logocentric – Page 85

Žižek aims at butler

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

It is as if the three components of the production process — intellectual planning and marketing, material production, the provision of material resources — are increasingly autonomized, emerging as separate spheres. In its social consequences, this separation appears in the guise of the “three main classes” in today’s developed societies, which are precisely not classes but three fractions of the working class:

– intellectual laborers,

– the old manual working class,

– and the outcasts (the unemployed, those living in slums and other interstices of public space) .

The working class is thus split into three, each fraction with its own “way of life” and ideology: the enlightened hedonism and liberal multiculturalism of the intellectual class; the populist fundamentalism of the old working class; more extreme and Singular forms of the outcast fraction.

In Hegelese, this triad is clearly the triad of the universal (intellectual workers), the particular (manual workers), and the Singular (outcasts).

The outcome of this process is the gradual disintegration of social life proper, of a public space in which all three fractions could meet, and “identity” politics in all its forms is a supplement for this loss.

Identity politics acquires a specific form within each fraction: multicultural identity politics among the intellectual class; regressive populist fundamentalism among the working class; semi-illegal groupings (criminal gangs, religious sects, etc.) among the outcasts.

What they all share is recourse to a particular identity as a substitute for the missing universal public space. The proletariat is thus divided into three, each part being played off against the others : intellectual laborers full of cultural prejudices against “redneck” workers; workers who display a populist hatred of intellectuals and outcasts; outcasts who are antagonistic to society as such.

The old cry “Proletarians, unite !” is thus more pertinent than ever: in the new conditions of “postindustrial” capitalism, the unity of the three fractions of the working class is already their victory. This unity, however, will not be guaranteed by any figure of the “big Other” prescribing it as the “objective tendency” of the historical process itself — the situation is thoroughly open, divided between the two versions of Hegelianism.

Žižek general intellect

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

To grasp these new forms of privatization, we need to critically transform Marx’s conceptual apparatus. Because he neglected the social dimension of the “general intellect;’ Marx failed to envisage the possibility of the privatization of the “general intellect” itself-and this is what lies at the core of the struggle over “intellectual property:’ Negri is right on this point: within this framework, exploitation in the classical Marxist sense is no longer possible, which is why it has to be enforced more and more by direct legal measures, that is, by non-economic means.

This is why, today, exploitation increasingly takes the form of rent: as Carlo Vercellone puts it, postindustrial capitalism is characterized by the “becoming-rent of the profit.” And this is why direct authority is needed: in order to impose the (arbitrary) legal conditions for extracting rent, conditions which are no longer “spontaneously” generated by the market.

Perhaps therein resides the fundamental”contradiction” of today’s “postmodern” capitalism: while its logic is de-regulatory, “anti-statal;’ nomadic, deterritorializing, and so on, its key tendency to the “becoming-rent-of-profit” signals a strengthening of the role of the state whose regulatory function is ever more omnipresent. Dynamic deterritorialization co-exists with, and relies on, increasingly authoritarian interventions of the state and its legal and other apparatuses. What one can discern at the horizon of our historical becoming is thus a society in which personal libertarianism and hedonism co-exist with (and are sustained by) a complex web of regulatory state mechanisms. Far from disappearing, the state is today gathering strength.

To put it another way: when, due to the crucial role of the “general intellect” (knowledge and social cooperation) in the creation of wealth, forms of wealth are increasingly “out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production;’ the result is not, as Marx seems to have expected, the self-dissolution of capitalism, but rather the gradual relative transformation of the profit generated by the exploitation of labor-power into rent appropriated by the privatization of this very “general intellect.”

Take the case of Bill Gates: how did he become the richest man in the world? His wealth has nothing to do with the cost of producing the commodities Microsoft sells (one can even argue that Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary) . It is not the result of his producing good software at lower prices than his competitors, or of higher levels of “exploitation” of his hired workers. If this were the case, Microsoft would have gone bankrupt long ago: masses of people would have chosen programs like Linux, which are both free and, according to the specialists, better than Microsoft’s.

Why, then, are millions still buying Microsoft? Because Microsoft has succeeded in imposing itself as an almost universal standard, (virtually) monopolizing the field, in a kind of direct embodiment of the “general intellect.”

Gates became the richest man on Earth within a couple of decades by appropriating the rent received from allowing millions of intellectual workers to participate in that particular form of the “general intellect” he successfully privatized and still controls.

Is it true, then, that today’s intellectual workers are no longer separated from the objective conditions of their labor (they own their PC, etc.), which is Marx’s description of capitalist “alienation” ? Superficially, one might be tempted to answer “yes;’ but, more fundamentally, they remain cut off from the social field of their work, from the “general intellect;’ because the latter is mediated by private capital.

And the same goes for natural resources: their exploitation is one of the great sources of rent today, marked by a permanent struggle over who is to receive this rent, the peoples of the Third World or Western corporations. The supreme irony is that, in order to explain the difference between labor-power (which, when put to work, produces surplus-value over and above its own value) and other commodities ( the value of which is consumed in their use and which thus involve no exploitation) Marx mentions as an example of an “ordinary” commodity oil, the very commodity which is today a source of extraordinary “profits .” Here also, it is meaningless to link the rise and fall of oil prices to rising or falling production costs or the price of exploited labor —the production costs are negligible; the price we pay for oil is a rent we pay to the owners and controllers of this natural resource because of its scarcity and limited supply (147).

Žižek butler critique commie hypothesis pt 5

So what about the standard critique of “formal freedom’: namely that it is in a way even worse than direct servitude, since the former i s a mask that deludes one into thinking that one i s free? The reply to this critical point is provided by Herbert Marcuse’s old motto that “freedom is the condition of liberation” : in order to demand “actual freedom;’ I have to have already experienced myself as basically and essentially free-only as such can I experience my actual servitude as a corruption of my human condition. In order to experience this antagonism between my freedom and the actuality of my servitude, however, I have to be recognized as formally free: the demand for my actual freedom can only arise out of my “formal” freedom. In other words, in exactly the same way as, in the development of capitalism, the formal subsumption of the production process under Capital precedes its material subsumption, formal freedom precedes actual freedom, creating the latter’s conditions. The very force of abstraction which dissolves organic life-worlds is simultaneously the resource of emancipatory politics.

