The concept of accelerationism was first conceived in the blogosphere of the late 2000s. It was always, at its core, concerned with the future of capitalism and how we as capitalist subjects might weather or even help enact capitalism's demise. This line of questioning has two points of emergence that, when taken together, would birth a para-academic movement concerning the future of the relationship between philosophy and politics. However, at first glance, these two points hardly seem commensurate with one another. The dominant event was the era-defining financial crash of 2007-2008, an event that revitalised that question at the heart of any anti-capitalist discourse,
is there no alternative? More than that, the financial crash also placed this question in the minds of the general public. Bankers' greed and deregulation were not self-contained issues to be dealt with independently by the financial industries themselves. Nor were these issues to be critiqued in journals by economists and Marxist academics alone. These were issues relevant to all. The ways in which the financial savings of ordinary people had been unsuccessfully gambled upon made this abundantly clear. Later, adding insult to injury, government bailouts of the worst offenders were drawn from taxpayers' money, resulting on a global recession that impacted the working classes, the real victims of the crash, all the more. For a burgeoning crowd of accelerationists, a great what-if emerged from the years of austerity that followed. What if we had let the system run its course
and welcomed an inadvertent revolution caused by financier self-harm? And furthermore, what had stopped this option from emerging? There was the shadow of an opportunity here, but it seemed that the left, most of all, had been wholly unprepared for it. Still haunted as it was, and continues to be, by the failures of socialism and communism during the previous century, could the left even imagine a post-capitalist world anymore? Did it truly desire one? What was required of a left now, if it was to reassert and make productive its belief that another world was possible? Alongside this event, there was a much more minor incident that was no less responsible for galvanising a nascent accelerationist discourse online, placing these same questions in a telling but strange and idiosyncratic context. Slasov Zizek's brief analysis of
Zack Snyder's 2006 film 300 for the journal Lacanian Inc. A film adaptation of Frank Miller's comic book series of the same name, 300 retells the story of the Battle of Thermopylae during the Greek-Persian War of 480 BC, during which a small cohort of soldiers and other fighters attempted to stop the invading Persian army. The group of 300 men were successful for a while until they were all eventually slaughtered by the enemy in their overwhelming numbers. Their sacrifice, however, helped secure a Greek victory overall. The film is today remembered as the last influential product of Hollywood's mid-2000s Frank Miller fever. The comic book writer's various projects had seen a resurgence in popularity following Robert Rodriguez's 2005 adaptation of Miller's 1990s franchise, Sin City,
a grotesque and highly stylised neo-noir that brought a stark, inky blackness to the typically bright and colourful world of crime-fighting superheroes. Miller's penchant for such darkness had long proved popular in the comic book world, with his stories for Daredevil and Batman in the 1980s producing some of the most critically acclaimed sagas of all time. However, in hindsight, Miller's stories are viewed more squeamishly. and it was arguably the film adaptation of 300 that finally made Hollywood recoil from their infatuation with his source material, with many interpreting the film to be little more than the hyper-violent celebration of American militarism that, at its worst, glorified fascism. In stereotypically Zizekian fashion, the Slovenian philosopher used his article for Lucanian Inc. to subvert the film's fascistic overtones,
and instead affirm its narrative of militaristic and sacrificial discipline from the left. In this sense Zizek knowingly swam against the current of a dominant discourse already surrounding the film's release which he believed had been unnecessarily attacked as the worst kind of patriotic militarism with clear allusions to the recent tensions in Iran and events in Iraq On the contrary, he argues, 300 should be thoroughly defended against these accusations However, Zizek's defence of this filmic lost cause is superficially contrarian For starters, he points out that the film in fact tells the story of a small and poor country, Greece, invaded by the army of a much larger state, Persia, at that point much more developed, and with a much more developed military technology. The Spartans are clearly the underdogs,
and so, if we are to draw parallels between the film and the US's then recent interventions in the Middle East, surely the Americanised heroes of the saga are instead representative of the Taliban. This is supposedly made clear by the film's climax. When the last surviving group of the Spartans and their king Leonidas are killed by thousands of arrows, Zizek argues, are they not in a way bombed to death by techno-soldiers operating sophisticated weapons from a safe distance, like today's US soldiers who push the rocket buttons from the warships safely away in the Persian Gulf? None of these arguments are used to suggest, as one might generously anticipate, that the film is an opportunity for consciousness-raising, through which the American movie-going public might develop empathy for an estranged foreign other. Instead, Zizek argues that the film offers the left a chance to develop a new revolutionary spirit through discipline and sacrifice.
