The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left 9789619085127

Citation preview

The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left edited by Jela Krečič

Edited by Jela Krečič Copy editor: Jeff Bickert Contributors: Boris Buden, Mladen Dolar, Saroj Giri, Boris Groys, Agon Hamza, Jamil Khader, Jela Krečič, Robert Pfaller, Frank Ruda, Alenka Zupančič, Slavoj Žižek Published by IRWIN, Ljubljana and Wiener Festwochen, Vienna Design: New Collectivism Printed by Tiskarna Januš d.o.o., Ljubljana, 2017 in 3000 copies ISBN 978-961-90851-2-7

The book is supported in part by Arbeiterkammer Wien and the Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia.

CIP - Kataložni zapis o publikaciji Narodna in univerzitetna knjižnica, Ljubljana 314.151.3-054.73(4)(082) The FINAL countdown : Europe, refugees and the left / [contributors Boris Buden ... et al.]; edited by Jela Krečič. - Ljubljana : Irw in ; VFenna : Wiener Festwochen, 2017 ISBN 978-961-90851-2-7 (Irwin) 1. Buden, Boris 2. Krečič, Jela 289881344

Published on the occasion of the NSK State Pavilion, 57thVenice Biennale

9

Jela Krečič

The Final Countdown or Lessons to Be Learned from Comedy and Antihumanism 21

Alenka Zupančič

Back to the Future of Europe 33

Boris Groys

Contemporary Europe: In Search of Cultural Biotopes 49

Robert Pfaller

White Lies, Black Truths: Elements of Adult Communication 67

Mladen Dolar

Who is the Victim? 79

Saroj Girl

Parasitic Anti-Colonialism 103

Boris Buden

The One Too Many: On How Democracy Ends in Sophistry 129

Frank Ruda

First as Tragedy, Then as Tragedy? 143

Jamil Khader

Beyond the Biopolitics of the Refugee: Totality, Global Capitalism, and the Common Struggle 167

187

Agon Hamza The Refugee Crisis and the Helplessness of the Left Slavoj Žižek

Terrorists with a Human Face

Jela Krečič The Final Countdown or Lessons to Be

Learned from Comedy and Antihumanism

If we had to propose a single word that marked the beginning of the 21st century, that word would surely be crisis. This new century opened with the 9/11 attacks, and the so-called terrorist crisis has been in play ever since, indeed continues to this day. The world also saw several natural disasters, among them the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, with almost a quarter of a million people killed, which in turn produced an exceptional humanitarian crisis. In 2008 came the financial crisis, which began in the Americas and Europe and soon evolved into a full-blown economic crisis that hit comparatively marginal countries like Greece especially hard. The Middle East remains a place of permanent crisis, with the focus shift­ ing from Afghanistan to Iraq and on through Tunis, Egypt and Palestine to Syria. The turmoil in Syria and environs came with and was followed by the so-called refugee crisis, when tens of thousands of refugees from devastated parts of the Middle East fled to Europe seeking asylum. Last year, with Great Britain's decision to part ways with the European Union, we began speaking of the EU crisis. And though all of these crises are quite different, they all share a common denominator—they are all part of the body of crises that constitute the new normal. Crisis—or the state of crisis—is here to stay; it is permanent. If and when one crisis passes, it is only so that another crisis can take its place. Crisis has become a way of life. Think only of politics in the West, which seems to consist largely in the politics of managing one crisis or another, while the frame of every crisis and its solution remains intact. In other words, while everybody is sacrificing something (Europeans their wel­ fare state, Arabs their secular traditions) in order to overcome the crisis at hand, the social and economic foundations that led to the crisis remain the same. The existing order has become a prolonged system of crisis management, with its one unchangeable and untouchable dominant: neoliberal capitalism.

9

Never before have we seen so much outspoken criticism aimed at neolib­ eral capitalism and the crises it produces as we find today. At the same time, never was there a firmer (unconscious) conviction that there is simply no alternative to the prevailing global system. Perhaps this com­ bination is not as paradoxical as it may appear. The need to constantly point out social injustices, to identify the victims of the global capitalist order, is perhaps closely connected to a sort of superstitious belief that nothing can or will really change, and that the real catastrophe will not materialize as long as we remain conscious and vigilant. Today, particularly in the West, we can discern two attitudes towards the crises. One is the more or less cynical attitude of the ruling politicians who are "just" managing the crisis. This position is a rightist one, even if it is manifested in and by nominally "leftist" governments; the only difference the rising rightist populism brings to this managerial aspect of politics is the urge to blame some form of otherness (immigrants, LGBT community, etc.) for all of the present crises currently unfolding. Today's predominant leftist attitude has been largely reduced to lamenting the unjustness and cruelty of capitalism or wringing their hands over the ignorant, ordinary people who are falling for politicians like Donald Trump. But this reaction of the Left's is not, however, self-evident—it begs interpretation, especially if we consider the fact that the most tangible result of the 2008 financial collapse is an even stronger, and more brutal version of capitalist exploitation and domination. As a result, we could say that, behind and beneath the great prolifera­ tion of crises our media is only to happy to bombard us with—economic, financial, ecological, refugee, moral—the foremost crisis is the crisis of the Left, which cannot seem to find a way out of the discourse of crisis imposed by the managing elite. The fact that the Left so often complains about its own incapacity, its own internal fights and conflicts, only goes to show that today's Left dwells in its own crisis. It seems to find a cer­ tain enjoyment in maintaining the moral high ground, in displaying the ability to recognize and put on record all the world's injustices, while at the same time it is thoroughly unable to provide any real political strategy or alternative. If the cynicism of the ruling elites and the lamentations of the defeated Left are the principal answers to today's theoretical and political dead­ locks, how can we escape the debilitating and immobilizing power of

10 Th e Fin al C o u n td o w n ...

the discourse of crisis? It would seem almost natural that, in a time of prevailing crises, one would turn to pessimism, reluctance, and selfpity. But it is in precisely such times that we should remember Mao's old adage: "Everything under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is excellent." The first and obvious interpretation of this adage says that one should find courage even in dire situations. However, it has implications that reach far beyond a common platitude that exhorts us to gather strength when things get tough. Mao proposes a radical shift of perspective: our strength, our political imagination, our solutions are truly radical only when they emerge out of impossible situations. A situation of disorder can set in motion our political imagination and bring out our true pow­ ers, powers of which we were unaware in our ordinary lives. In this sense, Mao's adage points to the basic structure of comedy: in comedy, a crisis or catastrophe is the driving power, is what incites its course of action, without sentimentality or pity, but with a supplemen­ tary dimension of unanticipated pleasures, satisfactions or joys.1This in no way implies that comedy—at least when we are dealing with a true comedy—somehow obscures the antagonisms or the desperate harsh­ ness of the situation with laughter and jokes. On the contrary, it opens itself up to catastrophic reality in all its disastrous, embarrassing and humiliating aspects and, by means of the comic procedure, provides a positive outcome to it. Again, the term positive does not imply that comedy makes things somehow better; it means that it opens up a dif­ ferent angle or perspective on a catastrophic situation, a point from which we can see the unexpected truth of it.2The history of classical 1 For an elaboration of com edy's strategies see Alenka Zu p an čič, Th e O d d O ne In (C am bridge: MIT Press, 2008). 2 A no ther exam ple of com ic strategy com es to m ind here. There is a recurring scene in Ernst Lubitsch's To Be o r N o t t o Be, w h en , during Ham let's fam ous m onologue the main ch aracter Jo se f Tura utters the w ords "To be or not to be", he notices th at a man (who, u nb ekn o w nst to him , is his w ife's lover) stands up and w alks out of the th eatre. As M laden Dolar pointed out, this is a com ical answ er to a trick q uestion: instead of g etting trap ped in an alte rn a tive (live or die) w hich is stru ctu red in a w ay that doesn't really offer an a lte rn a ­ tive, one should ju st w alk out. Such a gesture of non-com pliance w ith a false choice is alread y the Right answ er. This strategy is ve ry much in accordance w ith Mao's adage: w hen the situation is catastro p h ic, one should not becom e en tang led in the proposed fram e of solving the problem , but rather stand up and w alk aw ay. With this gesture alone, another angle on the catastro p h e w ill arise, w hich w ill open up a new approach to reso lving the situatio n .

K re čič

11

Hollywood comedy proves that, with its most outstanding figures, this genre was able to provide a different and engaging (and at the same time humorous) attitude towards the worst crises and catastrophes of the 20th century (World War I, the Great Depression of the 1930s, World War II). The figure of the Tramp created and played by Charlie Chaplin is a brilliant example of this shift of perception of social reality.3The mere fact that a homeless, dirty, shabby protagonist is present in almost all of Chaplin's movies is a harsh, critical comment on America's poverty and consequently, on its privileged wealthy classes as well. Whenever a scene in one of his films begins in a calm, refined setting, we can be sure it will soon be contaminated with the stain of social injustice. A good example of this recurring stain is the beginning of City Lights, when respectable members of society gather at a festive event to hon­ our the statue of Peace and Prosperity: when the time comes to unveil the statue covered with white sheets, the crowd is treated to the sight of the Tramp sleeping in the intimate embrace of the statue's bosom. The image of poverty lying in/on the symbol of Peace and Prosperity of course deflates and defeats the purpose of the event. This becomes obvious when the Tramp, who has just woken up, tries to climb off the statue and gets stuck on one or another parts of the statue (wherein his butt rests obscenely on the statue's face).4 But when Chaplin shows us an unflattering portrait of homelessness, poverty, and human devastation he doesn't present the Tramp as a pitiful victim of social injustice begging for our sympathy and char­ ity. Not only does the Tramp use every chance he gets to fight back and get his revenge on the authorities (recall his recurring physical encounters with the police officers, who represent the guardians of private property and the elite), he can also be brutal, exploitative, and vicious in his fights. The fact that the Tramp always wears gentleman's clothes, together with accompanying hat and cane—though torn and dusty—shows his unyielding determination to transcend his social 3 Let us m ention ju st a few of the classics w h erein we can find the fig ure of the Tram p: The K id (1921), The C ircus (1927), C ity L ig h ts (1931), M o d e rn Tim es (1936).

4 I ow e this exam ple and its reading to Alenka Z u pan čič, "Filo zo f Ch ap lin," in R e tro sp e k tiv a C h a rlie ja C h a p lin a (Ljub ljan a: Slovenska kinoteka, 2011). (This catalog ue w as published in Slovene on the occasion of a retro spective of the film s of C harlie Chaplin at Slovenian C in em atiq ue in April 2011).

12 Th e Fin al C o u n td o w n ...

stratum and, at the same time, makes the social class difference even more apparent. Chaplin is also the author of one of the first and best comedies about World War II, The Great Dictator, where he shows how even the Nazi men­ ace can be exploited by comedy. He doesn't simply demonize dictators by representing them as compelling figures of evil, but rather ridicules them, by making them vulnerable and pathetic human beings—the same way Ernst Lubitsch does in his celebrated To be Or Not to Be. We should bear in mind that both comedies were made at a time when the horrors and consequent turmoil of the Nazi regime seemed unstoppable, before the United States entered the War and Hitler was celebrating one vic­ tory after another, with very little potential resistance in sight. To Be or Not to Be, which takes place in occupied Warsaw in the early days of the Nazi occupation, provides a frame that enables us to see a hopeless situation as just a little less hopeless, even a bit hopeful.5 A group of theatre actors decides to help the resistance with a rather elaborate plot, which includes Nazi impersonators, collaborators and spies. The light comical tone colours and underlies all of the characters and situ­ ations, even the most threatening ones, such that the impossible vanity of a celebrity Polish actor is as much a laughing stock as the array of clumsy and stupid Nazi officers.6 The political dimension of these comedies resides in the fact that they provide a new frame and offer a different kind of attitude towards the threat of Nazism: with the comical shift, Hitler and the Nazis become a vulnerable, beatable force, and resistance no longer seems futile.7The strategy of a comedy is therefore emancipatory: it never gives up, never succumbs to the temptation to humanize or celebrate the underdogs of the situation. Comedy doesn't surrender to the banal humanist impulse 5 I owe this th esis to M laden Dolar. See M laden Dolar, "To Be or Not To Be? No, th ank you," in L u b itsc h C a n 't W ait, ed. M laden Dolar, Ivana Novak et al. (Ljub ljan a: Slovenska kinoteka, 2014). 6 It's im p ortan t to note th at the hum orous treatm en t of both parties involved (the Poles and the Germ ans) in this m ovie is resp onsib le for its rather cold critical recep tion . Critics of the m ovie (who sound like predecessors of today's p o litically correct) w ere esp ecially bothered by the fact th at even a ruthless Nazi o fficer is allow ed to disp lay an au then tic sense of hum our: w hen the pom pous Polish actor Jo seph Tura, now disguised as Nazi co l­ laborator Professor Siletsky, asks o ffice r Ehrhardt if he know s the prom inent actor Tura, the o ffice r replies: "Yes. W hat he did to Shakespeare, we are now doing to Poland." (Dolar, Ibid., 120 - 121). 7 Ibid.

K re čič

13

to victimize anyone: the underdogs are treated with the same ruthless­ ness as the forces of evil. The “winners" must be able to fight their way to victory, and to rise above their imperfections and weaknesses by the power of their wit and resourcefulness. Chaplin's and Lubitsch's masterpieces thus stand in clear contrast to today's prevailing leftist position, which is based on the victimizing and humanizing of all who are faced with terrible adversity and suf­ fering, from terrorist attacks and acute cultural clashes to the various expressions of class struggle, poverty and similar. A third Hollywood director who followed the line drawn by Chaplin and Lubitsch was Preston Sturges, whose Sullivan's Travels is as much a comedy about show business as it is the false leftist stance toward the poor masses and social inequality. The film's protagonist, famous Hollywood direc­ tor John Sullivan, decides he's going to lead the life of a tramp in order to be able to make a movie that deals adequately and fairly with the issues of poverty and social injustice; he's tired of making genre mov­ ies purely for the sake of entertainment and wants to confront social inequality with all the realism and truthfulness it deserves. Sturges's film doesn't celebrate the homeless and the poor, but depicts them as rough, brutal beings. And this is what also differentiates Sturges from Frank Capra, who is known for his benevolent attitude towards the humiliated and always finds in them a warm heart and natural goodness. What Sturges's Sul­ livan realizes, however, is that there's nothing romantic and ennobling about poverty or living on the margins of society. Here we are far from the leftists who, from a safe and comfortable distance, dream of the impoverished masses that will, at a certain point, become agents of the revolution. Sullivan's Travels succeeds in showing us that poverty and homelessness isn't a question of one's heart, be it warm, evil or otherwise, but a real social problem, a systemic problem that can't be addressed or solved with the charity of the rich nor by romanticizing the poor as well-intentioned victims. A different kind of social change is required. The end of the film also warrants a few thoughts. Sullivan finds himself in jail, wheremovies are shown every weekend for the entertainment of the prison inmates, and we see Sullivan with his fellow inmates watch­ ing a stupid Disney cartoon that makes all the prisoners laugh out loud.

