The first book on the pandemic is here already

Before long we’ll have a tsunami of books about COVID-19. No surprise, perhaps, that Slavoj Žižek is first out of the blocks. But his book is oddly comforting

Right now I am sitting in the middle of Manhattan, which is kind of a stupid place to be during this epidemic. Five weeks in, daily deaths have dropped to “only” 500+ (from a peak near 800 a week or so ago). But the city remains in silence. In normal times, there is a hum of traffic from nearby Seventh Avenue; now there’s nothing, save for the odd siren. Ten minutes ago an ambulance drew up outside my brownstone just north of Central Park, and the crew wheeled a gurney into the block opposite. They’ve gone now, and there’s a police van there instead.

I see few people. It is three weeks since I have been out. My neighbour was here but has now gone upstate. Every few days a delivery will come to my door, borne on the ubiquitous e-bikes that speed pizzas around New York City. (They are illegal, but the Mayor’s decided not to ticket them for the duration.) My bellpush buzzes and I go downstairs to find a masked and gloved figure at the door with groceries, or liquor. We stand well apart; they pass me my bag at arm’s length, and at arm’s length I hand over a grubby $10 or $20 note as a tip, not much in truth for someone taking the risks that they do. They turn quickly away and speed off through the deserted city.

Now and then I clamp on my earphones and talk to someone. On Monday it was my cousin in London. A few days earlier it was my sister in rural Oxfordshire; three cases in her village. Today, Sunday, I spoke to my friend from the office. She is just a mile away on the East Side. I miss her. We talked about food. I make huge pots of meat sauce or dhal that are meant to last me a week but after two days I am sick of them. She made a huge stew of barley and collard greens and is already sick of that. We laughed; and then spoke, as one so often does, of the world after this, and how it will be changed.

*

Slavoj Žižek thinks he knows – or at least, he sees two possible scenarios: Communism or barbarism. The first would surely imply some Stalinist hell; the second, a sort of Mad Max dystopia in which we chase each other through the streets with Armalites, killing for a roll of toilet paper or a tin of beans. Actually, Žižek’s vision of both is more subtle, and more plausible. They’re set out in his new book, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World (OR Books).

I don’t know who chose the title; perhaps the sub’s desk of a Fleet Street tabloid. But my goodness, he certainly got the book out quickly. This may have seemed cynical to some. In fact, Žižek is not making money from this; he is donating his royalties to Médecins Sans Frontières, and in any case the book is modestly priced (and the publisher gave away the first 10,000 downloads for free). Still, it may be his perceived opportunism that prompted a coruscating review on Buzzfeed (The First Book About The Coronavirus Is Here, And It's Terrible, April 8 2020). Yohann Koshy in The Guardian (April 23 2020) was less harsh, but described the book as ‘forgettable’.

To be sure, the book has some of the hallmarks of Žižek’s previous book (of which more in a minute). One is that he jumps about somewhat rather than developing an ordered, linear argument – perhaps because the book’s been assembled from pieces already published in the media. Another is a tendency to quote the sort of French intellectual that inspired Sokal and Bricmont’s 1999 book Fashionable Nonsense. In fact Žižek is not jerking off; he has studied and worked in France and has genuinely been influenced by the theories of the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, and has brought them across to his own discipline, philosophy. But to the anglophone reader, with their pragmatic approach, it can all sound rather pretentious, for we judge a writer’s skill by their clarity and simplity of expression. Lacan or Derrida may relate to the French mind; for us, John Stuart Mill or George Orwell make more sense.

But the book is not terrible. And while Žižek may not order his argument as a logical progression, that argument is surely there. He writes of the huge bailouts, the tax relief and the millions of unemployment cheques the UK and US are using to try and protect the economy. “There is effectively something much more radical going on,” he says. “With such measures, money no longer functions in a traditional capitalist way; it becomes a voucher to allocate available resources so that society can go on functioning, outside the constraints of the law of value.” Žižek actually refers to this new corporatism as ‘Communism’. One wonders if it is really that, but he is surely right to ask whether it will become the new normal and, if it does, whether we will shift to a post-capitalist world. He believes we may. In short, COVID-19 could be a body-blow for capitalism.