Quoting his friend and fellow philosopher Alain Badiou, he writes, We need a popular discipline. I would even say that those who have nothing have only their discipline. The poor, those with no financial or military means, those with no power, all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together. This discipline is already a form of organisation. In today's era of hedonist permissivity as the ruling ideology, the time is coming for the left to re-appropriate discipline and the spirit of sacrifice. There is nothing inherently fascist about these values. This controversial argument emerges from Boudou's suggestion in the same 2007 interview from which Zizek is quoting that the left should make contact once again with the militancy of Marxist-Leninism,
albeit in a form more appropriate to the challenges of the 21st century. The left, Boudou argues, seems allergic to effective organisation precisely because it is the state that organises most effectively. In trying to negate the state, that is embody everything that the state is not and can never be, the left is dooming itself to a new irrelevancy, relegating itself to never becoming more than a weak, subservient and disorganised opposition to bourgeois oppression and state power. Instead, the left needs to embrace the power of organisation, discipline and sacrifice and beat the state at its own game. Zizek's suggestion that 300 is somehow representative of this move is unconvincing and no doubt purposefully antagonistic, but the overarching
point is prescient. Whilst it is by no means a new argument, he is right to suggest that this crisis of effective organisation is, under the impotency of neoliberalism, all the more pressing today. These critiques, despite appearances, are not necessarily informed by the cynicism of too old and down on younger activists with contempt. In fact, this crisis in negation would soon become the defining political problem of the late 2000s. As a global anti-capitalist movement began to emerge following the financial crash, the left was no longer concerned with simply negating the states but instead negating the capitalist class as such. The observation that the top 1% of capitalists around the world held as much wealth as the other 99% for instance became a rallying cry for a new movement that was all too aware of its economic disadvantages but increasingly aware
of its populist strengths and potential for organised revolution. However, the circumstances surrounding the financial crash only served to reinforce the reading of 300 that Zizek rejected. The difference then was that the top 300 capitalists around the world were successfully holding back the hordes of proletariat baying for their blood. Was this because they were disciplined? Hardly. Even in the context of the film, discipline doesn't end up accounting for much. The Spartans may deem their deaths to be honourable, but they still end up dead. but it's their belief in honour that allows them to sacrifice their lives. The financial crash was, by contrast, an instance of the bourgeoisie sacrificing the proletariat to make up for their own mistakes, just as they always had done. This was evidently not just a simple case of who has the numbers either.
Following the financial crash, it was clear that 99% remained impotent despite their size. Organisation was certainly an issue here, but it begs the question of what else stands in the way of this anti-capitalist revolution being achieved. For Zizek the problem is that the 99% have been arrested in ideological capture with consequences that are far more insidious than simply undermining the left's capacity for collective action. They may acknowledge that the system is rigged and does not move in their favour but they nonetheless seem unable to imagine any sort of alternative. This crisis of organisation then is not just strategic but imaginative. They are unable to collectively imagine the correct action, never mind collectively go through with whatever it is. From this perspective, Boudou's analysis of the crisis within negation begins to take on a wider resonance.
