Demanding the Impossible

by Slavoj Zizek

  30

  Gandhi, Aristide, and Divine Violence

  You concluded your book, In Defense of Lost Causes, by saying that the domain of pure violence is the domain of love. Here we are thinking of elements that include ethics, universal love, compassion, and empathy. In particular, we are interested to hear your ideas about love and compassion, which we see as a practice of the common good. Alain Badiou sees love as a means to revolution, but you take a different view. What would the practice of the common good look like? You say that revolution cannot happen without cruelty and violence, but you also quote Che Guevara – “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality” – on the animating role of love in revolution. What do you make of the examples of Gandhi, Mandela, and Aristide as regards the transformative power of love in revolution?

  SŽ: Talking about love, I like to quote Christ, who says: “If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). How are we to read this statement?

  Love is, for me, a category of struggle. For example, I once said, to provoke my friend, that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. You know what I wanted to say? Of course Hitler was more violent in the sense of killing people. But in reality, all this violence was, in terms of Nietzsche, reactive. Basically, Hitler’s problem was how to save the capitalist regime, how to prevent revolution. He did not really act; all his actions were fundamentally reactions. And he was doing all this just to make things stay the way they had been.

  What Gandhi did, although it was very peaceful but in a way extremely violent, was to boycott customs, etc. He targeted the entire structure of the British colonial state. Hitler never did this. He never targeted the functioning of the German state. You see, this is a good example of what I mean by divine positive violence. It’s just the act of suspending the hold of power.

  You mention Nelson Mandela: he was more or less the same. There were of course battles and bombs, but that’s another story. Although one must say, in criticism of Mandela and Gandhi, that there’s a limit to this procedure. It’s very sad. But this procedure, where you play on human dignity, only works, as in Egypt, up to the point where your opponent is minimally dignified with a certain ethics.

  This is the reason Gandhi’s way worked but why you can’t universalize it. It worked because the British colonizers, in spite of all the horror, had a certain minimal dignity. Is not the ultimate limitation of Gandhi’s strategy, however, that it works only against a liberal democratic regime which abides by certain minimal ethico-political standards – in which, to put it in emotive terms, those in power still “have a conscience”? When Gandhi was asked what the Jews in Germany should do against Hitler in the late 1930s, he said they should commit mass suicide and thus arouse the conscience of the world. But it wouldn’t work with the Nazis. We can easily imagine the Nazi reaction to this: “Fine, we’ll help you – where do you want the poison delivered to?” This was really tragic.

  Do you know about the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in South Africa? Here we encounter the inherent limitation of the otherwise sublime effort of the truth and reconciliation strategy in post-apartheid South Africa. It can only work if you can count on minimal ethics. Because do you know what happened a couple of times? It often did work. Do you know what the rule was? Even an evil torturer or a bad guy would come and confront his victims and publicly tell them what he’d done and confess, after which he’s pardoned. Anyone who was prepared to tell the truth publicly about his acts, often in front of his or her former victims themselves, was promised clemency, no matter how heinous those acts had been.

  But on a couple of occasions some really weird, morally terrifying things happened – for example, the case of the secret police officers who brutally murdered the black activist Steven Biko. The torturer came along and, with a cynical smile, told his story of torture and death in all its grisly details: “Yes, I squeezed your balls, stuck a razor into your mouth … Ha-ha, I told you, so now I am free.” No remorse, nothing! With a totally shameless person or a cynical subject, this doesn’t work.

  The ethical horror of this vision is that it displays the limit of the “truth and reconciliation” idea: what if we have a perpetrator for whom the public confession of his crimes not only doesn’t give rise to any ethical catharsis in him, but even generates an additional obscene pleasure?

  To get back to your question, we always have to see how it works in a certain limited situation. Even Aristide, he also knew when to use violence. Sometimes defensive violence is needed. But nonetheless, what we should always remember is that this violence is, in a good sense, reactive violence. It should be our basic position, and this is what is so great about identifying an authentic leftist with emancipatory rebellion. You have enemies, but you are never exclusionary. It is love itself that enjoins us to unplug ourselves from the organic community into which we were born.

  31

  No Moralization But Egotism

  What will the authentic leftist project be? Is it the moral task, simply evoking utilitarian egotism, or something beyond that? And, as you once mentioned, if there is no need to evoke some high moral ground, then where should it be aiming?

  SŽ: In Egypt, for example, you can see that it is an emancipatory demonstration. It’s an authentic left because, when the police started to shoot at them, they cried out: “You are with us! You’re our brothers! Join us!” Even if they engaged in defensive violence, they didn’t stop repeating this message – join us. The project is not a murderous one. This project is a positive one.