The philosophical consequences of this real status of abstraction are crucial: they compel us to reject the historicist relativization and contextualization of different modes of subjectivity, and to assert the “abstract” Cartesian subject (cogito) as something which today corrodes from within all different forms of cultural self-experience —

no matter how far we perceive ourselves as being embedded in a particular culture, the moment we participate in global capitalism, this culture is always already de-naturalized, effectively functioning as one specific and contingent “way of life” of abstract Cartesian subjectivity. (144)

How did we reach this new phase of the reign of abstraction? The 1968 protests focused their struggles against (what was perceived as) the three pillars of capitalism: the factory, the school, the family. As a result, each domain was subsequently submitted to postindustrial transformation: factory work is increasingly outsourced or, in the developed world at least, reorganized on a post-Fordist non-hierarchical interactive team-work basis; permanent and flexible privatized education is increasingly replacing universal public education; multiple forms of variegated sexual arrangements are replacing the traditional family. The Left lost in the very moment of victory: the immediate enemy was defeated, but was replaced by a new form of even more direct capitalist domination. In “postmodern” capitalism, the market has invaded new spheres which were hitherto considered the privileged domain of the state, from education to prisons and law and order. When ” immaterial work ” (education, therapy, etc.) is celebrated as the kind of work which directly produces social relations, one should not forget what this means within a commodity economy: namely, that new domains, hitherto excluded from the market, are now commodified. When in trouble, we no longer talk to a friend but pay a psychiatrist or counselor to take care of the problem; children are increasingly cared for not by parents but by paid nurseries or child-minders, and so on. We are thus in the midst of a new process of the privatization of the social, of establishing new enclosures. (144)

Žižek democracy elections are not truth

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king-but a king in a constitutional democracy, a monarch who decides only formally, whose function is merely to sign off on measures proposed by an executive administration. This is why the problem with democratic rituals is homologous to the great problem of constitutional monarchy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively makes decisions, when we all know this not to be true? (134)

Trotsky was thus right in his basic reproach to parliamentary democracy, which was not that it gives too much power to the uneducated masses, but, paradoxically, that it passivizes the masses, leaving the initiative with the apparatus of state power (in contrast to the ”soviets” in which the working classes directly mobilize themselves and exert power).

What we refer to as the “crisis of democracy” occurs not, therefore, when people stop believing in their own power, but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, those who are supposed to know for them and provide the guidelines, when they experience the anxiety accompanying the recognition that “the (true) throne is empty:’ that the decision is now really theirs. This is why in “free elections” there is always a minimal aspect of politeness: those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power, and ask us to decide freely if we want to give them power-in a way which mirrors the logic of a gesture meant to be refused. (135)

To put it in the terms of the Will: representative democracy in its very notion involves a passivization of the popular Will, its transformation into non-willing-willing is transferred onto an agent which re-presents the people and wills on its account. Whenever one is accused of undermining democracy, one’s answer should thus be a paraphrase of the reply given by Marx and Engels to a similar reproach (that communism undermines the family, property, freedom, etc.) in The Communist Manifesto: the ruling order is itself already doing all the undermining necessary. In the same way that (market) freedom is un freedom for those who sell their labor-power, in the same way that the family is undermined by the bourgeois family as legalized prostitution, democracy is undermined by the parliamentary form with its concomitant passivization of the large majority, as well as by the growing executive power implied by the increasingly influential
logic of the emergency state.

🙂 Žižek goes after Laclau and Mouffe here

For if democracy means representation, it is first of all the representation of the general system that bears its forms. In other words : electoral democracy is only representative in so far as it is first of all the consensual representation of capitalism, or of what today has been renamed the “market economy. ” This is its underlying corruption . . . [Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy]

One should take these lines in the strictest transcendental sense: at the empirical level, of course, multi-party liberal democracy “represents”mirrors, registers, measures-the quantitative dispersal of different opinions, what people think about the proposed programs of the parties and about their candidates, and so on; however, prior to this empirical level, and in a much more radical “transcendental” sense, multi-party liberal democracy “represents”- instantiates-a certain
vision of society, politics, and the role of the individuals within it.

Liberal democracy “represents” a very precise vision of social life in which politics is organized by parties which compete through elections to exert control over the state legislative and executive apparatus, and so on and so forth. One should always be aware that this “transcendental frame” is never neutral —it privileges certain values and practises. This non-neutrality becomes palpable in moments of crisis or indifference, when we experience the inability of the democratic system to register what people really want or think-an inability signaled by anomalous phenomena such as the UK elections of 2005 when, in spite of the growing unpopularity of Tony Blair (who was regularly voted the most unpopular person in the UK), there was no way for this discontent to find a politically effective expression. Something was obviously very wrong here —it was not that people “did not know what they wanted” but rather that cynical resignation prevented them from acting upon it, so that the result was a weird gap between what people thought and how they acted (voted) .

Plato, in his critique of democracy, was fully aware o f this second form of corruption, and his critique is also clearly discernible in the Jacobin privileging of Virtue: in democracy, in the sense of the representation of and negotiation between a plurality of private interests, there is no place for Virtue.

This is why, in a proletarian revolution, democracy has to be replaced by the dictatorship of the proletariat. There is no reason to despise democratic elections; the point is only to insist that they are not per se an indication of Truth —on the contrary, as a rule, they tend to reflect the predominant doxa determined by the hegemonic ideology.

Let us take an example which is surely not problematic: France in 1940 . Even Jacques Duclos, second in charge of the French Communist Party, admitted in a private conversation that if at that point free elections had been held in France, Marshal Petain would have won with 90 percent of the votes. When de Gaulle, in his historic act, refused capitulation to Germany and claimed that only he, not the Vichy regime, spoke on behalf of the true France (not only on behalf of the “majority of the French” ! ) , what he was saying was deeply true even if “democratically” speaking it was not only without legitimization, but was clearly opposed to the opinion of the majority of French people. There can be democratic elections which enact an event of Truth —elections in which, against sceptical-cynical inertia, the majority momentarily “awakens” and votes against the hegemonyof ideological opinion. However, the very exceptional nature of such an occurrence proves that elections as such are not a medium of Truth.

Both Putin and Berlusconi rule in democracies which are increasingly being reduced to empty ritualized shells, and in spite of the rapidly worsening economic situation they both enjoy a high level of popular support (over 60 percent in
the polls) . No wonder they are personal friends: both have a tendency towards occasion al “spontaneous” scandalous outbursts (which, at least in the case of Putin, are well-prepared in advance so that they fit the Russian “national character”) (138).

From Profit to Rent

Whence this resurgence of direct, non-democratic authority? Above and beyond any cultural factors involved, there is an inner necessity for this resurgence in the very logic of contemporary capitalism. That is to say, the central problem we are facing today is how the predominance (or even hegemonic role) of “intellectual labor” within late capitalism affects Marx’s basic scheme of the separation of labor from its objective conditions, and of the revolution as the subjective re-appropriation of those conditions.

