Читать книгу Living in the End Times - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 10

This same materialism is also clearly discernible in The Laws of Manu,¹⁹ the ancient Indian text which is one of the most exemplary ideological texts in the entire history of humanity. Firstly because, while the text encompasses the entire universe including its mythic origins, it nevertheless focuses on everyday practices as the immediate materiality of ideology: how (what, where, with whom, when . . .) we eat, defecate, have sex, walk, enter a building, work, make war, etc., etc. But also because the book stages a radical shift with regard to its starting point (its presupposition): the ancient code of Veda. What we find in the Veda is a brutal cosmology based on killing and eating: higher things kill and eat/consume lower ones, the stronger eat the weaker; that is, life is a zero-sum game in which one’s victory is another’s defeat. The “great chain of being” appears here as founded in the “food chain,” the great chain of eating: gods eat mortal humans, humans eat mammals, mammals eat lesser animals who eat plants, plants “eat” water and earth . . . such is the eternal cycle of being. So why does the Veda claim that the top social stratum consists not of warrior-kings stronger than all other humans, “eating” them all, but of the caste of priests? It is here that the code’s ideological ingenuity becomes apparent: the function of the priests is to prevent the first, highest, level of cosmic eating, the eating of human mortals by gods. How? By way of performing sacrificial rituals. Gods must be appeased, their hunger for blood must be satisfied, and the trick of the priests is to offer the gods a substitute (symbolic) sacrifice: an animal or other prescribed food instead of human life. The sacrifice is needed not to secure any special favors from the gods, but to make sure that the wheel of life goes on turning. Priests perform a function which concerns the balance of the entire universe: if the gods remain hungry, the whole cycle of cosmic life is disturbed. From the very beginning, the “holistic” notion of the great chain of Being—the reality of which is the brutal chain of the strong eating the weak—is thus based on a deception: it is not a “natural” chain, but a chain based on an exception (humans who don’t want to be eaten). Thus sacrifices are substitute insertions aimed at restoring the complete life cycle.

This was the first contract between ideologists (priests) and those in power (warrior-kings): the kings, who retain actual power (over the life and death of other people), will recognize the formal superiority of the priests as the highest caste, and, in exchange for this appearance of superiority, the priests will legitimize the power of the warrior-kings as part of the natural cosmic order. However, around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, something new took place: a radical “revaluation of all values” in the guise of a universalist backlash against this cosmic food chain; the ascetic rejection of this entire infernal machine of life reproducing itself through sacrifice and eating. The circle of the food chain is now perceived as the circle of eternal suffering, and the only way to achieve peace is to exempt oneself from it. (With regard to food, this, of course, entails vegetarianism: not eating dead animals.) From perpetuating the life cycle in time, we move on to the goal of entering the timeless Void. With this reversal from a life-affirming stance to world-renunciation, comparable to the Christian rejection of the pagan universe, the highest values are no longer strength and fertility, but compassion, humility, and love. The very meaning of sacrifice changes with this reversal: we no longer sacrifice so that the infernal life cycle might go on, but in order to rid ourselves of the guilt of participating in that cycle.

What are the socio-political consequences of this reversal? How can we avoid the conclusion that the entire social hierarchy, grounded in the “great food chain” of eaters and eaten, should be suspended? It is here that the genius of The Laws of Manu shines through: its basic ideological operation is to unite the hierarchy of castes and the ascetic world-renunciation by making purity itself the criterion of one’s place in the caste hierarchy: “Vegetarianism was put forward as the only way to liberate oneself from the bonds of natural violence that adversely affected one’s karma. A concomitant of this new dietary practice was a social hierarchy governed to a large extent by the relative realization of the ideal of non-violence. The rank order of the social classes did not change. But the rationale for the ranking did.”²⁰ Vegetarian priests are at the top, as close as humanly possible to purity; they are followed by the warrior-kings who control society by dominating it and killing life—they are in a way the negative of the priests, i.e., they entertain towards the Wheel of Life the same negative attitude as the priests, albeit in aggressive/interventional mode. Then come the producers who provide food and other material conditions for life; and, finally, at the bottom, are the outcasts whose main task is to deal with all kinds of excrements, the putrefying dead remainders of life (from cleaning the toilets to butchering animals and disposing of human bodies).

