Human Rights in a Chocolate Egg

http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/11/kinderEgg.php

Issue 11 Flight Summer 2003

Slavoj Žižek

Kinder Surprise, one of the most popular chocolate products on sale all around Central Europe, are empty egg shells made of chocolate and wrapped up in brightly colored foil; after one unwraps the egg and cracks the chocolate shell open, one finds in it a small plastic toy (or small parts from which a toy is to be put together). A child who buys this chocolate egg often nervously unwraps it and immediately breaks the chocolate, not bothering to eat it at first and worrying only about the toy in the center. Is such a chocolate-lover not a perfect case of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s dictum “I love you, but, inexplicably, I love something in you more than yourself, and, therefore, I destroy you”? And, effectively, is this toy not l’objet petit a at its purest, the small object filling in the central void of our desire, the hidden treasure, agalma, in the center of the thing we desire?


This material void in the center, of course, stands for the structural gap on account of which no product is “really it,” no product lives up to the expectations that it elicits. In other words, the small plastic toy is not simply different than chocolate (the product we bought); while materially different, it fills in the gap in chocolate itself, i.e., it operates on the same surface as the chocolate. As we know already from Marx, the commodity is a mysterious entity full of theological caprices, a particular object satisfying a particular need, but it is at the same time also the promise of “something more,” of an unfathomable enjoyment whose true location is fantasy. All advertising addresses this fantasmatic space (“If you drink X, you will experience not just a drink, but also...”). And the plastic toy is the result of a risky strategy of directly materializing, rendering visible, this mysterious excess: “If you eat our chocolate, you will not just eat a chocolate, but also have a (totally useless) plastic toy.” The Kinder egg thus provides the formula for all the products which promise “more” (“buy a DVD player and get 5 DVDs for free,” or, in an even more direct form, more of the same—“buy this toothpaste and get one third more for free”), not to mention the standard Coke bottle trick (“look on the inside of the metal tab and you may find that you are the winner of a prize, from another free Coke to a brand new car”). The function of this “more” is to fill in the lack of a “less,” to compensate for the fact that, by definition, a merchandise never delivers on its (fantasmatic) promise. In other words, the ultimate “true” merchandise would be the one which would not need any supplement, the one which would simply fully deliver what it promises—“you get what you paid for, neither less nor more.”1

The idea of a void in the middle of a dessert has a long history. In Elizabethan England, with the rise of modern subjectivity, a difference emerged between the “substantial” food (meat) eaten in the great banquet hall and the sweet desserts eaten in a separate small room while the tables were cleared (“voided”) in the banquet hall. Eventually, the small room in which these desserts were consumed came to be called “the void.” Consequently, the desserts themselves were referred to as “voids,” and, furthermore, in their form, usually in the shape of an animal and empty on the inside, they came to imitate the void. The emphasis was on the contrast between the substantial meal in the large banquet hall and the insubstantial, ornamental, dessert in the void: the void was a “like-meat,” a fake, a pure appearance. It could be, for example, a sugar peacock that looked like a peacock without being one (the key part of the ritual of consuming it was to violently crack the surface to reveal the void inside). This was the early modern version of today’s decaffeinated coffee or artificial sweeteners, and the first example of food deprived of its substance so that in eating it one was in a way “eating nothing.” The further key feature was that this void also provided the space for deploying private subjectivity as opposed to the public space of the banquet hall. The void was consumed in a place to which one withdrew after the public ceremony of the official meal; in this separate place, one was allowed to drop the official masks and abandon oneself to the relaxed exchange of rumors, impressions, opinions, and confessions, in their entire scope from the trivial to the most intimate. The opposition between the substantial “real thing” and the trifling ornamental appearance that only enveloped a void thus mirrored the opposition between substance and subject. No wonder then that, in the same period, the word void also functioned as an allusion to the subject itself, the Void beneath the deceptive appearance of one’s social masks. This, perhaps, is the first culinary version of Hegel’s famous motto according to which one should conceive the Absolute “not only as Substance, but also as Subject“: You should eat not only meat and bread, but also good desserts.


