Category: love

Žižek, Slavoj.  “The Jew Is Within You, But You, You Are in the Jew.”  Udi Aloni. What Does a Jew Want? Columbia University Press. 2011.   EBOOK

Ismail Kadare’s The Palace of Dreams tells the story of the Tabir Sarrail, the “palace of dreams” in the capital of an unnamed, vast nineteenth-century Balkan empire (modeled on Turkey). In this gigantic building thousands assiduously sift, sort, classify, and interpret the dreams of citizens systematically and continuously assembled from all parts of the empire. Their intense work of bureaucratic interpretation is Kafkaesque: intense yet a meaningless fake. The ultimate goal of their activity is identify the Master-Dream that will provide clues to the destiny of the empire and its sultan. This is why, although supposed to be a place of dark mystery exempted from the daily power struggles, what goes on in the Tabir Sarrail is caught in a violent power struggle—which dream will be selected (or, perhaps, even invented) as the Master-Dream is the outcome of intense dark intrigues.

“In my opinion,” Kurt went on, “it is the only organization in the State where the darker side of its subjects’ consciousness enters into direct contact with the State itself.”

He looked around at everyone present, as if to assess the effect of his words.

“The masses don’t rule, of course,” he continued, “but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence all the State’s affairs, including its crimes. And that mechanism is the Tabir Sarrail.”

“Do you mean to say,” asked the cousin, “that the masses are to a certain extent responsible for everything that happens, and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?”

“Yes,” said Kurt. Then, more firmly: “In a way, yes.”1

In order to interpret properly these lines, there is no need for any obscurantist themes like the “dark irrational link (or secret solidarity) between the crowd and its rulers.” The question to be raised is that of power (domination) and the unconscious: how does power work, how do subjects obey it? This brings us to the (misleadingly) so-called erotics of power: subjects obey power not only because of the physical coercion (or its threat) and ideological mystification, but because of their libidinal investment into power. The ultimate “cause” of power is objet a, the object-cause of desire, the surplus-enjoyment by means of which the power “bribes” those it holds in its sway. This objet a is given form in (unconscious) fantasies of the subjects of power, and the function of Kadare’s Tabir Sarrail is precisely to discern these fantasies, to learn what kind of (libidinal) objects they are for their subjects. These obscure “feedbacks” of the subjects of power to its bearers regulates the subjects’ subordination to power, so if they are disturbed the power edifice can lose its libidinal grip and dissolve. The Palace of Dreams is, of course, itself an impossible fantasy: the fantasy of a power that would directly try to deal with its fantasmatic support.

In European societies antisemitism is a key component of this obscure “feedback”; its fantasmatic status is clearly designated by the statement attributed to Hitler: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” A. B. Yehoshua provided an adequate comment to this statement: “This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.” In this sense Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles: what is “in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves,” not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead “alien” monster who cannot ever be pinned down to a determinate form.

In a sense Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”—what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the antisemite, his identity, is also in the Jew. What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of antisemitism?

WHAT GOES ON WHEN NOTHING GOES ON?

It is against this background that one should approach the Middle East imbroglio. One cannot but respect the brutal honesty of the first-generation founders of the State of Israel who in no way obliterated the “founding crime” of establishing a new state: they openly admitted they had no right to the land of Palestina, it is just their force against the force of the Palestinians. On 29 April 1956 a group of Palestinians from Gaza crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz kibbutz’s fields; Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields, galloped toward them on his horse brandishing a stick to chase them away; he was seized by the Palestinians and carried back to the Gaza Strip; when the UN returned his body, his eyes had been plucked out. Moshe Dayan, then the chief of staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day:

“Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camps of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance.

It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roi’s blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have we forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz bears the burden of Gaza’s gates on its shoulders?”4

Apart from the parallel between Roi and the blinded Samson (which plays a key role in the later mythology of the IDF), what cannot but strike the eye is the apparent non sequitur, the gap, between the first and the second paragraph: in the first paragraph Dayan openly admits that the Palestinians have the full right to hate the Israeli Jews, since they took their land; his conclusion, however, is not the obvious admission of one’s own guilt, but to fully accept “the destiny of our generation in all its brutality.” i.e., to assume the burden—not of guilt, but—of the war where might will be right, where the stronger will win. The war was not about principles or justice, it was an exercise in “mythic violence”—the insight totally obliterated by the recent Israeli’s self-legitimization. As in the case of feminism, which taught us to discover the traces of violence in what appears, in a patriarchal culture, as a natural authority (of a father), we should remember the grounding violence obliterated by today’s Zionism—Zionists should simply read Dayan and Ben-Gurion

The same violence goes on today, but disavowed, masked as multicultural tolerance. On August 2, 2009, after cordoning off part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh-Jarrah in East Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than fifty people) from their homes; permitted Jewish settlers immediately moved into the emptied houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s Supreme Court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than fifty years. The event, which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media, is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process.