Pointing to this unconscious crisis in his essay for Lacan.com, Zizek notes how the digital production of 300, which was largely shot against a green screen in a warehouse in Montreal rather than on the shores of the Aegean, shrouds the film in an uncanny claustrophobia. Its epic but nonetheless digitally rendered backdrops suffocate the film, making it feel as if the story does not take place in real reality with its endless open horizons, but in a closed world, a kind of relief world of closed space. Such was the case in the capitalist west following the financial crash. As the limitations of capitalism were made more apparent on a global scale, so too was the impotence of its innately antagonistic nature. As Zizek insinuates, the effect produced by the narrowing of capitalism's horizon was one of true reality
losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament. As a result, the universe we see on the Korean is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth. Zizek's description of this antagonism resonates with what Perdue once called a crisis of negation. It renders Zizek's article as an essay of two halves. The first affirms 300's moralistic tensions, whilst the second mournfully acknowledges the impotence of doing so. For Perdue, this is a defining issue within Marxism itself. In the 21st century, this antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie, between Greek and
Persian forces is no longer productive. Sacrifice comes to naught. Oddly enough, this is already apparent in the interview with Badiou that Zizek originally quoted from. In the interview, Badiou speaks to a politics that is currently destructive rather than subtractive. A politics that does not subtract injustice and build a world with what is left, but rather one which destroys everything in its path. It is a politics that struggles to distinguish between what is part of the problem and what can be repurposed as part of the solution. Referring to this as the problem of the negative, Boudouf firmly situates his critique within the description of political economy provided by Karl Marx. For Marx, he says, the dialectical conception of negation defined the relation between philosophy and politics, what used to be called the problem of dialectical materialism. Marx was famously
inspired by the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, and particularly his philosophy of the dialectic, which was based on the idea that the comprehension of a unity between opposites through logic and reason leads to the production of new thought. However, for Marx, Hegel did not go far enough in his philosophy. In fact, Marx goes so far as to suggest the dialectic is useless if it is limited to the life of the mind and not applied to lived experience. It's worth noting that this does not reduce any dialectical philosophy to some vague gesture towards consensus and reconciliation, as it is often popularly misunderstood. The two opposing sides in Hegel's dialectical idealism are less like two interlocutors in disagreement, as was the case in Plato's original dialectical, or rather, dialogical philosophy.
They instead give form to an internal process that can be constituted between a subject and its object. I, for instance, as a subject, am conscious of myself and what I know. I am also aware that an object before me, living or inert, at the very least something I am unfamiliar with, requires a new consciousness in order for it to be fully understood. As I go about acquiring this new knowledge, my self-consciousness has expanded and become something new. For Hegel, this established the dialectical method as a motive for change in consciousness. This was also true for Marx. However, in his attempts to translate Hegel's idealism into a materialism, Marx also sought to invert or perhaps even extend this process one step further. My dialectical method is, in its foundations, not only different from the Hegelian,
but exactly opposite to it. He writes in his most famous defence of his magnum opus Capital. Whereas Hegel transforms the process of thinking into an independent subject under the name of the idea, Marx explains that for him the reverse is true. The ideal is nothing but the material world reflected in the mind of man and translated into forms of thought. For Marx then, the change in consciousness afforded by Hegel's dialectical idealism must then be put back to work in the world that it reflects so that it can bring about a positive change in the material existence of, specifically, the working class under capitalism. When considering the constitution of a capitalist society, such as the primary purpose of Marx's capital, this means understanding the material interrelation of the working and ruling classes, the proletariates and the bourgeoisie, so that the
proletariates might rise up and escape the unjust conflicts that keep the means and broader system of production, working solely in the favour of their oppressors. Put another way, the proletariat, in coming to fully understand the bourgeoisie's oppressive nature, must gain a new self-consciousness that allows them to change society. As such, the proletariat must also approach the bourgeoisie dialectically, and this is notably a process that only works one way. After all, the bourgeoisie has already transformed the nature of the proletariat from slaves and serfs into wage labourers, as Marx put it. This was a process controlled by those feudal lords and owners of private property who would form the bourgeois class as we know it today. The bourgeoisie have no need for a
cognitive programme of self-actualisation in this regard. Capitalism is already the actualisation of their hegemonic rule in both ideological and materialist senses. Therefore it is the proletariat who are the agents of social change within a capitalist society as it is in their favour that the system must swing. However, the system itself is not ignorant to this. The bourgeoisie and the proletariat find themselves in a dance of adaptations from below and oppressions from above, an antagonism enforced by capitalism's cunning willingness to adapt and reform itself, so long as it retains its grip on society as a whole. There are limits to this principle, of course. For instance, capitalism will always adapt, but it will never abolish class struggle. We might argue that this is because capitalism is a system driven by this very tension between opposing forces.