Or maybe not. Maybe it will just make it nastier. In the final chapter, Žižek presents an alternative scenario. What if this is all a plot to preserve capitalism? Maybe the capitalists have understood for some time that their system is unsustainable, and have been searching for a way to reorder and preserve it – and have found in the pandemic exactly the tool they need. “What if [capital is] ruthlessly exploiting the pandemic in order to impose a new form of governance?” he asks, and goes on to paint a grim picture of what that might be; the old and the weak left to die, workers’ living standards slashed and more. It will not help that the pandemic has – according to Žižek – unleashed a tide of ideological viruses; fake news, paranoid conspiracy theories, racism. These are forces that the Right could certainly harness. Žižek regards this outcome as barbarism.

But there is an alternative: Communism. And what Žižek means by this is surprisingly mild; he certainly does not want us to return to the Gulag. Rather, states should “seek cooperation with other states. As in a military campaign, information should be shared and plans fully coordinated. This is all I mean by the “Communism” needed today.” So the essence of Pandemic! is that Žižek sees two possible outcomes to the pandemic; his rather mild form of Communism, or barbarism. And populations must organise and fight for the former. So stark is this choice, in Žižek’s view, that we should not waste time in fuzzy New Age speculation about changes to our values when all is over. We must be harshly practical.

*

It’s not the first time Žižek’s made this sort of argument. Neither is it the first time he’s trotted out a book in double-quick time in response to the news. Back in 2016 he published Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours – a meditation on Europe’s refugee crisis and what it really meant.

“Refugees,” wrote Žižek, “are the price humanity is paying for the global economy.” They are a result of global inequalities, and slamming down the drawbridge will not help, for mass-migrations are an inevitable part of the future, especially as climate change begins to bite. However, opening the floodgates and letting large numbers of refugees into Europe is an equally futile response, and can only cause trouble; in the end, we won’t like them and they won’t like us. Better to understand that this is all the result of global class struggle, and engage with it. Half-measures will get us nowhere.

Against the Double Blackmail was especially harsh on liberals and their response to the refugee crisis. Early in the book Žižek condemned the hypocrisy he thought inherent in arguing for open borders for refugees. Everyone knows it won’t happen, he said, because it would “trigger a populist revolt”, so advocating it is a self-indulgence of those who want to present themselves as “beautiful souls”. In the same vein, he argued against opening the doors to refugees on humane grounds, and insisted that there were limits to human empathy. Do not pretend we can empathise with refugees, he says. And don’t expect them to be grateful to us for being rich. He cited the New Year’s Eve 2015 disturbances in Cologne, when large numbers of women were assaulted, apparently by refugees. Žižek also drew on his links with psychoanalysis to argue that people of different cultures do not necessarily wish to live in proximity (here he was influenced by psychoanalyst Lacan’s idea of “the other”; a good example of Žižek’s ability to bring ideas across disciplines).

What all this led up to was Žižek’s central point: There is no point in pretending to like people who we don’t really want living next door to us. It’s a hypocritical liberal lie and in any case, it won’t solve the problem. The refugee crisis is a symptom of global class war. The rich world fuels conflict so that it can rob poorer countries of their natural resources, and refugees, Boko Haram and the rest are the result; what did we expect? There is no “let them in” option, and no “keep them out” choice either. There is only one answer: To engage with the class struggle. This is a profoundly Marxian analysis, imbued with a visceral loathing for a hypocritical, self-interested “liberal” class that Žižek clearly thought was at its worst on the refugee issue.

Was he wrong? Western liberals did have some thinking to do. As Žižek also suggested, the “culture wars” did, and do, represent a class struggle between liberals and their own proletariat, and the different responses to the refugee crisis – “refugees welcome” hashtags on one side, Pegida on the other – did throw this into sharp relief. And it is quite true that global instability is a result of inequality, just as air masses of different temperatures create the weather. So a “humane” response to the refugee crisis would solve nothing. At the same time, I could not help being annoyed by Žižek’s analysis. Humanity is not always a bad basis for policy, and empathy is not always the false emotion that he seemed to imply in Against the Double Blackmail. Besides, what would he do if he saw a Syrian or an Eritrean struggling in the water? Leave them to drown? I don’t suppose so.

I did not, in fact, like Against the Double Blackmail. I thought it bleak. It was a polemic that had virtually nothing optimistic or generous in its 25,000-odd words. But it did have some intriguing insights, and its central, Marxian, message of global class war made alarming sense. Against the Double Blackmail did have something to say, and liberals who were too smug about the refugee crisis should have read it. But I found it – as I said – bleak. A humane response is not always the tawdry hypocrisy that Žižek seemed, in that book, to perceive it to be. I finished the book respecting Žižek’s ruthless logic but less sure of his humanity or his sense of humour.