Five months earlier, on March 1, 2009, it was reported that the Israeli government had drafted plans to build more than seventy thousand new housing units in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank; if implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about three hundred thousand—a move that would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian state but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians. A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were therefore of limited relevance: the actual construction of new homes in the settlements required the approval of the defense minister and prime minister. However, fifteen thousand of the plans have already been fully approved; plus, almost twenty thousand of the planned units lie in settlements that are far from the “green line” that separates Israel from the West Bank, i.e., in the areas Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with the Palestinians.

The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating the situation on the ground that will render a two-state solution de facto impossible. The dream that underlies this politics is best rendered by the wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby hill somewhere in the West Bank. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall—but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass, trees… is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as it should be, empty, virginal, waiting to be settled?

This process is sometimes covered in the guise of cultural gentrification. On October 28, 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Simon Wiesenthal Center can build its long-planned Center for Human Dignity–Museum of Tolerance on a contested site in the middle of Jerusalem. (Who but) Frank Gehry will design the vast complex consisting of a general museum, a children’s museum, a theater, conference center, library, gallery and lecture halls, caffeterias, etc. The museum’s declared mission will be to promote civility and respect among different segments of the Jewish community and between people of all faiths—the only obstacle (overturned by the Supreme Court’s ruling) being that the museum site served as Jerusalem’s main Muslim cemetery until 1948 (the Muslim community appealed to the Supreme Court that museum construction would desecrate the cemetery, which allegedly contained the bones of Muslims killed during the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).

This dark spot wonderfully enacts the hidden truth of this multiconfessional project: it is a place celebrating tolerance, open to all… but protected by the Israeli cupola, which ignores the subterranean victims of intolerance — as if one needs a little bit of intolerance to create the space for true tolerance. And as if this were not enough, as if one should repeat a gesture to make its message clear, there is another, even vaster similar project going on in Jerusalem: Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multiyear development plan in the so-called holy basin, the site of some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City, as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital.

The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to a private group that is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has drawn almost no public or international scrutiny. As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history—and, conveniently, many of the “unauthorized” Palestinian houses have to be erased to create the space for the redevelopment of the area. The “holy basin” is an infinitely complicated landscape dotted with shrines and still hidden treasures of the three major monotheistic religions, so the official argument is that its improvement is for everyone’s benefit—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—since it involves restoration that will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest that has long suffered neglect.

However, as Hagit Ofran of Peace Now noted, the plan aimed to create “an ideological tourist park that will determine Jewish dominance in the area.” Raphael Greenberg of Tel Aviv University put it even more blundly: “The sanctity of the City of David is newly manufactured and is a crude amalgam of history, nationalism and quasi-religious pilgrimage… the past is used to disenfranchise and displace people in the present.” Another big Religious Venue, a “public” interfaith space under the clear domination and protective cupola of Israel…

What does all this mean? To get at the true dimension of news, it is sometimes enough to read two disparate news items together—meaning emerges from their very link, like a spark exploding from an electric short circuit. On the very same day the reports on the government plan to build seventy thousand new housing units hit the media (March 2), Hilary Clinton criticized the rocket fire from Gaza as “cynical,” claiming: “There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks.” But should the Palestinians stand idly while the West Bank land is taken from them day by day?

When Israeli peace-loving liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral “symmetrical” terms, admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace, etc., one should ask a simple question: what goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e., when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)?

What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank: the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop burning and religious desecration up to individual killings), all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations.

Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, described how, although the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: its primary forms are application forms, title deeds, residency papers, and other permits. It is this micromanagement of daily life that does the job of securing the slow but steadfast Israeli expansion: one has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, to go to work, to school, to a hospital… One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc. Palestinians often use the problematic cliché of the Gaza strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world” — however, in the last year this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality that makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The State of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow process, invisible, ignored by the media, a kind of underground digging of the mole, so that, one day, the world will awaken and realize that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we can only accept the fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already looks like a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks of illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers grew into regular daily events, the State of Israel tried to contain these excesses (the Supreme Court ordered the evacuation of some settlements, etc.), but, as many observers noted, these measures cannot but appear halfhearted, counteracting a politics that, at a deeper level, IS the long-term politics of the State of Israel, which massively violates the international treaties signed by Israel itself. The reply of the illegal settlers to the Israeli authorities basically is: we are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what right do you have to condemn us? And the answer of the state basically is: be patient, don’t rush too much, we are doing what you want, just in a more moderate and acceptable way… The same story seems to go on from 1949: while Israel accepts the peace conditions proposed by international community, it counts that the peace plan will not work.

