In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek

ecological crisis seems to offer a unique chance of accepting a reinvented version of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The argument is thus that, while these phenomena were, each in its own way, a historical failure and monstrosity (Stalinism was a nightmare which caused perhaps even more human suffering than fascism; the attempts to enforce the “dictatorship of the proletariat” produced a ridiculous travesty of a regime in which precisely the proletariat was reduced to silence, and so on), this is not the whole truth: there was in each of them a redemptive moment which gets lost in the liberal-democratic rejection—and it is crucial to isolate this moment. One should be careful not to throw out the baby with the dirty water—although one is tempted to turn this metaphor around, and claim that it is the liberal-democratic critique which wants to do this (say, throwing out the dirty water of terror, while retaining the pure baby of authentic socialist democracy), forgetting thereby that the water was originally pure, that all the dirt in it comes from the baby. What one should do, rather, is to throw out the baby before it spoils the crystalline water with its excretions, so that, to paraphrase Mallarmé, rien que l’eau n’aura eu lieu dans le bain de l’histoire.

      Our defense of lost Causes is thus not engaged in any kind of deconstructive game in the style of “every Cause first has to be lost in order to exert its efficiency as a Cause.” On the contrary, the goal is to leave behind, with all the violence necessary, what Lacan mockingly referred to as the “narcissism of the lost Cause,” and to courageously accept the full actualization of a Cause, including the inevitable risk of a catastrophic disaster. Badiou was right when, apropos the disintegration of the Communist regimes, he proposed the maxim: mieux vaut un désastre qu’un désêtre. Better a disaster of fidelity to the Event than a non-being of indifference towards the Event. To paraphrase Beckett’s memorable phrase, to which I shall return many times later, after one fails, one can go on and fail better, while indifference drowns us deeper and deeper in the morass of imbecilic Being.

      A couple of years ago, Premiere magazine reported on an ingenious inquiry into how the most famous endings of Hollywood films were translated into some of the major non-English languages. In Japan, Clark Gable’s “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn!” to Vivien Leigh from Gone With the Wind was rendered as: “I fear, my darling, that there is a slight misunderstanding between the two of us”—a bow to proverbial Japanese courtesy and etiquette. In contrast, the Chinese (in the People’s Republic of China) rendered the “This is the beginning of a beautiful friendship!” from Casablanca as “The two of us will now constitute a new cell of anti-fascist struggle!”—struggle against the enemy being the top priority, far above personal relations.

      Although the present volume may often appear to indulge in excessively confrontational and “provocative” statements (what today can be more “provocative” than displaying even a minimal sympathy for or understanding of revolutionary terror?), it rather practices a displacement along the lines of the examples quoted in Premiere: where the truth is that I don’t give a damn about my opponent, I say that there is a slight misunderstanding; where what is at stake is a new theoretico-political shared field of struggle, it may appear that I am talking about academic friendships and alliances . . . In such cases, it is up to the reader to unravel the clues which lie before her.

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      1 Happiness and Torture in the Atonal World

       Human, all too human

      In contrast to the simplistic opposition of good guys and bad guys, spy thrillers with artistic pretensions display all the “realistic psychological complexity” of the characters from “our” side. Far from signaling a balanced view, however, this “honest” acknowledgment of our own “dark side” stands for its very opposite, for the hidden assertion of our supremacy: we are “psychologically complex,” full of doubts, while the opponents are one-dimensional fanatical killing machines. Therein resides the lie of Spielberg’s Munich: it wants to be “objective,” presenting moral complexity and ambiguity, psychological doubts, the problematic nature of revenge, of the Israeli perspective, but, what its “realism” does is redeem the Mossad agents still further: “look, they are not just cold killers, but human beings with their doubts—they have doubts, whereas the Palestinian terrorists . . .” One cannot but sympathize with the hostility with which the surviving Mossad agents who really carried out the revenge killings reacted to the film (“there were no psychological doubts, we just did what we had to do”) for there is much more honesty in their stance.¹

      The first lesson thus seems to be that the proper way to fight the demonization of the Other is to subjectivize her, to listen to her story, to understand how she perceives the situation—or, as a partisan of the Middle East dialogue put it: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.”² Practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, Iceland’s authorities recently imposed a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the Other. In order to fight growing xenophobia (the result of increasing numbers of immigrant workers), as well as sexual intolerance, they organized what they called “living libraries”: members of ethnic and sexual minorities (gays, immigrant East Europeans or blacks) are paid to visit an Icelandic family and just talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams, and so on—in this way, the exotic stranger who is perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with a complex world of her own . . .

      There is, however, a clear limit to this procedure. Can we imagine inviting a Nazi thug to tell us his story? Are we ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy because his story hadn’t been heard? A Serb journalist recently reported a strange piece of news from the politician who, after long painful talks, convinced Slobodan Milo

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evic calmed him down, saying that he had given his word to his wife, Mira Markovic, that he would wash his hair before leaving. Does this personal-life detail “redeem” the horrors that resulted from Milo

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’s reign, does it make him “more human”? One can well imagine Hitler washing Eva Braun’s hair—and one does not have to imagine, since we already know that Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, liked to play Beethoven’s late string quartets with friends in the evenings. Recall the couple of “personal” lines that usually conclude the presentation of a writer on the back cover of a book: “In his free time, X likes to play with his cat and grow tulips . . .”—such a supplement which “humanizes” the author is ideology at its purest, the sign that he is “also human like us.” (I was tempted to suggest for the cover of one my books: “In his free time,

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ek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and to teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders . . .”)

      Our most elementary experience of subjectivity is that of the “richness of my inner life”: this is what I “really am,” in contrast to the symbolic determinations and mandates I assume in public