Mick Hartley

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Inside the nonsense machine

Roger Scruton takes on Slavoj Žižek, the clown prince of the revolution. It's a long journey, through some dense Lacanian thickets, but he makes some good points on the way:

Those who imagined, in 1989, that never again would an intellectual be caught defending the Leninist Party, or advocating the methods of Stalin, had reckoned without the overwhelming power of nonsense. In the urgent need to believe, to find a central mystery that is the true meaning of things and to which one’s life can be dedicated, nonsense is much to be preferred to sense. For it builds a way of life around something that cannot be questioned. No reasoned assault is possible against what denies the possibility of a reasoned assault. And thus it is that utopia stepped again into the place vacated by theology, to erect its own mysterium tremendum et fascinans in the center of intellectual life. A new generation rediscovered the authentic voice of the proletariat, which speaks the language of the nonsense machine. And despite all the disappointments, they were reassured that “the dictatorship of the proletariat” remains an option—indeed, the only option. The proof of this is there in Žižek’s prose; you have his word for it.

In Žižek, we find astonishing evidence of the fact that the “Communist hypothesis,” as Badiou calls it, will never go away. Notwithstanding Marx’s attempt to present it as the conclusion of a science, the “hypothesis” cannot be put to the test and refuted. For it is not a prediction or, in any real sense, a hypothesis. It is a statement of faith in the unknowable. Žižek unhesitatingly adds his weight to every cause that is directed, in whatever way, against the established order of the Western democracies. He even sets himself against parliamentary democracy and has no qualms in advocating terror (suitably aestheticized) as part of his glamorous detachment. But his few empty invocations of the egalitarian alternative advance no further than the clichés of the French Revolution and are soon wrapped in Lacanian spells by way of shielding them from argument. When it comes to real politics, he writes as though negation is enough. Whether it be the Palestinian intifada, the IRA, the Venezuelan Chavistas, the French sans-papiers, or the Occupy movement—whatever the radical cause, it is the attack on the “System” that matters.

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4 responses to “Inside the nonsense machine”

  1. Bob-B Avatar
    Bob-B

    Scruton has some good discussion of a range of dubious characters in his ‘Fools, Frauds and Firebrands: Thinkers of the New Left’: Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Guattari, English figures like Hobsbawm, E. P. Thompson, and Perry Anderson, and others such as Lukacs, Gramsci, and Said.
    In the case of the French thinkers, he comments that
    A deep disappointment with reality and a desire to tear it down in the name of Utopia has been the default position of left wing thinking in France from the Jacobins to the present day. (chapter 4)
    On Hobsbawm’s apologetics for the Russian Revolution, he comments that
    Reading these pages of The Age of Extremes I found myself astonished that the book had not been dismissed as a scandal of the same order as David Irving’s whitewash of the Holocaust. (chapter 2)
    On Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason he writes that
    We find emerging from his pages the same destructive fantasies, the same false hopes, the same pathological hatred of the imperfect and the normal, that have characterized all the followers of Marx from Engels to Mao. (chapter 4)
    On Althusser he remarks that
    his meta-theory establishes precisely nothing, and is indeed not a theory at all so much as a bundle of incantations. (chapter 6)
    On the nonsense of Deleuze, and Guattari he comments that
    The monsters of unmeaning that loom in this prose attract our attention because they are built from forgotten theories, forged together in weird and ghoulish shapes, like gargoyles made from the debris of a battlefield. And always the gargoyles are sticking out their tongues at the bourgeoisie. (chapter 6)
    In Anderson’s work he finds
    the greatest illusion of all: the myth of the revolutionary working class, which not only desires ‘emancipation’, but desires it by way of an alliance with people like Anderson’ (chapter 7)
    And so on.

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  2. Mick H Avatar
    Mick H

    OK, thanks. I’ve added it to my Amazon basket.
    He has something of an image problem as an old fogey, Scruton, doesn’t he? I’m sure he cultivates it – the only right-wing philosopher, battling the tide of right-on leftism. I remember a picture of him looking rather silly, all dressed up in hunting gear, in a pro-hunting polemic.
    He mentions Raymond Tallis and his description of Lacan as “the shrink from hell”. I’ve linked to it before, but here’s Tallis’ original piece – http://www.psychiatrie-und-ethik.de/infc/en/Shrink_from_Hell.htm
    There’s also Tallis’ fine book Enemies of Hope, on the same subject.

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  3. Bob-B Avatar
    Bob-B

    In places he’s it a bit too conservative for my taste, but what he has to say about these thinkers seems reasonable. He is prepared to some positive things. For example,on Anderson’s ‘Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism’ and ‘Lineages of the Absolutist State’, he comments that ‘the range of Anderson’s historical knowledge in those two books is extraordinary’. He also notes the quality of the writing of Hobsbawm and Foucault, saying of the latter that ‘the synthesizing poetry of his style rises above the murky sludge of left-wing writing like an eagle over mud flats’. A pretty level-headed discussion, I think.

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  4. Martin Adamson Avatar
    Martin Adamson

    I think I’ve said it before here, but Žižek is nothing more than a series of random arguments for mass murder, dressed up in the pretentious language of mittel-European philosophy.
    Scruton does make a single valid point in Žižek’s credit, though. Having been brought up in the most liberal province of the Communist world, he did at least receive a genuinely rigorous education in the European classical tradition, unlike the dumbed-down mumblings Western European leftism has inflicted upon its votaries over the last 50 years.

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