Slavoj Žižek’s Virulent Polemic Against Covid-19, and Stuff!

“I used to be Deleuzanal, but, now, I’m not Saussure.”

– Toilet stall wall riddle, next to Nietzsche Is Peachy

Someone must have called Slavoj on his Radphone in the middle of the night and said go over to your window and look up at the sky; he did, and there it was: the Rad-Signal lighting up a silver Z. Some thought it was a call for Zorro; some said Zarathustra. Slavoj is a little bit of both. The voice on the phone continued on loudspeaker, “There’s a virus afoot, Slavoj, we need your wisdom.” He thanked the caller, an anxious acolyte, and hung up the phone. He climbed out of his phone-booth pajamas and raced over to his word processor and typed like a maniac on a mission from the entity formerly known as God.

Because he’s a genius, he was finished in an hour, saved the pdf, and sent it to his publisher: Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World. The exclamation mark there to build up the threat he faced. Could this be his kryptonite?! Or his finest philosophical hour? The world waited for the master’s work with baited breath. Read it and seep.

In his introduction, Slavoj Žižek starts off Pandemic! by quoting from the Bible, John 20:17, “Noli me tangere,” the one where Jesus has Arisen and Mary Magdalen recognizes him and comes a-running to give him a hug, and he says,”Whoa, don’t touch the threads, Mary. I’m a Made man now.” Or, he has a virus; maybe her simplex has rubbed off. We’re all herpes hosts; it erupts once in a blue moon, like original sin, to remind us we still have moral work to do. Žižek says we mustn’t touch each other, but, at the same time, if we use this historical moment properly, “there is a hope that corporeal distancing will even strengthen the intensity of our link with others.”

Who’s zoomin’ zoomin’ who? (Watch for her Genius premiere next month.)

Žižek makes the all-important point that “we are all in the same boat now.” This is a truism, and explains why he gets the Big Bucks. One pictures the maiden Titanic asea, but, now, without the worry of icebergs ahead. Rather, the worry is whether there’ll be any ports ahead not under water. The Upstairs/Downstairs of Das Boot, held together by a melancholy stringed quartet, Cate and Leo, twin figureheads at the prow of the new flying dutchman we call the world. “Hegel wrote,” writes Žižek, “that the only thing we can learn from history is that we learn nothing from history, so I doubt the epidemic will make us any wiser.” Or, we’ve nothing to fear from history but fear of history itself.

Žižek says, “There is no return to normal, the new ‘normal’ will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives, or we will find ourselves in a new barbarism whose signs are already clearly discernible.” This is probably true, if the Plague lasts long enough. We read the pressures are mounting: domestic abuse, already a crisis in America, is bound to go into full swing; jobs are dropping like flies; cantaloupes (meaning all migrant agro) lie unpicked and bleeding in the sun; talking heads buddy up with news broadcasts from their cribs (presumably). One head says, through Žižek, “What iswrong with our system that we were caught unprepared by the catastrophe despite scientists warning us about it for years?” Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed. Indeed.

Panels pick apart the symptoms and point pingers, and “The usual suspects are waiting in line to be questioned: globalization, the capitalist market, the transience of the rich.” We make bells of our hands and wring them, Bobby Dylan-style, for all of us who are Left. Žižek says, Frank Wells told his brother H.G. that the feckin’ White Devil pommies had wiped out the aborigines of Tasmania, and that’s what inspired War of the Worlds, and that “Perhaps an epidemic which threatens to decimate humanity should be treated as Wells’s story turned around: the ‘Martian invaders’” and that it’s ironic that “we are now threatened ‘by the humblest things that God, in his wisdom, has put upon this earth,’ stupid viruses which just blindly reproduce themselves—and mutate.”

Žižek asks, “Why are we tired all the time?” Some of the answers are terrifying. But he posits that most folks are so caught up in pleasing The Man, polishing his apples with a smile, and as Wordsworth sighs, “We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!” Žižek says,

When a medical worker gets deadly tired from working overtime, when a caregiver is exhausted by a demanding charge, they are tired in a way that is different from the exhaustion of those driven by obsessive career moves. Their tiredness is worthwhile.

You don’t want to know how tired I am, nor how seasick.

