Thursday, August 9, 2012
On Pussy Riot
“The True Blasphemy”: Slavoj Žižek on Pussy Riot
Pussy Riot members accused of blasphemy and hatred of religion?
The answer is easy: the true blasphemy is the state accusation itself,
formulating as a crime of religious hatred something which was clearly a
political act of protest against the ruling clique. Recall Brecht’s old quip
from his Beggars’ Opera: “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the
founding of a new bank?” In 2008, Wall Street gave us the new version: what is
the stealing of a couple of thousand of dollars, for which one goes to prison,
compared to financial speculations that deprive tens of millions of their homes
and savings, and are then rewarded by state help of sublime grandeur? Now, we
got another version from Russia, from the power of the state: What is a modest
Pussy Riot obscene provocation in a church compared to the accusation against
Pussy Riot, this gigantic obscene provocation of the state apparatus which
mocks any notion of decent law and order?
Was the act of Pussy Riot cynical? There are two kinds of
cynicism: the bitter cynicism of the oppressed which unmasks the hypocrisy of
those in power, and the cynicism of the oppressors themselves who openly
violate their own proclaimed principles. The cynicism of Pussy Riot is of the
first kind, while the cynicism of those in power — why not call their
authoritarian brutality a Prick Riot — is of the much more ominous second
kind.
Back in 1905, Leon Trotsky characterized tsarist Russia as
“a vicious combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market.” Does
this designation not hold more and more also for the Russia of today? Does it
not announce the rise of the new phase of capitalism, capitalism with Asian
values (which, of course, has nothing to do with Asia and everything to do with
the anti-democratic tendencies in today’s global capitalism). If we understand
cynicism as ruthless pragmatism of power which secretly laughs at its own
principles, then Pussy Riot are anti-cynicism embodied. Their message is: IDEAS
MATTER. They are conceptual artists in the noblest sense of the word: artists
who embody an Idea. This is why they wear balaclavas: masks of
de-individualization, of liberating anonymity. The message of their balaclavas
is that it doesn’t matter which of them got arrested — they’re not
individuals, they’re an Idea. And this is why they are such a threat: it is easy
to imprison individuals, but try to imprison an Idea!
The panic of those in power — displayed by their
ridiculously excessive brutal reaction — is thus fully justified. The more
brutally they act, the more important symbol Pussy Riot will become. Already
now the result of the oppressive measures is that Pussy Riot are a household
name literally all around the world.
It is the sacred duty of all of us to prevent that the
courageous individuals who compose Pussy Riot will not pay in their flesh the
price for their becoming a global symbol.
Slavoj Žižek
Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Gotham City | on ‘The Dark Knight Rises’
Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Gotham City | on ‘The Dark Knight Rises’
By Slavoj Žižek
Exclusive on Boitempo’s Blog.
Warning: the following article contains spoilers of The
Dark Knight Trilogy.
The Dark Knight Rises attests yet again to how Hollywood blockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicament of our societies. Here is a (simplified) storyline. Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, the previous installment of the Batman saga, law and order prevail in Gotham City: under the extraordinary powers granted by the Dent Act, Commissioner Gordon has nearly eradicated violent and organized crime. He nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of Harvey Dent’s crimes (when Dent tried to kill Gordon’s son before Batman saved him, Dent fell to his death, and Batman took the fall for the Dent myth, allowing himself to be demonized as Gotham’s villain), and plans to admit to the conspiracy at a public event celebrating Dent, but decides that the city is not ready to hear the truth. No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives isolated in his Manor while his company is crumbling ling after he invested in a clean energy project designed to harness fusion power, but shut it down after learning that the core could be modified to become a nuclear weapon. The beautiful Miranda Tate, a member of the Wayne Enterprises executive board, encourages Wayne to rejoin with society and continue his philanthropic works.
Here enters the (first) villain of the film: Bane, a terrorist leader who was a member of the League of Shadows, gets hold of the copy of Gordon’s speech. After Bane’s financial machinations bring Wayne’s company close to bankruptcy, Wayne entrusts Miranda to control his enterprise and also engages in a brief love affair with her. (In this she competes with Selina Kyle, a cat burglar Selina Kyle who steals from the rich in order to redistribute wealth, but finally rejoins Wayne and the forces of law and order.) Learning about Bane’s mobilization, Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane, who says that he took over the League of Shadows after Ra’s Al Ghul’s death. Crippling Batman in a close combat, Bane detains him in a prison from which escape is virtually impossible: inmates tell Wayne the story of the only person to ever successfully escape from the prison, a child driven by necessity and the sheer force of will. While the imprisoned Wayne recovers from his injuries and retrains himself to be Batman, Bane succeeds in turning Gotham City into an isolated city-state. He first lures most of Gotham’s police force underground and traps them there; then he sets off explosions which destroy most of the bridges connecting Gotham City to the mainland, announcing that any attempt to leave the city will result in the detonation of Wayne fusion core, which has been taken hold and converted into a bomb.
Here we reach the crucial moment of the film: Bane’s takeover is accompanied by a vast politico-ideological offensive. Bane publicly reveals the cover-up of Dent’s death and releases the prisoners locked up under the Dent Act. Condemning the rich and powerful, he promises to restore the power of the people, calling on the common people to “take your city back” – Bane reveals himself to be “the ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the 99% to band together and overthrow societal elites.”[1] What follows is the film’s idea of people’s power: summary show trials and executions of the rich, streets littered with crime and villainy… A couple of months later, while Gotham City continues to suffer popular terror, Wayne successfully escapes prison, returns to Gotham as Batman, and enlists his friends to help liberate the city and stop the fusion bomb before it explodes. Batman confronts and subdues Bane, but Miranda intervenes and stabs Batman – the societal benefactor reveals herself to be Talia al Ghul, Ra’s daughter: it was she who escaped the prison as a child, and Bane was the one person who aided her escape. After announcing her plan to complete her father’s work in destroying Gotham, Talia escapes. In the ensuing mayhem, Gordon cuts off the bomb’s ability to be remotely detonated while Selina kills Bane, allowing Batman to chase Talia. He tries to force her to take the bomb to the fusion chamber where it can be stabilized, but she floods the chamber. Talia dies when her truck crashes off the road, confident that the bomb cannot be stopped. Using a special helicopter, Batman hauls the bomb beyond the city limits, where it detonates over the ocean and presumably kills him.
