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The Menon-Źižek Debate: “The Tale of the (Never-marked) (But secretly coded) Universal and the (Always marked) Particular…”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Gautam Basu Thakur
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Abstract

On occasion of his first lecture tour of India in 2010, Źižek sparked off a debate with Nivedita Menon, a leading postcolonial feminist scholar. The debate revolves around Menon's contention that Źižek's emphasis on European, Christian Universalism as the most proactive model for countering capitalism is ignorant of the heteroglossiac postcolonial histories of South Asia. Menon's response (“The Two Źižeks”) suggests that what Źižek appears to be missing is knowledge of the fallibility of Eurocentric discourses in negotiating the colonial and postcolonial situations particular to the subcontinent. Though Źižek's debates with Badiou and Butler are well known, few outside India are aware of the Menon-Źižek debate. This paper will occasion this little known debate to consider some of the major points raised by Menon against the applicability of Źižek's theoretical arguments toward reading and understanding postcolonial politics and culture.

Type
Slavoj Źižek
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 72 , Issue 4 , Winter 2013 , pp. 750 - 770
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2013

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References

The subtitle is taken from Nivedita Menon's comment made in her blog post titled “The Two Źižeks.” A version of this paper was presented at the annual convention of the Modern Language Association in Seattle on 7 January 2012.1 want to thank Mark D. Steinberg, Dušan Bjelić, Jessie Labov, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions during the revision process. I specially want to thank Jane T. Hedges for her meticulous reading of my manuscript. I remain indebted as well to Reshmi Mukherjee for her critical insights on my section on subalternity and to Meghant Sudan and Ralph Clare for being patient listeners.

1. The publication house Navayana invited Źižek as the chief speaker at its first Annual Lecture Series. Founded by Ravikumar and S. Anand in 2003, Navayana is “India's first and only publishing house to exclusively focus on the issue of caste from anticaste perspective.” As part of its commitment to the public intellectual sphere in India, the Annual Lecture Series invites international scholars and philosophers to address issues such as “struggles for justice, equality and freedom.” Źižek gave four lectures on this tour: two in New Delhi, and one each at Hyderabad and Kochi.

2. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” in Nelson, Cary and Grossberg, Lawrence, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana, 1988), 271–313 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6. See, for example, his interview with Katie Engelhart, “Slavoj Źižek: I Am Not the World's Hippest Philosopher!” Salon, 29 December 2012, at http://www.salon.com/2012/12/29/slavoj_Źižek_i_am_not_the_worlds_hippest_philosopher/ (last accessed 19 July 2013). For Źižek's take on postcolonialism as “feel-good multicultural identity politics,” see Mezzadra, Sandro and Rahola, Federico, “The Postcolonial Condition: A Few Notes on the Quality of Historical Time in the Global Present,” Postcolonial Text 2, no. 1 (2006)Google Scholar, at http://www.postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/393/819 (last accessed 19 July 2013).

7. Nivedita Menon, “The Two Źižeks” (7 January 2010), Kafila, at kafila.org/2010/01/07/ the-two-Źižeks/ (last accessed 19 July 2013). Kafila is a blog site with difference. Theirs is a “collaborative practice… of concerned individuals—scholars, activists, writers, journalists— to create a space for critical engagement on a wide range of issues of the contemporary world” separate and free from the “mediatized” spaces of public discourse.

8. Emphasis added. We do not have the text of Źižek's talk available to us. Currently some videos of the lecture are available for viewing on YouTube. This paper relies primarily on Menon's written text and, to a lesser extent, on the videos. While reading Menon's piece, it is helpful to keep in mind that her response is not just based on Źižek's talk (or his book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce [London, 2009]) but offers a general reaction to his writings overall.

