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In a critical reading of my plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference in 2007, Sara Ahmed challenged my claim that it is an “empirical fact” that liberal multiculturalism is hegemonic.⁴⁶ Her first step was to emphasize the distinction between the semblance of hegemony (ideological illusion) and actual hegemony:

Hegemony is not really reducible to facts as it involves semblance, fantasy and illusion, being a question of how things appear and the gap between appearance and how bodies are distributed. To read hegemony we have to distrust how things appear. Indeed, what is striking about Žižek’s retort is how much his reading of “political correctness” and “liberal multiculturalism” involved a certain literalism, as if the prohibition of speech acts that are not based on respecting the other’s difference are “really” what is prohibited, or as if the prohibition is simply real by virtue of being articulated within public culture. So the speech act, “we must support the other’s difference,” is read as hegemonic, is taken literally as a sign not only that it is compulsory to support the other’s difference, but that we are not allowed to refuse this support. The speech act is read as doing what it says. In order to re-consider the effects of such injunctions and prohibitions, I have introduced a new class of what I call non-performatives: speech acts that do not do what they say, that do not bring into effect that which they name. Could the speech work to create an illusion that we do support the other’s difference, which might work by not bringing such support into existence?

My point is double here. First, I agree with the category of the “nonperformatives,” but with a twist: they are performatives, even very effective ones, but different from what they claim to be. There are other theoretical notions we can use to describe this duality, such as the “pragmatic paradox,” the gap between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation,” the “double bind”; there are nonetheless differences between these notions. The “double bind” implies an unbearable subjective tension (the proverbial mother who explicitly enjoins her son to leave home and start an autonomous life, but whose message between the lines is a desperate call for him to stay; the father who tells his son to act autonomously, but if the son effectively does so, he thereby asserts his subordination to his mother, since he is following her injunction), while the “non-performative” works smoothly, enabling you, as it were, to both have your cake and eat it, in other words to assert your superiority over the Other in/through the very gesture of guaranteeing their equality and your respect for their difference.

When I claim that multiculturalism is hegemonic, I claim only that it is hegemonic as ideology, not that it describes the reality of the predominant form of social relations—which is why I criticize it so ferociously. So when Ahmed writes that “multiculturalism is a fantasy which conceals forms of racism, violence and inequality,” I can only add that this goes for every hegemonic ideology. I do not confuse ideological fantasy and fact—they are confused in reality: the reality of what Ahmed calls “civil racism” can only function through (in the guise of) the illusion of anti-racist multiculturalism. And, furthermore, an illusion is never simply an illusion: it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that really sustain it—as is so common amongst politically correct critics on the Left. The counter-argument that the form is never a “mere” form, but involves a dynamic of its own which leaves traces in the materiality of social life, made by Claude Lefort and Jacques Rancière, is fully valid. After all, the “formal freedom” of the bourgeois sets in motion processes of altogether “material” political demands and practices, from trade unions to feminism.

Rancière rightly emphasizes the radical ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the gap between formal democracy, with its discourse of the rights of man and political freedom, and the economic reality of exploitation and domination. This gap between the “appearance” of equality-freedom and the social reality of economic and cultural differences can be interpreted in the standard symptomatic way, namely that the form of universal rights, equality, freedom, and democracy is just a necessary, but illusory expression of its concrete social content, the universe of exploitation and class domination. Or it can be interpreted in the much more subversive sense of a tension in which the “appearance” of égaliberté is precisely not a “mere appearance,” but has a power of its own. This power allows it to set in motion the process of the re-articulation of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progressive “politicization”: why shouldn’t women also vote? Why shouldn’t conditions at the workplace also be of public political concern? And on we could go. If bourgeois freedom is merely formal and does not disturb the true relations of power, why, then, did the Stalinist regime not permit it? What was it so afraid of? In the opposition between form and content, the form possesses an autonomy of its own—one could almost say: a content of its own.

To return to Ahmed: how, then, does multiculturalism as fantasy function?

