Defending the indefensible

If you had to put money on which academic would be the first to play Wembley Arena, you'd have to go for Slavoj Zizek. Once dubbed "the Elvis of cultural theory," Zizek is the author of some 40 books ranging in subject from Hitchcock to Christianity, from the Iraq war to Lacanian psychoanalysis. As relaxed discussing Jennifer Aniston as Kant's theory of the phenomenon, he's almost too good to be true. Look at his background: born in 1949 in Slovenia, a country perfect for that outsider, slightly marginalised status every intellectual needs. And it comes with the added bonus of an outrageous accent which, as anyone who's seen him lecture will vouch, simply adds to his undeniable charisma. Then there's that fantastic Scrabble-winning triumph of a name (worth 43 points—never let it be said that book reviewers don't do their research). Surely he's actually a bloke from Wolverhampton called Kevin who's taking us all for a ride.

If that is the case, then Kevin is doing a brilliant job. In Defense of Lost Causes is typical Zizek: exhilarating, inspiring, thought-provoking and sometimes very, very hard. Zizek is a Lacanian-Hegelian, constantly drawing on Lacan's reworking of Freud and his own reworking of Hegel's idealist philosophy as he whips from Kierkegaard to Borat, from Althusser to internet masturbatathons. Chapter headings like "The Crisis of Determinate Negation" and "Unbehagen in der Natur" don't exactly conjure up a relaxed deckchair read, but what makes the difficult bits worthwhile is the sheer verve and passion of Zizek's argument—that, and the machine-gun scattering of original thought and mischievous wit from his headlong narrative. As a particularly competitive friend of mine put it, you're conversationally guaranteed to "win" any dinner party with this kind of ammunition. I'm certainly looking forward to some extra aubergine polenta for my Zizekian thesis that Schindler's List is just Jurassic Park with the Nazis as dinosaurs.

In Defense of Lost Causes asks whether it's still possible to believe in any big ideas (Marx, Freud, the rest of the gang) in a postmodern age where the concept of objective truth has been so thoroughly discredited. More specifically, for Zizek, does the Marxist big idea have any relevance now that global capitalism seems to enjoy near total dominance? His answer to both queries is an emphatic, post-postmodern yes. And to prove his point he sets about defending what some of his detractors (the post-post-postmodernists?) would brand "lost causes"—Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, Heidegger. So, maybe it wasn't so good for Heidegger to say that the Führer-state is the perfect actualisation of the people, or that the Holocaust was an example of the agricultural exploitation of nature (producing corpses rather than wheat). But he should be celebrated for taking a right step, a revolutionary one, albeit in the wrong direction. What's more, Zizek continues, the problem with Hitler was that he wasn't violent or radical enough (probably best not to try and win a dinner party with this one). He misplaced his violence onto the Jews rather than destroying the capitalist system itself. When it came to real change, Hitler, like Mao and Stalin and Robespierre, bottled it.

Zizek is understandably keen to point out he's not defending Hitler or Stalin, but rather attempting to step outside the dominant liberal-democratic interpretation of history so as to better understand the task that faces the left today. In Beckett's words, we must learn to "try again. Fail again. Fail better." Zizek is also fantastically withering about the thinkers of the "postmodern left," such as the English philosopher Simon Critchley, whom he lampoons as a "critical, secular, well-dressed, metrosexual post-Kantian." Such thinkers accept capitalist hegemony and merely snipe at the state from the margins, Zizek argues. His solution is far more radical. He mounts a rousing defence of the dictatorship of the proletariat, seeing in the swelling populations of the ghettos, shantytowns and slums a new worldwide proletariat-in-waiting. He calls on us to put aside our fears—of global warming, of biotechnology, of Islamic fundamentalism—and to act, reinventing what he terms "egalitarian terror" to combat the global challenges we face. "Egalitarian," in that all are to be treated equally (on global warming, for instance, every person in every country in the world would have exactly the same carbon allowance), but also entailing "terror," in that those who transgress (like polluters) would be ruthlessly punished for the greater good.

All of which is a challenge to liberals like me, who feel a revolutionary act is to put on the soundtrack from Les Mis. But there is something inspiring about Zizek's radical engagement and the passion and energy of his arguments. To the barricades, citizens! Down with capitalism! At least until it's time for The Apprentice.