2011, The Chinese Perspective On Žižek and Žižek S Perspective On China

Guest Editor's Introduction
Tonglin Lu
Why has Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian cultural theorist and philosopher,

become so popular among intellectuals and even the mass media in China
today.? This question is especially relevant at a time when theory seems to
play, at best, a marginal role in our increasingly globalized society. Since
Zizek started publishing in English, more than twenty of his works have
been translated into Chinese, despite the difficulty of his writing (or maybe
because of it). A fair number of journal articles and monographs concerning Zizek's work have recently emerged.' A well-known Beijing conceptual
artist, Wang Jianwei, even claims to have found inspiration in izek's theoretical writings.2
This special issue is partly a reflection of Zizek's popularity in China.
Apart from Zizek himself, who contributed several essays, all the contributors are scholars of China studies; most of us have followed Zizek's work
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for decades. We have often questioned our fascination with him; his theory attracts us hecause it encourages us to problematize both our own and
Zizek's premises.
Before deaHng with Chinese perspectives on izek a subject that occupies several contributors here I address how Zizek perceives China, since
his two essays and lengthy response to Liu Kang's commentary summarize
his highly publicized stance. The enthusiastic reception of izek's works by
Chinese intellectuals apparently has not been reciprocated. The Slovenian
author seldom mentions China, except in his introduction to Mao's On Practice and Contradiction,^ and in three journalistic pieces on tradition, religion,
and political economy, although he claims to see "China's current political development" as an interesting "live laboratory" for the world's future."*
Indeed, Zizek's visit to China in June 2007 did trigger some "experiments"
in this "live laboratory." Following this trip, izek's writings on China were
published in English and Chinese journals.
izek offered a Beijing News journalist an interesting explanation for his
carefully maintained distance from China: "The more one likes this place,
the less one dares get close to it, out of fear that the sense of mystery will disappear after it is penetrated."^ Was this a polite remark to the host country
or an excuse to avoid direct engagement.? Whichever it was, his activities in
late 2007 reveal an effort to "penetrate" the "mystery" of China though
this effort lasted barely six months. In summer 2010, Zizek returned to
China for a second visit. It will be interesting to see what reactions the current trip provokes from him.
If the Chinese reception of izek's general theoretical works has been
enthusiastic, his writings on China have been received in a much more
ambivalent manner: many Chinese scholars view his writings on China
with deep skepticism, if not hostility. On the one hand, Zizek had to explain
to Chinese liberal intellectuals why he does not idealize China especially
Maoist China their own bte noire.^ On the other hand, when I tried to
publish translations of his three articles on China, Chinese journals turned
them down because of "their politically sensitive nature." In 2008, when I
forwarded Zizek's three short pieces on China to the Web site of Modern
Chinese Literature and Culture (MCLC), the reaction among sinologists was
virulent. Several Chinese editors furiously criticized izek for writing on
Tonglin I Guest Editor's Introduction
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a subject about whicb be was not sufficiently informed. One blogger asked
bow tbe star tbeorist dared act so irresponsibly in writing on Cbinese tradition witbout knowledge of its language, witbout mentioning tbat of classical
Cbinese.
One possible explanation for tbe ambiguity of Cbina's reception to izek's
work is its purported desire for a "izek witbout izek" "tbe desire to
deprive a radical tbinker of bis excess and radicalness," as Kwai-Cbeung
Lo wittily puts it (tbis issue, 745). Or, does tbis apparently self-contradictory
desire result from more complicated factors, since izek's audience includes
not only Cbina's official media witbin Cbina but also tbe circle of sinologists
outside Cbina?
Zizek's introduction to Mao's work fares a little better. It was translated
into Cbinese tbougb only partially, and witb a note from tbe translator to express bis reservation on certain inaccuracies.'' Despite tbeir apparently opposite positions, izek's Cbinese fans and detractors sbare a common trait: passion. Liu Kang's commentary on izek is a case in point. We
invited Aizek to clarify bis views on Cbina in response to Liu's commentary;
be penned an equally passionate defense, wbicb belps us better understand
botb bis own stance and tbe ambiguous reception be provokes.
Our fascination witb izek's works, bis somewbat epbemeral (bopefully
renewable) interest in Cbinese culture and politics, and tbe passionate reaction be provokes bave created a complicated cultural pbenomenon in Cbina,
one tbat may sbed ligbt on a more universal situation: tbe encounter between
tbeorists (traditionally considered Western) and sinologists (traditionally
confined to a bermeneutic world inaccessible to tbe uninitiated). As Cbina
emerges from its Maoist isolationism and rapidly integrates into tbe global
capitalist market, it is no longer possible to preserve tbe rigid boundaries
between tbese sides a tbeorist witb international standing can no longer
grasp today's world wbile closing bis or ber eyes to Cbina; a Cbinese scbolar
can no longer take refuge in tbe mystery of Oriental culture, because intensified globalization bas made tbe distinction between East and West almost
irrelevant. Tbis special issue embraces tbe gradual disappearance of tbese
boundaries, a cbange tbat is beneficial and unsettlingbeneficial because
it enricbes perspectives on eitber side, and unsettling because it forces us to
go beyond our comfort zones.
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izek does not speak Chinese as the blogger at the MCLC Web site
correctly pointed out. Similarly, our contributors have not undertaken a systematic study of German transcendental philosophy or Lacanian psychoanalysis, both of which are foundational to Zizek's thinking; most of us
do not read German or French, or, for that matter, Slovene. But we do not
believe that we must master each other's expertise or language before we can
enter into dialogue.
Usually, cultural theorists who visit China avoid discussing its contemporary society. Zizek is an exception in this regard. Excited by what is happening in China, he wrote about it immediately after his first visit. The
subsequent controversy over his writings has no doubt reinforced izek's
popularity in China, because he at least had the courage to speak from a
position of imperfect knowledge, as a colleague (comrade?), and not as a
masterful theorist safe within his comfort zone. The demands for perfection
in his knowledge of China imply that outsiders to sinology have no right
to comment on China in "serious" academic circles. This demand is onesided. In most cases, we use critical theory not because we intend to become
specialists in it; the contributors to this issue do not consider themselves
Zizekian specialists. If we don't need to perfect our background knowledge to take advantage of Zizek's theory in forming our own conceptual
framework on China, why should we demand that izek master an understanding of China before he writes about its post-Mao culture.? Perhaps such
demands arise from the assumption that the West represents universality
(something everyone knows or should know), while China occupies a position of particularity (a mystery that needs serious study).
Like China in Zizek's writings, critical theory has been part of our
"live laboratory" for several decades. This special issue is an example of an
"experiment" in this "laboratory," into which we have invited izek, asking
him to explain to us his experiment on China even as we explicate our own
experiments with his theory. I hope that this issue will break ground for
similar dialogues in the future; such mutual experiments enrich our critical
perspectives in an increasingly globalized world.
Zizek's first essay is an interesting combination of his three articles on
China. These have been subject to censorship in Beijing and virulent criticism from my sinologist colleagues at the MCLC. Rather than studying Chi-
621
nese tradition as the venerable object of a "world museum," izek remains

in a strictly modern context. He prefers the Qin emperor and his legalistic
legacy usually the least favored Chinese tradition. Mao Zedong could
have found theoretical support in Zizek's work here, for his (m)Movement
of Criticism of Confucius and Lin Bao during the Cultural Revolution, and
vice versa. In this regard, Mao and Zizek are in agreement, as both consider this school a rupture from tradition an instance of modernization,
if not revolution. In dealing with the favorite topic of Western media and
politicians religious freedom when they wish to chastise China for its
totalitarianism, izek shows the extent to which this freedom is a "structural illusion" in both China and the West. Instead of singling out China
either in terms of its really existing socialist past or its integration into global
capitalism as a betrayal of its past, !Zizek offers a cornplex picture of current
Chinese economic development as a continuation (or repetition) of Mao's
Great Leap and links this development to the past and the future of Western
democracy (and capitalism). Together, izek's three articles frame contemporary Chinese culture not as a rupture from but as a continuation of Chinese classical tradition; they represent China not as the other (or a reversed
mirror image) but as an integrated part of global culture and capitalism.
In the same vein, Zizek analyzes Mao's successes and failures in political
philosophy by integrating Chinese revolution with a Marxist "universality,"
as one step in its continual development through exceptions: from a theoretical model of an advanced capitalist country to the October Revolution
in backward Russia to Mao's mobilization of millions of Chinese peasants.
Depictions of Mao in the West tend to be one-sided. Critics of communist
ideology demonize Mao as a dictator and disregard his political thinking,
while Maoist defenders idealize the emancipatory potential without analyzing his works from a critical distance. Although Louis Althusser used Mao's
concept of principle contradiction and overdetermination, he did so outside
the cultural and political context in which they were theorized.^
In his essay on revolutionary violence, Zizek offers a close reading of
Mao's works to explain the endless political struggle of the Mao era as an
absence of negation of negation in Mao's philosophical thinking. As a child
of the Cultural Revolution who had to study Mao's works as a daily ritual
in a period of seemingly endless struggle, I am struck by Zizek's analysis.
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offering as it does a different angle from which to examine this history in

the context of global politics, izek attributes the frenetic development of
capitalism in post-Cultural Revolution China to Mao's failure to accept the
negation of negation. Instead of "swallowing" his enemies "a big fish eats
small fishes" as Mao would have hoped, his refusal to integrate former
enemies prepared the road for post-Mao China to be swallowed by the biggest fish of all global capitalism. Mao's mistake was not isolated; from the
beginning, Marxist tradition bas underestimated the capacity of capitalism
to develop productivity the contradiction at the heart of capitalism is that
it is the engine of, not the obstacle to, the frenetic development of China's
economy in its mad dance with global capital. In China this past summer,
2izek directly connected Mao's concept of permanent self-revolution with
the inherent dynamisms of capitalism.'
Using a similar logic and izekian theory, Zhang Yiwu explains China's
development of capitalism since 1980. As a member of a former socialist
country, Zizek, in his analysis of real, existing socialism, sheds light on the
change of attitude among Chinese intelligentsia toward Western humanism.
Just as in Eastern Europe, "when dissidents denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of authentic human solidarity, they unwittingly, for
the most part, spoke from the place opened up by Communism itselfthis
is why they tend to be disappointed when 'actually existing capitalism' does
not meet the high expectations of their anti-Communist struggle."'"
In the 1980s, Chinese intellectuals sought a solution by taking a humanistic notion of subjectivity as an anchorage against decades of Communist
Party dominance. By the 1990s, the subject had materialized into an individual, a diligent producer of surplus value and an eager consumer of commodities. At the same time, commoditization of the labor force, including
intellectual labor, laid the foundation for China's impressive economic prosperity and political ascension in the international arena. Thus the revelation
of productive labor which advanced capitalism tries to conceal, according
to Zizek has played a major role in constituting China as a threat to the
West, as made concrete in the ubiquitous label "made in China." This label
has been one of the most important contributors to the political ascension of
the most populous (nominally) socialist country in the world. Zhang makes
a shrewd comparison between China as a rapidly developing economy and
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Aizek as a theoretical superstar, revealing the controversial positions toward

global capitalism vis--vis commodities that are "made in China" and theoretical inventions that are "made by izek." Toward the end of his essay,
Zhang remarks that "izek is the China of theory for the age of global
capitalism, while China is the real Zizek" (Zhang Yiwu, this issue, 737).
While Zhang Yiwu juxtaposes Zizek and China in their relations to
global capitalism, Kwai-Cheung Lo compares izekian theory with one
Chinese subject that izek did study in his essay: religion. According to Lo,
the Chinese government "respectfully tolerates but no longer takes seriously"
botb religion and Marxism (Kwai-Cheung Lo, this issue, 739). Lo regards
the enthusiastic reception of Zizek in China as part of a conscious effort to
sinicize Marxist theory. In the post-Mao ideological vacuum, nationalism
has become an important trans-individual value system for China's government in its efforts to preserve its legitimacy. Marxism, which questions capitalistic economic infrastructure, paradoxically remains the only ideological
(or theoretical) justification for the state's pseudo-socialist superstructure.
As a Marxist theorist who is deeply skeptical of liberal democracy, izek
plays a symbolic function in contemporary China: he represents a progressive
West that is close enough to be sinicized. As Lo puts it, "Perhaps what the
Chinese want from Zizek is a 'Zizek without izek' the desire to deprive
a radical thinker of his excess and radicalness: that is to say, an obscene joke
without the critical theory behind it" (Kwai-Cheung Lo, this issue, 745). At
the same time, China's successful state-led capitalism, which has generated
many problems, including an increase in the gap between rich and poor,
needs izek's "radicalness" more than ever. Lo raises interesting questions:
can Zizek resist this "sinicization" and preserve his much-needed radicalness.? Will he go all the way in his dialogue with Chinese intellectuals to
bring them not only his superstar performance but his great critical power
vis--vis global capitalism, of which China has become an integral part.? In
other words, is Zizek with Zizek possible in China.?
Instead of sinicization, my essay uses izek's concept of parallax view to
interpret Taiwanization in Chinese language communities in a Taiwanese
film. The Japanese colonial period, which has been closely associated with
collective suffering, plays an important if controversial role in the reformulation of cultural identity. As a historical emotional trauma, Japanese
624
colonialism is often unsymbolizable in its excess; thus to impose meaning

using collective suffering requires a parallactic shift. As a point of reference
for identity formation, the unsymbolizable nature of suffering invites continual reinterpretation, as in the case of Japanese colonial history in Taiwan.
Ironically, control of the discourse of suffering is equivalent to ideological
dominance in Chinese communities, in the strange "logic of wound," to
borrow Rey Chow's expression." This logic typically serves dominant ideology, while dividing the population through its various loyalties to political parties. In the changing political map of Taiwan, the reconfiguration
of cultural identity through collective suffering has coincided with the
reinterpretation of colonial history to satisfy the needs of dominant ideology.
Six decades after the migration of the nationalist government to Taiwan,
the arbitrary initial division of Taiwanese and mainlanders still shapes the
political landscape, despite their common origins and shared geopolitical
spaces.
If Kwai-Cheung Lo compares China's attitude toward Zizekian theory
with its treatment of religion, Yang Huilin uses an unexpected angle their
respective approaches to religion to, by contrast, explain the closeness
between Zizek and Chinese intelligentsia. Post-Mao culture has witnessed
many radical changes, notably in the area of religion. In Mao's China, religious practices were, with few exceptions, forbidden, and religion was considered the "opium of the masses." Now, the number of churchgoers likely
surpasses that of Communist Party members.'^ As a historical materialist,
!Zizek writes extensively on Christianity and claims that Christian tradition
can only be salvaged from a materialist perspective. Traditional theology
has been perverted by links made between the weakness of human beings
and that of the Christian God, instead of his all-mightiness. Materialism,
which izek considers the perverse core of Christianity, serves as a powerful
connection between Zizek and Chinese religious scholars like Yang, izek's
claims of perversion go much further than claims of "perverse theology" by
neo-theological scholars, izek does not believe in the existence of a positive
Christian theology, since its perversion is situated at the heart of Christian
theology, in its implicit acknowledgment of an unbridgeable gap between
the symbolic order and the impossible real, between the "structure and its
event," to use Yang's Badiouian terminology.
625
Notes
1. See Han Zhenjiang, Qize/ê yishixingtai lilun yanjiu {A Study of .Help's Theory on Ideology)
' (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2009).

2. See Wang Jianwei's Web site, www.wangjianwei.com, especially "Dilemma: Three Ways of
Fork in tbe Road" (accessed June i, 2011).
3. Slavoj izek, "Introduction: Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule," in On Practice
and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), i 28.
4. Chen Ying and Tang Shi, "Zbuanfang Qizeke" ("Interview with izek"). Practice and Text,
September 14, 2007, www.ptext.cn/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=i866&
Itemid.
5. "Zizek Is a Legalist," Beijing News, June 15, 2007, www.kellerstrans.com/blog/?p=27.
6. Ibid.
7. See "Qizeke lun Mao Zedong zai Makesizhuyi fazhanshishang de diwei" ("izek on Mao
Zedong's Position in the Historical Development of Marxism"), trans. Wu Dake and Zhou
He, Foreign Theoretical Trends 9 (2007): 74 (quoted by Kwai-Cheung Lo).
8. Louis Althusser, "On tbe Materialist Dialectic," in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London:
Verso, 1990), 21012.
9. See the opening paragraph of Zizek's speecb at Renmin University, May 17, 2010, www
.pbilosopbyol.com/pol/?action-viewtbread-tid-267o6 (accessed June i, 2011).
10. Slavoj izek. Did Anybody Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 130-31. Quoted by
Zhang Yiwu in his essay.
11. Rey Chow, "Introduction: On Chineseness as a Theoretical Problem," Boundary 2 25 (1998):
3-10.
12. According to a 2005 article in USA Today, official statistics count 16 million Christians
counting only registered church members. Church groups in Hong Kong and tbe United
States estimate an additional 35 to 150 million unregistered Christians. See Calum MacLeod,
"Christians in China Persevere despite Religious Restrictions," USA Today, November 17,
2005, www.usatoday.com/news/world/2oo5 " ~ 16china-churches_x.btm.
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Poeticizing Revolution: Zizek's Misreading of Mao and China

Liu Kang
Tbe Marcb 2009 Conference on tbe Idea of Communism organized by

Slavoj izek and Alain Badiou at Birkbeck College, University of London,
was planned as an academic event but turned out to be an immense media
bype. As one Guardian reporter put it, "Tbe bottest ticket in London tbis
weekend is not for a pop singer or a football matcb but for a conference on
communism wbicb brings togetber some of tbe world's leading Marxist academics."' One year later, tbe Cbinese newspaper Zhongguo shehui kexue bao
{Chinese Social Sciences News) reported tbat izek delivered anotber speecb
at Birkbeck College, titled "On tbe Idea of Communism: A Year After."
Tbe newspaper, witb only several tbousand subscribers among Cbinese academics, labeled tbe event "Tbe Return of Communism," bigbligbting tbe
conference's dramatic end, "wben Zizek led tbe cboir singing 'Tbe Internationale.'"^ Back to Marcb 2009. Tbe Financial Times carried a weekend
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column hy its news editor, "Lunch with the FT: Slavoj izek," with the
following concluding remarks: "The role of philosophers, as [izek] sees it,
is to help clarify the questions that societies should ask and force us to think,
rather than conjuring up ready-made solutions to all our problems. 'I feel
like a magician who is only producing hats and never rabbits,' he says."^ The
more scholarly review from Criticism echoed the Financial Times in assessing the performance of the "magician": "Part of the appeal of events such as
this conference is simply that they give us an opportunity to see academic
superstars in action. From this perspective, 'On the Idea of Communism'
did not disappoint. Slavoj izek was in fine form, manic and excited, and
so full of a kind of outward-directed energy that I didn't really mind his
overbearingness.""* The reviewer reiterated that izek's purpose was "not
to engage in discussion of actual political programs, or to intervene in the
harsh realities of day-by-day social and political struggles, but to consider
how the philosophical idea, or ideal, of communism might be revitalized
and made useful in the twenty-first century."^
While mainstream media and academics worldwide have acknowledged
the conference's success as performance art with Zizek as its brilliant star,
one Chinese commentator offered a different opinion on izek, and Western Left intellectuals in general: "The greatest problem faced by [Western]
radical leftist thinkers is how to unite their theories with reality. . . . Marxism in essence is to transform communism from non-reality to reality, but
the contemporary Western radical leftists are taking the opposite direction.
Their communist hypothesis is essentially a return of the form of communist
specters."* The endeavor to revitalize communism qua Marxism by izek
and the Western Left cannot solve its fundamental dilemma, inscribed on
Marx's tombstone: that of changing the world by revolutionary practice
rather than philosophizing. The Chinese commentator may not have had
a ready-made solution, but his point is relevant: inasmuch as iixitk aims to
revive revolutionary ideas that include, among others, Chinese experiences
and Maoism in particular, and inasmuch as China's revolutionary legacy
resonates theoretically and practically with the Western Left (Alain Badiou,
spiritual leader of the conference, is a self-proclaimed Maoist), the question
of revolutionary Marxism has brought the Western Left and China together,
converging (or colliding) on a range of issues.
Liu I Poeticizing Revolution
629
As the Western Left seeks alternatives to global capitalism, its members

view China as an authoritarian and therefore deviant capitalist state, rejecting Western-style democracy and rule of law, as well as socialist egalitarianism and justice. However, the specters of China's recent past haunt the
political unconscious of Zizekians. izek refers to the unconscious in his
psychoanalytical readings of China the country's past and present, and
Mao in particular which are uncanny, perplexing, and contradictory,
even as they reveal a symptom shared with the Western Left, izek remains
oblivious to his own political unconscious, despite his masterful symptomatic or parallax readings of so many complex ideas, images, and words.
Zizek's rereading of Mao (and Lenin) emphasizes the passion and energy
of revolution; less obvious is the purpose of such revitalization. Is Zizek's
analysis of China today a critique of twentieth-century communist legacies
that draws on real experiences a political clarification of history's conjuncture with the contemporary world.? Or is it a passionate reenactment of
historical drama as a poetic displacement of the past.? Given the overwhelming attention on the performative, affective aspects of Zizek's "theoretical
variety show" (Fredric Jameson), and on izek himself as a self-conscious
"intellectual rock star" (Terry Eagleton), I understand izek's readings of
Mao and China as Austinian performative texts out of real historical context, as speech acts set in an "imaginary" context.'' If Zizek's (mis)reading is
poetic displacement, then perhaps it is best called "theory" or "philosophy,"
in which the former seeks to unite with practice and the latter remains an
immanent, abstract system of truth.^ In the end, as Chinese critic Zhang
Yiwu puts it, it may be that Zizek's reading of Mao and China is an imaginary other, with "Made in China" as its real. In Zizekian parallax fashion,
Zhang Yiwu concludes, "Zizek is the China of theory for the age of global
capitalism, while China is the real 'Zizek'" (Zhang Yiwu, this.issue, 737).
A theoretical and poetic Zizek must confront his real subject, be it China
or the world at large. This is, again, the predicament of the Western Left:
an unwillingness or inability to break away from intellectual foreclosure,
which in Zizek's case is camouflaged as Lacanian post-Marxism or parallax
theory.
Zizek's poetic misreadings of Mao and China are symptomatic of the
pessimism and cynicism of the Western Left concerning real alternatives to
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global capitalism and the historical legacy of Marxist-inspired revolution.

How, I ask, can we come to terms with the legacy of revolution in theory and
practice, when izek and other Western Left intellectuals avoid or displace
the question, and when, in China, the largest existing socialist state (at least
in name), revolution is being demonized and rapidly erased from collective
memory.?
The Western Left, Mao, and China: Rethinking Historical Contexts
The Western Left's engagement with Mao and China peaked in the late
1960s. At the height of worldwide cultural revolution, French and German
thinkers, including Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, and Herbert Marcuse, enthusiastically embraced Maoism and the Chinese Cultural Revolution as a critique of and alternative to capitalist modernity. The late 1960s
constituted an extraordinary episode of the twentieth century and a major
conjuncture of modernity, marked by the events of May 1968 in Western
Europe, the Vietnam War, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and the
Chinese Cultural Revolution. During that tempestuous decade, the internal
tensions and contradictions of modernity erupted, fundamentally altering
the world order although of course they never fully destroyed capitalism,
only shook it. Indeed, transnational capitalism emerged around this time,
as new communications technologies rapidly changed modes of production
and distribution. Capitalism entered a new phase of postindustrialism or
postmodernism. To a large extent, this transformation was a response to the
social and cultural changes of the 1960s.
Philosophically, as Fredric Jameson notes, the Althusserianism of the
mid- to late 1960s "is the most revealing and suggestive of the various 'structuralisms,' " which hailed language or the symbolic as the new paradigm of
the "politics of otherness."' This politics was closely related to the decolonization that marked the beginning of the third world. Decolonization forced
first world intellectuals to reexamine assumptions about Western civilization
and modernity, predicated on a system of binary oppositions. The Althusserian politics of otherness illuminated both the possibilities and limitations
of cultural and aesthetic solutions to the problems of capitalist modernity,
especially when these solutions were translated into concrete practice. Dur-
631
ing this period, Althusser painstakingly searched for conceptual alternatives

by critiquing Hegelianism, Stalinism, and bourgeois humanism. It was, as
Jameson points out, the moment that made Chinese Marxism a universal
Marxism. "What is less often remembered," Jameson continues, "but what
should be perfectly obvious from any reading o For Marx, is the origin of
this new problematic in Maoism itself, and particularly in Mao Zedong's
essay 'On Contradiction,' in wbicb the notion of the complex, alreadygiven overdetermined conjuncture of various kinds of antagonistic and nonantagonistic contradictions is mapped out."'"
Jameson acknowledges Mao's notion of contradiction as one of the most
significant theoretical formulations for the Western Left in the 1960s. Seeking alternatives to capitalist modernity, Althusser used Mao's notion of contradiction to formulate several important concepts, including overdetermination, structural causality, and structural totality. Althusser characterized
his project as theoretical critique. Throughout his life, he insisted on "theoretical practice" as distinct from political and material practices: "My aim
was equally clear: to make a start on the first left-tuing critique of Stalinism,
a critique that would make it possible to reflect not only on Khrushchev
and Stalin but also on Prague and Lin Piao; that would above all help put
some substance back into the revolutionary project in the West. . . . [F]or
me philosophy is something of a battlefield."" Ironically, Althusser's cultural and theoretical critique involved an unanticipated political twist. In
China, where Lin Piao served as Mao's chieftain, the Cultural Revolution
became an episode of bloodshed and violence between radical groups and
ordinary citizens. What started out in the cultural sphere on "symbolic
battlefields," as Althusser perceived it became nationwide chaos, eventually suppressed by the People's Liberation Army, Mao's "army of guns." At
the time, Althusser and his French colleagues could hardly comprehend the
consequences. Nor could they have imagined that China would exist under
virtual martial law for the rest of the revolution, from 1969 to 1976, until
Mao's death.
Alain Badiou, on the other hand, seems to have thought through not only
Mao's theory and its practical consequences but his own French Maoism,
taking Althusser as a point of departure. Rather than abandoning altogether
the radical legacy of Mao, as did many on the radical Western Left, Badiou
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retained its "rational kernel," taking Mao's tbeory as a pbilosopby serving

trutbs tbat "will largely bave consisted in introducing an interior divide into
tbe legacy of Marxism-Leninism," as Bruno .Bosteels puts it.'^ Or, in Badiou's words, "Rebel tbinking if tbere ever was one, revolted tbinking of tbe
revolt: dialectical tbinking."'^ Wben most of tbe Western Left turned tbeir
backs on tbe radical legacy of tbe 1960s, remorseful of tbeir admiration for
Mao, Badiou insisted on being a Maoist, or post-Maoist, in principle. Tbis
can only be explained by Badiou's internalization of Mao's tbeory of revolution; he saw it as a universal principle rather than an Orientalist overture of
third world radicalism.
In contrast, Alain Badiou's comrade, Slovenian Slavoj izek, harkens
back to an Orientalist attitude vis--vis Mao and Cbina that some Western
Left intellectuals, such as Sartre, Julia Kristeva, and Michel Foucault, once
harbored, taking Mao as an embodiment of oriental despotism disguised
as revolutionary rebel. Tbere is, of course, sometbing more tban romantic
fantasy gone awry in izek's reading of Mao and Cbina; tbey are part and
parcel of bis ambitious efforts "in defense of lost causes," resuscitating a
revolutionary past to reignite tbe lost zeal of collective movement against tbe
current conditions of globalization. Following Altbusser and Badiou, izek
continues to probe Mao's ideas concerning contradiction, as be endeavors to
internalize Maoism in radical tbinking and to refute Altbusser's and Badiou's attempts to make Maoism a radical universalism. Tbis may be notbing
more tban postmodern pbilosopbical jostling. Or it may involve a genuine
belief in revolutionary tbeory and practice as alternatives to current impasses,
no matter bow improbable sucb propositions may seem at present.
Overdetermism, Antideterminism, or the "Lord of Misrule"?
On Practice and On Contradiction are Mao Zedong's two most pbilosopbical

texts, botb written in 1937 wben Mao embarked on tbe task of "sinifying
Marxism": transforming Marxism into a Cbinese tbeory of revolution witb
an "indigenous form." A year later, in tbe tbroes of tbe Sino-Japanese War
(1938-45), Mao formally announced tbe program of making Marxism Cbinese. In "The Role of the Chinese Communist Party in the National War"
(1938), Mao told Communist Party leaders, "Being Marxists, communists
633
are internationalists, but Marxism can only be realized through a national

form. There is no abstract Marxism, there is only concrete Marxism. By
concrete Marxism we mean the Marxism with national form, and to apply
Marxism to the concrete struggles in the concrete circumstances of China,
rather than applying it in the abstract."'"* Mao spelled out a program of peasant guerrilla warfare for making Marxism concrete through revolution; he
also tackled epistemological issues of universality (the abstract) and particularity (the concrete), by way of contradiction.
When Louis Althusser "rediscovered" Mao's idea of contradiction some
thirty years later in postindustrial, advanced capitalist France, as he reflected
on the possibility of revolution against capitalist modernity, he took theoretical and philosophical works as his battleground. His "epistemological revolution" is widely acknowledged as a significant achievement of the Western
Left, and it was certainly connected to real, violent, radical movements from
Paris to San Francisco (though Althusser refused to participate in demonstrations and riots on the Parisian streets and university campuses). Both
Mao and Althusser were motivated by revolutionary objectives in theorizing
contradiction, by the communist-led war of national liberation in China and
battles against both Stalinism and advanced capitalist modernity, respectively. Their thinking on contradiction is decidedly epistemological, grappling with issues of identification and the logic of worldwide revolution in
their search for alternatives.'^
In two key texts, "On Contradiction and Overdetermination" and "On
the Materialist Dialectic," Althusser elaborated his theory of overdetermination as the essential part of "structural causality" vis--vis Hegelian
"expressive causality." Mao's work on contradiction figures prominently in
Althusser's thinking here, as a way to understand history not as a linear,
teleological totality but as an overdetermined, structural totality. He characterized his work as "interventions in a definite conjuncture," taking Marxism as a "theory of epistemological history."'^ For Althusser, the historical conjunctures were, first, the crisis of international communism in the
aftermath of the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
Union, which triggered the collapse of Stalinism as a socialist alternative to
capitalist modernity; and second, the 1960s "era of cultural revolutions," in
which Mao's revolutionary theory and practice emerged as a new alterna-
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
634
tive. Althusser's concept of overdetermination involves the particularity and

specificity of Marxist materialist dialectic and is indispensable to his critique
of the teleological and determinist logic underlying classical Marxism and
Stalinism.
Mao's insistence on the primacy of particularity and the unevenness of
contradiction provided the philosophical and theoretical ground for his program to sinify Marxism. Marxism provided Mao with a universalist theory,
but his transformation of Marxist universalism by emphasizing particularity
justified his endeavor to construct an alternative modernity. Mao conceived
socialism in rural, third world China, with its underdeveloped, unindustrialized economy, as a necessary alternative to Western capitalist modernity. His emphasis on cultural and ideological revolution as the condition
of socialism offered an alternative not only to Western capitalism but to the
Stalinist model of "economism." That Mao's theory and practice revolved
around contradiction amounts to a logic of antideterminisni; Althusser's
antideterminist concept of overdetermination and Mao's notion of contradiction are mutually illuminating. By drawing on Lenin's Russian Revolution
as the "weakest link" and Mao's particularity of contradiction, Althusser
constructed a specific, overdetermined, contradictory "universality," conceived first by Mao.
Universality for Mao was both absolute and relative (relational). The
"absoluteness of contradiction" or particularity was never an ontological or
metaphysical concept but an epistemology or hermeneutic to interpret temporal and spatial particularities. In short, Mao's concept is an antideterminist
notion that favors particularity. However, his insistence on universal truths
smacks of essentialism and determinism as a structural limit of modernity.
Mao's elaboration of the mutability of contradiction, coupled with particularity as the absolute condition of universality, contains the basic proposition
of cultural revolution as a patb to alternative modernity. Mao elaborated
on the mutability of contradiction to invert the economic determinism inherent in classical Marxism:
In the contradiction between the economic base and the superstructure,
the economic base is the principal aspect [of contradiction];. . . b u t . . . in
certain conditions, such aspects as . . . superstructure in turn manifest
Liu I Poeficizing Revolufion
635
themselves in the principal and decisive role. . . . The creation and advocacy of revolutionary theory plays the principal and decisive role in those
times of which Lenin said, "Without revolutionary theory there can be
no revolutionary movement." . . . When the superstructure (politics, culture, etc.) obstructs the development of the economic base, political and
cultural changes become principal and decisive.'^
It was clear to Mao that the mutability of contradiction was as important
as its particularity and unevenness. Moreover, he considered mutability to
be an absolute and therefore universal conditionality, without which the
Cultural Revolution would have been impossible. In Mao's view, contradiction could only be mutable in revolutionary practice, guided by theory that
would compel revolutionary subjects to bring about structural change in
their own conditions of existence. Not unlike many Western Marxists, Mao
considered the realm of consciousness as the foremost arena for practice. In
"On New Democracy," a programmatic text for alternative modernity, he
elaborates disproportionally on the role of cultural revolution, leaving little
room for economic issues: "Revolutionary culture is a powerful revolutionary weapon for the broad masses of the people. It prepares the ground ideologically before the revolution comes and is an important, indeed essential
fighting front in the general revolutionary front."'^
Cultural revolution constitutes the particularity of the Chinese Revolution, a conditionality of the mutability of contradiction. But Mao's alternative modernity required that cultural revolution be ceaselessly reenacted,
renewed, and reinforced, often at the expense of economic and social development. Mao predicted that struggle "between the proletariat and bourgeoisie in the ideological sphere will still be protracted, tortuous, and even
violent at times. . . . Whether among the entire population or among the
intellectuals, Marxists remain a minority. Therefore Marxism still has to
develop through struggle. That Marxism can only develop through struggle
holds true not only for the past and present but will also inevitably hold
true in the future."'^ Mao's somber, even pessimistic vision for the future
of Marxism is a parallax reflection of his insistence on endless cultural
revolution.
As an antideterminist and antiessentialist strategy, cultural revolution
positions 19:3
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636
lapsed into a paradoxical affirmation of cultural determinism and fetishized

class struggle. Similarly, when compelled to seek alternatives to Stalinist
economism and capitalist modernity, Althusser elevated Marxism to the
status of true science, fetishizing the difference between "science" and "ideology." When made absolute as the "general objective law" (Mao) or "science" (Althusser), cultural revolution lapsed into an essentialist determinism that merely replaced economic determinism. Post-Mao China witnessed
the reversal of historical determinism from Mao to Deng, whose economic
developmentalism was a response to the Cultural Revolution. Ultimately,
Mao and Althusser were unable to transcend the determinist and essentialist epistemology of modernity. As Alain Lipietz observes, Althusser's
fetishization of objective conditions "unfortunately slipped from methodology to ontology. It has thus remained capable of analyzing past conditions
but finds itself powerless to apprehend the new humanity in the process of
making the world."^"
If Althusser's engagement with Mao's contradiction sought epistemological alternatives to the Hegelian conceptual impasse, as well as Stalinist and
Western modernities, then izek's postmodern reading of Mao is clearly a
rebuttal of alternatives, conceptual or real. Zizek's invocation of Mao is not
a viable political strategy for revolution (in fact, izek emphatically denies
any alternative modernity in Mao's vision); rather, it is a rhetorical trope for
Mao's Oriental despotism as "lord of misrule." While Althusser integrated
Mao's theoretical and practical endeavors on contradiction into a revolutionary epistemology of overdetermination and structural causality, in izek's
reading, Mao's ideas are but historical vagaries of "vulgar evolutionism."
In his introduction to a 2007 edition of Mao's On Practice and Contradiction, Zizek questions Hegelian propositions on Western thought vis--vis
a prephilosophical, mythical Asiatic universe, claiming that "it is this Asiatic 'radical strangeness' which is mobilized, politicized, by Mao Tse-tung's
communist movement."^' Through parallax juggling, izek's repudiation
of the Hegelian prejudice against Oriental otherness affirms that which it is
prejudiced against, while denouncing "prejudice" as a gesture.
One cannot miss the dazzling brilliance of izek's reading of Mao, with
his signature style of rhapsody or fantasia, this time on "radical Oriental
strangeness." His purported aim is to "reinvent emancipatory terror" (6).
637
But by bis account, tbe Jacobians, Soviet, and Cbinese revolutionaries failed
to accomplish such terror, owing to an "excess of egalitarian democracy
over the democratic procedure" (7). Despite its seemingly illogical logic, a
major motif of Zizek's assessment of Mao and the Chinese Revolution is
that Mao's failure lay in a regression to "primitive pagan 'wisdom' " or a
"non-dialectical notion of the 'bad infinity' of struggle" (10). He portrays
Mao as a crazy pagan lord wbose apocalyptic view of tbe "proto-Nietzcbean
'overcoming' of man is notbing less tban a terrorist vision of doomsday,
wbicb closely ecboes tbe so-called 'bio-cosmism,' tbe strange combination
of vulgar materialism and Gnostic spirituality wbicb formed occult sbadow
ideology, tbe obscene secret teacbing, of the Soviet Marxism" (i i).
Zizek ignores or dismisses the centrality of particularity and the mutability of contradiction as tbe conditions for revolution in Mao's tbinking.
Instead, be focuses on Mao's insistence on continuing class struggle as a
rejection of tbe dialectical principle of "negation of negation." He notes tbat
"tbe conceptual consequence of tbis 'bad infinity' [continuing class struggle]
tbat pertains to vulgar evolutionism is Mao's consistent rejection of tbe 'negation of negation' as universal dialectical law in bis explicit polemics against
Engels" (12). Mao did remain skeptical of tbe "negation of negation," or
dialectical syntbesis of abstract opposites. izek recounts tbe debate over tbe
One and tbe Two of tbe 1950s, in wbicb Cbinese Marxist pbilosopber Yang
Xianzben proposed tbe tbesis "Two unite into One."
Mao rejected tbis tbesis and insisted tbat, as quoted by izek, "in any
given tbing, tbe unity of tbe opposites is conditional, temporary, and transitory, and bence relative, wbereas tbe struggle of opposites is absolute" (ibid.).
Mao rejected Yang's tbesis in tbe aftermatb of the disastrous Great Leap
Forward of the late 1950s, largely to defend his Utopian vision of surpassing Western capitalism. Indeed, the debate was a precursor to tbe Cultural
Revolution, in wbich Mao's antideterminist vision culminated in tragic
events with deadly consequences. Though he must be aware of tbis bistory, Zizek ignores tbe specific context in which Mao formed his ideas and
concepts, and launches a grandiose, rather abstract denouncement first of
Mao's "cosmic perspective" and tben of "Marx's fundamental mistake" on
the possibility of communism. He tbus views Mao's insistence on continuing
class struggle as a dismissive "attitude towards tbe buman costs of economic
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
638
and political endeavors" (ii). Without any critical reflection on the West's
demonization of Mao, Zizek writes, "If one is to believe Mao's latest biography, he caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear and arms industries; 38 million people were starved and
slave-driven to death in 1958 61" (ibid.).^^ Tabloid histories of Mao's alleged
atrocities abound in Western popular media; grounding serious theoretical
inquiry on such unreliable accounts is frivolous.
But my concern here is not with izek's uncritical acceptance of the popular demonization of Mao in the West, or even among Chinese intellectuals.
Rather, I draw attention to his refusal to acknowledge the logic of Mao's
(and Althusser's and Badiou's) search for alternatives in cultural revolution,
however ill-fated they may have been in practice. Marx is said to have committed the same "fundamental mistake" by envisioning a communist future
of higher social order. In Zizek's parallax view, communism is impossible
because the negation of negation or synthesis, or overcoming of capitalism as obstacle ultimately is not a victory, but "victory in defeat" (13).
His logic is confusing: on one hand, izek argues that a victory of synthesis
"occurs when one's specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even
by the enemy." On the other hand, he suggests that the abolition of capitalist
antagonism will result in a loss of momentum: "If we take away the obstacle
[of capitalism], the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates" (ibid.).
By stretching this confusing logic, Zizek concludes that "ironically this is
the 'synthesis' of capitalism and communism in Mao's sense. In a unique
poetic justice of history, it was capitalism which 'synthesized' Maoist communism" (14). His conclusion does more 'justice than it does poetic justice,
dismissing Mao's search for alternative modernity as the whim of a crazy
mind, and naming it as a direct cause of the brutal, primitive capitalism
that China now embraces. izek elaborates on what he calls the "profound
structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing,
the permanent struggle against the ossification of state structures, and the
inherent dynamics of capitalism. It is the reign of today's global capitalism
which is the true Lord of Misrule" (17). Would he also deduce that Marx,
by envisioning a communist future for humanity, anticipated the "victory
in defeat" of global capitalism? If so, what is the point of "reinventing an
emancipatory terror" and "defending a lost cause"?
639
Perhaps Zizek's real interest lies elsewhere: in an imaginary realm of

poetic justice, in all the confusing, illogical hodge-podge of Orientalist,
exotic deeds and thoughts of the lords of misrule, or proto-terrorists. In
his portrayal of Mao, Zizek swings between negative and positive: he often
depicts Mao as a primitive pagan lord, transgressing law and order and lacking a true notion of politics. Yet he sometimes paints Mao as a poetic and
passionate Robespierrean hero: "This brings us back to Robespierre who
expressed in a touching way the simple faith in the eternal Idea of freedom
which persists through all defeats" (20). Zizek is at his best when citing
Robespierre's last speech, where he claims that "it exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and delight of magnanimous hearts;
that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that
sacred love for the homeland," and he links this to Mao's China: "Does the
same not hold even more true for the last big installment in the life of this
Idea, the Maoist Cultural Revolution.? Without this Idea, the Cultural Revolution was to an even greater degree 'just a noisy crime that destroys another
crime'" (21). This is Zizek as a postmodern, postrevolutionary romantic
poet, performing a poeticizing act with "compassionate zeal." However, his
poeticizing remains far from the concrete historical contexts in which Mao
and Althusser groped for theoretical and practical alternatives that would
change the real conditions of existence. Zizek's allegation that Mao's revolution led to today's global capitalism in China borders on irresponsible
absurdity.
Post-Maoism as Universalism: How to Think about China Today
Zizek's indebtedness to Badiou is evident in much of his writing on China.

"Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao," a chapter in In Defense
of Lost Causes, begins with a discussion of Badiou's elaboration on revolutionary politics and ends with Mao. However, for Zizek, Badiou's Maoism
(or post-Maoism) affirms the Cultural Revolution, which he claims must
be rejected, because nothing about it was positive: "What if the Cultural
Revolution was 'negative' not only in the sense of clearing up the space and
opening up the way for a new beginning, but negative in itself negative as an
index of the impotence to generate the New.? This brings us back to the cen-
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
640
tral weakness of Mao's politics" (15). !Zizek never renounces Badiou directly.
However, it is clear that he parts with Badiou over the issue of Mao and
China when discussing the logic (and values) of revolution and alternatives
to capitalism.
Following Althusser's rediscovery of Mao, Badiou considers Mao's notion
of contradiction as a political tool for revolution, and reflects on the ramifications of the Cultural Revolution not only for China but for revolution
as a social practice or event seeing it as a genuine alternative within the
context of capitalist modernity. Badiou's soul searching, as it were, is no
intellectual acrobatics or nostalgia for the radical 1960s but an attempt to
bring revolutionary theory and practice, Mao and China, to bear on contemporary reality. Badiou insists that he is a Maoist in the present tense,
as noted by Bosteels: "Pour le maoiste que je suis" (For the Maoist that I
am)."2^ In his reflection on the Cultural Revolution, Badiou claims that "we
carry their questions rather than their outcomes.''^"* These questions remain
relevant today, because China's revolution represents a real alternative for
Badiou and his cohort of French Maoists: "For us, the Cultural Revolution remains the obligatory historical reference for whoever holds fast to
the communist project, in the conditions offered by our time: conditions
that are fixed by the necessary Marxist assessment of this monster that the
October revolution through an inversion whose political laws need to be
investigated ended up engendering."^' In short, it is "the question: must
we, and can we, march toward communism?"^^
Western intellectuals acknowledge Badiou as a major contemporary
thinker who "forces us to interrogate most if not all of our postmodern
beliefs: from the death of Marxism and the deconstruction of the subject
to the revival of neo-Kantianism and scientific pragmatism," by "pierc[ing]
the common sense of each and every one in order to reveal, against a backdrop of conventional wisdom, philosophy as a militant discourse on truth."^^
Badiou follows Althusser's footsteps quite faithfully, holding fast to radical
political engagement. In his early years, he embraced Sartrean Marxism; in
the upheavals of the 1960s, he dedicated himself to Maoism as a radical alternative to capitalism. When the Chinese Cultural Revolution was denounced
throughout the world, and after the collapse of Soviet-style socialism and the
641
retreat of the communist movement, Badiou engaged in a difficult reflection

on a post-Maoist "politics without party." As a philosopher, Badiou stands
out as a steadfast "militant," dedicated to subversive and rebellious politics
against capitalist modernity, and he remains an idealist for a communist
future. Theory for Badiou does not involve interpretations of empty, floating signifiers; in old-fashioned Marxist fashion, he believes in the power of
revolution to change the world. He therefore adamantly opposes the contemporary reduction of philosophy to language and premature announcements of its demise.
Badiou insists on viewing Maoism as an incomplete revolutionary task,
rather than as an impractical theory or a past accomplishment to be remembered nostalgically. In Thorie du sujet, he proposes, "To defend Marxism
today means to defend a weakness. We have to do Marxism.... That which
we name 'Maoism' is less a final result than a task, a historical guideline. It
is a question of thinking and practicing post-Leninism."^^ He thus favors
a Maoist cultural politics, closely related to the critique of everyday life
formulated around the same time by Henri Lefebvre and the Situationist
International. According to Badiou, philosophy takes place under four conditions: art, love, politics, and science "procedures" that can, under the
right conditions, produce truths. He looks for points of suture or places of
exceptional connection between the truths produced by these discourses.^'
Thus we should learn from truths that are produced outside philosophy,
through art, love, politics, and science.
Mao's proposition that "revolution is an everyday task" and the practices
of the Cultural Revolution are such points of suture, and thus they constitute
ideal objects for Badiou to investigate. He lists three reasons for discussing
the Cultural Revolution:
One, the Cultural Revolution has been a constant and lively reference of
militant activity throughout the world, and particularly in France, at least
between 1967 and 1976. It is part of our political history and the basis for
the existence of the Maoist current, the only true political creation of the
sixties and seventies. Two, the Cultural Revolution is the typical example
of a political experience that saturates the form of the party-state. Three,
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
642
tbe Cultural Revolution is a great lesson in bistory and politics, in bistory

as tbought from within politics.^"
In tbe same article, tbrough a detailed description of Cultural Revolution
processes, Badiou shows his admiration for Maoism. He respects the Cultural Revolution as the historical development of contradiction. The goal
was to launch revolutionary movements in the margins of the state, even as
the subversion of bureaucracy by mass revolts created cbaos all over Cbina.
Tbe bistorical lessons suggest tbat tbe Cultural Revolution could not resolve
tbe tensions between tbe bureaucracy of tbe single-party state and tbe masses
Mao mobilized to curb and revamp tbe power structure from witbin. However, Badiou insists on discussing tbe positive side of tbe event. For bimi,
Mao's thought was formulated against all odds, and the Cultural Revolution
created new theoretical and practical spaces for continuous revolution. If
Maoism was a heroic but failed effort to constitute a new mode of politics,
tben tbe task after tbe Cultural Revolution is to prepare for a new Maoism.
Badiou's faitb in communism and bis insistence on Maoism as a revolutionary alternative seem quixotic but never cynical. His attempt to elevate
Maoism to a universal ideal of revolution is certainly cballenged by bistory,
and Mao's notion of contradiction (or Altbusser's concept of overdetermination) must not be taken as tbe only premise witb wbicb bistory can be
understood. For tbose wbo remain faitbful to Marxist principles of liberation, tbe very real buman sufferings, political disruptions, economic stalemates, and borrific socioeconomic inequalities during Mao's reign must be
scrutinized. Wbile remaining faitbful to Marxist principles, Badiou has
neither confronted tbe real consequences of tbe Cultural Revolution nor
offered a Marxist critique and clarification of Mao, or of tbe revolution's
implications for general revolutionary causes. Badiou's post-Maoism is tbus
ambiguous and abstract and offers few clues regarding a post-Mao existence. He only implores Maoists to "keep going even wben you bave lost tbe
tbread, wben you no longer feel 'caugbt up' in tbe process, wben tbe event
itself bas become obscure, wben its name is lost, or wben it seems tbat it may
bave named a mistake, if not a simulacrum."^' In bis elaboration on eventbeing and trutb, Badiou claims tbat trutb does not exist in tbe relationsbip
between subject and object, but in tbe process. Likewise, tbe subject does
643
not exist before the event, but in the process of the event. For him. Maoism
is a truth-in-process, endlessly unfolding.
Like most Western Left intellectuals, Badiou is critical of the post-Mao
gaige l{aifang, or "opening up" launched by Deng Xiaoping. Accusations
against Deng's capitalist view of contemporary Chinese politics under leadership of the Communist Party reveal the Western Left's deep-seated pessimism over the purported failure of worldwide revolution, and a dilemma
in universalizing Maoism as a revolutionary theory under global capitalism.
Badiou's, categorical dismissal of the Deng and post-Deng eras as periods
of capitalist restoration reveals a conceptual cleavage between a prospective
and retrospective vision of revolution and alternatives to capitalism. The
principles of Badiou's post-Maoism are irreconcilable witb the specific conditions of China today. Rethinking China's position under global capitalism
and searching for a discourse of modernity in which China's experience
can play a significant part remain high on the intellectual agenda in China,
endorsed by the more assertive Chinese leaders. However, it is difficult to
find compatibility between the universalizing endeavors of Badiou's postMaoism and those of Chinese intellectuals (and some Western critics, such
as Joshua Ramos, who invented the so-called "Beijing Consensus"). The
incommensurability between the Western Left's agenda and "mainstream"
official, intellectual, and popular discourses in China, often highly contentious and fragmented, is a dilemma for the reconstruction of a postmodern
universalism, a set of universal principles for humanity.
For !Zizek, any universalism that derives from the Chinese experience
takes a different spin. In contrast to Badiou, izek's interpretation of contemporary China and its Maoist history is pessimistic, cynical, and nihilistic, denying any redemptive possibility in the "Fall" of revolutionary movements. The biblical references that run through Zizek's misreadings of
Mao and China betray a cultural bias, under the guise of Euro-continental
philosophy and psychoanalysis though he renounces the biblical anxieties
of (Western) Marxists over the Fall by calling forth the "displacement" of
Mao in his introduction to Mao's On Practice and Contradiction}^ In izek's
account, the two great displacements from Marx to Lenin and from
Lenin to Mao have changed Marxism "in the same way as Christ needed
644
Paul's 'betrayal' in order for Christianity to emerge as a universal church."^^

Mao's universalism must undergo a similar process: "This is the movement
of'concrete universality,' this radical 'transubstantiation' through which the
original theory has to reinvent itself in a new context: only by way of surviving this transplant can it emerge as effectively universal."^'*
It would be a gross miscalculation to expect izek to recover a universalism for radical change from Mao. What emerges in izek's "recovery" is a
bizarre homology between Mao's theory and practice, and global capitalism. This "homology" is a central motif in Zizek's writings on Mao (in this
special issue and in his introduction to Mao's works) and runs through his
analysis of China today. If his reading of Mao is (like that of so many Western Left intellectuals) mostly ambivalent and often contradictory, izek's
critique of contemporary China and its leadership is relentless. In the essay
"Three Notes on China: Past and Present" (this issue), izek discusses the
Chinese "Valley of Tears" and picks up his thesis regarding the universal
(and inexorable) triumph of capitalism, claiming that "there is thus nothing
exotic about today's China; what happens there merely repeats a forgotten
European past." Paraphrasing German liberal thinker Ralf Dahrendorf, he
writes that "after every revolutionary change, the road to prosperity leads
through a 'valley of tears.' After the breakdown of socialism, a state cannot
directly shift to the abundance of a successful market economy." izek uses
the German philosopher's theory to diagnose China's ills, concluding that
"the combination of capitalism and communist rule, far from an anomaly,
proved a blessing not even in disguise; China developed quickly, not despite
authoritarian communist rule but because of it" (Slavoj izek, "Three
Notes," this issue, 718).
For Zizek, the uncanny (but inevitable) realization of capitalism (the
Chinese "valley of tears") smacks of a universal agony of the dispossessed
that accompanied the primitive accumulation of capital, diagnosed by Marx
more than a century ago; it also carries specific Chinese characteristics a
concrete universality, so to speak. He invokes Mao's homology to global
capitalism verbatim from other works (it has become quite tedious to read
Zizek quoting himself profusely and repeatedly). With his instincts for theatricality, izek tells us that "today, the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward is repeating as the comedy of the rapid capitalist Great Leap Forward
645
into modernization, with the old slogan 'an iron foundry in every village'
reemerging as 'a skyscraper on every street.' The supreme irony of history
is that it was Mao who created the ideological conditions for rapid capitalist development, by tearing apart the fabric of traditional society" (izek,
"Three Notes," this issue, 719).
As shown in the brilliant analysis of izek's 2008 China tour by KwaiCbeung Lo and the parallax reading of a sinified izek by Zhang Yiwu
(this issue), izek's obscene jokes during his talks in China, his cinematic
flashes of memory and stream-of-conscious style, much amplified by popular media, have endeared him to a sizeable Chinese audience, mostly young
fans of Western celebrities. His witty, tongue-in-cbeek remarks on today's
Cbina bave placed him among the new popular icons of political jokesters
and bloggers. One such celebrity is comedian Zbou Libo, whose Shanghaidialect diatribes against petty bureaucrats and the vanity of non-Shanghai
Chinese have drawn applause from locals and fury from audiences outside
Shanghai, boosting ratings for tbe television station. There is also the audacious writer-turned-cyber-political-commentator Han Han, who was listed
among Time magazine's one hundred most influential people of 2010 for
his "mega-popular blog that pokes fun at prominent cultural figures and
incompetent officials."^^ Zizek's scandalous style is in perfect sync with
such current chic in China, especially on the Internet, where discontent over
political repression, rampant corruption, and sexual promiscuity is expressed
through e-gao (malicious parody-travesty) jokes in tveibo (microblogs) as well
as tweets and SMS (cell phone text messaging).
When Zizek's Bakhtinian carnivalesque imagination is cast on the harsh
reality of China, his jokes seem less funny and more ominous, especially his
indictment of China's passage to modernity from Mao to Deng. If Mao's
revolutionary theory and practice all but paved the way for China's current
exploitative capitalism, then the official efforts of the Communist Party to
resuscitate Marxism as state ideology are a paradoxical "sign of the ultimate triumph of capitalism" (izek, "Three Notes," this issue, 719; emphasis
izek's) or, inversely, the irrevocable failure of socialism and communism,
izek's scathing condemnation of the Chinese regime is no seasoned, wellgrounded exploration of China's complex reality; rather, it is a passionate,
overblown accusation of communist tyranny, made in the past by East-
646
ern European political dissidents such as Vaclav Havel during the events
of 1989. The problem is not so much that izek's political unconscious,
derived from his upbringing in the former communist regime, prejudices
him against China today. Beneath his boisterous rhetoric of radicalism there
lurks a pessimistic, nihilistic, and, indeed, fatalistic vision against communist and socialist ideas and the revolutions they inspired. To be fair, Zizek is
not without practical recipes for fighting against an omnipotent, oppressive
global capitalism: "In today's postpolitical times, social movements that keep
the state under constant pressure are often more important than what party
is democratically elected to power" (izek, "Three Notes," this issue, 721).
Nonetheless, he returns to his apocalyptic view of the future:
This, perhaps, is what is ultimately so unsettling about today's China:
the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a remainder
of a Western past, the repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation . . . but a sign of the future. What if "the vicious combination of the
Asian knout and the European stock market" proves to be economically
more efficient than liberal capitalism.? Wbat if it signals that democracy
is no longer a condition of economic development but its obstacle.? (Zizek,
"Three Notes," this issue, 721)
If capitalism, whether Western liberal or Chinese authoritarian, ultimately prevails in the absence of true alternatives, then what should be our
vision of future equality and justice.? izek has no answer. His postcommunist political practice in Slovenia and theoretical ruminations suggest
that he envisions discrete, fragmented movements in this time of so-called
interregnum, including antiglobalization, environmental, indigenous rights,
and gay rights activism. Zizek's politics is clearly aligned with the anarchist
social movement advocated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe, a "radical democracy and agnostic pluralism in advanced Western capitalism."^^
He surely espouses a Gramscian antihegemony politics, particularly the
"war of position" as "the only viable possibility in the West," with culture,
rather than physical might, as its foundation.^'' As I have argued elsewhere,
Gramsci's theory of hegemony parallels Mao's efforts to build alternatives
through cultural revolution.^^ However, as the Western Left's contemporary
647
appropriation of Gramsci has already displaced the Italian communist leader's anti-Fascist strategies and transmuted his concept of the interregnum to
a permanent condition of capitalism, Graniscian revolutionary theory and
practice have become vacuous, postmodern symbols of socialism's defeat.
izek's description of and prescription for China's problems today are
based less on historical understanding and serious inquiry than on abstract,
out-of-context generalization and speculation, wbich reveals his ignorance
of China's complexity. He does not offer us insights from a Marxist or postMarxist perspective that combines Western critical theory with Chinese
theory and practice. As the Western Left by and large remains silent on
China's rapid transformation over the last three decades, izek's invocation of Mao, coupled with his sweeping condemnation of China's current
development, has at least instilled a modicum of renewed interest among
the Western Left in Mao's revolutionary legacy. Granted, the Western Left
faces a crisis of identity, future orientation, and vision, as the last glimmer of
hope for alternatives to global capitalism seems to vanish from sight, even as
the capitalist world system plummets into its deepest economic crisis since
World War II. The Western Left must take into account China's revolutionary legacy from the early twentieth century through the late 1970s, and its
reform during the last three decades; without doing so, any effort at change
would be seriously flawed. Presumably izek, an icon of the Western Left,
takes on Mao and China as a part of his inquiry into a new universalism, a
grandiose and visionary intellectual agenda. But his mistake is to take for
granted Western interpretations of Mao and China the high theories of
Hegel, Sartre, Badiou, and Lacan, as well as the popular media and tabloid
biographies which he relies on without critical reflection.
There are different ways to reflect on the future by taking into account
China's history and passage to modernity. Perry Anderson, for instance, has
engaged in a serious inquiry into China's complex historical socialist trajectory. In "Two Revolutions," a 2010 essay, Anderson compares the Russian
and Chinese revolutions to excavate historical causes that may explain the
present moment.^^ In contrast to izek's sweeping generalization of Mao,
Anderson carefully traces Mao's revolutionary theory and practice and its
impact on China today. His description of the Cultural Revolution is more
positions 19:3
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648
historical than theoretical. For Anderson, Mao instilled "moral confidence"

in millions of Chinese people, which remains unbroken through today. The
energy and enthusiasm of Chinese people for modernization derives from
that self-confidence, and "Mao's dynamism, for better or worse, had been
one expression of the recovery ofthat confidence. The Reform Era propelled
by Deng would be another. In this historical self-assurance lay a fundamental difference between Russia and China.'"") Accordingly, Anderson's reading of the impact of the Chinese Revolution on current reforms gives the
revolution its due credit. He favors the view that Mao "laid the deep foundation for the feats of the Reform Era." He claims that with "the creation of a
strong sovereign state, the formation of an educated and disciplined laborforce, and the establishment of powerful mechanisms of economic control,
the Reform Era can rapidly move ahead."""
Anderson seeks alternatives to past revolutionary practices and explains
the various historical passages to modernity. This type of historical account
is absent in Zizek's readings of Mao and China. With a focus on theory
and ideology, Zizek misses real issues in China today. Faced with a crisis of
legitimacy, the Chinese state grapples with both ideological reinvention, as it
addresses questions of social justice and equality, and a socialist revolutionary legacy as the foundation of China's reform.
Today's China, saturated in modern communications technologies,
embodies the tensions and contradictions inherent in globalized media culture. Beyond the new social formations that techno-media culture has produced globally, Chinese culture is further complicated by political and economic developments, and new social values and identities that have emerged
since the Reform and Opening Up. Questions that must be addressed include
the discrepancy between state ideology and China's socioeconomic reality;
the fragmentation of state, intellectual elite, and grassroots populations
in their cultural expressions and values; and the post-i98os urban youth culture, which will become a dominant formation in years to come.
China is complex, not only because of its internal diversity, but because
it is integrating now into global capitalism, with all its inherent inequalities. Reducing it to an imagined, abstract "structural homology" hardly does
China justice, not even poetic justice. Politics is no poetics. Zizek's misreading of Mao and China is largely an abstract theorization, divorced from
649
specificity and bistoricity. His pessimism, camouflaged by radical bubris

and tbeatricality, can neitber furtber our understanding of Cbina's struggles
witb modernity, particularly Mao's endeavors for alternatives, nor inspire
a renewed searcb for social cbange. izek's poeticized version of tbe Cbinese Revolution is tbus a tbeatrical parody-travesty of tbe true revolution, an
imaginary rbapsody of "revolution witbout a revolution."
Notes
1. Duncan Campbell, "Move Over Jacko, Idea of Communism Is Hottest Ticket in Town This
Weekend," Guardian, March 12, 2009, www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2009/mar/12/philosophy.
2. Wang Xingfu, "Gongchanzhuyi de huigui: Lundun gongchanzhuy guannian dahui de
toushi yu fansi" ("The Return of Communism: Perspectives and Reflections on the London
Conference on the Idea of Communism"), Zhongguo shehui \exue bao (Chinese Social Sciences News), March 11, 2010.
3. John Thornhill, "Lunch with the FT: Slavoj izek," Financial Times, March 6, 2009.
4. Steven Shapiro, "Communism at Birkbeck Conference Review: On the Idea of Communism," Criticism 51 (Winter 2009): 147 48.
5. Ihid., J47.
6. Wang, "Return of Communism."
7. Fredric Jameson, "First Impressions," review of The Parallax View, by Slavoj izek, London Review of Books, September 7, 2006, www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n17/fredric-jameson/firstimpressions. Terry Eagleton, "The phenomenal Slavoj Zizek: Is There Any Subject on
Earth that Isn't Grist to Zizek's Intellectual Mill?" Times Literary Supplement (London),
April 23, 2008.
8. Fredric Jameson, "First Impressions."
9. Fredric Jameson, "Periodizing the '60s," in The Ideologies of Theory, vol. 2 (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 191.
10. Ibid.
11. Louis Althusser, "News," Radical Philosophy 12 (1975): 44, quoted in Ibid.
12. Bruno Bosteels, "Post-Maoism: Badiou and Politics," positions: east asia cultures critique 13
(2005): 576.
13. Alain Badiou, Thorie de la contradiction (Theory of Contradiction) (Paris: Maspero, 1975),
50 51. Quoted in Ibid.
14. Mao Zedong, "Lun xin jieduan," in Mao Zedong ji (Collected Worlds of Mao Zedong), ed.
Takeuchi Mmoru, vol. 6 (Hong Kong: PoWen Book Co., 1976), 260 61. Mao's writings
underwent extensive revision and editing in the definitive Mao Zedong xuanji, appearing
in English translation as the Selected Worlds of Mao Tse-tung. For the corresponding text of
positions 19:3 Winter 2011
650
the quotation, see Selected Worlds of Mao Tse-tung, vol. 2 (Beijng: Foreign Languages Press,
1965), 209-10.
15. For a detailed analysis of the theoretical linkages between Althusser and Mao, see Liu
Kang, "The Problematics of Mao and Althusser: Alternative Modernity and Cultural Revolution," Rethin/îng Marxism 8 (1995): 125.
16. Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. B. Brewster (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969), 38-39.
17. Mao Tse-tung, "Qn Contradiction," in Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, vol. i (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 336.
18. Mao Tse-tung, "Qn New Democracy," in Selected Wor^s of Mao Tse-tung, vol. i (Beijing:
Foreign Languages Press, 1965), 382.
19. Mao Zedong, "Qn Correctly Handling Contradictions among the People," in The Writings
of Mao Zedong (149-1976), ed. J. Leung and M. Kau, vol. 2 (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe,
1992), 331.
20. Alain Lipietz, "From Althusserianism to 'Regulatory Theory,' " in The Althusserian Legacy,
ed. E. A. Kaplan and M. Sprinker (London: Verso, 1992), 125.
21. Slavoj Zizek, "Introduction: Mao Tse-tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule," in Mao on Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), 2.
22. The biography izek cites is Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (New
York: Knopf, 2005).
23. Bosteels, "Post-Maoism," 576.
24. Quoted from Tani Barlow, editor's introduction to the special issue on Badiou and China,
positions: east asia cultures critique 13 (2005): 475.
25. Alain Badiou, "The Triumphant Restoration,"/>o/y/;on/; east asia cultures critique 13 (2005):
661.
26. Ibid., 659.
27. Jason Barker,/I/a; Badiou: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2002), i.
28. Alain Badiou, Theorie du sujet (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 198.
29. Barker, Alain Badiou, 106.
30. Alain Badiou, "The Cultural Revolution: The Last Revo\ution?"positions: east asia cultures
critique 13 (2005): 481-83.
31.
32.
33.
34.
Alain Badiou, Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (London: Verso, 2002), 79.
Zizek, "Introduction," I3.
Ibid., 2.
Ibid., 4.
35. "The 2010 TIME 100 Poll: Han Han," Time, April i, 2010, www.time.com/time/specials/
36. Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical
Democratic Politics (New York: Verso, 1985). 2izek cited this book as having had a significant impact on his ideas, particularly in The Sublime Object of Ideology.
Liu I Poeficizing Revolufion
651
37. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, trans. J. A. Buttigieg, vol. 3 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2007), 168.
38. Liu Kang, "Hegemony and Cultural Revolution," New Literary History 27 (1996): 34-51.
39. Perry Anderson, "Two Revolutions," New Left Review, January February 2010.
40. Ibid., 79.
41. Ibid., 95.
Reply: What to Do When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil

Slavoj Zizek
Unfortunately, my position is so grossly misrepresented in "Poeticizing

Revolution" that I have to spend time (and precious printed space) just correcting misrepresentations. The author again and again mentions my rock
star theorist status, my performance skills, and so on. To talk about this
in a theoretical debate is his choice, not mine. There are texts, books even,
written on me that simply deal with my theory. If the author were to spend
a little bit more time on my actual line of argumentation, this debate would
bave been much easier.
The author's main reproach is that my reading of Mao and China consists
of "poetic misreadings symptomatic of the prevalent pessimism and cynicism
in the Western Left, concerning the real alternatives to global capitalism
and the historical legacy of Marxist-inspired revolution." In short, instead of
closely analyzing the specificity of the complex Chinese revolutionary propositions 19:3 Doi 10.1215/10679847-1369253
positions 19:3
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cess (with all its failures) as an attempt to construct an alternate modernity, I

read the triumph of capitalism in contemporary China as a proof that there
is no alternative to capitalism in today's world: "Zizek's postmodern reading
of Mao is clearly a rebuttal of alternatives, either conceptual or real. Zizek's
invocation of Mao turns out not as a political strategy of viable revolution or
alternative modernity (in fact Zizek emphatically denies any possible alternative modernity in Mao's vision); rather, it is a metaphorical and rhetorical
trope for Mao's vision of oriental despotism or 'lord of misrule' " (Liu Kang,
this issue, 636).
Everything is wrong in this passage. First, why should my reading be
postmodern.? I never considered myself a postmodernist, and I use the term
as a critical category. Second, far from rejecting alternatives, in my last
political books, I try to outline the concrete contours of why it is necessary
to abolish capitalism, and why our emancipatory goal should still be called
communism, up to the repeated insistence on the need for a new cultural
revolution. So when my critic writes.
If capitalism, whether Western liberal or Chinese authoritarian, ultimately
prevails in the absence of true alternatives, then what should be our vision
of future equality and justice.? Zizek has no answer. His postcommunist
political practice in Slovenia and theoretical ruminations suggest that he
envisions discrete, fragmented movements in this time of so-called interregnum, including antiglobalization, environmental, indigenous rights,
and gay rights activism. Zizek's politics is clearly aligned with the anarchist social movement advocated by Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe,
a "radical democracy and agnostic pluralism in advanced Western capitalism." (Liu Kang, this issue, 646)
I find it difficult to understand how someone who claims to know my
work can write these lines: I do offer an answer, and, as is known from
the vicious polemics between Laclau and me, tbis answer is definitely not
"clearly aligned with the kind of anarchist new social movement advocated
by Ernesto Laclau and Chantai Mouffe, a 'radical democracy and agnostic
pluralism in advanced Western capitalism.' " (Furthermore, the characterization of Laclau and Mouffe's politics as "anarchist" and "agnostic pluralism" is in itself nonsensical.) When my critic claims that, by my account.
Zizek I When Evil Is Doncing on tbe Ruins of Evil
655
the Jacobins' or tbe Soviet and Cbinese revolutionaries' ultimate failure is

due to "an excess of egalitarian democracy over tbe democratic procedure"
(Liu Kang, tbis issue, 637), be again totally misreads tbe passage to wbicb
be refers. In tbis passage, I, on tbe contrary, praise tbe "excess of egalitarian
democracy over tbe democratic procedure":
Jacobins were at tbeir best not in tbe tbeatrics of Terror, but in tbe Utopian
explosions of political imagination apropos tbe reorganization of daily life:
everytbing was tbere, proposed in tbe course of tbe frantic activity condensed in a couple of years, from tbe self-organization of women to tbe
communal bomes in wbicb tbe old will be able to spend tbeir last years
in peace and dignity. Tbe barsb consequence to be accepted bere is tbat
tbis excess of egalitarian democracy over tbe democratic procedure can
only "institutionalize" itself in tbe guise of its opposite, as revolutionarydemocratic terror}
Wbat tben follows are two further total misreadings, botb based on a false
equation signaled by a deceitful "or." Do I really deny "a political strategy of
viable revolution or alternative modernity".? No: wbat I deny is tbe "or." For
precise reasons (elaborated already by Fredric Jameson) I consider "alternate
modernity" a dangerous ideological category, an attempt to bave a capitalism witbout its antagonisms (in tbis sense, fascism was also an attempt
at alternate modernity). Tbis is also wby radical revolution sbould not be
formulated in tbe terms of alternate modernity (and, incidentally, as far as
I know, Mao also never used tbe term alternate modernity to apply tbis
term to Mao is a clear case of trying to squeeze Mao into tbe jacket of postcolonial studies). And, again, do I really talk about "Mao's vision of Oriental
despotism or 'lord of misrule' ".? No: I never categorize Maoism as a case
of oriental despotism, and my notion of tbe "lord of misrule" bas notbing
wbatsoever to do witb oriental despotism! Wben, in a more pbilosopbical
mood, my critic renders problematic my understanding of Mao's dialectics,
be again simply misrepresents my position:
2izek ignores or dismisses tbe centrality of particularity and tbe mutability of contradiction as tbe conditions for revolution in Mao's tbinking.
Instead, be focuses on Mao's insistence on continuing class struggle as a
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rejection of the dialectical principle of "negation of negation."... Mao did

remain skeptical of the "negation of negation," or dialectical synthesis of
abstract opposites. (Liu Kang, this issue, 637)
The statement that I ignore and dismiss the particularity of contradiction
is empirically false: in the subchapter "The Limits of Mao's Dialectics" of
my text on Mao I devote pages to Mao's notion of contradiction as always
rooted in a particular constellation, appraising it as a key achievement and
seeing in it a philosophical foundation of the project of Cultural Revolution.
As to negation of negation, the critique is again based on a false equation:
"the 'negation of negation' or dialectical synthesis of abstract opposites" (Liu
Kang, this issue, 637) what has the authentic dialectical notion of "negation of negation" to do with the "synthesis of abstract opposites"? Furthermore, it is misleading to say that Mao was "skeptical" about the negation of
negation, since my point is much stronger: he simply didn't understand it,
what he criticizes when he rejects it is a ridiculous textbook simplification.
Now, bringing together the negation of negation with my alleged denial
of any viable alternatives to capitalism, we finally reach the central and most
scathing critical point where I am accused of "confusing, illogical logic":
In Zizek's parallax view, communism is impossible because the negation
of negation or synthesis, or overcoming of capitalism as obstacle ultimately is not a victory, but "victory in defeat." His logic is confusing: on
one hand, Zizek argues that a victory of synthesis "occurs when one's
specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even by the enemy."
On the other hand, he suggests that the abolition of capitalist antagonism will result in a loss of momentum: "If we take away the obstacle [of
capitalism], the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates." (Liu
Kang, this issue, 638)
The reproach is that I am inconsistent, emphasizing the need for the revolutionary "negation of negation" of capitalism and simultaneously claiming
that, when one takes away the obstacle (the frame of capitalist appropriation), we also lose what this obstacle was impeding. There is, of course, no
inconsistency here. My reproach to Marx is precisely that his project of the
revolutionary negation of capitalism was not enough a "negation of nega-
Zizek I When Evil Is Dancing on fhe Ruins of Evil
657
tion": in negating capitalism, Marx continued to endorse its underlying productivist premise (the urge to continuous expanded reproduction), while my
point is that, if one is really to negate capitalism, one should negate also this
underlying premise.
This, finally, brings us to what the polemic against me in "Poeticizing
Revolution" is about: when I am accused of "irresponsible absurdity" in proposing a "bizarre homology between Mao's theory and practice, and global
capitalism" (Liu Kang, this issue, 644), what really bothers my critic is my
analysis of the clear limitations of the Maoist project, and my call for a radically new beginning. (The same goes for the reproach that I engage in the
"demonization" of Mao: if, even according to official statistics, dozens of
millions died in the famine of the late 1950s, should one not note this fact
and ask how it was possible.?) There is a lot of unintended irony in the fact
that, with regard to my text on Mao, which is the object of harsh criticism, I am usually attacked from the opposite end, accused of celebrating
tbe greatest mass murderer in history, and so forth. What I am effectively
doing is simply the following: while, in no uncertain terms, I accept Mao's
greatness and the key world-historical role of the Chinese revolution, I also
inquire into the reasons of its ultimate failure to provide a viable alternative
to global capitalism. Like Badiou, I tbink tbat, if the communist project is to
be renewed as a true alternative to global capitalism, we should begin from
the beginning again, enacting a clear break from the twentieth-century
communist experience. One cannot bypass this problem tbrough repetitive
references to the need for concrete historical analysis of the Chinese particularity: the very call for such analysis in my critic's text is purely formal and
abstract.
So what does it mean to begin from the beginning again.? One should
bear in mind that 1990 was not only the defeat of communist state socialism
but also tbe defeat of the Western social democracy. Nowhere is the misery
of today's Left more palpable than in its "principled" defense of the socialdemocratic welfare state: the idea is that, in the absence of a feasible radical
Leftist project, all that the Left can do is to bombard the state with demands
for the expansion of the welfare state, knowing well that the state will not be
able to deliver. This necessary disappointment will then serve as a reminder
of the basic impotence of tbe social-democratic Left and thus push the
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658
people toward a new radical revolutionary Left. It is needless to add that

such a politics of cynical "pedagogy" is destined to fail, since it fights a lost
battle: in the present politico-ideological constellation, the reaction to the
inability of the welfare state to deliver will be rightist populism. In order to
avoid this reaction, the Left will have to propose its own positive project
beyond the confines of the social-democratic welfare state. One should never
forget that 1989 was the defeat o both tendencies of the modern statist Left,
communist and social-democratic. This is also why it is totally erroneous
to put the hopes on strong (fully sovereign) nation-states (which can defend
the acquisitions of the welfare state) against transnational bodies such as the
European Union which, so the story goes, serve as the instruments of global
capital to dismantle whatever remained of the welfare state. From here, it is
only a short step to accept the "strategic alliance" with the nationalist Right
worried about the dilution of national identity in transnational Europe.
But the trickiest mode of the false fidelity to twentieth-century communism is the rejection of all "really existing socialisms" on behalf of some
authentic working-class movement waiting to explode. Back in 1983, Georges
Peyrol wrote "Thirty Ways to Easily Recognize an Old-Marxist," a wonderful ironico-critical portrait of a traditional Marxist certain that sooner or
later, we just have to be patient and wait an autbentic revolutionary workers movement will arise again, victoriously sweeping away the capitalist rule
as well as the corrupted official Leftist parties and trade unions. Georges
Peyrol is one of the pseudonyms of Alain Badiou. The targets of his ironic
attack were the surviving Trotskyites who continued to rely on the trust
that, out of the entire crisis of the Marxist Left, a new authentic revolutionary working-class movement would somehow emerge.
So where are we today.? Alain Badiou wonderfully characterized the
postsocialist situation as "this troubled situation, in which we see Evil dancing on the ruins of Evil"^: there is no question of any nostalgia, the communist regimes were "evil" the problem is that what replaced them is
also "evil," albeit in a different way. In what way.? Back in 1991, Badiou
gave a more theoretical formulation to the old quip from the times of really
existing socialism about the difference between the democratic West and
the communist East: in the East, the public word of intellectuals is eagerly
awaited and has a great echo, but they are prohibited to speak and write
Zizek I When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil
659
freely, while in the West, they can say and write whatever they want, but
their word is ignored by the wide public. Badiou opposes the West and
the East with regard to the different ways the (rule of the) law is located
between the two extremes of state and philosophy (thinking). In the East,
philosophy is asserted in its importance, but as a state philosophy, directly
subordinated to the state, so that there is no rule of law: the reference to
philosophy (its legitimizing role) justifies the state as working directly on
behalf of the truth of history, and this higher truth allows it to dispense
with the rule of law and its formal freedom. In the West, the state is legitimized not by the higher truth of history but by democratic elections guaranteed by the rule of law, and the consequence is that the state as well as the
public is indifferent to philosophy: "The submission of politics to the theme
of Law in parliamentary societies . . . leads to the impossibility of discerning the philosopher from the sophist.... Inversely, in bureaucratic societies
it is impossible to distinguish the philosopher from the functionary or the
policeman. In the last instance, philosophy is generally nothing other than
the word of the tyrant."^
In both cases, philosophy is denied its truth and autonomy, since "the
inherent adversaries of the identity of philosophy, the sophist and the tyrant,
or even the journalist and the policeman, declare themselves philosophers.'"'
One should add here that Badiou in no way secretly or openly prefers the
police party-state to the state of law: he states that it is fully legitimate to
prefer the state of law to the police party-state; he draws here another key
distinction: "The trap would be to imagine that this preference, which concerns the objective history of the State, is really a subjective political decision."^ What he means by "subjective political decision" is the authentic collective engagement along the communist (radical emancipator) lines: such an
engagement is not "opposed" to parliamentary democracy, it simply moves
at a radically different level, that is, in it, political engagement is not limited
to the singular act of voting, but implies a mucb more radical continuous
"fidelity" to a cause, a patient collective "work of love." Today, when the
democratic honeymoon is definitely over, this lesson is more actual than
ever: what Badiou put in theoretical terms is confirmed by daily experiences
of the majority of ordinary people: the collapse of communist regimes was
no event in the sense of a historical break, of giving birth to something new
positions 19:3
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in the history of emancipation; after tbe break, tbings just returned to tbeir
capitalist normality, so tbat we bave tbe same passage from tbe entbusiasm
of freedom to tbe rule of profit and egotism described already by Marx in
bis analysis of tbe French Revolution. Exemplary is here the case of Vaclav
Havel: his followers were shocked to learn tbat tbis bigbly etbical figbter
for "living in trutb" later engaged in sbady business deals with suspicious
real estate companies dominated by ex-members of tbe communist secret
police. How naive appeared Timotby Garton Asb on bis visit to Poland in
2009 apropos tbe twentietb anniversary of tbe fall of communism: blind to
tbe vulgar gray reality around him, he tried to convince the Poles that they
sbould feel glorious, as if tbeir land were still tbe noble land of solidarity.
Tbe ruling ideology is, of course, well aware of tbis gap, and its reply
is "maturity": one sbould get rid of Utopian bopes tbat can only end up
in totalitarianism and accept tbe new capitalist reality. Tbe tragedy is tbat
some Leftists subscribe to this judgment. Badiou described tbree distinct
ways for a revolutionary (i.e., radical emancipatory) movement to fail. First,
tbere is, of course, a direct defeat: one is simply crusbed by tbe enemy forces.
Tben, tbere is a defeat in tbe victory itself: one wins over tbe enemy (temporarily, at least) by way of taking over tbe main power agenda of tbe enemy
(tbe goal is to take state power, eitber in tbe parliamentary-democratic way
or in a direct identification of tbe party witb tbe state). On tbe top of tbese
two versions, tbere is perbaps the most authentic, but also tbe most terrifying, way: guided by tbe correct instinct telling it tbat every solidification of
tbe revolution into a new state power equals its betrayal, but unable to invent
and impose on social reality a truly alternative social order, tbe revolutionary movement engages in a desperate strategy of protecting its purity by tbe
"ultra-leftist" resort to all-destructive terror. Badiou aptly calls this last version the "sacrificial temptation of the void":
One of the great Maoist slogans from the red years was "Dare to fight,
dare to win." But we know that, if it is not easy to follow tbis slogan, if
subjectivity is afraid not so mucb to figbt but to win, it is because struggle
exposes it to a simple failure (tbe attack didn't succeed), wbile victory
exposes it to tbe most fearsome form of failure: tbe awareness tbat one
won in vain, tbat victory prepares repetition, restoration. Tbat a rvolu-
2!izek I When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil
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tion is never more than a between-two-States. It is from here that the

sacrificial temptation of the void comes. The most fearsome enemy of
the politics of emancipation is not the repression hy the established order.
It is the interiority of nihilism, and the cruelty without limits which can
accompany its void.^
What Badiou is effectively saying here is the exact opposite of Mao's "Dare
to win!" One should be afraid to win (to take power, to establish a new sociopolitical reality), because the lesson of the twentieth century is that victory
either ends in restoration (return to the state power logic) or gets caught in
the infernal cycle of self-destructive purification. This is why Badiou proposes to replace purification with subtraction: instead of "winning" (taking
over power) one maintains a distance toward state power, one creates spaces
subtracted from the state. But are we not in this way de facto close to a kind
of division of labor (or complementarity) between the radical and pragmatic
Left? Subtracting itself from statal politics, the radical Left limits itself to
assuming principled positions and bombarding the state with impossible
demands, while the pragmatic Left makes a pact with the devil in the sense
of Peter Mandelson's admissions that, in the matters of economy, we are
all Thatcherites. Badiou's radical conclusion is based on his rejection of the
standard "orthodox" twentieth-century Marxist view according to which
"there is an 'objective' agent, inscribed into social reality, which carries the
possibility of emancipation." According to Badiou, therein resides the difference between the great revolutionary sequence of the twentieth century
and our present time; throughout the twentieth century, "one supposed that
the politics of emancipation is not a pure idea, a will, a prescription, but is
inscribed, almost programmed, in and by historical and social reality. A
consequence of this conviction is that this objective agent has to be transformed into a subjective power, that this social entity has to become a subjective actor."^
The first thing that one should note here is that the alternative Badiou
presupposes here either politics of emancipation inscribed into social reality, generated by the "ohjective" social process, or the purity of the communist idea is not exhaustive. Let us take Gyrgy Lukacs's History and
Class Consciousness: this work is radically opposed to any kind of objectiv-
662
ism, of direct reference to "ohjective circumstances," that is, for Lukacs, class
struggle is the primordial fact, which means that every "objective" social fact
is already "mediated" by the struggling suhjectivity (Lukacs's key example:
one doesn't wait for the "ripe" objective circumstances to do a revolution,
circumstances become "ripe" for revolution through the engaged political
struggle). Although Lukacs used the famous Hegelian couple "in-itself/
for-itself" to describe the becoming-proletariat of the "empirical" working
class as part of social reality, this doesn't mean that class consciousness arises
out of the "ohjective" social process, that it is "inscribed, almost programmed,
in and by historical and social reality": the very ahsence of class consciousness
is already the outcome of the politico-ideological struggle. In other words,
Lukacs doesn't distinguish the neutral objective social reality from subjective political engagement, not because, for him, political subjectivization is
determined by the "objective" social process, but because there is no "objective
social reality" tbat is not already mediated by political subjectivity.
Tbis brings us to Badiou's dismissal of the critique of political economy.
Since he conceives economy as a particular sphere of positive social being, he
excludes it as a possible site of a "truth-event." But once we accept that economy is alwAys political economy, that is, a site of political struggle, and that
its depoliticization, its status as a neutral sphere of "servicing the goods," is
in itself always-already the outcome of a political struggle, then the prospect
opens up of the repoliticization of economy and thus of its reassertion as
the possible site of truth-event. Badiou's exclusive opposition between the
"corruptive" force of economy and the purity of the communist idea as two
incompatible domains introduces an almost gnostic tone into his work: on
the one side the noble citoyen struggling on behalf of the principled axiom
of equality, on the other side the "fallen" bourgeois, a miserable "human
animal" striving for profits and pleasures. The necessary outcome of such
a gap is terror: it is on account of the very purity of the communist idea
motivating the revolutionary process, of the lack of "mediation" between
this Idea and social reality, that the Idea can intervene into historical reality
without betraying its radical character only in the guise of self-destructive
terror. This is why the "critique of political economy" is crucial if we are to
surmount this deadlock: only through a change in the structure of capitalism can the circle of necessary defeats be broken.
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When Badiou proposed his "communist hypothesis," the reaction of his

