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 with 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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