It is paradoxically sustained by the threats made upon its existence from within. These threats are manifest in part through the discontent of the proletariat, but also through the greed of the bourgeoisie themselves. After all, capitalists cannot help but accumulate capital, a process that leads inevitably towards the monopolisation and centralisation of the means of production. As Marx put it, one capitalist always strikes down many others. This is to say that in streamlining its own processes of accumulation, capitalism consolidates itself into an ever finer point. Left to its own devices, it is likely that we would eventually find ourselves in a world where one capitalist owns everything, as the rest of us work for scraps. The resistance of the proletariat moderates this process of accumulation.
It even produces glimmers of other worlds that capitalism must absorb to stave off revolution. Marx writes, Along with the constant decrease in the number of capitalist magnates who usurp and monopolise all the advantages of this process of transformation, the mass of misery, oppression, slavery, degradation and exploitation grows. But with this there also grows the revolt of the working class, a class constantly increasing in numbers, and trained, united and organised by the very mechanism of the capitalist process of production. Here Marx is pointing out that the working classes in working together, ironically because capitalism demands it, it requires a cohesive workforce, will inevitably acquire a group consciousness and come to resent how the benefits produced by their labouring
are enjoyed by a constantly decreasing number of upper class people. Capitalism's prospects from this vantage point don't look good. In the most simplistic terms, the fewer the amount of people who own the means of production, the clearer the target for retribution and revolution. This process could lead to capital being accumulated, for instance, solely by the state instead. But either way, capitalism is revealed to be, by its very nature, unsustainable. It either makes itself increasingly vulnerable to attacks from those it seeks to oppress, or it inevitably leads to socialism. It is against this backdrop of inadvertent self-harm that Marx makes the case for his negation of negation, the argument that the proletariat must always persist in negating capitalism's self-serving reforms.
Capitalism first establishes itself, he argues, through the abolition of individual property. This is most obvious when we consider land ownership. Feudal serfs do not own the land on which they live, and so they must work to retain the right to live in their homes. However, as feudalism transitions into capitalism and the exchange of labour for shelter becomes abstracted, the working classes no longer directly supply the owner of the land on which they live with goods or services. Instead, the working class goes to work elsewhere and then gives the money they make from that work to the landowner. However, this process of abstraction, central to capitalism in Marx's analysis, similarly leads to the possibility of capitalism's own demise. Through abstraction, the glimmer of individual ownership returns. Soon it is possible that the working class will be able to own their own homes,
and this possibility is necessarily extended to everyone, at least in theory. Capitalists will of course make it increasingly harder for the working class to do so. However, the underlying point is that individual ownership only persists as a concept for as long as it is an exception to the general way of the world. It is similarly dependent on a concept of scarcity. There are only so many homes in the world, so the individual ownership of property becomes a goal that incentivises a worker to work. But what happens if, as Marx wonders, individual ownership becomes universal? Then the very concept of the individual is diminished. Without scarcity, and with every individual owning their own home, the very concept of individual ownership becomes redundant and is instead replaced by a concept of social ownership.
