THE BLIND SPOT OF LIBERALISM
Paradoxically, we could say that what Eastern Europe needs most now is more alienation: the establishment of an "alienated" State which would maintain its distance from the civil society, which would be "formal," "empty," i.e., which would not embody any particular ethnic community's dream (and thus keep the space open for them all). Is, then, the solution for Eastern Europe's present woes simply a larger dose of liberal democracy? The picture we have presented seems to point in this direction: Eastern Europe cannot start to live in peace and true pluralist democracy because of the specter of nationalism, i.e., because the disintegration of Communism opened up the space for the emergence of nationalist obsessions, provincialism, anti-Semitism, hatred of all that comes from abroad, ideology of a threat to the nation, antifeminism, and a postsocialist moral majority inclusive of a pro-life movement-in short, enjoyment in its entire "irrationality." Yet what is deeply suspicious about this attitude, about the attitude of an antinationalist, liberal Eastern European intellectual, is the already-mentioned obvious fascination exerted on him by nationalism: liberal intellectuals refuse it, mock it, laugh at it, yet at the same time stare at it with powerless fascination. The intellectual pleasure procured by denouncing nationalism is uncannily close to the satisfaction of successfully explaining one's own impotence and failure (which always was a trademark of a certain kind of Marxism). On another level, Western liberal intellectuals are often caught in a similar trap: the affirmation of their own autochthonous tradition is for them a red-neck horror, a site of populist protofascism (for example, in the U.S.A., the "backwardness" of the Polish, Italian, etc. communities, the alleged brood of "authoritarian personalities" and similar liberal scarecrows), whereas such intellectuals are at once ready to hail the autochthonous ethnical communities of the other (African Americans, Puerto Ricans ... ). Enjoyment is good, on condition that it not be too close to us, on condition that it remain the other's enjoyment.
As to the ultimate inefficiency of this "enlightened," "socially conscious" critical analysis, suffice it to recall Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry series: the first film of the series unabashedly stages and thereby endorses the rightwing, populist fantasy (a lone avenger breaking the corrupted, inefficient law in order to "get things done," a masochist, sexually ambiguous criminal, etc.), whereas in the following installments, it seems as if Eastwood somehow incorporated a liberal critic's reflections on the first film. Already the first one to follow, Magnum Force, rebukes the logic of a "lone avenger" and insists on unconditional respect for the letter of the Law; Sudden Impact gives the logic of the lone avenger almost a feminist touch, with Harry setting free the female killer, a rape victim, since she was not able to obtain justice from the male-chauvinist legal system; Tightrope alludes to the dark parallelisms between the murderer and the law-enforcing inspector. And yet in spite of this self-reflective incorporation of the liberal, "socially conscious" ingredients, the fantasy remains thoroughly the same, its efficiency in structuring our space of desire intact. The truly radical critique of ideology should therefore go beyond the selfcongratulatory "social analyses" which continue to participate in the fantasy that sustains the object of their critique and to search for ways to sap the force of this underlying fantasy-frame itself-in short, to perform something akin to the Lacanian 11 going-through the fantasy" 12 The general lesson to be drawn from it with reference to how ideology works concerns the gap that separates ideology qua discursive formation from its fantasy-support: an ideological edifice is of course submitted to incessant retroactive restructurations, the symbolicdifferential value of its elements shifting all the time, but fantasy designates the hard kernel which resists symbolic "perlaboration," i.e., which as it were anchors an ideology in some "substantial" point and thus provides a constant frame for the symbolic interplay. In other words, it is on account of fantasy that an ideology cannot be reduced to a network of elements whose value wholly depends on their respective differential position within the symbolic structure.