by
Slavoj Žižek
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
[...] This fact confronts us with another, less attractive, aspect of globalisation: the ‘global information village’ is the condition of the fact that something which appeared in an obscure daily in Denmark caused a violent stir in distant Muslim countries. It is as if Denmark and Syria, Pakistan, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon and Indonesia really were neighbouring countries. Those who understand globalisation as an opportunity for the entire earth to be a unified space of communication, one which brings together all humanity, often fail to notice this dark side of their proposition. Since a Neighbour is, as Freud suspected long ago, primarily a thing, a traumatic intruder, someone whose different way of life (or, rather, way of jouissance materialised in its social practices and rituals) disturbs us, throws the balance of our way of life off the rails, when it comes too close, this can also give rise to an aggressive reaction aimed at getting rid of this disturbing intruder. [...]
What if, however, humans exceed animals in their capacity for violence precisely because they speak? As Hegel was already well aware, there is something violent in the very symbolisation of a thing, which equals its mortification. This violence operates at multiple levels. Language simplifies the designated thing, reducing it to a single feature. It dismembers the thing, destroying its organic unity, treating its parts and properties as autonomous. It inserts the thing into a field of meaning which is ultimately external to it. When we name gold ‘gold’, we violently extract a metal from its natural texture, investing into it our dreams of wealth, power, spiritual purity and so on, which have nothing whatsoever to do with the immediate reality of gold.
connects it to Lacan's idea of the Master-Signifier
The same principle applies to every political protest: when workers protest their exploitation, they do not protest a simple reality, but an experience of their real predicament made meaningful through language. Reality in itself, in its stupid existence, is never intolerable: it is language, its symbolisation, which makes it such. So precisely when we are dealing with the scene of a furious crowd, attacking and burning buildings and cars, lynching people, etc., we should never forget the placards they are carrying and the words which sustain and justify their acts. [...]
(the previous example relates to anti-Semitism being based on one's personal image of "the Jew")
he connects this to Heidegger's idea of "essencing" (Wesen) later on in the paragraph but idk if I really care about the specifics
[...] She is aware that Beauvoir’s claim about the factual inferiority of blacks aims at something more than the simple social fact that, in the American South of (not only) that time, blacks were treated as inferior by the white majority and, in a way, they effectively were inferior. But her critical solution, propelled by the care to avoid racist claims on the factual inferiority of blacks, is to relativise their inferiority into a matter of interpretation and judgment by white racists, and distance it from a question of their very being. But what this softening distinction misses is the truly trenchant dimension of racism: the ‘being’ of blacks (as of whites or anyone else) is a socio-symbolic being. When they are treated by whites as inferior, this does indeed make them inferior at the level of their socio-symbolic identity. In other words, the white racist ideology exerts a performative efficiency. It is not merely an interpretation of what blacks are, but an interpretation that determines the very being and social existence of the interpreted subjects.
We can now locate precisely what makes Sandford and other critics of Beauvoir resist her formulation that blacks actually were inferior: this resistance is itself ideological. At the base of this ideology is the fear that, if one concedes this point, we will have lost the inner freedom, autonomy and dignity of the human individual. Which is why such critics insist that blacks are not inferior but merely ‘inferiorised’ by the violence imposed on them by white racist discourse. That is, they are affected by an imposition which does not affect them in the very core of their being, and, consequently, which they can (and do) resist as free autonomous agents through their acts, dreams and projects.
about Stella Sandford's response to Simone de Beauvoir saying:
many racists, ignoring the rigors of science, insist on declaring that even if the psychological reasons haven’t been established, the fact is that blacks are inferior. You only have to travel through America to be convinced of it.
[...] The fact that there was no programme behind the burning Paris suburbs is thus itself a fact to be interpreted. It tells us a great deal about our ideologico-political predicament. What kind of universe is it that we inhabit, which can celebrate itself as a society of choice, but in which the only option available to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out? The sad fact that opposition to the system cannot articulate itself in the guise of a realistic alternative, or at least a meaningful utopian project, but only take the shape of a meaningless outburst, is a grave illustration of our predicament. What does our celebrated freedom of choice serve, when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence? [...]
What needs to be resisted when faced with the shocking reports and images of the burning Paris suburbs is what I call the hermeneutic temptation: the search for some deeper meaning or message hidden in these outbursts. What is most difficult to accept is precisely the riots’ meaninglessness: more than a form of protest, they are what Lacan called a passage a l’acte – an impulsive movement into action which can’t be translated into speech or thought and carries with it an intolerable weight of frustration. This bears witness not only to the impotence of the perpetrators, but, even more, to the lack of what cultural analyst Fredric Jameson has called ‘cognitive mapping’, an inability to locate the experience of their situation within a meaningful whole.