In such a fantasy, racism is “officially prohibited.” This is true. We are “supposed” to be for racial equality, tolerance and diversity, and we are not “allowed” to express hatred towards others, or to incite racist hatred. I would argue that this prohibition against racism is imaginary, and that it conceals everyday forms of racism, and involves a certain desire for racism. Take Big Brother and the Jade Goody story. You could argue that Big Brother’s exposure of racism functions as evidence that political correctness is hegemonic: you are not allowed to be racist towards others. But that would be a misreading. What was at stake was the desire to locate racism in the body of Jade Goody, who comes to stand for the ignorance of the white working classes, as a way of showing that “we” (Channel 4 and its well-meaning liberal viewers) are not racist like that. When anti-racism becomes an ego ideal you know you are in trouble.

The prohibition of racist speech should not then be taken literally: rather, it is a way of imagining “us” as beyond racism, as being good multicultural subjects who are not like that. By saying racism is over there—“Look, there it is! in the located body of the racist”—other forms of racism remain unnamed, what we could call civil racism. We might even say that the desire for racism is an articulation of a wider unnamed racism that accumulates force by not being named, or by operating under the sign of civility.

The best example one can imagine of this was the presidential election in France in 2002, when Jean-Marie Le Pen made it into the second round: reacting to this racist and chauvinist threat, the entirety of “democratic France” closed ranks behind Jacques Chirac, who was re-elected with an overwhelming majority of 80 percent. No wonder everyone felt good after this display of French anti-racism, no wonder people “loved to hate” Le Pen; by way of clearly locating racism in him and his party, general “civil racism” was rendered invisible.

Similarly, in Slovenia recently, a big problem arose with a Roma family who were camping close to a small town. When a man was killed in the camp, the townspeople started to protest, demanding that the Roma be moved from the camp (which they had occupied illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. Predictably, Slovenian liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism in this isolated small town, though the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, had no contact with the Roma other than meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras. When the TV reporters interviewed the “racists” from the town, it became clear they were a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of minor harassment. It is all too easy to say (as did the liberals) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of centuries of exclusion and mistreatment, that the townspeople should be more receptive to the Roma, and so on and so forth. What nobody was prepared to do vis-à-vis the local “racists” was offer concrete solutions for the very real problems the Roma camp evidently posed for them.

One of the most irritating liberal-tolerant strategies is that of distinguishing between Islam as a great religion of spiritual peace and compassion and its fundamentalist-terrorist abuse—whenever Bush or Netanyahu or Sharon announced a new phase in the War on Terror, they never forgot to include this mantra. (One is almost tempted to counter it by claiming that, as with all religions, Islam is, in itself, a rather stupid and inconsistent construction, and that what makes it truly great are its possible political uses.) This is liberal-tolerant racism at its purest: this kind of “respect” for the Other is the very form of the appearance of its opposite, of patronizing disrespect. The very term “tolerance” is here indicative: one “tolerates” something one does not approve of, but cannot abolish, either because one is not strong enough to do so or because one is benevolent enough to allow the Other to retain its illusions—in this way, a secular liberal “tolerates” religion, a permissive parent “tolerates” his children’s excesses, and so on.

Where I disagree with Ahmed is in her supposition that the underlying injunction of liberal tolerance is monocultural—“Be like us, become British!” On the contrary, I claim that the injunction is one of cultural apartheid: others should not come too close to us, we should protect our “way of life.” The demand “Become like us!” is a superego demand, a demand which counts on the other’s inability to really become like us, so that we can then gleefully “deplore” their failure. (Recall how, in apartheid South Africa, the official regime’s ideology was multiculturalist: apartheid was needed so that all the diverse African tribes would not get drowned in white civilization.) The truly unbearable fact for a multiculturalist liberal is an Other who really does become like us, while retaining their own specific features.⁴⁷

Furthermore, Ahmed passes too easily between forms of racism which should be distinguished. In a kind of spectral analysis, one can identify at least three different modes of contemporary racism. First, there is the old-fashioned unabashed rejection of the Other (despotic, barbarian, orthodox, Muslim, corrupt, oriental . . .) on behalf of authentic values (Western, civilized, democratic, Christian . . .). Then there is the “reflexive” politically correct racism: the multiculturalist perception of, for example, the Balkans as the terrain of ethnic horror and intolerance, of primitive irrational bellicose passions, as opposed to the post-national liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts through rational negotiation, compromise, and mutual respect. Here racism is, as it were, elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on down there. Finally, there is reversed racism, which celebrates the exotic authenticity of the Balkan Other, as in the notion of the Serbs who, in contrast to the inhibited, anemic Western Europeans, still exhibit a prodigious lust for life.

