Some concluding notes on violence, ideology and communist culture
Slavoj Žižek
Subjectivity (2010) 3, 101–116.
Here, Hegel himself commits a failure with regard to his own standards: he only deploys how, in the process of culture, the natural substance of sexuality is cultivated, sublated, mediated – we, humans, no longer just make love for procreation, we get involved in a complex process of seduction and marriage by means of which sexuality becomes an expression of the spiritual bond between a man and a woman and so on. However, what Hegel misses is how, once we are within the human condition, sexuality is not only transformed/civilized, but, much more radically, changed in its very substance: it is no longer the instinctual drive to reproduce, but a drive that gets thwarted as to its natural goal (reproduction) and thereby explodes into an infinite, properly meta-physical, passion. The becoming cultural of sexuality is thus not the becoming cultural of nature, but the attempt to domesticate a properly unnatural excess of the meta-physical sexual passion.
THIS is the properly dialectical reversal of substance: the moment when the immediate substantial (‘natural’) starting point is not only acted-upon, transformed, mediated/cultivated, but changed in its very substance.
[ … ]
The logic of this reproach seems impeccable:
radical emancipatory activity aims to abolish unjust suffering, and what we experience as unjust suffering is always determined by the coordinates of the symbolic order within which we move (that is, we have to formulate our complaint, and the only means at our disposal is the existing symbolic order); if, then, the ‘divine violence’ of the radical emancipatory act remakes the entire symbolic order, does this not imply that the revolutionary activity loses any sense, as the disintegration of the symbolic order that justified the revolutionary activity deprives it of its raison d’etre?
Impeccable as it may appear, I reject this reasoning: the logic of a radical emancipatory process is more complex. We, of course, start by formulating a complaint (or formulating our suffering and injustice) in the terms of the hegemonic ideology; however, what we experience in the course of our activity is that the very normative frame through which we perceived the situation is part of the situation, complicit in it, so that, in the course of the radical emancipatory (‘revolutionary’) activity, its agents do not only change society, they also change themselves, the way they perceive and evaluate society, the standards they use to judge society. This reproach is grounded in the critical point that my theoretical edifice is inconsistent, trying to bring together the purely symbolic notion of universal rights (on which emancipatory egalitarian politics is based) and the ‘irrational’ explosion of the real (‘divine violence’); this is why there is a fetishistic disavowal at the heart of Žižek’s own position – a simultaneous desire to claim that, despite its origins, the formal language of universal rights has ushered in a series of genuinely emancipatory developments and to see all our ways of thinking about egalitarian politics as so impoverished as to necessitate the accumulated wrath of pure resentment enacted by a coming, but obscured, revolutionary Subject’.
However, for me as a Hegelian there is no inconsistency here that would have called for a fetishist disavowal to obfuscate it: as I repeat again and again, the universality I am referring to is not the ‘abstract’ universality of the same rights, and so on, but the universality that only appears from the position of those who, within the social edifice, directly embody it – the ‘part of no part’,
those who, although they are formally part of society, lack a proper place within it and are thus, on account of their very marginality, universal subjects (it is in a similar sense that Marx speaks of proletariat as the ‘universal class’).
And as this agent can only assert itself by way of subverting the innermost logic that sustains the entire social edifice, its self-assertion is unavoidably (experienced as) violent. Violence is the only way for the universality to assert itself against the particular content that constrains it.
the ‘personality structure’ of a subject engaged in a radical emancipatory struggle, a subject who subscribes without any qualms to the motto ‘Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action, strength through pride’, and yet remains engaged in a radical egalitarian emancipatory struggle. What a liberal can do apropos such a subject is either to dismiss it as another version of the ‘authoritarian personality’, or to claim that this subject displays a ‘contradiction’ between the goals of its struggle (equality and freedom) and the means employed (collective discipline, and so on) – in both cases, the specificity of the subject of the radical emancipatory struggle is obliterated, this subject remains ‘unseen’, there is no place for him in the liberal’s ‘cognitive mapping’.
On Rammstein
This, then, is what Rammstein does to totalitarian ideology: it desemanticizes it and brings forward its obscene babble in its intrusive materiality. Does the Rammstein music not exemplify perfectly the distinction between sense and presence, the tension in a work of art between the hermeneutic dimension and the dimension of presence ‘this side of hermeneutics’, a dimension that Lacan indicated by the term sinthom (formula-knot of jouissance) as opposed to symptom (bearer of meaning)? What Lacan conceptualizes is the non-semantic dimensions in the symbolic itself.
The direct identification with Rammstein is a direct over-identification with sinthoms, which undermines ideological identification.We should not fear this direct over-identification, but rather the articulation of this chaotic field of energy into a (Fascist) universe of meaning. No wonder Rammstein music is violent, materially present, invading, intrusive with its loud volume and deep vibrations – its materiality is in constant tension with its meaning, undermining it. One should therefore resist the Susan Sontag temptation to reject as ideologically suspect the music of Rammstein with its extensive use of ‘Nazi’ images and motifs – what Rammstein does is the exact opposite:
by pushing the listeners into direct identification with the sinthoms used by the Nazis, bypassing their articulation into the Nazi ideology, they render palpable a gap where ideology imposes the illusion of seamless organic unity. In short, Rammstein liberates these sinthoms from their Nazi-articulation: they are offered to be enjoyed in their pre-ideological status of ‘knots’ of libidinal investment.
One should thus not be afraid to draw a radical conclusion: enjoying Riefenstahl’s pre-Nazi films or the music of bands like Rammstein is not ideology, while the struggle against racist intolerance in the terms of tolerance is. So when, while watching a Rammstein video clip depicting a blonde girl in a cage, with people in dark uniforms evoking Nordic warriors and so on, some Leftist liberals fear that the uneducated public will miss the irony (if there is any) and directly identify with the proto-Fascist sensibility displayed here, one should counter it with the good old motto: the only thing we have to fear here is fear itself.
Rammstein undermines totalitarian ideology not by the ironic distance towards the rituals it imitates, but by directly confronting us with its obscene materiality and thereby suspending its efficiency.
… More precisely, what such passionate immersion suspends is not primarily the ‘rational Self’ but the reign of the instinct for survival (self-preservation) on which, as Adorno knew well, the functioning of our ‘normal’ rational egos is based:
Speculations on the consequences of just such a general removal of the need for a survival instinct (such a removal being then in general what we call Utopia itself) leads us well beyond the bounds of Adorno’s social life world and class style (or our own), and into a Utopia of misfits and oddballs, in which the constraints for uniformization and conformity have been removed, and human beings grow wild like plants in a state of nature/y/no longer fettered by the constraints of a now oppressive sociality,/they/blossom into the neurotics, compulsives, obsessives, paranoids and schizophrenics, whom our society considers sick but who, in a world of true freedom, may make up the flora and fauna of ‘human nature’ itself. (Jameson, 1994, p. 99)