Читать книгу Living in the End Times - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 19

Alan Weisman’s book The World Without Us offers a vision of what would happen if humanity (and only humanity) were suddenly to disappear from the earth—natural diversity would bloom again, with nature gradually colonizing human artefacts. We, the humans, are here reduced to a pure disembodied gaze observing our own absence. As Lacan pointed out, this is the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence—like the fantasy of witnessing the act of one’s own conception, parental copulation, or the act of witnessing one’s own burial, like Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn. “The world without us” is thus fantasy at its purest: witnessing the Earth itself regaining its pre-castrated state of innocence, before we humans spoiled it in our hubris. The irony is that the most obvious example is the catastrophe at Chernobyl: flourishing nature has taken over the disintegrating debris of the nearby city of Pripyat, which had to be abandoned. A good counterpoint to such fantasizing, which relies on the notion of Nature as a balanced and harmonious cycle derailed by human intervention, is the thesis of an environmental scientist that, while one cannot be sure of the ultimate result of humanity’s interventions in the geosphere, one thing is certain: if humanity were to stop its immense industrial activity abruptly and let nature retake its balanced course, the result would be total breakdown, an unimaginable catastrophe. “Nature” on Earth is already “adapted” to human intervention to such an extent—human “pollution” being already deeply implicated in the shaky and fragile equilibrium of “natural” reproduction on Earth—that its cessation would cause a cataclysmic imbalance.

We find exactly the same structure at the very heart of utopia. In “Frenzy,” the aforementioned novella from Her Body Knows, David Grossman does for jealousy in literature what Luis Buñuel did for it in cinema with his El—he produces a masterpiece displaying the basic fantasmatic coordinates of the notion. In jealousy, the subject creates/imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded. The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from anti-Semitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews to Christian fundamentalists’ fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. As Klaus Theweleit has pointed out, it is all too easy to read such phenomena as mere “projections”: jealousy can be quite real and well-founded, other people can and often do have a much more intense sexual life than the jealous subject—a fact which, as Lacan remarked, does not make jealousy any less pathological. And does this also not tell us something about the position of the spectator in cinema? Is she not, by definition, a jealous subject, excluding herself from the utopia observed on screen? We find this stance even where we would never expect it. Gérard Wajcman begins his memorable essay on “the animals that treat us badly” by recounting his experience of a trip to an African wilderness park:

A whole team of tourists traverses the savannah back and forth, arrives on the scene with an engine backfiring and a dust cloud looming to plant themselves twenty meters from three big bad lions . . . and nothing. As if we didn’t exist. Such was my definitive experience with the animal world. A thorough disenchantment. An encounter of the zero type. We do not share animal space. We invade their territory or we cross over it, but we never meet them. The zoo, the circus (less and less), state parks (more and more), hunting grounds, television channels consecrated to animals, protection societies, nature museums, animal houses of every kind, we multiply the places, the occasions, and the modes of encounter. Humanity passes its time watching the animals. We’ve invented all kinds of devices expressly for the purpose. We never grow tired of it. No doubt they represent for us a perfect world. Something strange, different from our own, from our uncertain screwed up chaotic mess of a world. All of which makes the animal world look that much better. Sometimes it seems so foreign that we stand before their perfection and we are stupefied and stricken mute, and despite our sincere wishes, we wonder whether we could ever be like them, ever become so marvelous a society as have the ants and the penguins, where everyone has his place, where everyone is in his place, and where everyone knows and does exactly as he must so that everything can keep on in its proper place, so that society can perpetuate itself, unchanged, indefinitely the same and infinitely perfect. We’ve had a hard time of it, finding our places. After the disasters of the 20th century the animal societies seem to have become the ideal.¹

The fact that the animals ignore the intruding tourists is crucial—it points towards a double movement of de-realization that characterizes utopian fantasies: the scene presented is a fantasy (even if it “really happened,” as is the case here—what makes it into a fantasy is the libidinal investment that determines its meaning); we (the participants) de-realize ourselves, reducing ourselves to a pure de-substantialized gaze ignored by the objects of the gaze—as if we are not part of the reality we observe (despite disturbing the wildlife park’s rhythm with our vehicles), but rather a spectral presence unseen by living beings—we are reduced to spectral entities observing “the world without us.” As external observers of the paradise barred to us, we assume the same position as the unfortunate Stella Dallas in the final scene of the Hollywood melodrama of the same name: from outside the big house where the ceremony is in progress, Stella watches through the window the marriage of her daughter to her rich suitor—the paradise of a happy rich family from which she is excluded.

