Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ killing and war are necessary.”²²

      Is this supplementing of universality with exceptions a case of what Hegel called the “concrete universal”? Definitely not, and for a very precise reason: although both the structure of universal law with exceptions and Hegelian “concrete universality” mobilize the gap between the universal and the particular, the nature of the gap is different in each case. In the first case, it is simply the gap between the pure universal principle or law and the pragmatic consideration of particular circumstances, i.e., the (ultimately empiricist) notion of the excess of the wealth of concrete particular content over any abstract principle—in other words, here, universality precisely remains abstract, which is why it has to be twisted or adapted to particular circumstances in order to become operative in real life. In the second case, on the contrary, the tension is absolutely immanent, inherent to universality itself: the fact that a universality actualizes itself in a series of exceptions is an effect of this universality being at war with itself, marked by an inherent deadlock or impossibility. (The same goes for the idea of Communism: it is not enough to say that the idea of Communism should not be applied as an abstract dogma, that, in each case, concrete circumstances should be taken into consideration. It is also not enough to say, apropos the fiasco of the twentieth-century Communist countries, that this mis-application in no way disqualifies the idea of Communism. The idea’s imperfect [or, rather, catastrophic] actualizations bear witness to an “inner contradiction” at the very heart of the idea.)

      Let us take a (surprising, perhaps) case of the Hegelian “concrete universality”: a wonderful Jewish story about an anti-death-penalty Talmud specialist who, embarrassed by the fact that the death penalty is ordained by God himself, proposed a delightfully practical solution: one should not directly overturn the divine injunction, that would have been blasphemous; but one should treat it as God’s slip of tongue, his moment of madness, and invent a complex network of sub-regulations and conditions which, while leaving the possibility of a death penalty intact, ensure that this possibility will never be realized.²³ The beauty of this procedure is that it turns around the standard trick of prohibiting something in principle (torture, for instance), but then slipping in enough qualifications (“except in specified extreme circumstances . . .”) to ensure it can be done whenever one really wants to do it. It is thus either “In principle yes, but in practice never” or “In principle no, but when exceptional circumstances demand it, yes.” Note the asymmetry between the two cases: the prohibition is much stronger when one allows torture in principle—in this case, the principled “yes” is never allowed to realize itself; while in the other case, the principled “no” is exceptionally allowed to realize itself. In other words, the only “reconciliation” between the universal and the particular is that of the universalized exception: only the stance which re-casts every particular case as an exception treats all particular cases without exception in the same way. And it should be clear now why this is a case of “concrete universality”: the reason we should find a way to argue, in each particular case, that the death penalty is not deserved, lies in our awareness that there is something wrong with the very idea of the death penalty, that this idea is an injustice masked as justice.

      This reference to Judaism should be linked to the fact that the Book of Job (from the Old Testament) can be counted as the first exercise in the critique of ideology in the entire history of humanity. The Laws of Manu should thus be opposed to the Book of Job as one of the founding texts of ideology versus one of the founding texts of its critique. No wonder the British colonial administration in India elevated The Laws of Manu into the privileged text to be used as a reference for establishing the legal code which would render possible the most efficient domination of India—up to a point, one can even say that The Laws of Manu only became the book of the Hindu tradition retroactively, chosen to stand for the tradition by the British from among a vast choice (the same goes for its obscene obverse, “tantra,” also systematized into a coherent, dark, violent, and dangerous cult by the British colonizers). In all these cases we are dealing with “invented traditions.” What this also implies is that the persistence of the phenomenon and social practice of the Untouchables is not simply a remainder of tradition: their number grew throughout the nineteenth century, with the spreading of cities which lacked proper sewers, so that more outcasts were needed to deal with the resulting dirt and excrement. At a more general level, one should thus reject the idea that globalization threatens local traditions, that it flattens differences: sometimes it threatens them, more often it keeps them alive, resuscitates them or even creates them by way of ex-apting them to new conditions—in the way, say, the British and Spanish re-invented slavery in early modernity.

      With the formal prohibition of discrimination against the Untouchables, their exclusion changed its status to become the obscene supplement of the official/public order: publicly disavowed, it continues in its subterranean existence. However, this subterranean existence is nonetheless formal (it concerns the subject’s symbolic title/status), which is why it does not follow the same logic as the well-known Marxist opposition between formal equality and actual inequality in the capitalist system. Here, it is the inequality (the persistence of the hierarchic caste system) which is formal, while in their actual economic and legal life, individuals are in a way equal (an Untouchable can also become rich, etc.).²⁴ The status of the caste hierarchy is not the same as that of nobility in a bourgeois society, which is effectively irrelevant, merely a feature which may add to the subject’s public glamor.

      Exemplary here is the conflict between B. R. Ambedkar and Gandhi during the 1930s. Although Gandhi was the first Hindu politician to advocate the full integration of the Untouchables, and called them “the children of god,” he perceived their exclusion as the result of the corruption of the original Hindu system. What Gandhi envisaged was rather a (formally) non-hierarchical order of castes within which each individual has his or her own allotted place; he emphasized the importance of scavenging and celebrated the Untouchables for performing this “sacred” mission. It is here that the Untouchables are exposed to the greatest ideological temptation: in a way which prefigures today’s “identity politics,” Gandhi allowed them to “fall in love with themselves” in their humiliating identity, to accept their degrading work as a noble and necessary social task, to see even the degrading nature of their work as a sign of their sacrifice, of their readiness to do a dirty job for the sake of society. Even his more “radical” injunction that everyone, Brahmins included, should clean up his or her own shit, obfuscates the true issue, which, rather than having to do with our individual attitude, is of a global social nature. (The same ideological trick is performed today when we are bombarded from all sides with injunctions to recycle personal waste, placing bottles, newspapers, etc., in the appropriate bins. In this way, guilt and responsibility are personalized—it is not the entire organization of the economy which is to blame, but our subjective attitude which needs to change.) The task is not to change our inner selves, but to abolish Untouchability as such, that is, not merely an element of the system, but the system itself which generates it. In contrast to Gandhi, Ambedkar saw this clearly when he

      underlined the futility of merely abolishing Untouchability: this evil being the product of a social hierarchy of a particular kind, it was the entire caste system that had to be eradicated: “There will be outcasts [Untouchables] as long as there are castes.” . . . Gandhi responded that, on the contrary, here it was a question of the foundation of Hinduism, a civilization which, in its original form, in fact ignored hierarchy.²⁵

      Although Gandhi and Ambedkar respected each other and often collaborated in the struggle for the dignity of the Untouchables, their difference is here insurmountable: it is the difference between the “organic” solution (solving the problem by returning to the purity of the original non-corrupted system) and the truly radical solution (identifying the problem as the “symptom” of the entire system, the symptom which can only be resolved by abolishing the entire system). Ambedkar saw clearly how the structure of four castes does not unite four elements belonging to the same order: while the first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchant-producers) form a consistent All, an organic triad, the Untouchables are, like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” СКАЧАТЬ