Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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illegally) to another location, organizing vigilante groups, etc. Predictably, Slovenian liberals condemned them as racists, locating racism in this isolated small town, though the liberals, living comfortably in the big cities, had no contact with the Roma other than meeting their representatives in front of the TV cameras. When the TV reporters interviewed the “racists” from the town, it became clear they were a group of people frightened by the constant fighting and shooting in the Roma camp, by the theft of animals from their farms, and by other forms of minor harassment. It is all too easy to say (as did the liberals) that the Roma way of life is (also) a consequence of centuries of exclusion and mistreatment, that the townspeople should be more receptive to the Roma, and so on and so forth. What nobody was prepared to do vis-à-vis the local “racists” was offer concrete solutions for the very real problems the Roma camp evidently posed for them.
One of the most irritating liberal-tolerant strategies is that of distinguishing between Islam as a great religion of spiritual peace and compassion and its fundamentalist-terrorist abuse—whenever Bush or Netanyahu or Sharon announced a new phase in the War on Terror, they never forgot to include this mantra. (One is almost tempted to counter it by claiming that, as with all religions, Islam is, in itself, a rather stupid and inconsistent construction, and that what makes it truly great are its possible political uses.) This is liberal-tolerant racism at its purest: this kind of “respect” for the Other is the very form of the appearance of its opposite, of patronizing disrespect. The very term “tolerance” is here indicative: one “tolerates” something one does not approve of, but cannot abolish, either because one is not strong enough to do so or because one is benevolent enough to allow the Other to retain its illusions—in this way, a secular liberal “tolerates” religion, a permissive parent “tolerates” his children’s excesses, and so on.
Where I disagree with Ahmed is in her supposition that the underlying injunction of liberal tolerance is monocultural—“Be like us, become British!” On the contrary, I claim that the injunction is one of cultural apartheid: others should not come too close to us, we should protect our “way of life.” The demand “Become like us!” is a superego demand, a demand which counts on the other’s inability to really become like us, so that we can then gleefully “deplore” their failure. (Recall how, in apartheid South Africa, the official regime’s ideology was multiculturalist: apartheid was needed so that all the diverse African tribes would not get drowned in white civilization.) The truly unbearable fact for a multiculturalist liberal is an Other who really does become like us, while retaining their own specific features.47
Furthermore, Ahmed passes too easily between forms of racism which should be distinguished. In a kind of spectral analysis, one can identify at least three different modes of contemporary racism. First, there is the old-fashioned unabashed rejection of the Other (despotic, barbarian, orthodox, Muslim, corrupt, oriental . . .) on behalf of authentic values (Western, civilized, democratic, Christian . . .). Then there is the “reflexive” politically correct racism: the multiculturalist perception of, for example, the Balkans as the terrain of ethnic horror and intolerance, of primitive irrational bellicose passions, as opposed to the post-national liberal-democratic process of solving conflicts through rational negotiation, compromise, and mutual respect. Here racism is, as it were, elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutral benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on down there. Finally, there is reversed racism, which celebrates the exotic authenticity of the Balkan Other, as in the notion of the Serbs who, in contrast to the inhibited, anemic Western Europeans, still exhibit a prodigious lust for life.
Ahmed further claims that racists themselves present themselves as a “threatened minority” whose free speech must be protected:
[They] use the prohibition as evidence that racism is a minority position which has to be defended against the multicultural hegemony. Racism can then be articulated as a minority position, a refusal of orthodoxy. In this perverse logic, racism can then be embraced as a form of free speech. We have articulated a new discourse of freedom: as the freedom to be offensive, in which racism becomes an offense that restores our freedom: the story goes, we have worried too much about offending the other, we must get beyond this restriction, which sustains the fantasy that “that” was the worry in the first place. Note here that the other, especially the Muslim subject who is represented as easily offended, becomes the one who causes injury, insofar as it is the Muslim other’s “offendability” that is read as restricting our free speech. The offendable subject “gets in the way” of our freedom. So rather than saying racism is prohibited by the liberal multicultural consensus, under the banner of respect for difference, I would argue that racism is what is protected under the banner of free speech through the appearance of being prohibited.
We should here supplement Ahmed’s presentation with different examples which render visible the perhaps unexpected implications of her theoretical propositions. Consider the paradox of Chomsky, when he wrote the preface to a book by Robert Faurisson, a Holocaust denier, defending the author’s right to publish the book. Chomsky makes it clear that he is personally disgusted by Faurisson’s reasoning; but the problem, as he goes on to say, is that once we start to prohibit certain opinions, who will be next in line? The question is thus: how to counteract the fake liberal prohibition on racism? In the Chomsky mode, or by replacing it with a “true” prohibition?
Another unexpected example: according to Jean-Claude Milner, a unified Europe could only constitute itself on the basis of a progressive erasure of all divisive historical traditions and legitimizations; consequently, a unified Europe will be based on the erasure of history, of historical memory. Recent phenomena such as Holocaust revisionism, or the moral equation of all victims of World War II (Germans suffered under aerial bombardments no less than did the Russians or the British; the fate of Nazi collaborators liquidated by the Russians after the war was comparable to that of victims of the Nazi genocide, etc.), are the logical outcome of this tendency: all specified limits are potentially erased on behalf of abstract suffering and victimization. And this Europe—and this is what Milner is aiming at all along—in its very advocacy of unlimited openness and multicultural tolerance, again needs the figure of the “Jew” as a structural obstacle to this drive to unlimited unification. Contemporary anti-Semitism, however, no longer takes the same form as the old ethnic anti-Semitism; its focus has been displaced from Jews as an ethnic group onto the State of Israel: “in the program of the Europe of the twenty-first century, the State of Israel occupies exactly the position that the name ‘Jew’ occupied in the Europe before the rupture of 39–45.”48 In this way, the anti-Semitism of today can present itself as anti-anti-Semitism, full of solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust; the reproach is just that, in our era of the gradual dissolution of all limits, of the fluidification of all traditions, the Jews wanted to build their own clearly delimited nation-state. Here are the very last lines of Milner’s book:
If modernity is defined by the belief in an unlimited realization of dreams, our future is fully outlined. It leads through absolute theoretical and practical anti-Judaism. To follow Lacan beyond what he explicitly stated, the foundations of a new religion are thus posited: anti-Judaism will be the natural religion of the humanity-to-come.49
Is Milner, a passionate pro-Zionist, not relying here on the same logic as used by Ahmed? In his view, are Jews not caught in the same paradoxical predicament as, say, British Muslims: they were offered civil rights, the chance to integrate into UK society, but, ungrateful as they are, they persisted in their separate way of life? Plus, again similarly to Muslims, they are perceived as being excessively sensitive, seeing “anti-Semitism” everywhere. Milner’s point is thus that the official anti-anti-Semitism, which issues prohibitions (recall the case of David Irving), is but the form of appearance of a secret anti-Semitism.
Returning to Ahmed’s line of argumentation: the hegemony of multiculturalism is thus not a direct form of hegemony, but a reflexive one:
the hegemonic position is that liberal multiculturalism is the hegemony. This is why the current monocultural political agenda functions as a kind of retrospective defense against multiculturalism. The explicit argument of New Labour is that multiculturalism went “too far”: we gave the other “too much” respect,