Remember Slavoj Zizek, the self-indulgent Slovenian Marxist?

Here is a fine if depressing piece by Adam Kirsch which drills deep into the black heart of Zizek’s cynicism.

And finds … blackness:

"To be clear and brutal to the end," he [Zizek] sums up, "there is a lesson to be learned from Hermann Goering’s reply, in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he protected a well-known Jew from deportation: ‘In this city, I decide who is a Jew!’… In this city, it is we who decide what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusations of inconsistency." …

… This is not just the "adrenalin-fueled" audacity of the bold writer who "dares the reader to disagree." To produce this quotation in this context is a sign, I think, of something darker.

It is a dare to himself to see how far he can go in the direction of indecency, of an obsession that has nothing progressive or revolutionary about it.

More:

… he has begun to articulate a new rationale for revolution, one that acknowledges its destined failure in advance. "Although, in terms of their positive content, the Communist regimes were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery," he explains, "at the same time they opened up a certain space, the space of utopian expectations."

Read the whole thing.

Zizek has made a lively and popular name for himself by his sheer, unqualified, open extremism, sneering at everything decent and wallowing in his own weird rhetoric about the (for him) heroic aspects of violence:

Zizek is hardly the only leftist thinker who has believed in the renovating power of violence, but it is hard to think of another one for whom the revolution itself was the acte gratuite. For the revolutionary, Zizek instructs in In Defense of Violence, violence involves "the heroic assumption of the solitude of a sovereign decision."

The point is that, stunning and appalling as it may seem, Zizek is on to something important.

After so many millions of deaths caused directly by communist collectivist ideology, including now the further hundreds and thousands looming in Zimbabwe at Mugabe’s hands, many people are attracted back to these ravings, like moths fluttering ever closer to the bright flame which will consume them.

And so it is that the Zizeks of this world have an agreeable life, polluting the moral life of the planet and getting a nice living out of it.

Interesting, by the way, that Zizek comes from Slovenia.

This is a strange little country.

It played the goody-two-shoes in communist Yugoslavia. Tip-toeing from the carnage as Yugoslavia collapsed, its cunning, bland communist elite helped Slovenia slip smoothly into modern ‘social-democratic Europe’ while making as few concessions as possible to its countless deep dirty secrets. Slovenia hosts amazing numbers of mass graves of communist massacres after WW2, which are still being unearthed.

So there we have it.

The Banality – and Anality – of Marxism:

Holding on and holding in: Instead of displaying and offering excrement, the child may want to hold it in, hoard it and keep it both for himself and as a part of himself. By virtue of displacement, children, and adults, may  collect and hoard things considered to be of great value, which are disguised forms of excrement…

This lumpen Freudian analysis goes a long way to explaining Lenin’s Mausoleum in Moscow. A visualisation of the blackest parts of the human soul, something so profound and disgusting that many Russians are proud of daring to contemplate it.

Zizek if anything goes even further.

Which is more depraved?

To revere nihilistic wickedness?

Or to smirk knowingly at it?