Demanding the Impossible

by Slavoj Zizek

  SŽ: What I’m claiming is that something strange is happening. In some Western countries and in the United States, you can be a total creep or a complete idiot – there is no limit – but you can still be a leader. For example, Clinton: we all know, or at least surmise, that he did it. The majority of people believe there was something between the two of them; they believe that Clinton was lying when he denied it. Nonetheless, they support him. So everything can be open; there is no limit. You can say all this and everything still functions. In a way it designates the key element of the efficiency of an ideological statement or of a power structure. This power structure is totally cynical. “Say whatever you want! It will happen anyway.” This is also a very dangerous cynical tendency. And all big “public issues” are now translated into attitudes toward the regulation of “natural” or “personal” idiosyncrasies.

  The next step is Berlusconi. He has been accused of prostitution and cheating, but he’s still at the top in Italy. When people claim that everything is open to the media and we no longer have a private life, I claim, on the contrary, that we no longer have a public life. What is effectively disappearing here is public life itself, the public sphere proper, in which one operates as a symbolic agent who cannot be reduced to a private individual, to a bundle of personal attributes, desires, traumas, and idiosyncrasies. The public domain is fast disappearing and we treat it as a private domain.

  I was shocked when a German former Foreign Minister, Joschka Fischer, an old leftist, after being charged with relaxing controls on visa regulations for Ukraine and allowing illegal immigrants with fake identities, explained his decision on public television. It was like watching some sort of TV reality show like Actor’s Studio. He said, “I had a bad night. I was thinking and I was crying.” My god, we are talking about dignified public decisions. We don’t care about his private traumas and worries. It doesn’t matter.

  Do you know who started this shameless openness? The US President Richard Nixon. I sympathize with him more and more. I think he should be rehabilitated. Forget about the ideology of two journalists overthrowing him. It is clear that there must have been some support in the US establishment. This is the myth of US democracy: “Look what a great country we are. Two ordinary journalists, Woodward and Bernstein, can overthrow a president.” But what I’m saying is that Nixon was the last one to struggle with dignity. He wanted to be dignified, but he couldn’t. He was a crook, but a crook who fell victim to the gap between his ideals and ambitions and the reality of his acts, and who thus experienced an authentically tragic downfall. What a tragic case.

  But Ronald Reagan was totally a new model, who shamelessly displayed his deficiencies and weaknesses: a so-called “Teflon” president whom one is tempted to characterize as post-Oedipal – a “postmodern” president. I remember all the stupid liberal media people who, after every speech of Reagan, published a long report enumerating all the mistakes he made. Do you know what people discovered? The more he was caught making stupid mistakes, the more popular he became. People simply identified with this false “humanization.”

  Berlusconi is doing this masterfully. People don’t want a perfect leader, they want a leader with weaknesses like them, even with vulgarities. I read a nice analysis of Berlusconi: what it said is that he is just like an average Italian. He wants to screw around with women and he wants to cheat with taxes. They have a president who perfectly embodies or enacts the mythical image of the average Italian. People identify with him and he still remains popular. And yet, this appearance of his being “just an ordinary guy like the rest of us” should not deceive us.

  What I wanted to say through all of this is that something very important is changing – I don’t know how to formulate it – in the way that political leaders operate today. I claim that this old figure of a masterful leader with dignity is disappearing. Even Putin is very careful about this tendency. At some charity event, Putin played the piano and sang “Blueberry Hill.” I asked my friend, who is close to Putin, and he said that it is all planned, in the same way that he appears to lose his nerve and, from time to time, use dirty words. He knows this makes him popular. Something is changing here even with the features of the new model of political leader.

  12

  The Screen of Politeness/ Empty Gestures and Performatives

  How do you understand the general analysis of North Korea?

  SŽ: If you ask me about North Korea, I think it is interesting, as an extreme case, to ask how this regime functions; how it is possible. From what I read, one or two years ago North Korea changed its constitution, dropping out all references to socialism and communism. It is now some kind of patriotic military regime. Also what interests me is that even when Mao Zedong and Stalin were still in power and local media were praising them, North Korea never directly upheld the supernatural. At that time, it never claimed that Mao could create wonders, but now that is what is said in North Korea.

  For example, the official story of the death of Kim Il-Sung is that, when he died, thousands of ravens came down because people cried so much, so they decided not to take his soul away. It’s very interesting how the first communist regime directly transformed into supernatural dimensions. What intrigues me is a very simple question: do ordinary people in North Korea believe it or not? The answer might be relatively complex, because in a way they might not believe it, but, in another way, they cannot be simply cynical. There must be an interesting self-blinding confused mechanism.

  I wonder how much the floodgates will open. I read somewhere that they are now getting more cellphones and DVDs smuggled in from China. Will the regime survive with this? And if they want unification, what will happen if it takes place all of a sudden? My God, there are 20 million poor people. Are outsiders allowed to visit North Korea? I was told that you could go into North Korea via China, and in Beijing there are some agencies through which to do this. Recently I was told that the only way to visit there was either officially, as a diplomat or journalist, or you have to become a member of some North Korean Society of Friendship and play along with it for at least two years. I like this: even in the worst days of Stalinism, you were prohibited from talking with foreigners, and in North Korea I read that it’s even very dangerous for local people if you fix your gaze on them or if they have any kind of communication, even a non-verbal one too, with a foreigner.

