Oh, the Zizek thing again... posted by Richard Seymour

K-Punk has stuck his oar in, on the side of Zizek, or at least against myself and Le Colonel Chabert. A couple of remarks to begin with, just to get some intellectual clutter out of the way. K-Punk's accusations of moralising against Chabert would be more impressive if he didn't engage in the same himself, ragging about her class position (which she has never concealed to me at any rate). As Cliff once reportedly said "Frederich Engels was a capitalist, and we didn't ex-communicate him!" Second, if he insists on amateur (or pop) psychology, we might have a word or two to say about what his extraordinary over-the-top invective against Chabert and the Socialist Workers' Party adverts to, especially as it consists of an impressionistic layering of accusations and sneers rather than an impressive argument. The worry about "guilt-mongering" is suggestive of a guilty conscience, for instance. Thirdly, the charges of "quasi-McCarthyite ... denunciation" don't inspire confidence when they come in the midst of a stream of bombast and slander that flurries from the keyboard like scurf from the head of an NME critic. Fourthly, and rather more basically, attending the opera is not a crime, nor even an activity that deserves resentful barbs. Such kvetching is inanity to the power of infinity.

Anyway, I'll try - perhaps quixotically - to drag a little sense out of K-Punk's intervention. Here, I think, is the cri de coeur - "It is just that I refuse to accept that Islamophilia is the opposite of Islamophobia; I refuse to equivocate between defending Muslims from racist attack and defending Islam; and I refuse to renounce the centrality of atheism to Marxism. The simple fact is that Marxist explanations are in competition with religious explanations.". The first dialectical point has been made before - by Zizek, in fact, who suggests that philosemitism is really not so very far from antisemitism. Okay - right deviation, left deviation, is anyone else tired of the Stalinist dialectics? I have never met an Islamophile (or a Buddherast) in my life, so I think the point is moot. It would be as if those who defended Judaism against the Blood Libel were met with stern, knowing rebukes that their 'philosemitism' is really not very far from antisemitism. This refusal of two Bad Extremes is indistinguishable from liberal platitude. The second point is obstinately purblind: everyone knows that there is a difference between being anti-racist and being a Defender of Islam, but there is not a straightforward opposition - what happens when the demonisation of Muslims takes the form of the demonisation of Islam itself? When Muslims are forever accused on the basis of this or that passage in the Quran, this or that fragment of 'Islamic' history, this or that mangled, manipulated bit of data? Is it not imperative at this point to 'defend' Islam? No one here at any rate has suggested that one couldn't be a critic of Islam and also be an anti-racist. Tariq Ali manages it, so why not you? Knock yourself out. However, it pays to demonstrate some familiarity with the matter on which one speaks. The third point, about Marxism competing with religion, is okay as far as it goes, but check the sequel out:

Islamic Marxism would be a way forward, but this would entail a politicization of Islam not the Islamicization of politics practised by all the variants of really existing political Islam of which I am aware. (I sincerely hope that there are some other modes of political Islam out there at the moment... someone tell me where they are.)

So competition can give way to cooperation then, at least formally. Well, if K-Punk likes, he can have a glance at the archives of Islamism, perhaps at the Mujahiden e-Khalq, a Marxist-Islamist formation as it once was during the Iranian revolution, or at Hasan Hanafi, an Egyptian left-Islamist intellectual. One might also mention that much of the liberal opposition within Saudi Arabia takes a specifically Islamist form. But what is this building up to? Well: "the SWP seems to accept that it is a straight choice between EITHER capitalism OR political Islam, no buts." To put it bluntly, a straightforward lie, a sectarian fabrication - and K-Punk knows this to be a fabrication. He knows it as surely as he knows that he can't find a single article, polemic, essay, disquisition or commandment supporting such a stance. I simply can't believe that he is misled on the matter. And so it goes on: one straw man after another, in which ironies supposedly redound to the discredit of the SWP. Don't you guys understand that religion is in competition with Marxism? Don't you realise that Islamophobia is not really to do with Islam? What's with all the stuff about cultural difference?

Much more interesting is the defense of Zizek, whose

reflation of Eurocentrism has to be seen conjuncturally, in the context of the racial delirium of US supremacist-fascists like [the Canadian] Mark Steyn, with their tiresome denunciations of Old Europe and 'Eurabia'. To trumpet Europe and atheism in the New York Times constitutes a provocation: better atheist Eurabia than fundamentalist USArabia.

As if. The liberal intelligentsia that reads the New York Times is not likely to be rocked by a smug celebration of Europe, atheism and tolerance. This is the same sanctimonious horse shit that the same elite glorified itself with while applauding Clinton's bombardment of Yugoslavia. The smug falsehoods about Muslims and non-European cultures will have gone down a treat as well, as will the self-congratulatory guff about the liberal press (Mladina here functions as a substitute for the NYT). And isn't Zizek there performing the exact gesture that K-Punk accuses Chabert of? Doesn't he here seek good capitalists (liberal European ones) versus bad capitalists (fundamentalist American ones)? What else could be with the concern about marginal creatures of the North American far right? There's more:

USArabia is the neo-con project for a new fundamentalist century, the reality of the US-political Islam complicity that lies behind the 'official' stand-off between the US and Islamism. As Hamid Taqvaee of the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq has argued, US neo-conservatism has fed a resurgent religious climate from which political Islam has profited. We all know of the longstanding links between the US and bin Laden; and we need to remember that the US has looked mightily unperturbed while the previously secular Iraq has acquired its first Islamic constitution.