Ahmed further claims that racists themselves present themselves as a “threatened minority” whose free speech must be protected:

[They] use the prohibition as evidence that racism is a minority position which has to be defended against the multicultural hegemony. Racism can then be articulated as a minority position, a refusal of orthodoxy. In this perverse logic, racism can then be embraced as a form of free speech. We have articulated a new discourse of freedom: as the freedom to be offensive, in which racism becomes an offense that restores our freedom: the story goes, we have worried too much about offending the other, we must get beyond this restriction, which sustains the fantasy that “that” was the worry in the first place. Note here that the other, especially the Muslim subject who is represented as easily offended, becomes the one who causes injury, insofar as it is the Muslim other’s “offendability” that is read as restricting our free speech. The offendable subject “gets in the way” of our freedom. So rather than saying racism is prohibited by the liberal multicultural consensus, under the banner of respect for difference, I would argue that racism is what is protected under the banner of free speech through the appearance of being prohibited.

We should here supplement Ahmed’s presentation with different examples which render visible the perhaps unexpected implications of her theoretical propositions. Consider the paradox of Chomsky, when he wrote the preface to a book by Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier, defending the author’s right to publish the book. Chomsky makes it clear that he is personally disgusted by Faurisson’s reasoning; but the problem, as he goes on to say, is that once we start to prohibit certain opinions, who will be next in line? The question is thus: how to counteract the fake liberal prohibition on racism? In the Chomsky mode, or by replacing it with a “true” prohibition?

Another unexpected example: according to Jean-Claude Milner, a unified Europe could only constitute itself on the basis of a progressive erasure of all divisive historical traditions and legitimizations; consequently, a unified Europe will be based on the erasure of history, of historical memory. Recent phenomena such as Holocaust revisionism, or the moral equation of all victims of World War II (Germans suffered under aerial bombardments no less than did the Russians or the British; the fate of Nazi collaborators liquidated by the Russians after the war was comparable to that of victims of the Nazi genocide, etc.), are the logical outcome of this tendency: all specified limits are potentially erased on behalf of abstract suffering and victimization. And this Europe—and this is what Milner is aiming at all along—in its very advocacy of unlimited openness and multicultural tolerance, again needs the figure of the “Jew” as a structural obstacle to this drive to unlimited unification. Contemporary anti-Semitism, however, no longer takes the same form as the old ethnic anti-Semitism; its focus has been displaced from Jews as an ethnic group onto the State of Israel: “in the program of the Europe of the twenty-first century, the State of Israel occupies exactly the position that the name ‘Jew’ occupied in the Europe before the rupture of 39–45.”⁴⁸ In this way, the anti-Semitism of today can present itself as anti-anti-Semitism, full of solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust; the reproach is just that, in our era of the gradual dissolution of all limits, of the fluidification of all traditions, the Jews wanted to build their own clearly delimited nation-state. Here are the very last lines of Milner’s book:

If modernity is defined by the belief in an unlimited realization of dreams, our future is fully outlined. It leads through absolute theoretical and practical anti-Judaism. To follow Lacan beyond what he explicitly stated, the foundations of a new religion are thus posited: anti-Judaism will be the natural religion of the humanity-to-come.⁴⁹

Is Milner, a passionate pro-Zionist, not relying here on the same logic as used by Ahmed? In his view, are Jews not caught in the same paradoxical predicament as, say, British Muslims: they were offered civil rights, the chance to integrate into UK society, but, ungrateful as they are, they persisted in their separate way of life? Plus, again similarly to Muslims, they are perceived as being excessively sensitive, seeing “anti-Semitism” everywhere. Milner’s point is thus that the official anti-anti-Semitism, which issues prohibitions (recall the case of David Irving), is but the form of appearance of a secret anti-Semitism.

