Slavoj Žižek. Freedom: A Disease Without a Cure. London: Bloomsbury, 2023. 320 s.
Reviewing a Žižek book is a bit like “dancing about architecture,” to borrow a Frank Zappa quotation. Ideally, a review ought to provide a rational overview of a work’s contents and form. But Žižek unusual prose style resists simplified summary, and many of his most recent works are, if not formless, then at least formally idiosyncratic—more like patchworks of loosely interwoven textual fragments than formal or even sustained argument. With strands of text that have been recombined, reused and (occasionally subtly) rewritten, his texts at times seem to draw more upon Burroughs’ “cut-up” collage technique than the Western canon of philosophy, redolent of the free-associating analysand on the couch giving free rein to their thoughts: One idea succeeds the next, certainly, but the sum of it all is naturally quite fragmentary.
What, then, ties it all together? After some 40 years of writing books, Žižek is perhaps first and foremost a thinker of dialectical inversion, someone who has made turning things upside down into something of an intellectual trademark. A large part of Žižek’s method revolves around showing that a thing is actually its own counterpart—and the more absurd, paradoxical or comical the result, the better. What if the laugh tracks in TV sitcoms don’t so much passivize us as “laugh for us” and therefore allow us to escape the passivity of having to laugh “on our own,” which the cultural theorist Robert Pfaller calls interpassivity (p. 143)? What if the metaphoric masks we wear, i.e. our public personas, are more authentic than the “real” self behind the mask (p. 119)? What if the conventional understanding of freedom is actually a form of unfreedom—as when we are given a choice we are meant to refuse (an illusory freedom), or when the prohibition itself provides an independent pleasure that then disappears as soon as the culture is liberalized and social norms opened up (p. 3)? Or what if military occupation is not a form of oppression, but an opportunity to take fate into one’s own hands and thus, paradoxically, experience a deeper freedom—as when Sartre wrote in 1944 that “never were we freer than during the German occupation,” which Žižek quotes approvingly (p. 25)?
It goes without saying that this “up-is-really-down” methodology is far from unproblematic. It can be taken too far, and at times Žižek over-applies his theoretical matrix, either to the point of boredom or the politically problematic. Sartre’s romanticization of occupation was, after all, invalid for the murdered millions who could not join a Resistance; a superficial persona put on to function in public is more oppressive than being able to “be yourself,” whatever that might mean; and the softening of social norms is, on the whole, a good thing for many groups: Who wants to return back to the 1950s? Turning things upside down can be as reactionary as it is enlightening. Moreover, Žižek isn’t entirely consistent in the way he deploys this “Hegelian” dialectic. A good question to ask oneself when facing a book by Žižek might thus be: Which firmly fixed “Archimedean” points of reference does he nevertheless insist upon establishing? What is it that he is not willing to turn upside down? In other words, where does Žižek choose to make his stand, with both feet firmly planted on the ground?
Because there are some solid anchor points, even in Freedom. The Ukraine war, for example, becomes in Žižek’s book an unproblematic narrative about Russia’s imperial ambitions that triggers a commitment from the West to provide military assistance to Kyiv. Žižek seems to fear a peace treaty between Ukraine and Russia as a possible symptom of Western, and U.S., weakness of resolve (p. 197)—and this despite acknowledging only a few pages later, en passant, that “Ukraine cannot win over Russia” (p. 210). Western NATO critics are dismissed as mere “peaceniks,” which is Cold War language, fitting for a second Cold War: “The peaceniks who are against NATO and sending arms to Ukraine ignore the key fact that it was Western help that allowed Ukraine to resist—without it, Ukraine would be all long occupied” (p. 229; italics in original). No dialectical twist awaits us here: The only way forward is “full support for Ukraine” (p. 229), whatever the cost, and forget suggesting that any war must sooner or later end in a political solution (as U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently recognized in Congress). Quite the contrary: “The most despicable figures in our public space are the peaceniks from Chomsky through Varoufakis to Peterson” (p. 229). Žižek offers no critical attempt to think beyond the confines of a tragically locked geopolitical situation. Moreover, one can disagree with left-wing intellectuals like Varoufakis and Chomsky, but are they “despicable figures”? For someone who has advocated more “politeness and civility” in public discourse, partly in response to Trump’s vulgarity, this seems strangely inconsistent.
