Demanding the Impossible

by Slavoj Zizek

  Bernard-Henri Lévy, a guy whom I don’t like much, told me that Sarkozy, at that time Interior Minister, sent not only police but also social workers to the site, and he even organized Muslim priests to go to these young people and ask them “What do you want?” And they didn’t get an answer – they didn’t express any demands, just an abstract discontent and pure explosion. Isn’t this a set sign of Western European societies? That you get this kind of pure explosion of violence, which cannot even formulate a minimal utopian program. Here, again, this is a dangerous moment.

  So the principal task of the twenty-first century is to politicize and discipline – the “destructured masses” of slum-dwellers. Today’s historical situation does not compel us to drop the notion of the proletariat, of the proletarian position; on the contrary, it compels us to radicalize it to an existential level well beyond Marx’s imagination. We need a more radical notion of the proletarian subject, a subject reduced to the evanescent point of the Cartesian cogito, deprived of its substantial content. For this reason, the new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. The ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure – in a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially a Homo Sacer, and the only way to stop actually becoming one is to act preventively.

  So what we find in “really existing slums” is, of course, a mixture of improvised modes of social life, from religious “fundamentalist” groups held together by a charismatic leader and criminal gangs up to seeds of a new “socialist” solidarity. The slum-dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called “symbolic class” (managers, journalists, and PR people, academics, artists, etc.). What we should be looking for are signs of new forms of social awareness that will emerge from the slum collectives: they will be the seeds of the future.

  27

  Bolivarianism, the Populist Temptation

  You mentioned Chávez and slums of favelas famous for having the highest crime rates in the world. What went wrong there? The “Bolivarian Revolution” seemed so promising, with Chávez’s participatory ideas concerning oil money and the slums, but they ended up with such negative consequences.

  SŽ: I don’t know the exact causes. But although Chávez wanted people to participate, the problem was the way local self-organization was connected to the state. Why? It became brutally hard to get money and help from the state. It wasn’t purely local self-organization; it was self-organization subordinated to the state in order to get money. And because of this, of course, it exploded into corruption, into inefficiency, etc. It just showed us that when we combine local self-organization and the state, it becomes authoritarian, and you can end up with a dangerous mix of populist violence.

  Another dangerous game is the following one: Chávez tries to ignore the problem of violence. I heard they somehow prohibited the reporting of revolts in the media because a much darker thing is happening there. This is what my leftist friends told me: Chávez thought that those who are horrified by violence are mostly from the middle classes. The idea is that poor people are exerting more violence against the middle classes. But since Chávez considered the middle classes to be his enemies, his idea was this: “Fuck them. Let’s have a little bit of violence!” He played a very dangerous game here.

  Chávez is lost steam. It is a real tragedy. Because he played these populist games, he neglected the physical infrastructure. The machinery of oil extraction is falling apart, and they are compelled to pump less and less. Chávez started well in politicizing and mobilizing the excluded, but then he fell into the traditional populist trap. Oil money was a curse for Chávez, because it gave him space to maneuver rather than confront the problems. But then he had now he must confront them. He had enough money to patch things up without solving problems. For instance, Venezuela has experienced a massive brain-drain to Colombia and other places: it is, in the long term, a catastrophe. I am distrustful of all these traditions, “Bolivarianism,” etc. – it’s all bullshit.

  I have a very leftist friend who told me how this really looks. He told me he was in a middle-class restaurant with friends in the center of Caracas. Three or four of Chávez’s fanatic guards came in and started to shout and laugh at a woman. Nobody said anything. They were totally intimidated, in a state of constant terror. You know, I’m saying something very bourgeois, not Marxist, but it’s true that Lenin was aware of this: you need an effective middle class that can organize production and societal development. Without this, you can do nothing good. What Chávez was doing is horrible.

  All revolutions have this kind of original sin. For example, in Cuba, do you know what one of Castro’s sins was? In 1958, when Castro was already holding the eastern part of the island of Cuba and had made the final pushes to get Havana, he knew that the main object was to get the elite behind him. The purely Spanish, not mestizos, not mixed: the intellectuals, doctors, and so on. And he played the racism card more or less openly. Remember that the dictator whom Castro overthrew was Batista, who is a half black mestizo. And Castro’s propagandists spread rumors to all those elite loyal Hispanics: “Allow us to take power and black slaves will no longer rule you.” It’s true now if you look at the structure of the Cuban elites; of course there are a couple of symbolic impotent black figures. But when you turn on the TV, count the faces, and look at how many blacks you see there. We can see that a pure Hispanic elite rules that society. You can see a couple of women to fill the quota, making it appear better, and there are some ministerial posts occupied by women, but they are the ones that a macho society typically gives to women, like healthcare or education. These are for women and, in practice, for blacks. Remember, you would never have guessed that in Cuba pure Hispanics are in the minority; the majority consists of mestizos and then pure blacks.