9. Menon is referring to Źižek's argument in First as Tragedy, Then as Farce that “British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself” (116). For Źižek's optimistic view of colonialism, see Slavoj Źižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 116-18. To the story of Margaret Thatcher's reception by the Chinese premier in 1985, as given by Źižek in the book, one should counterpose the story of David Cameron's visit to China in 2010 where he and members of his delegation wore Remembrance Day poppies in their jacket lapels! When the “Chinese officials asked that they remove them, since they considered these poppies “inappropriate,” Cameron “refused to back down [and] followed this refusal with a lecture on human rights.” As Robert Young puts it, if Cameron's refusal echoed the “famous incident when the British ambassador Earl McCartney refused to kowtow before the Emperor in 1793,” then his violent defense of human rights was the “historical irony [that] was apparent to all but himself.” See Young, Robert, “Postcolonial Remains,” NewLiterary History 43, no. 1 (Winter 2012): 19–42 Google Scholar.

10. Menon, “The Two Źižeks.” Emphasis in the original.

11. Ibid.

12. Ibid.

13. Aditya Nigam, “End of Postcolonialism and the Challenge for ‘Non-European' Thought,” Critical Encounters: A Forum of Critical Thought from the Global South, 19 May 2013, at http://www.criticalencounters.net/2013/05/19/end-of-postcolonialism-and-thechallenge-for-non-european-thought/ (last accessed 7 August 2013).

14. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?,” 271.

15. Menon, “The Two Źižeks.“

16. Ibid.

17. Ibid.

18. Dabashi, “Can Non-Europeans Think?“

19. Ibid.

20. See, Menon, “The Two Źižeks“; Źižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 116.

21. Macaulay, Thomas Babington, “Indian Education, The Minute of the 2nd of February, 1835,” in Macaulay: Prose and Poetry, selected by Young, G. M. (London, 1952), 722 Google Scholar.

22. Ibid., 724.

23. Here I am referring to the document prepared by Mr. Kurtz on behalf of the International Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs. The document ends with the words: exterminate all the brutes. See Conrad, Joseph, Heart of Darkness, ed. Armstrong, Paul (New York, 2006 [1899])Google Scholar.

24. Macaulay, “Indian Education,” 729. European books, Homi Bhabha tells us, served a slew of critical functions in the colonial world. On the one hand, books worked alongside brute force as central ideological signifiers in the constitution of docile colonized subjects. On the other hand, books, especially The Book, reasserted control over the volatile Other space through the repetition of textual authority as the sign and support of European authority. See Bhabha, Homi, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” The Location of Culture (London, 2004), 145–74Google Scholar. For a detailed analysis of the British colonial project of introducing English in India, see Vishwanathan, Gauri, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York, 1989)Google Scholar.

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26. See Źižek, Slavoj, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London, 2004), 35–36 Google Scholar; Źižek, “Permanent Economic Emergency,” 85; Źižek, “Defenders of the Faith,” New York Times, 12 March 2006, at http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/12/opinion/12Źižek.html?_r=0 (last accessed 19 July 2013).

27. Źižek, Iraq, 32-33.

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29. For Źižek on Gandhi, see The Universal Exception (New York, 2006), 222-23. See also, Adam Kirsch, “Źižek Strikes Again,” New Republic, 26 luly 2010, at http://www.newrepublic.eom/article/books-and-arts/76531/slavoj-zzek-philosophy-gandhi, (last accessed 19 July 2013), and Shobhan Saxena, “First They Called Me a Joker, Now I Am a Dangerous Thinker,” Times of India, 10 January 2010, at articles.timesofindia.indiatimes. com/2010-01-10/all-that-matters/28120874_l_buddhism-political-violence-philosopher (last accessed 19 July 2013). For Tagore on Gandhi, see The Mahatma and the Poet: Lettersand Debates between Gandhi and Tagore, 1915-1941, comp. and ed. Sabyasachi Bhattacharya (New Delhi, 1997).

30. Źižek “Defenders of the Faith.“

31. See Young, Robert, Postcolonialism: A Historical Introduction (Oxford, 2001)Google Scholar.

32. I am inferring this definition of modernity from Enrique Dussel's argument that modernity must be reconceptualized as transmodernity, that is, not strictly a “European but a planetary phenomenon, to which the ‘excluded barbarians’ have contributed, although their contribution has not been acknowledged.” See Mignolo, Walter, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” in Morana, Mabel, Dussel, Enrique, and Jáuregui, Carlos A., eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, 2008), 225–26Google Scholar. Put differently, the move toward modernity as inclusive rather than exclusive can be rephrased in the words of Edward Said as moving from a unitary, singular identity of the Self (as opposed to the Other) to an identity that includes the Other “without suppressing the difference[s]” particular to the Other. See Said, “On Orientalism,“ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vdE18HdfanI&feature=related (last accessed 19 July 2013).