14 Th e Fin al C o u n td o w n ...

The situation makes Sullivan realize how comedy provides a bit of fun and laughter, and makes life a little more bearable for the humiliated captives. This insight doesn't simply amount to the cheap wisdom that all the poor need is a little bit of entertainment to keep them happy enough to keep on working more for little or no money; rather it points up and problematizes Sullivan's initial patronizing, self-righteousness attitude. It shows that his attempt to present real life in all its misery on the screen is a false and misdirected one, and instead only serves to fulfil the moralist self-satisfaction of those leftists who have no idea what being poor really means. It also suggests or implies that senti­ mental realism is a fantasy of the real and not a raw truth: comedy as a genre is far better equipped to provide a far more brutal—and pertinent—analysis of society than any such realism. Sullivan's Travels itself stands as proof that comedy can succeed in telling us something relevant about class struggle and social injustice. All four above-mentioned comedies treat the victims (of war, of econom­ ic destitution) without a trace of pity or sympathy. Comedy is merciless with all parties involved—which shouldn't come as any surprise, since by definition comedy examines and takes apart any and all positions and questions all established truths. We might say comedy is utterly and entirely politically incorrect. Moreover, it doesn't value human life per se—the ridiculousness of human life is the reason comedy exists in the first place. Comedy feeds on all the many levels of human imperfection, of the human organism in all its subjectivity, from excretion to senility, from personal misunderstanding to mankind's collective folly. It is the most misanthropic of all genres: in comedy, the value of every individual existence remains to be proven, and the best proof of one's worth is also that which is open to ridicule, however merciless. With this we are not, of course, suggesting that we should make com­ edies with the aim of resolving the many ongoing crises (although this would likely prove far more productive than many of the Left's initia­ tives and endeavours); we are merely suggesting that comedy shows a way of reframing a given political or social situation. But what if we were nonetheless to imagine a work of art, of creative production—a novel, a movie—depicting the fate of refugees in some European country like Germany in a comedic way? (Let's not forget Chaplin's supreme silent short comedy The Immigrant.) Can we imagine a Tramp-like Syrian

K re čič

15

or Pakistani boy cunningly exploiting the pompous German and his refugee-processing machine, his well-meaning yet patronizing charity, as they spar and play one against the other, against the larger European racism(s] and Muslim fundamentalism, too? Can we imagine how, in order to realize and gain the object of his love, he manipulates both Western clichés about Muslims and Muslim fundamentalist dogma, ultimately carving out a place for himself in the empty space between the big ideological blocks? In and out of all of its misanthropy and anti-humanism comedy is the heir of what was/is best in the Enlightenment: the rights the Enlighten­ ment grants to every human being do not derive from any substantial content that inheres to his/her subjectivity, but are based precisely on the very absence of any substantial attributes. All people, regard­ less of their race, gender, religion, sexual orientation—and not because of them—are entitled to this body of rights. When rights are linked to specific and contingent features, like skin colour, religion, sexual orientation or ethnicity, it valorizes them and opens up the path to Fascism and other ideologies grounded in social hierarchy. A person is but a void, which in a society of reason is nonetheless entitled to a just existence. This void is not a negative feature, but an opportunity for said person to accomplish something, regardless of who or what he/ she is, an opportunity to transcend his/her own humanity and create something that can be judged according to the terms of reason, and not the terms of sympathy. If we speak of anti-humanism as the basis for the Enlightenment or indeed the basis of any comedy worthy of its name, it's because a human being is granted all rights possible in order to make something of him/herself—not because being human is some kind of accomplishment in itself. In this sense comedy is a highly philosophical genre: it never takes any character or situation for granted, it accepts no given values, norms, attitudes, or given social orders. Comedy makes fun of power and those who occupy positions of power, from kings and aristocrats to manag­ ers and police officers, making clear how excessive identification with any title or identity is in itself ridiculous—as Lacan so eruditely put it, a madman is not only the beggar who thinks he is a king, but also the king who thinks he is a king. However, comedy not only makes us real­ ize that great titles and identities are in fact fundamentally worthless,

16 Th e Fin al C o u n td o w n ...

especially when we "wear" them proudly or truly identify with them; far more importantly it also reminds us that we should not expect to find an authentic, sincere human being beneath the mask, for every such hidden gem behind any such mask is but itself a fake, just another (and far more efficient] mask. The essays collected herein can be seen as an attempt by leftist thinkers to return to this most valuable comic heritage of the Enlightenment; for all here work at re-framing our perception of the ongoing crisis or cri­ ses in a "comical" way that opens up a new perspective on the political circumstances of our times and shows them in their terrible complexity, without fearing the consequences of such a risky endeavour. If the starting point for all of the contributions herein is the latest Eu­ ropean agenda—referred to in our media as the refugee crisis—the au­ thors succeed in touching upon and critically examining the far deeper political and ideological frame in which this "crisis" is operating. The problem is not a problem of Europe's anti-immigrant populism alone; the problem also resides in the Left's inability to constitute its own political ground and articulate its own agenda(s). The only answer the (liberal) Left provides in the face of brutal and shameless populist hatred and the variously desperate attempts to protect "our way of life" is unreflecting multiculturalism, identity politics, and politically correct discourse. Alenka Zupančič offers compelling insight into the secret complicity of two diametrically opposed positions—the populist on the one hand and the multiculturalist leftist on the other. She makes an important distinction between today's populism and Fascism, pointing out that, unlike Fascism, populism never even attempts to address the contradic­ tions inherent to a given system. Instead, it offers up a tangible enemy to a body of frustrated people. However, she also shows how the leftist answer—fighting for the rights of particular groups, insisting on politi­ cally correct discourse—equally overlooks the systemic dimension of today's political situation. In a similar way, Boris Groys focuses on iden­ tity politics and, by tracing its historic roots in theory and elsewhere, demonstrates why it is clearly not an alternative to populist-nationalist efforts to preserve the identity politics of one against the threat of some form of Other: in actual fact they are complementary, since both accept the unbridled competition of the global market advocated by neoliberal

K re čič

17

capitalism. Both authors come, despite their very different arguments, to a similar conclusion: the energy wasted on establishing politically correct vocabularies or standing up for marginalized identities in no way challenges the functioning of the existing capitalistic order; by producing increasingly more antagonisms on so many levels it is in fact the crucial contributing factor to the many injustices various groups and identities are forced to suffer. Robert Pfaller's contribution belongs to the same theoretical frame, though he approaches the problem of identity politics and political cor­ rectness from another perspective entirely. Here he deals with black humour and what he calls 'black truths', and shows how this most pre­ cious of European legacies enables us to recognize and critically exam­ ine the ideological discourse that works to legitimize systems that are fundamentally unjust. This line of thought can also be traced to the contributions of Mladen Dolar and Saroj Giri, which critically focus on questions related to post­ colonial studies, the victimization of the Other, and the culpabilization of the West. While Dolar shows how far the work of Frantz Fanon departs from today's logic of complaint and victimization, Giri reflects on the politically mollifying effects of postcolonial studies, particularly as they relate to questions of class struggle, race, and more. Boris Buden, Frank Ruda and Jamil Khader all deal with the figure of the immigrant or refugee, which they trace, among others, to Giorgio Agamben's homo sacer and to Hannah Arendt's elaboration on the figure of the refugee and the rights this figure may or may not enjoy. While they enumerate the many inadequacies of the prevailing refugee poli­ tics in Europe and elsewhere today, their primary concern focuses on the glaring shortcomings of the political Left; because by advocating a humanitarian openness to the refugees they entirely depoliticize this most political of issues. What unites most of the authors and their contributions herein is the need for a new and broader solidarity grounded in a new leftist politics with a truly universal reach. Agon Hamza, whose analysis also deals with Islamic theological and political traditions, proposes a formula for a new type of organization or institution that would provide a more effective way of dealing with our crises. And finally, Slavoj Zizek's con-

18 Th e Fin al C o u n td o w n ...

eluding contribution exposes the dark underside of the humanitarian Left, and expounds on the way it secretly participates in and enjoys the very horrors it purports to fight. The premise of The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left, suggests that our situation today is extremely dangerous, that near unimaginable catastrophes are there lurking on the horizon. Simulta­ neously, the book takes these perils as a challenge to produce a new vision for the Left. The Final Countdown is also the countdown to a new beginning; it's an exercise of comedy in the field of theory, a practice of theory that is not here to lament but to re-think and reframe the very basic coordinates according to which we understand and deal with our crises.

K re čič

19

Alenka Zupančič Back to the Future of Europe

In 1991, Lars von Trier released the film Europa—the last film in his so-called European trilogy, and the first to bring him widespread in­ ternational fame. As the year of its production indicates, the film was made at the height of pro- and pre-European Union euphoria, in great anticipation of its formal establishment. And although the narrative of the movie is set in another European time (the close of WWII), its famous opening sequence significantly begins with a countdown, with which the hypnotic voice of Max von Sydow brings us to "Europa": "You will now listen to my voice. My voice will help you and guide you still deeper into Europa... I shall now count from one to ten. On the count of ten you will be in Europa. I say: one, two..." The film also ends with a countdown. The train from which the opening hypnotic sequence is shot hurtles off a bridge into a river, and the movie ends with the equally hypnotic drowning of the main protagonist trapped in a train compart­ ment: "You are in a train in Germany. Now the train is sinking. You will drown. On the count often you will be dead." We then witness, against the background of a slow countdown, the desperate, agonizing and hopeless drowning of the main protagonist. When the counting voice reaches "ten", the hero is dead. The scene is painful to watch: it—and von Trier has always been a master of this—grabs you by the guts and pulls you in, and down, gasping for air. Seen from our perspective today, a full quarter-century later, Europa cannot but strike us as deeply prophetic, with Europe's destiny pro­ foundly linked to the image of drowning. "More than 3,000 migrants have drowned so far in 2016," trying to reach Europe, while "Europe may soon be swept by a new wave of migrants." These are but two exemplary newspaper headlines. Migrants who are not drowning in the Mediterranean threaten to flood the European mainland. Together, these two headlines convey a truly ghastly alternative: "Let them drown or be drowned by them."

We have seen a lot of indignant denunciation of the mischievous and misleading vocabulary used by the mainstream media and politicians in their talk about migrants: migrant "waves", "tsunamis", "currents" and "floods", accompanied by the appropriate images, all suggesting a kind of natural disaster—as if we were not speaking about people, about human beings. It is, however, worth taking a closer look into this vocabulary and the way it functions. For example, it seems plausi­ ble to suggest that not even the most hardened anti-immigrant Right wing agitators believe that the immigrant "wave" has anything to do with natural causes. At stake here is not at all the same logic we find at work when our political leaders try to present, for example, the laws of (capitalist) economy as natural laws. The issue of immigrants is not being "depoliticized"—quite the contrary. Paradoxically, it is the tradi­ tional political Left that seems forced to seek recourse in a depoliticized vocabulary: immigrants are simply human beings who need our help (very much like in the case of natural disasters). And to be sure, they do, and wars do have effects similar to those of natural disasters. But as we also know, the problem with this scheme is that it usually works only insofar as mere survival is at stake—precisely because it has no real political platform to sustain it beyond the humanitarian point of saving lives. This restriction is not simply temporal, as is often believed (after the first humanitarian effort we lose interest, suffer fatigue, run out of energy). In many cases direct humanitarianism is the long-term systemic "solution". The problem with humanitarianism is not that "it can only go on for so long", but rather that it usually goes on for too long. Humanitarianism as a long-term solution is a bad solution because, by its inherent logic, it binds the solution to mere survival, and reproduces its (own) reductive logic. The main point of the aquatic vocabulary in question is thus simply to underline the threat that the refugees and immigrants in general present to Europe—and to induce fear. The sad fact is, however, that Europe doesn't need any "wave of immigrants" to be swept away and drowned. For Europe is its own worst enemy (and its "immigrant politics", or better the lack thereof, is part of this self-sabotaging behavior). What Europe needs is not a dam (or a wall) that would protect it from an im­ migrant or other wave—what it needs is rather its own wave, current, flood. What it needs is—to borrow the name of the famous Haitian left wing movement and party—the Flood; its own Flood, its own Levalas.

22

B ack to th e Fu tu re of Europe

What it needs is a serious and well-organized international movement of the Left, one that would constitute a genuine alternative platform to its present (mal)functioning. So far, it has only the "International" of the far Right: the Koblenz meeting of European far Right parties in January 2017 was unprecedented in more than one way, all of them deeply sinister. When walls (or "just fences") started going up in Europe, critics liked to evoke the Berlin Wall: the dismantling of the Berlin wall was Europe's great achievement, and it seems absurd to start building walls all over again. Perhaps this argument demonstrates some rhetorical efficiency, but it has little bearing beyond that. Why? Because the Berlin Wall was very different from the walls that are going up now. As a matter of fact, it wouldn't even be too far-fetched to say that the walls that we see going up today are a consequence of the fall of the Berlin Wall. By this I simply mean that it was the real and symbolic disappearance of the Eastern bloc as an alternative social and economic organization that played a crucial part in the last sequence of the capitalist world order; which, in turn, is largely responsible for the things and developments that the walls going up today are supposed to protect us from: huge economic migrations and refugees fleeing disastrous wars. The point is of course not that we shouldn't have let the Berlin Wall fall, and should instead have attempted to preserve the socialist bloc and its alternative system at all cost, so as to force capital to maintain and ensure the welfare state. This would indeed be a perverse exercise in mathematics. Moreover, the socialist alternative failed not simply as the result of imperialist pressure, but as the result of its own contradictions and problems. A nostalgic, uncritical looking back is the last thing we need. It is not from the past, but from the present and the future that we can look to for the parameters with which to formulate what was, and still is, worth fighting for in the "communist idea". With the rise of populist leaders in Europe, and of course with Trump's election in the US, certain things are becoming abundantly clear: mod­ erateness and center ("midway") as a political orientation aiming to sustain the status quo no longer serve as efficient barriers against re­ actionary populism and ruthless exploitation. The "democratic system" as we knew it is falling apart because capitalism has eaten away its economic base. Yet contrary to what some believe, this in itself will not

Z u p a n č ič

23

bring about the end of capitalism—far from it. It is simply that capitalism will cause increasingly greater devastation in its new systemic forms. There is no way back, and the future will not arrive by itself. What will come by itself is only more devastation; and the future, on the other hand, will have to be invented. The political success of Right-wing populist leaders around the world is of course related to a certain social and economic configuration: “crisis" is a pale and supposedly neutral term for the devastation—both social and economic—caused by late capitalism and its global triumph. It is true that, in this respect, fascism emerged and ascended according to a similar configuration and was in this sense a product, a child of capital­ ism. However, xenophobia, racism and reactionary agendas are not yet fascism. This does not mean that we can relax because we are not “yet" there—on the contrary. What it means is that a crucial element of any fight is reading the parameters of a situation correctly, and hence seeing where the true front lines and true battles are situated. So let's start by asking why a comparison of the present moment with fascism doesn't hold water, so to speak. Fascism was a key element of anti-Semitism, and the key element of anti-Semitism is not simply a “hatred of Jews", but the idea that Jews and the Jewish conspiracy are running the world. It was the idea that they stand behind everything that bothers “us", and hold all the strings in their hands. They look like us, completely ordinary, yet they are strangeness incorporated. But we can't say that they aren't sufficiently integrated in our society—on the contrary, they are integrated all too well, beyond recognition. Refugees and immigrants are not at all in the same position. As Moishe Postone pointed out1: nobody thinks refugees and migrants are running the world, that they are behind the banks and major corporations, that they are pulling the strings. They are also far too visible, and visibly different. This induces, and is part of, a different logic, which deserves the name of “reactionary populism". Immigrants are presented as our immediate competition that is competing with us, or with “our people", in the struggle for everyday survival, for our daily bread and access to welfare. We don't think that they are responsible for the workings of the greedy capitalist machine, but see in them the thing that separates 1 Agon Ham za, Frank Ruda, "In te rvie w w ith M oishe Postone: That Capital Has Lim its Does Not Mean That it Will Collapse," Crisis a n d C ritiq u e 3 (2016), accessed D ecem ber 5, 2016.

24 B ack to th e Fu tu re of Europe

us—entirely within the framework of the operating of this machine— from happiness and wealth. Reactionary populism offers an immediate answer (and outlet) for the general sense of insecurity, frustration, anger, despair. It also gives us a symbolic mandate to take it all out on those whose position is (even) weaker than ours. Marx has shown convincingly how, in its very essence, capital works through abstract forms of domination, which we experience very strong­ ly, but cannot see, and yet relate to, directly. The principal gesture of populism is always to propose very concrete struggles and to name very concrete enemies, as well as struggles against the (local) authorities at hand. If we return to the issue of anti-Semitism, it is also here that we can recognize an important difference: the figure of the Jew is not the figure of an immediate enemy, but an abstract category; the fact that their difference is invisible to the naked eye is, in this respect, crucial. The “Jew" is the embodiment of a pure difference: not the difference between us and them, but of the invisible difference that separates us from ourselves (from the possibility of living fully). The “Jew" is not the figure of the Other, but of Otherness as such. The fascist invention is the figure of the “Jew", which provides the short circuit between the abstract kernel of capitalist domination and an empirical “race" as its embodiment. The Jews are “chosen" to localize the point of abstract domination, in the horrid equation that produced the holocaust as the “final solution" to the contradictions of capitalism: “elimination" of the Jews = elimination of the abstract domination of capital and its thirst for blood. “Refugee", “migrant", “foreigner" are not abstract categories in this sense, they are figures of the Other, of a concrete Other. The principal gesture and strategy of reactionary populism is that, unlike fascism, it never even tries to touch the real (that is the abstract) forms of the domination, conflicts and contradictions of the given system; it leaves the active mechanisms generating people's frustrations utterly intact, and offers them a concrete, tangible enemy instead. Along with this, it also offers them something else: the message that it hears and under­ stands their frustrations, and that they have every Right to express these frustrations. On the other hand, the (obviously utterly perverted) way in which fascism went about eliminating the real (that is abstract) form of domination is precisely the point of its absolute horror, which

Z u p a n č ič

25

includes the coldly systematic and consequent execution of its political agenda. The power of populism lies elsewhere, namely in the fact that it is anything but consequent and consistent; instead its power lies in its inconsistent, illogical and non-systematic character. The Other, on account of which our "life sucks", can change from one day to the next, in­ deed, from one hour to the next, and these different figures of the Other can be mutually antagonistic (today it can be "our women", tomorrow "their man"...), so that it is impossible to imagine a common front among these Others. This was very well demonstrated in the election of Donald Trump: inconsistency, the absence of logic, contradictions, and obvious conflicts of interest proved to be non-issues, posed no real problem at all; on the contrary, as long as underneath it all everyone hears the same "populist" message: we hear you, you are right, you are all victims of irresponsibility and injustice. Immanuel Kant adeptly mocked this kind of "harmonious" universalism in his Critique of Practical Reason: "In this way there results a harmony similar to that depicted by a certain satirical poem on the concord of soul between a married couple who are [bent on] bringing themselves to ruin: 0 marvelous harmony, what he wants she also wants, etc.; or to what is reported about the pledge made by King Francis I against Emperor Charles V: What my brother Charles wants to have (Milan) I also want to have."2 And what about the Left? The problem of the Left is and has been, for quite some time now, obvious: it only exists, at any given moment and location, as a response to the agenda of a more or less populist Right. In this way the Right has successfully managed to impose and install its own very particular perspective on reality. Even where the Right loses a particular fight, it does so on the very territory that it itself has set. The Left has long since abandoned its fight on the abstract and univer­ sal level, while throwing itself all the more eagerly into battles on the specific, concrete level: it took under its protective wing all particular Others cast out by the populist Right as bad Others, and betting on the anti-colonialist position fought for their rights, pleading for "tolerance"... Which of course was the right thing to do, but also far too little. Why? Because in so doing they were accepting the very perspective on real­ ity as produced and framed by the liberal Right. And this is, put very 2 Im m anuel Kant, C ritiq u e o f P ra c tic a l R e a so n (Ind ianap olis: Hackett Publishing Com pany, 2002), 41-42.

26

B ack to th e Fu tu re of Europe

simply, that all of the conflicts and problems that the Left recognized as such (like racism, violence, poverty, environmental and ecological problems, sexual discrimination, religious fundamentalism, corruption and more) basically exist against a background of social harmony in which fundamental political problems have already been solved, at least in principle (or on paper). All that remains for us is to keep fighting for women's rights, for the rights of all colors and races, for gay rights, for the poor, for the environment, for the separation of church and state.... (Lately, this has also transformed into a more "conservative" fight to preserve already acquired rights that are now under siege.) To repeat, these fights are absolutely necessary, but something else is necessary as well: namely the Left relating to and joining in the idea that they are part of a fundamental social antagonism that has not only not yet been solved, but one that is actually getting worse. What is at stake here is not that all of these particular fights should be subjected to a higher, or more fundamental fight: that which is "more", and more fundamental than these individual fights, is not some independent fight, but the very form of these fights—that they can stand for each other and never lose sight of the point at which their emancipatory dimension depends and hinges on their universal address. What this means, for example, is that the fight of racial "minorities" for their rights becomes a genuine political fight when it also starts to function as the embodiment of a more general fight against inequality and exploitation. This can result in some surprising, unorthodox alliances, even alliances between groups that are considered "natural enemies". When something like this hap­ pens, it is a political event; but then again it hinges very much on its political articulation and organization, which has to be able to affect the systemic (and economic) parameters of social injustice. And this is a question of both having an idea what to do, and the power to do it. It's no exaggeration to say that the Left long ago abandoned all pretension to actual political power, resigning itself instead to the comfortable position that Hegel described as the "beautiful soul". Yet power (to carry something out) is essential to politics—it is not something accidental to it. It certainly seems that within the established system the rise to power demands the loss of all political edge, and the abandoning of any particularly radical ideas. But if this was once true, it's no longer so— and the growing power of the radical right is grimly yet unmistakably testament to such.

Z u p a n č ič

27

The Left was reduced to fighting to conserve the fast-disappearing re­ mains of the welfare state. But with the devastating economic politics of the last decades this also is a lost fight—lost not simply because of the financial elite who profits from its loss, but because this same financial elite can rely on the growing army of those who never even had access to any of these "benefits" and instead denounce them as privileges. The present dynamic is disastrous because far from endangering it, the growing poverty and insecurity play right into the hands of the infa­ mous "1%". The extremely poor do the fighting for the extremely rich, as was made all too clear in the election of Donald Trump as president. And the Left does little else than scold and insult them. It should be abundantly clear by now that to call people names ("xenophobes", "chauvinists", "racists" and similar) and to feel superior on the grounds of our more enlightened, cosmopolitan position doesn't lead very far. This was, after all, one of the obvious lessons of the recent American presidential election: politicians need to pay attention to the very widespread and growing dissatisfaction of the people, for there are deep and serious economic grounds for this dissatisfaction, which nobody is addressing. There is, however, also the opposite trap to avoid, which is hardly less paternalistic than the first stance: it consists in saying that we have to "understand" the people, and in perceiving the dramatic rise of na­ tionalism and the emergence of populist leaders as a genuine, perhaps singular alternative to liberal capitalism, to its truly global reach and devastation. Nation states are the only format in which democracy has some meaning, and they represent the only defense against the ruin­ ous effects of global capitalism. But this position, now held by more than a few on the Left, is based on an incorrect or insufficient analysis of the situation. Why? Because it fails to see that liberalism and grow­ ing nationalism are, strictly speaking, two sides of the same coin. The expressions of nationalism we see on the rise today are not simply a reaction to global capitalism, they are intrinsically over-determined by its logic and exist as an intrinsic part of it. Nation states, as we once knew them, were effectively dismantled by global capitalism—they did not simply go into hiding somewhere beyond its immediate reach, such that we could now simply return to them. Contemporary nationalism is absolutely intrinsic to globalized capitalism—it is a close ally, not its

28 Back to th e Fu tu re of Europe

enemy. Today's nationalisms are, strictly speaking, "compromise format ions": they are not an obstacle to the free movement of capital, but a new form or path for overcoming its internal limits and contradictions. There may seem to exist no greater nor more spectacular opposition than the opposition between liberal identity politics, combined with political correctness, and the populist, nationalist, grass-root rightist movements. Yet this opposition is in fact more like a mirage, or a sym­ metrical mirroring, since the language, vocabulary and form of address are very much the same in both cases. Because here we are dealing with the same depoliticized vocabulary of injustice, hurt, and injured sensibilities, combined with an appeal to the Other to redeem these injustices and injuries and to protect them and their particular identity from any possible further mischief. In this sense the nationalist Right has simply taken over the realm of identity politics—they say: "It's not you (gays, blacks...), but we who are the real victims here, we are the minority, nobody cares about us..." In a recent paper, Faisal Devji3proposed a most interesting argument that can help us illustrate this point. If we look at the basic outlines of the common story told in former colonies to formulate or explain what happened to them, the basic parameters are as follows: we were once very powerful, and had the best of science, art etc. The colonizers took all that from us, and developed it further (with our help) on their own territory, and now they dominate us with the enhanced fruits of what was once our strength and knowledge. They robbed us of our vitality, so as to feed their own, which they now use to subjugate us. Devji then points out how (perhaps surprisingly) a very similar story is being told and deployed in Europe of late, with Michel Houellebecq's Submission as an illustrious example: Muslims have taken and further developed our achievements, our vitality, which we now no longer possess, but they do. They now have the will, the strength, the discipline, they believe in something that we no longer can or do. As we see, Europe is now speaking like a colony. And it's no coincidence that this mirroring is unfolding in the same ("colonial") language, because this language is the depoliticized language of capitalism and is common to both terms of the opposition at stake ("Western world" and "Muslim world"). One 3 Faisal D evji, "Idols, C o m m odities and Islam " (paper presented at the in tern ational conference Fantasies of C ap ital, Jnan apravah a Institute, M um bai, D ecem ber 16-18, 2016).

Z u p a n č ič

29

should also add that, from the "Western perspective", the contagious signifier of (Islamic) "terrorism" has contaminated the otherwise het­ erogeneous multiple of refugees and immigrants (coming from very different places). The possibility of terrorists hiding in the mass of refugees paints the whole "mass" as somehow vaguely "Muslim", thus playing into the hands of the opposition that sustains the ideology of the "clash of civilizations". To return to our previous discussion, the maxim "the people are al­ ways right" is problematic because it replaces political correctness with what we could call "political righteousness". It's problematic not because sometimes the people are also wrong, but because people are both right and wrong, at the same time. And it is because of this split, between "people" as the point of truth of a social configuration, and what "people" say or do, and which can be very wrong, that politics ex­ ists. Politics exists precisely because the two are not one and the same thing, even when they overlap. The space of politics is the very interval between the two terms of this split inherent to "the people". Politics is not political correctness, which consists in saying all the right things, yet speaking from a point in a given configuration that is not its point of truth. This is why political correctness is rather like lying with truth. It says the right things, but ends up coming across as wrong nevertheless. Populism, on the other hand, is something like telling the truth in the form of a lie. It says all the wrong things, yet we nevertheless feel that there is something right about it. The two mirror each other across one point that they both have in common: namely that they both tend to eliminate the split between statements and the point of their enuncia­ tion by reducing this split to just one of its terms. In the populist scheme it doesn't matter what you say, because you have "all the rights" to say it, and because truth is in the end all about the position from which you speak. According to the politically correct scheme what you say is the only thing that matters, because there is no position of truth, and everybody has his/her own truth. Political correctness and political righteousness function by disavowing a fundamental contradiction, and the split between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the statement(s) is precisely the form of this contradiction. From this perspective we could define genuine politics as follows: Poli­ tics maintains that there is a position of truth, yet this does not imply

30 B ack to th e Fu tu re of Europe

I h.it whatever is said from this position is directly true; it means that what "people" say must be taken seriously, however not simply at (its) lace value. This is because the position of truth of a certain configuration is precisely the point of its inherent contradiction. The position of l ruth is the point of contradiction as truth. Politics does not mean that we know in advance what is, or might be, l he right thing to say. Politics means to take the people seriously, and i hen invent the right things to say (in a concrete situation). But how do we know that we have invented the right thing to say? Nietzsche wrote in Ecce homo that we first discover the truth by experiencing lies as lies. (iould we not say something similar in this case—namely that the right thing is that which has the effect of making us recognize lies as lies? That is to say, to recognize false contradictions and oppositions as false? This is crucial in establishing where the true lines of struggle are situ­ ated today, who are the enemies and who the allies. Every struggle involves not only a fight, but also a split between "us" and "them", yet it is absolutely decisive where we see and set this dividing line. There are many such contradictions, or oppositions, which politics should make us recognize as false, starting of course with the opposition between the "Western World" and the "Muslim World". As was already said herein, there exists a crucial element shared by both Islam and Western liberalism, and this is precisely capitalism. It is the latter— capitalism—that induces the same colonial vocabulary on both sides of this opposition. Politics has the task of breaking out of this vocabulary, and out of this kind of mirroring: there is no "Western World" and no "Muslim World" as homogeneous entities; what we refer to in these terms are entities fiercely divided from within, divided because of that which constitutes their common point (capitalism). These transver­ sal divides are the only real references that we can use and rely on in political struggles. In other words, and as pointed out by Žižek in sev­ eral of his interventions: our allies are progressive political forces that light and stand for similar things in different countries, "cultures" and "worlds"—only such transversal struggles are genuinely universalist, as opposed to the "harmonic universalism" so mocked by Kant. It is not by going back to anything that Europe can have a future, for there is very little to go back to. The only way to counteract capitalist

Z u p a n č ič

31

globalization is not by "going local" again, but by "traversing globaliza­ tion", that is to say by systematically building up a series of connections that are transversal, cut across the dividing lines imposed by global capitalism. Our future can only be born out of these connections—much like in that deservingly famous scene from the movie Back to the Future, where the hero is desperately trying to connect his parents, induce them to fall in love (and hence conceive him). In the past, where he has been sent by mistake, he has with him a photograph from which he is slowly disappearing, because he is failing to connect his parents. The past of the future we presently inhabit is being decided in a somewhat similar way, and beyond the false, moralizing opposition between "ego­ istic" and "altruistic" motives: if we want to ("egoistically") take care of ourselves and our future, we can only do so by working toward and for the connections and alliances capable of "conceiving" our future. Many powerful forces work systematically and violently against such connections, which is why making and sustaining them will not, to be sure, prove a simple task.

32 B ack to th e Fu tu re of Europe

Boris Grays Contemporary Europe: In Search of Cultural Biotopes

The situation in contemporary Europe is characterized by the rise of Right-wing parties that are becoming increasingly influential in the former Western Europe—in France, Holland, Belgium and also Germany. But they have become even more influential in the former Eastern Europe. These parties are time and again compared with the Fascist parties of 1930s and 1940s Europe. And, indeed, they use a similar racist, xenophobic rhetoric. And these parties also support the "conservative revolution" directed against the dominant ideologies of the 20th century, namely Liberalism and Socialism, and against the political institutions that are historically related to these ideologies, like the European Union. However, these new rightist parties are not as aggressive and imperialist as they were in the 1930s. Today, they are rather defensive. Explicitly or implicitly they are inspired by the diagnosis that was already formulated by Oswald Spengler in his famous book The Decline o f the West (Der Untergang des Abendlandes) from 1918: Europe is in decline and loses the global struggle for domina­ tion. Spengler saw the USA and Russia as the potential winners of such a struggle. After World War II, his diagnosis seemed to be confirmed by the division of Europe between two empires—the American and Soviet empires. However, during the Cold War the Europeans tried to compensate for this division, at least in part, by creating the European institutions that led to the emergence of the European Union. So it's an interesting question why now, after the end of the Cold War, the Rightwing parties are trying to dissolve the European Union and return to a 19th century version of nationalism.

33

I.

The sources of today's European rightist discourses can be traced back to the identity politics of the 1980s—especially in the USA. It was then that an important phenomenon emerged—or we might say re-emerged— that could be called "vertical solidarity". The notion of solidarity is historically connected to the struggle of the exploited classes against the exploiting classes. Thus, in the context of the class struggle soli­ darity was always "horizontal solidarity". This was a solidarity among the oppressed, directed against the oppressors. However, in the 1980s a different kind of solidarity emerged—which we should make clear with some recent examples. Thus it is that we will often read that all American women should manifest their solidarity with Hillary Clinton because she's a woman. Earlier we heard that the African-American community enjoyed a certain advancement with the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. In the Marxist tradition a class was defined economically and through its participation in the development of productive forces. According to this tradition a worker who makes a career or a fortune ceases to be a worker and becomes a representative of the upper class. The hori­ zontal solidarity with a particular person becomes annulled when this person leaves his or her class. But, of course, things aren't so simple when the status of oppression is inscribed into the body of the op­ pressed. Solidarity among women was dictated by their unfavourable or disadvantaged economic and social position vis-à-vis men, just as solidarity among blacks was dictated by their unfavourable position vis-à-vis whites. But what if a female or black politician does manage to make a career for themselves? Should other women or blacks break their solidarity with them or not? On the one hand, these particular female or black politicians changed their position in the class struggle by moving from the side of the oppressed to the side of the oppressors. Thus, it can be argued that these politicians, having made a personal career for themselves, seems not to have changed anything of the fate of other women or blacks. Indeed, it would be wrong to see in such careers signs of any particular improvement in the social or economic standing of minorities. Such claims remind me of the art theorists who believed that Duchamp's readymade practice served to erase the dividing line between the museums and external reality. However, the

34 C o n te m p o ra ry E u ro p e ...

fact that five pissoirs currently reside within museum walls has not changed the fate of their innumerable brethren that remain fixed to toilet walls all over the world. But, on the other hand, if somebody of a certain identity makes a career it means that he or she changes what one can call their "identity rat­ ing". Of course, all identities are in theory equal. But in practical terms identities have different ratings, which are related to different expec­ tations of social and financial success, to different assumptions about the bearer's social status. This is the point where horizontal solidarity is transformed into vertical solidarity. Barack Obama remained black after becoming president, and Hillary Clinton would remain a woman also in the case that she became president. Other blacks and women seem to profit insofar as their identities enjoy a higher rating or "bump" thanks to these individual successes. Here it's important to recognize the fact that a person's actual identity has nothing to do with the way that person identifies (himself or her­ self]. Identity, as it's currently understood, is not a subjective attitude but a genealogical fact. A person's identity is defined by the identity of the parents and by place and date of birth. Of course, somebody born, for example, as Jewish or German can reject his or her identity. But in the eyes of others such a rejection would only confirm and reproduce a cer­ tain pattern of self-denial that is already historically well known—and perceived as typical for these identities. One has no power of definition, no sovereignty over one's own identity. The production of identities is always the work of others. One can say that the notion of identity is simply racist—and there is certainly some truth to that. But today things have become more com­ plicated. The popularity the notion of identity enjoys today has a lot to do with the proliferation of identity documents, like passports and birth certificates, but also other bureaucratic forms that allow the individual as well as society in general to become informed about this individual's genealogy—and, thus, about his/her identity. The Internet made finding and acquiring genealogical information far more accessible than ever before; and today it is relatively easy to find out about one's genealogi­ cal past. The contemporary notion of identity is contingent on global information networks and applied to individuals to the extent that their genealogies are documented on these networks. And according

G ro ys

35

to the conditions of the information age almost nobody can escape the genealogical control machinery. Now genealogy is closely related to ecology. The reproduction of certain kinds of human animals—human animals with the same identities— requires that the biotopes in which this reproduction takes place be sustainable. That's why the thinking of the rightist parties isn't cultural or economical but ecological. These parties extend ecological concerns to human animals and try to organize their particular ecosystems in a way that they would favour the (re)production of human bodies with certain identity characteristics. And as is the case with other animals the main concern is the stability of these ecosystems, their defence against the intruder-animals that would potentially destroy the already existing ecological balance. This defence of particular ecosystems can be understood as an interruption of the global flow of goods, capital and people. But this isn't quite the case. The (re)production of bodies with a particular identity only makes sense if one believes in its high global rating. The rightist parties believe in the exchange between different ecosystems—they only try to keep certain identity ratings high and competitive. In this sense the rightist parties are perfectly compatible with the contemporary neo-liberal globalization that lets human animals with different identity characteristics compete on the global stage. Indeed, today's contemporary globalized world is a place of compe­ tition—a competition of everybody against everybody. Of course, it is easier to become successful in this competition if one enters it with a certain amount of money, perhaps inherited from one's family. But, as Michel Foucault has shown, it's primarily so-called human capital that makes an individual truly competitive. According to Foucault, human capital can be defined as the sum of the habits, skills and norms that an individual inherits from his/her family.1 It is precisely this human capital that is meant when one speaks of identity. And in the context of global competition different identities have different identity ratings. That's why, in this highly competitive situation, people are interested in being associated with the suc­ cessful representatives of the group they belong to—and not with 1 M ichel Foucault, The B irth o f B io p o litic s : L e c tu re s a t th e C o llèg e d e F ra n ce, 1978-79 (New York: Palgrave M acm illan, 2008), 215.

