“They saw their injured country's woe;
The flaming town, the wasted field;
Then rushed to meet the insulting foe;
They took the spear, - but left the shield.”
―Philip Freneau
.
And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again?
Archilochus
Rock, Rock
O! My Rock of Gibraltar
You are my heavenly altar
The doves sing, the white clouds dance
And the white waves at sea wave romance
And for the love of chess
Let me humbly confess
The way you move those chess pieces
Can mend anyones hearts broken pieces
Rock, Rock
O! My Rock of Gibraltar
With nature beautiful beyound wonder
The monkeys & birds are at home
They play about and joyously roam
And when I look at you it is clear
You are a breathe of fresh Gibraltar air
You touch my pawns, rook, bishop, queen, king and knight
My heart racing, I think this must be Gilbraltar love Alright!
- Sylvia Chidi, "My Rock of Gibraltar"
This, of course, brings us back to Schelling: the gap between the ethereal image and the raw fact of the - inert, dense - Real is precisely the gap between Existence (ethereal form) and its impenetrable Ground, on account of which, as Schelling puts it, the ultimate base of reality is the Horrible. Crucial for any materialist ontology is this gap between the bodily depth of the Real and the pseudodepth of Meaning produced by the Surface. It is also easy to see the connection with Freud, who defined reality as that which functions as an obstacle to desire: "ugliness" ultimately stands for existence itself, for the resistance of reality, which never simply lends itself effortlessly to our molding. Reality is ugly, it "shouldn't be there" and hinder our desire. However, the situation is here more complicated, since the obstacle to desire is at the same time the site of unbearable, filthy, excessive pleasure - of jouissance. What shouldn't be there is ultimately jouissance itself: the inert stuff is the materialization of jouissance. In short, the point not to be missed is that, in the opposition between desire and the hard reality (bringing pain, unpleasure, preventing us from achieving the balance of pleasure), jouissance is on the side of 'hard reality'. Jouissance as "real" is that which resists (symbolic integration); it is dense and impenetrable. In this precise sense, jouissance is 'beyond the pleasure principle'. Jouissance emerges when the very reality that is the source of unpleasure, of pain, is experienced as a source of traumatic-excessive pleasure. Or to put it another way: desire is in itself "pure", it endeavors to avoid any "pathological" fixation. The "purity" of desire is guaranteed by its residing in the very gap between any positive object of desire and desire itself. The fundamental experience of desire is ce n'est pas ca, this is not that. In clear contrast to it, jouissance (or libido, or drive) is by definition "dirty" and/or ugly, it is always "too close": desire is absence, while libido-drive is presence.
All this is absolutely crucial for the functioning of ideology in the case of our "everyday" sexism or racism: their ultimate problem is precisely how to "contain" the threatening inside from "spilling out" and overwhelming us. Are women's Periods not the exemplary case of such an ugly inside spilling out? Is the presence of African-Americans no felt so threatening precisely insofar as it is experienced as too massive, too close? Suffice it to recall the racist caricatural cliche of black heads and faces: with eyes bulging out, mouth too-large, as if the outside surface is barely able to contain the inside threatening to break through. (In this sense, the racist fantasmatic duality of blacks and whites coincides with the formless stuff and shadowy-spectral-impotent form without stuff.) Is the concern with how to dispose of shit (according to Lacan, is one of the crucial features differentiating human beings from animals) also not a case of how to get rid of the inside that emerges? The ultimate problem of intersubjectivity is precisely the extent to which we are ready to accept the other, our (sexual) partner, in the real of his or her existence - do we still love him when she or he defacates, makes unpleasant sounds? (See the extent to which James Joyce was ready to accept his wife Nora in the "ugly" jouissance of her existence.) The problem, of course, is that, in a sense, life itself is ""ugly": if we want to get rid of the ugliness, we are forced to adopt the attitude of a Cathar, for whom terrestrial life is a hell and the God who created this world is Satan himself, the Master of the World. So, in order to survive, do we need a minimum of the real - in a contained, gentrified condition.
