Demanding the Impossible

by Slavoj Zizek

  Because everything manipulates. In this respect, Chávez was the same. I’m sorry, but I don’t think the Latino American populist model can be universally applied, and I don’t think it will ever work for them. I think this will be their ruin. I also don’t like this idea of, “Who are you to tell us about our tradition?” This is what the Chinese often say. I think everyone should be allowed to criticize everyone else on the condition that we are also all prepared to be criticized ourselves. What I don’t like about the Chinese is that, if you criticize them for lack of freedom, they say, “Oh, you’re a racist, you’re importing pure imperialist notions!” No, we should be able to criticize everyone. I have the right to criticize your society, and you have the right, too. Why? Because this is very productive.

  Let me tell you an anecdote from Hollywood. Many good films that give a critical view on American society are made by immigrant directors from Europe. Sometimes a foreigner who has only a naive view from outside can see much better what is wrong in a society than those who are already living there. Even in Europe, it is the same. This viewpoint could perhaps be designated as that of the Persian ambassador from Montesquieu’s famous Persian Letters: a strange look upon our world destined to bring about our own estrangement from it. He criticized France through the eyes of a fictional Persian ambassador, who came there and noted many strange things. I think we shouldn’t respect each other. But it’s important that you include yourself in the game, such that my criticism of you is not a way to elevate myself.

  Here I like Descartes, who is often accused of being Eurocentric. There is the famous opening – this could be a wonderful beginning of good multiculturalism – of Chapter 3 of Descartes’ Discourse on Method, in which he outlines the necessity and content of the “provisory code of morals” that he adopted while engaged in the search for a new unconditional foundation: “The first was to obey the laws and customs of my country, adhering firmly to the faith in which, by the grace of God, I had been educated from my childhood and regulating my conduct in every other matter according to the most moderate opinions … I was convinced that I could not do better than follow in the meantime the opinions of the most judicious; and although there are some perhaps among the Persians and Chinese as judicious as among ourselves.” We should turn Descartes around: infinity can emerge only within the horizon of finitude; it is a category of finitude.

  Here is an old phrase I like: “The only way to the universal good is that we all become strangers to ourselves.” You imagine looking at yourself with a foreign gaze, through foreign eyes. I think this is something that could be the greatest thing in humanity. You are never really limited just to your own perspective. I don’t like the false identity politics of multiculturalism which says that “you are enclosed in your culture.” No, we have all this amazing capacity to be surprised, not by others, but by ourselves seeing how what we are doing is strange.

  I like this wonderful and simple example: some anthropologists found that, for them, the treasure in a Polynesian island was represented by a big precious stone, which was carved. But then there was an earthquake or storm, and the stone was submerged under water. They didn’t have access to it. But they say: “Oh, it’s still there even though we can’t see it.” And we say: “Oh, how stupid they are.” But isn’t this what we do with gold in Fort Knox? Piles of gold have to lie around uselessly at Fort Knox so that the so-called monetary balance is maintained. It’s exactly the same. It’s there, inaccessible to us, but it nonetheless functions. I think this is the best multicultural critical anthropology. Where you discover in foreigners what obviously appears to be stupid, but then you find we’re doing the same!

  This is the Interpassivity Model. I’d like to start by making fun of those stupid Tibetans who do not have to pray. The Tibetan praying wheel works like this: I put a piece of paper with a prayer written on it into the wheel, turn it around mechanically (or, even more practically, let the wind turn it around), and the wheel is praying for me – as the Stalinists would have put it, “objectively” I am praying, even if my thoughts are occupied with the most obscene sexual fantasies. To dispel the illusion that such things can only happen in “primitive” societies, think about canned laughter on a TV screen (the reaction of laughter to a comic scene which is included in the soundtrack itself): even if I do not laugh, but simply stare at the screen, tired after a hard day’s work, I nonetheless feel relieved after the show, as if the TV did the laughing for me. To grasp this strange process properly, one should supplement the fashionable notion of interactivity, with its uncanny double, interpassivity.