This utopia accounts for two further phenomena of contemporary culture: first, the popularity of Darwinist reductions of human societies to animal ones, with their explanations of human achievements in terms of evolutionary adaptation. Pop-scientific texts abound in journals and reviews reporting on how scientists have succeeded in explaining apparently crazy or useless human behavior as grounded in adaptive strategies. (Why such useless luxury? To impress the potential sexual partner with our ability to afford such excess, and so on and so forth.) In this way, the scientists suggest that

we might yet have a chance to orient ourselves, to be led over and above our animality. If the subject has a nasty habit of fooling himself all the time, we must bear in mind that nature is never mistaken. Salvation will come in our being animal—body, genes, neurons, and all the rest of it. So whispers the cognitivist in the politicians’ ears to help them find their way. Follow the body, more monkey business!²

Such “reports” thus represent dreams of how we might counteract the growing dysfunctionalization and reflexivity of our “postmodern”n societies, in which relying on inherited traditions to provide models for behavior becomes increasingly untenable: animals, by contrast, do not need any coaching, they just do it . . .

Second, we can also explain why we obviously find it so pleasurable to watch endless animal documentaries on specialized channels (Nature, Animal Kingdom, National Geographic): they provide a glimpse into a utopian world where no language or training are needed, in other words, into a “harmonious society” (as they put it today in China) in which everyone spontaneously knows his or her role:

Man is a denatured animal. We are animals sick with language. And how sometimes we long for a cure. But just shutting up won’t do it. You can’t just wish your way into animality. So it is then, as a matter of consolation, that we watch the animal channels and marvel at a world untamed by language. The animals get us to hear a voice of pure silence. Nostalgia for the fish life. Humanity seems to have been hit by the [Jacques] Cousteau syndrome.³

This is why the case of National Geographic (the journal even more than the TV channel) is so interesting: although it combines reports on both nature and human societies, its trick essentially is to treat a human society (whether a tribe in the middle of the Sahara or a small town in the USA) as an animal community in which things somehow work, where “everyone has his place, where everyone is in his place, and where everyone knows and does exactly as he must so that everything can keep on in its proper place.” And, since the basic inconsistency constitutive of human being as such is the discord (the “impossibility”) of the sexual relationship, no wonder that one of the key elements in our fascination with the animal kingdom is represented by its perfectly regulated mating rituals—animals do not need to worry themselves with all the complex fantasies and stimulants needed to sustain sexual lust, they are able to “have sex ahistorically,” as Wajcman puts it in a wonderful phrase:

Between men and women it’s been pretty messy, the big disorder. Not necessarily unpleasant of course; it’s not war, it’s not some kind of permanent fuck-up, it’s rather a kind of mixing up and clearing up . . . No set rule, no rhyme or reason. Not at all as it is with animals, where everybody seems to know perfectly well how to do it. How, and with whom, and when . . . The animal world has realized the human dream of sex without a back-story, sex without (hi)story precisely when we humans have gone and invented literature to tell ourselves love stories in which nothing ever happens but a (hi)story . . . We’d be happy to put down our books and get straight to the point of what exactly it is to have sex ahistorically.⁴

Examples like this indicate an approach to utopias which leaves behind the usual focus on content (on the structure of society proposed in a utopian vision). Perhaps it is time to step back from the fascination with content and reflect on the subjective position from which such content appears as utopian. On account of its temporal loop, the fantasmatic narrative always involves an impossible gaze, the gaze by means of which the subject is already present at the scene of its own absence. When the subject directly identifies its own gaze with the objet a, the paradoxical implication of this identification is that the objet a disappears from the field of vision. This brings us to the core of a Lacanian notion of utopia: a vision of desire functioning without an objet a and its twists and loops. It is utopian not only to think that one can reach full, unencumbered “incestuous” enjoyment; for it is no less utopian to think that one can renounce enjoyment without this renunciation generating its own surplus-enjoyment.

