Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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nightmare, the vision of a New Man who has left behind all the old ideological baggage.
As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness—which should be relativized and historicized—ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly referred to as “common decency” (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a “spurious infinity” in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects “harassing” other subjects, who—in the absence of such mores—is to decide what counts as “harassment”? In France, there are associations for obese people demanding that all public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating habits be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the “speciesism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal—for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegetophobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right to incest-marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . .
The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rules. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns members of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case of meddling with other “ways of life.” It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the “fight against discrimination” is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Michéa puts it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.”41
The ideological coordinates of such liberal multiculturalism are determined by two features of our “postmodern” zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism (all values and rights are historically specific, hence any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent)42 and the universalized “hermeneutics of suspicion” (all “high” ethical motifs are generated and sustained by “low” motives of resentment, envy, etc.—the call to sacrifice our life for a higher cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or a pathological expression of masochism—and this either/or is an inclusive vel, i.e., both terms can be true at the same time). Another way to formulate Badiou’s insight that we live in a world-less universe would be to say that the functioning of ideology today no longer relies on mechanisms for the interpellation of individuals into subjects: what liberalism proposes is a value-neutral mechanism of rights, and so on, a mechanism “whose free play can automatically generate a desired political order, without at any point interpellating individuals into subjects.”43 The nameless jouissance cannot be a title of interpellation proper; it is more a kind of blind drive with no symbolic value-form attached to it—all such symbolic features are temporary and flexible, which is why the individual is constantly called upon to “re-create” himself or herself.
There is a problem with this liberal vision of which every good anthropologist, psychoanalyst, or even perspicuous social critic such as Francis Fukuyama, is aware: it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is usually referred to as “socialization” which it simultaneously undermines, thereby sawing off the branch on which it is sitting. In the market—and, more generally, in the social exchange based on the market—individuals encounter each other as free rational subjects, but such subjects are the result of a complex previous process which concerns symbolic debt, authority, and, above all, trust (in the big Other which regulates exchanges). In other words, the domain of exchange is never purely symmetrical: it is an a priori condition for each of the participants to be able to give something without return so that he or she can participate in the game of give-and-take. For a market exchange to take place, there have to be subjects involved who participate in the basic symbolic pact and display an elementary trust in the Word. Of course, the market is a domain of egotistic cheating and lying; however, as Lacan taught us, in order for a lie to function, it has to present itself and be taken as truth, i.e., the dimension of Truth has to be already established.
Kant missed the necessity of unwritten, disavowed, but necessary rules for every legal structure or set of social rules—it is only such rules that provide the “substance” on which laws can thrive, or properly function. (One could again imagine, along these lines, yet another version of the Kantian secret clause enjoining states to always take into account the unwritten rules, without publicly admitting so.) The exemplary case of the effectiveness of such unwritten rules is “potlatch”; the key feature that opposes potlatch to direct market exchange is thus the temporal dimension. In market exchange, the two complementary acts occur simultaneously (I pay and I get what I paid for), so that the act of exchange does not lead to a permanent social bond, but merely to a momentary exchange between atomized individuals who, immediately afterwards, return to their solitude. In potlatch, on the contrary, the time elapsed between my giving a gift and the other side returning it to me creates a social link which lasts (for a time, at least): we are all linked together by bonds of debt. From this standpoint, money can be defined as the means which enables us to have contacts with others without entering into proper relations with them. (Is the function of the masochistic practice of bondage not [also] to supplement this lack of social bond proper, so that, in it, the foreclosed returns in the real—the suspended symbolic bond returns as literal bodily bondage?)44
This atomized society, in which we have contact with others without entering into proper relations with them, is the presupposition of liberalism. The problem of organizing a state thus cannot be solved “even for a race of devils,” as Kant put it—the idea that it can be is the key moment of the liberal utopia. One should link this Kantian reference to a race of devils to another detail of his ethical thought. According to Kant, if one finds oneself alone on the sea with another survivor of a sunken ship near a floating piece of wood which can keep only one person afloat, moral considerations are no longer valid—there is no moral law preventing me from fighting to the death with the other survivor for the place on the raft; I can engage in it with moral impunity. It is here, perhaps, that one encounters the limit of Kantian ethics: what about someone prepared willingly to sacrifice himself in order to give the other person a chance of survival—and, furthermore, who is ready to do it for non-pathological reasons? If there is no moral law commanding one to do this, does this mean that such an act has no ethical status proper? Does this strange exception not demonstrate that ruthless egotism, a concern for personal survival and gain, is the silent “pathological” presupposition of Kantian ethics—that the Kantian ethical edifice can only maintain itself by silently presupposing the “pathological” image of man as a ruthless utilitarian egotist? In exactly the same way, the Kantian political structure, with his notion of ideal legal power, can maintain itself only by silently presupposing the “pathological” image of the subjects of this power as “a race of devils.”
According to Kant, the mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits: “The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature (natura daedala rerum). In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord.” This is ideology at its purest. One can claim that the notion of ideology was posited “for itself” only in the liberal universe, with its founding distinction