old colleague Jacques-Alain Miller, now a respectable right-of-center liberal,
was the skeptical platitude that this hypothesis was more than enough tested
in the twentieth century to leave any doubts about its feasibility to serve
as the structuring principle of a new society. Is communism then simply
"impossible" in the sense that it cannot be stabilized into a new order.? Even
Badiou presents the eternal Idea of communism as something that returns
again and again, from Spartacus and Thomas Munzer to Rosa Luxemburg
and the Maoist Cultural Revolution which means as something that fails
again and again. Is, then, communism to remain the eternal spirit of egalitarian rebellion whose destiny is to fail in one of the three modes deployed
by Badiou or to persist in subtraction from the domain of state power.?
The term impossible should make us stop and think. Today, impossible
and possible are distributed in a strange way, both simultaneously exploding
into an excess. On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedoms and
scientific technology, the impossible is more and more possible (or so we are
told): "nothing is impossible"; we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions;
entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available for downloading;
going to space is available to everyone (with money); and there is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our
basic properties through interventions into genome, up to the tech-gnostic
dream of achieving immortality by way of fully transforming our identity
into a software tbat can be downloaded from one to another hardware. On
the other hand, especially in the domain of socioeconomic relations, our era
perceives itself as the era of maturity in which, with the collapse of communist states, humanity has abandoned tbe old millenarian Utopian dreams
and accepted the constraints of reality (read: the capitalist socioeconomic
reality) with all its impossibilities: you cannot engage in large collective acts
(wbich necessarily end in totalitarian terror), cling to the old welfare state
(it makes you noncompetitive and leads to economic crisis), isolate yourself from the global market, and so forth. (In its ideological version, ecology also adds its own list of impossibilities, so-called threshold values no
more global warming than two degrees Celsius, etc. based on "expert
opinions.")
It is crucial to clearly distinguish here between two impossibilities: the
664
impossible-real of a social antagonism and the impossibility on which the

predominant ideological field focuses. Impossibility is here redoubled, it
serves as a mask of itself, that is, the ideological function of the second
impossibility is to obfuscate the real of the first impossibility. Today, the
ruling ideology endeavors to make us accept the "impossibility" of a radical
change, of abolishing capitalism, of a democracy not constrained to parliamentary game, and so on, in order to render invisible the impossible/real
of the antagonism that cuts across capitalist societies. This real is impossible in the sense that it is the impossible of the existing social order, that is,
its constitutive antagonism which, however, in no way implies that this
real/impossible cannot be directly dealt with and radically transformed in
a "crazy" act that changes the basic "transcendental" coordinates of a social
field. This is why, as Alenka Zupancic put it, Jacques Lacan's formula of
overcoming an ideological impossibility is not "everything is possible," but
"impossible happens." The Lacanian real/impossible is not an a priori limitation that should realistically be taken into account, but it is the domain
of act, of interventions that can change its coordinates: an act is more than
an intervention into the domain of the possible an act changes the very
coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. This is why communism also concerns the real: to act
as a communist means to intervene into the real of the basic antagonism
underlying today's global capitalism.
In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal but a critical notion to
locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony
of the whole, but to include into a system all its "symptoms," antagonisms,
inconsistencies, as its integral parts. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a "totality": the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism
is structured so that liberalism itself generates its opposite. So what about
the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, and so forth.? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them that is, its
own core against the fundamentalist onslaught. Fundamentalism is a
reaction a false, mystifying, reaction, of course against a real flaw of
liberalism, and this is why it is again and again generated by liberalism. Left
to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itselfthe only thing that can
save its core is a renewed Left.
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In Western and Eastern Europe, tbere are signs of a long-term rearrangement of tbe political space. Until recently, tbe political space was dominated
by two main parties tbat addressed tbe entire electoral body, a rigbt-ofcenter party (e.g., Cbristian-Democrat, liberal-conservative, people's) and
a left-of-center party (e.g., socialist, social-democratic), witb smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate (ecologists, liberals, etc.). Now, tbere is
progressively emerging one party tbat stands for global capitalism as sucb,
usually witb relative tolerance toward abortion, gay rigbts, religious and
etbnic minorities, and so forth; opposing tbis party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party tbat, on its fringes, is accompanied by
directly racist neo-Fascist groups. Tbe exemplary case here is Poland: after
tbe disappearance of tbe ex-communists, tbe main parties are tbe "antiideological" centrist liberal party of Prime Minister Donald Dusk and tbe
conservative Cbristian party of tbe Kaczynski brotbers. Silvio Berlusconi in
Italy is proof tbat even tbis ultimate opposition is not insurmountable: tbe
same party, his Forza Italia, can be botb the global-capitalist party and integrate tbe populist anti-immigrant tendency. In tbe depoliticized spbere of
postideological administration, tbe only way to mobilize people is to awaken
fear (from immigrants, i.e., from tbe neighbor). To quote Gaspar M. Tamas
from a personal conversation, we are tbus again slowly approacbing a situation in wbicb "tbere is no one between Tsar and Lenin," tbat is, in wbicb
a complex situation will be reduced to a simple basic cboice: community or
collective, socialism or conimunism (Otto Weininger was rigbt to claim that
socialism is Aryan, while communism is Jewish). Or, to put it in tbe wellknown terms from t968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism
needs tbe brotberly belp of tbe radical left.
Tbe task is tbus to remain faitbful to wbat Badiou calls tbe eternal Idea
of Communism: the egalitarian spirit alive for thousands of years in revolts
and Utopian dreams, in radical movements (Buddhism versus Hinduism,
Daoism or legalists versus Confucianism, etc.). The problem is bow to avoid
tbe alternative of radical social explosions tbat end in defeat, unable to stabilize tbemselves in a new order, or of equality, but displaced to a domain
outside social reality (in Buddbism we are all equal in nirvana). It is bere
tbat tbe originality of Western tbougbt enters, in its tbree great bistorical
ruptures: Greek pbilosopby breaking witb tbe mytbic universe, Cbristianity
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breaking with the pagan universe, and modern democracy breaking with
traditional authority. In all these cases, the egalitarian spirit is transposed
into a (limited, but nonetheless actual) new positive order.
In short, the wager of the Western thought is that radical negativity (whose
first and immediate expression is egalitarian terror) is not condemned to
remain a short ecstatic outburst after which things have to return to normal
on the contrary, radical negativity, this undermining of every traditional
hierarchic order, can articulate itself in a new positive order in which it
acquires the stability of a new form of life. This is the meaning of the Holy
Spirit in Christianity: faith cannot only be expressed in, but exists as the
collective of believers. This faith is in itself based on "terror," indicated by
Christ's words that he brings sword, not peace, and that whoever doesn't
hate his or her father and mother is not his true follower, and so forth. The
content of this terror is the rejection of all traditional hierarchic community
ties, with the wager that another collective link is possible based on this terror, an egalitarian link of believers connected by agape as political love.
Another example of such an egalitarian link based on terror is democracy
itself One should follow Claude Lefort's description of democracy here: the
democratic axiom is that the place of power is empty, that there is no one
who is directly qualified for this post either by tradition, charisma, or his
or her expert and leadership properties. This is why, before democracy can
enter the stage, terror has to do its work, forever dissociating the place of
power from any natural or directly qualified pretender: the gap between this
place and those who temporarily occupy it should be maintained at any cost.
And this is also why one can supplement in a democratic way Hegel's deduction of monarchy. Hegel insists on the monarch as the "irrational" (contingent) head of state precisely in order to keep the summit of state power
apart from the experts (for him embodied in state bureaucracy) while
the bureaucracy rules by expertise; that is, while bureaucrats are chosen on
account of their abilities and qualifications, the king is a king by his birth,
ultimately, by a lot, on account of natural contingency. The danger Hegel
is thereby trying to avoid exploded a century later in Stalinist bureaucracy,
which is precisely the rule of (communist) experts: Stalin is not a figure of a
master but the one who "really knows," who is an expert in all imaginable
fields, from economy to linguistics, from biology to philosophy.
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But we can well imagine a democratic procedure maintaining the same

gap on account of the irreducible moment of contingency in every electoral
result: far from being its limitation, the fact that the elections do not pretend
to select the most qualified person is what protects them from the totalitarian temptation which is why, as it was already clear to the Ancient
Greeks, the most democratic form of selecting who will rule us is by a lot.
That is to say, as Lefort has demonstrated, the achievement of democracy is
to turn what is in traditional authoritarian power the moment of its greatest crisis, the moment of transition from one to another master when, for
a moment, "the throne is empty," which causes panic, into the very resort
of its strength: democratic elections are the moment of passing through
the zero point when the complex network of social links is dissolved into
purely quantitative multiplicity of individuals whose votes are mechanically
counted. The moment of terror, of the dissolution of all hierarchic links,
is thus reenacted and transformed into the foundation of a new and stable
positive political order.
Hegel is thus perhaps measured by his own standards of what a rational state should be wrong in his fear of the direct universal democratic
vote (see his nervous rejection of the English Reform Bill in 1831). It is precisely democracy (democratic universal election) that (much more appropriately than his own state of estates) accomplishes the "magic" trick of converting the negativity (the self-destructive absolute freedom that coincides with
the reign of terror) into a stable new political order. In democracy, the radical negativity of terror, the destruction of everyone who pretends to identify
with the place of power, is aufgehoben and turned into the positive form of
democratic procedure.
Today, when we know the limitation of the formal democratic procedure,
the question is whether we can imagine a step further in this direction of
the reversal of egalitarian negativity into a new positive order. One should
look for traces of such an order in different domains, including the scientific
communities. A report on how the CERN community (European Organization for Nuclear Research) is functioning is indicative here: in an almost
Utopian way, individual efforts coexist with nonhierarchic collective spirit,
and the dedication to the scientific cause (to recreate the conditions of the
Big Bang) far outweighs material considerations.
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We are in the middle of a new wave of "enclosure of commons": the commons of our natural environs, of our symbolic substance, even of our genetic
inheritance. This enclosure concerns the relations of people to the objective
conditions of their life process as well as relations between people: commons are privatized at the expense of the proletarized majority. There is
a gap between these two aspects commons can also be restored to collective humanity without communism, in an authoritarian-communitarian
regime; and the desubstantialized, "rootless" subject, deprived of its substantial content, can also be counteracted in the direction of communitarianism,
of finding its proper place in a new substantial community. In this precise
sense, Antonio Negri was right with his anti-Socialist title Good-Bye Mr.
Socialism: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, instead of the
egalitarian collective, offers a solitary organic community Nazism was
national socialism, not national communism. There can be socialist antiSemitism; there cannot be a communist one. (If it appears, as in Stalin's last
years, it is an indicator that one is no longer faithful to the revolutionary
event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title "Socialism Has Failed. Now Capitalism Is Bankrupt. So What Comes Next?" The
answer is communism. Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms
without the fourth one, without the singular universality of the proletariat.
The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously to avoid the communist solution will be to reinvent
some kind of socialism in the guise of communitarianism, populism, capitalism with Asian values, or whatsoever. The future will be communist or
socialist. How, then, are we to counter the threat of ecological catastrophe
in a communist way? It is here that we should return to the four moments
of what Badiou calls the "eternal idea" of revolutionary-egalitarian justice.
What is demanded is
strict egalitarian justice. All people should pay the same price in eventual
renumerations, that is, one should impose the same worldwide norms
of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on;
the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment
at the present rate, blaming the developing third world countries, from
Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid
development;
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669
terror. Ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective

measures, inclusive of severe limitations of liberal "freedoms" and technological control of the prospective lawbreakers;
voluntarism. The only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions that will run counter
to the "spontaneous" immanent logic of capitalist development; as Walter Benjamin pointed out in his "Theses on the Concept of History,"
today, the task of a revolution is not to help the historical tendency or
necessity to realize itself but to "stop the train" of history that runs
toward the precipice of global catastropbe an insigbt that gained
new weight with the prospect of ecological catastrophe;
and, last but not least, all this combined with the trust in the people
(the wager that the large majority of the people support these severe
measures, see them as their own, and are ready to participate in their
enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of
terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures
of all egalitarian-revolutionary terror, the "informer" who denounces
the culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal. Time
magazine was right to celebrate the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)
This is how what once was called communism can still be of use today.
Notes
1. Slavoj izek, "Introduction: Mao Tse-tung, the Marxist Lord of Misrule," in Mao on Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), 7.
2. Alain Badiou, Ofan Obscure Disaster (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Acadmie, 2009), 37.
3. Ibid., 55-56.
4. Ibid., 57.
5. Ibid., 58.
6. Alain Badiou, Uhypothse communiste (The Communist Hypothesis) (Paris: Lignes, 2009),
28.
7. Ibid., 46.
Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao

Slavoj Zizek
'What Do You Want?'
In his Logique des mondes, Alain Badiou elaborates the eternal idea of the
politics of revolutionary justice at work in the ancient Chinese legalist philosophers through the Jacobins to Lenin and Mao.' Logique des mondes consists of four movements: voluntarism, or the belief that one can move mountains and ignore objective laws and obstacles; terror, which is the ruthless
will to crush the enemy of the people; egalitarian justice and its immediate
brutal imposition, which with no understanding of any "complex circumstances" would compel us to proceed gradually; and, of course, trust in the
people. Suffice to recall here two examples, Maximilien Robespierre and
bis great trutb ("tbe cbaracteristic of popular government is to be trustful
toward the people and severe towards itself") and Mao Zedong's critique
of Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR where he qualifies
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Stalin's point of view as "almost altogether wrong" because his "basic error
is mistrust of the peasants."^
In modern European history, in the course of the French Revolution, the
Jacobins were the first to fully enact the politics of revolutionary justice.^
Nowhere is the dictum "every history is a history of the present" more true
than in the case of the French Revolution, since its historiographie reception
closely mirrors the twists and turns of political struggles. The identifying
mark of all conservatives is a flat rejection: the French Revolution was a
catastrophe from its inception, the product of the godless modern mind,
and God's punishment for humanity's wicked ways, and its traces should
be undone as thoroughly as possible. The typical liberal attitude is a differentiated one. Its formula is "1789 without 1793." In short, what the sensitive
liberals want is a decaffeinated revolution, a revolution that doesn't smell of
a revolution. Radicals, on the contrary, are possessed by what Alain Badiou
called the "passion of the Real." Thus if you say A equality, human
rights, and freedoms then, you should not shirk from its consequences
and gather the courage to say B that the terror was needed to defend and
assert A."*
However, something, some kind of historical cut, effectively took place in
1990. From then on everyone, including today's "radical Left," is somehow
ashamed of the Jacobin legacy of revolutionary terror and its state-centralized
characters, so that the commonly accepted motto on the Left is that if it is
to regain political efficacy it should thoroughly reinvent itself, and finally
abandon the so-called "Jacobin paradigm." Robespierre serves perfectly
today's antitotalitarian liberals who no longer need to portray Robespierre
as a cruel monster with a sneering, evil smile. The popular image now is
Robespierre as a kind of inverted Elephant Man. While the latter had a horribly deformed body hiding a gentle and intelligent soul, Robespierre was
a kind and polite person hiding ice-cold, cruel determination signaled by
his green eyes. Everyone is willing to recognize his moral integrity and full
devotion to the revolutionary cause since his very purity is the problem and
the cause of all the trouble. What, then, should those who remain faithful
to the legacy of the radical Left do with all this.?
Two things at least. First, the terrorist past has to be accepted as ours,
even when maybe even precisely because it is critically rejected. How-
Zi:;ek I Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao
673
ever, this is not the entire story. One should also not allow our opponents
to determine the field and topic of the struggle. What this means is that
ruthless self-critique must go hand in hand witb fearless admission of wbat,
to parapbrase Marx's judgment on Hegel's dialectics, one is tempted to call
tbe "rational kernel" of tbe Jacobin terror. In Badiou's pbrasing, "Materialist
dialectics assumes, witbout particular joy, tbat, till now, no political subject was able to arrive at tbe eternity of tbe trutb it was deploying witbout
moments of terror. Since, as Sant-Just asked: "Wbat do tbose wbo want
neitber Virtue nor Terror want.?" His answer is well-known: tbey want
corruption anotber name for tbe subject's defeat."^ Or, as Saint-Just put it
succinctly: "Tbat wbicb produces tbe general good is always terrible."''
Tbe revolutionary terror of 1792 94 was not a case of wbat Walter Benjamin and others call state-founding violence. It was a case of "divine violence." One should recall here Friedrich Engels's reference to the Paris Commune as an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. And one should
repeat it, mutatis mutandis, apropos of divine violence: "Well and good,
gentlemen critical theorists, do you want to know what this divine violence
looks like.? Look at the revolutionary Terror of 17921794. That was the
Divine Violence."
When those outside the structured social field strike "blindly," demanding and enacting immediate justice/vengeance, tbis is "divine violence."
Recall tbe panic in Rio de Janeiro a decade or so ago wben crowds descended
irom favelas into tbe rieb part of tbe city and started looting and burning
supermarketsthis was "divine violence." Like tbe biblical locusts, divine
punisbment for men's sinful ways strikes out of nowbere and is a means
without end, or, as Robespierre put it in bis speecb in wbicb be demanded
tbe execution of Louis XVI, "Peoples do not judge in tbe same way as courts
of law; tbey do not band down sentences, tbey tbrow tbunderbolts; tbey do
not condemn kings, tbey drop tbem back into tbe void; and tbis justice is
wortb just as mucb as tbat of tbe courts."^
"Dictatorsbip of tbe proletariat" is tbus anotber name for tbe Benjaminian "divine violence" outside law, a violence exerted as brutal revenge/
justice. Why "divine".? "Divine" points toward the dimension of the "inhuman"; one should thus posit a double equation: divine violence = inbuman
terror = dictatorsbip of tbe proletariat. Tbe Benjaminian "divine violence"
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should be conceived as divine in the precise sense of the old Latin motto vox
populi, vox dei: not in the perverse sense of "we are doing it as mere instruments of the people's will," but as the heroic assumption of the solitude of
sovereign decision. The decision to kill, to risk or lose one's own life, for
instance, is made in the absolute solitude, with no cover in the big Other. As
Robespierre put it in a poignant way, "What do you want, you who would
like truth to be powerless on the lips of representatives of the French people?
Truth undoubtedly has its power, it has its anger, its own despotism; it has
touching accents and terrible ones, that resound with force in pure hearts
as in guilty consciences, and that untruth can no more imitate than Salome
can imitate the thunderbolts of heaven; but accuse nature of it, accuse the
people, which wants it and loves it."^
And this is what Robespierre aims at in his famous accusation to the
moderates: what they really want is a "revolution without a revolution."
They want a revolution deprived of the excesses in which democracy and
terror coincide, a revolution respecting social rules, subordinated to preexisting norms, a revolution in which violence is deprived of the "divine" dimension and thus reduced to a strategic intervention serving precise and limited
goals.
Asserting the Inhuman
The critical analysis and the acceptance of the historical legacy of the Jacobins overlap in the true question to be raised: does the (often deplorable) actuality of revolutionary terror compel us to reject the very idea of terror, or is
there a way to repeat it in today's different historical constellation, to redeem
its virtual content from its actualization? It can and should be done, and
the most concise formula of repeating the event designated by the name
"Robespierre" is to pass from (Robespierre's) bumanist terror to antihumanist (or, rather, inhuman) terror.
In his Le sicle, Alain Badiou conceives as a sign of the political regression that occurred toward the end of the twentieth century the shift from
"humanism and terror" to "humanism or terror."^ There is a variation, usually left aside: the choice "humanism or terror," but with terror, not humanism, as a positive term. This is a radical position difficult to sustain, but, per-
Z'zek I Revolufionary Terror from Robespierre fo Mao
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haps, our only hope. It does not amount to the obscene madness of openly
pursuing a "terrorist and inhuman politics," but something much more difficult to think. In today's "postdeconstructionist" thought (if one risks this
ridiculous designation, which cannot but sound as its own parody), tbe term
inhuman gained a new weight, especially in the work of Giorgio Agamben
and Badiou.
What Emmanuel Levinas has obfuscated on the other hand is the monstrosity of the neighbor, monstrosity on account of which Jacques Lacan
applies to the neighbor the term thing {das Ding), used by Freud to designate
the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the neighbor is the (evil) thing that potentially lurks beneath every
homely human face. Just think about Stephen King's The Shining, in which
the father, a modest failed writer, gradually turns into a killing beast, who,
with an evil grin, goes on to try to slaughter his entire family. In a properly
dialectical paradox, what Levinas, with all his celebration of the Otherness,
fails to take into account is not some underlying sameness of all humans but
the radically "inhuman" Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being
reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure
of the Muselmann, the "living dead" in the concentration camps.
It is against this background that one can understand why Lacan speaks
of the inhuman core of the neighbor. Back in the 1960s, the era of structuralism, Louis Althusser launched the notorious formula of "theoretical antihumanism," allowing, demanding even, that it be supplemented hy practical
humanism. In our practice, we should act as humanists, respecting others,
treating them as free persons with full dignity, creators of their world. However, in theory, we should no less always bear in mind that humanism is an
ideology, the way we spontaneously experience our predicament, and that
the true knowledge of humans and their history should treat individuals
not as autonomous subjects but as elements in a structure that follows its
own laws.
In contrast to Althusser, Lacan accomplishes the passage from theoretical
to practical antihumanism, that is, to an ethics that goes beyond the dimension of what Nietzsche called "human, all too human," and confronts the
inhuman core of humanity. This means not only an ethics that no longer
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denies but fearlessly takes into account the latent monstrosity of beinghuman, the diabolic dimension that exploded in phenomena usually covered
by the concept-name "Auschwitz," an ethics that would be still possible after
Auschwitz, to paraphrase Theodor Adorno. This inhuman dimension is for
Lacan at the time the ultimate support of ethics.
It is against the background of this topic of sovereign acceptance of death
that one should reread Robespierre's speecb in the National Assembly on ii
Germinal Year II (March 31, 1794). The previous night, Georges Danton,
Camille Desmoulins, and some others were arrested, so many members of
the Assembly were understandably afraid that their turn would also come.
Robespierre directly addresses the moment as pivotal: "Citizens, the moment
has come to speak the truth." He then goes on to evoke the fear floating in
the room: "One wants on veut] to make you fear abuses of power, of the
national power you have exercised. . . . One wants to make us fear that the
people will fall victim to the Committees. . . . One fears that the prisoners
are being oppressed."'"
The opposition is here between the impersonal "one" (the instigators of
fear are not personified) and the collective thus put under pressure, which
almost imperceptibly shifts from the plural second-person "you (vous)" to
first-person "us" (Robespierre gallantly includes bimself in the collective).
However, the final formulation introduces an ominous twist: it is no longer
that "one wants to make you/us fear" but tbat "one fears," which means that
the enemy stirring up fear is no longer outside "you/us," members of the
Assembly, it is here, among us, among "you" addressed by Robespierre, corroding our unity from within. At this precise moment, Robespierre, in a
true master's stroke, assumes full subjectivization; waiting a little bit for
the ominous effect of his words to take place, he then continues in the first
person singular: "I say that anyone who trembles at this moment is guilty;
for innocence never fears public scrutiny."" That is to say, the fear of being
accused of treason is my treason, because, even if I "did not do anytbing
against the revolution," this fear itself, the fact that it emerged in me, demonstrates that my subjective position is external to the revolution, that I
experience "revolution" as an external force threatening me.
But what goes on in this unique speech is even more revealing. Robespierre directly addresses the touchy question that has to arise in the mind of
Zi::ek I Revolufionary Terror from Robespierre fo Mao
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his public: how can Robespierre be sure that he will not be tbe next in line
to be accused.? He is not the master exempted from the collective, the "I"
outside "we." After all, he was once very close to Danton, a powerful figure
now under arrest, so what if, tomorrow, his proximity to Danton will be
used against him.? In short, how can Robespierre be sure that the process
he unleashed will not swallow him.? It is here that his position assumes the
suhlime greatness he fully assumes the danger that now threatens Danton and that will tomorrow threaten him. The reason that he is so serene,
that he is not afraid of this fate, is not that Danton was a traitor, while he,
Robespierre, is pure, a direct embodiment of the people's will. It is that he,
Robespierre, is not afraid to die, and his eventual death will be a mere accident that counts for nothing: "What does danger matter to me.? My life
belongs to the Fatherland; my heart is free from fear; and if were to die, I
would do so without reproach and without ignominy."'^
Consequently, insofar as the shift from "we" to "I" can effectively be
determined as the moment when the democratic mask falls down and when
Robespierre openly asserts himself as a master (up to this point, we follow
Claude Lefort's analysis), the term master has to be given here its full Hegelian weight: the master is the figure of sovereignty, the one who is not afraid
to die, who is ready to ris\ everything. In other words, the ultimate meaning
of Robespierre's first-person singular ("I") is: I am not afraid to die. What
authorizes him is just this, not any kind of direct access to the big Other;
that is, he doesn't claim that he has direct access to the people's will that
speaks through him.
It is against this background that one should assert Mao Zedong's message to the hundreds of millions of downtrodden, a simple and touching
message of courage: do not be afraid of the big powers: "Bigness is nothing
to be afraid of The big will be overthrown by the small. The small will
become big."'^ Tbe same message of courage sustains also Mao's (in)famous
stance toward a new atomic world war. He wrote.
We stand firmly for peace and against war. But if the imperialists insist
on unleashing another war, we should not be afraid of it. Our attitude on
this question is the same as our attitude towards any disturbance: first,
we are against it; second, we are not afraid of it. The First World War
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was followed by the birth of the Soviet Union with a population of 200
million. The Second World War was followed by the emergence of the
socialist camp with a combined population of 900 million. If the imperialists insist on launching a Third World War, it is certain that several
hundred million more will turn to socialism, and then there will not be
much room left on earth for the imperialists.'"^
It is too easy to dismiss these lines as empty posturing of a leader ready to
sacrifice millions for his political goals (the extension ad absurdum of Mao's
ruthless decision to starve tens of millions to death in the late 1950s). The
other side of this dismissive attitude is the basic message: "We should not
be afraid."
In fact, is this not the only correct attitude apropos of war: "First, we are
against it; second, we are not afraid of it." The logic of Mao's argument is
very precise here. Imperialists are the Nietzschean slaves, and they need
wars but are afraid to lose in them possessions to which they are attached;
while the proletarians are the true aristocratic masters who do not want
war but are not afraid of it, because they have nothing to lose in a war.
Che Guevara approached the same line of thought when, in the midst of
the unbearable tension of tbe Cuban missile crisis, he advocated a fearless
approach of risking a new world war that would involve (at least) the total
annihilation of the Cuban people and be praised the heroic readiness of the
Cuban people to risk its disappearance.
Another "inhuman" dimension of Robespierre's virtue-terror is the rejection of habit, that is to say, the rejection of the agency of realistic compromises. Every legal order (or every order of explicit normativity) has to rely
on a complex "reflexive" network of informal rules that tells us how we are
to relate to the explicit norms and how we are to apply them; to what extent
we are to take them literally, how and when we are allowed, solicited even,
to disregard them, and so on, is the domain of habit. To know tbe babits of
a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its explicit norms: when to
use them or not use them, when to violate them, when not to use a choice
that is offered, and when we are effectively obliged to do something but bave
to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice (as in the case of potlatch).
Recall the polite offer-meant-to-be-refused: it is a "habit" to refuse such an
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679
offer, and anyone who accepts such an offer commits a vulgar blunder. The
same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say
no but we are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes.
With many sexual prohibitions, the situation is the opposite one: the explicit
"no" effectively functions as the implicit injunction "do it, but in a discreet
way!"
Measured against this background, revolutionary-egalitarian figures from
Robespierre to John Brown are (potentially, at least)y^wr without habits:
they refuse to take into account the habits that qualify the functioning of a
universal rule. John Brown wrote.
Such is the natural dominion of habit that we regard the most arbitrary
conventions, sometimes indeed the most defective institutions, as absolute measures of truth or falsehood, justice or injustice. It does not even
occur to us that most are inevitably still connected with the prejudices
on which despotism fed us. We have been so long stooped under its yoke
that we have some difficulty in raising ourselves to the eternal principles
of reason; anything that refers to the sacred source of all law seems to us
to take on an illegal character, and the very order of nature seems to us a
disorder. The majestic movements of a great people, the sublime fervours
of virtue often appear to our timid eyes as something like an erupting volcano or the overthrow of political society; and it is certainly not the least
of the troubles bothering us, tbis contradiction between the weakness of
our morals, the depravity of our minds, and the purity of principle and
energy of character demanded by the free government to which we have
dared aspire."
To break the yoke ofthat habit means tbat if all men are equal, then all men
are to be effectively treated as equal. If African-Americans are also human,
they should be immediately treated as such.
For this reason, John Brown is a key political figure in the history of
the United States: in his fervently Christian "radical abolitionism," he came
closest to introducing the Jacobin logic into the U.S. political landscape.
Today even, long after slavery was abolished. Brown is the dividing figure
in U.S. collective memory; those whites who support Brown are all the more
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precious among tbem, surprisingly, Henry David Tboreau, tbe great

opponent of violence. Against the standard dismissal of Brown as bloodtbirsty, foolisb, and insane, Tboreau painted a portrait of a peerless man
wbose embrace of a cause was unparalleled; be even goes as far as to liken
Brown's execution (be states tbat be regards Brown as dead before bis actual
deatb) to Cbrist's crucifixion.'^ Tboreau vents at tbe scores of tbose wbo
bave voiced tbeir displeasure and scorn for Jobh Brown. Tbe same people
wbo can't relate to Brown because of tbeir concrete stances and "dead" existences are truly not living, but tben only a bandful of men bave lived.
Tbe problem bere is not terror as sucb. Our task today is precisely to
reinvent emancipatory terror. Tbe problem lies elsewbere. Egalitarian political "extremism" or "excessive radicalism" sbould always be read as a pbenomenon of ideologico-political displacement. It sbould be read as an index
of its opposite, a limitation, a refusal effectively to "go to tbe end." It is on
tbis level tbat one sbould searcb for the decisive moment of a revolutionary process, say, in the case of the October Revolution, not tbe explosion
of 1917i8, not even tbe civil war tbat followed, but tbe intense experimentations of tbe early 1920s, tbe (desperate, often ridiculous) attempts to
invent new rituals of daily life: Witb wbat to replace tbe prerevolutionary
procedures of marriage and funerals.? How to organize tbe most common
interaction in a factory, in an apartment block.?
It is at tbis level of wbat one is tempted to call "concrete terror," of imposing a new order onto daily life, tbat tbe Jacobins and botb tbe Soviet Revolution and tbe Cbinese Revolution ultimately failed, and not for tbe lack of
attempts in tbis direction, to be sure. Jacobins were at tbeir best not in tbe
theatrics of terror, but in tbe Utopian explosions of political imagination
apropos of tbe reorganization of daily life: everytbing was tbere, proposed
in tbe course of tbe frantic activity condensed in a couple of years, from tbe
self-organization of women to tbe communal bomes in wbicb tbe old were
to spend tbeir last years in peace and dignity.''' Tbe barsb consequence to
be accepted bere is tbat this excess of egalitarian democracy over the democratic procedure can only "institutionalize" itself in the guise of its opposite,
as revolutionary-democratic terror.
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681
Transubstantiation of Marxism
In modern history, this politics of revolutionary terror casts its shadow on

the historical epoch spanning from Robespierre to Mao, or, more generally,
the disintegration of the Communist bloc in 1990 and its last installment, the
Maoist Cultural Revolution. Where does this leave us? One of the most
devious traps lurking for Marxist theorists is the search for the moment of
the fall, when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism. We
must reject this entire topic. There is no opposition here. The fall is to be
inscribed into the very origins. So the first thing is to fully endorse the displacement concentrated in the two great passes or violent cuts in the history
of Marxism: the passage from Marx to Lenin and the passage from Lenin to
Mao. In each case there is a displacement of the original constellation: from
the most forward country to a relatively backward country, from workers
to poor peasants as the main revolutionary agent, and so on. It is an inner
necessity of the "original" teaching to submit to and survive this so-called
betrayal, to survive this violent act of being torn out of one's original context
and thrown into a foreign landscape where it has to reinvent itself because
only in this way is universality born.
The second violent transposition, carried out by Mao, occurred too
recently to condemn his reinvention of Marxism as theoretically inadequate
or as a regression. But it is no less too short a lapse of time to blur the violence of the cut and to accept Mao's reinvention as a logical continuation
or "application" of Marxism, relying, as is usually the case, on the simple
metaphoric expansion of class struggle. This recalls Martin Heidegger's
insistence, throughout the 1930s, that the main task of Western thought
today is to defend the Greek breakthrough, the founding gesture of the
"West," the overcoming of the prephilosophical, mythical "Asiatic" universe,
to struggle against the renewed "Asiatic" threat, the alleged greatest opposite
of the "West," "the mythical in general and the Asiatic in particular."'^ It
is this Asiatic "radical strangeness" that is mobilized and politicized in Mao
Zedong's communist movement.
As is well known among those who still remember Marxism, the ambiguous central point of its theoretical edifice concerns its premise that capitalism
itself creates the conditions for its self-overcoming through proletarian revo-
682
lution. Lenin's theory of the "weakest link of the chain" accepts that the first
revolution can take place not in the most developed country but in a country where antagonisms of the capitalist development are most aggravated,
even if it is less developed (Russia, which combined concentrated modern
capitalist industrial islands with agrarian backwardness and predemocratic
authoritarian government). The October Revolution was still perceived as a
risky breakthrough that could succeed only if it were soon joined by largescale Western European revolution, and all eyes were focused on Germany
in this respect.
The radical ahandonment of this model occurred only with Mao, for
whom the proletarian revolution should take place in the less developed
part of the world, among the large crowds of the third world impoverished
peasants, workers, and even "patriotic bourgeoisie," wbo are exposed to the
aftershocks of the capitalist globalization, organizing their rage and despair.
Since, however, such "unripe" economic conditions do not allow the construction of properly postcapitalist socialism, the necessary correlate is the
assertion of the "primacy of politics over economy": the victorious revolutionary subject is a voluntarist agent that acts against "spontaneous" economic
necessity, enforcing its vision on reality through revolutionary terror.
One should bear in mind here the fundamental lesson of the Hegelian
"concrete universality": the universal necessity is not a teleological force that,
operative from the outset, pulls the strings and runs the process, guaranteeing its happy outcome; on the contrary, this universal necessity is always
retroactive, it emerges out of the radical contingency of the process and signals the moment of the contingency's sdi-Aufhebung. One should thus say
that, once the (contingent) passage from Leninism to Maoism took place, it
cannot but appear as "necessary," that is, one can (re)construct the "inner
necessity" of Maoism as the next "stage" of the development of Marxism. In
order to grasp this reversal of contingency into necessity, one should leave
behind the standard linear historical time structured as the realization of
possibilities (at the temporal moment, X, where there are multiple possible
directions history can take, and what actually takes place is the realization
of one of those possibilities. Only when the thing takes place can we then
"see" how it was possible.
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683
The rather boring debate about the origins of Maoism (or Stalinism)
oscillates around three main options: (i) the "hard" anticommunists and
the "hard" partisans of Stalinism claim that there is a direct immanent
logic that leads from Marx to Lenin and from Lenin to Stalin (and then
from Stalin to Mao); (2) the "soft" critics claim that the Stalinist (or, prior
to it, Leninist) turn is one of the historical possibilities present in Marx's
theoretical edifice it could have turned otherwise, yet the Stalinist catastrophe is nonetheless inscribed as an option into the original theory itself;
(3) finally, the defenders of the purity of the "original teaching of Marx"
dismiss Stalinism (or already Leninism) as a simple distortion and betrayal,
insisting on the radical break between the two: Lenin and Stalin simply
"kidnapped" Marx's theory and used it for purposes totally at odds with
Marx. One should reject all three versions as based on the same underlying linear-historicist notion of time, and opt for the fourth version, beyond
the false question "to what extent was Marx responsible for tbe Stalinist
catastrophe."
Marx is fully responsible, but retroactively, wbich is to say the same holds
true for Stalin as for Franz Kafka in Jorge Luis Borges's famous formulation, that they both created their own predecessors. This is the movement
of "concrete universality," this radical "transubstantiation," through which
the original theory has to reinvent itself in a new context. Only by way of
surviving this transplant can it emerge as effectively universal. This is how
capitalism is a "concrete universality." It is not a question of isolating what
all particular forms of capitalism have in common, some shared universal
feature, but of grasping this matrix as a positive force in itself, as something
that all actual particular forms try to counteract, to contain its destructive
effects.
The Limits of Mao's Dialectics
This is how one should approach what is arguably Mao's central contribution to Marx's pbilosophy, that is, his elaborations on the notion of contradiction. One should not dismiss these as worthless philosophical regressions,
which, as one can demonstrate, rely on a vague notion of "contradiction,"
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which simply means the "struggle of opposite tendencies." Deserving close

reading then is Mao's On Practice and Contradiction. This text addresses the
two facets of contradictions, "the principal and the non-principal contradictions in a process, and the principal and the non-principal aspects of a contradiction." Mao's reproach to the "dogmatic Marxists" is that they "do not
understand that it is precisely in the particularity of contradiction that the
universality of contradiction resides."'^ For instance, Mao wrote.
In capitalist society the two forces in contradiction, the proletariat and
the bourgeoisie, form the principal contradiction. The other contradictions, such as those between the remnant feudal class and the bourgeoisie,
between the peasant petty bourgeoisie and the bourgeoisie, between the
proletariat and the peasant petty bourgeoisie, between the non-monopoly
capitalists and the monopoly capitalists, between bourgeois democracy
and bourgeois fascism, among the capitalist countries and between imperialism and the colonies, are all determined or influenced by this principal contradiction.
When imperialism launches a war of aggression against such a country, all of its various classes, except for some traitors, can temporarily
unite in a national war against imperialism. At such a time, the contradiction between imperialism and the country concerned become the
principal contradiction, while all the contradictions among the various
classes within the country (including what was the principal contradiction, between the feudal system and the great masses of people) are temporarily relegated to a secondary and subordinate position. (87)
His key point is that the principal or universal contradiction does not
overlap with the contradiction that should be treated as dominant in a particular situation the universal dimension literally resides in this particular
contradiction. In each concrete situation, a different "particular" contradiction is the predominant one, in the precise sense that, in order to win the
fight for the resolution of the principal contradiction, one should treat a particular contradiction as the predominant one, to which all other struggles
should be subordinated. The further key point concerns the principal aspect
of a contradiction; for example, with regard to the contradiction between
the productive forces and the relations of production.
'.izek I Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Moo
685
the productive forces, practice, and the economic base generally play tbe
principal and decisive role; wboever denies tbis is not a materialist. But
it must also be admitted tbat in certain conditions, sucb aspects as tbe
relations of production, tbeory, and tbe superstructure in turn manifest
tbemselves in tbe principal and decisive role. Wben it is impossible for tbe
productive forces to develop witbout a cbange in tbe relations of production, tben tbe cbange in tbe relations of production plays tbe principal
and decisive role. (92)
Tbe political stakes of tbis debate are decisive: Mao's aim is to assert tbe
key role, in tbe political struggle, of wbat tbe Marxist tradition usually refers
to as tbe "subjective factor" tbeory, superstructure. Tbis is what, according to Mao, Stalin neglected: "Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in
the USSR from first to last says notbing about tbe superstructure. It is not
concerned witb people; it considers things, not people.... [It speaks] only of
the production relations, not of tbe superstructure nor politics, nor tbe role
of tbe people. Communism cannot be reacbed unless tbere is a communist
movement" (11718).
Alain Badiou, a true Maoist bere, applies tbis to today's constellation,
avoiding tbe focus on tbe anticapitalist struggle, even ridiculing its main
form today (tbe antiglobalization movement), and defining tbe emancipatory struggle in strictly political terms as tbe struggle against (liberal)
democracy (today's predominant ideologico-political form.?). "Today tbe
enemy is not called Empire or Capital. It's called Democracy."^"^ Wbat,
today, prevents tbe radical questioning of capitalism itself is precisely the
belief in the democratic form^ of the struggle against capitalism. Yes, economy is
tbe key domain; tbe battle will be decided tbere; one bas to break tbe spell
of tbe global capitalism. But tbe intervention sbould be properly political,
not economic. Today, wben everyone is "anticapitalist," including directors
of tbe Hollywood "socio-critical" conspiracy movies (from The Enemy of
the State to The Insider) in wbicb tbe enemies are tbe big corporations witb
tbeir ruthless pursuit of profit, the signifier "anticapitalism" has lost its subversive sting. Wbat one should problematize is the self-evident opposite of
this "anticapitalism": the trust in the democratic substance of bonest U.S.
citizens to break up the conspiracy. This is the hard kernel of today's global
capitalist universe, its true master-signifier: democracy.^'
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Thus Mao's further elaboration on the notion of contradiction in his "On

the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People" (1957) also cannot be reduced to its best-known feature, the rather commonsense point of
distinguishing between the antagonistic and the nonantagonistic contradictions. One must always read the distinction between antagonistic and the
nonantagonistic contradictions together with its more ominous supplement,
a warning that the two aspects may overlap. "In ordinary circumstances,
contradictions among the people are not antagonistic. But if they are not
handled properly, or if we relax our vigilance and lower our guard, antagonism may arise."^^ The point is that democratic dialogue, the peaceful
coexistence of different orientations among the working class, is not something simply given, it is something gained and sustained by vigilance and
struggle.
So what are we to do with these elaborations? One should be very precise in diagnosing, at the very abstract level of theory, where Mao was right
and where he was wrong. Mao was right in rejecting the standard notion
of "dialectical synthesis" as the "reconciliation" of the opposites, as a higher
unity that encompasses their struggle; he was wrong in formulating this
rejection, this insistence on the priority of struggle, division, over every synthesis or unity, in the terms of a general cosmology-ontology of the "eternal
struggle of opposites" this is why he got caught in the simplistic, properly
nondialectical, notion of the "bad infinity" of struggle.
The nondialectical leads him to regress to primitive pagan "wisdom" on
how every creature, every determinate form of life, sooner or later meets
its end. "One thing destroys another, things emerge, develop, and are
destroyed, everywhere is like this. If things are not destroyed by others, then
they destroy themselves." One should give Mao his due at this level: he goes
to the end of this direction. He wrote,
I don't believe that communism will not be divided into stages . . . and
that there will be no qualitative changes. Lenin said that all things can be
divided. He gave the atom as an example, and said that not only can the
atom be divided, but the electron, too, can be divided. Formerly, however,
it was held that it could not be divided; the branch of science devoted to
splitting the atomic nucleus is still very young, only twenty or thirty years
2!izek I Revolufionary Terror from Robespierre fo Moo
687
old. In recent decades, the scientists have resolved the atomic nucleus into
its constituents, such as protons, anti-protons, neutrons, anti-neutrons,
mesons and anti-mesons. (183)
Mao goes even a step further and moves beyond humanity itself, forecasting, in a proto-Nietzschean way, the "overcoming" of man: "The life
of dialectics is the continuous movement toward opposites. Mankind will
also finally meet its doom. When the theologians talk about doomsday, tbey
are pessimistic and terrify people. We see the end of mankind is something
which will produce something more advanced than mankind. Mankind is
still in its infancy" (182). And, even more, Mao comments on the rise of
some animals themselves to what we consider today as an exclusively human
level of consciousness. His time frame of "a million years, ten million years"
underwrites his contention that "horses, cows, sheep, and insects will all
change" (176).
Two things should be added to this "cosmic perspective"; first, one should
remember tbat Mao is bere talking to the inner circle of party ideologists.
This is what accounts for the tone of sharing a secret not to be rendered public, as if Mao is divulging his "secret teaching" and, effectively, Mao's speculations closely echo the so-called "bio-cosmism," the strange comhination
of vulgar materialism and Gnostic spirituality that formed occult shadow
ideology, the obscene secret teacbing of the Soviet Marxism. Repressed out
of public sight in the central period of the Soviet state, bio-cosmism was
openly propagated only in the first and in the last two decades of the Soviet
rule. Its main theses are that the goals of religion can be realized in terrestrial life through the development of modern science and technology; in the
future, sexual difference be abolished, with the rise of chaste posthumans
reproducing themselves through direct bio-technical reproduction; it will
be possible to resurrect all the dead of the past (establishing their biological
formula through their remains and then reengendering them, since at that
time, DNA was not yet known), thus even erasing all past injustices, "undoing" past suffering and destruction. In this bright bio-political communist
future, not only humans, but also animals, all living beings, will participate
in a directly collectivized Reason of the cosmos.
Second, this "cosmic perspective" is for Mao not just an irrelevant phil-
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osophical caveat; it has precise ethico-political consequences. When Mao

