In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek

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      There are still only two theories which imply and practice such an engaged notion of truth: Marxism and psychoanalysis. They are both struggling theories, not only theories about struggle, but theories which are themselves engaged in a struggle: their histories do not consist in an accumulation of neutral knowledge, for they are marked by schisms, heresies, expulsions. This is why, in both of them, the relationship between theory and practice is properly dialectical, in other words, that of an irreducible tension: theory is not just the conceptual grounding of practice, it simultaneously accounts for why practice is ultimately doomed to failure—or, as Freud put it concisely, psychoanalysis would only be fully possible in a society that would no longer need it. At its most radical, theory is the theory of a failed practice: “This is why things went wrong . . .” One usually forgets that Freud’s five great clinical reports are basically reports on a partial success and ultimate failure; in the same way, the greatest Marxist historical accounts of revolutionary events are the accounts of great failures (of the German Peasants’ War, of the Jacobins in the French Revolution, of the Paris Commune, of the October Revolution, of the Chinese Cultural Revolution . . .). Such an examination of failures confronts us with the problem of fidelity: how to redeem the emancipatory potential of these failures through avoiding the twin trap of nostalgic attachment to the past and of all-too-slick accommodation to “new circumstances.”

      The time of these two theories seems over. As Todd Dufresne recently put it, no figure in the history of human thought was more wrong about all the fundamentals of his theory than Freud⁵—with the exception of Marx, some would add. And, indeed, in liberal consciousness, the two now emerge as the main “partners in crime” of the twentieth century: predictably, in 2005, the infamous The Black Book of Communism, listing all the Communist crimes,⁶ was followed by The Black Book of Psychoanalysis, listing all the theoretical mistakes and clinical frauds of psychoanalysis.⁷ In this negative way, at least, the profound solidarity of Marxism and psychoanalysis is now displayed for all to see.

      There are nonetheless signs which disturb this postmodern complacency. Commenting on the growing resonance of Alain Badiou’s thought, Alain Finkelkraut recently characterized it as “the most violent philosophy, symptomatic of the return of radicality and of the collapse of anti-totalitarianism”⁸—an honest and surprised admission of the failure of the long and arduous work of all kinds of “anti-totalitarians,” defenders of human rights, combatants against “old leftist paradigms,” from the French nouveaux philosophes to the advocates of a “second modernity.” What should have been dead, disposed of, thoroughly discredited, is returning with a vengeance. One can understand their despair: how can it be that, after having explained for decades not only in scholarly treatises, but also in the mass media, to anyone who wanted to listen (and to many who did not) the dangers of totalitarian “Master-Thinkers,” this kind of philosophy is returning in its most violent form? Have people not caught on that the time of such dangerous utopias is over? Or are we dealing with some strange ineradicable blindness, or an innate anthropological constant, a tendency to succumb to totalitarian temptation? Our proposal is to turn the perspective around: as Badiou himself might put it in his unique Platonic way, true ideas are eternal, they are indestructible, they always return every time they are proclaimed dead. It is enough for Badiou to state these ideas again clearly, and anti-totalitarian thought appears in all its misery as what it really is, a worthless sophistic exercise, a pseudo-theorization of the lowest opportunist survivalist fears and instincts, a way of thinking which is not only reactionary but also profoundly reactive in Nietzsche’s sense of the term.

      Linked to this is an interesting struggle which has been going on recently (not only) among Lacanians (not only) in France. This struggle concerns the status of the “One” as the name of a political subjectivity, a struggle which has led to many broken personal friendships (say, between Badiou and Jean-Claude Milner). The irony is that this struggle is taking place among ex-Maoists (Badiou, Milner, Lévy, Miller, Regnault, Finkelkraut), and between “Jewish” and “non-Jewish” intellectuals. The question is: is the name of the One the result of a contingent political struggle, or is it somehow rooted in a more substantial particular identity? The position of “Jewish Maoists” is that “Jews” is such a name which stands for that which resists today’s global trend to overcome all limitations, inclusive of the very finitude of the human condition, in radical capitalist “deterritorialization” and “fluidification” (the trend which reaches its apotheosis in the gnostic-digital dream of transforming humans themselves into virtual software that can reload itself from one hardware to another). The name “Jews” thus stands for the most basic fidelity to what one is. Along these lines, François Regnault claims that the contemporary Left demands of Jews (much more than of other ethnic groups) that they “yield with regard to their name”⁹—a reference to Lacan’s ethical maxim “do not yield with regard to your desire” . . . One should remember here that the same shift from radical emancipatory politics to the fidelity to the Jewish name is already discernible in the fate of the Frankfurt School, especially in Horkheimer’s later texts. Jews here are the exception: in the liberal multiculturalist perspective, all groups can assert their identity—except Jews, whose very self-assertion equals Zionist racism . . . In contrast to this approach, Badiou and others insist on the fidelity to the One which emerges and is constituted through the very political struggle of/for naming and, as such, cannot be grounded in any particular determinate content (such as ethnic or religious roots). From this point of view, fidelity to the name “Jews” is the obverse (the silent recognition) of the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles. No wonder that those who demand fidelity to the name “Jews” are also those who warn us against the “totalitarian” dangers of any radical emancipatory movement. Their politics consists in accepting the fundamental finitude and limitation of our situation, and the Jewish Law is the ultimate mark of this finitude, which is why, for them, all attempts to overcome Law and tend towards all-embracing Love (from Christianity through the French Jacobins to Stalinism) must end up in totalitarian terror. To put it succinctly, the only true solution to the “Jewish question” is the “final solution” (their annihilation), because Jews qua objet a are the ultimate obstacle to the “final solution” of History itself, to the overcoming of divisions in all-encompassing unity and flexibility.

      But is it not rather the case that, in the history of modern Europe, those who stood for the striving for universality were precisely atheist Jews from Spinoza to Marx and Freud? The irony is that in the history of anti-Semitism Jews stand for both of these poles: sometimes they stand for the stubborn attachment to their particular life-form which prevents them from becoming full citizens of the state they live in, sometimes they stand for a “homeless” and rootless universal cosmopolitanism indifferent to all particular ethnic forms. The first thing to recall is thus that this struggle is (also) inherent to Jewish identity. And, perhaps, this Jewish struggle is our central struggle today: the struggle between fidelity to the Messianic impulse and the reactive (in the precise Nietzschean sense) “politics of fear” which focuses on preserving one’s particular identity.

      The privileged role of Jews in the establishment of the sphere of the “public use of reason” hinges on their subtraction from every state power—this position of the “part of no-part” of every organic nation-state community, not the abstract-universal nature of their monotheism, makes them the immediate embodiment of universality. No wonder, then, that, with the establishment of the Jewish nation-state, a new figure of the Jew emerged: a Jew resisting identification with the State of Israel, refusing to accept the State of Israel as his true home, a Jew who “subtracts” himself from this state, and who includes the State of Israel among the states towards which he insists on maintaining a distance, living in their interstices—and it is this uncanny Jew who is the object of what one cannot but designate as “Zionist anti-Semitism,” a foreign excess disturbing the nation-state community. These Jews, the “Jews of the Jews themselves,” worthy successors of Spinoza, are today the only Jews who continue to insist on the “public use of reason,” refusing to submit their reasoning to the “private” domain of the nation-state.

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