Fwd: 911 Zizek Interview

[Claudia Westermann]

>To: rohrpost at mikrolisten.de
>From: Krystian Woznicki <krystian at snafu.de>
>- http://www.berlinergazette.de
>- http://www.tonspion.de/tv_digital07.php3

[...]

>'The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other'
>
>by Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann
>
>The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has gained something of a cult
>following for his many writings - including The Ticklish Subject, a
>playful critique of the intellectual assault upon human subjectivity.
>
>At the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2001, he talked to
>Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann about subjectivity, multiculturalism,
>sex and unfreedom after 11 September.
>
>-----------------
>
>Has 11 September thrown new light on your diagnosis of what is
>happening to the world?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: One of the endlessly repeated phrases we heard in recent
>weeks is that nothing will be the same after 11 September. I wonder if
>there really is such a substantial change. Certainly, there is change
>at the level of perception or publicity, but I don't think we can yet
>speak of some fundamental break. Existing attitudes and fears were
>confirmed, and what the media were telling us about terrorism has now
>really happened.
>
>In my work, I place strong emphasis on what is usually referred to as
>the virtualisation or digitalisation of our environment. We know that
>60 percent of the people on this Earth have not even made a phone call
>in their life. But still, 30 percent of us live in a digitalised
>universe that is artificially constructed, manipulated and no longer
>some natural or traditional one. At all levels of our life we seem to
>live more and more with the thing deprived of its substance. You get
>beer without alcohol, meat without fat, coffee without caffeine...and
>even virtual sex without sex.
>
>Virtual reality to me is the climax of this process: you now get
>reality without reality...or a totally regulated reality. But there is
>another side to this. Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a
>counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou
>invented a nice name: 'La passion du rel', the passion of the real.
>That is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is
>somehow a universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only
>authentic real experience must be some extremely violent, shattering
>experience. And this we experience as a sense that now we are back in
>real life.
>
>Do you think that is what we are seeing now?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: I think this may be what defined the twentieth century,
>which really began with the First World War. We all remember the war
>reports by Ernst Jnger, in which he praises this eye-to-eye combat
>experience as the authentic one. Or at the level of sex, the
>archetypal film of the twentieth century would be Nagisa Oshima's Ai
>No Corrida (In The Realm Of The Senses), where the idea again is that
>you become truly radical, and go to the end in a sexual encounter,
>when you practically torture each other to death. There must be
>extreme violence for that encounter to be authentic.
>
>Another emblematic figure in this sense to me is the so-called
>'cutter'- a widespread pathological phenomenon in the USA. There are
>two million of them, mostly women, but also men, who cut themselves
>with razors. Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide. It's
>simply that they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: it's only
>through this pain and when you feel warm blood that you feel
>reconnected again. So I think that this tension is the background
>against which one should appreciate the effect of the act.
>
>Does that relate to your observations about the demise of subjectivity
>in The Ticklish Subject? You say the problem is what you call
>'foreclosure'- that the real or the articulation of the subject is
>foreclosed by the way society has evolved in recent years.
>
>Slavoj Zizek: The starting point of my book on the subject is that
>almost all philosophical orientations today, even if they strongly
>oppose each other, agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist
>stance. For example, Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida would both
>agree that the Cartesian subject had to be deconstructed, or, in the
>case of Habermas, embedded in a larger inter-subjective dialectics.
>Cognitivists, Hegelians - everybody is in agreement here.
>
>I am tempted to say that we must return to the subject - though not a
>purely rational Cartesian one. My idea is that the subject is
>inherently political, in the sense that 'subject', to me, denotes a
>piece of freedom - where you are no longer rooted in some firm
>substance, you are in an open situation. Today we can no longer simply
>apply old rules. We are engaged in paradoxes, which offer no immediate
>way out. In this sense, subjectivity is political.
>
>But this kind of political subjectivity seems to have disappeared. In
>your books you speak of a post-political world.
>
>Slavoj Zizek: When I say we live in a post-political world, I refer to
>a wrong ideological impression. We don't really live in such a world,
>but the existing universe presents itself as post-political in the
>sense that there is some kind of a basic social pact that elementary
>social decisions are no longer discussed as political decisions. They
>are turned into simple decisions of gesture and of administration. And
>the remaining conflicts are mostly conflicts about different cultures.
>We have the present form of global capitalism plus some kind of
>tolerant democracy as the ultimate form of that idea. And,
>paradoxically, only very few are ready to question this world.
