Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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or “In principle no, but when exceptional circumstances demand it, yes.” Note the asymmetry between the two cases: the prohibition is much stronger when one allows torture in principle—in this case, the principled “yes” is never allowed to realize itself; while in the other case, the principled “no” is exceptionally allowed to realize itself. In other words, the only “reconciliation” between the universal and the particular is that of the universalized exception: only the stance which re-casts every particular case as an exception treats all particular cases without exception in the same way. And it should be clear now why this is a case of “concrete universality”: the reason we should find a way to argue, in each particular case, that the death penalty is not deserved, lies in our awareness that there is something wrong with the very idea of the death penalty, that this idea is an injustice masked as justice.
This reference to Judaism should be linked to the fact that the Book of Job (from the Old Testament) can be counted as the first exercise in the critique of ideology in the entire history of humanity. The Laws of Manu should thus be opposed to the Book of Job as one of the founding texts of ideology versus one of the founding texts of its critique. No wonder the British colonial administration in India elevated The Laws of Manu into the privileged text to be used as a reference for establishing the legal code which would render possible the most efficient domination of India—up to a point, one can even say that The Laws of Manu only became the book of the Hindu tradition retroactively, chosen to stand for the tradition by the British from among a vast choice (the same goes for its obscene obverse, “tantra,” also systematized into a coherent, dark, violent, and dangerous cult by the British colonizers). In all these cases we are dealing with “invented traditions.” What this also implies is that the persistence of the phenomenon and social practice of the Untouchables is not simply a remainder of tradition: their number grew throughout the nineteenth century, with the spreading of cities which lacked proper sewers, so that more outcasts were needed to deal with the resulting dirt and excrement. At a more general level, one should thus reject the idea that globalization threatens local traditions, that it flattens differences: sometimes it threatens them, more often it keeps them alive, resuscitates them or even creates them by way of ex-apting them to new conditions—in the way, say, the British and Spanish re-invented slavery in early modernity.
With the formal prohibition of discrimination against the Untouchables, their exclusion changed its status to become the obscene supplement of the official/public order: publicly disavowed, it continues in its subterranean existence. However, this subterranean existence is nonetheless formal (it concerns the subject’s symbolic title/status), which is why it does not follow the same logic as the well-known Marxist opposition between formal equality and actual inequality in the capitalist system. Here, it is the inequality (the persistence of the hierarchic caste system) which is formal, while in their actual economic and legal life, individuals are in a way equal (an Untouchable can also become rich, etc.).24 The status of the caste hierarchy is not the same as that of nobility in a bourgeois society, which is effectively irrelevant, merely a feature which may add to the subject’s public glamor.
Exemplary here is the conflict between B. R. Ambedkar and Gandhi during the 1930s. Although Gandhi was the first Hindu politician to advocate the full integration of the Untouchables, and called them “the children of god,” he perceived their exclusion as the result of the corruption of the original Hindu system. What Gandhi envisaged was rather a (formally) non-hierarchical order of castes within which each individual has his or her own allotted place; he emphasized the importance of scavenging and celebrated the Untouchables for performing this “sacred” mission. It is here that the Untouchables are exposed to the greatest ideological temptation: in a way which prefigures today’s “identity politics,” Gandhi allowed them to “fall in love with themselves” in their humiliating identity, to accept their degrading work as a noble and necessary social task, to see even the degrading nature of their work as a sign of their sacrifice, of their readiness to do a dirty job for the sake of society. Even his more “radical” injunction that everyone, Brahmins included, should clean up his or her own shit, obfuscates the true issue, which, rather than having to do with our individual attitude, is of a global social nature. (The same ideological trick is performed today when we are bombarded from all sides with injunctions to recycle personal waste, placing bottles, newspapers, etc., in the appropriate bins. In this way, guilt and responsibility are personalized—it is not the entire organization of the economy which is to blame, but our subjective attitude which needs to change.) The task is not to change our inner selves, but to abolish Untouchability as such, that is, not merely an element of the system, but the system itself which generates it. In contrast to Gandhi, Ambedkar saw this clearly when he
underlined the futility of merely abolishing Untouchability: this evil being the product of a social hierarchy of a particular kind, it was the entire caste system that had to be eradicated: “There will be outcasts [Untouchables] as long as there are castes.” . . . Gandhi responded that, on the contrary, here it was a question of the foundation of Hinduism, a civilization which, in its original form, in fact ignored hierarchy.25
Although Gandhi and Ambedkar respected each other and often collaborated in the struggle for the dignity of the Untouchables, their difference is here insurmountable: it is the difference between the “organic” solution (solving the problem by returning to the purity of the original non-corrupted system) and the truly radical solution (identifying the problem as the “symptom” of the entire system, the symptom which can only be resolved by abolishing the entire system). Ambedkar saw clearly how the structure of four castes does not unite four elements belonging to the same order: while the first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchant-producers) form a consistent All, an organic triad, the Untouchables are, like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” the “part of no part,” the inconsistent element within the system which holds the place of what the system as such excludes—and as such, the Untouchables stand for universality. Or, as Ambedkar put it with his ingenious wordplay: “There will be outcasts as long as there are castes.” As long as there are castes, there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it. Gandhi obfuscates this paradox, as if a harmonious caste structure were possible. The paradox of the Untouchables is that they are doubly marked by the excremental logic: they not only deal with impure excrements, their own formal status within the social body is that of excrement.
This is why the properly dialectical paradox is that, if one is to break out of the caste system, it is not enough to reverse the status of the Untouchables, elevating them into the “children of god”—the first step should rather be exactly the opposite one: to universalize their excremental status to the whole of humanity. Martin Luther directly proposed just such an excremental identity for man: man is like a divine shit, he fell out of God’s anus—and, effectively, it is only within this Protestant logic of man’s excremental identity that the true meaning of Incarnation can be formulated. In Orthodoxy, Christ ultimately loses his exceptional status: his very idealization, elevation to a noble model, reduces him to an ideal image, a figure to be imitated (all men should strive to become God)—imitatio Christi is more an Orthodox than a Catholic formula. In Catholicism, the predominant logic is that of a symbolic exchange: Catholic theologians enjoy pondering over scholastic juridical arguments about how Christ paid the price for our sins, etc. No wonder Luther reacted badly to the lowest outcome of this logic: the reduction of redemption to something that can be bought from the Church. Protestantism, finally, posits the relationship as real, conceiving Christ as a God who, in His act of Incarnation, freely identified Himself with His own shit, with the excremental real that is man—and it is only at this level that the properly Christian notion of divine love can be apprehended, as the love for the miserable excremental entity called “man.” We are dealing here with what can be ironically referred to as the cosmic-theological proletarian position, whose “infinite judgment” is the identity of excess and universality: the shit of the earth is the universal subject. (This excremental status of man is signaled already by the role of sacrifice in the original Veda: by way of substituting the sacrificial victim for humans, the sacrifice bears witness to the eccentric, exceptional, role of man in the great chain of food—to paraphrase Lacan, the sacrificial