Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 24

When, in G.K. Chesterton’s “The Sign of the Broken Sword” (a story from The Innocence of Father Brown),¹ Father Brown explains the mystery to his companion Flambeau, he begins with “what everyone knows”:

Arthur St. Clare was a great and successful English general. [Everyone] knows that after splendid yet careful campaigns both in India and Africa he was in command against Brazil when the great Brazilian patriot Olivier issued his ultimatum. [Everyone] knows that on that occasion St. Clare with a very small force attacked Olivier with a very large one, and was captured after heroic resistance. And [everyone] knows that after his capture, and to the abhorrence of the civilised world, St. Clare was hanged on the nearest tree. He was found swinging there after the Brazilians had retired, with his broken sword hung round his neck.

However, Father Brown notices that something does not fit in this story that everybody knows: St. Clare, who was always a prudent commander, characterized more by a sense of duty than by dashing, made a foolish attack which ended in disaster; Olivier, who was magnanimous to the point of knight errantry and always set free prisoners, cruelly killed St. Clare. To account for this mystery, Father Brown evokes a metaphor:

“Where does a wise man hide a leaf? In the forest. But what does he do if there is no forest? He grows a forest to hide it in,” said the priest in an obscure voice. “A fearful sin. [. . .] And if a man had to hide a dead body, he would make a field of dead bodies to hide it in.”

The denouement relies on the hypothesis of the dark corrupted side of the English hero: Sir Arthur St. Clare

was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him. When will people understand that it is useless for a man to read his Bible unless he also reads everybody else’s Bible? A printer reads a Bible for misprints. A Mormon reads his Bible, and finds polygamy; a Christian Scientist reads his, and finds we have no arms and legs. St. Clare was an old Anglo-Indian Protestant soldier.[. . .] Of course, he found in the Old Testament anything that he wanted—lust, tyranny, treason. Oh, I dare say he was honest, as you call it. But what is the good of a man being honest in his worship of dishonesty?

In the Brazilian jungle, just before the fatal battle, the general encountered an unexpected problem: his accompanying younger officer, Major Murray, had somehow guessed the hideous truth; and as they walked slowly through the jungle, he killed Murray with his sabre. But what could he do now with this body he would have to account for? “He could make the corpse less unaccountable. He could create a hill of corpses to cover this one. In twenty minutes eight hundred English soldiers were marching down to their death.” Here, however, things went wrong for the general: the surviving English soldiers somehow guessed what he had done—it was they who killed the general, not Olivier. Olivier (to whom the survivors surrendered) generously set them free and withdrew his troops; the surviving soldiers then tried St. Clare and hanged him, and then, in order to save the glory of the English army, covered up their act by the story that Olivier had had him killed.

The story ends in the spirit of John Ford’s westerns which prefer heroic legend to truth (recall John Wayne’s final speech to the journalists about the ruthless general played by Henry Fonda, from Fort Apache): “Millions who never knew him shall love him like a father—this man whom the last few that knew him dealt with like dung. He shall be a saint; and the truth shall never be told of him, because I have made up my mind at last.”

What, then, is the Hegelian lesson of this story? Is it that the simple cynical-denunciatory reading should be rejected? Is it that the gaze which reduces the general’s corruption to the truth of his personality is itself mean and base? Hegel described long ago this trap as that of the Beautiful Soul whose gaze reduces all great heroic deeds to the private base motives of their perpetrators:

No hero is a hero to his valet, not, however, because the hero is not a hero, but because the valet is—the valet, with whom the hero has to do, not as a hero, but as a man who eats, drinks, and dresses, who, in short, appears as a private individual with certain personal wants and ideas of his own. In the same way, there is no act in which that process of judgment cannot oppose the personal aspect of the individuality to the universal aspect of the act, and play the part of the “moral” valet towards the agent.²

Is, then, Father Brown, if not this kind of “moral valet” to the general, then, at least, a cynic who knows that the unpleasant truth has to be covered up for the sake of the public good? Chesterton’s theological finesse is discernible in the way he allocates the responsibility for the general’s gradual downfall: it is not the general’s betrayal of the Christian faith through his moral corruption due to the predominance of base materialist motives. Chesterton is wise enough to depict the cause of the general’s moral downfall as inherent to Christianity: the general “was a man who read his Bible. That was what was the matter with him.” It was the particular—in this case, Protestant—reading that is held responsible. And can one not say the same about Heidegger’s attempt (and also that of Adorno and Horkheimer, and even of Agamben) to lay the blame for the ethico-political catastrophes of the twentieth century on the shoulders of the entire tradition of “Western metaphysics” with its instrumental Reason, and so on and so forth, leading in linear fashion “from Plato to Nato” (or, rather, the gulag)? Sloterdijk has written the following about the leftist global problematization of “Western civilization”:

Through the boundless forms of cultural criticism—say, the reduction of Auschwitz back to Luther and Plato, or the criminalization of Western civilization in its entirety—one tries to blur the traces which betray how close to a class-genocidical system we ourselves were standing.³

The only thing one should add here is that the same applies to Heidegger and other former fascists: they too hid their Nazi corpse in the mountain of corpses called Western metaphysics . . . And should one not reject in the same way, as an over-hasty generalization, the liberal popular wisdom according to which philosophers who meddle in politics will always lead to disaster? According to this view, starting with Plato, they either miserably fail or succeed . . . in supporting tyrants. The reason, so the story goes on, is that philosophers try to impose their Notions on reality, violating it—no wonder that, from Plato to Heidegger, they are resolutely anti-democratic (with the exception of a few empiricists and pragmatists), dismissing the “people” as the victim of sophists, at the mercy of a contingent plurality . . . So when those who hold to this commonsensical wisdom hear of Marxists who defend Marx, claiming that his ideas were not faithfully realized by Stalinism, they reply: “Thank God! It would have been even worse had they been fully realized!” Heidegger at least was willing to draw the consequences of his catastrophic experience and concede that those who think ontologically have to err ontically, that the gap is irreducible, that there is no “philosophical politics” proper. It thus seems that G.K. Chesterton was fully justified in his ironic proposal to install a “special corps of policemen, policemen who are also philosophers”:

It is their business to watch the beginnings of this conspiracy, not merely in a criminal but in a controversial sense. [. . .] The work of the philosophical policeman [. . .] is at once bolder and more subtle than that of the ordinary detective. The ordinary detective goes to pothouses to arrest thieves; we go to artistic tea-parties to detect pessimists. The ordinary detective discovers from a ledger or a diary that a crime has been committed. We discover from a book of sonnets that a crime will be committed. We have to trace the origin of those dreadful thoughts that drive men on at last to intellectual fanaticism and intellectual crime.⁴

Would not thinkers as different as Popper, Adorno, and Levinas also subscribe to a slightly amended version of this idea, where the political crime is called “totalitarianism” and the philosophical crime is condensed in the notion of “totality”? A straight road leads from the philosophical notion of totality to political totalitarianism, and the task of the “philosophical police” is to detect in a book of Plato’s dialogues or a treatise on the social contract by Rousseau that a political crime will be committed. The ordinary political policeman goes to secret organizations to arrest revolutionaries; the philosophical policeman goes to philosophical symposia to detect proponents of totality. The ordinary anti-terrorist policeman tries to detect those preparing to blow up buildings and bridges; the philosophical policeman tries to arrest those about to deconstruct the religious and moral foundations of our societies . . .⁵

This position is that of “wisdom”: a wise man knows that one should not “enforce” reality, that a little bit of corruption is the best defense against great corruption. Christianity is in this sense a form of anti-wisdom par excellence: a crazy wager on Truth, in contrast to paganism which, ultimately, counts on wisdom (“everything returns to dust, the Wheel of Life goes on forever . . .”). The fateful limitation of this stance of wisdom resides in the formalism that pertains to the notion of balance, of avoiding the extremes. When one hears formulae such as “we need neither total state control nor totally non-regulated liberalism/individualism, but the right measure between these two extremes,” the problem that immediately pops up is the measurement of this measure—the point of balance is always silently presupposed. Suppose someone were to say: “We need neither too much respect for Jews, nor the Nazi Holocaust, but the right measure in between, some quotas for universities and prohibition of public office for the Jews to prevent their excessive influence,” one cannot really answer at a purely formal level. Here we have the formalism of wisdom: the true task is to transform the measure itself, not only to oscillate between the extremes of the measure.

In his otherwise admirable Holy Terror, Terry Eagleton seems to fall into the same trap when he deploys the pharmakos dialectic of the excess of the Sacred, of the Holy Terror as the excess of the Real which should be respected, satisfied, but kept at a distance. The Real is simultaneously generative and destructive: destructive if given free rein, but also destructive if denied, since its very denial unleashes a fury which imitates it—again a case of the coincidence of opposites. Eagleton here perceives freedom as such as a pharmakos, which becomes destructive when unhindered. Is, however, this not all too close to a conservative form of wisdom? Is it not a supreme irony here that Eagleton, arguably the sharpest and most perspicuous critic of postmodernism, displays here his own secret postmodern bias, endorsing one of the great postmodern motifs, that of the Real Thing towards which one should maintain a proper distance? No wonder that Eagleton professes his sympathy for conservatives such as Burke and his critique of French Revolution: not that it was unjust, and so on, but that it exposed the founding excessive violence of the legal order, bringing to light and re-enacting what should be at all costs concealed—this is the function of traditional myths. Rejection of these myths, reliance on pure Reason critical of tradition, thereby necessarily ends up in the madness and destructive orgy of Unreason.⁶

