By Slavoj
Žižek
Lately I am getting used to
attacks that not only render my position in a totally wrong way but also
practice slander pure and simple, so that, at this level, any minimally
rational debate becomes meaningless. Among many examples, suffice it to mention
Hamid Dabashi, who begins his book Can Non-Europeans Think? with:
“‘Fuck you, Walter Mignolo!’
With those grandiloquent words and the gesture they must have occasioned and
accompanied, the distinguished and renowned European philosopher Slavoj Žižek
begins his response to a piece that Walter Mignolo wrote…”[1]
No wonder that no reference is
given, since I never uttered the phrase “Fuck you, Walter Mignolo!”. In a
public talk in which I responded to Mignolo’s attack on me, I did use the words
“fuck you,” but they did not refer to Mignolo: his name was not mentioned in
conjunction with them; they were a general exclamation addressed (if at anyone)
at my public. From here, it is just one step to elevating my exclamation into
“Slavoj Žižek’s famous ‘Fuck you, Walter Mignolo’,” as Dan Glazerbrook did.[2]
Back to Dabashi’s book. On
page 8, the comedy reaches its peak: a long quoted passage is attributed to me
(it follows “Žižek claims:”), and after the quote the text goes on: “This is
all fine and dandy – for Žižek. He can make any claim he wishes. All power to
him. But the point is…” There is just one tiny problem: the passage quoted and
attributed to me and then mocked as an example of my European racism and of my
misreading of Fanon is from Fanon himself (again, no reference is given in
Dabashi’s book – the quoted passage is from Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White
Masks, New York: Grove Press 2008, p. 201-206.)
So, I thought we had reached
the lowest point, although in a more recent contribution to Al-Jazeera, Dabashi
puts me into the same line with Breivik, the Norwegian racist mass murderer.[3] But the reactions to my “The Sexual Is
Political” demonstrate that one can go even lower. Browsing through numerous
tweets and email blogs, I searched in vain for a minimum of argumentation. The
attackers mostly just make fun of a position, which is simply not mine.
Here is a relatively decent
example:
“I know that this is difficult
to understand, mostly because it draws from his big Daddy the contemptible
Lacan. Really though, all Zizek is saying is that opposition to transgender
people represents an anxiety which in his theory occurs because of sexual
difference; i.e. transgender people disrupt the binaries we construct in order
to place ourselves into discrete genders. What Zizek tries to say, he’s not a
very good writer in English at least, is that the antagonism will exist even if
we completely accept LGBT people as members of our community because they
always exist as a threat to the binary. I don’t think that Zizek ultimately
thinks social antagonism against LGBT people is something we can move beyond as
long as the binary system exist. This is why he cites the story of Şalcı Bacı,
to Zizek she represented an existential threat to people’s identities. In a
sense you can say it is a right-wing concept, because it’s essentially saying
that transgender people are indeed the threat to society they’re portrayed to
be. The question would be, does Zizek approve of threats to society as the
revolutionary he supposes himself to be?”[4]
I have to admit that I
couldn’t believe my eyes when I was reading these lines. Is it really so
difficult to follow the thread of my argumentation? First claim: “all Zizek is
saying is that opposition to transgender people represents an anxiety which in
his theory occurs because of sexual difference; i.e. transgender people disrupt
the binaries we construct in order to place ourselves into discrete genders…”
No, I’m not saying that at all: I don’t talk about the anxiety experienced by
heterosexuals when they confront transgender people. My starting point is the
anxiety transgender people themselves experience when they confront a forced
choice where they don’t recognize themselves in any of its exclusive terms
(“man,” “woman”). And then I generalize this anxiety as a feature of every
sexual identification. It is not transgender people who disrupt the
heterosexual gender binaries; these binaries are always-already disrupted by
the antagonistic nature of sexual difference itself. This is the basic
distinction on which I repeatedly insist and which is ignored by my critics: in
the human-symbolic universe, sexual difference/antagonism is not he same as the
difference of gender roles. Transgender people are not traumatic for
heterosexuals because they pose a threat to the established binary of gender
roles but because they bring out the antagonistic tension which is constitutive
of sexuality. Şalcı Bacı is not a threat to sexual difference; rather, she is
this difference as irreducible to the opposition gender identities.
