Anti-Semitism and Anti-Other-isms

Back in the 1930s, Hitler offered anti-Semitism as a narrative explanation of the troubles experienced by ordinary Germans: unemployment, moral decay, social unrest—behind all this stands the Jew, i.e. the “Jewish plot” made everything clear by way of providing a simple “cognitive mapping.” Does today’s hatred of multi-culturalism and of the immigrant threat not function in a homologous way? Strange things are happening, financial meltdowns occur, which affect our daily lives, but are experienced as totally opaque. The rejection of multiculturalism introduces a false clarity into the situation: it is the foreign intruders who are disturbing our way of life. There is thus an interconnection between the rising anti-immigrant tide in Western countries (which reached a peak in Anders Behring Breivik’s killing spree) and the ongoing financial crisis. Clinging to ethnic identity serves as a protective shield against the traumatic fact of being caught in the whirlpool of non-transparent financial abstraction. The true “foreign body,” which cannot be assimilated, is ultimately the infernal self-propelling machine of the Capital itself.

There are good reasons to think of Breivik’s ideological self-justification as well as of reactions to his murderous act. The manifesto of this Christian “Marxist hunter” who killed more than 70 people in Oslo is precisely not a case of a madman’s rambling; it is simply a consequent exposition of “Europe’s crisis,” which serves as the (more or less) implicit foundation of the rising anti-immigrant populism, the very inconsistencies of which are symptomatic of the inner contradictions of this view. The first thing that cannot but strike the eye is how Breivik constructs his enemy out of the combination of three elements (Marxism, multiculturalism, Islamism), each of which belongs to a different political space (Marxist radical Left, multiculturalist liberalism, Islamic religious fundamentalism). The old fascist habit of attributing to the enemy mutually exclusive features (“Bolshevik-plutocratic Jewish plot” translates into the Bolshevik radical Left, plutocratic capitalism, and ethnic-religious identity) returns here in a new guise. Even more indicative is the way Breivik’s self-designation shuffles the cards of the radical right-wing ideology. Breivik advocates Christianity, but remains a secular agnostic. Christianity is for him merely a cultural construct to oppose Islam. He is anti-feminist and thinks women should be discouraged from pursuing higher education, but he favors a “secular” society, supports abortion, and declares himself pro-gay. Furthermore, Breivik combines Nazi features (also in part—for example, his sympathy for Saga, the Swedish pro-Nazi folk-singer) with the hatred for Hitler: one of his heroes is Max Manus, the leader of the Norwegian anti-Nazi resistance. Breivik is not so much racist as anti-Muslim: all his hatred is focused on the Muslim threat. And, last but not least, Breivik is anti-Semitic, but pro-Israel, since the State of Israel is the first defense line against the Muslim expansion. He even wants to see the Jerusalem Temple rebuilt. His view is that Jews are OK as long as there aren’t too many of them, or, as he wrote in his “Manifesto”:

There is no Jewish problem in Western Europe (with the exception of the UK and France) as we only have 1 million in Western Europe, whereas 800,000 out of these 1 million live in France and the UK. The US, on the other hand, with more than 6 million Jews (600% more than Europe) actually has a considerable Jewish problem.

His figure thus embodies the ultimate paradox of a Zionist Nazi. But how is this possible?

A key is provided by the reactions of the European Right to Breivik’s attack. Its mantra was that, in condemning his murderous act, we should not forget that he addressed “legitimate concerns about genuine problems” which mainstream politics is failing to address, such as the corrosion of Europe by Islamicization and multi- culturalism. Or, to quote The Jerusalem Post, we should use the Oslo tragedy “as an opportunity to seriously re-evaluate policies for immigrant integration in Norway and elsewhere.”1 (Incidentally, it would be nice to hear a similar appreciation of the Palestinian acts of terror, going along the lines of “these acts of terror should serve as an opportunity to re-evaluate the Israeli politics.”) A reference to Israel is, of course, implicit in this evaluation: a “multicultural” Israel has no chance to survive, and apartheid is the only realistic option. The price for this properly perverse Zionist- rightist pact is that, in order to justify the claim to Palestine, one has to acknowledge retroactively the line of argumentation, which was previously, in earlier European history, used against the Jews. The implicit deal is that “we are ready to acknowledge your intolerance towards other cultures in your midst if you acknowledge our right not to tolerate Palestinians in our midst.” The tragic irony of this implicit deal is that, in the European history of the last centuries, Jews themselves were the first “multicul- turalists”: their problem was how to survive with their culture intact in places where another culture was predominant. (Actually, one should note here that, in the 1930s, in direct response to Nazi anti-Semitism, Ernest Jones, the main agent of the conformist gentrification of psychoanalysis, engaged in weird reflections on the percentage of foreign population a national body can tolerate in its midst without putting in danger its own identity, and thereby accepting the Nazi problematic.) At the end of this road lies the extreme possibility which should in no way be discarded—that of a “historic compromise” between Zionists and Muslim fundamentalists.

But what if we are entering a new era where this new reasoning will impose itself? What if Europe should accept the paradox that its democratic openness is based on exclusion, since there is “no freedom for the enemies of freedom,” as Robespierre put it long ago? In principle this is, of course, true, but it is here that one has to be very specific. In a way, Breivik was right in his choice of target: he didn’t attack the foreigners but those within his own community who were too tolerant towards the intruding foreigners. The problem is not the foreigners; it is our own (European) identity. Although the ongoing crisis of the European Union appears as a crisis of economy and finances, it is in its fundamental dimension an ideologico-political crisis. The failure of referendums about the EU constitution a couple of years ago gave a clear signal that voters perceived the EU as a “technocratic” economic union, lacking any vision which could mobilize people (until the recent protests, the only ideology able to mobilize people was the anti-immigrant defense of Europe).

Recent outbursts of homophobia in East European post-communist states should also give us a pause to think. In early 2011 there was a gay parade in Istanbul where thousands paraded in peace, with no violence or other disturbances. In gay parades that took place at the same time in Serbia and Croatia (Belgrade, Split), police were not able to protect the participants who were ferociously attacked by thousands of violent Christian fundamentalists. These fundamentalists, not Turkey, stand for the true threat to European legacy. So, when the EU basically blocked Turkey’s entry, we should have raised the obvious question: What about applying the same rules to Eastern Europe? (Not to mention the weird fact that the main force behind the anti-gay movement in Croatia is the Catholic Church, well known for numerous paedophiliac scandals.)

It is crucial to locate anti-Semitism in this series, as one of the elements alongside other forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, etc. In order to ground its Zionist politics, the State of Israel is here making a catastrophic mistake: it decided to downplay, if not outright ignore, the so-called “old” (traditional European) anti-Semitism, focusing instead on the “new” and allegedly “progressive” anti-Semitism masked as the critique of the Zionist politics of the State of Israel. Along these lines, Bernard Henri-Levy (in his The Left in Dark Times) recently claimed that the anti-Semitism of the twenty-first century will be “progressive” or there will be none. Brought to its logical conclusion, this thesis compels us to turn around the old Marxist interpretation of anti-Semitism as a mystified/displaced anti-capitalism, where, instead of blaming the capitalist system, the rage is focused on a specific ethnic group accused of corrupting the system. For Henri-Levy and his partisans, today’s anti-capitalism is a disguised form of anti-Semitism.

