Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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one and the same person, on the one hand, warning against imposing our Eurocentric values on other cultures, and, on the other, advocating that classics like Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn novels should be removed from school libraries because of their racially insensitive portrayal of blacks and Native Americans.
43 Michéa, L’Empire du moindre mal, p. 69.
44 For a more detailed analysis of “potlatch,” see Chapter 1 of Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes.
45 Even in Stalinist Marxism, which—in total opposition to Marx—uses the term “ideology” in a positive sense, ideology is opposed to science: first, Marxists analyze society in a neutral scientific way; then, in order to mobilize the masses, they translate their insights into “ideology.” All one has to add here is that this “Marxist science” opposed to ideology is ideology at its purest.
46 Sara Ahmed, “‘Liberal Multiculturalism Is the Hegemony—It’s an Empirical Fact’—A response to Slavoj Žižek” (unpublished manuscript).
47 Furthermore, the liberal-multiculturalist’s opposition to direct racism is not a mere illusion whose truth is the protection of racism: there is a class-coded dimension to it, of which Ahmed is aware, directed against (white) working-class fundamentalism/racism/anti-feminism.
48 Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Paris: Editions Verdier 2003, p. 97.
49 Ibid., p. 126.
50 One feminist strategy (especially in France and Italy) is to admit that the paternal authority is disintegrating, and that late capitalism is approaching a globalized perverse society of “pathological narcissists” caught up in the superego call to enjoy, but to claim that, to counter this lack, a new figure of authority is emerging “from below,” unnoticed by the media—the symbolic authority of the mother which has nothing to do with the traditional patriarchal figure of the Mother; the new mother here does not fit into the existing ideological coordinates. The problem with this solution is that as a rule it amounts to descriptions and generalizations of actual cases of (single and other) mothers who have to take care of children—in short, it reads as a (sometimes almost Catholic-sentimental) description of the heroic and compassionate single parent who keeps the family together when the father is absent. Such an approach does not really confront the key question, that of the Name-of-the-Father. That is to say, the Name-of-the-Father plays a key role in structuring the symbolic space, sustaining prohibitions which constitute and stabilize desires—what happens to this role with the rise of maternal authority? Also, for Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father only functions when recognized—referred to—by the mother; that is, for him, the Name-of-the-Father is a structuring principle for the entire field of sexual difference. Thus one can well imagine a lesbian couple raising children where, although there is no father, the Name-of-the-Father is fully operative. So what happens to sexual difference, as well as to the symbolic function of the father, with the rise of maternal authority?
51 It is interesting to note that the Evo Morales government in Bolivia is pursuing a similar goal: it set itself the task of exploring the possibilities of combining the legal order of a modern state with older indigenous practices of resolving conflictual situations.
Interlude 1. Hollywood Today:
Report from an Ideological Battlefield
Let us begin, quite arbitrarily, with Michael Apted’s Enigma (2001, screenplay by Tom Stoppard, based on the novel by Robert Harris), which takes place in 1943, among the cryptanalysts at Bletchley Park working day and night to crack the German “Enigma” code. They are rejoined by Tom Jericho, a troubled working-class mathematical genius who is back after a period of recuperation brought on by overwork and an unhappy love affair with Claire, the easy-going femme fatale, which led to his psychic breakdown. Jericho immediately tries to see Claire again and finds that she has mysteriously disappeared. He enlists the help of Claire’s housemate Hester to follow the trail of clues and learn what has happened to her; the two repeatedly break both the rules of the Bletchley Park establishment and the law as their hunt gets more intense. Jericho is closely watched by Wigram, an upper-class MI5 agent, who plays cat and mouse with him throughout the film. Jericho is tolerated at the Park, despite his transgressions, because of the brilliant plan he invents for uncovering the new key. Tom and Hester at the same time uncover a British government plot to bury the intelligence information on the Katyn massacre, for fear it might weaken American willingness to remain in the war on the same side as the Soviet Union. This, in turn, leads to their discovery that a Polish cryptanalyst, Jozef Pukowski, was so incensed on learning of the massacre that he is prepared to betray Bletchley’s secrets to the Nazis in order to take revenge on Stalin. The fate of Claire remains unclear to the end: was she killed or did she just disappear? All we learn is that she was in reality also an MI5 agent under Wigram’s control.
The film was criticized for its manipulation of historical facts: apart from a minor series of changes (for example, the only known traitor at Bletchley Park was John Cairncross, who worked for the Soviet Union), the film’s biggest alteration concerns the character of Jericho, who is obviously a sanitized version of the legendary Alan Turing, a key figure at the real Bletchley Park in both the cracking of the Enigma code and the development of the digital computer; in the 1950s, Turing was prosecuted for homosexual acts, lost his security clearance, and was subjected to brutal chemical treatment, which resulted in his suicide in 1954. In the film, a firmly heterosexual Turing-Jericho finally gets over his traumatic crush on Claire—in the final scene, we see him in 1946, meeting Hester, pregnant with their child, in front of the National Gallery in London.1
However, such an analysis moves at the level of what one is tempted to call constituted ideology, following the distinction proposed by Alain Badiou between two types (or rather levels) of corruption in democracy: de facto empirical corruption, and the corruption that pertains to the very form of democracy with its reduction of politics to the negotiation of private interests. In a homologous way, one should distinguish between constituted ideology—empirical manipulations and distortions at the level of content—and constitutive ideology—the ideological form which provides the coordinates of the very space within which the content is located.2
To discern the contours of the “constitutive ideology” of Enigma, one should focus on how the film rather obviously plays upon the register of two enigmas: the enigma of the German secret code and the enigma of the Woman. No matter how complex the military codes are, they can be cracked—the true enigma which cannot ever be cracked is the Woman. (The split between Claire and Hester is crucial here: the only way for a man to normalize the sexual relationship is to erase the enigmatic Woman and accept the ordinary woman as a partner.) By re-framing the story of the effort to break the German “enigma” code into a story about the enigma of woman, what the film adds to the narrative is ideological surplus-enjoyment: it is this re-framing which sustains our pleasure in the otherwise narratively rather dull work of cracking secret codes. This feature is also what makes the film part of the Hollywood ideological universe: if a movie on the same topic (military decoding) had been made in, say, the Soviet Union, there would have been no erotic re-framing of the “enigma” (which is why the film would also have been much more boring. . .).
What Does the Joker Want?
Today, this fundamental level of constitutive ideology assumes the guise of its very opposite: non-ideology.
David Grossman stands for the Jewish attitude at its purest, as rendered in a nice personal anecdote: when, just prior to the 1967 Israeli–Arab war, he heard on the radio about the Arab threats to throw the Jews into the sea, his reaction was to take swimming lessons—a paradigmatic Jewish reaction if there ever was one, in the spirit of the long talk between Josef K. and the priest (the prison chaplain) that follows the parable on the door of the law in Kafka’s Trial. Grossman’s work is marked by a strange line of separation.