The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. Slavoj Žižek
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mortgage banks which hasten their indebtedness and accelerate the concentration of property. But these banks are to be used to make money out of the confiscated estates of the House of Orleans; no capitalist wants to agree to this condition, which is not in the decree, and the mortgage bank remains a mere decree, etc., etc.
Bonaparte would like to appear as the patriarchal benefactor of all classes. But he cannot give to one without taking from another. Just as it was said of the Duke de Guise in the time of the Fronde that he was the most obliging man in France because he gave all his estates to his followers, with feudal obligations to him, so Bonaparte would like to be the most obliging man in France and turn all the property and all the labor of France into a personal obligation to himself. He would like to steal all of France in order to make a present of it to France.3
We encounter here the deadlock of the All: if all (classes) are to be represented, then the structure has to be like that of le jeu du furet (“ferret game”), in which players form a circle around one person and quickly pass the “ferret” behind their backs; the player in the center then has to guess who holds the ferret—if he guesses right, he changes places with the one who had the ferret. (In the English version, the players shout, “Button, button, who’s got the button?”) However, this is not all. In order for the system to function, that is, in order for Napoleon to stand above all classes and not to act as a direct representative of any class, it is not enough for him to locate the direct base of his regime in the refuse or remainder of all classes. He also has to act as the representative of one particular class, of that class which, precisely, is not constituted to act as a united agent demanding active representation. This class of people who cannot represent themselves and can thus only be represented is, of course, the class of small-holding peasants:
The small-holding peasants form an enormous mass whose members live in similar conditions but without entering into manifold relations with each other. Their mode of production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into mutual intercourse … They are therefore incapable of asserting their class interest in their own name, whether through a parliament or a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented. Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an authority over them, an unlimited governmental power which protects them from the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds its final expression in the executive power which subordinates society to itself.4
Only these features together form the paradoxical structure of populist-Bonapartist representation: standing above all classes; shifting between them; direct reliance on the abject remainder of all classes; plus the ultimate reference to the class of those who are unable to act as a collective agent demanding political representation.5 What these paradoxes point towards is the impossibility of pure representation (recall the stupidity of Rick Santorum who in early 2012 said that, in contrast to Occupy Wall Street, which claims to stand for the 99 percent, he represents the entire 100 percent). As Lacan would have put it, the class antagonism renders such a total representation materially impossible: class antagonism means that there is no neutral All of a society—every “All” secretly privileges a certain class.
Recall the axiom followed by the great majority of contemporary “specialists” and politicians: we are told again and again that we live in critical times of deficit and debt and will all have to share the burden and accept a lower standard of living—all, that is, with the exception of the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is an absolute taboo: if we do this, so we are told, the rich will lose any incentive to invest and thereby create new jobs, and we will all suffer the consequences. The only way out of these hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. And if the rich look to be in danger of losing some of their wealth, society must help them out. The predominant view of the financial crisis (that it was caused by excessive state borrowing and spending) is blatantly in conflict with the fact that, from Iceland to the US, the ultimate responsibility for it lies with the big private banks—in order to prevent their collapse, the state had to intervene with enormous sums of taxpayers’ money.
The standard way of disavowing an antagonism and presenting one’s own position as the representation of the All is to project the cause of the antagonism onto a foreign intruder who stands for the threat to society as such, for the anti-social element, for its excremental excess. This is why anti-Semitism is not just one among many ideologies; it is ideology as such, kat’exohen. It embodies the zero-level (or the pure form) of ideology, establishing its elementary coordinates: the social antagonism (“class struggle”) is mystified or displaced so that its cause can be projected onto the external intruder. Lacan’s formula “1 + 1 + a” is best exemplified by the class struggle: the two classes plus the excess of the “Jew,” the objet a, the supplement to the antagonistic couple. The function of this supplementary element is double. It involves a fetishistic disavowal of class antagonism, and yet, precisely as such, it stands for this antagonism, forever preventing “class peace.” In other words, were there only the two classes, 1 + 1, without the supplement, then we would not have “pure” class antagonism but, on the contrary, class peace: the two classes complementing each other in a harmonious Whole. The paradox is thus that the very element that blurs or displaces the “purity” of the class struggle also serves as its motivating force. Critics of Marxism who insist that there are never just two classes opposed in social life thus miss the point: it is precisely because there are never only two opposed classes that there is class struggle.
This brings us to the changes in the “Napoleon III dispositif” that occurred in the twentieth century. First, the specific role of the “Jew” (or its structural equivalent) as the foreign intruder who poses a threat to the social body was not yet fully developed, and one can easily show that foreign immigrants are today’s Jews, the main target of the new populism.
Second, today’s small farmers are the notorious middle class. The ambiguity of the middle class, this contradiction embodied (as Marx put it apropos Proudhon), is best exemplified by the way it relates to politics: On the one hand, the middle class is against politicization—it just wants to maintain its way of life, to be left to work and live in peace, which is why it tends to support authoritarian coups that promise to put an end to the crazy political mobilization of society, so that everybody can return to his or her rightful place. On the other hand, members of the middle class—now in the guise of a threatened patriotic hard-working moral majority—are the main instigators of grassroots right-wing populist movements, from Le Pen in France and Geert Wilders in the Netherlands to the Tea Party movement in the US.
Finally, as part of the global shift from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of the University, a new figure has emerged—that of the (technocratic, financial) expert who is allegedly able to rule (or rather, “administer”) in a neutral post-ideological way, without representing any specific interests.
But where in all this is the usual suspect identified by the orthodox Marxist analysis of fascism—the big capital (corporations like Krupp, etcetera) that “really stood behind Hitler”? (The orthodox Marxist doxa violently rejected the theory of middle-class support for Hitler.) Orthodox Marxism is correct here, but for the wrong reasons: big capital is the ultimate reference, the “absent cause,” but it exerts its causality precisely through a series of displacements—or, to quote Kojin Karatani’s precise homology with the Freudian logic of dreams: “What Marx emphasizes [in his Eighteenth Brumaire] is not the ‘dream-thoughts’—in other words, the actual relationships of class interest—but rather the ‘dream-work,’ in other words, the ways in which class unconsciousness is condensed and displaced.”6
Perhaps, however, we should invert Karatani’s formula: are not “dream-thoughts” rather the contents/interests represented in multiple ways through the mechanisms described by Marx (small farmers, lumpenproletariat, etcetera), and is not the “unconscious wish,” the Real of the “absent Cause” overdetermining this game of multiple representations, the interest of big Capital? The Real is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access; the Thing that eludes our grasp and the distorting screen that makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective