Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World- Slavoj Zizek
Published in 2020 by OR Books, New York and London
114 pages
Within the span of a few short months, the COVID-19 epidemic has radically altered the way in which we live. At the time of this review, many of us are holed up in our houses and apartments, socially distancing ourselves from one another in order to slow the spread of the virus. Some of us find ourselves on the frontline of the epidemic, continuing to work in grocery stores, restaurants, and hospitals as we find ourselves to be “essential workers.” Some of us, in our newfound ample time to ourselves, have busied ourselves with reading books that have been sitting on our bookshelves gathering dust. Even fewer of us have taken it upon ourselves to write a book while we’ve been self-isolating.
And leave it to none other than Slavoj Zizek, always thinking at the forefront of culture, to write a book about the coronavirus in the midst of this global pandemic. In his latest offering, Pandemic!: COVID-19 Shakes the World, Zizek produces this short collection of essays regarding the coronavirus and its implications for building a new kind of society. In it, he gives his thoughts regarding the nature of viruses, our inept responses to it, and some potential paths forward that might open up after such a rupturing Event.
Overview:
Zizek begins this short book by quoting the words of Jesus of Nazareth when, after the Resurrection, he tells Mary Magdalene, “Touch me not” (John 20:17). He then applies this to the current moment, bringing in Hegel to make a salient point about gazing into another person’s eyes and intimacy through absence. In the first chapter, Zizek lays out some of his initial framework regarding his view of the epidemic, contrasting China’s military-like quarantine measures with the US’s more libertarian response. This is where he makes his first case (among many) for a new kind of “Communist” coordination of production. He then ends the chapter by urging us not to try to find deeper meaning in the epidemic, but rather view it as an example of radical contingency.
In the second chapter, ‘Why are we So Tired?’, Zizek delineates three kinds of labor: precarious freelancers and managers, essential care workers (such as doctors, nurses, servers, and grocery store clerks), and Fordist production workers (Amazon employees and manufacturing workers). Utilizing Byung-Chun Han’s account of “burnout society” and freelance labor, where we are never free from expectations and are turned into perpetual projects ourselves, Zizek argues that all three categories face different kinds of exhaustion in this epidemic. Precarious freelancers are facing severe psychological distress due to market pressures to be productive in the midst of unprecedented change, essential workers have to care for others while putting on an empathetic and brave face, and assembly workers are debilitated by monotony and repetitiveness. Due to the physical and economic stress that we are under, Zizek, in the third chapter, argues that there is also a “Perfect Storm” forming that could lead to a third precarious situation: the political upheavals in Turkey and Syria (assisted by Russia). Zizek worries that people could use this epidemic as a justification for scapegoating immigrants, and remarks on the potential danger in this, justifying racism in the name of science.
In the fourth chapter, Zizek argues, via Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill, that this virus is acting as a kind of “Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique” on Western capitalism, where we are living in the brief moments between the explosive hit and the victim’s (neoliberal capitalism’s) death. Zizek argues that this type of dystopian, catastrophic event can bring about a kind of universal solidarity, and laments that we even need a catastrophe to rethink our ways of living. He proposes a type of world healthcare system that defies international borders and calls on us to stop anthropomorphizing market forces (aka. the stock market is “panicking”) and instead of focusing on the lives lost. He further rails against the cruise industry, car production, and Disney amusement parks, celebrating their decline into ghost towns as a benefit for society as a whole, leaving his distaste for amusement parks unquestionable. He then proceeds in the following chapter to sketch out the ways in which we, as a collective society, are experiencing the five stages of grief in the face of this epidemic.
Zizek then goes on, in the sixth chapter, to imagine the empty streets of Wuhan, China as an example of what a non-consumerist society might look like. While this could easily be misconstrued as absurd, Zizek is careful to note that those who are currently walking the streets of Wuhan are not thinking about post-consumerist ideology, but are rather rightly focused on material concerns, such as food and medicine, with fear, anger, and confusion on their minds rather than philosophical and political reflection. Zizek then sketches out the logic of panic (especially in relation to the absurd toilet paper crisis in the US), calling us not to react in a mode of panic, but rather to organize ourselves into a new form of Communism (which, for Zizek, is simple collective cooperation to pool and share resources).
