Читать книгу Living in the End Times - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 21

This, however, is only one side of the story—religion being, by definition, a multifarious phenomenon which offers itself for different uses. Recently, in the UK, an atheist group displayed posters with the message: “There is no God, so don’t worry and enjoy life!” In response, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church started a counter-campaign with posters saying: “There is a God, so don’t worry and enjoy life!” The interesting feature is how both propositions seem to be in some way convincing: if there is no God, we are free to do what we want, so let us enjoy life; if there is a God, he will take care of things in his benevolent omnipotence, so we don’t have to worry and can enjoy life. This complementarity demonstrates that there is something wrong with both statements: they both share the same secret premise: “We can act as if there is no God and be happy, because we can trust the good God (or fate, or . . .) to watch over us and protect us!” The obvious counter-proposition to both statements and their underlying premise is: “Whether there is a God or not, life is shit, so one cannot really enjoy it!” This is why we can easily imagine the following (no less convincing) alternative propositions: “There is no God, so everything depends on us and we should worry all the time!” and “There is a God who watches what we are doing all the time, so we should be anxious and worry continuously!”

The question we confront here is how, precisely, to distinguish the fundamentalist conflation of theology and politics from its emancipatory version? Both enact a unity of love and violence, justifying violence with love: killing can be done out of love. Perhaps, we should take love as our starting point—not intimate-erotic love, but that political love whose Christian name is agape. “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.” This is how, in Wuthering Heights, Cathy characterizes her relation to Heathcliff—and provides a succinct ontological definition of unconditional erotic love. There is an unmistakable dimension of terror at work here—think of the ecstatic trance of Tristan and Isolde, ready to obliterate their entire social reality in their immersion into the Night of deadly jouissance. Which is why the proper dialectic of erotic love consists in the tension between contraction and expansion, between erotic self-immersion and the slow work of creating a social space marked by the couple’s love (children, common projects, etc.). Agape functions in a wholly different way—how? It may appear that, in contrast to eros, with its violent subtraction from collective space, the love for a collective succeeds in doing away with the excess of terrorizing violence: does agape not imply an emphatic yes to the beloved collective and ultimately to all humanity, or even—as in Buddhism—to the entire domain of (suffering) life? The object here is loved unconditionally, not on account of a selection of its qualities but in all its imperfections and weaknesses.

A first counter-argument goes by way of the reply to a simple question: which political regimes in the twentieth century legitimized their power by invoking the people’s love for their leader? The so-called “totalitarian” ones. Today, it is only and precisely the North Korean regime which continually invokes the infinite love of the Korean people for Kim Il Sung and Kim Yong Il and, vice versa, the radiating love of the Leader for his people, expressed in continuous acts of grace. Kim Yong Il wrote a short poem along these lines: “In the same way that a sunflower can only thrive if it is turned towards the sun, the Korean people can only thrive if their eyes are turned upwards towards their Leader”—i.e., himself . . . Terror and mercy are thus closely linked; they are effectively the front and the back of the same power structure: only a power which asserts its full terroristic right and capacity to destroy anything and anyone it wants can symmetrically universalize mercy—since this power could have destroyed everyone, those who survive do so thanks to the mercy of those in power. In other words, the very fact that we, the subjects of power, are alive is proof of the power’s infinite mercy. This is why the more “terroristic” a regime is, the more its leaders are praised for their infinite love, goodness, and mercy. Adorno was right to emphasize that, in politics, love is invoked precisely when another (democratic) legitimization is lacking: loving a leader means you love him for what he is, not for what he does.

