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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

Zizek, nationalism, pyschoanalysis « Previous | |Next »
January 13, 2007

Adam Kostko has a review of Slavoj Zizek's The Parallax View. I'd read the earlier Interrogating the Real and thought it pretty thin as an ideology critique that deployed of Lacanian concepts, which had been established in Tarrying With the Negative .

I was interested in Zizek because he was known for an interesting contemporary theory of nationalism, but Adam doesn't give us much on this as it belongs to the earlier work, which traces the gradual retreat of the liberal-democratic tendency in the face of the growth of corporate national populism. From memory Zizek explains this shift by way of rethinking the notion of national identification from a psychoanalytic perspective, more precisely a Lacanian standpoint, which argued that identities always remain incomplete and that ideologies of nationalism and populism only can operate if they succeed in convincing us otherwise. I was unclear how this account was different from the psychoanalytic work of Theodor Adomo.

Jodi Dean says ina paper entitled 'Zizek against Democracy' that Zizek's interest in nationalism arises from what happened in Eastern Europe after the collapse of communism. She says that Zizek notes in For They Know Not What They Do that:

...in the initial days of communism’s disintegration in Eastern Europe, the democratic project breathed with new life. Democracy held out promises of hope and freedom, of arrangements that would enable people to determine collectively the rules and practices through which they would live their lives. But instead of collective governance in the common interest, people in the new democracies got rule by capital. Their political choices became constrained within and determined by the neoliberal market logics of globalized capitalism already dominating Western Europe, Great Britain, and the United States. What emerged after the communists were gone was the combination of neoliberal capitalism and nationalist fundamentalism, a “scoundrel time”

In this interview Zizek says that:
nationalism is the most cogent language used by many communities in understanding the difficulties thrown up by a destablished world. It seems more realistic than socialism and it also seems to offer more immediate solutions than capitalist liberalism. It is strong, because it psychologically recapitulates the structure of the family. Nationalism represents authority, ensuring guardianship, offering the option of identification and warmth. As such it is here to stay and the post-imperialistic world is an equally fertile breeding ground for nationalism to bloom.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:32 PM |