Where does Lacan stand with regard to this complex topic referred to by the tiresome and stupid designation “the social role of intellectuals”? Lacan’s theory, of course, can be used to throw new light on numerous politico-ideological phenomena, bringing to the fore the hidden libidinal economy that sustains them; but we are asking here a more basic and naive question: does Lacan’s theory imply a precise political stance? Some Lacanians (and not only Lacanians), such as Yannis Stavrakakis, endeavor to demonstrate that Lacanian theory directly grounds democratic politics. The terms are well known: “there is no big Other” means that the socio-symbolic order is inconsistent, no ultimate guarantee, and democracy is the way to integrate into the edifice of power this lack of ultimate foundation. Insofar as all organic visions of a harmonious Whole of society rely on a fantasy, democracy thus appears to offer a political stance which “traverses the fantasy,” that is, which renounces the impossible ideal of a non-antagonistic society.

The political theorist who serves as a key reference here is Claude Lefort, who was himself influenced by Lacan and uses Lacanian terms in his definition of democracy: democracy accepts the gap between the symbolic (the empty place of power) and the real (the agent who occupies this place), postulating that no empirical agent “naturally” fits the empty place of power. Other systems are incomplete, they have to engage in compromises, in occasional shake-ups, to function; democracy elevates incompleteness into a principle, it institutionalizes the regular shake-up in the guise of elections. In short, S(barred A) is the signifier of democracy. Democracy here goes further than the “realistic” nostrum according to which, in order to actualize a certain political vision, one should allow for concrete unpredictable circumstances and be ready to make compromises, to leave the space open for people’s vices and imperfections—democracy turns imperfection itself into a notion. However, one should bear in mind that the democratic subject, which emerges through a violent abstraction from all its particular roots and determinations, is the Lacanian barred subject, , which is as such foreign to, incompatible with, enjoyment:

Democracy as empty place means for us: the subject of democracy is a barred subject. Our small algebra enables us to grasp immediately that this leaves out the small (a). That is to say: all that hinges on the particularity of enjoyments. The empty barred subject of democracy finds it difficult to link itself to all that goes on, forms itself, trembles, in all that we designate with this comfortable small letter, the small (a). We are told: once there is the empty place, everybody, if he respects the laws, can bring in his traditions and his values. [. . .] However, what we know is that, effectively, the more democracy is empty, the more it is a desert of enjoyment, and, correlatively, the more enjoyment condenses itself in certain elements. [. . .] the more the signifier is “disaffected,” as others put it, the more the signifier is purified, the more it imposes itself in the pure form of law, of egalitarian democracy, of the globalization of the market, [. . .] the more passion augments itself, the more hatred intensifies, fundamentalisms multiply, destruction extends itself, massacres without precedent are accomplished, and unheard-of catastrophes occur.⁷

What this means is that the democratic empty place and the discourse of totalitarian fullness are strictly correlative, two sides of the same coin: it is meaningless to play one against the other and advocate a “radical” democracy which would avoid this unpleasant supplement. So, when leftists deplore the fact that today only the Right has passion, is able to propose a new mobilizing imaginary, and that the Left only engages in administration, what they do not see is the structural necessity of what they perceive as a mere tactical weakness of the Left. No wonder that the European project which is widely debated today fails to enflame the passions: it is ultimately a project of administration, not of ideological commitment. The only passion is that of the rightist reaction against Europe—all the leftist attempts to infuse the notion of a united Europe with political passion (such the Habermas—Derrida initiative in the summer of 2003) fail to gain momentum. The reason for this failure is that the “fundamentalist” attachment to jouissance is the obverse, the fantasmatic supplement, of democracy itself.

What to do, then, once one draws the consequences of this Unbehagen in democracy? Some Lacanians (and not exclusively Lacanians) endeavor to attribute to Lacan the position of an internal critic of democracy, a provocateur who raises unpleasant questions without proposing his own positive political project. Politics as such is here devalued as a domain of imaginary and symbolic identifications, as the self, by definition, involves a misrecognition, a form of self-blinding. Lacan is thus a provocateur, in the tradition extending from Socrates to Kierkegaard, and he discerns democracy’s illusions and hidden metaphysical presuppositions. The outstanding advocate of this second position is Wendy Brown who, although not a Lacanian, deploys an extremely important and perspicuous Nietzschean critique of the politically correct politics of victimization, of basing one’s identity on injury.