In spheres like the World Wide Web, production, exchange and consumption are inextricably intertwined, potentially even identified: my product is immediately communicated to and consumed by another.

Marx’s classic notion of commodity fetishism in which “relations between people” assume the form of “relations between things” has thus to be radically re-thought: in ‘immaterial labor’; “relations between people” are “not so much hidden beneath the veneer of objectivity, but are themselves the very material of our everyday exploitation,” so we cannot any longer talk about “reification” in the classic Lukacsian sense.

Far from being invisible, social relationality in its very fluidity is directly the object of marketing and exchange: in “cultural capitalism;’ one no longer sells (and buys) objects which “bring” cultural or emotional experiences, one directly sells ( and buys) such experiences.

What if, in it, the invisible “relations between [immaterial] things [of Capital] appear as direct relations between people”?

Here, more than ever, it is crucial to remember the lesson of the Marxist dialectic of fetishization: the “reification” of relations between people (the fact that they assume the form of phantasmagorical “relations between things”) is always redoubled by the apparently opposite process, by the false “personalization” (“psychologization” ) of what are effectively objective social processes. Already in the 1930s, the first generation of Frankfurt School theoreticians drew attention to how — at the very moment when global market relations began to exert their full domination, making the individual producer’s success or failure dependent on market cycles totally beyond his control the notion of a charismatic “business genius” reasserted itself in the “spontaneous capitalist ideology:’ attributing the success or failure of a businessman to some mysterious je ne sais quai he possessed. And does not the same hold true even more so today, as the abstraction of the market relations that govern our lives is pushed to an extreme point? The bookshops are overflowing with psychological manuals advising us on how to succeed, how to outdo our partner or competitor — in short, treating success as being dependent on the proper “attitude:’

So,in a way, one is tempted to turn Marx’s formula on its head: under contemporary capitalism, the objective market “relations between things” tend to assume the phantasmagorical form of pseudo-personalized “relations between people:’ And Hardt and Negri seem to fall into this trap: what they celebrate as the direct “production of life” is a structural illusion of this type. (142)

Žižek communist hypothesis pt 4

This brings us to the next elementary definition of communism: in contrast to socialism, communism refers to singular universality, to the direct link between the singular and the universal, bypassing particular determinations.

When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, “there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks;’ he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identities, etc., are not a category of truth. To put it in precise Kantian terms: when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is, we act as “immature” individuals, not as free humans who dwell in the dimension of the universality of reason. (104)

In his vision of public space characterized by the unconstrained exercise of Reason, he invokes a dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of one’s social identity, of one’s position within the order of (social) being —precisely the dimension so crucially missing in Rorty.

This space of singular universality is what, within Christianity, appears as the “Holy Spirit” -the space of a collective of believers subtracted from the field of organic communities, or of particular lifeworlds (“neither Greeks nor Jews”) . Consequently, is Kant’s “Think freely, but obey!” not a new version of Christ’s “Render therefore untoCaesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” ? ” Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s” : in other words, respect and obey the “private” particular life —world of your community; “and unto God the things that are God’s”: in other words, participate in the universal space of the community of believers. The Paulinian collective of believers is a proto-model of the Kantian “world-civil – society;’ and the domain of the state itself is thus in its own way “private”: private in the precise Kantian sense of the “private use of Reason” in the State administrative and ideological apparatuses (106).

The ex-slaves of Haiti took the French revolutionary slogans more literally than did the French themselves: they ignored all the implicit qualifications which abounded in Enlightenment ideology (freedom-but only for rational “mature” subjects, not for the wild immature barbarians who first had to undergo a long process of education in order to deserve freedom and equality . . . ) . This led to sublime “communist” moments, like the one that occurred when French soldiers (sent by Napoleon to suppress the rebellion and restore slavery) approached the black army of (self-)liberated slaves. When they heard an initially indistinct murmur coming from the black crowd, the soldiers at first assumed it must be some kind of tribal war chant; but as they came closer, they realized that the Haitians were singing the Marseillaise, and they started to wonder out loud whether they were not fighting on the wrong side. Events such as these enact universality as a political category. In them, as Buck-Morss put it, “universal humanity is visible at the edges”:

rather than giving multiple, distinct cultures equal due, whereby people are recognized as part of humanity indirectly through the mediation of collective cultural identities, human universality emerges in the historical event at the point of rupture. It is in the discontinuities of history that people whose culture has been strained to the breaking point give expression to a humanity that goes beyond cultural limits. And it is in our emphatic identification with this raw, free, and vulnerable state, that we have a chance of understanding what they say. Common humanity exists in spite of culture and its differences. A person’s nonidentity with the collective allows for subterranean solidarities that have a chance of appealing to universal, moral sentiment, the source today of enthusiasm and hope. (112-113)

Buck-Morss provides here a precise argument against the postmodern poetry of diversity: the latter masks the underlying sameness of the brutal violence enacted by culturally diverse cultures and regimes: “Can we rest satisfied with the call for acknowledging ‘multiple modernities: with a politics of ‘diversity: or ‘multiversality,’ when in fact the inhumanities of these multiplicities are often strikingly the same?” But, one may ask, was the ex -slaves’ singing of the Marseillaise ultimately not an index of colonialist subordination-even in their self-liberation, did not the Blacks have to follow the emancipatory model of the colonial metropolis? And is this not similar to the idea that contemporary opponents of US politics should be singing the Stars and Stripes? Surely the true revolutionary act would have been for the colonizers to sing the songs of the colonized?

The mistake in this reproach is double. First, contrary to appearances, it is far more acceptable for the colonial power to see its own people singing others’ (the colonized’s) songs than songs which express their own identity — as a sign of tolerance and patronizing respect, colonizers love to learn and sing the songs of the colonized . . . Second, and much more importantly, the message of the Haitian soldiers’ Marseillaise was not “You see, even we, the primitive blacks, are able to assimilate ourselves to your high culture and politics, to imitate it as a model!” but a much more precise one: “in this battle, we are more French than you, the Frenchmen, are —we stand for the innermost consequences of your revolutionary ideology, the very consequences you were not able to assume.” Such a message cannot but be deeply unsettling for the colonizers— and it would certainly not be the message of those who, today, might sing the Stars and Stripes when confronting the US army.

(Although, as a thought experiment, if we imagine a situation in which this could be the message, there would be nothing a priori problematic in doing so.)