Batman is now celebrated as a hero whose sacrifice saved Gotham City, while Wayne is believed to have died in the riots. As his estate is divided up, Alfred witnesses Bruce and Selina together alive in a cafe in Florence, while Blake, a young honest policeman who knew about Batman’s identity, inherits the Batcave. In short, “Batman saves the day, emerges unscathed and moves on with a normal life, with someone else to replace his role defending the system.”[2]The first clue to the ideological underpinnings of this ending is provided by Gordon, who, at Wayne’s (would-be) burial, reads the last lines from Dickens’sTale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Some reviewers of the film took this quote as an indication that it “rises to the noblest level of Western art. The film appeals to the center of America’s tradition – the ideal of noble sacrifice for the common people. Batman must humble himself to be exalted, and lay down his life to find a new one. /…/ An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to save others.”[3]
And, effectively, from this perspective, there is only one step back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” (Matthew 16:25 26) Batman’s sacrifice as the repetition of Christ’s death? Is this idea not compromised by the film’s last scene (Wayne with Selena in a Florence café)? Is the religious counterpart of this ending not rather the well-known blasphemous idea that Christ really survived his crucifixion and lived a long peaceful life (in India or even Tibet, according to some sources)? The only way to redeem this final scene would have been to read it as a daydream (hallucination) of Alfred who sits alone in the Florence café. The further Dickensian feature of the film is a de-politicized complaint about the gap between the rich and the poor – early in the film, Selina whispers to Wayne while they are dancing at an exclusive upper class gala:
“There’s a storm coming, Mr. Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large, and leave so little for the rest of us.” Nolan, as every good liberal, is “worried” about this disparity and he admits this worry penetrates the film:
“What I see in the film that relates to the real world is the idea of dishonesty. The film is all about that coming to a head /…/ The notion of economic fairness creeps into the film, and the reason is twofold. One, Bruce Wayne is a billionaire. It has to be addressed. /…/ But two, there are a lot of things in life, and economics is one of them, where we have to take a lot of what we’re told on trust, because most of us feel like we don’t have the analytical tools to know what’s going on. /…/ I don’t feel there’s a left or right perspective in the film. What is there is just an honest assessment or honest exploration of the world we live in – things that worry us.”[4]
Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they tend to forget where his wealth comes from: arms manufacturing plus stock-market speculations, which is why Bane’s stock-exchange games can destroy his empire – arms dealer and speculator, this is the true secret beneath the Batman mask. How does the film deal with it? By resuscitating the archetypal Dickensian topic of a good capitalist who engages in financing orphanage homes (Wayne) versus a bad greedy capitalist (Stryver, as in Dickens). In such Dickensian over-moralization, the economic disparity is translated into “dishonesty” which should be “honestly” analyzed, although we lack any reliable cognitive mapping, and such an “honest” approach leads to a further parallel with Dickens – as Christopher Nolan’s brother Jonathan (who co-wrote the scenario) put it bluntly: “Tale of Two Citiesto me was the most sort of harrowing portrait of a relatable recognizable civilization that had completely fallen to pieces. The terrors in Paris, in France in that period, it’s not hard to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.”[5] The scenes of the vengeful populist uprising in the film (a mob that thirsts for the blood of the rich who have neglected and exploited them) evoke Dickens’s description of the Reign of Terror, so that, although the film has nothing to do with politics, it follows Dickens’s novel in “honestly” portraying revolutionaries as possessed fanatics, and thus provides
“the caricature of what in real life would be an
ideologically committed revolutionary fighting structural injustice. Hollywood
tells what the establishments want you to know – revolutionaries are brutal
creatures, with utter disregard for human life. Despite emancipatory rhetoric
on liberation, they have sinister designs behind. Thus, whatever might be their
reasons, they need to be eliminated.”[6]
Tom Charity was right to note “the movie’s defense of the establishment in the form of philanthropic billionaires and an incorruptible police”[7] – in its distrust of the people taking things into their own hands, the film “demonstrates both a desire for social justice and a fear of what that can actually look like in the hands of a mob.”[8] Karthick raises here a perspicuous question with regard to immense popularity of the Joker figure from the previous film: why such a harsh disposition towards Bane when the Joker was dealt with lenience in the earlier movie? The answer is simple and convincing:
“The Joker, calling for anarchy in its purest form, critically underscores the hypocrisies of bourgeois civilization as it exists, but his views are unable to translate into mass action. Bane, on the other hand poses an existential threat to the system of oppression. /…/ His strength is not just his physique but also his ability to command people and mobilize them to achieve a political goal. He represents the vanguard, the organized representative of the oppressed that wages political struggle in their name to bring about structural changes. Such a force, with the greatest subversive potential, the system cannot accommodate. It needs to be eliminated.”[9]
However, even if Bane lacks the fascination of Heath Ledger’s Joker, there is a feature which distinguishes him from the latter: unconditional love, the very source of his hardness. In a short but touching scene, we see how, in an act of love in the midst of terrible suffering, Bane saved the child Talia, not caring for consequences and paying a terrible price for it (he was beaten within an inch of his life while defending her).
