WHY IS ŽIŽEK NOW FAKE?
Of course I hate Donald Trump, but . . . .
Žižek made a memorable comment in a recent Jacobin interview, saying that ‘if we really want to be against racism, our practice should be like that of Alcoholics Anonymous, fake it to make it’. As someone many years part of that gang, it’s interesting to take the analogy literally, as alcoholism is thought within AA to be a relapsing ‘disease’ from which one never fully recovers—there is only ever a daily reprieve. In other words, Žižek’s logic, though convincing in understanding the Twelve-Step spiritual fake, also carries with it the perhaps less welcome suggestion that racism is not something we can ever abolish, in symbolic or other terms, but we can learn, gradually, to abstain. Racism is endemic, but abstainable.
There is something slightly dampened, or wet-brained, about the rhetoric in this latest interview, with Žižek’s more or less uncensored way of talking about things appearing to create more rhetorical knots than usual, and to be less ambiguously condemnatory. For example, he says that when it comes to social media’s decisions to remove and block the last President, he ‘fully deserved it’, and that 45 is ‘the lowest of the lowest’. Perhaps we can find a useful way of thinking about this Manichean jargon by assuming that here, instead of being brain-washed by recent changes in the language climate, Žižek is faking it to make it with his condemnation of Trump as well.
But the overall impression is that Žižek is suddenly less autistic, experimenting perhaps in giving an un-ambiguous ambiguity a chance. Such a higher freedom—instead of believing we need to be either merely condemnatory or ambiguous—would be a kind of abstinence. I am prepared to fake it to make it by all degrees and by all means—such are the tactics of maturity as dialectic. As addicts, we know what the fake means—spiritually.
There are also moments where Žižek lays bare the hiccups of such an approach, as if drunk. ‘Trump is a disgusting nightmare and so on, but . . . ’, he says, as if every creative statement now had to be preceded by a reassurance of being on the right side. Just how difficult it is to maintain such a dual passport is evident when Žižek says,
the ultimate enemy for me, not that they are worse than Trump I’m not saying that, is this Democratic centrist establishment.
Obviously, if the ultimate enemy really is the Democratic centrist establishment, then the Democratic centrist establishment really is worse than Trump, and that really is what Žižek is saying, and no spiritual powers of the fake and the fakely righteous can take that away. And yet even after this non-congruent avowal acting as a firm denial, Žižek continues with the public ‘disavowals’, ‘whatever you say about Trump, I do hate him, he’s incredibly vulgar and so on’. Disavowal as disowning slips as ever in American English into the analytic mode and back again.
At the end of the day, perhaps Žižek is simply giving in, rather than developing an enlightened double discourse. Donald Trump is not the lowest of the low, nobody is. And faking it to make it can always be just that, fake. Disavowing 45 to get along in life, to get to what’s next, can always simply mean ‘circling back’ and remaining in the past which you mistake for the future by removing Trump as referentiality itself.
Farewell Donald Trump
Jack from The Perfume Nationalist recently wrote that Trump is the ‘greatest president, artist, and countercultural figure of our time whose legacy will forever haunt liars, conformists, censors, and fascist idiots’. When I wrote a similar argument a short time after the American election last year, the essay received more clicks than any other of mine on this Substack. The reasons why should be obvious by now: Donald Trump sells because Donald Trump is quantumly beautiful.
Saying so is actually not an argument at all—it is itself a powering up of the spiritual powers of the fake beyond belief. There is nothing contrarian about the love of Trump, since it is merely the space of rebuttal. Simone Weil, who will always circulate in this domain, wrote on Hitler under Hitler and refused to buckle to the language invasion impressing on us mere condemnation. Walter Benjamin did the same, disentangling ‘Hitler’ from the real enemy, the longer haul of annihilative historicism some perhaps now call, wanting a better word, ‘neo-liberalism’.
Whatever complicated arguments we make about hatred or indifference or love in Trump’s regard, what finally happens is that we love to hate and hate to love, and what really had us hooked is the addiction to other peoples’ being wrong or right on this score. We love to hate others who love Trump, and we love to hate others who hate Trump. The libidinal economies and their results are the same—they both, or all, keep the hyper-loop on go.
To be able to say any of this without saying ‘Trump is a disgusting nightmare and so on, but . . . ’ is of course a risk, given language atmospheres. But the status of an American president as corrupt might be, or even should be, by now, a given, and this is where a truly spiritual fakery kicks in, if it so wishes. Against the background of such assumed corruption, and given that Trump has lost, why would someone like Žižek continue to need to say ‘Trump is a disgusting nightmare and so on, but . . . ’? He may do so, but that way is less resonant.
I take these questions to contain everything at stake right now, and describe what ubiquitous relapse really is, which may require a different type of judgment and charged neutrality, a quantic love, to scope out the extent of robodenihilism—into which we merge and surrender. More and more, I am convinced that the only real word that describes the last four years in American world-transmission is assassination.1 The truth is that Trump was assassinated again and again from day one, an action Žižek somehow wants to repeat, and he was assassinated out of the realm of reading, and it’s only now that this is entirely clear—which it also still fails to be. Such is automated unreading.
Since JFK-style takedowns aren’t possible anymore because of the internet and a conspiracy-savvy Generation Z that would know all too well and quickly the truth, what is viable is four years of extreme slander on the Chinese model. It was self-evident that Trump was not Hitler, and yet for four years Trump, like the Dalai Lama, was Hitler, and the result of this has been an increase in the Less Interesting Powers of the Fake.
Those who love ‘Donald Trump’ in an underground, furtive and allegorical fashion do so with and without illusions and not always close to the dialectical warring halves set up by the media, by academia and the poets. They do not belong to any especial ‘alt’, they are not always ‘meme makers’, and they would never, were this salvific gentility possible, endorse any degree of Marxian human sacrifice. Every argument about Trump will, one day, fall away to reveal what was in fact a quantic forcing function and mystic apparition.
It is perhaps useful here to read Emma Cline writing this: ‘All it took, it turned out, was total annihilation. Attempted annihilation, he corrected himself, the threat of annihilation. . . . “There’s been an assassination attempt”, he heard in his head, as if from a news announcer, “an attempt on the President’s life.” This had been a recurring thought lately: an assassination attempt, an assassination attempt. He had survived an assassination attempt. Because how else could you describe what they were trying to do to him?’