Singular Universality as "Post-postcolonialism"

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 116-118:

One should not dismiss the talk of the "unconscious tool of history" as the expression of a naive teleology, of trust in the Cunning of Reason which makes even the vilest crimes instruments of progress--the point is simply that the British colonialization of India created the conditions for the double liberation of India: from the constraints of its own tradition as well as from colonialization itself. At a reception for Margaret Thatcher in 1985, the Chinese president applied to China Marx's statement about the role of British colonialization in India: "The British occupation has awakened China from its age-old sleep." (Quoted from Bruckner, La Tyrannie de la penitence, p. 153)

Far from signalling continuous self-abasement in front of the ex-colonial powers, statements like these express true "post-postcolonial," namely, a mature independence: to admit the positive effect of colonization, one has to be really free and be able to leave behind its stigma. (And symmetrically, rejecting self-blame, while fully and--why not--proudly claiming one's emancipatory heritage, is a sine qua non for the renewal of the Left.)

Someone who cannot be accused of softness towards the colonizers is Frantz Fanon: his thoughts on the emancipatory power of violence are an embarrassment for many politically correct postcolonial theorists. However, as a perspicuous thinker trained in psychoanalysis, he also, back in 1952, provided the most poignant expression of the refusal to capitalize on the guilt of the colonizers:

"I am a man, and what I have to recapture is the whole past of the world. I am not responsible solely for the slave revolt in Santo Domingo. Every time a man has contributed to the victory of the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to subjugate his fellows, I have felt solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past.... My black skin is not a repository for specific values....Haven't I got better things to do on this earth than avenge the Blacks of the seventeenth century? ... I as a man of color do not have the right to hope that in the white man there will be a crystallization of guilt toward the past of my race. I as a man of color do not have the right to seek ways of stamping down the pride of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden.... I do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world.... Am I going to ask today's white men to answer for the slave traders of the seventeenth century? Am I going to try by every means available to cause guilt to burgeon in their souls? ... I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors.... it would be of enormous interest to discover a black literature or architecture from the third century before Christ. We would be overjoyed to learn of the existence of a correspondence between some black philosopher and Plato. But we can absolutely not see how this fact would change the lives of eight-year-old kids working in the cane fields of Martinique or Guadeloupe.... I find myself in a world and I recognize that I have one right alone: That of demanding human behavior from the other."

(Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove Press 2008, pp. 201-6)

Singular Universality (contra Rorty et al.)

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 104-106:

This brings us to the next elementary definition of communism: in contrast to socialism, communism refers to singular universality, to the direct link between the singular and the universal, bypassing particular determinations. When Paul says that, from a Christian standpoint, "there are no men or women, no Jews or Greeks," he thereby claims that ethnic roots, national identities, etc., are not a category of truth. To put it in precise Kantian terms: when we reflect upon our ethnic roots, we engage in a private use of reason, constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions; that is, we act as "immature" individuals, not as free humans who dwell in the dimension of the universality or reason. The opposition between Kant and Rorty with regard to this distinction of public and private is rarely noted, but is nonetheless crucial. Both sharply distinguish between the two domains, but in opposite ways. For Rorty, the great contemporary liberal par excellence, the private is the space of our idiosyncrasies where creativity and wild imagination rule and moral considerations are (almost) suspended; the public, on the contrary, is the space of social interaction where we are obliged to obey the rules in order not to hurt others. In Rorty's own terms, the private is the space of irony, while the public is the space of solidarity. For Kant, however, the public space of the "world-civil-society" exemplifies the paradox of universal singularity, of a singular subject who, in a kind of short-circuit, bypassing the mediation of the particular, directly participates in the Universal. This then is what Kant, in a famous passage from his essay "What is Enlightenment?" means by "public" as opposed to "private": "private" designates not one's individual as opposed to communal ties, but the very communal-institutional order of one's particular identification; while "public" refers to the transnational universality of the exercise of one's Reason:

"The public use of one's reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men. The private use of one's reason, on the other hand, may often be very narrowly restricted without particularly hindering the progress of enlightenment. By public use of reason I understand the use which a person makes of it as a scholar before the reading public. Private use I call that which one may make of it in a particular civil post or office which is entrusted to him." (quotation from Immanuel Kant's "What is Enlightenment")

The paradox of Kant's formula "Think freely, but obey!" (which, of course, poses a series of problems of its own, since it also relies on the distinction between the "performative" level of social authority and the level of free thinking where performativity is suspended) is thus that one participates in the universal dimension of the "public" sphere precisely as a singular individual extracted from, or even opposed to, one's substantial communal identification--one is truly universal only when radically singular, in the interstices of communal identities. It is Kant who should be read here as the critic of Rorty. In his vision of public space characterized by the unconstrained exercise of Reason, he invokes a dimension of emancipatory universality outside the confines of one's social identity, of one's position within the order of (social) being--precisely the dimension so crucially missing in Rorty.

This space of singular universality is what, within Christianity, appears as the "Holy Spirit"--the space of a collective of believers subtracted from the field of organic communities, or of particular life-worlds ("neither Greeks nor Jews"). Consequently, is Kant's "Think freely, but obey!" not a new version of Christ's "Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's; and unto God the things that are God's"? "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's": in other words, respect and obey the "private" particular life-world of your community; "and unto God the things that are God's": in other words, participate in the universal space of the community of believers. The Paulinian collective of believers is a proto-model of the Kantian "world-civil-society," and the domain of the state itself is thus in its own way "private": private in the precise Kantian sense of the "private use of Reason" in the State administrative and ideological apparatuses.

Dictatorship of the Proletariat

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 102:

Liberals who acknowledge the problems of those excluded from the socio-political process formulate their goal as being the inclusion of those whose voices are not heard: all positions should be listened to, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practises respected, and so on. The obsession of this democratic discourse is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, e tutti quanti. The formula of democracy is patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost here is the proletarian position, the position of universality embodied in the Excluded. This is why, upon a closer look, it becomes clear that what Hugo Chavez has begun doing in Venezuela differs markedly from the standard liberal form of inclusion: Chavez is not including the excluded in a pre-existing liberal-democratic framework; he is, on the contrary, taking the "excluded" dwellers of favelas as his base and then reorganizing political space and political forms of organization so that the latter will "fit" the excluded. Pedantic and abstract as it may appear, this difference--between "bourgeois democracy" and "dictatorship of the proletariat"--is crucial.

Badiou versus Foucault

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 101-102:

In this choice of "Badiou versus Foucault," one should nonetheless insist on a dimension ignored by the Foucauldian approach, a dimension on which Badiou's notion of invisibility focuses. That is to say, in the Foulcauldian notion of productive power, a power which works not in an exclusionary way, but in an enabling/regulatory way, there is no room for Badiou's notion of the point of inconsistency (or the "symptomal torsion") of a situation, that element of a situation for which there is no proper place (with)in the situation--not for accidental reasons but because its dislocation/exclusion is constitutive of the situation itself. Take the case of the proletariat: of course, the working class is "visible" in multiple ways within the capitalist world (as those who freely sell their labor-power on the market; as a potential rabble; as faithful and disciplined servants of capitalist managers, etc.). However, none of these modes of visibility covers up the symptomal role of the proletariat as the "part of no-part" of the capitalist universe. Badiou's "invisibility" is thus the obverse of visibility within the hegemonic ideological space, it is what has to remain invisible so that the visible may be visible. Or, to put it in another, more traditional way: what the Foucauldian approach cannot grasp is the notion of a two-faced symptomal element, whose one face is a marginal accident of a situation, and whose other face is (to stand for) the truth of this same situation. In the same way, the "excluded" are, of course, visible, in the precise sense that, paradoxically, their exclusion itself is the mode of their inclusion: their "proper place" in the social body is that of exclusion (from the public sphere).

