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Living in the End Times (Verso, 2010)
By Slavoj ?i?ek?
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(Verso, 2010)
Revised and updated paperback edition,
with an Afterword?? (Verso 2011)
504 pages
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Review By William Converse
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Living in the End Times first appeared in 2010 and a lot has happened since, including the ongoing European debt crisis and the Occupy Wall Street movement.? ?i?ek has added a lengthy Afterword to the paperback edition (2011).? This is his most important book since The Parallax View (2006). It is also his best written and, therefore, more accessible than either The Ticklish Subject (1999) or The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) that established his reputation internationally as a social theorist and cultural critic.
?i?ek is an outsider. He has achieved the dual status of a public intellectual and the bad boy of continental philosophers. He is paradoxical and confrontational as well as outrageous and at times even obscene. He manages to offend just about every one, whether former Marxists or Fascists, Zionists or anti-Semites, Conservatives, Liberals, Nationalists, Populists, Social Democrats, and bien-pensants generally.? Along with other continental philosophers, the radical Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben and the French philosopher Alain Badiou, ?i?ek takes a strong stand against post-modernists and deconstructionists; he disparages the paragons of political correctness and the advocates of ?tolerance? in the name of pluralism in Western secular societies. He delights in exposing the inner contradictions and hypocrisy of the dominant ideologies. He dislikes academic philosophers; this has not prevented him from teaching at a number of? prestigious American universities and he is currently a professor at the European Graduate School.
?i?ek?s thought represents a synthesis of Hegel, Marx, and the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.? He is not a systematic thinker; his forte is critical analysis and cultural criticism. He is at his best when giving a detailed analysis of the failure of Communism in the 20th century or arguing why the current economic and financial problems of global capitalism cannot be resolved within the existing political framework of Western liberal democracy.? The current political gridlock in Washington and the difficulties that the European Union is having dealing with the Greek debt crisis are two examples.? He is dismissive of parliamentary democracy which he characterizes as ?pantomime?; he is contemptuous of its political leaders, Nicolas Sarkozy, ?with his clownish outbursts and marriage to Carla Bruni? or Silvio Berlusconi, ?a self-proclaimed clown.?
However, Living in the End Times fails to offer any viable alternative to global capitalism or the prevailing political system. ?i?ek does not proffer any solutions for the impending cataclysm. Apart from calling for a return to the critique of political economy, an essential component of Marxist theory, there are few concrete ideas. There are no strategies, except the need ?to protect free spaces of subtraction from state power,? for example, New York?s Zuccotti Park during the Occupy Wall Street movement which he addressed on October 10, 2011. This ?free space? was created within the existing economic and political system, not outside it and was only temporary.?
The title of the book is somewhat misleading. Unlike Giorgio Agamben?s The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (2005), Living in the End Times is not about eschatology. The image on the cover, Gottfried Helnwein?s untitled version of The Sea of Ice (also called The Wreck of Hope), after the painting by the 19th century German Romantic artist Caspar David Friedrich, is also ambiguous; it could equally well represent the shipwreck of the proletarian revolutions of the 20th century.
?i?ek was born in 1949 in Slovenia (then part of the Yugoslavia). He came of age during a temporary period of liberalization of Tito?s regime. Even before the Slovenian reformers were removed in 1973, he was already in trouble with the authorities for his ?non-Marxist? views; his thesis was rejected because it was not sufficiently ?Marxist.? After graduating from the University of Ljubljana, where he studied philosophy and sociology, ?i?ek pursued studies in psychoanalysis at the University of Paris VIII, with Jacques-Alain Miller and Fran?ois Regnault.
?i?ek is an avowed Marxist, an atheist and a materialist; he describes himself as a ?communist in a qualified sense? and a ?radical leftist.? He insists that the Left (or what remains of it) must be ready for any eventuality in these very uncertain times. However, Marx is not much help here. While Marx envisaged the eventual emergence of global capitalism, the conditions of the workers in England and Germany that he described in Das Kapital (1867) are less evident today in the West, with its post-industrial, knowledge-based economy, than in Communist China where capitalist methods of production have been adopted with little regard to the safety or wellbeing of the workers.
?i?ek belongs to a group of continental thinkers, largely, but not exclusively, former Marxists, who have rediscovered religion (specifically Christianity) as a major force in European history. They acknowledge that Christian theology has played a key role in the development of modern science and the emergence of the secular state. ?i?ek has criticized the European Union for its failure to recognize this historical fact in the European Constitutional Treaty.
?i?ek, who also styles himself a ?Christian materialist,? has written a number of books on religion: The Fragile Absolute:? Or Why is the Christian Legacy worth Fighting For? (2000); On Belief (2001); and The?? Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003).? He is closely associated with the French philosopher Alain Badiou whose book, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism (1997) he references.? In 2010, he collaborated with John Milbank, Creston Davis and Catherine Pickstock, names associated with the school of theology, known as ?Radical Orthodoxy,? to publish Paul?s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Theology, dealing with the Apostle?s radical understanding of politics and authority.
