Eastern European Liberalism and Its Discontents.pdf

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EasternEuropeanLiberalism nd its Discontents

SlavojZizekIn the good old deconstructionist manner, I would like to begin bycalling into question the hidden implications of the request made ofme to give a reporton recent ethnic conflicts in the exotic place I camefrom, Slovenia.' In an articlefor NewLeftReview,2 endeavored to de-scribe why, a year or two ago, western Europe was so fascinated byevents in the east: the true object of fascinationwas the supposed gazeof the east, fascinated by western democracy, still naively believing init, a kind of "subject supposed to believe" - in the east, the westfound a sucker stillhavingfaith in itsvalues. The leftistdemand to givea report on what is "really going on" in the east functions as a kind ofmirror-reversalof this demand: we are expected to confirm suspicions,to saythatpeople arealreadydisappointed in "bourgeois" democracy,that they slowly perceive not only what they have gained but also whatthey have lost (social security,etc.). In my article,I consciously walked

into this trapand gave the left what it wanted: a vengeful vision of hownow things are even worse, how the effective result of democratic en-thusiasm is nationalistcorporatism- in short, it serves us rightfor be-trayingsocialism Yetin accordance with the greatguiding principle ofsocialism - self-criticismas the impetus of progress - this criticismofthe demand, as I perceive it, is actuallya criticismof myself as a mem-ber of the Slovenian liberal-democraticparty and of its candidate in1. This text is a revisedversion of the paper presented on Saturday,25 April 1992,at the conference on "The Re-emergence of Nationalism and Xenophobia in Germa-ny and Central Europe," Deutsches Haus, Columbia University.2. Slavoj Zizek, "Eastern Europe's Republics of Gilead," New LeftReview183(Sept.-Oct. 1990);repr. in DimensionsofRadicalDemocracy,d. Chantal Mouffe (London:Verso, 1992).

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the elections. Let me take as my starting point the liberal-democraticvision according to which, afterthe breakdownof "realsocialism,"wewould have a flourishing market economy and plural democracy ineasternEurope, if it were not for two stainsthatmar the picture:on theone hand, the remainders of the old totalitarian orces that, althoughthey lost the battle, continue with their underground machinations;onthe other hand, national corporatism, obsession with national unityand with an imagined "threatto the nation."If, in the recent disintegration of the "real socialism" in Slovenia,there were a political agent whose rule fully deserves the designation"tragic," this was the Slovenian communists who lived up to theirpromise to make possible the peaceful, nonviolent transition into plu-ralist democracy. From the very beginning they were caught in theFreudianparadox of the superego: the more they gave way to the de-mands of the (then) opposition and accepted democratic rules of thegame, the more violent were the opposition's accusationsof their "to-talitarianism,"the more they were suspected of accepting democracy"in word" only, while actually engaged in demonic plots against it.The paradox of this accusationemerged in its purest form when, final-ly, after a long period of accusations that their democratic commit-ments were not to be takenseriously, it became clearthat they "meantit": far from being perplexed, the opposition simply changed thecharge and accused the communists of "unprincipled behavior" -how can you trust someone who shamelessly betrayedhis old revolu-tionary past and accepted democratic reform?The demand of the opposition thatcan be detectedthroughthispara-dox is an ironicrepetitionof the Stalinistdemand at workin the politicalmonster trials,where the accused were forced to admit their guilt andclaim supreme punishment for themselves: for the anticommunistop-position, the only good communist would be the one who firstorgan-ized free multipartyelections and then voluntarilyassumed the role ofthe scapegoat n them, a representative f totalitarianhorrorswho has tobe beaten. In short, communists were expected to assume the impossi-ble position of a pure metalanguageand to say,"Weconfess,we are to-talitarian,we deserve to lose the election " - like the victims of theStalinist rials.The shiftin the publicperceptionof Sloveniandemocraticcommunists was truly enigmatic:up to the "point of no return"on theway to democracy,the public trembled for them, counting on them toendure the pressure of the truly antidemocraticforces (the Yugoslav


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army, Serbian populism, old hard-liners) and to organize free elec-tions;yet once it became clear thatfree elections would takeplace, theysuddenly became the Enemy.The logic of this shift from the "open" condition before elections toits closure afterward s illuminated byJameson's concept of the "van-ishing mediator."3A system reaches its equilibrium, that is, establishesitself as a synchronous totality, when - in Hegelese - it "posits" itsexternal presuppositions as its inherent moments and thus obliteratesthe tracesof its traumaticorigins.What we have here is the tension be-tween the open situation when a new social pact is generated and itssubsequent closure - in Kierkegaard'sterms, the tension betweenpossibility and necessity: the circle is closed when the new social pactestablishes itself in its necessity and renders invisible its "possibility,"the open, undecided process that engendered it.4 In between, whenthe socialistregime was alreadyin a state of disintegration,but beforethe new regime stabilized itself,we witnessed a kind of opening; thingsthatwere for a moment visible immediately became invisible.To put itbluntly, those who triggered the process of democratization andfought the greatestbattles are not those who today enjoy its fruits, notbecause of a simple usurpation and deception on the part of the pres-ent winners, but because of a deeper structurallogic. Once the processof democratization reached its peak, it buried its detonators.Who effectively triggered this process? New social movements,punk, the New Left - after the victory of democracy, all these im-pulses suddenly and enigmaticallylost ground and more or less disap-peared from the scene. Culture itself, the set of cultural preferences,changed radically:from punk and Hollywood to national poems andquasi-folkloriccommercial music (in contrast to the usual overshad-owing of authentic national roots by universalAmerican-westerncul-ture).What we had was a true "primitiveaccumulation"of democracy,a chaotic story of punkers, students with their sit-ins, committees forhuman rights,and so on, which literallybecame invisible the momentthe new system established itself - and with it, its own myth of originwas likewise extinguished. The same people who, a few years ago,abused the new socialmovements from the position of partyhardliners

3. FredricJameson, "The Vanishing Mediator;or, Max Weber as Storyteller,"TheIdeologiesf Theory,ol 2. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988).4. As to this problematic, see ch. 5, Slavoj Zizek, ForTheyKnowNot WhatTheyDo(London: Verso, 1991).


