In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek
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so forth, are the only ideological materials at the disposal of the Iranians that can sustain the properly metaphysical elevation of the Event—the Event turns into a purely formal feature, indifferent towards its specific historical content. In other words, Foucault ends up at a point at which one should effectively raise the question usually addressed to Badiou: why, then, is Hitler’s Nazi “revolution” not also an Event? Does it not share the very features attributed by Foucault to the Iranian revolution? Did we not have there also the spiritual unity of people, undivided into particular subgroups separated by interests, a unity for which individuals were ready to sacrifice themselves? And, as in the case of Iran, was this spirit of unity not sustained by the “vilest” elements of tradition (racism and so on)?
At this point, the only move that remains is to drop this form itself—no wonder, then, that, after his Iranian experience, Foucault withdrew to the topic of the care of the self, of the aesthetics of existence (and, politically, to supporting different human-rights initiatives, which makes him in France a darling of the neoliberal-humanitarian “new philosophers”). Here, one can only venture the hypothesis that the conceptual root of this Foucauldian deadlock is his key notion of the dispositif. At first sight, it may appear that Lacan’s big Other is the poor cousin of Foucault’s notion of the dispositif, which is much more productive for social analysis. However, there is the deadlock of the dispositif with regard to the status of the subject: first (in his history of madness), Foucault tended to exclude from it the resisting core of subjectivity; then, he shifted his position to its opposite, to the radical inclusion of resistant subjectivity into the dispositif (power itself generates resistance, and so on—the themes of his Discipline and Punish); finally, he tried to outline the space of the “care of the self” that allows the subject to articulate through self-relating his own “mode of life” within a dispositif, and thus to regain a minimum of distance from it. The subject is here always a curve, a disturbance, of the dispositif, the proverbial grain of sand that disrupts its smooth running. With Lacan’s “big Other,” the perspective is completely the opposite: the very “positing” of the big Other is a subjective gesture, that is, the “big Other” is a virtual entity that exists only through the subject’s presupposition (this moment is missing in Althusser’s notion of the “Ideological State Apparatuses,” with its emphasis on the “materiality” of the big Other, its material existence in ideological institutions and ritualized practices—Lacan’s big Other is, on the contrary, ultimately virtual and as such, in its most basic dimension, “immaterial”).
But let us return to Iran. Foucault’s blunder in no way implies that the Iranian revolution was a pseudo-Event (in a Badiouian sense) comparable to the Nazi “revolution”: it was an authentic Event, a momentary opening that unleashed unprecedented forces of social transformation, a moment in which “everything seemed possible.” To detect this dimension, it is enough to follow closely the shifts and reversals of the Iranian events, the gradual closing of the multiple modes of self-organization of the protesting crowds through the takeover of political power by the new Islamic clergy. There was nothing comparable to the effervescent first months after the shah’s fall—the constant frantic activity, debates, utopian plans, etc.—in Germany after the Nazi takeover (although there was something comparable going on in the first years after the October Revolution). One should not take this qualitative difference as something that concerns only the formal level of events (or, even worse, the group-psychological level, as if the Iranian explosion was more “sincere” than the Nazi one)—its crucial dimension was that of socio-political content: what makes the Iranian explosion an Event was the momentary emergence of something new that pertained to the struggle to formulate an alternative beyond the existing options of Western liberal democracy or a return to pre-modern tradition. The Nazi “revolution” was never “open” in this authentic sense.
Foucault was also fully justified in emphasizing Shia Islam’s potential for serving as the ideological vehicle for a democratic-egalitarian movement: the opposition Sunni versus Shia is, in political terms, one of hierarchical state organization versus the egalitarian opening of the event. In contrast to both Judaism and Christianity, the two other religions of the book, Islam excludes God from the domain of paternal logic: Allah is not a father, not even a symbolic one—God as One is neither born nor does He give birth to creatures: there is no place for a Holy Family in Islam. This is why Islam emphasizes so much the fact that Muhammad himself was an orphan; this is why, in Islam, God intervenes precisely at the moments of the suspension, withdrawal, failure, “blackout,” of the paternal function (when the mother or the child are abandoned or ignored by the biological father). What this means is that God remains thoroughly in the domain of the impossible-Real: He is the impossible-Real beyond the father, so that there is a “genealogical desert between man and God.”27 (This was the problem with Islam for Freud, since his entire theory of religion is based on the parallel of God with the father.) More importantly still, this inscribes politics into the very heart of Islam, since the “genealogical desert” renders impossible a grounding of the community in the structures of parenthood or other bonds based on blood: “the desert between God and Father is the place where the political institutes itself.”28 With Islam, it is no longer possible to ground a community in the mode of Totem and Taboo, through the murder of the father, the ensuing guilt bringing brothers together—thence Islam’s unexpected actuality. This problem is at the very heart of the (in)famous umma, the Muslim “community of believers”; it accounts for the overlapping of the religious and the political (the community should be grounded directly on God’s word), as well as for the fact that Islam is “at its best” when it grounds the formation of a community “out of nowhere,” in the genealogical desert, as the egalitarian revolutionary fraternity—no wonder Islam succeeds when young men find themselves deprived of a traditional familial safety network.
This, too, compels us to qualify and limit the homology between Foucault’s Iranian engagement and Heidegger’s Nazi commitments: Foucault was right in engaging himself, he correctly detected the emancipatory potential in the events; all insinuations of liberal critics that this was yet another chapter in the sad saga of Western radical intellectuals projecting their fantasies onto an exotic foreign zone of turbulence, which allows them to satisfy simultaneously their emancipatory desires and their secret “masochistic” longing for harsh discipline and oppression, totally miss the point. So where was his mistake? One can claim that he did the right thing for the wrong reason: the manner in which he theorized and justified his engagement is misleading. The framework within which Foucault operates in his analysis of the Iranian situation is the opposition between the revolutionary Event, the sublime enthusiasm of the united people where all internal differences are momentarily suspended, and the pragmatic domain of the politics of interests, strategic power calculations, and so forth—the opposition which, as we have already seen, directly evokes Kant’s distinction between the noumenal (or, more precisely, the sublime which evokes the noumenal dimension) and the phenomenal. Our thesis is here a very precise one: this general frame is too “abstract” to account for different modalities of collective enthusiasm—to distinguish between, say, the Nazi enthusiasm of the people united in its rejection of the Jews (whose effects were undoubtedly real), the enthusiasm of the people united against the stagnating Communist regime, or a properly revolutionary enthusiasm. The difference is simply that the first two are not Events, merely pseudo-Events, because they lacked the moment of a truly utopian opening. This difference is strictly immanent to enthusiastic unity: only in the last case, the common denominator of this unity was the “part of no-part,” the “downtrodden,” those included in society with no proper place within it and, as such, functioning as the “universal singularity,” directly embodying the universal dimension.
This is also why the opposition between noumenal enthusiasm and particular strategic interests does not cover the entire field—if it were so, then we would remain stuck forever in the opposition between emancipatory outbursts and the sobering “day after” when life returns to its pragmatic normal run. From this constrained perspective, every attempt to avoid and/or postpone this sobering return to the normal run of things amounts to terror, to the reversal of enthusiasm into monstrosity. What if, however, this is what is truly at stake in a true emancipatory process: in Jacques Rancière’s terms, how