First as Tragedy, then as Farce

I recently finished reading Slavoj Zizek's book First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, which I received as a Christmas gift. This is the first of Zizek's books that I read, but I suspect not the last (in part because I was also gifted several others). This is a difficult book to review. Zizek's writing style is erudite, and obviously sometimes this makes certain passages unparsable. However, beneath the densely worded and implicitly referenced philosophical ideas in texts I've never read by authors I've never heard of, there are very many interesting ideas and a fascinating argument to be considered.

Zizek takes his cue from the currently ongoing «privatisation of the commons» of «the shared substance of our social being»--namely, the commons of culture; the commons of external nature; and the commons of internal nature. These three are interrelated because they are all major antagonisms raging within modern capitalism, along with a fourth antagonism, the creation of new forms of apartheid. Together, these four antagonisms are tearing at the fabric of democracy from within, because as capitalism is allowed to continue unfettered, there arises an inevitable struggle to enclose any potential rent-producing activity, which is subsequently commodified for consumption. So just as things like copyright law are eroding the commons of culture, pollution is eroding the commons of external nature, and our internal nature--i.e. our genes and chromosomes--is increasingly patented and handled.

It is illuminating to think of Zizek's point as a counterpoint to the Right's claim that free markets are the ultimate good and that government regulation is the ultimate evil. AS Zizek states, «new domains, hitherto excluded from the market, are now commodified. . . . we are in the midst of a new process of privatization of the social . . . of the privatization of the "general intellect" itself--and this is what lies at the core of the struggle over "intellectual property".» Nowadays, therefore, increasingly direct legal regulatory authority is required in order to impose the arbitrary legal conditions for extracting rents from activities which are now easy to obtain for free, such as music. It is here, Zizek notes, that the fundamental contradiction of modern capitalism lays: «while its logic is de-regulatory [and] anti-statal», the present-day application of regulatory law to preserve rents that modern technology has made obsolete «signals a strengthening of the role of the state whose regulatory function is ever more omnipresent. . . . far from disappearing, the state is today gathering strength.»

To counter this path, Zizek offers Communism, and suggests that it will be pure voluntarism, the mobilization of individuals, which will make the difference and provide the grassroots impetus that will impede the enclosure of the commons and show the way forward. Of course, he is right, at least in the medium term. More concrete solutions, though, would have been much appreciated. Zizek is however a philosopher, not an engineer.

I overall enjoyed the book very much, at least until it became abstruse and inaccesible with references to Badiou and Foucault and Kant and Hegel. This is not Zizek's fault, though, it is mine. As you can see from this list, I have not read anything any of these people have written. I liked that I was able to read most of the book with relative ease, though, and I liked that it make me think quite a lot. In fact, I liked the book so much that I reread parts of it immediately after finishing so that I could annotate them. I have not done that since college. I highly recommend this book.