Since the two attitudes are ultimately incompatible, the task of their unification is an impossible one and can be achieved only by a complex panoply of tricks, displacements and compromises whose basic formula is that of universality with exceptions: in principle yes, but . . . The Laws of Manu demonstrates a breathtaking ingenuity in accomplishing this task, with examples often coming dangerously close to the ridiculous. For example, priests should study the Veda, not trade; in extremity, however, a priest can engage in trade, but he is not allowed to trade in certain things like sesame seed, except in certain circumstances; and if he sells sesame seed in the wrong circumstances, he will be reborn as a worm in dogshit . . . Is the structure here not exactly the same as that of the famous Jewish joke on the marriage-mediator who reinterprets every deficiency in the bride-to-be as a positive asset: “She is poor . . .”—“so she will know how to handle the family money, making the most of it!” “She is ugly . . .”—“so the husband will not have to worry that she will cheat on him!” “She stutters . . .”—“so she will keep quiet and not annoy the husband with incessant prattle!” and so on until the final “She really stinks!”—“So you want her to be perfect, without any defect?” The general formula of this procedure is to “state one general rule, to which the whole of the subsequent treatise constitutes nothing but a series of increasingly specific exceptions . . . ‘A specific injunction is stronger than a general one.’”²¹ In other words, the great lesson of The Laws of Manu is that the true regulating power of the law resides not in its direct prohibitions, in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating the very violations of prohibitions: the law silently accepts that the basic prohibitions are violated (or even discreetly solicits us to violate them), and then, once we find ourselves in this position of guilt, it tells us how to reconcile the violation with the law by violating the prohibition in a regulated way.

There is nothing “Oriental” about this procedure: the Christian church faced the same problem from the fourth century onwards, when it became the state church: how to reconcile the feudal class society where rich lords ruled over impoverished peasants with the egalitarian poverty of the collective of believers as described in the Gospels? The solution of Thomas Aquinas was that, while in principle shared property is better, this holds only for perfect humans; for the majority of us who dwell in sin, private property and difference in wealth are natural, and it is even sinful to demand egalitarianism or the abolishment of private property in our fallen societies, i.e., to demand for imperfect people what befits only the perfect. Even Buddhism often falls into this trap—say, in the guise of allowing (only) a violence perpetrated in a non-violent attitude, through inner peace and distance: “Even though the Buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. Therefore, as a means of bringing into harmony those things which are incompatible, killing and war are necessary.”²²

Is this supplementing of universality with exceptions a case of what Hegel called the “concrete universal”? Definitely not, and for a very precise reason: although both the structure of universal law with exceptions and Hegelian “concrete universality” mobilize the gap between the universal and the particular, the nature of the gap is different in each case. In the first case, it is simply the gap between the pure universal principle or law and the pragmatic consideration of particular circumstances, i.e., the (ultimately empiricist) notion of the excess of the wealth of concrete particular content over any abstract principle—in other words, here, universality precisely remains abstract, which is why it has to be twisted or adapted to particular circumstances in order to become operative in real life. In the second case, on the contrary, the tension is absolutely immanent, inherent to universality itself: the fact that a universality actualizes itself in a series of exceptions is an effect of this universality being at war with itself, marked by an inherent deadlock or impossibility. (The same goes for the idea of Communism: it is not enough to say that the idea of Communism should not be applied as an abstract dogma, that, in each case, concrete circumstances should be taken into consideration. It is also not enough to say, apropos the fiasco of the twentieth-century Communist countries, that this mis-application in no way disqualifies the idea of Communism. The idea’s imperfect [or, rather, catastrophic] actualizations bear witness to an “inner contradiction” at the very heart of the idea.)

Let us take a (surprising, perhaps) case of the Hegelian “concrete universality”: a wonderful Jewish story about an anti-death-penalty Talmud specialist who, embarrassed by the fact that the death penalty is ordained by God himself, proposed a delightfully practical solution: one should not directly overturn the divine injunction, that would have been blasphemous; but one should treat it as God’s slip of tongue, his moment of madness, and invent a complex network of sub-regulations and conditions which, while leaving the possibility of a death penalty intact, ensure that this possibility will never be realized.²³ The beauty of this procedure is that it turns around the standard trick of prohibiting something in principle (torture, for instance), but then slipping in enough qualifications (“except in specified extreme circumstances . . .”) to ensure it can be done whenever one really wants to do it. It is thus either “In principle yes, but in practice never” or “In principle no, but when exceptional circumstances demand it, yes.” Note the asymmetry between the two cases: the prohibition is much stronger when one allows torture in principle—in this case, the principled “yes” is never allowed to realize itself; while in the other case, the principled “no” is exceptionally allowed to realize itself. In other words, the only “reconciliation” between the universal and the particular is that of the universalized exception: only the stance which re-casts every particular case as an exception treats all particular cases without exception in the same way. And it should be clear now why this is a case of “concrete universality”: the reason we should find a way to argue, in each particular case, that the death penalty is not deserved, lies in our awareness that there is something wrong with the very idea of the death penalty, that this idea is an injustice masked as justice.