high-handedly dismisses the threat of the atomic bomb, he is not downplaying the scope of the danger. He is fully aware that nuclear war may lead to
the extinction of humanity as such, so, to justify his defiance, he has to adopt
the "cosmic perspective" from which the end of life on Earth would hardly
mean anything to the universe as a whole. This "cosmic perspective" also
grounds Mao's dismissive attitude toward the human costs of economic and
political endeavors. If one is to believe Mao's latest biography,^^ he caused
the greatest famine in history by exporting food to Russia to buy nuclear
and arms industries: 38 million people were starved and slave-driven to
death in 1958 61. This is instrumental attitude at its most radical: killing
as part of a ruthless attempt to realize a goal, reducing people to a disposable
means. One should bear in mind tbat the Nazi holocaust was not the same:
the killing of the Jews was not part of a rational strategy, but a self-goal, a
meticulously planned "irrational" excess (recall the deportation of the last
Jews from the Greek islands in 1944, just before the German retreat, or
the massive use of trains for transporting Jews instead of war materials in
1944). This is why Heidegger is wrong when he reduces the holocaust to the
industrial production of corpses: it was not that, Stalinist communism was
The conceptual consequence of this "bad infinity" that pertains to vulgar
evolutionism is Mao's consistent rejection of the "negation of the negation"
as a universal dialectical law in his explicit polemics against Engels. Noting
that Engels raised three categories, Mao went on, "I don't believe in two
of those categories. . . . There is no such thing as the negation of the negation. Affirmation, negation, affirmation, negation . . . in the development of
things, every link in the chain of events is both affirmation and negation"
(181). Along these lines, Mao scathingly dismisses the category of "dialectical
synthesis" of the opposites and promotes his own version of "negative dialectics." Every synthesis is for Mao ultimately what Adorno in his critique of
Lukacs called ''erpresste Versoehnung" or enforced reconciliation, and meant
at best a momentary pause in the ongoing struggle that occurs not when
the opposites are united, but when one side simply wins out over the other.
Mao wrote.
2 izek I Revolutionory Terror from Robespierre to Mao
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What is synthesis.? You have all witnessed how the two opposites, the
Kuomintang and the Communist Party, were synthesized on the mainland. The synthesis took place like this: their armies came, and we
devoured them, we ate them bite by bite. . . . One tbing eating another,
big fish eating little fish, this is synthesis. It has never been put like this in
books. I have never put it this way in my books either. For his part, Yang
Hsien-chen believes that two combine into one, and that synthesis is the
indissoluble tie between two opposites. What indissoluble ties are there
in this world.? Things may be tied, but in the end they must be severed.
There is nothing which cannot be severed. (179 80)
This was at the core of the famous debate in the late 1950s over the One and
the Two.
The question at stake was whether the Two united into One, or the One
divided into Two. "In any given thing," Mao wrote, "the unity of the opposites is conditional, temporary, and transitory, and hence relative, whereas
the struggle of opposites is absolute." This leads to what one is tempted to
call Mao's ethico-political injunction, to paraphrase the last words of Samuel
Beckett's L'Innommable: "In the silence you don't know, you must go on
severing, I can't go on, I'll go on severing."^' The paradox of Mao's radical
politics of the eternally ongoing division that never reaches the final point
of peace is that it rejoins its opposite, the rightist social-democratic revision
whose founder Eduard Bernstein proposed the well-known formula: "The
goal is nothing, the movement is everything."
So where does Mao fall short here.? He falls short in the way he opposes
this injunction to sever, to divide, to accommplish dialectical synthesis.
When Mao mockingly refers to "synthesizing" as the destruction or subordination of the enemy, his mistake resides in this mocking attitude. He
does not see the true Hegelian synthesis; is this not the Hegelian "negation
of the negation".? Does it not mean that the old order is negated within its
own ideological-political form, but this form has then to be negated.? Those
who oscillate, those who are afraid to take the second step of overcoming
the ideological-political form itself, are those who (to repeat Robespierre)
want a "revolution without revolution." Lenin displays all the strength of his
"hermeneutics of suspicion" in discerning the different forms of this retreat.
True victory, the negation of negation, occurs when the enemy speaks your
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language. A true victory, tben, is victory in defeat: it occurs wben one's specific message is accepted as a universal ground, even by tbe enemy. Say, in
tbe case of rational science versus belief, tbe true victory of science takes
place wben tbe cburcb starts to defend itself in the language of science.
Or, in contemporary politics of the United Kingdom, as many a perspicuous commentator observed, tbe Tbatcber revolution was in itself cbaotic,
impulsive, and marked by unpredictable contingencies, and it was only tbe
"Tbird Way" Blairite government wbo was able to institutionalize it, to stabilize it into new institutional forms, or, to put it in Hegelese, to raise (wbat
first appeared as) a contingency, a bistorical accident, into necessity. In tbis
sense, Blair repeated Tbatcberism, elevating it into a concept, in tbe same
way tbat, for Hegel, Augustus repeated Caesar, transforming-sublating
a (contingent) personal name into a concept, a title. Tbatcber was not a
Tbatcberite, sbe was just berself. It was Blair (more tban Jobn Major) wbo
truly formed Tbatcberism as a notion. Tbe dialectical irony of bistory is tbat
only a (nominal) ideologico-political enemy can do tbis to you, can elevate
you into a concept tbe empirical instigator bas to be knocked off: Julius
Caesar bad to be murdered; Tbatcber bad to be ignominiously deposed.
A surprising lesson of tbe last decades is tbat tbe Cbinese communists
are presiding over wbat is arguably tbe most explosive development of capitalism in its entire bistory. Recall tbe classical Marxist account of tbe overcoming of capitalism: capitalism unleasbed tbe breatbtaking dynamics of
self-enbancing productivity in capitalism, "all tbings solid melt into tbin
air," capitalism is tbe greatest revolutionizer in tbe entire bistory of bumanity; on tbe otber band, tbis capitalist dynamic is propelled by its own inner
obstacle or antagonism tbe ultimate limit of capitalism (of tbe capitalist self-propelling productivity) is Capital itself, tbat is, tbe incessant capitalist development and revolutionizing of its own material conditions, tbe
mad dance of its unconditional spiral of productivity, is ultimately notbing but a desperate fligbt forward to escape its own debilitating inberent
contradiction.
Marx's fundamental mistake was bere to conclude, from tbese insigbts,
tbat a new, bigber social order (communism) was possible, an order tbat
would not only maintain but even raise to a bigber degree and effectively fully
release tbe potential of tbe self-increasing spiral of productivity tbat, in capi-
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talism, on account of its inherent obstacle/contradiction, is again and again

thwarted by socially destructive economic crises. In short, what Marx overlooked is that, to put it in standard Derridean terms, this inherent obstacle/
antagonism as the "condition of impossibility" of the full deployment of the
productive forces is simultaneously its "condition of possibility." If we abolish the obstacle, the inherent contradiction of capitalism, we do not get the
fully unleashed drive to productivity finally delivered of its impediment, but
we lose precisely this productivity that seemed to be generated and simultaneously thwarted by capitalism. If we take away the obstacle, the very potential thwarted by this obstacle dissipates. And it is as if the logic of "obstacle
as a positive condition" underlying the failure of the socialist attempts to
overcome capitalism is now returning with a vengeance in capitalism itself:
capitalism can fully thrive not in the unencumbered reign of the market
but only when an obstacle (the minimal welfare state interventions, up to
the direct political rule of the Communist Party, as is the case in China)
constrains its unimpeded reign.
So, ironically, this is the "synthesis" of capitalism and communism in
Mao's sense. In a unique poetic justice of history, it was capitalism that "synthesized" Maoist communism. The key news from China in the last years is
the emergence of a large-scale workers movement, protesting the work conditions that are the price for China's rapidly becoming the world's foremost
manufacturing place, and the brutal way the authorities cracked down on
it a new proof, if one is still needed, that China is today the ideal capitalist
state: freedom for the capital, with the state doing the "dirty job" of controlling the workers. China as the emerging superpower of the twenty-first
century thus seems to embody a new kind of capitalism: disregard for ecological consequences, disregard for workers' rights, everything subordinated
to the ruthless drive to develop and become the new superpower.
This is the ultimate price for Mao's theoretical mistake of rejecting "negation of negation," of his failure to grasp how "negation of negation" is not
a compromise between a position and its too radical negation, but, on the
contrary, the only true negation.^^ And because Mao is unable to tbeoretically formulate this self-relating negation of form, he gets caught in the "bad
infinity" of endless negating, scissions into two, or subdivision. In Hegelese, Mao's dialectic remains at the level of understanding, of fixed notional
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oppositions; it is unable to formulate the properly dialectical self-relating

of notional determinations. This "serious mistake" (to use a Stalinist term)
led Mao, when he was courageous enough to draw all the consequences
from his stances, to reach a properly nonsensical conclusion that, in order to
invigorate class struggle, one should directly open up the field to the enemy.
"Let them do it," Mao states. "Let them attack us madly, demonstrate in the
streets, take up arms to rebel I approve all of these things. Society is very
complex, there is not a single commune, a single hsien, a single department
of the Central Committee, which one cannot divide into two" (172-73).
This notion of dialectics provides the basic matrix of Mao's politics, its
repeated oscillation between "liberal" openness and the "hard line" purge.
First allow the proverbial "hundred flowers to bloom," so that the enemies
will actualize and fully express their reactionary hidden tendencies. Then,
once everyone's true positions are clearly articulated, engage in a ruthless
struggle. Anarchist outbursts are not a transgression of law and order. In our
societies, anarchism already is in power, wearing the mask of law and order.
Our justice is a travesty of justice, the spectacle of law and order an obscene
carnival. The point is made clear by the arguably greatest political poem in
the English language, "The Mask of Anarchy" by Percy Shelley, describing
the obscene parade of the figures of power.
And many more Destructions played
In this ghastly masquerade.
All disguised, even to the eyes.
Like Bishops, lawyers, peers, or spies.
Last came Anarchy: he rode
On a white horse, splashed with blood;
He was pale even to the lips.
Like Death in the Apocalypse.
And he wore a kingly crown;
And in his grasp a sceptre shone;
On his brow this mark I saw
'I AM GOD, A N D KING, A N D LAW!
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<:uiturai Revolution and Power
Is not this shift from the criminal transgression of law and order to law
and order itself as the highest criminal transgression directly enacted by
Mao himself.? This is why, while setting in motion and secretly pulling the
strings of the self-destructive carnival, Mao nonetheless remained exempted
from its shifts. At no moment was there ever a serious threat that Stalin or
Mao himself should be ritualistically deposed, treated as "yesterday a king,
today a beggar," since Mao was not the traditional master, but the "Lord of
Misrule."
What Mao does is to deprive the transgression of its ritualized, ludic
character by way of taking it seriously. Revolution is not just a temporary
safety valve, a carnivalesque explosion destined to be followed by the sobering morning after. Mao's problem was precisely the lack of the "negation
of negation." It was the failure of any attempt to transpose revolutionary
negativity into a truly new positive order. All temporary stabilizations of
the revolution amounted to so many restorations of the old order, so that the
only way to keep the revolution alive was the "spurious infinity" of endlessly
repeated negation, which reached its apex in the Great Proletariat Cultural
Revolution (GPCR).
In his Logiques des mondes, Badiou elaborated two subjective attitudes
of countering an event: the "reactive subject" and the "obscure subject."^^
Insofar as one is ready to assume the risk of obscenely designating tbe
reintroduction of capitalism into China a kind of event, one can claim that
the Cultural Revolution and the revisionism identified by tbe name "Deng
Hsiao-Ping" stand, respectively, for tbe obscure and the reactive subject:
Deng orchestrated the rintgration of capitalism into the new communist
China, while the Cultural Revolution aimed at its total annihilation and
was as such precisely what Badiou calls un desastre obscur. Badiou himself
concedes that the final result of the Cultural Revolution was a negative one.
"It all began," according to Badiou, "when, hetween 1966 and 1968, saturating in the real the previous hypotheses, the Red Guardist high-school pupils
and students, and then the workers of Shanghai, prescribed for the decades
to come the affirmative realization of this beginning, of which they themselves, since their fury remained caught into what they were raising against,
explored only the face of pure
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But what if the Cultural Revolution was "negative" not only in the sense
of clearing up the space and opening up the way for a new beginning, but
negative in itself negative as an index of the impotence to generate the new.?
This brings us back to the central weakness of Mao's thought and politics.
Many a commentator has made ironic remarks about the apparent stylistic clumsiness of the titles of Soviet communist books and articles, such as
their tautological character, in the sense of the repeated use of the same
words, such as "revolutionary dynamics in the early stages of the Russian
revolution," or "economic contradictions in the development of the Soviet
economy." What if these tautologies actually point toward the awareness
of the logic of betrayal best rendered by the classic reproach of Robespierre to
the Dantonist opportunists.? "What you want is a revolution without revolution": here the tautological repetition signals the urge to repeat the negation.
The true revolution would then be "revolution with revolution" a revolution
that, in its course, revolutionizes its own starting presuppositions.
Hegel had a presentiment of this necessity when he wrote, "It is a modern
folly to alter a corrupt ethical system, its constitution and legislation, without
changing the religion, to have a revolution without a reformation.''^^ He
thereby announced the necessity of cultural revolution as the condition of
the successful social revolution. This, then, should be our precise version of
Robespierre's retort: "What you want is a revolution without reformation!"
The problem with hitherto revolutionary attempts is not that they were too
extreme, but that they were not radical enough, since they did not question
their own presuppositions. In a radical revolution, people not only "realize
their old dreams," they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming.
Is this not the exact formula of the link between death drive and sublimation.? Therein resides the necessity of the Cultural Revolution clearly
grasped by Mao. And as Herbert Marcuse put it in anotber wonderful circular formula from the same eipoch, freedom (from ideological constraints,
from the predominant mode of dreaming) is the condition of liberation. If we
only change reality in order to realize our dreams and do not change these
dreams themselves, we sooner or later regress to old reality. There is a Hegelian positing of presuppositions at work here: the hard work of liberation
retroactively forms its own presuppositions.
It is only this reference to what happens after the revolution, to the
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"morning after," tbat allows us to distinguisb between libertarian patbetic

outbursts and true revolutionary upbeavals. Upbeavals lose tbeir energy
wben one has to approach the prosaic work of social reconstruction at
this point, lethargy sets in. In contrast to it, recall the immense creativity of
the Jacobins just prior to tbeir fall, tbe numerous proposals about new civic
religion, about bow to sustain tbe dignity of old people, and so on. Tberein
also resides tbe interest of reading tbe reports about daily life in tbe Soviet
Union in tbe early 1920s, witb tbe entbusiastic urge to invent new rules for
quotidian existence: bow does one get married.? Wbat are tbe new rules of
courting.? How does one celebrate a birtbday.? How does one get buried.?^"
At tbis point, tbe Cultural Revolution miserably failed. It is difficult to
miss tbe irony of tbe fact tbat Badiou, wbo adamantly opposes tbe notion
of act as negative, locates tbe bistorical significance of tbe Maoist Cultural
Revolution precisely in tbe negative gesture of signaling "tbe end of tbe
party-State as tbe central production of revolutionary political activity" it
is bere tbat be sbould bave been consequent and deny tbe ventai status of
tbe Cultural Revolution: far from being an Event, it was ratber a supreme
display of wbat Badiou likes to refer to as tbe "morbid deatb drive." Destroying old monuments was not a true negation of tbe past; it was ratber an
impotent passage l'acte bearing witness to tbe failure to get rid of tbe past.
In a way tbere is a poetic justice in tbe fact tbat tbe final result of Mao's
Cultural Revolution is today's unprecedented explosion of capitalist dynamics in Cbina. Tbat is to say, witb tbe full deployment of capitalism, especially today's "late capitalism," tbe predominant "normal" life gets, in a way,
"carnivalized," witb its constant self-revolutionizing, its reversals, crises,
and reinventions. Brian Massumi formulated clearly tbis deadlock, wbicb
is based on tbe fact tbat today's capitalism already overcame tbe logic of
totalizing normality and adopted tbe logic of tbe erratic excess:
Tbe more varied, and even erratic, tbe better: normalcy starts to lose
its bold. Tbe regularities start to loosen. Tbis loosening of normalcy is
part of capitalism's dynamic. It's not a simple liberation. It's capitalism's
own form of power. It's no longer disciplinary institutional power tbat
defines everytbing, it's capitalism's power to produce variety because
markets get saturated. Produce variety and you produce a nicbe mar-
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ket. The oddest of affective tendencies are okay as long as they pay.
Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but only in order to
extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify profit potential.
It literally valorises affect. The capitalist logic of surplus-value production
starts to take over the relational field that is also the domain of political
ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and predictable paths. It's
very trouhling and confusing, because it seems to me that there's been a
certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of capitalist power and
the dynamic of resistance.^'
There is thus, beyond all cheap jibes and superficial analogies, a profound
structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing,
the permanent struggle against the ossification of state structures, and the
inherent dynamics of capitalism. The reign of today's global capitalism is
the true Lord of Misrule. It is against this background that one should read
the recent big campaign in China to resuscitate Marxism as efficient state
ideology (literally hundreds of millions of U.S. dollars are invested in this
venture). Those who see in this operation a threat to capitalist liberalization, a sign that hard-liners want to reassert their hegemony, totally miss the
point. Paradoxical as it may sound, this return of Marxism is the sign of the
ultimate triumph of capitalism, the sign of its full institutionalization.
What kind of Marxism is being offered as appropriate for today's China?
Emphasis is on the distinction between Marxism and "leftism": Marxism is
not the same as leftism, a term that refers to any talk of workers liberation,
from free trade unions to overcoming of capitalism. Based on the Marxist
thesis on the development of the forces of production as the key factor of
social progress, the main task of the progressive forces is defined as that
of creating the conditions for the continuing fast "modernization," while
avoiding all forms of instability, those caused by leftism as well as those
caused by rightism (multiparty democracy, etc.), which will bring chaos and
thus hinder the very rapid modernization. The conclusion is clear: in today's
China, only the leading role of the Communist Party can sustain rapid
modernization in the conditions of social stability tbe official (Confucian)
term is that China should become a "harmonious society." (As a force that
contrihutes to this "harmony," religion is now fully rehabilitated.)
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697
Consequently, to put it in the old Maoist terms, although it may appear

that the main enemy is the "bourgeois" threat, the "principal contradiction"
is, in the eyes of the ruling elite, the one between the existing "harmonious"
order (unfettered capitalist development sustained by Communist Party
rule) and the threat of workers' and peasants' revolts which is why the
recent strengthening of the oppressive apparatuses (the formation of special
units of riot police to crush popular unrest, etc.) is the actual social expression of what, in ideology, appears as a revival of Marxism.
The problem with this revival is that, to put it in Immanuel Kant's terms,
it totally subordinates Marxism to the "private use of reason." For Kant, the
public space of the "world-civil-society" designates the paradox of the universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypassing of the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the universal.
This is what Kant, in the famous passage of his "What Is Enlightenment.?"
means by "public" as opposed to "private": "'Private' is not one's individual
as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of
one's particular identification; while 'public' is the trans-national universality of the exercise of one's reason.^^ x h e paradox of Kant's formula "Think
freely, but obey!" is thus that one participates in the universal dimension
of the "public" sphere precisely as a singular individual extracted from or
even opposed to one's substantial communal identification one is truly
universal only when radically singular, in the interstices of communal
identities. And, back to today's China, the artificially resuscitated Marxism
is an exemplary case of the private use of reason: Marxism is mobilized
not on account of its inherent universal truth but in order to legitimize
the present Chinese state interest of maintaining Communist Party power
and thus guaranteeing stability in fast economic development such a
use of Marxism is "objectively cynical," with no cognitive value at all. The
tragedy is that the Chinese state will sooner or later encounter the limits
of the formula "capitalism with Confucian values," and, at that point,
only an unconstrained "public use of reason" will be able to do the job of
inventing new solutions. No wonder that, in today's China, the two terms
public intellectual and civil society are very badly viewed in the official eyes:
although they are not explicitly prohibited, every intellectual knows it is
better to avoid them if one wants to remain in good terms with those in
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power. Anything (almost) is permitted in closed academic debates, that

is, if it does not reach the general public.
How, then, do leading communist theorists react when confronted with
the all-too-obvious contradiction: a Communist Party that still legitimizes
itself in Marxist terms but renounces Marxism's basic premise, that of
workers' self-organization as a revolutionary force in order to overthrow
capitalism.? This paradox is nicely rendered in the title of a recent report
on China: "Even What's Secret Is a Secret in China."^^ Many troublesome
intellectuals who report on political oppression, ecological catastrophes,
rural poverty, and so on, (for example, a Chinese woman who sent her
husband, wbo lives abroad, clippings from a local Chinese newspaper),
got years of prison for betraying a state secret. However, "many of the
laws and regulations that make up the state-secret regime are themselves
classified, making it difficult for individuals to know how and when they're
in violation."^"* This secrecy of the prohibition itself serves two different
purposes that should not be confused. Its commonly admitted role is that
of universalizing guilt and fear: if you do not know what is prohibited, you
cannot even know when you are violating a prohibition, which makes you
potentially guilty all the time.
Except at the climax of the Stalinist purges when everyone could be found
guilty, people do know when they are doing something that will annoy those
in power. The function of prohibiting prohibitions is thus not to give raise to
"irrational" fear, but to let the potential dissidents (who think they can get
away with their critical activity, since they are not breaking any laws, but
only doing what laws guarantee them freedom of the press, etc.) know
that, if they annoy those in power too much, they can be punished at the
power's will. In ex-Yugoslavia, the infamous Article 133 of the penal code
could always be invoked to prosecute writers and journalists. It criminalized
any text that falsely presented the achievements of the socialist revolution
or that might arouse tension and discontent among the public for the way it
dealt with political, social, or other topics. This last category is obviously not
only infinitely plastic but also conveniently self-relating. Doesn't the very
fact that you are accused by those in power mean that you ''aroused tension
and discontent among the public"} In those years, I remember asking a Slovene politician how he justified this law. He just smiled, and with a wink.
699
said, "Well, we have to have some tool to discipline at our will those who
annoy us."
But there is another element to this prohibiting prohibition that is no less
crucial: it maintains appearances. And we all know how absolutely crucial
appearances were in Stalinism, since the Stalinist regime reacted with total
panic whenever there was a threat that appearances would be disturbed, as,
say, an accident reported in the public media that was clearly the result of
the regime's failures. Prohibiting prohibitions is far from limited to communist regimes. It is operative in today's "permissive" capitalism, as we can
plainly see. The "postmodern" boss insists that he is not the master but just a
coordinator of our joint creative efforts, the first among equals; there should
be no formalities among us, we should address him by his nickname, he
shares a dirty joke with us but in all this, he remains our master. In such a
social link, relations of domination function through their denial: in order
to be operative, tbey have to be ignored. We are not only obliged to obey our
masters, we are also obliged to act as if we are free and equal, as if there is
no domination which, of course, makes the situation even more humiliating. Paradoxically, in such a situation, the first act of liberation is to demand
from the master that he acts as one: one should reject false coUegiality from
the master and insist that he treats as with cold distance, as a master.
The ultimate ground of this paradox in contemporary social relations
is the rise of capitalism itself. One should apply here Marx's old formula
of commodity fetishism in which relations between people appear as relations between things. This is why, in capitalism, we areas people all
equal, possessing the same dignity and freedom; and it is why the hierarchic relations of domination, which were in previous societies directly
hierarchic relations among persons, are now transposed onto hierarchic
relations among "things" (commodities). The logic of domination that necessarily denies itself as domination is inscribed into the very core of capitalist
relations.
This brings us back to the paradox of today's Chinese Marxism. It is
easy to mock a Marxism that dispenses with Marxism's central idea, the
liberation of workers, from the standpoint of libertarian Western Marxism.
However, this condescension misses the point, for we are not dealing with a
simple betrayal of Marxism here but, literally, with its symptom, a Marxian
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formula to resolve its own inconsistency. There was in "original" Marxism a

dimension that potentially led to workers' enslavement to "progress" or the
fast development of the forces of production. Stalinism organized "progress"
in the frame of the centralized state economy, and today's China draws the
obvious, logical conclusion that the most efficient motor of development are
capitalist relations. The premise of classical Marxism, embraced by tbeorists
including Toni Negri, was tbat "bistory is on our side." In tbis premise,
workers' resistance to capitalism "objectively" accelerates development of
tbe forces of production, wbicb means capitalism is no longer a motor but
more an obstacle to development. Wbat to do, tben, if capitalism de facto
proves itself as the most efficient motor of social relations.? The answer is the
Chinese solution: to honestly admit tbat, in tbis pbase of world bistory, one
sbould fully embrace capitalism. Wbere Marxism enters is in tbe claim tbat
only tbe leading role of tbe Communist Party can sustain such modernization and simultaneously maintain a "harmonious society," that is, prevent
social disintegration that characterizes Western liberal capitalism.
Altbougb a failure, tbe Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was unique
in attacking a key point. Tbe stakes for tbe GPCR were not just tbe takeover of state power but tbe new economic organization and reorganization
of daily life. Its failure was precisely the failure to create a new form of
everyday life: it remained a carnivalesque excess, with the state apparatus,
under Chou En-Lai, guaranteeing the continuation of daily life, of production. At the level of social reality, there is obviously some trutb in tbe fact
tbat tbe Cultural Revolution was triggered by Mao to reestablisb bis full
power. It is also true tbat tbe GPCR brougbt immeasurable suffering, tbat
it cut deep wounds in tbe social fabric, and that its story can be told as tbe
story of tbe fanaticized crowd, cbanging slogans. However, tbis is simply
not tbe entire story.
In spite of, or even perbaps because of, all its borrors, the Cultural Revolution undoubtedly did contain elements of an enacted utopia. At tbe very end
of tbe GPCR, before Mao, having achieved his goal of full power and eliminated the top nomenklatura competitors, blocked tbe agitation, tbe Sbangbai Commune arose. One million workers simply took tbe official slogans
seriously, demanded the abolition of tbe state and even tbe party itself, and
sougbt tbe direct communal reorganization of society. It is significant tbat at
701
this very point Mao ordered the army to intervene and to restore order. The
paradox is that of a leader who triggers an uncontrolled upheaval, while
trying to exert full personal power in an overlap of extreme dictatorship and
extreme emancipation of the masses. This genuinely revolutionary aspect
of the Cultural Revolution is sometimes admitted even by the conservative
critics.
What this means is that we can read the Cultural Revolution at two different levels. If we read it as a part of historical reality or being, we can
easily submit it to a "dialectical" analysis that perceives the final outcome
of a historical process as its "truth." In this argument, the ultimate failure
of the Cultural Revolution bears witness to the inherent inconsistency of
the very project of Cultural Revolution. If, however, we analyze it as an
event, as an enactment of the eternal idea of egalitarian justice, then the ultimate factual result of the Cultural Revolution, its catastrophic failure and
reversal into the recent capitalist explosion, does not exhaust the real of the
Cultural Revolution. The eternal idea of the Cultural Revolution survives
its defeat in socio-historical reality. It continues to lead the underground
spectral life of the ghosts of failed utopias that haunt the future generations,
patiently awaiting its next resurrection. This brings us back to Robespierre,
who expressed in a touching way the simple faith in the eternal idea of
freedom that persists through all defeats, without which, as it was clear to
Robespierre, a revolution "is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime,"
the faith most poignantly expressed in Robespierre's very last speech on the
8 Thermidor 1794, the day hefore his arrest and execution.
But there do exist, I can assure you, souls that are feeling and pure; it
exists, that tender, imperious and irresistible passion, the torment and
delight of magnanimous hearts; that deep horror of tyranny, that compassionate zeal for the oppressed, that sacred love for the homeland, that even
more sublime and holy love for humanity, without which a great revolution is just a noisy crime that destroys another crime; it does exist, that
generous ambition to establish here on earth the world's first Republic.^^
Does the same not hold even more true for the last big installment in the life
of this idea, the Maoist Cultural Revolution? Without this idea, the Cultural
Revolution was to an even greater degree "just a noisy crime that destroys
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another crime." One recalls here Hegel's sublime words on the French Revolution from his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. "It has been
said," he wrote,
that the French revolution resulted from philosophy, and it is not without
reason that philosophy has been called Weltweisheit [world wisdom]; for
it is not only truth in and for itself, as the pure essence of things, but also
truth in its living form as exhibited in the affairs of the world. We should
not, therefore, contradict the assertion that the revolution received its first
impulse from philosophy. . . . Never since the sun had stood in the firmament and the planets revolved around him had it been perceived that
man's existence centers in his head, i.e., in thought, inspired by which
he builds up the world of reality... . [N]ot until now had man advanced
to the recognition of the principle that thought ought to govern spiritual reality. This was accordingly a glorious mental dawn. All thinking
beings shared in the jubilation of this epoch. Emotions of a lofty character
stirred men's minds at that time; a spiritual enthusiasm thrilled through
the world, as if the reconciliation between the divine and the secular was
now first accomplished.^^
This did not prevent Hegel from coldly analyzing the inner necessity of
abstract freedom to turn into its opposite, of course, self-destructive, revolutionary terror. However, do not forget that Hegel's critique is immanent and
accepts the basic principle of the French Revolution (with its key supplement,
the Haiti Revolution). This is precisely what one should do apropos of the
October Revolution and the Chinese Revolution. As Badiou has pointed out,
the October Revolution was the first case in the entire history of humanity
of the successful revolt of the exploited poor. They were the zero-level members of the new society and they set the standards. The revolution stabilized
itself into a new social order and a new world was created, miraculously
surviving for decades amid unthinkable economic and military pressure and
isolation. This was effectively "a glorious mental dawn. All thinking beings
shared in the jubilation of this epoch." Against all hierarchic orders, egalitarian universality directly came to power.
It may seem that the only consequent Hegelian standpoint is the one that
703
measures a notion by the success or failure of its actualization, so that, in

the perspective of the total mediation of the essence by its appearance, any
transcendence of the idea over its actualization is discredited. The consequence of this is that, if we insist on the eternal idea that survives its historical defeat, this necessarily entails in Hegelese a regression from the
level of the notion as the fully actualized unity of essence and appearance,
to the level of the essence supposed to transcend its appearing.
Is it really so, however.? One can also claim that the excess of the Utopian
idea that survives its historical defeat does not contradict the total mediation
of idea and its appearing. The basic Hegelian insight according to which
the failure of reality to fully actualize an idea is simultaneously the failure
(limitation) of this idea itself, continues to hold. What one should add only
is that the gap separating idea from its actualization signals a gap within
this idea itself This is why the spectral idea that continues to haunt historical reality signals the falsity of the new historical reality itself, its inadequacy
to its own notion. The failure of the Jacobin utopia, its actualization in the
utilitarian bourgeois reality, is simultaneously the limitation of this utilitarian reality itself
One should consequently turn around the commonplace reading of
Lacan's "Kant avec Sade" according to which, the Sadean perversion is the
"truth" of Kant, more "radical" than Kant, and draw out the consequences
Kant himself did not have the courage to confront. It is not in this sense that
Sade is the truth of Kant. On the contrary, the Sadean perversion emerges as
the result of the Kantian compromise, of Kant's avoiding the consequences
of his breakthrough. Sade is the symptom of Kant. While it is true that
Kant retreated from drawing all the consequences of his ethical revolution,
the space for the figure of Sade is opened up by Kant's compromise, by his
unwillingness to go to the end, to retain the full fidelity to his philosophical
breakthrough. Far from being simply and directly "the truth of Kant," Sade
is the symptom of how Kant betrayed the truth of his own discovery the
obscene Sata.njouisseur is a stigma bearing witness to Kant's ethical compromise. The apparent "radicality" o Uns jouisseur figure (the willingness of
the Sadean hero to go to the end in his Will-to-Enjoy) is a mask of its exact
opposite. In other words, the true horror is not a Sadean orgy. It is the real
704
core of the Kantean ethic itself. To paraphrase Brecht yet again, what is the
miserable evil of a Sadean group orgy in comparison with the "diabolical
evil" that pertains to a pure ethical act.?
And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for the relationship between the
Chinese Cultural Revolution and today's explosion of capitalist development
as its "truth." This explosion is also a sign that Mao retreated from drawing
all the consequences of the Cultural Revolution, which is only to say that
the space for the capitalist explosion was opened up by this compromise, by
Mao's unwillingness to go to the end, to retain the full fidelity to the idea
of the Cultural Revolution. And the lesson both times, in the case of Kant
as well as in the case of Mao, is the same one, from Beckett's Worstward Ho:
"Try again. Fail again. Fail better."^^
Notes
1. Alain Badiou, "Introduction," in Logiques des mondes (Logics of the Worlds) (Paris: Seuil,
2oo6).
2. Mao Zedong, On Practice and Contradiction (London: Verso, 2007), 146. The catch resides in
the ambiguity of "the people." Are the people who are trusted the "empirical" individuals
or the People, on behalf of whom one can turn the terror on behalf of the people against the
people's enemies into the terror against individual people themselves? Does the ecological
challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent this "eternal idea"?
3. Its elements were already discernble in the earlier "millenarist" revolutions from the Czech
Hussites to Thomas Munzer, and in Cromwell's commonwealth.
4. For a balanced historical description of the Terror, see David Andress, The Terror: Civil War
in the French Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 2005).
5. Badiou, Logiques, 98.
6. Louis-Antoine-Leon Saint-Just, Oeuvres choisies (Selected Worlds) (Paris: Gallimard, 1968),
330- ,
Maximilien Robespierre and Slavoj Zizek, Virtue and Terror (New York: Verso, 2007), 59.
Ibid., 130.
See Alain Badiou, Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
Quoted from Claude Lefort, "The Revolutionary Terror," in Democracy and Political Theory
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 63.
11. Quoted from Lefort, 65.
12. Quoted from Lefort, 64.
13. Mao, On Practice and Contradiction.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Zi:;ek I Revolutionary Terror from Robespierre to Mao
705
14. Ibid., 109.

15. www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/brown/filmmore/reference/interview/washington05.html.
16. See Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (New York: Dover, T993).
17. So what about Robespierre's rather ridiculous attempt to impose a new civic religion celebrating a supreme being? Robespierre succinctly formulated the main reason for bis opposition to atheism: "Atheism is aristocratic" (Maximilien Robespierre, Oeuvres compltes [Complete Worf(s], vol. 10 [Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1910-67], 195). Atheism was for him the ideology
of the cynical-hedonistic aristocrats who lost all sense of historical mission.
18. Martin Heidegger, Schelling's Treatise on Human Freedom (Athens: Ohio University Press,
1985), 146.
19. Mao, On Practice and Contradiction, 00. (Henceforth, all page numbers in parentheses refer
to this book.)
20. Alain Badiou, "Prefazione all'edizione Italiana" ("Preface to the Italian Edition"), in Metapolitica (Metapolitics) (Napoli: Cronopio, 2002), 14.
21. And are the latest statements of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt not a kind of unexpected
confirmation of Badiou's insight? Following a paradoxical necessity, their very (focusing
on) anticapitalism led them to acknowledge the revolutionary force of capitalism, so tbat, as
they put it recently, one no longer needs to fight capitalism, because capitalism is already in
itself generating communist potentials the "becoming-communist of capitalism," to put
it in Deleuzian terms.
22. Mao Zedong, "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People" (1957), www
.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswr5_58.htm.
23. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unl^nown Story (New York: Knopf, 2005).
24. Heidegger is also wrong in his letter to Marcuse, comparing the holocaust to the 1946-47
deportation of Germans from Eastern Europe. Herbert Marcuse was right in his reply:
the difference between the fate of Jews and the Eastern European Germans was, at that
moment, the thin line that separated barbarism from civilization.
25. Samuel Beckett, Trilogy (London: Calder Publications, 2003), 418.
26. No wonder, then, that, when he describes the "democratic method of resolving contradictions among the people," Mao has to evoke his own version of, precisely, "negation of negation" in the guise of the formula "unity-criticism-unity": "starting from the desire for unity,
resolving contradictions through criticism or struggle, and arriving at a new unity on a new
basis. In our experience tbis is the correct method of resolving contradictions among the
people."
27. Alain Badiou, Logiques des mondes, 62 70.
28. Badiou, Lo^2ê, 543-44, emphasis mine.
29. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyl^lopaedie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline) (Hamburg: F. Meiner, 1959), 436.
30. Was Che Guevara's vvithdrawal from all official functions, even from Cuban citizenship.
706
in 1965, in order to dedicate himself to world revolution this suicidal gesture of cutting
the links with the institutional universe really an act} Or, was it an escape from the
impossible task of the positive construction of socialism, from remaining faithful to the
consequences of the revolution, namely, an implicit admission of failure.'
31. Brian Massumi, "Navigating Movements," in Hope, ed. Mary Zournazi (New York: Routledge, 2002), 224.
32. Immanuel Kant, "What Is Enlightenment?" in Isaac Kramnick, The Portable Enlightenment Reader (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), 5.
33. See "Even What's Secret Is a Secret in China,"/pan Times, June 16, 2007.
34. Ibid.
35. ôhesîtrre, Oeuvres compltes, 129.
36. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 263.
37. Samuel Beckett, Nohow On (London: Calder, 1992), ioi.
Tlliree Notes on China: Past and Present

