surplus and other stuff

Doug Henwood dhenwood at panix.com
Sat Jan 23 10:37:35 PST 1999


rc&am wrote:


>it occurs to me to ask the question in this context of why the major
>struggles of today are pitched as struggles between rational, modern
>capitalism and traditional identity, including various fundamentalisms.

I know I sound like a broken record, but Zizek offers a fine beginning to answering this question in the "Love your nation as yourself!" chapter of Tarrying With the Negative. An excerpt:

In her article "Nuclear Sublime," Frances Ferguson" registered the growing claustrophobia displayed by a series of features in our everyday life: from the awareness of how smoking endangers not just smokers themselves but nonsmokers in their company, through the obsession with child abuse, up to the revival of the theory of seduction in (the critique of) psychoanalysis (Masson's The Assault on Truth). What lurks in the background of these features is the Spinozist idea that, imperceptibly, at a presubjective level, we are entangled in a network by way of which others encroach upon us: ultimately, the very presence of others as such is perceived as violence. However, in order for this enhanced awareness of how others threaten us, of how we are totally "exposed" to them, to emerge, a certain solipsist shift had to occur which defines the "postmodern" subject: this subject has as it were withdrawn from the big Other, maintaining a protopsychotic distance toward the Other; i.e., this subject perceives himself as an out-Law, lacking the common ground shared with others. And for this reason, every contact with others is perceived and experienced as a violent encroachment.

The so-called "fundamentalism" on which today's mass media more and more confer the role of the Enemy par excellence (in the guise of selfdestructive "radical Evil": Saddam Hussein, the narco-cartels ... ) is to be grasped as a reaction to the ruling Spinozism, as its inherent Other. The result is sad enough, although theoretically very instructive: it is as if today the usual opposition of Good qua unyielding ethical attitude, the readiness to risk all rather than compromise one's sense of justice, and of Evil qua opportunist giving way under the pressure of circumstances, is inverted and thus attains its hidden truth. Today, "fanaticism," any readiness to put everything at stake, is as such suspicious, which is why a proper ethical attitude survives only in the guise of "radical Evil." The only true dilemma today is whether or not the late-capitalist Spinozism is our ultimate horizon: is all that seems to resist this Spinozism mere "remainders of the past," simply limited, "passive" knowledge, unable to contemplate the CapitalSubstance sub specie aeternitatis, as a selfsufficient machinery, or can we effectively call this Spinozism into question?

Dreams of Nationalism, Explained by the Dream of Radical Evil

Where, then, are we to look for the way out of this vicious circle of latecapitalist Spinozism? Needless to stress, we are far from advocating that fundamentalist overidentification is "anticapitalist": the point is precisely that the contemporary forms of "paranoiac" overidentification are the inherent reverse of Capital's universalism, an inherent reaction to it. The more the logic of Capital becomes universal, the more its opposite will assume features of "irrational fundamentalism." In other words, there is no way out as long as the universal dimension of our social formation remains defined in terms of Capital. The way to break out of this vicious circle is not to fight the "irrational" nationalist particularism but to invent forms of political practice that contain a dimension of universality beyond Capital; their exemplary case today, of course, is the ecological movement.

And where does this leave us with regard to Eastern Europe? The liberal point of view which opposes liberaldemocratic "openness" to nationalistorganic "closure" - the view sustained by the hope that a "true" liberaldemocratic society will arise once we get rid of the protofascist nationalistic constraints -falls short, since it fails to take into account the way the supposedly "neutral" liberal-democratic framework produces nationalist 11 closure" as its inherent opposite." The only way to prevent the emergence of protofascist nationalist hegemony is to call into question the very standard of "normality," the universal framework of liberal-democratic capitalism- as was done, for a brief moment, by the "vanishing mediators" in the passage from socialism into capitalism.

In the ethnic tensions emerging in Eastern Europe, the Western gaze upon the East encounters its own uncanny reverse usually qualified (and by the same token disqualified) as "fundamentalism": the end of cosmopolitanism, liberal democracy's impotence in the face of this return of tribalism. It is precisely here that, for the sake of democracy itself, one has to gather strength and repeat the exemplary heroical gesture of Freud, who answered the threat of Fascist anti-Semitism by depriving Jews of their founding father: Moses and Monotheism is Freud's answer to Nazism. What Freud did was therefore the exact opposite of Arnold Schoenberg, for example, who scornfully dismissed Nazi racism as a pale imitation of the self-comprehension of the Jews as the elected people: by way of an almost masochistic inversion, Freud targeted Jews themselves and endeavored to prove that their founding father, Moses, was Egyptian. Notwithstanding the historic (in)accuracy of this thesis, what really matters is its discursive strategy: to demonstrate that Jews are already in themselves "decentered," that their "originality" is a bricolage. The difficulty does not reside in Jews but in the transference of the anti-Semite who thinks that Jews "really possess it," agalma, the secret of their power: the anti-Semite is the one who "believes in the Jew," so the only way effectively to undermine anti-Semitism is to contend that Jews do not possess "it.:

In a similar move, one has to detect the flaw of liberal democracy which opens up a space for "fundamentalism." That is to say, there is ultimately only one question which confronts political philosophy today: is liberal democracy the ultimate horizon of our political practice, or is it possible effectively to comprise its inherent limitation? The standard neoconservative answer here is to bemoan the "lack of roots" that allegedly pertains to liberal democracy, to this kingdom of the Nietzschean "last man" where no place is left for ethical heroism, where we are more and more submerged in the idiotic routine of everyday life regulated by the pleasure-principle, etc.: within this perspective, "fundamentalism" is a simple reaction to this "loss of roots," a perverted, yet desperate search for new roots in an organic community. Yet this neoconservative answer falls short by failing to demonstrate how the very project of formal democracy, conceived in its philosophical founding gesture, opens up the space for "fundamentalism."