Should we not link this use of void to the fact that, at exactly the same historic moment, at the dawn of modernity, zero as a number was invented—a fact, as Brian Rotman has pointed out, that was connected to the expansion of commodity exchange and of the production of commodities into the hegemonic form of production, so that the link between the void and the commodity is there from the very beginning.2 In Heidegger’s classic analysis of the Greek vase in “Das Ding,” to which Lacan refers in his Ethics of Psychoanalysis, Heidegger emphasizes how the vase as an emblematic Thing is formed around a central void, i.e., it serves as the container of a void.3 One is thus tempted to read the Greek vase and the Kinder chocolate egg together as designating two moments of the Thing in the history of the West; the sacred Thing at its dawn and the ridiculous merchandise at its end. The Kinder egg is our vase of today. Perhaps, then, the ultimate image condensing the entire “history of the West” would be that of the ancient Greeks offering to the gods a vase containing ... a Kinder egg plastic toy. One should effectively follow here the procedure, practiced by Adorno and Horkheimer in their Dialectics of Enlightenment, of condensing the entire development of the Western civilization into one simple line—from pre-historical magical manipulation to technological manipulation, or from the Greek vase to the Kinder egg. What one must bear in mind is that the dawn of Ancient Greek philosophy took place at the same time (and place) as the rise of commodity production and exchange. One of the stories about Thales, the first philosopher, is that he set out to prove his versatility in “real life” by becoming rich on the market, after which he returned to philosophy. The double meaning of the word speculation (metaphysical and financial) is thus operative from the very beginning. One should perhaps then risk the hypothesis that, historically, the Greek vase to which Heidegger refers was already a commodity, and that it was this fact which accounted for the void in its center, which gave to this void its true resonance. It is as a commodity that a thing is not only itself but also points “beyond itself” to another dimension, which is inscribed into the thing itself as a central void.


No wonder, then, that there is a homology between the Kinder egg, today’s void, and the abundance of commodities which offer us “X without X,” deprived of its substance (coffee without caffeine, sweetener without sugar, beer without alcohol, etc.). In both cases, we are offered the surface form deprived of its core. However, more fundamentally, as the discussion of the Elizabethan void indicates, is there not a clear structural homology between this structure of the commodity and the structure of the bourgeois subject? Do subjects—precisely insofar as they are the subjects of universal human rights—not also function as these Kinder chocolate eggs? In France, it is still possible to buy a dessert with the racist name “la tête du nègre” [“a Negro head”], which is a round chocolate cake that is empty inside (“like the stupid Negro’s head”). The Kinder egg fills in this void, but the lesson here is that we in fact all have “negro heads” with a hole in the centre, that subjectivity is in fact structured around a central void.


The humanist-universalist reply to this claim would be to deny that we all have “negro heads” by positing precisely something very much like a Kinder egg theory of the human subject. As humanist ideologists would argue, we may be infinitely different—some of us are black, others white, some tall, others small, some women, others men, some rich, others poor, and so on—yet, deep inside us, there is a moral equivalent of the plastic toy, the same je ne sais quoi, an elusive X which somehow accounts for the dignity shared by all humans. To quote Francis Fukuyama:


What the demand for equality of recognition implies is that when we strip all of a person’s contingent and accidental characteristics away, there remains some essential human quality underneath that is worthy of a certain minimal level of respect—call it Factor X. Skin, color, looks, social class and wealth, gender, cultural background, and even one’s natural talents are all accidents of birth relegated to the class of nonessential characteristics. ... But in the political realm we are required to respect people equally on the basis of their possession of Factor X.4

In contrast to transcendental philosophers who emphasize that this Factor X is a sort of “symbolic fiction” with no counterpart in the reality of an individual, Fukuyama heroically locates it in our “human nature,” in our uniquely human genetic inheritance. And, effectively, is the genome not the ultimate figure of the plastic toy hidden deep within our human chocolate skin, so that we can have exteriors made of white chocolate, milk chocolate, dark chocolate, with or without nuts or raisins, but inside there is always the same plastic toy? What Fukuyama ultimately fears is that if we mess too much with the production of the chocolate egg, we might generate an egg without the plastic toy inside. How? Fukuyama is quite right to emphasize that it is crucial that we experience our “natural” properties as a matter of contingency and luck: if my neighbor is more beautiful or intelligent than me, it is because he was lucky to be born like that, and even his parents could not have planned it that way. The philosophical paradox is that if we take away this element of lucky chance, if our “natural” properties become controlled and regulated by biogenetic and other scientific manipulations, we lose the Factor X.


