Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek
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an animal or other prescribed food instead of human life. The sacrifice is needed not to secure any special favors from the gods, but to make sure that the wheel of life goes on turning. Priests perform a function which concerns the balance of the entire universe: if the gods remain hungry, the whole cycle of cosmic life is disturbed. From the very beginning, the “holistic” notion of the great chain of Being—the reality of which is the brutal chain of the strong eating the weak—is thus based on a deception: it is not a “natural” chain, but a chain based on an exception (humans who don’t want to be eaten). Thus sacrifices are substitute insertions aimed at restoring the complete life cycle.
This was the first contract between ideologists (priests) and those in power (warrior-kings): the kings, who retain actual power (over the life and death of other people), will recognize the formal superiority of the priests as the highest caste, and, in exchange for this appearance of superiority, the priests will legitimize the power of the warrior-kings as part of the natural cosmic order. However, around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, something new took place: a radical “revaluation of all values” in the guise of a universalist backlash against this cosmic food chain; the ascetic rejection of this entire infernal machine of life reproducing itself through sacrifice and eating. The circle of the food chain is now perceived as the circle of eternal suffering, and the only way to achieve peace is to exempt oneself from it. (With regard to food, this, of course, entails vegetarianism: not eating dead animals.) From perpetuating the life cycle in time, we move on to the goal of entering the timeless Void. With this reversal from a life-affirming stance to world-renunciation, comparable to the Christian rejection of the pagan universe, the highest values are no longer strength and fertility, but compassion, humility, and love. The very meaning of sacrifice changes with this reversal: we no longer sacrifice so that the infernal life cycle might go on, but in order to rid ourselves of the guilt of participating in that cycle.
What are the socio-political consequences of this reversal? How can we avoid the conclusion that the entire social hierarchy, grounded in the “great food chain” of eaters and eaten, should be suspended? It is here that the genius of The Laws of Manu shines through: its basic ideological operation is to unite the hierarchy of castes and the ascetic world-renunciation by making purity itself the criterion of one’s place in the caste hierarchy: “Vegetarianism was put forward as the only way to liberate oneself from the bonds of natural violence that adversely affected one’s karma. A concomitant of this new dietary practice was a social hierarchy governed to a large extent by the relative realization of the ideal of non-violence. The rank order of the social classes did not change. But the rationale for the ranking did.”20 Vegetarian priests are at the top, as close as humanly possible to purity; they are followed by the warrior-kings who control society by dominating it and killing life—they are in a way the negative of the priests, i.e., they entertain towards the Wheel of Life the same negative attitude as the priests, albeit in aggressive/interventional mode. Then come the producers who provide food and other material conditions for life; and, finally, at the bottom, are the outcasts whose main task is to deal with all kinds of excrements, the putrefying dead remainders of life (from cleaning the toilets to butchering animals and disposing of human bodies).
Since the two attitudes are ultimately incompatible, the task of their unification is an impossible one and can be achieved only by a complex panoply of tricks, displacements and compromises whose basic formula is that of universality with exceptions: in principle yes, but . . . The Laws of Manu demonstrates a breathtaking ingenuity in accomplishing this task, with examples often coming dangerously close to the ridiculous. For example, priests should study the Veda, not trade; in extremity, however, a priest can engage in trade, but he is not allowed to trade in certain things like sesame seed, except in certain circumstances; and if he sells sesame seed in the wrong circumstances, he will be reborn as a worm in dogshit . . . Is the structure here not exactly the same as that of the famous Jewish joke on the marriage-mediator who reinterprets every deficiency in the bride-to-be as a positive asset: “She is poor . . .”—“so she will know how to handle the family money, making the most of it!” “She is ugly . . .”—“so the husband will not have to worry that she will cheat on him!” “She stutters . . .”—“so she will keep quiet and not annoy the husband with incessant prattle!” and so on until the final “She really stinks!”—“So you want her to be perfect, without any defect?” The general formula of this procedure is to “state one general rule, to which the whole of the subsequent treatise constitutes nothing but a series of increasingly specific exceptions . . . ‘A specific injunction is stronger than a general one.’”21 In other words, the great lesson of The Laws of Manu is that the true regulating power of the law resides not in its direct prohibitions, in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating the very violations of prohibitions: the law silently accepts that the basic prohibitions are violated (or even discreetly solicits us to violate them), and then, once we find ourselves in this position of guilt, it tells us how to reconcile the violation with the law by violating the prohibition in a regulated way.
There is nothing “Oriental” about this procedure: the Christian church faced the same problem from the fourth century onwards, when it became the state church: how to reconcile the feudal class society where rich lords ruled over impoverished peasants with the egalitarian poverty of the collective of believers as described in the Gospels? The solution of Thomas Aquinas was that, while in principle shared property is better, this holds only for perfect humans; for the majority of us who dwell in sin, private property and difference in wealth are natural, and it is even sinful to demand egalitarianism or the abolishment of private property in our fallen societies, i.e., to demand for imperfect people what befits only the perfect. Even Buddhism often falls into this trap—say, in the guise of allowing (only) a violence perpetrated in a non-violent attitude, through inner peace and distance: “Even though the Buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, there will never be peace. Therefore, as a means of bringing into harmony those things which are incompatible, killing and war are necessary.”22
Is this supplementing of universality with exceptions a case of what Hegel called the “concrete universal”? Definitely not, and for a very precise reason: although both the structure of universal law with exceptions and Hegelian “concrete universality” mobilize the gap between the universal and the particular, the nature of the gap is different in each case. In the first case, it is simply the gap between the pure universal principle or law and the pragmatic consideration of particular circumstances, i.e., the (ultimately empiricist) notion of the excess of the wealth of concrete particular content over any abstract principle—in other words, here, universality precisely remains abstract, which is why it has to be twisted or adapted to particular circumstances in order to become operative in real life. In the second case, on the contrary, the tension is absolutely immanent, inherent to universality itself: the fact that a universality actualizes itself in a series of exceptions is an effect of this universality being at war with itself, marked by an inherent deadlock or impossibility. (The same goes for the idea of Communism: it is not enough to say that the idea of Communism should not be applied as an abstract dogma, that, in each case, concrete circumstances should be taken into consideration. It is also not enough to say, apropos the fiasco of the twentieth-century Communist countries, that this mis-application in no way disqualifies the idea of Communism. The idea’s imperfect [or, rather, catastrophic] actualizations bear witness to an “inner contradiction” at the very heart of the idea.)
Let us take a (surprising, perhaps) case of the Hegelian “concrete universality”: a wonderful Jewish story about an anti-death-penalty Talmud specialist who, embarrassed by the fact that the death penalty is ordained by God himself, proposed a delightfully practical solution: one should not directly overturn the divine injunction, that would have been blasphemous; but one should treat it as God’s slip of tongue, his moment of madness, and invent a complex network of sub-regulations and conditions which, while leaving the possibility of a death penalty intact, ensure that this possibility will never be realized.23 The beauty of this procedure is that it turns around the standard trick of prohibiting something in principle (torture, for instance), but then slipping in enough qualifications (“except in specified extreme circumstances . . .”) to