Slavoj Žižek: “Why — or, rather, how — do I read?”
Slavoj Žižek: “I practise a violent reading, a reading which tears (what appear as) organic unities apart and takes them out of their context, establishing new unexpected links between fragments. These links do not operate at the level of continuous linear historical progress: they rather emerge at points of ‘dialectics at a standstill’ (Walter Benjamin), in which a present moment, in a kind of trans-historical short-circuit, directly echoes homologous moments in the past.
Such a reading breaks out of the space of the standard opposition between the immanent reading, which tries to remain faithful to the interpreted text, and the practice of quotation, which uses fragments of a text to justify present ideological and political measures. The exemplary case of such practice is found in Stalinism: the key to Leninism as (Stalinist) ideology is provided by Mikhail Suslov, the member of the Politburo responsible for ideology from Stalin’s late years to the time of Brezhnev. Neither Khrushchev nor Brezhnev would release any document until Suslov had looked over it — why? Suslov had an enormous library of Lenin’s quotes I his Kremlin office; they were written on index cards, organized by themes and contained in wooden filing cabinets. Every time a new political campaign, economic measure or international policy was introduced, Suslov found an appropriate quote from Lenin to support it. Lenin’s quotes in Suslov’s collection were isolated from their original contexts. Because Lenin was an extremely prolific writer who commented on all sorts of historical situations and political developments, Suslov could find appropriate quotes to legitimate as ‘Leninist’ almost any argument and initiative, sometimes even if they opposed each other: ‘the very same quotes from the founders of Marxism-Leninism that Suslov successfully used under Stalin and for which Stalin so highly valued him, Suslov later employed to critique Stalin.’
This was the truth of Soviet Leninism: Lenin served as the ultimate reference, and a quote of his legitimized any political, economic or cultural measure, but in a totally pragmatic and arbitrary way — in exactly the same way, incidentally, that the Catholic Church refers to the Bible. The irony is thus that the two big orientations of Marxism — the Stalinist one and the authentic one — can be perfectly grasped through two different modes of quotations.
What Benjamin conceptualized and practised (together with Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Brecht, James Jameson and many others) was a radically different practice of quotation, quotation as a form of struggle with the quoted text as well as with the writer’s own predicament.
Materialist quotation is internal to the quoted original through its very externality to it: its violent disfiguration of the original is in some sense more faithful to the original than the original itself, since it echoes social struggles that traverse both.
In his wonderful How to talk About Books you Haven’t Read, Pierre Bayard demonstrates (in an ironic reasoning which is ultimately meant quite seriously) that, in order to really formulate the fundamental insight or achievement of a book, it is generally better not to read it all — too much data only blurs our clear perception. For example, many essays on Joyce’s Ulysses — often the best ones — were written by scholars who did not read the whole book; the same goes for books on Kant or Hegel, where a truly detailed knowledge can only give rise to a boring specialist’s exegesis, not to living insights.
The best interpretations of Hegel are always partial: they extrapolate the totality from a particular figure of thought or of dialectical movement. As a rule, it is not a direct reading of a thick book of Hegel himself but some striking detailed observation — often wrong or at least one-sided — made by an interpreter that allows us to grasp Hegel’s thoughts in its living movement.
Hegel’s basic lesson is thus exact opposite of the standard notion of ‘totality’, which enjoins us to locate a thing into the infinitely complex network of its relations and interdependence: dialectical progress occurs through abstraction, through violent reduction.”
Leave a Reply