Slavoj Zizek's Response to Jordan Peterson | Video Lecture Series
Slavoj Zizek vs Jordan Peterson
In this installment of our video lecture series on Slavoj Zizek, the Slovenian philosopher responds to Jordan Peterson's "critique" of Communism.
Taken from the "so-called" debate concerning Happiness, Communism and Capitalism, this video hopes to serve as an audiovisual supplement of the original.
An excerpt from the video:
"I cannot but notice the irony of how Peterson and I, the participants in this duel of the century, are both marginalized by the official academic community. I am supposed to defend here the left, liberal line against neo-conservatives. Really? Most of the attacks on me are now precisely from left liberals. Just remember the outcry against my critique of LGBT+ ideology, and I’m sure that if the leading figures were to be asked if I were fit to stand for them, they would turn in their graves even if they are still alive.
So, let me begin by bringing together the three notions from the title – Happiness, Communism, Capitalism in one exemplary case – China today.
China in the last decades is arguably the greatest economic success story in human history. Hundreds of millions raised from poverty into middle class existence. How did China achieve it? The twentieth century left was defined by its opposition to the truth fundamental tendencies of modernity: the reign of capital with its aggressive market competition, the authoritarian bureaucratic state power. Today’s China combines these two features in its extreme form – strong, totalitarian state, state-wide capitalist dynamics. And – it’s important to note – they do it on behalf of the majority of people. They don’t mention communism to legitimize their rule, they prefer the old Confucian notion of a harmonious society. But, are the Chinese any happier for all that? Although even the Dalai Lama justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms in the full suite of happiness and the avoidance of pain, happiness as a goal of our life is a very problematic notion.
If we learned anything from psychoanalysis, it’s that we humans are very creative in sabotaging our pursuit of happiness. Happiness is a confused notion, basically it relies on the subject’s inability or unreadiness to fully confront the consequences of his / her / their desire. In our daily lives, we pretend to desire things which we do not really desire, so that ultimately the worst thing that can happen is to get what we officially desire. So, I agree that human life of freedom and dignity does not consist just in searching for happiness, no matter how much we spiritualize it, or in the effort to actualize our inner potentials. We have to find some meaningful cause beyond the mere struggle for pleasurable survival. However, I would like to add here a couple of qualifications.
First, since we live in a modern era, we cannot simply refer to an unquestionable authority to confer a mission or task on us. Modernity means that yes, we should carry the burden, but the main burden is freedom itself. We are responsible for our burdens. Not only are we not allowed cheap excuses for not doing our duty, duty itself should not serve as an excuse. We are never just instruments of some higher cause. Once traditional authority loses its substantial power, it is not possible to return to it. All such returns are today a post-modern fake.
Does Donald Trump stand for traditional values? No – his conservatism is a post-modern performance, a gigantic ego trip. In this sense of playing with traditional values of mixing references to them with open obscenities, Trump is the ultimate post-modern president. If we compare with Trump with Bernie Sanders, Trump is a post-modern politician at its purest while Sanders is rather an old fashion moralist. Conservative thinkers claim that the origin of our crisis is the loss of our reliance on some transcendent divinity. If we are left to ourselves, if everything is historically conditioned and relative, then there is nothing preventing us from indulging in our lowest tendencies. But is this really the lesson to be learned from mob killing, looting and burning on behalf of religion? It is often claimed that true or not that religion makes some otherwise bad people do good things.
From today’s experience, we should rather speak to Steven Weinberg’s claim that while without religion good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. More than a century ago in his Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky warned against the dangers of godless moral nihilism – if god doesn’t exist, then everything is permitted."
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you like the video, please like and comment (the algorithm Gods demand it!).
Subscribe to our channel
Follow us: Facebook | Twitter | LinkedIn (just kidding, we don’t have a LinkedIn)