However, the way to avoid this utopian reduction of the subject to the impossible gaze witnessing an alternate reality from which it is absent is not to abandon the topos of an alternate reality as such. Recall Walter Benjamin’s notion of revolution as redemption-through-repetition of the past: apropos the French Revolution, the task of a genuine Marxist historiography is not to describe the events the way they really were (and to explain how these events generated the ideological illusions that accompanied them); the task is rather to unearth the hidden potentiality (the utopian emancipatory potential) which was betrayed in the actuality of revolution and in its final outcome (the rise of utilitarian market capitalism). Marx’s point is not primarily to make fun of the Jacobins’ revolutionary enthusiasm, to show how their high-flown emancipatory rhetoric was just a means used by the historical “cunning of reason” to establish the vulgar reality of commercial capitalism; it is, rather, to explain how these radical-emancipatory potentials continue to “insist” as types of historical specters which haunt the revolutionary memory, demanding their enactment, such that the later proletarian revolution should also redeem (or put to rest) these ghosts of the past. These alternate versions of the past persisting in a spectral form constitute the ontological “openness” of the historical process, as was—again—clear to Chesterton:

The things that might have been are not even present to the imagination. If somebody says that the world would now be better if Napoleon had never fallen, but had established his Imperial dynasty, people have to adjust their minds with a jerk. The very notion is new to them. Yet it would have prevented the Prussian reaction; saved equality and enlightenment without a mortal quarrel with religion; unified Europeans and perhaps avoided the Parliamentary corruption and the Fascist and Bolshevist revenges. But in this age of free-thinkers, men’s minds are not really free to think such a thought.

What I complain of is that those who accept the verdict of fate in this way accept it without knowing why. By a quaint paradox, those who thus assume that history always took the right turning are generally the very people who do not believe there was any special providence to guide it. The very rationalists who jeer at the trial by combat, in the old feudal ordeal, do in fact accept a trial by combat as deciding all human history.⁵

Why, then, is the burgeoning genre of “What If?” histories hegemonized by conservative historians? The typical Introduction to such a volume begins with an attack on Marxists who allegedly believe in historical determinism. The editors’ conservative sympathies become clear as soon as one sees the contents pages of the leading What-If volumes: the favored topics oscillate between the “major premise”—how much better history would have been if a revolutionary or “radical” event had been avoided (if King Charles had won the civil war against Parliament; if the English Crown had won the war of independence against the American colonies; if the Confederacy had won the US civil war, aided by Great Britain; if Germany had won the Great War; if Lenin had been assassinated at the Finland Station . . .)—and the “minor premise”—how much worse history would have been if history had taken a more “progressive” twist (if Thatcher had been killed in the Brighton IRA bombing in 1984; if Gore had won instead of Bush and so had been president on 9/11, etc.). So what should the Marxist’s answer be here? Definitely not to rehash the tiresome old ratiocinations of Georgi Plekhanov on the “role of the individual in history” (the logic of “even if there had been no Napoleon another individual would have played a similar role, since the deeper historical necessity called for a passage to Bonapartism”). One should rather question the very premise that Marxists (and Leftists in general) are dumb determinists opposed to entertaining such alternative scenarios.

The first thing to note is that the What-If histories are part of a more general ideological trend, of a perception of life that explodes the form of the linear, centered narrative and renders it as a multiform flow. Up to the domain of the “hard” sciences (quantum physics and its Multiple-Reality interpretation; neo-Darwinism, and so on), we seem to be haunted by the chanciness of life and alternate versions of reality—as Stephen Jay Gould, a Marxist biologist if ever there was one, bluntly put it: “Wind back the film of life and play it again. The history of evolution will be totally different.” These views of our reality as being one possible, and often even not the most probable, outcome of an “open” situation, this notion that other possible outcomes are not simply cancelled but continue to haunt us as specters of what might have been, conferring on our “true” reality the status of extreme fragility and contingency, is by no means foreign to Marxism—indeed, it is on such perceptions that the felt urgency of the revolutionary act often depends.

