[Nettime-bold] FW: <fwd> Zizek interviewed

["Alexander Tauras" <atauras@uclink.berkeley.edu>]

for the philosopher's admirers, detractors, and the zizek-curious.

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Subject: <fwd> Zizek interviewed


'The one measure of true love is: you can insult the other'

by Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann

The Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek has gained something of a cult
following for his many writings - including The Ticklish Subject, a
playful critique of the intellectual assault upon human subjectivity.

At the prestigious Frankfurt Book Fair in October 2001, he talked to
Sabine Reul and Thomas Deichmann about subjectivity, multiculturalism,
sex and unfreedom after 11 September.

-----------------

Has 11 September thrown new light on your diagnosis of what is happening
to the world?

Slavoj Zizek: One of the endlessly repeated phrases we heard in recent
weeks is that nothing will be the same after 11 September. I wonder if
there really is such a substantial change. Certainly, there is change at
the level of perception or publicity, but I don't think we can yet speak
of some fundamental break. Existing attitudes and fears were confirmed,
and what the media were telling us about terrorism has now really
happened.

In my work, I place strong emphasis on what is usually referred to as
the virtualisation or digitalisation of our environment. We know that 60
percent of the people on this Earth have not even made a phone call in
their life. But still, 30 percent of us live in a digitalised universe
that is artificially constructed, manipulated and no longer some natural
or traditional one. At all levels of our life we seem to live more and
more with the thing deprived of its substance. You get beer without
alcohol, meat without fat, coffee without caffeine...and even virtual
sex without sex.

Virtual reality to me is the climax of this process: you now get reality
without reality...or a totally regulated reality. But there is another
side to this. Throughout the entire twentieth century, I see a
counter-tendency, for which my good philosopher friend Alain Badiou
invented a nice name: 'La passion du rel', the passion of the real. That
is to say, precisely because the universe in which we live is somehow a
universe of dead conventions and artificiality, the only authentic real
experience must be some extremely violent, shattering experience. And
this we experience as a sense that now we are back in real life.

Do you think that is what we are seeing now?

Slavoj Zizek: I think this may be what defined the twentieth century,
which really began with the First World War. We all remember the war
reports by Ernst Jnger, in which he praises this eye-to-eye combat
experience as the authentic one. Or at the level of sex, the archetypal
film of the twentieth century would be Nagisa Oshima's Ai No Corrida (In
The Realm Of The Senses), where the idea again is that you become truly
radical, and go to the end in a sexual encounter, when you practically
torture each other to death. There must be extreme violence for that
encounter to be authentic.

Another emblematic figure in this sense to me is the so-called 'cutter'-
a widespread pathological phenomenon in the USA. There are two million
of them, mostly women, but also men, who cut themselves with razors.
Why? It has nothing to do with masochism or suicide. It's simply that
they don't feel real as persons and the idea is: it's only through this
pain and when you feel warm blood that you feel reconnected again. So I
think that this tension is the background against which one should
appreciate the effect of the act.

Does that relate to your observations about the demise of subjectivity
in The Ticklish Subject? You say the problem is what you call
'foreclosure'- that the real or the articulation of the subject is
foreclosed by the way society has evolved in recent years.

Slavoj Zizek: The starting point of my book on the subject is that
almost all philosophical orientations today, even if they strongly
oppose each other, agree on some kind of basic anti-subjectivist stance.
For example, Jrgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida would both agree that
the Cartesian subject had to be deconstructed, or, in the case of
Habermas, embedded in a larger inter-subjective dialectics.
Cognitivists, Hegelians - everybody is in agreement here.

I am tempted to say that we must return to the subject - though not a
purely rational Cartesian one. My idea is that the subject is inherently
political, in the sense that 'subject', to me, denotes a piece of
freedom - where you are no longer rooted in some firm substance, you are
in an open situation. Today we can no longer simply apply old rules. We
are engaged in paradoxes, which offer no immediate way out. In this
sense, subjectivity is political.

But this kind of political subjectivity seems to have disappeared. In
your books you speak of a post-political world.

Slavoj Zizek: When I say we live in a post-political world, I refer to a
wrong ideological impression. We don't really live in such a world, but
the existing universe presents itself as post-political in the sense
that there is some kind of a basic social pact that elementary social
decisions are no longer discussed as political decisions. They are
turned into simple decisions of gesture and of administration. And the
remaining conflicts are mostly conflicts about different cultures. We
have the present form of global capitalism plus some kind of tolerant
democracy as the ultimate form of that idea. And, paradoxically, only
very few are ready to question this world.