This unspoken but no less efficient prohibition against attacking the “old” anti­Semitism is taking place at the very moment when the “old” anti-Semitism is returning all around Europe, especially in post-communist East European countries. We can observe a similar weird alliance in the US: how can the US Christian funda­mentalists, who are, as it were, by nature anti-Semitic, now passionately support the Zionist policy of the State of Israel? There is only one solution to this enigma. It is not that the US fundamentalists changed, it is that Zionism itself, in its hatred of the Jews who do not fully identify with the politics of the State of Israel, paradoxically became anti-Semitic, i.e., constructed the figure of the Jew who doubts the Zionist project along anti-Semitic lines. Israel is playing a dangerous game here: Fox News, the main US voice of the radical Right and a staunch supporter of Israeli expansionism, recently had to demote Glen Beck, its most popular host, whose comments were becoming openly anti-Semitic.2

The standard Zionist argument against the critics of the policies of the State of Israel is that, of course, like every other state, the State of Israel can and should be judged and eventually criticized, but that the critics of Israel misuse the justified critique of Israeli policy for anti-Semitic purposes. When the unconditional Christian fundamentalist supporters of the Israeli politics reject leftist critiques of Israeli policies, their implicit line of argumentation is best rendered by a wonderful cartoon published in July 2008 in the Viennese daily Die Presse. It shows two stocky Nazi-looking Austrians, one of them holding in his hands a newspaper and commenting to his friend: “Here you can see again how a totally justified anti-Semitism is being misused for a cheap critique of Israel!” These are today’s allies of the State of Israel. Jewish critics of the State of Israel are regularly dismissed as self-hating Jews; however, are the true self-hating Jews, those who secretly hate the true greatness of the Jewish nation, not precisely the Zionists making a pact with anti-Semites? How did we end up in such a weird situation?

The fantasmatic status of anti-Semitism is clearly designated by the statement attributed to Hitler: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” A. B. Yehoshua provided an adequate comment to this statement:

This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.3

In this sense, Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles. They are what is “in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves”—not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead “alien” monster who can never be pinned down to a determinate form. In this sense, Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity.4 It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”; what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, his identity, is also in the Jew.5 What does this paradoxical entwinement mean for the destiny of anti-Semitism?

One of the supreme ironies of the history of anti-Semitism is that Jews can stand for both poles of an opposition: they are stigmatized as upper class (rich merchants) and low class (filthy), as too intellectual and too earthly (sexual predators), as lazy and workaholics. Sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in; sometimes they stand for a “homeless” and uprooted universal cosmopolitanism, indifferent towards all particular ethnic form. The focus changes with different historical epochs. In the era of the French Revolution, the Jews were condemned as too particularist, as they continued to stick to their identity, rejecting the need to become abstract citizens like everyone else. In late nineteenth century, with the rise of imperialist patriotism, the accusation is turned around, and Jews become all too “cosmopolitan” lacking all roots.

The key change in the history of Western anti-Semitism occurred with their political emancipation (the granting of civil rights), which followed the French Revolution. In the early modernity, the pressure on them was to convert to Christianity, and the problem was: Can one trust them? Did they really convert, or do they secretly continue to practice their rituals? However, in the later nineteenth century, a shift occurs which culminates in the Nazi anti-Semitism. Conversion is now out of the question, meaningless. Why? For the Nazis, the guilt of the Jews is directly rooted in their biological constitution. One does not have to prove that they are guilty, as they are guilty solely by being Jews. The question remains: Why?

The key is provided by the sudden rise, in the Western ideological imaginary, of the figure of the wandering eternal Jew in the age of Romanticism, i.e., precisely when, in real life, with the explosion of capitalism, features attributed to Jews expanded to the whole of society (since commodity exchange became hegemonic). It was thus at the very moment when Jews were deprived of their specific properties, which made it easy to distinguish them from the rest of the population, and when the “Jewish question” was “resolved” at the political level by the formal emancipation of the Jews (i.e. by granting to Jews the same rights as to all other “normal” Christian citizens) that their “curse” was inscribed into their very being. They were no longer ridiculous misers and usurers but demoniac heroes of eternal damnation, haunted by an unspecified and unspeakable guilt, condemned to wander around, and longing to find redemption in death. So it was precisely when the specific figure of the Jew disappeared that the absolute Jew emerged, and this transformation conditioned the shift of anti-Semitism from theology to race. Their damnation was their race; they were not guilty for what they did (exploit Christians, murder their children, rape their women, or, ultimately, betray and murder Christ), but for what they were. Is it necessary to add that this shift laid the foundations for the Holocaust, for the physical annihilation of the Jews as the only appropriate final solution of their “problem”? Insofar as Jews were identified by a series of their properties, the goal was to convert them, to turn them into Christians, but, from the moment that Jewishness concerns their very being, only annihilation can resolve the “Jewish question.”

The true mystery of anti-Semitism, however, is why it is such a constant. Why does it persist through all historical mutations? Perhaps this is somewhat similar to what Marx said about Homer: the true mystery to be explained is not its origins, its original form (how Homer’s poetry is rooted in early Greek society) but why it persists in its supreme artistic charm today, long after the social conditions that gave birth to it disappeared. It is easy to date the original moment of European anti-Semitism. It all started not in Ancient Rome but in eleventh- and twelfth-century Europe, which was awakening from the inertia of the “Dark Ages” and experiencing a fast growth in market exchange and the greater prominence of money. At that precise point, “the Jew” emerged as the enemy: the usurper, the parasitic intruder who disturbs the harmonious social edifice. Theologically, this moment is also the moment of what Jacques le Goff called the “birth of the Purgatorium,” the idea that the choice is not only between Heaven and Hell but that there has to be a third, mediating, place, where one can make a deal, pay for one’s sins (if they are not too great) with a determined amount of repentance—money again!

So where are we today? Asked about his anti-Semitism, the Croat nationalist rock- singer Marko Perkovic Thompson said in an interview: “I have nothing against them and I did nothing to them. I know that Jesus Christ also did nothing against them, but still they hanged him on the cross.” This is how anti-Semitism works today: it is not we who have anything against the Jews; rather, it is how the Jews themselves are. On top of it all, we are witnessing the final version of anti-Semitism, which reached the extreme point of self-relatedness. The privileged role of Jews in the establishment of the sphere of the “public use of reason” hinges on their subtraction from every state power. Theirs is the position of the “part of no-part” in every organic nation-state community, and it is this position, not the abstract-universal nature of their monotheism, that makes them the immediate embodiment of universality. No wonder, then, that, with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel, refusing to accept the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who “subtracts” himself from this State, and who includes the State of Israel among the states towards which he insists on maintaining a distance, to live in their interstices. And it is this uncanny Jew who is the object of what one cannot but designate as “Zionist anti-Semitism,” the foreign excess disturbing the community of the nation-state. These Jews, the “Jews of the Jews themselves,” worthy successors of Spinoza, are today the only Jews who continue to insist on the “public use of reason,” refusing to submit their reasoning to the “private” domain of the nation-state.

This brings us to the political stakes and consequences of Zionist anti-Semitism. On August 2, 2009, after cordoning off a part of the Arab neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem, Israeli police evicted two Palestinian families (more than 50 people) from their homes and allowed Jewish settlers to move immediately into the empty houses. Although Israeli police cited a ruling by the country’s Supreme Court, the evicted Arab families had been living there for more than 50 years. The event, which, rather exceptionally, did attract the attention of the world media, is part of a much larger and mostly ignored ongoing process. Five months earlier, on March 1, 2009, it was reported6 that the Israeli government had drafted plans to build more than 70,000 new housing units in Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank. If implemented, the plans could increase the number of settlers in the Palestinian territories by about 300,000—a move that would not only severely undermine the chances of a viable Palestinian state, but also hamper the everyday life of Palestinians. A government spokesman dismissed the report, arguing that the plans were of limited relevance: the actual construction of new homes in the settlements required the approval of the Defense Minister and the Prime Minister. However, 15,000 of the planned units have already been fully approved, with an additional 20,000 of the planned units lying in settlements that are far from the ”green line” that separates Israel from the West Bank, i.e., in the areas Israel cannot expect to retain in any future peace deal with the Palestinians. The conclusion is obvious: while paying lip-service to the two-state solution, Israel is busy creating the situation on the ground which will render a two-state solution de facto impossible. The dream that underlies this politics is best rendered by the wall that separates a settler’s town from the Palestinian town on a nearby hill somewhere in the West Bank. The Israeli side of the wall is painted with the image of the countryside beyond the wall, but without the Palestinian town, depicting just nature, grass, trees and so on. Is this not ethnic cleansing at its purest, imagining the outside beyond the wall as it should be, namely empty, virginal, waiting to be settled?