36 C o n te m p o ra ry E u ro p e ...

the losers. That's also why vertical solidarity has fared better than has horizontal solidarity. Of course, at the centre of Right-wing propaganda we find various anti­ immigration campaigns of one sort or another. These anti-immigration campaigns are loud and attract plenty of attention. But this anti-immi­ grant effect cannot simply be explained as hate of others—in this case, of immigrants. Immigrants are rejected not as "people with a different identity" but, rather, as agents of the "big world" in which all kinds of identity disappear. In Brussels I often heard from my Flemish friends that their main problem with the immigrants is that the immigrants prefer French to Flemish. I heard the same in Germany—among many other things the immigrants are held responsible for the Americani­ zation of Germany, including the everyday use of English instead of German. Following the fear of the disappearance of different kinds of plants and animals we've become concerned with the potential dis­ appearance of German or Flemish human animals. In the European countries there is a lot of talk about the necessity of "integration" of the immigrants into the respective national European cultures. But it is obvious to everyone that just the opposite is happening: the influx of immigrants speeds the integration of the local European cultures into the Americanized, globalized, English-speaking world. The immigrants are perceived (and resented] as agents of the Empire; their appear­ ance on the territory of Europe is seen as the effect of an American conspiracy. The anti-immigrant effect is in fact the anti-imperial effect. And this effect is not new—in fact it was the main motivation for the creation of the European Union.

II. One of the architects of the European institutions that still form the foundation of the EU was Alexandre Kojève, who represented France in Brussels in the earliest diplomatic efforts to create a unified Europe from the end of WWII up until his death in 1968. Kojève wrote the first laws that shaped tariff policies and politics in Europe and influenced the further development of the bureaucratic machinery in Brussels. However, before becoming a politician Kojève was a philosopher. And v his career shift from philosopher to politician was partly the result of

G ro ys

37

the success (in French political and diplomatic circles) of a relatively short text of his dedicated to the project of the so-called Latin Empire (written in 1945).2 Now, as the crisis of the European Union has become so obvious, many people are turning their attention back to this project, asking why things moved in the direction they did. In this text Kojève writes that the Latin countries—and France in particular—cannot easily find a place in a world dominated by the Communist Soviet Union and the Protestant United States. As a result, they feel compelled to create a Latin Empire on the basis of a union between France, Italy and Spain—with cultural contacts to the Arab countries of Maghreb and to Latin America. This Empire should have only one goal: to protect the specific way of life of Latin, Catholic—or rather, post-Catholic—cultures. Here Kojève pro­ poses a project of cultural biopolitics or, let's say, cultural ecology: the human animals of a Latin kind should be allowed to live their traditional way of life because only then will they be truly happy; whereas the role of the imperial, European bureaucracy would consist in protecting this way of life from the aggressive and expanding empires of the Soviet Union and the USA. So we have here a project that is not based on any specific future promise, on any specific ideology, on any historical mis­ sion. Instead, its mission is to secure the propagation and reproduction of a certain way of life that has its origins in the historical past. To better understand this project it makes sense to say a couple of words about Kojève as a philosopher. Alexandre Kojève became famous primarily for his discourse on the end of history and the post-historical condition—the discourse he developed in his seminar on Hegel's Phe­ nomenology of the Spirit that he taught at the École pratique des hautes études in Paris between 1933 and 1939. This seminar was regularly at­ tended by leading figures of French intellectual life of the time, including Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, André Breton, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Raymond Aron. Transcripts of Kojève's lectures circulated in Paris­ ian intellectual circles and were widely read there—also by Sartre and Camus.3 The end of history as it is understood by Kojève is, of course, 2 A lexan d re Kojeve, O u tlin e o f a D o c trin e o f Fren ch P o licy, accessed Septem b er 16, 2016, h ttp s://w w w .m arxists.o rg /re fe re n ce /su b je ct/p h ilo so p h y/w o rks/fr/ko jeve2.h tm . 3 A lexan d re Kojeve, In tro d u c tio n to th e R e a d in g o f H e g e l: L e c tu re s on th e P h e n o m e n o lo g y o f S p irit (Ithaca: Cornell U n iversity Press, 1980).

38 C o n te m p o ra ry E u ro p e ...

not the end of historical processes and events. Rather, Kojève believed that history is not merely a chain of events but has a telos—and that this telos can be achieved and has, in actual fact, already been achieved. According to the Platonic-Hegelian tradition in which Kojève situated is own discourse, this telos is Wisdom. Kojève understands Wisdom as perfect self-transparency, self-knowledge. The wise man knows the reasons for all his actions—he can explain them, translate them into rational language. The emergence of the wise man, of the Sage, is the telos of history. And the moment the Sage emerges history ends. At this point one might ask: but why does history wait for the Sage to emerge? Indeed, one could assume that it is possible to become a Sage at any moment in history—it's enough for man to decide to practice introspec­ tion, self-reflection, self-analysis, instead of exclusively cultivating an interest in the outside world. However, Kojève, following Hegel, does not believe that such a shift is possible under ordinary circumstances, that it can be effectuated by a simple decision to switch one's attention from contemplation of the world to self-contemplation. Such a voluntary decision would be possible only if “the subject'' were ontologically different from and contrary to, other than, the world as Plato or Descartes believed it to be. But Kojève develops his discourse in the post-metaphysical, post-religious age. He wants to be radically atheistic—and that for him means that under “normal conditions'' man is part of the world, and human consciousness is entirely captured by the world. The “subject" does not have the onto­ logical status, scope and energy required to turn or transform it from being immersed in the world to a contemplation of itself—to effectuate phenomenological epoché in the Husserlian sense. Self-consciousness can emerge only when man finds himself opposed to the world. And one is opposed to the world only if one's own life is put at risk, is endangered by the world. There must be a specific force that would oppose the “hu­ man animal" in the world and turn it against the world by turning the world against it. It is precisely this force that produces the transition from nature to history. History sets up man's opposition to nature. So one needs history in order to constitute the “self", and at the same time to turn a man's attention to the (his) self. Only a historical man is able to have self-consciousness—and that means to be man in the full sense of the word.

G ro ys

39

For Kojeve, it is not thinking but desire that primarily turns the sub­ ject against the world and turns the subject's consciousness toward itself. However, desire is rooted not in man's humanity but in its ani­ mality. Humans have desires because they are still animals—and it is precisely the animal component of humankind that originally produces the human self, the human identity, if we may call it that. Kojeve writes: "The man who contemplates is 'absorbed' by what he contemplates; the 'knowing subject' 'loses' himself in the object that is known... The man who is 'absorbed' in his contemplation can be 'brought back to himself' only by a Desire; by the desire to eat, for example. Desire is what transforms Being, revealed to itself by itself in (true) knowledge... revealed to a 'subject'... The (human) I is the I of a Desire or of Desire."4 Desire wants, requires satisfaction and thus turns man from contem­ plation to action whose goal is to deliver this satisfaction. This action is always a "negation" of the status quo in which the desire remains unsatisfied. The I of Desire is an emptiness that negates and destroys everything "external", "given". But the Self-Sentiment is not yet SelfConsciousness. The Self-Consciousness is produced by a specific type of desire—the "anthropogenic" desire that is a desire not of particular things but desire of the desire of the other: "Thus, in the relationship between man and woman, for example, Desire is human only if one de­ sires not the body but the desire of the other;..."5The same can be said about the relationship between the individual and society. What we want from the society is recognition, admiration, love. In other words, we want prestige. And we are even ready to sacrifice our lives for the sake of public recognition and immortal prestige. Kojeve writes further: "Without this fight to the death for pure prestige, there would never have been human beings on Earth."6Thus, the "subject" becomes constituted. This subject is not "natural", because it is ready to sacrifice all its natural needs and even its "natural" existence for an abstract idea of recognition. And only if the desire of an individual is recognized by society does this individual gain access to self-knowledge. Our self-reflection is mediated by society—we are able to know and love ourselves only if we are known and loved by society. Here the project of achieving Wisdom becomes 4 Ibid., 5. 5 Ibid., 6-7. 6 Ibid., 7.

40 C o n te m p o ra ry E u ro p e ...

a historical project: to know oneself one has to make transparent the totality of the society in which one lives. And such transparency is historically achievable. Indeed, every de­ sire—also the desire for recognition—can be satisfied. That is the basic difference between thinking and desire: thinking is infinite (which is why God is infinite) but desire is finite. The desire of social rec­ ognition ends with the revolutionary spasm. And history as history of desire of desire also ends here. The end of history is the point at which the subject becomes constituted for whom society becomes transparent—society organized as the post-revolutionary state. This state speaks—and, in fact, for the first time in history, it speaks the true language, the language of knowledge. But that does not mean that it speaks "evident language". Kojeve insists that the truth of speech cannot be defined as a relation of this speech to the outside "reality", be it temporal (then every speech is a mere opinion) or eternal (then the truth is "not relevant for praxis"). Rather, according to Hegel, the truth of speech is guaranteed by its completeness—and its complete­ ness is "proven" by its circularity: "whoever has said everything can only repeat himself, and no one can contradict him."7 In other words, post-historical speech is true because it always runs a full circle—and thus repeats the circle that was for the first time described by Hege­ lian philosophy. This circularity makes every individual statement irrefutable and irrelevant at the same time. It is irrefutable because it is always already included in the full circle. And it is irrelevant because only the full circle is relevant. Thus, the language of the post-historical state is not persuasive but dissuasive. If the modern state is a kind of a machine then circular speech functions as its motor. The individual philosophical position becomes, as was already said, impossible—it becomes impossible because it is always already included. The only position that remains possible is the position of the maintenance of this motor as such, maintenance of the circular speech. It is no longer the position of a philosopher but of a Sage. The Sage occupies himself with the truth. Thus, he takes the position that was earlier occupied by the philosopher. But the Sage does not produce his own kind of persuasive speech. Instead, he is occupied with the 7

Leo Strauss, On T yra n n y: C o rre c te d a n d E x p a n d e d E d itio n ; In clu d in g th e S tra u ss-K o je v e

C o rre s p o n d e n c e (C hicago, London: Chicago U n iversity Press, 2013), 281.

G ro ys

41

smooth running of the circular, dissuasive speech. In this sense the Sage is more a worker, a technician of speech than an "original thinker". Mastery of language belongs to the past—after the end of history this mastery is situated in the realm of literary entertainment. The Sage is obviously a member of the ruling bureaucracy—but what about the fate of the ruled? The echo of Rousseauian optimism can be found in the famous footnote 6 to the first edition of Kojeve's Introduction. In this footnote, Kojeve asserts that after the end of history Nature survives. Kojeve refers to Marx, who predicted that the historical Realm of Necessity that posited man in opposition to Nature and one class against another class would be substituted by the Realm of Freedom, which would open for mankind the possibility to enjoy "art, love, play etc." in harmony with Nature.8 However, later Kojeve realized that this idyllic vision excludes the actual telos of historical development—Wisdom. Life in harmony with Nature leaves no room for the Wise Man. In the extension of this footnote writ­ ten for the Second edition of Introduction Kojeve accepts his previous error and concedes that the disappearance of historical man also makes traditional notions of art, love and play obsolete: "Hence it would have to be admitted that after the end of history men would construct their edifices and works of art as birds build their nests and spiders spin their webs, would perform their musical concerts after the fashion of frogs and cicadas, would play like young animals and would indulge in love like adult beasts."9But, most importantly the human animal would lose language, which is the only medium of Wisdom— the discourse, Logos, would disappear: "Animals of the species Homo sapiens will react by conditioned reflexes to vocal signals... What would disappear is not only Philosophy or the search for discursive wisdom, but also Wisdom itself. For in these post-historical animals, there would no longer be any understanding of the World and of self."10 For Kojeve, European mankind is already the mankind after the end of history, of revolutions and wars: pacified, without true ambitions, incapable of sacrifice—a society consisting not of humans but of human animals. So his project of the Latin Empire is not an aggressive but a defensive project. It is a project of creation of a biotope for human animals of the Latin kind, in 8 Kojeve, In tro d u c tio n to th e R e a d in g o f H eg el, 157-159. 9 Ibid., 159. 10 Ibid., 160.

42 C o n te m p o ra ry E u ro p e ...

which these animals could be happy—and could reproduce themselves and their way of living. Of course, the real European Union doesn't look like the Kojevean Latin Empire—it has expanded to include the whole of Europe, and at the same time came to be, from the beginning, de facto integrated into NATO—something Kojeve vehemently rejected. However, the basic structure of the European Union corresponds to the Kojevean project: the professional European bureaucracy still understands itself as the protector of a specific European way of life—of a European culture that is interpreted not as a sum of cultural achievements, like literary texts, pieces of music or paintings but, rather, as a specific ecological milieu into which European children are born and raised. In other words, as the space of reproduction of human capital as described by Foucault— reproduction of the European human animals with all of their specific identities, skills and abilities that provide them with the chance to compete on the world's capitalist markets. And it is precisely at this point that the new Right-wing protest parties emerge. The ecological protection of the European way of life seems about to collapse—the sages of the European Union have lost the public trust. The reason for this development is obvious enough. The neo­ liberal version of globalization triumphed after the end of the Cold War. Pacified Europe was confronted with other regions and populations that were experienced from the European perspective as still histori­ cal; in other words, as far more vital and ambitious than post-historical Europe. China and other Asian economies such as Vietnam and Korea and the dynamic Muslim world in which sacrifice and self-sacrifice remain operative seem to produce a pressure that the European Un­ ion simply cannot withstand. Integrated Europe was shaken as it was confronted with its own initial claim. This claim was to defend and protect the European way of life—but such an integrated way of life did not and does not exist. The Latin world actually has little in com­ mon with the Northern Protestant Germanic and Anglo-Saxon cultures. And naturally, the Latin world and the Protestant North don't build any ecological unities. So at the moment every particular ethnicity, state and region begins to look for a way out of the European Union towards the creation of their own, safe individual system, their own guaranteed ecological biotope.

G ro ys

43

III.