In short, transgender people
are not simply marginals who disturb the hegemonic heterosexual gender norm;
their message is universal, it concerns us all, they bring out the anxiety that
underlies every sexual identification, its constructed/unstable character.
This, of course, does not entail a cheap generalization which would cut the
edge of the suffering of transgender people (“we all have anxieties and suffer
in some way”); it is in transgender people that anxiety and antagonism, which
otherwise remain mostly latent, break open. So, in the same way in which, for
Marx, if one wants to understand the “normal” functioning of capitalism, one
should take as a starting point economic crises, if one wants to analyze
“normal” heterosexuality, one should begin with the anxieties that explode in
transgender people.
This is why it makes no sense
to talk about “social antagonism against LGBT people” (incidentally, a
symptomatically clumsy and weird expression: “antagonism against”?). Antagonism
(or, as Lacan put it, the fact that “there is no sexual relationship”) is at
work in the very core of normative heterosexuality, and it is what the violent
imposition of gender norms endeavors to contain and obfuscate. It is here that
my parallel with the anti-Semitic figure of the Jew enters. The (anti-Semitic
figure of the) “Jew” as the threat to the organic order of a society, as the
element which brings into it from the outside corruption and decay, is a fetish
whose function is to mask the fact that antagonism does not come from the
outside but is immanent to every class society. Anti-Semitism “reifies”
(embodies in a particular group of people) the inherent social antagonism: it
treats “Jews” as the Thing which, from outside, intrudes into the social body
and disturbs its balance. What happens in the passage from the position of
class struggle to Fascist anti-Semitism is not just the replacement of one
figure of the enemy (bourgeoisie, the ruling class) with another (Jews); the
logic of the struggle is totally different. In class struggle, the classes
themselves are caught in the antagonism inherent to social structure, while the
Jew is a foreign intruder who causes social antagonism, so that all we need in
order to restore social harmony, according to Fascist anti-Semitism, is to
annihilate Jews. This is the old standard Marxist thesis: when my critic writes
about my line of thought “In a sense you can say it is a right-wing concept,” I
would really like to know what precise sense he has in mind.
So, what is the anxiety I
refer to about? For a brief moment, let me ignore my primitive critics and
engage in a brief theoretical exercise. The underlying structure is here that
of a failed interpellation (where “interpellation” refers to the basic
ideological mechanism described by Louis Althusser). In the case of
interpellation, Althusser’s own example contains more than his own theorization
gets out of it. Althusser evokes an individual who, while carelessly walking
down the street, is suddenly addressed by a policeman: “Hey, you there!” By
answering the call—that is, by stopping and turning round towards the
policeman—the individual recognizes-constitutes himself as the subject of
Power, of the big Other-Subject. Ideology
“ ‘transforms’ the individuals
into subjects (it transforms them all) by that very precise operation which I
have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the
lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing: ‘Hey, you
there!’.
Assuming that the theoretical
scene I have imagined takes place in the street, the hailed individual will
turn round. By this mere one-hundred-and-eighty-degree physical conversion, he
becomes a subject. Why? Because he has recognized that the hail was ‘really’
addressed to him, and that ‘it was really him who was hailed’ (and not someone
else). Experience shows that the practical transmission of hailings is such
that they hardly ever miss their man: verbal call or whistle, the one hailed
always recognizes that it is really him who is being hailed. And yet it is a
strange phenomenon, and one which cannot be explained solely by ‘guilt
feelings,’ despite the large numbers who ‘have something on their consciences.’
