Sunday, March 1, 2009

What We Need Is Even More Hatred

From Žižek's The Fragile Absolute (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 10-11:

"Although Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the 'end of history' quickly fell into disrepute, we still silently assume that the liberal-democratic capitalist global order is somehow the finally found 'natural' social regime; we still implicitly conceive of conflicts in Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophes, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on fanatical identification with ethnic roots (and what is 'ethnic' here if not again a codeword for nature?). And, again, the key point is that this all-pervasive renaturalization is strictly correlative to the global refexivization of our daily lives. For that reason, confronted with ethnic hatred and violence, one should thoroughly reject the standard multiculturalist idea that, against ethnic intolerance, one should learn to respect and live with the Otherness of the Other, to develop a tolerance for different lifestyles, and so on--the way to fight ethnic hatred effectively is not through its immediate counterpart, ethnic tolerance, on the contrary, what we need is even more hatred, but proper political hatred: hatred directed at the common political enemy."

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