Marx articulates this argument as follows The centralisation of the means of production and the socialisation of labour reach a point at which they become incompatible with their capitalist integument This integument is burst asunder The knell of capitalist private property sounds The expropriators are expropriated This process whereby the expropriators are expropriated in other words whereby those who have taken property have their property taken from them is what Marx calls the negation of the negation. The first negation, the abolition of individual property, is necessarily negated again by capitalism itself but must be pushed forwards by those it benefits. By affirming this second negation, regardless of the fact that it is a
negation inaugurated by capitalism, we may hasten the dissolution of capitalism itself. However, as prescient and affirming as Marx's analysis is, Bajou argues that this conception of the negation of negation is no longer fit for purpose in the 21st century. To stick with the example of property ownership, it is widely acknowledged that people are today increasingly less likely to own their own homes, whether in the present or the future, not more. In fact, rent is now a pervasive fact of life, and we don't only rent our homes but also other kinds of property too, and this property is increasingly abstract. When I rent media from streaming services such as Netflix and Spotify for instance, I am simply paying a subscription fee to retain access to that media, just as I pay a monthly subscription to retain access to my own home. But the difference
is that I do not have to physically own or even interact with what I'm paying for. This is increasingly true of software as well and the impact of this new normal on production and consumption is increasingly disheartening. This very lecture series that you are listening to, for instance, has been written and recorded using rented Word and Audio processing software. You have similarly paid to gain access to what are just ephemeral digital files. Every stage of the process of cultural production and consumption is impacted by this renting, which costs consumers and producers more, ensuring profits for owners of the means of production, whilst also costing those same owners far less themselves. Rentism, as it has been called, is therefore a win-win for capitalism. The ubiquity of renting today is arguably just one part of a much wider process of economic as opposed to technological deceleration.
What seems to be happening is that capitalism, rather than negating itself, is stagnating itself. In order to slow the process of its own dissolution and perpetuate its firm grip on society, it is settling into a reified form that is in fact increasingly stale, despite incessantly conjuring up the illusions of progress and change. This is a process that has become more and more visible in recent years, particularly following the rise of a populist right wing. The likes of Donald Trump in the USA, Boris Johnson in the UK, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Viktor Orban in Hungary and various others all share similar tactics of vigorous obfuscation. Whilst their controversial personalities and policies often invite derision and claims that their governments are unprecedented
centred in their chaos, more often than not they are simply spectacularly conservative. That is, they have turned the repealing of progress or the fortification of an old bourgeois normality into a new spectacle. They have made the retention of neoliberal hegemony a sight to behold. In this sense, the retreat into tradition is as much an illusion as the march towards progress. Here again we find ourselves in Mark Fisher's frenzied stasis. This is similarly true within capitalism's markets. For instance, while the negation of the negation of individual property is being slowed to a snail's pace through the abstracting of digital software, technological development on the whole continues to develop at an exciting pace. Take, for example, the games industry. Today, business is booming. Consumers reportedly spent
$43.4 billion on gaming globally in 2018. However, it is also an industry where technological innovations clearly outpace cultural development. The impact of this, intensified in recent years, is that the consumer is increasingly driven by nostalgia. As a particular generation's foundational experiences of the culture become lost as the hardware improves, since consumers have memories longer than the rapid cycle of a console generation, consumers find that the familiar is far more fleeting than the new. It is easy to be cynical about this, but the drive is understandable. Sometimes we want the comfort of something we know. This desire for the familiar is innocuous for the most part. The market's response to this desire has been to develop a veritable cottage industry of not just remastered but rebuilt games.
