Has Slavoj Žižek been taken hostage?

I skimmed through a recent article called Pacifism is the wrong response to the war in Ukraine by Slavoj Žižek (The Guardian). I’ve read a lot of Žižek. I’ve heard a lot of interviews with him. This article doesn’t “sound” like him at all.

There are no contrarian positions, there are no mentions of Hegel or Lacan, no mentions of psychiatry. He made absolutely no pop-culture references. He told no jokes. He usually talks of being a realist communist—nothing of the sort here. No mention of Ukraine’s absolute war on communism. There’s no subtlety at all in this article—just vaguely hawkish and unsubtle good-guys-vs-bad-guys rhetoric.

A search of earthli.com for Žižek yields a wealth of interviews and articles I’ve covered over the last couple of years. Read any excerpt or transcription from a video and see whether the style in the Guardian article matches his prior style at all.

The summary can’t possibly have been written by him, unless he’s recently struck his head quite badly, “The least we owe Ukraine is full support, and to do this we need a stronger Nato”. This is woefully less nuanced than he used to be. I suspect a ghost-writer or that he’s been taken hostage. Maybe this topic finally drove him around the bend, though; I must remain open to this possibility.

I haven’t seen any writing of his for months. He interviewed frequently at the beginning of the incursion and was much more nuanced and balanced in his views—but he hasn’t interviewed in quite some time. Now, an article appears “out of the blue”, as it were, wherein he espouses an opinion that wouldn’t be at all out of place on major U.S. cable-news channels.

The whole article is full of realpolitik references that Žižek has historically glossed-over in favor of more interesting philosophical ruminations. This article could have been written by any of dozens of other people—and I fear that it was. Perhaps something of what Žižek submitted survives a bit—if he submitted anything at all. I wouldn’t put it past the Guardian to publish something in his name.

The final, somewhat contrarian paragraph, seems possibly to have been written by Žižek, though,

“From the rightist standpoint, Ukraine fights for European values against the non-European authoritarians; from the leftist standpoint, Ukraine fights for global freedom, inclusive of the freedom of Russians themselves. That’s why the heart of every true Russian patriot beats for Ukraine.”

However, directly after this ending paragraph is a section that explains who Žižek is, followed by a much-longer section that starts with “I write from Ukraine, where I’ve spent much of the past six months […]” and is signed “Luke Harding”. Did he write the article? Or did he just write the blurb requesting donations?

The article Slavoj Zizek Does His Christopher Hitchens Impression by Ron Jacobs (CounterPunch) has a more to-the-point, if less-charitable, title. His analysis is quite astute, but he also seems to be negatively predisposed toward Žižek, whereas I am very positively predisposed to Žižek. Hence, where Jacobs is willing to believe that this article represents Žižek’s denouement, I am much more willing to believe that he didn’t write the damned thing at all—or that he wrote it while tied to a chair with a gun to his head.