Slavoj Žižek’s aim in this book is to move people through the 5 stages of grief in order to more quickly bring people to the fifth stage, acceptance, in which, once having passed the zero point, one is finally ready to act productively to address the four “horsemen” of the late capitalist apocalypse: the ecological crisis, the biogenetic revolution, imbalances in the system, and social divisions.
Anger: The Actuality of the Theologico-Political
According to Lacan “the fundamental subjective position of fantasy: [is] to be reduced to a gaze observing the world in the condition of the subject’s non-existence.” Žižek gives several examples (like wanting to witness one’s own eulogy), but focus on nature documentaries and a type of zoo in which the spectators are in vehicles watching the wildlife in their “natural” environment. This phenomenon seems to be linked to a growing “popularity of Darwinist reductions of human societies to animal ones, with their explanations of human achievements in terms of evolutionary adaptations.” The popularity of nature documentaries and of evolutionary biological explanations “provide a glimpse into a utopian world where no language or training are needed…into a ‘harmonious society’ in which everyone spontaneously knows his or her role.” Now, in contrast to this harmonious society we have our society and all its problems. So what if the world were different? “What-If histories are part of a more general ideological trend, of a perception of life that explodes the form of the linear, centered narrative and renders it as a multiform flow.” Having opened up these possibilities of thought one can more easily think backwards; meaning, one can consider what would have been if a decision in one’s life had been made differently. This can be particularly lamentable or traumatic for social and/or environmental activists who may focus on past failures.
Pen names or nom-de-guerres are a useful fiction for the ideological key to a real war criminal. Žižek looks at the poetry of “Dragan Dabic” AKA Radovan Karadži?. The simple outright dismissing of a war criminal’s poems as propaganda or for show is, in Žižek mind, a lost opportunity to recognize our common humanity (not for the sake of sympathy but rather as a warning of how we could also easily become one too) but also catch a glimpse of the poetico-military complex and “how ethnic cleansing functions.” Poetry at the services of the poetico-military complex allows “The superego suspension of moral prohibitions [this] is the crucial feature of today’s ‘postmodern’ nationalism….nationalist ‘fundamentalism’…serves as the operator of a secret, barely concealed you may! Without full recognition of this perverse pseudo-liberating effect of contemporary nationalism, of how the obscenely permissive superego supplements the explicit texture of the social symbolic law, we condemn ourselves to misunderstanding its true dynamic.” Love and hatred; peace and war co-existing. Žižek then contrasts the message of love with one of the most difficult to understand passages in the new testament: (Matt 10:34-39 and Luke 12:49-53) where Jesus claims to have come, not to bring peace, but a sword; to set generation against generation. It is a surprisingly common juxtaposition in revolutionary writing from J.J. Rousseau to Che Guevara. “Guevara’s claim that ‘the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love’ should be read together with his much more ‘problematic’ statement on revolutionaries as ‘killing machines’”. A point of revolutionary writing (such as the new testament), is to destroy the existing world and usher in a new one. Agape, the universal Christian love is the revolutionary love of and for a better new world. But the bringing about of a new world for the sake of love is terror inspiring – meaning love must be potentially terrible if not it is impotent. Consider disciplining one’s children (and taking aside that fact that spanking is not considered good today but that spanked kids can be good and non-spanked kids can turn out bad): whatever form of discipline one chooses there is always a level of violence in any imposition (even if it is just taking something away). In this sense the art of parenting is to discipline without ruining the child; to impose some level of violence. Parents who fail to socialize their children have in a sense failed to apply the proper level of violence. Likewise with all social and activist movements today, their failure is a result of not being violent enough. Žižek, from his book Violence notes that there is still a lot of violence perpetrated in the world even (and especially) when the struggle is labeled “non-violent.” Gandhi’s successful non-violent campaigns had a very violent tendency to disrupt the British Colonial government through breaking the law (consider burning his identity card in South Africa, civil disobedience and non-cooperation) and disrupting economic activity (his deliberate breaking of the law in his march to the sea to collect sea salt and avoid paying the British to do it.) Ghandi’s genius was that he found an acceptable level of violence that won the day. The failure of environmental, feminist, social, and democracy activists today is that they have been unwilling to deploy sufficient violence to get the job done.