*

Now, reading Pandemic!, I wonder if I was wrong – if not about that earlier book, at least about the man. Against the Double Blackmail was written as a polemic and was probably always supposed to piss people off. But Žižek was not a refugee and – like all of us – could probably not imagine how it felt to be one. The COVID-19 disaster is different; even if we remain healthy, we are all involved, and he is no exception. Maybe that is why Pandemic! has a much more humane feel.

Žižek in Warsaw, 2009 (Mariusz Kubik)

For example, Žižek is, like me, not young (he is 71), and his son must limit contact him. “Only now,” he writes, “when I have to avoid many of those who are close to me ...I fully experience their presence, their importance to me.” Indeed, at the start of the book, he quotes Jesus after the Resurrection – His injunction noli me tangere, “touch me not”, and His explanation – wherever my followers love each other, I am present. I don’t think this is a sudden conversion to Christ; Žižek has been highly critical of religion in the past (see for instance this piece in the New York Times from 2006), and I doubt if he’s changed his mind. Rather, his point seems to be that human relationships will survive this and may even be strengthened. This is not the Savonarola of just four years ago.

Pandemic! Is humane in another respect: Žižek is at pains to stress that the virus has no nature of its own. It is not in any way self-aware. It is simply a self-replicating piece of DNA. It does not think, does not have it in for us, has not been sent to punish us. It is a scientific phenomenon that demands a scientific answer. To believe otherwise is to persuade oneself that we are somehow important. “Even if our very survival is threatened, there is something reassuring in the fact that we are punished, the universe (or even Somebody-out-there) is engaging with us,” says Žižek. “We matter in some profound way. The really difficult thing to accept is the fact that the ongoing epidemic is a result of natural contingency at its purest, that it just happened and hides no deeper meaning.” But we do have to accept that lack of meaning. There is, says Žižek, nothing to be gained through a mystical approach to what is happening to us.

This is a point that Žižek could have pursued much further than he does; he only really mentions it in passing, albeit at more than one point in the book. But it is important. While a distrust of the mystical clearly applies to religion, it should also constrain those environmentalists who talk of our species as a plague on the planet and would see a sort of secular divinity in the plague sent, in its turn, to punish us. Such views, whether clerical or secular, can encourage us to believe that we have no control over our fate when we do, in fact, have agency. They are, in effect, inhumane. Shut up, you are guilty, you are being punished; people will die; you must accept your fate; you deserve it; there is nothing you can do. One remembers Father Paneloux in Camus’s The Plague, preaching with force that the pestilence is a flail from the sky, sent by God to punish the sinful of Oran. But it was not. It was an accident of nature that Rieux, the doctor, and his friends had to combat, and it was in their quiet pragmatism that true compassion lay. So it is today.

It is a point that Žižek could have made much more strongly in Pandemic!; after all, a big part of the book is the argument that we face a choice. This pandemic will shape history, that much is clear – but shape it into what? An even more barbaric form of capitalism? Or a benign “Communism”, as he calls it? This is where we all have agency, and Žižek wants us to use it. 

*

It is now seven o’clock on a cold spring evening. In the afternoon thunder and heavy rain swept over New York City, but the clouds are breaking up now, there are patches of blue, and a fresh breeze is blowing through my open window. The air has felt much cleaner since the lockdown began. It has been a strange day. The death rate has been falling but it is still not clear where we stand, and the city lacks the testing kits it needs if it is to begin the long journey back to normal. On this, and much else, Governor Cuomo and President Trump do not see eye to eye. They met in Washington this afternoon. I doubt if it was cordial.

Meanwhile, on the dot of seven, there is clapping and cheering in the street. It happens every night at this time. The neighbours are expressing their thanks – love, almost – for the healthcare and other essential workers who have stayed at their posts, and sometimes died. They know what the cost has been. The transit authority alone has lost about 50 dead so far. The clapping goes on for several minutes, and some people bang pots and pans. Listening to this, I wonder if our values might be changing.

That is why Žižek’s book is important. It has been written in a hurry; the argument is not linear; there are digressions, and quotations from philosophers that most of his readers will not know, or greatly care about. But the book is not ‘terrible’, or 'forgettable’. It was worth writing, and is worth reading. Our values are changing, but Žižek knows that our world may not change to reflect them; may, in fact, change into something that is not better, but rather nastier. But we could also be on the verge of something new, more decent. It will be up to us.

Mike Robbins is the author of a number of fiction and non-fiction books. They can be ordered from bookshops, or as paperbacks or e-books from Amazon and other on-line retailers.

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