Slavoj Zizek
Theory of Ideology in Ancient China
The Qin king who ruthlessly united China and, in 221 BC, proclaimed
himself its First Emperor. This arch-model of "totalitarian" rule relied so
heavily on the advice of the "legalist" philosophers that he arguably represents the first case of imposing a theoretically conceived state order:
The king of Qin was not necessarily the brains of the outfit his advisers, free of the strictures of courtly life, were the ones who had masterminded his rise to power. The plan to install him as the ruler of the world
had commenced before he was even born, with the contention of longdead scholars that the world required an enlightened prince. It had proceeded with . . . an alliance of scholars in search of a patron who might
allow them to secure their own political ends. Ying Zheng, the king of
Qin, became the First Emperor with the help of great minds.'
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These legalists first among them Han Fei and the great Li Si
emerged from the crisis of Confucianism. In the fifth to third centuries BC,
China went through the period of "Warring States"; Confucians perceived
the betrayal of old traditions and customs as the ultimate cause of this slow
but persistent decay. Confucius was not so much a philosopher as a protoideologist: he was not interested in metaphysical truths, but a harmonious
social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives.
He was the first to clearly outline what I am tempted to call the elementary
scene, or zero level of ideology. This zero level asserts the (nameless) authority of tradition and refers to an original time when this tradition still reigned
(when "a king was really a king, a father really a father," etc.). In contrast,
the present is a time of decay, involving the disintegration of organic social
ties and a growing gap between things and words, individuals and their
titles or social roles. No wonder Confucius represented his teachings as lessons transmitted from antiquity; that he often did the exact opposite and
proposed something new meaning that "tradition" was in fact what Eric
Hobsbawm calls "invented tradition" makes his insistence that he was
"a transmitter and not a maker" all the more symptomatic: his reference to
tradition is not a fact, but a necessary structural illusion.
According to Confucius, people live within parameters established by
heaven (which, more than a purposeful Supreme Being, designates the natural order of things with its own fixed cycles and patterns). Men are, however,
responsible for their actions, especially their treatment of others: we can do
little or nothing to alter our fated spari of existence, but we determine what
we accomplish and what we are remembered for. Heaven rules the physical
universe through ming, or "destiny," which is beyond human understanding and control, and it rules the moral universe of human bebavior tbrough
t'ien ming, or "mandate of heaven." This mandate is based on the idea that
heaven is primarily concerned with human well-being, which it engenders
through an earth-bound authority. Heaven imparts its mandate to a family
or an individual, sworn to protect the welfare of the masses and rule over
them with justice and fairness. When a ruler or dynasty fails in this task,
heaven removes its mandate and bestows it on another. Is, then, "heaven"
not the Chinese name for the "big other" (tradition).? Is not Communist
Party rule legitimized by the "mandate of heaven," obliging the communists
Zizek I Three Notes on China: Past and Present
709
to make the welfare of their people a principal concern.? (A truly radical

revolutionary subject should drop this reference to heaven: there is no higher
cosmic law to justify our actions. So when Mao Zedong said, "There is great
disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent," he made a Lacanian
point: the inconsistency of the big other opens up the space for the act.)
Most troubling to Confucius was his perception that the political institutions of his day had broken down. He attributed this collapse to the fact that
both those who wielded power and those who occupied subordinate positions did so by claiming titles for which they were not worthy. When asked
about the principles of good government, Confucius replied, "Good government consists in the ruler being a ruler, the minister being a minister, the
father being a father, and the son being a son" {Analects 12.11). In Europe,
this is called corporate vision: each individual must stay in his proper social
place and play his particular role. This is the very opposite of democracy,
in which no one is constrained to a particular place, and everyone has the
right to participate in universal affairs and deliberate society's future. No
wonder that Confucius's description of social disorder "Rulers do not rule
and subjects do not serve" recalls a democratic society in which united
subjects rule and nominal rulers serve them.
Confucius proposed a proto-Althusserian theory of ideological interpellation: the ideological "big other," embodied in its apparatuses (rituals), interpellates individuals, who must act in accordance with their titles. If I claim
a title and participate in various hierarchical relationships as entitled by that
title, then I should live up to its meaning. Confucius saw a lack of connection
between things and names, and the need to correct such circumstances; his
analysis is referred to as zhengming, the "rectification of names." This name
itself is a symptomatic misnomer: acts must be rectified, and correspond
to their names: "If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is
meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains
undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice
goes astray, people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must
be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything" {Analects
13:3). Confucius, who called for the respect of tradition, rituals, and politeness, here undermines the very thing he defends. Are not all good manners
based on the fact that "what is said is not what is meant".? When, at a table.
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I ask my colleague, "Can you please give me salt.?" I do not say wbat I mean.
I ask bim if be can do it, but wbat I really mean is tbat be simply sbould do
it. If my colleague wanted to be brutal, be would answer with, "Yes, I can,"
and do nothing. So when Confucius writes, "Look at nothing in defiance of
ritual, listen to nothing in defiance of ritual, speak of nothing in defiance of
ritual, never stir hand or foot in defiance of ritual" {Analects 12.i), he asks us
to say what we don't mean: rituals are to be followed, not understood, and
wben we obey tbem, we repeat formulas wbose true meaning is obscure.
Tbe legalists abandoned tbis line. For Confucians, tbe land was in cbaos
because old traditions were ignored; tbey perceived tbe Qin state, witb its
centralized military organization and dismissal of custom, as tbe embodiment of wbat bad gone wrong. However, in contrast to bis teacber Xunzi,
wbo regarded Qin as a tbreat to peace, Han Fei "proposed tbe untbinkable, tbat maybe tbe way of tbe Qin government was not an anomaly to
be addressed, but a practice to be emulated."^ Tbe solution resided in what
appeared to be tbe problem. Tbe true cause of trouble was not tbe abandonment of tradition but tbe traditions themselves, wbicb demonstrated daily
tbeir inability to serve as guiding principles of social life. As Hegel put it in
Phenomenology of Spirit, tbe standard by wbich we measure a situation and
establisb it as problematic is part of tbe problem and sbould be abandoned.
Han Fei applied tbe same logic to tbe observation tbat (the majority of) men
are evil by nature, unwilling to act for tbe common good. He saw buman
evil as an opportunity for tbe state to seize power. If tbat power was enligbtened by tbe rigbt tbeory (one tbat described tbings tbe way tbey really are,
"beyond good and evil"), it could manage buman evil: "Wbere Xunzi saw
an unfortunate observation, tbat men were evil by nature, Han Fei saw a
cballenge for tbe institution of stern laws to control tbis nature and use it to
tbe benefit of tbe state."^
One of tbe great acbievements of contemporary leftist political tbeorists
(Altbusser, Balibar, Negri) was to rebabilitate Macbiavelli, to save bim from
tbe standard reading. Since legalists are often presented as ur-Macbiavellians,
we must do tbe same witb tbem, extricating a radical emancipatory kernel
from tbeir image as "proto-totalitarians." A quick glance at tbe tbree central
premises of the legalist doctrine makes tbis kernel clear:
Zizek I Three Notes on China: Past and Present
711
Fa: law or principle, clearly written and public. All subjects are equal
before the law, which must reward those who ohey and punish those who
hreak them. The state is run by the law, not the ruler. (These are unambiguous trademarks of antifeudal egalitarianism.)
Shu: tactics or arts, "secrets" employed by the ruler to ensure others don't
take control of the state. It is especially important that no one should
fathom the ruler's motivations and thus understand how to get ahead,
except by following the law. (This "Machiavellian" point also has an
egalitarian-emancipatory core: if the ruler's motivations are unknown,
all that remains is the law.)
Shi: legitimacy, power, or charisma. It is the position of ruler, not the
ruler himself, that holds power. Therefore, analysis of trends, context,
and facts are essential for a ruler. (Is this not the same insight, formulated
much later, of Europe's great modern thinkers, from Pascal to Marx: that
people do not treat a man as king because he is a king, rather he is king
because he is treated as one? Charisma is the performative result of symbolic social practices, not a natural [or spiritual] property of the person
who exerts it.)
In theory and practice, these principles were given a "totalitarian" twist:
a ruler must have at his disposal an excessive number of laws that, although
made individually public, clear, and unambiguous, also partially contradict
each other. Within this complex framework, where submission to one law
can bring a subject into conflict with another, almost anyone of any station
can be in violation of something at any time, with innocence difficult if not
impossible to prove if accused. This enables the ruler's agents to practice AM,
the tactic or art of choosing which law is to be enforced in a specific situation.
Power is enacted not only through prosecution but through the selection of
which law to prosecute, or through the cessation of prosecution owing to
some other contravening law. Such selective enforcement ultimately occurs
at the pleasure of the ruler, and in this way the mystery of the emperor's
pleasure was communicated to the masses. The lesson is pure Lacan: the
other's impenetrable desire and iis jouissance are located in its inconsistency
(the system of laws), in the contingency that dwells at its very heart.
712
I note here a thing unthinkable in Western tradition: the two opposing

theories, Confucianism and legalism, share a deep materialist premise. For
both, the truth of ideology does not matter; it is even implied that ideological myths are "beautiful lies." Instead, what matters is how ideological
myths and rituals function, and their role in sustaining social order. The
Chinese legalists, the "proto-totalitarians," formulated a vision later propounded by liberalism: of a state power that, instead of relying on people's
mores, suhjects them to a mechanism that makes their very vices work for
the common good.
The Politics of Reincarnation
Against this background, I read events such as the institution of Order

Number Five, a law that came into effect on Septemher i, 2007, to manage the reincarnation of living Buddhas in Tibet. Predictably, the Western
liberal media had a laugh when the Chinese State Administration of Religious Affairs passed this law, qualifying it as an "important move to institutionalize management of reincarnation." Order Number Five stipulates
the procedures that must be followed to reincarnate. In short, it prohibits
Buddhist monks from reincarnating without government permission: no
one outside China can infiuence the reincarnation process, and only monasteries in China can apply for permission.
Before we explode in rage at the Chinese communist totalitarianism that
now wants to control its subjects even after death, we should remember
that this measure would not have seemed foreign in Europe's early modern
period. The 1555 Peace of Augsburg, the first step toward the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, which ended the Thirty Years' War, declared the prince's
religion as the official religion (cuius regio, eius religio). However, when a
new ruler of a different religion took power, large groups had to convert to
that religion. The first significant institutional move toward religious tolerance in modern Europe thus involved a similar paradox to Order Number
Five: religious belief, a matter of innermost spirituality, was regulated by the
whims of a secular prince.
Today, the Chinese government regulates religious practices that it not
only tolerates but even supports. Its concern is not religion but "social har-
Zizek I Three Notes on Cbina: Past and Present
713
mony" the political dimension of religion. To curb the social disintegration caused by capitalist explosion, Chinese officials now celebrate religions
and traditional ideologies that sustain social stability, from Buddhism to
Confucianism the very ideologies that were the target of the Cultural
Revolution. In April 2006, Ye Xiaowen, China's top religious official, told
the Xinhua News Agency that "religion is one of the important forces from
which China draws strength." He singled out Buddhism for its "unique role
in promoting a harmonious society," the official formula for combining economic expansion with social development and care; the same week, China
hosted the World Buddhist Forum.
The stakes of legislating reincarnation became clear when, in the ongoing struggle between Chinese authorities and the Dalai Lama, the Chinese
acted as protectors of ancient Tibetan traditions. In November 2007, in reaction to Order Number Five, the Dalai Lama proclaimed that his successor
would probably be cbosen not by reincarnation but through more modern
democratic means: he suggested that a representative religious body, like the
conclave at the Vatican, should select his successor. The Chinese government
counterattacked by defending reincarnation as the method of choice and
accusing the Dalai Lama of abandoning Tibetan tradition because of vested
political interests.
The role of religion as a force of stability against capitalism was thus
officially sanctioned. What bothers Chinese authorities in the case of sects
like Falun Gong is their independence from state control. In the same vein,
the problem with Tibetan Buddhism resides in an obvious, tbough oftforgotten, fact: the traditional Tibetan power structure, at the head of which
resides the Dalai Lama, is a theocracy. The Dalai Lama unites religious and
secular power, so when we are talking about bis reincarnation, we are talking about a method of choosing a head of state. It is strange to hear those
who complain about Chinese undemocratic pressure on Tibet also worry
about the rights of the Dalai Lama, a nondemocratically elected leader if
there ever was one.''
In recent years, China's rulers have changed their strategy in Tibet: tbey
now rely more on ethnic and economic colonization than sheer military
coercion and have rapidly transformed Lhasa into a Chinese version of the
capitalist Wild West, where karaoke bars mingle with Disney-like Bud-
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714
dhist "theme parks" for Western tourists. In short, media images of brutal
Chinese soldiers terrorizing Buddhist monks conceal a much more effective
U.S.-style socioeconomic transformation: in a decade or two, Tibetans will
be reduced to the status of Native Americans in the United States. It seems
that Chinese communists finally learned a lesson, for what is the oppressive
power of secret police and Red Guards who destroy ancient monuments
compared to that of unbridled capitalism, to undermine traditional social
relations.? Finally, Marx's Communist Manifesto is of some use to them: "All
fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated
before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind."^
Perhaps some find China's reincarnation laws outrageous not because
they represent an alien sensibility, but because they openly spill the secret
that the Chinese are simply doing what all "civilized" governments are
doing: respectfully tolerating what is not taken quite seriously and trying to
contain its political consequences through legal regulation.
There is even more to it. It is too easy to laugh at the idea of an atheist
state regulating (and thereby admitting) something that, in its eyes, doesn't
exist. However, do we believe in it.? When Taliban forces in Afghanistan
destroyed the ancient Buddhist statues at Bamiyan, benevolent Western
observers were not outraged because they believed in the divinity of Buddha,
but because the Taliban did not show respect for their country's cultural heritage. Rather, the Taliban believed in their own religion and demonstrated
no great sensitivity for the cultural value of other religious monuments. The
paradox is that the Buddha statues were more of an authentic spiritual challenge and counterforce for the Taliban than for liberal Westerners.
Therein reside the stakes of today's references to culture, which has
emerged as the central life-world category. If, with regard to religion, we
no longer "really believe," many of us still follow (certain) religious rituals
and mores out of respect for the community to which we belong (nonbelieving Jews obeying kosher rules, etc.). "I do not really believe in it, it is just
part of my culture," seems to be the predominant mode of the disavowed
or displaced belief that is characteristic of our times. For what is a cultural
Zizek I Three Notes on Chino: Past and Present
715
lifestyle if not the fact that, although we do not believe in Santa Claus, there
is a Christmas tree in every "Christian" house (and others) each December.? Perhaps the nonfundamentalist notion of culture as distinguished from
"real" religion is at its core the name for the field of disowned, impersonal
beliefs, for all those things we practice without really believing in them.
This is the reason why science is not a part of this notion of culture it is
all too real. It is also why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as anticultural
barbarians who dare to take their beliefs seriously. Today, many of us perceive those who live their culture, who lack distance toward it, as a threat
to culture itself
In Peter Shaffer's Equus (1973), the police ask Martin Dysart, a psychiatrist, to treat seventeen-year-old Alan Strand, who inexplicably blinds six
horses at the stables where he works. Dysart discovers that when Alan was a
child, his mother, a devout Catholic, read to him daily from the Bible, while
his atheist father, concerned that Alan was taking too much interest in the
Bible's violent aspects, destroyed a picture of the crucifixion at the foot of
Alan's bed and replaced it with one of a horse. Alan's father tells Dysart that
one night he saw Alan kneeling in front of the picture, chanting a made-up
genealogy of horses parodying that of Christ in the Bible, which ended with
"Equus"; the interpretation is that Alan deified horses because of his failure
to integrate paternal authority. At the stables, Alan becomes erotically fixated on a stallion called Nugget, secretly taking him for midnight rides,
bareback and naked, enjoying the power of the animal and the smell of its
sweat. One evening, Alan's coworker Jill suggests that they go to the stables
to have sex; as he hears the horses moving around, his nervousness makes
him unable to get an erection. He threatens Jill with a hoof pick; after she
escapes, he blames the spirit of Equus and punishes the six horses by blinding tbem for seeing his embarrassment and shame. At the play's end, Dysart
doubts wbether he can really help Alan: his treatment will stamp out Alan's
intense sexual-religious life. Dysart also sees that despite his deep personal
interest in ancient pagan spirituality, his own life is sterile; it took him a long
time to recognize in Alan the living presence of what he had been searching
for in old artifacts.^ When the Taliban forces in Afghanistan destroyed the
Bamiyan statues, were the outraged Westerners not all like Dysart.?
Equus is typically read as a play that celebrates the living force of a
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716
reawakened pagan spirituality, yet the narrative sustains the opposite message: pagan spirituality explodes when Western (Christian) religion fails,
and the symbolic law it guarantees collapses. What appears as "primordial" is thus a secondary reaction, a myth concocted to fill in the hole of
suspended paternal law. In a way, Alan is a "horse-man" like little Hans,
Freud's child patient, but with the key difference that, in Equus, the horse
is not an object of phobia but one of excessive jouissance, of the noncastrated
paternal libido.
The Chinese Valley of Tears
We must take a step back now from "superstructure" to "base," and locate
this ideological imbroglio in the context of today's explosion of capitalism
in China. Faced with this issue, analysts often ask when democracy as the
"natural" political accompaniment of capitalism will enforce itself. However, closer analysis quickly dispels this hope.
Rather than an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, China should
be seen today as a repetition of the development of capitalism in Europe.
In early modernity, most European states were far from democratic; if they
were (as in the Netherlands), they were only so for the liberal elite, not the
workers. The conditions for capitalism were created and sustained by brutal
dictatorship, very much like today's China: a state that legalizes the violent
expropriation of the proletariat and disciplines common people in a new
role. The features identified with liberal democracy (trade unions, universal
vote, free education, freedom of the press, etc.) were won through a long
struggle of the lower classes over the course of the nineteenth century and
were far from a "natural" consequence of capitalist relations. Recall the list
of demands with which The Communist Manifesto concludes: with the exception of the abolition of private property, most are widely accepted today in
"bourgeois" democracies, as the result of popular struggle.
Recall another ignored fact: today, the equality between whites and blacks
in the United States is celebrated as part of the American Dream and perceived as a self-evident political-ethical axiom. However, in the 1920s and
1930s, the communists were the only political force that argued for equality between the races.^ Those who suggest a natural link between capital-
/jzek I Tbree Notes on Cbina: Past and Present
717
ism and democracy are cbeating in tbe same way tbe Catbolic Church is
cheating when it presents itself as the "natural" advocate of democracy and
human rights against the threat of totalitarianism as if the Church did
not accept democracy only at the end of the nineteenth century, and even
tben witb teetb clencbed in a desperate compromise, having made clear its
preference for monarchy. Tbe Catbolic Cburcb as a beacon of freedom and
buman dignity.? Let us make a simple mental experiment. Until tbe early
1960s, tbe Church maintained tbe (in)famous Index of works wbose reading
was probibited for (ordinary) Catbolics. How would tbe artistic and intellectual bistory of modern Europe look if we erased all works tbat, at one
time or anotber, found tbemselves on tbis Index} We would bave a Europe
witbout Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzscbe,
Kafka, Sartre, and a great many literary classics.
Tbere is tbus notbing exotic about today's Cbina; wbat bappens tbere
merely repeats a forgotten European past. Some Western liberal critics bave
asked bow mucb faster Cbina's development would be if combined with
political democracy. In a recent television interview, Ralf Dahrendorf linked
the growing distrust in democracy to the fact that, after every revolutionary change, the road to prosperity leads through a "valley of tears." After
the breakdown of socialism, a state cannot directly sbift to tbe abundance
of a successful market economy; tbe limited, but real, socialist welfare and
security apparatus bas first to be dismantled, and tbese steps are necessarily painful. Tbe same goes for Western Europe, wbere tbe passage from
welfare state to a new "global economy" involves less individual security and
weakened social care. For Dabrendorf, tbe problem is encapsulated by tbe
fact tbat passage tbrougb tbe "valley of tears" lasts longer tban tbe average
period between (democratic) elections, so tbe temptation is great to postpone difficult cbanges for sbort-term electoral gains. Here we see tbe disappointment of postcommunist nations witb tbe economic results of tbe new
democratic order. In tbe glorious days of 1989, tbese nations equated democracy witb tbe abundance tbat cbaracterized Western consumerist societies;
today, two decades later, wben tbe abundance bas still not yet materialized,
tbey blame democracy. Unfortunately, Dabrendorf focuses less on tbe opposite temptation: if tbe majority resists tbe necessary structural cbanges in
economy, tbe logical conclusion is tbat, for a decade or so, an enligbtened
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elite should take power, even by nondemocratic means, to enforce the measures and thus lay the foundation for a truly stable democracy. Along these
lines, Fareed Zakaria points out how democracy can only "catch on" in economically developed countries.^ If developing countries are "prematurely
democratized," the result is a populism that ends in economic catastrophe
and political despotism. No wonder the most economically successful third
world countries today (Taiwan, South Korea, Chile) embraced democracy
only after a period of authoritarian rule.
Is this not an argument in support of the Chinese path to capitalism, as
compared with the Russian version? After the collapse of communism, Russia engaged in "shock therapy" and threw itself into democracy, purportedly on a fast track to capitalism with economic bankruptcy as the result.
(There are good reasons to be modestly paranoid here, and ask whether
Yeltsin's Western economic advisers, who proposed this path to capitalism,
were really as innocent as they appeared, or whether they were serving a
U.S. interest in an economically weakened Russia.) China, by contrast, followed tbe path of Chile and South Korea, using unencumbered state power
to control the social costs of the passage to capitalism and thus suppressing
the chaos. In short, the combination of capitalism and communist rule, far
from an anomaly, proved a blessing not even in disguise; China developed
quickly, not despite authoritarian communist rule but because of it. To raise
a Stalinist suspicion, what if those who worry about the lack of democracy
in China are in fact worried about its rapid rise to the position of glohal
superpower, its threat to Western primacy?
There is a paradox here: beyond cheap jibes and superficial analogies,
there is a profound structural homology between Maoist self-revolutionizing,
a struggle against the ossification of state structures, and the inherent
dynamics of capitalism. I am tempted to paraphrase Bertolt Brecht's quip,
"What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?"
What are the violent outbursts of a Red Guard caught in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true Cultural Revolution, the permanent dissolution
of all life-forms by capitalist reproduction? Today, the tragedy of the Great
Leap Forward is repeating as the comedy of the rapid capitalist Great Leap
Forward into modernization, with the old slogan "an iron foundry in every
village" reemerging as "a skyscraper on every street."
2'izek I Three Notes on China: Past and Present
719
The supreme irony of history is that it was Mao who created the ideological conditions for rapid capitalist development, by tearing apart the fabric of
traditional society. His call to the people, especially the young, during the
Cultural Revolution was, "Don't wait for someone else to tell you what to do,
you have the right to rebel! Think and act for yourselves, destroy cultural
relics, denounce and attack not only your elders, but government and party
officials! Swipe away the repressive state and organize yourself into communes!" And the people heard Mao's call. What followed was an explosion
of passion to delegitimize all forms of authority, so that, in the end, Mao had
to call in the army to restore order. The paradox is that the key battle of the
Cultural Revolution was between not tbe Communist Party apparatus and
its traditionalist enemies but between the army and Communist Party, the
forces that Mao called into being.
A similar dynamic is at work in China today: the big ideological traditions are being resuscitated to contain the disintegrative consequences of a
capitalist explosion called into being by the Party. I read the recent campaign in China to revive Marxism as state ideology (literally hundreds of
millions of U.S. dollars are invested in this venture) against this background.
Those who see a threat to capitalist liberalization, a sign that hard-liners
are reasserting their hegemony, totally miss the point. Paradoxical as it may
sound, this return of Marxism is a sign of the ultimate triumph of capitalism,
of its full institutionalization. (Recent legal measures that guarantee private
property, hailed by the West as a crucial step toward stability, are part of the
same thrust.)
What kind of Marxism is being offered as appropriate for today's China.?
The emphasis is on its distinction from "leftism," which refers to any talk of
worker liberation, from trade unions or capitalism. Based on Marx's thesis
that development of the forces of production is the key factor in social progress, the main task of progressive forces is to create (or maintain) the conditions for fast "modernization," while avoiding all forms of instability
those caused by "leftism" as well as by "rightism" (multiparty democracy,
etc.), which will bring cbaos and tbus binder modernization. The conclusion is clear: in China, only Communist Party leadership can sustain rapid
modernization under conditions of social stability; the official (Confucian)
term is that China should become a "harmonious society."
positions 19:3
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To put it in Maoist terms, though it may appear that the enemy is the
bourgeoisie, in the eyes of the ruling elite, the principal contradiction lies
between the existing "harmonious order" (unfettered capitalist development sustained by communist rule) and worker and peasant revolts. The
recent strengthening of the oppressive state apparatus (the formation of
special units of riot police to crush popular unrest, etc.) is the social expression of what ideologically appears as a revival of Marxism. Does Trotsky's
characterization of tsarist Russia in 1905 as "the vicious combination of the
Asian knout and the European stock market" not also characterize today's
China.?9
What about a quasi-Leninist defense of the Chinese capitalist explosion
as a prolonged case of the New Economic Policy (NEP) adopted by the
Soviet Union in 1921 to allow private property and market exchange and
lasting in that country until 1928, with the Communist Party firmly exerting political control and able to undo its concessions to the historical class
enemy at any moment.? To bring this logic to its extreme: insofar as a tension
exists in capitalist democracies between the egalitarian sovereignty of the
people and economic class divisions, and insofar as the state can in principle enforce expropriations, capitalism is one big N E P detour on a path
that should move directly from feudal relations of domination to communist
egalitarian justice.
There is an obvious counterargument. Why not have it both ways: a
democratically elected government kept in check by social movements.? The
problem is tbat democratic elections give government a legitimization that
makes it impervious to critique by social movements. The state can dismiss
such movements as "extremist" minorities out of sync with the majority that
elected the government. A government not legitimized by "free elections"
finds itself under great pressure, its rulers deprived of the option to say to
protesters, "Who are you to criticize us.? We are an elected government!"
Without democratic legitimization, governments have to earn it the hard
way: by their deeds. I remember the last years of communist rule in Slovenia: there was no government eager to earn its legitimacy and do something for the people, precisely because the communists held power that as
everyone, including themselves, knew was not democratically supported.
y.'iiek I Three Notes on Cbina: Past and Present
721
Since the communists knew their end was near, they also knew they would
be harshly judged.
For China, a much better solution than a multiparty system might be
Party rule with a strong civil society maintaining independent control over
ecology, working conditions, and so on. In today's postpolitical times, social
movements that keep the state under constant pressure are often more
important than what party is democratically elected to power.
There is also the possibility that the promised democratic second stage
that follows the authoritarian valley of tears will never arrive. This, perhaps,
is what is ultimately so unsettling about today's China: the suspicion that its
authoritarian capitalism is not merely a remainder of a Western past, the
repetition of the process of capitalist accumulation that, in Europe, went
from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century, but a sign of the future. What
if "the vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market" proves to be economically more efficient than liberal capitalism.? What
if it signals that democracy is no longer a condition of economic development but its obstacle.?
notes
1. Jonathan Clements, The First Emperor of China (Stroud, UK: Sutton, 2006), 16.
2. Ibid., 34.
3. Ibid., 77.
4. Although an argument can be made that reincarnation is a way to practice lot or chance, it
was a democratic means widely used in Ancient Greece.
5. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1985), 83-84.
6. Although the best-known Dysart was Richard Burton, who played the role hoth on Broadway and in the cinema version, two other actors evoke much more interesting associations:
Anthony Hopkins and Anthony Perkins Dysart between Hannibal Lecter and Norman
Bates!
7. Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Defying Dixie: The Radical Roots of Civil Rights (New York:
Norton, 2007).
8. Fareed Zakaria, The Future of Freedom (New York: Norton 2003).
9. Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary (New York: The Free Press 1996),
1919.
2:izek's China, China's Zizek

Zhang Yiwu
Translated by Jon Solomon
Cbinese reception of Slavoj Zizek and zizek's rise to fame in tbe West were
separated only by a very sbort time. And in tbe years since tbe end of tbe
twentietb century, tbe translation and introduction of izek's work bas been
a focal point of Cbinese critical tbeory. Virtually all of izek's prodigious
oeuvre bas been translated into Cbinese. Tbe level of entbusiasm witbin
Cbina for Zizek's work bas been so bigb tbat tbe only comparable example
would be tbe fad for Sartre and Nietzscbe during tbe 1980s. But compared
to tbe direct way in wbicb Sartre and Nietzscbe were taken up, tbe relation
between izek's unconstrained language and its connection to us bas always
confounded tbe Cbinese. Wbile tbe Cbinese bave evinced great entbusiasm
for translations on tbe one band, tbere bas been a paucity of application and
explanation on tbe otber. Clearly, Zizek enjoys a certain relation to us, yet it
is mystical to the point of being virtually undecipberable. Altbougb izek
positions 19:3 DOI 10.1215/10679847-1369280

724
has touched upon some of our innermost desires, they are not quite given
concrete expression. Thus we have established a complex, inexplicable relation with Zizek. As part of us, he nevertheless floats outside. The enthusiasm and confusion surrounding izek's reception in the Chinese intellectual
milieu has virtually become an irreparable rift. We keep looking to izek
to provide us with a point of intervention into the present, and at the same
time we expect his formulations to endow us with our self-image. Yet his
paradoxical expressions and complex formulations, derived from Lacanian
psychoanalysis, bring us a "redundancy" that is extremely difficult to express
"fully" in our linguistic context.
Ever since The Sublime Object of Ideology was translated into Chinese
in 1999, izek has been imbued witb a special sort of "Chineseness." The
contradictory quality of this Chineseness lies in the fact that it exists outside
China, while China itself, except in several recent essays, clearly lies outside
ziizek's view and is not the focus of his attention. Nevertheless he still manages to occupy a position in recent Chinese cultural debates and researcb
that is incontrovertibly important. His ideas have been deeply inscribed in
the current process of China's globalization, while his analysis of global capitalism provides a perspective from which China can look at both itself and
the world alike. China has been taking advantage of !Zizek to look at itself;
at the same time, it uses him to look at the world. In the meantime, izek's
view cannot afford not to include China, inasmuch as China constitutes an
important, irreplaceable link in contemporary globalization. As we approach
the relation between Zizek and China, it is actually not just a question of the
interaction between a theorist and a specific society but rather the trials and
tribulations between our entire age and one of its sharpest observers.
Tbe crux of the relation between izek and Cbina lies in the socialist background. The point in common is that both have stepped beyond
the socialist experience of the past into the global capitalist world. For both
Zizek and China alike, the memory of socialism is not some fictional "other"
but a series of micro/concrete, lived experiences over a period of time that
is substantial and cannot simply be erased. Those moments continue to live
on among us. Hence many of izek's most acute observations find uncanny
application to China. Especially since the wave of globalization beginning
in the 1990s, during which China has, almost unbelievably, become a focal
\iwu I Zizek's China, China's Zizek
725
point and a center an object of attention for almost everyone izek

and China share a similitude that is practically fortuitous. They are both
stars of the last decade of the twentieth century: in the age since the fall of
the Berlin Wall, each attracts the interest of a different global group; both
share a similar socialist experience and memory while becoming the object
of adulation.
izek's fate in the midst of the "theoretical" camp of global capitalism
since the 1990s is extremely similar to that of China. Both have been seen as
marginal and the "other" with respect to the mainstream, yet unexpectedly
transformed the very meaning of otherness and marginality as defined by
the "central mainstream." China's fate shares with that of izek a difference
of means that arrive at a similar end: at the same moment that innumerable
new theories and prodigious publications bearing the mark "made by izek"
have received contradictory treatment in the heart of the Western academy,
the fate of things "made in China" has been unusually similar. On the one
hand, academic critical theory has been shocked and even made uncomfortable by izek's provocative imagination. The unusual situation created by
the unexpected advent of this "other" is highly apparent. This other is an
external intruder. What makes him different from Jacques Lacan, Michel
Foucault, and others is the fact that he hails from the living environment
and the memory of socialism. His educational background, like his theories,
has a bizarre otherness to it. A certain disregard for the Western Left and an
ironic indifference to political correctness have made him appear like a maverick, hecoming an unusual and even paradoxical sensation. His disdain for
every form of the rules of the game has left people shocked and fearful. On
the other hand, his deep familiarity with theory, analytical prowess admired
by so many, and ability to interpret various texts across all kinds of boundaries have elicited genuine admiration in many. His consummate knowledge
of German philosophy and the complete ease with which he applies psychoanalysis produce a feeling of power. His unique insights infatuate everyone, producing a new sense of dependency in the Western academy. Among
the great quantity of textual "theoretical commodities" bearing the mark
"made by izek," there is just as much redundancy and chaff as there are
scintillating analyses (his works are filled with self-referentiality and repetition), leaving people feeling awed and infatuated. In fact, goods "made in
positions 19:3
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726
China" in enormous quantities possess the same special quality. On the one
hand, the discomfort and shock produced by the "made in China" ingress
has left many Westerners feeling both excited and perplexed. The depth
and breadth of the penetration of goods "made in China" into everyday life
has left them displeased and confused. "Made in China" is, like izek, an
intruder bearing the mark of past socialist origins, unexpectedly becoming
the most noticeable and ubiquitous commodity in this wave of globalization.
Naturally there is in all of this an element of the inexplicable that incites
shock and discomfort, filling people with insecurity and fear. The chaos
surrounding the transmission of the Olympic flame was one of the signs
of this insecurity and fear. On the other hand, this wave of globalization
unexpectedly also opens up China as a space of new possibility for itself, and
"made in Cbina" has already become one of the most attention-grabbing
forces in global capitalism, a tbing of dependence and infatuation. Among
the many theories that evaluate "made by izek" and "made in China,"
history reveals an uncanny similarity. Both unexpectedly project the complexity and nuances of the capitalist imaginary in the post-cold war era of
globalization. They are both sorts of global commodities piercing the limits
of culture and history to announce themselves in the West. In this respect I
have always felt that there are two respects in which izek and China share
a great connection, or again, that there are two marvelous points of intersection at which izek's theories can interpret China. The first would be
the commonality they both share with regard to the experience of socialism
and the planned economy highlighting, in short, the historical connection between izek and China. The second would be the position and role
of consumption and production in today's global capitalism highlighting,
by contrast, the contemporary connection between izek and China. Hence
between izek and Cbina, there is a certain connection. Just as izek gives
us a necessary angle from which to interpret China, so China provides a
necessary angle from which to interpret izek.
The first aspect constitutes the most intuitive side of the resemblance
between izek and China. Reading Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? we
discover that izek's discourse on Stalinism and the great purges of the
1920s and 1930s applies in toto to the situation in China during the Cultural
Revolution, izek's contradictions expose the complexity and nuances of
Yiwu I Zizek's China, China's Zizek
727
everything that happened in China during that time. In izek's profound

analyses, the history of the Chinese Revolution acquires new meaning:
Despite its horrors and failures, "actually existing Socialism" was the
only political force that for some decades, at least seemed to pose
an effective threat to the global rule of capitalism, really scaring its representatives, driving them into paranoiac reaction. Since, today, capitalism
defines and structures the totality of human civilization, every "Communist" territory was and is again, despite its horrors and failures a kind
of "liberated territory," as Fredric Jameson put it apropos of Cuba. What
we are dealing with here is the old structural notion of the gap between
the Space and the positive content that fills it: although the Communist
regimes, in their positive content, were mostly a dismal failure, generating terror and misery, they simultaneously opened up a certain space,
the space of Utopian expectations which, among other things, enabled
us to measure the failure of actually existing Socialism itself. What antiCommunist dissidents tend, as a rule, to overlook is that the very space
from which they themselves criticized and denounced day-to-day terror
and misery was opened and sustained by the Communist breakthrough,
by its attempt to escape the logic of Capital. In short, when dissidents like
Havel denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of authentic human solidarity, they (unwittingly, for the most part) spoke from
the place opened up by Communism itselfthis is why they tend to be
disappointed when "actually existing capitalism" does not meet the high
expectations of their anti-Communist struggle."'
The above analysis sheds light on the problems faced by Chinese intellectuals in the 1980s. This was precisely the moment when Chinese socialism
began to endure its first shocks in the aftermath of the experience of the
Cultural Revolution; Mao's radical political movements had already produced fatigue and disgust. At the time, Chinese intellectuals displayed a
certain fearless quality, the courage and desire to demand an exit from the
collective discourse of the planned economy. This was actually a clear and
unmistakable expression of the 1980s appeal to subjectivity. Elaboration of
this subjectivity provided the imagination for liberation from the former
spiritual and mental order. Zhang Nuanxin had, in fact, hit upon the cul-
positions 19:3
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728
tural theme of the 1980s at a nascent moment, and tbe key to the culture of
the 1980s lay precisely in a new elaboration of tbe concept of subjectivity. In
tbe 1984 edition of ^4 Critique of Critical Philosophy by Li Zebou, tbe most
important Chinese thinker of the 1980s, there is an unusually important
appendix titled, "An Outline of Kantian Philosophy and the Establisbment of Subjectivity." Tbis essay covers tbe core problems of tbe entirety of
tbougbt in tbe 1980s. In it, Li writes, Kant "raises the question of humanity
(the subjectivity, in other words, of the human race) with extreme acuity."^
Li admittedly did not provide sufficient explanation of the Kantian theory
of subjectivity, entering instead directly into its implementation. Indeed, for
Li, it was tbe implementation that was the most important: "We should recognize that the immense significance and value of the individual existence
becomes all tbe more salient and important witb tbe development of tbe era.
Following tbe progress of society's material civilization, tbe individual, an
existence composed of fiesb and blood, increasingly becomes aware of tbe
uniqueness and unrepeatable quality of its own existence."^ Li's appeal to
tbe gbost of Kant is actually a call to tbe new spirit of tbe 1980s. Subjectivity
was precisely tbe foundation for an exit from tbe discourse of tbe planned
economy. And tbis subjectivity was exactly tbe precondition for tbe elaboration of tbe new modernity. Tbe search for this subjectivity was tbe greatest
dream bequeatbed to us by tbe modernity of tbe 1980s. Yet tbe Kant in
question bad been Marxified, constructed out of tbe young Marx's discourse
of alienation. Li Zebou's application of Kant obviously passed tbrougb bis
own interpretation and implementation. Subjectivity bad acquired its own
special meaning, an individual capable of realizing tbe ideal of buman
nature. Yet bis searcb for tbe source of Kantianism came straigbt from tbe
practical aestbetics tbat bad begun in fact only witb early Marx.
It is necessary at tbis point to mention Zbou Yang's 1983 article "An Exploration of Several Tbeoretical Problems in Marxism."'' Tbis article enjoyed
enormous influence at tbe time, attracting intense criticism. On account of
it, Zbou Yang was transformed from tbe most important literary official
of tbe Maoist era and a leader of tbe Cbinese leftist literary movement to a
tbinker of dissident politics. Zbou's essential idea was tbat everytbing from
tbe past could be attributed to tbe tragedy of incorrectly understanding
Marx. Marx's original ideas were alienated by tbe reality of socialism. Wbat
Ywu I Zizek's China, China's Zizek
729
the present required was in fact a Utopian road different from that of both
really existing socialism and capitalism. The legitimacy of this road would,
however, overcome not just alienation. China's intellectuals also hoped to
overcome both actually existing socialism and capitalism, providing the latitude for a new utopia. They had discovered that after the chaos and terror of
the Cultural Revolution, which had had an impact on the very foundations
of legitimacy, it was clearly impossible to hold together a socialist planned
economy; yet they felt that despite its material abundance, capitalism could
not offer spiritual hope and refuge. They still had an unshakeable faith in
Marx's theory of social development by stages. The problem with socialism
lay in the fact that it had not yet created the economic force to sustain its
development; poverty was at the root of socialism's inability to prolong itself
Hence during the 1980s, the problem of socialism in China was understood
as the resuscitation of traditional society, a kind of feudalism rather than the
elaboration of authentic socialism. It was precisely the negation of actually
existing socialism that led them toward an even more intense interest in
Utopia. Both Li Zehou and Zhou Yang were hoping to find in the concept
of subjectivity a passage to the ideal world, a society in which the individual
would be sufficiently realized. Their approach coincided exactly with the
ideas of political dissidents in Eastern Europe analyzed by izek.
The basis for this coincidence lies in the significance of one of izek's other
important observations: "Capitalism and Communism are not two different
historical realizations, two species, of'instrumental reason' instrumental
reason as such is capitalist, grounded in capitalist relations; and 'actually
existing Socialism' failed because it was ultirhately a subspecies of capitalism, an ideological attempt to 'have one's cake and eat it,' to break out of
capitalism while retaining its key ingredient."' Its occurrence in the Chinese
linguistic context was similarly intense. In China, this ideology was concentrated in an intense pursuit of economic competitiveness. Owing to China's
semicolonial status since the second half of the nineteenth century, socialist
ideals were wrapped up with those of becoming a power, each reinforcing
the other. The desire for economically surpassing (the West) has always been
the central desire of Chinese society. It was at the fore in everything from
Mao Zedong's Great Leap Forward in 1958 to its adoption by the third plenary session of the People's Congress just before the Cultural Revolution in
positions 19:3
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730
1964, all the way up to its consolidation in the Four Modernizations adopted
in the midst of the Cultural Revolution by the Fourth Plenary Session of the
People's Congress in 1975.^ Rapid modernization in economic terms was
thought to be impossible to achieve in China by a capitalist path, whereas the
socialist approach could attain that goal. By the time of the Dengist era of
the 1980s, the slogan was bequeathed to the next generation and became the
evidence that explained, via the notion that the Four Modernizations had
not yet been realized, the ineffectiveness of the old system. It also explained
why China had not achieved greater productivity than capitalism, a defeat in
the midst of competition. Following the defeats of a series of socialist modernization efforts from the Great Leap Forward to the Cultural Revolution,
Chinese intellectuals had reached a consensus about importing the capitalist experience of modernization in order to achieve economic growth and
development. We could call it the developmental consensus. The majority
of intellectuals believed that economic development was the core indicator
of social progress. In the words of Li Zehou, "Modernization most certainly
started in the West: modern industrial production, the steam engine, electric appliances, chemicals, computers . . . as well as the various technologies,
techniques, and management systems used in their production are not all
of these from the West.? In this most fundamental way the development
of modern industrial production modernization is westernization."'' At
the same time, the 1980s also saw the development of a personal consensus. The basis for this consensus lay in the post May Fourth description of
Chinese history through the trope of "national salvation takes priority over
enlightenment." Many intellectuals had come to believe tbat the discourse of
taking salvation as the center of modernity and the nation-state as its subject
was directly responsible for the tragedy of the Cultural Revolution and that
personal liberation and the development of the individual subject should
be the central concern of culture. Li Zehou's comments in this regard were
extremely succinct:
The "May Fourth" Movement was two movements, not one single one.
Between the two lay a distinction of nature. That of enlightenment was
antifeudal; that of salvation was antiimperialist. The precarious state of
the nation and the increasingly intense reality of the struggle transformed
731
the parallel between enlightenment and salvation. The theme of political salvation completely overwhelmed that of intellectual enlightenment.
Hence, the enlightenment work of "May Fourth" was left basically unfinished. After the founding of the republic, enlightenment continued to be
neglected, as was the critique of feudalism. After our country had gone
through the experience of the semifeudal, semicolonial society, it went
directly into what was proclaimed to be socialism when in fact the economic structure of society, like the cultural psychology structure of the
people, had not yet been impacted by capitalist democracy and individualism, so that feudalism stubbornly remained part of the deep structure
of people's ideas, conceptual ideology, and unconscious. . . . Feudalism, I
believe, is still the theme of the present."^
Henceforth, the reality of Chinese socialism was explained in terms of a
process whose denouement resulted in economic defeat and the collapse of
idealism. Seen in this light, it was an elaboration of izek's idea that socialism is just an offshoot of capitalism, to be judged according to the logic of
capitalist principles. The radicalism of Mao's opposition to capitalism could
not but be domesticated by capitalist logic and ideology. From the hopeless
oppressiveness of the loess plateau in Yellow Earth to the waves of sorghum
grain in Red Sorghum, everything showed a profound disappointment in
tradition and, via that disappointment, the search for subjectivity.
Given that Mao did not succeed and that neither the Great Leap Forward
nor the Cultural Revolution was capable of producing modernization, we
bad to find anotber model. We did not possess the legitimacy necessary to
open the door to capitalism, and if you can't do it on your own, you might
as well just do it the way the other guys have done it. That kind of logic
became totally acceptable, and, henceforth, the road map showing China
the way to enter global capitalism acquired certain legitimacy. Since actually existing socialism could not help but recognize the logic of capitalist
economic development, it could not help but be defeated. There was no way
that the utopia that resulted from this defeat could have been elaborated in
reality. In tbe end it would have still had to face up to the hardcore existence
of the "real." This real is capitalism's material life and the concrete temptations of consumption. For a society with an overabundance of ideals and a
positions 19:3
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732
shortage of material goods, it was simply irresistible. China's inclusion on

