Is the Islamic State evil, or really evil? We've heard from the Duck Dynasty patriarch. Now Slavoj Zizek, the Coldplay of critical Marxist psychoanalytical theory, has a New York Times post titled "ISIS Is a Disgrace to True Fundamentalism." It's... not bad, actually. And it raises a few good questions.

Zizek—star of The Pervert's Guide to Cinema and fashionably accented Slovenian theorist of choice for hemp-wearing graduate students still pining for ze revolyution—explains nicely what he means by true fundamentalism, and how the Islamists fall way short:

But are the terrorist fundamentalists really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the United States — the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers' way of life. If today's so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers. Why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist's search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the nonbelievers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful other, they are fighting their own temptation. This is why the so-called fundamentalists of ISIS are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.



This may seem a little Pollyannaish; there's a whole lot of paranoid, militant fundamentalism, in all three of the major monotheistic faiths, and it poses a much more immediate challenge for societies than the passive cultural rejectionism of chanting Buddhists and buggy-driving Amish communities.

But I think Zizek's basically on solid ground here: the arch-fundamentalist's violent reaction to America, the West, and the modernizing Middle East is somehow bound up in a good deal of fascination with modernity. (You can see this modernity/anti-modernity tango in Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's fancy watch, or the fanboyism of ISIS rallies, or their painstaking use of cutting-edge TV optics in broadcasting how they mete out Medieval atrocities.) The more an ascetic is tempted, the more decisively he must strike a blow against that temptation to maintain his sense of identity.

In typical Zizek form, the philosopher riffs on his own melody until it's evanesced into some weird generalizations, sprinkled liberally with Foucault and Nietzsche references. (For instance, he attacks the "commonplace" explanation of ISIS as an "anticolonial awakening," because genuine Foucaultian "biopowered" anticolonial awakenings are not bad things, and let's not throw out the baby with the Islamist batshit here.)

But one of Zizek's interesting riffs suggests, as usual, that there's something hypocritically sexual at the bottom of all this:

While the official ISIS ideology rails against Western permissiveness, the daily practice of the ISIS gangs includes full-scale grotesque orgies, including robberies, gang rapes, torture and murder of infidels.



To riff like this about active killers is largely and understandably taboo in mainstream U.S. media, but the "grotesque orgy" imagery is kind of worth exploring here: From a psychoanalytical perspective, what is the beheading of a Western Other, or the mass-shooting of perhaps thousands of surrendering Iraqis, but a release of tension in the otherwise abstentionist ISIS psyche? If they are receptive to secular society's temptations, but constrained from enjoying the fruits, what satisfaction can they have but to quash those fruits? Sex or death.

All of which is a pretty bombastic, meandering way of saying that, in place of the Beltway-fed geopolitical explanations of ISIS and other radical Islamist groups, we need an erotics of militancy. Or perhaps that's just a personal need on my part, because for the life of me, I can't quash the deep-seated desire to see every single one of these self-important dipshits burn alive screaming. At least you and I have that need for psychic satisfaction in common, crazy jihadi motherfuckers.