Žižek takes some time to pot-shot the Israelis. Suddenly, with the arrival of Covid-19, Yahu’s nits are all largesse with the PLA, and are now ‘helping’ in Gaza, “not out of goodness and human consideration, but for the simple fact that it is impossible to separate Jews and Palestinians there.” The new rule: any Palestinian looking to give a hug to a “muscle tough” border guard will be shot. The Kamila Shamsie debacle is noted, the author “retroactively stripped” of a literary prize, says Žižek, ostensbly for “participating in…boycott measures against the Israeli government for its Palestinian policies since 2014.” Nothing to do with the virus (or does it?).

He knocks the Turkish-Russian alliance, calling it “Putoğan.” Žižek blames the alliance for the Syrian refugee crisis. “A perfect storm is gathering,” he says. “Three storms are gathering and combining their force above Europe. The first two are not specific to Europe: the coronavirus epidemic…[and] the Putoğan virus: the new explosion of violence in Syria between Turkey and the Assad regime.” The third storm is, he writes, the refugee virus — “a new wave of refugees organized by Turkey [may] have catastrophic consequences in this time of the coronavirus epidemic.” This is being forced on Europe, thanks to the Putoğan stranglehold on oil to Europe. Žižek predicts that “populist racists will have their heyday.”

In a section he calls Welcome To The Viral Desert, Žižek complains that “The ongoing spread of the coronavirus epidemic has also triggered a vast epidemic of ideological viruses which were lying dormant in our societies: fake news, paranoiac conspiracy theories, explosions of racism.” But Žižek is holding out for the arrival of a johnny-on-the-spot better-angels-of-our-nature virus and that a “much more beneficent ideological virus will spread and hopefully infect us: the virus of thinking of an alternate society, a society beyond nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation.” I’m thinking, how about Pax Americana? But Žižek’s all about a manifest commie destiny. I’m conflicted.

To make his manifesto come to life, Žižek says Chinese communism must die (and probably capitalism, too). He believes the death could come suddenly, after a brief bout of violence. Think, he says, the “‘Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique,’ the deadliest blow in all of martial arts.” He references, he actually references Tarantino, Kill Bill II, Beatrix (playing Covid-19) striking Bill, and Bill, played by the aging David Carradine (who kinda looks Asian and American, so fits the bill), takes one for the team, and after a teary ideological goodbye with his killer, dies. I’m welling up now, as I think of the simultaneous deaths of communism and capitalism. Music in my head, “My Corona.”

Next, he brings up Dr. WHO and “capitalist animism” and, out of nowhere, he adds, “Do not play with yourself.” Excess is the road to the palace of wisdom, Blake tells us, but damn. Anyway, Žižek manages to move on and leads us, like a google-eyed Virgil, through the Inferno, to a version of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, and applies it to epidemics, on our way to the beatitudinal Beatrix. As we recall, the stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Žižek asks rhetorically: “And is this not also how we are dealing with the coronavirus epidemic that exploded at the end of 2019?” It’s a hoax; China did it; well, at least it’s not SARS; we’re fucked; okay, let’s work this shit out.

Ever the optimist, because he’s got tenure, Žižek insists we can get over this pandemic and looks to historical precedents and seemingly refers to Foucault’s History of Sexuality (you can’t always tell) when he brings up medieval times and plagues and how they got past it all to finally produce Us. He adds a Step here, between depression and acceptance — “orgies.” Because, they reasoned, says Žižek that “since our lives are over, let’s get out of it all the pleasures still possible with lots of drinking and sex.” I thought, for no particular reason of the beginning of Foucault’s Sanity and Madness, and the reference to Narrenschiffen (Ship of Fools), and the transport of the mad from port to port on seasick asylum ships, and that recalled the Janus film classic, The King of Hearts, instant Carnival and a near-Corona.

He asks, “One interesting question raised by the coronavirus epidemic, even for a non-expert in statistics like me, is: where does data end and ideology begin?” This is a fair, if unelaborated query, given the Age of the Algorithm we’ve entered. He adds, mysteriously,

Many dystopias already imagine a similar future: we stay at home, work on our computers, communicate through videoconferences, exercise on a machine in the corner of our home office, occasionally masturbate in front of a screen displaying hardcore sex, and get food by delivery, never seeing other human beings in person.

Medieval porn, one presumes, and, um, why the objectification of the Dominos pizza guy?

