Slavoj Žižek: What's Wrong with Fundamentalism?

The logic is here the same as that of Anne Frank who, in her diaries, expresses belief in the ultimate goodness of man in spite of the horrors accomplished by men against Jews in World War II: what renders such an assertion of belief (in the essential goodness of Man; in the truly human character of the Soviet regime) sublime, is the very gap between it and the overwhelming factual evidence against it, i.e. the active will to disavow the actual state of things. Perhaps therein resides the most elementary meta-physical gesture: in this refusal to accept the real in its idiocy, to disavow it and to search for Another World behind it. The big Other is thus the order of lie, of lying sincerely. And it is in this sense that "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity": even the best are no longer able to sustain their symbolic innocence, their full engagement in the symbolic ritual, while "the worst," the mob, engage in (racist, religious, sexist...) fanaticism? Is this opposition not a good description of today's split between tolerant but anemic liberals, and the fundamentalists full of "passionate intensity"?¹

The Žižek quote above reminds me of an article I once read about reasons why liberalist and conservative thoughts have such a gap (or maybe "split" in lacanese). The article was written by a professor of social sciences in US. The name of the professor now escapes me and I cannot find the link to the article. But, the basic logic or attraction of conservative ideology as I remember it (read: religious/political fundamentalism of any kind, which we have a fare share in Finland too, we do not need to go into american evangelicals) is that it gives very clear answers to basic human questions. I think in lacanese this means: how should we manage our enjoyment? While conservative thinking is very precise in this the liberal opposition does have very weak answers. Regarding this an example: finnish television recently aired a debate which precisely illustrates this. The debate between pro-daycare activist Jarkko Tontti, and children-should-be-taken-care-by-their-mother partisan Nina Mikkonen turned to be a farce between aggressive conservative Mikkonen "speaking from her heart" and cool Tontti, who backed his side with supporting scientific studies. Precisely this brings us to a point, or two points actually. First is that precise answers backed with strong emotion, (never mind how dubious the ideological background; i.e. who is speaking when we talk about the "best of the children"?) make a strong case against the liberal we-can-change-our-mind-if-scientific-studies-point-to-other-direction position. The second point can be found in the next quote of Žižek.

At some point, Alcoholics Anonymous meet Pascal: "Fake it until you make it.." However, this causality of the habit is more complex than it may appear: far from offering an explanation of how beliefs emerge, it itself calls for an explanation. The first thing to specify is that Pascal's "Kneel down and you will believe!" has to be understood as involving a kind of self-referential causality: "Kneel down and you will believe that you knelt down because you believed!" The second thing is that, in the "normal" cynical functioning of ideology, belief is displaced onto another, onto a "subject supposed to believe," so that the true logic is: "Kneel down and you will thereby MAKE SOMEONE ELSE BELIEVE!" One has to take this literally and even risk a kind of inversion of Pascal's formula: "You believe too much, too directly? You find your belief too oppressing in its raw immediacy? Then kneel down, act as if you believe, and YOU WILL GET RID OF YOUR BELIEF - you will no longer have to believe yourself, your belief will already ex-sist objectified in your act of praying!" That is to say, what if one kneels down and prays not so much to regain one's own belief but, on the opposite, to GET RID of one's belief, of its over-proximity, to acquire a breathing space of a minimal distance towards it? To believe - to believe "directly," without the externalizing mediation of a ritual - is a heavy, oppressing, traumatic burden, which, through exerting a ritual, one has a chance of transferring it onto an Other...¹

So the more you make clear that you believe in your cause (kneel down, act as you believe...), the more you make others believe on behalf of you. This is visible in muslim religion (if you behave like a believer, pray on the designated hours and take part in other rituals you are a true believer) and in christian cults too. There is no third way.

"...The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere / the ceremony of innocence is drowned; / the best lack all conviction, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity." W.B Yeats²

¹ WITH OR WITHOUT PASSION What's Wrong with Fundamentalism?
² Quoted in the beginning of the same article by Žižek.

Slavoj Žižek: Looking Awry, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (1992)

I have been reading Slavoj Žižek's books for a while and I finished the latest after new year. Towards the end of Looking Awry Zizek gets to his most interesting point in his book. The abstract essence of democracy.

