Читать книгу Living in the End Times - Slavoj Žižek - Страница 7

The twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall should have been a time for reflection. It has become a cliché to emphasize the “miraculous” nature of the fall of the Wall: it was like a dream come true. With the disintegration of the Communist regimes, which collapsed like a house of cards, something unimaginable happened, something one would not have considered possible even a couple of months earlier. Who in Poland could have imagined the arrival of free elections, or Lech Wałęsa as president? We should, however, note that an even greater “miracle” was to occur only a few years later: namely, the return of the ex-Communists to power through free democratic elections, and the total marginalization of Wałęsa who had become even more unpopular than the man who, a decade and a half earlier, had attempted to crush Solidarność in a military coup—General Wojciech Jaruzelski.

The standard explanation for this later reversal evokes the “immature” utopian expectations of the majority, whose desire was deemed contradictory, or, rather, inconsistent. The people wanted to have their cake and eat it: they wanted capitalist-democratic freedom and material abundance but without paying the full price of life in a “risk society”; that is, without losing the security and stability once (more or less) guaranteed by the Communist regimes. As sarcastic Western commentators duly noted, the noble struggle for freedom and justice turned out to be little more than a craving for bananas and pornography.

When the unavoidable sense of disappointment set in, it gave rise to three (sometimes opposed, sometimes overlapping) reactions: (1) nostalgia for the “good old” Communist era;¹ (2) right-wing nationalist populism; (3) a renewed and “belated” anti-Communist paranoia. The first two reactions are easy enough to comprehend. Communist nostalgia in particular should not be taken too seriously: far from expressing a genuine wish to return to the grey reality of the pre-existing regime, it was closer to a form of mourning, a process of gently relinquishing the past. The rise of rightist populism, for its part, is not an Eastern European specialty, but a feature common to all countries caught up in the vortex of globalization. More interesting then is the third reaction, the weird resurrection of anti-Communist paranoia two decades on. To the question “If capitalism is really so much better than socialism, why are our lives still miserable?” it provides a simple answer: it is because we are not yet really in capitalism, for the Communists are still ruling, only now wearing the masks of new owners and managers . . .

It is an obvious fact that, among the people protesting against the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, a large majority of them were not demanding a capitalist society. They wanted social security, solidarity, some kind of justice; they wanted the freedom to live their own lives outside the purview of state control, to come together and talk as they please; they wanted a life liberated from primitive ideological indoctrination and the prevailing cynical hypocrisy. As many perspicuous analysts have observed, the ideals that inspired the protesters were to a large extent taken from the ruling socialist ideology itself—they aspired to what can most appropriately be designated “Socialism with a human face.”

The crucial question is how we are to read the collapse of these hopes. The standard answer, as we have seen, appeals to capitalist realism, or the lack of it: the people simply did not possess a realistic image of capitalism; they were full of immature utopian expectations. The morning after the enthusiasm of the drunken days of victory, the people had to sober up and face the painful process of learning the rules of the new reality, coming to terms with the price one has to pay for political and economic freedom. It is, in effect, as if the European Left had to die twice: first as the “totalitarian” Communist Left, then as the moderate democratic Left which, over recent years, has been gradually losing ground in Italy, in France, in Germany. Up to a point, this process can be accounted for by the fact that the centrist and even the conservative parties now in the ascendant have integrated many traditionally Leftist perspectives (support for some form of welfare state, tolerance towards minorities, etc.), to the extent that, were someone like Angela Merkel to present her program in the US, she would be dismissed as a radical Leftist. But this is indeed true only up to a point. In today’s post-political democracy, the traditional bipolarity between a Social-Democratic Center-Left and a Conservative Center-Right is gradually being replaced by a new bipolarity between politics and post-politics: the technocratic-liberal multiculturalist-tolerant party of post-political administration and its Rightist-populist counterpart of passionate political struggle—no wonder that the old Centrist opponents (Conservatives or Christian Democrats and Social Democrats or Liberals) are often compelled to join forces against the common enemy.² (Freud wrote about Unbehagen in der Kultur, the discontent/unease in culture; today, twenty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we experience a kind of Unbehagen in liberal capitalism. The key question now is: who will articulate this discontent? Will it be left to nationalist populists to exploit? Therein resides the big task for the Left.)

