Читать книгу In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 9

In contrast to the simplistic opposition of good guys and bad guys, spy thrillers with artistic pretensions display all the “realistic psychological complexity” of the characters from “our” side. Far from signaling a balanced view, however, this “honest” acknowledgment of our own “dark side” stands for its very opposite, for the hidden assertion of our supremacy: we are “psychologically complex,” full of doubts, while the opponents are one-dimensional fanatical killing machines. Therein resides the lie of Spielberg’s Munich: it wants to be “objective,” presenting moral complexity and ambiguity, psychological doubts, the problematic nature of revenge, of the Israeli perspective, but, what its “realism” does is redeem the Mossad agents still further: “look, they are not just cold killers, but human beings with their doubts—they have doubts, whereas the Palestinian terrorists . . .” One cannot but sympathize with the hostility with which the surviving Mossad agents who really carried out the revenge killings reacted to the film (“there were no psychological doubts, we just did what we had to do”) for there is much more honesty in their stance.¹

The first lesson thus seems to be that the proper way to fight the demonization of the Other is to subjectivize her, to listen to her story, to understand how she perceives the situation—or, as a partisan of the Middle East dialogue put it: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.”² Practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, Iceland’s authorities recently imposed a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the Other. In order to fight growing xenophobia (the result of increasing numbers of immigrant workers), as well as sexual intolerance, they organized what they called “living libraries”: members of ethnic and sexual minorities (gays, immigrant East Europeans or blacks) are paid to visit an Icelandic family and just talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams, and so on—in this way, the exotic stranger who is perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with a complex world of her own . . .

There is, however, a clear limit to this procedure. Can we imagine inviting a Nazi thug to tell us his story? Are we ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy because his story hadn’t been heard? A Serb journalist recently reported a strange piece of news from the politician who, after long painful talks, convinced Slobodan Miloevi in his villa to surrender to the police and let himself be arrested. Miloevi said yes and then asked to be allowed to go to the first floor of the villa to attend to some business. The negotiator, afraid that Miloevi was going to commit suicide, expressed his doubts, but Miloevic calmed him down, saying that he had given his word to his wife, Mira Markovic, that he would wash his hair before leaving. Does this personal-life detail “redeem” the horrors that resulted from Miloevi’s reign, does it make him “more human”? One can well imagine Hitler washing Eva Braun’s hair—and one does not have to imagine, since we already know that Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, liked to play Beethoven’s late string quartets with friends in the evenings. Recall the couple of “personal” lines that usually conclude the presentation of a writer on the back cover of a book: “In his free time, X likes to play with his cat and grow tulips . . .”—such a supplement which “humanizes” the author is ideology at its purest, the sign that he is “also human like us.” (I was tempted to suggest for the cover of one my books: “In his free time, iek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and to teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders . . .”)

Our most elementary experience of subjectivity is that of the “richness of my inner life”: this is what I “really am,” in contrast to the symbolic determinations and mandates I assume in public life (father, professor, philosopher). The first lesson of psychoanalysis here is that this “richness of our inner life” is fundamentally a fake: a screen, a false distance, whose function is, as it were, to save my appearance, to render palpable (accessible to my imaginary narcissism) my true social-symbolic identity. One of the ways to practice the critique of ideology is therefore to invent strategies to unmask this hypocrisy of “inner life” and its “sincere” emotions, in the manner systematically enacted by Lars von Trier in his films:

My very first film, The Orchid Gardener, opened with a caption stating that the film was dedicated to a girl who had died of leukaemia, giving the dates of her birth and death. That was entirely fabricated! And manipulative and cynical, because I realized that if you started a film like that, then the audience would take it a lot more seriously.³

There is much more than manipulation at work here: in his feminine trilogy (Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, Dogville), von Trier provokes us in our innermost being, stirring up automatic sympathy with the ultimate archetypal image of the victimized woman who, with her heart of gold, suffers pain. Through his “manipulation,” he displays the lie of this sympathy, the obscene pleasure we gain from seeing the victim suffer, and thereby disturbs our self-satisfaction. Does this mean, however, that my “truth” is simply in my symbolic identity obfuscated by my imaginary “inner life” (as a simplistic reading of Lacan seems to indicate, opposing the subject of the signifier to the imaginary ego)?