Now, I must say that I already had the opportunity to watch a similar process unfold during the dissolution of the Soviet Union. During the process, Soviet ethnic groups, large and small, came to the conclusion that it would be far more successful on the global stage than any of the other ethnic groups—especially more than the Russians. Here again, the presence of representatives of other ethnic groups on its territory was considered by every ethnic group that felt itself associated with this territory as a destructive tool being used by the Soviet Empire—the same story one could see and hear during the dissolution of Yugoslavia. In fact, it was remarked long ago that hyper-competitive, neo-liberal globalization leads to glocalization: the local becomes most important in global terms; and every mediation between the local and the global, be it empire, national state or group of states, tends to dissolve. Meanwhile, many of the products of disintegration of the former Social­ ist bloc have been included into the European Union—and they have brought with them a certain set of attitudes that still influence their position on the new requirements of European integration. The post­ socialist countries entered the international cultural and political scene at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, as this scene was almost entirely dominated by identity politics. The universalist utopias of the 1960s and 70s were not only forgotten but ideologically rejected. Everyone was obliged to seek one's own roots; everyone had to discover one's own tradition. At first glance, this return to roots and the critique of universalist ideologies promised an easy acceptance of Eastern European cultures as another set of national-cultural identi­ ties under the conditions of postmodern permissiveness. And yet the situation became more complicated. Indeed, if the core of the standard postcolonial discourse and identity politics is expressed as the struggle against Eurocentricism, the core of the dominant post-communist discourse in the Eastern European countries became the affirmation of Eurocentricism. The time of the So­ cialist regimes in Europe was experienced as a time of separation from Europe. After the fall of the Berlin Wall the Eastern European nations wanted to become European again. The majority of intellectuals and artists of these countries looked to their “European", pre-communist

44 C o n te m p o ra ry E u ro p e ...

past with the aim of finding their cultural roots. In other words, they looked to the Europe of the 1930s or even, in the case of some post-Soviet republics, including Russia, to the Europe of the late 19th century, to a time when their countries were still truly European. That was a time of national states, nationalist politics and nationalist ideologies preceding both the First and Second World Wars. This Eurocentric attitude led many Eastern European intellectuals to criticize the contemporary West as not being European enough. Here the West was criticized pre­ cisely for reasons other than, contrary to the usual critique levelled in the name of cultural identity—not for its exclusivity but for its lack of exclusivity, for its naive belief in globalization and a rich cultural mix. Many Eastern Europeans were shocked by the degree to which the West wasn't “Western"—at least in the eyes of somebody raised on nostalgic memories of the 1930s. Thus, for the Eastern Europeans' Eurocentric desire the West revealed itself as an obscure object: treacherous and unfaithful to its own identity. One can say that the Eurocentric critique of Europe is a reactionary one. And it is, of course, true. But what about the neo-liberal version of globalization that was practiced by the West in recent decades? Does this version of globalization function as an ef­ fective alternative to the nationalism we now see so on the rise? The initial promise of neo-liberal post-modernism was the rejection of rigid identities—all identities had to become flexible, mixed, hybrids. However, cultural globalization also became something quite different from that which many initially expected it to be. The reason for this lies partly in the fact that the Internet handed us the near-unlimited power of algorithmically organized surveillance and control by oth­ ers—again, primarily by the states. Neo-liberal globalization as such revealed itself as the direct opposite of the modern ideal of internation­ ality or universality. Under the current regime of the global exchange culture is understood as a specific kind of information. One allows, puts into circulation texts, images and music—and equates this free flow of artistic production with the establishment of world culture. From this perspective the Right wing's insistence on an “unspoiled" regional and national culture is criticized as a manifestation of “isolationism" that operates by means of censorship. At first glance, this liberal critique seems plausible, but it actually misses the point because it doesn't differentiate between culture and cultural

G ro ys

45

information. As was already said, culture is not a sum of cultural com­ modities or information about cultural events. Culture is rather a certain way of being in the world—the way of being into which a child is born and by which its attitudes, habits and behaviour patterns are formed. This process of cultural formation takes place long before the child becomes an Internet user, content provider and cultural consumer. When the Right-wing parties insist on keeping intact a certain cultural identity they have in mind the everyday, habitual, "non-formalized”, eco­ logical sense of culture—which has nothing to do with the production and distribution of cultural commodities or the circulation of cultural information. Which is why the polemics practiced by representatives of the liberal and nationalistic points of view are so absurd—because the protagonists of this polemic have entirely different ideas of culture on their minds. However, even if there is no formal understanding between the liberal and nationalistic points of view they are easily compatible on both the economic and political level. Indeed, economic liberalization and globalization on the one side and cultural nationalism on the other aren't mutually exclusive—precisely because the cultural formations function as de facto preconditions for the effective participation of those individuals engaged in the economic and political competition. Which is why a combination of cultural globalization and extreme cultural conservatism defines the art and politics of our time. IV. Thus, things didn't go the way Kojeve hoped and predicted they would go. Kojeve was a Hegelian: for him, every empire was an intermediate step on the way from the national state towards the "universal and homogeneous state" that he more or less associated with international Communism. This concept of Internationalism embodied by a Universal state stands in direct opposition to the contemporary globalism that is based on the competition of everyone against everyone. It is this competition that fragments all contemporary states and empires. In theory, this process of fragmentation has to stop with the individuals who become liberated from all local social obligations. However, before these individuals can be liberated they should be produced (born, cared for, educated etc.). And they should also be invested with a certain hu­ man capital that would make them competitive.

46 C o n te m p o ra ry E u ro p e ...

The Right-wing political parties pretend to define and protect the bio­ topes that make the re-production of certain kinds of human animals secure and successful. This claim isn't easily countered with references to the joys of the Internet and other means of contemporary global communication. As was already said, cultural formation and cultur­ al information are not the same thing. The only valuable alternative would be a project of global, universal culture. In his Notes towards the Definition of Culture (1948), T.S. Eliot speaks about such a project as a necessary project.11However, the notion of culture, as defined by Eliot, contradicts the understanding of culture as the sum of cultural goods. He understands culture much like contemporary rightist parties do—as an ecologically defined biotope for the re-production of different kinds of human animals. At the same time he doesn't believe protecting such biotopes would prove effective. The reason for Eliot's scepticism lies in his analysis of the shift in the function of migration. Individual tribes and small ethnic groups once migrated in their entirety, so that they brought their culture, their way of life with them. However, migration today doesn't operate or proceed on the level of the whole Volk. Today's migrants are individuals who have left the centres and original areas of their culture—and in so doing don't transport their culture in its entirety, but mix it with the culture of the populations amidst which they are living.12 Eliot speaks about this new type of migration in relation to colonialism. He worries about the influence of Europeans on the sustainability of non-Western cultures. However, today migration is far more closely associated with the movement of people from non-Western countries into the countries of the West. Thus, those worries as formulated by Eliot have become, for contemporary Europeans, even more acute. But Eliot doesn't believe in the possibility of stopping migration and protecting the European cultural biotope. Eliot writes: "For if we con­ tent ourselves with the ideal of'European culture' we shall be unable to fix any definite frontiers. European culture has an area but no definite frontiers: and you cannot build Chinese walls. A notion of the self-con­ tained European culture would be as the notion of the self-contained national culture: in the end as absurd as the notion of preserving a local 11 T.S. Eliot, N otes to w a rd s th e D e fin itio n o f C u ltu re (London: Faber and Faber, 1962), 62. 12 Ibid., 63.

G ro ys

47

uncontaminated culture in a single county or village in England. We are therefore pressed to maintain the ideal of a world culture, while admitting that it is something that we cannot imagine”13 This world culture, according to Eliot, should be "actual in diverse local manifesta­ tions"—for him an improbable vision. Nevertheless, Eliot states that we should remain loyal to the idea of such an unimaginable world culture precisely because it is not only unimaginable but also unrealizable.14 At this point one has to ask: Why is such a culture unimaginable and unrealizable? The answer is obvious enough—even if not explicitly formulated by Eliot. A global culture is impossible under the condition of global competition. A global culture could be only imagined as the culture of a universal and homogeneous state that Kojéve envisions at the end of human history. In such a state, in which everyone would be recognized equally, a world culture could take the form of a global cultural ecology that would embody Eliot's ideal of unity in difference. However, Eliot rejects all of the efforts by the "world planners" of the Hegelian-Marxist tradition to create a world state and, in the spirit of the Cold War, accuses "our Russian friends" of working to eradicate all cultural differences and instead create a "uniform" world culture that would dehumanize humanity.15 These accusations serve to indirectly glorify the historical past in which the humanity of mankind mani­ fested itself in conflict, competition and rivalry. Basically, it is a kind of Nietzschean aversion to the perspective of the pacified, post-historical, socialist/communist humanity that motivates Eliot to proclaim the pro­ ject of a world culture impossible—the same aversion that today unites the nationalists and the liberals in a common celebration of human capital and creativity. Today we have returned to the 19th Century—to a combination of globalized markets and localized cultures, of the In­ ternet and Marine Le Pen. And now, as then, the only alternative to this combination is the socialist/communist one—one that could expand and extend the ecological protection of culture over the entire world. But it seems this alternative needs some time to become re-actualized in global political practice.

13 Ibid., 62. 14 Ibid., 63. 15 Ibid., 61-62.

48 C o n te m p o ra ry E u ro p e ...

Robert Pfaller White Lies, Black Truths:

Elements of Adult Communication

Part A: White Lies

1. Filmy superstructures Many social procedures rely on the element of deception. For instance, let us consider the classic romance movie love scene, when two people are considering whether to spend the night together. In such a situation, it always appears necessary to ask something like “Would you like to come over for a cup of coffee?“1Obviously, this is a deception. Yet, it's interest­ ing to consider the question—who is deceived? Is anybody ever deceived? This little coffee-question belongs to the genre of “beliefs" or “illusions without owners.“2 It is one of the typical deceptions of politeness by which, as Immanuel Kant perspicuously remarked, nobody is ever de­ ceived: “everyone understands that nothing sincere is meant.“3 Herein lies the first paradox of the white lie: it is a deception without anyone being deceived. This is why Kant found the “lie" of politeness morally acceptable, or even morally productive: for him, politeness was an in­ nocent, “white" lie. 2. Objects destroyed by their recognition On the other hand, even if it is quite unlikely that anyone could ever be deceived by such a simple trick, it appears most certain that this trick 1 Slavoj Žižek's brilliant and w itty elaboration on the "coffee-issue" in his A b so lu te R e c o il was not yet know n to me w hen I started w orking on this essay. Slavoj Žižek, A b so lu te R e c o il (London: Verso, 2014), 406. 2 cf. O ctave M annoni, Clefs p o u r I'lm aginaire ou I A utre Scene (Paris: Seuil, 2003); Robert Pfaller, On th e P le a su re P rin cip le in C u ltu re : Illu sio n s W ith o u t O w n ers (London: Verso, 2014). 3 Im m anuel Kant, A n th ro p o lo g y fro m a P ra g m a tic P o in t o f V iew (London, A m sterd am : Fetter and Sim on, 1978), 38.

49

is an absolutely necessary element of superstructure, maybe even a textbook example of what a superstructure can do. Even if such a de­ ception (without a deceived) is completely transparent to everybody, it still offers a filmy, insubstantial cover-up for a reality that without this cover-up could not come into existence. Directly suggesting the erotic night would make it impossible. If there were no coffee to hide behind, there would be no erotic night. “Esse est non percipi”—in order to exist, the thing has to not be perceived: with this witty reversal of George Berkeley's famous formula, Slavoj Žižek well rendered this strange and surprising structure.4 For our special case, we can slightly modify this in order to point out its utter paradoxicality: In order to exist (for virtually everyone), the object has to be misrecognized (by literally no one). We could call such a paradoxical phenomenon a "doublette"—a two-sided thing composed of an "ontological" and a "non-epistemological" side, yet with both belong­ ing to the ontological (since the non-epistemological is the condition of existence for the ontological), and with the specific feature that this ontologically efficient non-epistemology refers to no subject whatsoever. What is striking here is the disproportion between the practically non-existent deceptive power of the coffee-"superstructure" and its simultaneously absolute necessity for the existence of its love-night“basis". Herein lies the second paradox of the white lie: Why is it that a deception without a deceived must be introduced? What is the reason for this firmest of necessities behind this most ethereal deception that always appears already overcome and left behind once it encounters its first potential believer? 3. Misrecognition on the side of the object, and not of its theory In the first place, it may be interesting here to point out the unusual relationship of such phenomena with their respective theories. The deception (without a deceived), or the lie or error, are a part of a specific reality; they are not part of the description or theory of this reality. Hence, it is not the case here that theory can err, misrecognize, describe falsely or lie. Rather, in order to describe matters properly, theory has 4

See Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, London: The MIT Press, 2006).

50 W h ite Lie s, B lack T ru th s ...

to account for the lying or erring of its object. We can speak here of an "objective misrecognition"—one that occurs on the side of the object, as opposed to the usual kinds of misrecognition that occur on the side of t heory, and which can thus be called "subjective". An adequate descript ion or theory would therefore have to account for the structure of this specific reality, composed of a reality and its condition of possibility, namely its objective misrecognition (by no one). Now, if the deception, lie, error etc. are in this case part of the object (i.e. of the reality to be described), then the relationship between the theory and its object can not in this case be described as an "epistemo­ logical break": it is not the case that theory breaks with the self-under­ standing of its object, thereby producing its adequate knowledge. Here Althusser's "Golden Rule" of materialism—"never mistake the object's self-understanding for its reality"5—becomes strangely suspended. Hence, we are dealing here with a case precisely the opposite of the usual scenario—such as, for instance, when actors in a social field (e.g. art­ ists) regard themselves as "progressive", but theory has to acknowledge the fact that objectively they serve reactionary (let us say, neoliberal) interests.6 Here the object of theory—the people who falsely consider themselves progressive—is simply naive. However, in the case of the coffee/sex doublette, things lie (in the double sense of the word) differently: theory appears here to coincide with the self-consciousness of the observed object —it has to state, just like the object itself, that there is a deception, but nobody is deceived. There is no idiot or fool on the side of the object. We could call this object an "enlightened", "knavish", or even "cynical" object. It is endowed with clear-sighted knowledge about its own deception. The "objective" lie is just a "white lie". The lying object does not invite the observer to follow it in its self-deception. Rather, it "interpassively" accomplishes the false belief in place of its observer. This may provide the first explanation for the "solidity" of the white lie. Whereas a deception situated on the side of theory may vanish as soon as a better notion becomes available, 5 See Louis A lthusser, Écrits sur la psychoanalyse. Freud et Lacan (Paris: Stock/ IMEC, 1993), 234. 6 A case, by the w ay, for w hich the "esse est non percipi" p rin cip le ap plies ju st as w ell: precisely in order to pursue n eoliberal p o litics m ost e fficie n tly , m any actors in the social field have to p erceive th em selves as p o litically progressive forces. Thus a good part of neoliberal cu tbacks could only be im plem ented by social d em ocrats, and w ith seem ing ly em an cip ato ry arg um en ts.

P fa lle r

51

a deception on the side of the object persists—at least as long as the object does. 4. The truth of the white lie The amazing and paradoxical necessity of the white lie for certain situ­ ations in social life may also stem from the dimension of truth that is still inherent in it, despite its deceptive nature. Let us take the exam­ ple of a small child who has been given a kitschy present by its dying grandmother. When asked whether it liked the gift, the child may well feel inclined to state that it liked it. This may be false with regard to the object, but it is not false with regard to the child's wishes and af­ fections. The child may not like the gift, but it may well like the fact that it was a gift from grandmother; and it may love the grandmother. Like the hysteric, the white.liar may be untruthful about facts, but fully truthful about his or her desires. In the same way, a ritual formula of politeness, such as "I wish you a good day" can be deciphered as "I wish to wish you a good day". Turning to Althusser's theory of ideology, one may state here: the white lie represents "the subject's imaginary relationship to its real condi­ tions of existence."7The subject may, due to the poor conditions of its existence, not really wish a good day for the other; and yet it may, owing precisely to the same poor conditions of its existence, wish to have a better relationship to these conditions (as the heroes of Bertolt Brecht's "Three Penny Opera" put it: "Wir wären gut, anstatt so roh/ Doch die Verhältnisse, sie sind nicht so"8). It may wish to wish the other a good day. In other words, the white lie may be false with regard to what it says, but it is truthful, and an expression of love, with regard to the fact that it is uttered. Deceptive on the level of the enunciated content, it is authentic on the level of enunciation. This truth pertaining to the white lie may be the first reason for the white lie's solidity and endurance. Due to this truth on its level of enunciation, the white lie is not vulnerable to any 7 Louis A lthusser, On Id e o lo g y (London, New York: Verso, 2008), 36. 8 "We w ould be good instead of so rude, if only the circum stances w ere not as th ey are." Bertolt Brecht, Die Gedichte von Bertolt Brecht in einem B and (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 1106.

52 W h ite Lie s, B lack T ru th s ...

truth that would contradict its enunciated deception. In this connection, Benedict de Spinoza offers: "No positive quality possessed by a false idea is removed by the presence of what is true, in virtue of its being true."9 Due to its positive quality of loving affection, the white lie is solid and able to resist any challenge by whatever truth that might and only ever tackle its filmy deceptive part. This idea of a loving truth pertaining to the white lie also appears in a beautiful little allegory by the Austrian 19th century writer Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach. This story presents Honesty walking happily through the world, in a most self-assured way. "I am a virtuous person," Honesty thinks, "I discern between Good and Evil, there is no filthy dealing possible with me; and no virtue is conceivable without me." Then Honesty encounters Lie who comes in most colourful clothes, fol­ lowed by a huge crowd. Honesty turns away, most disgusted. Yet at the end of the procession, Honesty sees a number of shy and humble beings with children's faces. "Who are you?" Honesty asks. One after the other they answer, "I am the lie because of respect"; "I am the lie because of piety"; "I am the lie because of mercy"; "I am the lie because of love." "And those smallest amongst us are: the silence because of politeness, the silence because of esteem, and the silence because of pity." Then Honesty blushes, and all of a sudden it feels a bit blunt and brutal.10 This little story presents another form of the white lie: silence. Silence is a crucial virtue for civility, since it is one instance of the civil practices of "acting as if"11. In order to behave in a civilized way we often have to remain silent and act as if we had not heard certain noises, or not seen certain actions, nor smelled certain odours. Civility thus presupposes the ability to resist a certain temptation en­ couraged by one's knowledge of the truth. If superego is, according to Freud, the instance controlling the reality principle and thus the sub­ jects' sincerity to truth,12there also seems to be a superego injunction to always tell the truth. Yet, virtue here seems to consist in, despite one's knowing the truth, still not telling it—and hence in maintaining an 9 Bened ict de Spinoza, E th ic s, c o rre sp o n d e n c e (New York: Dover Pub lications, 1955), 191. 10 See for this: M arie von Ebn er-Eschen bach, D ie A u fric h tig k e it. P a ra b e ln u n d D ia lo g e (B erlin: H ofenberg, 2015), 5. 11 See for this Richard S e n n e tt, Th e F a ll o f P u b lic M a n (New York: Knopf, 1977). 12 Sigm und Freud, G roup Psychology a n d the Analysis o f the Ego, Standard Edition, Vol. 18,114.