This process is sometimes covered in the guise of cultural gentrification. On October 28, 2008, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Simon Wiesenthal Center could build its long-planned Center for Human Dignity, the Museum of Tolerance, on a contested site in the middle of Jerusalem. (Who but) Frank Gehry will design the vast complex consisting of a general museum, a children’s museum, a theater, conference center, library, gallery and lecture halls, cafeterias, etc. The museum’s declared mission will be to promote civility and respect among different segments of the Jewish community and among people of all faiths—the only obstacle (overrun by the Supreme Court’s ruling) being that the museum site served as Jerusalem’s main Muslim cemetery until 1948 (the Muslim community appealed to the Supreme Court that museum construction would desecrate the cemetery, which allegedly contained the bones of Muslims killed during the Crusades of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries).7 This dark spot wonderfully enacts the hidden truth of this multi-confes­sional project: it is a place celebrating tolerance, open to all, but protected by the Israeli cupola, which ignores the subterranean victims of intolerance, as if one needs a little bit of intolerance to create the space for true tolerance.

And as if this were not enough, as if one should repeat a gesture to make its message clear, there is another, even vaster, similar project going on in Jerusalem. Israel is quietly carrying out a $100 million, multi-year development plan in the so-called “holy basin,” the place of some of the most significant religious and national heritage sites just outside the walled Old City, as part of an effort to strengthen the status of Jerusalem as its capital. “The plan, parts of which have been outsourced to a private group that is simultaneously buying up Palestinian property for Jewish settlement in East Jerusalem, has drawn almost no public or international scrutiny.”8 As part of the plan, garbage dumps and wastelands are being cleared and turned into lush gardens and parks, now already accessible to visitors who can walk along new footpaths and take in the majestic views, along with new signs and displays that point out significant points of Jewish history. Conveniently, many of the “unauthorized” Palestinian houses had to be demolished to create the space for the redevelopment of the area.

The “holy basin” is an infinitely complicated landscape, dotted with shrines and still hidden treasures of the three major monotheistic religions, so the official argument is that its improvement is for everyone’s benefit—Jews, Muslims, and Christians—since it involves restoration that will draw more visitors to an area of exceptional global interest that has long suffered neglect. However, as Hagit Ofran of Peace Now noted, the plan aimed to create “an ideological tourist park that will determine Jewish dominance in the area.” Raphael Greenberg of Tel Aviv University put it even more bluntly: “The sanctity of the City of David is newly manufactured and is a crude amalgam of history, nationalism and quasi-religious pilgrimage … the past is used to disenfranchise and displace people in the present.” Another big religious venue, a “public” inter-faith space under the clear domination and protective cupola of Israel.

What does all this mean? To get at the true dimension of the news, it is sometimes enough to read two disparate news items together. Meaning emerges from their very link, like a spark, exploding from an electric short-circuit. On October 13, 2007, the Vatican’s press representative Federico Lombardi confirmed that the Vatican had suspended a priest occupying a high place in Vatican hierarchy who, in an interview for Italian TV, publicly admitted his homosexuality, insisting that he doesn’t feel in any sense guilty for practicing homosexuality. He was suspended because he broke the Church law. The obscenity of this message becomes clear the moment one juxtaposes it with the fact that hundreds of pedophiliac priests are not suspended, but a priest is suspended if he publicly admits his orientation. The message is unmistakable here: what matters is appearance, not reality.

On the very same day these reports hit the media (March 2), Hilary Clinton criticized the rocket fire from Gaza as “cynical,” claiming: “There is no doubt that any nation, including Israel, cannot stand idly by while its territory and people are subjected to rocket attacks.” But should the Palestinians stand idly by while land in the West Bank is taken from them day by day? When Israeli peace-loving liberals present their conflict with Palestinians in neutral “symmetrical” terms, admitting that there are extremists on both sides who reject peace, etc., one should ask a simple question: What goes on in the Middle East when nothing goes on there at the direct politico-military level (i.e. when there are no tensions, attacks, negotiations)? What goes on is the incessant slow work of taking the land from the Palestinians on the West Bank, the gradual strangling of the Palestinian economy, the parceling of their land, the building of new settlements, the pressure on Palestinian farmers to make them abandon their land (which goes from crop burning and religious desecration up to individual killings)—all this supported by a Kafkaesque network of legal regula­tions. Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation,9 described how, although the Israeli Occupation of the West Bank is ultimately enforced by the armed forces, it is an “occupation by bureaucracy”: its primary forms are application forms, title deeds, residency papers, and other permits. It is this micro-management of daily life that does the job of securing the slow but steadfast Israeli expansion. One has to ask for a permit in order to leave with one’s family, to farm one’s own land, to dig a well, to go to work, to school, to a hospital. One by one, Palestinians born in Jerusalem are thus stripped of the right to live there, prevented from earning a living, denied housing permits, etc.10 Palestinians often use the problematic cliche of the Gaza Strip as “the greatest concentration camp in the world”; however, in the past year, this designation has come dangerously close to truth. This is the fundamental reality which makes all abstract “prayers for peace” obscene and hypocritical. The State of Israel is clearly engaged in a slow process, invisible, ignored by the media, a kind of underground digging of the mole, so that, one day, the world will awaken and realize that there is no more Palestinian West Bank, that the land is Palestinian-frei, and that we can only accept that fact. The map of the Palestinian West Bank already resembles a fragmented archipelago.

In the last months of 2008, when the attacks by illegal West Bank settlers on Palestinian farmers became a regular daily occurrence, the State of Israel tried to contain these excesses (the Supreme Court ordered the evacuation of some settle­ments, etc.); but, as many observers noted, these measures cannot but appear half-hearted, counteracting a politics which, at a deeper level, is the long-term politics of the State of Israel which massively violates the international treaties signed by Israel itself. The reply of the illegal settlers to the Israeli authorities is basically: we are doing the same thing as you, just more openly, so what right do you have to condemn us? And the answer of the State is basically: be patient, don’t rush too much, we are doing what you want, just in a more moderate and acceptable way.

The same story seems to go on from 1948: while Israel accepts the peace condi­tions proposed by the international community, it bets that the peace plan will not work. The wild settlers sometimes sound like Brunhilde from the last act of Wagner’s Walkuere, reproaching Wotan that, by counteracting his explicit order and protecting Siegmund, she was only realizing Wotan’s own true desire which he was forced to renounce under external pressure, in the same way that the illegal settlers only realize the State’s true desire it was forced to renounce because of the pressure of the international community. While condemning the open violent excesses of “illegal” settlements, the State of Israel promotes new “legal” West Bank settlements, continues to strangle the Palestinian economy, etc. A look at the continuous changes of the map of East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians are gradually encircled and their space sliced, tells it all. The condemnation of extra-statist anti-Palestinian violence obfuscates the true problem of state violence; the condemnation of “illegal” settlements obfuscates the illegality of the “legal” ones. Therein resides the two-facedness of the much-praised non-biased “honesty” of the Israeli Supreme Court. By way of occasionally passing a judgment in favor of the dispossessed Palestinians, proclaiming their eviction illegal, it guarantees the legality of the remaining majority of cases.

Consequently, in the Israel-Palestinian conflict also, soyons realistes, demandons Vimpossible! If there is a lesson to be learned from the endlessly protracted negotia­tions, it is that the main obstacle to peace is precisely what is offered as a realistic solution, i.e. the two separate states. Although none of the two sides really wants it (Israel would probably prefer a little bit of West Bank that it is ready to cede to become a part of Jordan, and the Palestinians consider also the pre-1967 Israel as a part of their land), it is somehow accepted by both sides as the only feasible solution. What both sides exclude as an impossible dream is the simplest and most obvious solution—a bi-national secular state comprising all of Israel plus the occupied territories and Gaza. To those who dismiss the bi-national state as a utopian dream disqualified by the long history of hatred and violence, one should reply that, far from being utopian, the bi-national state already is a fact. The reality of today’s Israel and West Bank is that it is one state (i.e. the entire territory is de facto controlled by one sovereign power, the State of Israel), divided by internal borders, so that the task should rather be to abolish the apartheid and transform it into a secular democratic state.11

Furthermore, this entire topic is to be seen against the background of a long-term rearrangement of the political space in Western and Eastern Europe. Until recently, the political space of European countries was dominated by two main parties that addressed the entire electoral body: a Right-of-center party (Christian-Democrat, liberal-conservative, the people’s party) and a Left-of-center party (socialist, social- democratic), with smaller parties addressing a narrower electorate (ecologists, communists, and so on). The latest electoral results in the West as well as in the East signal the gradual emergence of a different polarity. There is one predominant centerist party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with a liberal cultural agenda, including tolerance towards abortions, gay rights, and religious and ethnic minorities. Opposing this party is an increasingly stronger anti-immigrant populist party, which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist neofascist groups. The exemplary case here is Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centerist liberal party of the Prime Minister Donald Dusk and the conservative Christian party of the Kaczynski brothers. Similar tendencies are discernible in the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, Hungary. How did we come to this?

After decades of the (promise of) a welfare state, when financial cuts were limited to short periods and sustained by a promise that things would soon return to normal, we are entering a new epoch in which the crisis—or, rather, a kind of economic state of emergency—with the need for all sorts of austerity measures (cutting benefits, dimin­ishing free health and education services, making jobs more and more temporary, etc.) is permanent, turning into a constant, becoming simply a way of life. After the disintegration of the communist regimes in 1990, we entered a new era in which the predominant form of the exercise of state power became a depoliticized expert administration and coordination of interests. The only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilize people, is through fear—fear of immigrants, fear of crime, fear of godless sexual depravity, fear of the excessive state (with its burden of high taxation and control), fear of ecological catastrophe, but also fear of harassment (political correctness is the exemplary liberal form of the politics of fear). Such a politics always relies on the manipulation of a paranoid ochlos, the frightening rallying of frightened men and women. This is why the big event of the first decade of the new millennium was that anti-immigration politics went mainstream and finally cut the umbilical cord that had connected them to far Right fringe parties. From France to Germany, from Austria to Holland, in the new spirit of pride at one’s cultural and historical identity, the main parties now found it acceptable to stress that immigrants are guests who have to accommodate themselves to the cultural values that define the host society: “it is our country, love it or leave it.”

Progressive liberals are, of course, horrified by such populist racism. But a closer look reveals how their multicultural tolerance and respect of (ethnic, religious, sexual) differences share with the anti-immigration advocates the need to keep others at a proper distance. The others are OK, I respect them, but they should not intrude too much into my own space. The moment they do it, they harass me with their smell, their dirty talk, their vulgar manners, their music, their cuisine, and so on. I fully support affirmative action for the blacks, but I am in no way ready to listen to loud rap music. What is increasingly emerging as the central human right in late capitalist societies is the right not to be harassed, which is the right to be kept at a safe distance from others. A terrorist whose deadly plans should be prevented and who belongs in Guantanamo, the empty zone exempted from the rule of law; a fundamentalist ideologist who should be silenced because he is spreading hatred; a parent, teacher, or priest who abuses and corrupts children—all these are toxic subjects who disturb my peace.

In today’s market we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. And the list goes on: what about virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) and warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of politics as the art of expert administration, or politics without politics, up to today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of the Other deprived of its Otherness—the decaffeinated Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife-beating remain out of sight?

The mechanism of such neutralization was best formulated back in 1938 by Robert Brasillach, the French fascist intellectual condemned and shot in 1945, who saw himself as a “moderate” anti-Semite and invented the formula of “reasonable anti-Semitism”:

We grant ourselves permission to applaud Charlie Chaplin, a half Jew, at the movies; to admire Proust, a half Jew; to applaud Yehudi Menuhin, a Jew; and the voice of Hitler is carried over radio waves named after the Jew Hertz. … We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable actions of instinctual anti­Semitism is to organize a reasonable anti-Semitism.12

Is this same attitude not at work in the way our governments are dealing with the “immigrant threat”? After righteously rejecting direct populist racism as “unrea­sonable” and unacceptable for our democratic standards, they endorse “reasonably” racist protective measures, or, as today’s Brasillachs, some of them even Social Democrats, are telling us:

We grant ourselves permission to applaud African and East European sportsmen, Asian doctors, Indian software programmers. We don’t want to kill anyone, we don’t want to organize any pogrom. But we also think that the best way to hinder the always unpredictable violent anti-immigrant defensive measures is to organize a reasonable anti-immigrant protection.

This vision of the detoxification of the Neighbor presents a clear passage from direct barbarism to barbarism with a human face. It practices the regression from the Christian love of the Neighbor back to the pagan privileging of our tribe (Greeks, Romans, etc.) versus the barbarian Other. Even if it is cloaked as a defense of Christian values, it is itself the greatest threat to Christian legacy.

Notes

1 Editorial on “Norway’s Challenge,” July 24, 2011.

2 Another figure in this series of anti-Semitic Zionists is John Hagee, the founder and National Chairman of the Christian-Zionist organization Christians United for Israel. At the top of the standard Christian conservative agenda (Hagee sees the Kyoto Protocol as a conspiracy aimed at manipulating the US economy; in his bestselling novel Jerusalem Countdown, the Antichrist is the head of the European Union), Hagee has been to Israel 22 times and has met with every prime minister since Begin. However, despite his professed “Christian Zionist” beliefs and public support for the State of Israel, Hagee has made statements that definitely sound anti-Semitic: he has blamed the Holocaust on the Jews themselves; he has stated that Hitler’s persecution was a “divine plan” to lead the Jews to form the modern state of Israel; he calls liberal Jews “poisoned” and “spiritually blind”; he admits that a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Iran that he favors will lead to the deaths of most Jews in Israel. (As a curiosity, he claims in Jerusalem Countdown that Hitler was born from “a lineage of accursed, genocidally murderous half-breed Jews.”)

3 A. B. Yehoshua, “An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism,” Azure no. 32 (spring 2008), available online at http://azure.org.il/article.php?id=18 [date accessed August 7, 2013].

4 A taboo question should be raised: what does the fixation of Arab countries and worldwide Muslim communities on the State of Israel mean? It cannot be accounted for in terms of the real threat to the Arab nation (after all, Israel occupies a tiny piece of land), so its role is obviously symptomatic. When regimes as different as the utterly corrupt Saudi monarchy and the anti-establishment populist movement focus on the same enemy, an external intruder, does this not bear witness to a strategy of avoiding the true internal antagonism?

5 I am here, of course, paraphrasing Lacan’s famous statement: “The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture.”

6 See Tobias Duck, “Israel Drafts West Bank Expansion Plans,” Financial Times, March 2, 2009.

7 See Tom Tugend, “Israel’s Supreme Court OKs Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem Project,” Observer, October 29, 2008.