  Incidentally, in Brazil it’s the same. Look at all the elite there. Even leftists around Lula, they are all white. You would never have guessed that black people make up over 40 percent of the population in Brazil. And typically, in Lula’s government, there was one black guy, and he was a minister of culture, a silly post. He was put there for the sake of appearances, and was allowed just to organize his concerts and propaganda and whatever. They don’t allow him to have any real power. Unfortunately, one has to pay the price for a political choice.

  28

  Violent Civil Disobedience

  As you mentioned the car-burning rebels in Paris, the leftist revolutionary gesture is someway typically stigmatized as a violent one. So the problem of violence in the process of revolution must be critical, especially in your context. How do you understand, within this framework, the violence of the French banlieues? What is your definition of violence? What, today, is the relation between violence and politics? Can any violence be justified for any reason?

  SŽ: What I’d like to insist on in this case is that, like in Egypt, an actual revolution takes place, as you could see, in a pure way. The only violence there was symbolic violence. Symbolic violence in the sense that you walk in the street and ignore the authorities. Demonstrators didn’t kill anyone. Violence always occurs after the authorities step in. Even if you look at the French Revolution, it was the same. Forget about all those stories you know about terrorism or violence. Every good historian will tell you that before and after the Jacobins in the French Revolution there were many more people killed. But they were insignificant and ordinary people – nobody cares about them. When you kill some well-known prince, then everyone talks about it as terror.

  I think the logic is this. First, there’s invisible violence going on all the time. We must be very careful when we talk about violence. I quoted in my book, Living in the End Times, a wonderful sentence from Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: “A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at
and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” You know, it’s ridiculous. In order to grasp this parallax nature of violence, one should focus on the short circuits between different levels, between, say, power and social violence, yet it should be experienced as violence.

  For example, in Egypt, if 100 people die, it’s horrible. But are you aware of how many people die regularly of torture and terror even at times when there is nothing particular going on? For me, the big question, when you talk about violence, is always what goes on in apparently normal times. At times like this, people perceive the situation as peaceful. Are we really aware of how much violence happens during these periods? I don’t mean some sort of poetic violence. By violence, I mean extremely brutal violence: torturing, starving, beating, and whatever. It went on all the time in Egypt: their prisons were so terrifying, horrific. So again, that’s my first point.

  My second point is that this is the logic of authentic revolution. People are violent when they raise a revolution. Of course, there may always be excesses. But as you can see here clearly, they are extremely marginal. Most people are violent just in the sense of ignoring power. When the policeman tells you: “You shouldn’t go there,” you say “Fuck you. No! I will go there.” Remember those magic moments when the authorities allowed people to gather in Tahrir Square. Violence stopped. People were there just demonstrating.

  Violence comes, as a rule, from the other side. It comes from those in power who think that they have to scare people to create violence. It’s not that I advocate violence in the sense of, “Oh, let’s do some killing.” I’m just saying that the move people should make, of course, is a kind of massive boycott-style of violence, which is totally non-violent in the sense of there being no killing or torturing people. The problem is what happens when the other side starts to counter-attack. Even then, as a revolutionary, you usually don’t have the wherewithal to make a counter-attack, but you must somehow resist and defend yourself. Here I agree with Badiou. The left should learn, from the twentieth century, the horror of state terror or violence. Violence of leftist progressives should basically be defensive violence, in the sense that “We occupy the square. We defend if you attack us – but not this kind of aggressive violence.”

  Like now, wonders can be done here. I think that just ignoring the crowds was masterful. Remember when the army tanks started to arrive? Instead of attacking them, they started to embrace them, even treating them as friends. It was masterful because it was a very reasonable way to behave, even if the army wasn’t as good as the government claimed or even if they sent hundreds of tanks. It was clear that the army would have been going too far if they had simply started to shoot at the people. So why not simply receive them? What does it mean? Nothing. Even though there were some tanks, people ignored them and went on to embrace the soldiers. Isn’t this a model of how to resist?

  And even if you take a violent act to be a problem, take Wikileaks. People claim it is violent in the sense that it can cause catastrophes. But didn’t Wikileaks do it in a very moderate way? Some people think it was too moderate. From what I know, they didn’t just publish everything. They only gave certain information to four or five big media outlets, for example, some names of the spy in China who may then be arrested or killed. Yet still, didn’t they do it in a moderate and considerate way? I think it should be acceptable.

  The only violence that I advocate is in situations where there is a terrorist or autocratic violent regime – usually you might call it, although it’s maybe a little more radical, civil disobedience. Like when you start to behave as if you don’t admit the legitimacy of public authority. And then you create your free territory in this way. Violence should only be defensive. I don’t find anything problematic about this.

  29

  Legitimacy of Symbolic Violence

  So you mean that the defensive form of violence is legitimate? But can it be revolutionary enough to make actual changes? Isn’t that just too naive a concept of the violent act?

