Slavoj Žižek’s First As Tragedy, Then As Farce appears, on first approach, to be a slender intervention into the disorientation of the first post–Cold War decade, yet it insists on staging a wholesale rectification of how that decade should be named, remembered, and used. It is a book anchored in the shock of two emblematic ruptures—September 11, 2001 and the 2008 financial collapse—and it refuses to let either be domesticated by the pieties of policy or the consolations of memory.
Žižek condenses his wager into the now—by him—canonical pairing of tragedy and farce: not the cheap anticommunist trope that treats any reappearance of egalitarian politics as a clownish relapse, but the more austere, Hegel–Marx reminder that modernity repeats itself under altered masks and that sometimes the comic return wounds more deeply than the solemn original. It is precisely because the book is from 2009 that it remains urgent: its analytic grammar—of emergency politics, of the media choreography of panic, of a Left tempted by moral lamentation rather than strategic invention—maps, with disquieting accuracy, the cycles of crisis that have since followed one another with algorithmic regularity. Žižek’s object is neither a chronicle of disasters nor a homily; it is an attempt to seize a historical configuration in the act of legitimating itself, and to reopen, in the name of a communist hypothesis, the very field that liberal reason calls closed.
From the first pages, the book forces the reader to abandon the lazy reflex that hears “tragedy/farce” and thinks only of the specter of totalitarianism. Žižek’s title points instead to the internal rhythm of the first decade of the century, framed by two speeches that sounded eerily alike: George W. Bush after 9/11 and again after the financial implosion. In both cases, the defense of the “American way of life” required, we were told, a suspension of the very liberties or laissez-faire precepts that define that way of life; the rhetoric of salvation borrowed its force from the very exceptions it declared necessary. Here the diagnosis is Hegelian in structure but Marxian in emphasis: repetition does not mean comfort, and the farce of 2008—insofar as “bi-partisan” emergency governance suspended debate to rescue abstract confidence—can be more terrifying in its consequences than the tragic pathos of 2001. The point is not to register symmetry but to insist that symbolic forms (the language of emergency, the invocation of life-styles) operate as instruments, and that this instrumentality is the doctrine of the age.
What dies twice in Žižek’s telling is “liberalism”: first as a political doctrine that claims to universalize freedoms while normalizing exceptions, and then as an economic theology that declares markets self-regulating but survives by abruptly socializing private risks. That second death is narrated not as an opinion but through the utterance of its apostles. The book returns to the dramatic weeks when “doing something” was elevated into a virtue beyond prosecution and Senator Jim Bunning could denounce Federal Reserve ambitions as “socialism alive and well in America,” before the same political class transformed an unprecedented transfer of liabilities into a moral inevitability. The populist grammar—Main Street versus Wall Street—was not wrong in content so much as weaponized in the wrong direction: the subsidy to lenders, not borrowers; the elevation of “moral hazard” to a taboo violated only when it propped up the very institutions that had manufactured the hazard. Žižek’s point is structural: within capitalism, the asymmetry between the “street” that produces and the “street” that finances cannot be dissolved by will; Main Street’s reproduction is subordinated to the health of its creditor. The bailout, therefore, is not an aberration but a revealing norm: socialism becomes admissible when it stabilizes capitalism.
This is why the book lingers on belief. Markets are theatres of second- and third-order expectations—Keynes’s beauty contest—and the decisive gesture in 2008, for all its astronomical figures, was not the repair of a concrete bridge or the reconstruction of an actual factory; it was the purchase of confidence. The fabulous sums did not address a determinate physical scarcity; they sought to reconfigure the distribution of expectations, the delicate transference that Lacanian theory calls a “subject supposed to know.” Žižek cites the telling confession: policy had to be done fast so as to prevent thinking; dissenters had to be tutored into silence in the name of urgency. In that interval, democratic procedures were suspended not by a conspiracy but by a pedagogy of fear, and the pedagogy worked because the “fifth element”—money as the natural force—arrived as an absolute imperative eclipsing, even if only for a cycle, the clamors of ecological collapse, pandemics, and hunger. The rescue was of signifiers; the patient was a symbolic architecture, and the medicine was belief.
