Slavoj Žižek | On Practice and Contradiction by Mao Zedong
Slavoj Žižek, On Practice and Contradiction by Mao Zedong, PDF, Verso, 199 pages, January 2007, 9781844675876 | Slavoj Žižek, Introduction. Mao Zedong: the Marxist Lord of Misrule
One of the most devious traps which lurk for Marxist theorists is the search for the moment of the Fall, when things took the wrong turn in the history of Marxism: was it already the late Engels with his more positivist-evolutionary understanding of historical materialism? Was it the revisionism AND the orthodoxy of the Second International? Was it Lenin? Or was it Marx himself in his late work, after he abandoned his youthful humanism (as some “humanist Marxists” claimed decades ago)? This entire topic has to be rejected: there is no opposition here, the Fall is to be inscribed into the very origins. (To put it even more pointedly, such a search for the intruder who infected the original model and set in motion its degeneration cannot but reproduce the logic of anti-Semitism.) What this means is that, even if – or, rather, especially if – one submits the Marxist past to a ruthless critique, one has first to acknowledge it as “one’s own”, taking full responsibility for it, not to comfortably get rid of the “bad” turn of the things by way of attributing it to a foreign intruder (the “bad” Engels who was too stupid to understand Marx’s dialectics, the “bad” Lenin who didn’t get the core of Marx’s theory, the “bad” Stalin who spoils the noble plans of the “good” Lenin, etc.).
Alain Badiou, Lettera a Slavoj Žižek sull’opera di Mao Tse-Tung
Slavoj Žižek, Risposta ad Alain Badiou