In some places, Žižek’s critical observations turn conspiratorial. On China, for example, he claims that “[t]hey have already started to plant small chips into the bodies of individuals” for the “general purpose of controlling the whereabouts and characteristics of individuals” (p. 186). On Switzerland, he claims that the country is “really run by a half-secret elite board of twenty men who really decide everything” (p. 210). Perhaps unsurprisingly, both sets of claims are unsourced.
The Dangers of Freedom
In this book, too, Žižek treads familiar ground. We meet here the same Hegelian-Lacanian-Marxist admixture we have grown accustomed to from dozens of past books and essays, interspersed with pop culture references (Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem, Agatha Christie novels, the Netflix series Inventing Anna, Alexandre Dumas, Fight Club), where the goal—as always, and somewhat contrary to the book’s purported aim—seems to be to capture the world’s overall ideological situation and basic political-economic-cultural logic. With grandiose ambitions such as these, it goes without saying that the pitfalls run deep.
Having said all this, Freedom is still a stimulating book. For a book supposedly devoted to the concept of freedom, however, it makes up a vanishingly small part of the book’s overall contents. The ironic subtitle, A Disease Without a Cure, nevertheless reveals its overarching thesis conclusion. We are facing here a very different concept from liberalism’s paeans to freedom. In Žižek’s terms, we are condemned to be free, understood as the ability and opportunity to shape the political, social and cultural space, especially through collective action. However, following Kant, Žižek notes that our natural urge for freedom needs to be restrained; freedom must be met with “discipline” in order to curb man’s unruly “Wildheit” (lit. “wildness”) (p. 5). But at the same time, this “wildness” is our greatest strength as a species; it is expressed in the capacity for passion, which Žižek understands as an irrational (over)identification with an activity or project, often artistic or political. Passion makes us more than animals: “Passion is as such purely human: animals have no passions, just instincts” (p. 5). The paradox, then, is that the human urge for freedom or “wildness”—a word redolent with the natural—is actually our most civilizing quality, what in its essence separates us from other animals.
But as Žižek writes, the desire for freedom is also “at its most basic a disease” (p. 4), something that is “beyond the pleasure principle,” and not necessarily a source of joy—neither for individuals who are seized by a passion and who can thus find themselves submitting their entire life force to the project, but also for social collectives seized by the desire for freedom. With his long-standing interest in Stalinism, Žižek nevertheless reads the Soviet Union’s origins in the Bolshevik Revolution as based on a fundamental idea of freedom—what Žižek, following the German author Bini Adamczak, calls “the ineradicable, absolutely authentic, Communist desire, the Idea of a society which fully overcomes domination” (p. 202). The Soviet Union was a disaster for the millions who died in Stalin’s murderous campaigns, but this longing for a world without (illegitimate) domination, without social suffering, is an immortal, positive idea—a product of the desire for freedom. Communism in its purest form is thus the idea of a world enhanced by freedom, even if the self-proclaimed “moderately conservative communist” Žižek is nevertheless fully aware of the dangers of utopian fantasies. (As he likes to phrase it in various written and verbal contexts, he has “no illusions.”)
This dialectical alternation between positive and negative understandings of freedom is replaced in the conclusion of Freedom with a one-sidedly dark reading of the effects of freedom, in which Žižek notes that climate change is the result of an excessive exercise of freedom: An impending climate catastrophe—recall that nearly 80 percent of leading scientists polled now expect a 2.5 degree increase by 2100 and believe we are facing a “semi-dystopian” future—does not necessarily (only) mean that the earth is getting warmer, but that nature as such, understood as a stable foundation for the exercise of human freedom, will cease to exist. Žižek encapsulates this with the phrase “the end of nature” (p. 265), a consequence of humanity going too far in its exercise of freedom:
The lesson of global warming is that the freedom of humankind was possible only against the background of the stable natural parameters of life on earth (temperature, the composition of the air, sufficient water and energy supply, etc.): humans can “do what they want” only insofar as they remain marginal enough so that they don’t seriously perturb the parameters of life on earth. The limitation of our freedom that becomes palpable with global warming is the paradoxical outcome of the very exponential growth of our freedom and power, i.e., of our growing ability to transform nature around us up to destabilizing the very basic geological parameters of life on earth. (p. 266)
The more scientific and technological advances, the more power to act—but also, consequently, the power to destroy, a clear illustration of the dialectic of enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno’s book is a recurring reference in Žižek’s works over the decades).
