their systems, the interpreter--the philosopher for Hegel, the analyst for Lacan--is granted absolute, unchallengeable authority. Most people are necessarily in thrall to appearances, and thereby to the deceptions of power; but the interpreter is somehow immune to them, and can singlehandedly recognize and expose the hidden meanings, the true processes at work in History or in the Unconscious.

This sacerdotal notion of intellectual authority makes both thinkers essentially hostile to democracy, which holds that the truth is available in principle to everyone, and that every individual must be allowed to speak for himself. Zizek, too, sees the similarity--or, as he says, "the profound solidarity"--between his favorite philosophical traditions. "Their structure," he acknowledges, "is inherently 'authoritarian': since Marx and Freud opened up a new theoretical field which sets the very criteria of veracity, their words cannot be put to the test the same way one is allowed to question the statements of their followers." Note that the term "authoritarian" is not used here pejoratively. For Zizek, it is precisely this authoritarianism that makes these perspectives appealing. Their "engaged notion of truth" makes for "struggling theories, not only theories about struggle."

But to know what is worth struggling for, you need theories about struggle. Only if you have already accepted the terms of the struggle--in Zizek's case, the class struggle--can you move on to the struggling theory that teaches you how to fight. In this sense, Zizek the dialectician is at bottom entirely undialectical. That liberalism is evil and that communism is good is not his conclusion, it is his premise; and the contortions of his thought, especially in his most political books, result from the need to reconcile that premise with a reality that seems abundantly to indicate the opposite.

Hence the necessity of the Matrix, or something like it, for Zizek's worldview. And hence his approval of anything that unplugs us from the Matrix and returns us to the desert of the real--for instance, the horrors of September 11. One of the ambiguities of Zizek's recent work lies in his attitude toward the kind of Islamic fundamentalists who perpetrated the attacks. On the one hand, they are clearly reactionary in their religious dogmatism; on the other hand, they have been far more effective than the Zapatistas or the Porto Alegre movement in discomfiting American capitalism. As Zizek observes, "while they pursue what appear to us to be evil goals with evil means, the very form of their activity meets the highest standard of the good." Yes, the good: Mohammed Atta and his comrades exemplified "good as the spirit of and actual readiness for sacrifice in the name of some higher cause." Zizek's dialectic allows him to have it all: the jihadis are not really motivated by religion, as they say they are; they are actually casualties of global capitalism, and thus "objectively" on the left. "The only way to conceive of what happened on September 11," he writes, "is to locate it in the context of the antagonisms of global capitalism."




III.

'Will America finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world"? Zizek asked in 2002. The answer was no. Even September 11 did not succeed in robbing the West of its liberal illusions. What remains, then, for the would-be communist? The truly dialectical answer, the kind of answer that Marx would have given, is that the adaptations of capitalism must themselves prove fatally maladaptive. This is the answer that Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt gave in their popular neo-Marxist treatises Empire and Multitude: as global capitalism evolves into a kind of disembodied, centerless, virtual reality, it makes labor autonomous and renders capital itself unnecessary. But Zizek, in In Defense of Lost Causes, has no use for Negri's "heroic attempt to stick to fundamental Marxist coordinates." When it comes to the heart of the matter, what Zizek wants is not dialectic, but repetition: another Robespierre, another Lenin, another Mao. His "progressivism" is not linear, it is cyclical. And if objective conditions are different from what they were in 1789 or 1917, so much the worse for objective conditions. "True ideas are eternal, they are indestructible, they always return every time they are proclaimed dead," Zizek writes in his introduction. One of the sections in the book is titled "Give the dictatorship of the proletariat a chance!"

Of course, Zizek knows as well as anyone how many chances it has been given, and what the results have been. In his recent books, therefore, he 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 the tens of millions already lost in Russia, China, Cambodia, and elsewhere, Zizek is prepared to add however many more are required. He endorses the formula of the French radical philosopher Alain Badiou: "mieux vaut un desastre qu'un desetre," better a disaster than a lack of being.