Returning to Ahmed’s line of argumentation: the hegemony of multiculturalism is thus not a direct form of hegemony, but a reflexive one:

the hegemonic position is that liberal multiculturalism is the hegemony. This is why the current monocultural political agenda functions as a kind of retrospective defense against multiculturalism. The explicit argument of New Labour is that multiculturalism went “too far”: we gave the other “too much” respect, we celebrated difference “too much,” such that multiculturalism is read as the cause of segregation, riots and even terrorism.

I totally agree with the general principle that “hegemonies are often presented as minority positions, as defenses against what are perceived to be hegemonic positions.” Today’s celebration of “minorities” and “marginals” is the predominant majority position. But we could add a series of other examples, such as the neocons who complain about the terrors of liberal political correctness, presenting themselves as protectors of an endangered minority. Or take those critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it were still a hegemonic position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago, in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations.” Such an insight is still ignored by those leftist cultural theorists who focus their critique on patriarchal ideology and practice. Is it not time to start wondering about the fact that the critique of patriarchal “phallogocentrism” and so forth was elevated into the main question at the very historical moment—ours—when patriarchy definitively lost its hegemonic role, when it was progressively swept away by the market individualism of rights? What becomes of patriarchal family values when a child can sue his parents for neglect and abuse, or when the family and parenthood itself are de jure reduced to a temporary and dissolvable contract between independent individuals? (And, incidentally, Freud was no less aware of this: for him, the decline of the Oedipal mode of socialization was the historical condition of the rise of psychoanalysis.⁵⁰) In other words, the critical claim that patriarchal ideology continues to be the hegemonic ideology is the form of the hegemonic ideology of our times—its function is to enable us to evade the deadlock of the hedonistic permissiveness which is actually hegemonic.

On February 7, 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury told BBC Radio 4’s World at One that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK “seems unavoidable”: the UK has to “face up to the fact” that some of its citizens do not relate to the British legal system, so that adopting parts of Islamic Sharia law would help maintain social cohesion. He stressed that “nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well”; however, an approach to law which simply said “there’s one law for everybody and that’s all there is to be said, and anything else that commands your loyalty or allegiance is completely irrelevant in the processes of the courts—I think that’s a bit of a danger.” Muslims should not have to choose between “the stark alternatives of cultural loyalty or state loyalty.” The issue of whether Catholic adoption agencies should be forced to accept gay parents under equality laws already showed the potential for legal confusion: “The principle that there is only one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western democracy. But I think it is a misunderstanding to suppose this means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society and that the law needs to take some account of that.” People may legally devise their own way to settle a dispute in front of a designated third party as long as both sides agree to the process. Muslim Sharia courts and the Jewish Beth Din come into this category: the country’s main Beth Din at Finchley in north London oversees a wide range of cases including divorce settlements, contractual rows between traders, and tenancy disputes; in a similar way, Muslims should be allowed to choose to have marital disputes or financial matters dealt with in a Sharia court.⁵¹

However, notwithstanding all my sympathies for Rowan Williams, I think the devil hides in the details of his proposal, where the old dilemma of group rights versus individual rights explodes with a vengeance. Williams is careful enough to emphasize two limitations of his proposal: (1) individual Muslims should retain a choice: they should not be forced to obey the Sharia, just permitted to choose it; (2) the Sharia should be implemented only in certain areas, applying norms which are not in conflict with the general law (marital disputes, not amputations of hands for theft . . .). But if we really follow these two principles, then nothing radical really happens: if some group of people wants to regulate its affairs in a way which adds new rules without infringing upon the existing legal order, so what? Things become problematic the moment we move a step further and concede to one particular ethnic-religious community a more substantial role as the untranscendable foundation of one’s existence.

