Zizek From politics to Biopolitics and back.pdf

Slavoj Žižek

From Politics to Biopolitics . . . and Back

I n our Western tradition, the exemplary case of

a traumatic Real is the Jewish Law. In the Jewish

tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced

as something externally imposed, contingent,

and traumatic—in short, as an impossible/real

Thing that ‘‘makes the law.’’ What is arguably the

ultimate scene of religious-ideological interpel-

lation—the pronouncement of the Decalogue on

Mount Sinai—is the very opposite of something

that emerges ‘‘organically’’ as the outcome of the

path of self-knowing and self-realization. The

Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly

opposed to the New Age gnostic problematic of

self-realization or self-fulﬁllment: when the Old

Testament enjoins you to love and respect your

neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary

semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua trau-

matic Thing. In contrast to the New Age attitude

that ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to

my mirror image or to the means on the path to

self-realization (like the Jungian psychology in

which other persons around me are ultimately

reduced to the externalizations/projections of

the diﬀerent disavowed aspects of my person-

ality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which

an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in

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502 Slavoj Žižek

my Neighbor—the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic

presence that hystericizes me.

The Jewish commandment that prohibits images of God is the obverse of

the statement that relating to one’s neighbor is the only terrain of religious

practice, of where the divine dimension is present in our lives—‘‘no images

of God’’ does not point toward a gnostic experience of the divine beyond our

reality, a divine that is beyond any image; on the contrary, it designates a

kind of ethical hic Rhodus, hic salta: You want to be religious? Okay, prove it

here, in the ‘‘works of love,’’ in the way you relate to your neighbors....We

have here a nice case of the Hegelian reversal of reﬂexive determination into

determinate reﬂection: instead of saying ‘‘God is love,’’ we should say ‘‘Love

is divine’’ (and, of course, the point is not to conceive of this reversal as the

standard humanist platitude. It is for this precise reason that Christianity,

far from standing for a regression toward an image of God, only draws the

consequence of the Jewish iconoclasm through asserting the identity of God

and man).

If, then, the modern topic of human rights is ultimately grounded in this

Jewish notion of the Neighbor as the abyss of Otherness, how did we reach

the weird contemporary negative link between Decalogue (the traumati-

cally imposed divine Commandments) and human rights? That is to say,

within our postpolitical liberal-permissive society, human rights are ulti-

mately, in their innermost, simply the rights to violate the Ten Command-

ments. ‘‘The right to privacy’’—the right to adultery, done in secret, where

no one sees me or has the right to probe into my life. ‘‘The right to pur-

sue happiness and to possess private property’’—the right to steal (to exploit

others). ‘‘Freedom of the press and of the expression of opinion’’—the right

to lie. ‘‘The right of the free citizens to possess weapons’’—the right to kill.

And, ultimately, ‘‘freedom of religious belief ’’—the right to celebrate false

gods. 1 Of course, human rights do not directly condone the violation of the

Commandments—the point is just that they keep open a marginal ‘‘gray

zone,’’ which should remain out of reach of (religious or secular) power: in

this shady zone, I can violate the commandments, and if the power probes

into it, catching me with my pants down and trying to prevent my viola-

tions, I can cry, ‘‘Assault on my basic human rights!’’ The point is thus that

it is structurally impossible, for the Power, to draw a clear line of separa-

tion and prevent only the ‘‘misuse’’ of the Right, while not infringing on

the proper use—that is, the use that does not violate the Commandments.

The ﬁrst step in this direction was accomplished by the Christian notion

From Politics to Biopolitics ...andBack 503

of grace. In Mozart’s La Clemenza di Tito, just before the ﬁnal pardon, Tito

himself is exasperated by the proliferation of treasons that oblige him to

proliferate acts of clemency:

The very moment that I absolve one criminal, I discover another./.../

I believe the stars conspire to oblige me, in spite of myself, to become

cruel. No: they shall not have this satisfaction. My virtue has already

pledged itself to continue the contest. Let us see, which is more con-

stant, the treachery of others or my mercy./.../Letitbeknownto

Rome that I am the same and that I know all, absolve everyone, and

forget everything.

One can almost hear Tito complaining: ‘‘Uno per volta, per carita!’’—

‘‘Please, not so fast, one after the other, in the line for mercy!’’ Living up to

his task, Tito forgets everyone, but those whom he pardons are condemned

to remember it forever:

sextus: It is true, you pardon me, Emperor; but my heart will not

absolve me; it will lament the error until it no longer has memory.

titus: The true repentance of which you are capable, is worth more

than constant ﬁdelity.

This couplet from the ﬁnale blurts out the obscene secret of Clemenza:the

pardon does not really abolish the debt, it rather makes it inﬁnite—we are

forever indebted to the person who pardoned us. No wonder Tito prefers

repentance to ﬁdelity: in ﬁdelity to the Master, I follow him out of respect,

while in repentance, what attaches me to the Master is the inﬁnite indelible

guilt. In this, Tito is a thoroughly Christian master.