Karthick is totally justified in locating this event into the long tradition, from Christ to Che Guevara, which extols violence as a “work of love,” as in the famous lines from Che Guevara’s diary: “Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.”[10] What we encounter here is not so much the “Christification of Che” but rather a “Cheization” of Christ himself – the Christ whose “scandalous” words from Luke (“if anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”(14:26)) point in exactly the same direction as Che’s famous quote: “You may have to be tough, but do not lose your tenderness.”[11] The statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love” should be read together with Guevara’s much more “problematic” statement on revolutionaries as “killing machines”:
“Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective, and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.”[12]
Or, to paraphrase Kant and Robespierre yet again: love without cruelty is powerless; cruelty without love is blind, a short-lived passion which loses its persistent edge. Guevara is here paraphrasing Christ’s declarations on the unity of love and sword – in both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere unstable and pathetic sentimentality, is its cruelty itself, its link with violence – it is this link which raises love over and beyond the natural limitations of man and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive. This is why, back to The Dark Knight Rises, the only authentic love in the film is Bane’s, the “terrorist’s,” in clear contrast to Batman.
Along the same lines, the figure of Ra, Talia’s father, deserves
a closer look. Ra is a mixture of Arab and Oriental features, an agent of
virtuous terror fighting to counter-balance the corrupted Western civilization.
He is played by Liam Neeson, an actor whose screen-persona usually radiates
dignified goodness and wisdom (he is Zeus in The Clash of Titans), and who
also plays Qui-Gon Jinn inThe Phantom Menace, the first episode of the Star
Wars series. Qui-Gon is a Jedi knight, the mentor of Obi-Wan Kenobi as
well as the one who discovers Anakin Skywalker, believing that Anakin is the
Chosen One who will restore the balance of the universe, ignoring Yoda’s
warnings about Anakin’s unstable nature; at the end of The Phantom Menace,
Qui-Gon is killed by Darth Maul.[13]
In the Batman trilogy, Ra is also the teacher of the young Wayne: in Batman Begins, he finds the young Wayne in a Chinese prison; introducing himself as “Henri Ducard,” he offers the boy a “path.” After Wayne is freed, he climbs to the home of the League of Shadows, where Ra’s is waiting, although presenting himself as the servant of another man called Ra’s al Ghul. At the end of a long and painful training, Ra explains that Bruce must do what is necessary to fight evil, while revealing that they have trained Bruce with the intention of him leading the League to destroy Gotham City, which they believe has become hopelessly corrupt. Ra’s is thus not a simple embodiment of Evil: he stands for the combination of virtue and terror, for the egalitarian discipline fighting a corrupted empire, and thus belongs to the line that stretches (in recent fiction) from Paul Atreides in Dune to Leonidas in 300. And it is crucial that Wayne is his disciple: Wayne was formed as Batman by him.
Two common sense reproaches impose themselves here. First, there weremonstrous mass killings and violence in actual revolutions, from Stalinism to Khmer Rouge, so the film is clearly not just engaging in reactionary imagination. The second, opposite reproach: the actual OWS movement was not violent, its goal was definitely not a new reign of terror; insofar as Bane’s revolt is supposed to extrapolate the immanent tendency of the OWS movement, the film thus ridiculously misrepresents its aims and strategies. The ongoing anti-globalist protests are the very opposite of Bane’s brutal terror: Bane stands for the mirror-image of state terror, for a murderous fundamentalist sect taking over and ruling by terror, not for its overcoming through popular self-organization… What both reproaches share is the rejection of the figure of Bane. – The reply to these two reproaches is multiple.
First, one should make clear the actual scope of violence – the best answer to the claim that the violent mob reaction to oppression is worse than the original oppression itself, was the one provided long by Mark Twain in his A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: “There were two ‘Reigns of Terror’ if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood… our shudders are all for the ‘horrors’ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
Then, one should demystify the problem of violence, rejecting simplistic claims that the XXth century Communism used too much excessive murderous violence, and that we should be careful not to fall into this trap again. As a fact, this is, of course, terrifyingly true, – but such a direct focus on violence obfuscates the underlying question: what was wrong in the XXth century Communist project as such, which immanent weakness of this project pushed Communist to resort the Communists (not only those) in power to unrestrained violence? In other words, it is not enough to say that Communists “neglected the problem of violence”: it was a deeper socio-political failure which pushed them to violence. (The same goes for the notion that Communists “neglected democracy”: their overall project of social transformation enforced on them this “neglect.”) It is thus not only Nolan’s film which was not able to imagine authentic people’s power – the “real” radical-emancipatory movements themselves also were not able to do it, they remained caught in the coordinates of the old society, which is why the actual “people’s power” often was such a violent horror.
And, last but not least, it is all too simple to claim that there is no violent potential in OWs and similar movements – there IS a violence at work in every authentic emancipatory process: the problem with the film is that it wrongly translated this violence into murderous terror. Which, then, is the sublime violence with regard to which even the most brutal killing is an act of weakness? Let us make a detour through Jose Saramago’s Seeing which tells the story of the strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country. When the election day morning is marred by torrential rains, voter turnout is disturbingly low, but the weather breaks by mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to their voting stations. The government’s relief is short-lived, however, when vote counting reveals that over 70% of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled by this apparent civic lapse, the government gives the citizenry a chance to make amends just one week later with another election day. The results are worse: now 83% of the ballots are blank.
The two major political parties – the ruling party of the right (p.o.t.r.) and their chief adversary, the party of the middle (p.o.t.m.) – are in a panic, while the haplessly marginalized party of the left (p.o.t.l.) produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are essentially a vote for their progressive agenda. Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy exists, the government quickly labels the movement
“terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and declares a state of
emergency, allowing it to suspend all constitutional guarantees and adopt a
series of increasingly drastic steps: citizens are seized at random and
disappear into secret interrogation sites, the police and seat of government
are withdrawn from the capital, sealing the city against all entrances and
exits, and finally manufacturing their own terrorist ringleader. The city
continues to function near-normally throughout, the people parrying each of the
government’s thrusts in inexplicable unison and with a truly Gandhian level of
nonviolent resistance… this, the voters’ abstention, is a case of truly
radical “divine violence” which prompts brutal panic reactions of those in
power.
