by Slavoj Zizek
Again, maybe this is one of the solutions that I’m playing with: the left should get rid of this idea of saying that we must be subversive and go beyond good and evil. No! We have to take over some motives of the so-called moral majority. I think the greatest triumph of the ruling ideology has been to keep this moral majority on their side and to present the left as crazy people who think only about having sex with animals and all this dirty stuff. I think, really, the left hasn’t yet reached the zero level of crisis.
Here I agree with my friend Alain Badiou, who once said: “We must begin again,” quoting Lenin from his short text, “On Ascending a High Mountain.” Lenin’s conclusion – “to begin from the beginning over and over again” – makes it clear that we should drop the continuity with the twentieth-century left. It had its glorious moment, but that story is over. This, exactly, is where we are today, after what Badiou called the “obscure disaster” of 1989, the definitive end of the epoch which began with the October Revolution.
Even with Western social democracy, for example: what is wrong with it as long as it works? Let’s take Scandinavian countries. We can be critical of them. I know all those stories about Sweden being really racist and collaborating with the Nazis, etc., etc. But, let me be very naive: in the history of humanity, I don’t think there have ever been, at any stage, so many people living such a relatively safe and comfortable life. So when Western European social democracy is still successful, what is so bad about this? Nothing. But the point is that, unfortunately, because of economic necessities, this social democratic system is approaching its end. It cannot work in that way.
There is, radically, a new level of capitalism where everything changes. For example, take personal morality. This is my big problem with my old friend Judith Butler. My problem with post-feminists is that, for them, the enemy is still patriarchal identity politics. But, as I tell them all the time, this is no longer the ruling ideology today. The ruling ideology today is basically something like a vague hedonism with a Buddhist touch. “Realize yourself! Experiment! Be satisfied! Do what you want with your life.” It’s a kind of generalized hedonism. So what Judith Butler is preaching is a subversive model: “No fixed identity. Reconstruct yourself.” But this, I claim, is not the ruling ideology today. Conservatives are just a reaction to this. The basic model is this one: there is no longer a fixed identity.
You see what I mean? We really have to rethink it all. Everything should be rethought, one should begin from the zero point. The left is not yet aware of what 1990 meant. It was that all models – the communist state model, the social democratic model, also this immediate democracy model – have failed. So, we should really start to think again.
21
The Fear of Real Love
What should the left take as a warning from this failure? What will we learn from this failed revolution?
SŽ: Let me quote Badiou here. I think this might amuse you. Now, even sex, in the sense of intensively falling in love, is going out of fashion. What is fashionable now are one-night-stands, as shown by all these slogans: “Don’t take bonds too seriously. You must creatively try homosexuality and heterosexuality. Be open. Don’t fix yourself.” Alain Badiou drew my attention to something. He found a wonderful French advertisement for an internet dating site and matrimonial agency, which promised: “We will enable you to be in love without falling in love!” It works both in French and English with the word “fall” which, in French, is “tomber.” The idea of falling in love is considered to be something terrible. Let’s admit it. You have a good, normal life. Everything is perfect. But when you fall in love – I mean in a true meaning of love – you will be shocked. Falling in love is really just too traumatic. Because your life will be totally ruined. We are too narcissistic to risk any kind of accidental trip or fall. Even into love.
Well, this is such a narcissistic economy that you must have a marital agency. It is somehow a nice idea, but nonetheless here we are basically in a way returning to the pre-modern tradition of arranged marriages or dates. Only instead of parents and relatives, it’s the agency that takes on this role. You know why? Because we are afraid of exposing ourselves. We do not fall in love. Rather, we look out for better characteristics and economic backgrounds. But it’s incredible to see how this actually works. And did you notice, in our narcissistic era, how love or fanatical sexual engagements are themselves becoming transgressive?
I am tempted to link this to another example that really worries me. Something weird is going on in Hollywood. It’s a small symptom, but I think it’s dangerous. Did you know that the James Bond film Quantum of Solace – it’s relatively leftist as James Bond saves the Morales regime in Bolivia – was the first Bond film where Bond didn’t have sex with the Bond Girl? In all the earlier movies, this happened. This was always the standard ending. James Bond equals “sex in the end.”
You can say this is only one example of this asexual character. Then did you see the Dan Brown horror movie Angels and Demons? In the novel, there is sex between Robert Langdon and Vittoria Vetra. But in the film version, there is no sex. It used to be the other way around. Hollywood inserted the sex. What is going on? Then, take one of the worst novels of all time, Lost Symbol. No sex at all – there is not even erotic tension there, nothing. I frankly think that, in the West, we are developing into such a narcissistic culture; we want to be cocooned and safe, and even passionate sex, giving yourself to others, is becoming sex without love – sex is good but in moderation, you know. This reminds me of an explanation that I often use. It’s somehow comical. The products we buy in the market have had their damaging ingredient removed: coffee without caffeine, alcohol-free beer, cigarettes without nicotine, even sex without sex. I like this paradox. It illustrates nicely what Freud already said about the paradoxes of the pleasure principle. You see, any form of passionate attachment is seen as a threat in our narcissistic, solipsistic, and individualistic culture.
