Freedomism

In an instructive article in the Observer, Frances Stonor Saunders (author of “Who Paid the Piper“, about the cultural cold war) wonders what use intellectuals are:

Last week came an announcement from the University of London’s Birkbeck College that it intends to establish a centre for public intellectuals. Its international director is to be Professor Slavoj Zizek. In case you haven’t heard of this ‘world-renowned public intellectual’, Zizek has published more than 50 books ‘on topics ranging from philosophy and Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis, to theology, film, opera and politics’.

He was also a candidate for the presidency of his native Slovenia in the first democratic elections after the break-up of Yugoslavia in 1990. ‘Political issues are too serious to be left only to politicians,’ says Zizek. ‘We need intellectuals – not to make decisions, but to make clear what the issues are about.’

We need intellectuals to do no such thing. Saunders looks back at the congress held in Paris in 1935 at which a selection of leading intellectuals led by Malraux, Gide, and Aragon, declaimed on the glories of Soviet communism. She concludes:

In many ways, we are still living out the battles of the Thirties. Fascism and communism have been replaced by Islamic fundamentalism and American freedomism (with America the less plausible enemy). Will Birkbeck’s future generation of public intellectuals, once they have got over Derrida, want to explain to us which barricades to mount? Will their interventions yield a more positive legacy than their predecessors? Or should they, perhaps, stick to Derrida after all?

Still living out the battles of the thirties is all too true as far as Zizek is concerned: he’s still celebrating the glories of Leninist freedom over the false consciousness of bourgeois freedom. American freedomism though? Hmm…..sounds grim.