The basic opposition on which the entire liberal vision relies is that between those who are ruled by culture, totally determined by the lifeworld into which they are born, and those who merely ‘enjoy’ their culture, who are elevated above it, free to choose it. This brings us to the next paradox: the ultimate source of barbarism is culture itself, one’s direct identification with a particular culture which renders one intolerant towards other cultures. The basic opposition here is that between the collective and the individual: culture is by definition collective and particular, parochial, exclusive of other cultures, while – next paradox – it is the individual who is universal, the site of universality, insofar as she extricates herself from and elevates herself above her particular culture. Since, however, every individual has to be somehow particularised, has to dwell in a particular lifeworld, the only way to resolve this deadlock is to split the individual into universal and particular, public and private [...]

[...] Liberalism itself thus privileges a certain culture: the modern Western one. As to freedom of choice, liberalism is also marked by a strong bias. It is intolerant when individuals of other cultures are not given freedom of choice – as is evident in issues such as clitoridectomy, child brideship, infanticide, polygamy and incest. However, it ignores the tremendous pressure which, for example, compels women in our liberal society to undergo such procedures as plastic surgery, cosmetic implants and Botox injections in order to remain competitive in the sex market.

The liberal idea of a ‘free choice’ thus always gets caught in a deadlock. If the subject wants it, he or she can opt for the parochial tradition into which they were born, but they have first to be presented with alternatives and then make a free choice among them. Amish adolescents, on the other hand, are formally given a free choice, but the conditions they find themselves in while they are making the choice make the choice unfree. In order for them to have a genuine free choice, they would have to be properly informed on all the options and educated in them. But the only way to do this would be to extract them from their embeddedness in the Amish community and Americanise them.

[...] One should always bear in mind the hugely liberating aspect of this violence which makes us experience our own cultural background as contingent. Let us not forget that liberalism emerged in Europe after the catastrophe of the Thirty Years War between Catholics and Protestants. It was an answer to the pressing question of how people who differ in their fundamental religious allegiances could coexist. It demanded from citizens more than a condescending tolerance of diverging religions, more than tolerance as a temporary compromise. It demanded that we respect other religions not in spite of our innermost religious convictions but on account of them – respect for others is a proof of true belief.

‘Postcolonial’ critics like to emphasise the insensitivity of liberalism to its own limitation: in defending human rights, it tends to impose its own version of them onto others. However, the self-reflexive sensitivity to one’s own limitation can only emerge against the background of the notions of autonomy and rationality promoted by liberalism. One can, of course, argue that, in a way, the Western situation is even worse because in it oppression itself is obliterated and masked as free choice. (What are you complaining for? YOU chose to do this.) Our freedom of choice effectively often functions as a mere formal gesture of consent to our own oppression and exploitation. However, Hegel’s lesson that form matters is important here: form has an autonomy and efficiency of its own. So when we compare a Third World woman, forced to undergo clitoridectomy or promised in marriage as a small child, with the First World woman ‘free to choose’ painful cosmetic surgery, the form of freedom matters – it opens up a space for critical reflection.

Isn’t one of the topoi of Western liberalism the elevation of the Other as leading a life that is more harmonious, organic, less competitive, and aiming at cooperation rather than domination?

The key moment of any theoretical – and indeed ethical, political, and, as Badiou demonstrated, even aesthetic – struggle is the rise of universality out of the particular lifeworld. The commonplace according to which we are all thoroughly grounded in a particular, contingent lifeworld, so that all universality is irreducibly coloured by and embedded in that life-world, needs to be turned round. The authentic moment of discovery, the breakthrough, occurs when a properly universal dimension explodes from within a particular context and becomes ‘for-itself’, and is directly experienced as universal. This universality-for-itself is not simply external to or above its particular context: it is inscribed within it. It perturbs and affects it from within, so that the identity of the particular is split into its particular and its universal aspects. Surely Marx already pointed out how the true problem with Homer was not to explain the roots of his epics in early Greek society, but to account for the fact that, although clearly rooted in their historical context, they were able to transcend their historical origin and speak to all epochs. Perhaps the most elementary hermeneutic test of the greatness of a work of art is its ability to survive being torn from its original context. In the case of truly great art, each epoch reinvents and rediscovers it. There is a romantic Shakespeare and a realist Shakespeare.