🙂 Žižek says the politically correct guilt felt by Western countries over its colonialist past, inhibits their ability to see things clearly

The French colonized Haiti, but the French Revolution also provided the ideological foundation for the rebellion which liberated the slaves and established an independent Haiti; the process of decolonization was set in motion when the colonized nations demanded for themselves the same rights that the West took for itself. In short, one should never forget that the West supplied the very standards by which it (and its critics) measures its own criminal past. We are dealing here with the dialectic of form and content: when colonial countries demand independence and enact a “return to roots;’ the very form of this return (that of an independent nation-state) is Western. In its very defeat (losing the colonies) , the West thus wins, by imposing its social form on the other (115).

… the point is simply that the British colonization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonization itself (116).

The standard position adopted by the unconditional defenders of the rights of illegal immigrants is to concede that, at the level of state, the counter-arguments may well be “true” (ie., of course a country cannot accept an endless flow of immigrants; of course they compete in ways which threaten local jobs, and may also pose certain security risks), but their defense moves at a different level altogether, a level which has a direct link with demands of reality, the level of principled politics where we can unconditionally insist that “qui est ici est d’ici” (“those who are here are from here’) . But is this principled position not all too simple, allowing for the comfortable position of a beautiful soul?

I insist on my principles, and let the state deal with pragmatic constraints of reality . . . In this way, do we not avoid a crucial aspect of the political battle for the rights of immigrants: how to convince the workers opposing those immigrants that they are fighting the wrong battle; and how to propose a feasible form of alternative politics?

The “impossible” (an openness to immigrants) has to happen in reality-this would be a true political event.

But why should the immigrant not be satisfied with his normalization? Because, instead of asserting his identity, he has to adapt to his oppressor’s standards: he is accepted, but defacto in a secondary role. His oppressor’s discourse defines the terms of his identity. One should remember here the programmatic words of Stokely Carmichael (the founder of Black Power) :

“We have to fight for the right to invent the terms which will allow us to define ourselves and to define our relations to society, and we have to fight that these terms will be accepted. This is the first need of a free people, and this is also the first right refused by every oppressor.”

The problem is how, exactly, to do this. That is to say, how to resist the temptation to define oneself with reference to some mythical and totally external identity (“African roots”) , which, by way of cutting links with “white” culture, also deprives the oppressed of crucial intellectual tools for their struggle (namely, the egalitarian emancipatory tradition) as well as potential allies.

One should thus slightly correct Carmichael’s words: what the oppressors really fear is not some totally mythical self-definition with no links to white culture, but a self-definition which, by way of appropriating key elements of the “white” egalitarian-emancipatory tradition, redefines that very tradition, transforming it not so much in terms of what it says as in what it does not say —that is, obliterating the implicit qualifications which have defacto excluded Blacks from the egalitarian space. In other words, it is not enough to find new terms with which to define oneself outside of the dominant white tradition —one should go a step further and deprive the whites of the monopoly on defining their own tradition.

In this precise sense, the Haitian Revolution was “a defining moment in world history. The point is not to study the Haitian Revolution as an extension of the European revolutionary spirit, that is, to examine the significance of Europe (of the French Revolution) for the Haitian Revolution, but rather to assert the significance of the Haitian Revolution for Europe.

It is not only that one cannot understand Haiti without Europe —one cannot understand either the scope or the limitations of the European emancipation process without Haiti. Haiti was an exception from the very beginning, from its revolutionary struggle against slavery which ended in independence in January 1804: “Only in Haiti was the declaration of human freedom universally consistent. Only in Haiti was this declaration sustained at all costs, in direct opposition to the social order and economic logic of the day:’ For this reason, “there is no single event in the whole of modern history whose implications were more threatening to the dominant global order of things.” (Hallward Damning the Flood) 121

Žižek communist fidelity

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

What the communist fidelity to the proletarian position involves is thus an unambiguous rejection of any ideology implying a return to any kind of prelapsarian substantial unity, On November 28, 2008, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter on the subject “Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism:’ Here are its opening statements:

Sisters and brothers: Today, our Mother Earth is ill . . . . Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system, In two and a half centuries, the so called “developed” countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries . . . . Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world.

The politics pursued by the Morales government in Bolivia is on the very cutting edge of contemporary progressive struggle. Nonetheless, the lines just quoted demonstrate with painful clarity its ideological limitations (for which one always pays a practical price). Morales relies in a simplistic way on the narrative of the Fall which took place at a precise historical moment: “Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750 . . .” —and, predictably, this Fall consists in losing our roots in mother earth: “Under Capitalism mother earth does not exist.”

(To this, one is tempted to add that, if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that, precisely, mother earth now no longer exists.) “Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world” —meaning that our goal should be to restore a “natural” balance and symmetry. What is thereby attacked and rejected is the very process that gave rise to modern subjectivity and that obliterates the traditional sexualized cosmology of mother earth (and father heaven), along with the idea that our roots lie in the substantial “maternal” order of nature.

Fidelity to the communist Idea thus means that, to repeat Arthur Rimbaud, il faut etre absolument moderne —we should remain resolutely modern and reject the all too glib generalization whereby the critique of capitalism morphs into the critique of “instrumental reason” or “modern technological civilization.”

This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the fourth antagonism —the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included— and the other three: it is only this reference to the Excluded that justifies the use of the term communism. There is nothing more “private” than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. (97)

In the series of the four antagonisms then, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one. Without it, all others lose their subversive edge —ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded.

🙂 Judy Butler smile (click)

Furthermore, one can even formulate certain aspects of these struggles in the terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only “private” concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell their products with a progressive spin. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that ensure good benefits for their staff and customers (according to the corporation’s own standards), and so on. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian battling against poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire (98).

There is another key difference between the first three antagonisms and the fourth: the first three effectively concern questions of the (economic, anthropological, even physical) survival of humanity, but the fourth is ultimately a question of justice. If humanity does not resolve its ecological predicament, we may all vanish; but one can well imagine a society which somehow resolves the first three antagonisms through authoritarian measures which not only maintain but in fact strengthen existing social hierarchies, divisions and exclusions.

In Lacanese, we are dealing here with the gap that separates the series of ordinary signifiers (S2) from the Master-Signifier (S1), that is, with a struggle for hegemony: which pole in the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded will “hegemonize” the other three? One can no longer rely on the old Marxist logic of “historical necessity” which claims that the first three problems will only be solved if one wins the key “class” struggle between the Excluded and the Included-the logic of “only the overcoming of class distinctions can really resolve our ecological predicament.”

