Neo-Liberalism as Tragedy and Farce

A Review of Slavoj Zizek’s First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

By Michael J. Pyska

Love him or hate him, agree with him or otherwise, it would be hard not to at least acknowledge that Slavoj Zizek makes you think. Zizek’s work, discussed among academics and lay intellectuals alike, often deploys a remarkable talent for dialectical thinking through explosive, sometime infuriating, engagements with received dogma.

Zizek's latest offering, a book called First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (2009), is a sobering analysis of neo-liberal economics and the ideological 'faith' that supports it. Much to the dismay of many elite power-brokers, Zizek's exposition and deconstruction of the policies and philosophy of neo-liberalism leaves no doubt as to the emptiness and pathological ignorance adhered to by its loudest and most powerful proponents.

With eloquence, wit and brief, but insightful, case studies, Zizek identifies two historic turning points that render neo-liberal practice and ideology bankrupt. Zizek convincingly argues that both the World Trade Center attacks of 9/11 and the economic crisis almost exactly seven years later were symptomatic of the definitive collapse of neoliberalism's alleged authority.

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Žižek Against Ecology

Ecology Against Nature

By Slavoj Žižek

Recall Marx’s and Engels’s famous description of the capitalist dynamics in The Communist Manifesto:

“Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. […] In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so, also, in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.” (Marx and Engels, 1985: 83-4)

Does this not, more than ever, describe our contemporary reality? Ericsson phones are no longer Swedish, Toyota cars are manufactured 60% in the USA, Hollywood culture pervades the remotest parts of the globe. Furthermore, does the same not also go for all forms of ethnic and sexual identities? Should we not supplement Marx’s description in this sense, adding that also sexual ‘one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible’, that also concerning sexual practices ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned’, so that capitalism tends to replace the standard normative heterosexuality with a proliferation of unstable shifting identities and/or orientations?

Today, with the latest biogenetic developments, we are entering a new phase in which it is simply nature itself that melts into air: the main consequence of the scientific breakthroughs in biogenetics is the end of nature. Once we know the rules of their construction, natural organisms are transformed into objects amenable to manipulation. Nature -human and inhuman- is, thus, ‘desubstantialized’, deprived of its impenetrable density, of what Heidegger called ‘earth’. This development compels us to give a new twist to Freud’s title Unbehagen in der Kultur - discontent, uneasiness in culture. With the latest developments, the discontent shifts from culture to nature itself: nature is no longer ‘natural’, the reliable ‘dense’ background of our lives; it now appears as a fragile mechanism, which, at any point, can explode in a catastrophic direction.

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