In Žižek’s Defense

Lord knows that Slavoj Žižek doesn’t need me to come to his rescue, but I wanted to point out that the article Slavoj Zizek and Harum Scarum by Hamid Dabashi (Al Jazeera) uses comments that Žižek made about “capitalism with Asian values” as a springboard from which to launch an entirely-too-long and under-researched article against Orientalism. A noble cause, no doubt, but using Žižek’s name as a modern-day proponent of Orientalism is laughable. The man is many things, but an Orientalist he is not. He often goes on and on and on and ties a thousand ideas together under one roof and won’t sit still and loves tangents, but he’s not an Orientalist. He takes a semantic shortcut in an interview and this guy jumps all over him. Žižek has made his views abundantly[1] clear:

1. The phrase is not his; it is rather that of the detractors of that form of capitalism and one he uses as a shorthand instead of reiterating the pages of argument it would take to describe. The phrase is perhaps unfortunate but Žižek has never been one to care about using unfortunate labels.
2. Asian capitalism is opposed to Western capitalism as a form that does not make an effort to fake its way into a moral high ground. It is top-down, totalitarian and it seems to be beating the fake touchy-feely version at its own game. Perhaps Chinese capitalism would be a better label, but Singapore has a similar system. Sino-Singo-capitalism, perhaps? Until someone else joins the club?
3. Žižek does not prefer one form of capitalism over the other. Even in the citation, it’s clear that no love is lost for either. Everything else he’s written in the last ten years makes it abundantly clear that while he does not disavow capitalism in toto, the forms with which we are familiar are doomed to be too undemocratic and he prefers something more socialist.[2] He is one of the last people to romanticize Western capitalism, as is alluded in the article.

Kudos to Mr. Dabashi for scaring up a few extra page views by featuring Žižek’s name, but his argument rings hollow. Not everyone who is indiscriminate with an epithet is actually a racist—and it would be nice if the preponderance of his work would weigh more heavily than one off-the-cuff remark in one interview.