Chapter One Outline: The Negativity of the Left

Despite the increasingly apparent contradictions of global capitalism – most notably in the current financial crisis and the interactions between ecological degradation, scarcity of resources and the continued expansion of life threatening poverty – the political Left appears to have no response. If ‘What is to be done?’ was the proto-typical Leftist question, at least for those able to bear the presence of Lenin, today those who cannot have been reduced to asking, ‘How can we help?’

The Left appears to have no response to the contradictions of capitalist political economy primarily because it has lost sight of either political economy or the economy in general. The Left has been split, in terms of academia, politics and ideology, between either an apolitical economy in which the reform of administrative devices are assumed to be neutral, or a withdrawal into (postmodern) politics or cultural studies without economy. It is as if neither politics or economy can be held together at the same time; an impossible element – class struggle – prevents their fusion. In essence, capitalism and class struggle has ceased to exist for both the Left and the Right, a circumstance with which the latter appears quite content. For Radical Leftist politics to regain its strength and begin to engage with the economy, capitalism must again return to the forefront of analysis.

Against the current splitting of the Left, in this thesis I shall argue that Slavoj Zizek operates at a particular symptomatic point within Leftist discourse. Zizek embodies the impossibilities of Leftist politics because, whilst he work grapples with the same difficulties of representation that have brought the downfall of traditional Leftist essentialist (read Marxist) politics, he maintains that the Left must not abandon the political terrain either through a tragic resignation to the dilemmas of representation or by losing sight of the politics of economy, which he labels class struggle. Indeed, Zizek has come to embody the very point of class struggle, insisting on the instantiation of the impossibility of political economy.

Yet, Zizek appears both unable and unwilling to posit an alternative imaginary. Instead he argues that the status of capitalism is such that any alternative or radical action has already been accounted for by the system; in these times it is neither possible to produce revolutionary activity, nor conceive of alternative imaginaries. Because of this interpretation of capital – along with the constitutive inability of psychoanalytic theory to produce a discourse of the good – Zizek’s work has become the point of much academic and political frustration. As he himself would argue, as a symptom, the signifier ‘Zizek’ has become a point of enjoyment. Yet, it is the wager of this thesis that despite the apparent impossibilities of Lacanian politics and Zizek’s interpretation of capitalism, it is Zizek’s work that provides the most hope for the hungry.

We must ask, therefore, If Zizek ‘s work embodies a singular point of radicality against global capital, what kind of political practices stem from his work? Moreover, first we must consider the kind of theory which has led to Zizek holding this position.