Žižek’s Apocalypse: The End of the World or the End of Capitalism?

J. Jesse Ramírez

Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times. New York: Verso, 2010. US $ 29.95 (hardcover), 432 pp.
ISBN 9781844675982.

In The Sense of an Ending, a groundbreaking study of apocalyptic narrative, Frank

Kermode warned against the category mistake of taking apocalypse literally.1 For Kermode,

human beings exist “in the middest,” in the thick of worldly affairs, where the two great

mysteries of the human condition, birth and death, obstruct knowledge on either side. The power

of fiction is its capacity to unite beginning, middle, and end in an intelligible whole, affording us

a perspective otherwise inaccessible from our place in the middest. Apocalypse, one of the oldest

versions of the End, is for Kermode a narrative pattern that humans project onto history in order

to make it coherent and comprehensible. To believe in apocalyptic narratives, to subscribe to the

view that the End is nigh, and that the world will (and must) soon come to a violent climax, is

thus to mistake paradigm for reality—an error that Kermode, writing in the 60s, considered the

root of Nazi and Soviet “totalitarianism.”

Half a century after The Sense of an Ending, myriad apocalyptic scenarios, from climate

change to pandemics to the Christian Rapture, continue to lurk just beyond the horizon. If

1
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press,
1967).
Kermode is right, apocalypticism will persist as long as it continues to meet the existential and

epistemological needs of beings in the middest. But things have also changed since Kermode’s

time. As regards the ecological crisis, reality is rapidly adjusting to our sense of an ending: the

alarming forecasts of climate scientists have made belief in the impending end of human life as

we know it an empirically legitimate position. Today even the most sober-eyed sociologists

recognize that “serious perils to the existence of humanity have become a fact of contemporary

life. …What was once dismissed as apocalyptic fanaticism is now the prediction of leading

scientists.”2 (In this context, Kermode’s warnings about apocalyptic belief should be reversed:

what is truly dangerous and naïve is the view that climate change is just another run-of-the-mill

doomsday fantasy, one that “green capitalism” will soon dispel.) While the critique of universal

or grand narratives defined much of theory and criticism from the mid-twentieth-century onward

—in this respect, Kermode and the poststructuralists share a suspicion of “totalizing thought,”

which for them would designate fascism, communism, and apocalypticism alike—the species-

level crises of the age of globalization demand a thorough reconsideration of these categories.3 It

is to such a project that Slavoj Žižek’s Living in the End Times appears to be a timely

contribution.

Žižek’s latest book begins with the premise that “the global capitalist system is

approaching an apocalyptic zero-point” (x). Žižek identifies four breaking points, or Four

Horsemen of the Apocalypse, threatening contemporary capitalism: climate change, biogenetics,

“imbalances within the system itself,” and social divisions (ibid.). In an ingenious analytical

move, he then proposes that the psychoanalytic theory of grief can map the dominant responses
2
Robert Wuthnow, Be Very Afraid: The Cultural Response to Terror, Pandemics, Environmental Devastation,
Nuclear Annihilation, and Other Threats (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8.
3
For a compelling argument for the contemporary importance of the concept of species, see Dipesh Chakrabarty,
“The Climate of History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry 35 (2009): 197-222.
to the coming catastrophe; the book’s five chapters promise critically to analyze contemporary

“social consciousness” as symptomatic of the five stages of grief, starting with liberal denial and

proceeding to anger, bargaining, depression, and finally revolutionary acceptance. The last stage

is summed up in Mao’s remark, “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.”

As outlined in the introduction, at least, Living in the End Times promises to be an

important rejoinder to liberal critics of apocalyptic thinking, from Kermode’s and Norman

Cohn’s classic studies to the more recent work of John Gray and Peter Y. Paik.4 Whereas

Kermode emphasized the dangers of linking apocalyptic categories to praxis, of attempting to

“rearrange the world to suit them [or] test them by experiment, for instance in gas-chambers,”5

Žižek brazenly affirms apocalyptic analysis as a means for generating “engaged truth.” “The

truth we are dealing with here is not ‘objective’ truth” (xiii), Žižek notes, and neither is it the sort

of supernatural-transcendent truth claimed by Christian fundamentalists’ literal reading of the