So, what's wrong with that?

Slavoj Zizek: This post-political world still seems to retain the
tension between what we usually refer to as tolerant liberalism versus
multiculturalism. But for me
- though I never liked Friedrich Nietzsche - if there is a definition
that really fits, it is Nietzsche's old opposition between active and
passive nihilism. Active nihilism, in the sense of wanting nothing
itself, is this active self-destruction which would be precisely the
passion of the real - the idea that, in order to live fully and
authentically, you must engage in self-destruction. On the other hand,
there is passive nihilism, what Nietzsche called 'The last man' - just
living a stupid, self-satisfied life without great passions.

The problem with a post-political universe is that we have these two
sides which are engaged in kind of mortal dialectics. My idea is that,
to break out of this vicious cycle, subjectivity must be reinvented.

You also say that the elites in our Western world are losing their
nerve. They want to throw out all old concepts like humanism or
subjectivity. Against that, you say it is important to look at what
there is in the old that may be worth retaining.

Slavoj Zizek: Of course, I am not against the new. I am, indeed, almost
tempted to repeat Virginia Woolf. I think it was in 1914 when she said
it was as though eternal human nature had changed. To be a man no longer
means the same thing. One should not, for example, underestimate the
inter-subjective social impact of cyberspace. What we are witnessing
today is a radical redefinition of what it means to be a human being.

Almost all philosophical orientations today agree on some kind of basic
anti-subjectivist stance

Take strange phenomena, like what we see on the internet. There are
so-called 'cam' websites where people expose to an anonymous public
their innermost secrets down to the most vulgar level. You have websites
today - even I, with all my decadent tastes, was shocked to learn this -
where people put a video-camera in their toilets, so you can observe
them defecating. This a totally new constellation. It is not private,
but also it is also not public. It is not the old exhibitionist gesture.

Be that as it may, something radical is happening. Now, a number of new
terms are proposed to us to describe that. The one most commonly used is
paradigm shift, denoting that we live in an epoch of shifting paradigm.
So New Age people tell us that we no longer have a Cartesian,
mechanistic individualism, but a new universal mind. In sociology, the
theorists of second modernity say similar things. And psychoanalytical
theorists tell us that we no longer have the Oedipus complex, but live
in an era of universalised perversion.

My point is not that we should stick to the old. But these answers are
wrong and do not really register the break that is taking place. If we
measure what is happening now by the standard of the old, we can grasp
the abyss of the new that is emerging.

Here I would refer to Blaise Pascal. Pascal's problem was also
confrontation with modernity and modern science. His difficulty was that
he wanted to remain an old, orthodox Christian in this new, modern age.
It is interesting that his results were much more radical and
interesting for us today than the results of superficial English liberal
philosophers, who simply accepted modernity.

You see the same thing in cinema history, if we look at the impact of
sound. Okay, 'what's the problem?', you might say. By adding the sound
to the image we simply get a more realistic rendering of reality. But
that is not at all true. Interestingly enough, the movie directors who
were most sensitive to what the introduction of sound really meant were
generally conservatives, those who looked at it with scepticism, like
Charlie Chaplin (up to a point), and Fritz Lang. Fritz Lang's Das
Testament des Dr Mabuse, in a wonderful way, rendered this spectral
ghost-like dimension of the voice, realising that voice never simply
belongs to the body. This is just another example of how a conservative,
as if he were afraid of the new medium, has a much better grasp of its
uncanny radical potentials.

The same applies today. Some people simply say: 'What's the problem?
Let's throw ourselves into the digital world, into the internet, or
whatever.' They really miss what is going on here.

So why do people want to declare a new epoch every five minutes?

Slavoj Zizek: It is precisely a desperate attempt to avoid the trauma of
the new. It is a deeply conservative gesture. The true conservatives
today are the people of new paradigms. They try desperately to avoid
confronting what is really changing.