8 See Ethan Bronner and Isabel Kershner, “Parks Fortify Israel’s Claim to Jerusalem,” New York Times, May 9, 2009.

9 See Saree Makdisi, in Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (New York: Norton, 2008).

10 We witnessed a similar oppression without (too much) open brutality in post-1968 Czechoslovakia. In his dissident classic Normalization, Milan Simecka described how, after 1968, the hardline communists enforced the “normalization” of the Czech population, their awakening from the dream of 1968 to crude socialist reality. There was little direct brutal pressure, since most of the job was done through the gentle art of low-level everyday corruption and blackmail, in the style of: “You want your children to go to university? Then just sign a statement which will not even be published, saying that you were seduced in participating in 1968 events and that you now see it was a mistake.” Is not something similar going on in our late capitalist liberal societies, where there is no open brutal pressure, just small everyday clear signals that it is better for your career not to overstep certain limits? There is nonetheless a key difference between late socialist corruption and our late capitalist corruption, a difference which concerns the status of appearance. What mattered in socialist regimes was maintaining the appearance—just recall the (deservedly) famous example of the vegetable store seller from Vaclav Havel’s “Power of the Powerless,” who obediently displays in the window of his store official propaganda slogans, although neither he nor his customers take them seriously. What matters is the gesture of obedience. In liberal capitalism, however, not only does nobody care (within certain limits, of course) what slogans one puts in the window, but also provocative ones are welcomed, if they help the sales. The market is the greatest ironizer. Recall how big companies sometimes use for publicity purposes ironic paraphrases of communist topics. One cannot imagine the authorities in state socialism doing the same with capitalist topics.

11 I owe this line of thought to Udi Aloni.

12 See Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, Then as Farce (London and New York: Verso, 2009), 48.

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Anti-Semitism and its Transformations’

Jouissance for You, Not Me?

Adam Kotsko, a professor of humanities at Shimer College in Chicago, in an email to me, provided the best characterization of the reactions to my latest text on the refugees and Paris attacks:

I notice that the responses always seem to be a referendum on you, almost a Rorschach test for what people think of you. If they think you’re a terrible quasi-fascist, pro-Western ideologue, they find stuff to support that. If they assume you’re in good faith, they can find a more positive reading. But the discussion never gets to the point of actually addressing the issue—it’s almost like “what we should do about the issue” is treated as self-evident to all concerned, and the question is whether and how you measure up to this implicit standard (which of course can’t be explicitly stated by anyone).

As for numerous attacks on what I have written, most of them don’t deserve an answer since they simply repeat the position I criticize. What should I say to the claim that I want to use the military to quarantine and throw out the refugees, apart from the fact that it’s a simple lie? Some of the criticism, however, is worthy of reply.

I often hear the reproach that I speak as a European, part of the European elite with whom I am in solidarity, and as such I am treating refugees as an external threat to be contained. To which I can only say: Of course I speak from an European position. To deny this would be a preposterous lie, an unmistakable sign of patronizing fake solidarity.

But which European position? In the same way that there is no one Islam, that Islam also can harbor emancipatory potentials (and I’ve written about this extensively ), European tradition is also marked by a series of deep antagonisms. The only way to effectively fight “Eurocentrism” is from within, mobilizing Europe’s radical-emancipatory tradition. In short, our solidarity with non-Europeans should be a solidarity of struggles, not a “dialogue of cultures” but a uniting of struggles within each culture.

Merkel’s invitation to accept the refugees—more refugees than any other Euruoean state—was a genuine ethical miracle, one that cannot be reduced to the capitalist strategy of importing cheap labor force. What I find more than a little bit weird is the eagerness to criticize Germany for not showing enough openness toward the refugees instead of focusing on those states that adopt the paraoniac anti-immigrant attitude: Poland, Hungary, etc. It’s the same old superego logic; the more we obey the commandment of the law, the more we are guilty. The more Germany acts in a (relatively) decent way, the more it will be criticized. On the top of that, it is deeply symptomatic of our hypocrisy how rarely the European Left insists that the way to defuse the racist fear of refugees is to include refugees in the public debate. Our TV stations and other public media should have been full of refugees describing their plea, talking about their expectations, etc. One should give them the space to speak in public, not just speak on their behalf.

Another often-repeated reproach targets my mention of Western “values” and “way of life”: How dare I ignore the blatant fact that “Western values” are for the Third World people the very ideology that justifies their colonization and exploitation, the ruthless destruction of their ways of life? My answer is that I am far from ignoring it—I’ve written pages and pages on it. What I insist upon is that, in the same way that Islam does not designate one big homogeneous entity, European tradition also provides the resources for radical emancipation, i.e., for the radical self-critique of “Eurocentrism,” while calls for a return to some pre-colonial indigenous roots mostly fit perfectly global capitalism.

A more refined version of this reproach points out that egalitarianism, feminism, etc., are not simply part of Western core values but the result of a long struggle against the hegemonic ideology and politics of capitalism. It maintains that the freedom of press, of public speech, etc., is not an ingredient of liberal capitalist societies that arose spontaneously: it was hard won through popular struggles throughout 19th century. When the West boasts of its emancipatory values, one should always bear in mind that we are largely dealing with the logic of “if you can’t defeat them, join them.” I cannot but agree with this point, adding that the same struggle goes on today (Wikileaks, etc.).

The last point. In public debates on many campuses from London to Berlin, I am repeatedly told that now is not the time to raise the topic of the incompatibility of ways of life, of the status of women in some immigrant communities, etc.—that now we are dealing with a big humanitarian crisis, hundreds of thousands are fighting for their life, and to bring in cultural issues ultimately just detracts from the key issue. I totally disagree with this logic: It is precisely now, when hundreds of thousands are ariving into Europe, that we should talk about all this and elaborate a formula of how to deal with it.

The reason is not merely that only such a direct approach can help to defuse anti-immigrant paranoia, but a much more ominous fact: Sexuality has emerged as one of the central ingredients of today’s ideologico-political struggles.

Let’s take the Nigerian Boko Haram movement, the name which can be roughly and descriptively translated as “Western education is forbidden”—meaning, in particular, any education of women. How, then, to account for the weird fact of a massive sociopolitical movement whose main programmatic item is the hierarchic regulation of the relationship between the two sexes?

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini made clear decades ago why an attack like the Paris bombings that focuses on the “dissolute” every day amusements can be considered appropriate. In February 1979, on his return to the Islamic Republic of Iran he said, “We’re not afraid of sanctions. We’re not afraid of military invasion. What frightens us is invasion by western immorality.” The fact that Khomeini talks about fear, about what a Muslim should fear most in the West, should be taken literally: Muslim fundamentalists, be they Shiite or Sunni, do not have any problems with the brutality of economic and military struggles, their true enemy is not the Western economic neocolonialism and military aggressiveness but its “immoral” culture.

The same holds for Putin’s Russia, where the conservative nationalists define their conflict with the West as cultural, in the last resort focused on sexual difference: apropos the victory of the Austrian drag queen Conchita Wurst (a.k.a. Tom Neuwirth) at the 2014 Eurovision contest, Putin himself said at a dinner in St. Petersburg: “The Bible talks about the two genders, man and woman, and the main purpose of union between them is to produce children.” As usual, the rabid nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky, a member of parliament, was more outspoken. He called her victory “the end of Europe,” saying: “There is no limit to our outrage. … There are no more men or women in Europe, just it.” Vice prime minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted that the Eurovision result “showed supporters of European integration their European future—a bearded girl.”

There is a certain quasi-poetic uncanny beauty in this image of the bearded lady (for long time the standard feature of circus freakshows) as the symbol of united Europe—no wonder Russia refused to transmit the Eurovision contest to its TV public, with calls for a renewed cultural Cold War. Note the same logic as in Khomeini: not army or economy, the truly feared object is immoral depravity, the threat to sexual difference. Boko Haram just brought brings this logic to the endits endpoint.
What psychoanalysis tells us

One should not underestimate the complexity and persistence of different “ways of life,” and here psychoanalysis can be of some help. Which is the factor that renders different cultures (or, rather, ways of life in the rich texture of their daily practices) incompatible? What is the obstacle that prevents their fusion or, at least, their harmoniously indifferent co-existence?

The psychoanalytic answer is: jouissance. It is not only that different modes of jouissance are incongruous with each other without a common measure; the Other’s jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance.

The ultimate incompatibility is not between mine and other’s jouissance, but between myself and my own jouissance, which forever remains an ex-timate intruder. It is to resolve this deadlock that the subject projects the core of its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but give rise to jealousy: In jealousy, the subject creates/imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded.