So how about the next candidate for love as a political category—Oriental spirituality (Buddhism) with its more “gentle,” balanced, holistic, ecological approach. Over the 150 years of Japan’s rapid industrialization and militarization, with its ethics of discipline and self-sacrifice, the process was supported by the majority of Zen thinkers (who, today, knows that D. T. Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the America of the 1960s, supported in his youth the spirit of total discipline and militaristic expansion in the Japan of the 1930s?). There is no contradiction here, no manipulative perversion of authentic compassionate insight: the attitude of total immersion into the self-less “now” of instant enlightenment—in which all reflexive distance is lost and “I am what I do,” as C. S. Lewis put it; in which absolute discipline coincides with total spontaneity—perfectly legitimizes one’s subordination to the militaristic social machine.

What this means is that the all-encompassing compassion of Buddhism (or Hinduism, for that matter) has to be opposed to Christianity’s intolerant, violent love. The Buddhist stance is ultimately that of Indifference, the quenching of all passions which strive to establish differences, while Christian love is a violent passion to introduce difference, a gap in the order of being, in order to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of an other. Love is violence not (only) in the vulgar sense of the Balkan proverb: “If he doesn’t beat me, he doesn’t love me!”; violence is already the love choice as such, which tears its object out of its context, elevating it to the Thing. In Montenegrin folklore, the origin of Evil is a beautiful woman: she causes the men around her to lose their balance, she literally destabilizes the universe, colors all things with a tone of partiality.

In order to properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred, and indifference, one has to rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception which introduces existence. The truth of the universal proposition “Man is mortal” does not imply the existence of even one man, while the “less strong” proposition “There is at least one man who exists (i.e., some men exist)” implies their existence. Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from a universal proposition (which defines the content of a notion) to existence only through a proposition stating the existence, not of the singular element of the universal genus which exists, but of at least one which is an exception to the universality in question. What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition “I love you all” acquires the level of actual existence only if “There is at least one whom I hate”—a thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity has always led to brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is the “truth” of universal love, in contrast to true love which can only emerge against the background not of universal hatred, but of universal indifference: I am indifferent towards All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love you, the unique individual who stands out against this indifferent background. Love and hatred are thus not symmetrical: love emerges out of universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love. In short, we are dealing here again with the formulae of sexuation: “I do not love you all” is the only foundation of “There is nobody that I do not love,” while “I love you all” necessarily relies on “I really hate some of you.” “But I love you all!”—this is how Erich Mielke, the Secret Police boss of the GDR, defended himself; his universal love was obviously grounded in its constitutive exception, the hatred of the enemies of socialism . . .

But, again, how to distinguish this violence from the violence implied by authentic Christian love, the tremendous violence which dwells at the very heart of the Christian notion of love for one’s neighbour, the violence which finds direct expression in a number of Christ’s most disturbing statements? Here are the main versions:

Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household. He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me. And he who does not take his cross and follow after Me is not worthy of Me. He who has found his life will lose it, and he who has lost his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 10:34–9)

I have come to cast fire upon the earth; and how I wish it were already kindled! But I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished! Do you suppose that I came to grant peace on earth? I tell you, no, but rather division; for from now on five members in one household will be divided, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law. (Luke 12:49–53)

If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple. (Luke 14:26)

Perhaps people think that I have come to cast peace upon the world. They do not know that I have come to cast conflicts upon the earth: fire, sword, war. For there will be five in a house: there’ll be three against two and two against three, father against son and son against father, and they will stand alone. (Thomas 16, non-canonical)