The Lacanian proof of the Other's existence is the jouissance of the Other (in contrast to Christianity, for example, where this proof is Love). In order to render this notion palpable, suffice it to imagine an intersubjective encounter: when I do encounter the Other "beyond the wall of language," in the real of his or her being? Not when I am able to describe her, not even when I learn her values, dreams, and so on, but only when I encounter the Other in her moment of jouissance: when I discern in her a tiny detail - a compulsive gesture, an excessive facial expression, a tic - that signals the intensity of real jouissance. This encounter with the real is always traumatic, there is something at least minimally obscene about it, I cannot simply integrate it into my universe, there is always a gap separating me from it. This, then, is what "intersubjectivity" is actually about, not the Habermasian "ideal speech situation" of a multitude of academics smoking pipes at a round table arguing about some point by means of undistorted communication: without the element of real jouissance, the Other remains ultimately a fiction, a purely symbolic subject of strategic reasoning exemplified in "rational choice theory." For that reason, one is even tempted to replace the term multiculturalism with multiracism: multiculturalism suspends the traumatic kernel of the Other, reducing it to an aseptic folklorist entity. What we are dealing here is - in Lacanese - the distance between S and a, between the symbolic features and the unfathonable surplus, the "indivisible remainder' of the real; at a somewhat different level, Walter Benn Michaels made the same point in claiming that
the accounts of cultural identity that do any cultural work require a racial component. For insofar as our culture remains nothing more than what we do and believe, it is impotently descriptive... It is only if we think that our culture is not whatever beliefs and practices we actually happen to have but is instead the beliefs and practices that should properly go with the sort of people we happen to be that the fact of something belonging to our culture can count as a reason for doing it. But to think this is to appeal to something that must be beyond culture and that cannot be derived from culture precisely because our sense of which culture is properly ours must be derived from it. This has been the function of race...Our sense of culture is characteristically meant to displace race, but... culture has turned out to be a way of continuing rather than repudiating racial thought. It is only the appeal to race that makes culture an object of affect and that gives notions like losing our culture, preserving it, stealing someone else's culture, restoring people's culture to them, and so on, their pathos... Race transforms people who learn todo what we do into the thieves of our culture and people who teach us to do what they do into the destroyers of our culture; it makes assimilation into a kind of betrayal and the refusal to assimilate into a form of heroism.
The historicist/culturalist account of ethnic identity, isofar as it functions as performatively binding for the group accounted for and not merely as a distranced ethnological description, this has to involve "something more," some transcendental "kernel of the real." (The postmodern multiculturalist only displaces this pathos onto the allegedly more "authentic" Other: hearing "The Star Spangled Banner" gives no thrill, yet what does give a thrill is listening to some ritual of Native Americans, of African-Americans. What we are dealing with here is clearly the inverted form of racism.) Without this kernel, we remain caught in the vicious cycle of symbolic performativity that in an "idealistic" way, retroactively grounds itself. It is Lacan who - in a Hegelian way - enables us to resolve this deadlock: the kernel of the real is the retroactive product, the "fallout," of the very process of symbolization. The "Real" is the unfathonable remainder of the ethnic substance whose predicates are different cultural features that constitutes our identity; in this precise sense, race relates to culture like real to symbolic. The "Real" is the unfathonable X at stake in our cultural struggles; it is that on account of which, when somebody learns too much of our culture, he or she "steals" it from us; it is that on account of which, when somebody shifts allegiance to another culture, he or she "betrays" us; and so on. Such experiences prove that there must be some X that is "expressed" in the cultural set of values, attitudes, rituals that materialize our way of life. What is stolen, betrayed... is always objet petit a, the little piece of the Real.
Jacques Ranciere gave a poignant expression to the "bad surprise" that awaits today's postmodern ideologues of the "end of politics." It is as if we are witnessing the ultimate confirmation of Freud's thesis, from Civilization and Its Discontents: after every assertion of Eros, Thanatos reasserts itself with a vengeance. At the very moment when, according to the official ideology, we are finally leaving behind the "immature" political passions (the regime of the "political": class struggle and other "outdated" divisive antagonisms) for the postideological pragmatic universe of rational administration and negotiated consensus, for the universe, free of utopian impulses, in which the dispassionate administration of social affairs goes hand in hand with the aestheticized hedonism (the pluralism "ways of life") - at this very moment, the foreclosed political is celebrating a triumphant comeback in the most archaic form of pure, undistilled racist hatred of the Other that renders the rational, tolerant attitude utterly impotent. In this precise sense, "postmodern" racism is the symptom of multiculturalist late capitalism, bringing to light the inherent contradiction of the liberal-democratic ideological project. Liberal "tolerance" condones the folklorist Other deprived of its substance (like the multitude of "ethnic cuisines" in a contemporary magalopolis): however, any "real" Other is instantly denounced for its "fundamentalism," since the kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance; that is, the "real Other" is by definition "patriarchal," "violent," never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming customs. One is tempted to reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of "repressive tolerance," reconceiving it as the tolerance of the Other in its aseptic, benign form, which forecloses the dimension of the Real of the Other's jouissance.
In placid hours well-pleased we dream
Of many a brave unbodied scheme.
But form to lend, pulsed life create,
What unlike things must meet and mate:
A flame to melt—a wind to freeze;
Sad patience—joyous energies;
Humility—yet pride and scorn;
Instinct and study; love and hate;
Audacity—reverence. These must mate,
And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart,
To wrestle with the angel—Art.