This ontology of revolution raises some questions. On several occasions, Zizek describes the "utopian" moment of revolution as "divine." In support of this notion he adduces Walter Benjamin on "divine violence." "The most obvious candidate for 'divine violence,'" he writes in Violence, "is the violent explosion of resentment which finds expression in a spectrum that ranges from mob lynchings to revolutionary terror." It is true that Benjamin did, in his worst moments, endorse revolutionary violence in these terms. But for Benjamin, who had a quasi-mystical temperament, the divine was at least a real metaphysical category: when he said divine, he meant divine. For Zizek, who sometimes employs religious tropes but certainly does not believe in religion, "divine" is just an honorific--a lofty way of justifying his call for human sacrifices.

"In the revolutionary explosion as an Event," Zizek explains in In Defense of Lost Causes, "another utopian dimension shines through, the dimension of universal emancipation which, precisely, is the excess betrayed by the market reality which takes over 'the day after'--as such, this excess is not simply abolished, dismissed as irrelevant, but, as it were, transposed into the virtual realm." But if utopia is destined to remain virtual--if Robespierre is always followed by Bonaparte, and Lenin by Stalin--why should actual lives be sacrificed to it? Would it not be wiser to seek this "dimension," this "divinity," bloodlessly, outside politics, by means of the imagination?

But what if it is not the utopia that appeals to Zizek, but the blood and the sacrifice? That is certainly the impression he gives with his strange misreading of Benjamin's most famous image. In Violence, Zizek cites the passage in Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" that was inspired by Paul Klee's Angelus Novus:

"This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress."

The moral sublimity of this image, which has made it a touchstone for so many postwar thinkers, lies in Benjamin's opposition between the violence of history and the ineffectual but tireless witness of the angel. Violence lies in the nature of things, but the angel, who is the always-imminent messiah, resists this nature absolutely: his one desire is to "make whole what has been smashed." Yet here is Zizek's response to Benjamin: "And what if divine violence is the wild intervention of this angel?" What if "from time to time he strikes back to restore the balance, to enact a revenge"? Benjamin's point could not be more completely traduced: if the angel struck back, he would no longer be the angel. He would have gone over to the side of the "progress" that kills.

That is not Benjamin's side, but it is Zizek's. And in his recent writings, as the actual--or, in his Heideggerian terminology, the "ontic"--possibility of revolution recedes, its "ontological" importance has increased. No, the Revolution will not bring the millennium. As a historical science, Marxism is false. Divine violence "strikes from out of nowhere, a means without an end." And yet "one should nevertheless insist that there is no 'bad courage.'" The courage displayed in the Revolution is its own justification, it is the image of the utopia it cannot achieve. "The urge of the moment is the true utopia."

Zizek is hardly the only leftist thinker who has believed in the renovating power of violence, but it is hard to think of another one for whom the revolution itself was the acte gratuite. For the revolutionary, Zizek instructs in In Defense of Violence, violence involves "the heroic assumption of the solitude of a sovereign decision." He becomes the "master" (Zizek's Hegelian term) because "he is not afraid to die, [he] is ready to risk everything." True, "democratic materialism furiously rejects" the "infinite universal Truth" that such a figure brings, but that is because "democracy as a rule cannot reach beyond pragmatic utilitarian inertia ... a leader is necessary to trigger the enthusiasm for a Cause." In sum, "without the Hero, there is no Event"--a formula from a video game that Zizek quotes with approval. He grants that "there is definitely something terrifying about this attitude--however, this terror is nothing less than the condition of freedom."

There is a name for the politics that glorifies risk, decision, and will; that yearns for the hero, the master, and the leader; that prefers death and the infinite to democracy and the pragmatic; that finds the only true freedom in the terror of violence. Its name is not communism. Its name is fascism, and in his most recent work Zizek has inarguably revealed himself as some sort of fascist. He admits as much in Violence, where he quotes the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk on the "re-emerging Left-Fascist whispering at the borders of academia"--"where, I guess, I belong." There is no need to guess.