  Here is why the authentic leftist project always distinguishes between people and their functions: in the same way that we want the end of the bourgeoisie but we don’t want to kill all the capitalists. It’s a different project. It’s always as if, “It’s not too late. You have a chance, join us.” While fascists are different. Hitler never said to the Jews: “Listen, it was a misunderstanding, join us.” No! For him, Jews were problematic by nature. The only way to solve the problem was to kill them all. This is the huge difference. And it is where the events really confirm this wonderful moment. This is what is so great about the left. Even when they’re engaged in struggle, it is an inclusionary struggle. It’s the struggle with a call: “Join us, you are one of us.”

  Although fascists claim that they represent all the people, it is obvious they’re never able to do so. They always need some kind of external threatening movement, like Jews, foreigners, etc. In other words, they have much more sacrificial logic, as in “Somebody has to be killed.”

  Then, of course, we know how this works from Rousseau. Rousseau was not an idiot, he wasn’t as naive as Marx. In his unique book of dialogues, Rousseau, Judge of Jean-Jacques, Rousseau deployed the wonderful idea of distinguishing between two types of egotism – amour-de-soi (that love of the self which is natural) and amour-propre, the perverted preferring of oneself over others in which a person focuses not on achieving a goal, but on destroying the obstacle to it. Here I wanted to develop a wonderful theory of Rousseau, where he says that egotism is not evil: “The primitive passions, which all directly tend towards our happiness, make us deal only with objects which relate to them, and whose principle is only amour-de-soi, are all in their essence lovable and tender; however, when, diverted from their objects by obstacles, they are more occupied with the obstacle they try to get rid of, than with the object they try to reach, they change their nature and become irascible and hateful. This is how amour-de-soi, which is a noble and absolute feeling, becomes amour-propre, that is to say, a relative feeling by means of which one compares oneself, a feeling which demands preferences, whose enjoyment is purely negative and which does not strive to find satisfaction in our own well-being, but only in the misfortune of others.”

  It’s very
easy, in contrast to what theologians are saying, to pass from an egotist concern to the common good. He said that we have an assertive egotism, amour-propre, and there is nothing bad about that. But he said the problem begins not only when you think that the only way for you to be happy is to hurt others, but when hurting others becomes more important than your own happiness. Here, I totally agree with the criticism over the religious stupidity of the Pope, who says: “Capitalism and egotism, they are both evil.” Maybe we don’t have enough egotism today. No high ethical standards are needed for such a turning point.

  What, then, is the logic of envy and resentment? I quoted some Slovene saying – we have all these wonderful proverbs and fairy tales. A magic person asks a farmer what he would prefer: to receive one cow himself while his neighbor receives two cows, or for one of his cows to be killed and two of his neighbor’s cows killed. Every Slovenian would prefer the second choice. Better for me to suffer than the neighbor gets more. This logic is crucial when things go wrong, where hurting the other becomes more important even than your own happiness. Gore Vidal demonstrated the point succinctly: “It is not enough for me to win – the other must lose.”

  That is why I don’t think egotism is an evil. An evil person is thus not an egotist, he is just “thinking only about his own interests.” A true egotist is too busy taking care of his own good to have time to cause misfortune to others. The primary vice of a bad person is precisely that he is more preoccupied with others than with himself. Great philosophers like Hegel and, especially, Schelling knew this. It means elevating yourself above your utilitarian interests and pleasure. This is why the critics complain that, in today’s hedonistic-egotistic society, true values totally miss the point. The true opposite of egotist self-love is not altruism, a concern for the common good, but envy, ressentiment, which makes me act against my own interests. Then evil is very ethical. Evil means: “I will kill you even if I die doing it.” It means that you’re ready to sacrifice for the hatred of another; you are even ready to sacrifice your own good just to hurt the other.

  It’s very tragic, I think, how today’s religious institutions in Europe are unable to respond to current crises. I think all the answers they give today are simply wrong. What was the response of the Church to the financial crisis? “It is a moral crisis, a crisis of egotism.” It’s totally wrong. Crisis is in the system.

  I don’t like him, but I almost felt sympathetic toward the horrible guy Bernard Madoff, who stole 60 billion, because he became a scapegoat; everyone blamed him for being a filthy guy. No! He was almost an idealist. As an ideal capitalist today, he took the path where the system pushes you today. The problem isn’t Madoff; the problem is what pushed him into doing it. How was that possible? It almost sounds anti-Semitic to me. How? Because Madoff was a Jew. When we have these critical moments, I don’t like moralization, which turns a social process into personal responsibility.

  Let us take the case of ecology. We often hear that our ecological crisis is the result of our short-term egotism: obsessed with immediate pleasures and wealth, we forgot about the common good. However, it is here that Walter Benjamin’s notion of capitalism as religion becomes crucial: a true capitalist is not a hedonist egotist; he is, on the contrary, fanatically devoted to his task of multiplying his wealth, ready to neglect his health and happiness for it, not to mention the prosperity of his family and the well-being of the environment. There is thus no need to evoke some high-ground moralism and trash capitalist egotism – against capitalist perverted fanatical dedication, it is enough to evoke a good measure of simple egotist and utilitarian concerns. In other words, the pursuit of what Rousseau calls the natural amour-de-soi requires a highly civilized level of awareness.

