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Slavoj Žižek

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Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbours Hardcover – International Edition, February 28, 2017

by Slavoj Zizek (Author)

4.3 79 ratings

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Today, hundreds of thousands of people, desperate to escape war, violence and poverty, are crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Our response from our protected European standpoint, argues Slavoj Zizek, offers two versions of ideological blackmail: either we open our doors as widely as possible; or we try to pull up the drawbridge. Both solutions are bad, states Zizek. They merely prolong the problem, rather than tackling it. The refugee crisis also presents an opportunity, a unique chance for Europe to redefine itself: but, if we are to do so, we have to start raising unpleasant and difficult questions. We must also acknowledge that large migrations are our future: only then can we commit to a carefully prepared process of change, one founded not on a community that see the excluded as a threat, but one that takes as its basis the shared substance of our social being. The only way, in other words, to get to the heart of one of the greatest issues confronting Europe today is to insist on the global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed. Maybe such solidarity is a utopia. But, warns Zizek, if we don't engage in it, then we are really lost. And we will deserve to be lost.

Print length

128 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Penguin Press
Publication date

February 28, 2017
Dimensions

5.3 x 0.6 x 8.1 inches
ISBN-10

9780241278840
ISBN-13

978-0241278840
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Slavoj Zizek
276
Paperback
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Slavoj Zizek
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About the Author

Slavoj Žižek is a Hegelian philosopher, Lacanian psychoanalyst, and political activist. He is international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities and the author of numerous books on dialectical materialism, critique of ideology and art, including Living in the End Times, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce, Trouble in Paradise and, most recently, Against the Double Blackmail.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0241278848
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press (February 28, 2017)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 128 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780241278840
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0241278840
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.3 x 0.6 x 8.1 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #4,270,479 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #3,466 in Social Philosophy
- #11,993 in Political Philosophy (Books)

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4.3 79 ratings

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Slavoj Žižek

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"The most dangerous philosopher in the West," (says Adam Kirsch of The New Republic) Slavoj Zizek is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic. He is a professor at the European Graduate School, International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. His books include "First as Tragedy, Then as Farce;" "Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle;" "In Defense of Lost Causes;" "Living in the End Times;" and many more.

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4.3 out of 5

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skater

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on December 10, 2016

Loved it

Reviewed in the United States on September 29, 2016

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Very incisive analysis of problems and myths. Well worth reading. The last chapter on solutions is naive.

One person found this helpful

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petr svoboda

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on June 7, 2016

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Great book

4 people found this helpful

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Mike Robbins

Refugees, hypocrisy and class struggle

Reviewed in the United States on July 15, 2016

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“Refugees,” says Slavoj Žižek, “are the price humanity is paying for the global economy.” They are a result of global inequalities, and slamming down the drawbridge will not help, for mass-migrations are an inevitable part of the future, especially as climate change begins to bite. However, opening the floodgates and letting large numbers of refugees into Europe is an equally futile response, and can only cause trouble; in the end, we won’t like them and they won’t like us. Better to understand that this is all the result of global class struggle, and engage with it. Half-measures will get us nowhere.

That’s the core message of this bleak little book. It’s a polemic that has virtually nothing optimistic or generous in its 25,000-odd words. But it does have some intriguing insights, and its central, Marxian, message of global class war makes alarming sense.

It’s fair to say Žižek doesn’t like liberals much. Early in his argument he condemns the hypocrisy arguing for open borders for refugees. Everyone knows it won’t happen, because it would “trigger a populist revolt”, so advocating it is a self-indulgence of those who want to present themselves as “beautiful souls”. In the same vein, he argues against opening the doors to refugees for humane reasons, and insists that there are limits to human empathy. Do not pretend we can empathise with refugees, he says. And don’t expect them to be grateful to us for being rich. Žižek cites the New Year’s Eve 2015 disturbances in Cologne, when large numbers of women were assaulted, apparently by refugees. In a bizarre but interesting comparison, he then quotes a 1731 incident in Paris in which printers’ apprentices murdered cats because their master’s wife pampered them while they starved.