the capitalist road map was a necessary result of history. Finally, after the
1990s, after the disappearance of the utopia of overcoming alienation, the
pursuit of concrete materiality was given a full whitewash, becoming a new
chapter in the story of China's transformation. Capitalism was no longer the
vague phantom that appeared in the expressions of romantic intellectuals
but had rather become the elaboration of micro/concrete reality the truly
hard "elaboration of the Thing." And it was within the context of this elaboration of the Thing that the so-called "China dream" took shape.
I would like to discuss two films from the 1990s by Zhang Nuanxin, a
director who made her name in the 1980s. The first is called Southern China
7994 {Nan Zhongguo 194, made in same year). I had the chance to see this
movie at a time when the general public still could not. Many critics said it
was only average, bereft of innovation. However, from a historical perspective, it was actually a very important work, a work that touched with the
greatest sensitivity upon the direction of China's development. It expresses
with unusual profundity the pain and agony experienced in the period at
the start of China's globalization.
Southern China 799^ tells the story of a Tsinghua University graduate who
goes to work in a Taiwanese enterprise in Shenzhen a naive, idealistic
youth who is incorporated into the new globalized system of production.
This process was unexpectedly similar to that experienced by the Fifth Generation directors. After graduation from the film academies, the directors
of the Fifth Generation who had been expecting to appeal for enlightenment within China were suddenly subsumed by a global market about
which they had never given thought. Henceforth, they were in a totally
different space with a different destiny. Once this youth discovers that the
world is completely different from the way he had imagined it, he falls in
love with the boss's secretary only to discover that she is his mistress. He supports and sympathizes with the movement created by the boss's exploitation
but ends up hoping, for organizational reasons, that the workers will rapidly resume work. This was the first time that Chinese cinema had delved
into the secrets of the miracle known today around the world as "made in
China." Of course it was filled with suffering, intense contradictions, and
conflicts, as well as a great deal of unhappiness and misfortune, yet people
Yiwu I Zizek's Cbina, Cbina's Zizek
733
nevertbeless still cbose witbout besitation and regret to join tbe ranks of
globalization. Regardless of failure, setback, and pain, tbe myriad numbers
of Cbinese laborers tbat flasb across tbe screen were unforgettable for me.
Tbe desire and bope written on tbeir faces was unstoppable. Of course, tbey
paid a price and experienced mucb pain during tbose intense cbanges, yet
tbey still managed to maintain tbeir dreams with regard to the change, facing up to the challenge of destiny.
The China dream that we witnessed demanded that we rely on our
own strength in order to change our destiny. This was exactly the case in
the cboice exercised by tbe girl Ai Hong, played by Ma Xiaoqing, in Good
Morning, Beijing (dir. Zhang Nuanxin, 1991). She chooses the fake overseas Chinese Keke rather than the amiable and bonest bus driver. Altbougb
deceived and burt, sbe unbelievably remains witb Keke witbout complaint.
Even today, tbe ending o Good Morning, Beijing is unforgettable. Carrying
a bundle of clotbing onto tbe bus driven by tbat very same bus driver, sbe
and Keke, tbe fake overseas Cbinese wbo had previously deceived her, move
on to start up a private clothing business. Altbougb it was a big surprise to
botb of tbe guys wbo bad gone tbrougb tbat period witb ber, wbat came
as an even greater surprise to tbem was ber unprecedented confidence and
courage in tbe face of the future. She had already broken free of ber original
immature naivete. Sbe bad, of course, been mislead by temptation, and on
tbat account bad even paid a dear price, yet in tbe end sbe decided to rely
only on herself to achieve her dreams. One of the most provocative points
of the story lay in the fact that Keke was a fake overseas Chinese. The economic future he promised was not something he could actually deliver, yet
this Chinese girl was exactly like the courageous Carrie in Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Although attracted by material pursuits, sbe nevertbeless
possessed an incredible faitb witbout illusion. Tbis sort of sticking-to-iteven-if-it's-wrong, or of bitting-tbe-target-by-sbooting-way-off-tbe-mark,
unexpectedly serves as a metapbor for Cbina's destiny. We bad taken an
irrevocable patb, dancing witb globalization. We accepted tbe sacrifice: for
our dreams tbere was no otber cboice.
Witbout a material transformation, we could not bave a new future.
Altbougb we migbt lose tbose tbings from tbe 1980s tbat were precious, tbe
loss was necessary. In tbe 1980s, our cultural imaginary was built upon tbe
positions 19:3
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734
basis of the mind, as if we were standing inverted on our brains. Although

we faced the hardship of lack and the material temptations from the outside
world, the purity of our intellectual pursuit and abstract ideals sustained
our imagination and interrogations. Hence although the new era of the
1980s took place against the background of massive material attraction, it
nevertheless took the mental level as its main site of elaboration without
extending into the world of things. The pursuit of these ideals virtually
ignored the temptation and attractions of the material. The 1990s transformed the abstract intellectuality of the 1980s into the pursuit of material
things. Zhang Nuanxin grasped both the seductive power of the start of
consumerism as well as the poverty of the era's abstract subjectivity amidst
the reality of globalization and marketization. Ai Hong's cboice, like the
difficulties faced by Tsinghua graduate Yuan Fang in Southern China igg4,
issued from these changes. The dizzying Kantian method of standing on
one's head was transformed into a subjectivity based upon standing on one's
own two feet. Seen through Zhang Nuanxin's oeuvre, there was an innate
continuity in the midst of the break between the 1980s and the 1990s. The
1990s turned the abstract subject of the 1980s into the concrete individual
of globalization and marketization. The subject of the 1980s entered the
world through abstract intellect, expressing nothing more than a sincere
and simple desire at the same time that it opened up a new possibility. The
1990s were precisely what was needed to fill in the emptiness that came
from the 1980s lack of material support. The labor power that came from
all of these concrete individuals in China in the 1990s poured into the
world, utilizing its concrete labor and low wages to search for a substantial,
materialistic world. Hence what we find is that the 1990s gave the abstract
1980s their concrete, sensual realization. The abstract, romantic ideas of tbe
1980s were concretized by the consumerist desire and material pursuit of
the 1990s.
This is the point at which we can return to today's reality and begin to
consider our second theme, which is that of the current situation between
izek and China. Here, another aspect of izek's thought reveals the problem in a different light. He points to
today's ideological perception [tbat] work itself (manual labor as opposed
to "symbolic" activity), and not sex, becomes the site of obscene indecency
735
to be concealed from the public eye. The tradition, going back to Richard
Wagner's Rheingold and Fritz Lang's Metropolis, in which the working
process takes place underground, in dark caves, today culminates in the
millions of anonymous workers sweating in third world factories, from
Chinese gulags to Indonesian or Brazilian assembly lines; in their invisibility, the West can itself afford to babble on about the "disappearing
working class." Yet what is crucial in this tradition is the equation of labor
with crime, the idea that labor hard work is originally an indecent
criminal activity to be hidden from the public eye.^
Today, global capitalism can no longer hide the "trace" of labor. The trace
now has a name "made in China" and has surrounded the West by
means of consumer items. In the realm of theory, they are known by the
name izek who has surrounded the West through inexhaustible theoretical production.
China has forced the West to rediscover that production, which had
been hidden, not only exists but constitutes a substantial threat. At the very
moment when China gave global capitalism a new price mechanism, via
the production of massive quantities of consumer goods, it revealed the
incontrovertible concreteness of labor. When China unleashed the power
of the individual, and the hillion Chinese people began to have the right to
pursue individual happiness and opportunities, the energy released could
not be underestimated. The moment when the desire of all these common
people who had previously repressed their consumerist desire was affirmed,
when their pursuit of micro/concrete satisfaction was affirmed, was exactly
the moment when China began an unprecedented ascendancy. All the key
factors of production in China were activated hy the efforts of these common workers striving to satisfy their own consumerist desire. Whereupon
the things of which we could only dream and the hopes that had before
seemed so distant now stood directly in front of us. Tbe Chinese toiled in
the factories of Dongguan and Shenzhen and played with computers in
the crowded alleys of Zhongguancun (Beijing), Chinese people scoured the
country for new opportunities, Chinese affirmed the power of wealth, and
Chinese people began interacting through QQ'" and SMS. Chinese modernity had previously viewed the satisfaction of consumption as dangerous, but
today's China has discovered that "consumption" activates production. At
positions 19:3
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736
the moment when the Chinese began to consume brazenly, China became
the world's factory. At the very moment when the West became unusually enamored of the flow of capital and the nonsuhstantial economy, China
exhibited a certain essence of capitalist production, as if to tell the world,
production cannot be elided! izek tells us that theory is still as essential as
in the days of Kant and Hegel; it cannot simply be avoided in the fashion of
a Jean Baudrillard. izek and China cannot be easily blown apart like an
underground factory built by some evil tyrant opposed to the West as in the
James Bond movies." This factory is not one that is absolutely opposed to
the West, attempting to destroy its power this is not the unfolding of the
actually existing socialism of the past! It is rather a concrete and substantial
link deeply embedded in globalization, the very basis, even, upon which
global capitalism subsists. The products "made in China" are precisely that
which supports the endless flow of capital and information in global capitalism. It is the basis upon which global capitalism is able to sustain tbe
contemporary imaginary, in just the same way that izek the Slovenian has
revealed the secrets of global capitalism, enabling it to understand itself via
critique.
What is so intriguing here is that China itself desperately needs to erase
the existence of production. On the eastern side of the banks of tbe Huangpu
River that divide Shanghai in half stand the imposing towers of the Pudong
District; on the other stand the foreign structures on the Bund, left over
from the Concessions, that have now been creatively renovated into appealing shopping centers. In Beijing, the Olympic Stadium Bird's Nest and the
Water Cube loom together over the Fourth Ring Road, while the image of
Tiananmen Square has been transformed because of tbe presence of the
new Egg National Opera House. China, too, appears to be hiding the figure
of the producer bebind the disarming spectacle of capitalist consumption. In
A World without Thieves (2004), by Feng Xiaogang, Cbina's most acclaimed
director, a young worker called Sba Gen earns RMB 60,000. Taking a train
back home, he is so confident that nobody would dare steal the money that
he brags aloud about how he has it with him, daring others to steal it. As he
dreams sound asleep, thieves, of course, actually steal the money, yet one of
them is moved by his naivete to protect him. After a series of fantastic turns
and an intense train brawl, the thief who was protecting Sha Gen is killed
737
by the thief who stole his money, yet the former manages to take the book
bag with the money in it off the top of the train and place it back next to
the dreaming Sha Gen. Sha Gen, who has no idea that his money had been
stolen, continues to dream. That dream is just like today's China dream, the
way in which global capitalism is being imagined in China. Labor has been
dissimulated and a legend has already appeared.
izek and China are actually quite close; we are as close as can be. izek
and China bear an unexpected similarity; my interest lies in the hidden connection between "made by izek" and "made in China." And to a certain
extent, izek is the China of theory for the age of global capitalism, wbile
China is the real izek for the age of global capitalism.
Notes
1. Slavoj izek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (London and New York: Verso, 2001),
130-31.
2. Li Zehou, A Critique of Critical Philosophy: A Review of Kant (Pipan zhexue de pipan: Kande
shuping) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1984), 424.
3. Ibid., 434.
4. A detailed account of the controversy surrounding the one hundredth anniversary of Marx's
birth can be found in Wannian Zhou Yang (Shanghai: Wenhui Chubanshe, 2003), by Gu
Xiang, a ghost writer who collaborated with Zhou in the composition of his article which is
included in this text.
5. Slavoj izek. The Fragile Absolute; or. Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London and New York: Verso, 2000), 19.
6. The Four Modernizations were industrial modernization, agricultural modernization, scientific and technological modernization, and national defense modernization.
7. Li Zehou, Collections of Li Zehou's Worlds (Li Zehou Ji) (Harbin: Heilongjiang Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1988), 353. For a thorough discussion of this problem, refer to Zhang Yiwu, Cong
Xiandaixing dao Houxiandaixing (From Modernity to Postmodernity) (Nanning: Guangxi
Jiaoyu Chubanshe, 1997), 4-9.
8. Li Zehou, Follow My Own Path (Zou ziji de lu) (Taipei: Fengyun Shidai, 1990), 288.
9. Slavoj izek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood (New York and London:
Routledge, 2001), 210.
10. Translator's note: QQ is an online instant messaging software whose user interface is essentially the same as Microsoft's Messenger.
11. Zizek has an excellent analysis of this scene. See Zizek, Did Anybody Say Totalitarianism?
133-
Sinicizing Zizek? The Ideology of Inherent Self-Negation in Contemporary China

Kwai-Cbeung Lo
In response to Cbinese legislation probibiting Tibetan Buddbist monks from

reincarnating witbout tbe government's permission, apparently a political
means to prevent Tibet's exiled spiritual leader, tbe Dalai Lama, from being
succeeded by someone beyond Cbina's control, Slavoj Zizek writes tbat it is
a common desire among autbority, botb Eastern and Western, to contain
by law tbe political consequences of sometbing it does not take seriously
but respectfully tolerates.' However, wbat tbe Cbinese government today
respectfully tolerates but no longer takes seriously, otber tban Tibetan religious practice, is Marxism itself. It is widely believed tbat Beijing bas selfnegated its political belief in order to embrace tbe capitalist market economy.
But in tbe face of tbe ideological vacuum and tbe lack of political legitimacy,
tbe Cbinese government desperately resorts to nationalism and cultural tradition as a bricolage solution. Tbe notion of "socialism witb Cbinese cbar-
positions 19:3 DOI 10.1215/10679847-1369289

positions 19:3
Winter 2011
740
acteristics" and the invocation of the Confucian "social harmony" are merely
parts of this "sinicization" process. While Chinese traditional culture can
neither unify the nation internally (the invocation of Confucianism actually alienates many non-Han minorities) nor help China actively face the
new external challenges, the drive for sinicization paradoxically reveals a
strong inherent sense of self-negation. If Marxism was introduced to China
as a powerful tool to annihilate the old order of traditional ideology, this
political force of negation nowadays seems to he negated, too. But the fall of
Marxism in China, though we may not have to fully subscribe to this view,
does not necessarily lead to the revival of traditional cultural order (even if
the officials manipulate it to tackle the ideological crisis at present); on the
contrary, the social and ecological problems created by contemporary postsocialist China's rapid and ruthless capitalization urgently call for the realization of socialism now more than during any previous historical period.
izek has written extensively on the dialectical notion of negation, and
his interest in China is apparently growing. His sardonic comment that
"China is today the ideal capitalist state" in reference to the fact that it is
now the state not the capitalists doing the nasty job of oppressing the
proletariats for the sake of economic development can also be caught in the
process of self-negation.^ Whether the Chinese receptions of and responses
to izek's critique of China's problems are positive does not matter, however. What does matter is that if the popularity of izek in the West does
not necessarily make his ideas more politically influential to those living in
advanced capitalist societies, how will the Chinese people receive the political messages underlying his international fame, larger-than-life image, and
intricate theories? If izek's worldwide reputation has already proven that
even a hot commodity (he is the focus of at least three films; the general
public flocks to his lectures, although they may leave early; there is a multilingual online journal dedicated to his philosophy; a dozen academic books
and antbologies study his ideas; and one might imagine yuppies reading
his theoretical works in the subway)^ arousing much curiosity and interest cannot necessarily change the coordinates of the established system and
conventional perceptions, what can we expect even given that more than
ten of his books have already been translated into Chinese from a connection made between 'Zizek and the world's most populous country? What
Lo I Sinicizing Zizek?
741
kind of chemistry will this link produce.? Will Chinese readers see izek's
words as provocative things to stimulate them to reflect on their conditions
of social existence.? Or as undesirable comments that impede their pursuit of
capitalist modernization.? Perhaps most fundamentally, what point is there
to connecting China with izek.?
Furthermore, how is it possible for izek to recreate bis ideas through
encounters with what today's China stands for.? Will izek who is always
critical of Western democracy'' find something inspiring about the Chinese understanding of the notion.? Is not China one of the leading societies that refuse to fetishize liberal democracy or parliamentary politics as a
master signifier.? For those who have been frustrated by the hegemony of the
Western sociopolitical system, under which history, in Francis Fukuyama's
sense, has ceased to occur, does China not symbolize a place in which history is still happening.? Bearing no historical connections or memories with
China, izek, unlike many "progressive" Euro-U.S. radical thinkers, probably can avoid falling in the logic of fantasy when he approaches the country.5 Hence it is not merely a question of juxtaposing 'Zizek and China in
order to generate what izek calls a parallax view by means of which a radical noncoincidence of the two designates the hard kernel of antagonism in
today's world. It is a clich to lament that East is East, and West is West, and
never the twain shall meet (however, whether the Slovenian izek is really
considered Western even if he is identified as such by the Chinese
is another question). The split or irreducible gap between them cannot be
easily closed, although izek's recent publications have become more and
more engaged with the ideas of Mao Zedong and contemporary China
regarding questions of political revolutions and capitalist mechanisms,*^ he
paid his first visit to China in June 2007, and Chinese media emphasize
izek's admiration for China and Chinese culture. To appropriate izek's
theoretical ideas in an understanding of China or to pose Chinese issues as a
challenge to izek's emancipatory politics does not constitute a synthesis or
mediation of the two but forms an impossible short circuit. Just as Marx has
provocatively identified politics with its other, that is, economics, the way to
understand the connection between izek and China is perhaps by means
of which the truth cannot be found within but outside oneselfthat is, in
one's externality. Instead of combining the two to establish an amalgam.
positions 19:3
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742
connecting China with izek is inevitably a way of introducing a gap that

separates one from itself.
Zizek's First China Visit
Invited by Nanjing University for a week to give a series of seminars on

Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hollywood movies,'' izek who also spent
a few days in Shanghai after his academic trip was described by the
Chinese media and some personal blogs (whose authors either attended
izek's lectures or interacted with him personally during his China visit)
as a "Hegelian-Lacanian," a "defender of Marxism," a "popular culture
analyst," a "political commentator," a "Western academic star," a leading
thinker "from the small nation of Slovenia," "husband of a glamorous
Argentine model," and a sweaty person with diabetes.^ Some Cbinese journalists reported how izek almost never changed clothes during his China
visit he dressed always in the same proletarian shirt and jeans; how his
modesty in dress proves that he is a proletariat and a committed leftist, as
compared to many Western Marxists who, in izek's own words, "simultaneously speak for the poor and order the best red wine for dinner, wbile [he]
only drinks Diet Coke"; and how he sneers at his U.S. peers "who proclaim
themselves to be anticapitalism leftists but speculate in the stock market."^
Speaking to the Chinese media, izek appears whiny about his situation
in the West: "My theories seem to be popular and appealing to the masses,
but they do not really have any impact"'" and "I'm the target of attacks
from university scholars, and actually I'm not a powerful figure in Western
academia. Other leftist intellectuals, like Jameson, when they write recommendation letters, can help students get jobs at top universities. My situation
is entirely opposite. The universities reject those who should have teaching
positions after they've read my recommendation letters.""
As if to show comradeship, the Chinese media use the brotherhood metaphor to describe izek's relationship with his Chinese colleagues: "[izek]
hates the politics among the professors at Western institutions, but when he
mingles with faculty in the Philosophy Department at Nanjing University,
they quickly become 'brothers' [ge men]."^^ Calling him a "steadfast leftist"
{jianding zuopai), Chinese reporters describe his using communist class-
Le I Sinicizing Zizek?
743
based vocabulary as if to invoke Mao's notion of class exploitation of proletariat third world nations by the bourgeois Western first world: "izek's
mind and appearance are that of a vulgar truck driver. While all his peers
wear corduroy to show they are elite, izek is willing to present himself as
a proletariat [wuchen jieji]. . . . [I]n Nanjing and Shanghai he asked for very
simple meals. . . . In China his favorite food was dumplings: 'I eat what
everybody eats even at the filthy sidewalk stalls.'"'^ The terms brother and
proletariat comrade are conventional Chinese rhetoric used to describe positive encounters with foreigners (who may have skills or things to offer) in
terms of inclusion rather than exclusion. The strategy of inclusion, however,
is intended to maintain an existing Sinocentric cultural order, izek's willingness to show empathy with China makes him a "good foreigner," whereas
the inclusive strategy of welcoming good foreigners is always accompanied
by the drawing of a line between Chinese and other (bad) foreigners in traditional xenophobic discourse. However, a foreigner is always a foreigner
for the Sinocentric gaze and moral standard. If Chinese intellectuals are not
too disturbed by izek's unorthodox interpretation of Mao, it is the Chinese
media that attempt to scandalize this foreigner and shamelessly expose his
personal and trivial affairs in a gossipy manner, revealing that the commercialized tabloid culture has become so pervasive in China that no realm
is left untouched.''' The tabloidization of China's media indicates an ideological shift from the propagation of political and governmental doctrines
to the spreading of "harmless," petty information to entertain its curious
public. Tbe Internet, with its growing popularity in the nation, provides an
expanding rumor-craving community where such material can further circulate and flourish. However, there remains a loose attachment to the notion
of proletariat class identity that somewhat overrides racial or cultural differences between the Chinese and izek postsocialist citizens. The vacillation of othering izek and proletarianizing him by counting him as China's
"good friend" reveals much about the ambivalent situation of contemporary
Chinese society.
During the several interviews granted to Chinese reporters, izek was
often asked about his impressions of the nation, but little reference was
made to how critically he has written about China.'^ In opposition to his
recent writings on the absurdity of China's recent legislation on religious
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
744
reincarnation in Tibet and tbe brutality of Cbinese autboritarian capitalism, Zizek was very diplomatic about tbe country in bis Cbinese interviews
(as befits a good foreign visitor).'^ Indeed be only said positive tbings about
tbe nation and its culture be likes Cbina despite being afraid of getting
too intimate witb its culture lest be be disillusioned by its reality; be finds
Sbangbai more beautiful tban many European cities; be admires Chinese
traditional arts and popular culture; he and his seven-year-old son enjoy
Chinese martial arts films such as Zhang Yimou's Hero and Fearless, and
so on. His politeness is a practice that generates a certain illusion but is of
crucial importance to the ideological reproduction of contemporary Chinese
society. Tbe good words uttered by a guest are generally just expressions
of politeness and appreciation for tbe bost's bospitality. Tbese are nothing
anyone would take seriously. But in today's China, illusive courteous words
from the mouth of an honorable guest are considered significant (explaining
Cbina's willingness to spend billions of dollars to bost tbe Olympics in order
to just sbow off its bospitality), altbougb tbe Cbinese are not exactly duped
by tbem. Expressions of gratitude bave been seen not necessarily as evidence
of appreciation for Cbina's acbievements but ratber as evidence of bow successfully Cbina promotes its image to tbe world and educates foreigners
about its culture especially as the nation begins to dream about its soft
power, a new term associated witb tbe memory of Confucian rituals of tbe
imperial tributary system. It is also tbe way tbe Cbinese relay tbeir convictions to otber foreign agents in a modernization process tbat simultaneously
creates colossal wealtb and generates tremendous problems. Assuming tbe
otber bas a stronger belief tban one does oneself, as izek bas repeatedly
written, is precisely tbe mark of ideological fantasy.'^
Wbile complaining bow difficult izek's tbeories are for general audiences (one blogger blames it on tbe tbick accent in izek's spoken Englisb),
botb tbe Cbinese mainstream media and tbe bloggers are actually far more
interested in tbe obscene jokes Zizek uses in bis talks (as well as in bis writings), implicitly revealing not only that China is still a sexually repressed
country but also tbat tbere is a general desire to depoliticize bis works. Being
probed as to wby be references so many indecent jokes and stories, izek
offers bis typical answer: "You want obscene jokes.? You've got tbem! But
wbile you're bappily swallowing tbem, you'll get tbe taste of tbeory. It's like
Lei I Sinicizing Zizek?
745
fishing. My bait is the obscene joke, but what is important is what's behind
it. You take a big bite and then discover it's actually a theoretical work! It's
too late now!"'^ But seemingly the Chinese fish swallows only the obscenity
and spits out the theoretical-political element. Although the Chinese are
fascinated by zizek's eloquent juggling of abstract theories and hilarious
exemplifications while holding their political effects at a respectful distance
(his insights may represent some universal truth but have little or nothing
to do with China's unique situation, and the obscenities precisely serve as
a buffer for Chinese reception), the Chinese gaze on Zizek can be understood as an unconscious but essentialist attempt to sinicize what the signifier
"izek" represents in terms of conflating every major international practice
or trend such as socialism, modernization, modernity, postmodernism,
nationalism, feminism, and so on with the notion of "Chineseness."
"Zizek" is by no means a movement or practice there can't be a Chinese version of him (or "it"). However, the typical Sinocentric response to
izek's intervention in China's "internal affairs," as one can imagine, is this:
How can a foreigner without any immediate connection to China's particular circumstances authentically know what it means to be Chinese and
comment on China's unique experiences and problems? After all, the Chinese government always claims not to meddle with other countries' internal affairs. Neither does it want others to interfere with its own. From a
utilitarian point of view taken up by many Chinese intellectuals from the
late nineteenth century and still held at present the primary concern is
how izek (and many other objects, ideas, concepts or notions from abroad)
might be useful to China today. But in order to assess how useful he and his
theories might be, we need to know what China really wants an enigma
not only to others but also to China itself Perhaps what the Chinese want
from izek is a "Zizek without izek" the desire to deprive a radical
thinker of his excess and radicalness: that is to say, an obscene joke without
the critical theory behind it. While holding fast to a belief in national sovereignty against foreign interference, the Chinese state, and perhaps many
of its people, too, want not only to be a part of tbe world (by tapping into
anything trendy and popular) but also to become a bigger player in it.
Chinese nationalists dream of China's "rise" {jueqi) to become a great
power in the twenty-first century. China's rapid economic growth concerns
746
the West not merely because of its competitiveness but also because of the
threat of China's influence on the dominant Euro-U.S. model of modernity
as its integration with the global system accelerates. Emphasizing China's
unique historical past, the Chinese government advocates a specific kind of
modernization one that differs from the Euro-U.S. model but fits well
into its specific context and needs. If the officially endorsed phrase "socialism with Chinese characteristics" has already provided justification for the
coexistence of planned economy and market forces in postsocialist China
and allowed the Chinese government to undertake drastic measures to
^
develop into an industrialized country, then the assertion of a development

model with Chinese traits may serve a similar function in rationalizing why
a sociopolitical system other than the Western liberal-democratic one better
suits its people. The insistence on a model with Chinese cultural-historical
features, however, cannot easily be interpreted as a gimmick of the authoritarian regime. It also reflects the national pride of a people who want their
nation to be a world actor rather than a follower after a hundred years of
Western humiliation and invasion.
It should be noted that China's claim to a different model of capitalist
development may have nothing to do with transforming or revolutionizing the existing global system, although Mao's China might have had such
an ambition. China may become a potential emergent center of capitalist
power that will cause the global picture of modernization to be redrawn,
meaning that Chinese capitalization could play a significant part in reshaping the Euro-U.S. model by contributing its own specific characteristics.
But the Chinese government, faced with many thorny domestic issues on a
daily basis, such as the widening gap between the haves and the have-nots,
disasters caused by environmental pollution and administrative mismanagement, endemic corruption, social instability, and riots of rural and ethnic populations, is too preoccupied to plan for its global influence. If there
were any world impacts exerted by China, they would not be produced at
China's will. Qin Hui, a political philosopher at Tsinghua University, argues
that the unrestrained state market economy in China, which is neither thoroughly neoliberal nor socialist, could unexpectedly change the established
rules of the world economy. Western nations confronted with the increasingly severe malaise of labor disputes, unemployment, immigrant problems.
747
and financial deficits may consider the Chinese model as a possible solution. One example that seemingly follows in China's footsteps, according to
Qin, is Sarkozy's France, which has increased the power of the government
and aggressively dismantled the social welfare system. In Qin's view, the
global mecbanism has diffused the social tensions of China's modernization
throughout the world. As a result, China's development model has compelled some Western governments to cut down their social welfare benefits
and forced others to restrict their laissez-faire policies by taking protectionist measures. Qin sarcastically remarks that the "sinicization" (zhongguohua)
of the world, which is by no means China's intention, is a gospel neither of
socialism nor of neoliberalism.'^ Indeed, in "China's Valley of Tears," izek
has commented that what is so unsettling for the Western developed countries about China's capitalization is that its authoritarian capitalism may not
be merely a reminder of Europe's past but a portent of the global future.
Does sinicization in today's global mecbanism, as Qin points out, refer
to tbe dissemination of China's internal challenges to the world.? Unlike
in Mao's time, China now no longer exports the emancipatory politics of
communist revolution but of environmental damage (for exarnple, the yellow dust storms caused by rapid desertification and aggravated by toxins
from China's overindustrialized regions annually hit East Asia and even
the North American Pacific shore; its carbon emissions are also expected
soon to surpass those of the United States); the flow of unchecked unsafe
Chinese products, food, and chemicals into the world market; and its hunger for energy supplies and natural resources, inflating global prices. Then,
is sinicization nowadays equivalent to the dark global effects of Cbina's
modernization.?
Tllie Making of Sinicization
Though it may seem a loosely defined term, sinicization in Chinese history designates an ideological process of cultural assimilation of other nonHan ethnics and foreign barbarians, as well as the ethnicization of social
inequalities.2" It also serves as a supplement or excess of Han-ethnocentrism,
which creates a fictive ethnicity of a permanent and homogeneous descent
from a prehistorical kinship group, facilitating the construction of a major-
positions 19:3
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748
ity identity and the oppression of ethnic minorities. In short, it carries strong
cultural connotations and ideological implications beyond economic interests. However, sinicization also is understood as a Han-chauvinist way of
interpreting China's past, allowing a Han majority to find consolation by
asserting the irresistible power of traditional Chinese culture to assimilate
and civilize alien conquerors, such as the Mongol and Manchu peoples.
However, the mechanism of sinicization throughout Chinese history is far
more complex than being a mere identity formation, a cultural assimilation, or a solace for the Han in the face of military defeat by alien conquerors. Historically, it is the ethnically non-Han rulers who made use of
sinicization including mass Chinese immigrations to ethnic regions in
order to expand and sustain the empire's territory. At first glance, the nonHan rulers' sinicization policy can be understood as a kind of self-negation
of their own cultural identities. But the ethnic peoples who become sinicized
have transformed the very content and form of what it means to be Chinese,
which is also another kind of self-negation of the so-called Chineseness.
The Manchu rulers of the Qing dynasty (1644-1911) set up the illustrious
example of how sinicization is systematically appropriated for building and
consolidating a multiethnic empire. The Qing court also proved that being
Manchu and becoming Chinese by implementing the Chinese administrative system and identifying with Chinese social norms, thoughts, and values
do not necessarily present a contradiction. By exalting Confucian values that
differentiate social customs, emphasize hierarchy in human relationships,
and demand loyalty to authority, the Qing ruling class reaps the benefits of
a sinicization policy. When national crises intensified in the late nineteenth
century and later, the Manchu and the Han Chinese "shared more and more
a larger sense of identity being all 'Chinese' in the same boat struggling
to navigate through the rough waters" of internal uprisings and imperialist
encroachment.2' In other words, sinicization was not simply a Han Chinese
civilizing mechanism to tame and incorporate the ethnics; it was also a strategy adopted by the invading alien minority to gain ruling legitimacy and to
usher the whole nation into a solid unity.
Based on the criteria of today's multiculturalism which is itself very
problematic sinicization is easily equivalent to Sinocentric Han chauvinism, a cultural sense of superiority, and xenophobia. However, according to
lo I Sinicizing Zizek?
749
some idealist descriptions or projections of modern Chinese intellectuals,

the Tang dynasty (618-907), with which contemporary China identifies, has
provided a flexible version of sinicization. Instead of affirming tbe supremacy
of tbe Cbinese political system and cultural tradition and imposing forced
assimilation upon foreigners. Tang ruling elites in tbe dream version of
sinicization promoted tolerance and cosmopolitanism, blending various
streams of etbnicity in tbe body of Cbinese culture. During tbe entire Tang
period, non-Cbinese cultures and arts were continuously introduced to the
empire. Many famous poets, intelligentsia, and politicians serving the court
were of non-Chinese origin. The Tang Empire boasted tbe largest polyetbnic army, unique in Cbinese bistory. Numerous alien etbnics cbose to
reside in China under Tang rule. As a result, the almost complete absence
of references to ethnic terms indicates that ethnic groups became sinicized
or otberwise integrated into tbe enlarged Cbinese nation.^^ In otber words,
tbe Tang Cbinese experienced their cultural heritage as radically contingent, something subjected to tbe influence of otbers. Hence tbe universal
notion of tbe multiplicity of peoples and cultures is tbat every particular
etbnic group encompasses itself and all otber etbnic cultures. Tbere are no
objective criteria for delineating different etbnicities, since every strata in
society is multietbnic. Tbus tbere are only particular universals, and eacb
particular bas its own universal and contains a specific perspective on tbe
totality. Nevertbeless, as related by historians, such cosmopolitan-oriented
and open-minded sinicization subsided in Cbinese minds when the nation
was humiliated and menaced by prolonged military assaults and barassment
by nortbern etbnic groups. After two centuries of national sbame inflicted
by foreign imperialists, contemporary Cbina is not yet able to treat etbnic
minorities as equals and sbrug off tbe xenopbobic dimension of sinicization, wbicb, in tbe face of cballenges posed by modern Western cultures,
is narrowly defined from a receptive perspective as a process of adapting,
domesticating, and assimilating alien elements.
If sinicization, tbe principle of an internal unity, can be understood as
various moments in tbe Lacanian triad of imaginary-symbolic-real, tbe
imaginary moment is tbe monocultural model of Han Cbinese civilization
tbat bomogenizes and "barmonizes" all etbnic differences and disputes,
enforcing a bierarcbical unity; wbile tbe symbolic designates tbe Cbinese
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
750
hegemony imposing certain norms of behavior and thought without entirely

wiping out other forms of identity. But the real element of sinicization
brings forth not only the antagonism hetween Han Chinese, other ethnic
groups, and "barbaric" foreigners, but also the inherent contradictions of
dominant Chinese cultural codes. This manifestation of internal contradictions is a radical self-negation that may transform the coordinates of the
existing order and annihilate its own cultural identity.
The antagonism between tradition and modernity might have been
brought out by the project of sinicization in today's Chinese society. Postsocialist China is by no means against liberal capitalism. It refuses to integrate into the world market according to the rules set by the West, and it
endeavors to produce a new social order and correct the inherent imbalances of tbe capitalist system by conjuring up its cultural tradition, instead
of a Marxist tradition. Sinicization now seems to contain the antagonism
of capitalist modernity. By sinicizing things newly arisen from capitalization, the Chinese state wishes to conceive the antagonism of modernity as
the coexistence of two opposed positive entities, that is, traditional culture
and alien objects from abroad, against which the solution is presumed to
lie in reestablishing the equilibrium of the two with the parallel fact that
the capitalism mechanism cannot reproduce itself if there is no support
from traditional forms of social relations. However, the sinicization policy
adopted by the officials is precisely the ideological fantasy that conceals that
antagonism, which is itself a proof of the real external to the illusion of harmony that contemporary China tries desperately to achieve. Demonstrating
the major shift of political economy from the class struggle to the logic of
capital, the Chinese state has now repressed, with the mechanism of sinicization policy, this Marxist notion of social antagonism that constitutes the
inherent limit of society that prevents it from making itself into a complete
and self-enclosed whole. To put it more precisely, what China now wants to
dispose of is not merely the "outdated" Marxist class struggle but tbe real of
traumatic social antagonism in the so-called historic age of Prosperous China
{shengshi zhongguo), a term that alludes to a glorious imperial past. However,
the antagonistic dimension of the society makes a forceful comeback in the
real moment of the celebrated sinicization: the Sinocentric, racist hatred of
ethnic others has rendered the tolerant attitude actively promoted by the
751
State for the construction of the "harmonious society" {hexie shehui) entirely
pointless, if not ridiculous.
As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Marxist ideas, which have
been conceived by the Chinese Communist Party as scientific truth or the
other of ideological discourse, is now reduced to an ideology in today's China
in the face of capitalist globalization. When there is general gnawing doubt
about every universal concept fabricated by ruling institutions to govern and
simplify reality in contemporary China, that all thoughts are ideological
cannot preclude Marxism itself Meanwhile, a multi-million-dollar, back-toMarxist-basics project, launched in 2004 under the leadership of Hu Jintao,
entitled "Makesizhuyi lilunyanjiu he jianshegongcheng" (Project of Marxist
Theoretical Research and Building) and involving scholars and cadres in
an effort to systematically promote and reconstruct fading Marxism to the
younger generation (for instance, by means of the publication of textbooks),
demonstrates that Chinese leaders apparently have exchanged the cult of
abstract revolutionary practice for marketization, capitalist production, and
further integration into the world economy. Without a doubt, nationalist
ideology (the modern embodiment of sinicization) rather than Marxist doctrine has a much stronger appeal among today's young urban Chinese who
are, however, the primary target of the back-to-Marxism project. Educated
youths are actually the most patriotic, establishment-supporting group in
Chinese society nowadays, since they are the biggest beneficiaries of China's
economic achievements and prosperity, izek ironically calls this campaign
that desperately resuscitates Marxism an indication of the ultimate triumph
of capitalism and its full institutionalization in China.^^
What he does not pay adequate attention to, however, is that this project is
not a sheer retrieval of orthodox Marxist ideology; it involves an ambivalent,
self-doubting negation. Post Mao China undergoing economic liberalization that triggers sociopolitical changes of potentially great magnitude
and steers the nation onto the road to capitalism is no longer concordant
with the teleological outcome promised by the Marxist dialectic view of historical development, although the one-party regime is very anxious about
its Marxist legacy. The project is probably little more than a Marxian window dressing that enables the Chinese communists to deceive themselves
that, while they are thoroughly engulfed by the capitalist system, they can
positions 19:3
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752
Still maintain some distance from it. Harkening back to Marx's basic ideas,
therehy revealing that the Marxist foundation is really shaken, is to propose
an oblique challenge to the orthodox Marxist historiography of unilinearism
and to opt for the different paths that different societies may take owing to
their structural peculiarities. However, the return to Marxism is also a way
to sinicize doctrine in order to make it appropriate to the changing conditions in China a domesticating attempt that Chinese are always keen on
(isn't Maoism already a sinicized Marxism .?).^'' Like the notion of "socialism
with Chinese characteristics," the salvaging of Marxist ideas in postsocialist Chinese society, in which economic development preoccupies everyone
and has become the only social principle, appears to be an empty gesture of
resistance against the engulfing absorption of the capitalist system. Precisely
because the project seems so vacuous that the Chinese people see no substance witbin it,^5 it turns into a negation that, however, says something that
cannot be told in any positive representation.
Reinterpeilating the Marxist Ideology
This failed interpellation, in the Althusserian sense, by no means succeeds

in establisbing a full and imaginary subject. Hence it is unlikely tbat Cbina
can still be seen as a communist state disseminating political ideology ratber
than an emerging nation competing for hegemony and for limited global
resources, and it is also bardly possible that Chinese people identify themselves as bequeathing Marxist legacies tban as legitimately inheriting their
ancient civilization. However, Mladen Dolar and izek botb argue against
Altbusser that interpellation never will entirely succeed in complete subjectivization. On tbe contrary, tbere is always a "beyond of interpellation,"^^
in which the subject is never intimately tied to identity by the ideological
hailing to recognize its designated position and imaginarily relating to its
conditions of existence, but is separated by a "non-integrated surplus of
senseless traumatism."" In other words, the internalization of ideological
meaning and truth is never fully achieved; there is always a residue that cannot be entirely absorbed. In izekian logic, this traumatic leftover, far from
obstructing the subject from subordinating itself to an ideological calling,
serves as tbe very condition of its full submission.
lo I Sinicizing Zizek?
753
Hence even though Chinese people may find the state's retrieval of Marxist principles meaningless at a time when the quest for profit prevails over
the community, and they might believe that only a dupe would identify with
the Marxist ideological cause, subjectivization or interpellation still takes
place. Discontent with the ideology of the ruling institution can perfectly
coexist with certain or even strong commitment to it. The Chinese people
(even if generally unhappy with the communist state), who are at present
given unprecedented freedom in the market economy to make sense of
things on their own, are still very bonded to the regime, because the people
still share an unquestionable conviction that only the state, not any individual or any other external power, is able to handle and contain, if not solve,
China's unique problems. Indeed, ideology always provides the interpellated
subject the opportunity to negate or call its identity into question, allowing
it to imagine a transgression that is a necessary part of interpellation. This
"interpellation beyond interpellation"^^ is particularly common among the
urban Chinese younger generation, who appear to be far more interested
in the culture of consumerism than in politics. Their obsession with the
bourgeois lifestyle, blogging, video games, and overseas travel and their
general reluctance to foment any democratic reform, allegedly beyond the
materiality of political ideology allow them to live in the "beyond" or the
imaginary transgression from the interpellation conferred upon them. As
the major beneficiaries of the economic success of the last three decades,
young urban Chinese are more involved in preserving the status quo and
supporting the existing administration. In addition, the youngsters' patriotic
and unquestioning support of their government can easily be inflamed by
any national disputes with Japan, the United States, or France; by perceived
Western sympathy for Tibetan separatists; and by the foreign news media
bias against China.
Although the nationalist sentiments of the older generation are not as
strong, and they are more willing to criticize the government, there is a
widespread fetishism of the state function especially as state authority is
eroding in many places among Chinese intellectuals, who are the controlled and disciplined products of the state-party. The Chinese state may
own the largest think-tank community in the world. In Beijing, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has five hundred research centers with four
754
tbousand full-time researcbers.^' Despite intense debates among Cbinese

intellectuals including neoliberals wbo cbampion bourgeois autonomy
and private property rigbts and new leftists who emphasize social justice
and redistribution of resources tbere is a common belief tbat tbey need
to rely on tbe state to test tbeir new ideas and new ways of doing tbings.
Tbe state is believed to be tbe only agent tbat can effectively constrain social
antagonism and impose a law-governed society on selfisb people divided by
tbeir interests and etbnicities. Altbougb tbe function and domination of tbe
state in Marx's perspective may only serve particular, not universal, interests,
Cbinese intellectuals anticipate tbat it may fulfill a "transcendental" function tbat betters tbe nation.
Cosmopolitanism or internationalism of tbe Marxist kind may no longer
rein in intellectual minds today, altbougb Cbina is positioned by its intelligentsia in tbe world picture. Cbina bas come to an era of excessive selfobsession-dreaming of bow to reclaim its ancient glory and imagining
bow resentful Western powers conspire to binder and tbwart Cbina's rise.
Wbile tbe Beijing Olympics is perceived by tbe Cbinese public as a symbol
of Cbina's due respect from tbe world, from tbe beginning it bas galvanized protests, boycott tbreats, and criticism about alleged Cbinese buman
rigbts abuses in Tibet and elsewbere and for its close relations witb brutal regimes, tbus angering Cbinese nationals wbo see tbese accusations as
evidence of a Western refusal to accept and recognize Cbina. The fury of
the Chinese urges them to cling to the postsocialist government, which in
turn depends on the appeal of nationalism. The success of the Olympics (in
terms of the numbers of gold medals won by tbe Cbinese atbletes, tbe selfcongratulating mode of tbe visually stunning opening ceremony, and tbe
numerous entbusiastic Cbinese T V viewers tuning into tbe live Olympic
broadcast) also makes Cbinese people proud of tbe state organizing power.
Tbe loyalty to tbe party-state tbat still preserves tbe name of communism is
of course not identical to a general faitb in Marxism. However, Cbina is one
of very few places in tbe world wbere a relation between tbe tbeory or ideology of Marxism and tbe political practice of communism can still be articulated, when Marxism as a revolutionary praxis has already withered away
worldwide. Marxism in China is not a sheer theory tbat serves as an end in
itself, but remains sometbing to be transformed into revolutionary practice
Li3 I Sinicizing Zizek?
755
from the communist perspective and to be implemented in the community.