>
>So, what's wrong with that?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: This post-political world still seems to retain the
>tension between what we usually refer to as tolerant liberalism versus
>multiculturalism. But for me - though I never liked Friedrich
>Nietzsche - if there is a definition that really fits, it is
>Nietzsche's old opposition between active and passive nihilism. Active
>nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing itself, is this active
>self-destruction which would be precisely the passion of the real -
>the idea that, in order to live fully and authentically, you must
>engage in self-destruction. On the other hand, there is passive
>nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just living a stupid,
>self-satisfied life without great passions.
>
>The problem with a post-political universe is that we have these two
>sides which are engaged in kind of mortal dialectics. My idea is that,
>to break out of this vicious cycle, subjectivity must be reinvented.
>
>You also say that the elites in our Western world are losing their
>nerve. They want to throw out all old concepts like humanism or
>subjectivity. Against that, you say it is important to look at what
>there is in the old that may be worth retaining.
>
>Slavoj Zizek: Of course, I am not against the new. I am, indeed,
>almost tempted to repeat Virginia Woolf. I think it was in 1914 when
>she said it was as though eternal human nature had changed. To be a
>man no longer means the same thing. One should not, for example,
>underestimate the inter-subjective social impact of cyberspace. What
>we are witnessing today is a radical redefinition of what it means to
>be a human being.
>
>Almost all philosophical orientations today agree on some kind of
>basic anti-subjectivist stance. Take strange phenomena, like what we
>see on the internet. There are so-called 'cam' websites where people
>expose to an anonymous public their innermost secrets down to the most
>vulgar level. You have websites today - even I, with all my decadent
>tastes, was shocked to learn this - where people put a video-camera in
>their toilets, so you can observe them defecating. This a totally new
>constellation. It is not private, but also it is also not public. It
>is not the old exhibitionist gesture.
>
>Be that as it may, something radical is happening. Now, a number of
>new terms are proposed to us to describe that. The one most commonly
>used is paradigm shift, denoting that we live in an epoch of shifting
>paradigm. So New Age people tell us that we no longer have a
>Cartesian, mechanistic individualism, but a new universal mind. In
>sociology, the theorists of second modernity say similar things. And
>psychoanalytical theorists tell us that we no longer have the Oedipus
>complex, but live in an era of universalised perversion.
>
>My point is not that we should stick to the old. But these answers are
>wrong and do not really register the break that is taking place. If we
>measure what is happening now by the standard of the old, we can grasp
>the abyss of the new that is emerging.
>
>Here I would refer to Blaise Pascal. Pascal's problem was also
>confrontation with modernity and modern science. His difficulty was
>that he wanted to remain an old, orthodox Christian in this new,
>modern age. It is interesting that his results were much more radical
>and interesting for us today than the results of superficial English
>liberal philosophers, who simply accepted modernity.
>
>You see the same thing in cinema history, if we look at the impact of
>sound. Okay, 'what's the problem?', you might say. By adding the sound
>to the image we simply get a more realistic rendering of reality. But
>that is not at all true. Interestingly enough, the movie directors who
>were most sensitive to what the introduction of sound really meant
>were generally conservatives, those who looked at it with scepticism,
>like Charlie Chaplin (up to a point), and Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang's Das
>Testament des Dr Mabuse, in a wonderful way, rendered this spectral
>ghost-like dimension of the voice, realising that voice never simply
>belongs to the body. This is just another example of how a
>conservative, as if he were afraid of the new medium, has a much
>better grasp of its uncanny radical potentials.
>
>The same applies today. Some people simply say: 'What's the problem?
>Let's throw ourselves into the digital world, into the internet, or
>whatever.' They really miss what is going on here.
>
>So why do people want to declare a new epoch every five minutes?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: It is precisely a desperate attempt to avoid the trauma
>of the new. It is a deeply conservative gesture. The true
>conservatives today are the people of new paradigms. They try
>desperately to avoid confronting what is really changing.
>
>Let me return to my example. In Charlie Chaplain's film The Great
>Dictator, he satirises Hitler as Hinkel. The voice is perceived as
>something obscene. There is a wonderful scene where Hinkel gives a big
>speech and speaks totally meaningless, obscene words. Only from time
>to time you recognise some everyday vulgar German word like
>'Wienerschnitzel' or 'Kartoffelstrudel'. And this was an ingenious
>insight; how voice is like a kind of a spectral ghost. All this became
>apparent to those conservatives who were sensitive for the break of
>the new.