P fa lle r

53

appearance. This leads to another paradox of the white lie, and another of its crucial structural features. 5. Virtues without faith After having stated that the white lie does not deceive anybody, Im­ manuel Kant comes up with an even more surprising claim: “For when men play these roles," he states, "virtues are gradually established, whose appearance had up until now only been affected. Those virtues will ultimately become part of the actor's disposition. To deceive the deceiver in ourselves, or the tendency to deceive, is a fresh return to obedience under the law of virtue. It is not the deception but rather the blameless deluding of ourselves."13 This claim by Kant provides a new answer to the question concerning the white lie's function and endurance: despite not deceiving anybody, the white lie deceives the deceiver; or to be more precise, the deceiver within the role-playing person ("the deceiver in ourselves"). With this formula, Kant is obviously referring to a psychic agency within the per­ son. We can without difficulty identify this agency with the aforemen­ tioned Freudian superego. The white lie then deceives the deceiver, i.e. the person's superego. The superego's urge to be authentic and brutal, and to shout the truth into the world, at whatever cost, thus gets pacified. But why is the superego a deceiver? This can probably only be under­ stood when we take into account the dimension of truth pertaining to the white lie. When there is something truthful about the white lie, then the superego's claim for authenticity is a deception. "Deceiving the deceiver" would then mean making the superego believe that the opposite, the white lie's truth, is true. This would translate into shut­ ting up the superego. The process of "symbolic causality" that Kant describes, that only the appearance of these virtues is initially affected, and then these virtues become established in the actor's "disposition" (in German: "Gesinnung"), must therefore not be read as a process of internalization or introjection. It is not that individuals first behave politely only out of social pressure from others and then begin behaving under pressure 13

Kant, A n th ro p o lo g y fro m a P ra g m a tic P o in t o f View , 39.

54 W h ite Lie s, B lack T ru th s ...

from their superego.14Exercise and routine in politeness do not lead to a kind of "subjectivized", superego-powered practice of white lying. There is no faith behind politeness. In this case, the superego is not empowered but silenced. This becomes possible by a replacement. In place of the superego, another psychic agency takes command, an agency for whom the "mere appearance" of those virtues is its truth.15 This other agency has to be described as a "naive observer". The ef­ ficiency of the naive observer can be explained using another example. 6. The white lie and its naive observer The naive observer is at work when, for example, two colleagues who may not harbour particularly friendly feelings towards each other still behave politely instead of expressing these feelings. It is as if they felt observed by, let us say, a colleague from a different company, and take pride in not revealing the true nature of their relations to him. Instead, they both make an effort to deceive this observer. Now this mechanism works even when no real third person is actually present. In such case, the two colleagues still keep their secret against the "naive observer"—a psychic agency that has to be presupposed in order to account for these astonishing effects.16By not revealing their dirty secret, the two polite white liars act in solidarity. They form a coalition, even if otherwise nothing else unites them. 14 This w ould be the kind of d evelop m ent d escribed by Freud: first, children act according to the parent's norm s, because they are afraid to lose the parents' love. Later, they "in tro je ct" this outer au tho rity, erect a superego and start acting m orally on th eir ow n. Sigm und Freud, C iv iliz a tio n a n d Its D is co n te n ts , Standard Edition, Vol. 21, 124. 15 For Kant's eth ics, there are only tw o po ssib ilities w ith regard to ap pearan ces: either there is nothing else but ap pearan ce, and then ap pearance has to be ackno w led ged as tru th ; or there is a p o ssib ility of a d ifference betw een ap pearance and tru th , and then truth is on the other side of ap pearance. W ith regard to politeness, Kant's position is clear: p o lite n e s s c a n n o t be fa k e d ; it is a lw a y s tru e. With regard to sincere feeling s or religious faith , th in gs are d iffe re n t. Religious faith can be faked by a production of m ere ap pearan ces, for exam ple the perform ing of religious rituals. In this case, the ap pearances can never "deceive the d eceiver". A su b je ct indulging in rituals is, for Kant, not on a hopeful w ay tow ards true relig io sity, but instead engaging in "p seud o service"— an o b stacle for any real religious "service". Kant, R e lig io n w ith in th e L im its o f B are R e a so n (Ind ianap olis: Hackett Publishing Com pany, 2009), 83. In the case of p o liteness, the only thing that changes during its exercise is th at the idea that ap pearance w as "just an illusion" reveals itself to be an illu sio n. In the case of relig ious pseud o-services, on the contrary, it has to be revealed that th ey are ju st illu sions. 16 Pfaller, On th e P le a su re P rin cip le in C u ltu re , 231.

P fa lle r

55

This coalition is then the truth of this type of white lie—just as the lov­ ing affection had been the truth of the white lie's previous examples. The two colleagues team up—just as, according to Octave Mannoni's perspicuous remark, the spectators in a theatre team up with the ac­ tors in order to maintain an illusion that is nobody's illusion.17Together, they maintain the spectacle's illusion for the gaze of an invisible naive observer. To put it in the terminology of John L. Austin: Performatively, they produce the truth of their alliance. 7. The white lie's fakes Having followed the different schemes and structures of the white lie, we can now attempt to sharpen the definition of such. It has become obvious to us that defining the white lie as simply "a falsehood not meant to injure anyone, and of little moral import,"18 is insufficient. Rather, the white lie is of considerable moral import, as Immanuel Kant has acknowledged. And this is because it is not a mere falsehood. Rather, it harbours a truth—of a loving bond or coalition. This is the reason why many instances of lies of which one could claim had never been believed by anybody, still cannot be called white lies. Think, for example, of the former American Secretary of State Colin Powell's 2003 announcement that Iraq possessed weapons of mass de­ struction. Did anyone ever really believe this? (Why then was nobody particularly surprised or outraged when these weapons were never found?)19Or what of the constant preaching of austerity politics by the leading EU officials, even after the effects of these policies had revealed themselves as highly detrimental. Have there ever been any experts that really believed in the ability of these measures to ease or rescue suffering economies? A lie of this kind does not establish any alliances, 17 See M annoni, Clefs po u r l'Im aginaire ou l'Autre Scène, 63-164. 18 Sissela Bok, Lyin g. M o ra l C h o ice In P u b lic a n d P riva te L ife (New York: V intag e Books, 1989), 58. 19 Was it not a telling detail that during Pow ell's speech at the UN, the rep rod uction of Picasso's painting "G uernica" at the entrance of the se cu rity council had to be ve ile d — o th e rw ise it w as feared the painting m ight lend an u nfavorable com m ent to Powell's sp eech. David W alsh, "UN Conceals Picasso's 'G u ernica' for Powell's Presen tatio n," W orld S o c ia lis t W eb S ite , Feb ruary 8, 2003, accessed Novem ber 29, 2016, h ttp s://w w w .w sw s.o rg / en/articles/2003/02/g uer-f08.htm l. O nly veiling the painting allow ed Powell to present the film y veil that the attack on Iraq required as its ju stific a tio n .

56 W h ite Lie s, B lack T ru th s ...

solidarity, a loving or social bond. The only function it serves is to relieve the liar of the pressure of his superego. The same goes for a number of recent bureaucratic lies. For example, did anyone ever believe that the so-called "Bologna-reform" could really improve Europe's universities—in any respect? Is it not astonishing, just how stubbornly this reform was pushed through, despite the many warnings by all serious experts? The measure was a purely cynical reform, never really meant to convince anybody or improve anyone's condition—except that of the bureaucrats who, by doing so, created their own jobs. Again, the deception without a deceived only served to relieve them of the pressure of their superegos. Or take the propaganda surrounding and implementation of so-called political correctness (PC). Has anyone ever really believed that such clumsy and artificial ways of communicating could really improve peo­ ple's social relations? Of course, it was argued that PC in itself was a kind of white lie. There were theorists claiming that speaking us­ ing better, more appropriate words would bring about better societal environments. But today, after almost 30 years of PC talk, one has to acknowledge that this program has failed, utterly. What we find today is not more tolerance or respect, but rather the opposite. People of different opinions who might have listened to each other 30 years ago now simply start shouting at each other, claiming that the other used inappropriate terms. The failure of political correctness can probably well be explained by the fact that it is not a white lie. A white lie, like politeness, has to convince the naive observer. It has to create a perfect appearance—which is why politeness, as Alain pointed out, has to be learned and exercised.20 PC, however, never managed to create the perfect appearance. Soon after one "good" word was suggested in order to replace a "bad" one, the good word itself came under suspicion and had to be replaced by a new 20 "P oliteness is learned , like d ancing . He w ho does not know how to dance th in ks that the d iffcu lt part is learning the rules of dancing and m aking his m ovem ents conform to them ; this is only a su p e rficial view of the m atter; one m ust be able to dance w ith o u t stiffn e ss or aw kw ard n e ss, and therefo re w ith o u t fear." This rem ark can be applied litte rally to the problem s w ith PC: M any people th in k that the d ifficu lt part is learning the rules. But one m ust be able to speak w ith o u t stiffn e ss— and this can often only be achieved by transg ressing the rules. See A lain, On H a p p in e ss (New York: Frederick Ungar P ub lish in g, 1973), 221.

P fa lle r

57

one (for example, neither "black" nor "people of colour" nor "African American" nor any other designation ever managed to remain unprob­ lematic). This is due to the fact that PC always remained merely "well meant", i.e. a matter of faith, and never became one of belief. It remained a "pseudoservice" and did not really make the shift over to the side of the naive Other by assuming a perfect, convincing appearance. Thus the replacement of the superego by the big Other could not take place. The incessant dissatisfaction with every "good" new word proves this: such dissatisfaction is typical for the work of the superego. The common denominator of all postmodern, neo-liberal pseudo-pol­ itics, like the Bologna-reform, political correctness, identity politics etc. is their "top-down" structure: all of these measures were taken in the name of some underprivileged group, by bureaucratic boards that served to install and entrench their own power. The invocation of the underprivileged served as the "white", filmy pretext for the bureaucrats' coming into power. The arguments provided to legitimize these meas­ ures were never meant to convince anybody. The people who promoted these policies were very well aware of what they were doing; they were perfect "knaves" who just offered a few filmy "coffee"-like pretexts for the pursuit of their own interests. On the other hand, the critics who delivered sincere counter-arguments played the role of the "fools". Of course, they did not believe the reformer's knavish arguments; but at least they fell into the trap of believing that this struggle was about the arguments. In all of these cases, the object formed a perfectly well defined, cynical doublette. If ever there were any deceived idiots to be found, they were to be found not on the side of the object, but on the side of its theory, of its criticism. What we encounter here as variations of fake white lies—none of them meant to deceive anybody, but neither any of them establishing a social bond with regard to an invisible naive observer—brings us to consider anew the whole field of black and white, lies and truths. If white is the colour of innocence, then the fake white lies cannot sin­ cerely claim to be called white. They would rather pertain to the vast domain of black lies—lies unable to establish social bonds, regardless of whether these lies are deceptions with or without deceived people; i.e. whether they are really fooling somebody, or are entirely cynical superstructures.

58 W h ite L ie s, B lack T ru th s ...

Now if lies can be black or white, then the question has to be raised: does the same also hold for truths? Can it be that truth isn't always innocent, but sometimes of some malign quality that would qualify it to be called black?21Do we thus have to conceive of a kind of Aristotelian square that would put the white lie in a contradictory relationship with the white truth, and the black lie in a contradictory relationship with the black truth?

Part B: Black Truths

1. Truths that no one can sincerely mean When it comes to the issue of "black truths", we may remind ourselves of the many achievements in the field of black humour. In 1939, André Breton declared in the preface to his anthology of black humour, that a sense for this kind of humour was widespread and typical, an indispen­ sable prerequisite for being a contemporary artist or intellectual. Today, however, black humour appears to have been largely expelled from the field of art and intellectualism. In order to find at least some traces, one would have to engage in some archaeological fieldwork. One of Breton's historical examples is Jonathan Swift's "Modest Pro­ posal" from 1729 (Swift 2008), a proposal "for preventing the children of poor people in Ireland from being a burden to their parents or country, and for making them beneficial to the public." Swift's solution to both problems—widespread poverty amongst the adult masses, and the ter­ rible abundance of poor children—goes as follows: "I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricas­ see or a ragout.... I grant this food will be somewhat dear, and therefore very proper for landlords, who, as they have already devoured most of the parents, seem to have the best title to the children."22 21 For the m yth olog ies of black and w h ite in m od ernity see the beautiful volum e by M onika W agner and Helm ut Leth en. S ch w a rz -W e iß als E v id e n z , ed. M onika W agner and Helm ut Lethen (Fran kfu rt, New York: Cam pus, 2015). 22 Jo nath an S w ift, A M o d e s t P ro p o sa l & O th e r S h o rt P ieces In clu d in g A Tale o f Tab (H azleton: P enn sylvania State U n ive rsity Press, 2008), 7.

Pfa11er 59

A similar type of intervention had been suggested some years earlier, in 1705, by Bernard de Mandeville in his poem "The Grumbling Hive. Or Knaves Turned Honest", better known as "The Fable of the Bees", a text notorious for the claim made in its subtitle: "Private Vices, Pub­ lic Benefits". Against the sensualist assumptions of his philosophical contemporaries, according to whom people's sensual appetites would make them moral beings, and their being moral beings would be decid­ edly best for society, Mandeville argued that in the first place people's sensual inclinations were not moral; but, more importantly, being moral would not be good for society, either. Only a bee society full of ruthless egotists, uncannily similar to early capitalist civil conditions, could be a prospering society: “Then leave Complaints: Fools only strive To make a Great an Honest Hive T'enjoy the World's Conveniencies Be fam'd in War, yet live in Ease, Without great Vices, is a vain Eutopia seated in the Brain. Fraud, Luxuria and Pride must live, While we the Benefits receive.''23

What allows us to classify Swift's and Mandeville's interventions not only as examples of black humour, but also as "black truths", is the fact that they present exactly the reversed structure of the white lie: If white lies are deceptions but without a deceived, then these black truths may be quite right by what they say; but the question is: is it possible to mean what they say? While white lies are hard ly to be believed, black truths are hardly to be meant. Just like white lies, they present a split between the level of the enunciated content that may be quite rational and the level of enunciation that appears utterly crazy. Their affirmations appear to have been made from an "impossible" standpoint. When, for example, Mandeville claims that imperfect justice is good, and only small crooks are hanged while big crooks are set free, it is clear that both sides could not agree. The small crooks would say, "How can you find that good?" The big crooks, on the contrary, would argue, "How 23 Bernard de M andeville, Die B ienenfabel oder Private Laster, öffentliche Vorteile (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 79.

60 W h ite Lie s, B lack T ru th s ...

can you claim that this is true? Of course, some big crooks do escape occasionally, but is the justice apparatus not constantly improving in order to avoid such in the future?" In this sense, Louis Althusser emphasized that taking an impossible standpoint is a necessary requirement for critical theory. Althusser writes: "I remembered Machiavelli, whose rule of Method, rarely stated but always practised, was that one must think in extremes, which means within a position from which one states borderline theses, or, to make the thought possible one occupies the place of the impossible."24 White lies can be understood as "underaffirmations" of given facts; for the sake of some truth and love they build up a superstructure beyond these facts. Black truths, on the contrary, can be explained as "overaf­ firmations": they affirm a given state of affairs at a point precisely where this state of affairs itself, in order to persist, cannot fully affirm itself; where it needs a superstructure to cover it up. The classes interested in maintaining this state of affairs very much need some counterfactual illusion in order to justify the position that they themselves occupy within this state of affairs. 2. When full affirmation destroys its object The profiteers of Irish poverty, in Swift's case, would have found it most appalling to even consider eating poor children, and this tender sentiment is exactly what allows them to "eat" the poor parents, as Swift so nicely put it. Were they compelled to fully acknowledge their cannibalistic position they could probably not bear to maintain it any longer. The pressure of the superego would simply become too strong if not for the filmy pretexts shifting the weight of the issue over to some naive observer. This could be seen when in 2000 German performance artist Christoph Schlingensief showed his installation "Bitte liebt Österreich" next to the opera house in Vienna. It was suggested that asylum seekers were living in some metal containers and the Austrian public was encouraged, fol24 Louis Althusser, P h ilo so p h y a n d th e S p o n ta n e o u s P h ilo so p h y o f th e S c ie n tists (London: Verso, 1990), 209.