Book of Revelation. Living in the End Times indeed participates in the various “returns to

religion” in contemporary Marxist critical theory,6 but it is no Left Behind. Žižek claims to

capture truth in Badiou’s sense as that which demands the subject’s fidelity to it. Living in the

End Times is an atheist apocalyptic critique whose force should be measured by its “truth effect,”

its ability to reveal the terminal logic of capitalism and to summon the emancipatory subjectivity

needed to overcome it. Here we see both the root of liberal commentators’ uneasiness, and the

4
See Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the
Middle Ages, 3rd. ed. (1957; New York: Oxford University Press, 1970); John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic
Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007); Peter Y. Paik, From Utopia to
Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010).
5
Kermode, 40.
6
John Roberts, “The ‘Returns to Religion’: Messianism, Christianity and the Revolutionary Tradition. Part I:
‘Wakefulness to the Future,’” Historical Materialism 16 (2008): 59–84.
radical left’s occasional fascination, with apocalypticism: the End is a figure not just for making

sense of the world, but for radically changing it.

Unfortunately, the rest of Living in the End Times mostly fails in its fidelity to the

intriguing thematic and analytical outline with which it begins. For this reader, at least, the five

remaining chapters have little to do with Žižek’s stated project; after completing a section, I

often had the impression that the essay’s only claim to being a critical deployment of grief theory

and apocalypticism, as the introduction proposes, was its title, which itself seemed to have been

merely tacked on as an afterthought. (It should be noted that Žižek himself describes his writing

technique in similar terms in the documentary film Žižek!.) Each chapter needs to contain at least

two conceptual moments in order for Žižek to fulfill his introductory promises: a descriptive

account of the climatic, biogenetic, social, political, or cultural Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and

a critical-analytical recoding of these phenomena in psychoanalytic terms. This is difficult to do

when none of the chapters contain systematic reflections on the psychoanalytic concepts after

which they are named, and especially when, as is often the case, Žižek does not mention his key

concepts at all. Chapter one wanders from reflections on Confucianism and Kant to Žižek’s

increasingly familiar ideas about liberal tolerance and the retroactive logic of the Event, finally

focusing on liberal utopia, the chapter’s supposed focus, only in the last few pages. Chapter two,

ostensibly on anger, and thus a golden opportunity to confront Peter Sloterdijk’s Rage and Time,

elaborates instead on the “Christian materialist” political theology Žižek has advocated in other

works (e.g., The Fragile Absolute, The Puppet and the Dwarf, The Monstrosity of Christ). The

third chapter on bargaining is really a defense of political economy, while the fourth, on

depression, contains speculation on the emergence of a new “autistic,” “detached,” “post-

traumatic” subjectivity. To be sure, these sections are brilliant at times, as can be expected from
such an eclectic and unsettling thinker as Žižek. But two problems stand out. First, those already

familiar with Žižek’s views on issues like ideology, the act, Christianity, environmentalism, rent,

the neighbor, and the dialectic will find few new ideas in this book (with the exception of an

interesting foray into architecture). Second, while the chapters might be worth reading in their

own right, they do not cohere with one another or follow the rubric laid out in the introduction.

How they elaborate on the seemingly central trope of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse is

mostly left to the reader’s imagination. The essays would be better (and more honestly)

published either separately, or together under a more general title, as in Žižek’s In Defense of

Lost Causes.

More than 300 pages in, after the reader has almost forgotten the book’s title, Žižek turns

to apocalypticism—in an interlude. Only now does the book one expects from Žižek truly begin

as he surveys three varieties of contemporary apocalypticism (only one of which, by the way,

relates back to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse mentioned earlier). According to Žižek,

Christian fundamentalists view the apocalypse biblically, as prelude to the final victory of Christ

over the Antichrist; digital post-humanists, for which the World Transhumanist Association is

one example, look forward to the bio-technological perfection of humanity; and New Age

spiritualists, adding a mystical significance to the post-humanist position, anticipate the

reunification of the human mind with the cosmos. Žižek’s critique of the digital post-humanists

is particularly devastating: “when they describe the possibility of intervening in our biogenetic

base and changing our very ‘nature,’ they somehow presuppose that the autonomous subject

freely deciding on his or her acts will still be present, deciding on how to change its ‘nature’”

(347). As Žižek makes clear, the dream of technological self-enhancement fails to comprehend

that such transformation must spell the annihilation of the self. Digital post-humanism is just
another humanism after all. Žižek then responds to the New Age spiritualists with his critique of

the idea of nature, which many will remember from way back in Looking Awry, while he affirms

the deep “radical ‘millenarian,’” that is, materialist, core of Christian fundamentalism (337).