Neither has Žižek any time for those who are too polite about other people’s religions, including Islam. In this context he quotes the Rotherham child-abuse case, in which men of mainly Pakistani descent were found to have been sexually abusing and exploiting young girls over a period of many years, and the local authority had not intervened because (it is said) it was afraid of being seen as racist. He also draws on his background in psychoanalysis to argue that people of different cultures do not necessarily wish to live in proximity.

What all this is leading up to is Žižek’s central point: There is no point in pretending to like people who we don’t really want living next door to us. It’s a hypocritical liberal lie and in any case, it won’t solve the problem. The refugee crisis is a symptom of global class war. The rich world fuels conflict so that it can rob poorer countries of their natural resources, and refugees, Boko Haram and the rest are the result; what did we expect? It’s a fair comment. Žižek makes the interesting point that the Taliban takeover in the Swat valley in 2009 was at least in part a class-driven conflict against feudal landlords.

In the richer countries, Žižek’s sympathies are less with liberals than with lower-income groups of the sort who would oppose immigration or asylum. When Western liberals point the finger at working people in their own countries for being bigoted peasants, says Žižek, this is part of the “culture wars” fuelling movements such as Trump’s (he could have added Brexit in Britain, had he written the book a few months later). The “culture wars”, in his opinion, are themselves class conflict between the disadvantaged and a liberal elite that wishes to denigrate them to maintain its own position. I think he might be right. In this sense, class struggle underlies not only the movement of refugees but the response to them in their chosen countries of refuge. There is no “let them in” option, and no “keep them out” choice either. There is only one answer: To engage with the class struggle. This is a profoundly Marxian analysis, imbued with a visceral loathing for a hypocritical, self-interested “liberal” class that Žižek clearly wishes would go to hell.

While I accept Žižek’s analysis in principle, I did have some problems with this book. An underlying theme is that, sometimes, cultures are incompatible. Given that Žižek himself thinks future large-scale migrations are inevitable, I think that’s a dangerous message. We’re going to have to get used to each other. Moreover the evidence he presents is flawed. Rotherham is not a good example – it may have had as much to do with alienation and poor governance as it did with Islam or cultural difference. He also pushes a theory, based on the work of the French psychoanalyst Lacan, that we have a morbid distrust of the “other” and their customs that both attracts and repels, and causes tensions. I do not buy this. Has he never lived next door to someone whose habits are different? It’s not always so hard. Neither are humane impulses always a bad driver of policy, although Žižek is probably right that they can’t provide a stable world.

Moreover, while global conflict and forced migration is mostly the result of inequality and imperialism, there are other factors. The US and Britain invaded Iraq for several reasons, of which oil was only one. There was also messianic attachment to democracy, and a deluded belief that freedom would make Iraqis love Israel. Moreover, while the invasion helped open the gates of hell in neighbouring Syria, there had long been communal tensions there, and they had erupted before (I know this; I used to live there). Žižek might reply that these were the result of an arbitrary colonial division of the region in 1919 that put the borders in the wrong places. In the case of Iraq this holds water, but Syria is too complex ever to have been culturally homogenous. Elsewhere, Eritrean refugees are fleeing their own government as much as they are poverty.

Lastly, I did not feel that the arguments in the book were presented in a coherent sequence. For example, two early chapters deal with the obscene underbellies of religion, and the existence of undirected violence. They do not really feed into Žižek’s central argument and may have been culled from other work he has done. I wondered if he had felt that the refugee crisis was a golden opportunity to present a thesis of global class struggle, and put it together quickly. That’s not to say that Against the Double Blackmail is a bad read; it’s pithy and well-written. But it often lacks cohesion.

Western liberals do have some thinking to do. The “culture wars” do represent a class struggle with their own proletariat, and the different responses to the refugee crisis – “refugees welcome” hashtags on one side, Pegida on the other – has thrown this into sharp relief. And it is quite true that the current instability is a result of inequality, just as air masses of different temperatures create the weather. So a “humane” response to the refugee crisis will solve nothing. At the same time, humanity is not always a bad basis for policy, and empathy is not always the false emotion or tawdry hypocrisy that Žižek would have us believe. Besides, what would he do if he saw a Syrian or an Eritrean struggling in the water? Leave them to drown? I don’t suppose so.

