2010年5月齐泽克人民大学座谈文稿（外一篇）

Reference of 'Tea & Talk with Prof. Zizek' at Renmin University of China 14:30-15:30, May 17, 2010 There is, beyond all cheap jibes and superficial analogies, a profound structural homology between the Maoist permanent self-revolutionizing, the permanent struggle against the ossification of State structures, and the inherent dynamics of capitalism. One is tempted to paraphrase here Bertolt Brecht’s pun 'What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?': what are the violent and destructive outbursts of a Red Guardist caught in the Cultural Revolution compared to the true Cultural Revolution, the permanent dissolution of all life-forms necessitated by the capitalist reproduction? Today, the tragedy of the Great Leap Forward is repeating itself as the comedy of the rapid capitalist Great Leap Forward into modernization, with the old slogan “iron foundry into every village”re-emerging as “a skyscraper into every street.”Or, to put it in a brutally-ironic way, the liquidations of the enemies in the Maoist purges gives way to the liquidation totale of the market sales (“Everything must go!”). So what if, in a kind of unintended and for this reason all the more cruelly ironic Cunning of Reason, the Cultural Revolution, with its brutal erasure of past traditions, was a “shock” which created the conditions for the ensuing capitalist explosion? What if China has to be added to Naomi Klein’s list of states in which a natural, military or social catastrophy cleared the slate for a new capitalist explosion? No wonder, then, that, in order to curb the excess of social disintegration caused by the capitalist explosion, Chinese authorities now celebrate religions and traditional ideologies which sustain social stability, from Buddhism to Confucianism, i.e., the very ideologies that were the target of the Cultural Revolution. In April 2006, Ye Xiaowen, China’s top religious official, told the Xinhua News Agency that “religion is one of the important forces from which China draws strength,” and he singled out Buddhism for its “unique role in promoting a harmonious society,” the official formula for combining economic expansion with social development and care. But can religion do this job? The formula which justifies this role of religion is the thesis attributed to Dostoyevsky (although he actually never formulated it): 'If there is no God, everything is permitted.' Conservatives like to evoke this thought apropos scandals among the atheist-hedonist elite: from millions killed in gulags up to animal sex and gay marriages, here is where we end if we deny all transcendent authority which poses some unsurpassable limits to human endeavours. Without suchlimits – so the story goes – there is no ultimate to exploit one's neighbors ruthlessly, to use themn as tools for profit and pleasure, to enslave and humiliate them, to kill them in millions. All that separates us from this ultimate moral vacuum are, in the absence of a transcendent limit, temporary and non-obligatory 'pacts among wolves,' self-imposed limitations in the interest of one's survival and well-being which can be violated at any moment... But are things really like that? The first thing one cannot help noticing is that Lacan's well-known critical inversion of Dostoyevski's dictum ('If there is no god, then everything is prohibited.' is much more appropriate to describe the universe of atheist liberal hedonists: they dedicate their life to the pursuit of pleasures, but since there is no external authority which would gurantee them a space for this pursuit, they get entangled into a thick network of self-imposed Politically Correct regulations, as if a superego much more severe than that of the traditional morality is controlling them: they get obsessed by the idea that, in pursuing their pleasures, they may humiliate or violate others' space, so they regulate their behavior with detailed prescriptions of how to avoid 'harrassing' others, not to mention the no less complex regulation of their own care of the self (bodily fitness, health food, spiritual relaxation...). Indeed, nothing is more oppressive and regulated than being a simple hedonist. The second thing, strictly correlative to the first observation, is that today, it is rather to those who refer to god in a brutally direct way, perceiving themselves as instruments of god's will, that everything is permitted. First, this permissivity concerns the so-called display of so-called 'human weaknesses': isolated extreme forms of sexuality among godless hedonists are immediately elevated into representative symbols of the depravity of the godless, while any questioning of, say, the link between the much more massive phenomenon of priests' paedophilia and the Church as institution is rejected as anti-religious slander. The well-documented story of how the Catholic church as institution protects paedophiliacs in its own ranks is another good example of how if god does exist, then everything is permitted (to those who legitimize themselves as his servants). What makes this protective attitude towards paedophiliacs so disgusting is that it is not practiced by tolerant hedonists, but – to add insult to injury - by the very institution which poses as the moral guardian of society... But, much more important, the so-called fundamentalists practice a perverted version of what Kierkegaard called religious suspension of the ethical: on a god's mission, one is allowed to kill thousands of innocents. The lesson of today’s terrorism is thus that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of His will, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any “merely human” constraints and considerations. The absence of limits should thus not be read in the standard way of “either humanity will find a way to set itself limits or it will perish in the uncontained violence.” If there is a lesson from so-called totalitarian experiences, it is that the temptation is exactly the opposite one: the danger of absence of a divine limit is to impose a NEW pseudo-limit, a fake transcendence on behalf of which I act (from Stalinism to religious fundamentalism). Even ecology functions as ideology the moment it is evoked as a new Limit: it has all the chances of developing into the predominant form of ideology of