Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 ed. by Slavoj Žižek (review)

Abstract

562 Reviews dominant' (cf. Chapter 6) in the Soviet period. When, therefore,itcomes to prolonged attention to one director outside of the book's encyclopaedic objectives, it is perhaps not surprising that the author chooses Andrei Tarkovskii, juxtaposed with Eisenstein (Nostalgia and The Sacrifice are described with special poignancy). I would take polite issue with this choice, since by opting for a director who in the West embodies a spirit of contrariness in Soviet cinema, we may be reinstating the very binarism of dogma that this book wishes to sidestep. None the less, I might then counter my own argument by noting that within Tarkovskii's corpus Gillespie stresses the role of memory, in which case within dualisms there lie the inclusionary tendencies of retrospection?the unwillingness to forget or plot 'progressive' trajectories through selective, discriminatory processes. In finding in Tarkovskii a propensity towards inclusion, as opposed to a mere foil to another's stately doxa, the readers of this book will realize the importance of David Gillespie's book as an opportune and most im? portant tool for the study of Eastern cinema. University of California, Los Angeles David MacFadyen Revolution atthe Gates: A Selection of WritingsfromFebruary to October igij. Ed. by SlavojZizek. London:Verso. 2002. viii + 344pp. ?15. ISBN 1-85984-661-0. The jacket photos of this extremely provocative book belie the strange asymmetries of its contents.'Lenin', despite being the monograph's ostensible raison d'etre, is printed with an appreciably smaller font than the name of the editor, Zizek. Even the figure of Lenin himself, shown as a saluting statue against an oppressively dark blue sky, is shot from afar and through a blurred object in the foreground. He is remote and discernible only with irksome effort.This diminished, displaced object is, however, well outside Eastern Europe and much closer than many readers may realize. It stands atop a residential building on the Lower East Side of New York, brought to America as a kitsch curio after being toppled on the outskirts of Moscow. It now salutes the Big Apple from a great height and is joined by an equally large clock (not shown on the cover) with its twelve, classical numerals strangely in the wrong order. Lenin's risible presence is thus surprisingly, if not disconcertingly, near. Zizek's task parallels that unusual proximity: he aims to address and counter the 'outbursts of sarcastic laughter' that would surely accompany any serious suggestion of an origi? nal significance for Lenin's work in modern America. In some sense, this impressive undertaking develops his monograph of 2000, The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso). There Zizek strove to unearth and extol the revolutionary, subversive spirit of Chris? tianity that is often hijacked by institutionalized, fundamentalist forms of belief. In Revolution at the Gates he uses an introduction and enormous essay to fill more than half the book with an analogous, arresting entreaty to 'repeat Lenin?in the Kierkegaardian sense' (p. 11), such that a limitless, elemental rush of revolutionary thinking will lead us (healthily) far from the co-ordinates of stable, dulling sureties and towards the 'very delicate line between materialism and idealism' (p. 181). Beyond that line, in talk of Lenin'vs relationship to the 'void', we might expect the abstractions of Lacan or Badiou, but Zizek with aplomb turns instead to more practical, pressing matters, to sociopolitical parallels today: 'The key premise of State and Revolution is that you cannot fully "democratize" the State; that the State 'as such', in its very notion, is a dictatorship of one class over another' (p. 192). The latent intolerances of institutionalized liberalism are extended by Zizek into a trenchant, telling critique of political correctness, of its purportedly liberating inclusiveness that in fact (barely) hides an exclusionary tendency 'to tolerate the Other [only] in so far as he himself is tolerant' (p. 225). This attitude masks the kind of MLRy 99.2, 2004 563 reliance upon stable, codified co-ordinates that led, says the editor, men who attended Khrushchev's secret speech to have nervous breakdowns or heart attacks. Zizek takes a similar, unsettling look at the events of September 11 and suggests that the terrorists who attacked the World...