Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 7

Roma locuta, causa finita—the decisive words of authority that should end a dispute, in all its versions, from “the Church synod has decided” to “the Central Committee has passed a resolution” and, why not, “the people has made clear its choice at the ballot box” . . . However, is not the wager of psychoanalysis the opposite one: let the Cause itself speak (or, as Lacan put it, “I, the truth, speak”), and the Empire (of Rome, that is, contemporary global capitalism) will fall apart? Ablata causa tolluntur effectus: when the cause is absent, the effects thrive (Les effets ne se portent bien qu’en absence de la cause). What about turning this proverb around? When the cause intervenes, the effects are dispelled . . .¹

However, which Cause should speak? Things look bad for great Causes today, in a “postmodern” era when, although the ideological scene is fragmented into a panoply of positions which struggle for hegemony, there is an underlying consensus: the era of big explanations is over, we need “weak thought,” opposed to all foundationalism, a thought attentive to the rhizomatic texture of reality; in politics too, we should no longer aim at all-explaining systems and global emancipatory projects; the violent imposition of grand solutions should leave room for forms of specific resistance and intervention . . . If the reader feels a minimum of sympathy with these lines, she should stop reading and cast aside this volume.

Even those who otherwise tend to dismiss “French” postmodern theory with its “jargon” as an exemplary case of “bullshit” tend to share its aversion towards “strong thought” and its large-scale explanations. There is indeed a lot of bullshitting going on these days. Unsurprisingly, even those who popularized the notion of “bullshit,” such as Harry Frankfurt, are not free from it. In the endless complexity of the contemporary world, where things, more often than not, appear as their opposites—intolerance as tolerance, religion as rational common sense, and so on and so forth—the temptation is great to cut it short with a violent gesture of “No bullshit!”—a gesture which seldom amounts to more than an impotent passage à l’acte. Such a desire to draw a clear line of demarcation between sane truthful talk and “bullshit” cannot but reproduce as truthful talk the predominant ideology itself. No wonder that, for Frankfurt himself, examples of “no bullshit” politicians are Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, and, today, John McCain²—as if the pose of outspoken personal sincerity is a guarantee of truthfulness.

The common sense of our era tells us that, with regard to the old distinction between doxa (accidental/empirical opinion, Wisdom) and Truth, or, even more radically, empirical positive knowledge and absolute Faith, one should draw a line between what one can think and do today. At the level of common sense, the furthest one can go is enlightened conservative liberalism: obviously, there are no viable alternatives to capitalism; at the same time, left to itself, the capitalist dynamic threatens to undermine its own foundations. This concerns not only the economic dynamic (the need for a strong state apparatus to maintain the market competition itself, and so on), but, even more, the ideologico-political dynamics. Intelligent conservative democrats, from Daniel Bell to Francis Fukuyama, are aware that contemporary global capitalism tends to undermine its own ideological conditions (what, long ago, Bell called the “cultural contradictions of capitalism”): capitalism can only thrive in the conditions of basic social stability, of intact symbolic trust, of individuals not only accepting their own responsibility for their fate, but also relying on the basic “fairness” of the system—this ideological background has to be sustained through a strong educational, cultural apparatus. Within this horizon, the answer is thus neither radical liberalism à la Hayek, nor crude conservatism, still less clinging to old welfare-state ideals, but a blend of economic liberalism with a minimally “authoritarian” spirit of community (the emphasis on social stability, “values,” and so forth) that counteracts the system’s excesses—in other words what Third Way social-democrats such as Blair have been developing.

This, then, is the limit of common sense. What lies beyond involves a Leap of Faith, faith in lost Causes, Causes that, from within the space of skeptical wisdom, cannot but appear as crazy. And the present book speaks from within this Leap of Faith—but why? The problem, of course, is that, in a time of crisis and ruptures, skeptical empirical wisdom itself, constrained to the horizon of the dominant form of common sense, cannot provide the answers, so one must risk a Leap of Faith.

This shift is the shift from “I speak the truth” to “the truth itself speaks (in/through me)” (as in Lacan’s “matheme” of the analyst’s discourse, where the agent speaks from the position of truth), to the point at which I can say, like Meister Eckhart, “it is true, and the truth says it itself.”³ At the level of positive knowledge, it is, of course, never possible to (be sure that we have) attain(ed) the truth—one can only endlessly approach it, because language is ultimately always self-referential, there is no way to draw a definitive line of separation between sophism, sophistic exercises, and Truth itself (this is Plato’s problem). Lacan’s wager is here the Pascalean one: the wager of Truth. But how? Not by running after “objective” truth, but by holding onto the truth about the position from which one speaks.⁴