“What we need today is a theologico-political suspension of the ethico-legal.” All successful movements have broken the ethics and law of the time with a call to higher powers, truth, and/or ideals. This is in line with all successful revolutions (Haitian, American, French, and Russian) and movements (the suffragettes, Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr.) What this means for neighbourly relations is that the “safe” distance that habit and social norms have kept is under threat of rupture – this will bring the neighbour too close and then the difference will be traumatic. Thus necessitating new distance causing social norms. Žižek gives an example about how in America it is ok to ask about one’s sexual identity but much less so in Europe – Žižek, as a European in the US, was asked about his sexual identity and would have marginally preferred to answer questions about income and net wealth; knowing full well that such questions are far too intrusive in the US.
Interlude 2. Reverberations of the Crisis in a Multi-Centric World
Žižek begins by considering Zionism and anti-Semitism. He starts of by condemning anti-Semitism as the evil and racism it is. But what has been missing in the analysis is where we find anti-Semitism and what its function is in the modern world. The meaning of the term “Jew” in its anti-Semitism context has shifted in the last 200 years or so. While for most of the last 2000 years a Jew was a member of a religion who displayed certain Jewish characteristics in the 19th century the notion of a Jew became a being. “It was, then, precisely when the specific figure of the Jew disappeared that the absolute Jew emerged, a transformation which conditioned the shift of anti-Semitism from theology to race….Insofar as the Jews were identified by a series of properties, the goal was to convert them, to turn them into Christians; but, once Jewishness concerned their very being only annihilation could solve ‘the Jewish question.’” Therefore to fight the genocidal tendencies racism and discrimination no group must ever be thought of as being their properties (gays and trans people). “This is how anti-Semitism works today: it is not we who have anything against the Jews, it is just the way the Jews themselves actually are.” The implication is: they (really us) are unchangeable because of who they (we) are. Therefore the real philosophical fight against discrimination of which racism is an example (and anti-Semitism an example of racism) is to fight the becoming and identifying with one’s characteristics.
Anti-Semitism is a symptomatic fixation avoiding the real problems in the societies where it most emerges. And it is found in very surprising places. Žižek dives into Zionist anti-Semitism by looking at a now defunct website masada2000 dot org. “Which contain[ed] a self-proclaimed ‘dirt list’ of more than 7,000 SHIT (Self-Hating Israel-Threatening) Jews…. There is clearly no need to search out Arab propaganda to find examples of brutal anti-Semitism today—fanatical Zionists are themselves doing the job perfectly adequately….it’s that Zionism itself, in its hatred of Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the State of Israel, paradoxically became anti-Semitic, and constructed the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project along anti-Semitic lines.”
There is an extreme danger or a small opportunity in the Zionist project. “while paying lip service to the two-state solution, Israel is creating a situation on the ground which will render such a solution de facto impossible.” Meaning there will not be a two state solution. The fact is that there is one state of Israel that controls all the Palestinian territories with apartheid-like racial segregation. The true fight is against apartheid in the existing one state: Israel. This is not to say that the Palestinian people must not continue the violent struggle because sometimes “a little bit of intolerance is necessary in order to create the space for true tolerance.” What happens in Israel when the Palestinians do nothing? “What happens is nothing less than the slow but incessant process of the Israelis taking land form the Palestinians on the West Bank, gradually strangling the Palestinian economy…all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regulations….This is the fundamental reality which makes all abstract ‘prayers for peace’ obscene and hypocritical.” Peace, the zero level of violence is an ethico-legal, invisible, insidious, and incessant violence. Israeli settlers and other extremists legitimate this zero level of violence by Israel’s “honest” prohibitions. “The condemnation of non-state anti-Palestinian Violence obfuscates the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of ‘illegal’ settlements obfuscates the illegality of the ‘legal’ ones. Therein resides the two-faced nature of the much-praised ‘honesty’ of the Israeli Supreme Court: by occasionally passing a judgment in favor of the dispossessed Palestinians, now and then proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining vast majority of cases.” Žižek then does a similar analysis of events in China, Haiti, the Congo, the US and Europe. Racism is the symptom for deeper problems that creates problems more easily solved if one realized the problem is in the structures of late Capitalism. Ideology is what blinds people to the facts and to the obvious solutions.