Zizek endorses one after another of the practices and the values of fascism, but he obstinately denies the label. Is "mass choreography displaying disciplined movements of thousands of bodies," of the kind Leni Riefenstahl loved to photograph, fascist? No, Zizek insists, "it was Nazism that stole" such displays "from the workers' movement, their original creator." (He is willfully blind to the old and obvious conclusion that totalitarian form accepts content from the left and the right.) Is there something fascist about what Adorno long ago called the jargon of authenticity--"the notions of decision, repetition, assuming one's destiny ... mass discipline, sacrifice of the individual for the collective, and so forth"? No, again: "there is nothing 'inherently fascist'" in all that. Is the cult of martyrdom that surrounds Che Guevara a holdover from the death worship of reactionary Latin American Catholicism, as Paul Berman has argued? Perhaps, Zizek grants, "but--so what?" "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."




IV.

That sentence is a remarkable moment in Zizek's writing. It stands out even among the many instances in which Zizek, before delivering himself of some monstrous sentiment, warns the reader of the need to be harsh, never to flinch before liberal pieties. In order to defend himself against the charge of proto-fascism, Zizek falls back on Goering's joke about Jews! This is not just the "adrenalin-fueled" audacity of the bold writer who "dares the reader to disagree." To produce this quotation in this context is a sign, I think, of something darker. It is a dare to himself to see how far he can go in the direction of indecency, of an obsession that has nothing progressive or revolutionary about it.

It is not surprising that it is the subject of the Jews that calls forth this impulse in Zizek, because the treatment of Jews and Judaism in his work has long been unsettling--and in a different way from his treatment of, say, the United States, which he simply denounces. Zizek's books are loosely structured and full of digressions, more like monologues than treatises, but for that very reason, his perpetual return to the subject of the Jews functions in his writing the way a similar fixation might function in an analysand's recital: as a hint of something hidden that requires critical examination.

Typically, the form that Zizek's remarks on Jews take is that of an exposition of the mentality of the anti-Semite. This is an unimpeachable and rather common forensic device, but somehow it does not quite account for the passionate detail of Zizek's explorations. Consider, for instance, the passage in The Metastases of Enjoyment in which Zizek, in order to explicate John McCumber's theory about "the logic of the signifier" in Hegel, writes: "In order to explain this 'reflexivity,' let us resort to the logic of anti-Semitism. First, the series of markers that designate real properties are abbreviated-immediated in the marker 'Jew': (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty...)--Jew. We then reverse the order and 'explicate' the marker 'Jew' with the series (avaricious, profiteering, plotting, dirty...)--that is, this series now provides the answer to the question 'What does "Jew" mean?'" In the ensuing discussion, Zizek goes on to recite this list of "Jewish" adjectives six more times.

It is an odd way to demonstrate a point of linguistic theory. Odd, too, is 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?

These moments, unpleasant as they are, are not quite expressions of anti-Semitism. But in In Defense of Lost Causes, Zizek does make plain what he might call the "fantasmatic screen" through which he sees Jews. This occurs in his discussion of Man Is Wolf to Man, the Gulag memoir of a Polish Jew named Janusz Bardach. In his book, Zizek writes, Bardach relates that when he was freed from the Kolyma camp but still forced to remain in the region, he took a job in a hospital, where he worked with a doctor on "a desperate method of providing the sick and starving prisoners with some vitamins and nutritious foodstuffs. The camp hospital had too large a stock of human blood for transfusions which it was planning to discard; Bardach reprocessed it, enriched it with vitamins from local herbs, and sold it back to the hospital." Later, when the hospital objected to this technique, Bardach found a way to do the same thing with deer blood, "and soon developed a successful business." Here is Zizek's reaction to this story: "My immediate racist association was, of course: 'Typical Jews! Even in the worst gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for maneuver, they start trading--in human blood!'"

Now, Zizek is telling this story against himself, as an illustration of the way "racism works as a spontaneous disposition lurking beneath the surface" of all our minds. Still, there is something chilling about that "of course": his implication is that we all harbor the association of Jews with profiteering and blood-drinking, though we ought to try to suppress it. It is at such a moment that one realizes that for Zizek, born and raised in a city that the Holocaust left almost without Jews (today the official Jewish Community of Slovenia estimates there are four hundred to six hundred Jews in the whole country), Jews are a mere abstraction, objects of fantasy and speculation, that can be forced to play any number of roles in his psychic economy.