P fa lle r 61

lowing the model of the popular reality TV-shows of the time (like “Big Brother”), to vote out the candidate they liked least. It was promised that immediately after the decision was taken, the candidate would be expelled beyond the Schengen area borders. The only question was: should it be the cook from Kenya, or the engineer from Vietnam? What was particularly interesting here was the response to Schlingensiefs performance: it was precisely those Austrians and parties who were most hostile to asylum seekers who also most hated and attacked the performance.25 “Black truths” work the same way “paradoxical interventions” do in psychotherapy. Where the patient's resistance to his symptom works to support his symptom, the therapists intervene by paradoxically order­ ing the patient to indulge in his symptom: the notoriously lazy guy is told to be even lazier until the next session, the inhibited is told to go to a public space and behave in an even more inhibited fashion and so on. Here, just as in the case of “black truths”, the straightforward embracing of the evil attacks the very superstructure that, by apparently opposing this evil, is its main means of support. Black truths reveal here their position in our Aristotelian square: they “contradict” the black lies that are necessary to maintain bad states of affairs. Of course, this relationship is not merely a logical one.26 It is in fact a relationship of affective powers. The considerable power of black truths stems from the fact that they allow for a full “decathexis”: by saying one thing and its opposite at the same time, and by the humorous distance that they open up, they produce tremendous pleasure. Only this great amount of pleasure is able to replace the neurotic enjoyment of the hesitation involved in a position that constantly has to be covered up by an opposing superstructure. For it is quite a psychic effort to do one thing whilst constantly having to tell oneself a contrary story. The full ambivalence of black humour replaces this expensive contradictory bal­ ance between a basis and its superstructure. What black humour here 25 See for this Markus Lilienthal, Claus Philipp, Schlingensiefs A usländer raus. Bitte liebt Österreich, D okum entation (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). cf. Jennifer Friedlander, "Public Art and Radial

Democracy: Christoph Schlingensiefs Deportation Installation," Urbanity: The Discreet Sym ptom s o f Privatization an d the Loss o f Urbanity, ed. content.associates (Vienna: content.associates, 2013), 13-26,

h ttp ://w e b cach e .g o o g le u se rco n te n t.co m /se arch ?q = cach e:h ttp ://w w w .co n ten tasso ciates. cc/w p-content/uploads/2014/01/urbanity.pdf& gw s_rd= cr& ei= 8BhAW M jKCM q1afH 2pCg. 26 For this d ifference betw een logical con trad iction and real rep ug nan cy b etw een forces, see Lucio C o lle tti, "M arxism and the D ialectic," N ew L e ft R e v ie w 93 (1975).

62 W h ite L ie s, B lack T ru th s ...

allows to “laugh off” is the great amount of neurotic cathexis required to maintain a privileged—or even underprivileged—class position. 3. Crossing the imaginary axis of communication The way in which Swift, de Mandeville and Schlingensief managed to communicate with their readers or spectators can also be approached in relation to another square scheme: Jacques Lacan's “schema L”.27 Whereas ordinary communication always proceeds from “possible” standpoints, by speaking in a way that can be “meant” and by under­ standing the other in the way this other wants to be understood, black truths diametrically cross this axis. They listen to the other from a standpoint from which the other does not want to be understood, and they address the other at the point where this other actually stands. This is nicely illustrated by a joke that Sigmund Freud comments on: the artillerist Itzig joke.28The good, but unfortunately disobedient soldier Itzig is taken aside by his superior, who gives him some advice, telling him he should buy himself a cannon and start up his own business. The obvious nonsensical character of this advice is, as Freud remarks, coun­ tered by its rationale: the advice is clever, not in what it says but in the position from which it speaks. Putting its message into metalanguage this advice can, as Freud remarks, be reformulated as: “I want to give you some advice that is just as stupid as you are.” The advice mimics Itzig and his real position. Again, full ambivalence tackles the other's superstructured comfort-zone. And by not telling Itzig what he thinks, but instead “showing” it to him,29 the superior manages to cross the line of mutual imaginary understanding. He forces Itzig to “receive his (Itzig's) own message from the receiver in a reverted form.”30Thus he forces Itzig to see himself where he actually stands, instead of mirror27 See for this Jacqu es Lacan, É c rits (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1966), 53; Dylan Evans, A n In tro d u c to ry D ic tio n a ry o f L a c a n ia n P sy c h o a n a ly s is (London, New York: R outlegde, 1996),

168-171. 28 Sigm und Freud, Jo k e s a n d T h e ir R e la tio n s h ip to th e U n co n sc io u s (New York: W. W. Norton & Com pany, 1960), 64. 29 At this point, the d istinctio n b etw een "Sagen" und "Zeigen" (telling and dem onstratin g) introduced by Ludw ig W ittg enstein in his "Tractatus", sentences 4.121-4.1212, can be seen as a helpful parallel to Lacan's schem a L. Ludw ig W ittg enstein, T ra cta tu s lo g ic o p h ilo s o p h ic u s . L o g is c h - p h ilo s o p h is c h e A b h a n d lu n g (Fran kfurt am Main: Suhrkam p, 1979), 43. 30 Lacan, É c rits, 41.

P fa lle r

63

ing back to him the idealized self-image in which Itzig likes to see and recognizes himself. 4. The dark corners of European intercourse This ability to employ black humour and to address the other from an impossible standpoint appears to be part of a larger, typical old Euro­ pean cultural practice. Of course this doesn't exclude the notion that other cultures may not have developed the practice quite as brilliantly, and that outstanding individuals from elsewhere may not be able to un­ derstand or work with black humour equally well. Today, however, it ap­ pears that the political imagination of American culture, as it expresses itself in politically correct terms and identity politics programmes, is characterized by a specific forgetfulness of those crucial mechanisms and possibilities of human communication. Some years ago, I had the chance to witness a conversation at a confer­ ence between an American philosopher and her colleague, a woman from a former socialist European country. The American complained that she just learned that her beloved hamster back home in the U. S. had fallen ill, and that it needed some expensive treatment in order to survive. Now, she said, she had the money this would require, but on the other hand she felt a bit ashamed to invest so much in her hamster, considering how many poor children in India could be helped with this same money. Without any hesitation, the European woman offered her a brilliant solution to her predicament: “I know how to solve both prob­ lems”, she said. "Send your hamster to India. Then the starving children will eat it, gratefully.” Unfortunately, this example of truly Swifteaninspired heritage was completely shocking and incomprehensible to the poor American colleague. Despite the fact that both had read the same stock of continental philosophy, and were experts on darker authors and matters such as Hegel and de Sade, there was a profound cultural gap that separated them. What is more and more systematically overlooked by the American proponents of political correctness and similar ideologies, as well as by their followers all over the world, even in Europe, is the fact that speaking in "pure”, "innocent” terms builds up a superstructure—one that superstructures the most brutal realities. Is it not striking that a

64 W h ite Lie s, B lack T ru th s ...

country that constantly bombs other countries into "failed states" and battlegrounds of permanent civil war, a country that imprisons an amaz­ ing proportion of its own population—especially from amongst those groups that it names and addresses in politically correct terms—is on the other hand so terribly sensitive when it comes to words and takes so much care not to hurt anyone's feelings? Now, if brutal realities and sensitive talk are to be found quite regularly in this correlation, would it not be but consequent to tackle this politics of sensitive talk in order to deprive the brutal realities of the filmy pretext they require? Slavoj Žižek astutely points out that sensitive talk isn't limited only to issues like minorities or underprivileged groups, but can also touch on brutal realities themselves.31 When the CIA starts referring to (their) methods of torture like waterboarding as "enhanced interrogation techniques"32and the killing of civilians as "collateral damage", this tells a kind of uncanny truth about political correctness—one that could even be understood as a kind of "Itzig" reply to such policies. Of course, this naming has an even more uncanny side to it: the delib­ erately transparent filmy cover-up, the most cynical deception without a deceived, without even the slightest attempt to disguise it as a white lie. On the contrary, it's the utterly obscene fact that for US authorities today the use of torture has become standard procedure, and one they don't even make any effort to conceal. The purpose of the "correct" naming of it is not intended to make it look somehow better or nicer; it only points up the fact that these methods have now assumed the status of openly acknowledged official normality. Whereas PC works as a superstructure for brutal realities, this special case of PC is the of­ ficial utter shamelessness of no longer caring to construct the slightest filmy cover-up—an uncanny double dose of black humour, yet without any humorous distance: for it is uttered not from an impossible posi­ tion, but from one that takes itself as most real and justified by virtue of force alone. When this happens, a system has shifted not only from the neurotic "foolish" position of covering up its dirty sides with flimsy, filmy pretexts to the "impossible" perverted position of the "knave" who 31 See Slavoj Žižek, Ž iž e k 's Jo k e s (D id You H ea r th e O ne a b o u t H e g e l a n d N e g a tio n ?) (C am bridge: MIT Press, 2014), 29. 32 "These Are the 13 'Enhanced Interrogation Techniques' the CIA Used on Detainees," Business Insider, December 10,2014, accessed October 2,2016, h ttp ://w w w .b u sin essin sid er.co m / th e-13-enhanced-interrogation-techniques-the-cia-used-on-detainees-2014-12.

P fa lle r

65

answers with black humour, but has progressed to a psychotic position that not only takes into account acting immorally but also doesn't even make the slightest claim of morality whatsoever. For the issue of torture counts then what Blaise Pascal stated with re­ gard to inequality: "Inequality must necessarily exist among men, it is true; but that once granted the door is open not only to the most absolute rule but to the most absolute tyranny."33 Again, we find here a crucial distinction between acknowledging a truth and telling ("granting") it. Once authorities take on as their official, explicit position what black humour critics may have attacked as their implicit position, the field of argument is left entirely and a transition is made towards pure violence as the only currency—a state of matters which may appear plausible to some US authorities, given the apparent superiority of US armed forces almost all over the world. Still the "neurotic" use of PC as a filmy superstructure and its "psychotic" use as an obscene "coming out" have one philosophical root in common. Both are grounded in the assumption that human beings are confined to their "identity" particularities, and unable to transcend them, even for a moment. This is what the old European tradition of black humour, to the contrary, regards as possible: Itzig's superior regards it as pos­ sible to make the black joke about Itzig and to let Itzig transgress his particular confinements to the position of humour,34 so that Itzig can laugh about himself, together with his superior. Black humour is the practical outcome of a philosophy that allows us to regard laughter not as an exclusive instance of enjoyment that is constantly stolen from one person by another,35 but as a quality of life that can be shared in adult solidarity.

33 Blaise Pascal, P en sées (London: Penguin, 1995), 190. 34 In his essay on hum our, Freud has d escribed the hum orous attitu d e as one th at shifts from the p ersp ective of the ego to that of the superego, thus allow ing a su b ject to look upon h im self from a higher p e rsp ective, liberated from its p articu lar concerns, and w ith am u sem ent. Sigm und Freud, On H u m o u r, Standard Editio n, Vol. 21,159-66. 35 For the issue of the ty p ica lly postm odern fear of "th eft of enjoym ent", see Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel an d the Critique o f Ideology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 203.

66 W h ite Lie s, B lack T ru th s ...

Mladen Dolar Who is the Victim?

Let me take as a starting point Frantz Fanon's Black Skin, White Masks. This extraordinary book was published in 1952, at a time of anti-colonial struggles in which Fanon himself was fully involved up until his death in 1961, acquiring the status of their figurehead. Reading it so many dec­ ades later it seems, in retrospect, to surpass by far the bulk of the vast domain of subsequent post-colonial studies. One of his key arguments could be freely rendered as follows: in order to oppose white colonial supremacy one has to use universal concepts that are the legacy of the Enlightenment and thus in secret connivance with the oppression, con­ cepts that one has learned from the oppressor and belong to his culture. Yet, one has to avoid the contrary—falling into the trap of asserting the black identity, the black tradition and values, the blackness that cannot allow itself to be sublated by "white concepts". Here are some quotes: "In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of color. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored. I will not make myself the man of any past...1It is not the black world that governs my behavior. My black skin is not a repository for specific values...21have not the right as a man of color to research why my race is superior or inferior to another. I have not the right as a man of color to wish for a guilt complex to crystallize in the white man regarding the past of my race. I have not the right as a man of color to be preoccupied with ways of trampling on the arrogance of my former master. I have neither the right nor the duty to demand reparations for my subjugated ancestors. There is no black mission; there is no white burden...31 do not want to be the victim of the Ruse of a black world. My life must not be devoted to making an assessment 1 Frantz Fanon, B la ck S k in , W hite M a sk s (New York: Grove Press, 2007), 201. It is quite asto nishing how Fanon, in 1952, takes Hegel and Lacan as the prim ary references for his endeavor. 2 Ibid., 202. 3 Ibid., 203.

of black values. There is no white world; there is no white ethic - any more than there is a white intelligence...41am a black man, and tons of chains, squalls of lashes, and rivers of spit stream over my shoulders. But I have not the right to put down roots... I have not the right to become mired by the determinations of the past. I am not a slave to slavery that dehumanized my ancestors."5 The passages are most remarkable. We could say for the present pur­ pose that Fanon's polemic is twofold: first, it is against victimization. Of course it is absolutely true that the black man, whose structural placement and pathology he tries to scrutinize, has been the victim of colonization, there is no way that one could possibly minimize the massive cruelty and subjugation, no way to come up with any excuses for it, to relativize or to alleviate it. Yet, Fanon is adamantly opposed to lamenting the severe repression of the black culture and the ways it has been historically suppressed and silenced, and opposes the glorification of the supposed ineffable treasures of one's own tradition, the mystifica­ tion of one's identity and experience, the special black values set apart from the white world, exalting one's irreducible specificity. In short, he adamantly opposes what is currently called "the politics of identity". He thoroughly opposes the political agenda that would draw its principle resources from one's status of the victim, and would base its demands and credibility in victimhood. While it is absolutely true that the black culture and tradition have been cruelly suppressed, that the colonial subject was the victim of centuries of violence and robbery, this never­ theless cannot be a good or sufficient basis for the political struggle for emancipation. Being a victim is not enough for a political subjectivity. Moral indignation over the injustices that have been inflicted on the black culture is completely justified, yet it is nevertheless a trap and can become an obstacle. Secondly, the polemic is directed against the endless culpabilization of the perpetrators, the white colonizers and their present heirs. It is absolutely true that they are guilty, responsible for massive crimes, it is absolutely true that they have never assumed their responsibility and have invented all kinds of stratagems to evade their historic guilt, and the obligations that should follow from it. Yet the constant ascription of guilt to this white other can, nevertheless, also be 4 Ibid., 204. 5 Ibid., 204-205.

68 W ho is th e V ictim ?

a trap. The guilt that is ascribed is infinite and unrequitable, it doesn't merely concern the past wrongs but their present consequences. The dire conditions in which the ex-colonies found themselves, and still find themselves in today, is a consequence of the historic injustice, centuries of repression, the imposition of colonial rule. The ways in which the ex­ colonial subjects continue to be treated are to be submitted to severe criticism. Yet, there is a trap: if the colonial other is to be endlessly and relentlessly blamed for the bulk of black troubles, there is a trap in the tacit supposition that it is but the other that prevented us then and is still preventing us, now, from being ourselves. If this is the deadlock of the position of the oppressed that Fanón wishes to call into question, there is the symmetrical deadlock in the position of the "us”, the heirs of the shameful colonial past and the agents of its continuation with different means. To see in the other essentially a victim, and to assume the culpability for this victimhood in endless self-culpabilization—this is the tenor of so much of the discourse of post-colonial studies. Again, the other is indeed the victim, and "we” are indeed historically responsible, yet this doesn't amount to a political stance. Furthermore, this discourse often doesn't even notice the tacit racist suppositions that are assumed in the anti-racist discourse: to see in the other merely a victim is to deprive the other of its subjectivity, of its own habitus, reducing it to the object and the casualty of the rule historically imposed on it, thus unwittingly perpetuating this status of a mere victim. The flipside of this is the common glorification of the other culture and identity that have been suppressed, which easily falls into the mystification of such. Fanón opposes both.6 There is a complex, a syndrome, an intellectual-affective knot, that one could call (I apologize for the inelegance) lamentation-indignationvictimization-culpabilization. Fanon's lucid criticism is directed pre­ cisely against this syndrome. It is crucial to insist, yet again, that this is the problem not of factual truth, which is indisputable, but of the subject of enunciation, its positioning and its political stance. All the statements about the victims of centuries-long oppression and about the responsibility of the colonizers are true and justified, they have to be carefully studied, one has to be adamant to prevent any obfuscation; 6 "The black m an, h ow ever sincere, is a slave to the past. But I am a m an, and in this sense the Peloponnesian War is as m uch m ine as the invention of the com pass." Ibid., 200.

