Žižek is my favorite socio-cultural-political critic! This short book does not disappoint (Amazon link).

Žižek gave a speech at a book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, in 2023. The significance of books was a theme, but so was the war between Ukraine and Russia and the slaughter in Palestine—topics he says he was asked to address by the fair’s organizers.

The ‘zero point’ is some nadir in the economic, cultural, political, or social sphere from which no tinkering with the situation through conventional mechanisms will fix things in the sense of making everybody (or at least most) better off. Only the destruction and rebuilding of what exists can help, a process, he admits, that is usually “violent and bloody.” Žižek comes from the political left. In my humble opinion, he is correct in that, besides the sexual divide (male and female), the class divide (capitalist one percent vs. everyone else) is still the world’s most significant economic and political fault line, but the modern left has abandoned it. I am personally somewhere down in the ninety-nine percent and have watched “progressive identity politics” eviscerate the Democratic Party in the United States.  

The book begins with a half dozen short essays addressing the global situation in broad strokes. The upshot of all this is that we—that is, Western society—lie to ourselves. The international situation is growing worse rapidly now. We cannot “fix” climate change. Wars and economic exploitation around the world (Žižek here covers not only Palestine and Ukraine but also Sudan, Yemen, and the Eastern Congo) have gone beyond the capacity of any power to resolve. Things got this bad because the powers themselves benefited economically from the conflict.

The book’s second half is a series of essays responding to various criticisms of his Frankfurt speech (reproduced in the book’s appendix). Žižek is, of course, attacked from both the left and the right. As he says (taken from Hegel), this is a sign that he is on the right track. 

I’m not going to comment on Žižek’s take on Palestine. He goes out of his way to nuance what he says. I believe he is right about the entire situation going back to before Israel’s founding and now accelerated to a substantial degree by its political turn to the right. Both sides are to blame (and this goes back a long way). Neither side wants peace other than with the annihilation of the other side. That makes the present situation a zero point.

As for Ukraine, Žižek lays the entire blame on Russia, and he is undoubtedly correct as concerns the utterly unprovoked—in a military sense—present war. But Žižek does miss something concerning Ukraine. He fails to account for a Russian strategic military problem. If my reader will permit me I will use a few sentences to explain.

Between Napoleon and Hitler, Russia was invaded three times—always through Ukraine. Russia does not need Ukraine to be a formal part of a union. Still, like Belarus, Russia does need a Ukraine that is not politically and economically in a formal alliance with Western Europe. 

In the 1990s, Bill Clinton promised Russia (Yeltsin) that NATO would not move east—not incorporate countries of the former Warsaw Pact (Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Albania), Russia’s second-layer buffer beyond Ukraine and Belarus. Yet a few years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, this is precisely what happened (the Baltic nations—Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania—hard up against the Russian border, are now also NATO nations).

Some might object that, with or without Ukraine, Europe has no intention of invading Russia. That is true now, but what about fifty years from now? From a strategic military viewpoint, a country with Russia’s geographic vulnerability (shorn of an eastward-oriented Ukraine) cannot ignore this calculation. That is the threat Ukraine’s decisive turn towards the West poses for Russia. Does this excuse Russia’s present invasion? No, but Žižek does miss this point.

Žižek must feel like he’s been banging his head against a wall for decades. I’m not a big fan of his psychiatric (Lacanian) and metaphysical turns of phrase—the ‘Other,’ the ‘Real,’ ‘surplus pleasure,’ and so on. Such things might belong to relations between individuals, but they are, at best, metaphors when applied to geopolitics. Metaphor or not, they are in Žižek’s blood. In this little book, Žižek’s grasp of the world’s desperate plight reflects—it seems to me—a personal resignation. In his earlier books, he exhibits hope that things can get better. I sense little hope here.