  This is the best of critical multiculturalism. You start by making fun of the other. Why not? I like racist jokes. They’re the best. We’re not making jokes so much about the other; we are basically making jokes about ourselves. I think this is the best way to fight racism. Not to oppress it, but let’s say you have a certain racist cliché, you in a playful way accept it and make fun of yourself. I know, it is already a bit out of fashion, about the stupidity of blond girls. And what we all do here, for example – you must know this, I repeat it all the time – here in ex-Yugoslavia, Montenegro people are supposed to be lazy. They make fun of it in a wonderful way. And people in Bosnia pretend to be so primitive, cheating, and obsessed with sex. They make fun of it all the time. It’s a much better approach than politically correct terrorism. It can work.

  Even in much of today’s progressive politics, the danger is not passivity, but pseudo-activity, the urge to be active and to participate. People intervene all the time, attempting to “do something”; academics participate in meaningless debates. The truly difficult thing is to step back and to withdraw from it. Those in power often prefer even a critical participation to silence – just to engage us in a dialogue, to make sure that our ominous passivity is broken. Against such an interpassive mode in which we are active all the time to make sure that nothing will really change, the first truly critical step is to withdraw into passivity and to refuse to participate. This first step clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation.

  Back to your point, this would have been a wonderful topic of how to define the common good by becoming strangers to ourselves. I don’t believe the cultural approach taken by the United Nations or UNESCO. The reason that the books they publish in the name of culture, history, and humanity are so boring is that they’re terribly afraid of hurting anyone. “What a beautiful civilization here, what a beautiful civilization there.” I prefer to look at how stupid they are. And say: “Look, they’re even more stupid and so on.” That’s the only hope.

  34

  The Impossible Happens

  For the final question, what do you consider to be the most urgent theoretical question of our time?

  SŽ: There may be two sets of questions. First, there is of course the social question. It is a practical one. After the failure of social democracy, not so much but especially communism, and even after we have clearly seen the limits of direct council and local democracy, how can we imagine the real alternative? This is for me the tragedy of all that Seattle protest and Porto Alegre movement. These are protest movements. Everything works well as long as you only protest and then you have the enemy there. I had long debates with different people who are with Porto Alegre. Unlike the way the official slogan puts it, “another world is possible,” it seems, instead, that the Porto Alegre reunions have somehow lost their impetus. Just at the moment when there is the possibility of actually taking power, everything explodes. You have on the one hand those who say, “Don’t even think about the state, let’s think about local democracy,” but it’s never clear what they mean. Do they mean we should leave the state alone? Or that there should be no state?

  In the case of Hardt and Negri, they discern two ways to oppose the global capitalist empire: either the “protectionist” advocacy of the return to the strong nation-state, or the deployment of the even more flexible forms of mul
titude. Along these lines, in his analysis of the Porto Alegre anti-globalist meeting, Hardt emphasizes the new logic of the political space there. But what about when – if this really is the desire and will of these movements – “we take it over”? What would the “multitude in power” look like? Furthermore, is the state today really withering away (with the advent of the much-praised liberal “deregulation”)? On the contrary, isn’t the “war on terror” the strongest assertion yet of state authority? Are we not witnessing now the unheard-of mobilization of all (repressive and ideological) state apparatuses?

  For me, one of the tragic examples here is the Zapatista movement. I like it, but look at how they got lost. It started with an ambiguity. Is it a political movement or just a critical movement? And then, it found a modus vivendi by changing itself into a kind of moral authority. Now that it is a threat to no one, everyone simply loves it. Because every politician says: “It’s so nice to have these honest people, telling us what to do, but we live in real lives, so somebody has to do the dirty work.”

  No wonder my radical friend in Mexico once told me about an anonymous boss, Subcomandante Marcos. He said that many Mexican leftists now call him “Subcomediante” Marcos. Because he’s the kind of preacher to whom everybody listens because they love him. Even the establishment loves him, because he’s a threat to no one. I spoke with a guy who visited there. He told me wonderfully amusing details about how it really is. They have their own small liberated zone. The government doesn’t care and leaves them alone because it’s good for tourism. Then tourists come there. But there’s a problem because they want to be ethical there, so they have no gambling, no prostitution, no alcohol. But the tourists need these things. So Zapatista organized something in the evenings, then, if you want, a bus would take you just outside the liberated zone where you have bordellos, prostitution, alcohol, etc. So you visit the capitalist vice soon after you return to communism.

