Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

frankly whether he is aware that the slave rebellion is doomed, that sooner or later the rebels will be crushed by the Roman army; would he continue to fight to the end, even in the face of inevitable defeat? Spartacus’s answer is, of course, affirmative: the slaves’ struggle is not merely a pragmatic attempt to ameliorate their position, it is a principled rebellion on behalf of freedom, so even if they lose and are all killed, their fight will not have been in vain since they will have asserted their unconditional commitment to freedom—in other words, their act of rebellion itself, whatever the outcome, already counts as a success, insofar as it instantiates the immortal idea of freedom (and one should give to “idea” here its full Platonic weight).

      The present book is thus a book of struggle, following Paul’s surprisingly relevant definition: “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against leaders, against authorities, against the world rulers [kosmokratoras] of this darkness, against the spiritual wickedness in the heavens” (Ephesians 6:12). Or, translated into today’s language: “Our struggle is not against actual corrupt individuals, but against those in power in general, against their authority, against the global order and the ideological mystification which sustains it.” To engage in this struggle means to endorse Badiou’s formula mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre: better to take the risk and engage in fidelity to a Truth-Event, even if it ends in catastrophe, than to vegetate in the eventless utilitarian-hedonist survival of what Nietzsche called the “last men.” What Badiou rejects is thus the liberal ideology of victimhood, with its reduction of politics to a program of avoiding the worst, to renouncing all positive projects and pursuing the least bad option. Not least since, as Arthur Feldmann, a Viennese Jewish writer, bitterly noted: the price we usually pay for survival is our lives.

      1 The exhaustion of twentieth-century Party-State Socialism is obvious. In a major public speech in August 2009, Raúl Castro attacked those who merely shout “Death to US imperialism! Long live the revolution!”, instead of engaging in difficult and patient work. According to Castro, all the blame for the Cuban situation (a fertile land which imports 80 percent of its food) could be laid at the feet of the US embargo: there are idle people on the one side and empty tracts of land on the other. Surely the solution is just to start working the fields? While all this is obviously true, Castro nonetheless forgot to include his own position in the picture he was describing: if people do not work the fields, it is obviously not because they are lazy, but because the state-run economy is not able to provide them with work. So, instead of lambasting ordinary people, he should have applied the old Stalinist motto according to which the motor of progress in Socialism is self-criticism, and subjected to radical critique the very system he and Fidel personify. Here, again, evil resides in the critical gaze which perceives evil all around . . .

      2 Two passionate explosions occurred in May 2008. In Italy, a mob burned the Roma slums in the suburbs of Rome (with the silent approval of the new Right-populist government); this scandal cannot but force us to recall the late Husserl’s remark that, although the Gypsies have lived for centuries in Europe, they are not really a part of the European spiritual space—a remark all the more uncanny if one remembers that Husserl wrote this when the Nazis were already in power and he had been expelled from the university for exactly the same reasons—the Roma being effectively a kind of proxy Jewry. The other explosion took place in South Africa, when crowds attacked refugees from other countries (especially Zimbabwe), claiming that they were stealing their jobs and houses—an example of European populist racism reproducing itself among black Africans themselves.

      3 See Johann Hari, “A morally bankrupt dictatorship built by slave labour,” Independent, November 27, 2009, p. 6. Invisible to those who visit Dubai for the glitz of the consumerist high-society paradise, immigrant workers are ringed off in filthy suburbs with no air conditioning. They are brought to Dubai from Bangladesh or the Philippines, lured by the promise of high wages; once in Dubai, their passports are taken, they are informed that the wages will be much lower than promised, and then have to work for years in extremely dangerous conditions just to pay off their initial debt (incurred through the expense of bringing them to Dubai); if they protest or strike, they are simply beaten into submission by the police. This is the reality sustained by great “humanitarians” like Brad Pitt who invested heavily in Dubai.

      4 Sudep Chakravarti, Red Sun, New Delhi: Penguin Books 2009, p. 112.

      5 See Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, New York: Simon and Schuster 1969.

      6 Karl Marx, “A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Introduction,” in Early Writings, introduced by L. Colleti, Harmondsworth: Penguin 1975, p. 247.

      7 Quoted in Ian H. Birchall, Sartre Against Stalinism, New York: Berghahn Books 2004, p. 3.

      8 Golda Meir once said: “We can forgive Arabs for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.” In a homologous way, I am tempted to say: I can forgive those who attack me as a bad Slovene for what they are doing to me, but I can never forgive them for forcing me to act as a representative of Slovene interests, thereby countering their primitive racism.

      9 Fidelity should be strictly opposed to zealotry: a zealot’s fanatical attachment to his Cause is nothing but a desperate expression of his uncertainty and doubt, of his lack of trust in the Cause. A subject truly dedicated to his Cause regulates his eternal fidelity by means of incessant betrayals.

      I Denial: The Liberal Utopia

       Against the Tartar-Lovers

      What is ideology? In January 2010 Jean-François Copé, the parliamentary leader of the Union pour un Mouvement Populaire, the ruling French party, proposed the draft of a law which bans the full-body veil from French streets and all other public places. This announcement came after an anguished six-month debate on the burqa and its Arab equivalent, the niqab, which cover the woman’s face, except for a small slit for the eyes. All main political parties expressed their rejection of the burqa: the main opposition party, the Parti Socialiste, said it is “totally opposed to the burqa” which amounted to a “prison for women.” The disagreements are of a purely tactical nature: although President Nicolas Sarkozy opposes an outright ban on the burqa as counter-productive, he called for a “debate on national identity” in October 2009, claiming that the burqa is “against French culture.” The law imposes fines of up to 750 euros on anyone appearing in public “with their face entirely masked”; exemptions permit the wearing of masks on “traditional, festive occasions,” such as carnivals. Stiffer punishments are proposed for men who “force” their wives or daughters to wear full-body veils. The underlying idea is that the burqa or niqab are contrary to French traditions of freedom and laws on women’s rights, or, to quote Copé: “We can measure the modernity of a society by the way it treats and respects women.” The new legislation is thus intended to protect the dignity and security of women—and what could be less problematic than such a struggle against an ideology (and a practice) which subjugates women to the most ruthless male domination?

      Problems, however, begin with Sarkozy’s statement that veils are “not welcome” because, in a secular country like France, they intimidate and alienate non-Muslims . . . one cannot but note how the allegedly universalist attack on the burqa on behalf of human rights and women’s dignity ends up as a defense of the particular French way of life. It is, however, not enough to submit this law to pragmatic criticism, such as the claim that, if implemented, it will only increase the oppression of Muslim women, since they will simply not be allowed to leave home and thus be even more cut off from society, exposed to harsh treatment within forced marriages, etc. (Furthermore, the fine will exacerbate the problems of poverty and joblessness: it will punish the very women who are least likely to have control over their own money.) The problem is a more fundamental one—what makes the whole debate symptomatic is, first, the marginal status of the problem: the whole nation talks about it, while the total number of women wearing both types of full-body veil in France is around 2,000, out of a total French population of adult Muslim women of about 1,500,000. (And, incidentally, most of those women who wear full-length veils are below the age of thirty, with a substantial