By Slavoj Žižek
A couple months ago, Donald
Trump was unflatteringly compared to a man who noisily defecates in the corner
of a room in which a respectful drinking party is going on. Are other
Republican candidates for the U.S. presidency substantially any better?
We probably all remember the
scene from Luis Buñuel’s The Phantom of Liberty in which
relations between eating and excreting are inverted: People sit at their
toilets around the table, pleasantly talking, and when they want to eat, they
silently ask the housekeeper, "Where is that place, you know?," and
sneak away to a small room in the back.
So are the Republican
candidates’ debates—to prolong the metaphor—not like this reunion in Buñuel’s
film? And does the same not hold for many leading politicians around the globe?
Was Erdoğan not defecating in public when, in a recent paranoiac outburst, he
dismissed critics of his policy toward the Kurds as traitors and foreign
agents? Was Putin not defecating in public when (in a well-calculated public
vulgarity aimed at boosting his popularity at home) he threatened a critic of
his Chechen politics with medical castration? Was Sarkozy not defecating in
public when, back in 2008, he snapped at a farmer who refused to shake his hand,
"Casse-toi, alors pauvre con!" (a very soft translation would be
"Get lost then, you bloody idiot!")?
And the list goes on. In a
speech to the World Zionist Congress in Jerusalem on October 21, 2015, Prime
Minister Benjamin Netanyahu suggested that Hitler had only wanted to expel Jews
from Germany, not to exterminate them, and that, rather, it was Haj Amin
al-Husseini, the Palestinian grand mufti of Jerusalem, who somehow persuaded
Hitler to kill the Jews instead.
Netanyahu purported to
describe an exchange between the two men in November 1941 in which
al-Husseini told Hitler that if he expelled the Jews from Europe, “they’ll all
come here [to Palestine].” According to Netanyahu, Hitler then asked, “What
should I do with them?,” to which the mufti replied, “Burn them.”
Many of Israel’s top Holocaust researchers immediately problematized these
statements, pointing out that the exchange between al-Husseini and Hitler
cannot be verified, and that the mass killings of European Jews by SS mobile
killing units was already well underway by the point the two men met face to
face.
We should be under no
illusions about the meaning of statements like those of Netanyahu: They are a
clear sign of the regression of our public sphere. Accusations and ideas that
were till now confined to the obscure underworld of racist obscenity are now
gaining a foothold in official discourse.
The problem here is what Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel called Sittlichkeit: mores, the thick background of
(unwritten) rules of social life, the thick and impenetrable ethical substance
that tells us what we can and cannot do. These rules are disintegrating
today: What was a couple of decades ago simply unsayable in a public debate can
now be pronounced with impunity.
It may appear that this
disintegration is counteracted by the growth of political correctness, which
prescribes exactly what cannot be said; however, a closer look immediately
makes it clear how the "politically correct" regulation participates
in the same process of the disintegration of the ethical substance. To prove
this point, it suffices to recall the deadlock of political correctness: The
need for PC rules arises when unwritten mores are no longer able to regulate
effectively everyday interactions—instead of spontaneous customs followed in a
nonreflexive way, we get explicit rules, such as when “torture” becomes an
“enhanced interrogation technique.”
The crucial point is that
torture—brutal violence practiced by the state—was made publicly acceptable at
the very moment when public language was rendered politically correct in order
to protect victims from symbolic violence. These two phenomena are two sides of
the same coin.
We can discern a similar
phenomenon in other domains of public life. When it was announced that, from
July till September 2015, “Jade Helm 15”—a large U.S. military exercise—would
take place in the Southwest, the news immediately gave rise to a suspicion that
the exercises were part of a federal plot to place Texas under martial law in a
direct violation of the Constitution. We find all the usual suspects
participating in this conspiracy paranoia, up to Chuck Norris; the craziest
among them is the website All News Pipeline, which linked these exercises to
the closure of several Wal-Mart megastores in Texas: “Will these massive stores
soon be used as 'food distribution centers' and to house the headquarters of
invading troops from China, here to disarm Americans one by one as promised by
Michelle Obama to the Chinese prior to Obama leaving the White House?”
What makes the affair ominous
is the ambiguous reaction of the leading Texas Republicans: Governor Greg
Abbott ordered the State Guard to monitor the exercise, while Ted Cruz demanded
details from the Pentagon.
Trump is the purest expression
of this tendency toward debasement of our public life. What does he do in
order to “steal the show” at public debates and in interviews? He offers a
mixture of “politically incorrect” vulgarities: racist stabs (against Mexican
immigrants), suspicions on Obama’s birthplace and university diploma, bad-taste
attacks on women and offenses to war heroes like John McCain.
Such tasteless quips are meant
to indicate that Trump doesn’t care about false manners and “says openly what
he (and many ordinary people) think.” In short, he makes it clear that, in
spite of his billions, he is an ordinary vulgar guy like all of us common
people.
However, these vulgarities
should not deceive us: Whatever Trump is, he is not a dangerous outsider. If
anything, his program is even relatively moderate (he acknowledges many
Democratic achievements, and his stance toward gay marriage is
ambiguous). The function of his “refreshing” provocations and vulgar outbursts
is precisely to mask the ordinariness of his program.
His true secret is that if, by
a miracle, he wins, nothing will change—in contrast to Bernie Sanders, the
leftist Democrat whose key advantage over the academic politically correct
liberal left is that he understands and respects the problems and fears of
ordinary workers and farmers. The really interesting electoral duel would have
been the one between Trump as the Republican candidate and Sanders as the
Democratic candidate.
But why talk about politeness
and public manners today when we are facing what appears to be much more
pressing “real” problems? Because manners do matter—in tense situations, they
are a matter of life and death, a thin line that separates barbarism from
civilization. There is one surprising fact about the latest outbursts of public
vulgarities that deserves to be noted. Back in the 1960s, occasional
vulgarities were associated with the political left: Student revolutionaries
often used common language to emphasize their contrast to official politics
with its polished jargon. Today, vulgar language is an almost exclusive prerogative
of the radical right, so that the left finds itself in a surprising position as
the defender of decency and public manners.
That’s why the moderate
“rational” Republican right is in a panic: After the decline of the fortunes of
Jeb Bush, it is desperately looking for a new face, toying even with the idea
of mobilizing Bloomberg.
But the true problem resides
in the weakness of the moderate “rational” position itself. The fact that the
majority cannot be convinced by the “rational” capitalist discourse and is much
more prone to endorse a populist anti-elitist stance is not to be discounted as
a case of lower-class primitivism: Populists correctly detect the irrationality
of this rational approach; their rage directed at faceless institutions
that regulate their lives in a nontransparent way is fully justified.
No comments:
Post a Comment