Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

a monument of barbarism, has a precise impact on the very notion of being civilized: “to be civilized means to know one is potentially a barbarian.”⁴ Every civilization which disavows its barbarian potential has already capitulated to barbarism. This is how one should read the report about a weird confrontation in Vienna in 1938, when the SS arrived to search Freud’s apartment: the aged and dignified Freud standing face to face with a young SS thug is a metaphor of what was best in the old European culture confronting the worst of the newly emerging barbarism. One should nonetheless remember that the SS perceived and legitimized themselves as the defenders of European culture and its spiritual values against the barbarism of modernity, with its focus on money and sex—a barbarism which, for the Nazis, was epitomized by the name “Freud.” This suggests that we should push Benjamin’s claim a step further: what if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity? This, perhaps, is one of the ways to read Paul Celan’s succinct paraphrase of Brecht:

      What times are these

      when a conversation

      is almost a crime

      because it includes

      so much [implicitly] told?⁵

      Parenthetically, the continuous rumors regarding wild orgies at the top of the KGB in Stalinist Russia, and even the personal characterizations of its various leaders (Yagoda, Yezhov, Beria) as voracious sexual perverts, may or may not have been true, but even if they were correct, they clearly contain a fantasmatic core, which imagines a site of extreme debauchery as the hidden truth, the obscene Other Scene, of the official Bolshevik asceticism. One should always be aware that such hidden truth is the inherent obverse of the official ideology and, as such, no less fantasmatic. This brings us to the limit of liberal interpretations of Stalinism, which becomes palpable when liberal critics tackle the motivations of the Stalinist: they dismiss Stalinist ideology as a mere cynical and deceptive mask, and locate beneath it a brutal, egotistic individual who cares only about power and pleasure. In this way, the “pre-ideological” utilitarian individual is posited as the true figure beneath the ideological mask. The presupposition is here that the Stalinist subject related in a purely external-instrumental way towards his language, disposing of another code (the pre-ideological utilitarian one) which enabled him to be fully aware of his true motivations. But, what if—cynical though the Stalinists’ use of official jargon was—they did not dispose of any such alternative language to articulate their truth? Is it not this properly Stalinist madness which is obliterated by the liberal critics, ensuring that we remain safely moored in the commonsense image of a human being? ⁶

      The gap between the official text of the Law and its obscene supplement is not limited to Western cultures; in Hindu culture, it occurs as the opposition between vaidika (the Vedic corpus) and tantrika—tantra being the obscene (secret) supplement to the Vedas, the unwritten (or secret, non-canonic) core of the public teaching of the Vedas, a publicly disavowed but necessary element. No wonder that tantra is so popular today in the West: it offers the ultimate “spiritual logic of late capitalism”⁷ uniting spirituality and earthly pleasures, transcendence and material benefits, divine experience and unlimited shopping. It propagates the permanent transgression of all rules, the violation of all taboos, instant gratification as the path to enlightenment; it overcomes old-fashioned “binary” thought, the dualism of mind and body, in claiming that the body at its most material (the site of sex and lust) is the royal path to spiritual awakening. Bliss comes from “saying yes” to all bodily needs, not from denying them: spiritual perfection comes from the insight that we already are divine and perfect, not that we have to achieve this through effort and discipline. The body is not something to be cultivated or crafted into an expression of spiritual truths, rather it is immediately the “temple for expressing divinity.” We should note in passing here the opposition to Tarkovsky’s spiritual materialism that I have often touched on elsewhere: for Tarkovsky, the very material process of corruption (decay, decomposition, rotting, inertia) is spiritual, while here the ethereal incorruptibility of the flesh is celebrated. This tendency reaches its apogee with cyberspace: it is no coincidence that tantra is one of the constant references of the New Age ideologists who insist on the fusion of body and spirituality, in the guise of the virtual “incorporeal spiritual body” able to experience extreme pleasures. Our biological body itself is a form of hardware that needs re-programming through tantra like a new spiritual software which can release or unblock its potential. Tantric notions are here translated into cyberspeak: phone wires become nadis of the virtual subtle corpus, computer terminals chakras (nodes of energy), the flow of vital prajna the infinite stream of information; we thus obtain “a cyborgasm that combines the incorruptibility of cyberspace with the most this-worldly sensual pleasure of the self”⁸:

      Real Tantric sex blows your mind completely because it takes you beyond all our conceptions of everyday reality . . . Understanding that our bodies are temples for expressing divinity we can . . . expand, celebrate and share vibrational engorgement in every cell of our being . . . blending sex and spirit.⁹

      What we should always bear in mind is that there is nothing “spontaneous” in such transgressive outbursts. For example, we truly enjoy smoking and drinking only in public, as part of a public “carnival,” the sacred suspension of ordinary rules. The same goes for swearing and sex: neither, at its most intense, is an activity in which we “explode” in spontaneous passion against stifling public conventions—they are, on the contrary, both practiced “against the pleasure principle,” for the gaze of the Other. (Personally, I like to swear only in public, never in private, where I find doing so stupid and inappropriate, even indecent.) The violation of public rules is thus not performed by the private ego, but is enjoined by the very same public rules which are in themselves redoubled. This is what distinguishes such violations from the stance of tolerant wisdom, which allows for private transgressions, for transgressions beyond the public gaze (as with the proverbial Catholic attitude of ignoring—even suggesting—occasional infidelities if they help maintain the marriage).¹⁰

      How does one really become an adult? By knowing when to violate the explicit rule one is committed to. So, with regard to marriage, one can well say that one reaches adulthood when one is able to commit adultery. The only proof of reason is the occasional lapse into “irrationality” (as Hegel knew very well). The only proof of taste is that one knows how to occasionally appreciate things which do not meet the criteria of good taste—those who follow good taste too strictly only display their total lack of taste. (Likewise, someone who expresses his admiration for Beethoven’s ninth symphony or some other masterpiece of Western civilization immediately bears witness to his tastelessness—true taste is displayed by praising a minor work of Beethoven as being superior to his “greatest hits.”)

      Perhaps one should invert the terms of Bertrand Russell’s well-known barber paradox (does the barber who follows the rule of shaving all who do not shave themselves thereby shave himself?), which led him to prohibit the principle of self-inclusion, or inconsistent self-redoubling, as the only way to avoid contradiction. What if, on the contrary, it is the “consistent” adherence to rules which is truly self-contradictory, which turns into its opposite? And what if the only way to truly be reasonable or to truly display taste is to fully engage in self-redoubling, to violate the rule one follows self-reflexively?

      It is as if, in today’s permissive society, transgressive violations are permitted only in a “privatized” form, as a personal idiosyncrasy deprived of any public, spectacular or ritualistic dimension. We can thus publicly confess all our weird private practices, but they remain simply private idiosyncrasies. Perhaps we should also invert here the standard formula of fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well (that I should obey the rules), but nonetheless . . . (I occasionally violate them, since this too is part of the rules).” In contemporary society, the predominant stance is rather: “I believe (that repeated hedonistic transgressions are what make life worth living), but nonetheless . . . (I know very well that these transgressions are not really transgressive, but are just artificial coloring serving to re-emphasize the grayness of social reality).”