The wild settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde, from the last act of Wagner’s Walküre, reproaching Wotan that, by counteracting his explicit order and protecting Sigmund, she was only realizing Wotan’s own true desire, which he was forced to renounce under external pressure, in the same way that the illegal settlers only realize the state’s true desire it was forced to renounce because of the pressure of the international community. While condemning the open violent excesses of “illegal” settlements, the State of Israel promotes new “legal” West Bank settlements, continues to strangle the Palestinian economy, etc. A look at the continuous changes on the map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians are gradually encircled and their space sliced, tells it all.

The condemnation of extrastatal anti-Palestinian violence obfuscates the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of illegal settlements obfuscates the illegality of the legal ones. Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised nonbiased “honesty” of the Israeli Supreme Court: by way of occasionally passing a judgment in favor of the dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining majority of cases.

THE “NAME OF THE JEW

And, to avoid any kind of misunderstanding, taking all this into account in no way implies an “understanding” for inexcusable terrorist acts. On the contrary, it provides the only ground from which one can condemn the terrorist attacks without hypocrisy. Furthermore, when Western liberal defenders of peace in the Middle East oppose, among Palestinians, the democrats committed to compromise and peace and the Hamas radical fundamentalists, they fail to see the genesis of these two poles: the long and systematic endeavor by Israel and the USA to weaken the Palestinians by way of undermining the leading position of Fateh, an endeavor that, up to five or six years ago, even included the financial support of Hamas.

The sad result is that Palestinians are now divided between Hamas fundamentalism and Fateh corruption: the weakened Fateh is no longer the hegemonic force that truly represents the substantial longings of the Palestinians (and is, as such, in a position to conclude peace); it is more and more perceived by the majority of Palestinians for what it is, a crippled puppet supported by the U.S. as the representative of the “democratic” Palestinians.

Similarly, while the U.S. worried about Saddam’s basically secular authoritarian regime in Iraq, the “talibanization” of their ally Pakistan progressed slowly but inexorably: Taliban’s control now already spreads over parts of Karachi, Pakistan’s largest city. There is a shared interest on both sides of the conflict to see “fundamentalists in control” in Gaza: this characterization enables the fundamentalists to monopolize the struggle and the Israelis to gain international sympathies.

Consequently, although everyone deplores the rise of fundamentalism, no one really wants secular resistance to Israel among the Palestinians. But is it really true that there is none? What if there are two secrets in the Middle East conflict: secular Palestinians and Zionist fundamentalists—we have Arab fundamentalists arguing in secular terms and Jewish secular Westerners relying on theological reasoning:

The strange thing is that it was secular Zionism that brought god to bear so much on religious ideas. In a way, the true believers in Israel are the nonreligious. This is so because for the religious life of an orthodox Jew god is actually quite marginal. There were times when for a member of the orthodox intellectual elite it was in a way “uncool” to refer too much to god: a sign that he is not devoted enough to the real noble cause of the polemical study of Talmud (the continual movement of expansion of the law and evasion from it). It was only the crude secular Zionist gaze that took god, which was a sort of alibi, so seriously. The sad thing is that now more and more orthodox Jews seem convinced that they indeed believe in god.

The consequence of this unique ideological situation is the paradox of atheists defending Zionist claims in theological terms. Exemplary here is The Arrogance of the Present, Milner’s exploration of the legacy of 1968, which can also be read as a reply to Badiou’s The Century as well as to his exploration of the politico-ideological implications of the “name of the Jew.” In an implicit, but, for that reason, all the more intense, dialogue with Badiou, Milner proposes a radically different diagnosis of the twentieth century.

His starting point is the same as Badiou’s: “a name counts only as far as the divisions it induces go.” Master-Signifiers that matter are those that clarify their field by simplifying the complex situation into a clear division—yes or no, for or against.

Milner goes on: “But here is what happened: one day, it became obvious that names believed to bear a future (glorious or sinister) no longer divide anyone; and names dismissed as thoroughly obsolete began to bring about unbridgeable divisions” (21–22).