?i?ek admits that the new theological point of reference cannot simply be a return to the past. It is necessary to move beyond the old antinomies of atheism and theism to post-theological thinking. For this reason, he objects to placing in opposition Enlightenment values and fundamental belief: ?such counter-posing of formal Enlightenment values to fundamental-substantial beliefs is false, amounting to an untenable ideolgico-existential position. What we should do, by contrast, is fully to assume the identity of the two opposed moments?which is precisely what an apocalyptic ?Christian materialism? does do, in bringing together both the rejection of a divine Otherness and the element of unconditional commitment.?(p. 352).
Moreover, ?i?ek claims that secular atheism has a theological core:
?The point here is not to oppose the theological-political to secular atheism; on the contrary, it is from this theological-political perspective that we can discern the hidden theological core of secular atheism. The standard ideological-critical view of religious faith, that today it has more to do with capitalist business (the organized selling of faith), should also be turned around: not only is religious faith part of capitalism, capitalism is itself also a religion, and it too relies on faith (in the institution of money, amongst other things).? This point is crucial to understanding the cynical functioning of ideology: in contrast to the period when religious-ideological sentimentality covered up the brutal economic reality, today, it is ideological cynicism which obscures the religious core of capitalist beliefs.? (p. 130)
In The New York Times (Monday, March 13, 2006) ?i?ek argued that atheism is an important part of the European legacy that needs to be recovered since the two principal dangers today, namely, unbridled capitalism and religious fundamentalism, are historically interconnected:
?Hegel also clearly perceived the link between the antinomy in its social aspect (the coexistence of individual freedom and objective necessity in the guise of market mechanisms) and in its religious aspect (Protestantism with its antinomic motifs of individual responsibility and Predestination).? (p. 215)
At the end of the first edition of Living in the End Times (2010), ?i?ek posited that theology as a reference point for radical politics points to our radical freedom, adducing Dostoevsky?s antithesis of freedom and responsibility, though it is by no means certain that the Russian novelist would have approved:
?If theology is again emerging as a point of reference for radical politics, it is so not by way of supplying a divine ?big Other? who would guarantee the final success of our endeavors, but, on the contrary, as a token of our radical freedom in having no big Other to rely on.? It was already Dostoevsky who showed how God gives us both freedom and responsibility?he is not a benevolent Master steering us to safety, but the one who reminds us that we are totally left to our own devices.? (p. 401)
The focus of Living in the End Times is the set of challenges facing the world today. ?i?ek identifies these as the terminal crisis of global capitalism; the impending ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; and the biogenic revolution.? He analyzes our collective response to these threats in terms of the five stages of grief identified by the Swiss-born psychologist Elizabeth K?bler-Ross, namely, denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.? ?i?ek discovers these five stages in the contemporary collective social consciousness:
?One can discern the same five figures in the way our social consciousness attempts to deal with the forthcoming apocalypse.? The first reaction is one of ideological denial: there is no fundamental disorder; the second is exemplified by explosions of anger at the injustices of the new world order; the third involves attempts at bargaining (?if we change things here and there, life could perhaps go on as before?); when the bargaining fails, depression and withdrawal set in; finally, after passing through this zero-point, the subject no longer perceives the situation as a threat, but as the chance of a new beginning?or, as Mao Zedong put it: ?There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.?? (pp. xi-xii).
?i?ek uses this schema to structure his text, comprising five chapters, interspersed with four interludes, containing his observations on contemporary architecture, cinema, literature and music. (The title of this review is taken from Interlude 4.)? Living in the End Times is relatively free of the author?s penchant for recycling material from his earlier books. His jokes tend to be academic when they are not obscene. He often uses a joke to make a point. At the end of the first edition of Living in the End Times (2010), referring to theology as a point of reference for radical politics, he tells a Bolshevik joke with a decidedly Hegelian leitmotif:
?The God we get here is rather like the one in the Bolshevik joke about a talented Communist propagandist who, after his death, finds himself sent to Hell.? He quickly sets about convincing the guards to let him go to Heaven. When the Devil notices his absence, he pays a visit to God, to demand that the propagandist be returned to Hell.? However, as soon as the Devil begins his address, starting with ?My Lord . . . ,? God interrupts him, saying: First, I am not your Lord but a comrade. Second, are you crazy for talking to fictions?I don?t even exist! And third, be quick, otherwise I?ll miss my Party meeting!? This is the kind of God needed by the radical Left today: a God who has fully ?become a man,? a comrade amongst us, crucified together with two social outcasts, who not only ?does not exist? but also knows this himself, accepts his own erasure, passing over entirely into the love that binds all members of the ?Holy Ghost,? that is, of the Party or emancipatory collective.? (pp. 401-402) Author?s italics
?i?ek has two forthcoming books, both announced for April 2012: God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse, with Boris Gunjevi? and Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. In the meantime I recommend Living in the End Times in the Paperback Edition (2011), with his Afterword. Despite its shortcomings, this is an important and thought-provoking book, it is well worth reading.
? William Converse 2012
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William Converse?is a member of the Church of St. John the Evangelist in Montreal and currently editor of its publication The Evangelist.? He is? a regular contributor to The Montreal Anglican.
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