Let me return to my example. In Charlie Chaplain's film The Great
Dictator, he satirises Hitler as Hinkel. The voice is perceived as
something obscene. There is a wonderful scene where Hinkel gives a big
speech and speaks totally meaningless, obscene words. Only from time to
time you recognise some everyday vulgar German word like
'Wienerschnitzel' or 'Kartoffelstrudel'. And this was an ingenious
insight; how voice is like a kind of a spectral ghost. All this became
apparent to those conservatives who were sensitive for the break of the
new.


The most dangerous thing today is just to flow with things

In fact, all big breaks were done in such a way. Nietzsche was in this
sense a conservative, and, indeed, I am ready to claim that Marx was a
conservative in this sense, too. Marx always emphasised that we can
learn more from intelligent conservatives than from simple liberals.
Today, more than ever, we should stick to this attitude. When you are
surprised and shocked, you don't simply accept it. You should not say:
'Okay, fine, let's play digital games.' We should not forget the ability
to be properly surprised. I think, the most dangerous thing today is
just to flow with things.

Then let's return to some of the things that have been surprising us. In
a recent article, you made the point that the terrorists mirror our
civilisation. They are not out there, but mirror our own Western world.
Can you elaborate on that some more?

Slavoj Zizek: This, of course, is my answer to this popular thesis by
Samuel P Huntington and others that there is a so-called clash of
civilisations. I don't buy this thesis, for a number of reasons.

Today's racism is precisely this racism of cultural difference. It no
longer says: 'I am more than you.' It says: 'I want my culture, you can
have yours.' Today, every right-winger says just that. These people can
be very postmodern. They acknowledge that there is no natural tradition,
that every culture is artificially constructed. In France, for example,
you have a neo-fascist right that refers to the deconstructionists,
saying: 'Yes, the lesson of deconstructionism against universalism is
that there are only particular identities. So, if blacks can have their
culture, why should we not have ours?'

We should also consider the first reaction of the American 'moral
majority', specifically Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, to the 11
September attacks. Pat Robertson is a bit eccentric, but Jerry Falwell
is a mainstream figure, who endorsed Reagan and is part of the
mainstream, not an eccentric freak. Now, their reaction was the same as
the Arabs', though he did retract a couple of days later. Falwell said
the World Trade Centre bombings were a sign that God no longer protects
the USA, because the USA had chosen a path of evil, homosexuality and
promiscuity.

According to the FBI, there are now at least two million so-called
radical right-wingers in the USA. Some are quite violent, killing
abortion doctors, not to mention the Oklahoma City bombing. To me, this
shows that the same anti-liberal, violent attitude also grows in our own
civilisation. I see that as proof that this terrorism is an aspect of
our time. We cannot link it to a particular civilisation.

Regarding Islam, we should look at history. In fact, I think it is very
interesting in this regard to look at ex-Yugoslavia. Why was Sarajevo
and Bosnia the place of violent conflict? Because it was ethnically the
most mixed republic of ex-Yugoslavia. Why? Because it was
Muslim-dominated, and historically they were definitely the most
tolerant. We Slovenes, on the other hand, and the Croats, both
Catholics, threw them out several hundred years ago.

This proves that there is nothing inherently intolerant about Islam. We
must rather ask why this terrorist aspect of Islam arises now. The
tension between tolerance and fundamentalist violence is within a
civilisation.

Take another example: on CNN we saw President Bush present a letter of a
seven-year-old girl whose father is a pilot and now around Afghanistan.
In the letter she said that she loves her father, but if her country
needs his death, she is ready to give her father for her country.
President Bush described this as American patriotism. Now, do a simple
mental experiment - imagine the same event with an Afghan girl saying
that. We would immediately say: 'What cynicism, what fundamentalism,
what manipulation of small children.' So there is already something in
our perception. But what shocks us in others we ourselves also do in a
way.

So multiculturalism and fundamentalism could be two sides of the same
coin?

Slavoj Zizek: There is nothing to be said against tolerance. But when
you buy this multiculturalist tolerance, you buy many other things with
it. Isn't it symptomatic that multiculturalism exploded at the very
historic moment when the last traces of working-class politics
disappeared from political space? For many former leftists, this
multiculturalism is a kind of ersatz working-class politics. We don't
even know whether the working class still exists, so let's talk about
exploitation of others.

