Poker According to Žižek

*A Warning: This post concerns political theory and poker. If that does not interest you, read no further.

Slavoj Žižek is a Marxist-communist philosopher from former Yugoslavia, and I’m currently reading his book Welcome to the Desert of The Real for my Secrecy and Spectacle course. (The full course title is “Secrecy and Spectacle from Cold War to War on Terror.” It’s easily the most influential course I’ve ever taken up to this point.) The book is basically about how the illusions of Americans should have been shattered after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, but instead Americans used the attacks as an opportunity to create more illusions. This is an incredibly basic summary—so basic it’s actually wrong, but there’s really no other way to simplify it. Anyway--as you can see from the title of this post, this is in no way what I was planning on writing about, but since I’ve gone this far, I’ll go ahead and summarize what Žižek means.

Žižek believes that America pre-9/11 lived in a fantasy land of Us and Them thinking (Again, the problem of dichotomies. And “Them” equals everyone existing outside of the U.S.), and that when our own country was attacked, it was an opportunity to realize that we are part of a world where terrible things are happening. (For instance, all the Bosnian women who were terrorized, the mass killings in Congo—these are all things that happen to them.) Žižek claims that America did not take this opportunity, that instead, “it [America] opted to reassert its traditional ideological commitments: out with feelings of responsibility and guilt towards the impoverished Third World, we are the victims now!”

Anyway, Žižek fills the book with these little anecdotes and jokes he’s picked up from who knows where, and Saturday night there was a poker game at my house, and Žižek’s words kept bubbling up. Every aspect of the game corresponded to his text—part of me now wonders, in fact, if this book is actually incognito poker theory, only disguised as political theory.

1. Welcome to the Desert of the Real

The Desert of the Real is a place one ends up after illusion—or reality—is shattered. I lead many players to this desolate place Saturday night, as what they knew as reality—their ideological constructs—were shattered.

Playing your pocket jacks when there’s face cards on the table? Welcome to the Desert of the Real. Raising me on two pair when I’m holding an open-ended straight? I’m all in, and I catch my card. I rake your chips, and the only thing you can do is stare blankly at the table, pretending not to be upset. Pretending is all you can do, because you have nothing left. Welcome to the Desert of the Real.

2. Economics Always Trumps Politics

This is how Žižek explains America royally screwing Iran from the 1950’s on, and how I explain pretending to have nothing when I truly hit trips of the flop. You raise, I reraise—sorry “friend.” Secrecy and Spectacle exist not only in government, but at my kitchen table as well. Welcome to the dictates of capitalism—and subsequently, The Desert of the Real. It’s hot out there, maybe you should have another Guinness before you buy back in.

3. A man must desire life like water, but drink death like wine.

This is an idea attributed to G.K. Chesterton—the soldier surrounded by enemies can’t cling to life, or he won’t escape. “He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it.”

Many players experience a chip flux, where they go really low or high. In either case, the reaction can be the same—to tighten their greedy fist around their pile. Inevitably, this results in chips slowly being depleted. The trick is to drink poker death like wine, make your enemies look down the barrel of your all-in. Force a show-down where only one person gets to keep their money, and their ideology--and the other is left numb and alone in The Desert of the Real.