Jul 7, 2015

Žižek's piece on Greece and the Rise of Nephopolitics


I believe it goes without saying that it is almost impossible for a layperson - even an academic one - to follow all events and opinions surrounding the Greek crisis. But Žižek's piece for the New Statesman is refreshing and sobering in its diagnosis of the state of contemporary capitalism and power, in my opinion. I agree with everything he writes there, but I would like to quote this passage regarding the rise of what I call nephopolitics.
An ideal is gradually emerging from the European establishment’s reaction to the Greek referendum, the ideal best rendered by the headline of a recent Gideon Rachman column in the Financial Times: “Eurozone’s weakest link is the voters.”
In this ideal world, Europe gets rid of this “weakest link” and experts gain the power to directly impose necessary economic measures – if elections take place at all, their function is just to confirm the consensus of experts.
Neo-liberalism - and global financial capitalism as a political entity - is slowly making biopolitics a thing of the past. Power doesn't care about the population's biological life anymore. It actually wishes everyone would just hurry up and die, so money can flow unencumbered in the "cloud" of financial systems: this would be the dream of nephopolitics.

I have this mental image from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None [spoilers!] where the killer finally kills himself to complete his master plan, since even his own existence distracts from the plan's perfection. And the plan can only elegantly exist without him.

So I picture David Cameron as the last person alive in Britain, after the Tories have allowed everyone else to die so people wouldn't bother the Holy Market Forces. Smiling a victorious, complacent smile, he unplugs himself from life, while with his last moments of consciousness he contemplates the beauty of money virtually circling around in the cloud, in perpetuity, finally free of those pesky people/citizens/organisms.