This notion of tolerance effectively masks its opposite: intolerance

There may be nothing wrong with that as such. But there is a danger that
issues of economic exploitation are converted into problems of cultural
tolerance. And then you have only to make one step further, that of
Julia Kristeva in her essay 'Etrangers  nous mmes', and say we cannot
tolerate others because we cannot tolerate otherness in ourselves. Here
we have a pure pseudo-psychoanalytic cultural reductionism.

Isn't it sad and tragic that the only relatively strong - not fringe -
political movement that still directly addresses the working class is
made up of right-wing populists? They are the only ones. Jean-Marie Le
Pen in France, for example. I was shocked when I saw him three years ago
at a congress of the Front National. He brought a black Frenchman, an
Algerian and a Jew on the podium, embraced them and said: 'They are no
less French than I am. Only the international cosmopolitan companies who
neglect French patriotic interests are my enemy.' So the price is that
only right-wingers still talk about economic exploitation.

The second thing I find wrong with this multiculturalist tolerance is
that it is often hypocritical in the sense that the other whom they
tolerate is already a reduced other. The other is okay in so far as this
other is only a question of food, of culture, of dances. What about
clitoridectomy? What about my friends who
say: 'We must respect Hindus.' Okay, but what about one of the old Hindu
customs which, as we know, is that when a husband dies, the wife is
burned. Now, do we respect that? Problems arise here.

An even more important problem is that this notion of tolerance
effectively masks its opposite: intolerance. It is a recurring theme in
all my books that, from this liberal perspective, the basic perception
of another human being is always as something that may in some way hurt
you.

Are you referring to what we call victim culture?

Slavoj Zizek: The discourse of victimisation is almost the predominant
discourse today. You can be a victim of the environment, of smoking, of
sexual harassment. I find this reduction of the subject to a victim sad.
In what sense? There is an extremely narcissistic notion of personality
here. And, indeed, an intolerant one, insofar as what it means is that
we can no longer tolerate violent encounters with others - and these
encounters are always violent.

Let me briefly address sexual harassment for a moment. Of course I am
opposed to it, but let's be frank. Say I am passionately attached, in
love, or whatever, to another human being and I declare my love, my
passion for him or her. There is always something shocking, violent in
it. This may sound like a joke, but it isn't - you cannot do the game of
erotic seduction in politically correct terms. There is a moment of
violence, when you say: 'I love you, I want you.' In no way can you
bypass this violent aspect. So I even think that the fear of sexual
harassment in a way includes this aspect, a fear of a too violent, too
open encounter with another human being.

Another thing that bothers me about this multiculturalism is when people
ask
me: 'How can you be sure that you are not a racist?' My answer is that
there is only one way. If I can exchange insults, brutal jokes, dirty
jokes, with a member of a different race and we both know it's not meant
in a racist way. If, on the other hand, we play this politically correct
game - 'Oh, I respect you, how interesting your customs are' - this is
inverted racism, and it is disgusting.

In the Yugoslav army where we were all of mixed nationalities, how did I
become friends with Albanians? When we started to exchange obscenities,
sexual innuendo, jokes. This is why this politically correct respect is
just, as Freud put it, 'zielgehemmt'. You still have the aggression
towards the other.



You cannot do the game of erotic seduction in politically correct terms

For me there is one measure of true love: you can insult the other. Like
in that horrible German comedy film from 1943 where Marika Rck treats
her fianc very brutally. This fianc is a rich, important person, so her
father asks her why are you treating him like that. And she gives the
right answer. She says: 'But I love him, and since I love him, I can do
with him whatever I want.' That's the truth of it. If there is true
love, you can say horrible things and anything goes.

When multiculturalists tell you to respect the others, I always have
this uncanny association that this is dangerously close to how we treat
our children: the idea that we should respect them, even when we know
that what they believe is not true. We should not destroy their
illusions. No, I think that others deserve better
- not to be treated like children.

In your book on the subject you talk of a 'true universalism' as an
opposite of this false sense of global harmony. What do you mean by
that?

Slavoj Zizek: Here I need to ask myself a simple Habermasian question:
how can we ground universality in our experience? Naturally, I don't
accept this postmodern game that each of us inhabits his or her
particular universe. I believe there is universality. But I don't
believe in some a priori universality of fundamental rules or universal
notions. The only true universality we have access to is political
universality. Which is not solidarity in some abstract idealist sense,
but solidarity in struggle.

