Living in the End Times. Slavoj ŽižekЧитать онлайн книгу.
The speech act that declares liberal multiculturalism as hegemonic is thus the hegemonic position.
If we formulate the problem in these terms, the alternative appears as follows: either “true” multiculturalism, or else drop the universal claim as such. Both solutions are wrong, for the simple reason that they are not different at all, but ultimately coincide: “true” multiculturalism would be the utopia of a neutral universal legal frame enabling each particular culture to assert its identity. The thing to do is to change the entire field, introducing a totally different Universal, that of an antagonistic struggle which, rather than taking place between particular communities, splits each community from within, so that the “trans-cultural” link between communities is one of a shared struggle.
1 We should here reject the underlying premise of Harry Frankfurt’s critical analysis of bullshit: ideology is precisely what remains when we make the gesture of “cutting the bullshit” (no wonder that, when asked in an interview to name a politician not prone to bullshitting, Frankfurt named John McCain).
2 Sometimes, critique of ideology is just a matter of displacing the accent. Fox News’s Glenn Beck, the infamous Groucho Marx of the populist Right, deserves his reputation for provoking laughter—but not where he intends to do so. The dramaturgy of his typical routine begins with a violently satiric presentation of his opponents and their arguments, accompanied by a grimacing worthy of Jim Carrey; this part, which is supposed to make us laugh, is then followed by a “serious” sentimental moral message. But we should simply postpone our laughter to this concluding moment: it is the stupidity of the final “serious” point which is laughable, not the acerbic satire whose vulgarity should merely embarrass any decent thinking person.
3 It would have been interesting to reread Marcel Proust against the background of this topic of unwritten customs: the problem of his In Search of Lost Time is “How is aristocracy possible in democratic times, once the external marks of hierarchy are abolished?”, and his reply is: through the complex network of unwritten informal habits (gestures, tastes) by means of which those who are “in” recognize “their own,” and identify those who just pretend to belong to the inner circle and are to be ostracized. I owe this reference to Proust to Mladen Dolar.
4 Pascal Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la pénitence, Paris: Grasset 2006, p. 53.
5 Poems of Paul Celan, New York: Persea Books 2002, p. 319.
6 See Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 2009.
7 Hugh B. Urban, Tantra: Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, Berkeley: University of California Press 2003, pp. 22, 207.
8 Ibid., pp. 252–4.
9 “Sexual Energy Ecstasy,” quoted in ibid., p. 253.
10 I rely here on the reflections of Robert Pfaller.
11 Immanuel Kant, Perpetual Peace, New York: Penguin Books 2009, p. 62.
12 Jonathan Clements, The First Emperor of China, Chalford: Suton Publishing 2006, p. 16.
13 A truly radical revolutionary subject should drop this reference to Heaven: there is no Heaven, no higher cosmic Law which would justify our acts. So when Mao Zedong said “There is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent,” he thereby made a point which can be precisely rendered in Lacanian terms: the inconsistency of the big Other opens up the space for the act.
14 Arthur Waley, The Analects of Confucius, New York: Alfred A. Knopf 2000, p. 161.
15 Ibid., p. 153.
16 Clements, The First Emperor of China, p. 34.
17 Ibid., p. 77.
18 See the Wikipedia entry for “Legalism (Chinese Philosophy).
19 The Laws of Manu, trans. Wendy Doniger, New Delhi: Penguin Books 2000.
20 Ibid., p. xxxvii (translator’s Introduction).
21 Ibid., p. lv.
22 Shaku Soen, quoted in Brian A. Victoria, Zen at War, New York: Weatherhilt 1998, p. 29.
23 I owe this data to Eric Santner.
24 I am grateful to Shuddhabrata Sengupta, New Delhi, for drawing my attention to this crucial distinction.
25 Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability, New Delhi: Permanent Black 2005, pp. 68
26 Pablo Neruda, Memoirs, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2001, pp. 99–100. I owe this reference to S. Anand, New Delhi.
27 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Quand je mourrai, rien de notre amour n’aura jamais existé,” unpublished manuscript of an intervention at the colloquium Vertigo et la philosophie, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, October 14, 2005.
28 See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, London and New York: Verso 2008, pp. 208–9.
29 A scene in Ernst Lubitch’s wonderful To Be or Not To Be, a short dialogue between the two famous Polish theater actors, Maria Tura and her self-centered husband Josef, playfully subverts this logic. Josef tells his wife: “I gave orders that, in the posters announcing the new play we’re starring in, your name will be at the top, ahead of mine—you deserve it, darling!” She kindly replies: “Thanks, but you really didn’t have to do it, it wasn’t necessary!” His answer is: “I knew you would say that, so I already cancelled the order and put my name back on top . . .”).
There is a well-known joke about cooking which relies on the same logic: “How anyone can make a good soup in one hour: prepare all the ingredients, cut the vegetables, etc., boil the water, put the ingredients into it, cook them at a simmer for half an hour, occasionally stirring; when, after three quarters of an hour, you discover that the soup is tasteless and unpalatable, throw it away, open up a good can of soup and quickly warm it up in a microwave oven. This is how we, humans, make soup.
30 For a more detailed elaboration of this line of thought of Bergson, see Chapter 9 of Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes.
31 Viktor Frankl, Wissen und Gewissen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1966.
32 James was more interested in the contrast of mores between the near past and the present: the mechanics of time travel were foreign to him, which is why he wisely left the novel unfinished.
33 Quoted in Dupuy, “Quand je mourrai . . .”
34 Kant, Perpetual Peace, Appendix II, pp. 62–3.
35 Ibid., Appendix I.
36 Ibid.
37 Even some Lacanians praise democracy as the “institutionalization of the lack in the Other”: the premise of democracy is that no political agent is a priori legitimized to hold power, that the place of power is empty, open to competition. However, by institutionalizing the lack, democracy neutral-izes—normalizes—it, so that the big Other is again here in the guise of the democratic legitimization of our acts—in a democracy, my acts are “covered” as the legitimate acts which carry out the will of the majority.
38 Quoted from Udi Aloni’s outstanding analysis of this case, “Samson the Non-European” (unpublished manuscript).
39 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 36.
40 The standard liberal-conservative argument against Communism is that, since it wants to impose on reality an impossible utopian dream, it necessarily ends in deadly terror. What, however, if one should nonetheless insist on taking the risk of enforcing the Impossible onto reality? Even if, in this way, we do not get what we wanted and/or expected, we nonetheless change the coordinates of what appears as “possible” and give birth to something genuinely new.
41 Jean-Claude Michéa, L’Empire du moindre mal, Paris: Climats 2007, p. 145.
42 The limit of this historicism is discernible