Zizek speaking at the Cambridge Union last weekMê-Linh Riemann

Once described as ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the west’, Slavoj Zizek (woe betide anyone who calls him ‘Professor’) seems to delight in controversy - prefacing our interview with a grin and and assurance that “now you will see why many leftists hate me”. A Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, radical activist and self-described “complicated Marxist”, he has published books on ideology, philosophy, history and revolutionary politics – including his most recent, ‘Like A Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Age of Post-Humanity’. I sat down with him before his talk at the Cambridge Union to discuss the book and his wider thoughts on the current political situation around the world – touching on the new far-right, liberalism, capitalism, technology and where he sees potential avenues for radical change.

With far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro elected President in Brazil a fortnight ago - joining a perceived rogues’ gallery including Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey and Trump in America among others - some commentators have compared these developments, coupled with emboldened far-right street movements, to a resurgent 1930s-style fascism. Zizek disputes this analysis – “It’s definitely not fascism”, he says, attributing this theory to “the laziness of many left-liberals” in using familiar terminology to describe new phenomena. While assuring me that “it is very bad, I concede this”, he argues we should not “be too fascinated by it, you know, staring at Trump like at a snake’s head and oh-my-god hypnotised.”

“We should take a step back and realise that Trump didn’t fall from the moon. What went wrong here?”

In a recent interview with Owen Jones, Zizek courted controversy with the claim that “Clinton is the problem, not Trump”. When asked to elaborate on this long-held view of the 2016 Presidential candidates (prior to the elections, he had argued that “they are both worse”) - he suggested that “we should take a step back” and realise that “Trump didn’t fall from the moon. What went wrong here?” He suggests the origin of this phenomenon may be found in the pre-Trumpian ‘centrist liberal consensus’, which was perceived to have failed to tackle the alienation many feel with the political establishment, and is disintegrating - “in the USA and elsewhere we have almost an ideological civil war” between an emergent nationalist right and a shaken liberal-left.

Indeed, despite these reflections, he insists there can be no return to the pre-Trump consensus. He says that leftists shouldn’t panic, but rather use the opportunity this instability presents to forge a new, leftward consensus – gleefully quoting Mao Zedong in saying that “Everything under heaven is in utter chaos: The situation is excellent.”

In his book, Zizek assesses the current condition of the radical left, writing that: “...after so much bad news, seeing so many hopes brutally crushed in the space of radical action, spread between the two extremes of Maduro in Venezuela and Tsipras in Greece, it is easy to succumb to the temptation to claim that such action never really had a chance...that the hope of a real and effective change for the better was an illusion.” He denied this was another of his infamous pessimist readings, pointing to a slogan he argues may help leftists break from this despondency, coined in the crucible of the “extremely beautiful...liberation movements” around the world in 1968 - ‘Be Realistic: Demand the Impossible’.

Elaborating on how a leftward shift might be achieved within a political context seemingly characterised by a surging right, he argues that “in the United States, people who are terrified by Trump support these so-called Democratic Socialists, but you know, without Trump they wouldn’t arise.” 2016 Democratic candidate and self-described socialist Bernie Sanders was recently voted America’s most popular Senator, and last week’s US mid-terms saw young left-winger Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez elected to Congress. That self-professed ‘socialists’ have gained political prominence in a country where such socialism has historically been political anathema, implies Zizek, is a consequence of the shock-waves of Trumpism upon America’s political landscape.

Addressing the situation in Britain, he tells me that “your Corbyn”, despite what he describes as a ruthless campaign of media vilification of him as a “lunatic leftist”, actually has relatively moderate politics compared with “an average European social democracy half a century ago”, but that with the advent of neoliberalism, “the whole situation has changed” - demands for welfare-state social democracy are today seen as radical. For Zizek, while Jeremy Corbyn is “rather dry, non-charismatic” and not a “rabble rouser” (for him this is a good thing - he dislikes what he calls the left-populism of Jean-Luc Melenchon in France), “Corbyn is the right way. He is the true miracle of British politics.”

“We see the more capitalism is getting rotten, the more it thrives”

Advising liberals concerned by the rise of the right, he acknowledges that “the liberal tradition is threatened all around Europe” but that, paraphrasing T.S. Elliot, “only a heretic can save the corpse of a religion”, meaning that “today only a move to the left can save what is worth saving in the liberal tradition.”

After this characteristically wide-ranging analysis of the present political situation, I am eventually able to ask about his book’s concept of ‘post-humanism’. He refers to a metaphor from the Communist Manifesto, where Marx poses that under capitalism, “all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned”. After assuring me that this is not a moral judgement (like Marx, he has a secret admiration for the revolutionary nature of capitalism), Zizek elaborates that, in the age of emergent technologies like ‘Big Data’, AI, virtual currencies and bioengineering, what is solid may literally ‘melt into air’ - with the transition to an increasingly virtual existence potentially altering what is biologically and socially perceived to mean to be human.

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On the potential automation of labour, he warns against the prediction that the potentially sublimatory process of technological innovation will in and of itself undermine the capitalist system - arguing that capitalism as a social order, “...doesn’t have a zero-level of normal functioning. It thrives through repeated crises...Marx spoke of the final crisis of capitalism, then Lenin said imperialism is the very last stage of capitalism, then modern Marxists say American imperialism is even lower, totally rotting capitalism. So we see the more it is getting rotten, the more it thrives.” He asserts that “modern science, modern technology are, at least the way we know it, caught in capitalism” and jokes that if we don’t achieve post-capitalist humanity, we may end up with post-human capitalism. The problem for Zizek is not necessarily the technology, but the social framework in which it is conditioned.


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Overall it seems that with both the present political situation and with the social implications of technological innovation under capitalism, Zizek recommends identifying the emancipatory opportunity within the apparent crisis. Indeed, he tells me that the left needs to recapture and redefine what is seen as politically possible, as the right currently have – “horrible as it may sound”, these populist right movements “are genuinely democratic phenomena…” whose anti-establishment message gives them the political impetus to take radical steps towards courting the working class (“of their own race of course”), such as Trump promising his base he would bring jobs back to America, “which no social democracy today dares to do.”

Concluding with the insistence that Corbyn, Sanders and Melenchon are not radical communists, Zizek claims that their radicalism comes from the fact that, “in today’s constellation” of globalised neoliberalism, moderate welfare-state social democracy is not possible. But again, he insists, we should be realistic and demand the impossible - in order to achieve these socially liberal and environmentalist policies, or to redistribute society’s wealth in today’s system, “you will soon discover you have to change many more things.”