Everyone knows that the world is wildly out of sync with human needs and aspirations. Ground zero is the point, not reached by those shamelessly benefitting from it, when a sense of futility sends us into a descending spiral of despondency.
Sean Sheehan
It is also the point from where to start again: “To begin from the beginning”, as Lenin said when Bolshevism was under economic pressure in 1922; to “Try again”. Fail again, fail better, as Beckett writes in Worstward Ho.
Źiźek has quoted the lines from Lenin and Beckett before but they are now, in his most recently published set of essays, “Zero point”, invested with a demanding urgency. The ascendancy of the populist Right is frightening but an important point, he notes, is that Trump did not get more votes in 2020 than when first elected president. It was Kamala Harris who lost some ten million votes because her empty platitudes failed to engage voters, just as Starmer’s are failing to do so now in the UK.
The populist Right is currently successful at offering a (false) alternative to lying politicians and the unfair way things are and this is partly because centre-left parties have failed miserably to do so.
The first part of “Zero point” describes the situation we are now in and the second and longer part arises from an address given by Źiźek at the opening ceremony of the 75th Frankfurt Book Fair on October 17 2023.
He was asked by the Fair’s director to mention the war in Israel and he does so.
The text of his address is provided as an appendix in “Zero point” and in it he clearly condemns the attack by Hamas that had occurred ten days earlier.
He also sketched the context for the attack – the Nakba (the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from the new state of Israel in 1948) – and he referenced Marek Edelman, one of the Polish Jewish leaders of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Before he died in 2009, Edelman defended Palestinian resistance against the Israeli state.
Źiźek’s address was severely criticized in Germany, touching a raw nerve by reminding people about the country’s genocide of Jews and the way the Hamas slaughter of Jewish citizens evoked the slaughter of innocent Jews by the Nazis. Źiźek looks at the way his short address at Frankfurt was received in a set of essays written between 21 October 2023 and 10 October 2024.
These essays are recommended reading for their sane and nuanced analysis of the genocide in Gaza and the occupation in the West Bank.
Inevitably, he has been accused of ignoring anti-Semitism – ignoring the fact that Źiźek has been writing about this since his first book in English, “The sublime object of ideology”, appeared in 1989.
Expressions of what Źiźek calls the “I feel your pain” kind are now been expressed by the US and UK over the situation in Gaza.
Given that they facilitated the genocide from the beginning, this is rank hypocrisy.
“Zero point”, by Slavoj Źiźek, is published by Bloomsbury.
(Photos: Pixabay)
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