In his recent writings, as his concerns have shifted more and more toward the political, the roles reserved for Jews and Judaism have become decidedly more negative. True, Zizek is less straightforwardly hostile to Israel than many European leftists. In his chapter on the subject in Violence, he writes that "everybody knows the only viable solution" to the Middle East stalemate is the two-state solution, with a Jewish state and a Palestinian state side by side. Yet Zizek's sovereign disdain for fact, along with his imaginative fixation on the Jews, ensures that his portrait of Israel is a malign fantasy.

"In all honesty I have to admit that every time I travel to Israel, I experience that strange thrill of entering a forbidden territory of illegitimate violence," he declares. "Does this mean I am (not so) secretly an anti-Semite?" (Note the disarming sincerity that expects absolution, and in Zizek's case usually receives it.) One manifestation of this illegitimate violence, he writes, is that "the Jews, the exemplary victims ... are now considering a radical 'ethnic cleansing' (the 'transfer'--a perfect Orwellian misnomer--of the Palestinians from the West Bank)." In fact, "the Jews" are not considering this at all; the only political party in Israel that did advocate such an obscenity, Meir Kahane's Kach, was banned from the Knesset for exactly that reason. But such merely empirical considerations cannot be allowed to stand in the way of Zizek's "dialectical" conclusion. As far back as World War II, he remarks, rehearsing one of the oldest and most pointless "ironies" of modern history, "the Nazis and the radical Zionists shared a common interest.... In both cases, the purpose was a kind of 'ethnic cleansing.'"




This method of alleviating European guilt by casting "the exemplary victims" of the Holocaust as in some sense the agents of holocaust is far from unknown on the European left. But what is less common, even there, is Zizek's resurrection of some of the oldest tropes of theological and philosophical anti-Semitism. The key text here is Zizek's book The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, which appeared in 2000. It addresses "the delicate question of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity."

In Zizek's telling, that relationship is sickeningly familiar. Invoking Freud's Moses and Monotheism, Zizek asserts that Judaism harbors a "'stubborn attachment' ... to the unacknowledged violent founding gesture that haunts the public legal order as its spectral supplement." Thanks to this Jewish stubbornness, he continues, "the Jews did not give up the ghost; they survived all their ordeals precisely because they refused to give up the ghost." This vision of Judaism as an undead religion, surviving zombie-like long past the date of its "natural" death, is taken over from Hegel, who writes in the Phenomenology of Mind about the "fatal unholy void" of this "most reprobate and abandoned" religion. This philosophical anti-Judaism, which appears in many modern thinkers, including Kant, is a descendant of the Christian anti-Judaism that created the figure of the Wandering Jew, who also "refused to give up the ghost."

It makes sense, then, that Zizek should finally cast his anti-Judaism in explicitly theological terms. Why is it that so many of the chief foes of totalitarianism in the second half of the twentieth century were Jews--Arendt, Berlin, Levinas? One might think it is because the Jews were the greatest victims of Nazi totalitarianism, and so had the greatest stake in ensuring that its evil was recognized. But Zizek has another explanation: the Jews are stubbornly rejecting the universal love that expresses itself in revolutionary terror, just as they rejected the love of Christ. "No wonder," he writes in the introduction to In Defense of Lost Causes, "that those who demand fidelity to the name 'Jews' are also those who warn us against the 'totalitarian' dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards allembracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror."

Stalinism, in this reading, is the heir to Christianity, and yet another attempt to overcome law with love. Here Zizek is explicating the views of Badiou, to whom the book is dedicated, but it is safe to say that Zizek endorses those views, since precisely the same logic is at work in The Fragile Absolute, where he writes of "the Jewish refusal to assert love for the neighbor outside the confines of the Law," as against the Christian "endeavor to break the very vicious cycle of Law/sin." "No wonder," Zizek says, "that, for those fully identified with the Jewish 'national substance' ... the appearance of Christ was a ridiculous and/or traumatic scandal."

It does not bother Zizek that this hoary dichotomy is built on a foundation of complete ignorance of both Judaism and Christianity. Nothing could be lazier than to recycle the ancient Christian myth of Judaism as a religion of "mere law." And nothing could be more insulting to Christianity than to reduce it romantically to antinomianism, which has always been a Christian heresy. "Christianity," Zizek remarks, "is ... a form of anti-wisdom par excellence, a crazy wager on Truth." But surely it is no part of the Pascalian wager that murdering millions of people will help to win it.