Since the non-occurrence of the October Revolution is a favored topic among conservative What-If historians, let us look at how Lenin himself related to it: he was as far as imaginable from any kind of reliance on “historical necessity” (on the contrary, it was his Menshevik opponents who emphasized that one could not skip over the succession of stages prescribed by historical determinism: first bourgeois-democratic, then proletarian revolution . . .). When, in his “April Theses” from 1917, Lenin discerned the Augenblick, the unique chance for revolution, his proposals were met with stupor or contempt by a large majority of his own party colleagues. Within the Bolshevik Party, no prominent leader supported his call for revolution, and Pravda took the extraordinary step of dissociating the party, and the editorial board as a whole, from Lenin’s “Theses”—far from being an opportunist flattering and exploiting the prevailing mood in the party, Lenin’s views were highly idiosyncratic. Bogdanov characterized the “April Theses” as “the delirium of a madman,” and Nadezhda Krupskaya herself concluded: “I am afraid it looks as if Lenin has gone crazy.” Lenin immediately perceived the revolutionary chance which was the result of unique contingent circumstances: if the moment was not seized, the chance for the revolution would be forfeited, perhaps for decades. So we have here Lenin himself entertaining an alternative scenario: “What if we do not act now?”—and it was precisely his awareness of the catastrophic consequences of not acting that pushed him to act.

But there is a much deeper commitment to alternative histories in a radical Marxist view: it brings the What-If logic to its self-reflexive reversal. For a radical Marxist, the actual history that we live is itself a kind of realized alternative history, the reality we have to live in because, in the past, we failed to seize the moment and act. Military historians have demonstrated that the Confederacy lost the battle at Gettysburg because General Lee made a series of mistakes that were totally uncharacteristic: “Gettysburg was the one battle, fought by Lee, that reads like fiction. In other words, if ever there was a battle where Lee did not behave like Lee, it was there in southern Pennsylvania.”⁶ For each of the wrong moves, one can play the game of “What would Lee have done in that situation?”—in other words, it was as if, in the battle of Gettysburg, the alternate history actualized itself. In his less well-known Everlasting Man, Chesterton makes a wonderful mental experiment along these lines, in imagining the monster that man might have seemed at first to the merely natural animals around him:

The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from another land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need of averting his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibility which creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique.⁷

This is what Chesterton called “thinking backwards”: we have to leap back in time, before the fateful decisions were made or before the accidents occurred that generated the state which now seems normal to us, and the way to do so, to render palpable this open moment of decision, is to imagine how, at that point, history might have taken a different turn.

However, this does not mean that, in a historical repetition in the radical Benjaminian sense, we simply go back in time to the moment of decision and, this time, make the right choice. The lesson of repetition is rather that our first choice was necessarily the wrong one, and for a very precise reason: the “right choice” is only possible the second time, after the wrong one; that is, it is only the first wrong choice which literally creates the conditions for the right choice. The idea that we might already have made the right choice the first time, and that we just accidentally blew the chance, is a retroactive illusion. To clarify this point, let us take an example from recent historiography.