Naturally for the convenience
and clarity of my little theoretical theatre I have had to present things in
the form of a sequence, with a before and an after, and thus in the form of a
temporal succession. There are individuals walking along. Somewhere (usually
behind them) the hail rings out: ‘Hey, you there!’ One individual (nine times
out of ten it is the right one) turns round, believing/suspecting/knowing that
it is for him, i.e. recognizing that ‘it really is he’ who is meant by the
hailing. But in reality these things happen without any succession. The
existence of ideology and the hailing or interpellation of individuals as
subjects are one and the same thing.”[5]
The first thing that strikes
the eye in this passage is Althusser’s implicit reference to Lacan’s thesis on
a letter that “always arrives at its destination”: the interpellative letter
cannot miss its addressee since, on account of its “timeless” character, it is
only the addressee’s recognition/acceptance that constitutes it as a letter.
The crucial feature of the quoted passage, however, is the double denial at
work in it: the denial of the explanation of interpellative recognition by
means of a “guilt feeling,” as well as the denial of the temporality of the
process of interpellation (strictly speaking, individuals do not “become”
subjects, they “always-already” are subjects).[6] This double denial is to be read as a
Freudian denial: what the “timeless” character of interpellation renders
invisible is a kind of atemporal sequentiality that is far more complex than
the “theoretical theatre” staged by Althusser on behalf of a suspicious alibi
of “convenience and clarity.” This “repressed” sequence concerns a “guilt
feeling” of a purely formal, “non-pathological” (in the Kantian sense) nature,
a guilt which, for that very reason, weighs most heavily upon those individuals
who “have nothing on their consciences.” To ask differently: In what, precisely,
does the individual’s first reaction to the policeman’s “Hey, you there!”
consist? In an inconsistent mixture of two elements: (1) why me? what does the
policeman want from me? I’m innocent, I was just minding my own business and
strolling around…; however, this perplexed protestation of innocence is always
accompanied by (2) an indeterminate Kafkaesque feeling of “abstract” guilt, a
feeling that, in the eyes of Power, I am a priori terribly guilty of something,
though it is not possible for me to know what precisely I am guilty of. And for
that reason—since I don’t know what I am guilty of—I am even more guilty; or,
more pointedly, it is in this very ignorance of mine that my true guilt
consists.[7]
What we thus have here is the
entire Lacanian structure of the subject split between innocence and abstract,
indeterminate guilt, confronted with a non-transparent call emanating from the
Other (“Hey, you there!”), a call where it is not clear to the subject what the
Other actually wants from him (“Che vuoi?”). In short, what we encounter here
is interpellation prior to identification. Prior to the recognition in the call
of the Other by means of which the individual constitutes himself as
“always-already”-subject, we are obliged to acknowledge this “timeless” instant
of the impasse, when innocence coincides with indeterminate guilt: the
ideological identification by means of which I assume a symbolic mandate and
recognize myself as the subject of Power takes place only as an answer to this
impasse. So what remains “unthought” in Althusser’s theory of interpellation is
the fact that prior to ideological recognition we have an intermediate moment
of obscene, impenetrable interpellation without identification, a kind of
vanishing mediator that has to become invisible if the subject is to achieve
symbolic identity, i.e., to accomplish the gesture of subjectivization. In
short, the “unthought” of Althusser is that there is already an uncanny subject
preceding the gesture of subjectivization.
And the same goes in a much
stronger way for sexual interpellation. My identification as “man” or “woman”
is always a secondary reaction to the “castrative” anxiety of what I am.
One—traditional—way to avoid this anxiety is to impose a heterosexual norm,
which specifies the role of each gender, and the other is to advocate the
overcoming of sexuality as such (the postgender position). As for the
relationship between transgender and postgender, my point is simply that the
universal fluidification of sexual identities unavoidably reaches its apogee in
the cancellation of sex as such. In the same way as, for Marx, the only way to
be a royalist in general is to be a republican, the only way to be sexualized in
general is to be asexual. This ambiguity characterizes the conjunction of
sexuality and freedom throughout the twentieth century: the more radical
attempts to liberate sexuality get, the more they approximate their
self-overcoming and turn into attempts to enact a liberation from sexuality,
or, as Aaron Schuster put it (in personal communication):
If part of the twentieth
century’s revolutionary program to create a radically new social relation and a
New Man was the liberation of sexuality, this aspiration was marked by a
fundamental ambiguity: Is it sexuality that is to be liberated, delivered from
moral prejudices and legal prohibitions, so that the drives are allowed a more
open and fluid expression, or is humanity to be liberated from sexuality, finally
freed from its obscure dependencies and tyrannical constraints? Will the
revolution bring an efflorescence of libidinal energy or, seeing it as a
dangerous distraction to the arduous task of building a new world, demand its
suppression? In a word, is sexuality the object of or the obstacle to
emancipation?