This reference to Judaism should be linked to the fact that the Book of Job (from the Old Testament) can be counted as the first exercise in the critique of ideology in the entire history of humanity. The Laws of Manu should thus be opposed to the Book of Job as one of the founding texts of ideology versus one of the founding texts of its critique. No wonder the British colonial administration in India elevated The Laws of Manu into the privileged text to be used as a reference for establishing the legal code which would render possible the most efficient domination of India—up to a point, one can even say that The Laws of Manu only became the book of the Hindu tradition retroactively, chosen to stand for the tradition by the British from among a vast choice (the same goes for its obscene obverse, “tantra,” also systematized into a coherent, dark, violent, and dangerous cult by the British colonizers). In all these cases we are dealing with “invented traditions.” What this also implies is that the persistence of the phenomenon and social practice of the Untouchables is not simply a remainder of tradition: their number grew throughout the nineteenth century, with the spreading of cities which lacked proper sewers, so that more outcasts were needed to deal with the resulting dirt and excrement. At a more general level, one should thus reject the idea that globalization threatens local traditions, that it flattens differences: sometimes it threatens them, more often it keeps them alive, resuscitates them or even creates them by way of ex-apting them to new conditions—in the way, say, the British and Spanish re-invented slavery in early modernity.

With the formal prohibition of discrimination against the Untouchables, their exclusion changed its status to become the obscene supplement of the official/public order: publicly disavowed, it continues in its subterranean existence. However, this subterranean existence is nonetheless formal (it concerns the subject’s symbolic title/status), which is why it does not follow the same logic as the well-known Marxist opposition between formal equality and actual inequality in the capitalist system. Here, it is the inequality (the persistence of the hierarchic caste system) which is formal, while in their actual economic and legal life, individuals are in a way equal (an Untouchable can also become rich, etc.).²⁴ The status of the caste hierarchy is not the same as that of nobility in a bourgeois society, which is effectively irrelevant, merely a feature which may add to the subject’s public glamor.

Exemplary here is the conflict between B. R. Ambedkar and Gandhi during the 1930s. Although Gandhi was the first Hindu politician to advocate the full integration of the Untouchables, and called them “the children of god,” he perceived their exclusion as the result of the corruption of the original Hindu system. What Gandhi envisaged was rather a (formally) non-hierarchical order of castes within which each individual has his or her own allotted place; he emphasized the importance of scavenging and celebrated the Untouchables for performing this “sacred” mission. It is here that the Untouchables are exposed to the greatest ideological temptation: in a way which prefigures today’s “identity politics,” Gandhi allowed them to “fall in love with themselves” in their humiliating identity, to accept their degrading work as a noble and necessary social task, to see even the degrading nature of their work as a sign of their sacrifice, of their readiness to do a dirty job for the sake of society. Even his more “radical” injunction that everyone, Brahmins included, should clean up his or her own shit, obfuscates the true issue, which, rather than having to do with our individual attitude, is of a global social nature. (The same ideological trick is performed today when we are bombarded from all sides with injunctions to recycle personal waste, placing bottles, newspapers, etc., in the appropriate bins. In this way, guilt and responsibility are personalized—it is not the entire organization of the economy which is to blame, but our subjective attitude which needs to change.) The task is not to change our inner selves, but to abolish Untouchability as such, that is, not merely an element of the system, but the system itself which generates it. In contrast to Gandhi, Ambedkar saw this clearly when he

underlined the futility of merely abolishing Untouchability: this evil being the product of a social hierarchy of a particular kind, it was the entire caste system that had to be eradicated: “There will be outcasts [Untouchables] as long as there are castes.” . . . Gandhi responded that, on the contrary, here it was a question of the foundation of Hinduism, a civilization which, in its original form, in fact ignored hierarchy.²⁵

Although Gandhi and Ambedkar respected each other and often collaborated in the struggle for the dignity of the Untouchables, their difference is here insurmountable: it is the difference between the “organic” solution (solving the problem by returning to the purity of the original non-corrupted system) and the truly radical solution (identifying the problem as the “symptom” of the entire system, the symptom which can only be resolved by abolishing the entire system). Ambedkar saw clearly how the structure of four castes does not unite four elements belonging to the same order: while the first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchant-producers) form a consistent All, an organic triad, the Untouchables are, like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” the “part of no part,” the inconsistent element within the system which holds the place of what the system as such excludes—and as such, the Untouchables stand for universality. Or, as Ambedkar put it with his ingenious wordplay: “There will be outcasts as long as there are castes.” As long as there are castes, there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it. Gandhi obfuscates this paradox, as if a harmonious caste structure were possible. The paradox of the Untouchables is that they are doubly marked by the excremental logic: they not only deal with impure excrements, their own formal status within the social body is that of excrement.

