Slavoj Žižek on responses to the Paris killings
The formula of pathetic
identification ‘I am …’ (or ‘We are all …’) only functions within certain
limits, beyond which it turns into obscenity. We can proclaim ‘Je suis
Charlie,’ but things start to crumble with examples like ‘We all live in
Sarajevo!’ or ‘We are all in Gaza!’ The brutal fact that we are not all in
Sarajevo or Gaza is too strong to be covered up by a pathetic identification.
Such identification becomes obscene in the case of Muselmänner, the living dead
in Auschwitz. It is not possible to say: ‘We are all Muselmänner!’ In
Auschwitz, the dehumanisation of victims went so far that identifying with them
in any meaningful sense is impossible. (And, in the opposite direction, it
would also be ridiculous to declare solidarity with the victims of 9/11 by
claiming ‘We are all New Yorkers!’ Millions would say: ‘Yes, we would love to
be New Yorkers, give us a visa!’)
The same goes for the killings
last month: it was relatively easy to identify with the Charlie Hebdo journalists,
but it would have been much more difficult to announce: ‘We are all from Baga!’
(For those who don’t know: Baga is a small town in the north-east of Nigeria
where Boko Haram executed two thousand people.) The name ‘Boko Haram’ can be
roughly translated as ‘Western education is forbidden,’ specifically the
education of women. How to account for the weird fact of a massive
sociopolitical movement whose main aim is the hierarchic regulation of the
relationship between the sexes? Why do Muslims who were undoubtedly exposed to
exploitation, domination and other destructive and humiliating aspects of
colonialism, target in their response the best part (for us, at least) of the
Western legacy, our egalitarianism and personal freedoms, including the freedom
to mock all authorities? One answer is that their target is well chosen: the
liberal West is so unbearable because it not only practises exploitation and
violent domination, but presents this brutal reality in the guise of its
opposite: freedom, equality and democracy.
Back to the spectacle of big
political names from all around the world holding hands in solidarity with the
victims of the Paris killings, from Cameron to Lavrov, from Netanyahu to Abbas:
if there was ever an image of hypocritical falsity, this was it. An anonymous
citizen played Beethoven’s ‘Ode to Joy’, the unofficial anthem of the European
Union, as the procession passed under his window, adding a touch of political
kitsch to the disgusting spectacle staged by the people most responsible for
the mess we are in. If the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, were to
join such a march in Moscow, where dozens of journalists have been murdered, he
would be arrested immediately. And the spectacle was literally staged: the
pictures shown in the media gave the impression that the line of political
leaders was at the front of a large crowd walking along an avenue. But another
photo was taken of the entire scene from above, clearly showing that behind the
politicians there were only a hundred or so people and a lot of empty space, patrolled
by police, behind and around them. The true Charlie Hebdo gesture
would have been to publish on its front page a big caricature brutally and
tastelessly mocking this event.
As well as the banners saying
‘Je suis Charlie!’ there were others that said ‘Je suis flic!’ The national
unity celebrated and enacted in large public gatherings was not just the unity
of the people, reaching across ethnic groups, classes and religions, but also
the unification of the people with the forces of order and control – not only
the police but also the CRS (one of the slogans of May 1968 was ‘CRS-SS’), the
secret service and the entire state security apparatus. There is no place for
Snowden or Manning in this new universe. ‘Resentment against the police is no
longer what it was, except among poor youth of Arab or African origins,’
Jacques-Alain Miller wrote last month. ‘A thing undoubtedly never seen in the
history of France.’ In short, the terrorist attacks achieved the impossible: to
reconcile the generation of ’68 with its arch enemy in something like a French
popular version of the Patriot Act, with people offering themselves up to
surveillance.
The ecstatic moments of the
Paris demonstrations were a triumph of ideology: they united the people against
an enemy whose fascinating presence momentarily obliterates all antagonisms.