Back to Nolan, the triad of Batman-films thus follows an immanent logic. InBatman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a liberal order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of the two John Ford western classics (Fort Apache andThe Man Who Shot Liberty Valance) which deploy how, in order to civilize the Wild West, one has to “print the legend” and ignore the truth – in short, how our civilization has to be grounded onto a Lie: one has to break the rules in order to defend the system. Or, to put it in another way, in Batman Begins, the hero is simply a classic figure of the urban vigilante who punishes the criminals where police cannot do it; the problem is that police, the official law-enforcement agency, relates ambiguously to Batman’s help: while admitting its efficiency, it nonetheless perceive Batman as a threat to its monopoly on power and a testimony of its own inefficiency. However, Batman’s transgression is here purely formal, it resides in acting oin behalf of the law without being legitimized to do it: in his acts, he never violates the law. The Dark Knight changes these coordinates: Batman’s true rival is not Joker, his opponent, but Harvey Dent, the “white knight,” the aggressive new district attorney, a kind of official vigilante whose fanatical battle against crime leads him into killing innocent people and destroys him. It is as if Dent is the reply of the legal order to Batman’s threat: against Batman’s vigilante struggle, the system generates its own illegal excess, its own vigilante, much more violent than Batman, directly violating the law. There is thus a poetic justice in the fact that, when Bruce plans to publicly reveal his identity as Batman, Dent jumps in and instead names himself as Batman – he is “more Batman than Batman himself,” actualizing the temptation Batman was still able to resist. So when, at the film’s end, Batman takes upon himself the crimes committed by Dent to save the reputation of the popular hero who embodies hope for ordinary people, his self-effacing act contains a grain of truth: Batman in a way returns the favor to Dent. His act is a gesture of symbolic exchange: first Dent takes upon himself the identity of Batman, then Wayne – the real Batman – takes upon himself Dent’s crimes.
Finally, The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further: is Bane not Dent brought to extreme, to its self-negation? Dent who draws the conclusion that the system itself is unjust, so that in order to effectively fight injustice one has to turn directly against the system and destroy it? And, as part of the same move, Dent who loses last inhibitions and is ready to use all murderous brutality to achieve this goal? The rise of such a figure changes the entire constellation: for all participants, Batman included, morality is relativized, it becomes a matter of convenience, something determined by circumstances: it’s open class warfare, everything is permitted to defend the system when we are dealing not just with mad gangsters but with a popular uprising.
Is, then, this all? Should the film just be flatly rejected by those who are engaged in radical emancipatory struggles? Things are more ambiguous, and one has to read the film in the way one has to interpret a Chinese political poem: absences and surprising presences count. Recall the old French story about a wife who complains that her husband’s best friend is making illicit sexual advances towards her: it takes some time till the surprised friend gets the point – in this twisted way, she is inviting him to seduce her… It is like the Freudian unconscious which knows no negation: what matters is not a negative judgment on something, but the mere fact that this something is mentioned – in The Dark Knight Rises, people’s power IS HERE, staged as an Event, in a key step forward from the usual Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).
Here we get the first clue – the prospect of the OWS movement taking power and establishing people’s democracy on Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly non-realist, that one cannot but raise the question: WHY DOES THEN A MAJOR HOLLYWOOD BLOCKBUSTER DREAM ABOUT IT, WHY DOES IT EVOKE THIS SPECTER? Why even dream about OWS exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious answer (to smudge OWS with accusations that it harbors a terrorist-totalitarian potential) is not enough to account for the strange attraction exerted by prospect of “people’s power.” No wonder the proper functioning of this power remains blank, absent: no details are given about how this people’s power functions, what the mobilized people are doing (remember that Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing on them his own order).
This is why external critique of the film (“its depiction of the OWS reign is a ridiculous caricature”) is not enough – the critique has to be immanent, it has to locate within the film itself a multitude signs which point towards the authentic Event. (Recall, for example, that Bane is not just a brutal terrorist, but a person of deep love and sacrifice.) In short, pure ideology isn’t possible, Bane’s authenticity HAS to leave trace in the film’s texture. This is why the film deserves a close reading: the Event – the “people’s republic of Gotham City”, dictatorship of the proletariat on Manhattan – is immanent to the film, it is its absent center.
–––
[1] Tyler O’Neil, “Dark Knight and Occupy Wall Street: The Humble Rise”Hillsdale Natural Law Review, July 21 2012.
[2] Karthick RM, “The Dark Knight Rises a ’Fascist’?”, Society and Culture, July 21, 2012.
[3] Tyler O’Neil, op.cit.
[4] Christopher Nolan, interview in Entertainment 1216 (July 2012, p. 34.
[5] Interview with Christopher and Jonathan Nolan to Buzzine Film.
[6] Karthick, op.cit.
[7] Tom Charity, “’Dark Knight Rises’ disappointingly clunky, bombastic”, CNN, July 19, 2012.
[8] Forrest Whitman, “The Dickensian Aspects of The Dark Knight Rises”, July 21 2012.
[9] Op.cit.
[10] Quoted from Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life, New York: Grove 1997, p. 636-637.
[11] Quoted in McLaren, op.cit., p. 27.
[12] Op.cit., ibid.
[13] One should note the irony of the fact that Neeson’s son is a devoted Shia Muslim, and that Neeson himself often talks about his forthcoming conversion to Islam.
Wednesday, August 8, 2012
from the Iran Book News Agency
“Philosophy in Our Time” includes articles by Alain Badiou
and Slavoj Zizek on critical philosophy and functions of philosophy in our
time. The book is converted into Persian by Foad Habibi and Kamal Khaleq-panah.
IBNA: “Philosophy in Our time is converted into Persian
by Foad Habibi and Kamal Khaleq-panah.
Habibi regarded Zizek and Badiou as two critical theorists who criticize current capitalism with similar viewpoints.
He added: “Their articles in this volume revolve over the function of philosophy. They believe that accordign to the classics, philosophy should ponder over fundamental issues and distance itself from everyday life. Badiou and Zizek challenge this classical view by focusing on a special political philosophy that tends to transform everyday life. According to Badiou, philosophy is possible only when an event is taking place, otherwise philosophy has nothing to tell about trivial matters of daily life.”
Referring to the concept of ‘immediate thinkers’, Habibi said: “Badiou and Zizek call those thinkers that comment upon any event in the media and on the television as ‘immediate thinkers’ and criticize them. According to them, a philosophy id formed when a new event has taken place. In fact, it is wrong to think that a philosopher should comment on every happening.
“Philosophy in Our Time” is converted into Persian by Foad Habibi and Kamal Khaleq-panah and will be released in 90 pages by Roozbehan Publications.
Habibi regarded Zizek and Badiou as two critical theorists who criticize current capitalism with similar viewpoints.
He added: “Their articles in this volume revolve over the function of philosophy. They believe that accordign to the classics, philosophy should ponder over fundamental issues and distance itself from everyday life. Badiou and Zizek challenge this classical view by focusing on a special political philosophy that tends to transform everyday life. According to Badiou, philosophy is possible only when an event is taking place, otherwise philosophy has nothing to tell about trivial matters of daily life.”
Referring to the concept of ‘immediate thinkers’, Habibi said: “Badiou and Zizek call those thinkers that comment upon any event in the media and on the television as ‘immediate thinkers’ and criticize them. According to them, a philosophy id formed when a new event has taken place. In fact, it is wrong to think that a philosopher should comment on every happening.
“Philosophy in Our Time” is converted into Persian by Foad Habibi and Kamal Khaleq-panah and will be released in 90 pages by Roozbehan Publications.
Saturday, August 4, 2012
Friday, August 3, 2012
Signs from the Future
Signs from the Future
So where do we stand now, in 2012? 2011 was the year of dreaming dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory politics all around the world. Now, a year later, every day brings new proofs of how fragile and inconsistent the awakening was, with all of its many facets displaying the same signs of exhaustion: the enthusiasm of the Arab Spring is mired in compromises and religious fundamentalism; the OWS is losing momentum to such an extent that, in a nice case of the »cunning of reason,« the police cleansing of Zuchotti Park and other sites of the OWS protests cannot but appear as a blessing in disguise, covering up the immanent loss of momentum. And the same story goes on all around the world: the Maoists in Nepal seem outmaneuvered by the reactionary royalist forces; Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” experiment more and more regressing into a caudillo-run populism… What are we to do in such depressive times when dreams seem to fade away? Is the only choice we have the one between nostalgic-narcissistic remembrance of the sublime enthusiastic moments, and the cynically-realist explanation of why the attempts to really change the situation had to fail?
The first thing to state is that the subterranean work of
dissatisfaction is going on: rage is accumulating and a new wave of revolts
will follow. The weird and unnatural relative calm of the Spring of 2012 is
more and more perforated by the growing subterranean tensions announcing new
explosions; what makes the situation so ominous is the all-pervasive sense of
blockage: there no clear way out, the ruling elite is clearly losing its
ability to rule. What makes the situation even more disturbing is the obvious
fact that democracy doesn’t work: after elections in Greece and in Spain, the
same frustrations remain. How should we read the signs of this rage? In his Arcades
Project, Walter Benjamin quotes the French historian André Monglond: “The past
has left images of itself in literary texts, images comparable to those which
are imprinted by light on a photosensitive plate. The future alone possesses
developers active enough to scan such surfaces perfectly.”[1] Events
like the OWS protests, the Arab Spring, demonstrations in Greece and Spain,
etc., have to be read as such signs from the future. In other words, we should
turn around the usual historicist perspective of understanding an event out of
its context and genesis. Radical emancipatory outburst cannot be understood in
this way: instead of analyzing them as a part of the continuum of past/present,
we should bring in the perspective of the future, i.e., we should analyze them
as limited, distorted (sometimes even perverted) fragments of a utopian future
which lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential. According to
Deleuze, in Proust, “people and things occupy a place in time which is
incommensurable with the one that they have in space”[2]: the
notorious madeleine is here in place, but this is not its true time.[3] In
a similar way, one should learn the art to recognize, from an engaged
subjective position, elements which are here, in our space, but whose time is
the emancipated future, the future of the Communist Idea.