This is why the properly dialectical paradox is that, if one is to break out of the caste system, it is not enough to reverse the status of the Untouchables, elevating them into the “children of god”—the first step should rather be exactly the opposite one: to universalize their excremental status to the whole of humanity. Martin Luther directly proposed just such an excremental identity for man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus—and, effectively, it is only within this Protestant logic of man’s excremental identity that the true meaning of Incarnation can be formulated. In Orthodoxy, Christ ultimately loses his exceptional status: his very idealization, elevation to a noble model, reduces him to an ideal image, a figure to be imitated (all men should strive to become God)—imitatio Christi is more an Orthodox than a Catholic formula. In Catholicism, the predominant logic is that of a symbolic exchange: Catholic theologians enjoy pondering over scholastic juridical arguments about how Christ paid the price for our sins, etc. No wonder Luther reacted badly to the lowest outcome of this logic: the reduction of redemption to something that can be bought from the Church. Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in His act of Incarnation, freely identified Himself with His own shit, with the excremental real that is man—and it is only at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended, as the love for the miserable excremental entity called “man.” We are dealing here with what can be ironically referred to as the cosmic-theological proletarian position, whose “infinite judgment” is the identity of excess and universality: the shit of the earth is the universal subject. (This excremental status of man is signaled already by the role of sacrifice in the original Veda: by way of substituting the sacrificial victim for humans, the sacrifice bears witness to the eccentric, exceptional, role of man in the great chain of food—to paraphrase Lacan, the sacrificial object represents man for other “ordinary” members of the food chain.) Here is a quite surprising, if not outright shocking, passage from Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs, which deals precisely with the invisible excremental space and what one might discover by way of probing into it—the event described took place when he was the Chilean consul in Sri Lanka (Ceylon):

My solitary bungalow was far from any urban development. When I rented it, I tried to find out where the toilet was; I couldn’t see it anywhere. Actually, it was nowhere near the shower, it was at the back of the house. I inspected it with curiosity. It was a wooden box with a hole in the middle, very much like the artifact I had known as a child in the Chilean countryside. But our toilets were set over a deep well or over running water. Here the receptacle was a simple metal pail under the round hole.

The pail was clean every morning, but I had no idea how its contents disappeared. One morning I rose earlier than usual, and I was amazed when I saw what had been happening.

Into the back of the house, walking like a dusky statue, came the most beautiful woman I had yet seen in Ceylon, a Tamil of the pariah caste. She was wearing a red-and-gold sari of the cheapest kind of cloth. She had heavy bangles on her bare ankles. Two tiny red dots glittered on either side of her nose. They must have been ordinary glass, but on her they were rubies.

She walked solemnly toward the latrine, without so much as a side glance at me, not bothering to acknowledge my existence, and vanished with the disgusting receptacle on her head, moving away with the steps of a goddess.

She was so lovely that, regardless of her humble job, I couldn’t get her off my mind. Like a shy jungle animal she belonged to another kind of existence, a different world. I called to her, but it was no use. After that, I sometimes put a gift in her path, a piece of silk or some fruit. She would go past without hearing or looking. The ignoble routine had been transformed by her dark beauty into the dutiful ceremony of an indifferent queen.

One morning, I decided to go all the way. I got a strong grip on her wrist and stared into her eyes. There was no language I could talk with her. Unsmiling, she let herself be led away, and was soon naked in my bed. Her waist, so very slim, her full hips, the brimming cups of her breasts made her like one of the thousand-year-old sculptures from the south of India. It was the coming together of a man and a statue. She kept her eyes wide open all the while, completely unresponsive. She was right to despise me. The experience was never repeated.²⁶

Neruda then simply passes to other things. This passage is remarkable not only for obvious reasons: a shameless story of a rape, with the dirty details discreetly passed over (“she let herself be led away, and was soon naked in my bed”—how did she come to be naked? Obviously, she didn’t do it herself), the mystification of the victim’s passivity into a divine indifference, the lack of elementary decency and shame on the part of the narrator (if he was attracted to the girl, wasn’t he embarrassed by the awareness that she was smelling, seeing, and dealing with his shit every morning?). Its most remarkable feature is the divinization of the excrement: a sublime goddess appears at the very site where excrements are hidden. One should take this equation very seriously: elevating the exotic Other into an indifferent divinity is strictly equal to treating it like shit.