There is a common feature shared by all four antagonisms: the process of proletarianization, of the reduction of human agents to pure subjects deprived of their substance; this proletarianization, however, works in different ways. In the first three cases, it deprives agents of their substantial content; in the fourth case, it is the formal fact of excluding certain figures from socio-political space.

We should underline this structure of 3 + 1, namely the reflection of the external tension between subject and substance (“man” deprived of its substance) within the human collective. There are subjects who, within the human collective, directly embody the proletarian position of substanceless subjectivity. Which is why the Communist wager is that the only way to solve the “external” problem (the re-appropriation of alienated substance) is to radically transform the inner-subjective (social) relations.

It is thus crucial to insist on the communist-egalitarian emancipatory Idea, and insist on it in a very precise Marxian sense: there are social groups which, on account of their lacking a determinate place in the “private” order of the social hierarchy, stand directly for universality; they are what Ranciere calls the “part of no-part” of the social body.

All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the “public use of reason” and the universality of the “part of no-part” —this was already the communist dream of the young Marx: to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the Excluded into the socio-political space: democracy. Our question today is whether democracy is still an appropriate name for this egalitarian explosion.

Žižek communist hypothesis pt 2

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

For this reason, a new emancipatory politics will stem no longer from a particular social agent, but from an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletariat who have “nothing to lose but their chains;’ we are in danger of losing everything: the threat is that we will be reduced to abstract subjects devoid of all substantial content, dispossessed of our symbolic substance, our genetic base heavily manipulated, vegetating in an unlivable environment.

This triple threat to our entire being renders us all proletarians, reduced to “substanceless subjectivity” as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure —in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a homo sacer, and the only way to stop that from becoming a reality is to act preventively. If this sounds apocalyptic, one can only retort that we live in apocalyptic times.

It is easy to see how each of the three processes of proletarianization refer to an apocalyptic end point: ecological breakdown, the biogenetic reduction of humans to manipulable machines, total digital control over our lives . . . At all these levels, things are approaching a zero-point; “the end of times is near. ”

Apocalypse is characterized by a specific mode of time, clearly opposed to the two other predominant modes: traditional circular time (time ordered and regulated on cosmic principles, reflecting the order of nature and the heavens; the time-form in which microcosm and macrocosm resonate in harmony), and the modern linear time of gradual progress or development.

Apocalyptic time is the “time of the end of time;’ the time of emergency, of the “state of exception” when the end is nigh and we can only prepare for it. There are at least four different versions of apocalyptism today:

Christian fundamentalism, New Age spirituality, techno-digital post-humanism, and secular ecologism. Although they all share the basic notion that humanity is approaching a zero-point of radical transmutation, their respective ontologies differ radically:

Techno-digital apocalyptism (of which Ray Kurzweil is the main representative) remains within the confines of scientific naturalism, and discerns in the evolution of human species the contours of our transformation into “post-humans.”

New Age spirituality gives this transmutation a further twist, interpreting it as the shift from one mode of “cosmic awareness” to another (usually a shift from the modern dualist-mechanistic stance to one of holistic immersion).

Christian fundamentalists of course read the apocalypse in strictly biblical terms, that is, they search for (and find) in the contemporary world signs that the final battle between Christ and the Anti-Christ is imminent.

Finally, secular ecologism shares the naturalist stance of post-humanism, but gives it a negative twist-what lies ahead, the “omega point” we are approaching, is not a progression to a higher “post-human” level, but the catastrophic self-destruction of humanity.

Although Christian fundamentalist apocalyptism is considered the most ridiculous, and dangerous, in its content, it remains the version closest to a radical “milenarian” emancipatory logic. The task is thus to bring it into closer contact with secular ecologism, thereby conceiving the threat of annihilation as the chance for a radical emancipatory renewal.

Such apocalyptic proletarianization is, however, inadequate if we want to deserve the name of “communist:’ The ongoing enclosure of the commons concerns both the relation of people to the objective conditions of their life processes as well as the relation between people themselves: the commons are privatized at the expense of the proletarianized majority.

But there is a gap between these two kinds of relation: the commons can also be restored to collective humanity without communism, in an authoritarian communitarian regime; likewise the de-substantialized, “rootless” subject, deprived of content, can also be counteracted in ways that tend in the direction of communitarianism, with the subject finding its proper place in a new substantial community. In this precise sense, Negri’s anti-socialist title, GoodBye Mr. Socialism, was correct: communism is to be opposed to socialism, which, in place of the egalitarian collective, offers an organic community (Nazism was national socialism, not national communism). In other words, while there may be a socialist anti-Semitism, there cannot be a communist form. (If it appears otherwise, as in Stalin’s last years, it is only as an indicator of a lack of fidelity to the revolutionary event.) Eric Hobsbawm recently published a column with the title: “Socialism Failed, Capitalism Is Bankrupt. What Comes Next?” The answer is: communism.

Socialism wants to solve the first three antagonisms without addressing the fourth-without the singular universality of the proletariat. The only way for the global capitalist system to survive its long-term antagonism and simultaneously avoid the communist solution, will be for it to reinvent some kind of socialism-in the guise of communitarianism, or populism, or capitalism with Asian values, or some other configuration. The future wil thus be communist . . . or socialist (95).

As Michael Hardt has put it, if capitalism stands for private property and socialism for state property, communism stands for the overcoming of property as such in the commons. Socialism is what Marx called “vulgar communism” in which we get only what Hegel would have called the abstract negation of property, that is, the negation of property within the field of property —it is “universalized private property.”

Žižek real communist hypothesis

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

Saving endangered species, saving the planet from global warming, saving AIDS patients and those dying for lack of funds for expensive treatments, saving the starving children . . . all this can wait a little bit. The call to “save the banks!” by contrast, is an unconditional imperative which must be met with immediate action. The panic was so absolute that a transnational and non-partisan unity was immediately established, all grudges between world leaders being momentarily forgotten in order to avert the catastrophe. But what the much-praised “bi-partisan” approach effectively meant was that even democratic procedures were de facto suspended: there was no time to engage in proper debate, and those who opposed the plan in the US Congress were quickly made to fall in with the majority. Bush, McCain and Obama all quickly got together, explaining to confused congressmen and women that there was simply no time for discussion-we were in a state of emergency, and things simply had to be done fast . . . And let us also not forget that the sublimely enormous sums of money were spent not on some clear “real” or concrete problem, but essentially in order to restore confidence in the markets, that is, simply to change people’s beliefs!