Slavoj Žižek is as paradoxical as his world-renowned work, as much a serious intellectual as a comedian. Were it not for his vivid examples drawn from popular culture, the tangential though insightful ideas in his many books would be lost on the world and limited to a select few. He is an expert in Lacan, Stalin, Hitchcock, and Christianity, and coming from Slovenia has a fresh, surprising response to Western consumer products. He is a favorite speaker in Ivy League academia and in the contemporary art world, though he attacks them both.
He is the Senior Researcher at the Institute of Social Studies, University of Ljubljana, as well as the author of a dozen books of criticism including Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, On Belief, The Ticklish Subject, The Plague of Fantasies, The Sublime Object of Ideology, and The Puppet and the Dwarf. His most recent book, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, is an analysis of the strange logic that was used to justify the attack on Iraq.
My interview was typical of a conversation with Žižek: a conflicting competition to stop his rapid speech and jump in with my own ideas versus the fascination of listening to how his mind unfolds. I am still not sure which side won.
I will just say that Žižek, though tough to describe on paper, can be perhaps best encapsulated by what he once told me of going to the movies in a Chicago multiplex. “It included half mainstream Hollywood theaters and half art theaters. It is beautiful; when my friends drop me off, I can play the intellectual and say that I am going to see the new independent film, and then when they are not looking, I will run to see the blockbuster.”
—Dianna Dilworth
I. WHY STALINISM WAS MORE PERVERSE THAN NAZISM
THE BELIEVER: You have raised many eyebrows with your controversial rethinking of today’s accepted positions in philosophy. For example, you have said that Stalinism is worse than Nazism, despite the grand spectacle of the Holocaust. Can you describe your interest in Stalin here and why you think that his regime is a greater problem philosophically than Nazism?
SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK: It was typical in philosophy after World War II to evoke Nazism and the Holocaust as the most radical evil. You cannot comprehend it with any rational strategy. The idea is also that the experience of the Holocaust is something which undermines the entire traditional philosophy, which was basically the divine regulation, the idea that even if things appear thwarted, failed, and so on, ultimately, in some kind of rational totality, all of these tragedies are relativized as part of a harmonious project. It can be a divine plan; it can also be the development of humanity or whatever. The idea is that the Holocaust cannot be rationalized philosophically here.
Of course, I think that the Holocaust was horrific (my god, it is gross to even have to say that), but for me, Stalinism was even a greater philosophical problem than Nazism. For example, there is a basic difference between Stalinist and Nazi victim status, from a simple phenomenological approach. Under Nazism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed, no questions asked, you had nothing to prove. You are guilty for who you are, you are a Jew, you are killed, that’s it. Under Stalinism, of course, most [victims] were on trial for false accusations; most of them were not traitors. Nonetheless, there is one interesting feature: that they were tortured or through some kind of blackmail forced to confess to being traitors.
BLVR: So your line of questioning is of the functioning of the system?
SŽ: Yes. Why this strange need to make them confess? And why the total absence of this in Fascism? In Fascism, if you were a Jew, you were simply killed. Nobody had the idea of arresting Jews and torturing them to confess the Jewish plot. Because in Fascism, you are guilty for your whole being. The very fact that you had to confess makes Stalinism paradoxical and perverse. The idea is that, in a strange way, it admits that you are still a free human being, you had a choice. You are guilty, you have to confess. This does not make Stalinism cause any less suffering; nonetheless, this pure quarrel of radical objectivization, “You are a Jew, you are guilty for who you are,” was absent in Stalinism. In a totally perverted, thwarted, and twisted way, some margin of human freedom was acknowledged under Stalin. So the result is that in Stalinism, everybody was potentially a victim in a totally contingent way.
BLVR: So your interest is not to forget Nazism, but to reexamine Stalinism.
SŽ: To put it in simplistic terms, Fascism is relatively easy to explain. It is a reactionary phenomenon. Nazism was some bad guys having some bad ideas and unfortunately succeeding in realizing them. In Stalinism the tragedy is that its origin is some kind of radical emancipatory project. In the origins you had a kind of workers’ uprising; the true enigma is how this project of emancipation went so wrong. This is a much greater enigma. The most representative orientation of Marxism in the twentieth century—critical theory of the Frankfurt school—obsessed over Fascism, anti-Semitism, and so on, and simply ignored the topic of Stalinism. Sure, there are a couple of small books, but there is no systematic theory of what Stalinism is. So for me, the key phenomenon to be accounted for in the twentieth century is Stalinism. Because again, Fascism is simple, conservative reaction going wrong. The true enigma is why Stalinism or communism went wrong.
BLVR: Any conclusions?