The oscillation between these
two extremes is clearly discernible already in the first decade after the
October Revolution, when feminist calls for the liberation of sexuality were
soon supplemented by the gnostic-cosmological calls for a New Man who would
leave behind sexuality itself as the ultimate bourgeois trap. Today, with the
rise of the “Internet of Things” and biogenetics, this perspective got a new
boost. And, as a part of this new perspective, I predict that new demands for
overcoming old limitations will emerge. Among them there will be demands for
legalizing multiple marriages (which already existed, not only as polygamy but
also as polyandry, especially in the Himalaya region), as well as demands for
some kind of legalization of intense emotional ties with animals. I am not
talking about sex with animals (although I remember from my youth, from the
time of the late 1960s, the widespread tendency to practice sex with animals),
even less about “bestiality,” but about a tendency to recognize some animals
(say, a faithful dog) as legitimate partners. It’s not about “bestiality,” but
about the “culturalization of animals, their elevation to a legal partner.
To recapitulate, not only do I
fully support the struggle of transgender people against their legal
segregation, but I am also deeply affected by their reports of their suffering,
and I see them not as a marginal group, which should be “tolerated” but as a
group whose message is radically universal: it concerns us all; it tells the
truth about all of us as sexual beings. I differ from the predominant opinion
in two interconnected points that concern theory: (1) I see the anxiety apropos
sexual identities as a universal feature of human sexuality, not just as a
specific effect of sexual exclusions and segregations, which is why one should
not expect it to disappear with the progress of sexual desegregation; (2) I
draw a strict distinction between sexual difference (as the antagonism
constitutive of human sexuality) and the binary (or plurality) of genders. Both
these points are, of course, totally misread or ignored by my critics.
Concerning my “class
reductionism,” anyone minimally acquainted with my work knows that one of the
problems I am dealing with is precisely how to bring the struggle of Third
World people against neo-colonial oppression and the struggle for sexual
emancipation (women and gay rights) in the developed West together. Some
Leftists claim that we should focus on the universal anti-capitalist struggle,
allowing each ethnic or religious group to retain its particular culture or
“way of life.” I see a problem in this easy solution: one cannot distinguish in
a direct way the universal dimension of the emancipatory project and the identity
of a particular way of life, so that while we are all together engaged in a
universal struggle, we simultaneously fully respect the right of each group to
its particular way of life. One should never forget that, to a subject who
lives a particular way of life, all universals appear “colored” by this way of
life. Each identity (way of life) comprises also a specific way to relate to
other ways of life. So, when we posit as a guideline that each group should be
left to enact its particular identity, to practice its own way of life, the
problem immediately arises: where do customs that form my identity stop and
where does injustice begin? Are woman’s rights just our custom, or is the
struggle for women’s rights also universal (and part of the emancipatory
struggle, as it was in the entire Socialist tradition from Engels to Mao)? Is
homophobia just a thing of a particular culture to be tolerated as a component
of its identity? Should arranged marriages (which form the very core of the
kinship structures of some societies) also be accepted as part of a particular
identity? Etc.