And there is no doubt that this scale of killing is what Zizek looks forward to in the Revolution. "What makes Nazism repulsive," he writes, "is not the rhetoric of a final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it." Perhaps there is supposed to be some reassurance for Jews in that sentence; but perhaps not. For in In Defense of Lost Causes, again paraphrasing Badiou, Zizek writes: "To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the 'Jewish question' is the 'final solution' (their annihilation), because Jews ... are the ultimate obstacle to the 'final solution' of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility." I hasten to add that Zizek dissents from Badiou's vision to this extent: he believes that Jews "resisting identification with the State of Israel," "the Jews of the Jews themselves," the "worthy successors to Spinoza," deserve to be exempted on account of their "fidelity to the Messianic impulse."

In this way, Zizek's allegedly progressive thought leads directly into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor. In his New York Times piece against torture, Zizek worried that the normalization of torture as an instrument of state was the first step in "a process of moral corruption: those in power are literally trying to break a part of our ethical backbone." This is a good description of Zizek's own work. Under the cover of comedy and hyperbole, in between allusions to movies and video games, he is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century. He is trying to undo the achievement of all the postwar thinkers who taught us to regard totalitarianism, revolutionary terror, utopian violence, and anti-Semitism as inadmissible in serious political discourse. Is Zizek's audience too busy laughing at him to hear him? I hope so, because the idea that they can hear him without recoiling from him is too dismal, and frightening, to contemplate.

Adam Kirsch is a senior editor at The New Republic.











Copyright © 2007 The New Republic. All rights reserved.

Catastrophic Exceptions & Torture and Democracy

Catastrophic Exceptions
By Gary J. Bass
Torture and Democracy
by Darius Rejali


AMERICA, UNDER George W. Bush, became a torturing country. Everyone knows it. One of Bush’s worst lies is this: “I’ve said to the people that we don’t torture, and we don’t.” It is not just that the president’s words are demonstrably false, as evidenced by the sworn congressional testimony of the director of Central Intelligence and the horrific photographs from Abu Ghraib. What is most pernicious about Bush’s lie is that almost everyone would desperately want to believe it. Torture is so profoundly incompatible with modern liberalism that it took just six weeks after the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen in 1789 for France’s deputies to abolish judicial torture. So how can democracies torture today?

The answer is, in their own special way. As Darius Rejali explains in a sprawling, essential book, Torture and Democracy, the kind of torture depends on the political landscape. He is clear that authoritarian governments have a worse record on torture than democratic governments do. For a dictator, the use of torture—like other spectacular exercises of coercive state power—is meant not just to break the victim, but to cow all the other people. Mutilated victims are a hobbled reminder not to mess with the big man. Acid torture, for example, leaves victims either dead or scarred; it was showily used in Nazi-occupied France, Iran in the 1960s, Brazil and Argentina in the 1970s, and El Salvador and Syria in the 1980s.

Democratic torture, on Rejali’s account, goes on in a much different political arena. The torturers have to be worried about the interference of judges, lawyers, reporters, activists, and voters. To evade them, the democratic torturer has to turn to “electric prods and electroshockers, tortures by water and ice, drugs of sinister variety, sonic devices—and also by methods that are less technical, but no less sophisticated or painful; the modern democratic torturer knows how to beat a suspect senseless without leaving a mark.” Democratic publics, according to Rejali, also might be more willing to overlook torture when they think it is necessary for national security, or if it is done to different kinds of people, or in wars or colonialism. As an example of almost all of those dynamics, in 1902, during the war in the Philippines, Theodore Roosevelt coolly noted, “The enlisted men began to use the old Filipino method of mild torture, the water cure. Nobody was seriously damaged.” Democracies torture; they just do it evasively.