This book does have something to say, and smug liberals should read it. But it is meant as a provocative polemic. We should all take it with a pinch of salt. And maybe Žižek wants us to.

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in Canada on October 16, 2016

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Wonderful.

Ergun Coruh

Passionate but messy and unoriginal

Reviewed in Australia on December 2, 2016

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A tour de force on refugee crisis, this book establishes a root cause analysis, World nations’ track record of handling it and what needs to be done to solve it.

There are points that I agree and others I don’t. In this review I will attempt to cover both ends.

The reasons I gave two stars are mostly technical. This is not a cohesive narration, but rather a very messy one with varying degrees of meshed up complexity and plenty of divergence. Hence it suffers from lack of fluency, consistency and consequent punchline. Despite all the noise it creates, a hard one to read.

I agree with root cause analysis:

“The ultimate cause of refugees is today’s global capitalism itself and its geopolitical games.”

I also acknowledge his criticism of Western liberals and left, in regard to their passive stance, their boundless blind tolerance based on cultural relativism, “respect their culture regardless”.

“should we tolerate it if refugees settling in Europe prevent their children going to school; if they force their women to dress and behave in a certain way; if they arrange the marriages of their children, if they maltreat (and worse) gays among their ranks.”

However Zizek fundamentally sees tolerance problem less relevant than it sounds with respect to the necessity of bringing ever-famous communist motto, “class struggle”, BANG, on to the table:

“The only way to break out of this deadlock is to move beyond mere tolerance of others. Don’t just respect others: offer them a common struggle, since our problems today are common; propose and fight for a positive universal project shared by all participants.”

There are countless occurrences of the word “emancipatory” and “emancipation” in this book, there is no mention of the word “secular” or “secularism”, which is surprising really, as development of secularist ideas was the most significant aspect of the Western Enlightenment. Either Zizek does not think secularism can be useful as a toolset or he just simply misses the point.

Finally, Zizek brushes out his “solution” in the last chapter “What Is To Be Done”. In a nutshell he seeks global solidarity and demands class struggle back, i.e. same old dress, Communism.

One person found this helpful

Arch Stanton

A great intro to some of the issues circling around the ...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 18, 2016

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A great intro to some of the issues circling around the EU. But, as always one perspective among many. So I followed it up with 'And the Weak Suffer What they Must'. But a friend of mine who is Greek really wasn't complimentary about the guy who wrote that and was disparaging of his perspective on the Greek financial crisis and its history. So now I don't know what to think. So many perspectives, so little time.

One person found this helpful

bissan hazem

The book is confusing, and the author points aren't ...

Reviewed in Canada on June 26, 2017

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The book is confusing, and the author points aren't clear. The author is not providing new information, and the concepts aren't obvious.

One person found this helpful

Arthur Koestler

More Interesting than Birlliant

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 6, 2016

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I have a sneaking suspicion that my own interaction with popular left-wing philosopher Slavoj Zizek, resembles that of many others across the political spectrum. Keen more often than not to listen to any of his television appearances or to watch any of his larger public addresses via YouTube, I have always found the Slovenian intellectual, who seems in his general ‘feel good’ nature to be the left wing’s response to Boris Johnson, more entertaining than genuinely interesting and consequently Against the Double Blackmail, is the first time that I have ever decided to venture into reading any of his extensive written output.

For anyone who likewise is familiar with Zizek without having read him, it must be confirmed that he writes in exactly the same esoteric fashion in which he expresses himself when he speaks. This quite obviously entails the same merits and drawbacks. King of the shaggy dog story and the ability to go off on obscure tangents, Zizek can often invest so much effort in entertaining his reader, that it unfortunately acts to the severe detriment of any substantive points that he is otherwise trying to make. A case in point is found in one of the several essays in this work that has the expressed focus of critiquing the ugly characteristics of conservative Islam, which in fact spends more time talking about a bizarre case of reverse racism concerning the indigenous tribes of Canada. Sadly this isn’t the only instance in which you can find yourself either confused or even nodding off, due to the lack of any forward direction in the psychoanalytic house of mirrors that Zizek erects.