Should we, then, dismiss the utopian impulse which motivated the anti-Communist protests as a sign of immaturity, or should we remain faithful to it? At this point, it is well worth noting that the resistance to Communism in Eastern Europe in fact took three successive forms: (1) the “revisionist” Marxist critique of really-existing Socialisms (“this is not true Socialism, we want a return to the authentic vision of Socialism as a free society”)—here one might slyly remark that the same process went on in the early modern period in Europe, where secular opposition to the hegemonic role of religion first had to express itself in the guise of religious heresy; (2) the demand for an autonomous space of civil society freed from the constraints of Party-State control (this was the official position of Solidarity during the first years of its existence—its message to the Communist Party was: “we do not want power, we just want a free space outside your control where we can engage in critical reflection on what goes on in society”); (3) finally, the open struggle for power: “we do want full democratically legitimized power; which means it’s time for you to go.” Are the first two forms really just illusions (or rather, strategic compromises), and therefore to be discarded?

The underlying premise of the present book is a simple one: the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point. Its “four riders of the apocalypse” are comprised by the ecological crisis, the consequences of the biogenetic revolution, imbalances within the system itself (problems with intellectual property; forthcoming struggles over raw materials, food and water), and the explosive growth of social divisions and exclusions.

To take up only the last point, nowhere are the new forms of apartheid more palpable than in the wealthy Middle Eastern oil states—Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Dubai. Hidden on the outskirts of the cities, often literally behind walls, are tens of thousands of “invisible” immigrant workers doing all the dirty work, from servicing to construction, separated from their families and refused all privileges.³ Such a situation clearly embodies an explosive potential which, while now exploited by religious fundamentalists, should have been channeled by the Left in its struggle against exploitation and corruption. A country like Saudi Arabia is literally “beyond corruption”: there is no need for corruption because the ruling gang (the royal family) is already in possession of all the wealth, which it can distribute freely as it sees fit. In such countries, the only alternative to fundamentalist reaction would be a kind of social-democratic welfare state. Should this situation persist, can we even imagine the change in the Western “collective psyche” when (not if, but precisely when) some “rogue nation” or group obtains a nuclear device, or powerful biological or chemical weapon, and declares its “irrational” readiness to risk all in using it? The most basic coordinates of our awareness will have to change, insofar as, today, we live in a state of collective fetishistic disavowal: we know very well that this will happen at some point, but nevertheless cannot bring ourselves to really believe that it will. The US attempt to prevent such an occurrence through continuous pre-emptive activity is a battle that has been lost in advance: the very notion that it might succeed relies on a fantasmatic vision.

A more standard form of “inclusive exclusion” are the slums—large areas outside of state governance. While generally perceived as spaces in which gangs and religious sects fight for control, slums also offer the space for radical political organizations, as is the case in India, where the Maoist movement of Naxalites is organizing a vast alternate social space. To quote an Indian state official: “The point is if you don’t govern an area, it is not yours. Except on the maps, it is not part of India. At least half of India today is not being governed. It is not in your control . . . you have to create a complete society in which local people have very significant stakes. We’re not doing that . . . And that is giving the Maoists space to move in.”⁴

Although similar signs of the “great disorder under heaven” abound, the truth hurts, and we desperately try to avoid it. To explain how, we can turn to an unexpected guide. The Swiss-born psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed the famous scheme of the five stages of grief, which follow, for example, upon learning that one has a terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact: “This can’t be happening, not to me”); anger (which explodes when we can no longer deny the fact: “How can this happen to me?”); bargaining (in the hope that we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact: “Just let me live to see my children graduate”); depression (libidinal disinvestment: “I’m going to die, so why bother with anything?”); and acceptance (“I can’t fight it, so I may as well prepare for it”). Later, Kübler-Ross applied the same scheme to any form of catastrophic personal loss (joblessness, death of a loved one, divorce, drug addiction), emphasizing that the five stages do not necessarily come in the same order, nor are they all experienced by every patient.⁵

One can discern the same five figures in the way our social consciousness attempts to deal with the forthcoming apocalypse. The first reaction is one of ideological denial: there is no fundamental disorder; the second is exemplified by explosions of anger at the injustices of the new world order; the third involves attempts at bargaining (“if we change things here and there, life could perhaps go on as before”); when the bargaining fails, depression and withdrawal set in; finally, after passing through this zero-point, the subject no longer perceives the situation as a threat, but as the chance of a new beginning—or, as Mao Zedong put it: “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.”

