[Reader-list] Zizek : about subjectivity, multiculturalism, sex & unfreedom after 11 September

[Harsh Kapoor]

Spiked
November 15
http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D2C4.htm


'The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other' by Sabine 
Reul and Thomas Deichmann
The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has gained something of a 
cult following for his many writings - including The Ticklish 
Subject, a playful critique of the intellectual assault upon human 
subjectivity (1).
At the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2001, he talked to 
Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann about subjectivity, 
multiculturalism, sex and unfreedom after 11 September.

Has 11 September thrown new light on your diagnosis of what is 
happening to the world?
Slavoj Zizek: One of the endlessly repeated phrases we heard in 
recent weeks is that nothing will be the same after 11 September. I 
wonder if there really is such a substantial change. Certainly, there 
is change at the level of perception or publicity, but I don't think 
we can yet speak of some fundamental break. Existing attitudes and 
fears were confirmed, and what the media were telling us about 
terrorism has now really happened.
In my work, I place strong emphasis on what is usually referred to as 
the virtualisation or digitalisation of our environment. We know that 
60 percent of the people on this Earth have not even made a phone 
call in their life. But still, 30 percent of us live in a digitalised 
universe that is artificially constructed, manipulated and no longer 
some natural or traditional one. At all levels of our life we seem to 
live more and more with the thing deprived of its substance. You get 
beer without alcohol, meat without fat, coffee without caffeine...and 
even virtual sex without sex.
Virtual reality to me is the climax of this process: you now get 
reality without reality...or a totally regulated reality. But there 
is another side to this. Throughout the entire twentieth century, I 
see a counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain 
Badiou invented a nice name: 'La passion du réel', the passion of the 
real. That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live 
is somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only 
authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering 
experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in 
real life.
Do you think that is what we are seeing now?
Slavoj Zizek: I think this may be what defined the twentieth 
century, which really began with the First World War. We all remember 
the war reports by Ernst Jünger, in which he praises this eye-to-eye 
combat experience as the authentic one. Or at the level of sex, the 
archetypal film of the twentieth century would be Nagisa Oshima's Ai 
No Corrida (In The Realm Of The Senses), where the idea again is that 
you become truly radical, and go to the end in a sexual encounter, 
when you practically torture each other to death. There must be 
extreme violence for that encounter to be authentic.
Another emblematic figure in this sense to me is the so-called 
'cutter'- a widespread pathological phenomenon in the USA. There are 
two million of them, mostly women, but also men, who cut themselves 
with razors. Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide. 
It's simply that they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: 
it's only through this pain and when you feel warm blood that you 
feel reconnected again. So I think that this tension is the 
background against which one should appreciate the effect of the act.
Does that relate to your observations about the demise of 
subjectivity in The Ticklish Subject? You say the problem is what you 
call 'foreclosure'- that the real or the articulation of the subject 
is foreclosed by the way society has evolved in recent years.
Slavoj Zizek: The starting point of my book on the subject is that 
almost all philosophical orientations today, even if they strongly 
oppose each other, agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist 
stance. For example, Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida would both 
agree that the Cartesian subject had to be deconstructed, or, in the 
case of Habermas, embedded in a larger inter-subjective dialectics. 
Cognitivists, Hegelians - everybody is in agreement here.
I am tempted to say that we must return to the subject - though not a 
purely rational Cartesian one. My idea is that the subject is 
inherently political, in the sense that 'subject', to me, denotes a 
piece of freedom - where you are no longer rooted in some firm 
substance, you are in an open situation. Today we can no longer 
simply apply old rules. We are engaged in paradoxes, which offer no 
immediate way out. In this sense, subjectivity is political.
But this kind of political subjectivity seems to have disappeared. In 
your books you speak of a post-political world.
Slavoj Zizek: When I say we live in a post-political world, I refer 
to a wrong ideological impression. We don't really live in such a 
world, but the existing universe presents itself as post-political in 
the sense that there is some kind of a basic social pact that 
elementary social decisions are no longer discussed as political 
decisions. They are turned into simple decisions of gesture and of 
administration. And the remaining conflicts are mostly conflicts 
about different cultures. We have the present form of global 
capitalism plus some kind of tolerant democracy as the ultimate form 
of that idea. And, paradoxically, only very few are ready to question 
this world.
So, what's wrong with that?
