Violent protests like those in
Ferguson happen more and more often. Are these merely irrational outbursts or
symptoms of a new world order?
http://www.theeuropean-magazine.com/slavoj-zizek/9774-slavoj-zizek-on-ferguson-and-violence
In August 2014, violent
protests exploded in Ferguson, a suburb of St. Louis, after a policeman shot to
death an unarmed black teenager suspected of robbery. For days, police tried to
disperse mostly black protesters. Although the details of the accident are
murky, the poor black majority of the town took it as yet another proof of the
systematic police violence against them. In U.S. slums and ghettos, police
effectively function more and more as a force of occupation, something akin to
Israeli patrols entering the Palestinian territories on the West Bank; media
were surprised to discover that even their guns are more and more U.S. Army
arms. Even when police units try just to impose peace, distribute humanitarian
help, or organize medical measures, their modus operandi is that of
controlling a foreign population. “The Rolling Stone” magazine recently drew the conclusion that imposes itself
after the Ferguson incident:
“Nobody’s willing to say it
yet. But after Ferguson, and especially after the Eric Garner case that
exploded in New York after yet another non-indictment following a minority
death-in-custody, the police suddenly have a legitimacy problem in this
country. Law-enforcement resources are now distributed so unevenly, and justice
is being administered with such brazen inconsistency, that people everywhere
are going to start questioning the basic political authority of law
enforcement.”
In such a situation, when
police are no longer perceived as the agent of law, of the legal order, but as
just another violent social agent, protests against the predominant social
order also tend to take a different turn: that of exploding “abstract
negativity” – in short, raw, aimless violence. When, in his “Group Psychology”,
Freud described the “negativity” of untying social ties (Thanatos as
opposed to Eros, the force of the social link), he all too easily
dismissed the manifestations of this untying as the fanaticism of the
“spontaneous” crowd (as opposed to artificial crowds: the Church and the Army).
Against Freud, we should retain the ambiguity of this movement of untying: it
is a zero level that opens up the space for political intervention. In other
words, this untying is the pre-political condition of politics, and, with
regard to it, every political intervention proper already goes “one step too
far”, committing itself to a new project (or Master-Signifier).
Do they not hit the innocent?
Today, this apparently
abstract topic is relevant once again: the “untying” energy is largely
monopolized by the New Right (the Tea Party movement in the U.S., where the
Republican Party is increasingly split between Order and its Untying). However,
here also, every fascism is a sign of failed revolution, and the only way to
combat this Rightist untying will be for the Left to engage in its own untying
– and there are already signs of it (the large demonstrations all around Europe
in 2010, from Greece to France and the UK, where the student demonstrations
against university fees unexpectedly turned violent). In asserting the threat
of “abstract negativity” to the existing order as a permanent feature which can
never be aufgehoben, Hegel is
here more materialist than Marx. In his theory of war (and of madness), he is
aware of the repetitive return of the “abstract negativity” which violently
unbinds social links. Marx re-binds violence into the process out of which a
New Order arises (violence as the “midwife” of a new society), while in Hegel,
the unbinding remains non-sublated.
Are such “irrational” violent
demonstrations with no concrete programmatic demands, sustained by just a vague
call for justice, not today’s exemplary cases of what Walter Benjamin called
“divine violence” (as opposed to “mythic violence”, i.e. the law-founding state
violence)? They are, as Benjamin put it, means without ends, not part of a
long-term strategy. The immediate counter-argument here is: but are such
violent demonstrations not often unjust, do they not hit the innocent?
If we are to avoid the
overstretched Politically Correct explanations according to which the victims
of divine violence should humbly not resist it on account of their generic
historical responsibility, the only solution is to simply accept the fact that
divine violence is brutally unjust: it is often something terrifying,
not a sublime intervention of divine goodness and justice. A left-liberal
friend from the University of Chicago told me of his sad experience: when his
son reached high-school age, he enrolled him in a high school north of the
campus, close to a black ghetto, with a majority of black kids, but his son was
then returning home almost regularly with bruises or broken teeth – so what
should he have done? Put his son into another school with the white majority or
let him stay?
The point is that this dilemma is wrong. The dilemma cannot be
solved at this level since the very gap between private interest (safety of my
son) and global justice bears witness to a situation which has to be overcome
in its entirety.