While there is not a pure antagonism between the interests of the US ruling class and those of various reactionary Islamist groups, there is hardly a pure complicity or coincidence of interests either. Some of the more fringe neoconservatives might be happy to see Hosni Mubarak overthrown by a coalition of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Nasserists and the left, but I suspect that most of the US ruling class would find such a development decidedly inconvenient. This is the problem with conflating the 'neocon project' with that of American power, but the deeper problem is in falsely bundling Islamism as a single coherent project, which it is not. There are Islamist movements which in different times and places could find the US convivial, while there are those which will prove oppositional. In some cases, it makes sense to support the Islamists - for instance, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front - against the state or against US imperialism (US 'advisers' are busily helping troops from Manila wipe out the Moro opposition). Or Hamas in Palestine against Israel. Not uncritically, but it would be absurd to say to oppressed people that because they have decided to endorse or operate within some variant of Islamism, our support is being withdrawn. Is this what K-Punk thinks he means when he refers to the SWP's supposed counterposing of Political Islam to capitalism? It's hard to tell, because much of the argument is enthymematic - and the unstated assumptions seem to derive directly from the lexicon of a puerile Third Campism, which has absolutely nothing to do with deconstructing or refusing false oppositions.

Then there's this:

We need to do just as Marx recommended, and accelerate, not resist, capital's destruction of traditions, ethnicities and territorialities. It might be tempting to find bolt holes of reactionary tradition in which to take flight from the scouring winds of capital, but it is a temptation to be vehemently resisted. The non-organic product of capital's 'Frankensteinian surgery of the cities' (Lyotard), the proletariat emerges from the destruction of all ethnicities, the desolation of all tradition, the destitution of any home.

How do we go about this? In concrete terms, how does one 'accelerate' capital's "destruction of traditions, ethnicities and territorialities"? Leave aside for a second the question of what to do with capital's invention and reinvention of traditions, ethnicities and territorialities, how do we nurture its destructive side? I suppose a modest demand might be for a ban on the hijab, but why not go all out and support capital's destruction of traditions, ethnicities and territorialities in Iraq or Afghanistan? Why not support capital's displacement of traditional communities and the organic family through unemployment and alienation? There are many ways in which to accelerate capital's creative destruction, but I'm not as confident as K-Punk is that out of this will come an emboldened proletariat. I don't imagine for a second that he would support any of this either, but if his recommendation has no positive content, then it is abstract moralising posing as revolutionary machismo.

Just a couple of finishing points. K-Punk interprets the accusations of racism in Zizek's article as a complaint "that Zizek is not liberal enough, that he is insufficiently 'culturally sensitive', not deferential enough to the pieties of cultural difference." Pish. Cultural "sensitivity" has precisely fuck all to do with it - the main problem with Zizek's piece is that it retails almost every dull liberal cliche about 'the Muslim crowd' and other 'self-blaming' liberals who are insufficiently ruthless with Islam and so on. It is a liberal, Eurocentric whinge about Muslims, and it really does reduce the world to fundamentalisms of various kinds versus atheism, in which religion is supposedly the 'well-spring' of violence and atheism the pacific anti-dote. The problem with the piece in that sense is that it is anti-Marxist. It is a piece of liberal piety that would befit the Young Hegelians: religion as the source of violence and atrocity, because God condones all, because he exhorts you to do it, because there is a supererogatory enjoyment to be taken in it. If we were to re-commit to a Marxist analysis - that is a materialist analysis - we'd have to conclude that religion is a tenth order factor, focus on which obscures more important matters. For instance, one might incorporate Pape's research on suicide attacks or even just consider some basic details of the religion that is supposed to legitimise this or that atrocity (and there it might become necessary to - shudder - defend Islam). And K-Punk's complaint about "quasi-McCarthyite Islamophobic denunciation" is a little too close to the resentful whingeing of the racist right for comfort: "You can't bloody say anything without being called a racist!" This complaint is almost always false, and at any rate the correct response is to deal with the claim seriously, to challenge it properly, not to resentfully shore up one's amour propre, or vicariously do so on behalf of another.

The only thing that I wholeheartedly agreed with in K-Punk's argument was this: "Marxist atheism is only achieved once the theological critique of capitalism is completed. This is what separates Marxist atheism from the gliberal platitudes of the likes of Nick Cohen, who proclaim secularism while remaining attached to the theology of capital (liberal commonsense). Theism is defined not by any positive beliefs, but by the role of the fetish or totem as transcendental guarantee of any reality system. The critique of religion is the 'premise of all critique' because critique is about the exposure of such fetish-guarantees." Okay then, but why not take issue with Zizek's frequent reversion to liberal commensense? Why not expose his fetish-guarantee, namely the liberal order of atheism and secularism underwritten by Pauline Christianity?