[D66] ‘What I like about coronavirus’ by Slavoj Žižek

[A.OUT]

‘What I like about coronavirus’ by Slavoj Žižek
By
Charlie Nash
spectator.us
7 min
View Original

‘OK, can do it, but I am ill (NOT the virus).’

With that, the interview is set: an hour on the phone with Slavoj Žižek.

As I thanked Žižek for his time, he stresses, ‘Don’t expect too much. 
It’s not the virus, but…how do I put this, I have a lot of symptoms of 
the virus, but hopefully not the virus.’

‘I’ve had these symptoms for years,’ he noted. ‘You know I’m sneezing 
all the time, and so on.’

We are meant to discuss Žižek’s upcoming book of essays, A Left That 
Dares to Speak Its Name, which the 70-year-old says is an easier read 
than the majority of the books he has written in the past five decades.

But Žižek is far more eager to talk about the COVID-19 coronavirus.

‘Europe is approaching a perfect storm,’ he says, before asking whether 
I’d seen ‘that stupid movie about that fishing boat?’

‘The movie with George Clooney. It was called The Perfect Storm. You 
know what’s the definition of “perfect storm”? When calamities, like a 
tornado here and storm there, unite and then their unification 
multiplies their effect,’ he explained. ‘I think that Europe is now 
approaching a perfect storm.’

One of those calamities, according to Žižek, is the coronavirus.

‘I don’t get it, even what’s happening here. All official proclamations 
begin with, “No cause for panic, don’t panic”, and then all that they 
tell you is reasons to panic,’ he said, before noting that both the 
health and economic consequences of the coronavirus could cause severe 
damage to Europe.

‘If you add to this a possible new wave of refugees you get the perfect 
storm, and I think that Europe is so weakened that it will not be able 
to react in a unified way, and that’s what I mean when I say coronavirus 
gives a new chance to communism,’ he said. ‘Of course, I don’t mean the 
old-style communism. By communism, I mean simply what the World Health 
Organization is saying. We should mobilize, coordinate, and so on…like, 
my God, this is a dangerous situation. They’re saying this country lacks 
masks, respirators, and so on. We should treat this as a war. Some kind 
of European coordination…maybe even wartime mobilization. It can be 
done, and it can even boost productivity.

‘What I mean is that it is possible to keep the good sides of 
capitalism, but nonetheless, through a coordinated state, social effort 
to mobilize. Not just with coronavirus, this is needed with other 
ecological crises, refugees and so on.’

What about politics on the other side of the Atlantic? On the 2020 
Democratic nomination race, Žižek says, ‘My longstanding analogies are 
fully confirmed by recent events. Isn’t it absolutely clear that the 
message of the Democratic party establishment is, “better Trump than 
Bernie Sanders”?

‘I noticed how on the one hand you have this, let’s call it, 
“electability problem”. The Democratic establishment is saying Bernie 
Sanders is too extreme and so on and so on, but my God, that’s how Trump 
got elected!’ he continued. ‘I mean this line of reasoning that “play 
safely, stay in the middle if you want to be elected”, no longer works.

‘We have a large socialist movement which gained a serious foothold in 
United States politics and in the mainstream, and this is incredibly 
important to be visible there as a serious option.’

Žižek goes on to claim that the Democratic party and Republican party 
mainstream are becoming ‘indistinguishable’, pointing to billionaire 
Michael Bloomberg’s brief presidential run as a recent example.

‘If the Democratic establishment were to make a decision at gunpoint as 
it were — Trump or Sanders — they wouldn’t say, but de facto they would 
have preferred Trump. So I think, politically, there is the irony.’

According to Žižek, President Trump is too passive. A flaw he cites as 
being behind the United States’s decision to pull out of Syria, which 
Žižek described as ‘one of the most catastrophic things that Trump did’.

‘He sacrificed the Kurds,’ Žižek said. ‘The main victims. Everybody 
wants to screw them. I have full sympathy with the Kurds. Not so much 
with the Kurds in the north of Iraq, who are more conservative, but the 
Kurds in the southeast of Turkey and northern Syria.’

‘Trump opened up with unilateral withdrawal, a new situation where 
basically the two partners there are now Putin and Erdogan, and it’s 
clear what’s the target of both of them…to ruin Europe. European unity. 
People even didn’t notice that a similar thing is happening now in 
Libya. Russia is moving in, supporting one side, Turks supporting the 
other side in the civil war, and then they are making the deals.

‘I think that this is all coordinated. How this tension threatens Europe 
with new waves of refugees, which if — now it will sound horrible for a 
leftist — but I think that the new wave of refugees in Europe means a 
total ideological, political catastrophe. I am for more refugees…but 
four years ago when there was the first wave, it should have been done 
in an organized way. The way — this chaotic way — means that it will not 
only be Hungary and a couple of other populists. Populists will simply 
gradually take over Europe, and we should never forget what strange 
alliances we get here.’

To Žižek, Putin’s Russia and Erdogan’s Turkey are part of a ‘new Axis’ 
which, due to European passivity, ‘can always blackmail Europe’ through 
both oil and refugees.

‘I’m just shocked at this passivity of Europe,’ he declares. ‘We pay 
Turkey €6 billion if they help the refugees. I thought this is a 
disgusting compromise, but
OK. Then, the time that we had four years of relative peace should have 
been used for Europe to mobilize not against the refugees, but to change 
the situation there…of course, Europe should receive more refugees, but 
this is not the solution.

‘The wealthiest countries there…Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Emirates. They’re 
simply not receiving any immigrants. Why Europe? Why not Saudi Arabia, 
Kuwait, Emirates? Rich, wealthy countries. It should have been easy for 
them to receive.’

On the ‘populist left,’ Žižek, is skeptical, claiming they prefer to 
‘write wonderful books about why things went wrong’ than get their act 
together.

‘I would like to have a modest, realist left which has positive 
proposals of what to do. Like, OK, to talk frankly, we cannot obviously 
step out of capitalism. How to deal with it?’ he said, adding that the 
populist left needs to work out ‘how to use capitalist mechanisms’.

Žižek, says that ‘the rise of Trump and populism signals the end of this 
old liberal centrist consensus’.

‘The majority is disappointed by it and we cannot simply return to it. 
That’s why all around Europe — Le Pen, AfD, and so on — all around we 
have this populist revolt,’ he declared, before encouraging the left to 
‘do what Trump did on the right’.

‘I remember when Trump began, people thought he was too divisive. No! 
That’s how you win!’ he says. ‘Hillary lost because Hillary tried to 
play this game. “We must move more to the center”,…the moral majority, 
the silent moral majority. I think the left should appropriate this. The 
left’s strategy should not be, “we are radical, we provoke, we use dirty 
words in public”…I think that the left, to reinvent itself, should 
present itself in this way. If by postmodernism we mean obscenity, 
irony, inconsistency, fake news and so on, then Trump is the ultimate 
postmodern president, and I think that the left should shamelessly begin 
to scream, “no, we address not just some fringe group, we address 
normal, modest, impoverished everyday people”.

‘The left should also stop this obsession with it’s this LGBT minority, 
that minority, and so on and so on. I think that this obsession with 
different lifestyles, minorities, is ultimately just a maneuver to avoid 
the big economic problem.’

‘Class struggle is returning,’ Žižek proclaimed, noting that ‘the two 
surprising mega hits of the last year’, Joker and Parasite, are ‘both 
movies about class struggle’.

Whether the digital age will help workers in the class struggle, 
however, is an ‘ambiguous’ question on Žižek’s mind.

‘On the one hand, internet, of course, opens up the new space of 
immediate social coordination. You can reach millions instantly,’ he 
explained. ‘On the other hand, here Julian Assange enters I think.’

‘We are gradually becoming aware to what degree the control of internet, 
who will control the digital space? It’s one of the big battles today…I 
think this digital space is not simply either good or bad. It’s just one 
domain of struggle.’

I ask him about Nick Land and the increasingly popular philosophy of 
accelerationism, which starts from the idea that capitalism and 
technology should be sped up in order to precipitate social change. He 
doesn’t seem to know about Land but he says: ‘What I see good in 
accelerationism is that I don’t buy this idea that you can oppose global 
capitalism through some kind of local traditional resistance. Some of my 
Latino American friends claim we should return to ancient tribal 
traditions and so on and so on. No. I still remain a Marxist here. You 
have to go through radical capitalist modernization. There is no way back.’