Slavoj Žižek
July 11, 2019
Some British Jews feel
affronted by alleged anti-Semitism in the UK Labour Party. But how many of the
complainants empathize with complaints from West Bank Palestinians?
Throughout history, thinking
at variance with the mainstream was always unpopular and risky. However, at
various times, it has been tolerated to different degrees. Today, it’s less and
less acceptable than in the recent past.
Liberals of all colors like to
repeat German socialist Rosa Luxembourg’s critical stab at the Bolsheviks: “Freedom
is freedom for those who think differently.”
And, to spice it up, they
often like to add Voltaire’s maxim:
“I disapprove of what you say,
but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
That said, does our recent
(and not so recent) experience not show that freedom for those who think
differently is now acceptable only within the constraints of the predominant
social pact?
We can see this clearly, right
now, as the unwritten rule which determines the limits of what is acceptable is
breaking apart, and different visions compete to impose themselves as
hegemonic. Years ago, Noam Chomsky caused a scandal when he followed Voltaire’s
maxim to its extreme: he defended the holocaust denier Robert Faurisson’s right
to publish his book, and his argumentation even appeared in Faurisson’s book as
an afterword.
Today such a gesture would be
immediately identified as anti-Semitic.
Big numbers
Holocaust denial is today not
only criminalized, the terms of its criminalization are sometimes even
numerically circumscribed.
For example, an idea
circulated a decade or so ago that it should be punishable to set the number of
holocaust victims at lower than five million. Other mass crimes were then added
to the list – such as when France made it illegal to deny the Armenian
genocide.
Even if something is not
legally criminalized, it can be submitted to de facto criminalization. Typical
here is the fate of Martin Heidegger, until recently considered the key
philosopher of the 20th century. After his ‘Black Notebooks’ were published, a group of liberal critics made a coordinated
campaign to academically criminalize his thought.
The idea was that, due to his
direct links with the Nazi ideology, Heidegger doesn’t even deserve to be the
topic of a serious philosophical debate – he should be simply dismissed as
unworthy of such an approach since, as Emmanuel Faye put it, Heidegger not only
supported Nazism, his thought is nothing but the introduction of Nazism into
philosophy.
This procedure of extra-legal
criminalization reaches its peak in today’s politically correct version of
MeToo. Sometimes it looks as if its partisans care more about a couple of
affluent women who were shocked when Louis CK showed them his penis than with
hundreds of poor girls being brutally raped. In replying to those who insisted
on a difference between Harvey Weinstein and Louis CK, MeToo activists claimed
that those who say this have no idea about how male violence works and is
experienced, and that masturbation in front of women can be experienced as no
less violent than physical imposition.
Although there is some truth
in both of these claims, one should nonetheless impose a clear limit to the
logic that sustains this argumentation: the limits of freedom are set so narrow
here that even a modest debate about different grades of abuse is considered
unacceptable.
Is freedom (of debate) then
not de facto reduced to freedom solely for those who think like us? Not only
must we accept the general (PC) consensus and then limit our debate to minor
details, even the scope of the details one is allowed to debate is very narrow.
Ticking boxes
Am I then a diehard liberal
who pleads for total openness? No, prohibitions are necessary and limits should
be set. I just hate those hypocrites who don’t admit the obvious fact that, in
some sense, freedom effectively IS freedom for those who basically think like
us.
The partisans of the
criminalization of “hate speech” predictably try to concoct a way out of this
paradox; their usual line of argumentation is: hate speech deserves
criminalization because it effectively deprives its victims of their freedom
and humiliates them, so the exclusion of hate speech effectively widens the
scope of actual freedom.
This is true, but problems
arise with the PC procedure of prohibiting even an open debate about this
scope, so that an arbitrary exclusion (like the prohibition of Louis CK) is
itself excluded from debate.
The argument evoked against
defenders of Louis CK is the same as the one pushed by those who accuse the
British Labour Party of tolerating anti-Semitism: who are we to judge if the
complaints of the self-proclaimed victims are justified or not?
It is up to the affronted to
decide this – if they feel hurt, then this is it. But really?
Let’s take the case of
anti-Semitism: so we should take seriously the complaints of those UK Jews, who
feel offended. However, are they ready to take seriously the complaints of the
West Bank Palestinians, or is this considered a different case of a complaint
where the victim’s word is not to be trusted?
If so, it’s proof that the
claims of one’s own victimization are never to be taken at their face value but
always coldly analyzed.
As the French philosopher
Gilles Deleuze put it decades ago, all politics which relies on the unique
experience of a limited group is always reactionary.
