Slavoj Žižek and the struggle to understand the "universal dimension" in politics and human rights

I just listened to an interview Michael Brooks just released that he did with the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

My general response to Zižek is ... well, since he's a Hegel scholar, let's say it's dialectical. He sometimes has great insights to offer. Other times, he seems like he's being provocative for the sake of being provocative.

The Brooks interview appears here, TMBS - 117 - Slavoj Zizek On Everything 12/04/2019, beginning just after 1:20:30:

One of the things that often aggravates me about Žižek is when he talks about "political correctness" or woke culture in a way that sounds like he's trying to validate the talking points of rightwing whiners.

But in this interview, he took an approach to that in which the substance was more obvious. He talks about white activists being deferential to minorities in regarding them as participating in some kind of special victim status. But this time, instead of echoing rightwing talking points, he refers to Malcolm X and his notion of how distinct groups of society define their individual and group identities. And he refers to how white activists have to do something like that, too.

This reminded me of an important element that emerged in the civil rights movement in the 1960s around radical-left black nationalism and the Black Power movement. Malcolm X established himself as a leader in the Nation of Islam group, composed of African-American Muslims who advocated a fringe brand of Islam that was explicitly racist in arguing that white people were inferior to blacks. It provided a reversal of the values applied by white society that both offered a message of empowerment to African-Americans and exposed the ugliness of the white assumptions by holding up a mirror image of white attitudes.

When Malcolm was exposed more to mainstream Islam and performed the Hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca, he rejected the racial element in the Nation of Islam's doctrine, realizing that Islamic theology was fundamentally opposed to racism.

Earlier in his career as an activist and leader, he dismissed the idea that whites had any role to play in the black civil rights/liberation movement. But later he adjusted his concept to argue that whites should work among other whites to combat racism. It's a similar concept to the concept popular today for the American left of white activists being "allies" to minority freedom movements and causes.

Ahmed Shawki writes (The Legacy of Malcolm X Jacobin 02/21/2016):

Malcolm no longer believed all whites were the enemy, but he maintained the need for separate all-black organization: “Whites can help us, but they can’t join us. There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity. There can be no workers solidarity until there is first some racial solidarity. We cannot think of uniting with others, until we have first united ourselves.”

This can be a conceptual minefield. Žižek and Brooks discuss that idea here in terms of a consciousness that understands a "genuine multiplicity", rather than positioning oneself as a "universal subject" processing the world through a restricted worldview. Žižek "White liberals like blacks, Native Americans, and so on to develop their cultural identity. No! They should be allowed to do more, To define their own universality. White liberals secretly reserve the universal dimension for them[selves]. They like the others to be particular." (This part comes just after 1:36:00 in the video.)

Some other time, I might look at how this concept fits with Herbert Marcuse's notion of "repressive tolerance" or the analyses that other critical theorists like Rainer Forst and Wendy Brown have produced on tolerance.

Brooks and Žižek continue with a discussion of how different people draw on their own group identities, e.g., Buddhism or Hinduism, to achieve a universal viewpoint valid for all that still recognize important particularities.

I think this is an important way to think about the traditions of the Enlightenment and the political liberalism of the 18th century that both stimulated and were shaped by the American and French Revolution. Those were revolutions whose main subjects and immediate beneficiaries were white men. But those values understood primarily as applying to political communities of white men also contained the potential for applying them in a wider, more universal sense. Michael cites C.L.R. James' book Black Jacobins on the Haitian Revolution, which extended the principles and practices of the French Revolution to black people including slaves but was also the "fulfillment" and "the highest expression of the French Revolution", in Michael's words. (Just after !:42:40)