Bryan Ward-Perkins’s The Fall of Rome describes the gradual disintegration of the Roman empire from the fourth to seventh centuries CE, emphasizing the economic and civilizatory regression, catastrophe even, that this disintegration brought about: in a short period, the majority of imperial lands fell into a state even worse than they were prior to the Roman occupation.⁸ The book’s explicit polemical targets are recent “revisionist” attempts to portray late Antiquity not as a traumatic regression to the early medieval “Dark Ages,” but as a (mostly peaceful) gradual transformation of the united Roman empire into multiple new states, a process in which ethnic groups, freed from brutal Roman domination, matured into tolerant coexistence. Instead of collapse, one could even say that progress was taking place . . . Against this new doxa, Ward-Perkins convincingly demonstrates the breathtaking decline of economic and social complexity (the decline in literacy, the virtual disappearance of the complex network of trade routes and thus of the large-scale production of everyday objects, etc.). His emphasis on the economy and daily life is a welcome correction to Foucauldian analyses focusing on spiritual shifts in late Antiquity, describing the rise of new forms of subjectivity. Ward-Perkins’s book confirms two old insights: first, that all history is a history of the present; second, that our understanding of actual history always implies a (hidden or not) reference to alternate history—what “really happened” is perceived against the background of what might have happened, and this alternate possibility is offered as the path we should follow today. The two insights are thus closely linked—as we have said, Walter Benjamin had already conceptualized social revolution in this way (it will redeem the past by repeating past revolutionary efforts, finally actualizing their missed potentials). Here, however, we get a more conservative case. The “lesson for today” is directly spelled out in the book’s last paragraph:

there is a real danger for the present day in a vision of the past that explicitly sets out to eliminate all crisis and all decline. The end of the Roman West witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilization, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times. Romans before the fall were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.⁹

Echoes of the notion of a developed secular West threatened by new fundamentalisms are unmistakable here—let us not repeat the Roman mistake and minimize the mortal danger the new barbarians pose, otherwise we will find ourselves in a new Dark Ages . . . But what is even more interesting for a critico-ideological analysis is the alternate history that sustains this vision: it is the possibility that the Ostrogoths, who ruled Rome from the mid-fifth to the mid-sixth century, might have remained in power, defeating the invading Byzantine army:

if events had fallen out differently, it is even possible to envisage a resurgent western empire under a successful Germanic dynasty. Theodoric the Ostrogoth ruled Italy and adjacent parts of the Danubian provinces and Balkans from 493; from 511 he also effectively controlled the Visigothic kingdom in Spain and many of the former Visigothic territories in Southern Gaul, where he reinstated the traditional Roman office of “Praetorian Prefect for the Gauls” based in Arles. This looks like the beginnings of a revived western empire, under Germanic kings. As things turned out, all this was brought to an end by Justinian’s invasion of Italy in 535. But, given better luck, later Ostrogothic kings might have been able to expand on this early success; and—who knows?—might have revived the imperial title in the West centuries before Charlemagne in 800.¹⁰

Among historians, Peter Heather has developed this hypothesis most forcefully.¹¹ There is also an alternate history novel—Lest Darkness Fall (1941) by L. Sprague de Camp—which imagines this version: a modern archaeologist is transported through time to Ostrogothic Italy, helps to stabilize it after Theodoric’s death, and averts its conquest by Justinian. The underlying vision here is one of the productive synthesis of Roman civilization and Gothic strength and vitality: the Goths, who saw themselves as protectors of Roman civilization, would have been able to pull the dying empire out of its inertia and invest it with new vigor. In this way, there would have been no Dark Ages, and we would have passed directly from the Roman empire to Charlemagne, and so to a strong and civilized Europe.

