Living in the End Times. Slavoj Žižek

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       No Castes Without Outcasts

      This same materialism is also clearly discernible in The Laws of Manu,¹⁹ the ancient Indian text which is one of the most exemplary ideological texts in the entire history of humanity. Firstly because, while the text encompasses the entire universe including its mythic origins, it nevertheless focuses on everyday practices as the immediate materiality of ideology: how (what, where, with whom, when . . .) we eat, defecate, have sex, walk, enter a building, work, make war, etc., etc. But also because the book stages a radical shift with regard to its starting point (its presupposition): the ancient code of Veda. What we find in the Veda is a brutal cosmology based on killing and eating: higher things kill and eat/consume lower ones, the stronger eat the weaker; that is, life is a zero-sum game in which one’s victory is another’s defeat. The “great chain of being” appears here as founded in the “food chain,” the great chain of eating: gods eat mortal humans, humans eat mammals, mammals eat lesser animals who eat plants, plants “eat” water and earth . . . such is the eternal cycle of being. So why does the Veda claim that the top social stratum consists not of warrior-kings stronger than all other humans, “eating” them all, but of the caste of priests? It is here that the code’s ideological ingenuity becomes apparent: the function of the priests is to prevent the first, highest, level of cosmic eating, the eating of human mortals by gods. How? By way of performing sacrificial rituals. Gods must be appeased, their hunger for blood must be satisfied, and the trick of the priests is to offer the gods a substitute (symbolic) sacrifice: an animal or other prescribed food instead of human life. The sacrifice is needed not to secure any special favors from the gods, but to make sure that the wheel of life goes on turning. Priests perform a function which concerns the balance of the entire universe: if the gods remain hungry, the whole cycle of cosmic life is disturbed. From the very beginning, the “holistic” notion of the great chain of Being—the reality of which is the brutal chain of the strong eating the weak—is thus based on a deception: it is not a “natural” chain, but a chain based on an exception (humans who don’t want to be eaten). Thus sacrifices are substitute insertions aimed at restoring the complete life cycle.

      This was the first contract between ideologists (priests) and those in power (warrior-kings): the kings, who retain actual power (over the life and death of other people), will recognize the formal superiority of the priests as the highest caste, and, in exchange for this appearance of superiority, the priests will legitimize the power of the warrior-kings as part of the natural cosmic order. However, around the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, something new took place: a radical “revaluation of all values” in the guise of a universalist backlash against this cosmic food chain; the ascetic rejection of this entire infernal machine of life reproducing itself through sacrifice and eating. The circle of the food chain is now perceived as the circle of eternal suffering, and the only way to achieve peace is to exempt oneself from it. (With regard to food, this, of course, entails vegetarianism: not eating dead animals.) From perpetuating the life cycle in time, we move on to the goal of entering the timeless Void. With this reversal from a life-affirming stance to world-renunciation, comparable to the Christian rejection of the pagan universe, the highest values are no longer strength and fertility, but compassion, humility, and love. The very meaning of sacrifice changes with this reversal: we no longer sacrifice so that the infernal life cycle might go on, but in order to rid ourselves of the guilt of participating in that cycle.

      What are the socio-political consequences of this reversal? How can we avoid the conclusion that the entire social hierarchy, grounded in the “great food chain” of eaters and eaten, should be suspended? It is here that the genius of The Laws of Manu shines through: its basic ideological operation is to unite the hierarchy of castes and the ascetic world-renunciation by making purity itself the criterion of one’s place in the caste hierarchy: “Vegetarianism was put forward as the only way to liberate oneself from the bonds of natural violence that adversely affected one’s karma. A concomitant of this new dietary practice was a social hierarchy governed to a large extent by the relative realization of the ideal of non-violence. The rank order of the social classes did not change. But the rationale for the ranking did.”²⁰ Vegetarian priests are at the top, as close as humanly possible to purity; they are followed by the warrior-kings who control society by dominating it and killing life—they are in a way the negative of the priests, i.e., they entertain towards the Wheel of Life the same negative attitude as the priests, albeit in aggressive/interventional mode. Then come the producers who provide food and other material conditions for life; and, finally, at the bottom, are the outcasts whose main task is to deal with all kinds of excrements, the putrefying dead remainders of life (from cleaning the toilets to butchering animals and disposing of human bodies).

      Since the two attitudes are ultimately incompatible, the task of their unification is an impossible one and can be achieved only by a complex panoply of tricks, displacements and compromises whose basic formula is that of universality with exceptions: in principle yes, but . . . The Laws of Manu demonstrates a breathtaking ingenuity in accomplishing this task, with examples often coming dangerously close to the ridiculous. For example, priests should study the Veda, not trade; in extremity, however, a priest can engage in trade, but he is not allowed to trade in certain things like sesame seed, except in certain circumstances; and if he sells sesame seed in the wrong circumstances, he will be reborn as a worm in dogshit . . . Is the structure here not exactly the same as that of the famous Jewish joke on the marriage-mediator who reinterprets every deficiency in the bride-to-be as a positive asset: “She is poor . . .”—“so she will know how to handle the family money, making the most of it!” “She is ugly . . .”—“so the husband will not have to worry that she will cheat on him!” “She stutters . . .”—“so she will keep quiet and not annoy the husband with incessant prattle!” and so on until the final “She really stinks!”—“So you want her to be perfect, without any defect?” The general formula of this procedure is to “state one general rule, to which the whole of the subsequent treatise constitutes nothing but a series of increasingly specific exceptions . . . ‘A specific injunction is stronger than a general one.’”²¹ In other words, the great lesson of The Laws of Manu is that the true regulating power of the law resides not in its direct prohibitions, in the division of our acts into permitted and prohibited, but in regulating the very violations of prohibitions: the law silently accepts that the basic prohibitions are violated (or even discreetly solicits us to violate them), and then, once we find ourselves in this position of guilt, it tells us how to reconcile the violation with the law by violating the prohibition in a regulated way.

      There is nothing “Oriental” about this procedure: the Christian church faced the same problem from the fourth century onwards, when it became the state church: how to reconcile the feudal class society where rich lords ruled over impoverished peasants with the egalitarian poverty of the collective of believers as described in the Gospels? The solution of Thomas Aquinas was that, while in principle shared property is better, this holds only for perfect humans; for the majority of us who dwell in sin, private property and difference in wealth are natural, and it is even sinful to demand egalitarianism or the abolishment of private property in our fallen societies, i.e., to demand for imperfect people what befits only the perfect. Even Buddhism often falls into this trap—say, in the guise of allowing (only) a violence perpetrated in a non-violent attitude, through inner peace and distance: “Even though the Buddha forbade the taking of life, he also taught that until all sentient beings are united together through the exercise of infinite compassion, СКАЧАТЬ