[D66] 'Unreformable'

[A.O.]

uit Absolute recoil (Žižek):

And this brings us to the true focal point of the debate. Pippin’s line
of reasoning is that since, for me, bourgeois society is unreformable, a
radical change is needed; however, since there is no big Other, this
change cannot be a direct enactment of some historical necessity or
teleology in the classical Marxist sense, but must be an abyssal
voluntaristic act. Pippin here addresses what he sees as “the largest
question of all,” the one he “found the most dissatisfyingly addressed”
in my book:

[Žižek] wants to say that bourgeois society is fundamentally
self-contradictory, and I take that to mean “unreformable.” We need a
wholly new ethical order and that means “the Act.” That society’s
pretense to being a rational form is undermined by the existence of a
merely contingent particular, a figurehead at the top, the monarch. (A
better question, it seems to me, is why Hegel bothers, given how purely
symbolic and even pointless such a dotter of i’s and crosser of t’s
turns out to be.)

Pippin immediately makes it clear in what sense bourgeois society is
reformable—his reference is, as expected, “that great dream of social
democrats everywhere—‘Sweden in the Sixties!’” This, he continues,
does not seem to me something that inevitably produces its own
irrational and irreconcilable Unreason, or Other. More lawyers for the
poor in Texas, affordable daycare, universal health care, several fewer
aircraft carriers, more worker control over their own working
conditions, regulated perhaps nationalized banks, all are reasonable
extensions of that bourgeois ideal itself, however sick and often even
deranged modern bourgeois society has become.