The bulk of Rejali’s book is a massive dictionary of the unspeakable: the electric bath, the electrified prod, paddling, sleep deprivation, stress positions (the British Empire pioneered the Gag, the Wooden Collar, and the Whirligig; the French Empire used to discipline its troops with the silo and the crapaudine), crucifixion (used, incredibly, as a British punishment during World War I), dorsiflexing, eyeball pressing, sweatboxes, waterboarding. Among these horrors, he documents a democratic preference for the refinements of cruelty that do not leave marks—what he calls “clean torture.”

For instance, if you smash someone where flesh meets bone, it leaves bruises, which could tell the tale to investigating authorities. But Japanese police would beat prisoners in the midriff, hips, thighs and buttocks; the Royal Ulster Constabulary in Northern Ireland beat Irish captives in the genitals and with straight finger prods to the abdomen; and an American interrogator noted that he could beat Vietnamese prisoners senseless with an open hand and not leave reddened skin. More recently, Americans have not been quite as adept at “clean torture.” In the first major medical examination of former detainees in American military jails, Physicians for Human Rights assessed eleven men, four of whom had spent an average of three years in custody in Afghanistan or Guantánamo and seven of whom had been detained in Iraq for an average of six months. Most of them suffered psychological damage, which could be considered invisible. But according to a June 2008 report, the medical examiners found scars and injuries that fit the men’s own stories of beating and electric shocks, as well as at least one case of sodomy.

When democracies did not fear public monitoring, they were more brazen in their use of torture—as in colonial wars, or when the victims were from a group marginalized or despised by the public. Even so, Rejali argues, the prospect of oversight pushed colonial powers toward non-visible forms of torture. British colonial police were more likely to use visible torture in Kenya in the 1950s than in Mandatory Palestine fifteen years prior. He cautiously suggests that this is because of British fears of getting caught out in Palestine by the watchful eye of the Anglican Church. Given the scientific pretensions of torturers, it turns out that doctors play a major role in finding them out. In Turkey in the 1990s, torturers gave up on the falaka—beating the soles of the feet with a rod—as doctors figured out how to detect it in victims up to six months after the assaults.

Once the techniques of clean torture had been pioneered by democracies, they were adopted by dictatorships later in the twentieth century. Rejali explains this as mostly the result of monitoring too. Early in the twentieth century, dictatorships had little need to hide their tortures. There was scant international monitoring of their internal coercion. During the cold war, the Soviet Union spread torture know-how in East Germany, and the United States in Brazil. But by the 1970s, that had all changed. Many authoritarian governments found themselves embarrassed by new international human rights groups like Amnesty International, founded in 1961. AI issued its first global overview of torture in 1973. By the latter part of the last century, it was only the most isolated and extreme authoritarian states (such as North Korea) that could afford to ignore the international costs of torturing. Rejali argues that “clean torture” picked up substantially in the 1970s and 1980s, especially in authoritarian governments with close ties to powerful democracies like America, Britain, and France. Given the willingness of governments to turn a blind eye to their own abuses or those of their allies (Rejali points to British cover-ups in Northern Ireland and French whitewashes in Algeria), this is somewhat less convincing. Still, today, governments that would torture have to figure out ways to do so under the nose of monitors like the United Nations, the European Union, Human Rights Watch, and so on.

Rejali, an expert on Iranian torture, writes, “When we watch interrogators, interrogators get sneaky.” They also get lawyers. It is impossible to read this book without hearing the echoes of the August 2002 memorandum signed by Jay Bybee and chiefly written by John Yoo at the Justice Department, held up as a “golden shield” against potential prosecutions of the Americans who harshly interrogated senior Qaeda suspects such as Abu Zubaydah. Trying to skirt the American domestic law that implements the Convention Against Torture, Bybee and Yoo wrote, “Physical pain amounting to torture must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.” In other words, Bybee and Yoo are trying to redefine torture mostly as the visible kinds of torture, while winking at the more common democratic ways of “clean torture.” Jack Goldsmith, the former Justice Department lawyer who withdrew this memo, called it “legally flawed, tendentious in substance and tone, and overbroad and thus largely unnecessary.” In the light of Rejali’s book, it is also exactly what you would expect.

Slippery Slopes
As a matter of law, of course, none of this should happen. The United States has signed and ratified the Convention Against Torture and accepted without reservation Article 2(2): “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.” This flat prohibition is implemented in title 18 of the United States code—the law that Bybee and Yoo had to try to circumvent.