Although those in power see there must be a high concentration of capital
and a homogeneous proletarian consciousness in order to fulfill the objective
and subjective conditions for communism, a radical communist revolution
or liberation does not fully rely on the necessity of arriving at the mature
stage of capitalist development; it also relies on the intense antagonism and
contradictions cropping up from severe economic exploitation and political
oppression.
Migrant workers and slum dwellers in China have been briefly mentioned
by izek as possible revolutionary agents in defending himself against criticism of his works for lacking a determinate political vision and a precise
contour of political activity (although he campaigned for Slovenian presidency in 1990). There is, however, no antagonism that can grant the migrant
workers a revolutionary function, since "they are not simply a redundant
surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous ways."^
The actual practices of the proletariat always contradict its representations.
The Chinese proletariat, by definition, is not limited to those in the cities (although it is predicted that the urban population will hit 900 million,
60 percent of the total, by 2020) but should be included in the rural population. Instead of being identified as a specific class, they (being "part of nopart" in the izekian-Rancierian sense) are more the masses that stand for
the real dissolution of society, because they are stripped not only of material
belongings but also of individuality. There should be no such thing as an
ideology of the proletariat. But one is always forced on them, and in contemporary China, it is that of sinicization. What the 2008 Tibet riot and the
2009 Xinjiang riot revealed is that sinicization does not simply mean that
the socioeconomic development brougbt by the Chinese has gradually wiped
out Tibetan and Uighur traditional cultures, but also that the Han and Hui
Chinese, who were encouraged by the government to migrate to Lhasa and
Urumqi in order to seek economic opportunities, lost their lives and stores
during the unrest.
There is an intrinsic relationship between the ideology of nationalism
and the notion of social equality that makes sinicization very contradictory but renders its real element more visible. If the concept of (European)
nationalism introduced by some Cbinese intellectuals in the late nineteenth
positions 19:3
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756
century refers to an ideological mechanism for attaining unity and identity

for the people who have language, heritage, and culture in common, then
multietbnic Cbina bas appropriated the notion as a discursive formation
to handle a set of internal and external contradictions. Although nationalism invoked by Sun Yat-sen's Tbree Principles of tbe People occupied a
significant place in modern Cbinese bistory, tbe communist regime bas been
cautious of using nationalist discourse in various anti-Western movements
in order to empbasize national unity on tbe one band and to avoid provocation of etbnic nationalist sentiments on tbe otber. The fading out of communist ideals opens up a space for a strong return of Han-based nationalism tbat may alienate etbnic minorities. For example, Cbinese communist
leaders keep quoting Confucius's declaration tbat social barmony must be
cberisbed, wbicb is definitely a means to depoliticize or to cover up social
antagonisms. Socialism's sacred Labor Day observance bas been reduced to
a single day; tbe rest is redistributed over a series of Han Chinese traditional
holidays such as Tomb Sweeping Day, tbe Dragon Boat Festival, and tbe
Mid-Autumn Festival. Tbere is also a national drive to learn tbe Confucian classics. Confucian values bave, to some extent, been restored as civic
nationalist values. But Cbinese nationalism, wbicb is about tbe formation
of national unity witb reference to tbe strategy of (imaginary or symbolic)
sinicization, does not quite succeed, since class antagonism is always tbere,
designating an inberent contradiction as tbe real element of sinicization.
Tbe act of (re)sinicizing tbe people and culture in postsocialist Cbina may
actually count a lot more people out.
During tbe Olympic torcb relay in many Cbinese cities, tbousands of
poor villagers wbo could not afford to go to Beijing to attend tbe games
walked for miles in order to ensure a prime spot from wbicb to view the
arrival of the "holy flame" {sheng huo). They were provided red flags in
order to give the torchbearers a spectacular view of cbeering, flag-waving
masses. But tbe red flags were not necessarily national flags. Instead, tbey
were emblazoned with the logos of the Beijing Olympic sponsors, such as
Coca-Cola, Samsung, or Lenovo. In Hainan, a farmer who walked three
hours from his village in order to catch a glimpse of the torch complained,
"They had no national flags to give out, only this [Coca-Cola] advertisement."^' While being economically exploited, tbe Cbinese proletariat may
-O I Sinicizing Zizek?
757
tentatively embrace the ideology of nationalism promoted by the state during big national events. But it is always expected that ideology imposed on
the proletariat will eventually turn against the state, because, when it comes
to daily life, farmers are more concerned with how their land has been taken
away by corrupt local officials and how their water sources have been polluted by unrestrained development.
In Cbengdu, the capital of Sichuan, about two hundred people in 2008
"took a stroll" for two hours to protest against plans for an ethylene plant
and an oil refinery that would lead to serious air and water pollution. In
2007, thousands of protesters in Xiamen, Fujian Province, successfully made
authorities abandon plans for a chemical plant on the city's outskirts. Nowadays, demonstrations against environmental pollution, which is always connected with official abuse of power, are common across the countryside.
Similar dissent is growing in major cities. Hundreds of Shanghai homeowners marched to express concerns over an extension of the city's high-speed
magnetic-elevation train, which could emit radiation and bring down the
value of their homes. These were by no means well-organized struggles.
Most of them were actually contingent events, although their coordination
relied on the popular use of the Internet and SMS (short message service).
Unpredictable as these protests appear to be, they all point to China's breakneck development, totalized by the capitalist system, and may serve as a
practical (though contingent) intervention that radically shatters the system,
izek always urges us to remain faithful to old paradigms, such as the economic base and class struggles; isn't contemporary China a place that cleaves
to the applicability of these conceptual coordinates?
Contemporary China is no longer a communist state. But neither can
the nation fully depend on traditional values of sinicization in order to
rebuild social order and create national unity. Marxism in China is like a
residue that refuses to go away. What remains is an inherent self-negation
in the sense that there is no longer a simple return to socialism but its deep
entanglement with the new political, social, and cultural problems created
by China's capitalization. It does not mean that by doing away with communism in its nation-building program, China is now really on the rugged
road to becoming a socialist state. A more sensible scenario would be this:
being so successfully incorporated in global capitalism and thus generat-
positions 19:3
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758
ing so many antagonistic problems, including increasing exploitation and

oppression, Cbina more tban ever needs communism to confront all tbese
crises. A question for Zizek is wbetber Cbina is just one of bis many tbeoretical examples (tbough example is already a radical medium for the externalization of the destitute subject), or if be will accept tbat Cbina is tbe radical externalization of bis tbeory and not merely tbe subject of intellectual
acrobatics for its own sake.
Glossary
759
riotes
1. See Slavoj izek, "How China Got Religion," New York Times, October ii, 2007, www
.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/opinion/11zizek.html.
2. Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2008), 190.
3. izek refers to an episode from Jean-Jacques Lecercle, who described a yuppie on the Paris
Mtro reading Deleuze and Guattari's What Is Philosophy?, a book, in Lecercle's view,
explicitly written against yuppies. Though Lecercle sees it as an irony, Zizek questions
whether the yuppie reads the book not with puzzlement but with great enthusiasm, and he
argues that today's capitalism is far more revolutionary and fully adopts alternative forms.
See Slavoj izek. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2003), 183. In the same light, izek's argument could he applicable to his own works.
What if the yuppie also finds his Hegelian-Lacanian-Marxist works amusing?
4. For example, Zizek claims that "in today's constellation, the primary focus should not be
on anticapitalism, but on undermining the fetishist status of Democracy as our MasterSignifier." See his "Concesso non Dato," in Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Response to Slavoj
Zizek, ^'J- Geoff Boucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate,
2005), 222.
5. When asked why he visited China in 2007, Zizek said, "China is my favorite country. A lot
of people in the West are interested in India and Japan. But I don't like Indian spiritualism,
and Japan is too militant to me. In addition, I'm very interested in China's political development in the future. China now is a live laboratory. What China will be like in the future?
Will a new system he 'forced' to come into heing? I'll he hack again, and hring a bunch of
friends to discuss what China's development will mean to the world." See Chen Ying and
Tang Shi, "Zhuanfang Qizeke" ("Interview with Zizek"), Practice and Text, September 14,
2007, www.ptext.cn/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=i866&Itemid=>.
6. Zizek's introduction to Mao's thought ("Introduction: Mao Tse-Tung, the Marxist Lord of
Misrule," in On Practice and Contradiction [London: Verso, 2007], 1-28) has been partially
translated into Chinese. See "Qizeke lun Mao Zedong zai Makesizhuyi fazhanshishang
de diwei" ("Zizek on Mao Zedong's Position in the Historical Development of Marxism),
trans. Wu Dake and Zhou He, Foreign Theoretical Trends 2007, no. 9: 74 78. But as the
translators remark at the heginning, "even though Zizek's views on certain issues are not
accurate, certain aspects of his discourse can be used as reference" (74). It is indeed another
good piece of evidence that China wants a "izek without Zizek" (Ibid.).
7. One of the essays for his seminar series, "The Limits of Capitalism," has been translated
into Chinese and published in the Journal of Nanjing University 5 (2007): 6 13.
8. See, for instance, "Houxiandaimingxin Qizekefanghua Lilunzhuozuo jishenchangxiaoshu"
("Postmodern Star Zizek Visits China, His Works Become Best Sellers"), sina.com, June 6,
2007, www.hook.sina.com.cn/news/c/2007 0606/1734215712.shtml; Hong Fan, "Qizeke
760
zai Shanghai" ("Zizek at Shanghai"), douban.com, November 26, 2007, www.douban.com/

group/topic/1726072; Luozhiqiu, "Qizeke zai Nanjingdaxue" ("izek at Nanjing University"), Web blog, June 8, 2007, www.luozhiqiu.blog.hexun.com/992665o_d.html.
9. "Qizeke: xiuzhenxiaoguo de dazhaopai" ("izek: The Big Brand-Name of a Pocket-Sized
Nation"), Oriental Morning Post, June 22, 2007.
10. Chen and Tang, "Interview with izek."
11. Shi Jianfeng, "Qizeke: Wozaixifangxueshujie meiyoushenmequanshi" ("izek: I Don't
Have Any Power in Western Academia"), Oriental Morning Post, June 16, 2007.
12. Tang Shi and Chen Ying, "Silawore Qizeke: wohingfei fenshijisu, wozhishitianzhen"
("Slavoj izek: I'm Not Cynical, I'm Only Nave"), Nanjing University Post 953, June 30,
2007, www.xiaobao.nju.edu.cn/showarticle.php.?articleid=9777.
13. "izek: The Big Brand-Name."
14. There is additional news coverage on izek's three marriages and other details of his private life. See, for instance, Kuai Lehao, "Qizeke: Zibenzhuyi bingfei renlei zuizhongdaan"
("izek: Capitalism Is Not the Ultimate Answer for Human Beings"), Southern People
Wee/(ly, July 11, 2007, 61 -62; Hong Fan, "izek at Shanghai."
15. Identifying himself as a legalist, izek's short critique of the Confucian Analects has been
translated in Chinese and published as " 'Jisuobuyu wushiyueren' zuiweixian" (" 'Do Unto
Others as You Would Have Them Do unto You' Is the Most Dangerous"), Beijing News,
July 6, 2007.
16. For instance, Slavoj izek, "How China Got Religion," New Yorl^ Times, October 11, 2007,
www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/opinion/11zizek.html; izek, "China's Valley of Tears: Is
Authoritarian Capitalism the Future.?" In These Times, December 3, 2007, www.inthese
times.com/article/3425/chinas_valley_of_tears; izek, "No Shangri-La" (letter to the editor), London Review of Books, April 24, 2008, www.lrb.co.uk/v3o/no8/letters.html. Tonglin
Lu informs me that no journals wanted to publish the Chinese versions of these three pieces
in China because of their sensitive subjects.
17. See, for instance, how izek talks about the function of chorus and canned laughter in The
Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 34-35; and his notion of interpassivity in
The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), 113 17.
18. Luo Min, "Qizeke de Shanghai banri" ("izek's Half Day in Shanghai"), China Business
News, June 24, 2007, www.china-cbn.eom/s/n/005004004/20070624/000000070978.shtml.
19. Qin Hui, "Disanzhong kenengxing" ("The Third Possibility"), Nanfengchuang Magazine 20
(2007): 61 62.
20. The term is taken from Etienne Balibar. See his "The Nation Form: History and Ideology,"
in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities,
trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 1991), 86-106.
21. Ping-Ti Ho, "In Defense of Sinicization: A Rebuttal of Evelyn Rawski's 'Reenvisioning the
Qing,'" Journal of Asian Studies ^y (February 1998): 149.
761
22. Ho, "In Defense of Sinicization," 132 37.
23. Zizek, "China's Valley of Tears."
24. The project has heen assigned with the tasks of strengthening the "sinicization of Marxism"
in Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory, and the "Three Represents" proposed
hy Jiang Zemin; retranslating Marxist classics; establishing a Marxist system appropriate to
the times; producing higher-education texts with Marxist characteristics, as well as texts on
modern history imbued with the spirit of Mao Zedong Thought, Deng Xiaoping Theory,
and "Three Represents"; and of founding new institutions of Marxist research. See Arif
Dirlik, "Back to the Future: Contemporary China in the Perspective of Its Past, circa 1980,"
in An Alternative China: Three Decades after Reform and Opening (New York: Routledge,
forthcoming). See also Zhou Wensheng, "'Makesizhuyi lilunyanjiu he jianshegongcheng'
zuotanhui zongshu" ("Summary of the Forum on 'Project of Marxist Theoretical Research
and Building'"), Shandong Social Science 105 (2004): 121-27; "'Makesizhuyi lilunyanjiu
he jianshegongcheng' zhongdianjiaocai jianshegongcheng qidong sanzhounian bitan"
("Exchanges on the Teaching Materials of the 'Project of Marxist Theoretical Research and
Building' Three Years after Its haur\ch"). Journal of Ideological and Theoretical Education
IOI (2007): 6-14.
25. As Arif Dirlik criticizes, "it is not quite clear what purpose [the project] might serve in the
context of a society gripped hy fevers of'getting rich' and consumerism, especially among
youth." See "Back to the Future."
26. Mladen Dolar, "Beyond Interpellation," Qui Parle 6 (1993): 75-96.
27. Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 43.
28. Robert Pfaller, "Negation and Its Reliabilities: An Empty Subject for Ideology?" in Cogito
and the Unconscious, ed. Slavoj Zizek (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 240.
29. Mark Leonard, "China's New Intelligentsia," Prospect Magazine, March 2008, www
.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10078.
30. Zizek, "Concesso non Dato," 225.
31. Tom Miller, "Sponsor Well Served, Villagers Let Down as Torch Rushes By," South China
Morning Post, May 6, 2008.
A Cinematic Paraliax View: Taiwanese Identity and the Japanese Colonial Past
Tonglin Lu
In bis introduction to The Parallax View, Slavoj izek uses two anecdotes one about tbe widely assumed but false analogy between revolutionary ideology and avant-garde art, tbe otber concerning tbe fiction of
Walter Benjamin's alleged murder (after baving read bis last unpublisbed
manuscript, Josepb Stalin decided to eliminate Benjamin as an ideological
tbreat) to explain tbe title concept:
Tbe illusion on which these two stories rely, that of putting two incompatible pbenomena on tbe same level, is strictly ana.logous to wbat Kant
called "transcendental illusion," tbe illusion of being able to use tbe same
language for pbenomena wbicb are mutually untranslatable and can be
grasped only in a kind of syntbesis or mediation.... Tbus tbere is no rapport between tbe two levels, no sbared space altbougb tbey are closely
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connected, even identical in a way, they are, as it were, on the opposed

sides of a Moehius strip.'
The widespread identity reconfiguration in postcolonial East Asia, with
the help of reinterpretations of Japanese colonialism, is such a "transcendental illusion." The colonial history of Japan, the only Asian empire builder
of the modern period, serves as an important reference point for its former
colonies as they reconfigure national identities. As in the case of revolutionary ideology and avant-garde art, Japanese colonial history and the national
identity of its former colonies are "on the opposed sides of a Moebius strip."
Despite the apparent links hetween Japan and its neighbors, the two sides
never meet, except through a parallactic shift; suffering has become a prima
facie emotional bond between identity and this part of history. In this sense,
Japanese colonial history is an anchorage in the collective imagination, as
most traditional and even modern values have melted into thin air in the
midst of the mad circulation of global capital in East Asia since the late
twentieth century.
On the one hand, this anchorage serves as the ultimate reference with
which to construct national identity in a changing symbolic order. By offering apparently firm ground, Japan's colonial bistory stabilizes national (or
regional) identity in an increasingly globalizing environment. On the other
hand, as this anchorage is constructed through often-contradictory projections of the collective imagination, ultimately it is characterized by inconsistency. Indeed, perceptions of the colonial past have little to do with historical realities, and more with current political needs. In short, the inherent
inconsistency of Japanese colonial history foregrounds the precariousness of
national and cultural identity.
In this essay, I examine changing perceptions of the colonial past as a
crucial element of reformulating Taiwanese identity by analyzing tbe Taiwanese film A Borrowed Life (1994), directed by Wu Nien-jen.^ Faithful
to New Cinema's aesthetics of realism and its preferred autobiographical
genre, Wu's film filters colonial history through the nostalgic point of view
of his father, a miner born tbirteen years before the Nationalist retrocession
of Taiwan in 1945. Because its ambiguity toward Chinese identity has generated multiple perceptions of Japanese colonial histories, Taiwan offers an
Tcnglin I A Cinematic Parallax View
765
excellent case for examining the shifting linkages between the colonial past
and contemporary national identity.
Clianging Representations of Japan
Taiwan's colonial past, viewed from various political angles and historical
moments, has been portrayed "parallactically," as it has been incorporated
into different political realities. As Japan's first colony, Taiwan's attitude
toward its former colonizer is more ambiguous than that of its East Asian
neighbors, not necessarily because of a historical difference in the colonizing
scheme, but because the past has played different roles in contemporary politics. Ironically, the violent Nationalist crackdown on the Taiwanese people
(many of them members of the local intellectual elite) on February 28, 1947,
reinforced and extended this "ambivalent cultural as well as ethnic identification."^ Instead of serving as an external other against which national
identity could be defined, colonial Japan offers a counterpoint to mainland
China in the reformulation of Taiwanese identity, after four decades of the
Nationalist Party's China-centered ideology, and Communist China's military threat of the 1990s.
Since Taiwan's retrocession to the Kuomintang (KMT) government, the
representation of Japan has been a nodal point in the formation of Taiwanese identity mostly through suffering. At the beginning of its exile from
the mainland, the ruling Nationalist Party used colonial history to justify its
political power over the local population, which had been "enslaved {nuhua)
by the Japanese."'' Conflict between local people and immigrants was politicized and racialized, as typified by the terms Taiwanese {benshengren) and
mainlanders {waishengren); although using a patrilineal logic, the Nationalists
considered the majorities of both groups ethnic Han Chinese.' To reinforce
this ethnic and de facto class division, the Nationalists emphasized the
groups' roles in the Sino-Japanese war on the mainland at the beginning of
their political exile, while emphasizing the wartime suffering of mainlanders to legitimate their power through official culture as the governmentsponsored fledgling film industry showed in the 1950s and 1960s.''
This representation was not limited to the Nationalist propaganda
machine. Despite its emphasis on the formation of a local cultural iden-
766
tity, in opposition to the great narrative centered on Nationalist China, the

Native Soil literature of the 1960s and 1970s offered a critical portrayal of
Japan's colonial past and economic imperialistic presence. Considered the
cinematic successor of Native Soil literature (in fact, many Native Soil writers participated in the New Cinema movement). New Cinema inherited
this tradition. For example, in "Hsiao-ch'i's Hat" ("Xiaoqi de maozi"), an
episode of Sandwich Man {Erzi de dawanou, 1983), one of the earliest New
Cinema works, Zeng Zhuangxiang offers a critical portrayal of the aggressive marketing of Japanese products in Taiwan. The screenplay for Sandwich Man was based on three short stories by Huang Ch'un-ming, whose
fiction epitomizes Native Soil literature. Huang's works have been adapted
to the screen by a number of Nevv Cinema directors, including his satire on
Japanese sex tourism in TaiwanSayonara, Goodbye (Sayonala, zaijian).
Three decades of rapid economic growth transformed Taiwan from an
agricultural to an industrial society, and then from a manufacturing-based
to a high-tech economy. Economic development led to political democratization. In 1987, the four-decades-long curfew was lifted. Taiwanese citizens,
formerly treated as the ethnic power minority, have benefitted from these
changes. As Taiwan faces military intervention from mainland China, the
repressed colonial history of Japan has reemerged in a new light in Taiwanese cinematic representations, offering a fantasy space to reformulate local
Taiwanese identity.
Partly because Japanese colonizers shared more racial and cultural features with their colonized subjects than did European colonizers, they had
to walk a fine line on two counts. Japan had to prove its modernity by emulating the West, while simultaneously distinguishing itself from white racism by resisting the West in the name of "Asia."'' Vis--vis its colonized
people, Japan adopted a contradictory stance of identification and differentiation. On the one hand, Japan's government emphasized the divine origins of the Japanese people to distinguish them from other Asians. On the
other, it stressed pan-Asianism to legitimize its demands for loyalty from
colonized subjects all in the name of resisting European dominance, but
in reality because, from 1937, Japan desperately needed colonial subjects to
participate in the Sino-Japanese war. Not surprisingly, their notion of the
orient (toyo) was self-contradictory.^ Although Japan acquired Taiwan for its
Tonglin I A Cinematic Parallax View
767
economic and strategic significance, its restructuring of Taiwan's economy

helped to establish "a physical and institutional infrastructure for comprehensive modernization" of Taiwan as a remote but commercially prosperous province of the Qing Dynasty.^ Through an intensified program of
Japanization or imperialization, known as \omin\a, from the late 1930s,
the colonial government achieved a degree of hegemonic control over the
Taiwanese population "a weak hegemony," "because only the educated
upper Taiwanese class identified with kpminka.. The rest of the population
remained marginalized, outside hegemonic control."'''
Interestingly, the historical repression of the KMT government and the
current military threat from the Chinese mainland seem to have revived the
ghost oikpminka today, even in the absence of Japanese colonial power. Fear
of repression by two different Chinese regimes has retrospectively "enslaved"
the Taiwanese (like Duosang, protagonist of A Borrowed Life) to Japan
much more effectively than the "weak hegemony" of the well-planned wartime kpminka movement. If nostalgia for the Japanese colonial period has a
broader retrospective appeal among the Taiwanese of Duosang's generation
than it has historically, ironically, this has more to do with the Nationalists'
accusation of Taiwanese "enslavement" at the initial stage of their power
than with the success ohpminka, which was largely limited to the educated
upper class." This partly explains why Taiwan is the only former colony in
which this nostalgia is publicly professed.
Japan did not treat Korea much differently than Taiwan and faced the
same problems in both colonies. Though Japan needed to distinguish itself
from its Asian neighbors, which it achieved by emphasizing its cultural
superiority through a close association with modernity and/or the West, it
also needed to appear in solidarity with Asia for the good of the Greater
East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere naturally as the region's indispensable
leader. As Mark Caprio reminds us, "The Japanese repeatedly listed their
similarities with Koreans as the primary reason why they could integrate
(rather colonize) Koreans."'^ Further, as in Taiwan, Japanese colonization
contributed to Korea's modernization: "Colonial industrialization altered
not only the physical appearance of the peninsula, but the social landscape
as well," by helping Korea to create "a new urban intelligentsia, a small core
of white-collar managers and technicians, and a modern labor force."'^
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Japanese colonization bas also played an important role in tbe formation of cultural and national identity tbrougb Soutb Korean cinema. Unlike
Taiwanese representations, bowever, Soutb Korean cinema unwaveringly
portrays its colonial bistory as negative, representing Japan as an oppressive
otber tbat Korean patriots beroically resisted. In the early 1960s and 1970s,
Manchurian action film, a popular genre in Korea, portrayed the struggles
of Korean guerrillas resisting the powerful Japanese military in Manchuria.
Through these struggles in a Japanese-occupied Chinese territory, which
Koreans claimed as their own, such films valorized the nationalism and
masculinity of guerrilla fighters.'"* This portrayal has remained influential
in contemporary films, including the 2002 blockbuster 200g Lost Mmoires.
Tbe biggest action film in tbe bistory of Soutb Korean cinema, 200c Lost
Mmoires displaced Mancburian action patbos witb a time-travel science fiction setting, in wbicb anti-Japanese resistance was tbe ancbor of national
identity formation. Soutb Korea's negative representation of its colonial bistory is sbared by otber former colonies, sucb as Nortb Korea, Mancburia,
and parts of Soutb Asia; tbe nostalgia tbat prevails in contemporary Taiwanese cinema is a marked exception. Wby does colonial bistory enjoy sucb
a positive representation in Taiwan.? Tbe answer bas more to do witb current Taiwanese politics tban witb bistorical reality.
j.
Post New Cinema directors bave cbanged tbe representation of Japanese colonialism in Taiwan, and positive portrayals of Japan bave played an
important role in tbeir films since tbe release of tbe landmark City of Sadness {Beiching chengshi) in 1989. Wu Nien-jen and Hou Hsiao-bsien were
pioneers in tbis postcurfew transformation, as was Edward Yang, wbo portrays tbe lives of mainlanders in his urban films. June Yip perceives tbis
change as an attempt "to move beyond tbe anticolonial strategy of defining a
native self against a dominant foreign otber."'^ Yip offers a complex picture
of Taiwan as a cosmopolitan consumer society, but sbe overlooks political
factors. The persistent return of the image of Japan serves less to deconstruct
"the binarisms of classical nationalism"'^ tban to divide two political factions: tbose wbo identify with an abstract sense of "Cbineseness," and tbose
wbo promote Taiwan's independence.'^ In tbis context, positive portrayal
of the colonial experience results from both "postideological consumerism"
and a new form of politicization.
769
Wu Nien-jen and A Borrowed Life
Although Wu Nien-jen directed just two feature films, he played a crucial

role in the New Cinema movement as its most prolific screenwriter, as well
as promoter and occasional actor.'^ He wrote the screenplays for City of Sadness and Puppetmaster {Ximeng rensheng, 7993), two of Hou Hsiao-hsien's
trilogy that started the trend of positively representing the Japanese colonial period. In City of Sadness, even Japanese interpreters were shocked by
the degree of idealization of Japanese culture in the film's representation of
every detail related to Japan: music, cherry flowers, and swords.'^
A Borrowed Life is a biography of Wu's father, whom he calls Duosang
("father" in Japanese), a miner who struggled to support his family on a meager salary. Born in 1929, Duosang identified with Japanese colonial culture;
as the film shows, his "enslavement" had more to do with his fortune after
Japan's retrocession of Taiwan than with his experience under Japanese rule.
If colonial rule had continued past his adolescence, Duosang would likely
have settled into a middle-class lifestyle as a pharmacist, having just begun
his training at the moment of transition. But because several mainlanders
saw him publicly commemorate victims executed by the Nationalists during
the incident of February 28, Duosang was forced to flee from his apprenticeship to a remote area. His Japanese-language high-school education was no
longer useful in Mandarin-speaking Taiwan. With few choices left to earn
a livelihood, Duosang turned to mining. Thus the transition from Japanese
rule to that of the Nationalist government demoted Duosang from middle
to laboring class, as was the case for many Taiwanese of his generation.
Although the Nationalist government considered Japan a bte noire in
postwar Taiwan, Duosang remained attached to the colonial past: in the
film, he speaks to his buddies in Japanese, curses in Japanese, visits a geisha
house, and watches Japanese films. His friends call him Seiga, a Taiwanese
version of his Japanese name, while his family members address bim as
Duosang. Frequently unemployed, Duosang becomes addicted to gambling.
His lack of economic power diminishes his authority in the household, and
his fetishism of Japan often puts him at odds with his children, who have
been educated in the anti-Japanese political culture of the Nationalist government. Like many who worked in the mining industry, he suffered from
positions 19:3
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770
black lung disease, contracted at age fifty-three. He retired two years later
and dreamed of visiting the Japanese imperial palace and Mount Fuji. But
before he could take this trip, he leaped out the window of his hospital
room, to avoid being hooked to life support.
A Borrowed Life enjoyed critical international acclaim^^ and generated
highly emotional responses among some Taiwanese.^' Though (auto)biographical, like much of New Cinema,^^ Wu's film differs from its peers
in the director's claim to its political significance. In an interview, Wu links
his father's suffering to that of former President Lee Teng-hui; both men
mastered Mandarin only poorly, though it became the official language in
Taiwan under Nationalist rule in 1945. Wu remarks, "It could also be a
story about President Lee Teng-hui" or a collective memory of "this body
of people represented by Lee's generation."^^ According to Wu, Lee suffers similar discrimination by the Taiwanese media because of his language
handicap.^''
In fact, although Lee Teng-hui and Wu's father may have shared a language barrier, their experiences during the colonial period were far from
similar. Before the end of the Second World War, Lee had studied at Kyoto
University on a Japanese scholarship, while Duosang only dreamed of visiting the Imperial Palace as a retired Taiwanese miner. Their class origins
differed. Born to an aristocratic family in 1923, Lee completed his professional training in Japanese at the age of twenty-two, while Duosang, born
six years later to a lower middle-class family, could not complete his apprenticeship as an adolescent owing to changes in political culture. While Lee
could identify with Japanese colonialism as an upper-class adult and a true
beneficiary of the Japanese educational and economic system, Duosang suffered from the colonial legacy as a lower-class adolescent.
Not surprisingly, Duosang's actual experience during Japanese occupation is virtually absent in the film. This lack of reference to factual history creates a void filled by his emotional attachment or "sadness of being
Taiwanese" to borrow a well-known expression from Lee Teng-hui.
This sadness is about not the lost Japanese colonial past but "the loss itself
as object" the objet petit a par excellence.^5 The Japanese government, for
its part, has shown little nostalgia for its former colony; indeed, "Japan has
been extremely cautious and maintained a reserved stand about 'official'
Tcinglin I A Cinemafic Parallax Y\ev/
771
contact with Taiwan" to avoid offending "Beijing's hypersensitivity."^*^ Paradoxically, thanks to this indifference, Japan can fill the void as a sublime
object of ideology in the formation of Taiwanese identity by generating a
range of emotions, mostly associated with suffering.
Duosang's ostensive attachment to Japanese culture conflicted with mainstream ideology. He resented the new political system (as shown in his commemoration of its victims) and blamed it for taking away his potential for a
comfortable career as a pharmacist. Like his resentment, his pro-Japanese
gestures would not register in the new symbolic order and appeared meaningless even in the eyes of his children. Three decades later, however, his
once-idiosyncratic identification with this history becomes the norm (at least,
in Wu's film) through which the collective majority is defined. As Wu states,
"When you attack Lee [Teng-hui], you attack the Taiwanese psyche."^^ We
should not forget that by the time the film was made. Lee had been president for six years. By contextualizing his father's reminiscence of the colonial past within the politics of Taiwan in the 1990s, Wu rationalized his
father's emotional memory; the father's unsymbolizable gesture has become
politically meaningful.
fi. Reversed Father-Son Hierarchy
Wu's voice-over in Mandarin serves as an apparently neutral commentator.

The tone encourages the audience to identify with Duosang's position by
giving it a "transparent" representation. In the film, however, Wu's attitude
toward his father seems to change during his passage from childhood to
adolescence, as the elder son of the family. Like his siblings, as a child Wenjian (Nien-jen) does not truly respect his father. At one point, he writes a
letter to the local police to denounce his father's gambling addiction. When
Duosang beats him, he not only refuses to apologize but curses Duosang to
his face in front of neighbors. A man in the crowd describes Wenjian as a
potential spy for the Nationalist Party, since he starts denouncing people at
such a young age, at which point his father hits him so hard his son almost
loses his vision.
The cultural and political changes brought about by the Nationalist
government create a disconnect between father and son, who use different
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772
frames to interpret reality: the past of Japanese colonization and the present of the Nationalist government. In this confrontation, the son chooses
to employ written Chinese, the quintessential medium of Chinese culture,
while his father resorts to physical violence. Their means of expression
frame their discord: the father cannot read Chinese, whereas the son cannot respond to his father with violence because of Confucian values. Their
relationship, however, is more complicated than simple opposition: "The
parallax is not symmetrical, composed of two incompatible perspectives on
the same X: there is an irreducible asymmetry between the two perspectives, a minimal reflexive twist. We do not have two perspectives, we have a
perspective and what eludes it, and the other perspective fills in this void of
what we could not see from the first perspective."^^
Like the discord hetween father and son in the film, the neutral reality
of the colonial past does not exist; it depends on the perspective that fills the
void, the space of fantasy for the collective unconscious, as "our knowing of
reality is embedded in reality itself "2? Its ambiguity has made the colonial
past into the objet petit a, which eludes any attempt at symbolization. At
the same time, the symbolic order cannot avoid being negatively shaped by
iteither in anti-Japanese propaganda during Nationalist rule or in the'
pro-Japanese rearticulation of Taiwanese identity after the democratization of the late 1980s. Wu gradually renounces the framework provided by
Nationalist ideology; the void is filled by Duosang's perspective, but only
through negation namely, his suffering. In the film, this suffering takes
a positive role and coincides with contemporary mainstream ideology. This
politics has become the background of "the other perspective," which "fills
in this void of what we could not see from the first perspective."^"
The physical conflict between father and son results in the son's (temporary) blurred vision, which then leads to their reconciliation and Wu's
acceptance of his father's frame as part of his reality. At this point in the
film, the father's physical punishment undermines the son's vision, but also,
more importantly, the father's suffering. The narrator/son brings a lunchbox to Duosang and discovers his bleeding foot. Despite the son's warning,
Duosang continues to push his heavy trolley, as he encourages Wenjian to
study hard to avoid the same fate. After lunch, his father is so tired that he
falls asleep on a bench in the open air, his legs trembling. When it rains.
Tonglin I A Cinematic Parollax View
773
Wu stands in front of bis fatber to protect bim witb a raincoat. From tbis
moment, be shows more sympathy toward his father. To an extent, father
and son exchange roles: the son no longer looks for paternal authority, but
be bas become bis fatber's protector. Tbe two men are bound by a sense of
loss. Wu's film expresses bis desire to see from Duosang's perspective, but
tbe colonial past remains invisible even in tbe bigbly visual media of cinema.
Breaking tbe spell of official culture does not make tbe fatber's vision visible
to bis son; it only allows Wu to "feel" bis fatber's suffering, bis emotional
and physical pain. What ultimately makes visible Duosang's vision is its
connection witb President Lee Teng-bui, symbol of contemporary political
culture par excellence.
Negation, Loss, and the Absence of Paternal Authority
Tbe discontinuity of Duosang's beritage, brougbt about by tbe rapid transition from tbe defeated colonial government to tbe Nationalist Party, perverted tbe fatber-son relationsbip. Instead of probibiting tbe son to disobey
tbe fatber, for Lacan, paternal autbority, tbe non(m) du pre (tbe name,
or tbe no, of tbe fatber), probibits following tbe fatber's example, a quality
tbat tbe Confucian tradition considers an indispensable component of filial
pity. In tbis case, tbe name of the father is used to deny the father's place in
bis son's life. As a result, tbe fatber becomes "an excessive object, an object
tbat lacks its place in tbe structure."^' Instead of creating a fantasy space for
the son, the father's impotence forces tbe son to occupy tbe fatber's position:
be replaces bim as tbe family breadwinner. Later, bis motber invites tbe
teenage Wenjian to discuss tbe possibility of moving away from tbe mining
town, excluding bis sister and fatber from tbe discussion. Wben Wenjian
asks wby sbe doesn't include Duosang, bis motber contemptuously responds
tbat be doesn't bring money to tbe bousebold anyway. Because of bis lack
of financial power, Duosang is infantilized and feminized, kept from bis
family's decision-making circle along witb bis daugbter. In Duosang's case,
paternal autbority can only exist as self-negation.
Powerful or powerless, Duosang bas not sbown at tbis point mucb desire
to support bis family. He lets tbe six-year-old Wu sit alone in a tbeatre to
watcb a boring Japanese rhelodrama so tbat be may visit a geisha house. He
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774
would have drowned his youngest son if his wife had not come to rescue
him, because the baby's incessant cry frustrated the jobless Duosang. He
borrows money from a pawnshop, while gambling away the earnings meant
for family groceries. Only his suffering redeems his shortcomings: his pain
relieves him from responsibility. Near the end of the film, Duosang hides
in the bathroom to eat cake, despite diabetic medical restrictions. When
his grandson discovers the transgression, the family searches his pockets,
reprimanding him. This scene angers Duosang, who has become more of a
child than his grandson.
Turning the father into a helpless child does several things. Duosang
is forgiven for having privileged his own gratifications above his family's
needs (because a child is supposed to be narcissistic); he has also become
the representative of his generation of Taiwanese. Using the metaphor of a
helpless child to portray Taiwan can be traced back to The Orphan of Asia
(Yaxiya deguer), Wu Zholiu's well-known novel written during the Japanese
occupation, in which the protagonist is abandoned by both tbe Japanese
and Cbinese governments. Wu Nien-jen portrays the Taiwanese people
as helpless children in his cowritten screenplay for A City of Sadness: "The
Taiwanese are the most pitiful. Nobody cares about us; nobody loves us;
everyone tries to oppress and humiliate us."^^ Wu has also compared the
relationship of his father's generation to the Japanese colonizers to a child's
relationship to his or her mother.^^ Through the metaphor of helpless child,
Duosang becomes an image of the Taiwanese people. At the same time, the
negative quality implied in this father-son reversal transforms the name of
the fathernon(m) du pre into non-pre, exposing the void of paternal
authority.
The same can be said about Japanese colonial power. Like Duosang,
Japan has never been a good parental figure, baving used Taiwan to support
its own strategic, e'conomic, and military interests.^'' Duosang's emotional
attacbment to the colonial past proves the success of the kpminha program "to
transform colonial peoples into loyal subjects in preparation for the war."^'
This residual influence was ironically reinforced by tbe Nationalist government through its initial policy of discriminating against the Taiwanese.
Kominâ. solicited loyalty from colonial subjects by giving them equality
not to live but to die as subjects of the Japanese emperor.^^ But this helated
775
success benefits no one. Postwar Japan no longer needs such blind loyalty
not even from "authentic" Japanese. Duosang acts just like "the Japanese
soldier who spent decades in the jungle after the war ended, awaiting orders
from his superiors,"^'' not because be benefited from the colonial regime, but
because his attachment to a fictional past anchors his resistance to Nationalist ideology.
After Duosang's death, Wenjian carries his ashes to Japan, to realize his
father's lifelong dream posthumously. The Japanese customs officer, however, is puzzled by the action, instead of appreciating Duosang's passion
for the country.^ The officer's reaction reveals the one-sidedness of Duosang's attachment; it is meaningless in the symbolic system of the fantasized
"motherland." Like Duosang's relationships with his family members in life,
Japan, the projected parental figure, persists in indifference toward its former colony.^5 Japan occupies a fantasy space in Taiwan's collective memory
largely because any concrete attachment to its former colony remains conspicuously absent. Both Duosang and the Japanese colonial power occupy
the position of the Big Other through negation."""
>nctimization. Superego, and the Chinese Community
The parallactic shift from emotional trauma to the glorification of an ideology is not new in this context. The reification of past suffering as a process
of identification has often justified the dominant ideology in Chinese communities. For example, Maoist China practiced "telling bitterness" {sulû)
as an important part of political education. The suffering of the oppressed
class in China supposedly reinforced loyalty to Communist ideology and the
new Chinese nation. Further, it is not unusual for the image of Japan to play
an important role in Asian countries. Because Japan was the only colonial
power in modern Asia, its images have been associated with suffering, and
thus with constructions of identities in various Asian cultures, including
Chinese-language cultures.
This usage of Japanese colonial history was largely responsible for the
moral judgment implied in the division between Taiwanese and mainlanders. Since its exile, the Nationalist government used the Sino-Japanese war
to politicize this division. The reified history of suffering of mainlanders
during the war suppressed the allegedly enslaved Taiwanese, regardless of

their own victimization by Japan for half a century. This imposed meaning of suffering by the Nationalist government has actually contrihuted to
reversing the emotional memory of the Taiwanese of Duosang's generation,
hecause they suffered from its divisive consequences.
Formation of Taiwanese cultural identity and reinterpretation of colonial
history are separate phenomena, hetween which suffering is the only apparent link. The dependency of dominant ideology on the reinterpretation
of historical suffering is a transcendental illusion par excellence. Political
regimes, more often than not, have reinterpreted colonial suffering to create
and reinforce a senseless ethnic division between Chinese and Taiwanese,
which serves the interests of the ruling regime. Thus instead of starting the
process of healing, this reinterpretation of Japan's invasion and subsequent
colonialization generates a vicious circle of suffering.
In Chinese-language communities, suffering and identity formation
are intertwined. During the last two centuries, most memhers of Chinesespeaking populations have been victims of historical events. Historical suffering has often served as an important justification for the current political regime in power. This connection between power and suffering has
implicitly or explicitly promoted a rhetoric of suffering as an anchorage to
reconfigure cultural identity. Rey Chow calls this connection "the logic of
wound.'""
The history of suffering has played a crucial role in dividing Taiwanese
and mainlanders, a division that is unsymbolizable in some cases. A majority of Taiwanese and mainlanders are ethnically Chinese, regardless of the
false division based on provincial originsshengji, which denotes whether
a family migrated from the mainland before or after 1945. Without this
questionable chronological division, even provincial origins would not have
distinguished the two groups, and nearly all Taiwanese {benshengren) would
be considered mainlanders {wenshengren), except for local indigenous people.
At the same time, most "mainland" Taiwanese were born in Taiwan or have
lived on the island for decades. Thus they also could be considered "Taiwanese." After having divided on a vague and problematic notion of ethnicity,
the two groups have lived together for six decades on the same island; yet,
"ethnicity is everywhere; it's deeply rooted in everyone's mind" as Wu
777
Nien-jen points out,'*^ largely because identity formation has been so closely
associated with the meanings imposed on historical suffering by a political
regime.
Chen Kuan-hsing, a cultural critic whose family came from the mainland
in the late 1940s, concludes an article on A Borrowed Life with this statement:
"In my view, this is the key to understanding the difference: 'colonialism'
does not seem to exist in the structure of historical memory for Waishengren
(mainlanders), just as 'Cold War' does not occupy a central place in that
of benshengren (Taiwanese). If historical reality is that these two populations have to go on living together, 'reconciliation' would only be possible by
establishing mutual recognition of the historical trajectories of each other's
histories of 'suffering.' "'^^
If reconciliation must be based on mutual recognition of historical suffering, the question remains: what should each side recognize in the other's
suffering.? Must they measure suffering to reconcile.? Does the meaning of
suffering always imply ideological domination.? Political discourses in Chinese communities during the last century have excelled at imposing meanings on collective suffering. Reconciliation between Taiwanese and mainlanders cannot be achieved through a newly imposed meaning of suffering,
but rather through recognition of the arbitrariness of tbose meanings that
both sides currently take as their own. As a result, suffering can no longer
serve as the foundation for a division that only serves dominant ideology,
while reinforcing division among related groups.
Ilotes
1. Slavoj Zizek, The Parallax View (Camhridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 4.
2. Wu Nien-jen, Chang Shu A and V Production, Taiwan, 1994.
3. Ping-Hui Liao and David Der-wei Wang, eds., Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule
i8g^- ig4: History, Culture, Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 10.
4. General Bai Chongxi's words after the incident of February 28, 1948; Lin Qixu,/4 Synthetic
Study of the February 28 Incident in Taiwan (Taiwan ererba shijian zonghe yaNienjeniu) (Long
Island, NY: Taiwan Tribune, 1984), 180.
5. Etienne Balibar, "Racism and Nationalism," in Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein,
Race, Nation: Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), 60.
6. In the 1950s and 1960s, Taiwan produced few films. Besides a great deal of anticommu-
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
773
nist propaganda and "sanitary realism," other propaganda was anti-Japanese, including
Blacl{ List {Heimingdan, dir. Chen Rui, the Ministry of Defense, 1950); Bloody Battle (Xue
zhan, dir. Tian Shen, Zhongyihang Studio, 1957); Four Heroic Spies (Diehai si zhuangshi,
dir. Wang Liuzhao and Tang Huang, Dianfan Studio, 1962); and The Sacrifice of Heroes in
the Heart of Enemies (Dihou zhuangshi xue, dir. Wang Yin, Tiannan Studio, 1962). See Du
Yunzhi, The Cinematic History of China (Zhongguo dianying shi), vol. 3 (Taipei: Shangwu
yishuguan, 1972).
7. Leo Ching, Becoming "Japanese": Colonial Taiwan and the Politics of Identity Formation
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 66.
8. Stefan Tansika, Japan's Orient: Rending the Pasts into History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), II-13.
9. Christopher Howe, "Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: Model or Victim? Development
Problems in a Small Asian Economy," in Richard Louis Edmonds and Steven M. Goldstein,
eds., Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: A Retrospective View, The China Quarterly Special
Issues, New Series, No. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 40.
10. Fong Sbiaw-chian, "Hegemony and Identity in the Colonial Experience of Taiwan,
1895-1949," in Liao and Wang, Taiwan under Japanese Colonial Rule, ly^.
11. Ibid.
12. Mark Caprio, Japanese Assimilation Policies in Colonial Korea: igio-1^4^ (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 2009), 7.
13. Carter Eckert, Offspring of Empire: The Koch'ang Kims and the Colonial Origins of Korean
Capitalism i8y6- i4^ (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 253.
14. Jinsoo An, "The Ambivalence of tbe Nationalist Struggle in Deterritorialized Space: Tbe
Case of South Korea's Manchurian Action Film," China Information, Fall 2010.
15. June Yip, Envisioning Taiwan: Fiction, Cinema, and the Nation in the Cultural Imaginary
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 66.
16. Ibid., 66.
17. C\xng, Becoming "Japanese," 61 ii.
18. Darrell W. Davis, "A New Taiwan Person? A Conversation with Wu Nien-chen,"/>O/on.f;
east asia cultures critique 11 (Winter 2003): 730.
19. Liao Binghui (Ping-hui), "The Deaf-Mute Photographer" ("Jilong yuyan de sheyingshi"),
in Mi Zou and Liang Xinhua, eds.. The Death of New Cinema (Xin dianying zhisi) (Taipei:
Tangshan chubanshi, 1991), 130.
20. Martin Scorsese considers Wu's film the third best film of tbe 1990s. Martin Scorsese, foreword to Micbael Berry, Speaking in Images: Interviews with Contemporary Chinese Filmmal{ers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), vii.
21. "Wu Nien-jen: Writing Taiwan in the Shadow of Cultural Colonialism," in Berry, Speaking
in Images, 312.
22. Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh and Darrell William Davis, Taiwan Film Directors: A Treasure Island
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 146-50.
Tcinglin I A Cinematic Parallax View
779
23. Davis, "New Taiwan Person?" 721.