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now, as members of the ruling anticommunist coalition, accused theirrepresentativesof "protocommunism."This dialectics is especially interesting in its theoretical aspect.Roughly, we could say that in the last two decades, two philosophicalorientations dominated intellectual life in Slovenia:Heideggerianismamong the opposition and FrankfurtSchool Marxism among "offi-cial" party circles. So one would expect the main theoretical fight totake place between those two orientations,with the third block - us,Lacanians,and Althusserians- in the role of innocent bystanders.Yetas soon as polemics broke out, both orientations ferociously attackedthe same author, Althusser. And, even more surprisingly, the twomain proponents of this polemics, a Heideggerian and a (then)Frank-furt School Marxist,are now both ruling members of the ruling anti-communist coalition.In the seventies, Althusser actuallyfunctioned as a kind of sympto-matic point, a name apropos of which all the "official" adversaries,Heideggerians and FrankfurtSchool Marxistsin Slovenia, praxis phi-losophers and central committee ideologues in Zagreband Belgrade,suddenlytartedospeakhesame anguage,pronouncing the same accusa-tions. From the very beginning, our starting point was this experienceof how the name "Althusser"triggersan enigmatic uneasiness in allcamps. One is even tempted to suggest that the unfortunate event inAlthusser's private life (his stranglingof his wife) played the role of awelcome pretext, of a "little piece of reality" enabling his theoreticaladversaries o repressthe real traumarepresented by his theory ("Howcan a theory of someone who strangledhis wife be taken seriously?").It is perhaps more than a mere curiositythat, in Yugoslavia,Althus-serians (and more generally the structuralistand poststructuralistori-entation)were the only ones who remained "pure" in the fight for de-mocracy; all other philosophical schools at some point of other soldthemselves to the regime. The analytic philosophers were sending theregime the message: "True, we're not Marxists, but we are also notdangerous; our thought is pure apolitical professional apparatus, sonot only do you not have to be afraidof us, but by leavingus alone youcan even gain a reputation for allowing non-Marxism without riskingyour hold on political power." The message was received, and theywere left alone.

In the Republic of Bosnia, it was the FrankfurtSchool thatenjoyed asemi-official status in the seventies, whereas in Croatia and partly in


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Serbia there were "offical" Heideggerians, especially in the army cir-cles. There were caseswhere, in the universitypurges, someone lost hisjob for not understandingthe subtleties of negativedialectics (asit wasput in thejustificationafterthe fact),and cases of the apology of social-ist armed forces written in the purest Heideggerian style ("the essenceof the self-defense of our society is the self-defense of the essence ofour society," etc.).The resistance o Althusser ndicated that it was preciselyAlthusseriantheory - often defamed as proto-Stalinist - that served as a kind of"spontaneous"theoretical ool for the effectiveunderminingof the com-munist totalitarianregimes:his theoryof ideologicalstateapparatusesas-signed the crucial role in the reproductionof an ideology to "external"ritualsand practiceswithregardto which "inner"beliefs and convictionsare strictlysecondary.And is it necessaryto call attention to the centralplace of such rituals n "realsocialism"?What counted in itwas externalobedience, not "inner"conviction;thatis, obedience coincidedwith thesemblanceofobedience,hich is why the only way to be truly"subversive"was to act "naively," o make the system"eatits own words,"to under-mine the appearancef its ideological consistency.This disappearance of the "vanishing mediator," of course, is notpeculiar to Slovenia. Is not the most spectacularcase of this the role ofNeuesForumn East Germany?There is an inherently tragicethical di-mension in its fate:it presents a point at which an ideology takes itselfliterally and ceases to function as an "objectively cynical" (Marx)legitimation of existing power relations. Neues Forumconsisted ofgroups of passionate intellectuals who took socialism seriously andwere prepared to put all at stakein order to destroy the compromisedsystem and replace it with the utopian "thirdway" beyond capitalismand "reallyexisting" socialism. Their sincere belief and insistence thatthey were not working for the restoration of western capitalism, ofcourse, proved to be nothing but an illusion; however, we could saythatpreciselythis (athorough illusion without substance)made it strictosensunon-ideological: it did not "reflect" in an inverted-ideologicalform any actual relations of power.

At this point, I should correct the MarxistVulgate: contraryto thecommonplace according to which an ideology becomes "cynical"(ac-cepts the gap between words and deeds, no longer "believes in itself,"and is not longer experienced as truth but treats itself as purely instru-mental means of legitimating power), in the period of the "decadence"


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of a social formation, it could be said that precisely that period opensup to the ruling ideology the possibilityof "taking tself seriously"andeffectivelyopposing its own social basis (withProtestantism, he Chris-tian religion opposes feudalism as its social basis; the same with NeuesForum,which opposes existing socialismin the name of a "true"social-ism). In this way, unknowingly, it unleashes the forces of its own finaldestruction: once their job is done, they are "overrun by history"(NeuesForum btained three percent of the vote in the elections).A new"scoundrel time" sets in; people are in power who were mostly silentduring the communist repression and nonetheless now abuse NeuesForum s "crypto-communist."The general theoretical lesson to be drawn from this illustration isthat the concept of ideology must be disengaged from the "representa-tionalist"problematic:ideologyasnothingodo with"illusion,"ith a false,distorted representationof its social content. To put it another way:apolitical standpoint can be quite accurate ("true")as to its objectivecontent and yet thoroughly ideological, and vice versa: the idea it givesof its social content can prove totallywrong, and yet there is absolutelynothing "ideological" about it. With regardto the "factualtruth," theposition of NeuesForum of conceiving the disintegrationof the com-munist regime as the opening up of a possibility to invent some newform of social space that would reach beyond the confines of capital-ism - was doubtless illusory. NeuesForumwas opposed by the forceswho put their bets on the quickest possible annexation to West Germa-ny, that is, on the inclusion of their country in the world capitalistsys-tem; for them, the people around NeuesForumwere nothing but abunch of heroic daydreamers.This position proved accurate,yet it isnonethelessthoroughlydeological.Why?The conformist adoption of the West German model implied theideological belief in the unproblematic, nonantagonisticfunctioning ofthe late-capitalist"social state,"whereas the first stance, although illu-soryas to its factualcontent (its"enunciated"),by means of its scandal-ous and exorbitantposition of enunciation attested to an awarenessofthe antagonism that pertainsto late capitalism.This is one way to con-ceive the Lacanianthesis accordingto which truth has the structure offiction:in those confused months along the passagefrom "reallyexist-ing" socialism into capitalism,thefictionofa "thirdway"wastheonlypointat whichsocialantagonismwas notobliterated.Therein is one of the tasks ofthe "postmodern" criticism of ideology: to designate the elements