However, while one should learn to watch for such signs from
the future, we should also be aware that what we are doing now will only become
readable once the future will be here, so we should not put too much hopes into
the desperate search for the »germs of Communism« in today’s society. One
should thus strive for a delicate balance between reading signs from the
(hypothetic Communist) future and maintaining the radical openness of the
future: openness alone ends up in decisionist nihilism which constrains us to
leaps into the void, while full reliance on the signs from the future can
succumb to determinist planning (we know what the future should look like and,
from a position of meta-language, somehow exempted from history, we just have
to enact it). However, the balance one should strive for has nothing to do with
some kind of wise “middle road” avoiding both extremes (“we know in a general
sense the shape of the future we are moving towards, but we should
simultaneously remain open to unpredictable contingencies”). Signs from the
future are not constitutive but regulative in the Kantian sense; their status
is subjectively mediated, i.e., they are not discernible from any neutral
“objective” study of history, but only from an engaged position – following
them remains an existential wager in Pascal’s sense. We are dealing here with
the circular structure best exemplified by a science-fiction story set a couple
of hundred years ahead of our time when time travel was already possible, about
an art critic who gets so fascinated by the works of a New York painter from
our era that he travels back in time to meet him; he discovers that the painter
is a worthless drunk who even steals from him the time machine and escapes to
the future; alone in today’s world, the art critic paints all the paintings
that fascinated him in the future and made him travel into the past. In a
homologous way, the Communist signs from the future are signs from a possible
future which will become actual only if we follow these signs – in other words,
they are signs which paradoxically precede that of which they are signs. Recall
the Pascalean topic of deus absconditus, of a “hidden god” discernible
only to those who search for him, who are engaged in the path of this search:
“God has willed to redeem men and to open salvation to those
who seek it. But men render themselves so unworthy of it that it is right that
God should refuse to some, because of their obduracy, what He grants others
from a compassion which is not due to them. If He had willed to overcome the
obstinacy of the most hardened, He could have done so by revealing Himself so
manifestly to them that they could not have doubted of the truth of His
essence; as it will appear at the last day, with such thunders and such a
convulsion of nature that the dead will rise again, and the blindest will see
Him. It is not in this manner that He has willed to appear in His advent of
mercy, because, as so many make themselves unworthy of His mercy, He has willed
to leave them in the loss of the good which they do not want. It was not, then,
right that He should appear in a manner manifestly divine, and completely
capable of convincing all men; but it was also not right that He should come in
so hidden a manner that He could not be known by those who should sincerely
seek Him. He has willed to make himself quite recognizable by those; and thus,
willing to appear openly to those who seek Him with all their heart, and to be
hidden from those who flee from Him with all their heart. He so regulates the
knowledge of Himself that He has given signs of Himself, visible to those who
seek Him, and not to those who seek Him not. There is enough light for those
who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary
disposition.”[4]
God gives these signs in the guise of miracles, and this is
why the same mixture of light and obscurity characterizes miracles: miracles
are not visible as such to everyone, but only to believers – skeptical
non-believers (to whom Pascal refers as “libertins,” in a typical 17th century
way, as opposed to the 18th century predominant meaning of debauchery) can
easily dismiss them as natural phenomena, and those who believe in them as
victims of superstition. Pascal thus openly admits a kind of hermeneutic circle
in the guise of the mutual interdependence of miracles and “doctrine” (the
church teaching): “Rule: we must judge of doctrine by miracles; we must judge
of miracles by doctrine. All this is true, but contains no contradiction.”
Perhaps, one can apply here Kant’s formula of the relationship between reason
and (sensuous) intuition: doctrine without miracles is sterile and impotent,
miracles without doctrine are blind and meaningless. Their mutual independence
is thus not symmetrical: “Miracles are for doctrine, and not doctrine for
miracles.” In Badiou’s terms, miracle is Pascal’s name for an Event, an
intrusion of the impossible-Real into our ordinary reality which momentarily
suspends its causal nexus; however, it is only an engaged subjective position,
a subject who “desires to see,” which can truly identify a miracle.[5]
Many perspicuous Marxists noted long ago how this Pascal’s
topic, far from standing for a regression to obscurantist theology, points
forward towards the Marxist notion of a revolutionary theory whose truth is
discernible only from an engaged class position. And are we today not in
exactly the same situation with regard to Communism? The times of “revealed
Communism” are over: we cannot any longer pretend (or act as if) the Communist
truth is simply here for everyone to see, accessible to neutral rational historical
analysis; there is no Communist “big Other,” no higher historical necessity or
teleology to guide and legitimize our acts. In such a situation, today’s libertins (postmodern
historicist skeptics) thrive, and the only way to counter them, i.e., to assert
the dimension of Event (of eternal Truth) in our epoch of contingency, is to
practice a kind of Communism absconditus: what defines today’s Communist
is the “doctrine” (theory) which enables him to discern in (the contemporary
version of) a “miracle” – say, an unexpected social explosion like the crowd
persisting on Tahrir Square – its Communist nature, to read it is a sign from
the (Communist) future. (For alibertin, of course, such an event remains a
confused outcome of social frustrations and illusions, an outburst which will
probably lead to an even worst situation than the one to which it reacted.)
And, again, this future is not “objective,” it will come to be only through the
subjective engagement which sustains it.
Perhaps, we should turn the usual reproach about what we
want and what we don’t want around: it is basically clear what we want (in the
long term, at least); but do we really know what we don’t want, i.e., what we
are ready to renounce of our present “freedoms”?) Or, to go back to our Ninotchka joke:
we want coffee, but do we want it without milk or without cream? (Without
state? Without private property? Etc.) It is here that we should remain
resolutely Hegelian – Hegel’s opening towards the future is a negative one:
it is articulated in his negative/limiting statements like the famous »one
cannot jump ahead of one’s time« from his Philosophy of Right. The
impossibility to directly borrow from the future is grounded in the very fact
of retroactivity which makes future a priori unpredictable: we cannot
jump onto our shoulders and see ourselves »objectively,« the way we fit into
the texture of history, because this texture is again and again retroactively
rearranged. In theology, Kart Barth extended this unpredictability to the Last
Judgment itself, emphasizing how the final revelation of God will be totally
incommensurable with our expectations:
“God is not hidden to us; He is revealed. But what and how
we shall be in Christ, and what and how the World will be in Christ at the end
of God’s road, at the breaking in of redemption and completion, that is not
revealed to us; that is hidden. Let us be honest: we do not know what we are
saying when we speak of Jesús Christ’s coming again in judgment, and of the
resurrection of the dead, of eternal life and eternal death. That with all
these there will be bound up a piercing revelation – a seeing, compared to
which all our present vision will have been blindness – is too often testified
in Scripture for us to feel we ought to prepare ourselves for it. For we do not
know what will be revealed when the last covering is removed from our eyes,
from all eyes: how we shall behold one another and what we shall be to one
another – men of today and men of past centurias and millenia, ancestors and
descendants, husbands and wives, wise and foolish, oppressors and oppressed,
traitors and betrayed, murderers and murdered, West and East, Germans and
others, Christians, Jews, and heathen, orthodox and heretics, Catholics and
Protestants, Lutherans and Reformed; upon what divisions and unions, what
confrontations and cross-connections the seals of all books will be opened; how
much will seem small and unimportant to us then, how much will only then appear
great and important; for what surprises of all kinds we must prepare ourselves.