  SŽ: Although it is in a different context, let me tell you a funny story. When the Kurdish resistance in Turkey was much more active, I could not but sympathize with them. I was told by my leftist friend in Eastern Turkey that conditions in prisons about 15–20 years ago were horrible. People were tortured, suspected of being combatants. Then they did something to the guardians, after which nobody was killed. My god, I find it too strange that this was acceptable. They discovered that the guardians who did the torturing were from the local area. So Kurdish people from outside discreetly approached one of the guardians after office hours and said: “We know you’re torturing our people to death. But we know who you are and where you live. If you go on torturing, we will kill your wife and children.” All of a sudden, the torture stopped. Isn’t it funny? Conditions in prison started to get better and the guards treated the prisoners decently. I’m sorry, but this was a desperate measure, I would say a scam.

  But can you imagine a truly horrible situation? Can you imagine someone who is very close to you being held somewhere and raped and tortured and you know all about it but cannot do anything? I cannot even imagine my son or a woman I love dying suddenly as a result of some kind of an explosion and never hearing about it. But it could happen. This is, for me, the worst thing. And under those conditions, you have to fight back. It’s not enough to protest. To call foreign journalists and to do whatever you can do, you have to do it effectively if you can identify a guardian. I’m sorry to tell you this, but I think it’s still legitimate.

  To recapitulate my crucial two points. First, bear in mind that violence is already here. Because, as I said in my book, On Violence, our usual perception is that violence only means change, when something happens. No! Violence is here all the time so that things remain peacefully the way they are. Don’t forget about this about violence. And for the second point, don’t confuse this elementary violence – let’s call it civil disobedience – with brutal physical violence. We can understand an attempt to ignore power as being just for the right of the people when conditions demand it. It’s a very forceful weapon – maybe it will become more and more forceful. And you should never forget that the state is not up there. The state functions only as far as it is recognized as functioning. I mean, people have tremendous power in organizing themselves just to ignore the power.

  For example, in Slovenia – it is not a good example because it is more opportunistic – I remember we debated how to deal with conscription after independence. People acted spontaneously. When they got a call, young people simply ignored it. They threw the documents away. Police tried to bring in a couple of them, but then it became so massive and the state was confronted with the problem of having to arrest 40,000 people. And of course what they did was a nice humiliating retreat. They disguised it as a change in the law. All of sudden they discovered that it was strategically better for Slovenia to have a small professional army. They quickly changed the law, because people had simply ignored it. Again, if enough people do this, you can have power.

  So this is the violence I advocate: symbolic violence. For me, one of the greatest critiques of ideology is in the Old Testament, in The Book of Job, where God takes the side of Job. The other one is Étienne de La Boétie’s Discours de la servitude volontaire. He first described the mechanism of how a tyrant becomes a tyrant: because people treat him as a tyrant and fear him. Which is why these magical moments always fascinate me. Even if a leader still nominally holds power, all of a sudden people know that the game is over and don’t take it seriously and lose respect, and then a mysterious rupture takes place.

  I wrote about it in my early book with a quote from a Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapu´sci´nski, who recently died. He wrote a book, Shah of Shahs, which was wonderful. It’s mainly about the Khomeini revolution and how it took three or four months for the
Shah regime to disintegrate at a square in Tehran. At a Tehran crossroad, some protesters refused to budge when a policemen approached them and shouted, “Go away. This is prohibited.” One of demonstrators simple stood there and just looked at him. The policeman continued shouting, but the demonstrator didn’t move. The embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over. This became the symbol of the power of ignoring power.

  Is something similar going on now in Egypt? Even if that was happening, people died. But at some level, those in power lost their hold on the people. I think it would be wonderful to do a history of Eastern Europe: the integration of communist regimes at this level. At what point did this magic moment occur even though communists were formally still in power? All of a sudden freedom erupted. This is not just in the sense of intimate freedom, but social freedom. And in the sense of symbolic authority, those in power lost it. People were no longer afraid of them. This is a truly magic moment. Why? Because nothing happens in reality; it’s not that they stepped down, but in a very mysterious way everyone, even those in power, knows that the game is over. I wouldn’t call it a symbol of violence, but this is, for me, the essence of revolution.

  I’m not talking about some mystical inner event, because it’s a social effect. Power no longer works as a social link. When it is said that people are not afraid, it doesn’t mean that they are crazily heroic. Of course, if you see a policeman shooting at you, you should be afraid and run away. But at a different level, you no longer take the leadership seriously. Those in power know this is the most dangerous moment for them. This is what Mubarak is now trying to do. This was already happening. And Mubarak’s solution was to organize these brutal people to come and start beating, and in this way to create a demand for power. But it failed. So just by ignoring and not being afraid of the authorities, impossible revolution can truly occur.