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Good (by saying, for example, that it is part of my nature for which Iam not responsible). The very fact that I feel morally responsible formy evil bears witness to the fact that, in a timeless transcendentalact, Ihad to choose my eternal characterfreely by giving preference to Evilover Good. This is how Kant conceives "radicalEvil": as an apriorinot simply empirical-contingent - propensity of human nature to-ward Evil. By rejecting the hypothesis of "diabolical Evil," however,Kant recoils from the ultimateparadoxof radicalEvil,from the uncan-ny domain of those acts that,although evil in their content, thoroughlyfulfill the formal criteria of an ethical act - they are not motivated byany "pathological"consideration.Their sole motivating ground is Evilas a principle, which is why they can involve the radicalabrogationofone's pathological interests, up to the point of sacrifice of one's life.Let us recall Mozart'sDon Giovanni: hen, in the final confrontationwith the statue of the Commendatore, Don Giovanni refusesto do pen-ance, to renounce his sinful past, he accomplishes something that canonly properlybe designated as a radical ethical stance. It is as if his te-nacitymockinglyreversesKant'sown example from the CritiquefPracti-calReason,where the libertineis quicklypreparedto renounce the satis-faction of his passion as soon as he learns that the priceto be paid for itis the gallows:Don Giovannipersistsin his libertineattitude at the verymoment when he knowsverywell thatonly the gallowsawaithim. Thatis to say, from the standpoint of pathologicalinterests,the thing to dowould be to accomplish the formal gesture of penance: Don Giovanniknows that death is close, so that by atoning for his deeds he does notstand to lose anythingbut only to gain (i. e., to save himself from post-humous torments), and yet "out of principle" he persists as a defiantlibertine. How can one avoid experiencing Don Giovanni'sunyielding"No " to the statue, to the living dead, as the model of an intransigentethical ttitude, notwithstandingits "evil" content?If we accept the possibility of such an evil ethical act, then it is notsufficient to conceive of radical Evil as something that pertains to thevery notion of subjectivityon a par with disposition toward Good; oneis compelled to go a step further and to conceive of radical Evil assomething that ontologicallyprecedes Good by way of opening up thespace for it. In what, precisely, does evil consist? Evil is another namefor the death drive, for the fixation on a Thing that derails our custom-ary life circuit. By way of evil, humans wrest themselves from instinctu-al animal rhythms; evil introduces the radical reversal of a "natural"


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relationship. (In this sense, thefemme atale who, in thefilm noiruni-verse, derails the man's daily routine, is one of the personificationsofevil: a sexual relationship becomes impossible the moment woman iselevated to the dignity of the Thing.) Here, therefore, Kant's andSchelling's standardformulation (thatthe possibilityof evil is foundedin freedom of choice, by which humans may invertthe "normal"rela-tion between universalprinciples of Reason and their pathologicalna-ture by way of subordinatinghis suprasensiblenature to his egotisticalinclinations) reveals its insufficiency.Hegel, in Lessons n thePhilosophyf Religion, onceives the very act ofbecoming human, of passagefrom animal into human, as the Fallintosin, and is more penetrating in his analysis: the possible space forGood is opened up by the original choice of radical Evil, which dis-rupts the patternof the organicsubstantialWhole. The choice betweenGood and Evilis thus in a sense not the true, originalchoice: the actualfirst choice is that between (whatwill later be perceived as)yielding toone's own pathologicalnaturalleanings and radicalEvil, an act of sui-cidal egotism that "makes place" for the Good, that overcomes thedomination of pathological naturalimpulses by way of a purely nega-tive gesture of suspending the life circuit. Or, in Kierkegaard's erms,Evil is Good itself "in the mode of becoming" - it "becomes" as aradicaldisruption of the life circuit.The difference between them is amatter of purely formal conversion from the mode of "becoming"into the mode of "being." This is how "the wound can be healed onlyby the spear that smote you" (asWagner puts it in Parsifal):he woundis healed when the place of Evil is filled out by "good" content. Goodqua"the mask of the Thing" (Lacan)- that is, of radicalEvil - is anontologically supplementaryattempt to reestablish the lost balance;itsultimate paradigm in the social sphere is the corporatistendeavor to(re)construct ocietyas a harmonious, organic,nonantagonisticedifice.The thesis according to which the possibility to choose evil pertainsto the very notion of subjectivity has therefore to be radicalizedthrough a kind of self-reflective nversion: thestatusofthesubjectssuch salwaysevil;that is, insofar as we are human, we havealwaysalreadyhosenevil.Why then does Kant hold back from bringing out all the conse-quences of the thesis on radical Evil? The answer here is clear, if para-doxical: what prevents him is the very logic that compelled him to ar-ticulate the thesis on radical Evil in the first place, namely the logic of"real opposition," which constitutes a kind of ultimate phantasmatic


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frameof Kant'sthought.5If moral struggle s conceivedas the conflictoftwo opposing positiveforcesstriving or mutual annihilation, t becomesunthinkablefor one of the forces- Evil- not only to oppose the other,endeavoringto annihilate t, but to underminetfromwithin, ywayofassum-ingtheveryormofitsopposite.Whenever Kantapproachesthis possibility(aproposof "diabolicalEvil" n practicalphilosophy;aproposof the trialagainstthe monarchin the doctrineof law),he quicklydismisses it as un-thinkable,as an object of ultimate abhorrence. It is only with Hegel'slogic of negative self-relating hat this step can be accomplished.6Alreadyin Kant'sCritiquefPureReason,his space for (whatwill laterbecome) radical Evil is opened up by the distinction between negativeand indefinitejudgment. The very example that Kant uses to illustratethis is tell-tale: the positivejudgment by whose means a predicateis as-cribed to the (logical)subject, "The soul is mortal";the negativejudg-ment by whose means a predicateis denied to the subject, "The soul isnot mortal";the indefinitejudgment by whose means we affirma cer-tain non-predicate, ratherthan negatinga predicate, that is, the copulathat ascribes it to the subject, "The soul is non-mortal." (The differ-ence in German hinges on Kant's orthography: "Die Seele ist nichtsterblich" or "Die Seele ist nichtsterblich";oddly, Kant does not usethe standard "unsterblich.")Along this line of thought, Kantintroduces in the second edition ofthe CritiquefPureReason he distinction between positive and negativemeanings of noumenon:n the positivemeaning of the term, noumenons"anobjectof a nonsensible intuition,"whereasin the negative meaning,it is "a thing insofar as it is not an object of our sensible intuition."Thegrammaticalform should not deceive us here: the positive meaning isexpressedby the negative udgment and the negativemeaning by the in-definitejudgment. In other words, when one determines the Thing as"an object of nonsensible intuition," one accepts intuition as the un-questioned base or genus; againstthis background,one opposes its twospecies, sensible and nonsensible intuition. Negative judgment is thusnot only limiting; t also delineates a domain beyond phenomena whereit locates the Thing - the domain of nonsensible intuition - whereas inthe case of the negativedetermination,the Thing is excluded from thedomain of our sensible intuition, without being posited in an implicit

