So, I am in the curious position of interpreting what I understand is the political issue with Zizek and responding to you (Mr. Gonzalez) trying doing the same. So I suspect we are not so much dealing with Zizek the person as Zizek as provocative symbol of a debate on ideology within the Left.

Even if Professor Zizek saw this exchange and commented, it would do no more than tell us what he in fact believed and would not detract from either your or my comments on the problem of ideology. So, with that caveat, let us debate as if there was this clear thing called Zizek and see if we can smoke out a conclusion.

Thank you for the contribution which I respect as informed commentary. There is what Zizek means to those who read him with care (such as yourself) and what he means 'historically' (to purloin Marxist forms of speech). I agree with you as to what he is trying to do and that I have indeed neutered him a little.

But I am afraid that he can be a bit tricky on occasions - a public intellectual who seems to be trying to pull a 'progressive' largely 'bourgeois liberal' protest movement back into a very traditional class war model whilst trying to create a red line in public (the clear message of his Financial Times piece) between it and the 'mistakes' of Marxism-Leninism and 'failures' of social democracy.

His model depends (as Engels' analysis ultimately depended) on a 'crisis' (often cast in apocalyptic terms) that can make liberalism redundant. What he seems to want to do is create sufficient red line from the image of past socialism (while preserving the essence of revolutionary thought) yet build links to desperate hopeless 'liberals' and then rely on the crisis to make those liberals desperate and hopeless enough to abandon liberalism in a moment of transcendent acceptance of the necessity of revolution.

I understand this and do not judge it morally but this is perhaps the chance to consider the ethics of such politics. In the piece I simply raised a doubt that there would be such a crisis (any more than there was sufficient crisis to ensure a Marxist revolution in the capitalist heartland rather than in the developing peasant periphery).

Here, I add the doubt that the 'essence' of class-driven revolutionary politics (which is the business of breaking eggs to make an omelette) can return in any practical form faced with conservative resilience and, equally important, the libertarian and 'created identity' turn promoted by the new information and communications revolution. The 'history' of really existing socialism does not help much either.

Transcendental materialism is a 'nice idea' but, on closer scrutiny, it seems to be merely an attempt to recover Marxist Idealist discourse (the alleged materialism is still basically Hegelian essentialism) after its battering not so much by its conduct in practice ('re-encountering the traumatic event') but by the lack of tenability of all Idealisms after the revolution that was phenomenology.

People find it very difficult to let loose of 'grand projets' - they need to believe: Marxists are no exception. It is a psychological thing, not a truth thing. Zizek's passionate confrontation seems to be with post-modernism, the challenge to the Enlightenment and the collapse of past 'grand projets'.

He has tried to transfer the Marxist mentality to an abstract realm of psychological engagement (the Lacanian aspect) with political issues of ressentiment and engagement from which action and change, no doubt, will eventually ensue. Above all, he is determined on resurrecting the Cartesian - which positions him on one side of a major philosophical divide ...

Before I go any further, I should say that I agree with you (implicitly) and Zizek that the progressive agenda is flawed. It is like classical reformist social democracy in constantly coming up against the point where compromise must neuter it. We see this in the shattering reality for environmentalists of the farce being played out in Copenhagen as I write.

But the critique of the progressive agenda should not require a return to Marxist tropes in order to return to basics and begin at the beginning.

The beginning does not lie in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon or some such text but in the first person whose labour was used exploitatively, who was deprived of information to make choices or who was given a social role on the basis of their appearance, gender or who their parents were. Marxism often gets in the way of this simple truth.

What I find difficult about Zizek is that he wants his cake and to eat it. He wants to capture an aspect of the psychology of irrational protest (Robespierre's nutty worship of the Supreme Being perhaps) and then turn it to a cause of liberation through some sort of mental magic.

The single issue faith-based protester (nearly all causes involving progressivism today are based on essentialist models of the world where core values dictate acceptance of facts rather than facts dictating the expression of core values) is to become an ideological warrior for total liberation without fully accepting that any meaningful individual autonomy must result in doubts being presented about whether being 'transcendental' is anything more than hogwash.

We often have problems with terminology - liberal, socialist and communist are all slippery terms that have different meanings in different contexts. The socialist/communist assessment made by Zizek is a bone of contention here - it is a traditional over-simplified yin/yang dualist way thinking which does not relate to facts on the ground.

It is true that Asian economic systems are proving more effective than Western systems but this has a lot to do with the fact that the former are still catching up and that the Western form of 'socialism' adds major welfare costs which are ignored in the East but which, at some point (and this is a possibility) the West may eliminate in reaction to economic pain - or which the East may add to its cost base of a confucian 'progressive' agenda.