>
>
>The most dangerous thing today is just to flow with things
>
>In fact, all big breaks were done in such a way. Nietzsche was in this
>sense a conservative, and, indeed, I am ready to claim that Marx was a
>conservative in this sense, too. Marx always emphasised that we can
>learn more from intelligent conservatives than from simple liberals.
>Today, more than ever, we should stick to this attitude. When you are
>surprised and shocked, you don't simply accept it. You should not say:
>'Okay, fine, let's play digital games.' We should not forget the
>ability to be properly surprised. I think, the most dangerous thing
>today is just to flow with things.
>
>Then let's return to some of the things that have been surprising us.
>In a recent article, you made the point that the terrorists mirror our
>civilisation. They are not out there, but mirror our own Western
>world. Can you elaborate on that some more?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: This, of course, is my answer to this popular thesis by
>Samuel P Huntington and others that there is a so-called clash of
>civilisations. I don't buy this thesis, for a number of reasons.
>
>Today's racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference. It no
>longer says: 'I am more than you.' It says: 'I want my culture, you
>can have yours.' Today, every right-winger says just that. These
>people can be very postmodern. They acknowledge that there is no
>natural tradition, that every culture is artificially constructed. In
>France, for example, you have a neo-fascist right that refers to the
>deconstructionists, saying: 'Yes, the lesson of deconstructionism
>against universalism is that there are only particular identities. So,
>if blacks can have their culture, why should we not have ours?'
>
>We should also consider the first reaction of the American 'moral
>majority', specifically Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to the 11
>September attacks. Pat Robertson is a bit eccentric, but Jerry Falwell
>is a mainstream figure, who endorsed Reagan and is part of the
>mainstream, not an eccentric freak. Now, their reaction was the same
>as the Arabs', though he did retract a couple of days later. Falwell
>said the World Trade Centre bombings were a sign that God no longer
>protects the USA, because the USA had chosen a path of evil,
>homosexuality and promiscuity.
>
>According to the FBI, there are now at least two million so-called
>radical right-wingers in the USA. Some are quite violent, killing
>abortion doctors, not to mention the Oklahoma City bombing. To me,
>this shows that the same anti-liberal, violent attitude also grows in
>our own civilisation. I see that as proof that this terrorism is an
>aspect of our time. We cannot link it to a particular civilisation.
>
>Regarding Islam, we should look at history. In fact, I think it is
>very interesting in this regard to look at ex-Yugoslavia. Why was
>Sarajevo and Bosnia the place of violent conflict? Because it was
>ethnically the most mixed republic of ex-Yugoslavia. Why? Because it
>was Muslim-dominated, and historically they were definitely the most
>tolerant. We Slovenes, on the other hand, and the Croats, both
>Catholics, threw them out several hundred years ago.
>
>This proves that there is nothing inherently intolerant about Islam.
>We must rather ask why this terrorist aspect of Islam arises now. The
>tension between tolerance and fundamentalist violence is within a
>civilisation.
>
>Take another example: on CNN we saw President Bush present a letter of
>a seven-year-old girl whose father is a pilot and now around
>Afghanistan. In the letter she said that she loves her father, but if
>her country needs his death, she is ready to give her father for her
>country. President Bush described this as American patriotism. Now, do
>a simple mental experiment - imagine the same event with an Afghan
>girl saying that. We would immediately say: 'What cynicism, what
>fundamentalism, what manipulation of small children.' So there is
>already something in our perception. But what shocks us in others we
>ourselves also do in a way.
>
>So multiculturalism and fundamentalism could be two sides of the same
>coin?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: There is nothing to be said against tolerance. But when
>you buy this multiculturalist tolerance, you buy many other things
>with it. Isn't it symptomatic that multiculturalism exploded at the
>very historic moment when the last traces of working-class politics
>disappeared from political space? For many former leftists, this
>multiculturalism is a kind of ersatz working-class politics. We don't
>even know whether the working class still exists, so let's talk about
>exploitation of others.
>
>This notion of tolerance effectively masks its opposite: intolerance
>
>There may be nothing wrong with that as such. But there is a danger
>that issues of economic exploitation are converted into problems of
>cultural tolerance. And then you have only to make one step further,
>that of Julia Kristeva in her essay 'Etrangers nous mmes', and say we
>cannot tolerate others because we cannot tolerate otherness in
>ourselves. Here we have a pure pseudo-psychoanalytic cultural
>reductionism.