5. Cf. Monique David-Menard,La oliedansla raisonpure(Paris:Vrin, 1990).6. Cf. ch. 5, Zizek, ForTheyKnowNot WhatTheyDo.


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way as the object of a nonsensible intuition. By leaving in suspense thepositive status of the Thing, negative determination saps the very ge-nus common to affirmationand negation of the predicate.Therein also lies the differencebetween "is not mortal" and "is non-mortal": what we have in the firstcase is a simple negation, whereas inthe second case, a non-predicates affirmed.The only "legitimate"defi-nition of the noumenons that it is "not an object of our sensible intui-tion," that is, a wholly negative definition that excludes it from thephenomenal domain; thisjudgment is "infinite"since it does not im-ply any conclusion as to where, in the domain, the noumenons located.What Kant calls "transcendental illusion" ultimately consists in thevery (mis)readingof infinitejudgment as negativejudgment: when weconceive the noumenon s an "object of a nonsensible intuition," thesubject of the judgment remains the same (the "object of an intui-tion");whatchanges is only the character nonsensible instead of sensi-ble) of this intuition, so that a minimal "commensurability"betweenthe subjectand the predicate(in this case, between the noumenonnd itsphenomenal determinations) is still maintained.A Hegelian corollary to Kant here is that limitation is to be con-ceived as prior to what lies "beyond" it, so that it is ultimately Kant'sown notion of Thing-in-itself remains too "reified." Hegel's positionvis-A-vis this position is subtle: what he claims by stating that theSuprasensible is "appearance qua appearance" is precisely that theThing-in-itself is the limitationof thephenomenas such."Suprasensibleobjects (objects of suprasensible intuition)" belong to the chimerical"topsy-turvyworld" - they are nothing but an inverted presentation,projection, of the very content of sensible intuiton in the form ofanother, nonsensible intuition. Or, to recall Marx's ironic critique ofProudhon in ThePovertyfPhilosophy:Instead of the ordinaryindivid-ual with his ordinarywayof speech and thought, we get this same ordi-nary way of speech and thought, without the individual."(The doubleirony of it, of course, is that Marx intended these lines as a mocking re-jection of Proudhon's Hegelianism, that is, of his effort to supply eco-nomic theory with the form of speculativedialectics )This is what thechimera of "nonsensible intuition" is about: instead of ordinaryob-jects of sensible intuition, we get the same ordinary objects of intui-tion, minus their sensible character.This subtle difference between negative and indefinite judgment isat work in a certain type of witticism where the second part does not


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immediately invert the firstpart by negating its predicatebut repeats itwith the same negation displaced onto the subject.The judgment "Heis an individual with many idiotic features," for example, can be ne-gated in a standardmanner: "He is an individual with no idiotic fea-tures."Yet its negation can also be given in the form "He has many id-iotic features without being an individual." This displacement of thenegation from the predicate onto the subject provides the logical ma-trix of what is often the unforeseen result of our educational efforts toliberate the pupil from the constraintsof prejudices and cliches: not aperson capable of expressing himself or herself in a relaxed, uncon-strained way, but an automatized bundle of (new) cliches behindwhich we no longer sense the presence of a "real" person. Recall theusual outcome of psychological training intended to deliver the indi-vidual from the constraints of his/her everydayframe of mind and toset free his/her "true self," its authentic creativepotentials (transcen-dental meditation, etc.): once he or she gets rid of the old cliches thatwere still able to sustain the dialectical tension between "themselves"and the "personality"behind them, what take their place are new cli-ches that abrogate the very "depth" of personality behind them. Inshort, he or she becomes a true monster, a kind of "livingdead." Sam-uel Goldwyn,the Hollywood mogul, wasright:what we reallyneed aresome new, original cliches...The mention of the "livingdead" is by no means accidental here: inour ordinary language, we resort to indefinite judgments preciselywhen we endeavor to comprehend these borderline phenomena thatundermine established differences like that between living and beingdead: in the texts of popular culture, the uncanny creatures that areneither alive nor dead, the "living dead" (vampiresand the like), arereferred to as "the undead." Although they are not dead, they areclearly not alive like we ordinary mortals. The judgment "he isundead" is therefore an indefinite-limiting judgment in the precisesense of a purely negative gesture of excluding vampires from the do-main of the dead, without for that reason locating them in the domainof the living (as in the case of the simple negation "he is not dead").The fact that vampires and other "living dead" are usually referredtoas "things" has to be rendered in its full Kantiansense: a vampire is aThing that looks and acts like us, yet it is not one of us. In short, thedifference between the vampire and the living person is that betweenindefinite and negative judgment: a dead person loses the predicates of


