Marx on Balzac: intelligent conservatives see the deadlocks

01:17:45 — Marx on Balzac: intelligent conservatives see the deadlocks

Žižek’s closing political proposal, and its unlikely pedigree. The coalition he wants is not left + liberal but left + intelligent conservative — the Balzac type, not the reactionary type. What such conservatives supply that the left historically lacks is the honest recognition of deadlock: the acknowledgment that the current constellation really is stuck, that no prepared program dissolves it, and that politics must therefore begin from that acknowledgment rather than from a promise to sidestep it. The authority for this, Žižek notes, is Marx himself on Balzac.