The structural homology between Kantian formalism and formal democracy is a classical topos: in both cases, the starting point, the founding gesture, consists of an act of radical emptying, evacuation. With Kant, what is evacuated and left empty is the locus of the Supreme Good: every positive object destined to occupy this place is by definition "pathological," marked by empirical contingency, which is why the moral Law must be reduced to the pure Form bestowing on our acts the character of universality. Likewise, the elementary operation of democracy is the evacuation of the locus of Power: every pretender to this place is by definition a "pathological" usurper; "nobody can rule innocently," to quote Saint-Just. And the crucial point is that "nationalism" as a specifically modern, post-Kantian phenomenon designates the moment when the Nation, the national Thing, usurps, fills out, the empty place of the Thing opened up by Kant's "formalism," by his reduction of every "pathological" content. The Kantian term for this filling-out of the void, of course, is the fanaticism of Schwärmerei. does not "nationalism" epitomize fanaticism in politics?

In this precise sense, it is the very "formalism" of Kant which, by way of its distinction between negative and indefinite judgment, opens up the space for the "undead" and similar incarnations of some monstrous radical Evil. It was already the "pre-critical" Kant who used the dreams of a ghostseer to explain the metaphysical dream;"' today, one should refer to the dream of the "undead" monsters to explain nationalism. The filling-out of the empty place of the Thing by the Nation is perhaps the paradigmatic case of the inversion which defines radical Evil. As to this link between philosophical formalism (the emptying of the "pathological" content) and nationalism, Kant presents a unique point: by discerning the empty place of the Thing, he effectively circumscribes the space of nationalism, yet at the same time prohibits us from taking the crucial step into it (this was done later by way of the "aesthetization" of the Kantian ethic, in Schiller, for example). In other words, the status of nationalism is ultimately that of the transcendental illusion, the illusion of a direct access to the Thing; as such, it epitomizes the principle of fanaticism in politics. Kant remains a "cosmopolite" precisely insofar as he was not yet ready to accept the possibility of "diabolical" Evil, of Evil as an ethical attitude. This paradox of filling-out the empty place of the Supreme Good defines the modern notion of Nation. The ambiguous and contradictory nature of the modern nation is the same as that of vampires and other living dead: they are wrongly perceived as "leftovers from the past"; their place is constituted by the very break of modernity.

This pathological "stain" also determines the deadlocks of today's liberal democracy. The problem with the liberal democracy is that a priori, for structural reasons, it cannot be universalized. Hegel said that the moment of victory of a political force is the very moment of its splitting: the triumphant liberal-democratic "new world order" is more and more marked by a frontier separating its "inside" from its "outside" -a frontier between those who manage to remain "within" (the "developed," those to whom the rules of human rights, social security, etc., apply) and the others, the excluded (the main concern of the "developed" apropos of them is to contain their explosive potential, even if the price to be paid for such containment is the neglect of elementary democratic principles). This opposition, not the one between the capitalist and the socialist "bloc," is what defines the contemporary constellation: the "socialist" bloc was the true "third way," a desperate attempt at modernization outside the constraints of capitalism. What is effectively at stake in the present crisis of postsocialist states is precisely the struggle for one's place, now that the illusion of the "third way" has evaporated: who will be admitted "inside," integrated into the developed capitalist order, and who will remain excluded from it? Ex-Yugoslavia is perhaps the exemplary case: every actor in the bloody play of its disintegration endeavors to legitimize its place "inside" by presenting itself as the last bastion of European civilization (the current ideological designation for the capitalist "inside") in the face of oriental barbarism. For the right-wing nationalist Austrians, this imaginary frontier is Karavanke, the mountain chain between Austria and Slovenia: beyond it, the rule of Slavic hordes begins. For the nationalist Slovenes, this frontier is the river Kolpa, separating Slovenia from Croatia: we are Mitteleuropa, while Croatians are already Balkan, involved in the irrational ethnic feuds which really do not concern us; we are on their side, we sympathize with them, yet in the same way one sympathizes with a third world victim of aggression. For Croatians, the crucial frontier, of course, is the one between them and Serbians, i.e., between the Western Catholic civilization and the Eastern Orthodox collective spirit which cannot comprehend the values of Western individualism. Serbians, finally, conceive of themselves as the last line of defense of Christian Europe against the fundamentalist danger bodied forth by Muslim Albanians and Bosnians. (It should be clear, now, who, within the space of ex-Yugoslavia, effectively behaves in the civilized "European" way: those at the very bottom of this ladder, excluded from all-Albanians and Muslim Bosnians.) The traditional liberal opposition between "open" pluralist societies and "closed" nationalist-corporatist societies founded on the exclusion of the Other has thus to be brought to its point of self-reference: the liberal gaze itself functions according to the same logic, insofar as it is founded upon the exclusion of the Other to whom one attributes the fundamentalist nationalism, etc. On that account, events in ex-Yugoslavia exemplify perfectly the properly dialectical reversal: something which first appeared within the given set of circumstances as the most backward element, a left-over of the past, all of a sudden, with the shift in the general framework, emerges as the element of the future in the present context, as the premonition of what lies ahead. The outbursts of Balkan nationalism were first dismissed as the death throes of Communist totalitarianism disguised in new nationalist clothes, as a ridiculous anachronism that truly belongs to the nineteenthcentury age of nation-states, not to our present era of multinationals and world integration; however, it suddenly became clear that the ethnic conflicts of ex-Yugoslavia offer the first clear taste of the twenty-first century, the prototype of the post-cold war armed conflicts.



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