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THE YEAR OF
Slavoj Žižek
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In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, the great conservative T. S. Eliot remarked that there are moments when the only choice is that between heresy and non-belief, that the only way to keep a religion alive is sometimes to effect a sectarian split from its corpse. This is our position today with regard to Europe. Only a new “heresy” (represented at this moment by Syriza) can save what is worth saving in the European legacy: democracy, trust in the people, egalitarian solidarity … The Europe that will win if Syriza is outmaneuvered is a “Europe with Asian values” (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia, and everything to do with the clear and present danger of contemporary capitalism’s tendency to suspend democracy).
Greece is thus Europe’s singular universality: the nodal point at which the historical tendency that shapes its present appears at its purest. This is why—to paraphrase the finale of Wagner’s Parsifal—we should redeem the redeemer. We should not only save Greece from its saviors—the European consortium testing out “austerity measures” in Dr. Mengele-like fashion—but also save Europe itself from its saviors: the neoliberals promoting the bitter medicine of austerity and the anti-immigrant populists. There is, however, something wrong with this idea: the fact it is exactly the response of the archetypal European left-liberal moron—preferably a socially aware cultural intellectual—on the question of Europe today. As a politically correct anti-racist, he will insist that, of course, he rejects anti-immigrant populism: the danger comes from within, not from Islam. The two main threats to Europe, he says, are this very populism and neoliberal economics. Against this double threat, we must resuscitate social solidarity, multicultural tolerance, the material conditions for cultural development, etcetera. But how is this to be done? The main, moronic idea here involves a return to the authentic Welfare State: we need a new political party that will return to the good old principles abandoned under neoliberal pressure; we need to regulate the banks and control financial excesses, guarantee free universal health care and education, and so on. What is wrong with this? Everything. Such an approach is stricto sensu idealist, that is, it opposes its own idealized ideological supplement to the existing deadlock. Recall what Marx wrote about Plato’s Republic: the problem is not that it is “too utopian,” but, on the contrary, that it remains the ideal image of the existing politico-economic order. Mutatis mutandis, we should read the ongoing dismantling of the Welfare State not as the betrayal of a noble idea, but as a failure that retroactively enables us to discern a fatal flaw of the very notion of the Welfare State. The lesson is that if we want to save the emancipatory kernel of the notion, we will have to change the terrain and rethink its most basic implications (such as the long-term viability of a “social market economy,” that is, of a socially responsible capitalism).
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