by Slavoj Zizek
Take Latin America. It started well, and then it got lost. This makes me sad because what I really care about is not those big enthusiastic moments like now in Egypt. I’m much more of a realist here. What interests me is the day after. That is to say: out of this enthusiastic moment that makes us feel free, how will this be translated into a new institutional order? What will this order be? Will it be simply a Western liberal democracy? Or will it be some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime? Or will it be something new? I mean this is a real hope for me: that something will emerge out of these popular revolts that is neither just a corrupt Western democracy – which just means liberal elites who ignore the crowds – nor an Islamist hardline fundamentalist regime. I think this possibility means real hope.
But true hope rises from what we can’t even learn in the media. I don’t know how much it is reported in your country, but, for example, are you aware of what is going on in India? Almost one million Naxalite Maoists there have been mounting major rebellions. Horrible things have been happening back in the jungles of central India. They’re discovering new minerals, and are just killing the tribes in an extremely brutal way to make it free to industrialize. The Indian prime minister characterized this rebellion as the “single largest internal security threat,” and furthermore, the main media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about “red terrorism.” Nonetheless, as Arundhati Roy wrote in Outlook India magazine, the Maoist guerrilla army consists of just poor and desperate tribal people, who have been mercilessly exploited, raped, and cheated by moneylenders, fighting only for survival. Their situation is precisely that of Hegel’s rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are a starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.
Yet India is considered one of the largest democratic countries. People always oppose India to China. China is a totalitarian society, which is bad, and India is the biggest democracy in the world. Did you see that stupid film Slumdog Millionaire? You remember the beginning where the small guy, not a thief at all, was accused and they tortured him with electricity? When I was in India, I asked my friends whether it is still done like this. Then they said: “Yes, it is totally normal. Every police station has machinery to torture using an electric shock. And it’s done regularly to everyone. They just use it all the time.” He told me that, in India, the critics of those in power employ irony: “Please at least treat us like the Chinese treat the Tibetans where they torture you only if they suspected you of having links with the Dalai Lama’s politics.” They don’t torture ordinary small thieves. But, in India, they torture everyone.
So, again, I now see signs of hope there, yet the media ignore them. They are presented only as Maoist or terrorists and so on. But what the army is doing in India is horrible. They treat them like Americans in the nineteenth century treated the Native Indians. It’s extreme brutality. They say, “We will civilize the region,” but it means that the army rape the women and burn the houses. This is the tragedy today. Yet, hope is always connected with danger, potential chaos.
And this is a tough decision to make. Because it is clear apropos of Egypt. Western liberals, those who are in power, are, I think, too opportunistic. They say “No” to any better choice or any change, because every change is dangerous. I think we have to take a chance. I think precisely because of this attitude – “No changes in Arab countries. It’s better to have dictators and tyrants who are friendly to us” – that they will experience stronger and stronger uprisings. This is why I quoted the old motto of Mao Zedong in my article on Egypt, “Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?” published in the Guardian: “There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent.” This is the price you have to pay for the risk. If you say “No” to change, it can be chaos and nothing will change, so the situation will just get more and more explosive.
This again is the danger: to know how to walk this hazardous narrow path where there is great danger but, at the same time, there is hope. True hope for me only exists where there is danger. Walter Benjamin already said: “Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.” His old thesis not only still holds today, but is perhaps more pertinent than ever. So history brings situations, which are hopeful and dangerous, and it’s up to us what to do.
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The Universality of Political Miracles
What, then, do you see as a sign of tragedy, rather than of hope? And speaking of a crucial moment in Arab countries, can Egypt’s revolt lead to a new political reality?
SŽ: What I find so tragic in Western Europe today is the fact that the only passionate political agent, more or less, is predominantly the right-wing anti-immigrant populist, who brings the voice of popular discontent and change. The only passion is there. This is a very tragic situation. So I’m a pessimist for Europe.
Nonetheless Europe historically presented something nice. For me, moments of hope are always moments of universality. Do you know how often we talk about a multicultural culture, where we are suspicious about universalism? People often say that we are just too naive, and we all live in our own cultures, and there is no such thing as universality. But listen! What affected me tremendously, not only looking at the general picture of Tahrir Square but also listening to the interviews of protestors and participants, is how cheap and irrelevant this talk about multiculturalism becomes. There we all were fighting against tyrants; they wanted dignity and freedom and immediately found solidarity with each other. Here we already find universality. We have absolutely no problem identifying with them. That was the wonder of this revolution. And this is how we build universal solidarity. It’s a struggle for freedom, and freedom is universal.
I think the greatest triumph is this: when some Muslim brotherhood members were interviewed by the media, they honestly said, first, that this was not their revolution, but they just support it, and, second, that the goal was democracy, freedom, economic justice, and so on. Isn’t it nice that even the fundamentalist political agents had to adopt this language – the language of secular demands for democracy?
