not a real doctor

Slavoj Zizek and Costas Douzinas arguing at a recent Q&A

• Zizek: This is for me the crucial problem and when you say, “well, it’s a long process, we will find it”, it’s just rhetorics. Of course it’s a long process … but your position is basically, if I’ve got it correctly, we cannot say anything, we will see what happens. I mean this is for me a little bit too risky … The big problem is: can we imagine another way of what Gramsci called the “new order” of things functioning normally in a different way.
• Douzinas: But what you’re saying … the “new order” –– this is total eschatology.
• Zizek: No, because I’m not saying that this is the end of history.
• Douzinas: No no, what you’re telling us is we have to know how paradise is. Before we know what paradise is we’re not going to make any attempt to get there. And what I’m saying is that it is much more important to try to get to paradise and once we get there we’ll work it out. Because your recipe and your advice all over the world to these movements, to people who are standing up and mobilizing and so on, is that before you have a full blueprint of how society is going to be after the change you should not do anything. Do a bit of protest, do a bit of hippydom here and hippydom there, and since you do not have your full constitutional order and party in place, forget it!
• Zizek: I never said this. What I said is, on the contrary, that if you just want to go to a paradise without knowing where you are going you can well end in hell.
• Douzinas: Indeed, this is the chance you take. As [Walter] Benjamin said, the worst and best are very close to one another, but unless you aim for the best you don’t get anywhere.
• Zizek: Let me be concrete. I never spoke about what will be. Who knows what will be? … But my point is this one: I don’t think you can simply say how to get to paradise. Paradise is there. If there is a lesson to be drawn from the sad 20th century experience, it is that the germs of paradise must be already here in how we are organizing … and direct democracy is not enough …
• Douzinas: You’re a very imaginative guy so use your imagination and give us some alternative …
• Zizek: … our focus should … be … on different forms of representation. There lies the true creative work. In normal times, you cannot have permanent activity [in terms of horizontal or direct democracy], you need representation, but you need a type of representation, maybe even less democratic, I don’t know.
• Douzinas: I don’t think we disagree.
• Zizek: Yeah … can’t you see what worries me is that we will have a beautiful protest and then this protest will disappear and then all that will remain is that we will feel very well: what a nice time we had during the protest. Show me what will remain, show me what will remain as new institutional forms! And I agree with you, something probably will emerge. I’m not as pessimistic as I may sound here. Just let’s look at history and how people thought many things [were] not possible. Let’s not forget. Here we should even sincerely praise democracy itself: my God, up until modernity people thought the moment you don’t have a natural pretender to power, the moment you open up the field and admit the empty place of power, it’s catastrophe. The great triumph of democracy is that it turned this moment –– when the thrown is empty –– into the resource for the stability of the system. So things can be done. But I don’t want to terrorize people into this: oh give me a detailed blueprint! –– no! I just think that we should be very careful … . The people with their protests are not asking questions, they are an answer, but an opaque answer. What we intellectuals can do with our knowledge is not to provide answers, but to start to raise the right questions, so that the answer can only come from the people. The answer will be recognised as the answer if we provide the frame for the question to it. This is a much more modest model where nonetheless we intellectuals are crucial … I think, if anything, [given] the 20th Century fiascos, we intellectuals lost this arrogant right to say, “we have the answers, we show you the way” …