My next experience/experiment w/ Zizek came down to 2 books that were on Kindle (I didn’t have time to wait (vacation being almost over (for a hard copy through the mail: The Parallax View and Did Someone Say Totalitarianism. The Parallax View, going by the reviews, seemed a little more abstract (almost Deleuzian abstract (than what I was ready for at this time and the latter seemed a little closer to my heart in that one of my primary focuses with philosophy, as Deleuze and Guattarri encourage us to do, is to seek out the pockets of Fascism (the cornerstone of Totalitarianism (that emerge everywhere, including and most importantly within ourselves.
And whenever I start with new philosophical text, I find it helps to start with my own instincts about what it means and play it against reality: that of reality itself which includes the reality of the actual text. Therefore, I base the following on my instincts based on the reviews, what I do know about Zizek from other books, and what little of it I have read. And I do so with full disclosure that I may well be proven wrong on much of it.
My sense of it is that words like “totalitarianism” and “fascism” are terms we tend to throw at social, ideological, and political policies we don’t like when, in fact, they are basically abstractions that distract us from the very real issue (the particulars (of just and unjust policies. And I am as guilty as anyone else of this. To put it in Deleuzian terms: they only serve as the molarization (the buzzwords (of experience that can distract us from the true molecular aspect of the phenomenon we tag as such.
To give an example from my own possibly half-assed understanding: I like to say that it’s been said that to forget history is to repeat it; but to remember it in half-assed ways is to repeat it in different ways. Now imagine what it must of felt like to be a German in the years between the treaty that ended WWI and the rise of Hitler. Imagine the hell they must have been going through. Then imagine being in a pub during Hitler’s war economy and having the time of your life. How much thought would you have given to why it was happening and at what cost? And would you have thought you were in a totalitarian system?
(And at this point, we should bring another buzzword similar to the above: Freedom. If you were a German under the supposed totalitarianism of NAZISM, how not free would you feel being in that pub having the time of your life? We tend to associate freedom with choice. But if the only choice being offered to you is the choice you would make in the first place, how would you know you were under a totalitarian regime? For instance: how would those who had insurance in America, and afraid that anything else (such as a public option or nationalized healthcare might take something from them (recognize that having access to healthcare only through the private sphere is not really a choice? Not really freedom?)
Now imagine your average sports bar in America, that sense of being on top of the world and utter indifference to whose expense it comes at, then put uniforms on them. Or imagine it with hipsters, many of which are grabbing their wealth on Wall Street.
Now the thing is this isn’t exactly “totalitarianism” or “fascism” in the same sense as Germany in the 30’s. But it does warrant concern. And terms like “totalitarianism” or “fascism” can only distract from a full understanding of how odious this all actually is, how much of a sickness, very much like that of a drug addict. It keeps us looking for socially programmed cues for socially programmed responses (such as government over-reach (when the only real evil (that which approaches totalitarianism and fascism while not actually being totalitarianism or fascism (is that which is doing the programming.