We should begin with an elementary question: who is the subject of democracy? The Lacanian answer is unequivocal: the subject of democracy is not a human person, "man" in all the richness of his needs, interests and beliefs. The subject of democracy, like the subject of psychoanalysis, is none other than the Cartesian subject in all its abstraction, the empty punctuality we reach after subtracting all its particular contents. In other words there is a structual homology between the Cartesian procedure of radical doubt that produces the cogito, an empty point or reflective self reference as a remainder, and the preamble of every democratic proclamation "all people without regard to (race, sex, religion, wealth, sosial status)." We should not fail to notice the violent act of abstraction at work in this "without regard to"; it is an abstraction of all positive features, a dissolution of all substantial, innate links, which produces an entity strictly correlative to the Cartesian cogito as a point of pure nonsubstantial subjectivity. Lacan likened the subject of psychoanalysis to this entity, to the great surprise of those used to the "psychoanalytic image of man" as a wealth of "irrational" drives; he denotes the subject by a crossed-out S, indicating thereby a constitutive lack of any support that would offer the subject a positive, substantial identity. It is because of this lack of identity, that the concept of identification plays such a crucial role psychoanalytic theory: the subject attempts to fill out its constitutive lack by means of identification, by identifying itself with some master-signifier guaranteeing its place in the symbolic network.
This violent act of abstraction does not express an ideologically overstretched image of democracy, an "exaggeration never met in real life," it pertains on the contrary to the very logic we follow as soon as we accept the principle of formal democracy: "democracy" is fundamentally "antihumanistic," it is not "made to the measure of (concrete, actual) men," but to the measure of a formal, heartless abstraction. There is in very notion of democracy no place for the fullness of concrete human content, for the genuineness of community links: democracy is a formal link of abstract individuals. All attempts to fill out democracy with "concrete contents" succumb sooner or later to the totalitarian temptation, however sincere their motives may be.

Later in the same chapter Žižek goes on to discuss the "new social movements" (ecology, feminism) in relation to democracy.

... they make it clear that their aim is much more radical than that of the ordinary political parties: what they are striving after is a fundamental transformation of the entire mode of action and belief, a change in the "life paradigm" affecting our most intimate attitudes.
[...]
In other words, it is not possible to be an ecologist or feminist in quite the same way as one can be a conservative or a social democrat in a Western formal democracy. What is at stake in the former case is not just a political belief but an entire life attitude. And such a project radical change in the "life paradigm," once formulated as a political program, necessarily undermines the very foundations of formal democracy. The antagonism between formal democracy and the "new social movements" is irreducible, which is why this antagonism has to be fully assumed and not eluded by means of utopian projects for a "concrete democracy which would absorb the whole diversity of the so-called "life-work."

I am not sure if this solution Žižek proposes is the best. But this impossibility of irreducibility is very familiar in modern culture and politics. Maybe the biggest existing antagonism. Is it this antagonism that seems to dissolve seemingly opposite ideologies together. I am thinking here about counter cultures, that despite having opposite ideas about the driving of common interests, resist assimilation to democratic mainline.

Onwards to the next chapter where Žižek touches the mechanism of racism, which has been puzzling me lately.

This leftover to which formal democracy clings, that which renders possible the subtraction of all positive contents, is of course the ethnic moment conceived as "nation": democracy is always tied to the "pathological" fact of a nation-state. Every attempts to inaugurate a "planetary" democracy based upon the community of all people as "citizens of the world" soon attests its own impotence, fails to arouse political enthusiasm. Here we have again an exemplary case of the Lacanian logic of not-all where the universal function is founded upon an exception: the ideal leveling of all social differences, the production of of the citizen, the subject of democracy, is possible only through an allegiance to some particular national Cause.
[...]
What is at stake in ethnic tensions is always the possession of the national Thing: the "other" wants to steal our enjoyment. In short, what gets on our nerves, what really bothers us about the "other," is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment (the smell of his food, his "noisy" songs and dances, his strange manners, his attitude to work — in the racist perspective, the "other" is either a workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labor). The basic paradox is that our Thing is conceived as something inaccessible to the other and at the same time threatened by him; this is similar to castration which, according to Freud, is experienced as something that "really cannot happen," but whose prospect nonetheless horrifies us.