SŽ: It is very difficult; I am still working on it. My conclusions are not some kind of conservative or liberal vision according to which Stalinism should be pointed out as kind of a logical demonstration of any project of our so-called post-political era: the idea that the time for projects is over, all we can do is accept capitalist world-market economy, globalism, and so on. Today, whenever somebody tries to risk something politically, you immediately get, “Oh, didn’t you learn the lesson from history, this will end up in Holocaust.” This is the eternal topic of modern liberal-conservative skeptics, that the lesson of the twentieth century is that every radical attempt at social change ends up in mass murder. Their idea is a return to pragmatism, “Let’s strictly distinguish politics from ethics, politics should be limited, pragmatic, only ethics can be absolute.” What I aim at in my rethinking of all of these problems is precisely not to draw this conclusion.
II: THE END OF LIBERAL MODESTY
BLVR: So you obviously strongly disagree with this liberal reading of the ideology behind World War II. This leads me to think about how in your work you are known to criticize liberalism, as it is manifested in political correctness, pragmatism, American academia, etc. So would this be your criticism of this way of thinking?
SŽ: First of all, I don’t have any big problems with liberalism. Originally, liberalism was quite a noble project if one looks at how it emerged. Today it is a quite fashionable criticism, with feminists, anti-Eurocentric thinkers, etc., to dismiss liberalism in principle for preaching the equality of all people, but in reality privileging the white males of certain property, addressing automatic limitations. The next usual accusation is that liberalism is ultimately founded in what the American moral-majority religious Right likes to call secular humanism: the idea is that there is no Supreme Being or mystery in the universe. Their criticism is that this idea—that the ultimate prospect of humankind is to take over as master of his own destiny—is man’s arrogance, criticizing that it always misfires and so on.
First, I don’t think it is as simple as that, for two reasons. It is a historic fact that at the beginning, the idea of human rights and all of those liberal notions, effectively in a coded way implied the exclusion of certain people. Nonetheless, in this tension between appearance and reality (appearance: everyone has human rights; reality: many, through an implicit set of sub-rules, are excluded), a certain tension is set in motion where you cannot simply say that appearance is just a mask of the reality of oppression. Appearance acquired a social emancipatory power of its own. For example, of course at the beginning, women were excluded, but then very early on, women said, “Sorry, why not also us?” Then blacks said, “Why not us?” And workers, and so on. My point being that all of these groups that criticize liberalism emerged out of these early bourgeois liberal traditions. It set certain rules—this tradition of universality of human rights and so on—and in this way it opened up the space. So that is the first thing to say for liberalism.
BLVR: So even though liberalism was started by a limited few, built inside of it is the ability for all others to use it to their benefit?
SŽ: Yes. The second thing to say for liberalism is that originally it was not an arrogant attitude, but it was quite a modest, honest attitude of confronting the problem of religious tolerance after the Thirty Years’ War. In the seventeenth century, all of Europe was in a shock, and then out of this traumatic experience, the liberal vision came. The idea was that each of us has some existential or religious beliefs, but even if these are our fundamental commitments, we will not be killing each other for them. To create a coexistent social structure, a space where these inherently different commitments can be practiced. Again, I don’t see anything inherently bad in this project.
BLVR: Neither do I. But last year I attended a lecture you gave in which you vehemently attacked liberalism. Can you help clarify this for me?
SŽ: The problem that I find today, with liberalism, not economic liberalism, but radical human-rights liberalism, is the philosophical approach. The saddest thing to happen in the last thirty years is the loss of the belief that we had in communism, and even in the social-democratic welfare states of the West, the accepted fact that the fate of humanity is not simply an anonymous fate. This belief that some blind fate does not control us, that it is possible, through human collective action, to steer development, is gone. I think what happened in recent years is that this logic of blind fate returned. Global capitalism is simply accepted as a fact that you cannot do anything about. The only question is, Will you accommodate yourself to it, or will you be dismissed and excluded? A certain type of question, and it needn’t be put in the old-fashioned Marxist way as class struggle, but the general anticapitalist question, basically has disappeared.
BLVR: Generally speaking, yes. But I disagree, as would I think a number of others, that everyone accepts global capitalism. What about the antiglobalism movements that have been taking place all over the world in the last decade? Seattle, Genoa, etc. What do you think of these groups?
SŽ: Now with the antiglobalism movement, they are still, in a limited way, reemerging. But the idea is that the fundamental conflicting areas are no longer those of vertical up-vs.-down social struggle, but more horizontal differences between me and you, between different social groups: the problem of tolerance; the problem of tolerance of other races, religious minorities, and so on. So then the basic problem becomes that of tolerating differences. I am not saying this is bad, of course we should fight for this, but I don’t think that this horizon—within which the ultimate ethical value is then that of tolerating difference—is the fundamental place for question. My problem with liberalism is in principle. This move of the new Left, or new radicals, towards a problem of identity politics (minority politics, gay rights, etc.) lacks a certain more radical insight into the basically antagonistic character of society. This radical questioning has simply disappeared.