This is what makes the issue of universal compulsory education so controversial: liberals insist that children should be given the right to remain part of their particular community, but on condition that they are given a choice. But for, say, Amish children to really have a free choice of which way of life to choose, either their parents’ life or that of the “English,” they would have to be properly informed on all the options, educated in them, and the only way to do that would be to extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community, in other words, to effectively render them “English.” This also clearly demonstrates the limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil: it is deemed acceptable if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment a woman wears a veil as the result of her free individual choice, the meaning of her act changes completely: it is no longer a sign of her direct substantial belongingness to the Muslim community, but an expression of her idiosyncratic individuality, of her spiritual quest and her protest against the vulgarity of the commodification of sexuality, or else a political gesture of protest against the West. A choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of the choice itself: it is one thing to wear a veil because of one’s immediate immersion in a tradition; it is quite another to refuse to wear a veil; and yet another to wear one not out of a sense of belonging, but as an ethico-political choice. This is why, in our secular societies based on “choice,” people who maintain a substantial religious belonging are in a subordinate position: even if they are allowed to practice their beliefs, these beliefs are “tolerated” as their idiosyncratic personal choice or opinion; the moment they present them publicly as what they really are for them, they are accused of “fundamentalism.” What this means is that the “subject of free choice” (in the Western “tolerant” multicultural sense) can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn away from one’s particular lifeworld, of being cut off from one’s roots.

Western secular law not only promotes laws that are different from those of religious legal systems, it also relies on a different formal mode of how subjects relate to legal regulations. This is what is missed in the simple reduction of the gap that separates liberal universalism from particular substantial ethnic identities to a gap between two particularities (“liberal universalism is an illusion, a mask concealing its own particularity which it imposes onto others as universal”): the universalism of a Western liberal society does not reside in the fact that its values (human rights, etc.) are universal in the sense of holding for all cultures, but in a much more radical sense, for individuals relate to themselves as “universal,” they participate in the universal dimension directly, by-passing their particular social position. The problem with particular laws for particular ethnic or religious groups is that not all people experience themselves as belonging to a particular ethnic or religious community—so that aside from people belonging to such groups, there should be “universal” individuals who just belong to the realm of state law. Apart from apples, pears, and grapes, there should be a place for fruit as such.

The catch here is that of the freedom of choice given to you if you make the right choice: others should be tolerated only if they accept our society. As Ahmed explains:

this involves a reading of the other as abusing our multicultural love: as if to say, we gave our love to you, and you abused our love by living apart from us, so now you must become British. There is a threat implied here: become us, become like us (and support democracy and give up the burqa, so we can see your face and communicate with you like the ordinary people we are) or go away . . . Migrants enter the national consciousness as ungrateful. Ironically then racism becomes attributed to the failure of migrants to receive our love. The monocultural hegemony involves the fantasy that multiculturalism is the hegemony. The best description of today’s hegemony is “liberal monoculturalism” in which common values are read as under threat by the support for the other’s difference, as a form of support that supports the fantasy of the nation as being respectful at the same time as it allows the withdrawal of this so-called respect. The speech act that declares liberal multiculturalism as hegemonic is thus the hegemonic position.

If we formulate the problem in these terms, the alternative appears as follows: either “true” multiculturalism, or else drop the universal claim as such. Both solutions are wrong, for the simple reason that they are not different at all, but ultimately coincide: “true” multiculturalism would be the utopia of a neutral universal legal frame enabling each particular culture to assert its identity. The thing to do is to change the entire field, introducing a totally different Universal, that of an antagonistic struggle which, rather than taking place between particular communities, splits each community from within, so that the “trans-cultural” link between communities is one of a shared struggle.

1 We should here reject the underlying premise of Harry Frankfurt’s critical analysis of bullshit: ideology is precisely what remains when we make the gesture of “cutting the bullshit” (no wonder that, when asked in an interview to name a politician not prone to bullshitting, Frankfurt named John McCain).