The following five chapters refer to these five stances. Chapter 1—denial—analyzes the predominant modes of ideological obfuscation, from the latest Hollywood blockbusters up to false (displaced) apocalyptism (New Age obscurantism, and so forth). Chapter 2—anger—looks at violent protests against the global system, and the rise of religious fundamentalism in particular. Chapter 3—bargaining—focuses on the critique of political economy, with a plea for the renewal of this central ingredient of Marxist theory. Chapter 4—depression—considers the impact of the forthcoming collapse in its less familiar aspects, such as the rise of new forms of subjective pathology (the “post-traumatic” subject). Finally, Chapter 5—acceptance—discerns the signs of an emerging emancipatory subjectivity, isolating the germs of a communist culture in all its diverse forms, including in literary and other utopias (from Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes). This basic skeleton of the book is supplemented by four interludes, each of which provides a variation on the theme of the preceding chapter.

The turn towards an emancipatory enthusiasm takes place only when the traumatic truth is not only accepted in a disengaged way, but is fully lived: “Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!” Like Rilke’s famous lines, “for there’s no place that doesn’t see you. You must change your life,” this passage from Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game cannot but appear as a weird non sequitur: if the Thing looks back at me from everywhere, why does this oblige me to change my life? Why not rather a depersonalized mystical experience in which I “step out of myself” and identify with the other’s gaze? Likewise, if truth has to be lived, why need this involve a struggle? Why not rather a meditative inner experience? The reason is that the “spontaneous” state of our daily lives is that of a lived lie, to break out of which requires a continuous struggle. The starting point for this process is to become terrified by oneself. When, in his early “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx analyzed the backwardness of Germany, he made a rarely noticed yet crucial observation about the link between shame, terror and courage:

The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creating an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it public. Each sphere of German society must be depicted as the partie honteuse of that society and these petrified conditions must be made to dance by having their own tune sung to them! The people must be put in terror of themselves in order to give them courage.⁶

Such is our task today, when faced with the shameless cynicism of the existing global order.

In pursuing this task, one should not be afraid to learn from one’s enemies. After meeting Nixon and Kissinger, Mao said: “I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.” There is a deep truth in this observation. Mao’s lesson holds today even more than in his own day: one can learn much more from intelligent critical conservatives (not reactionaries) than one can from liberal progressives. The latter tend to obliterate the “contradictions” inherent in the existing order which the former are ready to admit as irresolvable. What Daniel Bell called the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” are at the origin of today’s ideological malaise: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumerist ideology, is gradually undermining the very (Protestant ethical) attitude which rendered capitalism possible—today’s capitalism increasingly functions as the “institutionalization of envy.”

The truth we are dealing with here is not “objective” truth, but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation. In his Seminar 18, on “a discourse which would not be of a semblance,” Lacan provided a succinct definition of the truth of interpretation in psychoanalysis: “Interpretation is not tested by a truth that would decide by yes or no, it unleashes truth as such. It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.” There is nothing “theological” in this precise formulation, only the insight into the properly dialectical unity of theory and practice in (not only) psychoanalytic interpretation: the “test” of the analyst’s interpretation lies in the truth-effect it unleashes in the patient. This is also how one should (re)read Marx’s Thesis XI: the “test” of Marxist theory is the truth-effect it unleashes in its addressees (the proletarians), in transforming them into revolutionary subjects.

The locus communis “You have to see it to believe it!” should always be read together with its inversion: “You have to believe in it to see it!” Though one may be tempted to oppose these perspectives—the dogmatism of blind faith versus an openness towards the unexpected—one should nevertheless insist on the truth contained in the second version: truth, as opposed to knowledge, is, like a Badiouian Event, something that only an engaged gaze, the gaze of a subject who “believes in it,” is able to see. Take the case of love: in love, only the lover sees in the object of love that X which is the cause of his love, the parallax-object; in this sense the structure of love is the same as that of the Badiouian Event, which also exists only for those who recognize themselves in it: there can be no Event for a non-engaged objective observer. Lacking this engaged position, mere descriptions of the state of things, no matter how accurate, fail to generate emancipatory effects—ultimately, they only render the burden of the lie still more oppressive, or, to quote Mao again, “lift up a rock only to drop it on their own feet.”

When, in 1948, Sartre saw that he was likely to be maligned by both sides in the Cold War, he wrote: “if that were to happen, it would prove only one thing: either that I am very clumsy, or that I am on the right road.”⁷ As it happens, this is often how I also feel: I am attacked for being anti-Semitic and for spreading Zionist lies, for being a covert Slovene nationalist and an unpatriotic traitor to my nation,⁸ for being a crypto-Stalinist defending terror and for spreading bourgeois lies about Communism . . . So maybe, just maybe, I am on the right path, the path of fidelity to freedom.⁹ In the otherwise all too sentimental-humanist dialogue of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, there is an exchange between Spartacus and a pirate who offers to organize transport for the slaves across the Adriatic. The pirate asks Spartacus frankly whether he is aware that the slave rebellion is doomed, that sooner or later the rebels will be crushed by the Roman army; would he continue to fight to the end, even in the face of inevitable defeat? Spartacus’s answer is, of course, affirmative: the slaves’ struggle is not merely a pragmatic attempt to ameliorate their position, it is a principled rebellion on behalf of freedom, so even if they lose and are all killed, their fight will not have been in vain since they will have asserted their unconditional commitment to freedom—in other words, their act of rebellion itself, whatever the outcome, already counts as a success, insofar as it instantiates the immortal idea of freedom (and one should give to “idea” here its full Platonic weight).

