Mariborchan

Are any French-speakers able to turn around the Levy-Zizek debate into English? After the disaster that was their meeting at New York Public Library, I’d like to know if ‘communism’ takes on a more refined form.

BHL is so stupid that I find no interest in translating this.
I just cant understand why Zizek loose his time on him

i love the hand gestures that zizek is doing at the start of the clip. it’s like he’s instructing his agents to bush BHL out of the window. that should force the latter (dripping in vanity) to move from being ‘in himself’ to ‘for himself’

This is what Zizek says (fast and loose what I can make out, he speaks a kind of weird broken French, no time to do BLH)

Zizek (2:46) : Why communism? I have a response much more modest. With all the naivety, violence, ???? etc. etc. Communism responds to certain problems, and these problems persists. The problems that I don’t like at the end : ecology, biogenetical, the new misery??? etc. etc. These are precisely the problems that we call in English ‘The Commons’ and that is my thesis to put it simply. My thesis, and I shall repeat is very concrete : there are the problems today, ecology and the others where we cannot see, never mind how to resolve them, but even cannot confront them without something such as a Communist perspective. It’s, that… these are terrible problems, there are idiotic genetic problems, and I agree with you regarding what is happening in China today. When I was in Shanghai, we were show the ????, that’s horrible. China has started to introduce controls biogenetical and say in a very beautiful way : the physical and property of the population. That… I’m sorry, the market and the state… the role of China… it’s exactly that we have the worst of the market….

Zizek (4:46) : How do we combat that? I believe… mobilization… We could call if we wanted Communism a collective mobilization.. but I don’t want to invite all these parallels. I don’t like the word ‘collective mobilization’ , it’s too marked by all that stupidity of the 20th Century.

BLH : Already we start to think about these things, of course, and on biogenetics, I am more advanced than you, I think. But I think that it needs…

Zizek : There are terrible things…

BLH : There are terrible things…

Zizek : The definition, How can we define that?

BLH : The production of living, the direction of living, it’s production in series (????).

Zizek : I propose to leave that to neither the market nor the state, that’s Communism for me.

BLH : If you do that then you are trying to lie down / sleep with (coucher) with a definition totally different of Communism…

Zizek : It’s even a little bit more precise. How can we say? Communism for me today is to identify the problem and to open the space for thinking… on the market… the state etc. etc… and it’s very important today to break apart this shared corpse of Fukyama???. (he says literally : brisé cette cadavre partagé de Fukuyama)

PS the bit at the end about the corpose is Zizek making a referance to something BHL says at the start of the clip regarding Communism, i.e. that Communism (for him) is dead and is it a question, like the Surrealists (exquisite corpse), of the resuscitation of a corpse.

the main argument of Levy is:
“how can communism be alive since i wrote it was dead!”

Many thanks Dr. K. @Dr.K

Hi, I don’t want to be pain in the ass but I still don’t get the audio in the last segment of the “ce soir ou jamais” debate. I wanted to comment on that thread but it is closed so I’m commenting here. Sorry. There used to be the whole video on the TV channel’s site but now apparently they took it off.
Anyway, if it is a problem you just can’t solve, it’s alright. Never mind. Also, I just wanted to tell you that I really appreciate what you are doing. Pozdrav iz Hrvatske.

Hello, I’m very gratetful for your website, along with the Zizek Journal you are contributing to an excellent source of ideas.
I would also like to ask if any of you think the comments Zizek makes about Communism isn’t somewhat related to Negri’s and Hardt Theory of Empire in the sense of the civil society ant the role of a new Communism through new technology.

@JRGM
I think Zizek had some critical things to say about Negri and Hardt somewhere (but then again he had critical things to say about almost everyone somewhere), except I can’t remember his exact points of contention which probably says how memorable it was.

I am interested to start reading Negri and Hardt, they seem like authors whose ideas are at least fruitful to engage with.

I have just found an article relating to my previous question, if any of you would like to read it and comment on it in the future, it is this one:

Slavoj Zizek: Have Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri Rewritten the Communist Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century? in RETHINKING MARXISM Volume 13, Number 3/4 (Fall/Winter 2001).

This is what he says in his critique:
“one immediately gets a sense of the boundaries to Hardt and Negri’s analysis. In their social-economic analysis, the lack of concrete insight is concealed in the Deleuzean jargon of multitude, deterritorialization, and so forth. No wonder that the three “practical” proposals with which this book ends appear anticlimactic. The authors propose to focus our political struggle on three global rights: the rights to global citizenship, a minimal income, and the reappropriation of the new means of production (i.e., access to and control over education, information, and commu- nication). It is a paradox that Hardt and Negri, the poets of mobility, variety, hybrid- ization, and so on, call for three demands formulated in the terminology of universal human rights. The problem with these demands is that they fluctuate between for- mal emptiness and impossible radicalization”.

And then continues on the idea of a global community in Empire, disliking the UN as an example:
“Let us take the right to global citizen- ship: theoretically, this right, of course, should be approved. However, if this demand is meant to be taken more seriously than a celebratory formal declaration in typical United Nations style, then it would mean the abolition of state borders; under present conditions, such a step would trigger an invasion of cheap labor from India, China, and Africa into the United States and Western Europe, which would result in a popu- list revolt against immigrants—a revolt of such violent proportions that figures like Haider would seem models of multicultural tolerance.

Thank you again, Mariborchan, for what you do. And many thanks to those comrades who help with the translations. My French is not so good anymore. Also I cannot subscribe to things like International Socialist Review or Rethinking Marxism, etc., because I am trapped in exploitative situation in the corporate-feudalist new Rome. Like many leftists in USA, my income is very low. Unlike the pseudo-leftists, Zizek has both written and said he does not mind that his work is made available for free. We have a duty to share Zizek’s ideas with the world, especially this one which is transcribed above: “I propose to leave that to neither the market nor the state, that’s Communism for me”. Merci beaucoup!

I believe Zizek’s main argument against Hardt and Negri focuses on the opposition between a struggle from the interstices of state power and the \jacobin-leninist\ seizure of state power. To put it in strictly Zizekian-Kierkegaardian terms \Either nomadic posmo-left resistance or the radical and violent substraction from the hegemonic field that simultaneously undermines it and lays bare its true coordinates. See in Tragedy- Socialism or Communism, The puppet n Dwarf p.96 and Lost Causes too.@JRGM