>
>Isn't it sad and tragic that the only relatively strong - not fringe -
>political movement that still directly addresses the working class is
>made up of right-wing populists? They are the only ones. Jean-Marie Le
>Pen in France, for example. I was shocked when I saw him three years
>ago at a congress of the Front National. He brought a black Frenchman,
>an Algerian and a Jew on the podium, embraced them and said: 'They are
>no less French than I am. Only the international cosmopolitan
>companies who neglect French patriotic interests are my enemy.' So the
>price is that only right-wingers still talk about economic
>exploitation.
>
>The second thing I find wrong with this multiculturalist tolerance is
>that it is often hypocritical in the sense that the other whom they
>tolerate is already a reduced other. The other is okay in so far as
>this other is only a question of food, of culture, of dances. What
>about clitoridectomy? What about my friends who say: 'We must respect
>Hindus.' Okay, but what about one of the old Hindu customs which, as
>we know, is that when a husband dies, the wife is burned. Now, do we
>respect that? Problems arise here.
>
>An even more important problem is that this notion of tolerance
>effectively masks its opposite: intolerance. It is a recurring theme
>in all my books that, from this liberal perspective, the basic
>perception of another human being is always as something that may in
>some way hurt you.
>
>Are you referring to what we call victim culture?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: The discourse of victimisation is almost the predominant
>discourse today. You can be a victim of the environment, of smoking,
>of sexual harassment. I find this reduction of the subject to a victim
>sad. In what sense? There is an extremely narcissistic notion of
>personality here. And, indeed, an intolerant one, insofar as what it
>means is that we can no longer tolerate violent encounters with others
>- and these encounters are always violent.
>
>Let me briefly address sexual harassment for a moment. Of course I am
>opposed to it, but let's be frank. Say I am passionately attached, in
>love, or whatever, to another human being and I declare my love, my
>passion for him or her. There is always something shocking, violent in
>it. This may sound like a joke, but it isn't - you cannot do the game
>of erotic seduction in politically correct terms. There is a moment of
>violence, when you say: 'I love you, I want you.' In no way can you
>bypass this violent aspect. So I even think that the fear of sexual
>harassment in a way includes this aspect, a fear of a too violent, too
>open encounter with another human being.
>
>Another thing that bothers me about this multiculturalism is when
>people ask me: 'How can you be sure that you are not a racist?' My
>answer is that there is only one way. If I can exchange insults,
>brutal jokes, dirty jokes, with a member of a different race and we
>both know it's not meant in a racist way. If, on the other hand, we
>play this politically correct game - 'Oh, I respect you, how
>interesting your customs are' - this is inverted racism, and it is
>disgusting.
>
>In the Yugoslav army where we were all of mixed nationalities, how did
>I become friends with Albanians? When we started to exchange
>obscenities, sexual innuendo, jokes. This is why this politically
>correct respect is just, as Freud put it, 'zielgehemmt'. You still
>have the aggression towards the other.
>
>
>You cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct
>terms
>
>For me there is one measure of true love: you can insult the other.
>Like in that horrible German comedy film from 1943 where Marika Rck
>treats her fianc very brutally. This fianc is a rich, important
>person, so her father asks her why are you treating him like that. And
>she gives the right answer. She says: 'But I love him, and since I
>love him, I can do with him whatever I want.' That's the truth of it.
>If there is true love, you can say horrible things and anything goes.
>
>When multiculturalists tell you to respect the others, I always have
>this uncanny association that this is dangerously close to how we
>treat our children: the idea that we should respect them, even when we
>know that what they believe is not true. We should not destroy their
>illusions. No, I think that others deserve better - not to be treated
>like children.
>
>In your book on the subject you talk of a 'true universalism' as an
>opposite of this false sense of global harmony. What do you mean by
>that?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: Here I need to ask myself a simple Habermasian question:
>how can we ground universality in our experience? Naturally, I don't
>accept this postmodern game that each of us inhabits his or her
>particular universe. I believe there is universality. But I don't
>believe in some a priori universality of fundamental rules or
>universal notions. The only true universality we have access to is
>political universality. Which is not solidarity in some abstract
>idealist sense, but solidarity in struggle.
>
>If we are engaged in the same struggle, if we discover that - and this
>for me is the authentic moment of solidarity - being feminists and
>ecologists, or feminists and workers, we all of a sudden have this
>insight: 'My God, but our struggle is ultimately the same!' This
>political universality would be the only authentic universality. And
>this, of course, is what is missing today, because politics today is
>increasingly a politics of merely negotiating compromises between
>different positions.