It matters that Žižek reads the crisis not as an accident but as the success of its own world-view. “Crisis as shock therapy” names how catastrophe is mobilized to fortify the very premises that produced it. Here Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine” is not adopted as an outside allegory; it is taken up as a precise description of how the public’s psychic disarray becomes a policy resource. The “return to basics” after a trauma rarely means a questioning of fundamentals; it is more often a consolidation of them. The spontaneity of panic is the ally of neoliberals who, faced with the ruins of their own prescriptions, reply that the doses were never pure enough, the deregulation never complete enough, the discipline never strict enough. The result is a circle that explains away empirical failures by appealing to an unattained ideal, while reimposing that ideal more ferociously the next time. Shock becomes a doctrine of repetition, and repetition becomes a doctrine of legitimacy.
Because this is a book about ideology, Žižek refuses the polite quarantine between “the economy” and “politics.” He reminds us that there is no neutral market mechanism; every configuration of exchange presupposes a prior decision about rules, force, and inclusion. The Mali example—cotton and cattle crushed by the subsidies of rich states—illustrates that the free market is a political artifact, not a natural equilibrium. The real dilemma is never “intervention or not?” but always “which intervention, for whom, and enforced by what violence?” To call this “political” is not rhetorical; it is a literal description of how sovereignty distributes risks and immunities. When the unthinkable—a General Motors bankruptcy—suddenly became “thinkable,” the logic was not that of a natural correction but of a struggle over which constituencies could be made to bear losses: a symbolic opportunity to break a union’s spine, not a technocratic optimization.
It is in this register that Žižek stages one of the book’s most disquieting dialogues, between psychoanalytic transference and the regulation of markets. Jacques-Alain Miller’s portrait of a financial universe held together by belief in a “subject supposed to know” becomes, in Žižek’s hands, a theory of how authority is manufactured and how quickly it collapses when the transferential support fails. Greenspan’s congressional confession—“I found a flaw in the model”—is less a mea culpa than an index of where error resides: not in data points, but in an ethical anthropology that imagined self-interest would generate prudence. It did not, because agents rationally outsource tail risk to the state when they can; the expectation of rescue is endogenous, not accidental. Policy that aims only to restore confidence while leaving the expectations architecture intact is policy that prepares the next panic to arrive on schedule.
Against the consolations of catastrophe, Žižek turns to the conceptual resources of communism—not as a museum piece but as a name for a situation in which the “commons” are being enclosed on all fronts and the forms of subjectivation available to those excluded tighten into caricature. He does not ask whether communism can be applied; he asks how our present looks if we think from the communist idea. The diagnosis names four antagonisms: ecological breakdown, the juridical inadequacy of private property to the regime of “intellectual property,” the bioethical precipice opened by techno-science, and the proliferation of walls and slums that reorganize the very map of citizenship. These are not items on a checklist but linked modalities of expropriation; they inscribe, each in its register, the same movement of enclosing what must be common if life is to be preserved. To call this “proletarianization” is not a romantic flourish; it is a literal statement that more and more domains of life are being stripped to the status of exposed laboring existence without substantial supports.
Here Žižek’s polemic against “vulgar communism”—what we call “socialism” when it is nothing more than universalized property under a different owner—does its clarifying work. If capitalism stands for private property and socialism for state property, then communism, in this lexicon, names the abolition of property as such with respect to the commons—culture, language, infrastructure, external nature, our genetic inheritance—so that their access is not mediated by owners, whether private or public. Social democracy’s return, especially in the wake of crisis, becomes legible as capitalism’s own reinvention of socialism in order to save itself: “we are all socialists now,” as one cover announced, but the phrase’s truth lies not in the advent of equality, rather in the tactical socialization of losses to keep the circuitry intact.
One will miss the book’s force if one reads its call for communist thinking as a posture of indignation. It is, instead, an argument that insists on method. Žižek refuses to chase the next neologism—“risk society,” “post-industrial,” “informational”—and he rejects the calendar’s tyranny. The way to grasp novelty is not to multiply labels, but to think with what is “eternal” in the old: ideas that do not dictate policies but expose antagonisms. Adorno’s counsel about Hegel governs the procedure: the question is not what of Hegel remains “alive” for us; it is what we look like to Hegel—how our forms appear when judged from the standard they still obscurely presuppose. So too with communism: the measure is not the museum but the contradiction that our epoch is compelled to deny. Truth is therefore “partial” in the strong sense: it is bound to a side, and it is universal not by hovering above conflict but by entering it as its immanent term.