Change (unless you believe in Engels' nonsensical apocalypticism) is just as likely to lead to a tough love libertarian community of the Right or to Rightist corporatism in the West as to anything remotely 'communist'. We just do not know. The choice is not between socialism and communism but between many forms of community survival and growth (or decline) management. Zizek needs the simple dichotomy of socialism/communism to be true. That does not make it true.

I am well aware of Zizek's admiration for the Jacobinical frame of mind and it is certain that this has been influential on many post-Marxist thinkers and even politicians (even where, as in the darker recesses of post-Marxist New Labour) they may seek to hide it for practical reasons.

The phenomenological frame of mind, the influence of Eastern philosophies, the inadequacy of Cartesianism, the existentialist synthesis and the critique of German Idealism and Judaeo-Christianity from the heirs of Kierkegaard and Nietsche have constructed a challenging alternative to the Enlightenment discourse.

The communitarian position of transcendence is one of imposition from without of value - Kierkegaaard introduced the idea of a free choice in embracing the irrational or absurd. This point of choice is critical and Zizek's model seems only to recognise imposition or the 'only choice you can make' - as if he pines for the community certainties of his youth even if he knows that they are absurd.

He clearly does not choose full Marxist absurdity (like a latter day Kierkegaard) but rejects the anarchy of free choices and comes back to a Jacobinical transformation as the only reasonable choice to which a person of the Left must steer themselves - an imposed transformational choice, essentially a Pauline conversion (or is this a completely wrong interpretation!)

The alternative non-transcendental (in community terms) way of seeing competes with an Enlightenment discourse which merges on its intense revolutionary fringe with Jacobinism, dare we say Illuminism, Marxism and other forms of authoritarian essentialism - now in its latest incarnation as the non-democratic Eco-Movement. This seems to be what Zizek is embracing in a private war against post-modern fluidity.

Both ways of thinking (on either side of liberal pragmatism) have had their crimes to contend with - on the one side the dabbling with obscurantism and murder in the fascist period and the other engaging with systematic lying and slave camps in the Soviet era. But Zizek is missing the point. He is in danger of becoming High Priest of a fringe religion that:-

- a) few want where the centre of global power resides,
- b) that will never shake off what it did from Lenin to Pol Pot,
- c) offers an authoritarian collectivism (of the mind rather than managerial organisation) despite claims to the contrary, under conditions where technology promotes libertarian and national or ethnic identity struggles against authority,
- d) gives primacy to an intellectualisation of transcendant emotion (a form of constructed materialist spirituality) when the culture prefers the emotionalisation of facts and of uncertainty as the primary means of relating to others.

(The odd aspect of d) is that his Transcendental Materialism and Cartesianism seems to crave certainty about the world and yet his philosophical thinking , from what I can grasp of it, seems to be quite capable of embracing uncertainty as a positive aspect of being - but then what do I know? :-) )

So, I do not feel fooled in the slightest by Zizek. I think he is trying to fool us. He wants us to believe in the apocalypse. And he wants those protesting now to become so anxious, frightened and disorientated that they have a Pauline moment of engagement with the revolutionary.

He may succeed with some relatively weak minds and, from this basis, there may be a recreation of the communist movement but it will not be significant outside the periphery and, where it is significant, it will be easily contained because the apocalypse is not coming soon - and, as I say repeatedly, conservatism is resilient.

The construction of Judaism through the imposition of a transcendental encounter with God is, in this context, a creative introduction to his thinking. This might tell us something about what was possible before new information and communications tools diminished the ability of some to impose their transcendalism on others (I cannot see a real God in this process, I am afraid).

But if Zizek is saying that the revolutionary Left must be recreated through a transcendental encounter with a new vision of humanity, then he is also saying that the community must subsume itself into a fiction, an essentialism constructed by consent under the leadership of the few - perhaps a natural leader like Robespierre (or Zizek himself).

This is authoritarianism under sociopathy on a magnificent scale, an absolute dehumanisation in order to create a new humanity - everything, in fact, that was wrong with Soviet culture. It is as if, unlike Sartre, Zizek's just cannot escape history because his presuppositions do not permit him to - perhaps he might clarify this for us ...

Fortunately, I cannot take Zizek seriously as a politician but if someone is ever potty enough to try and act on his strategy, using Transcendental Materialism to transform the Progressive Movement into a machinery for the acquisition of power then this might be no liberation beyond the economic.

It would probably be mass psychological enslavement - millions of lost souls lost in a hell of transcendent and somehat confused collectivism ripe for exploitation by psychopathic personalities eager to crack many eggs for their global omelette ...