But I had trouble taking most of this section seriously. Žižek’s survey of apocalypticism

is underdeveloped. It is based almost entirely on information taken from newspapers, personal

webpages, and Wikipedia, all of which are valuable sources, but hardly sufficient by themselves

for building a compelling account of the “apocalyptic zero-point” of global capitalism or of

today’s “social consciousness,” to use Žižek’s own terms. That would require a wider range of

materials and more space than an interlude can offer. To be sure, Žižek already acknowledged

that his study is not concerned with objective truth; instead of showing us signs of capitalism’s

apocalypse so that we may then believe in it, he suggests that we will never see it unless we

believe in it first. Žižek can assume that his Marxist readers, including this one, are already

engaged believers. Yet even believers can make reasonable demands for evidence and supporting

argumentation, especially if we also believe that books are weapons in the ideological struggle.

If Žižek’s main concern is not proof, then perhaps Living in the End Times should be a

slim volume consisting only of the introduction, the interlude on apocalypse, and the final

chapter, “Acceptance: The Cause Regained.” This chapter is Žižek’s strongest and most

interesting precisely because it allows him to abandon any pretenses to sociological description

and fully to assume the role of radical ideologue. Although Žižek will not have convinced

anyone of capitalism’s terminal logic by this point in the book, those already faithful to the truth

of the Marxist critique of capitalism will find Žižek’s ultimate thesis to be absolutely correct:

“The true utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the

only way to be truly ‘realistic’ is to think what, within the coordinates of the system, cannot but
appear as impossible” (363). Affirming the legacy of May ’68 and the slogan Soyons réalistes,

demandons l’impossible, Žižek dedicates his closing pages to elaborating on the “impossible,”

finding indications of the communist culture of the future in surprising places. In commentary

ranging from Kafka’s “Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk” to a Rammstein concert, Žižek

forcefully insists on our need for a new radically egalitarian collectivism, one founded on

supposedly “fascist” principles like ritual, discipline, and “a shamelessly total form of immersion

into the social body, a shared ritualistic social performance that would send all good liberals into

shock” (371). Even the radical Herbert Marcuse once quipped that baseball is a fascist sport,

presumably because of the way mass, commercialized emotion destroys critical subjectivity. Yet

Žižek is right to point out that “mass performances [are] not inherently fascist, they are not even

‘neutral,’ waiting to be appropriated by Left or Right—it was Nazism which stole them from the

workers’ movement, their original home” (372). Neither does collectivity simply mean the

eradication of difference; rather, only by participating in the collective universality of a shared

ritual, such as a heavy metal concert, are we free to express ourselves as the idiosyncratic

oddballs that we are. As such observations show, Žižek’s greatest contribution to political culture

today is his powerful, though often only minimally demonstrated, assault on liberalism’s anti-

collectivist common sense. For Žižek raises a crucial question that those living in the end times,

which is all of us, must ponder: does a political ideology founded on individualism, negative

freedom, and fear of all substantive definitions of the Good, the Beautiful, and the True have the

resources to avert an apocalypse that is becoming realer every day?

As is often the case when reading Žižek’s latest works, the reader will find in Living in

the End Times a mixture of brilliant philosophical analysis and obscurity, penetrating cultural

criticism and breezy blogosphere opinion, pithy Hegelian reversals and prose so bloated that it
can border on sloppiness. I am tempted to speculate that quality is at least partly related to

quantity: as the number and frequency of Žižek’s books has increased, has their precision and

insight not decreased? The question should be addressed to author and editor alike. To state the

point in Žižek’s own half-joking, half-obscene way, I wish our Elvis of cultural studies could

find a ruthless Stalinist editor who, as he put it in his acknowledgments to The Ticklish Subject,

constantly catches Žižek with is “(intellectual) pants down,” thus earning his respect and hate. If

at the very least Stalin made the trains run on time, maybe such an editor would at least make

sure that Žižek’s books have accurate titles.