First as Tragedy, Then as Farce

Event: First as Tragedy, Then as Farce
Cooper Union, October 14

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“The most dangerous philosopher in the West”—New Republic

“Žižek leaves no social or cultural phenomenon untheorized, and is master of the counterintuitive observation.”—New Yorker

“The future will be Hegelian – and much more radically than Fukuyama thinks.” Slavoj Žižek asks whether we are prepared now that history has forced itself upon us, first with the attacks of September 11, 2001 and more recently with the financial meltdown of 2008. In First As Tragedy, Then As Farce he deftly maneuvers between the utopian ideologies thrown up by the present crisis, and the disavowed anxieties that sustain them. While figures on the Right and Left alike now descry the years of irrational exuberance that propped up the housing bubble, few have come to understand the deadlock that binds us.

Nearly $1 trillion were pumped into the US banking system alone in a frantic attempt at financial stabilization. Many on the right see the bailouts as the terrifying birth of state socialism in the US, while others see it as the nadir of Wall Street cronyism at the expense of the American taxpayer. Both miss the point, insofar as they take crises in capitalism to be the extraneous, unpredictable accidents of an otherwise self-regulating market. Žižek reminds us that there is no “pure market”—only the “shock therapies” that capitalism is heir to. The experience of recent years should show us that the market requires a good deal of extra-market violence to establish and maintain the conditions for its functioning. From the War on Terror to the financial bailouts, we find ourselves increasingly constrained by the false choices of a liberal consensus that is losing its palliative charm day by day.

The task for the critical Left is to discard the narratives of the crisis that blame the meltdown on contingent deviations, and expose the mortal flaws of the global capitalist system as such. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce is a call for the Left to reinvent itself in the light of our desperate historical situation. As Žižek reveals, “The time for liberal, moralistic blackmail is over.”