This is the opposite of Iran. In Iran, the Khomeini revolution is basically more religious. Leftist Marxists had to smuggle themselves in talking an Islamic language. Here is the opposite. In Egypt, Islamics have to talk using a secular language. This is a wonderful event. I mean nobody believed that they could raise Arab crowds on purely secular grounds. Everybody thought: “Oh, maybe some elite liberals have to come. Arabs are too stupid and too conservative so whatever they need is religion.” No! they did it. Even if it turns out to be a fiasco, this is hope.
Here I’m tempted to quote Emmanuel Kant’s notion of the sublime. Kant interpreted the French Revolution as a sign that pointed toward the possibility of freedom. In spite of all the horror that goes on there, events like the French Revolution give you hope – that there’s some kind of universal tendency to freedom and progress.
Kant concluded with the fact that, although progress cannot be proven, we can discern signs indicating that progress is possible. This is what an event like this means. One should note here that the French Revolution generated enthusiasm not only in Europe, but also in faraway places like Haiti, where it triggered another world-historical event. The hitherto unthinkable happened: a whole people fearlessly asserted their freedom and equality. I think we should remain faithful to them.
Do these words not also fit perfectly the ongoing Egyptian uprising? The French Revolution was, for Kant, a sign of history in the triple sense of signum rememorativum, demonstrativum, prognosticum. The Egyptian uprising is also a sign in which the memory of the long past of authoritarian oppression and the struggle for its abolition reverberates; an event which now demonstrates the possibility of a change; a hope for future achievements. Whatever our doubts, fears, and compromises, in that instant of enthusiasm, each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity. All the skepticism displayed behind closed doors, even by many worried progressiv
es, was proven wrong. And also we should be realists. But nonetheless, we should be open to a kind of miracle. Things like this are miracles. I don’t mean in religious terms. I mean miracles in the sense that things like this always explode against the predictions of all the specialists, who are always wrong.
Well, I’m old enough to remember the Khomeini revolution. I remember a British general, Sir John Hackett, wrote a book, The Third World War: The Untold Story, three or four years before the Khomeini revolution in 1980, depicting the new world conflict. In Slovenia we all laughed at it. Because the decisive battlefield between East and West was supposed to take place 20 kilometers northeast of Ljubljana. But what’s interesting is the presupposition of that book. It says that there will be chaos in the Middle East, and the only American ally that is totally faithful is Iran. You know, it was such a shock for everyone in Iran. Nobody expected it in Iran. They all thought that there could be chaos in Egypt, but not in Iran.
This is exactly what is happening in Tunisia today. Everybody thought there could be chaos here and there, but not in Tunisia – it is the country where tourism is doing well and everything works peacefully. People even described Tunisia as the country, by definition, where nothing happened. But now we have a revolution there. So I think we should be open to this miraculous aspect: again, not a miraculous thing in the sense of God or religion, but a miraculous event in the sense that something can emerge out of nowhere. We cannot predict anything. Political miracles give me hope.
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Messianism, Multitude, and Wishful Thinking
It is obvious that events – political miracles as you call them – are taking place, but who will make these political miracles happen, not in the sense of populist demonstrations or uprisings but, rather, a change of political structure and economic systems? Can the “Multitude,” according to Negri and Hardt, be the way forward, or at least an alternative – despite the crucial critiques of the actual possibility of its holding on to political power?
SŽ: No, not the multitude. Negri and Hardt basically use this term almost in a religious sense – I’ve been having a long philosophical debate with them about this. The problem with multitude is that it mobilizes a certain philosophical topic, such as the difference between presence and representation. The idea of multitude is the presence of absolute democracy and it is always against political representation. And then, the goal is to achieve some kind of immediately transparent democracy. I don’t think this works.
I’m not against representation. As Claude Lefort and others have amply demonstrated, democracy is never simply representative in the sense of adequately representing (expressing) a pre-existing set of interests, opinions, etc., since these interests and opinions are constituted only through such representation. Yet global capitalism today can no longer be combined with democratic representation. Hardt and Negri aim at providing a solution to this predicament in Empire, as well as its follow-up, Multitude. I don’t think this dream of getting rid of all forms of representation and arriving at some kind of immediate transparency, so called “absolute democracy” – “the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts” – will work. I think Negri and Hardt’s intention is to repeat Marx.
All I can tell you is that the Marxist dream of there being one big agent of social change is illusory, just like the traditional Marxist answer to those who fought for the rights of women, ecology, or racism. Can’t you see that all these depend on capitalism? I still think that capitalism is the key problem. But nonetheless I don’t think that we have one agent, as it was historically predestined to be. As Hegel already knew, “absolute democracy” could only actualize itself in the guise of its “oppositional determination,” as terror. So this kind of mirror image of a reliance on Marx is their political deadlock. So, when Naomi Klein writes, “Decentralizing power doesn’t mean abandoning strong national and international standards – and stable, equitable funding – for health care, education, affordable housing and environmental protection. But it does mean that the mantra of the left needs to change from ‘increase funding’ to ‘empower the grassroots’,” one should ask the naive question: How? How are these strong standards and funding – in short, the main ingredients of the welfare state – to be maintained? What would “multitude in power” (not only as resistance) be? How would it function?
