Repeating Lenin by Slavoj Zizek

Repeating Lenin by Slavoj Zizek
9/20/11 2:53 PM
“To put it briefly, the East wishes to talk in terms of power and oppression; the West in terms of
culture and commodification. There are really no common denominators in this initial struggle for
discursive rules, and what we end up with is the inevitable comedy of each side muttering irrelevant
replies in its own favorite language."16
Jameson at the same time insists that Marxism still provides the universal meta-language
enabling us to situate and relate all other partial narrativizations/interpretations — is he simply
inconsistent? Are there two Jamesons: one, postmodern, the theorist of the irreducible
multiplicity of the narratives, the other, the more traditional partisan of the Marxist universal
hermeneutics? The only way to save Jameson from this predicament is to insist that Marxism is
here not the all-encompassing interpretive horizon, but the matrix which enables us to account
for (to generate) the multiplicity of narratives and/or interpretations. It is also here that one
should introduce the key dialectical distinction between the FOUNDING figure of a movement
and the later figure who FORMALIZED this movement: ultimately, it was Lenin who
effectively “formalized” Marx by way of defining the Party as the political form of its historical
intervention, in the same way that St. Paul “formalized” Christ and Lacan “formalized”
Freud.17
This formalization is strictly correlative to focusing on the Real of an antagonism: “class
struggle” is not the last horizon of meaning, the last signified of all social phenomena, but the
formal generative matrix of the different ideological horizons of understanding. That is to say,
one should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist
notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature,
but also politics, religion, science, they are all different narratives, stories we are telling
ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in
which this multitude of narratives can peacefully coexist, in which everyone, from ethnic to
sexual minorities, will have the right and possibility to tell his story. The properly dialectical
notion of Form signals precisely the IMPOSSIBILITY of this liberal notion of Form: Form has
nothing to do with “formalism,” with the idea of a neutral Form, independent of its contingent
particular content; it rather stands for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism, which
“colors” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the
Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, which means that it is not possible to
remain neutral towards it.
Of Apes and Men
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm
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