How not to recognize “divine violence” here, where it is openly proclaimed, in Jesus’ “I bring not peace, but a sword”? How are we to read these statements? Christian ideology resorts to five strategies to deal with them, rather than heroically accepting the message imposed by a literal reading and claiming that Christ himself advocates violence to crush his enemies. The first two readings are outright denials of the problem: one gets rid of it by disputing the standard translation, suggesting either a modest correction (changing “those who do not hate their father, etc.” into “those who do not prefer me to their father,” so that we get just a graduation of love enjoined by a jealous god—love your father, but love me more . . .), or a more radical correction, as in the Book of Kells, the Celtic illuminated manuscript copy of the Gospels, which erroneously uses the word “gaudium” (“joy”) rather than “gladium” (“sword”), rendering the verse in translation: “I came not [only] to bring peace, but joy.” (One is tempted to read this mistranslation together with the correct translation and thus compose the full message as: “I come not to bring peace, but the joy of the sword, of struggle.”) What then follows are three more sophisticated strategies, the first (arguably the most disgusting and politically dangerous) claiming that Christ’s message “I bring a sword” has to be read together with its apparent opposite, the “pacifist” warning, “all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword” (Matthew 26:52): the sword Christ is talking about when he announces that he “brings a sword” is the second sword in “those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”—in other words, it is others who first use the sword, or attack Christians, and Christians have the full right to defend themselves, by the sword, if necessary. This is also how the passage from Luke 22:38 (“if you don’t have a sword, better sell your clothes and buy one”) should be read: buy a sword to finish off those who first used one. The problem with this reading, of course, is that it courts the danger of sanctioning the most brutal violence as a defense against those who attack us, even giving it the force of fulfilling the divine prophecy-injunction (“those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword”). Hitler all the time claimed exactly the same—he was only using the sword to destroy those who had already taken up the sword against Germany . . .

The next strategy is to read Christ’s words not as an injunction or threat, but as a simple prediction and warning to his followers: “I bring a sword” means “When you spread my message, you should be ready for the hatred of those who will ferociously oppose it and use a sword against you”—a prediction fully confirmed by the many massacres of Christians in the Roman empire. It is in this sense that Christ is turning husband against wife, and so on: when a wife accepts Christianity before her husband, this can of course engender his animosity towards her. The problem with this reading is that it fails to account for the much stronger injunction to (actively) hate your father, and so forth, not merely to be prepared to (passively) endure their hatred: when Christ enjoins his followers to hate their parents, there is no qualification that they should do so only if their parents oppose their faith in Christ—the injunction clearly calls for a hatred which, as it were, makes the first move, and is not just a reaction to the hatred of others.

As might be expected, the final strategy involves a metaphoric reading: the “sword” in question is not the literal weapon used to hurt others but the word of God itself which divides truth from error, so that the violence it enacts is that of spiritual cleansing. Nice as this sounds, ambiguities and dangers lurk here.

In The Divided Heaven, Christa Wolf’s classic GDR novel from 1963, about the subjective impact of the divided Germany, Manfred (who has chosen the West) says to Rita, his love, when they meet for the last time: “But even if our land is divided, we still share the same heaven.” Rita (who has chosen to remain in the East) replies bitterly: “No, they first divided Heaven.” Apologetic for the East as the novel is, it offers a correct insight into how our “earthly” divisions and struggles are ultimately always grounded in a “divided heaven,” in a much more radical and exclusive division of the very (symbolic) universe in which we dwell. The bearer and instrument of this “division of heaven” is language as the “house of being,” as the medium which sustains our entire worldview, the way we experience reality: language, not primitive egotistic interest, is the first and greatest divider, and it is because of language that we and our neighbors (can) “live in different worlds” even when we live on the same street. What this means is that verbal violence is not a secondary distortion, but the ultimate resort of every form of specifically human violence.

So, back to Christ: even if his divisive sword is spiritual, its “division of heaven” is ontologically more violent than any “ontic” violence, which it can easily ground and justify. In order to account for Christ’s “problematic” endorsement of violence, we must confront it with traditional pagan wisdom. Although the rise of democracy and philosophy in Ancient Greece announced a different world, the traditional wisdom is still fully asserted there, exemplarily in the ethico-political poem on eunomia—the beautiful order—by Solon, the founder of Athenian democracy:

These things my spirit bids me

teach the men of Athens:

that Dysnomia

brings countless evils for the city,

but Eunomia brings order

and makes everything proper,

by enfolding the unjust in fetters,

smoothing those things that are rough,

stopping greed,

sentencing hubris to obscurity,

making the flowers of mischief to wither,

and straightening crooked judgments.

