The parallax view• Extract

Slavoj Zizek <The parallax view>
p4-5

Today's crisis of Marxism is not due only to the sociopolitical defeats of Marxist movements; at an inherent theoretical level, the crisis can (and should) also be indexed through the decline (virtual disappearance, even ）of dialectical materialism as the philosophical underpinning of Marxism—dialectical materialism, not the much more acceptable, and much less embarrassing, “materialist dialectic": the shift from determinate reflection to reflective determination is crucial here—this is another case where a word or the position of words decides everything. The shift we are dealing with here is the key dialectical shift--the one which is most difficult to grasp for a "negative dialectics" in love with explosions of negativity, with all imaginable forms of "resistance" and "subversion," but unable to overcome its own parasitizing on the preceding positive order—from the wild dance of the liberation from the (oppressive) System to (what German Idealists called) the System of Liberty. Two examples from revolutionary politics should suffice here: it is easy to fall in love with the multitude of freethinkers who blossomed in the prerevolutionary France of the late eighteenth century, from libertarians debating in the salons, enjoying the paradoxes of their own inconsistencies, to pathetic artists amusing those in power with their own protests against power; it is much more difficult fully to endorse the reversal of this unrest into the harsh new Order of the revolutionary Terror. Similarly, it is easy to fall in love with the crazy creative unrest of the first years after the October Revolution, with supremacists, futurists, constructivists, and so on, competing for primacy in revolutionary fervor; it is much more difficult to recognize in the horrors of the forced collectivization of the late 192os the attempt to translate this revolutionary fervor into a new positive social order. There is nothing ethically more disgusting than revolutionary Beautiful Souls who refuse to recognize, in the Cross of the postrevolutionary present, the truth of their own flowering dreams about freedom.

今天马克思主义的危机不仅是因为马克思主义运动的社会政治性挫败；在内部的理论的层面，这种危机也可以（并且应该）标注在作为马克思主义哲学基础的辩证唯物主义的整个衰退（甚至是可见的消失）中—辩证唯物主义，而不是更容易接受并且不那么令人难堪的“唯物辩证法”:从决断性反射到反射性决断的转变（the shift from determinate reflection to reflective determination）在这里是关键的—这是另一种一个词汇或者词汇的位置决定一切的例子。我们在这里面对的转变就是关键的辩证的转变—这对于与否定的爆炸相爱的“否定辩证”来说是最难以把握的，伴随着所有“抵抗”和“颠覆”的想像的形式，却不能克服它本身对前置的积极秩序的寄生（ its own parasitizing on the preceding positive order）— 从来自于（压抑的）系统的自由的狂野舞蹈到（德国理念主义者所说的）自由的系统。在这里举两个来自革命政治的例子应该足够了：要爱上在十八世纪晚期革命前涌现的众多法国自由思想家很容易，从沙龙里的自由主义辩论，享受他们自己的不一致的悖论，到用他们自己对权力的对抗来为那些权力者提供消遣的艺术家；更困难的是去完全认同这种进入革命恐怖的残酷新秩序的动荡状态的反转。同样，要爱上十月革命之后第一年中的疯狂的有创造力的动荡状态很容易，伴随着至上主义者，未来主义者，结构主义者，等等，在革命热情中争夺主导权（competing for primacy in revolutionary fervor）；更困难的是去承认1920年代末将这种革命热情转变为新社会秩序的强制集体化的恐怖。在伦理上，没有比处于后革命的交叉点的拒绝承认他们自己对于自由的美丽梦境的真相的革命美丽灵魂更加让人恶心的东西。