151. A Slovenian Philosopher

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The Balkan philosopher best known to me is Slavoj Zizek, one of eight contemporary philosophers chosen by Astra Taylor to present their ideas in her documentary Examined Life — one of those movies those unable to keep up with philosophy are sure to be drawn to.  (You think you can learn what's going on without killing yourself.)

Back home I found that Zizek was a Ljubljana native who, after getting his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and studying psychoanalysis at the University of Paris (where the influence of Lacan and Heidegger on his thinking significantly deepened), went on to make such a reputation for himself as a political and cultural theorist that there is now a whole periodical, the International Journal of Zizek Studies, devoted to his work.

But his fame apparently goes well beyond the academy.  According to Sean O'Hagan (The Observer, 6-27-10), "Žižek is to today what Jacques Derrida was to the 80s: the thinker of choice for Europe's young intellectual vanguard."  If you had to be "influential" to make Taylor's list of eight I suppose this alone would have qualified Zizek.

So, wouldn't you know, I fly straight from Ljubjana, Slovenia, to Athens, Ohio, and there, waiting for me, is the 7 June London Review of Books with a piece by Slavoj Zizek in it.  You can guess how I'll approach it: as the English Composition teacher with an eye out to squash Heidegger and his students (Posts #45 and 120).

The visit to the Balkans has made that role attractive again.  They must have composition (writing) courses in college there; what do the students learn?  What do they learn before that? What's their elementary-school teaching like?  What do their graduate students talk about over their evening drinks?  What's cool?  Those are the questions that, after two weeks of puzzling over the terrible, irresolvable conflicts here, we found ourselves asking.

Now, the Zizek piece.  He is arguing that the Greeks, in fighting austerity, are fighting "the European economic establishment" which, though it claims to be saving Greece is actually destroying it.  Greece's best hope, and ours if we are Europeans, is that the anti-austerity party, Syriza, wins the coming election.  Its leader, Alexis Tsipras, deserves our support.  "By saving Greece from its so-called saviours, we also save Europe itself."

That's what I get from it.  But how do I get it?  There's this sentence: "If Syriza wins, the European establishment will hope that we learn the hard way what happens when an attempt is made to interrupt the vicious cycle of mutual complicity between Brussels's technocracy and anti-immigrant populism."

Zizek knows what the European establishment will hope.  But can it hope this?  Would it call its own program, the one Syriza will interrupt, a "vicious cycle of mutual complicity"? No, that's Zizek speaking.  And Zizek knows far more than we know.  He knows just who the complicit parties are: Brussels technocracy and anti-immigrant populism.  All who know what he's referring to raise your hands. Anybody know how it's a cycle?  "See," I tell the writer after he's read his paper to the class, "you've got to explain.  Your readers are bright and informed but these are complicated matters and not everybody agrees on them."

But satisfying such readers is not Zizek's way and it's not in his tradition.  It is not, I think, going to be in any tradition that looks to aristocracy, as I think the tradition of continental philosophizing does.  I feel it in modern French philosophers, who by their scorn of the bourgeois seem driven to aristocratic habits — in speech, anyway. 

I hear a lord speaking in Zizek's conclusion: Syriza's voice "is not the voice of extreme left 'madness', but of reason speaking out against the madness of market ideology."  The voice speaking on Zizek's side is the voice of reason.  "You down there.  You're mad.  Believe it because I tell you."

Lordly speech.  How do you acquire it in Eastern Europe, where there was no middle class to scorn?  Was there only the peasant alternative?  Maybe, though, years under authoritarian regimes, a succession of them, any kind, encourage lordly speech, as official to underling.  Maybe any authoritarian lecture system, the teacher addressing an amphitheatre, encourages it.  Who knows?

The opposite of the authoritarian lecturer is the dialectical questioner, epitomized in the Oxbridge tutor, who says to the student (or whom the student can hear saying, whether he says it or not), "This subject is deeper than either of us but let's see what we can dig out together."

It's in the digging that care with words is developed, and insisted on by the tutor — in an oddly authoritarian way.  R. M. Hare, accounting years ago for the difference between British philosophy and continental philosophy, told a reporter that (I've quoted it a hundred times), "here you read a thing to your tutor and he says to you, 'What do you mean by that?' and then you have to tell him." There's no getting out of it.  You've got to make sense to an ordinary, informed reader, for whom your tutor speaks.

That, though often cramped in its expression into marginal comment and quick conference, is (or was) the ideal of English Composition in America.  We in big midwestern universities after the war had our eyes on Oxford and Cambridge, the mothers of lucid scholarship and sharp debate.

So now I want to put Zizek in the student's chair.  He's given a thing to his teacher that says, "The Europe we will end up with if Syriza is outmanoeuvred is a 'Europe with Asian values' — which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, but everything to do with the tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy."

That word "outmanoeuvred," Slavoj, what do you mean by that?  Does it mean anything more than being defeated in an election?  No?  Well, maybe you'd better just say that.  And "Asian values," what are they?  And whom are you quoting?  Ah, you can supply that.  Good.  Better do it.  That should be easy.  But here's a hard one, this "tendency of contemporary capitalism to suspend democracy."  Do you mean "deny people the vote"?  Do you know where this has happened and who did it?  Better give some examples.  Ah, you don't have any particular ones in mind, where capitalism was the cause?  Then you shouldn't suggest that you do.  It's like your reference to behind-the-scenes manoeuvering.  If you know what went on, tell us; if you don't, or don't know reliably, hold off.  Say only what your knowledge limits you to.

Here's where I start hearing all the other Balkan voices I've recently heard, or tuned in on:  General Strugar exhorting his fellow citizens to rise to the threat of Croat soldiers in Dubrovnik, a Vecernie Novosti writer reporting that forty Serb civilians were killed in Pakrac by Croatians, another that forty Serb babies had been killed in Vukovar, Radio Television of Serbia explaining that the people of Dubrovnik were burning automobile tires to simulate the destruction of the city.

"Say only what your knowledge limits you to."  It's cool instruction in a classroom or office, easily delivered in a time of peace or in a secure country.  But it trains.  And in broader ways than first appears.  In learning to write better students learn to listen better, and become critical. 

That last is how they can make their teachers most proud of them, up at the civic level.  A General Strugar (or his American equivalent) speaks and the student says, "Hang on a minute.  Do you really know that? For a fact?"  The retired teacher (Elderhostel is thick with them) who hears that will of course feel proud, but he'll feel more: he'll feel better about the future of his country.

How do retired Slovenian or Serbian or Croatian teachers feel about the time they spent in their classrooms?  Were those classrooms like ours, or not?  That's the trouble with these two-week tours: you don't have time or opportunity to find out.