The Fourth Sideways Glance: The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason
Žižek takes the concept of the Antinomy of Pure Reason from Emmanuel Kant who used four to illustrate how sometimes the thesis and its antithesis are both reasonable arguments that contradict each other without being unreasonable. The problem for Kant was that this kind of stuff will always happen if you try and go beyond reason’s proper limits. Kant’s problem was that if reason should never venture beyond experience because it will fall into these problems, how can we know anything we have never experienced? The only way to save pure and practical reason as well as judgment was to find a way to link pure reason to experience and then find the proper limits of that possible link.
Žižek points out that toleration, justice, respect, freedom and all the values we hold dear can fall into a similar trap. Any so called tolerant action can be shown to be intolerant and vice versa. Any virtue can be shown to be its own antithesis. He gives many examples from in the war on terror to the Danish caricatures of Mohamed but spends a lot of time to show that from either side of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict it can be reasonably and factually shown that one side has both justice and toleration on their side. It can also be reasonably and factually shown from one side that the other side is lacking in all justice and toleration. The difference between an antinomy and a “he said, she said” is that the truth is not somewhere in the middle; antinomies are both reasonable and they are un-synthesizable. To treat antinomies as synthesizable will fail and is a form of violence. Continued attempts to synthesize a solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict will necessarily be unreasonable and therefore likely unacceptable and a failure.
“Respect for others’ beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronizing way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple ‘regimes of truth,’ disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth. What however, about submitting Islam—together with all other religions—to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.”
The Fifth Sideways Glance: Tolerance as an Ideological Category
Today many problems are culturalized: it is what liberal multi-culturalists do. The notions of a “clash of civilizations” and the “end of history” are two examples. The clash of civilization’s thesis claims that with the end of ideological struggle (democracy vs totalitarianism and capitalism vs communism) the struggle will move to civilizations especially the west vs Islam. “The end of history” claims that history shows that there is nothing better than the neo-liberal democratic capitalist system and we have arrived. But what is actually happening is “political differences—differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation—are naturalised and neutralised into ‘cultural’ differences, that is into different ‘ways of life’ which are something given, something that cannot be overcome. They can only be ‘tolerated.’ This demands a response…from culturalisation of politics to politicisation of culture. The cause of this culturalisation is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as the Welfare State or various socialist projects.”
Žižek gives several examples; here is one based on the notion of free choice and its deadlock in our liberal society: “The limitations of the standard liberal attitude towards Muslim women wearing a veil are visible here, too. Women are permitted to wear the veil if this is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment women wear a veil to exercise a free individual choice, say in order to realise their own spirituality, the meaning of wearing a veil changes completely. It is no longer a sign of their belonging to the Muslim community, but an expression of their idiosyncratic individuality….the ‘subject of free choice’ in the Western ‘tolerant’ multicultural sense can emerge only as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn out of a particular lifeworld, of being cut off from one’s roots…. Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation.” Every culture has its own form of internal oppression. The one we grew up in often seems easier to justify and suffer through due to familiarity with it. Many social graces are presented as choices which become a faux pas if we do not choose correctly. “the most elementary level of symbolic exchange is made up of so-called ‘empty gestures,’ offers made or meant to be rejected.”
The Sixth Sideways Glance: Divine Violence
The world is full of senseless, random violence that could be or has been attributed to God. Two responses have come out. Both are illustrated in the book of Job. On the one hand we are drawn to a rational explanation and on the other we know there is no reason. Žižek then quotes Walter Benjamin’s comparison to mythic violence to divine violence: “‘If mythic violence is law-making, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates;’…the opposition of mythic and divine violence is that between the means and the sign, that is, mythic violence is a means to establish the rule of Law (the legal social order), while divine violence serves no means, not even that of punishing the culprits and thus re-establishing the equilibrium of justice. It is just the sign of the injustice of the world, of the world being ethically ‘out of joint’…it is a sign without meaning, and the temptation to be resisted is precisely the one which Job resisted successfully, the temptation to provide it with some ‘deeper meaning.’… there is no ‘objective’ criteria enabling us to identify an act of violence as divine; the same act that, to an external observer, is merely an outburst of violence can be divine for those engaged in it—there is no big Other guaranteeing its divine nature; the risk of reading and assuming it as divine is fully the subject’s own.” Divine violence is “radically subjective.” Those that experience it and survive cannot speak coherently of it and thus are not understood: they cannot give a why, a purpose or a reason. Žižek gives several examples mostly in the terror phase of revolutions. One more recent example was “the panic in Rio de Janeiro when crowds descended from the favelas into the rich part of the city and started looting and burning supermarkets. This was indeed divine violence…They were like biblical locusts, the divine punishment for men’s sinful ways. This divine violence strikes out of nowhere, a means without end”. Divine violence has an emancipatory and cathartic quality to those who survive going through it – for the rest of us it is terrible due to our inability to comprehend.
Žižek ends his book with an epilogue in which he crystalizes three lessons we should take from these 6 sideways glances at violence. “First, to chastise violence outright, to condemn it as ‘bad,’ is an ideological operation par excellence, a mystification which collaborates in rendering invisible the fundamental forms of social violence.” This is why he shockingly earlier said that those nice upright people who are bewildered by violence are the problem and should be taken out and shot: we make possible the rendering invisible of the fundamental forms of social violence.
The “Second lesson: it is difficult to be really violent, to perform an act that violently disturbs the basic parameters of social life.” This is why most revolutions fail and we never hear about them: they were not violent enough to disrupt the existing systemic and symbolic violence of the existing state and society. We live in an extremely violent society that we actively hide from ourselves and from others. When we fail to hide the violence we hear about it on the news. However, those acts of violence that we hear about on the news are not violent enough to destroy our illusions or our blindness to the violence we cause in our default: the zero state – the state of not seeing any unwanted physical force and therefore assuming that there is no violence.
The third lesson is “that violence is not a direct property of some acts, but is distributed between acts and their context, between activity and inactivity” in other words an identical act could be considered violent or non-violent depending on the context. When we buy bananas at the food store we don’t usually consider that a violent act but as we have seen there was a lot of violence to get that banana into our hands: our “non-violent” actions created the demand for violence elsewhere. Another example of non-violent violence is the recent release of the new Canada Food guide and the fact that it minimized and practically eliminated meat, dairy, and sugary drinks: how many jobs, livelihoods, and stock market portfolios are going to be hurt by that. Sometimes not acting is the violent act (as in a boycott). If a good majority of the world’s people were to go vegan then that would likely be one of the most violent (but not bloody) revolutions in history.