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traditional "organic" links are dissolved and the "remainder of thepremodern in modernity," the form "organic inveteracy" acquireswithin the modem post-traditionaluniverse, the form organic sub-stance acquireswithin the universe of the substanceless Cartesiansub-jectivity. The crucial point is again to conceive both aspects in theirinterconnectedness:it is the new "suture" effected by the Nation thatrenderspossible the "desuturing,"the disengagementfrom traditionalorganicties. "Nation"is a premodern leftover that functionsas an innercondition of modernity itself, as an inherent impetus to its progress.This pathological "stain" also determines the deadlocks of today'sliberal democracy. The problem with liberal democracy is that - forstructural reasons - it cannot be universalized a priori. Hegel saidthat the moment of victoryof a politicalforce is the verymoment of itssplitting: the triumphant liberal-democratic "new world order" ismore and more marked by a frontier separatingits "inside" from its"outside," a frontier between those who succeeded in remaining"within"(the "developed," those to whom the rules of human rights,social security,etc., apply)and the others, the excluded (the main con-cern of the "developed" with regardto them is to contain their explo-sive potential, even if the price to be paid is the neglect of elementarydemocratic principles).This opposition - and not that between capitalist and socialist"blocs" - defines the contemporaryconstellation:the "socialist" blocwas the true "third way," a desperate attempt at modernization out-side the constraints of capitalism.What is effectivelyat stakein the pre-sent crisisof postsocialiststatesis the strugglefor one's place, now thatthe illusion of the thirdway has evaporated:who will be admitted "in-side," integrated into the developed capitalistorder, and who will re-main excluded from it? Ex-Yugoslavia s perhaps the exemplary case:every actor in the blood-play of its disintegration endeavors tolegitimize its place inside by presenting itself as the last bastion of Eu-ropean civilization (the currentideological designation for the capital-ist "inside") in the face of oriental barbarism. For the right-wingna-tionalistAustrians,this imaginaryfrontier is Karavanke, he mountainchain between Austria and Slovenia: beyond it, the rule of Slavichordes begins. For the nationalist Slovenes, this frontier is the riverKolpa,separatingSloveniafrom Croatia:we SloveniansareMitteleuropa,while Croatians are already Balkan, involved in the irrational ethnicfeuds that really do not concern us. We are on their side, we sympathize


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with them, yet in the same wayone sympathizeswith a thirdworld vic-tim of aggression.For Croatians, of course, the crucial frontier is the one betweenthem and the Serbians, that is, between the western catholic civiliza-tion and the eastern orthodox collective spirit,which cannot graspthevalues of western individualism. Serbians, finally, conceive of them-selves as the last line of defense of ChristianEurope againstthe funda-mentalist danger embodied in Muslim Albanians and Bosnians. (Itshould now be clear who, within former Yugoslavia,effectively be-haves in the civilized "European"way:those at the verybottom of thisladder, excluded from all other groups - Albanians and MuslimBosnians.)The traditional iberal opposition between "open" pluralistsocieties and "closed" nationalist-corporatist ocieties founded on theexclusion of the Other has thus to be brought to its point of self-refer-ence: the liberalgaze itself functions accordingto the same logic, inso-far as it is founded upon the exclusion of the Other to whom one attri-butes fundamentalist nationalism, and so on.This antagonistic splitting inherent to capitalismas a world-systemopens up the field for the Khmer Rouge, Sendero Luminoso, and oth-er similar movements that seem to personify the "radicalevil" in to-day's politics: if "fundamentalism" functions as a kind of "negativejudgment" on liberal capitalism, as an inherent negation of the uni-versalistclaim of liberal capitalism, then movements like the ShiningPath enact an "infinite judgment" on it. In Philosophyf Right,Hegelconceives of the "rabble"(Pdbel)s a necessary product of modern so-

ciety: a segment not integrated into the legal order, prevented fromparticipating n its benefits, and for this veryreason delivered from re-sponsibility toward it - a necessarystructuralsurplus excluded fromthe closed circuit of social edifice.It seems as if it is only today, with the advent of late capitalism,thatthis notion of "rabble" has achieved its adequate realizationin socialreality,with the politicalforces thatparadoxicallyunite the most radicalindigenistantimodernism(therefusalof everythingthatdefines moder-nity:market,money, individualism)with the eminentlymodem projectof effacing the entire symbolic tradition and beginning from a zeropoint (in the case of the Khmer Rouge, the abolition of the entire sys-tem of education and the physicalliquidation of intellectuals).In whatprecisely does the "shining path" of the Senderistas consist? In the ideaof reinscribing the construction of socialism within the frame of the


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returnto the ancient Inca empire (much as the KhmerRouge saw theirregime as the returnto the lost grandeurof the old Khmer kingdom).The result of this desperate endeavor to surmount the antagonismbetween tradition and modernity is a double negation:a radicallyanti-capitalistmovement (the refusal of integrationinto the world market)coupled with a systematicdissolution of all traditional hierarchicalso-cial links, beginning with the family (atthe level of "micropower,"theKhmerRouge regime incited adolescentsto denounce theirparents:ananti-Oedipal regime at its purest).The truth articulated n an invertedform in the paradox of this double negation is that capitalismcannotreproduce itself without the supportof precapitalist orms of sociallink.In other words, far from presenting a case of exotic barbarism, the"radicalEvil" of the Khmer Rouge and the Senderistas s conceivableonly againstthe backgroundof the constitutiveantagonism of today'scapitalism.There is more than a contingentidiosyncrasy n the factthat,in both cases, the leader of the movement is an intellectualwell-skilledin the subtleties of western culture (priorto becoming a revolutionary,Pol Pot was a teacher at a Frenchlycee in Phnom Penh, known for hissubtle readings of Rimbaud and Mallarme; Antonio Guzman, the"presidente Gonzalo," the leader of the Senderistas,is a philosophyprofessorwhose preferredauthors are Heidegger and Jaspers).Forthatreason,it is too simple to conceive of these movements as thelastembodiments of the millenarianradicalism hat structures he socialspace as the exclusive antagonismbetween "us" and "them," allowingfor no possible formsof mediation:rather, hey representa desperateat-tempt to break out of the vicious circleof the constitutive mbalanceofcapitalism,withoutseekingsupportin some previoustraditionsupposedto enable us to master this imbalance (Islamicfundamentalism,withinthis logic, is forthat reasonultimatelya perverted nstrumentof modern-ization). In other words, behind Sendero Luminoso's attempt to erasethe entire traditionand to begin againfrom scratch n an act of creativesublimationis the correctinsightinto the complementaryrelationshipofmodernityand tradition:any true return to traditiontoday is apriorim-possible;its role is simplyto serveas a shock absorberfor the processofmodernization. The Khmer Rouge and the Senderistasas the "infinitejudgment" on late capitalismaretherefore, n Hegelese, an integralpartof its notion: if one wantsto constitutecapitalismas a world system,onemust take into account its inherent negation, "fundamentalism," as wellas its absolute negation - the infinite judgment on it.