But there are dark ideological investments at work here, investments which found expression in Felix Dahn’s novel Struggle for Rome, from 1876. (Returning to Germany, Robert Siodmak made a big historical spectacle out of this novel in 1968, with Orson Welles as Justinian—it was Siodmak’s last film.)¹² Dahn was a honorary member of the “Germania” association, a nationalistic and anti-Semitic organization, and his works contributed to the ideological foundation of National Socialism. His story begins with the death of Theodoric the Great, when his successors try to maintain his legacy: an independent Ostrogothic kingdom. They are opposed by the Byzantine empire, ruled by the mighty emperor Justinian who tries to restore the Roman empire to its former greatness by capturing the Italian peninsula. Witiges, Totila, and Teia, who—in that order—succeed Theodoric as kings, endeavor to defend their kingdom with the help of Theodoric’s faithful armorer Hildebrand. Meanwhile, Cethegus, a (fictional) Roman prefect who represents the majority of Rome’s population, has his own agenda to rebuild the empire: he too tries to get rid of the Goths but is at the same time determined to keep the Byzantines out of Italy. In the end, the Byzantines win and reclaim Italy, while Cethegus dies in a duel with the last Gothic king Teia. The struggle for Rome ends at a battle near Mount Vesuvius where the Ostrogoths make their last stand defending a narrow pass (a scene reminiscent of Thermopylae); once defeated, they withdraw to the island of Thule where their roots lay . . . The main motif of the book is stated in the poem which comments on the departing Ostrogoths: “Make way, you people, for our stride. / We are the last of the Goths. / We do not carry a crown with us, / We carry but a corpse.” This corpse belongs to eia, a dark, dejected man, who envisions the demise of the kingdom; even though he knows this demise to be predestined, he adopts the Germanic stance of confronting fate with courage in order to be well remembered (it is impossible to miss the echoes of darkly brooding Hagen from Nibelungs in the figure of Teia).

Although Ward-Perkins is far from peddling any such morbid heroic-fatalistic fascination, he nonetheless presents a series of theses which (even if historically accurate, as they mostly are) sustain the contemporary vision of the need to defend the secular and civilized West against the barbarian Third World onslaught, and warns against harboring any illusions about their peaceful integration. For example, one cannot but be struck by Ward-Perkins’s repeated insistence that the Roman West fell for strictly external reasons (the barbarian invasions), not because of its inherent antagonisms and weaknesses—a thesis which can be given many versions, from a Nietzschean blaming of Christianity as degenerate to the Marxist emphasis on how the gradual decline of free farmer-soldiers and their replacement by mercenary armies in the long term destabilized the empire (the Gracchus brothers, Marx’s personal heroes, can thus be seen as the last defenders of the true strength of Rome). The recent shift in the popular appreciation of Rome in the space of only two decades has resulted from similar contemporary reverberations: while in the 1990s, with the end of the Cold War and the emergence of the United States as the sole global superpower, Rome was celebrated as a mighty empire with a strong army, the passage to a more multi-centric world (to which President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy gave no small aid) has since generated an obsession with the Roman empire in decline.

The topic of late Antiquity is full of similar ideological traps, like the naïve celebration of Aristotelian secular-empirical reasoning, violently suppressed in the Dark Ages when faith treated intellectual curiosity as dangerous, but which then returns, although still formally subordinated to religion, with Thomas Aquinas.¹³ Aristotelian Reason, however, is organic-teleological, in clear contrast to the radical contingency which characterizes the modern scientific view. No wonder today’s Catholic Church attacks Darwinism as “irrational” on behalf of the Aristotelian notion of Reason: the “reason” of which the Pope speaks is a Reason for which Darwin’s theory of evolution (and, indeed, modern science itself, within which the assertion of the ultimate contingency of the universe, marking its break with Aristotelian teleology, is a constitutive axiom) is “irrational.” The “reason” of which the Pope speaks is a pre-modern teleological Reason, the view of the universe as a harmonious Whole in which everything serves a higher purpose. Which is why, paradoxically, the Pope’s remarks obfuscate the key role of Christian theology in the birth of modern science: what paved the way for modern science was precisely the “voluntarist” idea—elaborated by, among others, Duns Scotus and Descartes—that God is not bound by any eternal rational truths. While the view of scientific discourse as involving a pure description of facticity is illusory, the paradox resides in the coincidence of bare facticity and radical voluntarism: facticity can be sustained as meaningless, as something that “just is as it is,” only if it is secretly sustained by an arbitrary divine will. This is why Descartes is the founding figure of modern science, precisely when he makes even the most elementary mathematical facts like 2 + 2 = 4 dependent on arbitrary divine will: two plus two is four because God willed it so, with no hidden or obscure chain of reasons behind it. Even in mathematics, this unconditional voluntarism is discernible in its axiomatic character: one begins by arbitrarily positing a series of axioms, out of which everything else is then supposed to follow. The paradox is thus that it was the Christian Dark Ages which created the conditions for the specific rationality of modern science as opposed to the science of the Ancients. The lesson is thus clear: the utopia of a direct passage from late Rome to the “high” Middle Ages is a false one, ignoring the necessity of the Fall into the early “dark” Middle Ages which alone created the conditions for modern rationality.