>
>The post-political subverts the freedom that has been talked about so
>much in recent weeks. Is that what you are saying?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: I do claim that what is sold to us today as freedom is
>something from which this more radical dimension of freedom and
>democracy has been removed - in other words, the belief that basic
>decisions about social development are discussed or brought about
>involving as many as possible, a majority. In this sense, we do not
>have an actual experience of freedom today. Our freedoms are
>increasingly reduced to the freedom to choose your lifestyle. You can
>even choose your ethnic identity up to a point.
>
>But this new world of freedom described by people like Ulrich Beck,
>who say everything is a matter of reflective negotiation, of choice,
>can include new unfreedom. My favourite example is this, and here we
>have ideology at its purest: we know that it is very difficult today
>in more and more professional domains to get a long-term job.
>Academics or journalists, for example, now often live on a two- or
>three-year contract, that you then have to renegotiate. Of course,
>most of us experience this as something traumatising, shocking, where
>you can never be sure. But then, along comes the postmodern
>ideologist: 'Oh, but this is just a new freedom, you can reinvent
>yourself every two years!'
>
>The problem for me is how unfreedom is hidden, concealed in precisely
>what is presented to us as new freedoms. I think that the explosion of
>these new freedoms, which fall under the domain of what Michel
>Foucault called 'care of the self', involves greater social unfreedom.
>
>Twenty or 30 years ago there was still discussion as to whether the
>future would be fascist, socialist, communist or capitalist. Today,
>nobody even discusses this. These fundamental social choices are
>simply no longer perceived as a matter to decide. A certain domain of
>radical social questions has simply been depoliticised.
>
>I find it very sad that, precisely in an era in which tremendous
>changes are taking place and, indeed entire social coordinates are
>transformed, we don't experience this as something about which we
>decided freely.
>
>So, let's return to the aftermath of 11 September. We now experience a
>strange kind of war that we are told will not end for a long time.
>What do you think of this turn of events?
>
>Slavoj Zizek: I don't quite agree with those who claim that this World
>Trade Centre explosion was the start of the first war of the
>twenty-first century. I think it was a war of the twentieth century,
>in the sense that it was still a singular, spectacular event. The new
>wars would be precisely as you mentioned - it will not even be clear
>whether it is a war or not. Somehow life will go on and we will learn
>that we are at war, as we are now.
>
>
>The explosion of these new freedoms involves greater social unfreedom
>
>What worries me is how many Americans perceived these bombings as
>something that made them into innocents: as if to say, until now, we
>had problems, Vietnam, and so on. Now we are victims, and this somehow
>justifies us in fully identifying with American patriotism.
>
>That's a risky gesture. The big choice for Americans is whether they
>retreat into this patriotism - or, as my friend Ariel Dorfman wrote
>recently: 'America has the chance to become a member of the community
>of nations. America always behaves as though it were special. It
>should use this attack as an opportunity to admit that it is not
>special, but simply and truly part of this world.' That's the big
>choice.
>
>There is something so disturbingly tragic in this idea of the
>wealthiest country in the world bombing one of the poorest countries.
>It reminds me of the well-known joke about the idiot who loses a key
>in the dark and looks for it beneath the light. When asked why, he
>says: 'I know I lost it over there, but it's easier to look for it
>here.'
>
>But at the same time I must confess that the left also deeply
>disappointed me. Falling back into this safe pacifist attitude -
>violence never stops violence, give peace a chance - is abstract and
>doesn't work here. First, because this is not a universal rule. I
>always ask my leftist friends who repeat that mantra: What would you
>have said in 1941 with Hitler. Would you also say: 'We shouldn't
>resist, because violence never helps?' It is simply a fact that at
>some point you have to fight. You have to return violence with
>violence. The problem is not that for me, but that this war can never
>be a solution.
>
>It is also false and misleading to perceive these bombings as some
>kind of third world working-class response to American imperialism. In
>that case, the American fundamentalists we already discussed, are also
>a working-class response, which they clearly are not. We face a
>challenge to rethink our coordinates and I hope that this will be a
>good result of this tragic event. That we will not just use it to do
>more of the same but to think about what is really changing in our
>world.
>
>Dr Slavoj Zizek is professor of philosophy at University Ljubljana,
>Slovenia. He is currently a member of the Directors' Board at
>Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany.
>
>
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