2 Sometimes, critique of ideology is just a matter of displacing the accent. Fox News’s Glenn Beck, the infamous Groucho Marx of the populist Right, deserves his reputation for provoking laughter—but not where he intends to do so. The dramaturgy of his typical routine begins with a violently satiric presentation of his opponents and their arguments, accompanied by a grimacing worthy of Jim Carrey; this part, which is supposed to make us laugh, is then followed by a “serious” sentimental moral message. But we should simply postpone our laughter to this concluding moment: it is the stupidity of the final “serious” point which is laughable, not the acerbic satire whose vulgarity should merely embarrass any decent thinking person.

3 It would have been interesting to reread Marcel Proust against the background of this topic of unwritten customs: the problem of his In Search of Lost Time is “How is aristocracy possible in democratic times, once the external marks of hierarchy are abolished?”, and his reply is: through the complex network of unwritten informal habits (gestures, tastes) by means of which those who are “in” recognize “their own,” and identify those who just pretend to belong to the inner circle and are to be ostracized. I owe this reference to Proust to Mladen Dolar.

4 Pascal Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la pénitence, Paris: Grasset 2006, p. 53.

5 Poems of Paul Celan, New York: Persea Books 2002, p. 319.

6 See Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2009.

7 Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press 2003, pp. 22, 207.

8 Ibid., pp. 252–4.

9 “Sexual Energy Ecstasy,” quoted in ibid., p. 253.

10 I rely here on the reflections of Robert Pfaller.

11 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, New York: Penguin Books 2009, p. 62.

12 Jonathan Clements, The First Emperor of China, Chalford: Suton Publishing 2006, p. 16.

13 A truly radical revolutionary subject should drop this reference to Heaven: there is no Heaven, no higher cosmic Law which would justify our acts. So when Mao Zedong said “There is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent,” he thereby made a point which can be precisely rendered in Lacanian terms: the inconsistency of the big Other opens up the space for the act.

14 Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2000, p. 161.

15 Ibid., p. 153.

16 Clements, The First Emperor of China, p. 34.

17 Ibid., p. 77.

18 See the Wikipedia entry for “Legalism (Chinese Philosophy).

19 The Laws of Manu, trans. Wendy Doniger, New Delhi: Penguin Books 2000.

20 Ibid., p. xxxvii (translator’s Introduction).

21 Ibid., p. lv.

22 Shaku Soen, quoted in Brian A. Victoria, Zen at War, New York: Weatherhilt 1998, p. 29.

23 I owe this data to Eric Santner.

24 I am grateful to Shuddhabrata Sengupta, New Delhi, for drawing my attention to this crucial distinction.

25 Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability, New Delhi: Permanent Black 2005, pp. 68

26 Pablo Neruda, Memoirs, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2001, pp. 99–100. I owe this reference to S. Anand, New Delhi.

27 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Quand je mourrai, rien de notre amour n’aura jamais existé,” unpublished manuscript of an intervention at the colloquium Vertigo et la philosophie, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, October 14, 2005.

28 See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, London and New York: Verso 2008, pp. 208–9.

29 A scene in Ernst Lubitch’s wonderful To Be or Not To Be, a short dialogue between the two famous Polish theater actors, Maria Tura and her self-centered husband Josef, playfully subverts this logic. Josef tells his wife: “I gave orders that, in the posters announcing the new play we’re starring in, your name will be at the top, ahead of mine—you deserve it, darling!” She kindly replies: “Thanks, but you really didn’t have to do it, it wasn’t necessary!” His answer is: “I knew you would say that, so I already cancelled the order and put my name back on top . . .”).

There is a well-known joke about cooking which relies on the same logic: “How anyone can make a good soup in one hour: prepare all the ingredients, cut the vegetables, etc., boil the water, put the ingredients into it, cook them at a simmer for half an hour, occasionally stirring; when, after three quarters of an hour, you discover that the soup is tasteless and unpalatable, throw it away, open up a good can of soup and quickly warm it up in a microwave oven. This is how we, humans, make soup.

30 For a more detailed elaboration of this line of thought of Bergson, see Chapter 9 of Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes.

31 Viktor Frankl, Wissen und Gewissen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1966.

32 James was more interested in the contrast of mores between the near past and the present: the mechanics of time travel were foreign to him, which is why he wisely left the novel unfinished.