Names that today no longer divide, generate passionate attachment, but leave us indifferent, are those that traditionally were expected to act as the most mobilizing (“workers,” “class struggle”), while those that appeared deprived of their divisive edge violently reemerged in their divisive role—today, the name Jew “divides most deeply the speaking beings”: “Contrary to what knowledge predicted, the culminating point of the twentieth century did not take the form of social revolution; it took the form of an extermination. Contrary to what the Revolution has been promising, the extermination ignored classes and fixated on a name without any class meaning. Not even an economic one. Not a shadow of an objective meaning” (214).

Milner’s conclusion is that “the only true event of the twentieth century was the return of the name Jew” (212)—this return for an ominous surprise also for the Jews themselves. That is to say, with the political emancipation of the Jews in modern Europe, a new figure of the Jew emerged: the “Jew of knowledge” who replaces study (of Talmud, i.e., of his theological roots) with universal (scientific) knowledge.

We get Jews who excel in secular sciences, and this is why Marxism was so popular among Jewish intellectuals: it presented itself as “scientific socialism,” uniting knowledge and revolution (in contrast to Jacobins, who proudly said, apropos Laplace, that “the Republic doesn’t need scientists,” or millenarists who dismissed knowledge as sinful). With Marxism, inequality/injustice and its overcoming becomes an object of knowledge (201).

Enlightenment thus offers European Jews a chance to find a place in the universality of scientific knowledge, ignoring their name, tradition, roots. This dream, however, brutally ended with holocaust: the “Jew of knowledge” couldn’t survive Nazi extermination—the trauma was that knowledge allowed it, wasn’t able to resist it, was impotent in the face of it. (Traces of this impotence are already discernible in the famous 1929 Davos debate between Ernst Cassirer and Heidegger, where Heidegger treated Cassirer with impolite rudeness, refusing a handshake at the conclusion, etc.)

How did the European left react to this rupture? The core of Milner’s book is the close analysis of the Maoist proletarian left (la Gauche proletarienne), the main political organization emerging out of May 1968. When it fell apart, some of its members (like Benny Levy) opted for fidelity to the name of the Jew, others chose Christian spirituality. For Milner, the entire activity of the proletarian left was based on a certain disavowal, on a refusal to pronounce a name. Milner proposes a nice Magrittean image: a room with a window in the middle and a painting covering up and obstructing the view through the window; the scene on the painting exactly reproduces the exterior one would have seen through the window. Such is the function of ideological misrecognition: it obfuscates the true dimension of what we see (183).

In the case of the proletarian left this unseen dimension was the name of the Jew. That is to say, the proletarian left legitimized its radical opposition to the entire French political establishment as the prolongation of the Resistance against the Fascist occupation: their diagnosis was that the French political life was still dominated by people who stood in direct continuity with the Petainist collaboration. However, although they designated the right enemy, they kept silent on the fact that the main target of the Fascist regime was not the left, but the Jews. In short, they used the event itself to obfuscate its true dimension, similarly to the “Jew of knowledge” who tries to redefine his Jewishness so that he will be able to erase the real core of being a Jew.

Benny Levy’s transformation from a Maoist to a Zionist is thus indicative of a wider tendency. The consequence drawn by many from the “obscure disaster” of twentieth-century attempts at universal emancipation is that particular groups no longer accept “sublating” their own emancipation in the universal one (“we — oppressed minorities, women, etc. — can only attain our freedom through universal emancipation,” i.e., the Communist revolution): fidelity to the universal cause is replaced by fidelities to particular identities (Jewish, gay, etc.), and the most we can envisage is a “strategic alliance” between particular struggles.

Perhaps, however, the time has come to return to the notion of universal emancipation, and it is here that a critical analysis should begin. When Milner claims that the class struggle, etc. are no longer divisive names, that they are replaced by “Jew” as the truly divisive name, he describes a (partially true) fact, but what does this fact mean? Should it not also be interpreted in terms of the classic Marxist theory of antisemitism, which reads the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” as the metaphoric stand-in for class struggle?

The disappearance of the class struggle and the (re)appearance of antisemitism are thus two sides of the same coin, since the presence of the antisemitic figure of the “Jew” is only comprehensible against the background of the absence of class struggle. Walter Benjamin (to whom Milner himself refers as to an authority, and who stands precisely for a Marxist Jew who remains faithful to the religious dimension of Jewishness and is thus not a “Jew of knowledge”) said long ago that every rise of Fascism bears witness to a failed revolution — this thesis not only still holds today but is perhaps more pertinent than ever.

Liberals like to point out similarities between left and right “extremisms”: Hitler’s terror and camps imitated Bolshevik terror, the Leninist party is today alive in Al-Qaeda—yes, but what does all this mean? It can also be read as an indication of how Fascism literally replaces (takes the place of) the leftist revolution: its rise is the left’s failure, but simultaneously a proof that there was a revolutionary potential, dissatisfaction, that the left was not able to mobilize.