For example, take my friend Judith Butler. Of course from time to time, she pays lip service to some kind of anticapitalism, but it’s totally abstract, what it’s basically saying is just how lesbians and other oppressed sexual minorities should perceive their situation not as the assertion of some kind of substantial sexual identity, but as constructing an identity which is contingent, which means that also the so-called straight normal sexuality is contingent, and everybody is constructed in a contingent way, and so on, and in this way, nobody should be excluded. There is no big line between normality identity and multiple roles. The problem I see here is that there is nothing inherently anticapitalist in this logic. But even worse is that what this kind of politically correct struggling for tolerance and so on advocates is basically not only not in conflict with the modern tendencies of global capitalism, but it fits perfectly. What I think is that today’s capitalism thrives on differences. I mean even naïve positivist psychologists propose to describe today’s subjectivity in terms like multiple subject, fixed-identity subject, a subject who constantly reinvents itself, and so on. So my big problem with this is the painting of the enemy as some kind of self-identified stable substantial patriarch to which these multiple identities and constant reinventing should be opposed. I think that this is a false problem; I am not impressed by this problem. I think that this is a certain logic, totally within the framework of today’s capitalism, where again, capitalism, in order to reproduce itself, to function in today’s condition of consumption society, the crazy dynamics of the market, no longer needs or can function with the traditional fixed patriarchal subject. It needs a subject constantly reinventing himself.
III: ORGANIC FOOD, NEW-AGE SPIRITUALITY, AND NEW CARS
BLVR: OK, so you think that these antiglobalist movements aren’t asking the right questions and this can be really dangerous. I can see what you’re saying. This reminds me of the example that you gave in On Belief about the health-food market. How purchasing organic food, though seemingly good in intention, can really be a bad thing because of how it is appropriated. Can you explain what you meant by that?
SŽ: More and more crucial today are specialized markets, and in this sense, I think that it’s even more interesting to see how trends which were originally meant to be subversive or critical can be perfectly reappropriated and sold for consumption. Ecological food, organic food, green products, and so on—this is one of the key niche markets today. Let’s take a typical guy who buys organic food: he doesn’t really buy it in order to be healthy; he buys it to regain a kind of solidarity as the one who really cares about nature. He buys a certain ideological stance. It’s the same way as if you have stonewashed jeans, you don’t really buy it for the jeans, but you buy it to project a certain image of your social identity. So again, you are not buying a product, you are buying a certain social status, ideology, and so on.
BLVR: Does this also include your model of “Western Buddhism” as new-age philosophy being a product that can be purchased in capitalism (true Buddhism not being able to exist outside of the East)?
SŽ: Yes, you know why? Because this basic Buddhist insight that there is no permanent self, permanent subject, just events and so on, in an ironic way perfectly mirrors this idea that products are not essential, essential is this freedom of how you consume products and the idea that the market should no longer focus on the product. It is no longer: this car has this quality blah blah blah. No, it’s what you will do with the car. They are trying as directly as possible to sell you experiences, i.e. what you are able to do with the car, not the car as a product itself. An extreme example of this is this existing economic marketing concept, which basically evaluates the value of you as a potential consumer of your own life. Like how much are you worth, in the sense of all you will spend to buy back your own life as a certain quality life. You will spend so much in doctors, so much in beauty, so much in transcendental meditation, so much for music, and so on. What you are buying is a certain image and practice of your life. So what is your market potential, as a buyer of your own life in this sense?
BLVR: OK, so ironically, when Westerners buy into a Buddhist mentality, then they set themselves up to be perfect consumers in contemporary capitalism. It is kind of sad and funny at the same time. While looking for spirituality or God, they become ideal consumers to marketing executives. Sounds like science fiction.
IV: THE DANGERS OF EASTERN SPIRITUALITY IN THE WEST AND THE REVOLUTION OF ST. PAUL’S CHRISTIANITY, ALL THROUGH THE EYES OF AN ATHEIST.
BLVR: Do you believe in God?
SŽ: No, I am a complete atheist.
BLVR: Your book The Puppet and the Dwarf deals with St. Paul. In fact, it celebrates St. Paul’s Christianity in contrast to other forms of spirituality, i.e. gnosticism, new-age spiritualities, etc. So why would an atheist defend Christianity?