In order to keep consumers desiring the new, rather than becoming complacent with what they like, the industry has taken to rebuilding classic games from the ground up so that old experiences can be had with all the technological improvements provided by the latest technologies. But there is a darker side to this desire as well. The gaming industry also has a notoriously reactionary and conservative fan base. Despite the yearly salivating that results from instances of superficial technological progression, the tyranny of constantly improving graphics for instance, which is desired often at the expense of improvements in performance and storytelling, it is also an industry that is constantly dealing with controversies when it attempts to reflect the cultural changes of the world at large. Instances of minority representation in video games for example,
whether that be centring people of different genders, races or sexual orientations, is openly derided by fans of certain genres and franchises. Is this not the perfect encapsulation of the problem at hand? Whereby the speed of capitalism is forced to adapt to a neoconservative cultural drag. Doesn't this demonstrate how capitalist acceleration, now independent of the development of human culture, leads not to a frustrated capitalism, but to an increasingly reactionary subjectivity under capitalism? disenfranchisement increases but it is now devoid of an outlet as stasis becomes both the norm and the demand left oddly unfulfilled by the system at large which cannot help but speed ahead ignoring the typical lifespan of our parochial desires for baju this negating of the negation of negation
is precisely what defines our present political stuckness as well he explains just as the party which was once the vigorous form of insurrection is today outdated, so too is the dialectical theory of negation. It can no longer articulate a living link between philosophy and politics. In trying to clarify the political situation, we also need to search for a new formulation of the problem of critique and negation. I think that it is necessary, above all in the field of political action, to surpass the concept of a negation taken solely in its destructive and properly negative aspect. Contrary to Hegel, for whom the negation of the negation produces a new affirmation, I think we must assert that today negativity, properly speaking, does not create anything new. It destroys the old, of course, but it does not give rise to a new creation.
The issue here for Perdue is that Hegel and Marx's philosophical conception of negativity has itself been reduced to a reified form of the negative. It has been reduced to one side of a reductive tautology. The negative is that which is not positive, and nothing more. This is to say that negation today is simply an obstinate refusal to conform with neoliberal hegemony. But this refusal does not in itself produce change, because the capitalists and neoliberal governments of the world have triggered a perpetual fail-safe. Put it this way, in the context of late capitalism, negativity should be defined as the production of alternatives. A hegemonic ideological system declares the world to be like this. A philosophical and political negativity proclaims
that it is really like that. By combining our understanding of both positions, we can reason the truth of the relation between these two perspectives and find ways to change the world in accordance to their apparent disparities. This is the Marxian diagetical method. However, today, this process does not seem to produce change any longer. Instead, the system declares the world to be like this. An opposition proclaims that this is wrong, but provides little in the way of alternatives, and so the system may reform itself superficially whilst continuing unabated in its dominance. As such, the crisis of the negative, as Bidoux puts it, is not a crisis of capitalism, but the failure of socialism. It is the crisis of the idea of revolution. This dejection is again just as visible in the case of cultural rentism. The old proliferation of cultural
artefacts in the home, for instance, meant that it was easy to copy and disseminate materials and products. The public's rejection of a principle of scarcity, which gives media its value, is overtaken by a principle of sharing and leads to the rise of Napster in the early 2000s. The capitalists call this piracy. In order to re-expropriate their expropriators, the home entertainment industry does not proceed by seeking out and destroying the pirates, at least not the majority. Many of the very worst offenders were prosecuted. Instead, piracy is attacked through a process of subtraction. Capitalists increase the scarcity of the product in real terms, so that it is only available digitally, trapped in the cage of a streaming service, and available only for as long as you pay for access to it. As a result, capitalism is able to morph into something new.
Individual ownership is still an option, of course, but the speed of technological production means that already, easily replicated formats like DVDs and CDs are increasingly regarded as an outdated format, whilst harder to replicate formats like vinyl or the cinema experience become increasingly fetishised commodities, precisely due to the nostalgia that comes with their hard redundancy. As a result, rentism looms ever larger on the post-capitalist horizon. Through this lens, the crisis of negation is readily apparent. But what is the political equivalent of this cultural problem? And how might the pirates, as it were, resist or even appropriate the subtracted methods of the capitalist class for themselves? As the Occupy movement would later demonstrate, the 21st century left still has a problem with effective organisation in action.