  It’s not really an alternative. Again, we don’t really know what political model can replace it. Here I have a big problem with Negri and Hardt: the idea of absolute democracy and multitude, I think, doesn’t work as a global model. It cannot be universalized. No wonder that, at the end of the second volume of Multitude, after describing multiple forms of resistance to the empire, they talk about the final resolution with an almost Messianic note adumbrating the great Rupture, the moment of Decision: “The moment will come when the state will disappear and multitudes will govern themselves.” But they don’t even give any indication. All of a sudden, they adopt purely religious language, quoting St. Francis of Assisi as a figure of the multitude. These vague analogies and examples simply bring out an anxious suspicion.

  More generally, your project would be a concrete political question. But more radically, I think it would be a reasonable attempt, and the following task that I like to explore would be a job for philosophers, not only for scientists. What is happening to us today should be referred to in the context of being human. As I mentioned before, all those changes, like biogenetic manipulations and ecological crisis, are in a way transforming the very definition of being human. We are capable of doing things which will change our very perception of what it means to be human. If we or somebody else could control our physical and psychic properties, we would become much more powerful, but at the same time more subordinated, more vulnerable. It’s a very dangerous situation and we don’t have any clear ethical guidance here.

  And did you notice, when you talk about the possible and the impossible, how strangely this is distributed? On the one hand, in the domains of personal freedom and scientific technology, we are told that “nothing is impossible”: we can enjoy sex in all its perverse versions, entire archives of music, films, and TV series are available to download, space travel is available to everyone at a price. There is the prospect of enhancing our physical and psychic abilities, of manipulating our basic properties through interventions into the genome; even the tech-gnostic dream of achieving immortality by transforming our identity into software that can be downloaded into one or another set of hardware. What I’m saying is: everything is possible in technology. They even say that all diseases will be cured. The ultimate dream is the agnostic dream of technology that we will become immortal by changing ourselves into a software program, etc. Here, everything is possible.

  But, on the other hand, in the domain of socioeconomic relations, our era perceives itself as the age of maturity in which humanity has abandoned the old millenarian utopian dreams and accepted the con-straints of reality – read: capitalist socioeconomic reality – with all its impossibilities. When you want to make some changes to the economy to give a little bit more for healthcare, they say: “No, it’s impossible. The market won’t allow it.” We can become immortal, but we cannot get a little bit more money for healthcare. The commandment “You cannot” is its mot d’ordre. Obviously, there is something terribly wrong here with this disposition of what is possible and what is impossible. So again I think that the task of thinking today is – maybe to bring these two aspects together and put them into one abstract problem – to formulate precisely in a new way to rearrange the limits of the possible and the impossible.

  At certain levels, things we think of as possible are probably not possible: all those dreams of immortality or whatever. And at certain levels, what economists are telling us is impossible is possible. The impossible happens: not impossible in the sense of religious miracles, but in the sense of something we don’t consider possible within our coordinates. This is why Lacan’s formula for overcoming an ideological impossibility is not “everything is possible,” but “the impossible happens.” The Lacanian impossible-real is not an a priori limitation, which needs to be realistically taken into account, but the domain of action. An act is more than an intervention into the domain of the possible – an act changes the very coordinates of what is possible and thus retroactively creates its own conditions of possibility. Like in Egypt, the impossible happened, no one expected it was possible. Without clear limitations between the possible and the impossible, you cannot have a minimal stability that is probably needed for normal regular life.

  People who just like the events, as in Egypt, used to say that we cannot live in this situation all the time. This is also Mubarak’s dirty strategy. He wanted to prolong it and to make things more painful for people ; he expected them to say: “OK, that’s enough. Mubarak, come back and give us peace.” For me, again, the many reactionaries, today’s conservatives at least, like these moments of revolution, but then they say: “The game is over and we must return.” But do we really have to return? I think changes are possible.

  What is impossible? Our answer should be a paradox which turns around the one with which I began: soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible. The only realist option is to do what appears impossible within this system. This is how the impossible becomes possible.

  This is what cynics are telling us: “Yes, we need revolutionary upheaval every 30 years so that people can see that you cannot really change everything in the long term and you must return to the old game.” For example, there is no conservative today in France who’s point of pride is to say “I was there in ’68, and I was demonstrating but later I became a realist.” No! One must blur the line between what is possible and what is impossible and redefine it in a new way. So this would be for me the great task of thinking today: to redefine and rethink the limits of the possible and the impossible.