Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

the final triumph of the Good, then, of course, we are justified in engaging in Evil as the means to achieve the Good. In true Hegelian spirit, however, we should insist that such a justification is always and a priori retroactive: there is no Reason in History whose divine plan can justify Evil; the Good that may come out of Evil is its contingent by-product. We may say that the ultimate result of Nazi Germany and its defeat was the institution of much higher ethical standards of human rights and international justice; but to claim that this result in any sense “justifies” Nazism would be an obscenity. Only in this way can we truly avoid the perverse consequences of religious fundamentalism. Let us take a look at such fundamentalism at its darkest: the strange case of Doctor Radovan Karadžić.

       “Nothing is forbidden in my faith”

      To put it in Heideggerian terms, what is the exact meaning of “is” when we read on the publicity posters for a blockbuster film statements such as “Sean Connery IS James Bond in . . .” or “Matt Damon IS Bourne in . . .”? It is not simply a close identification of the actor with the screen hero, such that “we cannot even imagine anyone else playing him.” The first thing to note is that such identity claims always refer to a serial character, so that, in order to grasp the identification at stake here, we need to introduce a third term apart from the actor and the hero: namely, the screen image of the actor (John Wayne as tough Western guy, and so on)—it is this image, not the real actor, who is identified with the screen hero.

      What about in the case of a single (non-serial) role which becomes conflated with a particular actor, as in a publicity slogan we will certainly never see: “Anthony Perkins IS Norman Bates”? As expected, it ruined the actor’s career . . . When Radovan Karadžić, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs accused of organizing ethnic cleansing, was arrested, it was discovered that in his last years as a fugitive he had been “hiding in plain sight” as a spiritual healer, taking part in forums and lectures attended by several hundred people, and contributing articles to the Zdrav Život (Healthy Life) magazine. Can we then also say that “Radovan Karadžić IS Dragan Dabić”; the latter being not merely a mask of the former, but his “inner truth”? In other words, the relationship between the two is that of a genuine parallax. His editor at Zdrav Život, Goran Kojić, said: “He offered me an article that speaks about similarities and differences between meditation and tihovanje [quietude]. I thought the text was really good and published it in several parts in our magazine.” Here is a passage from the text:

      It is not only about the time you spend in prayer, or the exact position you adopt, but about a series of moments where you dive into yourself (which we could describe as pulling yourself together), where you calm down the passionate and obsessive re-living of everyday life. For each and every housewife, it is that solitary early morning coffee, when the household has still not woken up.

      “Dragan Dabić” is not merely a mask, a fiction constructed to obfuscate Karadžić’s true identity. Of course “Dragan Dabić” is a fiction, a fake persona, but it is here that Lacan’s thesis “truth has the structure of a fiction” acquires all its weight: the fictive person “Dabić” provides the ideological key to the “real” war criminal Karadžić. Here is a saying from Dabić, whose treatments aimed at setting free the patient’s “human quantum energy” which links every person to the cosmos (we are here firmly in the waters of the Jungian libido): “The basis of every religion is the idea of life as being sacred (which sets religion apart from sects).” Again, we are here immediately thrown into the pagan (pre-Christian) universe of cosmic Life and its sanctity—and, as experience teaches us (and as Walter Benjamin already warned us), whenever the sanctity of life is proclaimed, the smell of real blood being spilled is never far away.

      Plato’s reputation suffers from his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city—but it now appears rather sensible advice, at least judging from the post-Yugoslav experience, where ethnic cleansing was prepared for by the poets’ dangerous dreams. True, Milošević “manipulated” nationalist passions—but it was the poets who delivered him the material which lent itself to manipulation. They—the sincere poets, not the corrupted politicians—were at the origin of it all, when, back in the 1970s and early ’80s, they started to sow the seeds of aggressive nationalism not only in Serbia, but also in other ex-Yugoslav republics. Instead of the industrial-military complex, we in post-Yugoslavia had the poetico-military complex, personified in the twin figures of Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić. Karadžić, a psychiatrist by profession, was not only a ruthless political and military leader, but also a poet. His poetry should not be dismissed as ridiculous—it deserves a close reading, since it provides a key to how ethnic cleansing functions. Among ancient Chinese proverbs selected personally by “Dr. Dabic,” there is the following: “He who cannot agree with his enemies is controlled by them.” It fits perfectly Karadžic’s relation with the Bosnian Muslims. Here are the first lines of the untitled poem identified by a dedication “For Izet Sarajlić”:

      Convert to my new faith crowd

      I offer you what no one has had before

      I offer you inclemency and wine

      The one who won’t have bread will be fed by the light of my sun

      People nothing is forbidden in my faith

      There is loving and drinking

      And looking at the Sun for as long as you want

      And this godhead forbids you nothing

      Oh obey my call brethren people crowd¹⁴

      The superego suspension of moral prohibitions is the crucial feature of today’s “postmodern” nationalism. The cliché according to which passionate ethnic identification restores a firm set of values and beliefs in face of the confusing insecurity of a modern secular global society, is here to be turned around: nationalist “fundamentalism” rather serves as the operator of a secret, barely concealed You may! Without full recognition of this perverse pseudo-liberating effect of contemporary nationalism, of how the obscenely permissive superego supplements the explicit texture of the social symbolic law, we condemn ourselves to misunderstanding its true dynamic.

      In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel mentions the “silent weaving of the spirit”: the underground work of changing the ideological coordinates, mostly invisible to the public eye, which then suddenly explodes into view, taking everyone by surprise. This is what was going on in ex-Yugoslavia in the 1970s and ’80s, so that when things exploded in the late ’80s, it was already too late: the old ideological consensus had become thoroughly putrid and collapsed in on itself.

      To avoid the illusion that the poetico-military complex is a Balkan specialty, one should mention Hassan Ngeze, the Karadžić of Rwanda who, in his journal Kangura, systematically spread anti-Tutsi hatred and called for their genocide. It is all too easy to dismiss Karadžić and company as bad poets: other ex-Yugoslav nations (and Serbia itself) had poets and writers recognized as “great” and “authentic” who were also fully engaged in nationalist projects. What about the Austrian Peter Handke, a great figure of contemporary European literature, who demonstratively attended the funeral of Slobodan Milošević? Almost a century ago, referring to the rise of Nazism in Germany, Karl Kraus quipped that Germany, a country of Dichter und Denker (poets and thinkers), had become a country of Richter und Henker (judges and executioners)—perhaps such a reversal should not surprise us too much . . .

      But why this rise of religiously (or ethnically) justified violence today? Because we live in an era which perceives itself as post-ideological. Since great public causes can no longer be mobilized, since our hegemonic ideology calls on us to enjoy life and to fulfill ourselves, it is difficult for the majority of humans to overcome their revulsion at torturing and killing other human beings. Since the majority are spontaneously “moral” in this way, a larger, “sacred” Cause is needed, which will make individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religious or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. Of course, there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder for pleasure, just for the sake of it, but they are rare exceptions.