Ideology is not dead
Three hours into the lecture, the auditorium was still full, the aisles and corners still packed with reasonably alert listeners, and the lecturer himself showed no sign of running out of steam. Above the audience hung a mist of winter air and sundry exhalations, which may in a more innocent era have been the tobacco smoke generated by a discussion on Marxism. Here and now, thin people in casually scruffy clothes and intellectual beards focused on the two figures on the stage.
One figure was slim, cool and austere in black, and belonged to the feminist academic Nivedita Menon. But by far the more arresting figure, on account of its girth, careless dress, gingery-gray untrimmed beard and appallingly white European forearms, was that of the lecturer: the 60-year-old Slovenian philosopher, cultural theorist, author, filmmaker (and so on) Slavoj Zizek. This lecture in Delhi, one of a series delivered around the country at the cusp of 2009-2010, was chiefly to promote Zizek’s latest book.
Zizek is what they call an intellectual rock star. He grew up, studied and worked under the communists in Slovenia, and is a communist himself, though he makes frequent merciless digs at the modern Left. Only in 1989 did Zizek get noticed in the West, when he was finally published in English. Now there is a whole journal devoted to “Zizek studies”.
His mass appeal comes in part from the staggering range of his work, which veers wildly between the entertaining and the incomprehensible — often in the same piece. But it also owes to his gift for finding and using apt, up-to-date, real-life examples in which all sorts of parallels and contradictions are perfectly captured. With an infinite grab-bag of cultural referents at his command, he is a fantastic speaker and essayist. He can be very funny: so he’s also been called a “stand-up philosopher” and “the Marx Brother”.
First as Tragedy, then as Farce is aimed at the general reader. But it is no less polemical for that. The title plays on Marx’s idea, after Hegel, that history repeats itself, once as tragedy, and the next time as farce; Zizek glosses that the farce can be more terrifying than the tragedy. Example from his lecture: in Greek drama, the tragic has dignity. Not so in the Holocaust. Because Jews were regularly lined up to be sorted by the officers at Auschwitz — this one to work, this one to die — some of them realised that it was safer to look healthier. So they “pinked the lips” before they went to the sorting. There’s surely farce in that.
And from there to Roberto Benigni’s creepy, gutless comedy Life is Beautiful, to Tristan and Isolde, to Antigone, Slovenian proverbs, Star Wars, Mother Teresa, the AIDS crisis, the China quake and the Three Gorges dam, Buddhism as a hamster, Starbucks... a hypnotising tumble which all, miraculously, adds up to something.
It has to. For the villain of Zizek’s story is capitalist ideology. The context is the twin crises of 9/11 and 2008: one killed the “liberal-democratic political utopia”, and the other did in the “economic utopia”. Now is communism’s chance — but we, Left included, are trapped in the capitalist illusion. Zizek shows capitalist ideology at work and asserts that it cannot solve its own problems. He also lays to rest the notion that ideology is dead, killed by cynicism.
To do the argument justice, read the book — it is affordable, which is correct in a leftist text.
FIRST AS TRAGEDY, THEN AS FARCE
Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: Navayana
Pages: 156
Price: Rs 200