It calms the deeds of arrogance

and stops the bilious anger of harsh strife.

Under its control, all things are proper

and prudence reigns over human affairs.¹⁵

No wonder that the same principle is asserted in the famous chorus on the uncanny/demonic dimension of man from Sophocles’ Antigone:

If he honors the laws of the land, and reveres the Gods of the State, proudly his city shall stand; but a cityless outcast I rate who so bold in his pride from the path of right does depart; never may I sit by his side, or share the thoughts of his heart.¹⁶

(Some, such as A. Oksenberg Rorty, even propose a much more radical translation of the last line: “a person without a city, beyond human boundary, a horror, a pollution to be avoided.”) One should recall here that the chorus reacts to the news that someone (at this point we do not yet know who) has violated Creon’s prohibition and performed funeral rites on Polynices’ body—it is Antigone herself who is implicitly castigated as the “cityless outcast” engaged in excessive demonic acts which disturb the eunomia of the state, fully reasserted in the last lines of the play:

The most important part of happiness

is therefore wisdom—not to act impiously

towards the gods, for boasts of arrogant men

bring on great blows of punishment

so in old age men can discover wisdom.¹⁷

From the standpoint of eunomia, Antigone is definitely demonic and uncanny: her defiant act expresses a stance of excessive insistence which disturbs the “beautiful order” of the city; her unconditional ethics violates the harmony of the polis and is as such “beyond human boundary.” The irony is that, while Antigone presents herself as the guardian of the immemorial laws which sustain the human order, she acts as a freakish and ruthless abomination—there definitely is something cold and monstrous about her, as is made clear by the contrast between her and her warm and humane sister Ismene. This uncanny dimension is signaled by the ambiguity in the name “Antigone”: it can be read as “unbending,” coming from “anti-” and “-gon / -gony” (corner, bend, angle), but also as “opposed to motherhood” or “in place of a mother” from the root gone, “that which generates” (gonos, “-gony,” as in “theogony”). It is difficult to resist the temptation of positing a link between the two meanings: is being-a-mother not the basic form of a woman’s “bending,” her subordination, so that Antigone’s uncompromising attitude has to entail the rejection of motherhood? Ironically, in the original myth (reported by Hyginus in his Fabulae 72), Antigone was a mother: when she was caught in the act of performing funeral rites for her brother Polynices, Creon handed her over for execution to his son Haemon, to whom she had been betrothed. But Haemon, while he pretended to put her to death, smuggled her away, married her, and had a son by her. In time, having grown up, the son came to Thebes, where Creon detected him by the bodily mark which all descendants of the Sparti or Dragon-men bore on their bodies. Creon showed no mercy; so Haemon killed himself and his wife Antigone. There are indications that Hyginus here followed Euripides, who also wrote a tragedy Antigone, of which a few fragments survived, among them this one: “Man’s best possession is a sympathetic wife”—definitely not Sophocles’ Antigone.¹⁸

Those interpreters who see Antigone as a proto-Christian figure are right: in her unconditional commitment, she follows a different ethics that points forward towards Christianity (and can only be adequately read “anachronistically” from the later Christian standpoint)—why? Christianity introduces into the global balanced order of eunomia a principle totally foreign to it, a principle that, measured by the standards of the pagan cosmology, cannot but appear as a monstrous distortion: the principle according to which each individual has an immediate access to universality (of the Holy Spirit, or, today, of human rights and freedoms)—I can participate in this universal dimension directly, irrespective of my special place within the global social order. And do Christ’s “scandalous” words, quoted from Luke, not point in the same direction? Of course, we are not dealing here with a simple brutal hatred demanded by a cruel and jealous God: family relations stand metaphorically for the entire socio-symbolic network, for any particular ethnic “substance” that determines our place in the global order of things. The “hatred” enjoined by Christ is therefore not a kind of pseudo-dialectical opposite to love, but a direct expression of what St. Paul, in I Corinthians 13, described as agape, the key intermediary term between faith and hope: it is love itself that enjoins us to “unplug” from the organic community into which we were born, or, as Paul put it: for a Christian, there are neither men nor women, neither Jews nor Greeks. No wonder that, for those fully identified with the Jewish “national substance,” as well as for the Greek philosophers and the proponents of the global Roman empire, the appearance of Christ was perceived as a ridiculous and/or traumatic scandal.

