Repeating Lenin by Slavoj Zizek

Repeating Lenin by Slavoj Zizek
9/20/11 2:53 PM
obstacle which prevents thought from attaining full identity with itself. The moment we concede
on this point and externalize the obstacle, we regress to the pseudo-problematic of the thought
asymptotically approaching the ever-elusive “objective reality,” never being able to grasp it in it
infinite complexity.8 The problem with Lenin’s “theory of reflection” resides in its implicit
idealism: its very compulsive insistence on the independent existence of the material reality
outside consciousness is to be read as a symptomatic displacement, destined to conceal the key
fact that the consciousness itself is implicitly posited as EXTERNAL to the reality it “reflects.”
The very metaphor of the infinite approaching to the way things really are, to the objective truth,
betrays this idealism: what this metaphor leaves out of consideration is the fact that the partiality
(distortion) of the “subjective reflection” occurs precisely because the subject is INCLUDED in
the process it reflects — only a consciousness observing the universe from without would see
the whole of reality “the way it really is.”9
This, of course, in no way entails that the tracing of the difference between idealism and
materialism is today not more crucial than ever: one should only proceed in a truly Leninist way,
discerning — through the “concrete analysis of concrete circumstances” — WHERE this line of
separation runs. One is thus tempted to claim that, even WITHIN the field of religion, the
singular point of the emergence of materialism is signalled by Christ’s words on the cross
“Father, why have you forsaken me?” — in this moment of total abandonment, the subject
experiences and fully assumes the inexistence of the big Other. More generally, the line of
division is that between the “idealist” Socratic-Gnostic tradition claiming that the truth is within
us, just to be (re)discovered through an inner journey, and the Judeo-Christian “materialist”
notion that truth can only emerge from an EXTERNAL traumatic encounter which shatters the
subject’s balance. “Truth” requires an effort in which we have to fight our “spontaneous”
tendency.
And what if we were to connect this notion of the truth emerging from an external encounter
with the (in)famous Lenin’s notion, from What Is to Be Done?, of how the working class
cannot achieve its adequate class consciousness “spontaneously,” through its own “organic”
development, i.e. of how this truth has to be introduced into it from outside (by the Party
intellectuals)? In quoting Kautsky at this place, Lenin makes a significant change in his
paraphrase: while Kautsky speaks of how the non-working-class intellectuals, who are
OUTSIDE THE CLASS STRUGGLE, should introduce SCIENCE (providing objective
knowledge of history) to the working class, Lenin speaks of CONSCIOUSNESS which should
be introduced from outside by intellectuals who are outside the ECONOMIC struggle, NOT
outside the class struggle! Here is the passage from Kautsky which Lenin quotes approvingly —
http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek1.htm
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