Žižek, Slavoj. (2002). Welcome to the desert of the real! : five essays on 11 September and related dates. London ; New York: Verso.
As with many books that I would attempt to summarize, this contains much too much content to do justice in such an abbreviated space. However, because I find this quite helpful, I plod on.
“We ‘feel free’ because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom…our ‘freedoms’ themselves serve to mask and sustain our deeper unfreedom” (2). We are asked, in our enlightened societies, to understand that we are free, but this freedom is also masked by an unfreedom, a requirement to obey, to conform, etc. The same is for the choice of democracy or fundamentalism: you are free to choose whatever you would like, as long as it is liberal democracy. See Hamas,
This book reads like another Zizek book that I read, Iraq: Borrowed Kettle. It is full of striking insights that challenge the reader on each turn, but it bounces from one to another with such speed and seeming haste that it is less simple to string together a coherent theme. That may just be the point.
He talks about the passion for the real that has engulfed our society, and it can be seen everywhere. We want the real so much that it has become unreal. We drink coffee without caffeine, we have beer without alcohol, we have wars without (our) deaths. In fact, the title of the book comes from the scene in the Matrix when Neo is first confronted with real reality (i.e., outside the scope of the computer’s overt control).
This passion for the real is identified as having a core, and this is, “this identification with—this heroic gesture of fully assuming—the dirty obscene underside of Power: the heroic attitude of ‘Somebody has to do the dirty work, so let’s do it!’, a kind of mirror-reversal of the Beautiful Soul which refuses to recognize itself in its result. We find this stance also in the properly Rightist admiration for the celebration of heroes who are ready to do the necessary dirty work: it is easy to do a noble thing for one’s country, up to sacrificing one’s life for it-it is much more difficult to commit a crime for one’s country…” (30).
This helps to transition to Agamben’s Homo Sacer, the person who can be killed but not sacrificed, the living dead. The passion for the real leads some to be treated differently, as existing entirely outside of the law.
He then looks at the “clash of civilization” thesis that has been punted around since
Zizek then examines happiness, claiming that it is the betrayal of desire, and giving three ways in which the Czechoslovakian population of the 70s and 80s was happy: their material needs were satisfied, there was the Party to blame for things that didn’t go well and there was the “Other Place…which one was allowed to dream about, and even visit sometimes” (59). This was all disturbed by desire.
We then are taken on a general critique of liberal democracies and tolerance. One must understand that tolerance is not an absolute, and that a society doesn’t need both strong and weak, rich and poor, victim and torturer. He then goes on to introduce a contemporary version of Homo Sacer: Homo Sucker.
“In the good old German Democratic Republic, it was impossible for the same person to combine three features: conviction ()belief in the official ideology), intelligence, and honesty. If you believed and were intelligent, you were not honest; if you were intelligenta dn honest, you were not a believer; if you were a believer and honest, you were not intelligent. Does not the same also hold for the ideology of liberal democracy? If you (pretend to) take the hegemonic liberal ideology seriously, you cannot be both intelligent and honest: you are either stupid or a corrupted cynic. So, if I may indulge in a rather tasteless allusion to Agamben’s Homo sacer, I can risk the claim that the predominant liberal mode of subjectivity today is Homo sucker: while he tries to exploit and manipulate others, he ends up being the ultimate sucker himself. When we think we are making fun of the ruling ideology, we are merely strengthening its hold over us” (71).
There is a continued critique of liberal democracy, with the final section of the 3rd chapter making an interesting argument. Regarding the murder of Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician who was a blend of Rightist populism and political correctness could not be allowed to live. He was, at the same time, gay, friendly with immigrants, and yet held a Le Pen attitude towards further immigration. “…perhaps he had to die because he was living proof that the opposition between Rightist populism and liberal tolerance is a false one, that we are dealing with two sides of the same coin. Should we not, therefore, be striving for the exact opposite of the unfortunate Fortuyn: not the Fascist with a human face, but the freedom fighter with an inhuman face?” (82).
He continues on to skewer the
How to break out of this? He highlights the case of IDF forces who refused to fight. This represented an ethical act, an act that ruptured the hegemonic discourse of
The attacks of 9/11 did not represent an evil that was any greater than any other major global tragedy, as they have been made out to represent. They were an attempt to awake the Nietzscian Last Man from his eternal “bliss”.
And much more…