And so the question for Bidoux is whether all discipline can be reduced to a military model, and whether we can find, invent, exercise or experiment with, that is abstract from the hegemon, a non-military discipline. But there is clearly much more to consider than this alone. It was Boudou's interjection here, and the obvious limitations of this interjection, which are compounded by their filtering through the garish cultural expositions of Slasov Zizek, that sent up a flare over the blogosphere of the late 2000s. The blogosphere had initially emerged in around 2002, and the original grouping of writers persisted productively for at least the next decade. Many of those involved had been writing for many years already, as a way to keep up a personal but public writing habit, but the blogosphere came into its own following an influx of new blood,
many of whom had recently graduated from philosophy degrees around the UK and elsewhere. For Mark Fisher, whose K-Punk blog was a central node within the blogosphere for much of its 15-year run, blogging was a way of getting back into writing after the traumatic experience of doing a PhD. Writing in the introduction to Fisher's posthumously published collected writings, editor Darren Ambrose notes that K-Punk was an important part of a community of emergent bloggers, including music journalists Simon Reynolds, Ian Penman and David Stubbs, philosophers Nina Power, Alex Williams, Lars Lear, Adam Kotzko, Jodie Dean and Stephen Shaviro, writer and activist Richard Seymour, writers Siobhan McEwan and Carl Neville, and architecture critic Owen Hatherley.
There were many more involved besides. Inspired by the communities surrounding the various blogs run by Simon Reynolds in particular, which fulfilled many of the same functions that the music press used to, K-Punk and the blogs of various other professional and lapsed academics provided a blank space in which writers could pursue their own lines of interest without institutional pressures or the bureaucratic restrictions experienced by more professional columnists. This included a kind of meta-commentary on the other philosophical goings-on that were happening online at that time, including Zizek's blog-like postings on lacan.com. It was the American philosopher and cultural critic Stephen Shaviro who continues to run the blog The Pinocchio Theory, who was the first to pass comment on Zizek's article and produce crisis of negation more generally.
Indeed, the blogosphere complicated the matter somewhat, raising a number of questions. To what extent could this new left-wing organisation take shape online? Or was the acceleration of our new information age dooming online philosophy to a new era of complicity. The peculiar resonances of Boudou's argument aside, it seems that Shaviro believes Zizek is destined to help inaugurate the latter. This is to say that rather than extending Boudou's argument, Zizek only manages to epitomise his critique absolutely. Although he may believe that he is firmly on the side of a rationalist Marxist-Tagelianism, through which the free subject of reason can only emerge through a ruthless self-discipline. Shaviro argues that Zizek's contrarianism is just a sort of idiotic
macho one-upmanship, as in I can be even more outrageous and anti-commonsensical than anyone else, of the same sort that is routinely practiced by right-wing political economists or evolutionary theorists like the guys who wrote about how rape is an adaptive strategy. This is precisely the sort of negativity that Perdue announces. Is Zizek then not impotently affirming the fascism of 300 despite his insistence to the contrary rather than negating it. And isn't this largely due to his penchant for a clickbait outrageousness that would later come to define much conversation online? He has certainly not produced new thought or action through his contrarianism. Instead, he only entrenches the mire of postmodern impotence displayed routinely by the relativist right. As Shaviro damningly declares, Zizek totally depends upon the well-meaning, right-thinking, liberal ideology
that he sets out to frustrate and contradict at every turn. His own ideas remain parasitic upon those of the postmodern multicultural consensus that he claims to upset. It is nonetheless intriguing, considering the vast amount of material Zizek has produced throughout his career that has attempted to skewer this kind of ideological trap, that he would find himself so complicit in that which he claims to despise. Chiviro concludes with a similar bemusement, noting how his theories are little more than yet another demonstration, or symptom, of the situation that he himself has pointed to. The fact that in the current climate we find it difficult to imagine any alternative to capitalism, that in fact we find it easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Zizek's thought itself is one more demonstration
of our current blockage of imagination. Nonetheless, thanks to Zizek's utter embodiment of the issue at hand, Bajou's initial question somehow manages to penetrate the postmodern fuzz. we are indeed in the thrall of a crisis of the negative as he calls it our problem today is that the destructive part of negation is no longer in and of itself capable of producing the new the question for the blogosphere remains an appropriately leninist what is to be done