  The problem is if North Korea collapses; we don’t want a repeat of the mistakes made in the case of East Germany. If you ask me, it might sound horribly somehow fascist or totalitarian, but I wouldn’t open the border immediately. What would happen if the North were to collapse immediately? Practically, it would be too dangerous and chaotic. I’d retain North Korea as a kind of special zone and gradually solve problems. I’m not a utopian. Here I’m very realistic. Because West Germany made a mistake: they just threw an incredible amount of money into East Germany – as I remember, around 70,000 euros per person – and the effect was zero. So now East Germany has the most modern, more than the West, phone system and trains, but the whole social structure is still much less productive.

  And another problem is that there was no shared cultural project. For example, do you know a North Korean film, which they tried to show abroad? It is a famous film, Pulgasari, directed by Kim Jong-Il. It is about a big monster who helps the people but then demands victims, and the most beautiful girl sacrifices herself for the people, to be eaten. Well, it was even available for a while in the United States, with a small distributor. It was perhaps Kim’s biggest attempt. I even have a book published in English by Kim Jong-Il – On the Art of the Cinema – and it’s wonderful because it mixes political phrases with total platitudes. I love this.

  I also saw recently a North Korean film, The Schoolgirl’s Diary, which was released in France at the end of 2007. It’s about a teenage girl who is always sad because her father is away traveling all the time for the devotion to his country. But then her father comes home and explains to her that Kim Jong-Il, the g
eneral, is also a human like us – and then the father died at the end of the film. And this teenage girl is so glad and says to the father: “Now I know that you are not here, but I didn’t lose a father, I gained another father. Now I have two fathers, you and Kim Jong-Il.” It’s crazy. If you look at university locations or apartments in the movie, you would have thought that it was an upper-middle-class standard for everyone. In the 1990s, at least 10 percent of the people died from hunger. How did they manage it without any serious rebellions? I know that they are extremely brutal and totalitarian.

  My leftist friend, a Chinese philosopher, showed me a photocopy of a textbook for an elementary school in North Korea. They are taught that their leader Kim Jong-Il is so clean that he doesn’t shit or urinate. They don’t explain how, but he just doesn’t. This phenomenon always bothers me. Of course they don’t believe it, but nonetheless, on some deeper strange level, they take them seriously. This is my big obsession: people don’t mean all these things, yet nonetheless they are crucial.

  Let me give you an example. If a rich friend invites you to a restaurant, when the bill comes, of course, it’s polite for you to say, “No, please, I will pay. Or let us split.” But you both know that you just have to insist a little bit to be polite, and what’s so interesting is that we both know this is a game. The most elementary level of symbolic exchange is a so-called “empty gesture,” an offer made or meant to be rejected. It is not hypocrisy; it works in some way. Then there are rules and meanings I am aware of, but have to act on the outside as if I am not aware of them – dirty or obscene innuendos which one passes over in silence in order to maintain the proper appearances.

  Isn’t there a beautiful young ballet dancer in North Korea? But why does North Korea allow this? Do they take her money? What is her status? Somehow they don’t criticize her as a traitor but, rather, they use her as a symbol of brotherhood. This also fascinates me.

  Is it true that, on the southern side of the demilitarized zone (DMZ) in Korea, there is a unique visitor’s site, which can be seen from South Korea, with a theater building with a large screen-like window in front? In front of this theater has been built a completely fake model village with beautiful houses and nicely painted walls, and the people there are even give better clothes to wear, and, in the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time – although nobody lives in them – and people are obliged to take a walk. I love this idea. It’s like Disneyland. Is this not a pure case of the symbolic efficiency of the frame as such?

  Maybe the more they open the cities to show – this is my funny idea – the more North Korea will develop. Why don’t they open a platform on Pyongyang which can be looked at from the South? This is the moment of truth: North Korea behind a mask. Western observers even think that although North Koreans may be crazy, they’re immensely proud and independent. No, they’re not. They depend so terribly on what others think about them. But why do they have this obsession to impress others?

  In this sense, North Korea fascinates me. How does a society like this actually function? Contrary to what people say, it is a brutal regime. At the same time, it is fragile in the sense that appearances have to be maintained at any price. This already started under Stalinism. If you publish one critical text, or show a moment of weakness to the leader – for example, show Kim Jong-Il sleeping – this is a catastrophe. This is for me the big enigma of communism. It’s not just pure brutality but, at the same time, it’s an obsession with “feigning” simply to maintain appearances. This is a paradoxical point of the ambiguity of politeness that there is an unmistakable dimension of humiliating brutality in the politeness.

