Zizek Now by Khader Jamil; Rothenberg Molly Anne; & Molly Anne Rothenberg

Author:Khader, Jamil; Rothenberg, Molly Anne; & Molly Anne Rothenberg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2012-12-20T05:00:00+00:00

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Slavoj Žižek’s Eco-Chic

Verena Andermatt Conley

Agent provocateur par excellence of critical and cultural theory, Slavoj Žižek has touched both directly and obliquely on every type of culture war waged in the arena of capitalism today. It comes as no surprise that he should pronounce himself on issues concerning the environment. Žižek faces squarely what is often perceived as a difficult and somewhat uncertain area that many culture critics are reticent to broach. Ecology resonates in his exchanges with Glyn Daly in the same author’s Conversations with Žižek (2004); it figures in an address on “The Liberal Utopia” he delivered in Athens (2007); it is at the center in his conversation with Astra Taylor in Examined Life: Excursions with Eight Contemporary Thinkers (2008 dvd; 2009). In 2008 he also engaged the environment in both a lecture “Censorship Today: Violence or Ecology as a New Opium for the Masses” and an article, “Nature and its Discontents” (reprinted under the title “Unbehagen in der Natur” in his In Defense of Lost Causes). Most recently, ecology is actively present in Living in the End Times (2010).

However scattered or circumstantial they may appear, the reflections are of a consistent and forceful voice and of strong and avowedly Eurocentric philosophical tenor. Repeatedly calling into question the effects of global capitalism, they examine what the latter has wrought and were it may lead us. For Žižek the environment concerns all and everyone and, as a rule, it cannot be countenanced outside of capitalism. When pronouncing himself on ecology, the philosopher condemns unsparingly a capitalist system that keeps expanding, reinventing itself and, in a doomsday scenario forever surpassing its own limits. Against common assumptions he declares that capitalism is a universal and ecology a particular (Living in the End Times, 334). At our historical moment, we witness everywhere, especially in the media, a tendency to naturalize capitalism – to the point where it is replaced with “economy” and simply goes without saying. In their common struggle against anything that is perceived to be even remotely socialist, liberals and conservatives alike present capitalism in the name of the best of all worlds. Žižek argues that a true ecology cannot be thought without socialism or even without communism. Ecology too calls for a genuine collective experience shared by one and all. In the paragraphs to follow, I will work through Žižek’s pronouncements on ecology, especially at the core of “Nature and its Discontents,” before examining how they percolate through his other writings and, finally, assessing his theory in terms of ecological dilemmas today.

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