Slavoj Zizek: This post-political world still seems to retain the 
tension between what we usually refer to as tolerant liberalism 
versus multiculturalism. But for me - though I never liked Friedrich 
Nietzsche - if there is a definition that really fits, it is 
Nietzsche's old opposition between active and passive nihilism. 
Active nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this 
active self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the 
real - the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you 
must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive 
nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a 
stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions.
The problem with a post-political universe is that we have these two 
sides which are engaged in kind of mortal dialectics. My idea is 
that, to break out of this vicious cycle, subjectivity must be 
reinvented.
You also say that the elites in our Western world are losing their 
nerve. They want to throw out all old concepts like humanism or 
subjectivity. Against that, you say it is important to look at what 
there is in the old that may be worth retaining.
Slavoj Zizek: Of course, I am not against the new. I am, indeed, 
almost tempted to repeat Virginia Woolf. I think it was in 1914 when 
she said it was as though eternal human nature had changed. To be a 
man no longer means the same thing. One should not, for example, 
underestimate the inter-subjective social impact of cyberspace. What 
we are witnessing today is a radical redefinition of what it means to 
be a human being.
Almost all philosophical orientations today agree on some kind of 
basic anti-subjectivist stanceTake strange phenomena, like what we 
see on the internet. There are so-called 'cam' websites where people 
expose to an anonymous public their innermost secrets down to the 
most vulgar level. You have websites today - even I, with all my 
decadent tastes, was shocked to learn this - where people put a 
video-camera in their toilets, so you can observe them defecating. 
This a totally new constellation. It is not private, but also it is 
also not public. It is not the old exhibitionist gesture.
Be that as it may, something radical is happening. Now, a number of 
new terms are proposed to us to describe that. The one most commonly 
used is paradigm shift, denoting that we live in an epoch of shifting 
paradigm. So New Age people tell us that we no longer have a 
Cartesian, mechanistic individualism, but a new universal mind. In 
sociology, the theorists of second modernity say similar things. And 
psychoanalytical theorists tell us that we no longer have the Oedipus 
complex, but live in an era of universalised perversion.
My point is not that we should stick to the old. But these answers 
are wrong and do not really register the break that is taking place. 
If we measure what is happening now by the standard of the old, we 
can grasp the abyss of the new that is emerging.
Here I would refer to Blaise Pascal. Pascal's problem was also 
confrontation with modernity and modern science. His difficulty was 
that he wanted to remain an old, orthodox Christian in this new, 
modern age. It is interesting that his results were much more radical 
and interesting for us today than the results of superficial English 
liberal philosophers, who simply accepted modernity.
You see the same thing in cinema history, if we look at the impact of 
sound. Okay, 'what's the problem?', you might say. By adding the 
sound to the image we simply get a more realistic rendering of 
reality. But that is not at all true. Interestingly enough, the movie 
directors who were most sensitive to what the introduction of sound 
really meant were generally conservatives, those who looked at it 
with scepticism, like Charlie Chaplin (up to a point), and Fritz 
Lang. Fritz Lang's Das Testament des Dr Mabuse, in a wonderful way, 
rendered this spectral ghost-like dimension of the voice, realising 
that voice never simply belongs to the body. This is just another 
example of how a conservative, as if he were afraid of the new 
medium, has a much better grasp of its uncanny radical potentials.
The same applies today. Some people simply say: 'What's the problem? 
Let's throw ourselves into the digital world, into the internet, or 
whateverŠ.' They really miss what is going on here.
So why do people want to declare a new epoch every five minutes?
Slavoj Zizek: It is precisely a desperate attempt to avoid the 
trauma of the new. It is a deeply conservative gesture. The true 
conservatives today are the people of new paradigms. They try 
desperately to avoid confronting what is really changing.
Let me return to my example. In Charlie Chaplain's film The Great 
Dictator, he satirises Hitler as Hinkel. The voice is perceived as 
something obscene. There is a wonderful scene where Hinkel gives a 
big speech and speaks totally meaningless, obscene words. Only from 
time to time you recognise some everyday vulgar German word like 
'Wienerschnitzel' or 'Kartoffelstrudel'. And this was an ingenious 
insight; how voice is like a kind of a spectral ghost. All this 
became apparent to those conservatives who were sensitive for the 
break of the new.
