In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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to accept Persian domination, definitely do not sound like those of a fanatical Muslim fundamentalist: he tries to seduce Leonidas into subjection by promising him peace and sensual pleasures if he rejoins the Persian global empire. All he asks from him is the formal gesture of kneeling in acknowledgment of Persian supremacy—if the Spartans do this, they will be given supreme authority over all Greece. Is this not similar to what President Reagan demanded from the Nicaraguan Sandinista government? All they had to do was say “Hey uncle!” to the US . . . And is Xerxes’ court not depicted as a kind of multiculturalist different-lifestyles paradise? Everyone participates in orgies there, different races, lesbians and gays, the handicapped, and so forth? Are, then, the Spartans, with their discipline and spirit of sacrifice, not much closer to something like the Taliban defending Afghanistan against the US occupation (or, an elite unit of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard ready to sacrifice itself in the case of an American invasion)? Perspicuous historians have already noted this parallel—this is from the blurb of Tom Holland’s Persian Fire:
In the fifth century BC, a global superpower was determined to bring truth and order to what it regarded as two terrorist states. The superpower was Persia, incomparably rich in ambition, gold and men. The terrorist states were Athens and Sparta, eccentric cities in a poor and mountainous backwater: Greece.11
Western racist investment in the battle of Thermopylae is evident: it was widely read as the first and decisive victory of the free West against the despotic East—no wonder Hitler and Goering compared the German defeat at Stalingrad in 1943 to Leonidas’s heroic death at Thermopylae. However, it is for this very reason that one should invert the perspective. Western cultural racists like to claim that, had the Persians succeeded in subduing Greece, there would today be minarets all over Europe. This stupid claim is doubly wrong: not only would there be no Islam in the case of the defeat of the Greeks (since there would have been no ancient Greek thought and no Christianity, two historical presuppositions of Islam); even more important is the fact that there are minarets in many European cities today, and the kind of multicultural tolerance which made this possible was precisely the result of the Greek victory over the Persians.
The main Greek arm against Xerxes’ overwhelming military supremacy was discipline and the spirit of sacrifice—and, to quote Alain Badiou:
We need a popular discipline. I would even say . . . that “those who have nothing have only their discipline.” The poor, those with no financial or military means, those with no power—all they have is their discipline, their capacity to act together. This discipline is already a form of organization.12
In today’s era of hedonist permissivity which serves as the dominant ideology, the time has come for the Left to (re)appropriate discipline and the spirit of sacrifice: there is nothing inherently “fascist” about these values.
But even this fundamentalist identity of the Spartans is more ambiguous. A programmatic statement towards the end of the film defines the Greeks’ agenda as “against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future,” further specified as the rule of freedom and reason—which sounds like an elementary Enlightenment program, with even a communist twist! Recall also that, at the film’s beginning, Leonidas outrightly rejects the message of the corrupt “oracles” according to whom the gods forbid the military expedition to stop the Persians—as we learn later, the “oracles” who were allegedly receiving the divine message in an ecstatic trance had in fact been paid by the Persians, like the Tibetan “oracle” who, in 1959, delivered the message to the Dalai Lama to leave Tibet and who was—as we now know—on the payroll of the CIA!
But what about the apparent absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom, and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline, including of the practice of discarding weak children? This “absurdity” is simply the price of freedom—freedom is not free, as they put it in the film. Freedom is not something given, it is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. Spartan ruthless military discipline is not simply the external opposite of Athenian “liberal democracy,” it is its inherent condition, it lays the foundation for it: the free subject of Reason can only emerge through ruthless self-discipline. True freedom is not a freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between a strawberry cake and a chocolate cake; true freedom overlaps with necessity, one makes a truly free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence—one does it because one simply “cannot do otherwise.” When one’s country is under foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not “you are free to choose,” but: “Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?” No wonder that all the eighteenth-century egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to the Jacobins, imagined republican France as the new Sparta: there is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives even when we subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule, ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, and so forth—no wonder too that Trotsky himself called the Soviet Union in the difficult years of “war communism” a “proletarian Sparta.”
Even more important is, perhaps, the film’s formal aspect: the entire film was shot in a warehouse in Montreal, with the entire background and many of the people and objects digitally constructed. The artificial character of the background seems to infect the “real” actors themselves, who often appear like characters from comics brought to life (the film is based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300). Furthermore, the artificial (digital) nature of the background creates a claustrophobic atmosphere, as if the story is not taking place in “real” reality with its endless open horizons, but in a “closed world,” a kind of relief-world of closed space. Aesthetically, we are here steps ahead of the Star Wars and Lord of the Rings series: although, in these series also, many background objects and persons are digitally created, the impression is nonetheless one of (real and) digital actors and objects (elephants, Yoda, Urkhs, palaces, etc.) placed in a “real” open world; in 300, on the contrary, all the main characters are “real” actors placed against an artifical background, a combination which produces a much more uncanny “closed” world of a “cyborg” mixture of real people integrated into an artificial world. It is only with 300 that the combination of “real” actors and objects with a digital environment has come close to creating a truly new autonomous aesthetic space.
The practice of mixing different arts, of including in one artistic form the reference to another, has a long tradition, especially with regard to cinema; many of Hopper’s portraits of a woman at an open window, looking out, are clearly mediated by the experience of cinema (they offer a shot without its counter-shot). What makes 300 notable is that in it (not for the first time, of course, but in a way which is artistically much more interesting than, say, Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy) a technically more developed art form (digitalized cinema) refers to a less developed form (comics). The effect produced is that of “true reality” losing its innocence, appearing as part of a closed artificial universe, which is a perfect figuration of our socio-ideological predicament.
Those critics who claimed that the “synthesis” of the two art forms in 300 is a failure are thus wrong because they are right: of course the “synthesis” fails, of course the universe we see on the screen is traversed by a profound antagonism and inconsistency, but it is this very antagonism which is an indication of truth.
History and family in Frankenstein
There is, however, a more fundamental question to be raised apropos the family myth as interpretive tool. It seems obvious that the first task of the critique of ideology is, of course, to treat the family narrative as an ideological myth which should be handled like a dream’s explicit text, which should be deciphered back into the true struggle obfuscated by the family narrative. What if, however, one follows here the homology with the Freudian logic of dreams to the end, bearing in mind that the true focus of a dream, its “unconscious desire,” is not the dream-thought, but something that, paradoxically, inscribes itself into a dream-text through the very mechanisms of the transposition of the