Since I wrote my first article about Zizek back in March, I've been hovered over his most recent work, Living in the End Times, trying to understand it. Here's what I've come up with, and I'm sure it's tattered with misunderstandings, but it's (I think) an interesting read, nonetheless.
What inspires Zizek's work is laid out in the introduction: "The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its 'four riders of the apocalypse' are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property: forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions" (x). Throughout the book, Zizek provides many examples of the 'four riders of the apocalypse', but his main objective is to understand human responses to such dire horizons. He notes, "Should this situation persist, can we even imagine the change in the Western 'collective psyche' when (not if, but precisely when) some 'rogue nation' or group obtains a nuclear device, or powerful biological or chemical weapon, and declares its 'irrational' readiness to risk all in using it? The most basic coordinates of our awareness will have to change, insofar as, today, we live in a state of collective fetishistic disavowal: we know very well that this will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe it will" (x-xi). So the apocalypse will not be 2012 reigning down on us with hurricanes and tidal waves. It will be the logical completion of late capitalism.
To understand this, it's helpful think about the French philosopher Alain Badiou and his research in the classic text, Being and Event. In here, Badiou uses Cantorian set theory to ground his theory of Being and Events. Being refers to the field of ontology, which is what describes whatever can truly be said about the existence of entities, even as it possibly transcends empirical verification or formal proof, while nonetheless possessing an objective truth-value. For Badiou, mathematics is the ultimate example of Being: "(M)athematics, throughout the entirety of its historical becoming, pronounces what is expressible of being qua being" and "Mathematics is rather the sole discourse which 'knows' absolutely what it is talking about: being, as such, despite the fact that there is no need for this knowledge to be reflected in an intra-mathematical sense, because being is not an object and nor does it generate objects" (Badiou 8). This is to say that, mathematical entities, like the number two, cannot be empirically verifies as they don't exist in the physical universe, and yet they carry within them all the weight of being, and they can only be understood in terms of being. Mathematical entities assume an existence that can't be explained away by logical positivists or social constructivists. Indeed, the work of Godel helped verify Badiou's point about the Being of mathematical entities. Events, on the other hand, are "just those strictly unforeseeable and - as they appear at the time in question - wholly contingent irruptions of the new that may turn out to exert a uniquely powerful and lasting effect but which elude ontological specification precisely insofar as they belong to no existing (i.e. up-to-now thinkable) order of things" (Norris 9). An example that Badiou himself uses, that many of us can relate to, is the event of love. When someone falls in love, that unforeseeable experience will radically alter the previous order of things for the lover. One remains militantly dedicated to projects and priorities previously unthinkable within the confines of the paradigm previously guiding the lover. Badiou, in his work, uses Cantor's discovery of set theory as the penultimate example of an event. Set theory was discovered when mathematical theory had reached a zero point - a point of logical impasse that needed to be leaped over. It provided us with a discovery that couldn't exist within the previously existing order of things, but required a leap. For Badiou, we can trace the development of truth in those formal discoveries by militantly dedicated individuals that take us beyond formerly defined constructs and into new realms of understanding (which involves ontology, of course).
Zizek, like Badiou, sees all concepts, like Capitalism, as having within them a zero point, or a logical boundary from which one cannot pass, and from which pressure is continually exerted. For Capitalism, that boundary includes the 'four riders of the apocalypse'. Just as mathematics reached a logical impasse that Cantor leaped over, allowing it to evolve, Late-Capitalism contains a logical impasse that dedicated and creative individuals will one day leap over. His book does not speculate as to what that leap will be, although, for Zizek, it seems to involve some new model of communism. His book is really a Lacanian psychological analysis of the proponents of Late-Capitalism - the masses that "know very well that (the apocalypse) will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe that it will." Or, the masses that provide corrupt leaders with the right to torture prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, who pay the taxes that support the Iraq occupation, who ignore the faceless foreigners who live in abject poverty even as we stress about our iPods breaking down, who tolerate slums both locally and abroad, and who remain silent as the gap between the rich and poor widens at an alarming rate. Zizek reminds us, "power (the subordination of many to one) is not an objective state of things which persists even if we ignore it, it is something that persists only with the participation of its subjects, only if it is actively assisted by them" (399).
Living in the End Times analyzes this 'collective fetishistic disavowal' in terms of the 5 stages of grief popularized by psychologist Elisabeth Kubler-Ross: Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance.
In upcoming articles, I will clumsily provide Zizek's analysis of each stage.
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. New York: Continuum, 2005.
Norris, Christopher. Badiou's Being and Event. New York: Continuum, 2009.
Zizek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010.
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