Critical Inquiry — Volume 34, Number S2

Slavoj Žižek

Intellectuals, Not Gadflies

Philosophical Police

One of the main antitotalitarian clichés is that of intellectuals (in Paul Johnson’s infamous use of the term) seduced by the “authentic” touch of violent spectacles and outbursts, in love with the ruthless exercise of power, which supplements their wimpy existence; this draws a long line from Plato and Rousseau to Heidegger, not to mention the standard list of the dupes of Stalinism (Brecht, Sartre). According to liberal common wisdom, philosophers in politics stand for a catastrophic misfortune: beginning with Plato, they either miserably fail or succeed… in supporting tyrants. The reason, so the story goes on, is that philosophers try to impose their notion on reality, violating it. No wonder that, from Plato to Heidegger, they are resolutely antidemocratic (with the exception of some empiricists and pragmatists). So when the common wisdom hears of Marxists who defend Marx, claiming that his ideas were not faithfully realized in Stalinism, the reply goes: thank God! It would have been even worse to fully realize them! Heidegger at least was willing to draw consequences of his catastrophic experience and conceded that those who think ontologically have to err ontically, that the gap is irreducible, that there is no “philosophical politics” proper. It thus seems that G. K. Chesterton was fully justified in his ironic proposal to install a “special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers”:

It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense.… The work of the philosophical policeman … is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pot-houses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime.

Slavoj Žižek, dialectical-materialist philosopher and psychoanalyst, is codirector at the International Center for Humanities, Birkbeck College, University of London. His latest publications include The Parallax View (2006) and How to Read Lacan (2007).