Zizek: Paper Revolutionary

Žižek argues that the Leninist intervention should be “properly political, not economic.”87 My Kierkegaardian reply is that such an intervention must be based on economy—economy understood as the law of the Kierkegaardian house.

Kierkegaard’s Housing Project

Imagine a house with a basement, first floor, and second floor planned so that there is or is supposed to be a social distinction between the occupants according to floor. Now, if what it means to be human is compared with such a house, then all too regrettably the sad and ludicrous truth about the majority of people is that in their own house they prefer to live in the basement.

—Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death

The man wanders down the corridor, but finds no W.C. Wandering ever further into the recesses of the theatre, he walks through a door and sees a plant pot. After copiously urinating into it, he returns to his seat and his friend says to him, ‘What a pity! You missed the best part. Some fellow just came on the stage and pissed in that plant pot’.” Žižek ’s explanation is “The subject necessarily misses its own act, it is never there to see its own appearance on stage, its own intervention is the blind spot of its gaze.”37

It is clear, that Žižek has been urinating in a pot as he is called the Elvis of Cultural Theory, the most dangerous philosopher in the West, and Hegel’s clown. Succinctly stated, while even a broken clock is right at least twice a day we do not use it to tell time. If we want to avoid the worst then it makes no sense to follow Žižek to Stalin’s Terminus.

Kant has a great line in The Critique of Pure Reason that provides an answer to Žižek’s attempt to resurrect dialectical materialism. It presents, Kant says, “the ridiculous sight (as the ancient said) of one person milking a Billy-goat while the other holds a sieve underneath.”38 Is this not Hegelianism at its purest? The substance one thought was being ejected into the bucket becomes another unexpected one.39