Comradely Greetings by Slavoj Žižek Read Free Book Online Page B

bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.
    It is this crazy dynamic of global capitalism that makes effective resistance to it so difficult and frustrating. The rage exploding across Europe today is, as Franco Berardi put it in
After the Future
, “impotent and inconsequential, as consciousness and coordinated action seem beyond the reach of present society. Look at the European crisis. Never in our life have we faced a situation so charged with revolutionary opportunities. Never in our life have we been so impotent. Never have intellectuals and militants been so silent, so unable to find a way to show a new possible direction.” Berardi locates the origin of this impotence in the explosive speed of the functioning of the big Other (the symbolic substance of our lives) and the slowness of human reactivity (due to culture, corporeality, diseases, etc.): “the long-lasting neoliberal rule has eroded the cultural bases of social civilization, which was the progressive core of modernity. And this is irreversible. We have to face it.” Recall the great wave of protests that spread all over Europe in 2011, from Greece and Spain to London and Paris. Even if for themost part there was no consistent political program mobilizing the protesters, their protests did function as part of a large-scale educational process: the protesters’ misery and discontent were transformed into a great collective act of mobilization—hundreds of thousands gathered in public squares, proclaiming that they had enough, that things cannot go on like this. However, such protests, although they constitute the individuals participating in them as universal political subjects, remain at the level of a purely formal universality: what they stage is a purely negative gesture of angry rejection and an equally abstract demand for justice, lacking the ability to translate this demand into a concrete political program. In short, these protests were not yet proper political acts, but abstract demands addressed to an Other who is expected to act …
    One cannot but note the cruel irony of this contrast between Berardi and Hardt/Negri. Hardt and Negri celebrate “cognitive capitalism” as opening up a path towards “absolute democracy,” since the object, the “stuff,” of immaterial work is increasingly social relations themselves. Their wager is that this directly socialized, immaterial production not only renders owners progressively superfluous (who needs them when production is directly social, formally and in terms of its content?), but the producers also master the regulation of social space, since social relations (politics)
is
the stuff of their work: economic production directly becomes political production, the production of society itself. Berardi’s conclusion is the exact opposite: far from bringing out the potential transparency of social life, today’s “cognitive capitalism” makes it more impenetrablethan ever, undermining the very conditions of any form of collective solidarity among the “cognitariat.” What is symptomatic here is the way the same conceptual apparatus leads to two radically opposed conclusions.
    If we are not able to step outside the compulsion of the system, the gap between the frantic dynamics it imposes and our corporeal and cognitive limitations sooner or later brings about a fall into depression. Berardi makes this point apropos his friend Félix Guattari, who, in theory, preached a gospel of hyper-dynamic “de-territorialization,” while personally suffering from long bouts of depression:
    Actually the problem of depression and of exhaustion is never elaborated in an explicit way by Guattari. I see here a crucial problem of the theory of desire: the denial of the problem of