The most dangerous thing today is just to flow with thingsIn fact, 
all big breaks were done in such a way. Nietzsche was in this sense a 
conservative, and, indeed, I am ready to claim that Marx was a 
conservative in this sense, too. Marx always emphasised that we can 
learn more from intelligent conservatives than from simple liberals. 
Today, more than ever, we should stick to this attitude. When you are 
surprised and shocked, you don't simply accept it. You should not 
say: 'Okay, fine, let's play digital games.' We should not forget the 
ability to be properly surprised. I think, the most dangerous thing 
today is just to flow with things.
Then let's return to some of the things that have been surprising us. 
In a recent article, you made the point that the terrorists mirror 
our civilisation. They are not out there, but mirror our own Western 
world. Can you elaborate on that some more?
Slavoj Zizek: This, of course, is my answer to this popular thesis 
by Samuel P Huntington and others that there is a so-called clash of 
civilisations. I don't buy this thesis, for a number of reasons.
Today's racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference. It no 
longer says: 'I am more than you.' It says: 'I want my culture, you 
can have yours.' Today, every right-winger says just that. These 
people can be very postmodern. They acknowledge that there is no 
natural tradition, that every culture is artificially constructed. In 
France, for example, you have a neo-fascist right that refers to the 
deconstructionists, saying: 'Yes, the lesson of deconstructionism 
against universalism is that there are only particular identities. 
So, if blacks can have their culture, why should we not have ours?'
We should also consider the first reaction of the American 'moral 
majority', specifically Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to the 11 
September attacks. Pat Robertson is a bit eccentric, but Jerry 
Falwell is a mainstream figure, who endorsed Reagan and is part of 
the mainstream, not an eccentric freak. Now, their reaction was the 
same as the Arabs', though he did retract a couple of days later. 
Falwell said the World Trade Centre bombings were a sign that God no 
longer protects the USA, because the USA had chosen a path of evil, 
homosexuality and promiscuity.
According to the FBI, there are now at least two million so-called 
radical right-wingers in the USA. Some are quite violent, killing 
abortion doctors, not to mention the Oklahoma City bombing. To me, 
this shows that the same anti-liberal, violent attitude also grows in 
our own civilisation. I see that as proof that this terrorism is an 
aspect of our time. We cannot link it to a particular civilisation.
Regarding Islam, we should look at history. In fact, I think it is 
very interesting in this regard to look at ex-Yugoslavia. Why was 
Sarajevo and Bosnia the place of violent conflict? Because it was 
ethnically the most mixed republic of ex-Yugoslavia. Why? Because it 
was Muslim-dominated, and historically they were definitely the most 
tolerant. We Slovenes, on the other hand, and the Croats, both 
Catholics, threw them out several hundred years ago.
This proves that there is nothing inherently intolerant about Islam. 
We must rather ask why this terrorist aspect of Islam arises now. The 
tension between tolerance and fundamentalist violence is within a 
civilisation.
Take another example: on CNN we saw President Bush present a letter 
of a seven-year-old girl whose father is a pilot and now around 
Afghanistan. In the letter she said that she loves her father, but if 
her country needs his death, she is ready to give her father for her 
country. President Bush described this as American patriotism. Now, 
do a simple mental experiment - imagine the same event with an Afghan 
girl saying that. We would immediately say: 'What cynicism, what 
fundamentalism, what manipulation of small children.' So there is 
already something in our perception. But what shocks us in others we 
ourselves also do in a way.
So multiculturalism and fundamentalism could be two sides of the same coin?
Slavoj Zizek: There is nothing to be said against tolerance. But 
when you buy this multiculturalist tolerance, you buy many other 
things with it. Isn't it symptomatic that multiculturalism exploded 
at the very historic moment when the last traces of working-class 
politics disappeared from political space? For many former leftists, 
this multiculturalism is a kind of ersatz working-class politics. We 
don't even know whether the working class still exists, so let's talk 
about exploitation of others.
This notion of tolerance effectively masks its opposite: 
intoleranceThere may be nothing wrong with that as such. But there is 
a danger that issues of economic exploitation are converted into 
problems of cultural tolerance. And then you have only to make one 
step further, that of Julia Kristeva in her essay 'Etrangers à nous 
mêmes', and say we cannot tolerate others because we cannot tolerate 
otherness in ourselves. Here we have a pure pseudo-psychoanalytic 
cultural reductionism.
Isn't it sad and tragic that the only relatively strong - not fringe 
- political movement that still directly addresses the working class 
is made up of right-wing populists? They are the only ones. 
Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, for example. I was shocked when I saw 
him three years ago at a congress of the Front National. He brought a 
black Frenchman, an Algerian and a Jew on the podium, embraced them 
and said: 'They are no less French than I am. Only the international 
cosmopolitan companies who neglect French patriotic interests are my 
enemy.' So the price is that only right-wingers still talk about 
economic exploitation.
The second thing I find wrong with this multiculturalist tolerance is 
that it is often hypocritical in the sense that the other whom they 
tolerate is already a reduced other. The other is okay in so far as 
this other is only a question of food, of culture, of dances. What 
about clitoridectomy? What about my friends who say: 'We must respect 
Hindus.' Okay, but what about one of the old Hindu customs which, as 
we know, is that when a husband dies, the wife is burned. Now, do we 
respect that? Problems arise here.
An even more important problem is that this notion of tolerance 
effectively masks its opposite: intolerance. It is a recurring theme 
in all my books that, from this liberal perspective, the basic 
perception of another human being is always as something that may in 
some way hurt you.
Are you referring to what we call victim culture?
Slavoj Zizek: The discourse of victimisation is almost the 
predominant discourse today. You can be a victim of the environment, 
of smoking, of sexual harassment. I find this reduction of the 
subject to a victim sad. In what sense? There is an extremely 
narcissistic notion of personality here. And, indeed, an intolerant 
one, insofar as what it means is that we can no longer tolerate 
violent encounters with others - and these encounters are always 
violent.
Let me briefly address sexual harassment for a moment. Of course I am 
opposed to it, but let's be frank. Say I am passionately attached, in 
love, or whatever, to another human being and I declare my love, my 
passion for him or her. There is always something shocking, violent 
in it. This may sound like a joke, but it isn't - you cannot do the 
game of erotic seduction in politically correct terms. There is a 
moment of violence, when you say: 'I love you, I want you.' In no way 
can you bypass this violent aspect. So I even think that the fear of 
sexual harassment in a way includes this aspect, a fear of a too 
violent, too open encounter with another human being.
Another thing that bothers me about this multiculturalism is when 
people ask me: 'How can you be sure that you are not a racist?' My 
answer is that there is only one way. If I can exchange insults, 
brutal jokes, dirty jokes, with a member of a different race and we 
both know it's not meant in a racist way. If, on the other hand, we 
play this politically correct game - 'Oh, I respect you, how 
interesting your customs are' - this is inverted racism, and it is 
disgusting.
In the Yugoslav army where we were all of mixed nationalities, how 
did I become friends with Albanians? When we started to exchange 
obscenities, sexual innuendo, jokes. This is why this politically 
correct respect is just, as Freud put it, 'zielgehemmt'. You still 
have the aggression towards the other.
You cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct 
termsFor me there is one measure of true love: you can insult the 
other. Like in that horrible German comedy film from 1943 where 
Marika Röck treats her fiancé very brutally. This fiancé is a rich, 
important person, so her father asks her why are you treating him 
like that. And she gives the right answer. She says: 'But I love him, 
and since I love him, I can do with him whatever I want.' That's the 
truth of it. If there is true love, you can say horrible things and 
anything goes.
When multiculturalists tell you to respect the others, I always have 
this uncanny association that this is dangerously close to how we 
treat our children: the idea that we should respect them, even when 
we know that what they believe is not true. We should not destroy 
their illusions. No, I think that others deserve better - not to be 
treated like children.
In your book on the subject you talk of a 'true universalism' as an 
opposite of this false sense of global harmony. What do you mean by 
that?
Slavoj Zizek: Here I need to ask myself a simple Habermasian 
question: how can we ground universality in our experience? 
Naturally, I don't accept this postmodern game that each of us 
inhabits his or her particular universe. I believe there is 
universality. But I don't believe in some a priori universality of 
fundamental rules or universal notions. The only true universality we 
have access to is political universality. Which is not solidarity in 
some abstract idealist sense, but solidarity in struggle.
If we are engaged in the same struggle, if we discover that - and 
this for me is the authentic moment of solidarity - being feminists 
and ecologists, or feminists and workers, we all of a sudden have 
this insight: 'My God, but our struggle is ultimately the same!' This 
political universality would be the only authentic universality. And 
this, of course, is what is missing today, because politics today is 
increasingly a politics of merely negotiating compromises between 
different positions.