Do we need any further proof that Capital is the Real of our lives, a Real whose imperatives are much more absolute than even the most pressing demands of our social and natural reality? (80)

It was Joseph Brodsky who provided an appropriate solution to the search for the mysterious “fifth element:’ the quintessential ingredient of our reality: ”Along with air, earth, water, and fire, money is the fifth natural force a human being has to reckon with most often. If one has any doubts about this, a quick look at the recent financial meltdown should be more than sufficient to dispel them.

In order to approach these problems adequately, it will be necessary to invent new forms of large-scale collective action; neither the standard forms of state intervention nor the much-praised forms of local self-organization will be up to the job. If such problems are not solved one way or another, the most likely scenario will be a new era of apartheid in which secluded parts of the world enjoying an abundance of food, water and energy are separated from a chaotic “outside” characterized by widespread chaos, starvation and permanent war. What should people in Haiti and other regions blighted by food shortages do? Do they not have the full right to violent rebellion? Communism is once again at the gates (84).

First, as was noted earlier with regard to Mali, while imposing the globalization of agriculture on Third World countries, the developed Western countries are taking great care to maintain their own food self-sufficiency with financial support for their own farmers, etc. (Recall that financial support to farmers accounts for more than half of the entire European Union budget-the West itself has never abandoned the “policy of maximum food self-sufficiency”! )

Second, one should note that the list of products and services which, like food, are not “commodities like others” extends much further, including not only defense (as all “patriots” are aware), but above all water, energy, the environment as such, culture, education, and health . . . Who is to decide on the priorities here, and how, if such decisions cannot be left to the market? It is here that the question of communism has to be raised once again (85).

… the great defining problem of Western Marxism was the lack of a revolutionary subject or agent. Why is it that: the working class does not complete the passage from in-itself to for-itself: and constitute itself as a revolutionary agent? This problem was the main motivation for the turn to psychoanalysis, evoked precisely in order to explain the unconscious libidinal mechanisms which were preventing the rise of class consciousness, mechanisms inscribed into the very being (social situation) of the working class. In this way, the truth of Marxist socio-economic analysis could be saved, and there was no need to give ground to “revisionist” theories about the rise of the middle classes. For this same reason, Western Marxism was also engaged in a constant search for other social agents who could play the role of the revolutionary subject, as understudies who might replace the indisposed working class: Third World peasants, students, intellectuals, the excluded . . .

The failure of the working class as a revolutionary subject lies already at the very core of the Bolshevik revolution: Lenin’s skill lay in his ability to detect the “rage potential” of the disappointed peasants. The October Revolution took place under the banner of “land and peace:’ addressed to the vast peasant majority, seizing the brief moment of their radical dissatisfaction. Lenin had already been thinking along ‘ these lines a decade earlier, which is why he was so horrified at the prospect of the success of the Stolypin land reforms, aimed at creating a new and stronger class of independent farmers. He was sure that if Stolypin succeeded, the chance for revolution would be lost for decades.

All successful socialist revolutions, from Cuba to Yugoslavia, followed same model, seizing a local opportunity in an extreme and critical co-opting the desire for national liberation or other forms of “rage capital.” Of course, a partisan of the logic of hegemony would here point out that this is the “normal” logic of revolution, that the “critical mass” is reached precisely and only through a series of equivalences among multiple demands, a series which is always radically contingent and dependent on a specific, unique even, set of circumstances. A revolution never occurs when all antagonisms collapse into the Big One, but when they synergetically combine their power.

But the problem is here more complex: the point is not just that revolution no longer rides on the train of History, following its Laws, since there is no History, since history is an open, contingent process. The problem is a different one. It is as if there is a Law of History, a more-or-less clear and predominant line of historical development, but that revolution can only occur in its interstices, “against the current.”

Revolutionaries have to wait patiently for the (usually very brief) moment when the system openly malfunctions or collapses, have to exploit the window of opportunity, to seize power —which at that moment lies, as it were, in the street—and then fortify their hold on it, building up repressive apparatuses, and so forth, so that, once the moment of confusion is over and the majority sobers up only to be disappointed by the new regime, it is too late to reverse things, for the revolutionaries are now firmly entrenched.

The case of communist ex-Yugoslavia is typical here: throughout World War II, the communists ruthlessly hegemonized the resistance against the German occupying forces, monopolizing their role in the anti-fascist struggle by actively seeking to destroy al alternative (“bourgeois”) resisting forces, while simultaneously denying the communist nature of their struggle (those who raised the suspicion that the communists planned to grab power and foment a revolution at the end of the war were swiftly denounced as spreading enemy propaganda). After the war, once they did indeed seize full power, things changed quickly and the regime openly displayed its true communist nature. The communists, although genuinely popular until around 1946, nonetheless cheated almost openly in the general election of that year. When asked why they had done so-since they could easily have won in a free election anyway-their answer (in private, of course) was that this was true, but then they would have lost the next election four years later, so it was better to make clear now what kind of election they were prepared to tolerate. In short, they were fully aware of the unique opportunity that had brought them to power. An awareness of the communists’ historical failure to build and sustain genuine long-term hegemony based on popular support was thus, from the very beginning, taken into account.

Thus again, it is not enough simply to remain faithful to the communist Idea; one has to locate within historical reality antagonisms which give this Idea a practical urgency.

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today’s global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms:

the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe;
the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called “intellectual property”;
the socioethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics);
and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums.

There is a qualitative difference between this last feature-the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included-and the other three, which designate different aspects of what Hardt and Negri call the “commons;’ the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:

-the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of “cognitive” capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, the postal system, and so on;

-the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself);

– the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.

What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a free run. Nicholas Stern was right to characterize the climate crisis as “the greatest market failure in human history.” (91)
It is the reference to the “commons” which justifies the resuscitation of the notion of communism: it enables us to see the progressive “enclosure” of the commons as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance.

We should certainly not drop the notion of the proletariat, or of the proletarian position; on the contrary, the present conjuncture compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito.

saving liberalism from itself

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

A true Left takes a crisis seriously, without illusions, but as something inevitable, as a chance to be fully exploited. The basic insight of the radical Left is that although crises are painful and dangerous they are ineluctable, and that they are the terrain on which battles have to be waged and won. The difference between liberalism and the radical Left is that, although they refer to the same three elements (liberal center, populist Right, radical Left), they locate them in a radically different topology: for the liberal center, the radical Left and the Right are two forms of the same “totalitarian” excess; while for the Left, the only true alternative is the one between itself and the liberal mainstream, the populist “radical” Right being nothing but the symptom of liberalism’s inability to deal with the Leftist threat (75).