  32

  Possibility of Concrete Universality

  As you said, there is no need to emphasize the importance of identifying hidden assumptions, hidden power claims, in any kind of language of the common good. What do you think would be the most interesting questions around which to organize such a conference? Or if you were putting together discussions with the common good as a key theme, what would be the critical questions that would be worth emphasizing?

  SŽ: Here I would like to apply the basic lesson of what Hegel calls concrete universality. Universality is never neutral. Whenever you define something as common or neutral or universal – this is a classic Marxist point – it often as a rule secretly privileges some agent. For example, the classic Marxist critique of human rights, the way they’ve formulated it, already privileges a certain culture or a certain sex, etc.

  Some people like to take the idea from Western empires: if you put so much emphasis on individual responsibility, you put less emphasis on social collaboration. Although you claim this as a universal human right, you already privilege a certain Western individualist model – even if you claim they are universal, there’s already a certain privilege.

  Here is a nice example, which I saw on a history TV program. After the Tiananmen Square demonstration in 1989, the scene was shown repeatedly a million times: one guy alone confronting a tank. But in China, even for those who agreed with the demonstrators, this scene didn’t acquire such a symbolic status. It’s not a symbol for them. This is a typical Western idea: the military versus one single man. This is not their view. It was a typical example of what they describe as an icon – but no! It was an icon for us. It’s even a form of racism for them. As Naomi Klein put it in her Shock Doctrine, it is doubtful whether the Chinese saw the Tiananmen events as really so profoundly shocking. For them, it wasn’t so very symbolic. It’s a nice example of how we have to be very careful when constructing universalities.

  What further complicates the situation is that the rise of blank spaces in global capitalism is in itself also a proof that capitalism can no longer afford a universal civil order of freedom and democracy, that it increasingly requires exclusion and domination. How are we to break out of the deadlock of post-political dehistoricization? What is to be done after the Occupy Wall Street movement, when the protests which started far away – for example, in the Middle East, Greece, Spain, or the UK – reached the center, and are now reinforced and rolling out all around the world? What should be resisted at this stage is precisely a quick translation of the energy of the protest into a set of concrete pragmatic demands.

  I do believe in universalities like what we see in Egypt and elsewhere. And I think the topic of the secret bias of the common good would be a very good one. You know why? Because I see manipulations on both sides, and by both sides I mean Western Liberals and also the Oriental, Asiatic side. In the West, we should criticize ourselves for privileging this individualist model. But in the East you must know that when they talk about a harmonious society, it often legitimizes suppression. We have here two ways of how we should both engage in self-criticism, which almost sounds like Stalinist communism.

  In this, I’m almost an old Maoist. Although it sounds very gentle and Confucian, I wonder how much oppression exists in this harmonious hierarchical society. This would be, for me, a true multicultural dialogue. Not the typical boring story of UNESCO reports, which would have argued: “We in the West have our own notions of individuality, and in the East they have notions of an organic harmonious community. We should bring both of them together in a kind of synthesis.” No, what we need is exactly the opposite. Where we should collaborate is that each one of us should fight against our own shared experience. We should criticize the bias of our individualism and the bias of the so-called community spirit, which can be exploited to mask oppression.

  The standard accusation thus, in a way, knocks at an open door: the whole point of the notion of struggling universality is that true universality and partiality do not exclude one another, but universal truth is accessible only from a partially engaged subjective position. What we need to do is take a step away from this external opposition (or mutual reliance) into a direct internalized common ground, which means not only does one pole, when abstracted
from the other and thus brought to the extreme, coincide with its opposite, but there is no primordial duality of poles in the first place, only the inherent gap of the one. As Schelling, as well as Hegel, remained a monist, so I believe in the possibility of universality. And, as I once mentioned in the book The Parallax View, the universal as such is the site of an unbearable antagonism, self-contradiction, and the stellar parallax: the traps of ontological difference (the multitude of) its particular species are ultimately nothing but so many attempts to obfuscate/reconcile/master this antagonism. In other words, the universal names the site of a problem-deadlock, of a burning question, and the particulars are the attempted but failed answers to this problem.

  33

  Common Struggle for Freedom

  If the question of “concrete universality” is crucial for you, how would you like to transform this idea on a practical level? How can we apply it to the political and social context?

  SŽ: I think this question of the common good would be a wonderful topic. You know why? Because you must be aware that your project can easily be appropriated by some kind of New Age spirituality, peace, love, and so on. No! The common good is something of a struggle for me. The common good is a common struggle for freedom: not exclusionary struggle, not violent in the sense of shooting or killing, but breaking the hold of those in power. Again, I think, this topic is crucial.