There are still only two theories which imply and practice such an engaged notion of truth: Marxism and psychoanalysis. They are both struggling theories, not only theories about struggle, but theories which are themselves engaged in a struggle: their histories do not consist in an accumulation of neutral knowledge, for they are marked by schisms, heresies, expulsions. This is why, in both of them, the relationship between theory and practice is properly dialectical, in other words, that of an irreducible tension: theory is not just the conceptual grounding of practice, it simultaneously accounts for why practice is ultimately doomed to failure—or, as Freud put it concisely, psychoanalysis would only be fully possible in a society that would no longer need it. At its most radical, theory is the theory of a failed practice: “This is why things went wrong . . .” One usually forgets that Freud’s five great clinical reports are basically reports on a partial success and ultimate failure; in the same way, the greatest Marxist historical accounts of revolutionary events are the accounts of great failures (of the German Peasants’ War, of the Jacobins in the French Revolution, of the Paris Commune, of the October Revolution, of the Chinese Cultural Revolution . . .). Such an examination of failures confronts us with the problem of fidelity: how to redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to the past and of all-too-slick accommodation to “new circumstances.”

The time of these two theories seems over. As Todd Dufresne recently put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all the fundamentals of his theory than Freud⁵—with the exception of Marx, some would add. And, indeed, in liberal consciousness, the two now emerge as the main “partners in crime” of the twentieth century: predictably, in 2005, the infamous The Black Book of Communism, listing all the Communist crimes,⁶ was followed by The Black Book of Psychoanalysis, listing all the theoretical mistakes and clinical frauds of psychoanalysis.⁷ In this negative way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now displayed for all to see.

There are nonetheless signs which disturb this postmodern complacency. Commenting on the growing resonance of Alain Badiou’s thought, Alain Finkelkraut recently characterized it as “the most violent philosophy, symptomatic of the return of radicality and of the collapse of anti-totalitarianism”⁸—an honest and surprised admission of the failure of the long and arduous work of all kinds of “anti-totalitarians,” defenders of human rights, combatants against “old leftist paradigms,” from the French nouveaux philosophes to the advocates of a “second modernity.” What should have been dead, disposed of, thoroughly discredited, is returning with a vengeance. One can understand their despair: how can it be that, after having explained for decades not only in scholarly treatises, but also in the mass media, to anyone who wanted to listen (and to many who did not) the dangers of totalitarian “Master-Thinkers,” this kind of philosophy is returning in its most violent form? Have people not caught on that the time of such dangerous utopias is over? Or are we dealing with some strange ineradicable blindness, or an innate anthropological constant, a tendency to succumb to totalitarian temptation? Our proposal is to turn the perspective around: as Badiou himself might put it in his unique Platonic way, true ideas are eternal, they are indestructible, they always return every time they are proclaimed dead. It is enough for Badiou to state these ideas again clearly, and anti-totalitarian thought appears in all its misery as what it really is, a worthless sophistic exercise, a pseudo-theorization of the lowest opportunist survivalist fears and instincts, a way of thinking which is not only reactionary but also profoundly reactive in Nietzsche’s sense of the term.

Linked to this is an interesting struggle which has been going on recently (not only) among Lacanians (not only) in France. This struggle concerns the status of the “One” as the name of a political subjectivity, a struggle which has led to many broken personal friendships (say, between Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner). The irony is that this struggle is taking place among ex-Maoists (Badiou, Milner, Lévy, Miller, Regnault, Finkelkraut), and between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” intellectuals. The question is: is the name of the One the result of a contingent political struggle, or is it somehow rooted in a more substantial particular identity? The position of “Jewish Maoists” is that “Jews” is such a name which stands for that which resists today’s global trend to overcome all limitations, inclusive of the very finitude of the human condition, in radical capitalist “deterritorialization” and “fluidification” (the trend which reaches its apotheosis in the gnostic-digital dream of transforming humans themselves into virtual software that can reload itself from one hardware to another). The name “Jews” thus stands for the most basic fidelity to what one is. Along these lines, François Regnault claims that the contemporary Left demands of Jews (much more than of other ethnic groups) that they “yield with regard to their name”⁹—a reference to Lacan’s ethical maxim “do not yield with regard to your desire” . . . One should remember here that the same shift from radical emancipatory politics to the fidelity to the Jewish name is already discernible in the fate of the Frankfurt School, especially in Horkheimer’s later texts. Jews here are the exception: in the liberal multiculturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity—except Jews, whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism . . . In contrast to this approach, Badiou and others insist on the fidelity to the One which emerges and is constituted through the very political struggle of/for naming and, as such, cannot be grounded in any particular determinate content (such as ethnic or religious roots). From this point of view, fidelity to the name “Jews” is the obverse (the silent recognition) of the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles. No wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name “Jews” are also those who warn us against the “totalitarian” dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror. To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the “Jewish question” is the “final solution” (their annihilation), because Jews qua objet a are the ultimate obstacle to the “final solution” of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility.

But is it not rather the case that, in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud? The irony is that in the history of anti-Semitism Jews stand for both of these poles: sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in, sometimes they stand for a “homeless” and rootless universal cosmopolitanism indifferent to all particular ethnic forms. The first thing to recall is thus that this struggle is (also) inherent to Jewish identity. And, perhaps, this Jewish struggle is our central struggle today: the struggle between fidelity to the Messianic impulse and the reactive (in the precise Nietzschean sense) “politics of fear” which focuses on preserving one’s particular identity.