Moderately Conservative Communism?
In recent years, Žižek has begun to refer to himself, somewhat self-deprecatingly, as a “moderately conservative communist.” If the communist element is becoming somewhat harder to spot, the moderate conservatism is all the more conspicuous, e.g., lashing out against Sweden’s perceived crime problem (pp. 248-249), while failing to take into account that the level of crime in the Nordic country still remains extremely low in comparative terms or placing the suburbs in a larger context of political-economic liberalization. It is relevant that Sweden has systematically cut and liberalized the welfare state and that the level of inequality has increased: The country now has one of the world’s largest shares of dollar billionaires measured per capita. But Žižek is too busy rushing on to the next topic to dwell on the case of Sweden, even though he manages to claim that to “blame immigrants for their refusal to integrate” is just as wrong as blaming the majority “for its non-readiness to integrate immigrants” (p. 249), an example of how dialectics can just as easily result in centrist political platitudes.
So where does that leave the communism of Žižek’s self-styled ideology? In the face of what he calls the “four horsemen of the apocalypse,” consisting of “plague,” war, hunger and “death” (understood, unconventionally, as the “death” of the sovereign subject in the face of new digital technology, such as Elon Musk’s Neuralink technology and what Žižek has previously called “the wired brain” ), Žižek believes that “parliamentary liberal democracy,” and liberal market capitalism, are no longer enough. We will need something like communism, even as it must take on a completely different form than failed, catastrophic “20th century communism.” What is needed is precisely “a new form of communism” (p. 255). Žižek is not particularly clear on what he means by this here, other than offering the examples of “universal healthcare, social regulation of the economy, [and] free education” (p. 256), but small hints throughout the book, as well as in earlier texts (such as his 2020 book, PANDEMIC!), suggest the need for some form of strong state control, with collective control over important economic resources, perhaps subject to some sort of transnational coordination mechanisms.
In the poem Conundrum of the Workshops, Rudyard Kipling asked the pointed question (through the figure of the Devil): “It’s pretty, but is it art?”. Similarly, one is tempted to ask of Žižek: “It’s pretty (i.e. makes good sense), but is it communism?”
Perhaps not. What Žižek calls a “new communism” in fact resembles the policy packages and forms of statecraft that all the major geopolitical players have increasingly come to subscribe to in the post-pandemic era. The U.S., China and EU are all attempting to establish tighter state controls over energy supplies, key resources (such as rare minerals) and industries (microchips, solar cells, EV batteries), and increasingly deploy the full range of instruments at their disposal, from subsidies, tax breaks, and bilateral trade and investment agreements to more direct interventions in the market (depending on the country or bloc’s relative ideological leanings), whether it be President Joe Biden’s billion-dollar “green tax credits” or China’s billions in subsidies and loans to its domestic industry or the “Belt and Road” initiative. What Žižek terms a “new communism” seems more like the sort of state mercantilism that, in the wake of the unbridled market liberalism of the 1990s and 2000s, looks gradually set to become the dominant ideology of the major powers in our time. If communism is defined as minimally as Žižek does, Beijing, Washington, and Brussels are all more or less moving toward “communist” principles today. The state is increasingly called upon to regulate economic life for the preservation and furtherance of geographically-bounded social life, in direct contest with geopolitical peer competitors.
Consuming Culture
Žižek is a discerning curator of pop-cultural (and not-so-popular cultural) products, and one of the pleasures of reading a Žižek book is maintaining a running list of all the movies, books and music referenced. At his best, Žižek sends us on a voyage of discovery through his reference lists, whether it’s to read Andrei Platonov’s post-revolutionary novels or the final Hercule Poirot story, Curtain, or to listen to Shostakovich’s “failed” opera, Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk. And who wouldn’t want to read Adamczak’s meditation on Soviet communism from 1917 to 1939, Yesterday’s Tomorrow, after the following recommendation from Žižek in the footnotes: “After reading this book and trying to select quotes from it, I was overwhelmed by a weird feeling that the entire book should be quoted” (p. 300).
Perhaps, in the end, this is what Žižek does best: divulging and spreading his enthusiasms. As an enthusiastic reader of contemporary culture, at least, he stands on firm ground.
* A version of this essay in Norwegian is forthcoming in the philosophy journal, Agora: Journal for metafysisk spekulasjon.