global capitalism, a new opium for the masses replacing the declining religion[1]: it takes over the old religion’s fundamental function, that of putting on an unquestionable authority which can impose limits. The lesson this ecology is constantly hammering is our finitude: we are not Cartesian subjects extracted from reality, we are finite beings embedded in a bio-sphere which vastly transgresses our horizon. In our exploitation of natural resources, we are borrowing from the future, so one should treat our Earth with respect, as something ultimately Sacred, something that should not be unveiled totally, that should and will forever remain a Mystery, a power we should trust, not dominate. So why do we witness today the 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 as grounds of mass violence (or war), i.e., since our hegemonic ideology calls on us to enjoy life and to realize our Selves, it is difficult for the majority to overcome their revulsion at torturing and killing another human being. The large majority of people are spontaneously moral: torturing or killing another human being is deeply traumatic for them. So, in order to make them do it, a larger 'sacred' Cause is needed, which makes petty individual concerns about killing seem trivial. Religion or ethnic belonging fit this role perfectly. Of course there are cases of pathological atheists who are able to commit mass murder just for pleasure, just for the sake of it, but they are rare exceptions. The majority needs to be anaesthetized against their elementary sensitivity to the other's suffering. For this, a sacred Cause is needed: without this Cause, we would have to feel all the burden of what we did, with no Absolute on whom to put the ultimate responsibility. Religious ideologists usually claim that, true or not, religion makes some otherwise bad people to do some good things; from today’s experience, one should rather stick to Steve Weinberg’s claim that, while, without religion, good people would have been doing good things and bad people bad things, only religion can make good people do bad things. Religion – and poetry. Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serb leader responsible for terrible ethnic cleansing in the post-Yugoslav war, was also a poet, and his poetry should not be dismissed as ridiculous – it deserves a close reading, since it provides a key to how ethnic cleansing functions. Here are the first lines of the untitled poem identified by a dedication “…..For Izlet Sarajlic”: “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 crowd” These lines describe a precise constellation: a leader offering his subjects “inclemency and wine,” i.e., a leader who stands for the unconditional call of the brutal and obscene superego to suspend all prohibitions and enjoy in a permanent destructive orgy. Superego is “this godhead” which “forbids you nothing,” and such a suspension of moral prohibitions is the crucial feature of today's "postmodern" nationalism. Here, the cliche according to which passionate ethnic identification restores a firm set of values and beliefs in the confusing insecurity of a modern secular global society, is to be turned around: nationalist "fundamentalism" rather serves as the operator of a secret, barely concealed YOU MAY! It is today's apparently hedonistic and permissive postmodern reflexive society which is paradoxically more and more saturated by rules and regulations that allegedly serve our well-being (restrictions on smoking and eating, rules against sexual harassment...), so that the reference to some passionate ethnic identification, far from further restraining us, rather functions as a liberating call "You may!" - you may violate the stiff regulations of the peaceful co-existence in a liberal tolerant society, you may drink and eat whatever you want, engage in patriarchal mores prohibited by the liberal Political Correctness, even hate, fight, kill and rape... Without the full recognition of this perverse pseudo-liberating effect of today's nationalism, of how the obscenely permissive superego supplements the explicit texture of the social symbolic law, we condemn ourselves to the failure of grasping its true dynamics. Here is how Aleksandar Tijanic, a leading Serb columnist who was for a brief period even Milosevic's minister for information and public media, describes "the strange kind of symbiosis between Milosevic and the Serbs": "Milosevic generally suits the Serbs. In the time of his rule, Serbs abolished the time for working. No one does anything. He allowed the flourishing of the black market and smuggling. You can appear on the state TV and insult Blair, Clinton, or anyone else of the 'world dignitaries.' /.../ Furthermore, Milosevic gave us the right to carry weapons. He gave us the right to solve all our problems with weapons. He gave us also the right to drive stolen cars. /.../ Milosevic changed the daily life of Serbs into one great holiday and enabled us all to feel like high-school pupils on a graduation trip - which means that nothing, but really nothing, of what you do can be punishable." Plato’s reputation suffers because of his claim that poets should be thrown out of the city – a rather sensible advice, judging from this post-Yugoslav experience, where ethnic cleansing was prepared by poets’ dangerous dreams. True, Milosevic "manipulated" nationalist passions - but it was the poets who delivered him the stuff which lend itself to manipulation. They - the sincere poets, not the corrupted politicians - were at the origin of it all, when, back in the 70s 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 poetic-military complex, personified in the twin figures of Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic. 