A prominent European philosopher who argues that the Arab Spring is over simply can't fathom a new, hopeful world.
Hamid Dabashi
Al-Jazeera
"....Zizek: out of touch
But strange that the (evidently Marxist) European philosopher had no concerns about those kinds of “suffocating” the revolution. On a previous occasion I have suggested that the distinguished European philosophers like Zizek who wish to say something about other parts of the world need to diversify among their native informers. But alas, Zizek seems not to have listened to my advice. “The losers,” he warns Europeans, “will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak - in spite of the CIA funding they are getting - to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists”.
All these key confusions of Zizek - his “secular left” in particular is a giveaway - should warn him to start shopping around (with a proper credit card of course, for shoplifting is nihilistic) for better native informers. The ones he has now are no good. In a “worldless” world, filled with Absolute meanings of militant Islamists stealing revolutions like shoplifters, Zizek’s diagnosis is that “today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over?"
In this “worldless” world we have, it seems, a lack of organisation; yes indeed, party politics. Zizek mourns precisely where and what Saidj Mustapha celebrates. Zizek dismisses not just the UK shoplifters, the Muslim terrorists, and the Arab revolutions, but even the Spanish indignados.....
Is the Arab Spring half-full or half-empty?
Whence the difference between these two perspectives: the Arab intellectual morally invested and politically engaged, while his European counterpart morally aloof and politically pessimistic? One has everything to gain, a world to live; the other nothing to lose, having lost his world to worldlessness. The Algerian political scientist thrives on a visionary reading of a world that Zizek dismisses as already worldless. Why is Saidj Mustapha not afraid of a conspiracy between the Islamists and the generals? Why is Joseph Massad far more afraid of American neoliberals and neoconservatives than of Islamists? A world is unfolding right in front of Zizek’s eyes and he sees the world worldless, the Egyptian revolution suffocated, the Arab Spring lost. How and why is it that the Algerian intellectual celebrates precisely what the European philosopher mourns: the absence of party politics, the rise of a politics beyond clichés?
Zizek mourns worldlessness, and designates absolute Meaning as the cause of terrorism. He does not see the world that is unfolding right before him as a hopeful, purposeful, worldly, life-affirming world. This is because, just like Gaddafi, Zizek is stuck in his old ways. He cannot believe his eyes, he cannot believe what is happening to him: that his world has ended, not the world; that he (embodying a European philosophy at the losing end of its dead certainties) lives a worldless world, not the world.
Zizek and Gaddafi are identical souls, sticking to the worlds they know, militantly, the world they are losing - defiant rebels banging at the Bab Aziziyeh compound of their habitat, a world that is either theirs or it will not exits: “Après moi, le déluge.” Barely begun, Zizek dismisses the Arab Spring and then mourns the loss of idealism among the shoplifters.
It is in fact the European philosopher himself that is the gravedigger of history, having nothing to see, nothing to say, nothing to celebrate, because this history is not his history, is not History, for History has always been His, and not anyone else’s....."
Hamid Dabashi
Al-Jazeera
"....Zizek: out of touch
But strange that the (evidently Marxist) European philosopher had no concerns about those kinds of “suffocating” the revolution. On a previous occasion I have suggested that the distinguished European philosophers like Zizek who wish to say something about other parts of the world need to diversify among their native informers. But alas, Zizek seems not to have listened to my advice. “The losers,” he warns Europeans, “will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak - in spite of the CIA funding they are getting - to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists”.
All these key confusions of Zizek - his “secular left” in particular is a giveaway - should warn him to start shopping around (with a proper credit card of course, for shoplifting is nihilistic) for better native informers. The ones he has now are no good. In a “worldless” world, filled with Absolute meanings of militant Islamists stealing revolutions like shoplifters, Zizek’s diagnosis is that “today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over?"
In this “worldless” world we have, it seems, a lack of organisation; yes indeed, party politics. Zizek mourns precisely where and what Saidj Mustapha celebrates. Zizek dismisses not just the UK shoplifters, the Muslim terrorists, and the Arab revolutions, but even the Spanish indignados.....
Is the Arab Spring half-full or half-empty?
Whence the difference between these two perspectives: the Arab intellectual morally invested and politically engaged, while his European counterpart morally aloof and politically pessimistic? One has everything to gain, a world to live; the other nothing to lose, having lost his world to worldlessness. The Algerian political scientist thrives on a visionary reading of a world that Zizek dismisses as already worldless. Why is Saidj Mustapha not afraid of a conspiracy between the Islamists and the generals? Why is Joseph Massad far more afraid of American neoliberals and neoconservatives than of Islamists? A world is unfolding right in front of Zizek’s eyes and he sees the world worldless, the Egyptian revolution suffocated, the Arab Spring lost. How and why is it that the Algerian intellectual celebrates precisely what the European philosopher mourns: the absence of party politics, the rise of a politics beyond clichés?
Zizek mourns worldlessness, and designates absolute Meaning as the cause of terrorism. He does not see the world that is unfolding right before him as a hopeful, purposeful, worldly, life-affirming world. This is because, just like Gaddafi, Zizek is stuck in his old ways. He cannot believe his eyes, he cannot believe what is happening to him: that his world has ended, not the world; that he (embodying a European philosophy at the losing end of its dead certainties) lives a worldless world, not the world.
Zizek and Gaddafi are identical souls, sticking to the worlds they know, militantly, the world they are losing - defiant rebels banging at the Bab Aziziyeh compound of their habitat, a world that is either theirs or it will not exits: “Après moi, le déluge.” Barely begun, Zizek dismisses the Arab Spring and then mourns the loss of idealism among the shoplifters.
It is in fact the European philosopher himself that is the gravedigger of history, having nothing to see, nothing to say, nothing to celebrate, because this history is not his history, is not History, for History has always been His, and not anyone else’s....."
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