Where then do the core values of liberalism-freedom, equality, etc.-stand? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save its own core values from the fundamentalist onslaught. Its problem is that it cannot stand on its own: there is something missing in the liberal edifice. Liberalism is, in its very notion, “parasitic:’ relying as it does on a presupposed network of communal values that it undermines in the course of its own development. Fundamentalism is a reaction —a false, mystificatory reaction of course— against a real flaw inherent within liberalism, and this is why fundamentalism is, over and again, generated by liberalism. Left to itself, liberalism will slowly undermine itself —the only thing that can save its core is a renewed Left. Or, to put it in the well-known terms of 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism wil need the brotherly help of the radical Left (77).

Utopias of alternative worlds have been exorcized by the utopia in power, masking itself as pragmatic realism. It is not only the conservative dream of regaining some idealized Past before the Fal, or the image of a bright future as the present universality minus its constitutive obstacle, that is utopian; no less utopian is the liberal-pragmatic idea that one can solve problems gradually, one by one (“people are dying right now in Rwanda, so let’s forget about antiimperialist struggle, let us just prevent the slaughter”; or ”one has to fight poverty and racism here and now, not wait for the collapse of the global capitalist order” ). John Caputo recently wrote:

I would be perfectly happy if the far left politicians in the United States were able to reform the system by providing universal health care, effectively redistributing wealth more equitably with a revised IRS code, effectively restricting campaign financing, enfranchising all voters, treating migrant workers humanely, and effecting a multilateral foreign policy that would integrate American power within the international community, etc., i.e., intervene upon capitalism by means of serious (78) and far-reaching reforms . . . . If after doing all that Badiou and Žižek complained that some Monster called Capital still stalks us, I would be inclined to greet that Monster with a yawn.

The problem here is not Caputo’s conclusion that if one can achieve all that within capitalism, why not remain within the system? The problem lies with the “utopian” premise that it is possible to achieve all that within the coordinates of global capitalism. What if the particular malfunctionings of capitalism enumerated by Caputo are not merely accidental disturbances but are rather structurally necessary? What if Caputo’s dream is a dream of universality (of the universal capitalist order) without its symptoms, without any critical points in which its “repressed truth” articulates itself? (78)

The ongoing financial meltdown demonstrates how difficult it is to disturb the thick undergrowth of utopian premises which determine
our acts. As Alain Badiou succinctly put it:

The ordinary citizen must “understand” that it is impossible to make up the shortfall in social security, but that it is imperative to stuff untold billions into the banks’ financial hole? We must somberly accept that no one imagines any longer that it’s possible to nationalize a factory hounded by competition, a factory employing thousands of workers, but that it is obvious to do so for a bank made penniless by speculation ?

hysterical

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy Then as Farce. New York: Verso, 2009. Print.

The incessant pressure to choose involves not only ignorance about the object of choice, but, even more radically, the subjective impossibility of answering the question of desire. When Lacan defines the object of desire as originally lost, his point is not simply that we never know what we desire and are condemned to an eternal search for the “true” object, which is the void of desire as such, while all positive objects are merely its metonymic stand-ins. His point is a much more radical one: the lost object is ultimately the subject itself, the subject as an object; which means that the question of desire, its original enigma, is not p rimarily “What do I want?” but “What do others want from me? What object — objet a— do they see in me?” Which is why, apropos the hysterical question “Why am I that name? ” (ie., where does my symbolic identity originate, what justifies it? ) , Lacan points out that the subject as such is hysterical. He defines the subject tautologically as “that which is not an object:’ the point being that the impossibility of identifying oneself as an object (that is, of knowing what I am libidinally for others) is constitutive of the subject. In this way, Lacan generates the entire diversity of “pathological” subjective positions, reading it as the diversity of the answers to the hysterical question: the hysteric and the obsessive enact two modalities of the question — the psychotic knows itself as the object of the Other’s jouissance, while the pervert posits itself as the instrument of the Other’s jouissance (64).

Herein resides the terrorizing dimension of the pressure to choose — what resonates even in the most innocent inquiry when one reserves a hotel room (“Soft or hard pilows? Double or twin beds?”) is the much more radical probing: “Tell me who you are? What kind of an object do you want to be? What would fill in the gap of your desire?” This is why the “anti-essentialist” Foucauldian apprehension about “fixed identities” -the incessant urge to practise the “care of the Self,’ to continuously re- invent and re- create oneself-finds a strange echo in the dynamics of “postmodern” capitalism.

Of course, good old existentialism had already claimed that man is what he makes of himself, and had linked this radical freedom to existential anxiety. Here the anxiety of experiencing one’s freedom, the lack of one’s substantial determination, was the authentic moment at which the subject’s integration into the fixity of its ideological universe is shattered. But what existentialism was not able to envisage is … namely how,

by no longer simply repressing the lack of a fixed identity, the hegemonic ideology directly mobilizes that lack to sustain the endless process of consumerist “self-re-creation.” (65)

Žižek postmodern

one should nonetheless admit that, when Jean-Francois Lyotard, in The Postmodern Condition, elevated the term from simply naming certain new artistic tendencies (especialy in writing and architecture) to designating a new historical epoch, there was an element of authentic nomination in his act. “Postmodernism” now effectively functioned as a new Master-Signifier introducing a new order of intelligibility into the confused multiplicity of historical experience.

At the level of consumption, this new spirit is that of so-called “cultural capitalism” : we primarily buy commodities neither on account of their utility nor as status symbols; we buy them to get the experience provided by them, we consume them in order to render our lives pleasurable and meaningful. This triad cannot but evoke the Lacanian triad RSI: the Real of direct utility (good healthy food, the quality of a car, etc.), the Symbolic of the status (I buy a certain car to signal my status-the Thorstein Veblen perspective), the Imaginary of pleasurable and meaningful experience.

This is how capitalism, at the level of consumption, integrated the legacy of’68, the critique of alienated consumption: authentic experience matters. A recent Hilton Hotels publicity campaign consists of a simple claim: “Travel doesn’t only get us from place A to place B. It should also make us a better person:’ Only a decade ago, could one have imagined such an ad appearing? Is this not also the reason we buy organic food? Who really believes that half-rotten and overpriced “organic” apples are really healthier than the non-organic varieties? The point is that, in buying them, we are not merely buying and consuming, we are simultaneously doing something meaningful, showing our capacity for care and our global awareness, participating in a collective project . . . (54)

The new spirit of capitalism triumphantly recuperated the egalitarian and anti-hierarchical rhetoric of 1968, resenting itself as a successful libertarian revolt against the oppressive social organizations characteristic of both corporate capitalism and Really Existing Socialism-a new libertarian spirit epitomized by dressed-down “cool” capitalists such as Bil Gates and the founders of Ben and Jerry’s ice cream (56).

