The Real of Violence, Cynicism, and the “Right of Distress”
Slavoj Žižek
THE SINTHOME 14 Summer 2013
Recall Marx’s brilliant analysis of how, in the French revolution of 1848, the conservative-republican Party of Order functioned as the coalition of the two branches of royalism (orleanists and legitimists) in the “anonymous kingdom of the Republic.” [1] The parliamentary deputees of the Party of Order perceived their republicanism as a mockery: in parliamentary debates, they all the time generated royalist slips of tongue and ridiculed the Republic to let it be known that their true aim was to restore the kingdom.
What they were not aware of is that they themselves were duped as to the true social impact of their rule. What they were effectively doing was to establish the conditions of bourgeois republican order that they despised so much (by for instance guaranteeing the safety of private property).
So it is not that they were royalists who were just wearing a republican mask: although they experienced themselves as such, it was their very “inner” royalist conviction which was the deceptive front masking their true social role. In short, far from being the hidden truth of their public republicanism, their sincere royalism was the fantasmatic support of their actual republicanism.
Marx describes here a precise case of perverted libidinal economy: there is a Goal (restoration of the monarchy) which members of the group experience as their true goal, but which, for tactical reasons, has to be publicly disavowed; however, what brings enjoyment are not multiple ways of obscenely making fun of the ideology they have to follow publicly (rage and invectives again republicanism), but the very indefinite postponement of the realization of their official Goal (which allows them to rule united).
Recall how it is when, in the private sphere, I am unhappily married, I mock my wife all the time, declaring my intention to abandon here for my mistress whom I really love, and while I get small pleasures from invectives against my wife, the enjoyment that sustains me is generated by the indefinite postponement of really leaving my wife for my mistress.
This is the formula of today’s cynical politics: its true dupes are the cynics themselves who are not aware that their truth is in what they are mocking, not in their hidden belief. As such, cynicism is a perverted attitude: it transposes onto its other (non-cynical dupes) its own division. This is why, as Freud pointed out, the perverse activity is not an open display of the unconscious, but its greatest obfuscation.
To draw attention to the fundamental violence that sustains a “normal” functioning of the state (Benjamin called it “mythic violence”), and the no les fundamental violence that sustains every attempt to undermine the functioning of the state (Benjamin’s “divine violence”).
This is why the reaction of the state power to those who endanger it is so brutal, and why, in its very brutality, this reaction is precisely “reactive,” protective. So, far from eccentricity, the extension of the notion of violence is based on a key theoretical insight, and it is the limitation of violence to its directly-visible physical aspect which, far from being “normal,” relies on an ideological distortion.
It is difficult to be really violent, to perform an act that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life.
Addition: Life as the sum of ends has a right against abstract right. If for example it is only by stealing bread that the wolf can be kept from the door, the action is of course an encroachment on someone’s property, but it would be wrong to treat this action as an ordinary theft. To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation would be to stigmatize him as without rights, and since he would be deprived of his life, his freedom would be annulled altogether. /…/
Hegel does not talk here about humanitarian considerations which should temper our legalistic zeal (if an impoverished father steals bread to feed his starving child, we should show mercy and understanding even if he broke the law…), but about a basic legal right, a right which is as a right superior to other particular legal rights.
In other words, we are not dealing simply with the conflict between the demands of life and the constraints of the legal system of rights, but with a right (to life) that overcomes all formal rights, i.e., with a conflict inherent to the sphere of rights, a conflict which is unavoidable and necessary insofar as it serves as an indication of the finitude, inconsistency, and “abstract” character of the system of legal rights as such.
“To refuse to allow a man in jeopardy of his life to take such steps for self-preservation /like stealing the food necessary for his survival/ would be to stigmatize him as without rights“– so, again, the point is not that the punishment for justified stealing would deprive the subject of his life, but that it would exclude him from the domain of rights, i.e., that it would reduce him to bare life outside the domain of law, of the legal order. In other words, this refusal deprives the subject of his very right to have rights.
However, the key question here is: can we universalize this “right of distress,” extending it to an entire social class and its acts against the property of another class?
Although Hegel does not directly address this question, a positive answer imposes itself from Hegel’s description of “rabble” as a group/class whose exclusion from the domain of social recognition is systematic: “§ 244,
Addition: Against nature man can claim no right, but once society is established, poverty immediately takes the form of a wrong done to one class by another.” In such a situation in which a whole class of people is systematically pushed beneath the level of dignified survival, to refuse to allow them to take “steps for self-preservation” (which, in this case, can only mean the open rebellion against the established legal order) is to stigmatize them as without rights.