  This is why, when we had dissidents here, we were all obsessed with thinking that the secret police was watching and listening to us. But I told them that the right model – it’s a very racist example – should be this one: I read in some novel by James Baldwin that in the prostitution houses of the old South, of New Orleans before the Civil War, the African-American, the black servant, was not perceived as a person, so that, for example, two white people – the prostitute and her client – were not at all disturbed when a servant entered the room to deliver drinks. They were not embarrassed and they simply went on copulating, since the servant’s gaze did not count as the gaze of another person.

  The secret police should be treated as black servants once were. You shouldn’t care if they listen to you. Who cares? They shouldn’t count. You shouldn’t be afraid of them and you should ignore them – then it will work nicely. We will later learn that the secret police was always obsessed with this non-existent secret or any big plan. It is a big mistake to think that they don’t know there are no secrets. They totally miss the point and waste their energy for nothing. And another secret of the left is that we defy and confuse the enemy not by hiding something, but precisely by not hiding anything.

  13

  Deadlock of Totalitarian Communism

  You once mentioned that one should never forget the extent to which dissident resistance was indebted to the official ideology. And for this precise reason, I quote: “One can claim that today’s North Korea is no longer a communist country, not even in the Stalinist sense.” Yet most people generally consider North Korea to be a very communist regime. From an ethico-political perspective, how do you understand the general analysis of North Korea?

  SŽ: There are obvious things: we all know that North Korea is a total fiasco – I just don’t like Western scholars uttering platitudes about them. Some leftists like to say that South Korea is not totally innocent either. Yes, that is right, but we already know all this: before the Korean War in 1948, the South was also being provocative.

  I read an interesting thing in the book of a Western historian that for many years in the 1950s, until even the mid-’60s, the standard of living of the average person was higher in North Korea. Because they did have success until the mid-’60s, then it gradually broke down. This is, I think, the tragedy of communism – that it reached a certain level of primitive industrialization, but when the moment (postmodernism, digital technology, or whatever we like to call it) that we are now passing arrived, it didn’t work anymore. The irony is that traditional Marxist dogma – the means of production change more rapidly than the relations of production – is absolutely the best way to explain the fall of communism. You can also see this very nicely in the book on the communist economy of East Germany.

  I know a guy who was a dissident and who worked for one of the top Western journals, whose problem was how to adapt to the digital revolution. He told me that their approach was totally wrong. They didn’t see the social dimension of the digital revolution: the local interaction. But their idea was the traditional one. They thought they would be able to make centralized planning more efficient with perfect mega computers. You know, even if bureaucrats have a good plan, when it cannot react fast enough, then it doesn’t function. It simply didn’t work. This is the irony of the failure, literally, of totalitarian communism in the twentieth-century sense.

  East Germany was also doing relatively well in the 1950s and the early ’60s. Mostly, they were working in a ruined country where reconstruction had to happen fast. In the same way, after 1953, North Korea reconstructed, but in a much more efficient totalitarian way. But then after a certain point, it simply doesn’t work any more.

  What I’d like to do about North Korea is work out how to interpret this in a way that is not racist, because a typical European answer would have been: “Ha ha, you Koreans are primitive. Here is my answer.” No, I don’t think so. I think that this has to do with the specificity of the communist way of doing things, which can make us arrive implicitly at the true dimension. And this kind of religious dimension has already been seen with Mao and Stalin.

  Also, late communist regimes have a tendency to become monarchic. It even happened in Europe, with Nicolae Ceaus¸escu. Far from being a result of the radical break occurring now in Eastern Europe, the obsessive adherence to the nationa
l Cause is precisely what remains the same throughout this process. And this attachment was all the more exclusive the more the power structure was “totalitarian.” So, why this unexpected disappointment? Why does authoritarian nationalism overshadow democratic pluralism? The leftist thesis was that ethnic tensions were instigated and manipulated by the ruling party bureaucracy as a means of legitimizing the party’s hold on power. In Romania, for example, the nationalist obsession, the dream of Great Romania, the forceful assimilation of Hungarian and other minorities, created a constant tension which legitimized Ceaus¸escu’s hold on power

  Nonetheless, whatever you say about classical communist regimes, at one point they were honest and good. They never allowed direct family succession. For example, what about Stalin’s children? Did they have any power? No. This was an absolute prohibition. Succession should not be a family matter. Even Mao: of course they took care of their children, but were they privileged? They sent their children to study abroad and gave them the right to travel, but these were just small corruptions. There was never a question of Mao’s son becoming his successor.

  This tendency, I claim, has something to do with how communism reacted to its decay. It happened in Europe. And in a non-communist way, it also happened in all those crazy countries like Uzbekistan or Kazakhstan. You know who became the father of the nation? Heydar Aliyev, who was the chief of the KGB in the Brezhnev years, a total communist apparatchik. He reinvented himself as the father of the nation [Azerbaijan]. He died about a couple of years ago, and now his son is the president, which is total madness. Again, I really don’t want to go into this false racist explanation.

  The other thing that interests me is the fact that, even with all its problems, South Korea now has a relatively stable democracy and has already become a successful developed country. South Korea is nothing special, I mean, in a good sense. The point is what critical intellectuals like you can make out of this predicament in which we find ourselves.