33. See Young, Postcolonialism, 131-34.

34. Źižek, Slavoj, “A Plea for Leninist Intolerance,” Critical Inquiry 28, No. 2 (Winter 2002): 553 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Źižek, “Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,'” 988.

36. See Hart, William David, “Slavoj Źižek and the Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion,“ Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 3 (2002): 553–78Google Scholar; Źižek, Slavoj, “I Plead Guilty- But Where Is the Judgment?,” Nepantla: Views from South 3, no. 3 (2002): 579–83Google Scholar; Hart, William David, “Can a Judgment Be Read? A Response to Slavoj Źižek,” Nepantla: Views fromSouth 4, no. 1 (2003): 191–94Google Scholar.

37. Źižek, “I Plead Guilty,” 579-80.

38. Ibid., 580.

39. For a recent “postcolonial” reading of this postcolonial conundrum, see Nigam, “End of Postcolonialism.“

40. Hart, “Can a Judgment Be Read?,” 191.

41. Nigam “End of Postcolonialism.“

42. Walter Mignolo, “Yes, We Can: Non-European Thinkers and Philosophers.” AlJazeera, 19 February 2013, at http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2013/02/20132672747320891.html (last accessed 30 August 2013). Emphasis added.

43. Menon, “The Two Źižeks.“

44. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “In Response: Looking Back, Looking Forward,” in Morris, Rosalind C., ed., Reflections on the History of an Idea: Can the Subaltern Speak? (New York, 2010), 228–29Google Scholar.

45. Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Knowledge,” 229.

46. My use of the barred One here refers to Lacan's theory of the barred Other, which designates the symbolic order as barred, incomplete, or inconsistent. If western European philosophy is an impermeable symbolic order, a totality, an absolute, then Źižek is correct: one is either with it or opposed to it. My point here is to argue against such biased, fundamentalist notions privileging the fantasy of Europe as a totality.

47. Mignolo, “Geopolitics of Knowledge,” 225-26.1 use the Freudian term Verwerfung to define foreclosure in the terms delineated by Lacan in his Seminars, that is, as the refusing or repudiation of a significant signifier along with its affects from the symbolic order. In the specific context of Eurocentrism, what is being categorically rejected from constructions of a European symbolic order is the idea that the non-west may have contributed to European modernity or that the west has been built on the slave labor of the non-west.

48. See, for example, Rajan, Rajeswari Sunder, “The Third World Academic in Other Places; Or, the Postcolonial Intellectual Revisited,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 596–616 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. See Chinua Achebe's essay “The African Writer and the English Language,” Morning Yet on Creation Day (New York, 1975). Spivak has also said on a number of occasions that to question why postcolonial critics write and speak in Europe's “languages” is to deny the historical role of colonialism on postcolonial consciousness.

50. Das, Veena, “Subaltern as Perspective,” in Guha, Ranajit, ed., Subaltern Studies (New Delhi, 1989), 6:310 Google Scholar.

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53. Źižek, “Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,'” 988. Emphasis added.

54. Ibid., 989.

55. Das, “Subaltern as Perspective,” 310.

56. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, “Subaltern Studies: Deconstructing Historiography,“ In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York, 1998), 281 Google Scholar.

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58. See Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” See also, Barrett, Michele, “'Can the Subaltern Speak?’ New York, February 2004,” History Workshop Journal 58 (Autumn 2004), 359 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

59. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, 308; Spivak, “In Response,” 232-33.

60. Źižek, “Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,'” 988. Emphasis added.

61. Ibid., 989. Emphasis added.

62. Ibid., 990-91.

63. Ibid., 991.

64. Źižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, 157.

