Lenin’s Tomb alerts us to a recent talk and article by Žižek, in which he trots out the standard propaganda against Roma people in an effort to ‘understand’ racism. Talking about European right-wing xenophobic politics, he throws in this comment:
In a homologous way, there was, in Slovenia, around a year ago, a big problem with a Roma (Gipsy) family which camped close to a small town. When a man was killed in the camp, the people in the town started to protest against the Roma, demanding that they be moved from the camp (which they occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc.
As Lenin points out, this recycles the traditional anti-gypsy crap: they are anti-social, trouble-makers, out to rob you, don’t want to work, bring it on themselves – which you can hear now in Denmark or Norway or the Netherlands or Germany or Sweden or …
From where does he gain this information? From the reputable source of his nanny, who used to be a social worker with the Roma:
She told me this that, of course, don’t idealise them, at a certain level it is of course true, they are living in illegal camps, they are living off stolen cars, they, definitely it is true, she confirmed this for me, steal from the fields, and so on and so on.
AUFT wonders why Mr Z didn’t get taken down for his discussion of child porn in The Parallax View. But my own sense is that Mr Z has to be read against his own context in Slovenia and the former Yugoslavia. A telling signal here is that every person from the ‘former’ Yugoslavia I have met cannot stand him. Why? Because he was part of the city-based, liberal intelligentsia he castigates these days. And what did they want? The breakup of Yugoslavia, based on the curious idea that Slovenia is not Balkan but part of Mitteleuropa. And at that time he was fashionably skeptical of Marxism, as all good liberal intellectuals were, especially those who had nannies. In many respects, his work may be seen as a complex symptom of dealing with that complicity and that situation, so much so that he is still, deep down, an idealist thinker.
‘Reasonable racism’ anyone? I am waiting for Alasdair Maclagan to champion that cause.
14 January, 2011 at 10:09 am
Skeptical of Marxism? No! There must be something wrong with the man. Who could live in that most utopic of communist utopias and be critical of it in any way whatsoever?
14 January, 2011 at 10:13 am
Except that now of course he champions communism as THE answer, Deane.
14 January, 2011 at 11:28 am
He was pro-Marxist even in 1989. Just a little more critical of it, until he was challenged by the dogmaticians of universalism. He’s still critical, too.
16 January, 2011 at 11:24 am
It’s not me. I’ve already told you I’m sure it’s James.
14 January, 2011 at 10:10 am
‘Reasonable racism’ is spot on when it comes to Roma people. I get in these conversations all the time with people, as I have a Roma background (up to my grandmother, at least, who made the move from the road to a house). Largely, this is because pretty much everyone I talk to (apart from those who identify as indigenous) question whether this is a racial issue, rather a cultural one. They demand that in order for people to be “authentically” Roma that they do “Roma things” like live in caravans and tell fortunes: they do not see it as an ethnic issue, and look puzzled when I suggest that would be like demanding a black person sing gospel songs or play basketball in order to be authentically “black”. This is usually followed by a bunch of jokes about being a thieving gyppo. And all from ostensibly progressive individuals.
14 January, 2011 at 10:14 am
I’m all for a little creative redistribution. Like Brecht said: what is the crime of robbing a bank compared to establishing one?
14 January, 2011 at 10:46 am
Uncle Toms exist everywhere, it seems.
14 January, 2011 at 12:24 pm
NT: bullshit.
16 January, 2011 at 11:22 am
ROFL
14 January, 2011 at 5:15 pm
that he is still, deep down, an idealist thinker.
bingo!
14 January, 2011 at 6:56 pm
Mads-Peter Karlsen shows how deeply Zizek’s attachment to German idealism runs. It’s in MP’s brilliant and recent PhD thesis, The Grace of Materialism, for which I was the ‘opponent’- as the Danes say.
15 January, 2011 at 8:40 am
How interesting. I’ll have to read it sometime. I had hitherto treated all prior arguments with disdain owing to the losers from which they came, but I had my suspicions that there was a sharp turn in Ž circa mid-90s
15 January, 2011 at 4:35 pm
[...] Khepra has responded to Lenin’s Tomb‘s follow-up post on Žižek and racism with this absolute gem: First, I think it critical to point out that I would not argue that your [...]
16 January, 2011 at 2:26 pm
Apologies Deane, but you know that the sign of the true messiah is that he denies being such.
20 January, 2011 at 6:56 am
Zizek talks about this on pages 45 and 46 of his latest book, LIVING IN THE END TIMES. Zizek’s characterization of the Roma may indeed be problematic, but I think it makes more sense when read in the context given in his book. Zizek is attacking liberals–people who bitch about working class racism from a position of elite privilege. You know the type–people living in a white cocoon of wealth who never have a face-to-face encounter with a Mexican immigrant in their lives and yet heap scorn on some working
class Joe living in border-town USA worried about losing his job to a group of people who will work for cheap. The point, it seems to me, isn’t to defend or promote racism but merely to show the bankruptcy of typical liberal discourse. For Zizek, liberal economic policies have created the problem–through capitalism, neo-liberal globalization, etc.–but rather than treating the problem they merely get upset when some working class frustrations get articulated through prisms of xenophobia and racism. In other words, Zizek is attacking the liberal tendency to dismiss racism
without recognizing the liberalism itself is its underlying cause.