But the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has given us real-world situations that make it miserably unnecessary to ponder law school hypotheticals like the ticking time-bomb scenario. If a nuclear weapon were to go off in Los Angeles or other cities, it is almost unimaginable what the American government would do. It is vital to interrogate A.Q. Khan, the Pakistani nuclear-bomb maker, to try to discover the ins and outs of his network of proliferation profiteering that extended to North Korea, Libya, and Iran. Khan is protected in Pakistan by his status as a national hero, but with the potential death toll from his commerce in the millions, other states could not be expected to show the same deference.

THIS IS the terrifying domain of maximum emergency, leading to such proposals as Charles Fried’s “catastrophe exception” (to use Sanford Levinson’s term) and Bruce Ackerman’s plans for declaring a state of emergency while still restraining presidential power. No less a defender of basic liberties than Ackerman writes that, after a big terrorist attack, “early dragnets may well be functional,” even though he is painfully aware that they will throw many innocent people into detention.

Worse, governments have been tempted to let slip the leash for much less than maximum emergency. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Jimmy Carter said, “We need to remove unwarranted restraints on America’s ability to collect intelligence.” As Jack Goldsmith put it, the country goes through “cycles of timidity and aggression” toward the state’s intelligence apparatus. And Rejali notes that there has been systematic torture in all sorts of democracies that were not facing grave danger: Japan, Brazil, Russia, South Africa after democratization, and the American cities of New York and Chicago. Democratic torture can grow not just from national security imperatives, but from judicial systems that are too enamored of confessions or from police trying to torture their way to safe streets.

So strict prohibitions on torture will always be under siege. And once that bright-line rule against torture is dimmed, the descent down the slippery slope has started. This, too, is anything but hypothetical. One of the most useful things about Rejali’s book is the demonstration of this process. Torturers have a way of rounding up more suspects than originally approved and using nastier methods than originally authorized. The torturers tend to innovate, and those innovations in cruelty spread. This creates distinctive national—and sometimes international—styles of torture. Torture, although an underground activity, has managed to quietly adapt itself worldwide to new political conditions.

Recent American experience bears this out. Starting in the spring of 2002, the National Security Council’s principals’ committee signed off on the CIA’s so-called “combined” interrogation techniques on hard-to-crack terrorism suspects: whether to slap them, push them, deprive them of sleep, or waterboard them. This began, according to ABC News, with Abu Zubaydah, the top al-Qaeda leader who was waterboarded with White House approval. But abuse then spread far beyond. Perhaps most strikingly, Major General Geoffrey Miller, who commanded the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay, visited Iraq to review army prisons there from August 31 to September 9, 2003. This marked an effort to “Gitmoize” Abu Ghraib. At Guantánamo, Mohamed al-Qahtani, the alleged “20th hijacker” in the September 11 plot, had been menaced by growling dogs, leashed, and forced to wear women’s underwear on his head. But Miller (whose report is available in Mark Danner’s invaluable Torture and Truth) was unimpressed with Abu Ghraib’s interrogations. He wanted the interrogators to shift from “tactical interrogation operations” to “strategic interrogation operations,” in order to provide “GWOT [Global War on Terrorism] oriented” intelligence. He notes, “The application of emerging strategic interrogation strategies and techniques contain new approaches and operational art.” Miller’s visit set the stage for the nightmare abuse at Abu Ghraib from October to December 2003: detainees deprived of sleep, menaced by dogs, in naked pyramids, forced to simulate homosexual acts, forced to wear women’s underwear, and beaten to death. So much for keeping torture limited.

But Does It Work?
For an American debate on torture that has been largely theoretical, here is a book full of facts. Richard Posner, for one, has written that there is “abundant evidence that torture is often an effective method of eliciting true information.” Judge Posner should read this book and then think again.

Whether torture works depends, first of all, on what you think it is supposed to do. Torture is a device for terrifying a populace into submission, and it can work for that. It is a device for securing false confessions, and it works for that. And finally, it could be a device for getting accurate and actionable intelligence about security threats. Here, Rejali makes a devastating case against its effectiveness. There are, of course, non-torturing ways of getting intelligence, and the advocates of torture need to prove not just that their way works, but that it works better than the more decent methods. As Stephen Holmes has pointed out, with the example of Russian operations against Chechen terrorists, the question is not just whether torture works, but what the opportunity costs were.