Zizek continues this line of thought through the eighth chapter, where he contemplates the nature of state power in response to shutdowns. He critiques both the alt-Right and the “fake Left” for not taking the threat seriously (including Agamben and his concern regarding the continuation of a state of exception). In one of the most philosophical sections of the book, Zizek utilizes Hegel to frame the virus as occupying a space between the living and dead; viruses are not alive in the traditional sense but are parasitic, relying on a host to replicate and multiply. Zizek compares this relationship to the human spirit as a virus of animal nature. In the ninth chapter, Zizek admits to having nightmares about the virus as he ponders the potential societal fallout after the virus. Ultimately, he gives us this simple choice: are we going to be reduced to barbarism/privatization or civilization/collectivism after all is said and done?
Answering his own question, Zizek takes note of some of the ways in which the current Trump administration is acting in a form of “war Communism,” taking control of the private sector to provide and distribute resources and providing a limited form of Universal Basic Income (UBI) (a point, he argues, that reveals the hypocrisy of the political Right; aka.“if Obama were to do it, the right-wing populists would undoubtedly explode in rage, claiming that he was using the current health crisis as an excuse to introduce Communism to the US” (93)). While these measures are far from adequate, he is hopeful that Western countries might integrate more collaborative efforts (what he calls Enforced Socialism) into policy in the near future.
In the final chapter, Zizek takes the stark choice between “barbarism and Communism” even further. In contrast to the libertarian, every-man-for-himself society that Zizek argues is a real potential if state-power disintegrates, Zizek posits another, more optimistic vision of the future. In his version of Communism, which is already here in the form of emergency relief efforts, market forces are abandoned in favor of large-scale, state-powered cooperative operations. If we isolate, he argues, we will devolve into endless wars. Only by organizing collective efforts, including a kind of global collaborative health care, can we unite and hope to create a new humanity.
In the appendix, Zizek reflects on two letters from his friends, as he contemplates the psychoanalytical implications of the epidemic (citing Lacan and Freud, who noted that for soldiers returning from the war, those who didn’t receive any wounds or injuries had the toughest time overcoming their psychological trauma). Lacan helps us distinguish Reality from the Real, which is the invisible specter which haunts us, and is deemed all the more powerful due to its spectrality. Thus, we become trapped in predicament: either we succumb to paranoia or act out in ways that could expose us to the virus. Proposing another way, Zizek offers practical tips from a Lacanian perspective: identify with your symptoms and take any small ritual to help stabilize daily life; treat it like a game, watch movies, but don’t just retreat to the realm of black screens. Instead, Zizek tells us to use this time to make meaningful connections with those we love, even if only virtually.
Commendations:
Zizek’s work can roughly be grouped into two broad categories: philosophical and political. This work fits squarely within the latter. Essentially, Zizek’s argument is that we are beyond the point of no return. We cannot go back to the same sense of normalcy that we had before this epidemic; instead, this event has forced us to reconsider our ways of living and gives us the opportunity to let our failed political and social organizations fade away so that something new can emerge. This new form of organization, Zizek argues, would be a new form of communism defined by global coordination and cooperation, protecting us from descending into “global barbarism.” Through this work, Zizek deftly takes us through the political relationships between various countries, illuminates the crumbling structure of global capitalism, and ruminates on the psychological toll that the epidemic has brought upon us (both as individuals and as a global society). In the midst of such a life-changing event, Zizek gives us his brief, if illuminating, thoughts on it, and also provides us with potential courses of action for the present moment.
There is a real sense of immediacy and urgency within this work. Zizek, as a philosopher who is often much more in the public eye than most others, writes candidly about our current predicament, but it reads much more like a pamphlet than a book. It is remarkably brief, as most chapters are between 4 and 10 pages long, adding up to roughly 100 pages. This work is more of a collection of short opinion articles (most of which were previously published in The Los Angeles Book Review and Russia Today) than a deep, philosophically rigorous examination of the current crisis. That being said, it is also one of the most accessible of Zizek’s works, as it is not caught up in abstract, overtly philosophical jargon. It is one that almost anyone can pick up and read in a single afternoon without any former background knowledge, which makes it one of his most understandable and clear works for the average reader.