If we are engaged in the same struggle, if we discover that - and this
for me is the authentic moment of solidarity - being feminists and
ecologists, or feminists and workers, we all of a sudden have this
insight: 'My God, but our struggle is ultimately the same!' This
political universality would be the only authentic universality. And
this, of course, is what is missing today, because politics today is
increasingly a politics of merely negotiating compromises between
different positions.

The post-political subverts the freedom that has been talked about so
much in recent weeks. Is that what you are saying?

Slavoj Zizek: I do claim that what is sold to us today as freedom is
something from which this more radical dimension of freedom and
democracy has been removed - in other words, the belief that basic
decisions about social development are discussed or brought about
involving as many as possible, a majority. In this sense, we do not have
an actual experience of freedom today. Our freedoms are increasingly
reduced to the freedom to choose your lifestyle. You can even choose
your ethnic identity up to a point.

But this new world of freedom described by people like Ulrich Beck, who
say everything is a matter of reflective negotiation, of choice, can
include new unfreedom. My favourite example is this, and here we have
ideology at its
purest:
we know that it is very difficult today in more and more professional
domains to get a long-term job. Academics or journalists, for example,
now often live on a
two- or three-year contract, that you then have to renegotiate. Of
course, most of us experience this as something traumatising, shocking,
where you can never be sure. But then, along comes the postmodern
ideologist: 'Oh, but this is just a new freedom, you can reinvent
yourself every two years!'

The problem for me is how unfreedom is hidden, concealed in precisely
what is presented to us as new freedoms. I think that the explosion of
these new freedoms, which fall under the domain of what Michel Foucault
called 'care of the self', involves greater social unfreedom.

Twenty or 30 years ago there was still discussion as to whether the
future would be fascist, socialist, communist or capitalist. Today,
nobody even discusses this. These fundamental social choices are simply
no longer perceived as a matter to decide. A certain domain of radical
social questions has simply been depoliticised.

I find it very sad that, precisely in an era in which tremendous changes
are taking place and, indeed entire social coordinates are transformed,
we don't experience this as something about which we decided freely.

So, let's return to the aftermath of 11 September. We now experience a
strange kind of war that we are told will not end for a long time. What
do you think of this turn of events?

Slavoj Zizek: I don't quite agree with those who claim that this World
Trade Centre explosion was the start of the first war of the
twenty-first century. I think it was a war of the twentieth century, in
the sense that it was still a singular, spectacular event. The new wars
would be precisely as you mentioned - it will not even be clear whether
it is a war or not. Somehow life will go on and we will learn that we
are at war, as we are now.


The explosion of these new freedoms involves greater social unfreedom

What worries me is how many Americans perceived these bombings as
something that made them into innocents: as if to say, until now, we had
problems, Vietnam, and so on. Now we are victims, and this somehow
justifies us in fully identifying with American patriotism.

That's a risky gesture. The big choice for Americans is whether they
retreat into this patriotism - or, as my friend Ariel Dorfman wrote
recently: 'America has the chance to become a member of the community of
nations. America always behaves as though it were special. It should use
this attack as an opportunity to admit that it is not special, but
simply and truly part of this world.' That's the big choice.

There is something so disturbingly tragic in this idea of the wealthiest
country in the world bombing one of the poorest countries. It reminds me
of the well-known joke about the idiot who loses a key in the dark and
looks for it beneath the light. When asked why, he says: 'I know I lost
it over there, but it's easier to look for it here.'

But at the same time I must confess that the left also deeply
disappointed me. Falling back into this safe pacifist attitude -
violence never stops violence, give peace a chance - is abstract and
doesn't work here. First, because this is not a universal rule. I always
ask my leftist friends who repeat that mantra: What would you have said
in 1941 with Hitler. Would you also say: 'We shouldn't resist, because
violence never helps?' It is simply a fact that at some point you have
to fight. You have to return violence with violence. The problem is not
that for me, but that this war can never be a solution.

It is also false and misleading to perceive these bombings as some kind
of third world working-class response to American imperialism. In that
case, the American fundamentalists we already discussed, are also a
working-class response, which they clearly are not. We face a challenge
to rethink our coordinates and I hope that this will be a good result of
this tragic event. That we will not just use it to do more of the same
but to think about what is really changing in our world.

Dr Slavoj Zizek is professor of philosophy at University Ljubljana,
Slovenia. He is currently a member of the Directors' Board at
Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany.




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