So, when Paul writes (in I Corinthians 25): “The wisdom of the world is foolishness to God,” his target is the most fundamental feature of pagan wisdom. This is why one should rehabilitate even Tertullian’s (in)famous credo quia absurdum (“I believe because it is absurd”), which is a misquotation of the key passage from his On the Flesh of Christ: “The Son of God was crucified: I am not ashamed—because it is shameful. The Son of God died: it is immediately credible—because it is silly. He was buried, and rose again: it is certain—because it is impossible.”¹⁹ The first thing to bear in mind here is that Tertullian was not an opponent of reason: in his On Repentance (I, 2–3) he emphasizes that all things are to be understood by reason:

Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason—nothing which He has willed should not be handled and understood by reason. Al l, therefore, who are ignorant of God, must necessarily be ignorant also of a thing which is His, because no treasure-house at all is accessible to strangers. And thus, voyaging all the universal course of life without the rudder of reason, they know not how to shun the hurricane which is impending over the world.²⁰

No wonder, then, that Tertullian shows a deep respect for the great pagan philosophers (“Of course we shall not deny that philosophers have sometimes thought the same things as ourselves”) and even calls Seneca “saepe noster / almost one of us.”²¹ O ne should therefore reject the popular reading according to which Tertullian advocated a crazy and irrational belief in something patently absurd, something that runs counter to reason and the evidence of our senses. The passage quoted above from On the Flesh of Christ is part of a polemic against Marcion who, dismissing as absurd the notion that God could be embodied in human flesh, reduced Christ’s incarnation to a mere phantasm—Christ did not have a real body, he did not really suffer. The measure which makes the belief in full reincarnation appear absurd is thus not logic but custom and convention, not reason as such but common “wisdom,” the space of what is conventionally acceptable—it is when measured by this standard that the death and resurrection of Christ appear “impossible.” “Impossibility” is here meant rather in the sense of: “Impossible! How can you do a horrible thing like this! Aren’t you ashamed!” The idea that God Himself could die in pain on a cross, humiliated and punished as a common criminal, is “impossible”—dangerous, shameful, absurd; it violates the conventional expectation of what befits a god.

However, is not Christ’s resurrection “impossible” in a much stronger sense: while not logically impossible, it nonetheless clearly breaks the basic laws of what we perceive as our (material) reality? Here, one has to insist on the gap that separates the universe of modern science from our everyday understanding of reality; this gap reaches its apogee in quantum physics whose picture of reality simply does not make sense within the horizon of our commonsense perception. This is why a voluntarist/decisionist anti-Aristotelian view finds it much easier to accept the paradoxical results of modern physics than does our everyday understanding: scientific reason and “absurd” Christian theology end up on the same side against (Aristotelian) commonsense. Recall that Einstein provided his own scientific version of Tertullian’s certum est, quia impossibile: “If at first an idea does not sound absurd, then there is no hope for it.” Hope of what? That it will be proven true scientifically!

Lacan’s notion of the Real as impossible can be of help here—to render Tertullian’s certum est, quia impossibile much clearer, it suffices to replace “impossible” with “real”: “It is certain—because it is real.” The impossibility of the Real refers to the failure of its symbolization: the Real is the virtual hard core around which symbolizations fluctuate; these symbolizations are always and by definition provisory and unstable, the only “certainty” is that of the void of the Real which they (presup)pose.