The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from the anti-Semitic fantasies about the mysterious practices and abilities of the Jews (which sometimes reach the level of madness, like the claim that Jewish men also menstruate) to the Christian fundamentalists’ fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. As Klaus Theweleit, a scholar of fascist sociology, pointed out, it is all too easy to read such phenomena as mere “projections”: Jealousy can be quite real and well-founded; other people can and do have as much more intense sexual life than the jealous subject—a fact that, as Lacan remarked, doesn’t make jealousy any less pathological. Here is Lacan’s succinct description of the political dimension of this predicament:

With our jouissance going off track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only in so far as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies – unheard of before the melting pot. Leaving the Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped.

To recapitulate the argument: Due to our impasse with our own jouissance, the only way for us to imagine a consistent jouissance is to conceive it as the Other’s jouissance; however, the Other’s jouissance is by definition experienced as a threat to our identity, as something to be rejected, destroyed even.

With regard to the identity of an ethnic group, this means that “there is always, in any human community, a rejection of an inassimilable jouissance, which forms the mainspring of a possible barbarism.” Here, Lacan underpins Freud, for whom the social bond (group identification) is mediated by the identification of each of its members with the figure of a Leader shared by all: Lacan conceives this symbolic identification with a Master-Signifier as secondary to some preceding rejection of jouissance, which is why, for him, “the founding crime is not the murder of the father, but the will to murder he who embodies the jouissance that I reject.” (And, one might add, even the murder of the primordial father is grounded in the hatred of his excessive jouissance, his possessing of all women.)

The starting point, what I “immediately see,” is that I don’t know who or what I am since my innermost core of jouissance eludes me. I then identify myself with others who are caught in the same deadlock, and we ground our collective identity not directly in some Master-Signifier but, more fundamentally, in our shared rejection of the Other’s jouissance.

The status of Other’s jouissance is thus deeply ambiguous: It is a threat to my identity, but at the same time my reference to it founds my identity—in short, my identity emerges as a defensive reaction to what threatens it, or, as we may say apropos anti-Semitism, what is a Nazi without a Jew?

Hitler allegedly said: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” A.B. Yehoshua’s provided an adequate comment to this statement:

This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.

In this sense, Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles: what is “in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves,” not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead “alien” monster who cannot ever be pinned down to a determinate form.

In this sense, Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: Against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us”—what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, his identity, is also in the Jew. (And the same holds even for a certain kind of anti-racism. The Politically Correct anti-racism depends on what it fights (or pretends to)—on the first-level racism itself, thus parasitizing its opponent: The PC anti-racism is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment which emerges when the PC-subject triumphantly reveals the hidden racist bias on an apparently neutral statement or gesture.)

Another conclusion to be drawn from this intermingling of jouissances is that racism is always a historical phenomenon: Even if anti-Semitism seems to remain the same through millenia, its inner form changes with every historical rupture. French philosopher Étienne Balibar perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism, in which we are all neighbors to each other even if we live far away, the structure of anti-Semitism is in a way globalized: Every other ethnic group perceived as posing a threat to our identities functions as a “Jew” did for the anti-Semite. The paradox is that, in our specific historical situation, anti-Semitism is universalized. This universalization reaches its apogee in the unique exceptional fact that even the fervent Zionist themselves construct the figure of the “self-hating Jew” along the lines of anti-Semitism.
Why Sam Kriss is wrong

I read with interest Sam Kriss’s reply to me. First off, it was dishonest of him to write:

As Zizek himself frequently argues, the primary pathology of the racist is to refuse to see the Jew or the Muslim or the Roma as a person …

So what, then, are we to make of his statement that “Muslims find it impossible to bear our blasphemous images and reckless humor, which we consider a part of our freedoms”?

I said no such thing. This is what I wrote:

[F]undamentalist Muslims find it impossible to bear our blasphemous images and reckless humor, which we consider a part of our freedoms.

Do you notice the word that he omitted?

Despite such intellectual sleights of hand, Kriss seemed to engage also with the Lacanian concepts I use, accusing me of misusing them. But then I stumbled upon sentences like the following one: “Fantasy is that which structures reality, and even if it’s a symptom, the symptom is always a sign to be interpreted, rather than a cloud that obfuscates.”

Such sentences are strict nonsense, implying a series of false identifications: objet a as the cause of desire is reduced to its role in fantasy (while Lacan elaborated in detail the status of objet a outside fantasy, as well as modes of desiring which remain after we “traverse” the fantasy), fantasy is equated with symptom (while Lacan spent long chapters on elaborating their opposition), etc.

Since there is no space here to engage in this explanation (every good introduction to Lacan will do the job), I will limit myself to a passage from Kriss’s reply which condenses his double confusion, theoretical as well as political, culminating in his ridiculous notion of fidelity to a fantasy:

In Lacanian terminology, what Zizek identifies as a fundamental disparity between ‘our’ civilized European way of life and the irreducible foreignness of the migrants would be called an asymmetry in the Symbolic order. (It’s not just Lacanianism that he abandons here — what happened to the Hegelian identity of non-identity and identity?) If this asymmetry does exist, then fantasy is precisely the means by which it can be resolved. If we lack the appropriate signifiers for each other, then the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication. If migrants are to live peacefully and happily in Europe, the demand should not be that they give up their fantasy of a better life, but that they cling to it for all its worth.

First, the basic premise of Lacan’s theory is that what my critic rather clumsily calls the “asymmetry in the symbolic order” does not primarily occur between different ways of life (cultures) but within each particular culture: each culture is structured around its particular “points of impossibility,” immanent blockades, antagonisms, around its Real.

Second, far from “resolving” it, a fantasy obfuscates it, it covers up the antagonism – a classic case: the fantasmatic figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism obfuscates the class antagonism by way of projecting it onto the “Jew,” the external cause that disturbs an otherwise harmonious social edifice. The statement “If we lack the appropriate signifiers for each other, then the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication.” is thus totally misleading: it implies that each culture somehow manages to be in touch with itself, it just lacks appropriate signifiers for other cultures. Lacan’s thesis is, on the contrary, that each culture lacks “appropriate signifiers” for itself, for its own representation, which is why fantasies are needed to fill in this gap.

And it is here that things get really interesting: these fantasies as a rule concern other cultures. Back to the Nazis: the fantasy of the Jew is a key ingredient of the Nazi identity. The Jew as the enemy allows the anti-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital: by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate.

This is also why Julia Kristeva is right in linking the phobic object (the Jew whose plots anti-Semites fear) to the avoidance of a choice: “The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision.”

Does this proposition not hold especially for political phobia? Does the phobic object/abject on the fear of which the rightist-populist ideology mobilizes its partisans (the Jew, the immigrant, today in Europe the refugee) not embody a refusal to choose? Choose what? A position in class struggle. The anti-Semitic fetish-figure of the Jew is the last thing a subject sees just before he confronts social antagonism as constitutive of the social body (I paraphrase here Freud’s definition of fetish as the last thing a subject sees before discovering that a woman doesn’t have a penis).

So the first conclusion is that some fantasies at least are “bad”: we should definitely not advise the Nazis “not to give up their fantasy of a better life (without Jews) but to cling to it for all its worth”… Should we then distinguish between “good” and “bad” fantasies – say, should we replace racist fantasies with humanist all-inclusive fantasies of global brotherhood and collaboration?

This seems to be the direction of my critic when he writes that “the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication” - in short, even if a fantasy is not true, this is all we have to maintain at least a semblance of communication.

But is this really the (political) lesson of Lacan’s psychoanalysis? Is fantasy really the last resort of politics? Is Communism ultimately just a fantasy we should cling to whatever the cost? The least on can say is that Lacan’s theory opens up another way, what one may call a politics of traversing the fantasy: a politics which does not obfuscate social antagonisms but confronts them, a politics which aims not just to “realize an impossible dream” but to practice a “discourse (social link) which would not be that of a semblance” (Lacan), a discourse which touches/disturbs the Real. Whatever Lacan is, he is not a post-modernist who claims that all communication is, as Kriss puts it, a “semblance.”

