An Open Letter to Slavoj Zizek, Part II
Author’s note: I have no idea if any of this is going to come up looking roses but I get a kick out imagining an old Slovenian’s blood pressure going up a few notches every time he logs into Substack to see another one of these posts. They say never meet your heroes - I say freak your heroes out enough that they'll never want to meet you
I'm sure you, Dr. Zizek, of all the public intellectuals working today, have read the following quote before. Perhaps it has given you a sense of deep foreboding, the kind one gets when looking into the maw of a killer beast from a distance. Maybe at other times it has flummoxed you, as you tried to imagine the kind of educated person who would say such a thing at the beginning of the 21st century. But mostly, as time tik toks away and we are no further away chronologically from the consequences of this sort of thinking, I hope it leaves you feeling certain that no matter what else happens on this planet of ours in the near future, you are on the right side of history.
Whatever the fuck that is.
“The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.”
These are, of course, the words of a Bush administration flunky whose study of historiography ended with those essays at the end of War and Peace that nobody should ever read. In fact, nobody should ever read anything from War and Peace anymore at all with the exception of the description of the action fought by Tushin’s battery at the Battle of Schöngrabern. Let's face it. It's a great novel, but who has the time these days? Let's start reading literature like we watch pornography: pick out the choicest bits to savor as intensely as possible for just as long as we absolutely need to before we become bored and must seek out a new stimulus. And at some point we’ll decide to understand something; that's when we put the book down and die a little.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that Tushin was living on that playing field of life, caught up in the absolute rapture that a good artillery battery gets up to when they're impersonally slaughtering dozens, hundreds, of foreign barbarians trying to get close enough to kill you and your compatriots. You'll remember, I'm sure, that the staff officers trying to rein Tushin in - up to and including Andrei - were actually ordering Tushin wrap things up, to pull his battery out of its position in the center of the line, for fear of losing the guns to enemy attack. Nevermind the fact that Tushin’s battery was the only thing keeping the Russian army from get routed.