/ We also do not know what Nature, as the cosmos in which we have lived and
still live here and now, will be for us then; what the constellations, the sea,
the broad valleys and heights, which we see and know now, will say and mean then.”[6]
From this insight, it becomes clear how false, how “all too
human,” the fear is that the guilty will not be properly punished – here,
especially, we must abandon our expectations: “Strange Christianity, whose most
pressing anxiety seems to be that God’s grace might prove to be all too free on
this side, that hell, instead of being populated with so many people, might
some day prove to be empty!”[7] And
the same uncertainty holds for the Church itself – it possesses no superior
knowledge, it is like a postman who delivers mail with no idea what it says:
“The Church can only deliver it the way a postman delivers his mail; the Church
is not asked what it thinks it is thereby starting, or what it makes of the
message. The less it makes of it and the less it leaves on it its own
fingerprints, the more it simple hands it on as it has received it – and so much
the better.”[8]
No wonder Hegel formulated this same limitation apropos
politics: especially as Communists, we should abstain from any positive
imagining of the future Communist society. Recall Christ’s sceptical words
against the prophets of doom from Mark 13: »If anyone tells you,
‘Look, here is the Christ!’ or, ‘Look, there!’ don’t believe it. For there will
arise false Christs and false prophets, and will show signs and wonders, that
they may lead astray, if possible, even the chosen ones. But you watch.[9]‘«
Watch for the signs of the apocalypse, bearing in mind the open meaning of this
term in Greek: apokálypsis (“lifting of the veil” or “revelation”) is
a disclosure of something hidden from the majority of mankind in an era
dominated by falsehood and misconception. On account of this radical
heterogeneity of the New, its arrival has to cause terror and confusion –
recall Heiner Müller’s famous motto: “the first appearance of the new is the
dread.” Or, as Seneca put it almost two thousand years ago: “Et ipse miror
vixque iam facto malo / potuisse fieri credo. /Although the evil is
already done, we still find it hard to believe it is possible.”(Medea 883-4)
This is how we react to radical Evil: it is real, but still perceived as
impossible. But does the same not hold for everything that is really New?
So what about apocalyptic tones we often hear, especially
after a catastrophe occurs? The ultimate paradox here is that the very excessive
catastrophism (»the end of the world is near« mantra) is a defense, a way to
obfuscate the true dangers, not to take them really seriously. This is why the
only appropriate reply to an ecologist who tries to convince us of the
impending threat is that the true target of his desperate arguing is HIS OWN
nonbelief – consequently, our answer to him should be something like »Don’t
worry, the catastrophe will come for sure!«… And the catastrophe is coming,
the impossible is happening all around us – but watch patiently, don’t get
caught in precipitous extrapolations, don’t let yourself go to the properly
perverse pleasure of: »This is it! The dreaded moment has arrived!« In ecology,
such apocalyptic fascination arrives in many diverse forms: global warming will
drawn us all in a couple of decades; biogenetics will bring the end of human
ethics and responsibility; bees will disappear soon and unimaginable starvation
will follow… Take all these treats seriously, but don’t be seduced by them and
enjoy too much the false sense of guilt and justice (»We offended Mother Earth,
so we are getting what we deserve!«). Instead, keep your head cool and – »but
you watch«:
“But you watch, keep awake. For you do not know when the
time will come. It is like a man going on a journey, when he leaves home and
puts his servants in charge, each with his work, and commands the doorkeeper to
stay awake. Therefore stay awake —for you do not know when the master of the
house will come, in the evening, or at midnight, or when the rooster crows, or
in the morning — lest he come suddenly and find you asleep. And what I say to
you I say to all: Stay awake.”(Mark 13)
Stay wake and watch for what? As we have already seen, the
Left entered a period of profound crisis – the shadow of the XXth century still
hangs over it, and the full scope of the defeat is not yet admitted. In the
years of prospering capitalism, it was easy for the Left to play a Cassandra,
warning that the prosperity is based on illusions and prophesizing catastrophes
to come. Now the economic downturn and social disintegration the Left was
waiting for is here, protests and revolts are popping up all around the globe –
but what is conspicuously absent is any consistent Leftist reply to these
events, any project of how to transpose islands of chaotic resistance into a
positive program of social change: “When and if a national economy enters into
crisis in the present interlocking global order, what has anyone to
say – in any non-laughable detail – about ‘socialism in one country’ or even
‘partly detached pseudo-nation-state non-finance-capital-driven capitalism’?”[10] T.J.
Clark sees the reason for this inability to act in the Left’s “futuralism,” in
its orientation towards a future of radical emancipation; due to this fixation,
the Left is immobilized “by the idea that it should spend its time turning over
the entrails of the present for the signs of catastrophe and salvation,” i.e.,
it continues to be premised “on some terracotta multitude waiting to march out
of the emperor’s tomb.”[11]
We have to admit the grain of truth in this simplified bleak
vision which seems to sap the very possibility of a proper political Event:
perhaps, we should effectively renounce the myth of a Great Awakening – the
moment when (if not the old working class then) a new alliance of the
dispossessed, multitude or whatever, will gather its forces and master a
decisive intervention. The entire history of the (radical) Left, up to Hardt
and Negri, is colored by this stance of awaiting the Moment. After describing
multiple forms of resistance to the Empire, Hardt and Negri’s Multitude ends
with a messianic note pointing towards the great Rupture, the moment of
Decision when the movement of multitudes will be transubstantiated the sudden
birth of a new world: “After this long season of violence and contradictions,
global civil war, corruption of imperial biopower, and infinite toil of the
biopolitical multitudes, the extraordinary accumulations of grievances and
reform proposals must at some point be transformed by a strong event, a radical
insurrectional demand.”[12] However,
at this point when one expects a minimum theoretical determination of this
rupture, what we get is again withdrawal into philosophy: “A philosophical book
like this, however, is not the place for us to evaluate whether the time for
revolutionary political decision is imminent.”[13] Hardt
and Negri perform here an all to quick jump: of course one cannot ask them to
provide a detailed empirical description of the Decision, of the passage to the
globalized “absolute democracy,” to the multitude that rules itself; however,
what if this a justified refusal to engage in pseudo-concrete futuristic
predictions masks an inherent notional deadlock/impossibility? That is to say,
what one does and should expect is a description of the notional structure of
this qualitative jump, of the passage from the multitudes resisting the
One of sovereign Power to the multitudes directly ruling themselves.
