Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World by Slavoj Žižek

Contesting Byung-Chul Han’s argument that class divisions today are replaced by the ‘auto-exploiting labourer’ who is now ‘master and slave in one’, Zizek shows the continuity of class divisions and exploitation in neoliberal capitalism. For instance, he reflects on the subjective effects of this barbarism by examining the ‘different ways in which we become tired’ as a result of the nature of work in neoliberal capitalism (19).

Zizek argues that today we are facing a situation in which the threats of a ‘new barbarism’ are ‘already clearly discernible’ (3). Firstly, what is the nature of crisis today with the ‘catastrophes’, ‘storms’ and threats of ‘barbarism’ that we face? Secondly, why is it impossible to think of any return to the normal? And finally, how does this situation point to the urgent need to reinvent communism, a name Zizek gives to the signs of global coordination and solidarity within the present crisis? Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World asks three fundamental questions. It is this antagonism between barbarism and solidarity which is at the heart of Zizek’s book.

Zizek, on the contrary, sees in this moment, a possibility for what Benjamin called a ‘real state of emergency’: a moment that explodes the continuum of capitalism, abolishes the ‘barbarism’ of privatisation and intensifies what he calls ‘solidarity’. Others like Alain Badiou saw in this moment nothing exceptional but a routine response of the bourgeois state to save its authority in times of war. During the Covid crisis, when the state declared emergency measures such as lockdowns and quarantine, philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben saw this declaration as a dangerous tendency of the state to ‘use the state of exception as a normal governing paradigm’. In times of crisis, the state temporarily declares a state of emergency in order to restore its authority that the crisis threatens. Zizek attempts to revitalise this thinking by arguing in Pandemic! Covid-19 Shakes the World that the Coronavirus crisis, that has interrupted our normal lives, is a political moment full of possibilities, where one must decide between ‘barbaric capitalism’ and a ‘reinvented communism’. It is in this tradition, which carries the names of the likes of Walter Benjamin, that we can perhaps add the name of Slavoj Zizek. It is a revolutionary tradition of reading history as pregnant with possibilities (both of catastrophes, on the one hand, and revolution, on the other). This tradition proposes an ‘opening up of history’ at the moment of the irruption of crisis. It is the Marxist tradition of thinking, on the contrary, that opposes this conservative reaction to crisis by viewing the interruption as a possibility for a radical change. Crisis, understood as an interruption of the normal, is seen as a negative moment that has to be either postponed, managed or overcome by a return to the normal.

Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World by Slavoj Žižek