Arts & Culture

Žižek For Jews

Slavoj Žižek declares in his latest opus, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso), that while postmodernism has caused (or allowed) every other kind of racial, social, and cultural identity to be in flux, Jewish identity appears to have become fixed … Read More

By / August 26, 2008

Slavoj Žižek declares in his latest opus, In Defense of Lost Causes (Verso), that while postmodernism has caused (or allowed) every other kind of racial, social, and cultural identity to be in flux, Jewish identity appears to have become fixed in a simple equation in which Jews=Zionists=racists (thank you, UN). Jews are expected, he says (in his usual difficult prose) to “yield with regard to their name”—that is, “in the liberal multiculturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity – except Jews, whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism.”

Žižek, an internationally reknowned intellectual, has been at the cutting edge of social and political theory for almost two decades, and apparently strives to be an outsider. It is therefore no surprise that he has developed an interest in Jews, as such. Žižek cares so much about Jewish identity because he identifies as Jewish. Not literally. He is no more a Jew than Joe Lieberman is a liberal. Rather, Žižek, a product of Slovenia, a country torn by the last century’s wars, sees in the Jewish experience a representation of contemporary experience that is far more subtle than a chaotic and relativistic mash-up of identity politics. Was it not, as Žižek says, that “in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud?

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  • Anonymous

    Great article.  I really enjoyed reading it.  A few points of conention, though…  I’ll mention just one. 

    I don’t really agree with your interpretation of Zizek’s point about the humanness of an enemy.  Your article seems to suggest that Zizek is in favour of humanizing the enemy in order to understand conflict.  This is one possible interpretation; however, I think he is using this point merely to comment on the ‘status’ of an enemy, or to answer the question:  what is an enemy?  His answer is that an enemy is someone who one views as inherently inhuman.  So, I don’t agree that ‘Humanising the other… may be one of the best ways to understand the basis of conflicts’.  Rather, the best way to understand conflicts is by looking at the way the enemy is portrayed (ideologically) as inhuman:  in other words, to look at the displacement of the relation between Inclusion/Exclusion onto the relation Human/Inhuman.

    This is also why it is utterly tasteless to try to humanize someone like Hitler!  This is not at all what Zizek is suggesting!  His point is not that we should try to understand ‘major actors in history’  through their humanness.  He is simply making a point about how the figure of the enemy is represented (or, in this case, under-represented, since ‘An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard’) in a particular society.

    However, it could be suggested that humanising the other is one way of ending conflict, rather than understanding the basis of conflict.  But that’s a whole other can of worms… Thanks for the article!

    Zizek has written tons on religion…  

    Check out Zizek’s book "The Puppet and the Dwarf"!