Does this fact, however, justify the Dark Ages? In theological terms, we stumble here upon the deadlock central to religion: how to deal with the Fall? Why does the Fall have to precede Salvation? The most radical and consistently perverse answer was provided by Nicolas Malebranche, the great Cartesian Catholic, who was excommunicated after his death and whose books were destroyed on account of his very excessive orthodoxy—Lacan probably had figures like Malebranche in his mind when he claimed that theologians are the only true atheists. In the best Pascalian tradition, Malebranche laid his cards on the table and “revealed the secret” (the perverse core) of Christianity; his Christology is based on an original proto-Hegelian answer to the question “Why did God create the world?”—so that He could bask in the glory of being celebrated by His creation. God wanted recognition, and He knew that, in order to gain that recognition, He would need another subject to recognize Him; so He created the world out of pure selfish vanity. Consequently, it was not that Christ came down to Earth in order to deliver people from sin, from the legacy of Adam’s Fall; on the contrary, Adam had to fall in order to enable Christ to come down to earth and dispense salvation. Here Malebranche applies to God Himself the “psychological” insight according to which the saintly figure who sacrifices himself for the benefit of others, to deliver them from their misery, secretly wants these others to suffer so that he will be able to help them—like the proverbial husband who works all day to support his poor crippled wife, yet would probably abandon her were she to regain her health and become a successful career woman. It is much more satisfying to sacrifice oneself for the poor victim than to enable the other to overcome their victim status and perhaps become even more successful than ourselves.

Malebranche pushes this parallel to its conclusion, to the horror of the Jesuits who organized his excommunication: in the same way that the saintly person uses the suffering of others to bring about his own narcissistic satisfaction, God also ultimately loves only Himself, and merely uses man to promulgate His own glory. From this reversal, Malebranche drew a consequence worthy of Lacan’s reversal of Dostoevsky (“If God doesn’t exist, then nothing is permitted.”): it is not true that, if Christ had not come to earth to deliver humanity, everyone would have been lost—quite the contrary, nobody would have been lost, that is, every human being had to fall so that Christ could come and deliver some of them. Malebranche’s conclusion is here shattering: since the death of Christ is a key step in realizing the goal of creation, at no time was God (the Father) happier than when He was observing His son suffering and dying on the Cross.

The only way to truly avoid this perversion, not just to obfuscate it, is to fully accept the Fall as the starting point which creates the conditions of Salvation: there is no state previous to the Fall from which we fell, the Fall itself creates that from which it is a Fall—or, in theological terms, God is not the Beginning. If this sounds like yet another typical Hegelian dialectical tangle, then we should disentangle it by drawing a line of separation between the true Hegelian dialectical process and its caricature. In the caricature, we have God (or an inner Essence) externalizing itself in the domain of contingent appearances, and then gradually re-appropriating its alienated content, recognizing itself in its Otherness—“we must first lose God in order to find Him,” we must fall in order to be saved. Such a position opens up the space for the justification of Evil: if, as agents of historical Reason, we know that Evil is just a necessary detour on the path towards the final triumph of the Good, then, of course, we are justified in engaging in Evil as the means to achieve the Good. In true Hegelian spirit, however, we should insist that such a justification is always and a priori retroactive: there is no Reason in History whose divine plan can justify Evil; the Good that may come out of Evil is its contingent by-product. We may say that the ultimate result of Nazi Germany and its defeat was the institution of much higher ethical standards of human rights and international justice; but to claim that this result in any sense “justifies” Nazism would be an obscenity. Only in this way can we truly avoid the perverse consequences of religious fundamentalism. Let us take a look at such fundamentalism at its darkest: the strange case of Doctor Radovan Karadžić.