The Second Sideways Glance: Fear Thy Neighbour as Thyself
Žižek begins by defining our world as bio-politics in a post-political world. “Post-political” he defines as “a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focus[es] on expert management and administration”. This is added to Foucault’s notion of “bio-politics” which means the “regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as [bio-politics’s] primary goal.” This means that the world is run by experts. This expert run world is the new zero level of politics. Analogous to how the notion that no unwanted physical force is the zero level of violence, the zero level of politics is not really a “no-politics” world; it merely appears that way. In that appearance, the zero level of politics is the default politics. A curious thing happens when cold rational experts run things: they only way to change or adjust the default is to get extremely emotionally riled up. All the evidence suggests that it is fear that is the most powerful political emotion. There is no end of topics to fear. Žižek brings up the point that tolerance is a politically correct way of phrasing a fear of harassment. You want to be tolerated and free of harassment concerning any of your quirks or eccentricities. It is the fear of harassment that animates fear of immigrants, crime, high taxes, an excessive state and climate change – and so the apparent political opposites of tolerance and hatred of the other are revealed to be two sides of the same fear. “What these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. This is why there is no contradiction between the respect for the vulnerable Other and the readiness to justify torture…”
Žižek then makes light fun of the naivety of “ethical” people who cannot imagine how a murderer or other “bad” person who has done horrible things can possibly live with themselves let alone be good, warm, gentle, and kind to some people. “[W]e are dealing here with a tragically misplaced ethical conviction, with a blind trust that avoids confronting the miserable, terrifying reality of its ethical point of reference….such a blindness, such a violent exclusionary gesture of refusing to see…is the innermost constituent of every ethical stance” This fetishistic disavowal is necessary in order to have an ethical system. To distinguish between the ethical and the non-ethical creates an Other. This Other is the repository of all that is horrible, brutal, wrong, and unethical to degrees we do not even want to imagine: because if we did regularly imagine, or worse yet see in reality, we could not be unaffected. After describing some brutal acts of torture Žižek asks: “Would the watcher be able to continue going on as usual? Yes, but only if he or she were able somehow to forget—in an act which suspended symbolic efficiency—what had been witnessed. This forgetting entails a gesture of what is called fetishist disavowal: ‘I know, but I don’t want to know that I know, so I don’t know.’ I know it, but I refuse to fully assume the consequences of this knowledge, so that I can continue acting as if I don’t know it.” In this way we can continue to think of ourselves as ethical people without having to think of all the evil we think we have excluded from our lives. We often react quite viscerally when the evil we don’t know we know impinges on the frontiers of our consciousness. “[A]n exclusion of some form of otherness from the scope of our ethical concerns is consubstantial with the very founding gesture of ethical universality, so that the more universal our explicit ethics is, the more brutal the underlying exclusion is”.
The excluded Other is always a neighbor, either next door or on the other side of the world and language is the excluding medium. Žižek agrees with Lacan that language isolates us because although it is meant to bring us together, the lived experience that individuals attribute to the symbols of language (such as words, idioms, and expressions etc.) are never the same; communication is always imperfect. Therefore the best that we can do when communicating is have a successful miscommunication. If this is the best we can do there is an increasing fear of the other the more different they appear. This symbolic violence (of necessarily using our private lived experience to misunderstand the Other) is what makes language inherently and an avoidably violent. Therefore any encounter with an Other is imbued with the potential violent use of language directed at ourselves. Language also creates space to be free of harassment because of its isolating and distance creating effects. There is a subtle dance between the safety it creates and the possibility of violence that language creates. The more different an-Other person is the greater our fear – because we use the violence of language all the time too (for example when we speak “well” of an Other we are simultaneously giving a subtle warning).
The Third Sideways Glance: “A Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed”
Žižek begins by defining the Lacanian term, “passage a l’acte” as “an impulsive movement into action which can’t be translated into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration.” He then ascribes it to the violence of the Paris suburb riots of 2005, the humanitarian crisis in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and many terrorist acts. I believe the Occupy Wall Street protests would also fit this term. Those on the right explain events as a clash of civilizations; those on the left explained these events as a whole range of neglect in the population “‘Populist reason’ here encounters its irrational limit: what we have is a zero-level protest, a violent protest act which demands nothing. There was an irony in watching the sociologists, intellectuals and commentators trying to understand and help.” Žižek claims that the lack of demands means nothing. It is a new type of phatic communication (words that serve a social function but do not carry any information such as ritual greetings) where violence was just a way to get visibility but, quoting Marshall McLuhan, Žižek claims the medium itself was the message. Žižek suggests we think of these protests as serving a phatic function: “‘Hello, do you hear me?’… a testing both of the channel and the code itself.”
Žižek claims that the fundamentalist terrorist’s resort to violence is an indication of their psychological impotence. “What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists…the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life….In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated by the sinful life of the non-believers….The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but rather that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior….what the fundamentalists lack is precisely a dose of that true ‘racist’ conviction of one’s own superiority.” Filled with resentment and envy, these terrorist are truly evil. Resentment and envy are two emotions within human desire that make us buy into a zero sum game where another’s loss is my gain or worse yet, where it is still desirable to lose as long as another loses more. “[E]galitarian justice, insofar as it is sustained by envy, relies on the inversion of the standard renunciation accomplished to benefit others…Far from being opposed to the spirit of sacrifice, evil here emerges as the very spirit of sacrifice, ready to ignore one’s own well-being—if, through my sacrifice, I can deprive the Other of his enjoyment.” The inability to enjoy an object and the desire to prevent others from enjoying an object of their enjoyment, especially when presented as a sacrifice, is psychological evil.
The human catastrophe in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina in New Orleans is representative of a false fear: that the breakdown of civilization will lead to a war of all against all. The irrational fear is that our human nature, if left unchecked by a civilizing force, will, with all the modern tools at its disposal, destroy the world. Fear mongers of this variety can find many examples to support their claim. But Žižek asks us to consider a different hidden and ignored reality: “what if the tension that led to the explosion in New Orleans was not the tension between ‘human nature’ and the force of civilisation that keeps it in check, but the tension between the two aspects of our civilisation itself? What if, in endeavoring to control explosions like the one in New Orleans, the forces of law and order were confronted with the very nature of capitalism at its purest, the logic of individualist competition, of ruthless self-assertion, generated by capitalist dynamics, a ‘nature’ much more threatening and violent than all the hurricanes and earthquakes?” Natural disasters are small and nearly inconsequential compared to capitalist disasters; natural competition is nothing bad compared to the artificially generated completion of the capitalist mode of production. Capitalist disasters are fueled by words and false reports – false reports that may be factually true. What one chooses to report in the media affects people and events (in New Orleans after Katrina, reports of anarchy effectively shut down incoming emergency services). There is a pathology in factual racist reporting. “We [are] dealing with what one can call lying in the guise of truth: even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.” For example when describing a black mob, if the word “riot” is used it creates connotations very different than in the case of a white mob being described as “having a little fun that got out of hand.” Žižek goes on to say “The obligation is not to lie, to falsify or ignore facts, on behalf of some higher political truth, but …to change one’s subjective position so that telling the factual truth will not involve the lie of the subjective position of enunciation.” This is the problem with politically correct language it is lazy because it does not change the subjective position, and it can be dishonest because it can hide facts. Getting the facts right is the easy part of reporting; honestly reporting the facts is the hard part – especially if you are not aware of your biases and the violence they can cause.