The public was offered a depressing choice: you are either a flic or a
terrorist. But how does the irreverent humour of Charlie Hebdo fit
in? To answer this question, we need to bear in mind the interconnection
between the Decalogue and human rights, which, as Kenneth Reinhard and Julia
Reinhard Lupton have argued, are ultimately rights to violate the Ten
Commandments. The right to privacy is a right to commit adultery. The right to
own property is a right to steal (to exploit others). The right to freedom of
expression is a right to bear false witness. The right to bear arms is a right
to kill. The right to freedom of religious belief is a right to worship false
gods. Of course, human rights do not directly condone the violation of the
Commandments, but they keep open a marginal grey zone that is supposed to be
out of the reach of (religious or secular) power. In this shady zone I can
violate the commandments, and if the power probes into it, catching me with my
pants down, I can cry: ‘Assault on my basic human rights!’ The point is that it
is structurally impossible, for the power, to draw a clear line of separation
and prevent only the misuse of a human right without infringing on its proper
use, i.e. the use that does not violate the Commandments.
[…]
The problem with Charlie
Hebdo’s humour is not that it went too far in its irreverence, but that it was
a harmless excess perfectly fitting the hegemonic cynical functioning of
ideology in our societies. It posed no threat whatsoever to those in power; it
merely made their exercise of power more tolerable.
In Western liberal-secular
societies, state power protects public freedoms but intervenes in private space
– when there is a suspicion of child abuse, for example. But as Talal Asad
writes in Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech (2009),
‘intrusions into domestic space, the breaching of “private” domains, is
disallowed in Islamic law, although conformity in “public” behaviour may be
much stricter … for the community, what matters is the Muslim subject’s social
practice – including verbal publication – not her internal thoughts, whatever
they may be.’ The Quran says: ‘Let him who wills have faith, and him who wills
reject it.’ But, in Asad’s words, this ‘right to think whatever one wishes does
not … include the right to express one’s religious or moral beliefs publicly
with the intention of converting people to a false commitment’. This is why,
for Muslims, ‘it is impossible to remain silent when confronted with blasphemy
… blasphemy is neither “freedom of speech” nor the challenge of a new truth but
something that seeks to disrupt a living relationship.’ From the Western
liberal standpoint, there is a problem with both terms of this neither/nor:
what if freedom of speech should include acts that may disrupt a living
relationship? And what if a ‘new truth’ has the same disruptive effect? What if
a new ethical awareness makes a living relationship appear unjust?
If, for Muslims, it is not
only ‘impossible to remain silent when confronted with blasphemy’ but also
impossible to remain inactive – and the pressure to do something may include
violent and murderous acts – then the first thing to do is to locate this
attitude in its contemporary context. The same holds for the Christian
anti-abortion movement, who also find it ‘impossible to remain silent’ in the
face of the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foetuses every year, a slaughter
they compare to the Holocaust. It is here that true tolerance begins: the
tolerance of what we experience as impossible-to-bear
(l’impossible-a-supporter’, as Lacan put it), and at this level the liberal
left comes close to religious fundamentalism with its own list of things it’s
‘impossible to remain silent when confronted with’: sexism, racism and other
forms of intolerance. What would happen if a magazine openly made fun of the
Holocaust? There is a contradiction in the left-liberal stance: the libertarian
position of universal irony and mockery, making fun of all authorities,
spiritual and political (the position embodied in Charlie Hebdo), tends to
slip into its opposite, a heightened sensitivity to the other’s pain and
humiliation.
It is because of this
contradiction that most left-wing reactions to the Paris killings followed a
predictable, deplorable pattern: they correctly suspected that something is
deeply wrong in the spectacle of liberal consensus and solidarity with the
victims, but took a wrong turn when they were able to condemn the killings only
after long and boring qualifications. The fear that, by clearly condemning the
killing, we will somehow be guilty of Islamophobia, is politically and
ethically wrong. There is nothing Islamophobic in condemning the Paris
killings, in the same way that there is nothing anti-Semitic in condemning
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians.