Everyone knows love is the greatest thing, but, at the same time, it is the most horrible thing. Can you imagine yourself living a nice life and meeting with friends and having one-night-stands, but all of sudden, you fall passionately in love? It’s horrible. It ruins your whole life. We are afraid of that. But – how can I put this? – we should return, I claim! When Laura Kipnis, an American writer who wrote Against Love, said that love is the last form of oppression, I told her: “No! This is today’s ideology.” Even love, passionate love, is too dangerous.
And it is no wonder that the Catholics are thriving. Because this is the message of the Catholic church: “Don’t be too much in love. If you are in love with a girl, marry her. Because then you will see how she is in private, and if you spend all your time together, passion will fade, as usual, and when you need passion you can just go to a prostitute from time to time.” My God, you see what a crazy world we live in. There is, on the one hand, more and more obsession with absolute safety, but, at the same time, there is, even within our society, more and more violence in all forms.
This is what I find problematic with so-called political correctness. How practically everything you do can be misread. For example, it has actually happened to me in the United States. I looked a woman in the eye and was accused of visual rape. I used a dirty word and was accused of verbal rape. Practically everything you do can be interpreted as aggression. We perceive any excessive proximity of other people to be violence. What fascinates me is how, on the one hand, you have explosive forms of violence, but at the same time this extremely protective attitude, even, “Just don’t come too close to me.” I think the discourse of political correctness hides extreme violence. And it is also related to the matter of tolerance. Isn’t it interesting that this also fits in with the old Judeo-Christian cliché, the fact that we are afraid of being too close to other people?
I even find this obsession with smoking suspicious. I don’t smoke; I am opposed to it, but I find it a little bit suspicious. Did you notice how the same people who are opposed to
smoking are often in favor of the legalization of drugs? Why? Because it is fashionable? But wait a minute. Drugs are probably rather more dangerous than cigarettes. All I’m saying is that this campaign against smoking is another sign of the narcissistic economy. Especially this obsession with passive smoking, which says: “You smoke? Oh, you are killing me.” It is total narcissism. And it is just some crazy theory, which is wrong. What scientists are telling us is that passive smoking can be more dangerous than active smoking. I think today that the discourse of victimization is almost the predominant discourse when it says that everyone can be a victim of smoking or sexual harassment. Today we have an extremely narcissistic notion of personality.
So this all adds up, I think, to an absolutely narcissistic economy. We can have sex, but not love, and no passionate attachment, and we need to keep an appropriate distance, and so on. We are really like the Roman Empire in the third–fourth century, when it was in decline. This is a very sad thing. This is why I like to quote the famous lines of a poem by William Butler Yeats, who was right in his diagnosis of the twentieth century. In his poem The Second Coming, he wrote: “The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned; / the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.” Is this not a good description of today’s split between anemic liberals and impassionate fundamentalists? Where do you find passion today in politics? Even though the so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalist is a disgrace to true fundamentalism, we can only find this passion with fundamentalists. The best are no longer able to fully engage themselves, while the worst engage in racist or religious fanaticism. This is what makes me sad.
22
Dialectic of Liberal Superiority
For another example of passion in political engagement and commitment, unlike the one of fundamentalists, I’m thinking of people like Anna Politkovskaya, a Russian journalist, who was assassinated. She was the one who took enormous risks to uncover the hidden stories of war in Chechnya and who opposed the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. Do you think that courage is contagious? That many can be moved by the courage of Politkovskaya, for example? What role might such contagious courage play in social change, including revolution? Is there a source of some kind of seriousness or guidance – as we might see in Simone Weil or others?
SŽ: First of all, I am against Putin. I don’t think that things are as clear as that. Of course it’s horrible what they did to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, but he was no angel. You can’t become the richest man in Russia by being a humanist. Although I am intrigued by this person. I believe that Khodorkovsky tried to do better because he was probably intelligent, and he got the idea that if you organize it better for workers in the long term, it functions. Even the case of Alexander Litvinenko. It was of course horrible what the Russians did, but he wasn’t just a good, honest guy. There were different struggles and scandals on finding radioactivity on a fax machine, and poison, etc. Otherwise, I totally sympathize with Politkovskaya; I think all this has to come out.
But what I don’t like is that you often find an aspect of satisfaction in saying: “Oh, poor Russia. But we know .… ” I always find it suspicious that, when you sympathize with freedom fighters in other countries, the conclusion is usually like this: “Look at those poor guys, but with us everything is okay.” If you take Stieg Larsson seriously, you can see strange things are also happening in our own countries.
So you don’t even have to take enormous risks like Politkovskaya. From my experience of just a normal academic life – I don’t know how it is in Sweden, but I can tell you about the United States and here in Slovenia – there is so much conformism, back-stabbing, and plotting going on. What I’m saying is that if you are worried about honesty and want to fight for something big, don’t look for fights out there; you have enough fights and struggles here. I, of course, support them, but I just don’t like this liberal superiority.