This “mediation” of the
universal with the particular (way of life) holds for all cultures, ours
(Western) included, of course. The “universal” principles advocated by the West
are also colored by the Western way of life, plus we should never forget the
rise of religious-nationalist fundamentalism in countries like Poland, Hungary
and Croatia. In the last decades, Poland was one of the few European definitive
success stories. After the fall of Socialism, the per capita gross domestic
product more than doubled, and, for the last couple of years, the moderate
liberal-centrist government of Donald Tusk ruled. And then, almost out of
nowhere, without any great corruption scandals as in Hungary, the extreme Right
took over, and there is now a widespread movement to prohibit abortions even in
the limit-cases of the mortal danger to the mother’s health, rape, and
deformities of the foetus. A whole series of problems emerge here: what if
equality among humans is in tension with equality among cultures (insofar as
some cultures neglect equality)?
The task is thus to bring the
struggle into every particular way of life. Each particular “way of life” is
antagonistic, full of inner tensions and inconsistencies, and the only way to
proceed is to work for an alliance of struggles in different cultures. From
here I would like to return to the project of the alliance between progressive
middle classes and nomad proletarians: In terms of a concrete problematic, this
means that the politico-economic struggle against global capitalism and the
struggle for women’s rights, etc. have to be conceived as two moments of the
same emancipatory struggle for equality.
These two aspects—the
imposition of Western values such as universal human rights, and respect for
different cultures independently of the horrors that can be part of these
cultures—are the two sides of the same ideological mystification. A lot has
been written about how the universality of universal human rights is twisted,
how they secretly give preference to Western cultural values and norms (the
priority of the individual over his/her community, and so on). But we should
add to this insight that the multiculturalist, anti-colonialist defence of the
multiplicity of ways of life is also false: it covers up the antagonisms within
each of these particular ways of life, justifying acts of brutality, sexism and
racism as expressions of a particular culture that we have no right to judge by
foreign Western values.
This aspect should in no way
be dismissed as marginal. From Boko Haram and Mugabe to Putin, anti-colonialist
critique of the West more and more appears as the rejection of Western “sexual”
confusion and as the demand for returning to traditional sexual hierarchy. It
is, of course, true that the immediate export of Western feminism and
individual human rights can serve as a tool of ideological and economic
neo-colonialism. (We all remember how some American feminists supported the US
intervention in Iraq as a way to liberate women there, while the result is
exactly the opposite). But one should nonetheless absolutely reject to draw
from this the conclusion that Western Leftists should make here a “strategic
compromise,” silently tolerating “customs” of humiliating women and gays on
behalf of the “greater” anti-imperialist struggle.
The communist struggle for
universal emancipation means a struggle which cuts into each particular
identity, dividing it from within. When there is racism, when there is domination
over women, it is always an integral part of a particular “way of life,” a
barbarian integral underside of a particular culture. In the “developed”
Western world, Communist struggle means a brutal and principled struggle
against all ideological formations which, even if they present themselves as
“progressive,” serve as an obstacle to universal emancipation (liberal
feminism, etc.). It means not only attacking our own racist and religious
fundamentalisms, but also demonstrating how they arouse out of the
inconsistencies of the predominant liberalism. And in Muslim countries,
Communist strategy should in no way be to endorse their traditional “way of
life” which includes honor killings, etc.; it should not only collaborate with
the forces in these countries which fight traditional patriarchy, but it should
also make a crucial step forward and demonstrate how, far from serving as a
point of resistance against global capitalism, such traditional ideology is a
direct tool of imperialist neocolonialism.
*
[2]Quoted
from http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/16/with-enemies-like-this-imperialism-doesnt-need-friends/
.
[3] See http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/06/europe-creation-world-160613063926420.html.
[4]
Quoted from: https://m.reddit.com/r/GamerGhazi/comments/4vxmfk/philosopher_slavoj_zizek_knows_next_to_nothing/.
[5] Louis
Althusser, »Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,« in Essays in
Ideology, London: Verso 1984, p. 163.
[6] I
resume here a more detailed critical reading of Althusser’s notion of ideology
from Chapter 3 of Slavoj žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment, London: Verso
Books, 2006.
[7] Here
I follow the perspicacious observations of Henry Krips. See his
excellent unpublished manuscript »The Subject of Althusser and Lacan.«
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