Žižek says, “ I caught myself dreaming of visiting Wuhan. The abandoned streets in a megalopolis—the usually bustling urban centers looking like ghost towns, stores with open doors and no customers, just a lone walker or a single car here and there, provide a glimpse of what a non-consumerist world might look like.” This reminded me of a book by Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, who in The Digital Age (originally titled The Empire of the Mind), described a holograph machine of the near future set up in the den, where you could send your bratty, privileged kids. Schmidt asks: “Worried your kids are becoming spoiled? Have them spend some time wandering around the Dharavi slum in Mumbai.” Wuhan? Maybe a coronavirus view of things for the brats?

Žižek references famous activists and reckons that that’s what’s missing. He honors the memory of the whistleblowing doctor who alerted the world to the virus before he succumbed. He writes, “Li Wenliang, the doctor who first discovered the ongoing coronavirus epidemic and was censored by authorities, was an authentic hero of our time, something like the Chinese Chelsea Manning or Edward Snowden.” And, “A Chinese Julian Assange is needed to expose to the public the concealment in China’s response to the epidemic.” This response could include “doctoring data” to show recovery where there is none. They may be commies, but they know das kapitalist strategies.

The ever-optimistic Žižek cites potential temptations we need to be aware of:

From a cynical, vitalist standpoint, one could be tempted to see coronavirus as a beneficial infection that allows humanity to get rid of the old, weak and ill, like pulling out the half-rotten weed so that younger, healthier plants can prosper, and thus contribute to global health.

He tells of “three wise men,” Magi coming not to celebrate new life, but grim reapers grinning down. “Under a so-called ‘three wise men’ protocol,” says Žižek, “three senior consultants in each hospital would be forced to make decisions on rationing care.” Damn, who’s gonna tell Grandma that the nice smiling doctors want to kill her?

Žižek is not advocating the Three Wise men approach here, although he does support euthanasia. He writes,

I want to assert that I am being an utter realist here: one should prepare medicaments to enable a painless death for the terminally ill, to spare them the unnecessary suffering. But our first principle should be not to economize but to assist unconditionally, irrespective of costs, those who need help, to enable their survival.

So don’t panic; Žižek has not gone over to the Other Side.

And then, lo and behold, he cites a phone conversation (unreported by the MSM) that Greek politician and writer Yanis Varoufakis had just a few days ago with Julian Assange, who weighed in on the Covid-19 crisis during a phone call from Belmarsh. Assange told Varoufakis that “this new phase of the crisis is, at the very least, making it clear to us that anything goes—that everything is now possible.” Varoufakis tells Assange, “Whether the epidemic helps deliver the good or the most evil society will depend, of course, on us – on whether progressives manage to band together.” Fuck, are we that desperate for change that we’re putting allour eggs in Covid-19 basket? That’s deplorable.

And that leads to his final section, Communism Or Barbarism, As Simple As That! What does the future hold for humanity? Following on from the Three Grim Reapers scenario, Žižek visions up:

I don’t think the biggest threat is a regression to open barbarism, to brutal survivalist violence with public disorders, panic lynching, etc.. More than open barbarism I fear barbarism with a human face—ruthless survivalist measures enforced with regret and even sympathy, but legitimized by expert opinions.

A kind of global Velvet Revolution! Featuring communism, without the tanks; a brotherhood of sisters; the 1% diluted; Animal Farm, the sequel (Boxer, the glue of society, graciously remembered); everybody sharing shit, the return of peer-to-peer networks. Man, imagine that! I got your pandemic: I got your pandemic right here.

By the time Z. ‘s finished, a half-mad globe is put back in some semblance of order. Our “avowed Christian atheist” has convened a new world order of fresh-faced Communism; Corona has abdicated, Climate Change has been biff-bam-boomed. That was the Plan, anyway. But, lo, after all is said and said, Z. is back in his phone-book jammies and half-asleep, when there comes a rap-rap-rappin’ on the windows and a knock-knock-knockin’, actually a loud banging, on the door.

Outside, his acolytes — deconstruction workers, panpsychists, old school existentialists, sordid coprolaliacs, and Derrida — are coming at him, the walking dead, and he waits, like Vincent Price, in The Last Man on Earth, he waits, with all the answers, as they chant, “Zizek! We’re going to kill you, Zizek!” and he falls and he falls into an opioid slumber, a white hole event horizon, where no darkness can escape.

 

John Kendall Hawkins is an American ex-pat freelancer based in Australia.  He is a former reporter for The New Bedford Standard-Times.