65. Menon, “The Two Źižeks.“

66. Bhabha, “Signs Taken for Wonders,” 153.

67. Freud, Sigmund, “Analysis of a Phobia in a Five-Year-Old Boy” (1909), in Stratchey, J., ed., The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London, 1955), 10:122 Google Scholar.

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69. I thank the anonymous reviewers for drawing my attention to these works. I am by no stretch of the imagination a scholar of Balkan history and culture, so I will merely highlight what more established scholars in the field have observed and what most readers of Slavic Review are well aware of. For a recent collection of essays examining Źižek's representation of the Balkans, see the “special section” in Psychoanalysis, Culture, andSociety 16, no. 3 (September 2011): 276-323.

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72. Spivak, In Other Worlds, 188-89.

73. Su-Lin Yu, “Reconstructing Western Female Subjectivity: Between Orientalism and Feminism in Julia Kristeva's About Chinese Women,” Jouvert 7, no. 1 (Autumn 2002), at english.chass.ncsu.edu/jouvert/v7isl/slyu.htm (last accessed 19 July 2013). Emphasis in the original.

74. The department of Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures at Ohio State University is organizing the 2013-2014 Sawyer Seminar on the topic of “Language, Politics, and Human Expression in South Asia and the Balkans: Comparative Perspectives.“ This “year-long Sawyer Seminar will focus on the intersection of language, politics, and human expression in two geopolitically key regions of the world—the Balkans and South Asia. The unique yet similar interplay of language, nationalism, ideology, and religion with literature, film, and other forms of expression within each of these regions compels us toward a comparative approach. The juxtaposition of the Balkans and South Asia, we suggest, will offer academics and policy-makers a transnational perspective on the relationships between culture and politics.” Emphasis added. See slavic.osu.edu/sawyerseminar (last accessed 19 July 2013).

75. Dirlik, Arif, The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism (Boulder, Colo., 1997)Google Scholar, and Dirlik, , Postmodernity's Histories: The Past as Legacyand Project (Lanham, Md., 2000)Google Scholar; Ahmad, Aijaz, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (London, 1992)Google Scholar; Loomba, Ania, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76. Editor's Column, ‘“The End of Postcolonial Theory?’ A Roundtable with Sunil Agnani, Fernando Coronil, Gaurav Desai, Mamadou Diouf, Simon Gikandi, Susie Tharu, and Jennifer Wenzel,” PMLA 122, no. 3 (May 2007): 633-51. Cited in Young, “Postcolonial Remains,” 19-42.

77. Chatterjee, Partha, “After Subaltern Studies,” Economic and Political Weekly, 47, no. 35, (September 2012): 44–49 Google Scholar. 78. Źižek, “Plea for Leninist Intolerance,” 545-46.

79. See Engelhart, “Slavoj Źižek.“

80. Critics of postcolonial studies can also be critics of Eurocentrism. Rajiv Malhotra, for instance, has this to say about Homi Bhabha: “Harvard University's Homi Bhabha is a role model hoisted by the American establishment for young Indian-Americans in English Departments and Postcolonial Studies to emulate. He has proven himself as having the ‘white gaze.’ This is the liberal path to becoming white.” A vocal critic of Eurocentrism and an avid advocate of Hindu-Indian identity, Malhotra should rightly be at the crosshairs of Źižek's critique. But he shares with Źižek the latter's distrust of postcolonial studies. Speak of unequal partners! See Rajiv Malhotra, “The Whitewashing of Bobby Jindal,“ Huffington Post, 31 January 2013, at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rajiv-malhotra/bobbyjindal-race_b_2588700.html (last accessed 19 July 2013).

81. On the question of the rejection of multiculturalism and identity politics, see Mezzadra Rahola, “Postcolonial Condition,” as well as Menon, “The Two Źižeks.” On the similarities between Źižek and postcolonial studies, see Almond, “Anti-Capitalist Objections to the Postcolonial.“

82. Mezzadra Rahola, “Postcolonial Condition“; Young, “Postcolonial Remains,” 22.

83. Spivak, Critique of Postcolonial Reason, x, 199.

84. Źižek, “Leftist Plea for ‘Eurocentrism,'” 1006.