The post-political subverts the freedom that has been talked about so 
much in recent weeks. Is that what you are saying?
Slavoj Zizek: I do claim that what is sold to us today as freedom 
is something from which this more radical dimension of freedom and 
democracy has been removed - in other words, the belief that basic 
decisions about social development are discussed or brought about 
involving as many as possible, a majority. In this sense, we do not 
have an actual experience of freedom today. Our freedoms are 
increasingly reduced to the freedom to choose your lifestyle. You can 
even choose your ethnic identity up to a point.
But this new world of freedom described by people like Ulrich Beck, 
who say everything is a matter of reflective negotiation, of choice, 
can include new unfreedom. My favourite example is this, and here we 
have ideology at its purest: we know that it is very difficult today 
in more and more professional domains to get a long-term job. 
Academics or journalists, for example, now often live on a two- or 
three-year contract, that you then have to renegotiate. Of course, 
most of us experience this as something traumatising, shocking, where 
you can never be sure. But then, along comes the postmodern 
ideologist: 'Oh, but this is just a new freedom, you can reinvent 
yourself every two years!'
The problem for me is how unfreedom is hidden, concealed in precisely 
what is presented to us as new freedoms. I think that the explosion 
of these new freedoms, which fall under the domain of what Michel 
Foucault called 'care of the self', involves greater social unfreedom.
Twenty or 30 years ago there was still discussion as to whether the 
future would be fascist, socialist, communist or capitalist. Today, 
nobody even discusses this. These fundamental social choices are 
simply no longer perceived as a matter to decide. A certain domain of 
radical social questions has simply been depoliticised.
I find it very sad that, precisely in an era in which tremendous 
changes are taking place and, indeed entire social coordinates are 
transformed, we don't experience this as something about which we 
decided freely.
So, let's return to the aftermath of 11 September. We now experience 
a strange kind of war that we are told will not end for a long time. 
What do you think of this turn of events?
Slavoj Zizek: I don't quite agree with those who claim that this 
World Trade Centre explosion was the start of the first war of the 
twenty-first century. I think it was a war of the twentieth century, 
in the sense that it was still a singular, spectacular event. The new 
wars would be precisely as you mentioned - it will not even be clear 
whether it is a war or not. Somehow life will go on and we will learn 
that we are at war, as we are now.
The explosion of these new freedoms involves greater social 
unfreedomWhat worries me is how many Americans perceived these 
bombings as something that made them into innocents: as if to say, 
until now, we had problems, Vietnam, and so on. Now we are victims, 
and this somehow justifies us in fully identifying with American 
patriotism.
That's a risky gesture. The big choice for Americans is whether they 
retreat into this patriotism - or, as my friend Ariel Dorfman wrote 
recently: 'America has the chance to become a member of the community 
of nations. America always behaves as though it were special. It 
should use this attack as an opportunity to admit that it is not 
special, but simply and truly part of this world.' That's the big 
choice.
There is something so disturbingly tragic in this idea of the 
wealthiest country in the world bombing one of the poorest countries. 
It reminds me of the well-known joke about the idiot who loses a key 
in the dark and looks for it beneath the light. When asked why, he 
says: 'I know I lost it over there, but it's easier to look for it 
here.'
But at the same time I must confess that the left also deeply 
disappointed me. Falling back into this safe pacifist attitude - 
violence never stops violence, give peace a chance - is abstract and 
doesn't work here. First, because this is not a universal rule. I 
always ask my leftist friends who repeat that mantra: What would you 
have said in 1941 with Hitler. Would you also say: 'We shouldn't 
resist, because violence never helps?' It is simply a fact that at 
some point you have to fight. You have to return violence with 
violence. The problem is not that for me, but that this war can never 
be a solution.
It is also false and misleading to perceive these bombings as some 
kind of third world working-class response to American imperialism. 
In that case, the American fundamentalists we already discussed, are 
also a working-class response, which they clearly are not. We face a 
challenge to rethink our coordinates and I hope that this will be a 
good result of this tragic event. That we will not just use it to do 
more of the same but to think about what is really changing in our 
world.
Dr Slavoj Zizek is professor of philosophy at University Ljubljana, 
Slovenia. He is currently a member of the Directors' Board at 
Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany.
Sabine Reul is sub-editor and Thomas Deichmann is chief editor of 
Novo, spiked's partner magazine in Germany. See the Novo website, 
where the full interview is published in German.
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