The privileged role of Jews in the establishment of the sphere of the “public use of reason” hinges on their subtraction from every state power—this position of the “part of no-part” of every organic nation-state community, not the abstract-universal nature of their monotheism, makes them the immediate embodiment of universality. No wonder, then, that, with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel, refusing to accept the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who “subtracts” himself from this state, and who includes the State of Israel among the states towards which he insists on maintaining a distance, living in their interstices—and it is this uncanny Jew who is the object of what one cannot but designate as “Zionist anti-Semitism,” a foreign excess disturbing the nation-state community. These Jews, the “Jews of the Jews themselves,” worthy successors of Spinoza, are today the only Jews who continue to insist on the “public use of reason,” refusing to submit their reasoning to the “private” domain of the nation-state.

This book is unashamedly committed to the “Messianic” standpoint of the struggle for universal emancipation. No wonder, then, that to the partisans of the “postmodern” doxa the list of lost Causes defended here must appear as a horror show of their worst nightmares embodied, a depository of the ghosts of the past they put all their energies into exorcizing: Heidegger’s politics as the extreme case of a philosopher seduced by totalitarian politics; revolutionary terror from Robespierre to Mao; Stalinism; the dictatorship of the proletariat . . . In each case, the predominant ideology not only dismisses the cause, but offers a replacement, a “softer” version of it: not totalitarian intellectual engagement, but intellectuals who investigate the problems of globalization and fight in the public sphere for human rights and tolerance, against racism and sexism; not revolutionary state terror, but the self-organized decentralized multitude; not the dictatorship of the proletariat, but the collaboration among multiple agents (civil-society initiatives, private money, state regulation . . .). The true aim of the “defense of lost causes” is not to defend Stalinist terror, and so on, as such, but to render problematic the all-too-easy liberal-democratic alternative. Foucault’s and, especially, Heidegger’s political commitments, while acceptable in their basic motivation, were clearly “right steps in the wrong direction”; the misfortunes of the fate of revolutionary terror confront us with the need—not to reject terror in toto, but—to reinvent it; the forthcoming ecological crisis seems to offer a unique chance of accepting a reinvented version of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The argument is thus that, while these phenomena were, each in its own way, a historical failure and monstrosity (Stalinism was a nightmare which caused perhaps even more human suffering than fascism; the attempts to enforce the “dictatorship of the proletariat” produced a ridiculous travesty of a regime in which precisely the proletariat was reduced to silence, and so on), this is not the whole truth: there was in each of them a redemptive moment which gets lost in the liberal-democratic rejection—and it is crucial to isolate this moment. One should be careful not to throw out the baby with the dirty water—although one is tempted to turn this metaphor around, and claim that it is the liberal-democratic critique which wants to do this (say, throwing out the dirty water of terror, while retaining the pure baby of authentic socialist democracy), forgetting thereby that the water was originally pure, that all the dirt in it comes from the baby. What one should do, rather, is to throw out the baby before it spoils the crystalline water with its excretions, so that, to paraphrase Mallarmé, rien que l’eau n’aura eu lieu dans le bain de l’histoire.

Our defense of lost Causes is thus not engaged in any kind of deconstructive game in the style of “every Cause first has to be lost in order to exert its efficiency as a Cause.” On the contrary, the goal is to leave behind, with all the violence necessary, what Lacan mockingly referred to as the “narcissism of the lost Cause,” and to courageously accept the full actualization of a Cause, including the inevitable risk of a catastrophic disaster. Badiou was right when, apropos the disintegration of the Communist regimes, he proposed the maxim: mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre. Better a disaster of fidelity to the Event than a non-being of indifference towards the Event. To paraphrase Beckett’s memorable phrase, to which I shall return many times later, after one fails, one can go on and fail better, while indifference drowns us deeper and deeper in the morass of imbecilic Being.

A couple of years ago, Premiere magazine reported on an ingenious inquiry into how the most famous endings of Hollywood films were translated into some of the major non-English languages. In Japan, Clark Gable’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” to Vivien Leigh from Gone With the Wind was rendered as: “I fear, my darling, that there is a slight misunderstanding between the two of us”—a bow to proverbial Japanese courtesy and etiquette. In contrast, the Chinese (in the People’s Republic of China) rendered the “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!” from Casablanca as “The two of us will now constitute a new cell of anti-fascist struggle!”—struggle against the enemy being the top priority, far above personal relations.

Although the present volume may often appear to indulge in excessively confrontational and “provocative” statements (what today can be more “provocative” than displaying even a minimal sympathy for or understanding of revolutionary terror?), it rather practices a displacement along the lines of the examples quoted in Premiere: where the truth is that I don’t give a damn about my opponent, I say that there is a slight misunderstanding; where what is at stake is a new theoretico-political shared field of struggle, it may appear that I am talking about academic friendships and alliances . . . In such cases, it is up to the reader to unravel the clues which lie before her.