Again, the agents of change are, as I describe them, somewhat related to my idea of different proletarian positions. It means those people who are deprived of their substance, like ecological victims, psychological victims, and, especially, excluded victims of racism, and so on. It is effectively surprising how many features of slum-dwellers fit the good old Marxist determination of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they are “free” in the double meaning of the word even more than the classic proletariat (“freed” from all substantial ties, dwelling in a free space, outside the police regulations of the state); and they are a large collective, forcibly thrown together, “thrown” into a situation where they have to invent some mode of being together, and simultaneously deprived of any support in traditional ways of life, in inherited religious or ethnic life-forms.
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Politicization of Favelas
Speaking of proletarian positions, added to the failure of multitude as an agent for change, it is not easy to capture the image of this term. An instant reactive image to this ambiguity might be slum-dwellers. How would you illustrate it? How do you think this abstract notion could involve the revolutionary potential? Or, as you once put it, was it a purely contingent drift, something which simply emerged “because, among all these possibilities, there was the possibility to emerge” (as Varela put it), or can we risk a more precise evolutionary account of its prehistory?
SŽ: My big hope is what happens in slums. I spoke with my Brazilian friends who told me how the government is playing dirty at this point. Of course what predominates in slums is an inner mafia – gangsters or religious sects, etc. But, from time to time, various kinds of new social rebel, less progressive, start to organize themselves. At least in Brazil, do you know what, as they told me, always happens at that point? All of a sudden drugs become available. The police consciously allow drug-related crime, and this criminal activity puts political awareness on the back burner. It’s a very dirty game. After every political mobilization in the slums, drugs are available. But it’s those in power who do it.
Do you remember the coup d’état against Solidarno´s´c in Poland? And again in Poland, after Wojciech Jaruzelski’s coup d’état in 1980? All of a sudden, drugs were readily available, together with pornography, alcohol, and Eastern Wisdom manuals, in order to ruin the self-organized civil society. My friends from Poland told me it wasn’t just communist repression. After the coup, communists allowed something very primitive but effective to happen. Of course they oppressed political activity, but at the same time it was very easy to get hold of drugs and pornography. They even supported Buddhist transcendental meditation. All this was just to distract younger generations from political activity. Religion, drugs, and sex are good just to depoliticize.
This is why Badiou is right in denying to the enthusiastic events of the collapse of the communist regimes the status of an Event. This way, one can continue to dream that revolution is round the corner: all we need is authentic leadership, which would be able to organize the workers’ revolutionary potentials. If one is to believe them, Solidarno´s´c was originally a worker’s democratic socialist movement, later “betrayed” by its leadership, which was corrupted by the Church and the CIA. There is, of course, an element of truth in this approach: the ultimate irony of the disintegration of communism was that the leaders revolt.
So maybe there is potential in the slums. Mike Davis may well be correct when he argues that “there’s a consensus, both on the left and the right, that it’s the slum peripheries of poor Third World cities that have become a decisive geopolitical space.” This would be, for me, a true miracle:
politicization of the slums. You know why? Slums are interesting because people are thrown into them without any regard to ethnic division or given unity. People there are usually from mixed levels of life. Also the only way to unite them would have been a more political one and I think this is why I still have some sympathy for Hugo Chávez. In spite of all the stupid things he did, he was the first one who really included people from slums, like favelas, in political-social life.
Even in Brazil they want other countries to help them in a humanitarian way, but this isn’t humanitarian help, because one doesn’t politically mobilize them. I’m not talking here as a naive revolutionary, but rather as a kind of conservative, because, I claim, if we don’t do this, then we come closer and closer to a kind of permanent emergency state, where parts of society in the slums will be invisible and there will be a kind of low-level civil war.
Like in France where, you remember, there were car-burning rebels in Paris about three years ago. This I think is a model of today’s form of revolt: a bad one. It was a very mysterious thing. It wasn’t some conservative Islamist movement, and it didn’t have any ideology. The first thing young people in the suburbs burned were their own mosques and cultural centers. It was a kind of pure protest without a program. It was, quoting Roman Jakobson in linguistics, the notion of “phatic communication.” The goal is not to pass information but just to signal, “Hi, I’m here.” The point is just to tell you this. There was no positive message of wanting more justice or dignity. It was a big explosion of violence. But the message was, basically, “Hi, we are here.” It is a dangerous situation when young people just have this abstract discontent.