On the information sheet in a New York hotel, I recently read: “Dear guest! To guarantee that you will fully enjoy your stay with us, this hotel is totally smoke-free. For any infringement of this regulation, you will be charged $200:’ The beauty of this formulation, taken literally, is that you are to be punished for refUSing to fully enjoy your stay . . . The superego imperative to enjoy thus functions as the reversal of Kant’s “Du kannst, denn du sollst!” (You can, because you must ! ) ; it relies on a “You must, because you can ! ” That is to say, the superego aspect of today’s “nonrepressive” hedonism (the constant provocation we are exposed to, enjoining us to go right to the end and explore all modes of jouissance) resides in the way permitted jouissance necessarily turns into obligatory jouissance.

This drive to pure autistic jouissance (through drugs or other trance-inducing means) arose at a precise political moment: when the emancipatory sequence of 1968 had exhausted its potential. At this critical point (the mid-1970s), the only option left was a direct, brutal, passage a l’acte, a push-towards-the-Real, which assumed three main forms: the search for extreme forms of sexual jouissance; Leftist political terrorism (the RAF in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, etc., whose wager was that, in an epoch in which the masses have become totally immersed in the capitalist ideological morass, the standard critique of ideology is no longer operative, and only a resort to the raw Real of direct violence- l’action directe-will awaken the masses); and, finally, the turn towards the Real of an inner experience (oriental mysticism) (58).

What all three shared was the withdrawal from concrete socio-political engagement into a direct contact with the Real. This shift from political engagement to the post-political Real is perhaps best exemplified by the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, that arch-renegade, whose works range from early masterpieces like Prima della rivoluzione to late aestheticist-spiritualist self-indulgences such as the abominable Little Buddha. This span achieved full circle with The Dreamers, Bertolucci’s late film about Paris ’68, in which a couple of French students (a brother and sister) befriend a young American student during the whirlwind of the events. By the film’s end, however, the friends have split up, after the French students become caught up in the political violence, while the American remains faithful to the message of love and emotional liberation (59).

Jean-Claude Milner is keenly aware of how the establishment succeeded in undoing all threatening consequences of 1968 by way of incorporating the so-called “spirit of ’68” and thereby turning it against the real core of the revolt. The demands for new rights (which would have meant a true redistribution of power) were granted, but merely in the guise of “permissions” -the “permissive society” being precisely one which broadens the scope of what subjects are allowed to do without actually giving them any additional power:

“Those who hold power know very well the difference between a right and a permission . . . . A right in a strict sense of the term gives access to the exercise of a power, at the expense of another power. A permission doesn’t diminish the power of the one who gives it; it doesn’t augment the power of the one who gets it. It makes his life easier, which is not nothing”

This is how it goes with the right to divorce, abortion, gay marriage, and so on and so forth- these are all permissions masked as rights; they do not change in any way the distribution of powers. Such was the effect of the “spirit of ’68”: it “effectively contributed to making life easier. This is a lot, but it is not everything. Because it didn’t encroach upon powers.” Therein resides “the secret of the tranquility which has ruled in France over the last forty years”

While May ’68 aimed at total (and totally politicized) activity, the “spirit of ’68” transposed this into a depoliticized pseudo-activity (new lifestyles, etc. ), the very form of social passivity (60).

Žižek neighbor belief

Žižek, Slavoj. First as Tragedy, Second as Farce. New York: Verso. 2009. Print.

… what is toxic is ultimately the Neighbor as such, the abyss of its desire and its obscene enjoyment.

The ultimate aim of all rules governing interpersonal relations, then, is to quarantine or neutralize this toxic dimension, to reduce the Neighbor to a fellow man.

It is thus not enough to search for contingent toxic components in (another) subject, for the subject as such is toxic in its very form, in its abyss of Otherness-what makes it toxic is the objet petit a on which the subject’s consistency hinges.

When we think we really know a close friend or relative, it often happens that, all of a sudden, this person does something-utters an unexpectedly vulgar or cruel remark, makes an obscene gesture, casts a cold indifferent glance where compassion was expected-which makes us aware that we do not really know them; we become conscious of a total stranger in front of us. (46)

At this point, the fellow man changes into a Neighbor.

Is not this same attitude at work in the way our governments are dealing with the “immigrant threat”? After righteously rejecting populist racism as “unreasonable” and unacceptable given our democratic standards, they endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures . . . even the Social Democrats, tell us: “We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of violent anti- immigration protests is to organize reasonable anti-immigrant protection:’ This vision of the detoxification of the Neighbor presents a clear passage from direct barbarism to Berlusconian barbarism with a human face. (48)

Kung Fu Panda, the 2008 cartoon film hit, provides the basic coordinates of the functioning of contemporary ideology. The fat panda bear dreams of becoming a sacred Kung Fu warrior, and when, through blind chance (beneath which, of course, lurks the hand of Destiny), he is chosen to be the hero to save his city, he succeeds . . . However, throughout the film, this pseudo-oriental spiritualism is constantly being undermined by a vulgar-cynical sense of humor. (50)

Niels Bohr anecdote

The surprise is how this continuous self-mockery in no way impedes on the efficiency of the oriental spiritualism—the film ultimately takes the butt of its endless jokes seriously. Similarly with one of my favorite anecdotes regarding Niels Bohr: surprised at seeing a horseshoe above the door of Bohr’s country house, the fellow scientist visiting him exclaimed that he did not share the superstitious belief regarding horseshoes keeping evil spirits out of the house, to which Bohr snapped back: “I don’t believe in it either. I have it there because I was told that it works even when one doesn’t believe in it:

This is indeed how ideology functions today: nobody takes democracy or justice seriously, we are all aware of their corrupted nature, but we participate in them, we display our belief in them, because we assume that they work even if we do not believe in them.

This is why Berlusconi is our own big Kung Fu Panda. Perhaps the old Marx brothers quip, “This man looks like a corrupt idiot and acts like one, but this should not deceive you-he is a corrupt idiot,” here stumbles upon its limit: while Berlusconi is what he appears to be, this appearance nonetheless remains deceptive. (51)