Of course, the hidden plastic toy can also be given a specific ideological twist—say, the idea that, after one puts aside the chocolate in all its ethnic variations, one always encounters an American (even if the toy is in all probability made in China). Furthermore, the Factor X does not only guarantee the underlying identity of different subjects, but also the continuing identity of the same subject. Twenty years ago, National Geographic published a famous photograph of a young Afghani woman with fierce bright green-yellow eyes; in 2001, the same woman was identified in Afghanistan. Although her face was changed, worn out from a difficult life and by heavy work, her intense eyes were instantly recognizable as the factor of continuity. However, this thesis of continuity was empirically undermined two decades ago when the German Leftist weekly journal Stern conducted a rather cruel experiment: the magazine paid a homeless man and woman to allow themselves to be thoroughly bathed, shaved, and then delivered to the top designers and hairdressers. The journal then published two large photos side-by-side of each person—in his/her destitute habitat, dirty and with unshaved faces, and then dressed up by a top designer. The result was effectively uncanny: although it was clear that we were dealing with the same person, the effect of the different dress, etc. was that our belief that there is always one and the same person beneath different appearances was shaken. It was not only the participants’ appearances that were different: the deeply disturbing effect of this change of appearances was that we, the spectators, somehow perceived a different personality beneath the appearances. Stern was bombarded by readers’ letters accusing the journal of violating the homeless people’s dignity, of humiliating them, submitting them to a cruel joke. However, what this experiment undermined was precisely the belief in Factor X, the kernel of identity that accounts for our dignity and persists through changes in appearance. In short, this experiment in a way empirically demonstrated that we all have a “negro head,” that the core of our subjectivity is a void filled in by appearances.


So let us return to the scene of a small kid violently tearing apart and discarding the chocolate egg in order to get at the plastic toy. Is he not the emblem of so-called “totalitarianism” which also wants to get rid of the “inessential” historical contingent coating in order to liberate the “essence” of man? Is not the ultimate “totalitarian” vision that of a New Man arising out of the debris of the violent annihilation of the old corrupted humanity? Paradoxically, then, liberalism and “totalitarianism” share this belief in the Factor X, the plastic toy in the midst of the human chocolate coating. The problem with Factor X which makes us equal despite our differences is clear: hidden behind the deep humanist insight that “deep down, we are all equal, the same vulnerable humans,” lies the cynical statement, “Why bother to fight against surface differences when, deep down, we already are equal?” The scenario in fact resembles nothing so much as the proverbial millionaire who pathetically discovers that he shares passions, fears, and loves with a destitute beggar.


1. No wonder, then, that these eggs are now prohibited in the US and have to be smuggled from Canada (and sold at a triple price): behind the official pretext (the eggs pose a danger to children), it is easy to discern the deeper reason—these eggs display too openly the inherent structure of a commodity.

2. See Brian Rotman, Signifying Nothing (London: MacMillan, 1987).

3. See Martin Heidegger, "Das Ding," in Vortraege und Aufsetze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954).

4. Francis Fukuyama, Our Posthuman Future (London: Profile Books 2002), pp. 149-150.

Democracy is the enemy

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2011/10/28/slavoj-zizek/democracy-is-the-enemy/

Slavoj Žižek 28 October 2011

The protests on Wall Street and at St Paul’s Cathedral are similar, Anne Applebaum wrote in the Washington Post, ‘in their lack of focus, in their inchoate nature, and above all in their refusal to engage with existing democratic institutions’. ‘Unlike the Egyptians in Tahrir Square,’ she went on, ‘to whom the London and New York protesters openly (and ridiculously) compare themselves, we have democratic institutions.’

Once you have reduced the Tahrir Square protests to a call for Western-style democracy, as Applebaum does, of course it becomes ridiculous to compare the Wall Street protests with the events in Egypt: how can protesters in the West demand what they already have? What she blocks from view is the possibility of a general discontent with the global capitalist system which takes on different forms here or there.

‘Yet in one sense,’ she conceded, ‘the international Occupy movement’s failure to produce sound legislative proposals is understandable: both the sources of the global economic crisis and the solutions to it lie, by definition, outside the competence of local and national politicians.’ She is forced to the conclusion that ‘globalisation has clearly begun to undermine the legitimacy of Western democracies.’ This is precisely what the protesters are drawing attention to: that global capitalism undermines democracy. The logical further conclusion is that we should start thinking about how to expand democracy beyond its current form, based on multi-party nation-states, which has proved incapable of managing the destructive consequences of economic life. 