So what happens if we radically renounce this stance of
eschatological expectation? Clark concludes that one has to admit the tragic
vision of (social) life: there is no (great bright) future, the “tiger” of
suffering, evil, and violence is here to stay, and, in such circumstances, the
only reasonable politics is the politics of moderation which tries to contain
the monster: “a politics actually directed, step by step, failure by failure,
to preventing the tiger from charging out would be the most moderate and
revolutionary there has ever been.”[14] Practicing
such a politics would provoke a brutal reply of those in power and dissolve the
“boundaries between political organizing and armed resistance.”[15] Again,
the grain of truth in this proposal is that, often, a strategically well-placed
precise “moderate” demand can trigger a global transformation – recall
Gorbachov’s “moderate” attempt to reform the Soviet Union which resulted in its
disintegration. But is this all one should say (and do)?
There are in French two words for “future” which cannot be
adequately rendered in English:futur and avenir. Futur stands
for future as the continuation of the present, as the full actualization of the
tendencies which are already here, while avenir points more towards a
radical break, a discontinuity with the present – avenir is what is
to come /a venir/, not just what will be. Say, in today’s apocalyptic global
situation, the ultimate horizon of the “future” is what Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls
the dystopian “fixed point,” the zero-point of the ecological breakdown, of
global economic and social chaos – even if it is indefinitely postponed, this
zero-point is the virtual “attractor” towards which our reality, left to itself,
tends. The way to combat the catastrophy is through acts which interrupt this
drifting towards the catastrophic “fixed point” and take upon themselves the
risk of giving birth to some radical Otherness “to come.” We can see here how
ambiguous the slogan “no future” is: at a deeper level, it does not designate
the closure, the impossibility of change, but what we should be striving for –
to break the hold of the catastrophic “future” over up and thereby open up the
space for something New “to come.”
Based on this distinction, we can see what was the problem
with Marx (as well as with the XXth century Left): it was not that Marx was too
utopian in his Communist dreams, but that his Communism was too “futural.” What
Marx wrote about Plato (Plato’s Republic was not a utopia, but an
idealized image of the existing Ancient Greek society), holds for Marx himself:
what Marx conceived as Communism remained an idealized image of capitalism,
capitalism without capitalism, i.e., expanded self-reproduction without profit
and exploitation. This is why we should return from Marx to Hegel, to Hegel’s
“tragic” vision of the social process where no hidden teleology is guiding us,
where every intervention is a jump into the unknown, where the result always
thwarts our expectations. All we can be certain of is that the existing system
cannot reproduce itself indefinitely: whatever will come after will not be “our
future.” A new Middle East war or an economic chaos or an unheard-of
environmental catastrophe can swiftly change the basic coordinates of our
predicament. We should fully assume this openness, guiding ourselves on nothing
more than ambiguous signs from the future.
[1] Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project,
Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1999.p. 482.
[2] Gilles Deleuze: Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press 1989, p. 39.
[3] With all respect for Marcel Proust’s genius, when one reads about his way of life – spending most of the day in half-darkened room, sleeping long, depending on his servant – it is difficult to resist the pleasure of imagining him being condemned by a workers’ regime to a years or so of re-education camp, where he would be forced to get up at 5 AM, wash in cold water, and then, after a meager breakfast, work most of the day digging up and transporting earth, with the evenings filled up with singing political sings and writing confessions…
[4] All quotes from Pascal are from the online version of Pensees.
[5] As to the relevance of Pascal’s deus absconditus for the notion of transference in psychoanalysis, see Guy Le Gaufey,L’objet a, Paris: EPEL 2012.
[6] Karl Barth, God Here and Now, New York: Routledge 2003, p. 45-46.
[7] Op.cit., p. 42.
[8] Op.cit., p. 49.
[9] Also translated as: “/But/ be on your guard!”
[10] T.J.Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” New Left Review 74 (March/April 2012), p. 55.
[11] Op.cit., p. 54.
[12] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York: The Penguin Press 2004, p. 358.
[13] Op.cit., p. 357.
[14] Clark, op.cit., p. 67.
[15] Op.cit., p. 74.
[2] Gilles Deleuze: Cinema 2: The Time-Image, Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press 1989, p. 39.
[3] With all respect for Marcel Proust’s genius, when one reads about his way of life – spending most of the day in half-darkened room, sleeping long, depending on his servant – it is difficult to resist the pleasure of imagining him being condemned by a workers’ regime to a years or so of re-education camp, where he would be forced to get up at 5 AM, wash in cold water, and then, after a meager breakfast, work most of the day digging up and transporting earth, with the evenings filled up with singing political sings and writing confessions…
[4] All quotes from Pascal are from the online version of Pensees.
[5] As to the relevance of Pascal’s deus absconditus for the notion of transference in psychoanalysis, see Guy Le Gaufey,L’objet a, Paris: EPEL 2012.
[6] Karl Barth, God Here and Now, New York: Routledge 2003, p. 45-46.
[7] Op.cit., p. 42.
[8] Op.cit., p. 49.
[9] Also translated as: “/But/ be on your guard!”
[10] T.J.Clark, “For a Left with No Future,” New Left Review 74 (March/April 2012), p. 55.
[11] Op.cit., p. 54.
[12] Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude, New York: The Penguin Press 2004, p. 358.
[13] Op.cit., p. 357.
[14] Clark, op.cit., p. 67.
[15] Op.cit., p. 74.
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