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The exotic storyof easternEurope's nineteenth-centurynationalismthus changes into a storyabout the west itself: for western liberal intel-lectuals, the affirmationof their own autochtonous tradition is a red-neck horror,a site of populist protofascism(forexample, in the UnitedStates,the "backwardness"of the Polish, Italian,and other communi-ties, the alleged brood of "authoritarianpersonalities"and similarlib-eral scarecrows),whereas they are always ready to hail the autochto-nous ethnic communities of the other (blacks, Puerto Ricans, nativeAmericans). Enjoyment is good, on the condition that it is not tooclose to us, on the condition that it remains the other'senjoyment.The positive expression of this ambivalencetoward the other'senjoy-ment is the obsessive attitudethatone can easilydetectin what is usual-lyreferred o as"PC,"political orrectness:hecompulsive ffort oun-cover ever new, ever more refined forms of racialand/or sexual domi-nation and violence (it is not PC to say that the president "smoked apeace pipe," since this is.patronizesnativeAmericans,etc.).The prob-lem here is simple: How can one be a white heterosexual male and stillretain a dear conscience? All other positions can affirm theirspecificity,their specific mode of enjoyment, and only the white-heterosexual-male position must remain empty, must sacrifice ts enjoyment.The weakpoint of the PCposition is thus the weakpoint of the neu-rotic compulsion: the problem is not that it is too severe, too fanatical,but quite the contrarythat it is notsevereenough.On firstapproach, thePC attitudeseems to involve extreme self-sacrifice, he renunciation ofeverything reminiscent of sexism and racism, the unending effort tounearth traces of it in oneself, an effort not unworthy of the earlyChristian saint who dedicated his life to discovering in himself evernew layersof sin. Yet all this effortshould not deceive us; it is ultimate-ly a stratagemwhose function is to conceal the fact that the PC type isnot ready to renounce what reallymatters:"I'm prepared to sacrificeeverythingbutthat"- but what? The very gesture of self-sacrifice.Inother words, the PC attitudeimplies the same antagonismbetween theenunciated content and the position of the enunciation that Hegel de-nounced apropos of ascetic self-humiliation: it conceals a patronizingelevation over those whose discriminationsare allegedly compensated.In the veryact of emptying the white-male-heterosexualposition of allpositive content, it retains it as a universal form of subjectivity.Or, toput it in straightforward, old-fashioned political terms: far from beinga disguised expression of the extreme left, the PC attitude is the main


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ideological protective shield of bourgeois liberalism againsta genuineleftist alternative.7What truly disturbs liberals is therefore enjoymentrganized in theform of self-sufficientethnic communities. Againstthis backgroundweshould conceive the ambiguous consequences of the politics of schoolbusing in the United States,for example. Its principal aim, of course,was to surmount racist barriers:children from black communities willwiden their culturalhorizons by partaking n the white way of life;chil-dren from white communities will experience the nullityof racialprej-udices by way of contacts with blacks. Yetinextricablyintermixed withthis was another logic, especiallywhere busing was externallyimposedby the "enlightened" liberal state bureaucracy:to destroy the enjoy-ment of the closed ethnic communities by abrogatingtheir boundar-ies. For that reason, busing - insofar as it was experienced by the af-fected communities as imposed from the outside - reinforced or tosome extent even generated racism where previously an ethnic com-munity maintained a relativeclosure in its way of life, a phenomenonthat is not in itself "racist"(as liberals themselves admit through theirfascination with exotic "modes of life" of others8).What one should do here is call into question the entire theoreticalapparatusthat sustains this liberal attitude, up to its FrankfurtSchool

7. The hystericalcounterpoint to this Americanobsessional attitudeis the positionof the traditionalEuropean "critical ntellectual"tormented by the question: Which isthe legitimatepower that I would be allowed to obey with a clearconscience? In otherwords, the traditionalEuropean left is - even more thanJane Eyre,this classicexam-ple of the female hysteric- in searchofa GoodMaster: e wants a master, but a masterwhom he would dominate, who would follow his advice.This attitudeprovokesa hys-tericalreaction, a reaction of "This is not that "whenever his side comes to power: adesperate searchfor reasons that would legitimate his continuing disobedience (an ex-emplary case is that of the French left intellectuals after the electoral victory ofMitterand'ssocialists in 1981: they were quick to discover in the socialistgovernmentfeatures that made it even worse than the preceding liberal-conservativegovernment,up to the signs of protofascistnationalism ).8. See the success of PeterWeir's thriller Witness,which takes place mostly in anAmish community: are not the Amish an exemplary case of a closed community thatpersists in itsway of life, yet without fallingprey to a paranoiaclogic of the "theft of en-joyment"? In other words, the paradox of the Amish is that, while they live accordingto the highest standardsof the MoralMajority, hey have absolutely nothing to do withthe MoralMajorityqua politico-ideological movement, that is, they are as far as possi-ble from the Moral Majority'sparanoiac logic of envy, of aggressive imposition of itsstandardsonto others. And, incidentally, the fact that the most effective scene of thefilm is the collective building of a new barn testifiesagain to what FredricJameson callsthe "utopian" potential of contemporary mass culture.


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psychoanalyticpiecede resistance,he theory of so-called authoritarianpersonality, which ultimately designates the form of subjectivitythat"irrationally" nsists on its specific way of life and, in the name of itsown enjoyment, resists liberal evidence of what are its supposed "trueinterests." The theory of "authoritarianpersonality"is nothing but anexpression of the ressentimentf the left-liberal intellectualsapropos ofthe fact that the "unenlightened" workingclasseswere not preparedtoaccept their guidance: an expression of their incapabilityof offering apositive theory of this resistance.9The impasses around busing enable us also to delineate the inherentlimitation of the liberal political ethic as articulatedin John Rawls'stheory of distributivejustice.10That is to say, busing fully meets theconditions of distributivejustice (it stands the trialof what Rawls callsthe "veil of ignorance"):it procures a more just distribution of socialgoods, it equalizes the chances of success of the individuals from dif-ferent social strata, etc. Yet the paradox is that all, including thosedeemed to profit most by it, somehow felt cheated and wronged.Why?The dimension infringed upon was precisely that offantasy.TheRawlsian iberal-democratic dea of distributivejustice ultimatelyrelieson a "rational"individual who is able to abstracta particularpositionof enunciation, to look upon himself or herself and all others from aneutral place of pure "metalanguage" and thus perceive all of their"true interests." This individual is the supposed subject of the socialcontract that establishes the coordinates of justice. What is thereby apriori eft out of consideration is the realm of fantasyin which a com-munity organizes its "wayof life" (itsmode of enjoyment).Within thisspace, what "we" desire is inextricablylinked to (whatwe perceive as)the other's desire, so that what "we" desire may turn out to be the verydestruction of our object of desire (if,in this way,we deal a blow to theother's desire). In other words, human desire, insofar as it is alwaysal-ready mediated by fantasy, can never be grounded in (or translatedback into) our "true interests": the ultimate assertionof our desire -sometimes the only way to assertits autonomy in the face of a "benev-olent" other providing for our Good - is to act against our Good."