Because the book is written at the threshold of 2009, one might think its archive would date it. The opposite is the case. Its figures—emergency decrees that suspend deliberation, bipartisan unanimities that translate anxiety into authorization, moral vocabularies that transform market-made disasters into theocentric fables about vanity—are not period curiosities; they are the operating system of a sequence we continue to inhabit. The symmetry between “war on terror” and “war to save the markets” is not a metaphor; it is the record of how sovereignty reeducates populations in crisis. The insistence that now is not the time for politics but for action returns like a refrain, and it returns not because facts are stubborn but because facts are already narrativized as exceptional. Žižek’s counter-pedagogy is Kantian in its sobriety: obey, but think. Resist the temptation to act out anger in ways that wound the very constituencies one means to defend; convert anger into analysis adequate to changing the rules that made blackmail possible.
One sees, then, why the book is merciless toward the Left’s own habits of consolation. There is a form of critique that soils the master’s garments but leaves the master’s power intact; Žižek mocks the dissident satisfaction of having “covered the testicles with dust” while rape proceeds undisturbed. To invert that joke requires, for him, not the fantasy of a purifying insurrection but a long labor of delegitimating the supposed knowledge that props up authority. This is neither romanticism nor cynicism; it is a program for stripping the aura from necessity, for showing that “there is no alternative” is not a description but a threat. His aphoristic coda—“the time for liberal-democratic moralistic blackmail is over”—is not an invitation to cruelty; it is the injunction to stop apologizing for wanting the very debate that emergency rule forbids.
A reviewer who wants a chapter digest will be disappointed; Žižek’s sections refuse to cohere into a syllabus. They cycle instead through demonstrations of a single thesis: that late-capitalist order secures itself by fusing exception with normalcy, and that it narrates this fusion as common sense. Hence the sideways peregrinations—the excursus on GM and the engineering of the “unthinkable,” the anatomy of the bailout’s class politics, the reminder that “markets” are composed of wagers on what others believe about belief. Each instance is less a case study than a proof by construction, showing how the same axiom recurs under different masks. The recurrences do not lull; they accumulate until the reader experiences a reversal in which the “natural” comes to look staged, and the staged comes to look inevitable.
The book’s philosophical neutrality—a style he calls “objective” only because it refuses confession—consists in precisely this: it neither sacralizes catastrophe nor reduces it to administrative error. Instead it disciplines attention on those points where explanation flips into justification: “we had to act”; “confidence had to be restored”; “there was no time.” These incantations are not lies; they are the empty centers that demand to be filled by politics. Žižek proposes that the only politics adequate to them is one that does not give up on universality, that finds in the commons not a decorative metaphor but a criterion: Who controls language, code, infrastructure, earth, and our genetic future? How are those controls legitimated? Under what sign are they withdrawn from deliberation? That these questions were posed in 2009, at the dawn of a cycle of privatizations of cognition and nature that has since accelerated, only confirms the book’s claim to relevance now.
First As Tragedy, Then As Farce reads like a philosophical dossier designed to force a choice between two incompatible temporalities: the emergency present that continually resets the clock and the historical time in which antagonisms ripen, reappear, and become nameable. In the former, crisis is that which interrupts ordinary politics; in the latter, crisis is the ordinary condition disguised by repetitions of panic and rescue. Žižek wagers on the second: that what looks like interruption is the rule, and that thought’s task is not to lament the rule but to break its charm by refusing its grammar of necessity. That is why the book, however much it inventories the cynicisms and hypocrisies of elites, keeps circling back to method—how to think in a way that alters the space of the possible rather than decorating the inevitable.
If the book is “older,” its insistence on antagonisms over accidents has aged into clarity. The subsequent years have not refuted its theses; they have multiplied their examples. The farce of repeats—“once-in-a-century” floods that arrive every other summer; “black swans” that flock; states of exception that quietly become administrative routine—should not seduce us into thinking we have discovered a new concept. We have, rather, been living inside the one First As Tragedy anatomizes: a regime that treats the social bond as collateral and the collateral as sacred, a pedagogy that teaches populations to call their losses natural and their rescues proof that nature is benevolent. Žižek’s reply is not a prophecy but a practice: cease to apologize for naming the commons as the field of struggle; cease to read every deviation from equilibrium as a return to order in disguise; learn again to think, rigorously, in the midst of obedience, so that obedience can become contestation. The time for moralistic blackmail—do you not see you are endangering stability?—is over to the extent that we dare to treat stability as the name of what forbids the imagination of justice. First As Tragedy, Then As Farce remains relevant because it names, with crisp cruelty and analytic patience, the lever by which the present continues to move us.
Simon Gros 
Leave a comment