33 Quoted in Dupuy, “Quand je mourrai . . .”

34 Kant, Perpetual Peace, Appendix II, pp. 62–3.

35 Ibid., Appendix I.

36 Ibid.

37 Even some Lacanians praise democracy as the “institutionalization of the lack in the Other”: the premise of democracy is that no political agent is a priori legitimized to hold power, that the place of power is empty, open to competition. However, by institutionalizing the lack, democracy neutral-izes—normalizes—it, so that the big Other is again here in the guise of the democratic legitimization of our acts—in a democracy, my acts are “covered” as the legitimate acts which carry out the will of the majority.

38 Quoted from Udi Aloni’s outstanding analysis of this case, “Samson the Non-European” (unpublished manuscript).

39 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 36.

40 The standard liberal-conservative argument against Communism is that, since it wants to impose on reality an impossible utopian dream, it necessarily ends in deadly terror. What, however, if one should nonetheless insist on taking the risk of enforcing the Impossible onto reality? Even if, in this way, we do not get what we wanted and/or expected, we nonetheless change the coordinates of what appears as “possible” and give birth to something genuinely new.

41 Jean-Claude Michéa, L’Empire du moindre mal, Paris: Climats 2007, p. 145.

42 The limit of this historicism is discernible in the way it coincides with a ruthless measurement of the past by our own standards. It is easy to imagine one and the same person, on the one hand, warning against imposing our Eurocentric values on other cultures, and, on the other, advocating that classics like Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn novels should be removed from school libraries because of their racially insensitive portrayal of blacks and Native Americans.

43 Michéa, L’Empire du moindre mal, p. 69.

44 For a more detailed analysis of “potlatch,” see Chapter 1 of Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes.

45 Even in Stalinist Marxism, which—in total opposition to Marx—uses the term “ideology” in a positive sense, ideology is opposed to science: first, Marxists analyze society in a neutral scientific way; then, in order to mobilize the masses, they translate their insights into “ideology.” All one has to add here is that this “Marxist science” opposed to ideology is ideology at its purest.

46 Sara Ahmed, “‘Liberal Multiculturalism Is the Hegemony—It’s an Empirical Fact’—A response to Slavoj Žižek” (unpublished manuscript).

47 Furthermore, the liberal-multiculturalist’s opposition to direct racism is not a mere illusion whose truth is the protection of racism: there is a class-coded dimension to it, of which Ahmed is aware, directed against (white) working-class fundamentalism/racism/anti-feminism.

48 Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Paris: Editions Verdier 2003, p. 97.

49 Ibid., p. 126.

50 One feminist strategy (especially in France and Italy) is to admit that the paternal authority is disintegrating, and that late capitalism is approaching a globalized perverse society of “pathological narcissists” caught up in the superego call to enjoy, but to claim that, to counter this lack, a new figure of authority is emerging “from below,” unnoticed by the media—the symbolic authority of the mother which has nothing to do with the traditional patriarchal figure of the Mother; the new mother here does not fit into the existing ideological coordinates. The problem with this solution is that as a rule it amounts to descriptions and generalizations of actual cases of (single and other) mothers who have to take care of children—in short, it reads as a (sometimes almost Catholic-sentimental) description of the heroic and compassionate single parent who keeps the family together when the father is absent. Such an approach does not really confront the key question, that of the Name-of-the-Father. That is to say, the Name-of-the-Father plays a key role in structuring the symbolic space, sustaining prohibitions which constitute and stabilize desires—what happens to this role with the rise of maternal authority? Also, for Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father only functions when recognized—referred to—by the mother; that is, for him, the Name-of-the-Father is a structuring principle for the entire field of sexual difference. Thus one can well imagine a lesbian couple raising children where, although there is no father, the Name-of-the-Father is fully operative. So what happens to sexual difference, as well as to the symbolic function of the father, with the rise of maternal authority?

51 It is interesting to note that the Evo Morales government in Bolivia is pursuing a similar goal: it set itself the task of exploring the possibilities of combining the legal order of a modern state with older indigenous practices of resolving conflictual situations.