9. As alreadynoted by numerous critics,the theoryof "authoritarianpersonality" sactuallya foreign body withinthe Frankfurt chool theoreticaledifice: it is based on sup-positions undermined by Adomo-Horkheimer'stheory of late-capitalist ubjectivity.10. Cf.John Rawls,A TheoryfJustice Cambridge:HarvardUP, 1971).11. The notion of fantasy thus designates the inherent limitation of distributive


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Every "enlightened" political action legitimized by reference tosome form of "trueinterests" encounters sooner or later the resistanceof a particularfantasy space: in the guise of the logic of "envy,"of the"theftof enjoyment." Even such a clearcutissue as the MoralMajorityprolife movement is in this respect more ambiguous than it may seem:one aspect of it is alsothe reaction to the attempt of the upper-middle-class ideology to pervade lower-classcommunity life. On another lev-el, was not the same attitude at work in the uneasiness of a wide circleof English left-liberal intellectuals apropos of the long and traumaticminer's strikein 1988? One was quick to denounce it as "irrational,"and "expression of an outdated working-classfundamentalism," andwhile all this was undoubtedly true, the factremains that this strikewasalso the desperate form of resistance of a certain traditionalworking-class way of life. As such it was perhaps more "postmodern," on ac-count of the veryfeaturesthat its criticsperceived as "regressive,"thanthe usual "enlightened" liberal-leftistcriticism of it.12The liberal horrorof "fundamentalist"overidentificationthus epito-mizes today's spontaneous ideological perception of the threatsto theexisting world order:today, with the disintegrationof "reallyexisting"socialism, the neutral,universalmedium, the presupposed measure ofthe "normal" state of things, is organized around the notion of capital-ist democracy (Media, Market,Pluralism,etc.), whereas those who op-pose it are more and more reduced to "irrational"marginal positions("terrorists,""fundamentalist fanatics"). As soon as some politicaljustice: although the other's interests are taken into account, the other's fantasy iswronged. In other words, when the trialby "veil of ignorance" tells me that, even if Iwere to occupy the lowest place in the community, I would still accept my ethicalchoice, I move within my own fantasy-frame- what if the other judges within theframe of an absolutely incompatible fantasy?For a more detailed LacaniancriticismofRawls's theory of justice, see ch. 3, Slavoj Zizek, EnjoyYourSymptom New York:Routledge, 1992).12. The reverse of this resistanceis a desire to maintain the "other" in its specific,limited form of (whatour gaze perceives as) "authenticity."In the recent case of PeterHandke, who expressed doubts about Slovene independence, he also claimed that thenotion of Slovenia as an independent state is something imposed on Slovenes fromoutside, not partof the inherent logic of their nationaldevelopment. Handke's motherwas Slovene, and within his artisticuniverse, Slovenia functions as a mythical point ofreference,a kind of maternalparadise,a country where words still referdirectlyto ob-jects, somehow miraculously bypassing commodification, where people are still or-ganicallyrooted in their landscape, and so on. (Seehis Repetition/Wiederholung.)hatul-timatelybothers him is thereforesimply the fact that the actualSlovenia does not con-form to his private myth and hence disturbs the balance of his artisticuniverse.


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force threatens too much the circulationof capital - even if it is, forexample, a benign ecological protest against the destruction of old-growth forest - it is instantlylabeled "terrorist,""irrational,"and soon. Perhaps our very survivaldepends on our capacity to perform akind of dialectical reversaland to locate the true source of madness inthe allegedlyneutral measure of "normality,"which enables us to per-ceive all opposition to it as "irrational."Today, when the media bom-bard us with shocking revelationsabout differentversions of madnessthat threaten the normal course of our everydaylives, from serialkill-ers to religious fundamentalists,from Sadam Hussein to narco-cartels,one has to rely more than ever on Hegel's dictum that thetrue ourceofEvil is theveryneutral azethatperceives vilall around.The fear of "excessive" identification is therefore the fundamentalfeature of late-capitalist ideology: the Enemy is the "fanatic" who"overidentifies" nstead of maintaininga proper distancefrom the dis-persed pluralityof subject-positions. In short: the elated "deconstruct-ivist"logomachy focused on "essentialism" and "fixed identities" ulti-mately fights a strawman. Farfrom containing any kind of subversivepotentials, the subjecthailed by postmodern theories - the dispersed,plural, constructed subject, the subject who undermines every perfor-mative mandate by way of its parodic repetition, the subject prone toparticular,inconsistent modes of enjoyment - simply designates theformofsubjectivityhatcorrespondso latecapitalism.Perhaps the time hascome to resuscitatethe Marxianinsight concerning capitalas the ulti-mate power of "deterritorialization" hat undermines every fixed so-cial identity, and to see "latecapitalism"as the epoch in which the tra-ditional fixity of ideological positions (patriarchalauthority, fixed sexroles, etc.) becomes an obstacle to the unbridled commodification ofeverydaylife.Where then are we to look for the way out of this vicious circle?Needless to stress, I am here farfrom advocatingfundamentalistoveri-dentification as "anticapitalist":he point is exactlythatthe contempo-raryforms of "paranoiac"overidentificationare the inherent reverseof capital'suniversalism, an inherent reaction to it. Themore he ogicofcapitalbecomesuniversal, he more ts oppositewill assume eatures of "irrationalfundamentalism."In other words, there is no way out as long as the uni-versal dimension of our social formation remains defined in terms ofcapital. The way to break out of this vicious circle is not to fight "irra-tional" ethnic particularism but to invent forms of political practice