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, taking everyone by surprise. This is what was going on in ex-Yugoslavia in the 70s and 80s, so that when things exploded in the late 80s, it was already too late, the old ideological consensus was thoroughly putrid and collapsed in itself. Yugoslavia in the 1970s and 1980s was like the proverbial cat in the cartoon who continues to walk above the precipice – he only falls down when, finally, he looks down and becomes aware that there is no firm ground beneath his legs. Milosevic was the first who forced us all to really look down into the precipice… And to avoid the illusion that the poetic-military complex is a Balkan specialty, one should mention at least Hassan Ngeze, the Karadzic of Ruanda who, in his journal Kangura, was systematically spreading anti Tutsi-hatred and calling for their genocide. And it is all too easy to dismiss Karadzic 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. And what about the Austrian Peter Handke, a classic of contemporary European literature, who demonstratively attended the funeral of Slobodan Milosevic? But what about the Stalinist Communist mass killings? What about the extra-legal liquidations of the nameless millions? Were they not a clear case of ruthless atheist politics? No - it is easy to see how these crimes were always justified by their own ersatz-god, a 'god that failed,' as Ignazio Silone, one of the great disappointed ex-Communists, called it: they had their own god, which is why everything was permitted to them. In other words, the same logic as that of religious violence applies here. Stalinist Communists do not perceive themselves as hedonist individualists abandoned to their freedom; no, they perceive themselves as instruments of historical progress, of a necessity which pushes humanity towards the »higher« stage of Communism – and it is this reference to their own Absolute (and to their privileged relationship to it) which permits them to do whatever they want (or consider necessary). This is why, the moment cracks appear in this ideological protective shield, the weight of what they did became unbearable to many individual Communists, since they have to confront their acts as their own, with no cover in a higher Reason of History – this is why, after Khruschev's 1956 speech denouncing Stalin's crimes, many cadres committed suicide: they did not learn anything new during that speech, alk the facts were more or less known to them, they were just deprived of the historical legitimization of their crimes in the Communist historical Absolute. In other words, one has to learn fully to accept that there is no big Other – or, as Badiou put it succinctly: “/…/ the simplest definition of God and of religion lies in the idea that truth and meaning are one and the same thing. The death of God is the end of the idea that posits truth and meaning as the same thing. And I would add that the death of Communism also implies the separation between meaning and truth as far as history is concerned. ‘The meaning of history’ has two meanings: on the one hand ‘orientation,’ history goes somewhere; and then history has a meaning, which is the history of human emancipation by way of the proletariat, etc. In fact, the entire age of Communism was a period where the conviction that it was possible to take rightful political decisions existed; we were, at that moment, driven by the meaning of history. /…/ Then the death of Communism becomes the second death of God but in the territory of history.”[2] We should thus ruthlessly abandon the prejudice that the linear time of evolution is “on our side,” that History is “working for us” in the guise of the famous mole digging under the earth, doing the work of the Cunning of Reason. Perhaps, the Chinese term for this agency of the big Other is Heaven. According to Confucius, people live their lives within parameters firmly established by Heaven (which, more than a purposeful Supreme Being, designates the higher natural order of things with its fixed cycles and patterns). The "Mandate of Heaven" is based on the idea that Heaven is primarily concerned with the well-being of humans and human society; in order to bring about this well-being, Heaven institutes government and authority. Heaven gives its mandate to a family or individual to rule over other human beings with justice and fairness; rulers are to make the welfare of their people their principal concern. When rulers or a dynasty fail to rule in this manner, Heaven removes its mandate from that ruler and bestows it on another. Is not, in this sense, the Communist Party rule legitimized by the "Mandate of Heaven," obliging the Communists to rule so that they make the welfare of their people their principal concern? (A truly radical revolutionary subject should precisely drop this reference to Heaven: there is no Heaven, no higher cosmic Law which would justify our acts. So when Mao Zedong said “There is great disorder under heaven, and the situation is excellent,” he thereby made a point which can be precisely rendered in Lacanian terms: the inconsistency of the big Other opens up the space for the act.) But what complicates the picture is the fact that religion – in its latest trend of the so-called Western Buddhism – has fully accomodated itself to this universe without a big Other. A wonderfully-ambiguous indicator of our present ideological predicament is Sandcastles. Buddhism and Global Finance, a documentary by Alexander Oey (2005) with commentaries from economist Arnoud Boot, sociologist Saskia Sassen, and the Tibetan Buddhist teacher Dzongzar Khyentse Rinpoche. Sassen and Boot discuss the gigantic scope, power, as well as social and economic effects of global finance: capital markets, now valued at an estimated $83 trillion, exist within a system based purely on self-interest, in which herd behavior, often based on rumors, can inflate or destroy the value of companies - or whole economies - in a matter of hours. Khyentse Rinpoche counters them with ruminations about the nature of human perception, illusion, and enlightenment; his philosophico-ethical statement "Release your attachment to something that is not there in reality, but is a perception," is supposed to throw a new light on the mad dance of billion-dollars-speculations. Echoing the Buddhist notion that there is no Self, only a stream of continuous perceptions, Sassen comments about global capital: "It's not that there are $83 trillion. It is essentially a continuous set of movements. It disappears and it reappears"… The problem here is, of course, how are we to read this parallel between the Buddhist ontology and the structure of virtual capitalism’s universe? The film tends towards the humanist reading: seen through a Buddhist lens, the exuberance of global financial wealth is illusory, divorced from the objective reali