Let us take a man who, deep down, cultivates sadistic fantasies while in public life he is polite, follows rules, and so forth; when he goes online to express those fantasies in a chat room, say, he is showing his truth in the guise of a fiction. But is it not the case, on the contrary, that the polite persona is the truth here and the sadistic fantasies serve as a kind of defense? As in a new version of the old Jewish joke: “You are polite, so why do you act as if you were polite?” Is not, then, the internet, where we supposedly express on screen our deepest truths, really a site for the playing out of defensive fantasies that protect us from the banal normality that is our truth?⁴

Two cases are to be distinguished here. When I am a brutal executive who, deep within myself, feel that this is just a public mask and that my true Self discloses itself in my spiritual meditations (and imagine my friends telling people: “His brutal business efficiency shouldn’t deceive you—he is really a very refined and gentle person . . .”), this is not the same as when I am, in real interactions with others, a polite person who, on the internet, gives way to violent fantasies. The site of subjective identification shifts: in the internet case, I think that I really am a polite person, and that I am just playing with violent fantasies, while, as a New Age businessman, I think that I am just playing a public role in my business dealings, while my true identity is my inner Self enlightened through meditation. In other words: in both cases, truth is a fiction, but this fiction is differently located. In the internet case, it is imaginable that, at some point, I will “take off the mask” and explode, that is, carry out my violent fantasies in real life—this explosion will effectively enact “the truth of my Self.” In the case of the New Age businessman, my truth is my public persona, and, here, “taking off the mask,” enacting my New Age self in reality, namely, really abandoning my businessman traits, would involve a real shift in my subjective position. In the two cases, “taking off the mask” thus works differently. In the internet case, this gesture is what Hitler did with actual anti-Semitic measures (realizing anti-Semitic fantasies), a false act, while in the New Age businessman case, would be a true act.

In order to resolve the apparent contradiction, one should reformulate the two cases in the terms of Lacan’s triad Imaginary—Symbolic—Real: we are not dealing with two, but with three elements. The dirty fantasies I am playing with on the net do not have the same status as my “true Self” disclosed in my meditations: the first belong to the Real, the second to the Imaginary. The triad is then I—S—R. Or, more precisely, in the internet case, my polite public persona is Imaginary—Symbolic versus the Real of my fantasies, while, in the New Age executive case, my public persona is Symbolic—Real versus my Imaginary “true Self.”⁵ (And, to take a crucial further theoretical step, in order for this triad to function, one has to add a fourth term, none other than the empty core of subjectivity: the Lacanian “barred subject” () is neither my Symbolic identity, nor my Imaginary “true Self,” nor the obscene Real core of my fantasies, but the empty container which, like a knot, ties the three dimensions together.)

It is this complex “knot” that accounts for a well-known tragic figure from the Cold War era: those Western leftists who heroically defied anti-Communist hysteria in their own countries with utmost sincerity. They were ready even to go to prison for their Communist convictions and their defense of the Soviet Union. Is it not the very illusory nature of their belief that makes their subjective stance so tragically sublime? The miserable reality of the Stalinist Soviet Union renders the fragile beauty of their inner conviction all the more majestic. This leads us to a radical and unexpected conclusion: it is not enough to say that we are dealing here with a tragically misplaced ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable, terrifying reality of its ethical point of reference. What if, on the contrary, such a blindness, such a violent gesture of refusing-to-see, such a disavowal-of-reality, such a fetishistic attitude of “I know very well that things are horrible in the Soviet Union, but I nonetheless believe in Soviet socialism,” is the innermost constituent part of every ethical stance? Kant was already well aware of this paradox when he deployed his notion of enthusiasm for the French Revolution in his Conflict of Faculties (1795). The Revolution’s true significance did not reside in what actually went on in Paris—much of which was terrifying and included outbursts of murderous passion—but in the enthusiastic response that the events in Paris generated in the eyes of sympathetic observers all around Europe:

The recent Revolution of a people which is rich in spirit, may well either fail or succeed, accumulate misery and atrocity, it nevertheless arouses in the heart of all spectators (who are not themselves caught up in it) a taking of sides according to desires [eine Teilnehmung dem Wunsche nach] which borders on enthusiasm and which, since its very expression was not without danger, can only have been caused by a moral disposition within the human race.⁶

The real Event, the dimension of the Real, was not in the immediate reality of the violent events in Paris, but in how this reality appeared to observers and in the hopes thus awakened in them. The reality of what went on in Paris belongs to the temporal dimension of empirical history; the sublime image that generated enthusiasm belongs to Eternity . . . And, mutatis mutandis, the same applies for the Western admirers of the Soviet Union. The Soviet experience of “building socialism in one country” certainly did “accumulate misery and atrocity,” but it nevertheless aroused enthusiasm in the heart of the spectators (who were not themselves caught up in it).

The question here is: does every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? Is even the most universal ethics not obliged to draw a line and ignore some sort of suffering? What about animals slaughtered for our consumption? Who would be able to continue eating pork chops after visiting an industrial farm in which pigs are half blind and cannot even properly walk, but are just fattened to be killed? And what about, say, the torture and suffering of millions about which we know but choose to ignore? Imagine the effect on one of us if we were forced to watch one single snuff movie of what goes on thousands of times a day around the earth—brutal torture (plucking out of eyes, crushing of testicles, for example)? Would we continue to go on living as usual? Yes—if we were able to somehow forget (suspend the symbolic efficiency) of what we had witnessed.

So, again, does not every ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal?⁷ Yes, every ethics—with the exception of the ethics of psychoanalysis which is a kind of anti-ethics: it focuses precisely on what the standard ethical enthusiasm excludes, on the traumatic Thing that our Judeo-Christian tradition calls the “Neighbor.” Freud had good reasons for his reluctance to endorse the injunction “Love thy neighbor!”—the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical domestication of the Neighbor. This is what Emmanuel Levinas did with his notion of the Neighbor as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates: he thereby obfuscated the monstrosity of the Neighbor, the monstrosity on account of which Lacan applied to the neighbor the term Thing (das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the Neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face, like the hero of Stephen King’s The Shining, a gentle failed writer, who gradually turns into a killing beast and, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family.

When Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the basic Judeo-Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor,” they are thus not just making the standard critico-ideological point about how every notion of universality is colored by our particular values and thus implies secret exclusions. They are making a much stronger point about the incompatibility of the Neighbor with the very dimension of universality. What resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbor. This brings us back to the key question: does every universalist ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answer is: every ethics that remains “humanist” (in the sense of avoiding the inhuman core of being-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbor. “Man,” “human person,” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbor.

Consequently, when one asserts the Neighbor as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards this unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality. Following Alain Badiou, one should assert that, on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true universality. The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.

We should celebrate the genius of Walter Benjamin which shines through in the very title of his early work: On Language in General and Human Language in Particular. The point here is not that human language is a species of some universal language “as such” which comprises also other species (the language of gods and angels? Animal language? The language of some other intelligent beings out there in space? Computer language? The language of DNA?): there is no actually-existing language other than human language—but, in order to comprehend this “particular” language, one has to introduce a minimal difference, conceiving it with regard to the gap which separates it from language “as such” (the pure structure of language deprived of the insignia of the human finitude, of erotic passions and mortality, of the struggles for domination and the obscenity of power).⁸ This minimal difference between inhuman language and human language is clearly a Platonic one. What if, then, we have to turn the standard relationship around: the obverse of the fact that, in Christ, God is fully human, is that we, humans, are not. G.K. Chesterton began The Napoleon of Notting Hill with: “The human race, to which so many of my readers belong . . .”—which, of course, does not mean that some of us are not human, but that there is an inhuman core in all of us, or, that we are “not-all human.”