However all of this being said this particular work is defiantly worth reading, as amongst a lot of waffle there are some genuinely interesting opinions voiced, made more so when one keeps in mind that they come from someone of Zizek’s background of Marxist Psychoanalysis. The first of these is his rejection and criticisms of the overly sentimental and emotive response that has greeted the European refugee crisis, at the expense of any hardnosed thinking about how it should be dealt with or resolved.

Zizek rejects in as stronger terms, those who wish to demonstrate what wonderful people they are by advertising their belief in the innate goodness of every refugee arriving on Europe’s shores, as much as he dismisses those who wish to cast them all as an unwashed mob of terrorists and rapists. Crucially he says that we have an ethical duty to do what is right in providing aid to the refugees, but refuses the expectation to indulge in a competition of fake and surreptitious expressions of empathy. As Zizek puts it, ‘what if getting to know them reveals that they are more or less like us – impatient, violent, demanding – plus, usually, part of a culture that cannot accept many of the features we perceive as self-evident?’. Here Zizek shows a remarkable and impressive capacity for common sense realism above misty eyed sentimentalism.

Worth quoting at length Zizek expands on this by reflecting upon the indispensable impersonal characteristics of human coexistence, ‘I move in a social space where I interact with others obeying certain external mechanical rules, without sharing their inner world. Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that, sometimes a dose of alienation is indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life. Sometimes alienation is not a problem but a solution. Sometimes, alienation is like alcohol for Homer Simpson, the cause of and the solution to all life’s problems.’. Therefore human interaction being as it is, introducing wholly divergent cultures into the mix, it’s not surprising that we will find out that these cultures don’t seem to gel harmoniously and ‘get on’ with each other, as we don’t in any true sense ‘get on’ with majority of people from our own cultural and ethnic or identity groupings.

Therefore it’s no surprise that so many of us end up fearing ‘the other’ and whole populist political movements have recently sprung up as a result, because as Zizek points out, we can’t as a society truly get to know them in the first place as much as we can’t truly get to know ourselves. Naturally this is then where hysteria gains traction, even without posing the inevitably poisonous questions of distributing the resources of welfare and social services. Though his then proposed solution is rather bemusing, of a militarised response to facilitating the equal redistribution of refugees to the 28 member states of the EU, it’s not really the primary focus of the piece.

He then goes on to expand his commentary, taking aim at the unremarkable exploits of Islamic political structures, to respond to the refugee crisis or to act in general as a force of opposition to global capitalism. The refusal of Saudi Arabia and Gulf States to take a single refugee and the facilitation of ISIS by the Turkish Islamist regime, being two clear points of illustration. These remarks are not too dissimilar from those that Zizek has passed with regards to dampening the hopes of those who naively believe that the Russians or the Chinese, are in any way more scrupulous as global actors when compared to the USA. Quite healthily Zizek doesn’t buy into the George Galloway and co obsession, of seeing all global injustice as being at root a cause of the Americans, making absolutely anyone who will fight against them a potential ally of expediency in the struggle of ‘anti-imperialism’.

Though this being said he does in the book dedicate an essay to the rather shallow idea that global capitalism is the mainspring of all major ethnic conflicts. However he also correctly identifies Islamic fundamentalism as being the product of a peculiar brew of the fascination, envy and hatred of western capitalist civilisation. Not simply a natural or prosaic response to western injustices.

Finally one more interesting essay in this collection is also dedicated to illustrating how the recent riots and demonstrations of explosive unrest amongst Europe and America’s urban youth, have absolutely zero true and conscious ideological underpinning or direction to them. As he says thousands of young men, who live in comparative material comfort, taking to the streets to destroy their own neighbourhoods, whether it be in Paris, London or Jefferson, proves to Zizek that we truly live in the deluge of a post-ideological age. This is another interesting admission from the left wing intellectual, as if these popular outcries have no grand and articulate vision to them, then it surely equally makes more conservative interpretations and explanations of them more credible, as these characteristically concern themselves with the more base and mundane qualities of human nature. Though even if this is rejected by Zizek’s own quite vague communal communist prescriptions, it at least lays the ground for a worthwhile debate.

Therefore over 110 pages the ideas expressed arn’t necessarily new, though they do instead come from a remarkably fresh ideological perspective. Read more at [...]

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