SŽ: Today, spirituality is fashionable. Either some pagan spirituality of tolerance, feminine principle, holistic approach against phallocentric Western imperialist logic or, within the Western tradition, we have a certain kind of rehabilitation of Judaism, respect for otherness, and so on. Or you are allowed to do Christianity, but you must do a couple of things which are permitted. One is to be for these repressed traditions, the early Gnostic gospels or some mystical sects where a different nonhegemonic/patriarchal line was discernible. Or you return to the original Christ, which is against St. Paul. The idea is that St. Paul was really bad, he changed Christianity into this patriarchal state, but Jesus, himself, was something different.
What I like is to see the emancipatory potential in institutionalized Christianity. Of course, I don’t mean state religion, but I mean the moment of St. Paul. I find a couple of things in it. The idea of the Gospel, or good news, was a totally different logic of emancipation, of justice, of freedom. For example, within a pagan attitude, injustice means a disturbance of the natural order. In ancient Hinduism, or even with Plato, justice was defined in what today we would call almost fascistic terms, each in his or her place in a just order. Man is the benevolent father of the family, women do their job taking care of the family, worker does his work and so on. Each at his post; then injustice means this hubris when one of the elements wants to be born, i.e. instead of in a paternal way, taking care of his population, the king just thinks about his power and how to exploit it. And then in a violent way, balance should be reestablished, or to put it in more abstract cosmological terms, you have cosmic principles like yin and yang. Again, it is the imbalance that needs to establish organic unities. Connected with this is the idea of justice as paying the price as the preexisting established order is balanced.
But the message that the Gospel sends is precisely the radical abandonment of this idea of some kind of natural balance; the idea of Gospels and the part of sins is that freedom is zero. We begin from the zero point, which is at least originally the point of radical equality. Look at what St. Paul is writing and the metaphors he used. It is messianic, the end of time, differences are suspended. It’s a totally different world whose formal structure is that of radical revolution. Even in ancient Greece, you don’t find that—this idea that the world can be turned on its head, that we are not irreducibly bound by the chains of our past. The past can be erased; we can start from the zero point and establish radical justice, so this logic is basically the logic of emancipation. Which is again why I find any flirting with so-called new-age spiritualities extremely dangerous. It is good to know the other side of the story, at least, when you speak about Buddhism and all of these spiritualities. I am sorry, but Nazis did it all. For Hitler, the Bhagavad Gita was a sacred book; he carried it in his pocket all the time. In Nazi Germany there were three institutes for Tibetan studies and five for the study of different sects of Buddhism.
BLVR: That is a really interesting point. I’m not religious at all, but when it comes to religions, I’ve always really distrusted new-age spiritualities.
SŽ: I agree. So let’s at least be clear of where in the West this fascination with Eastern spirituality originated. Of course when I advocate Christian legacy, I make it very clear that this legacy today is not alive in the Catholic or any Christian Church. Here I am kind of a vulgar Stalinist; churches should either be destroyed or turned into cultural homes or museums for religious horrors [laughs]. No no no, it’s not that, but nonetheless, a certain logic of radical emancipation exploded there. And all original emancipatory movements stopped there. This should be admitted. So the point is not to return to the Church, to rehabilitate Christianity, but to keep this certain revolutionary logic alive. I mean this is the good news that the Gospel means: you can do it, take the risk.
V: IDENTIFICATION WITH FICTIONAL MOVIES, WITH MURDERS
BLVR: So then is your problem with the rest of Christianity the ideology of institutionalized religion?
SŽ: This is not ideology. Ideology for me is a very specific term. Ideology, in a classical Marxist way, has nothing to do with what we usually take as an ideological project. The project of radically changing social orders, this is not, per se, ideology. The most conformist, modest empirical attitude can be ideology. Ideology is a certain unique experience of the universe and your place in it, to put it in standard terms, which serves the production of the existing power relations and blah blah blah. I claim that the minimum necessary structuring ingredient of every ideology is to distance itself from another ideology, to denounce its other as ideology. Every ideology does this. Which is why, the worst ideology today is post-ideology, where they claim we are entering a new pragmatic era, negotiations, plural interests, no longer time for big ideological projects.
BLVR: So even post-ideology is ideological?
SŽ: For me, ideology is defined only by how the coordinates of your meaningful experience of the world, and your place within society, relate to the basic tensions and antagonisms of social orders. Which is why for me no attitude is a priori ideological. You can be an extreme materialist, thinking that economic development ultimately determines everything; then you are truly ideological. You can be a fanatical millennialist religious mystic, and you are, in a certain way, not outside of ideology. Your position can be that of perfectly describing the data and nonetheless your point is ideological.