As for the notion that we
should contextualise and ‘understand’ the Paris killings, it is also totally
misleading. In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley allows the monster to speak for
himself. Her choice expresses the liberal attitude to freedom of speech at its
most radical: everyone’s point of view should be heard. In Frankenstein,
the monster is fully subjectivised: the monstrous murderer reveals himself to
be a deeply hurt and desperate individual, yearning for company and love. There
is, however, a clear limit to this procedure: the more I know about and
‘understand’ Hitler, the more unforgiveable he seems.
What this also means is that,
when approaching the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, we should stick to ruthless
and cold standards: we should unconditionally resist the temptation to
‘understand’ Arabic anti-Semitism (where we really encounter it) as a ‘natural’
reaction to the sad plight of the Palestinians, or to ‘understand’ Israeli measures
as a ‘natural’ reaction to the memory of the Holocaust. There should be no
‘understanding’ for the fact that in many Arab countries Hitler is still
considered a hero, and children at primary school are taught anti-Semitic
myths, such as that Jews use the blood of children for sacrificial purposes. To
claim that this anti-Semitism articulates, in a displaced mode, resistance
against capitalism in no way justifies it (the same goes for Nazi
anti-Semitism: it too drew its energy from anti-capitalist resistance).
Displacement is not here a secondary operation, but the fundamental gesture of
ideological mystification. What this claim does involve is the idea that, in
the long term, the only way to fight anti-Semitism is not to preach liberal
tolerance, but to articulate the underlying anti-capitalist motive in a direct,
non-displaced way.
The present actions of the
Israel Defence Forces in the West Bank should not be judged against the
background of the Holocaust; the desecration of synagogues in France and elsewhere
in Europe should not be judged as an inappropriate but understandable reaction
to what Israel is doing in the West Bank. When any public protest against
Israel is flatly denounced as an expression of anti-Semitism – that is to say,
when the shadow of the Holocaust is permanently evoked in order to neutralise
any criticism of Israeli military and political operations – it is not enough
to insist on the difference between anti-Semitism and criticism of particular
policies of the state of Israel; one should go a step further and say that it
is the state of Israel which, in this case, is desecrating the memory of
Holocaust victims, instrumentalising them as a way to legitimise political
measures in the present. What this means is that one should flatly reject the
notion of any logical or political link between the Holocaust and current
Israeli-Palestinian tensions. They are two thoroughly different phenomena: one
of them is part of the European history of rightist resistance to the dynamics
of modernisation; the other is one of the last chapters in the history of
colonisation.
The growth of anti-Semitism in
Europe is undeniable. When, for example, the aggressive Muslim minority in
Malmö harasses Jews so they are afraid to walk the streets in traditional dress,
it should be clearly and unambiguously condemned. The struggle against
anti-Semitism and the struggle against Islamophobia should be viewed as two
aspects of the same struggle.
In a memorable passage in Still
Alive: A Holocaust Girlhood Remembered (2001), Ruth Klüger describes a
conversation with ‘some advanced PhD candidates’ in Germany:
One reports how in Jerusalem
he made the acquaintance of an old Hungarian Jew who was a survivor of
Auschwitz, and yet this man cursed the Arabs and held them all in contempt. How
can someone who comes from Auschwitz talk like that? the German asks. I get
into the act and argue, perhaps more hotly than need be. What did he expect?
Auschwitz was no instructional institution … You learned nothing there, and
least of all humanity and tolerance. Absolutely nothing good came out of the
concentration camps, I hear myself saying, with my voice rising, and he expects
catharsis, purgation, the sort of thing you go to the theatre for? They were
the most useless, pointless establishments imaginable.
We have to abandon the idea
that there is something emancipatory in extreme experiences, that they enable
us to open our eyes to the ultimate truth of a situation. This, perhaps, is the
most depressive lesson of terror.
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