[...]

The standard Marxist hermeneutics of unearthing the particular bias of abstract universality should thus be supplemented by its opposite: by the properly Hegelian procedure which uncovers the universality of what presents itself as a particular position. [...]

Isn’t this the very lesson of Hegel’s ‘Cunning of Reason’? Particularity can indeed mask universality. [...] ore generally, an individual capitalist thinks he is active for his own profit, ignoring how he is serving the expanded reproduction of universal capital. It is not only that every universality is haunted by a particular content that taints it; it is that every particular position is haunted by its implicit universality, which undermines it. Capitalism is not just universal in itself, it is universal for itself, as the tremendous actual corrosive power which undermines all particular lifeworlds, cultures and traditions, cutting across them, catching them in its vortex. It is meaningless to ask ‘Is this universality true or a mask of particular interests?’ This universality is directly actual as universality, as the negative force of mediating and destroying all particular content.

This is the moment of truth in liberalism’s claim to kulturlos universality: capitalism, whose ideology liberalism is, effectively is universal, no longer rooted in a particular culture or ‘world’. This is why Badiou recently claimed that our time is devoid of world: the universality of capitalism resides in the fact that capitalism is not a name for a ‘civilisation’, for a specific cultural-symbolic world, but the name for a truly neutral economic-symbolic machine which operates with Asian values as well as with others. In that sense, Europe’s worldwide triumph is its defeat, its self-obliteration. Capitalism’s umbilical link to Europe has been cut. The critics of Eurocentrism who endeavour to unearth the secret European bias of capitalism fall short here: the problem with capitalism is not its secret Eurocentric bias, but the fact that it really is universal, a neutral matrix of social relations.

The same logic holds for the emancipatory struggle: the particular culture which tries desperately to defend its identity has to repress the universal dimension which is active at its very heart, that is the gap between the particular (its identity) and the universal which destabilises it from within. [...] The formula of revolutionary solidarity is not ‘let us tolerate our differences’, it is not a pact of civilisations, but a pact of struggles which cut across civilisations, a pact between what, in each civilisation, undermines its identity from within, fights against its oppressive kernel. What unites us is the same struggle. A better formula would thus be: in spite of our differences, we can identify the basic antagonism or antagonistic struggle in which we are both caught; so let us share our intolerance, and join forces in the same struggle. In other words, in the emancipatory struggle, it is not the cultures in their identity which join hands, it is the repressed, the exploited and suffering, the ‘parts of no-part’ of every culture which come together in a shared struggle.

One is tempted here to use that old Levi-Straussian term ‘symbolic efficiency’: the appearance of égaliberté is a symbolic fiction which, as such, possesses an actual efficiency of its own.

no longer Wagner as the poet of Teutonic mythology, of bombastic heroic grandeur

[...] totalitarian regimes are by definition regimes of mercy: they tolerate violations of the law, since, in the way they frame social life, violating the law, bribing and cheating, are conditions of survival.

[...] Perhaps, Nip/Tuck being an American series, this excess can be accounted for in the terms of the difference between Europe and the US. In Europe, the ground floor in a building is counted as 0, so that the floor above it is the first floor, while in the US, the first floor is at street level. In short, Americans start to count with 1, while Europeans know that 1 is already a stand-in for 0. Or, to put it in more historical terms, Europeans are aware that, prior to beginning a count, there has to be a ‘ground’ of tradition, a ground which is always already given and, as such, cannot be counted, while the US, a land with no premodern historical tradition proper, lacks such a ground. Things begin there directly with the self-legislated freedom. The past is erased or transposed onto Europe. [...]

questions about the dialectic between ‘original’ and ‘reproduction’ that have been unavoidable since Marcel Duchamp and Walter Benjamin

Wong is able to follow the implications of her research into the more rarefied realms of cultural theory and philosophical aesthetics

Wong’s virtuosity in tracking multiple levels of misprision lies precisely in the extent to which she succeeds in arousing scepticism

this latter emerging as a topos in Chinese television films set in Dafen

When a hidden amanuensis is revealed under the aegis of Romanticism, it would seem an outrage—as if signing one’s name on something someone else has painted was fraudulent