This is why Lacan claimed that Marx had already invented the (Freudian) notion of a symptom: for both Marx and Freud, the way to the truth of a system (of society, of the psyche) leads through what necessarily appears as a "pathological" marginal and accidental distortion of this system: slips of tongue, dreams, symptoms, economic crises. The Freudian Unconscious is thus "invisible" in an exactly homologous way, which is why there is no place for it in Foucault's edifice. This is why Foucault's rejection of what he calls the Freudian "repression hypothesis"--his notion of regulatory power discourses which generate sexuality in the very act of describing and regulating it--misses the (Freudian) point. Freud and Lacan were well aware that there is no repression without the return of the repressed, they were well aware that the repressive discourse generates what it represses. However, what this discourse represses is not what it appears to repress, not what it takes itself to be the threatening X it seeks to control. The figures of "sexuality" it portrays as the threat to be controlled--such as the figure of the Woman, whose uncontrolled sexuality is a threat to the masculine order--are themselves fantasmatic mystifications. Rather, what this discourse "represses" is (among other things) its own contamination by what it tries to control--say, the way the sacrifice of sexuality sexualizes sacrifice itself, or the manner in which the effort to control sexuality sexualizes this controlling activity itself. Sexuality is thus, of course, not "invisible"--it is controlled and regulated. What is "invisible" is the sexualization of this very work of control: not the elusive object we try to control, but the mode of our own participation within it.

Four Antagonisms Limiting Global Capitalism

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 90-91:

The only true question today is: do we endorse the predominant naturalization of capitalism, or does today's global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its indefinite reproduction? There are four such antagonisms: the looming threat of an ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of the notion of private property in relation to so-called "intellectual property"; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (especially in biogenetics); and, last but not least, the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums. There is a qualitative difference between this last feature--the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included--and the other three, which designate different aspects of what Hardt and Negri call the "commons," the shared substance of our social being, the privatization of which involves violent acts which should, where necessary, be resisted with violent means:

--the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of "cognitive" capital, primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity, the postal system, and so on;

--the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation (from oil to rain forests and the natural habitat itself);

--the commons of internal nature (the biogenetic inheritance of humanity); with new biogenetic technology, the creation of a New Man in the literal sense of changing human nature becomes a realistic prospect.

What the struggles in all these domains share is an awareness of the potential for destruction, up to and including the self-annihilation of humanity itself, should the capitalist logic of enclosing the commons be allowed a fee run.

Objet a, Obsessive, and Hysteric

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 63-4:

When Lacan defines the object of desire as originally lost, his point is not simply that we never know what we desire and are condemned to an eternal search for the "true" object, which is the void of desire as such, while all positive objects are merely its metonymic stand-ins. His point is a much more radical one: the lost object is ultimately the subject itself, the subject as an object; which means that the question of desire, its original enigma, is not primarily "What do I want?" but "What do others want from me? What object--objet a--do they see in me?" Which is why, apropos the hysterical question "Why am I that name?" (i.e., where does my symbolic identity originate, what justifies it?), Lacan points out that the subject as such is hysterical. He defines the subject tautologically as "that which is not an object," the point being that the impossibility of identifying oneself as an object (that is, of knowing what I am libidinally for others) is constitutive of the subject. In this way, Lacan generates the entire diversity of the answers to the hysterical question: the hysteric and the obsessive enact two modalities of the question [....]

From First as Tragedy, then as Farce

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), p. 46:

"If there is a clinical lesson to be learned about parenthood, it is that there can be no clean, non-toxic parent: some libidinal dirt will always stain the ideal parental figure. And one should push this generalization to the end: what is toxic is ultimately the Neighbor as such, the abyss of desire and its obscene enjoyment. The ultimate aim of all rules governing interpersonal relations, then, is to quarantine or neutralize this toxic dimension, to reduce the Neighbor to a fellow man. It is thus not enough to search for contingent toxic components in (another) subject, for the subject as such is toxic in its very form, in its abyss of Otherness--what makes it toxic is the objet petit a on which the subject's consistency hinges."