For example, I would like to use the wonderful model of Lacan. Let’s say that you are married and you are pathologically jealous, thinking that your wife is sleeping around with other men. And let’s say that you are totally right, she is cheating. Lacan says that your jealousy is still pathological. Even if everything is true it is pathological, because what makes it pathological is not the fact that is it true or not true, but why you invest so much in it—what needs does it fulfill? It’s the same with the Jews and the Nazis. It is not a question that they attributed false properties to the Jews; the point is why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew as part of their ideological project? It is clear why: their project was to have capitalism without individualism, without tensions, capitalism which would magically maintain what they thought previous eras shared, a sense of organic community and so on, so in order to have this, you must locate the source of evil not in capitalism as such, but in some foreign intruder, that through its profiteering just introduces imbalance and disturbs the natural cooperation between productive capital and labor.
BLVR: So there is no escaping ideology? We are always participating in it?
SŽ: I would say that this just brings about a certain tendency that was here all the time. Like if I go to a more general phenomenon like reality TV, the lesson of it is much more ambiguous, because the charm of it is a certain hidden reflexivity. It is not that we are voyeurs looking at what people are really doing. The point is that we know that they know that they are being filmed. The true reality TV would be to plant cameras and really shoot people unaware of their being watched.
BLVR: That exists already.
SŽ: I wonder if they would be able to go beyond that level, because it’s basically the same as snuff movies. I claim that the way we identify with fictional movies, with murders, is not that we identify it, no: the awareness that it’s not true is part of our identification. Even when we cry and so on. Because, imagine watching a detective story, and someone is shot. If you were to learn that he was really shot, it would ruin your identification with the story. There was this Polish movie from the mid-sixties, a historical spectacle about a pharaoh that has a scene where they sacrifice a horse. And the way that it is shot, they throw lances at the horse, and you can see bleeding. It’s obvious that they are really killing the horse. And it was a dramatic point, people in Poland protested, people in the West didn’t want to see the movie. So you see how much more refined identification in the movie is.
BLVR: We have a strong identification with fiction.
SŽ: My point is this: the problem is that of acting. I think that there is only one radical conclusion here, with reality soaps, that we are seeing people acting themselves. And the conclusion that I would draw is that it is not so much that it is fake, but that in everyday lives, we act already, in the sense that we have a certain ideal image of ourselves and we act that persona.
VI: NOSTALGIA AND IRRATIONAL POWER
BLVR: What do you think of the fact that California has an actor for governor?
SŽ: What I would like to avoid here is precisely this cheap conservative cultural criticism that this shows the decadence of our times. As if at some point politicians were substantially better—I don’t believe that. The fact that Bush is president is worse for me, because he is not even a good actor, and probably not much more intelligent. You never know what will happen. Schwarzenegger has advisors around him and they may give him good advice. I never quite agreed with the simple dismissal that there is no substance; when was there substance in politicians? The duty of a politician for me is to be a representative: a politician is not an expert, experts are experts, hired for their expertise and so on. A politician is more of…
BLVR: An actor that mediates?
SŽ: Yes, there is a dimension of identification of a master figure and so on. And for all that, it doesn’t matter if an actor does it. The problem for me is not that Schwarzenegger is governor, but the extent to which even politicians who are not actors are functioning like actors. But even this I am tempted not to simply dismiss as a bad phenomenon. Here I agree with Habermas, who made a very intelligent remark. It’s not so much that times are worse today, but that imperceptibly our standards are higher. For example, we don’t have feminism today because women are exploited only today, but they became much more sensitive to it today. The paradox is the following one, if you look, for example, at the typical genesis of a revolution: the terror never became so bad that the people exploded. No, it was always a kind of spiritual revolution, which raised the standards. And then usually those in power began to lose their nerves and accept these new standards silently. Out of this loss of legitimization, it exploded.
For example, recently I read a wonderful text by Bernard Williams that deals with David Mamet’s Oleanna, the harassment play, that made a nice point. If you look closely, Mamet is a little more refined than people usually think. The point is not that the young student is complaining about harassment, but that what she is complaining about is that she came to him as a student, she wanted guidance from him and so on. And basically, he was too liberal, not giving her any authentic guidance as an authority, and precisely because he renounced his authority, his power which remained as a professor appeared as irrational power. So paradoxically, it is precisely when the professor renounces his standard authority and behaves like we are all the same that, between the lines, he keeps his power (he can grade you and so on). At the moment when he pretends to be tolerant, you experience his power in all of its irrationality.
BLVR: That’s like your example of the employee and the boss. You said that when the boss claims to be buddies with the employee, he is actually exploiting the employee more, in that he is covering up all of his power, though in actuality, it still exists.