There are, however, also fruitful insights for those who prefer his more philosophical reflections as well. Zizek takes particular aim at Giorgio Agamben at a few places in this book, as he (rightly) critiques Agamben’s dismissal of the epidemic threat as an excuse for the state to declare a state of exception and seize power. While this could certainly prove to be a potential danger, Zizek deftly pushes back against this paranoid perspective from the Left, arguing that it is not in the best interest of the state to provoke panic in the public and trigger an economic crisis that disrupts the continued production of Capital. Furthermore, Zizek also employs an interesting Lacanian framework for the anxiety that is produced within this crisis in the Appendix. His discussion of Freud and Lacan and his tips for how to deal with the crisis from day to day were insightful, even if the tips themselves were not particularly novel or groundbreaking (ie. stay inside, watch TV, read books, have daily rituals beyond the screen, and reach out to loved ones). This lack of novelty, however, leads to one of the central critiques of this work.
Critique:
Although the book is eminently readable, it is also not exactly the most robust. Most of these articles can be found online in various publications, and they are just slapped together here in one place in this new book. While Zizek is clearly knowledgeable regarding the current political and economic situation that we are in, it is also not a rigorously researched book. Many of Zizek’s references and footnotes are links to MSN articles, pieces in the Guardian, and Wikipedia entries, and he bounces around from hot-take to hot-take with dizzying speed. Since these articles were written at different times throughout the past few months, Zizek often repeats the same thoughts and occasionally seems at odds with himself. For example, at the beginning of the work, Zizek insists that at the end of the day, the virus cannot be manipulated into having any deep, metaphysical meaning (rather, it is a signal of contingency and randomness). Then, in later chapters, he ascribes deeper meaning to the epidemic, postulating that it may be a way of nature returning back to us what we have done to it in an act of irony and revenge. It’s these minor inconsistencies that make this work seem more like musings or brief sketches of thought rather than a well-researched, robust argument.
This leads us to one of the issues of writing contemporaneously about a current global event, especially in a time of particular distress and precarity: the temptation to privilege the present moment, especially with a lack of complete data (ie, the event is ongoing and yet to end). One runs into the danger that, in the light of new information, the thoughts and takes on a particular issue or event could age rather poorly. While Zizek mitigates this as much as possible by focusing on larger scale implications and grand potentialities, many of his proposals could be seen as nothing more than wishful thinking. If radical contingency truly is the name of the game, then I’m not convinced that our choice will necessarily be between two options, namely: libertarian barbarism and cooperative Communism. And it's this insistence on a Communist future that leads me to my final critique.
Finally, Zizek is insistent on using the term “Communism” to mark what he hopes our future society will become, which he defines as merely a collective collaboration of states with strong central state power, yet is still democratic in form. This comes as no surprise, as Zizek prefers utilizing provocative or purposely inflammatory terms like this. I'm not convinced, however, that the term “Communism” could ever be the unifying Signifier for the Left. There is far too much baggage attached to the word Communism for there to be a meaningful, forward-thinking political project there. It would take too much work to rehabilitate the term, so why is Zizek so insistent on unnecessarily utilizing a term that will, more likely than not, alienate and raise red flags for most readers? Maybe Zizek thinks that this pandemic makes what seems impossible to be possible, but I’m not convinced that, even in the face of a wholly disrupted economic and social order, Communism would arise as the signifier under which we (especially as Americans) would unify. Communism cannot fully break with its unfortunately violent ties, and maybe it’s time to retire the word Communism and invent a new, more unifying signifier for the Leftist political movement. It seems that, in his next book, A Left that Dares to Speak its Name, Zizek will be elaborating more on his case for Communism (though I would argue his vision is markedly different than historical Communism, which is why I am confused as to why he insists on using it in the first place). Perhaps we will have to wait and see what kind of argument he makes for why we should reclaim or rehabilitate the corpse of Communism.
Conclusion
In short, through this brief work, Zizek gives us some reflections to think about during this current crisis. While it is certainly not the most rigorous book, it is still well worth reading, especially as it opens up discussions for how our collective future might look after this epidemic has passed. If you’ve never read Zizek, or are interested in a radical Leftist perspective on this current coronavirus crisis, then this book serves as an incredibly accessible entry point to Zizek’s work. While I’m skeptical of Zizek’s utilization of Communism as a unifying signifier for a new political vision, I do think that some of his proposals are well worth considering as we move forward together. And God knows we need each other more than ever now; together let's hope that we rediscover what true solidarity and social organization look like, even if, for now, we must do so from a distance.
P.S.
Last, but not least, it is incredibly important to note that Zizek is not receiving any royalties from the sale of this book; rather, 100% of the profits from this book are going to Doctors Without Borders. So, if you are interested in reading it, be sure to pick up a copy at: https://www.orbooks.com/catalog/pandemic/