Žižek : Welcome to the Desert of the Real!

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, Hezbollah, Iran, etc.

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 Huntington. He rejects this in favor of a clash within civilizations: The anthrax scare was more than likely the cause of Rightist fundamentalists, for example. It isn’t Bush verses Bin Laden, it is all of us against them. Also, there are those who operate between the civilizations, who take up an almost National Homo Sacer position, like Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.

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 3^rd 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 US and their position on torture, how future wars are not to be fought between nations, but between armies and groups of Homo Sacer, how liberals worked to open the discussion to torture (I’m against it, but…), how we all may be Homo Sacer at the end of the day, etc.

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 Israel enjoining the Palestinian armed forces to keep their people under control, then attacking when they can not, then blaming the armed forces for not keeping control and attacking IDF forces. “The point is simply that the IDF reservists’ refusal revealed an aspect of the situation which totally undermines the simple opposition of civilized liberal Israelis fighting Islamic fanatics: the aspect precisely, of reducing a whole nation to the status of Homo sacer, submitting them to a network of written and unwritten regulations which deprive them of their autonomy as members of a political community” (126-7).

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…

Baudrillard: The Spirit of Terrorism

Baudrillard, Jean, & Baudrillard, Jean. (2003). The spirit of terrorism ; and, Other essays (New ed.). London ; New York: Verso.

This is a short book, a glorified pamphlet, if you will, of four essays: The Spirit of Terrorism, Requiem for the Twin Towers, Hypotheses on Terrorism and The Violence of the Global. I will look briefly at what he says, will take part of my analysis from a professor of mine (who probably wouldn’t want to be named) and then make a brief conclusion.

Baudrillard looks at 9/11 as an event; as something that is meaningless and shatters the globalizing, totalizing violence of our current international system. 9/11 partially becomes an event because it does rupture the homogenizing violence of globalization.

“We may dismiss from the outset the hypothesis that September 11 constituted merely an accident or incident on the path to irreversible globalization. An ultimately despairing hypothesis, since something very extraordinary occurred there, and to deny it is to admit that henceforth nothing can even constitute an event, that we are doomed to play out the flawless logic of global power capable of absorbing any resistance, any antagonism, and even strengthening itself by so doing—the terrorist act merely hastening the planetary ascendancy of a single power and a single way of thinking” (51).

It is also an event because it invokes the spirit of terrorism. The “Spirit of Terrorism” is “a death which is symbolic and sacrificial—that is to say, the absolute, irrevocable event” (17). The terrorist, “have assimilated everything of modernity and globalism, without changing their goal, which is to destroy that power. They have even—and this is the height of cunning—used the banality of American every day life as cover and camouflage” (19).

He then looks at how this event ruptured our construction of images. “The role of images is highly ambiguous. For, at the same time as they exalt the event, they also take it hostage” (27). The image was ruptured, partially because the material was brought back to the image. The video of people jumping from buildings, the smoke billowing down the streets channeled by buildings, these made a Manhattan Horror Film real.

Since the modern image was ruptured and brought to face reality, the question of how to respond to such an event becomes problematic. How can you have a meaningful response when the very idea of meaning is problematized? For Baudrillard, it seems as if 9/11 brought about a sense of relief that the singular event could still rupture the ever-growing influence of hegemonic cultural ideals.

Another interesting note is a quote that allows Baudrillard to be snarlingly reviewed by the NY Times. The review says this (on the back of the book):

“First prize for cerebral coldbloodedness goes to French philosopher Jean Baudrillard… It takes a rare, demonic genius to brush off the slaughter of thousands on the grounds that they were suffering from severe ennui brought about by boring modern architecture.”

The quote that they are referring to is this:

“The violence of globalization also involves architecture, and hence the violent protest against it also involves the destruction of that architecture. In terms of collective drama, we can say that the horror for the 4,000 victims of dying in those towers was inseparable from the horror of living in them—the horror of living and working in sarcophagi of concrete and steel” (41)

No one would discount the coldbloodedness of this statement, though the NY Times may have taken it out of context. Baudrillard is pointing to the violence of the global, specifically through looking at how that violence can be portrayed in architecture. He certainly does not feel like the WTC was destroyed, in fact, he believes that, since it has moved from material space to the ideation space, it has transformed. “By the grace of terrorism, the World Trace Center has become the world’s most beautiful building—the eighth wonder of the world!” (48).