1 + 1 = 3

How are we to understand this reversal of an emancipatory thrust into fundamentalist populism? It is here that the materialist-dialectic passage from the Two to Three gains all its weight: the axiom of Communist politics is not simply the dualist “class struggle,” but, more precisely, the third moment as the subtraction from the Two of the hegemonic politics. That is to say, the hegemonic ideological field imposes on us a field of (ideological) visibility with its own “principal contradiction” (today, it is the opposition of market-freedom-democracy and fundamentalist-terrorist-totalitarianism: “Islamo-Fascism,” etc.), and the first thing to do is to reject (to subtract from) this opposition, to perceive it as a false opposition destined to obfuscate the true line of division. As we have already seen, Lacan’s formula for this redoubling is 1+1+a: the “official” antagonism (the Two) is always supplemented by an “indivisible remainder” that indicates its foreclosed dimension.

In other terms, the true antagonism is always reflective, it is the antagonism between the “official” antagonism and what is foreclosed by it (this is why, in Lacan’s mathematics, 1 + 1 = 3). Today, for example, the true antagonism is not the one between liberal multiculturalism and fundamentalism, but between the very field of their opposition and the excluded third (radical emancipatory politics).

Badiou already provided the contours of this passage from Two to Three in his reading of the Pauline passage from Law to love [St. Paul the Foundation of Universalism]. In both cases (in Law and in love) we are dealing with division, with a “divided subject”; however, the modality of the division is thoroughly different. The subject of the Law is “decentered” in the sense that it is caught in the self-destructive vicious cycle of sin and Law in which one pole engenders its opposite; Paul provided the unsurpassable description of this entanglement in Romans 7:

We know that the law is spiritual; but I am carnal, sold into slavery to sin. What I do, I do not understand. For I do not do what I want, but I do what I hate. Now if I do what I do not want, I concur that the law is good. So now it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. For I know that good does not dwell in me, that is, in my flesh. The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do the evil I do not want. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells in me. So, then, I discover the principle that when I want to do right, evil is at hand. For I take delight in the law of God, in my inner self, but I see in my members another principle at war with the law of my mind, taking me captive to the law of sin that dwells in my members. Miserable one that I am!

It is thus not that I am merely torn between the two opposites, Law and sin; the problem is that I cannot even clearly distinguish them: I want to follow the Law and I end up in sin. This vicious cycle is (not so much overcome as) broken, one breaks out of it, with the experience of love more precisely: with the experience of the radical gap that separates love from the Law.

Therein resides the radical difference between the couple Law/sin and the couple Law/love. The gap that separates Law and sin is not a real difference: their truth is their mutual implication or confusion — Law generates sin and feeds on it, etc., one cannot ever draw a clear line of separation between the two.

It is only with the couple Law/love that we attain real difference: these two moments are radically separate, they are not “mediated,” one is not the form of appearance of its opposite. In other words, the difference between the two couples (Law/sin and Law/love) is not substantial, but purely formal: we are dealing with the same content in its two modalities.

In its indistinction/mediation, the couple is the one of Law/sin; in the radical distinction of the two, it is Law/love. It is therefore wrong to ask the question “Are we then forever condemned to the split between Law and love? What about the synthesis between Law and love?” The split between Law and sin is of a radically different nature than the split between Law and love: instead of the vicious cycle of the mutual reinforcement, we get a clear distinction of two different domains[Law – love rt]. Once we become fully aware of the dimension of love in its radical difference from the Law, love has, in a way, already won, since this difference is visible only when one already dwells in love, from the standpoint of love.

In authentic Marxism, totality is not an ideal, but a critical notion — to locate a phenomenon in its totality does not mean to see the hidden harmony of the Whole, but to include into a system all its “symptoms,” antagonisms, inconsistencies, as its integral parts.

Let me take a contemporary example. In this sense, liberalism and fundamentalism form a “totality”: the opposition of liberalism and fundamentalism is structured in exactly the same way as the one between Law and sin in Paul, i.e., liberalism itself generates its opposite. So what about the core values of liberalism: freedom, equality, etc.? The paradox is that liberalism itself is not strong enough to save them — i.e., its own core — against the fundamentalist onslaught. Why?

The problem with liberalism is that it cannot stand on its own: there is something missing in the liberal edifice; liberalism is in its very notion “parasitic,” relying on a presupposed network of communal values that it is itself undermining its own development. Fundamentalism is a reaction — a false, mystifying, reaction, of course — against a real flaw of liberalism, and that is why it is again 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 from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical left.