rain and the rhinoceros

One of the best journalists in the U.S. Amy Goodman recently interviewed the so-called “intellectual rock star” Slavoj Zizek on Iraq, Bush, and the War on Terror. You can watch, listen, or read the transcript of Part I and Part II.

This is sort of a long quote to post, but I thought it was worth posting. Zizek does a good job of articulating the real obstacles revolutionary thought faces today. I think these are also the very obstacles that an articulation of a truly public theology faces in liberal democracies.

Fidelity to the democratic consensus means the acceptance of the present liberal-parliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it officially condemns and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose sociopolitical order would be different. In short, it means say and write whatever you want on the condition that what you do does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of global ecological catastrophy, violations of human rights, sexism, homophobia, antifeminism, growing violence not only in faraway countries but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives, and so on. There is nothing easier today than to get international, state, or corporate funds for mulitdisciplinary research into how to fight new forms of ethnic, religious, or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, a prohibition against thinking. Today’s liberal-democratic hegemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infamous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late sixties; the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously challenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: “Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new gulag!” And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for scientific objectivity means; the moment one seriously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandoning scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point that one cannot and should not concede: today, actual freedom of thought must mean the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democratic post-ideological consensus - or it means nothing.

Slavoj Zizek, “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance,” Critical Inquiry 28 (2002) 544-545.

Check out Slavoj Zizek’s latest provocative review of Simon Critchley’s new book in the London Review of Books.  In this article he mounts a scathing critique of various popular anarcho-Leftist movements.