The Paris outbursts were thus not rooted in any kind of concrete socio-economic protest [...] The riots were simply a direct effort to gain visibility. A social group which, although part of France and composed of French citizens, saw itself as excluded from the political and social space proper wanted to render its presence palpable to the general public. Their actions spoke for them: like it or not, we’re here, no matter how much you pretend not to see us. Commentators failed to notice the crucial fact that the protesters did not claim any special status for themselves as members of a religious or ethnic community striving for its self-enclosed way of life. On the contrary, their main premise was that they wanted to be and were French citizens, but were not fully recognised as such.
on the vision-less riots in Paris in 2005
Alain Badiou has reflected that we live in a social space which is progressively experienced as ‘worldless’. In such a space, the only form protest can take is ‘meaningless’ violence. Even Nazi anti-Semitism, however ghastly it was, opened up a world: it described its present critical situation by positing an enemy which was a ‘Jewish conspiracy’; it named a goal and the means of achieving it. Nazism disclosed reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire a global ‘cognitive mapping’, which included a space for their meaningful engagement. Perhaps, it is here that one of the main dangers of capitalism should be located: although it is global and encompasses the whole world, it sustains a stricto sensu ‘worldless’ ideological constellation, depriving the large majority of people of any meaningful cognitive mapping. Capitalism is the first socioeconomic order which detotalises meaning: it is not global at the level of meaning (there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’ no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper – the fundamental lesson of globalisation is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East); its global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the ‘Real’ of the global market mechanism.
However, are the terrorist fundamentalists, be they Christian or Muslim, really fundamentalists in the authentic sense of the term? Do they really believe? What they lack is a feature that is easy to discern in all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the nonbelievers’ way of life. If today’s so-called fundamentalists really believe they have found their way to truth, why should they feel threatened by non-believers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he hardly condemns him. He just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. In contrast to true fundamentalists, the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believers. One can feel that, in fighting the sinful Other, they are fighting their own temptation. These so-called Christian or Muslim fundamentalists are a disgrace to true fundamentalism.
[...] How fragile the belief of a Muslim must be, if he feels threatened by a stupid caricature in a low-circulation Danish newspaper. The fundamentalist Islamic terror is not grounded in the terrorists’ conviction of their superiority and in their desire to safeguard their cultural-religious identity from the onslaught of global consumerist civilisation. The problem with fundamentalists is not that we consider them inferior to us, but, rather, that they themselves secretly consider themselves inferior. This is why our condescending politically correct assurances that we feel no superiority towards them only makes them more furious and feeds their resentment. The problem is not cultural difference (their effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us, that, secretly, they have already internalised our standards and measure themselves by them. (This clearly goes for the Dalai Lama, who justifies Tibetan Buddhism in Western terms of the pursuit of happiness and the avoidance of pain.) Paradoxically, what the fundamentalists really lack is precisely a dose of that true ‘racist’ conviction of one’s own superiority.
Friedrich Hayek knew that it was much easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force: the good thing about the ‘irrationality’ of the market and success or failure in capitalism is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as ‘undeserved’, contingent. Remember the old motif of the market as the modern version of an imponderable fate. The fact that capitalism is not ‘just’ is thus a key feature of what makes it acceptable to the majority. I can live with my failure much more easily if I know that it is not due to my inferior qualities, but to chance.
very relevant to the idea of market justice being just another god, one that allows you to abdicate all responsibility, though from a slightly different perspective
An evil person is thus not an egotist, ‘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. [...]
drawing on Rousseau's distinction between amour-de-soi (good) and amour-propre (bad; engenders envy and schadenfreude)
How are we to read this social breakdown? The first reaction is the standard conservative one. The events in New Orleans confirm yet again how fragile social order is, how we need strict law enforcement and ethical pressure to prevent the explosion of violent passions. Human nature is naturally evil, descent into social chaos is a permanent threat … This argument can also be given a racist twist: those who exploded into violence were almost exclusively black, so here we have new proof of how blacks are not really civilised. Natural catastrophes bring to light the scum which is barely kept hidden and under check in normal times.
Of course, the obvious answer to this line of argument is that the New Orleans descent into chaos rendered visible the persisting racial divide in the US. New Orleans was 68 per cent black. The blacks are the poor and the underprivileged. They had no means by which to flee the city in time. They were left behind, starving and uncared for. No wonder they exploded. Their violent reaction should be seen as echoing the Rodney King riots in LA, or even the Detroit and Newark outbursts in the late 1960s.
on Katrina