I also find this myth that the Putin regime is harsh but effective to be problematic. It is simply not true. He’s just the voice of the majority of the oligarchs. His class bases are still oligarchic. As we all know, in the financial crisis, the state used its enormous reserves to help the oligarchs much more than ordinary people who were in trouble.
So, again, I totally reject the Putin propaganda that says: “OK, he may be a little harsh but that is the only way in Russia to prevent oligarchs from taking power over the people.” No! In every crisis, he let the ordinary people suffer to the end. This is why I don’t want to visit Russia now. Because I visited Russia six years ago, but then I discovered that those who invited me were people who are close to Putin and they tried to appropriate me. So now I would prefer to visit other groups in Russia and I don’t want to be seen there as part of the Putin circle.
It was the same in China when I visited Shanghai. It was a wonderful scandal. I like it. I basically provoked them: my translator there was an old lady. She was an old, dignified lady, and when I started to speak, illustrating the obscenity of ideology, she was so embarrassed that she stopped translating and almost lost consciousness. But she gave me a nice answer. She was nonetheless funny. In the end, I learned that she also translated for Clinton when he visited China on some business trips after his presidential term. So I asked her: “How do you compare Clinton to me?” She gave me a wonderful answer. Everyone laughed and applauded. She said: “You talk a lot about sex, but Clinton does it.” It was a wonderful answer.
It was also very funny when a sexually liberated young girl told me how penetration is oppressed, but the girls want to be fucked, want to be penetrated, etc. I told them: “It’s very strange. If this were in the United States, you would have been accused of being phallocentric.” But nonetheless I am so interested in China because there is a certain degree of artistic freedom. It is incredible how many unwritten rules they have about what you can say and what you really cannot say. I ask them how it was with Mao Zedong. They said with Deng Xiaoping’s judgment: “70 percent good, 30 percent bad.” Then I told them, “OK, I am allowed to write a book called 30 percent. We know what was good, so now let’s talk a little bit about what was bad.” They told me: “Of course not. We can’t!”
For example, there was the traumatic period in the late 1950s: the Great Leap Forward. How many people died then? Mao caused the greatest famine in history by exporting food in order to buy nuclear weapons. Somewhere between 36 and 38 million people starved and were slave-driven to death at that time. Even worse, the Mao government knew exactly what was going on. This is instrumental attitude at its most radical. It was a mega-tragedy. But people are not allowed to read or talk about this, and it is very interesting that a book about it is prohibited in China but was published in Hong Kong. And whenever they talk about it in public, they are not attacked as being a traitor, but are simply ignored. Nothing happens. This is a typical Chinese solution. I don’t like that model.
This is how things are going: you just mention certain things, but you are not allowed to go into details. For them, here is a good formulation of Lacan: the pervert is the instrument of the other’s desire. They are precisely the “perverts,” I would say. They always have the answers: never the questions, only the answers. They are not a danger but an annoyance. They pretend to have the answers, but totally without anything substantial.
But we need to deal with our heritage. I don’t like the left that has the attitude: “Yes, Stalinism was bad. But look at the horrors of colonialism!” Here I am very critical of Adorno and Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment. They are an extreme example. The task is still ahead. With all the horrors of the twentieth century, the liberals’ account is insufficient. It remains for the left to explain this.
23
The Day After
Let us talk about hope. You mentioned the revolutionary changes of our time. What action/movement gives you the most hope? Can you see any seedling or example of revolutionary change? Can you give us an example of that?
/> SŽ: The problem is that hope and horror are always intermingled. What is happening in these days in Egypt and other Arab countries is, of course, hopeful. Almost everyone in postmodern times thinks nothing can happen. But it has been so nicely falsified. It did happen: a very traditional uprising without any religious references, but just calling for human dignity and secular demands. It’s a wonderful event. And it’s a real event. What I mean by a “real event” is that it’s not just a smooth transition. We are living in this moment of uncertainty and you don’t know who is in power, and this, of course, shows that there is hope. Hope simply means an open moment when you don’t know who is in power, and then the regime falls apart.
But the problem is that, in these situations, there is hope and, at the same time, there are confusing times where you end up with an even worse regime than before. In Germany, for example, there was hope among the strong leftists in the early 1920s, but then they got Hitler. In Iran, it was the same. People were originally hopeful about the Khomeini revolution. It was also an emancipatory explosion. But after two years of hard internal fighting, all the leftists had been wiped out and today they have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now the struggle is still going on, and this for me is the true hope. For example, do you remember the big demonstration against Ahmadinejad organized by Mir Hossein Mousavi, who should have won the presidential election? This is clear proof that the Islamists didn’t really win in Iran. The struggle is still going on, and there is tremendous resistance. My point is that there’s still a lot of hope, but hope is always mixed with danger. The situation is so complex. I simply don’t see any political movement about which I would say, I’m for it or not.