24. Ibid., 722.
25. izek. Parallax View, 62.
26. Soeya Yoshihide, "Taiwan in lapan's Security Considerations," in Richard Louis Edmonds
and Steven M. Goldstein, eds., Taiwan in the Twentieth Century: A Retrospective View, The
China Quarterly Special Issues, New Series, No. i (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2001), 146.
28. izek. Parallax View, 29.
29. Ibid., 28.
30. Ibid.
31.
32.
33.
34.
Ibid., 122.
A City of Sadness, dir. Hou Hsiao-hsien, Taiwan, 1989.
Davis, "New Taiwan Person?" 722.
Cheng Tun-jen, "Transform Taiwan's Economic Structure in the Twentieth Century," in
Richard Louis Edmonds and Steven M. Goldstein, eds., Taiwan in the Twentieth Century:
A Retrospective View, The China Quarterly Special Issues, New Series, No. i (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), 20-24.
35. Cbing, Becoming "Japanese," 92.

36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
Ibid., 94.
Davis, "New Taiwan Person?" 725.
Wu Nien-jen, Dousang (A Borrowed Life) (Taipei: Maitian Wenxue, 1994), 23-24.
Yoshihide, "Taiwan in Japan's Security Considerations," 146.
According to Lacan, the Big Other occupies tbe space of ultimate reference in a symbolic
order. This space of social authority, is, in tbe end, empty. The Big Other, or le non(m)
du pre, results from the internalized sense of guilt of the rebellious son toward his cruel
and obscene primordial father. Out of culpability, tbe internalized name of the dead father
becomes more powerful for his guilty descendants than it was during his lifetime, as the
fundamental prohibition (no, or the law) on which civilization is founded. The Big Other, as
the empty space bebind the curtain, is necessarily inconsistent. Slavoj izek. Sublime Object
of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).
41. Rey Chow, "Introduction: On Cbineseness as a Theoretical Problem," Boundary 2 25 (1998):

3-10.

43. Kuan-bsing Chen, "A Borrowed Life in Banana Paradise: De-Cold War/Decolonization, or
Modernity in Its Tears," in Chris Berry and Feli Lu, eds.. Island on the Edge: Taiwan New
Cinema and After (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2005), 52-53.
Ib Reverse Our Premise with the Perverse Core:

H Response to Zizek's "Theology" in Chinese Context
Yang Huilin
Translated by Yizhong Gu
In recent years, the interaction between Christian theology and the humanities has drawn attention in Chinese academia. Scholarly works such as Critical Terms for Religious Studies and Radical Orthodoxy: A New Theology have
generated huge responses, and theological debates between leftist intellectuals and Western Marxists have proven provocative.'
Admittedly, Chinese academia is a fairly nonreligious context. The accumulated research into theological subjects of the past thirty years has not
burgeoned from a seminary system, but from the humanities and social science departments in universities. Such academic theology is distinct from
popular theology, subaltern theology, feminist theology, or black theology; Western scholars have led discussions on such phenomena under the
rubric of "Cultural Christians."^ Indeed, debate has persisted over whether
academic theology should even be categorized as theology an issue that
stands out in Chinese academia.
positions 19:3 Doi 10.1215/10679847-1369307
782
However, once theology is unrestricted by religious belief, it can create

the intellectual space for considering fundamental issues of cultural identity,
value systems, and meaning generation.^ This is precisely why theological
studies can be independently developed in universities. When Slavoj izek
investigates theology beyond the Christian tradition, he confronts similar
challenges to those faced by Chinese scholars. For that reason. The Fragile
Absolute and The Puppet and the Dwarf have drawn considerahle attention
in China.
Interestingly, the negative thinking of Christian theology has a counterpart in classical Chinese thought. A basic element of wisdom, negative
thinking has long been fundamental to the Chinese tradition of dialectical
thought, alerting us to the limitations of subjectivity and language. Western humanities, however, may reject processes of self-emptying or kenosis
(Philippians 2:7), which has led to difficulties of subjectivity and language
in modern philosophy. While it is hard to pinpoint a precise English translation for Derrida's account of "Comment ne pas parler,"'^ analogous phrases
can easily be found in Chinese classics, such as l ^ ^ W {zhizhe buyan. He
who knows the Tao does not speak about it, he who is ever ready to speak
about it does not know it)' or :^S.^ {dabian buyan. The great argument
does not require words).^ "ZiieXCs reverse or dialectical thinking on theology
thus resonates in Chinese academia.
All izekian reflections bear the mark of alterity, which renders his works
both attractive and easily misread. For example, in the preface to The izek^
Reader, Zizek frankly admits, "I am well aware that for many a reader the
main attraction of my work resides in the way the theoretical line of argumentation is sustained by numerous examples from cinema and popular
culture, by jokes and political anecdotes often dangerously approaching the
very limits of good taste this is the main reason why reviewers repeatedly
characterize my style as 'postmodern.' " izek's attention is drawn to the following question: "Where do I stand with regard to the present theoretical
imbroglio in which deconstruction and the cognitive sciences, the tradition
of the Frankfurt school and that of Heideggerian phenomenology. New
Age obscurantism and new historicism, fight for hegemony.?" He generalizes the "present theoretical imbroglio" into four types of "commonplaces,"
and then claims that "[his] gesture is the exact opposite."''
Huilin I To Reverse Our Premise with the Perverse Core
783
If we follow Zizek's own explanation, perverse (with its variations perversion, perverseness, and the pervert) becomes the essential key word. Is this
perverse part of the legacy of Christian tradition.? Does it offer a critique of
postmodernism.? To address these questions, we need first to restore theological meaning to the term.
Radical Orthodoxy, an essay collection edited by John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, is the foremost contemporary theological work related to izek's thought.^ Although theologians who advocate
radical orthodoxy would oppose izek's claims in many respects, radical
orthodox theology also involves a perversion namely, a theology that is
manifested in a nontheological manner in processes of secular modernity.
Compared with traditional theologies. Radical Orthodoxy shifts the focus to
secular experience in the modern world. Language, nihilism, desire, eroticism, bodies, the city, and aesthetics are the major issues of the book, which
is subtitled "A New Theology."
In Western history of the spirit, the construction of a "new theology"
through secular experience has been linked to a literary imagination and
has often been regarded as heterodox or even insane. Jubilate Agno (Rejoice
in the Lamb), by eighteenth-century English poet Christopher Smart, is a
case in point. In this poem, all the letters from A to Z are associated with
certain spirits, and further equated with God. For example, "for T is truth
and therefore he is God. . . . For U is union and therefore he is God." Radical Orthodoxy cites as its epigraph the following line from the poem: "X has
the power of three and therefore he is God." Milbank mentions Christopher
Smart, who was locked in a lunatic asylum when he composed the poem,
in the book's acknowledgments: "We hope that what we have written is not
foreign to the spirit of Ralph Cudworth and Christopher Smart."'
The "spirit of Christopher Smart" regards letters or God as symbols
manifesting some kind of spirit. It sounds appalling, but it is not necessarily
heterodox from a contemporary theological perspective. When Karl Barth
discusses the Bible, he also considers it to be "only a sign, indeed . . . the sign
of a sign."' It seems that Milbank quotes Smart's poem to reclaim the legitimacy of a reciprocal interpretation between theology and the humanities.
With the ultimate goal of "return[ing] theology to the center of contemporary critical debate," the book lays out four propositions: "i) secular moder-
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
734
nity is tbe creation of a perverse tbeology; 2) setting reason in opposition to

revelation is a modern corruption; 3) all tbougbt tbat brackets out God is
ultimately nibilistic; and 4) tbe material and temporal realms of bodies, sex,
art, and sociality, wbicb modernity claims to value, can truly be upbeld only
by acknowledging tbeir participation in tbe transcendent.""
For Milbank and bis collaborators, tbe new tbeology is perverse because
modernity manifests tbeology in a nontbeological manner. Corruption exists
because modern tbinkers consider reason to be incompatible witb revelation.
All tbougbt becomes nibilistic, because bracketing out God means bracketing out everytbing of significance. Secular experience is no longer only
secular wben it addresses values in tbe contemporary world. Tbus contemporary issues can be situated witbin a tbeological framework, and "aestbetics, politics, sex, tbe body, personbood, visibility, space" all tbese "sites in
wbicb secularism bas invested beavily" can be reinterpreted "in terms of
tbe Trinity, Cbristology, tbe Cburcb and tbe Eucbarist."'^
Wbetber or not izek bas ever paid attention to tbis "new tbeology,"
I argue tbat The Puppet and the Dwarf is a response to tbe problematic as
sucb.'^ As early as 1997, Milbank mentioned izek in footnotes; Grabam
Ward, anotber key figure advocating radical ortbodoxy, debated witb izek
on tbeological issues in a scbolarly work publisbed in 2000.''' In a 2009 collection of essays, izek's arguments and Milbank's discussion are apparently
put into direct dialogue." Wbereas Milbank considers secular modernity
to be a perverse tbeology, izek argues tbat tbere is no tbeology tbat is
not perverse, because tbe fundamental value of Cbristianity lies precisely in
"tbe perverse core." According to Milbank, "Wbat matters is not so mucb
tbat Zizek is endorsing a demytbologized, disencbanted Cbristianity . . .
as tbat be is offering in tbe end a beterodox version of Cbristian belief"
Zizek refutes bim: "My claim is that it is Milbank wbo is effectively guilty
of beterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am
more Christian than Milbank."'^
As "a materialist tbrougb and tbrougb,"'^ Zizek certainly does not intend
to situate secular experience witbin a tbeological frame. For bim, sucb an
effort would only lead to a "post-secular Messianic turn"'^ or a new lease
on life for tbeology.'^ izek bas always beld different opinions on fasbionable tbeological terms, sucb as deep spirituality, ontotheology, and Otherness.
Huilin I To Reverse Our Premise witb tbe Perverse Core
785
Although his ideas are as sensational as Milbank's, tbe two scholars take different approaches to the concept of the perverse. For izek, the perverse core
of Christianity not only results in a perverse epistemological logic but offers
a perverse interpretation of theology itself Thus, he claims, "the subversive
kernel of Christianity is accessible . . . only to a materialist approach and
vice versa: to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through
the Christian experience."^^ Such radical expression finds a counterpart in
Gilles Deleuze's argument that "modern dialectics is the truly Christian
ideology"^' an anti-Cartesian position that izek values highly. In this
vein, the izekian perverse neither manifests theology in a nontheological
manner nor opposes theology within the boundary of theological discourse,
but lies witbin a dialectical logic.
Following izek's claim in the subtitle of The Fragile Absolute, why is
the Christian legacy worth fighting for.? Where is the perverse element of
the core of Christianity.? I argue that izek's fundamental thought (and,
by extension, contemporary Western thought) hinges on these two questions, izek's essay, "The Structure and Its Event," provides a key to the
answers.
"The Structure and Its Event" is not an easy chapter to read, and the
existing Chinese translation is even more confusing. It is, however, crucial
to izek's theological premise. From the concept of "in-hetween" the
transformation from "the being of man" to "his position among beings"^^
izek teases out Benjamin's paradox: "The Messianic promise of a revolutionary Act. . . will retroactively redeem the Past itself: the present revolution will retroactively realize the crushed longings of the past, failed revolutionary attempts."^^ However, if the revolution is restored to its place as
the pursuit of the Real, therein lies a Lacanian puzzle: "what comes first,
the signifier or some deadlock in the Real.?"^'' izek examines the relationship between the structure and the event to explain the "impossible real" as
a deadlock. The incompatibility between the symbolic and natural orders
brings out an external trutb that "provokes us to think"25 and makes possible our pursuit of tbe Real. The subject can tbus only be deconstructed and
reconstructed in the position of "in-between," and the pursuit of the Real
will eventually negate the premise of the subject itself izek argues.
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
786
This means that the relationship between the Structure and its Event
is indeterminable. On the one hand, the Event is the impossible Real of
a structure, of its synchronous symbolic order, the engendering violent
gesture which brings about the legal Order that renders this very gesture retroactively "illegal," relegating it to the spectral repressed status of
something that can never be fully acknowledged-symbolized-confessed.
In short, the synchronous structural Order is a kind of defense-formation
against its grounding Event which can be discerned only in the guise of
a mythical spectral narrative. On the other hand, one can also claim the
exact opposite: is not the status of this Event itself (the mythical narrative of the primordial violent founding gesture) ultimately fantasmatic;
is not a fantasy-construction destined to account for the unaccountable
(the origins of the Order) by concealing, rendering invisible, the Real
of the structural antagonism (deadlock, impossibility) that prevents the
structural synchronous Order from achieving its balance.'' . . . The loop is
therefore perfect: the Structure can function only through the occultation
of the violence of its founding Event, yet the very narrative of this Event
is ultimately nothing but a fantasy destined to resolve the debilitating
antagonism/inconsistency of the structuring/synchronous Order. So,
again, one has to distinguish between the impossible Real of the "timeless"
antagonism and the fantasmatic primordially repressed narrative which
serves as the unacknowledged yet necessary spectral supplement.^^
A close reading of this long quotation reveals a series of concepts that
derive their origins from the notions of structure and event. The relationship between them (the structure and its event) indicates that the event is
the foundation of the structure and the origin of order. The grounding
event and the impossible real reveal the essence of the event, and the legal
order that renders the event illegal. Because of the antagonistic relationship
between the event and the symbolized, structured, and synchronized order,
the event must remain unacknowledged to "account for the unaccountable."
Such antagonism is both structural and debilitating: the event, defended by
the structure, is a fantasy-construction. This fact renders the relationship
between the two indeterminable. Thus the Real only exists in a deadlock,
in impossibility.
787
To further investigate this perfect loop, we can put all those dense concepts into two categories. The first includes the impossible real, the primordial violent founding gesture,^^ the grounding event (or the founding event),
and the unaccountahle as the origins of order. The second category involves
the synchronous symbolic order, the synchronous structural order, and the
structuring/synchronous order. On the one hand, there exist the orders that
conceal and defend the founding event; on the other, there is a mystical and
spectral narrative of the founding event.
Synthesizing these two categories reveals that izek's fundamental concern lies in the generative and primordial event the impossible real that
is defended and repressed, concealed and self-concealing. The concept of
the structure indicates the synchronous, symbolic, and structural order and
its governing narrative. Simply put, these two categories reveal the contrast
and correspondence between the founding event and the order; between the
impossible real and the narrative of the Real.
The "unacknowledged yet necessary" spectral narrative is not the analogy that has appeared in theological discussions since Thomas Aquinas.^s
For izek, the narrative of the event "maintain(s) a fidelity to the uncertain
event."^' People, from the very beginning, have not been able to grasp a real
with certainty. Therefore, "our path toward truth coincides with the truth
itself"^" Since izek insists that the absolute real is an impossible deadlock, his concept of the founding event bears affinity to the founding myths
descrihed by social theologians.
For every race, tradition, belief, or ideology there exists a corresponding
set of cultural stories, of which founding myths constitute the essential part.
Such myths include those of ancient Greece, the Bihle, other classic religious
texts, and even national politics. Though diverse, all rely on narrative to
build language structures and symbolic systems, which work simultaneously
to establish the narrative itself From a social theological perspective, this
process includes two steps: "constituting value and meaning by virtue of the
experience" and "bestowing the experience with forms and orders."^' For
izek, this process echoes the "unacknowledged yet necessary" mystical narrative, which weaves a perfect loop between the event and the structure.
This loop includes not only the engendering of the order from the event,
and the concealment of the event from the order, but their mutual reconcili-
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
788
ation. Just as the event brings about the legal order that retroactively renders
the event illegal, to "account for the unaccountable," the narrative must follow a specific system. The symbolic order must be accepted, because "the
primary phenomenon in the realm of understanding is not understanding
of language, but understanding through language."^^ In this way, the impossible real is rendered invisible. The event that antagonizes the structure and
the order becomes a fantasy-construction.
These arguments carry an obvious Lacanian tint: for 2izek, the symbolic
order creates a world that is described, regulated, and abstracted in symbols.
The symbolic world cannot coincide with the real world, but without the
former we cannot understand the latter. Lacan regards the moment of entry
into the symbolic order as a traumatic kernel: an infant is separated from
the mother's body, takes tbe name of the father, and leaves the natural state
for the symbolic order. Similarly, Zizek argues that the structure and the
order begin with an "engendering violent gesture" (the primordial founding
gesture)^^ "a traumatic, violent encounter with some external real."^''
According to !Zizek, the founding event as the impossible real both brings
out and is repressed by the symbolic order. As such, the founding event
invisibly controls the symbolic order and renders possible its "impossibility," to enter into the deadlock of the Real. This Zizekian impossible real, I
argue, is similar to Karl Barth's theological thesis.
In Church Dogmatics, Barth discusses "the limited knowledge of God"
and "the hidden God." He points out, "[When God] unveils Himself as the
One He is by veiling Himself in a form which He Himself is not. He uses
this form distinct from Himself, He uses its work and sign, in order to be
objective in, with and under this form, and therefore to give Himself to us
to be known. Revelation means the giving of signs."^' The understanding is
that one cannot understand, since fundamental knowledge of God must be
indirect knowledge.^^ Graham Ward, one of the editors o Radical Orthodoxy, likens Barth's thesis to Derrida's diffranceP
Zizek would certainly not agree with the advocates of radical orthodoxy
who attempt to resituate all contemporary issues within a theological framework. Neither would he support the idea of a rational subject who transforms all knowledge and values into one-dimensional actions. Relying on
Huilin I To Reverse Our Premise witb tbe Perverse Core
7g9
the perverse core of Christianity, izek establishes a perverse logic of his

own for the humanities. He claims boldly,
Tbe old liberal slander draws on tbe parallel between tbe Cbristian and
Marxist "Messianic" notion of history as the process of the final deliverance of the faithful (the notorious "Communist-parties-are-secularizedreligious-sects" theme).... Following Alain Badiou's path-breaking book
on Saint Paul, our premise bere is exactly tbe opposite one: instead of
adopting sucb a defensive stance, allowing tbe enemy to define tbe terrain of tbe struggle, wbat one sbould do is to reverse tbe strategy hy fully
endorsing what one is accused of: yes, tbere is a direct lineage from Cbristianity to Marxism; yes, Cbristianity and Marxism should figbt on tbe same
side of tbe barricade against tbe onslaugbt of new spiritualisms tbe
autbentic Cbristian legacy is mucb too precious to be left to tbe fundamentalist f k 3 *
In sbort, tbe Cbristian legacy for izek constitutes a structure of meaning
tbat replaces tbe one-dimensional subject witb "in-between" status, and uses
tbe indeterminate event to account for tbe impossible real. In otber words,
tbe perverse core of Cbristianity reflects a dialectical relation between
deconstruction and reconstruction.
How does tbis argument differ from Bartb's notion of "WboUy Otber"
or tbe impossible possibility.? Wby does izek need to refer to Saint Paul.?
How do we understand tbe opposite premises that izek finds in Badiou's
work.?
Following izek's thought, we can infer that the crucifixion of Jesus
Christ was a violent founding event that brougbt Cbristianity into a structure of belief izek would regard sucb a traumatic kernel as tbe Real,
because tbis enforced event occurred at tbe turning point from initiation to
transformation: tbe event establisbes (or transforms) tbe symbolic order, but
it cannot be entirely expressed in language.
Does tbe crucifixion of Jesus tbe founding mytb of Cbristianity indicate tbat tbe deadlock of tbe Real can retreat into a safe zone wbere it cannot be subjected to interrogation.? Is tbis event, or tbe revelation of God in
bistory, exempt from critical reflection.? In Chinese academia, these issues
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
790
are crucial to maintaining the distinction between theology in academic and

seminary systems; in Western seminarian theology, such a simple retreat
would be hard to accept.
Thus theologians such as Edward Schillebeeckx note that it is necessary to
"place the reality of what is meaningfully said between brackets," though we
must also seek "a form of linguistic analysis in which reality itself is brought
in," giving new interpretations to the verbal event.^^ A similar allusion can
be found in Heidegger: "the language is essentially neither expression, nor
an activity of the human being. The language speaks
The human being
speaks insofar as he or she corresponds to language.'"'" Heidegger's writing
corresponds to Schillebeeckx's arguments:
The verbal event is seen as tbe place of dialectical tension between what
is manifested and what we express, in our speech, of that manifestation,
between the openness of being and our seizing hold of and understanding that being. It is in this place that the priority of the language that
addresses us and the language that claims our speaking is manifested
Our primary and basic relationship with language is therefore not speaking, but listening. The act of speaking cannot be reduced . . . to the subjective intention of the subjects speaking.... Language protects being. In
the verbal event, being comes to us. Speaking is obedience, a word and
answer to the "silent language of being.'""
Whether izek agrees with the "echo of language" (Heidegger) or the
"echo of sacred words," incarnation in Christian belief must pass through
the verbal event to be interpreted as the watershed between accountable and
unaccountable, possible and impossible, Jesus Christ and Jesus-yet-to-beChrist.''^ If we exclude the psychoanalytical aspect of izek's explanation of
the incarnation event, his inheritance from the Christian legacy is most obvious in bis application of an uncertain event to explain the truth-procedure,
the basis of structure and the origin of order.''^ Saint Paul, who tries hard to
disseminate the event of incarnation, becomes "the very symbol of the establishment of Christian orthodoxy.'"''' In this regard, izek is not discussing
belief itself, but revealing the universal structure of meaning with the aid of
Christian experience. As he argues.
When one reads Saint Paul's epistles, one cannot fail to notice how thoroughly and terribly indifferent he is toward Jesus as a living person (the
Jesus who is not yet Christ. . .) Paul more or less totally ignores Jesus'
particular acts, teachings, parables. . . ; never in his writings does he
engage in hermeneutics, in probing into the "deep meaning" of this or
that parable or act of Jesus. What matters to him is not Jesus as a historical figure, only the fact that he died on the Cross and rose from the
dead
Paul goes on . . . organizing the new party called the Christian
community.'"
To demonstrate the link between Christianity and atheism, izek writes
a long footnote in The Puppet and the Dwarf regarding Heidegger's Being
and Time as the "radical attempt to render thematic the unsurpassable finitude of the human condition." Being and Time marks Heidegger's transition from "the reified ontological approach to reality ('subject' perceiving
'objects')" to "the active engagement of being-in-the-world." The transition
occurred in the early 1920s, when Heidegger read Saint Paul. There is also,
for izek, "an unexpected additional link between Heidegger and Badiou,"
because "they both refer to Paul in the same ambiguous way." "For Heidegger, Paul's turn from abstract philosophical contemplation to the committed
existence of a believer indicates care and being-in-the-world.... In the same
way, Badiou reads Paul as the first to deploy the formal structure of the
Event and truth-procedure."''^
izek's analysis of Saint Paul, Heidegger, Badiou, and Christian theology
focuses on the logic of the perverse. He notes that "what enabled [Paul] to
formulate the basic tenets of Christianity, to elevate Christianity from a Jewish sect into a universal religion (religion of universality), was the fact that he
was not part of Christ's 'inner circle.' '"'^ He further explains.
The key to Saint Paul's theology is repetition: Christ as the redemptive
repetition of Adam. Adam has fallen, Christ has risen again: Christ is
therefore "the last Adam" (i Corinthians 15:45-49). Through Adam,
as sons of Adam, we are lost, condemned to sin and suffering; through
Christ, we are redeemed. This, however, does not mean that Adam's Fall
(and the subsequent instauration of the Law) was a simple contingency
792
that is to say, that, if Adam had chosen obedience to God, there would
have been no sin and no Law: there would also have been no love. . . .
Adam and Christ also relate as "negation" and "negation of negation"....
Adam is Christ "in itself," and Christ's Redemption is not the "negation"
of the Fall, but its accomplishment, in exactly the same sense that, according to Saint Paul, Christ accomplishes the Law.''^
"Perverse" and "reverse" are the key concepts in this account, izek shows
considerable interest in the following quotes from Saint Paul's letters to the
Corinthians, and his perverse interrogation therein:
In this self-confident boasting I am not talking as the Lord would, but as
a fool. (2 Corinthians 11:17)
If I must boast, I will boast of the things that show my weakness.
(2 Corinthians 11:30)
Therefore I will boast all the more gladly about my weaknesses, so that
Christ's power may rest on me. That is why, for Christ's sake, I delight in
weaknesses, in insults, in hardships, in persecutions, in difficulties. For
when I am weak, then I am strong. I have made a fool of myself, but you
drove me to it. I ought to have been commended by you, for I am not in
the least inferior to the "super-apostles." (2 Corinthians 12:9- ii)''^
According to izek. Saint Paul's affirmation of his own weakness was

not intended to say, "I am weak to make the strength of God visible."
Rather, "in my weakness and ridicule, when I am mocked and laughed at,
I am identified with Christ, who was mocked and laughed at Christ, the
ultimate divine Fool, deprived of all majesty and dignity." In Paul's view,
false apostles take themselves seriously, so the true prophet must mock himself like a fool. Hence izek argues that "we are one with God only when
God is no longer one with Himself, but abandons Himself, 'internalizes'
the radical distance which separates us from Him."'" This reversed core of
Christianity is the Weak God emphasized by contemporary theology. As
Dietrich Bonhoeffer notes, "the God who is with us is the God who forsakes
us. The God who makes us live in this world without using him as a working hypothesis is the God before whom we are ever standing. Before God
and with him we live without God."" Paul Tillich points out, "The courage
703
to be is rooted in the God who appears when God has disappeared in the
anxiety of doubt."'^
It is because of this thesis of a Weak God that the perverse core of Christian theology need not rely on Barth's Other to let God be God;53 neither
does it need to rebuild certainty. The crucial point is that Paul's weakness
provides a starting point to construct structure, order, and meaning. Just as
"an apostolic subjectivity exists only through proclamation of an event (the
resurrection), . . . a truth comes into being through the subjects who proclaim It and, in doing so, constitute themselves as subjects in their fidelity to
the event."54 In this regard, the impossibility of the Real finds a solution in
the Christian Event of Incarnation.
If Heidegger's famous line "we never come to thoughts, they come to
us"55 comes to mind; if Paul Celan's "Spring: trees flying up to their birds"56
passes through our hearts; if we put izek's discussion in dialogue with
Emmanuel Levinas's concept of mourning as the first certainty,'^ or Derrida's mourning for the "name that can get along without him,"^ or Habermas's communicative rationality,^^ then izek's emphasis on the perverse
represents contemporary Western humanities. The perverse explains infinitude after limitations, the unaccountable, and impossibility have been consigned to the Real. The perverse reconstructs subjects when all the suspicious one-dimensional subjects have heen eliminated.
izek points out that "[Badiou's] central notion is that philosophy depends
on some truth event as its external condition
What provokes us to think
is always a traumatic, violent encounter with some external real that brutally
imposes itself on us, shattering our established ways of thinking. It is in this
sense that a true thought is always de-centered; one does not think spontaneously; one is forced to think."60 His discussion is not much about belief itself;
rather, Zizek reveals the universal structure of meaning through Christian
experience. This is no doubt the basis upon which izek claims himself as
"a Paulinian materialist."
Zizek's discussion of theology is not so different from his discussions of
other cultural issues. In a single text, he shifts among quotations from the
Bible, Karl Marx, and adult jokes. For Zizek, the notion of the perverse can
be widely applied. When he was invited to interpret forty-two classic films
in a documentary, he claimed to regard cinema as "the ultimate pervert
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
794
art." Witb a tone of advertisement and a style reminiscent o Lecture Room

( H ^ W S , Baijia jiangtan), a popular Cbinese television sbow featuring
scbolarly lectures,^'' izek claimed, "[Cinema] does not give you wbat you
desire, it tells you bow to desire."^^
Film is not tbe only media or vebicle tbat does so. Otbers include tbe
certainty tbat is acbieved by "maintaining fidelity to an uncertain event,"
tbe replacement of tbe impossible real during tbe trutb-procedure, and tbe
decentralization of true tbougbt in processes tbat force people to tbink. All
tbese seemingly irresolvable issues in buman spiritual activities (cultural
identity, value stance, meaning generation) are woven into a cultural story,
wbicb explains tbe issues under tbe same symbolic order. Tbis solution benefits from tbe perverse core of Cbristianity and its ensuing perverse logic.
Although for 2izek, the Christian legacy is worth fighting for and Christian theology provides him with a paradigm for its theoretical deduction, his
perverse theology is different from the secular modernity advocated by the
radical orthodox, izek notes.
One possible definition of modernity is: tbe social order in wbicb religion
is no longer fully integrated into and identified witb a particular cultural
life-form, but acquires autonomy. . . . Tbis extraction enables religion to
globalize itself (tbere are Christians, Muslims, and Buddhists everywhere
today); on the other hand, the price to be paid is tbat religion is reduced
to a secondary epipbenomenon witb regard to tbe secular functioning of
tbe social totality. In tbis new global order, religion bas two possible roles:
therapeutic or critical. It eitber belps individuals to function better in tbe
existing order, or it tries to assert itself as a critical agency articulating wbat
is wrong witb tbis order as sucb, a space for tbe voices of discontent.^^
Witbin tbis space, tbe Holy Spirit can enter as a signifier into tbe world.^"^
Beyond tbis space, tbeology is only a puppet.^'
Compared witb Radical Orthodoxy, wbicb examines Cbristian tbeological
tradition and attempts to restimulate it in today's cultural context, Zizekian
tbeology insists upon a perverse reading based on tbe self-reflective tendency
in tbe contemporary bumanities.^'' If we consider tbat izek tries to grasp
Cbristianity-in-becoming ratber tban "tbe establisbed positive dogma," Milbank and bis collaborators would surely agree witb izek on tbis point.''''
Huilin I To Reverse Our Premise witb the Perverse Core
795
Hence at least for Chinese academics, izek's discussion of theology does

not bring out a Messianic turn or a new lease on life for tbeology. Ratber,
it implies that the Christian legacy is not merely the religious experience of
belief; it is the basic model of the Western value system and its truths. The
Christian legacy not only regulated the previous intellectual paradigm, but
it enlightens and integrates humanities today. It affirms the absolute in its
fragility, reconstructs the subject in its vulnerability, and aids us in our pursuit of the Real beyond its deadlock.
notes
1. Jidujiao wenhua xuekan (M'S^SCit^^
Journal for the Study of Christian Culture), published by Renmin University, is the major journal for Cbinese theological scholarship.
Since 2003, this journal has organized many special issues, including "Secular Theology,"
"Ethics of Faith," "Theology and Hermeneutics," "The Publicity of Theology," "Theology of Dialogue," "Theology and Public Discourse," "Theological Event," "Option for the
Poor," "Sinology and Theology," and "Poetics and Theology." See Jidujiao wenhua xue{an, vols. 8-22 (Beijing: Zhongguo renmin daxue chubanshe/zongjiao wenhua chubanshe,
2003 - 8).
2. Fredrik Fllman, Salvation and Modernity: Intellectuals and Faith in Contemporary China
(Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2004).
3. For the related Chinese scholarly works in English, see Yang Huilin, Christianity in China:
The Wor{ of Yang Huilin (New York: M.E. Sharpe, 2004); and Yang Huilin and Daniel
Yueng, eds., Sino-Christian Studies in China (New York: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2006).
4. See Graham Ward, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995).
5. mm^, 56m.
6. ! ? ^'ît; Guo Qingfan ed., Zhuangzi jishi (ffiAlf, Collected Annotations on the
Zhuangzi), vol. i (Beijing: Zhonghua sbuju, 1961), 86.
7. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wrigbt, eds.. The lizel{ Reader (Oxford: Blackwell Publisbing, 1999), viii-ix.
8. lobn Milbank, Catberine Pickstock, and Graham Ward, eds.. Radical Orthodoxy: A New
Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 1999).
9. Ibid., xi.
10. Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics: A Selection with Introduction (New York: T&T Clark, 1961),
7411. Milbank, Pickstock, and Ward, Radical Orthodoxy, i.
12. Ibid., I.
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
796
13. Slavoj izek. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 2003), 5.
14. Adam Kotsko, ize\and Theology (New York: T&T Clark, 2008), i67n 9, 134.
15. Crestn Davis, ed.,The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? (Cambridge: MIT Press,
2009).
16. Ibid., II, 248.
17. izek. Puppet and the Dwarf, 5.

18. Slavoj izek. The Fragile Absolute, or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2000), I.
19. izek. Puppet and the Dwarf, 3.

20. Ibid., 6.
21. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Zhou Ying (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian
chubanshe, 2001), 27.
22. izek. Fragile Absolute, 82.
23. Ibid., 89.
24. Ibid., 91.
25. Slavoj izek, "Foreword," in Peter Hallward, Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), x.
26. i,izek. Fragile Absolute, <)2-i).
27. It is generally acknowledged that such a gesture for izek marks human separation from
the mother's body (the natural state) and entry into culture (the language system in the
name of father).
28. Translator's note: The analogy is in the use of words that are applied to the sensible world to
refer to God, a transcendent being. The argument is that such symbolization can lead to the
certainty of God, since divinity is beyond comprehension and representation in essence.
29. izek, "Foreword," xxv.
30. izek. The Sublime Object of Ideology, 64; see also izek, "Foreword," xxvi.
31. Fan Lizhu, James D. Whitehead, and Evelyn Eaton Whitehead, Dangdai shijie zongjiao
xue ( ^ f t t t ^ S i ^ , Religion in the Late Modern World) (Beijing: Shishi chubanshe, 2006),
7 - " . 17. 95-9832. Werner G. Jeanrond, Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance (London:
Macmillan, 1991), 154.
33. izek. Fragile Absolute, 92 93.
34. izek, "Foreword," x.
35. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 40.
36. Ibid.
37. Ward, Barth, Derrida, and the Language of Theology.
38. iek, Fragile Absolute,1-2.
huilin I To Reverse Our Premise wifh fhe Perverse Core
797
39. Edward Schillebeeckx, The Understanding of Faith: Interpretation and Criticism, trans. Zhu
Xiaohong (Hong Kong: Daofeng shushe, 2004), 35, 55.
40. Martin Heidegger, "Die Sprache," in Gesamtausgabe Band 12, Underwegs zur Sprache
(Frankfurt Am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1959), 16, 30, quoted in Jeanrond, Theological
Hermeneutics, 'i,.
41. Schillebeeckx, Understanding of Faith,
''^-^6.
42. For discussion of "the verbal event," see Gerhard Ebeling and Thomas Forsyth Torrance.
See also Yang Huilin, "Dangdai shenxue dui wenlun yanjiu de qianzai jiazhi" (^-f-tî^J
:S;iEWKW;"f Siffl, "The Potential Value of Contemporary Theology to Literary Criticism") in Wenyi yanjiu ('Xz:W% Literature and Art Studies), vol. 3, 2003.
43. iizek. Puppet and the Dwarf, iy.
44. Ibid., 9.
45. Ibid., 8-9.
46. Ibid., 173 74.
47. Ibid., 10.
48. Ibid., 81,87-88.

49. Ibid., 90.
50. Ibid., 90 91.
51. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge (New York: Macmillan, 1997), 360.
52. Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 186.
53. Barth, Church Dogmatics, 51.
54. Zizek, "Foreword," xxv xxvii.
55. Martin Heidegger, "The Thinker as Poet," trans. Peng Fuchun, in Shi, yuyan, shi (it ig-g ,,
Poetry, Language, Thought) (Beijing: Wenhua yishu chubanshe, 1990), 16.
56. Paul Celan, "Backlight," trans. Wang Jiaxin and Rui Hu, in Baoluo celan shiwen xuan
(^^W.î^'k.M,
Paul Celan: Collected Prose) (Shijiazhuang: Hebei jiaoyu chubanshe,
2002), 162.
'
57. Maurice Blanchot, "Notre compagne clandestine" ("Our Clandestine Companion"), in

Texte pour Emmanuel Levinas (Text for Emmanuel Levinas), ed. Franois Laruelle (Paris:
J.M. Place, 1980), 86-87.
58. Jacques Derrida, The Work of Mourning, ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 13.
59. Francis Schssler Fiorenza, "Introduction: A Critical Reception for a Practical Public Theology," in Don S. Browning and Francis Schssler Fiorenza, eds., Habermas, Modernity, and
Public Theology (New York: Crossroad Publishing, 1992), 2.
60. izek, "Foreword," ix x.
61. Translator's note: Lecture Room is a well-known television show in mainland China. From
positions 19:3
Winter 2011
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
798
2001, university professors, scientists, and social elites have given lectures on various topics in the arts and sciences. The show aims to make academic scholarship accessible to the
general public. Although the style of Lecture Room is performative and at times professors
overact their roles, it receives a warm response from the general Chinese audience.
The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (film), promotional Web site, www.thepervertsguide.com/
about.html (accessed March 27, 2011).
izek. Puppet and the Dwarf, 3.
Ibid., 9. izek's reading draws inspiration from Lacan.
Ibid., 3. izek's reading draws inspiration from Walter Benjamin.
Ibid., 53.
Ibid., 10.

2011, The Chinese Perspective On Žižek and Žižek S Perspective On China

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Guest Editor's Introduction

Why has Slavoj Zizek, a Slovenian cultural theorist and philosopher,

Tonglin I Guest Editor's Introduction

Tonglin I Guest Editor's Introduction

nese tradition as the venerable object of a "world museum," izek remains

positions 19:3 Winfer 2011

offering as it does a different angle from which to examine this history in

Tonglin I Guest Editor's Introduction

Aizek as a theoretical superstar, revealing the controversial positions toward

positions 19:3 Winfer 2011

colonialism is often unsymbolizable in its excess; thus to impose meaning

Tonglin I Guest Editor's Introduction

' (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 2009).

Poeticizing Revolution: Zizek's Misreading of Mao and China

Tbe Marcb 2009 Conference on tbe Idea of Communism organized by

positions 19:3 Doi 10.1215/10679847-1369244

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

As the Western Left seeks alternatives to global capitalism, its members

global capitalism and the historical legacy of Marxist-inspired revolution.

The Western Left, Mao, and China: Rethinking Historical Contexts

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

ing this period, Althusser painstakingly searched for conceptual alternatives

retained its "rational kernel," taking Mao's tbeory as a pbilosopby serving

On Practice and On Contradiction are Mao Zedong's two most pbilosopbical

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

are internationalists, but Marxism can only be realized through a national

tive. Althusser's concept of overdetermination involves the particularity and

Liu I Poeficizing Revolufion

lapsed into a paradoxical affirmation of cultural determinism and fetishized

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

Perhaps Zizek's real interest lies elsewhere: in an imaginary realm of

Post-Maoism as Universalism: How to Think about China Today

Zizek's indebtedness to Badiou is evident in much of his writing on China.

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

retreat of the communist movement, Badiou engaged in a difficult reflection

tbe Cultural Revolution is a great lesson in bistory and politics, in bistory

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

positions 19:3 Winfer 2011

Paul's 'betrayal' in order for Christianity to emerge as a universal church."^^

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

positions 19:3 Winfer 2011

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

historical than theoretical. For Anderson, Mao instilled "moral confidence"

Liu I Poeticizing Revolution

specificity and bistoricity. His pessimism, camouflaged by radical bubris

positions 19:3 Winter 2011

Liu I Poeficizing Revolufion

Reply: What to Do When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil

Unfortunately, my position is so grossly misrepresented in "Poeticizing

cess (with all its failures) as an attempt to construct an alternate modernity, I

Zizek I When Evil Is Doncing on tbe Ruins of Evil

the Jacobins' or tbe Soviet and Cbinese revolutionaries' ultimate failure is

rejection of the dialectical principle of "negation of negation."... Mao did

Zizek I When Evil Is Dancing on fhe Ruins of Evil

people toward a new radical revolutionary Left. It is needless to add that

Zizek I When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil

2!izek I When Evil Is Dancing on the Ruins of Evil

tion is never more than a between-two-States. It is from here that the

positions 19:3 Winfer 2011

Z zek I When Evil Is Dancing on tbe Ruins of Evil

When Badiou proposed his "communist hypothesis," the reaction of his

positions 19:3 Winter 2011