AT: Zizek- Cap K-Article from the future

Copyright 2008 The New Republic, LLC
The New Republic
December 3, 2008
SECTION: Pg. 30

LENGTH: 6947 words

HEADLINE: The Deadly Jester

BYLINE: Adam Kirsch

BODY:


In Defense of Lost Causes



By Slavoj Žižek

(Verso, 504 pp., $34.95)

Violence

By Slavoj Žižek

(Picador, 272 pp., $14)

I.

Last year the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek published a piece in The New York Times deploring America's use of torture to extract a confession from Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the Al Qaeda leader who is thought to have masterminded the attacks of September 11. The arguments that Žižek employed could have been endorsed without hesitation by any liberal-minded reader. Yes, he acknowledged, Mohammed's crimes were "clear and horrifying"; but by torturing him the United States was turning back the clock on centuries of legal and moral progress, reverting to the barbarism of the Middle Ages. We owe it to ourselves, Žižek argued, not to throw away "our civilization's greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity." For anyone who is familiar with Žižek's many books, what was striking about the piece was how un-Žižekian it was. Yes, there were the telltale marks--quotations from Hegel and Agamben kept company with a reference to the television show 24, creating the kind of high-low frisson for which Žižek is celebrated. But for the benefit of the Times readers, Žižek was writing, rather surprisingly, as if the United States was basically a decent country that had strayed into sin.