Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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philosopher who tried to undermine the very possibility of such unwritten obscene rules was Immanuel Kant. In his essay on “Perpetual Peace,” he grounds what he calls the “transcendental formula of public law” (“All actions relating to the right of other men are unjust if their maxim is not consistent with publicity”) in the obvious fact that a secret law, a law unknown to its subjects, would legitimize the arbitrary despotism of those who exercise it:
A maxim which I cannot divulge without defeating my own purpose must be kept secret if it is to succeed; and, if I cannot publicly avow it without inevitably exciting universal opposition to my project, the necessary and universal opposition which can be foreseen a priori is due only to the injustice with which the maxim threatens everyone.11
Things, however, soon become ambiguous in Kant. As every Kant scholar knows apropos his prohibition of lying, one has always to be very attentive with regard to the exceptions to Kant’s universal maxims. In the Second Supplement to his “Perpetual Peace” essay, Kant asks a naïve question: can the contract between states which obliges them to perpetual peace have a secret clause? Although he admits that a secret article in a contract under public law is objectively a contradiction, he allows for an exception for subjective reasons. This exception is not what one would have expected, namely a clause allowing for the sordid compromises of Realpolitik in order to maintain peace, such as the infamous secret clause in the Soviet–German Treaty of 1939 regarding the partition of Poland and other Eastern European states. It is, rather, something which may appear much more innocent, even ridiculous as the topic of a secret clause: “The opinions of philosophers on the conditions of the possibility of public peace shall be consulted by those states armed for war.” Why should this clause remain secret? If made public, it would appear humiliating to the legislative authority of a state: how can the supreme authority, to whom “we must naturally attribute the utmost wisdom,” seek instruction from its subjects? This may sound absurd, but do we not respect it even today? When Habermas was in England during the period of Blair’s government, did not Tony Blair invite him to a discreet dinner which went unreported in the media? Kant was thus correct: this clause should remain secret, because it does something more terrifying than exposing the dark, cynical underside of legal power (in today’s epoch, a state power can proudly admit to its dark side, advertising the fact that it is discreetly doing dirty things it is better for us not to know about). It underlines the blindness, stupidity and ignorance of power, none of which is personal but is rather institutional: in spite of input from hundreds of highly educated experts, for example, the results of the US invasion of Iraq were catastrophic.
There is, however, a problem with Kant’s thesis: what was unthinkable for Kant was modern “totalitarian ideology,” as opposed to mere authoritarian lust for power: the will to impose on reality a theoretically developed vision of a better world. In totalitarian regimes such as Stalinism, the rulers did indeed listen too much to the advice of philosophers—and was the same not already true of Robespierre, who relied on Rousseau, so much beloved by Kant? And the story continues up to today: Brecht, Sartre, Heidegger . . . Thank God that those in power do not listen to the philosophers’ advice too much! In the 1960s, when China detonated its first atomic bomb, Karl Jaspers advocated a large-scale atomic assault on China to prevent it becoming a threat to world peace. In ancient China itself, the king of Qin—who ruthlessly united the country and, in 221 BCE, proclaimed himself its First Emperor, instituting the ur-model of “totalitarian” rule—also relied so heavily on the advice of the “Legalist” philosophers that one can see this as the first case of a state regime forced on a society by a conscious, well-planned decision to break with past traditions and impose a new order originally conceived in theory:
The king of Qin was not necessarily the brains of the outfit—his advisers, free of the strictures of courtly life, were the ones who had masterminded his rise to power. The plan to install him as the ruler of the world had commenced before he was even born, with the contention of long-dead scholars that the world required an enlightened prince. It had proceeded with . . . an alliance of scholars in search of a patron who might allow them to secure their own political ends. Ying Zheng, the king of Qin, became the First Emperor with the help of great minds.12
These Legalists—first among them Han Fei and the great Li Si—emerged out of the crisis of Confucianism. When, in the fifth to third centuries BCE, China went through the period of the “Warring States,” Confucians saw the ultimate cause of this slow but persistent decay in the betrayal of age-old traditions and customs. Confucius was not so much a philosopher as a proto-ideologist: what interested him was not metaphysical Truths but rather a harmonious social order within which individuals could lead happy and ethical lives. He was the first to outline clearly what one is tempted to call the elementary scene of ideology, its zero-level, which consists in asserting the (nameless) authority of some substantial Tradition. Reference was made to an original time when this Tradition still fully reigned (when “a king was really a king, a father really a father,” etc.), in contrast to which the current period appeared as the time of decay, of the disintegration of organic social ties, of the growing gap between things and words, between individuals and their titles or social roles. No wonder Confucius represented his teachings as lessons transmitted from antiquity. And the fact that it is easy to demonstrate how he often did the exact opposite by proposing something quite new—in other words, that the tradition he appealed to was what Eric Hobsbawm has called an “invented tradition”—renders his insistence that he was simply “a transmitter and not a maker” all the more symptomatic: his reference to tradition was a necessary structural illusion.
According to Confucius, people live their lives within parameters firmly established by Heaven (which, more so than a purposeful Supreme Being, designates the higher natural order of things with its fixed cycles and patterns). Men are nonetheless responsible for their actions, especially for their treatment of others: we can do little or nothing to alter our fated span of existence, but we determine what we accomplish and what we are remembered for. Heaven rules the physical universe through ming, or “destiny,” which is beyond human understanding and control, and it rules the moral universe, the universe of human behavior, through T’ien ming, or “The Mandate of Heaven.” This “Mandate of Heaven” is based on the idea that Heaven is primarily concerned with the well-being of humans and human society; in order to bring this about, Heaven institutes government and authority. Heaven gives its mandate to a family or individual to rule over other human beings with justice and fairness; rulers are to make the welfare of their people their principal concern. When rulers or a dynasty fail to rule in this manner, Heaven removes its mandate and bestows it on another. Is “Heaven,” then, not the Chinese name for the big Other? In this sense, is not the rule of the Communist Party legitimized by the “Mandate of Heaven,” obliging the Communists to rule in a way that makes the welfare of their people their principal concern?13
Most troubling to Confucius was his perception that the political institutions of his day had completely broken down. He attributed this collapse to the fact that those who wielded power, as well as those who occupied subordinate positions, did so by making claim to titles of which they were not worthy. When asked about the principles of good government, Confucius is reported to have replied: “Good government consists in the ruler being a ruler, the minister a minister, the father a father, and the son a son.” In Europe, we call this a corporatist vision: society is like a body where each individual has to stay in his proper place and play his particular role. This is the very opposite of democracy: in democracy, nobody is constrained to stay in his or her particular place, everybody has the right to participate in universal affairs, to have her say in deliberations about the direction of society. No wonder, then, that Confucius’s description of the disorder he sees in society around him—“Rulers do not rule and subjects do not serve”—provides a good description of a really democratic society, in which the united subjects rule and the nominal rulers serve them.
Confucius proposes here a kind of proto-Althusserian theory of ideological interpellation: the ideological “big Other” (Tradition), embodied in its apparatuses (rituals), interpellates individuals, and it is up to the individual to live and act in accordance with the title that makes him what he is. If I claim for myself a title and attempt to participate in the various hierarchical relationships to which I would be entitled by virtue of