Buy this book

Michael Savage
posted 5 May 2006

Is this the next big idea? This book combines biting radical criticism and impressive philosophical sophistication; it is the magnum opus of a great mind trying to develop the critical tools that enable political intervention in a world still unfamiliar to the traditional left.

Slavoj Žižek is a caricature of an eastern European intellectual - bearded, neurotic and brilliant. He has a wide fan base, his books really are in all good bookshops, he has written op eds for the New York Times, he has stood for Presidency of Slovenia and he's had a movie made about him. Despite that, what they say is true; he is a genius.

The Parallax View is really, really difficult, and extremely rewarding in equal measure. It is easy to mock Žižek for his obscurity, his obsessive interest in dissecting modish films and bad jokes, his endless repetition of previous work (whole sections copied almost verbatim) and his offensive pomposity. It is harder to convey the sheer thrill of reading this stuff. On more levels than I begin to understand, it bursts with energy and ideas and insights. It is a politically engaged and intellectually rigorous contribution to a field that usually insists on either political engagement or academic rigour (and rarely achieves either). We will all find a few questionable facts or dodgy interpretations (eg. on the St Bartholomew's Day Massacre), but his hit rate is so high that us pedants should give him a break.

This book engages with ways of studying the world (science, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis), and with different ways of accounting for it (naturalism, poststructuralism, multiculturalism, for example). It is an attempt to account for Žižek's own methodology, and it is a political argument. It is a weighty treatise and it is a light hearted chat. Yes, it is hard to pin down. And harder to understand; I confess that I'm still stumped by much of it. Perhaps we should start not by locating the book in the context of contemporary thought, but in the context of Žižek's own intellectual project.

Žižek's earlier work was more clearly poststructuralist, at its apogee in The Sublime Object of Ideology. He has subsequently adopted a more explicitly Marxist bent and has been especially critical of the politics of his poststructuralist comrades - The Ticklish Subject is the best rendition of these arguments. He is often criticised for repeating whole paragraphs and chapters from one book to the next, but we should indulge him this; it bears re-reading, and is often subtly re-worked and used to different effect in new contexts, revealing the development of his ideas.

We can discern a shift between The Ticklish Subject and The Parallax View from agent to structure, from subject to object. I am not trying to identify a fundamental change in Žižek's thinking; rather, the two books should be read together as the development of his ideas through an engagement with different problems. The earlier book took issue with the one-sided criticisms of human agency in social theory and political practice; this one takes issue with one-sided approaches to the structures that we confront as human agents. Both meld Marxist critical method and Lacanian psychoanalysis, and pick up many other ideas along the way, dredging up discarded old reprobates like Kierkegaard, Derrida and St Paul and deploying them to great effect.

The immediate topic is dialectics, a central idea in Hegel's and Marx's thinking that asserts a dynamic approach against the more inflexible thinkers that preceded them. Dialectical thinking deals with historical change, and tries to grasp the dynamics by which subjects act upon the world. It is a subtle method, but a popular formulaic way of capturing it sees a thesis asserted, an antithesis challenging it, and a synthesis resulting. The Parallax View is an extended critique of this simplification.

Žižek notes that dialectics sounds positively new age, with its intermingling of opposites, its yin and yang. His argument is that dialectics is not a shortcut to grasping totality; it is a way of making sense of things by simultaneously adopting different standpoints. For example, physicists view light as both a particle and a wave. It is not one or the other, and it is not some 'third thing' that encompasses both. He explains that Marx used the economy to decode politics, and politics to decode economics, but there was no 'meta-language' outside either from which to understand the whole.

The parallax gap is the space between two perspectives that cannot be reduced to either one of them. This gap is a productive site; it is not a question of overcoming the gap, but of conceiving it as 'becoming'.

Sometimes Žižek sounds relativistic, or even a little poststructural: 'there is no meta-language that enables us to translate the logic of domination back into the capitalist reproduction-through-excess, or vice-versa' (p. 299). But he is getting at something very sensible; there is no external key to explanation. You can't explain political domination directly by explaining economic domination, nor vice-versa. And there is no external short-cut either, no God to make sense of it for us; there's no one here but us humans, you might say. It is easier to make sense of this by looking at Žižek's discussion of multiculturalism, which is a more immediate political issue.

Žižek's is one of the few satisfactory critiques of multiculturalism, because he is able to criticise both the liberal universalism (multiculturalism as the positive meta-language that makes sense of the parts), and the postmodern scepticism (multiculturalism as the unspoken whole that arises from the irreducible multiplicity of competing claims and worldviews). Most critics feel the need to assert that one or other logic is at play, which forces an unwitting endorsement of the other. In other words, they reduce multiculturalism to one thing or the other, rather than conceiving multiculturalism around the gap between the two positions.

The logic of multiculturalism is all-encompassing. It neutralises criticism by drawing it in as valid lifestyle. And that is the key to the political demand that Žižek ends with - 'I would prefer not to'. It is a purely negative attitude of refusal; refusal to play the part that is written for us, for we assert ourselves as subjects most forcefully when we refuse to accept the order that we are presented with - natural, political or cultural. This is perhaps Žižek's most creative political insight, and one that I shall return to in a forthcoming essay on Culture Wars.

There is no shortcut to understanding Žižek (good knowledge of Kant, Hegel, Marxism, Freud, Lacan and poststructuralism is needed for starters), and that is a story in itself. Žižek's style and form are fascinating. He sounds off about stuff that interests him, from German idealist philosophy to dirty jokes, detective novels to dialectics. At this level, the book can be enjoyed as a Socratic monologue. His prolific writing can be explained by his use of cut-and-paste; articles, essays and chapters get re-used time and again, forcing his readers to do the work of teasing out an argument from the asides and vignettes. You can get a lot out of Žižek from taking it at face value, and enjoying his stimulating chatter.

Others will read this book at another level, drawing out meaning as part of a coherent antidote to 'decaffeinated' mainstream theory, seeing Žižek as an academic superhero who provides us with theories to take out into the world. His buffoonery seems to belie this hopeful attitude, but we should not dismiss too quickly; he is easily underestimated, mainly because it is hard to tell if there is substance to the flamboyant style. There is no mistaking the breadth of his ambition, and his explicit project of bringing together Lacanianism and Marxism insists on something deeper than polemic and aside.

The Parallax View is a performative demonstration of its thesis. As he teaches us, both the superficial engagement and the deeper theory must be kept in mind together; the truth is not in the middle, it is in both places at once. Žižek formulates an approach to dialects that keeps in sight the dual aspects of reality, rather than trying to force them together as synthesis. It is a method that requires disciplined distancing from immediate politics. His book is a parallax performance; to grasp the ambitious theoretical superstructure you need to keep in mind the immediate engagements.

What I find disturbing in this 'cleverness' is that Slavoj Žižek, the radical thinker read by faddish radicals, oddly starts to resemble Leo Strauss, the reactionary thinker read by faddish neoconservatives. Both adopt a rhetorical strategy of presenting a relatively clear message on the surface, and a deeper message intended only for initiates. Žižek is more fun than Strauss, but the aristocratic implication is shared. The populist progressive content and the supercilious elitist form is yet another contradiction in this complex thinker.

Should you read this book? You must, of course. It is tough going, sometimes even demeaning, but it repays the effort. No one else today can match this awesome ambition, kaleidoscopic erudition, sheer intellectual power and effective political criticism.