In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek

(das Ding), used by Freud to designate the ultimate object of our desires in its unbearable intensity and impenetrability. One should hear in this term all the connotations of horror fiction: the Neighbor is the (Evil) Thing which potentially lurks beneath every homely human face, like the hero of Stephen King’s The Shining, a gentle failed writer, who gradually turns into a killing beast and, with an evil grin, goes on to slaughter his entire family.

      When Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the basic Judeo-Christian injunction to “love thy neighbor,” they are thus not just making the standard critico-ideological point about how every notion of universality is colored by our particular values and thus implies secret exclusions. They are making a much stronger point about the incompatibility of the Neighbor with the very dimension of universality. What resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbor. This brings us back to the key question: does every universalist ethics have to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answer is: every ethics that remains “humanist” (in the sense of avoiding the inhuman core of being-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbor. “Man,” “human person,” is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of the Neighbor.

      Consequently, when one asserts the Neighbor as the impenetrable “Thing” that eludes any attempt at gentrification, at its transformation into a cozy fellow man, this does not mean that the ultimate horizon of ethics is deference towards this unfathomable Otherness that subverts any encompassing universality. Following Alain Badiou, one should assert that, on the contrary, only an “inhuman” ethics, an ethics addressing an inhuman subject, not a fellow person, can sustain true universality. The most difficult thing for common understanding is to grasp this speculative-dialectical reversal of the singularity of the subject qua Neighbor-Thing into universality, not standard “general” universality, but universal singularity, the universality grounded in the subjective singularity extracted from all particular properties, a kind of direct short circuit between the singular and the universal, bypassing the particular.

      We should celebrate the genius of Walter Benjamin which shines through in the very title of his early work: On Language in General and Human Language in Particular. The point here is not that human language is a species of some universal language “as such” which comprises also other species (the language of gods and angels? Animal language? The language of some other intelligent beings out there in space? Computer language? The language of DNA?): there is no actually-existing language other than human language—but, in order to comprehend this “particular” language, one has to introduce a minimal difference, conceiving it with regard to the gap which separates it from language “as such” (the pure structure of language deprived of the insignia of the human finitude, of erotic passions and mortality, of the struggles for domination and the obscenity of power).⁸ This minimal difference between inhuman language and human language is clearly a Platonic one. What if, then, we have to turn the standard relationship around: the obverse of the fact that, in Christ, God is fully human, is that we, humans, are not. G.K. Chesterton began The Napoleon of Notting Hill with: “The human race, to which so many of my readers belong . . .”—which, of course, does not mean that some of us are not human, but that there is an inhuman core in all of us, or, that we are “not-all human.”

       The screen of civility

      The predominant way of maintaining a distance towards the “inhuman” Neighbor’s intrusive proximity is politeness—but what is politeness? There is a gentle vulgar story that plays on the innuendos of seduction: A boy and a girl are saying goodbye late in the evening, in front of her house; hesitantly, he says: “Would you mind if I come in with you for a coffee?”, to which she replies: “Sorry, not tonight, I have my period . . .” A polite version would be the one in which the girl says: “Good news, my period is over—come up to my place!”, to which the boy replies: “Sorry, I am not in a mood for a cup of coffee right now . . .” This, however, immediately confronts us with the ambiguity of politeness: there is an unmistakable dimension of humiliating brutality in the boy’s polite answer—as John Lennon put it in his “Working Class Hero”: “you must learn how to smile as you kill.”

      The ambiguity of politeness is best rendered in Henry James’s masterpieces: in this universe where tact reigns supreme, where the open explosion of one’s emotions is considered as the utmost vulgarity, everything is said, the most painful decisions are made, the most delicate messages are passed over—however, it all takes place in the guise of a formal conversation. Even when I blackmail my partner, I do it with a polite smile, offering her tea and cakes . . . Is it, then, that, while the brutal direct approach misses the Other’s kernel, a tactful dance can reach it? In his Minima Moralia, Adorno pointed out the utter ambiguity of tact clearly discernible already in Henry James: the respectful consideration for the other’s sensitivity, the concern not to violate her intimacy, can easily pass over into the brutal insensitivity for the other’s pain.⁹ The same spirit, elevated to the level of absurdity, was displayed by Field Marshall von Kluge, the commander of the Army Group Centre on the Russian front. In January 1943, a group of German officers in Smolensk, where the headquarters of the army group was based, was planning to kill Hitler during the latter’s visit; the idea was that, during a meal in the mess, some two dozen officers would simultaneously draw their pistols and shoot him, thus rendering the responsibility collective, and also making sure that Hitler’s bodyguards would not be able to prevent at least some of the bullets hitting their target. Unfortunately, von Kluge vetoed the plan, although he was anti-Nazi and wanted Hitler dead. His argument was that, by the tenets of the German Officer Corps, “it is not seemly to shoot a man at lunch.”¹⁰

      As such, politeness comes close to civility. In a scene from Break Up, the nervous Vince Vaughn angrily reproaches Jennifer Anniston: “You wanted me to wash the dishes, and I’ll wash the dishes—what’s the problem?” She replies: “I don’t want you to wash the dishes—I want you to want to wash the dishes!” This is the minimal reflexivity of desire, its “terrorist” demand: I want you not only to do what I want, but to do it as if you really want to do it—I want to regulate not only what you do, but also your desires. The worst thing you can do, even worse than not doing what I want you to do, is to do what I want you to do without wanting to do it . . . And this brings us to civility: an act of civility is precisely to feign that I want to do what the other asks me to do, so that my compliance with the other’s wish does not exert pressure on her. The movie Borat is at its most subversive not when the hero is simply rude and offensive (for our Western eyes and ears, at least), but, on the contrary, when he desperately tries to be polite. During a dinner party in an upper-class house, he asks where the toilet is, whence he then returns with his excrement carefully wrapped in a plastic bag, and asks his hostess in a hushed voice where he should put it. This is a model metaphor of a truly subversive political gesture: bringing those in power a bag of excrement and politely asking them how to get rid of it.

      In a perspicuous short essay on civility, Robert Pippin elaborates the enigmatic in-between status of this notion which designates all the acts that display the basic subjective attitude of respect for others as free and autonomous agents, equal to us, the benevolent attitude of transcending the strict utilitarian or “rational” calculation of costs and benefits in relations with others and engaging in trusting them, trying not to humiliate them, and so forth.¹¹ Although, measured by the degree of its obligatory character, it is more than kindness or generosity (one cannot oblige people to be generous), but distinctly less than a moral or legal obligation. This is what is wrong in politically correct attempts to moralize or even directly penalize modes of behavior which basically pertain to civility (like hurting others with vulgar obscenities of speech, and so on): they potentially undermine the precious “middle ground” of civility, mediating between uncontrolled private fantasies and the strictly regulated forms of intersubjective behavior. In more Hegelian terms, what gets lost in the penalization of un-civility is “ethical substance” as such: in contrast to laws and explicit normative regulations, civility is, by definition, “substantial,” something experienced as always-already given, never imposed/instituted as such.¹² Which