- Slavoj Zizek, "The Need to Traverse the Fantasy: A call to mobilize Europe’s radical-emancipatory tradition and why we need a solidarity of struggle, not a dialogue of cultures"

I NEED another trauma for my Ego to grow...

...This explains the so-called neo–fundamentalist appeal: As sociologists say, in postmodernity, in a reflexive society, there are no firm values, no nature or tradition, people who are used to a firm set of values get lost, long for safe haven… The other aspect of it is the exact opposite. It’s the postmodern subject of total permissiveness who gets caught up in so many prohibitions that precisely in order to be happy, the secret message between the lines of the totalitarian appeal to follow the master is, "If you follow me, you may." You may with impunity rape, sexually harass, kill, etc. I know this from personally talking to some years ago members of the old regime in Belgrade. There message was, "Before we were living this regulated life. Now at the point of us becoming Serb ethnic fundamentalists is that we may." Even before Adorno and Horkheimer, Brecht was attentive to this falsely liberating aspect of fundamentalism. Totalitarianism is not only "safe haven, firm values, we give you a sense of stability", it’s also a kind of false liberation. Which is why in an article from a year ago I offered as a metaphor for totalitarianism, the German fat free salami, whose slogan is Du Darfst. If you obey me, Du Darfst, you can have your salami without fat. Let’s go on. What happens in this superego universe of weak paternal authority? I think the references to two films are of some interest here. On one hand, Roberto Benigni’s "Life is Beautiful", in which the father in the concentration camp constructs a web of fantasies to protect his son from the trauma of the camp. On the other hand, Thomas Vinterberg’s "Celebration", in which the father is not only not the protector against the trauma but the source of the trauma, the rapist father. In one case we have a father assuming an almost maternal protective role and who relies on pure symbolic appearance, creating a protective web for his son, a father who is a kind of ersatz placebo. On the other hand, a father whose core we arrive at through the dismantling of all protective fictions — at the end the father is unmasked and confesses to be the brutal rapist, having sexual exploited his children, a kind of true revival of the Freudian Ur–Father from "Totem and Taboo". It’s my old thesis that Freud was right, he just got it in the wrong temporal succession. I claim that in this obsession with false memory syndrome, imagining some brutal raping father, it is not that, as Freud thought, that we have first in some mystical past the rapist father who possessed all the women of the tribe and then through the murder of the father, the father returns as symbolic authority. It’s rather the opposite. The symbolic authority disintegrates and what fills in its void is this brutal Ur–Father. It’s the modern totalitarian masters who are much closer to this Ur–Father figure. So what about these two father figures? It is crucial to avoid the trap of conceiving these two fathers along the axis of appearance vs. reality. It’s not that Benigni’s good father is a pure appearance of the protective maternal father and then that when we scratch the surface we get the violent real father. "Celebration" tells us a lot about how today, in the false memory syndrome of remembering being molested by one’s parents, Freud’s Ur–Father is resuscitated. "Celebration" tells us this precisely through its artificial character. The ultimate paradox of the film is that it’s the ultimate nostalgia. This horror of the rapist father, instead of shocking us, it articulates a kind of nostalgic longing for the good old times when we had fathers who really had force, and when it was really possible to experience such traumas. This is the paradox I want to address. One would expect that fantasies are defenses against traumas. We have a traumatic experience, we cannot endure it so we build up a protective fantasy web of fictions. I claim that we invent, as a protective web, trauma itself. Now, we would normally expect that concentration camp life would be the trauma and we build a fantasy to shield ourselves from it. But perhaps the trauma is the fantasy we construct to protect ourselves from something else. But what can be worse than concentration camp life itself? Let me return again to the opposition of the two fathers, imaginary and symbolic. I claim that what these horrifying figures fill in is the gap of symbolic authority. These two fathers, protective and rapist, have nonetheless something in common although they are opposed. They both suspend the agency of symbolic law, or symbolic prohibition, the proper paternal agency of authority whose function is to introduce the childhood into the universe of social reality with its harsh demands. The reality to which the child is exposed without any maternal protective shield. Benigni’s father offers the imaginary shield against the traumatic encounter with reality, instead of introducing us into reality. Vinterberg’s rapist father is also a father outside the constraints of the symbolic law, with access to full enjoyment. These two fathers fit the opposition elaborated by Lacan between the imaginary and the real. Benigni’s father offers the imaginary safety against the brutality of lawless violence, while Vinterberg’s father is this very violence outside symbolic law, and again what is missing is simply the father as symbolic authority. So what happens with the functioning of subjects when symbolic authority loses its efficiency? I claim we get subjects who are strangely de–realized, deprived of their psychology as if we are dealing with robotic puppets that are obeying some strange blind mechanism. As a metaphor I would like to introduce the method I learned of how they shoot soap operas in Mexico. Their timetable is so fully packed because each day they have to introduce a half–hour of the soap opera that actors do not have time to learn their lines in advances. How they solve the problem that on the set actors have earphones on, and behind the set there is a man trained reading the lines. So without any practice, the actors are trained to immediately enact the orders. "Kiss her, slap her, withdraw, apologize…" Of course, this minimal gap makes something ridiculously theatrical about it. I think that one of the reasons why David Lynch is one of the filmmakers of today is that in his films we find the same effect, scenes where actors produce stupid cliched statements in quite an earnest way. Another example from contemporary cinema can help us to clarify this point. I’d like to briefly refer to Spielberg’s film "Saving Private Ryan", which has an apparently unmilitaristic message in its brutal depiction of the bloodbath of war. I claim that it is secretly and in a refined way a militaristic film. The way it depicts the horror of film supports the recent tendency of the American army, first fully realized apropos of the bombing of ex–Yugoslavia, to promote the fantasy of war without casualties. Of course this goes only for our side, but I believe that the really ultimate fantasy is we will have war which is somehow virtual and takes place nowhere. In the last bombardments of Iraq a few months ago, in daily reports Baghdad was depicted as just a normal city, as if the bombing is just a nightmare which happens during the night and somehow life goes on. It’s as if war becomes simply virtualized. What’s my point here? I will try to answer the question of why we fantasize about violence. This tendency to erase death itself from war should not seduce us into endorsing the standard notion that war is made less traumatic when no longer experienced by soldiers as an actual encounter with another human being to be killed but as an abstract activity in front of a screen. That’s the idea, that today war is virtualized, nobody even sees the bodies, it’s a kind of videogame. What I learned from talking with war psychologists in the States is that the result is not less guilt but more anxiety. Even in the Gulf War of 1991, I read that in a report, that of American soldiers who had psychological traumas after the war, the majority of them were not as you would expect the ones who actually killed the Iraqi soldiers. It’s even the obverse correlation, those who experienced the war as strictly virtual, they didn’t feel guilt but an unbearable anxiety. This can retroactively explain another paradox. Already in World War I a mysterious phenomenon occurred which is I think a kind of military counterpoint to false memory syndrome. Sixty to seventy percent of soldiers remember this mythical, "authentic" experience of warfare such as that hailed by Ernst Junger. I see you, my enemy and briefly our gazes meet, there’s an authentic real encounter with another flesh and blood being, then it’s always the same, I stick you with a bayonet and throw you over my shoulder. However, according to all data it’s maximum one half percent that actually had this experience of killing in face–to–face combat. Far from being the ultimate traumatic point that you try to erase, the need to have this face–to–face encounter rather has a pacifying aspect of getting rid of anxiety for us. What really causes anxiety is virtualized warfare. My point I hope is now clear. This opposition between modern, virtualized warfare and the need to have the brutal encounter with another soldier this opposition is ultimately the same as the opposition of Benigni’s father and Vinterberg’s father. In the same way that it’s not that unfortunately we have to kill real persons and then we imagine how nice it would be to play just keyboard wars, but that it’s the soldier playing war behind the screen who is full of anxiety and fantasizes about a face–to–face real encounter, which although it would make him guilty would give him a real guilt, but the true horror would be to have a father like Benigni. That’s unbearable, that’s suffocating. It’s Benigni’s son who then fantasizes about a secret, concealed but nonetheless violent rapist aspect. You say "My god, my father cannot just be this maternal, ersatz placebo, that would suffocate me. I need to imagine some horrifying secret behind him in order to survive family life." This then is the deadlock of the superego. How do we get out of this deadlock? By means of what Lacan calls the act. The act means precisely breaking out of this deadlock. What is an act? Psychoanalysis knows a whole series of false acts. Psychotic paranoia, violent passage l’acte, hysterical acting–out, obsessional self–hindering, self–sabotage, perverse self–instrumentalization, all these acts are not simply wrong compared to some external standards. They are inherently wrong since they can only be properly grasped as reaction to some disavowed trauma that they displace, disavow or repress. For example, Nazi anti–Semitic violence was false in the same way. This entire large–scale frenetic activity was fundamentally misdirected in a massive passage l’acte betraying the inability the real kernel of the trauma, the social antagonism. What I claim is that anti–Semitic violence was not only factually wrong, in the sense that Jews were not really like that, they were not exploiting Germans, or organizing a universal plot against humanity. It wasn’t only morally wrong when judged against some elementary standards of decency. Of course it’s morally wrong but that doesn’t really hit the mark. If you claim it was factually wrong, in the sense that "Jews are not really like that", because the moment you accept the discussion in these terms, you are lost. Let’s say that in the 1930’s you try to answer a Nazi by claiming "Wait a minute, you are exaggerating." If you check it out the truth will of course be somewhere in the middle. Of course there were some Jews who were seducing German girls, why not? Of course there were some Jews whose influence in media was very strong. That’s not the point. We get a cue here from one of my favorite dictums of Lacan. Let’s say that you have a wife who sleeps with other men and you are pathologically jealous. Even if your jealousy is grounded in fact it’s still a pathology. Why? Because, even if what the Nazis claimed about Jews was up to a point true, anti–Semitism was formally wrong, in the same sense that in psychoanalysis a symptomatic action is wrong. It is wrong because it served to replace or repress another true trauma, as something that inherently functioning as a displacement, an act of displacement, as something to be interpreted. It’s not enough to say anti–Semitism factually wrong, it’s morally wrong, the true enigma is ,why did the Nazis need the figure of the Jew for their ideology to function? Why is it that if you take away their figure of the Jew their whole edifice disintegrates. For example, let’s say I have a paranoiac idea that you are trying to kill me. You miss the point if you try to explain to me that it’s morally wrong for me to kill you in pre–emptive self–defense. The point is, why in order to retain my balance do I need the fantasy of you trying to kill me? As Freud points out paranoia is not simply the illness, it’s a false attempt of recovery. The true zero point is where your whole universe disintegrates. Paranoia is the misdirected attempt to reconstitute your universe so that you can function again. If you take from the paranoiac his paranoiac symptom, it’s the end of the world for him. Along the same lines, we have false acts. What an authentic act is precisely what allows you to break out of this deadlock of the symptom, superego and so on. In an authentic act I do not simply express, or actualize my inner nature. I rather redefine myself, the very core of my identity. In this since I claim that an act is very close to what Kierkegaard was trying to conceptualize as the Christian rebirth. Kierkegaard was very precise in opposing the Christian rebirth to the pagan pre–modern Socratic logic of remembrance. This is the crucial choice that psychoanalysis is confronted with. Is psychoanalysis the ultimate in the logic of Socratic remembrance, where I say "I must return to my roots, it’s already deep in me the truth of my unconscious desire, I just must realize my inner self", or is psychoanalysis dependent on an act in the way that Christianity is an act, where you are born again, not in a religious sense, but redefine what you truly are. You go through a symbolic suicide and become another person.