For torture to extract accurate information, it must somehow be made scientific. But Rejali paints torture as a kind of Clausewitzian activity, where the ostensibly rational goal of the violence is overwhelmed by confusion, friction, and escalation. In reality, torture is not so much a precise science as, in Rejali’s words, “a craft apprenticeship.” There is little formal training, leaving many torturers relying on habit or word of mouth to confront a flummoxing range of complications thrown at them by the human beings they are tormenting. Different people feel pain differently; some resist more than others; and the attempt to ratchet up the pain can lead to numbness or sensory overload. To compensate for variation in pain tolerance, torturers can aim for maximum pain early on—but this risks the victim’s passing out, being badly hurt, or dying. Although individual torturers may imagine that they have a particular knack for it, Rejali coldly writes, “Once the torture session starts, it necessarily devolves into an unrestrained hit-or-miss affair.”

Similarly, Rejali finds little evidence that professionalism can restrain torture. Instead, “torture breaks down professionalism. Professionals become less disciplined, more brutal, and less skilled while their organizations become more fragmented and corrupt.” In Algeria, torture took an awful toll on the French military, deprofessionalizing soldiers and splintering the military. Torturers ignore regulations to get past a victim’s pain threshold (as at Abu Ghraib), engage in competitive cruelty for career advancement, and deceive their own governments about what they are up to. They forget normal police skills: “Why do fingerprinting when you’ve got a bat?” Moreover, if torture is an option, then governments will be tempted to use it. Rather than develop a corps of Arabic-speaking experts on Iraq, the government could just torture detainees.

Aristotle wrote that “evidence from torture may be considered utterly untrustworthy.” As noted by both a 1963 CIA intelligence manual and an Indonesian interrogation manual found in East Timor in 1983, people being tortured will often give up junk information. (When North Vietnamese interrogators demanded the names of members of John McCain’s squadron, the captive McCain fed them the names of the Green Bay Packers’ offensive line.) This, then, wastes time and effort as the authorities go check it out. Traumatized brains may suffer amnesia, and even cooperative prisoners may, in their torment, get their facts wrong. Japanese fascists, in a 1943 manual on interrogating prisoners of war, thought torture was “most clumsy.” In contrast, Rejali points to the impressive success of public information in helping British authorities swiftly catch the men suspected of putting bombs on London buses and trains on July 21, 2005.

Depressing as Rejali’s book is, it does rest on a certain weak faith in democracy. In his account, it is democratic monitoring that drives the torturers to their evasions. But as Rejali admits, this may not hold up: “Monitoring may also collapse through political pressures and public indifference.” Since Abu Ghraib, a staggeringly public display of American torture that undermined the war effort in Iraq and tarred the country’s image, there has been not much in the way of punishment. A weak dose of criminal justice was meted out to a handful of low-ranked officers, but went no further up the chain of command. (Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was in charge of the military police at Abu Ghraib, was reprimanded and demoted to colonel; Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, Centcom commander in 2003 and 2004, was pressured into retiring early, cutting short his career.) Bybee, of the torture memo, now sits on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, with lifetime tenure. He might take comfort from Michael Mukasey, the attorney general, who says he is unsure if waterboarding is torture, and recently complained of “breathtakingly casual” suggestions that “some of these lawyers should be subject to civil or criminal liability for the advice they gave.” Bush refused to accept the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld, then defense secretary, who was fired only after the Republicans lost the Congress in the 2006 midterm elections. Vice President Dick Cheney said, of criticism of Rumsfeld after Abu Ghraib: “Get off his back.” And, of course, at the top of the chain of command, George W. Bush, the Abu Ghraib president, won a second term as president in 2004. Bush used the ninth veto of his presidency, in March 2008, to ensure that the CIA is not bound by the U.S. Army field manual’s interrogation techniques, which forbid physical force and thus things like waterboarding.


Gary J. Bass is associate professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton and the author of Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (Knopf).


© 2008 Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas, Inc.