[D66] Žižek: don’t worry, the catastrophy will arrive…

[Antid Oto]

http://materializmidialektik.wordpress.com/2012/09/17/slavoj-zizek-dont-worry-the-catastrophy-will-arrive/

Progressive liberals today often complain that they would like to join a 
“revolution” (a more radical emancipatory political movement), but no 
matter how desperately they search for it, they just “don’t see it” 
(they don’t see anywhere in the social space a political agent with a 
will and strength to seriously engage in such activity). While there is 
a moment of truth in it, one should nonetheless also add that the very 
attitude of these liberals is in itself part of a problem: if one just 
waits to “see” a revolutionary movement, it will, of course, never 
arise, and one will never see it. What Hegel says about the curtain that 
separates appearances from true reality (behind the veil of appearance 
there is nothing, only what the subject who looks there put it there), 
holds also for a revolutionary process: “seeing” and “desire” are here 
inextricably linked, i.e., the revolutionary potential is not there to 
discover as an objective social fact, one “sees it” only insofar as one 
“desires” it (engages oneself in the movement). No wonder Mensheviks and 
those who opposed Lenin’s call for a revolutionary takeover in the 
summer of 1917 “didn’t see” the conditions for it as “ripe” and opposed 
it as “premature” – they simply did not want the revolution. Another 
version of this skeptical argument about “seeing” is that liberals claim 
how capitalism is today so global and all-encompassing that they cannot 
“see” any serious alternative to it, that they cannot imagine a feasible 
“outside” to it. The reply to this is that, insofar as this is true, 
they do not see tout court: the task is not to see the outside, but to 
see in the first place (to grasp the nature of today’s capitalism) – the 
Marxist wager is that, when we “see” this, we see enough, inclusive of 
how to get out…) So our reply to the worried progressive liberals, eager 
to join the revolution, and just not seeing its chances anywhere around, 
should be like the answer to the proverbial ecologist worried about the 
prospect of catastrophy: don’t worry, the catastrophy will arrive…