SŽ: Yes, these are the problems for me. The fact that something appears as irrational unjustified power, it’s not simply that it’s horrible authority. It is precisely when authority declines and you have the first steps towards a more equal tolerant attitude. So again, my lesson here is kind of a pessimistic one, but not pessimistic in the sense that nothing can be done. Pessimistic in the sense that maybe the first step towards really opening up the space to change something is to admit the extent to which there is no easy way out, nothing can be simply changed. Often, the worst way to become prisoner of a system is to have a dream that things may turn better, there is always the possibility of change. Because it is precisely this secret dream that keeps you enslaved to the system. At this level, I quite liked a modest movie, The Shawshank Redemption. The guy who doesn’t accept that he is in prison and dreams to get out, when he is let out, he hangs himself. And the guys who accept that they are really there, they are the ones who can really break out. So there are alternatives and in alternatives, a certain sense of false opening, in that it’s not necessarily so bad, maybe luck is around the corner, we can change things; those are the ideal ideological tools to keep you enslaved. The system functions through the idea that it can be changed at any point. So maybe the first step is to see that it can’t be changed, that it’s pretty closed.
VII: LACAN AND FASHION CATALOGUES
BLVR: I would like to go back to the problem of people acting as personas of themselves. This sounds very Lacanian, in the sense that we do not experience the world directly, but by interpretation. The real is itself, mediated (in this case through acting as a persona). Could you describe for me your basic insight into Lacan’s work and what you think is his idea of philosophy?
SŽ: Lacan was a French psychoanalytic theorist, who despised philosophy officially. For Lacan, the discourse of philosophy is of a complete worldview which fills in all of the gaps and cracks. And Lacan’s idea is that precisely what we learn in psychoanalysis is how cracks and inconsistencies are constitutive of our lives. So officially he was against philosophy, but the paradox is that Lacan was constantly in dialogue with philosophy. In his work, there are even more references to Plato and Hegel than to Freud himself.
BLVR: So even though Lacan didn’t want to define the world concretely, he was a kind of philosopher himself?
SŽ: Obviously, Lacan was playing philosophy against itself. The idea being very simply that in our experience of the reality of the world, we always stumble upon some fundamental crack, incompleteness. What appears as an obstacle, the fact that we cannot ever really know things, is for Lacan itself a positive condition of meaning. There is a kernel of philosophy here, what philosophers call ontological difference; this is this experience of a rupture as a fundamental constituent of our lives. So to cut a long story short, for Lacan (and I try to further develop this idea, based on his insight), to properly grasp what Freud was aiming at with the death drive (the fundamental libidinal stance of the human individual for self-sabotaging; the basic idea of psychoanalysis is the pursuit of unhappiness, people do everything possible not to be happy), is to read it against the background of negativity, a gap as fundamental to human subjectivity, so in other words to philosophize psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis in this way is no longer just a psychiatric science which develops a theory of how we can cure certain diseases; it’s kind of a mental and philosophical theory of the utmost radical dimensions of human beings.
BLVR: So Lacan was reading Freud’s death drive, the desire to self-destruct, as a good thing, philosophically speaking. Incompleteness and cracks, themselves being the place where difference is created.
SŽ: Exactly.
BLVR: You wrote some Lacanian-style quotations for last fall’s Abercrombie & Fitch catalog. How did that come about?
SŽ: Oh yes, I was helping someone who helped me once. It was easy, he sent me a series of provocative images, and I just wrote silly Lacanian statements about them. My critics have attacked me, saying how can you conscientiously accept money from such a company? I said, with less guilt than accepting money from the American university system.
The last sunbeam
Lightly falls from the finish’d Sabbath,
On the pavement here—and there beyond, it is looking,
Down a new-made double grave.
2
Lo! the moon ascending!
Up from the east, the silvery round moon;
Beautiful over the house tops, ghastly phantom moon;
Immense and silent moon.
3
I see a sad procession,
And I hear the sound of coming full-key’d bugles;
All the channels of the city streets they’re flooding,
As with voices and with tears.
4
I hear the great drums pounding,
And the small drums steady whirring;
And every blow of the great convulsive drums,
Strikes me through and through.
5
For the son is brought with the father;
In the foremost ranks of the fierce assault they fell;
Two veterans, son and father, dropt together,
And the double grave awaits them.
6
Now nearer blow the bugles,
And the drums strike more convulsive;
And the day-light o’er the pavement quite has faded,
And the strong dead-march enwraps me.
7
In the eastern sky up-buoying,
The sorrowful vast phantom moves illumin’d;
(’Tis some mother’s large, transparent face,
In heaven brighter growing.)
8
O strong dead-march, you please me!
O moon immense, with your silvery face you soothe me!
O my soldiers twain! O my veterans, passing to burial!
What I have I also give you.
9
The moon gives you light,
And the bugles and the drums give you music;
And my heart, O my soldiers, my veterans,
My heart gives you love.
"The data for any situation is infinite. So what you do is, you go through the motions of thinking about what you will do about this. But worriers are people, who think of all the variables beyond their control of what might happen. Choice is the act of hesitation we make before making a decision."