Instead of making this step, however, Applebaum shifts the blame onto the protesters themselves for raising these issues:

 ‘Global’ activists, if they are not careful, will accelerate that decline. Protesters in London shout: ‘We need to have a process!’ Well, they already have a process: it’s called the British political system. And if they don’t figure out how to use it, they’ll simply weaken it further.

So, Applebaum’s argument appears to be that since the global economy is outside the scope of democratic politics, any attempt to expand democracy to manage it will accelerate the decline of democracy. What, then, are we supposed to do? Continue engaging, it seems, in a political system which, according to her own account, cannot do the job.

There is no shortage of anti-capitalist critique at the moment: we are awash with stories about the companies ruthlessly polluting our environment, the bankers raking in fat bonuses while their banks are saved by public money, the sweatshops where children work overtime making cheap clothes for high-street outlets. There is a catch, however. The assumption is that the fight against these excesses should take place in the familiar liberal-democratic frame. The (explicit or implied) goal is to democratise capitalism, to extend democratic control over the global economy, through the pressure of media exposure, parliamentary inquiries, harsher laws, police investigations etc. 

What goes unquestioned is the institutional framework of the bourgeois democratic state. This remains sacrosanct even in the most radical forms of ‘ethical anti-capitalism’ – the Porto Allegre forum, the Seattle movement and so on.

Here, Marx’s key insight remains as pertinent today as it ever was: the question of freedom should not be located primarily in the political sphere – i.e. in such things as free elections, an independent judiciary, a free press, respect for human rights. Real freedom resides in the ‘apolitical’ network of social relations, from the market to the family, where the change needed in order to make improvements is not political reform, but a change in the social relations of production. We do not vote concerning who owns what, or about the relations between workers in a factory. Such things are left to processes outside the sphere of the political, and it is an illusion that one can change them by ‘extending’ democracy: say, by setting up ‘democratic’ banks under the people’s control. Radical changes in this domain should be made outside the sphere of such democratic devices as legal rights etc. They have a positive role to play, of course, but it must be borne in mind that democratic mechanisms are part of a bourgeois-state apparatus that is designed to ensure the undisturbed functioning of capitalist reproduction. Badiou was right to say that the name of the ultimate enemy today is not capitalism, empire, exploitation or anything of the kind, but democracy: it is the ‘democratic illusion’, the acceptance of democratic mechanisms as the only legitimate means of change, which prevents a genuine transformation in capitalist relations.

The Wall Street protests are just a beginning, but one has to begin this way, with a formal gesture of rejection which is more important than its positive content, for only such a gesture can open up the space for new content. So we should not be distracted by the question: ‘But what do you want?’ This is the question addressed by male authority to the hysterical woman: ‘All your whining and complaining – do you have any idea what you really want?’ In psychoanalytic terms, the protests are a hysterical outburst that provokes the master, undermining his authority, and the master’s question – ‘But what do you want?’ – disguises its subtext: ‘Answer me in my own terms or shut up!’ So far, the protesters have done well to avoid exposing themselves to the criticism that Lacan leveled at the students of 1968: ‘As revolutionaries, you are hysterics who demand a new master. You will get one.’

Žižek: Pervert's Guide to Europe

Donald Trump is the real deal

Hillary Clinton is the political mask of the corporate face of America, but Donald Trump is the real deal.

“Clinton has a proven record of murderous warmongering, on par with any Republican warmonger. Donald Trump only promises to do and be more of the same that she has done...”

Hamid Dabashi

http://www.aljazeera.com//indepth/opinion/2016/03/salesman-politicians-donald-trump-hillary-clinton

A spectre is hovering high over the United States - the spectre of a Trump presidency. All the elders of the Republican Party have now entered into a frightful alliance to disown and exorcise this spectre. But the goblin listens to no one, as millions of xenophobic, angry, "poorly educated" (as Trump proudly calls his own supporters), mostly white men and women storm around him, raising their right hands "Sieg Heil" style and pledging allegiance.

"In an extraordinary display of Republican chaos," CNN reports, "the party's most recent presidential nominees, Mitt Romney and John McCain, lambasted current frontrunner Donald Trump on Thursday, calling him unfit for office and a danger for the nation and the GOP [Grand Old Party]."