Usually, Judaism is conceived as the religion of the superego (of man’s

subordination to the jealous, mighty, and severe God), in contrast to the

Christian God of Mercy and Love—one opposes the Jewish rigorous Jus-

tice and the Christian Mercy, the inexplicable gesture of undeserved par-

don: we, humans, were born in sin, we cannot ever repay our debts and

redeem ourselves through our own acts—our only salvation lies in God’s

Mercy, in His supreme sacriﬁce. However, in this very gesture of break-

ing the chain of Justice through the inexplicable act of Mercy, of paying

our debt, Christianity imposes on us an even stronger debt: we are forever

indebted to Christ, we cannot ever repay him for what he did for us. The

Freudian name for such an excessive pressure that we cannot ever remu-

nerate is, of course, superego. It is precisely through not demanding from

504 Slavoj Žižek

us the price for our sins, through paying this price for us Himself, that the

Christian God of Mercy establishes itself as the supreme superego agency:

I paid the highest price for your sins, and you are thus indebted to me for-

ever. Is this God as the superego agency, whose very Mercy generates the

indelible guilt of believers, the ultimate horizon of Christianity? One should

eﬀectively correlate the unconditional guilt of superego and the mercy of

love—two ﬁgures of excess, the excess of guilt without proportion to what I

eﬀectively did, and the excess of mercy without proportion to what I deserve

on account of my acts.

As such, the dispensation of mercy is the most ecient constituent of

the exercise of power. That is to say, Is the relationship between law (legal

justice) and mercy really the one between necessity and choice? Is it really

that one has to obey the law, while mercy is by deﬁnition dispensed as a

free and excessive act, as something that the agent of mercy is free to do or

not to do—mercy under compulsion is no mercy but, at its best, a travesty

of mercy? What if, at a deeper level, the relationship is the opposite one?

What if, with regard to law, we have the freedom to choose (to obey or violate

it)? While mercy is obligatory, we have to display it—mercy is an unneces-

sary excess that, as such, has to occur. (And does the law not always take

into account this freedom of ours, not only by punishing us for its trans-

gression, but by providing escapes to being punished by its ambiguity and

inconsistency?) Is it not that showing mercy is the only way for a Master to

demonstrate his supralegal authority? If a Master were merely to guaran-

tee the full application of the law, of legal regulations, he would be deprived

of his authority and turn into a mere ﬁgure of knowledge, the agent of the

discourse of university. (This is why even a great judge is a Master ﬁgure:

he always somehow twists the law in its application by way of interpreting

it creatively.) This goes even for Stalin himself, a ﬁgure we deﬁnitely do not

associate with mercy: one should never forget that, as the (now-available)

minutes of the meetings of the Politburo and Central Committee (CC) from

the 1930s demonstrate, Stalin’s direct interventions, as a rule, displayed

mercy. When younger CC members, eager to prove their revolutionary fer-

vor, demanded instant death penalty for Bukharin, Stalin always intervened

and said ‘‘Patience! His guilt is not yet proven!’’ or something similar. Of

course this was a hypocritical attitude—Stalin was well aware that he him-

self generated the destructive fervor, that the younger members were eager

to please him—but, nonetheless, the appearance of mercy is necessary here.

We encounter the same ‘‘unity of opposites’’ in the new capitalist ethics,

where the ruthless pursuit of proﬁt is counteracted by charity: charity is,

From Politics to Biopolitics ...andBack 505

today, part of the game: it serves as a humanitarian mask hiding the under-

lying economic exploitation. In a superego blackmail of gigantic propor-

tions, the developed countries are constantly ‘‘helping’’ the undeveloped

(with aid, credits, and so on), thereby avoiding the key issue, namely, their

complicity in and coresponsibility for the miserable situation of the unde-

veloped. Which discursive shift underlies this new form of domination?

Lacan provides the answer in L’envers de la psychanalyse, his Seminar XVII

(1969–1970) on the four discourses, Lacan’s response to the events of

1968—its premise is best captured in his reversal of the well-known anti-

structuralist grati from the Paris walls of 1968, ‘‘Structures do not walk

on the streets!’’—if anything, this seminar endeavors to demonstrate how

structures do walk on the streets, that is, how structural shifts can account

for the social outbursts like that of 1968. Instead of the one symbolic Order

with its set of a priori rules that guarantee social cohesion, we get the matrix

of the passages from one to another discourse: Lacan’s interest is focused

on the passage from the discourse of the Master to the discourse of the

university as the hegemonic discourse in contemporary society. No won-

der that the revolt was located at the universities: as such, it merely sig-

naled the shift to the new forms of domination in which the scientiﬁc dis-

course serves to legitimize the relations of domination. Lacan’s underlying

premise is skeptic-conservative—Lacan’s diagnosis is best captured by his

famous retort to the student revolutionaries: ‘‘As hysterics, you demand a

new master. You will get it!’’ This passage can also be conceived in more

general terms, as the passage from the prerevolutionary ancien régime to

the postrevolutionary new Master who does not want to admit that he is

one, but proposes himself as a mere ‘‘servant’’ of the People—in Nietzsche’s

terms, it is simply the passage from Master’s ethics to slave morality, and

this fact, perhaps, enables a new approach to Nietzsche: when Nietzsche

scornfully dismisses ‘‘slave morality,’’ he is not attacking lower classes as

such, but, rather, the new masters who are no longer ready to assume the

title of the Master—slave is Nietzsche’s term for a fake master. How, then,

more closely, are we to read the University Discourse?

S 2 b a

——

S 1 a $

The University Discourse is enunciated from the position of ‘‘neutral’’

Knowledge; it addresses the remainder of the real (say, in the case of peda-

gogical knowledge, the ‘‘raw, uncultivated child’’), turning it into the sub-

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