- Slavoj Zizek, "The Superego and the Act: A lecture" (August 1999)

Travels with Dante

This obscene virtual dimension is inscribed into an ideological text in the guise of the fantasmatic background that sustains the emptiness of what Jacques Lacan called the Master-Signifier. The master-Signifier is tha signifier of potentiality, of potential threat, ot a threat which, in order to function as such, has to remain potential (in the same way as it is also the signifier of potential meaning whose actuality is the void of meaning: say, "our Nation" is the thing itself, 'the supreme Cause worth dying for, the highest density of meaning - and, as such, it means nothing in particular, it has no determinate meaning, it can be articulated only in the guise a tautology - "Nation is the Thing itself"). This emptiness of the threat is clearly discernible in everyday phrases like "Just wait! You will see what will happen to you!" - the very lack of the specification of WHAT exactly will befall you makes the threat so threatening, since it solicits the power of my fantasy to fill it in with imagined horrors. As such, the Master-Signifier is the privileged site at which fantasy intervenes, since the function of fantasy is precisely to fill in the void of the signifier-without-signified, i.e., fantasy is ultimately, at its most elementarv, the stuff which fills in the void of the Master-Signifier: again, in the case of a Nation, all the mythic obscure narratives which tell us what the nation is... This gap between the Law and its superego supplement concerns the ambiguous status of political representation, the constitutive excess of representation over the represented. At the level of the Law, the state Power only represents the interests of its subjects; it is serving them, responsible to them and itself subjected to their control; however, at the level of the superego underside, the public message of responsibility, etc., is supplemented by the obscene message of unconditional exercise of Power: laws do not really bind me, I can do to you WHATEVER I WANT, I can treat you as guilty if I decide so, I can destroy you if I say so... This obscene excess is a necessary constituent of the notion of sovereignty (whose signifier is the Master-Signifier) - the asymmetry is here structural, i.e. the law can only sustain its authority if subjects hear in it the echo of the obscene unconditional self-assertion.

It is similar with anti-Semitism: Jew is the Master-Signifier, the ultimate empty point of reference which accounts for the (inconsistent) series of phenomena that bother people (corruption, moral and cultural decadence, sexual depravity, commercialization, class struggle and other social antagonisms ... ); as such, the figure of the Jew has to be sustained/encircled by the swarm of fantasies about their mysterious rituals and properties. 6 However, in the XXth century, this link between power and invisible threat gets in a way redoubled or reflected-into itself: it is no longer merely the existing power structure which, in order to sustain its efficiency, its hold over its subjects, has to rely on the fantasmatic dimension of the potential/invisible threat; the place of the threat is, rather, externalized, displaced into the Outside, the Enemy of the power - it is the invisible (and for that very reason all-powerful and omnipresent) threat of the Enemy that legitimizes the permanent state of emergency of the existing Power (Fascists invoked the threat of the Jewish conspiracy, Stalinists the threat of the class enemy up to today's "war on terror," of course). This invisible threat of the Enemy legitimizes the logic of the preemptive strike: precisely because the threat is virtual, it is too late to wait for its actualization, one has to strike in advance, before it will be too late... In other words, the omnipresent invisible threat of Terror legitimizes the all too visible protective measures of defense (which pose the only TRUE threat to democracy and human rights, of course)if the classic power functioned as the threat which was operative precisely by way of never actualizing itself, by way of remaining a threatening GESTURE (and this functioning reached its climax in the Cold War, with the the threat of the mutual nuclear destruction which HAD to remain a threat), with the war on terror, the invisible threat causes the incessant actualization - not of itself, but - of the measures against itself. The nuclear strike had to remain the threat of a strike, while the threat of the terrorist strike triggers the endless series of strikes against potential terrorists... The power which presents itself as being all the time under threat, living in mortal danger, and thus merely defending itself, is the most dangerous kind of power.

-Slavoj Zizek, "Move the Underground"