The present book is thus a book of struggle, following Paul’s surprisingly relevant definition: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers [kosmokratoras] of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavens” (Ephesians 6:12). Or, translated into today’s language: “Our struggle is not against actual corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it.” To engage in this struggle means to endorse Badiou’s formula mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre: better to take the risk and engage in fidelity to a Truth-Event, even if it ends in catastrophe, than to vegetate in the eventless utilitarian-hedonist survival of what Nietzsche called the “last men.” What Badiou rejects is thus the liberal ideology of victimhood, with its reduction of politics to a program of avoiding the worst, to renouncing all positive projects and pursuing the least bad option. Not least since, as Arthur Feldmann, a Viennese Jewish writer, bitterly noted: the price we usually pay for survival is our lives.

1 The exhaustion of twentieth-century Party-State Socialism is obvious. In a major public speech in August 2009, Raúl Castro attacked those who merely shout “Death to US imperialism! Long live the revolution!”, instead of engaging in difficult and patient work. According to Castro, all the blame for the Cuban situation (a fertile land which imports 80 percent of its food) could be laid at the feet of the US embargo: there are idle people on the one side and empty tracts of land on the other. Surely the solution is just to start working the fields? While all this is obviously true, Castro nonetheless forgot to include his own position in the picture he was describing: if people do not work the fields, it is obviously not because they are lazy, but because the state-run economy is not able to provide them with work. So, instead of lambasting ordinary people, he should have applied the old Stalinist motto according to which the motor of progress in Socialism is self-criticism, and subjected to radical critique the very system he and Fidel personify. Here, again, evil resides in the critical gaze which perceives evil all around . . .

2 Two passionate explosions occurred in May 2008. In Italy, a mob burned the Roma slums in the suburbs of Rome (with the silent approval of the new Right-populist government); this scandal cannot but force us to recall the late Husserl’s remark that, although the Gypsies have lived for centuries in Europe, they are not really a part of the European spiritual space—a remark all the more uncanny if one remembers that Husserl wrote this when the Nazis were already in power and he had been expelled from the university for exactly the same reasons—the Roma being effectively a kind of proxy Jewry. The other explosion took place in South Africa, when crowds attacked refugees from other countries (especially Zimbabwe), claiming that they were stealing their jobs and houses—an example of European populist racism reproducing itself among black Africans themselves.

3 See Johann Hari, “A morally bankrupt dictatorship built by slave labour,” Independent, November 27, 2009, p. 6. Invisible to those who visit Dubai for the glitz of the consumerist high-society paradise, immigrant workers are ringed off in filthy suburbs with no air conditioning. They are brought to Dubai from Bangladesh or the Philippines, lured by the promise of high wages; once in Dubai, their passports are taken, they are informed that the wages will be much lower than promised, and then have to work for years in extremely dangerous conditions just to pay off their initial debt (incurred through the expense of bringing them to Dubai); if they protest or strike, they are simply beaten into submission by the police. This is the reality sustained by great “humanitarians” like Brad Pitt who invested heavily in Dubai.

4 Sudep Chakravarti, Red Sun, New Delhi: Penguin Books 2009, p. 112.

5 See Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, New York: Simon and Schuster 1969.

6 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Early Writings, introduced by L. Colleti, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975, p. 247.

7 Quoted in Ian H. Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism, New York: Berghahn Books 2004, p. 3.

8 Golda Meir once said: “We can forgive Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” In a homologous way, I am tempted to say: I can forgive those who attack me as a bad Slovene for what they are doing to me, but I can never forgive them for forcing me to act as a representative of Slovene interests, thereby countering their primitive racism.

9 Fidelity should be strictly opposed to zealotry: a zealot’s fanatical attachment to his Cause is nothing but a desperate expression of his uncertainty and doubt, of his lack of trust in the Cause. A subject truly dedicated to his Cause regulates his eternal fidelity by means of incessant betrayals.