Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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stakes. We’re not doing that . . . And that is giving the Maoists space to move in.”4
Although similar signs of the “great disorder under heaven” abound, the truth hurts, and we desperately try to avoid it. To explain how, we can turn to an unexpected guide. The Swiss-born psychologist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed the famous scheme of the five stages of grief, which follow, for example, upon learning that one has a terminal illness: denial (one simply refuses to accept the fact: “This can’t be happening, not to me”); anger (which explodes when we can no longer deny the fact: “How can this happen to me?”); bargaining (in the hope that we can somehow postpone or diminish the fact: “Just let me live to see my children graduate”); depression (libidinal disinvestment: “I’m going to die, so why bother with anything?”); and acceptance (“I can’t fight it, so I may as well prepare for it”). Later, Kübler-Ross applied the same scheme to any form of catastrophic personal loss (joblessness, death of a loved one, divorce, drug addiction), emphasizing that the five stages do not necessarily come in the same order, nor are they all experienced by every patient.5
One can discern the same five figures in the way our social consciousness attempts to deal with the forthcoming apocalypse. The first reaction is one of ideological denial: there is no fundamental disorder; the second is exemplified by explosions of anger at the injustices of the new world order; the third involves attempts at bargaining (“if we change things here and there, life could perhaps go on as before”); when the bargaining fails, depression and withdrawal set in; finally, after passing through this zero-point, the subject no longer perceives the situation as a threat, but as the chance of a new beginning—or, as Mao Zedong put it: “There is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.”
The following five chapters refer to these five stances. Chapter 1—denial—analyzes the predominant modes of ideological obfuscation, from the latest Hollywood blockbusters up to false (displaced) apocalyptism (New Age obscurantism, and so forth). Chapter 2—anger—looks at violent protests against the global system, and the rise of religious fundamentalism in particular. Chapter 3—bargaining—focuses on the critique of political economy, with a plea for the renewal of this central ingredient of Marxist theory. Chapter 4—depression—considers the impact of the forthcoming collapse in its less familiar aspects, such as the rise of new forms of subjective pathology (the “post-traumatic” subject). Finally, Chapter 5—acceptance—discerns the signs of an emerging emancipatory subjectivity, isolating the germs of a communist culture in all its diverse forms, including in literary and other utopias (from Kafka’s community of mice to the collective of freak outcasts in the TV series Heroes). This basic skeleton of the book is supplemented by four interludes, each of which provides a variation on the theme of the preceding chapter.
The turn towards an emancipatory enthusiasm takes place only when the traumatic truth is not only accepted in a disengaged way, but is fully lived: “Truth has to be lived, not taught. Prepare for battle!” Like Rilke’s famous lines, “for there’s no place that doesn’t see you. You must change your life,” this passage from Hermann Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game cannot but appear as a weird non sequitur: if the Thing looks back at me from everywhere, why does this oblige me to change my life? Why not rather a depersonalized mystical experience in which I “step out of myself” and identify with the other’s gaze? Likewise, if truth has to be lived, why need this involve a struggle? Why not rather a meditative inner experience? The reason is that the “spontaneous” state of our daily lives is that of a lived lie, to break out of which requires a continuous struggle. The starting point for this process is to become terrified by oneself. When, in his early “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right,” Marx analyzed the backwardness of Germany, he made a rarely noticed yet crucial observation about the link between shame, terror and courage:
The actual burden must be made even more burdensome by creating an awareness of it. The humiliation must be increased by making it public. Each sphere of German society must be depicted as the partie honteuse of that society and these petrified conditions must be made to dance by having their own tune sung to them! The people must be put in terror of themselves in order to give them courage.6
Such is our task today, when faced with the shameless cynicism of the existing global order.
In pursuing this task, one should not be afraid to learn from one’s enemies. After meeting Nixon and Kissinger, Mao said: “I like to deal with rightists. They say what they really think—not like the leftists, who say one thing and mean another.” There is a deep truth in this observation. Mao’s lesson holds today even more than in his own day: one can learn much more from intelligent critical conservatives (not reactionaries) than one can from liberal progressives. The latter tend to obliterate the “contradictions” inherent in the existing order which the former are ready to admit as irresolvable. What Daniel Bell called the “cultural contradictions of capitalism” are at the origin of today’s ideological malaise: the progress of capitalism, which necessitates a consumerist ideology, is gradually undermining the very (Protestant ethical) attitude which rendered capitalism possible—today’s capitalism increasingly functions as the “institutionalization of envy.”
The truth we are dealing with here is not “objective” truth, but the self-relating truth about one’s own subjective position; as such, it is an engaged truth, measured not by its factual accuracy but by the way it affects the subjective position of enunciation. In his Seminar 18, on “a discourse which would not be of a semblance,” Lacan provided a succinct definition of the truth of interpretation in psychoanalysis: “Interpretation is not tested by a truth that would decide by yes or no, it unleashes truth as such. It is only true inasmuch as it is truly followed.” There is nothing “theological” in this precise formulation, only the insight into the properly dialectical unity of theory and practice in (not only) psychoanalytic interpretation: the “test” of the analyst’s interpretation lies in the truth-effect it unleashes in the patient. This is also how one should (re)read Marx’s Thesis XI: the “test” of Marxist theory is the truth-effect it unleashes in its addressees (the proletarians), in transforming them into revolutionary subjects.
The locus communis “You have to see it to believe it!” should always be read together with its inversion: “You have to believe in it to see it!” Though one may be tempted to oppose these perspectives—the dogmatism of blind faith versus an openness towards the unexpected—one should nevertheless insist on the truth contained in the second version: truth, as opposed to knowledge, is, like a Badiouian Event, something that only an engaged gaze, the gaze of a subject who “believes in it,” is able to see. Take the case of love: in love, only the lover sees in the object of love that X which is the cause of his love, the parallax-object; in this sense the structure of love is the same as that of the Badiouian Event, which also exists only for those who recognize themselves in it: there can be no Event for a non-engaged objective observer. Lacking this engaged position, mere descriptions of the state of things, no matter how accurate, fail to generate emancipatory effects—ultimately, they only render the burden of the lie still more oppressive, or, to quote Mao again, “lift up a rock only to drop it on their own feet.”
When, in 1948, Sartre saw that he was likely to be maligned by both sides in the Cold War, he wrote: “if that were to happen, it would prove only one thing: either that I am very clumsy, or that I am on the right road.”7 As it happens, this is often how I also feel: I am attacked for being anti-Semitic and for spreading Zionist lies, for being a covert Slovene nationalist and an unpatriotic traitor to my nation,8 for being a crypto-Stalinist defending terror and for spreading bourgeois lies about Communism . . . So maybe, just maybe, I am on the right path, the path of fidelity to freedom.9 In the otherwise all too sentimental-humanist dialogue of Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, there is an exchange between