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that contain a dimension of universalitybeyond capital:the exemplarycase today, of course, is ecology.And where does this leave us with regard to eastern Europe? Theliberal point of view, which opposes liberal-democratic"openness" tonationalist-organic"closure" - the view sustained by the hope that"true" liberal-democratic society will arise once we get rid of theprotofascistnationalisticconstraints - falls short, since it fails to takeinto account their interconnection, that is, the way the supposedlyneutral liberal-democratic frameworkproduces nationalist closure asinherent opposite.13The only way to prevent the emergence of proto-fascist nationalist hegemony is to call into question the very standardof "normality,"the universalframeworkof liberal-democraticcapital-ism - as it was done, for a brief moment, by the "vanishingmedia-tors" in the passage from socialism into capitalism.The general theoretical lesson to be drawn from this second part isthat a cynicalnonidentificationwith the rulingideology's explicitcontentis a positivecondition of its functioning: he ideologicalapparatuses"runsmoothly" preciselywhen subjectsexperiencetheir innermost desire as"oppositional,"as "transgressive,"s the desire for a moment when oneis so to speak allowed to break the Law in the name of the Lawitself.What we encounter here is perversionas a sociallyconstructiveattitude:one can indulge in illicitdrives,torture and kill for the protectionof lawand order. This perversionrelies on the splitof the field of Law nto Lawqua "Ego-Ideal,"that is, symbolic order that regulates social life andmaintainssocialpeace, and into its obscene, superegotistical everse. Asnumerous analysesfrom Bakhtin onward have shown, periodic trans-gressionsare inherentin the socialorder;they function as a condition ofthe latter'sstability. Themistake of Bakhtin or, rather,of some of hisfollowers- was to presentan idealized imageof these "transgressions,"to pass in silence over lynching parties,and so forth,as the crucialformof the "carnivalesque uspensionof socialhierarchy.")The deepest iden-tificationthat holds togethera community is not so much an identifica-tion with the Lawthatregulates ts "normal"everydaycircuitas identifi-cation with the specificform of transgressionof the Law,of its suspen-sion (in psychoanalytic erms, with the specificform of enjoyment).

13. Thereby it repeatsthe mistake of the classicliberalopposition of "open" liberaland "closed" authoritarianpersonality:here, also, the liberalperspectivefails to noticethat the authoritarianpersonality s not an externalopposite to the "open" tolerantlib-eral personality,a simple distortion of it, but its hidden "truth" and presupposition.


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Letus recallsmall-townwhite communities in the American South ofthe twenties,where official,public law is accompanied by its shadowydouble, the nightlyterrorof the Klan.A white man is easilyforgivenatleast minor infringements of the Law, especially when they can bejustified by a "code of honor" - the community stillrecognizeshim as"one of us" (legendarycases of solidaritywith the transgressoraboundin southern white communities).Yet he will be effectivelyexcommuni-cated, perceivedas "not one of us," in the moment he disowns the spe-cific form of transgressionhatpertainsto thiscommunity - say,the mo-ment he refuses to partake n the rituallynchingsby the Ku Klux Klan,or even reports them to the Law (which, of course, does not want tohear about them, since they exemplify its own hidden inverse). TheNazi community relied on the same solidarity-in-guiltadduced by theparticipation n a common transgression: t ostracized those who werenot ready to assume the darkinverseof the idyllic Volksgemeinschafi,henight pogroms, the beatingsof political opponents - in short, all that"everybodyknew, yet did not want to speak of aloud."The truly subversive gesture is therefore to undermine the funda-mental identification with the "transgressive"mode of enjoyment thatholds a community together, to contaminate the stuff of which the ide-ological dream is effectivelymade. The same holds for."really exist-ing" socialism:nationalism, the attachmentto the nationalThing, wasfrom the very beginning its fantasy-support, ts inherent transgression,so that what we are left with now, when the symbolic network inter-twined around this Thing dissolved, is simply the alwaysalready pres-ent fantasy-supportin its nakedness, devoid of its symbolic clothing.Nationalism is what one obtains after the public proclamationthat thesocialist emperor is naked, that is, afterone assumes the nullity of thesocialist ideological fabric.In this way, the final question is alreadyanswered: Wherein consiststhe link between the two surpluses that disturb the liberal-democraticgaze? On the one hand, the democratic communists and new socialmovements in general present the moment of the "vanishingmedia-tor," of what must disappear, must become invisible, for the new or-

der to establish its identity-with-itself.The agentwho actually triggeredthe process must be perceived as its main impediment, or, to use theterms of Propp's structuralanalysisof fairytales, the Donor must ap-pear as the Malefactor, ike LadyCatherine de BourghinJane Austen'sPrideand Prejudicewho, under her mask of the evil impediment to


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Darcyand Elizabeth's marriage,is effectivelythe hand of Destiny whoenables the happy outcome. Nation as the substantial support is, onthe other hand, what the new ruling ideology sees so that it can notsee,overlookhe "vanishingmediator": "nation" is a fantasy entity that fillsthe void of the vanishing mediator. Here one must learn the material-ist lesson of antievolutionistcreationism,which resolves the contradic-tion between the literal meaning of the Scripture (accordingto whichthe universe was created about 5,000 years ago) and irrefutableproofsof its greaterage (million-year-oldfossils and the like)not via the usualindulging in the delicacies of the allegorical reading of the Scripture("Adamand Eve are not reallythe first couple but a metaphor for theearly stages of humanity") but by stickingto the literal truth: the uni-verse was created recently, only 5,000 years ago, butwith built-infalsetracesofthepast (God created fossils to give humans a false perspectiveof infinite openness'4).The past is always strictly synchronous; it is thewaya synchronousniversehinkstsantagonism.t sufficesto recall the infa-mous role of the "remnants of the past" in accounting for the diff-iculties of the "constructionof socialism." In this sense, the tale of eth-nic roots is from the very beginning the "myth of Origins":what is"national heritage" if not a kind of ideological fossil created retroac-tively by the ruling ideology in order to blur itspresentantagonism?In other words, instead of marvelling in a state of traumatic dis-orientation at the shocking swiftness of the emergence of nationalismin eastern Europe, it would perhaps be more appropriate to accom-plish a kind of Hegelian reversaland to transpose this shock into the"thing itself," to conceive of this traumatic disorientation not as aproblem but as a key to the solution: the recourse to nationalism itselfemerged in order to protectus from the traumaticdisorientation,fromthe loss of the ground under our feet caused by the disintegrationofthe social order, of the Lacanian"big Other"epitomized by "reallyex-isting" socialism.

14. Cf. StephenJay Gould, "Adam'sNavel," TheFlamingo'smile Harmondsworth:Penguin, 1985).

Documents

Eastern European Liberalism and Its Discontents.pdf