[...] Jacques Lacan claimed that, even if the patient’s wife really is sleeping around with other men, the patient’s jealousy is still to be treated as a pathological condition. In a homologous way, even if rich Jews in the Germany of the early 1930s ‘really’ exploited German workers, seduced their daughters, dominated the popular press, and so on, Nazi anti-Semitism was still emphatically ‘untrue’, a pathological ideological condition. Why? What made it pathological was the disavowed libidinal investment into the figure of the Jew. The cause of all social antagonisms was projected into the ‘Jew’, the object of a perverted lovehatred, the spectral figure of mixed fascination and disgust. Exactly the same applies to the looting in New Orleans: even if ALL reports of violence and rape were to be proved factually true, the stories circulating about them would still be ‘pathological’ and racist, since what motivated these stories was not facts, but racist prejudices, the satisfaction felt by those who would be able to say: ‘You see, blacks are really like that, violent barbarians under the thin layer of civilisation!’ In other words, we would be dealing with what one can call lying in the guise of truth: even if what I am saying is factually true, the motives that make me say it are false.

So what about the obvious rightist-populist counter-argument: if telling factual truth involves a subjective lie – the racist attitude – does this mean that, out of political correctness, we are not allowed to tell the simple facts when blacks commit a crime? The answer is clear: the obligation is not to lie, to falsify or ignore facts, on behalf of some higher political truth, but – and this is a much more difficult thing to do – to change one’s subjective position so that telling the factual truth will not involve the lie of the subjective position of enunciation. Therein resides the limitation of standard political correctness: instead of changing the subjective position from which we speak, it imposes on us a set of rules with regard to content. Don’t point out that blacks committed crimes. Don’t mention how lesbian couples mistreat their children. Don’t dwell on how underprivileged minorities brutalise women and children … But all these rules on content effectively leave our subjective position untouched.