Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism

Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of CapitalismSLAVOJ ZIZEK Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism Allen Lane, London, 2014, 234 pp.Borrowing the title of Ernst Lubitsch's eponymous film, Slavoj Zizek's Trouble in Paradise is yet another explosive cocktail of philosophical reflection of Hegelian descent, post-Marxist political theory and Lacanian psychoanalysis applied in a non-discriminatory manner - although chaotically, as one may notice - to political crises shaped by the dynamics of social discontent (Greece, Turkey, Egypt, Syria, among others), to politically-incorrect popular humor or to B-series culture. The explosion turns soft rather soon, however, for a reader who is already familiar with the Slovenian author's rhetoric, favorite themes, quotes and jokes that circulate freely and repeatedly in most of his works.The introduction warns the reader against whatever expectations he may have for a linear, straight-forward critical and analytical journey "from the end of history to the end of capitalism". Instead, Zizek's approach resembles a downward spiral revisiting common places of the socio-economic reality in order to illustrate what he identifies as the interlinked and symptomatic phenomena of a fast-paced metamorphosis of the global capitalism that grew to be ideologically accommodated even by non-democratic political regimes. This kind of discursive strategy is not new; it has been signaled by critical readers of Zizek's writings as early as 1989 - in his preface to The Sublime Object of Ideology, Ernesto Laclau made an observation that could be accurately restated with reference to Trouble in Paradise: "[t]his is not a book in the classical sense; that is to say, a systematic structure in which an argument is developed according to a pre-determined plan [. ] It is rather a series of theoretical interventions which shed mutual light on each other not in terms of the progression of an argument, but in terms of what we could call the reiteration of the latter in different discursive contexts"1.Despite its eclectic charm, this postmodern "method" presents some risks: discussing at length issues as varied as decaffeinated coffee, Henry Kissinger, The Sound of Music, the Muslim Brotherhood, the hyper-real monopoly of online giant power structures and the South Korean suicide rate, the volume strays relatively a long distance from a rigorous analysis of the double apocalypse announced in the subtitle, situating the ends of Zizek's position not very far from its points of departure.Explicitly pointing to Francis Fukuyama's unfulfilled prophecy of a liberal capitalist democracy presenting itself as the only socio-economic order towards which all the countries would aspire, ending in this way the ideological struggle that characterized the Cold War era, the author reformulates the premises of a disenchanted version of the "end of history" in terms of a "paradise" troubled by the divorce of the "eternal marriage" between capitalism and democracy. It should be mentioned that Fukuyama himself would restate his assumptions only one year after Zizek's critique in his Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy2 (of course, this does not account for any deterministic relationship between the two books). Endlessly filling in pieces from a confuse puzzle of both academic and popular cultural references, Trouble in Paradise delimitates its four chapters (and the Appendix which can be read as an autonomous chapter in itself) not along the logical steps of a transparent argument, but in a somewhat metaphorical correspondence with the humorous lines of a joke. The joke consists of a series of puns exploiting the repeated misunderstandings that embarrass an English snob who tries to speak French. Alluding to a situation of failed communication attempts leading to the very impossibility of meaning, the structural backbone of this book hints to the capitalism's failure to act solely within the democratic confines. …