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POLITICS – REPEATING MARX
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‘perhaps the signifier “Trotsky” is the most appropriate designation of that which is worth redeeming in the Leninist legacy’.52 For all the scornful dismissal of Derrida’s liberal evocation of Marxism, and critique of Derrida’s conclusion that capital is différance,53 Zizek gets drawn into the same kind of logic, finessed through reference to the ideological fantasy that keeps capitalism going, and to the dematerialisation of production through the emergence of a virtual economy in cyberspace,54 but he is still keen to hold on to exactly the postmodern displacement of the economic process into the movement of language. What then haunts Zizek from the postpolitics he claims to surpass is an attachment to capitalism as a system of critical différance driving itself around an obstacle that cannot and should not be given up. If Zizek rejects parapolitics, from which he takes the hope of an egalitarian post-property society, and postmodern postpolitics, from which he borrows the idea of dematerialised and re-energised capitalism, then what of more traditionalist alternatives, forms of politics that offer the hope of either organic closure or radical conflict? COMMUNITY AND ENMITY
Systems of rule that claim to be democratic conceal within their ideological apparatus two deadly lures for those who try to resist, bait often taken by Marxists at times of exhaustion and desperation. Tired Marxists who have wished so hard for a world without class conflict can sometimes come to believe that we have already arrived there, and they then fall with relief into the folds of a community that offers closure and peace.55 Impatient Marxists who are frustrated by the failure of the working class to overthrow capitalism can sometimes resort to measures designed to shake things up, and hope that through some extreme dramatic intervention the ideological ruses of the state can be exposed.56 Zizek, too, is someone who at times seems to yearn for closure or needs to angrily kick out. Arche-politics: medical corporatism
‘Arche-politics’, for Zizek, is that attempt to bring about closure – ‘traditional, close, organically structured, homogeneous social space that allows for no void in which the political moment or event can emerge’57 – and there are three examples of closure that are relevant here. The first lies in the East, in the ‘non-political, corporate functioning of Japanese society’,58 for example, or in Singapore’s ‘paradoxical combination of capitalist economic logic with corporate communitarian ethics aimed at precluding any politicization of social life’.59 Hong Kong under Chinese rule is also cited by him as moving in the same direction, ‘albeit in a more