The cause for fear is self-evident: "GOP hawks declare war on Trump," according to reports, "Prominent Republican hawks are debating whether to hold their noses and vote for Clinton instead."

Corporate skin, political masks

What is the difference between Trump and Clinton? This is the critical question the US voters face this year, but not the world at large, for which Trump promises to do more of what Clinton and all Democrat and Republican presidents before her have already done and continue to do to the world.

The difference between Trump and Clinton is the difference between commodity and branding. Trump is the real face of corporate America, Clinton its mask. In choosing Donald Trump, Americans are choosing corporate America instead of its representative Hillary Clinton. Donald Trump is the real deal, Hillary Clinton is the camouflage.

Why buy the stooge of corporate America, Donald Trump supporters are effectively asking, when the real deal, their preferred candidate, is on sale?

Why buy the stooge of corporate America, Donald Trump supporters are effectively asking, when the real deal ... is on sale?

This is a decisive moment because the fake facade of US politics is finally falling down and the naked truth of corporate reality running this show reveals its naked fascistic face for the whole world to see.

A demagogue salesman is appealing to the basest instinct of US consumers, to the very logic of US capitalism run amuck.

His supporters have been trained Pavlovian dog-style for Trump from birth and now instinctively each time they push a cart down the supermarket isle hunt for the cheapest product on sale. Trump is the cheapest product on sale.

Naked fascism

The naked fascism that Trump flaunts today has always been there but hidden behind the mask of politics-as-usual; hidden behind smiling faces, false promises, gaudy oratorical speeches, the kissing of frightened babies, the shaking of insincere hands, while hiding the terror of global warfare, drone attacks, special forces, secret kill lists, CIA torture chambers.

A consensus is now building in the US that the Trump presidency is so dangerous Democrats and Republicans should unite to prevent it by electing Hillary Clinton. But what exactly is the difference between a Clinton and a Trump presidency for the world at large?

The prospect of a Trump presidency is only frightful if you think Hillary Clinton's record of warmongering around the world - from Iraq to Libya to her threatening Iran with annihilation - is a stellar record of high-minded and competent diplomacy.

Americans have every reason to fear a Trump presidency, but the world at large has not an iota of reason to believe Clinton would be any better. Trump is promising to deliver to Americans a dose of what Clinton, her husband, the current US president, and all the Republicans and Democrat presidents before him have administered to the world at large.

Now suddenly these Republicans are scared of fascism. They did not worry about fascism when they produced George W Bush, who wreaked havoc on Afghanistan and Iraq and set in motion a criminal catastrophe that has now resulted in murderous mayhem raging from Iraq to Syria.

But now that Trump appears to threaten their entire party apparatus suddenly they worry about fascism. Fascism arrived and wreaked havoc from one end of the globe to another by these very Republican cons and neocons a very long time ago.

Xenophobia is on sale

Clinton has a proven record of murderous warmongering on a par with any Republican warmonger. Donald Trump only promises to do more of what she has done. He has no record of any such atrocities as yet.

He, in fact, has occasionally condemned both the Afghan and Iraq invasions, and on Israeli murderous records he has declared himself agnostic and neutral, even daring to suggest that Israel is not sincere in its claim to be peaceful. And, contrary to Clinton, he is not in any billionaire Zionist's deep pocket and has not written and signed a pledge of allegiance to those hell-bent on stealing the entirety of Palestine no matter what the cost to Palestinian lives and Liberty.

Yes, indeed, the horrors of Trump's xenophobic racism and misogyny against Mexicans, Muslims, women etc is abominable, but we know all this because he is not a seasoned politician and has not learned how to conceal and camouflage his racism.

When Clinton's guard was down and she did not realise the cameras were rolling, she too called young African Americans "super-predators" who had to be "brought to heel".

She is the same person - only now she has learned how to camouflage her racism. Trump has not mastered that art. Trump has a different product to sell - himself - and has targeted a different market - white supremacists basking in their racism. The salesman is naked in his fascism, the politician is properly dressed in socially acceptable verbiage.

In choosing Trump over Clinton, Americans are opting to buy the real product instead of a badly packaged camouflage representation of that product.

Clinton is the political mask of the corporate face of America, and this time around Americans wish to see the real face of their government, the rule of corporate America, and not some corrupt politician being funded by them to represent that face with a mask of fair play and warm wishes.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Source: Al Jazeera

Hamid Dabashi

About the Author

Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University.

@HamidDabashi

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