D o lar 69

yet the subject of enunciation has to situate itself in a way that avoids victimization and culpabilization as its primary resource. This can be the lesson we can take from Fanon regarding the present "refugee crisis". Although we are dealing with very different circum­ stances—not what Fanon had in mind—so much of the discourse around this crisis, the vast majority of it, appears to fall precisely under the gen­ eral heading of lamentation-indignation-victimization-culpabilization. One laments the massive amount of human suffering involved in it, with all the calls for sympathy and humanitarian aid. One shows one's moral indignation at the European incapacity to deal with it and the shameful cynicism it presents, the barbed wire fences which stand as the monu­ ment of and to the new European politics of exclusion, or rather as the conspicuous new avatar of the old politics of exclusion. One presents the refugees as the victims of the wars that were irresponsibly thrust upon them. One deplores the innocent victims, but becomes circumspect when they turn out to be not entirely destitute and blameless. We love our victims innocent, we empathize with them as long as they appear to be innocent, but the moment they display some trait that is not en­ tirely amiable—the sexual harassment in Cologne, the fights among the refugees, the possessions they may have allegedly proving they are not so very destitute, their patriarchal culture—the sympathy is cut short. Beyond that limit, if they display any subjectivity at all—other than as victims—they become suspects, potential terrorists, fraudulent asylum seekers seeking economic gain. On the other hand, there is the culpa­ bilization of the West, which caused it all. And of course it's absolutely true, one accuses the despicable Western politics that meddled with the Middle East in its pursuit of its own economic interests and political calculations, without any concern for the consequences. This can serve as a twist in treating the problematic traits that refugees can display, for they can be accounted for by the centuries of colonial politics and its present prolongation—they are not responsible for it themselves, having been the victims, they are not really the subjects of their comportment, but instead the mere mirror of what we have done to them. The paradigm has its Right-wing version, which stands very much at the core of the rise of the new populisms now mushrooming across Europe. Victimization can take the opposite perspective: we are the victims of the wave of the barbarians now flooding Europe, the spread

70 W ho is th e V ictim ?

of Islam is endangering our European values and way of life, they are a heavy burden on our economic resources, they are stealing our jobs, our wealth, our enjoyment. It is us who are innocent, and the other is intruding upon our most treasured traditions, it's not us who invaded them, they are invading us. Our subjecthood is essentially defined by victimhood. The blame is put on the incapacity of European politics to protect us, the multiculturalism that was already pervasive in the past and has now reached new proportions and dimensions (with Merkel, so critical of multiculturalism in the past, suddenly welcoming migrants). And there is no shortage of lamenting and moral indignation. Of course the two ways of approaching or employing this paradigm are not in any way symmetrical; it's obvious that the Right-wing version, now very successful, is based on the obfuscation of the causes of the present crisis, on a very selective treatment of the "facts",7 it relies on the old stock of racist fantasies, now revamped ("the other stealing our enjoyment" is the vintage core of racism), on stirring up resentment and fear. Yet, there is something troubling and symptomatic in the fact that there is a certain core that both versions share, that they both partake in the syndrome that I (maladroitly) try to spell out as lamentationindignation-victimization-culpabilization. This can almost serve as a checklist; one can make a check for each of these traits when reading the bulk of news media and other reactions to the refugee crisis. Victimization is perhaps the most symptomatic item on this checklist. Its basic assumption can be spelled out like this: being wounded, in­ jured, harmed is what entitles one to political subjectivity. Presenting oneself, or the other, as a victim is the basis of entitlement and the call for protection. Having been wounded entails the demand that there should be an instance that has the capacity and the duty to protect me.8 The curious flipside is that what is supposed to entitle me to political subjectivity at the same time deprives me of it, for I present myself not as an agent, but as a helpless victim that the other should take care of. There can be no question of the various ways of the connivance of the 7 Not seeing the "facts" has also been part of the Left liberal paradigm : u nd erestim atin g the am ount of d iscon ten t that enabled Trum p's victo ry, the position of the w h ite w orking class, deem ing Bernie Sanders too radical to succeed etc. 8 I m ust recall here the p erspicacio us classical analysis of this in W endy Brow n, S ta te s o f In ju ry (Princeto n: Princeton U n iversity Press, 1995). Tw enty years on th in gs becam e far m ore d rastic than could have been im agined th en.

D o lar

71

victim, which was the courageous main point of Fanon's analysis of the pathology of the colonial subject and precisely that which enabled him to see beyond the victimhood. Any exploration in this direction is im­ mediately suspicious, for it endangers the pure status of the victim—a "collaborating" victim is no longer a victim, whatever the nature of this connivance; and such a supposition often stands in the way of serious analysis of power relations, which are never clear-cut and present a messy heterogeneous image of what Foucault called the microphysics of power. Furthermore, any such exploration is quickly criticized for being an overt or tacit exculpation of the oppressor, blurring the line between the victim and the perpetrator. Fanon, again, can be the guide: no exculpation, but also no victimization. The term minority, in its double meaning, is highly apposite here: on the one hand minorities are "by definition" victims of the majoritarian rule and thus particularly in need of protection and of painstaking, vigilant care; on the other hand, minority as the state of not being of age ("being under the legal age of full responsibility", as the dictionary has it) is what is being unwittingly produced, reproduced and prolonged, for the very form of demands retains the form of minority and makes it persist. Be­ ing the victim means that all of the blame is on the other, victim is "by definition" passive, and claiming the status of the victim as the political resource also entails the perpetuation of passivity. Victimhood is the source of demands addressed to the other, who should do something to defend and shelter the victim; it is not conceived as a source of one's own political action. Thus empathy with the victim so often precludes what is most dearly needed: solidarity in action. Victimization is also a major resource of political correctness, where so much energy is invested into the proper naming of minorities, whether racial, sexual, religious, etc., and into respecting their particular identi­ ties and ways of life. Curiously, the working class, the basis of capitalist exploitation, doesn't usually feature on this list; the cultural and iden­ tity struggles inspire so much more passion and engagement than the political and the economic issues. The other, whom one is to protect, is basically seen as subject to injury and tacitly treated as an infant. The culture of trigger warnings in American universities, which still arouse some perplexity in Europe (but no doubt Europe will soon follow suit), relies on the same premises, on the subject conceived as the site

72 W ho is th e V ictim ?

of potential injury who should be warned in advance. This alarmism can go to great lengths, to issuing warnings over Dante's Inferno (this is not a fictitious example), but no amount of such warnings can shield anyone from the fact that the bulk of our cultural and political tradition has not been politically correct; it was highly injurious in so many ways, and finding it offensive doesn't help introducing new ways of analysing and counteracting it. Nor can it shield anyone from stepping outside the university and being exposed to the crudest kind of politically incorrect speech by none other than the American president. If people in academia lose their jobs over some contravention of the political correctness code (remember Phillip Roth's The Human Stain, written at a time when this tide was still far lower), then the person who would be most immedi­ ately fired in the vast majority of universities can be elected president. But Trump's victory is not the result of his "trumpling" all over political correctness, proving himself as someone who dares to courageously defy all the pieties, the subtle rules, delicate sensibilities and considera­ tions; instead it depends in large part on his using the same paradigm, which, as I already said, can be seen in different perspectives, depend­ ing on who is cast in the role of the victim. Victimization is open and subject to multiple uses, while its mechanism can remain largely the same. Trump's message was: you are the real victims, not the racial, sexual etc. minorities that the Left has been talking about to no end— victims of the establishment, of globalization, of migrations, victims of unemployment, of Obamacare; victims of the Mexican, Muslim or Chinese Other, etc.9You are the real victim, the victim who has the right to a say and the right to strike back, and I am the one who will protect you. His position and status depend on prolonging and perpetuating the victimization, and thus on maintaining the passivity of the victim; and there's little doubt the billionaire protector will ensure there will be no shortage of victimhood. I should here reiterate that of course I fully endorse the struggles of the minorities that political correctness strives to protect, their claims are fully justified and have to be pursued. What I here try to call into serious question is the framework in which those claims are made, which is not a sufficient basis for the political. The fact that class struggle, to use the 9 My arg um ent here in te rse cts w ith the arg um ent made by A lenka Z u pan čič in the sam e volum e, looking at the sam e com p lex from d iffe re nt p e rsp e ctives.

D o lar 73

old-fashioned Marxist term, is so often left out of the discussion in the very midst of all the talk about capitalism is a highly symptomatic omis­ sion, as is the fact that the very use of class struggle as a key concept so often raises objections of “class reductionism", as if by pointing out its universality one would push aside the entire vast area of “particulari­ ties" with which “identity politics" is concerned, without realizing how one can only go hand-in-hand with the other. Another perspective on this syndrome is the use of the term fascism. The ghost of fascism is haunting Europe, and apparently it has reached America as well, or so the alarming news and multitude of commenta­ tors tell us. In this constellation the term fascism most often refers to a predicament, and largely functions rather as the name of the absence of the concept. The trouble with using fascism as a “description" in political struggle is, in the first instance, that it is a highly affectively laden term. It is a term that immediately calls for affective reaction, for an immediate emo­ tional response rather than for reflection. If something truly qualifies as fascism then one is called upon to condemn this entity immediately and in the most resolute terms, no wavering and no compromise; any hesitation could be seen as a moral flaw. The implication of the term is: don't think, condemn. Don't think, but react, and since this is an extreme situation your reaction should also be suitably extreme. This termphenomenon is the reincarnation of the evil that remains so very vivid in the European memory, and modern Europe is founded on the victory over this evil. Anyone who witnessed the dissolution of Yugoslavia will be reminded of the widespread use of the term when different sides of the conflict endeavoured to mobilize followers and stir up affects. In Serbian propaganda the Croats were depicted as fascists, a reincarna­ tion or prolongation of the Ustasha regime, as were the Slovenes and particularly the Kosovars, while the Croat press painted Milosevic in Serbia as fascism reincarnated. Now Ukrainians are depicted as fascists by the current Russian propaganda and so on. This effect of immediate affective reaction, as opposed to thoughtful action, is not reserved for the “populist" uses of the term fascism. The Left has often been inclined to qualify the term as any use of violence by the democratic regimes, any occasion when the repressive state apparatus comes to the fore, or more generally for any other occasional excess exercising of political

74 W ho is th e V ictim ?

power. The temptation to see fascism in every excess was (and still is) great, for the word has the power to mobilize like no other (although its frequent use can quickly serve to produce the opposite effect). The temptation was also great not to confine the use of fascism to moments of excess, but to see in fascism the constant hidden truth of the appar­ ently normal run of liberal democracy and capitalism, to disentangle its true fascist core from under the misleading democratic disguise.10 As the Frankfurt School slogan ran, “the continuation of fascism by other means." The generalization for which this word seems so apt had the effect of depriving the term of its conceptual content and to reduce it to the affective marker. The other effect of the term fascism, given its inflammatory nature, is stigmatization. If a political movement is designated as fascist, then it is clear that it has to be pushed out of the political space; we can have no democratic deliberation or political discussion with fascists, they have to be excluded, banned, proscribed, they cannot possible figure as partners in any exchange. Fascist is the Other of the political; even more, it is the Other of the human. The designation serves to produce an anathema rather than to address and rearticulate the concerns that are fuelling such movements. So the danger is that the term fascism largely functions as the affective trigger and the ban rather than a call for reflection, analysis, and collec­ tive action. Furthermore, since we are indeed dealing with catastrophic phenomena, we tend to vent our feelings and rage using strong words, and we tend to congratulate ourselves for being thereby radical. This easily lends itself to lamentation and indignation over the catastrophic state of affairs. But use of the term will most likely not amount to a politically effective stance; instead it can easily lend itself to fighting populism by populist means and will in most cases make things even worse. One may well ask if they can be worse than they already are— indeed they can. The term has the further conceptual disadvantage that one tends to reduce any new phenomena to an old and well-known constellation, to find the familiar old devil under the ever-new highly problematic faces and facets of the new opponents. 10 Cf. e.g. the fam ous special issue of Les tem p s m o d e rn e s : N o u ve a u fa scism e , n o u v e lle d é m o c ra tie in 1972.

D o lar

75

The parallel with fascism no doubt exists. The new populisms are pros­ pering in the aftermath of a great economic crisis, just as German fascism did in the 1930s. The recent financial crisis was of colossal proportions, it entailed the greatest state intervention into the economy ever, and the huge private debts incurred by financial capital were shamelessly cov­ ered by public resources and loaded onto the shoulders of the populations via austerity measures and more. All of this was accomplished by the very people whose primary mantra was deregulation—deregulation of the economy, of the entire financial sector and beyond, and the rejection or withdrawal of any state intervention. No one was held accountable. The result was the growing rage of the population at large, the loss of cred­ ibility of established political institutions and parties, resentment and helplessness. The political question was and remains how to articulate this rage, and this is where Left paradigms have been competing with the populist ones. There have been a number of Left movements that have tried to produce such an articulation, from the Occupy Wall Street movement to indignados, la nuit debout, Siriza, Podemos, and particu­ larly Bernie Sanders. They have not proved successful for a variety of reasons: lack of political organization and program, the discourse of moral outrage rather than political thought, the despicable and shameful handling of the Greek crisis by Europe, the absence of an international front, the calculations and intrigues of the (American) Democratic Party etc. The major and larger reason lies in the fact that all of the traditional Left parties have abandoned the social-democratic agenda that was their background-source-framework for so many decades, they gave up on even moderate reformist politics and shamelessly espoused the neoliber­ al paradigm, and in the process merely endowing it with a more "human" face. They became largely indistinguishable from what was supposed to be their opponent. They didn't even try to articulate the widespread rage and worse, they didn't even seriously notice it. They accepted the terrain of political struggle defined by the neoliberal agenda, while the new Left movements were too scattered and disorganised to invent a new agenda. Reagan's neoliberal revolution in the 1980s was followed by Clinton, Blair and Schroder, whose main function was to normalize it, make it acceptable with only minor corrections; the catastrophe of the Bush years was followed by the stabilizing effect of the Obama presidency (along with conservative governments across Europe after 2008), which never called into real question the causes of the catastrophe; leading up

76 W ho is th e V ictim ?

to Trump. Hegel said in the Phenomenology: "... for only what is wholly bad is implicitly charged with the immediate necessity of changing round into its opposite."11 It is as if the Left has been rendered dumbstruck, waiting for the worst to end and turn around, and the lesson of the last decades is far from Hegel's optimism: the wholly bad can always get worse, and there will be no turn or overturning of anything unless we ourselves bring it about. Yet, the catastrophic perspective, marked among other things by the alarming voices announcing the rise of fascism, is perhaps the last thing we need. Also because it can easily fall prey to the logic of the old joke "the situation is catastrophic, but not yet serious", where lamentation about catastrophe simply dispenses with reflection and action, covers up their absence and can itself contribute to the progress of the very ca­ tastrophe it bemoans. This intervention had no other ambition than the preliminary one: to take stock of a certain deadlock in the discourse of the Left, the syndrome lamentation-indignation-victimization-culpabilization that underlies, on the one hand, so much of the identity politics, political correctness and post-colonial studies; and on the other hand, so much of the discourse on the migrant crisis and the rise of populism. Inventing a discourse that could leave it behind is no easy task, but is nevertheless of paramount importance.

11 G. W. F. Hegel, P h e n o m e n o lo g y o f S p irit (O xford: O xford U n iversity Press, 1977), 206.

D o lar 77

Saroj Giri Parasitic Anti-Colonialism

Today, most Western countries seem to be slipping into some kind of white ethno-nationalism, railing demagogue-like against neo-con core values like "free trade", and willing to disown the hegemonic whiteness of a global empire. The empire seems scared to play the liberal-imperial­ ist game of universal human rights, as we witness the US under Trump unwilling to act as the leader of the "free world" upholding "universal values" and instead imagining a very particularistic, wall-loving, guiltfree white Christendom. Pundits have already marked 2017 as the year of the called "geo-political recession" and the end of Pax Americana.1 Choosing to "make America great again" now seriously diverges from "making Empire great again". No more the secularist or republican "facade" that anti-Eurocentric theorists like Talal Asad unpack to reveal the underlying "core" of JudeoChristian values and "white normativity": now the latter will come all on its own, without any "transcendent mediation" of secularism or any idea of "universal human rights" or formal equality for all.2The imperial spread of the secular nation state, or "the ethnographic state", might no longer be key to the Western imperialist arsenal. In his cutting "Cornerstone Speech" of 1861, American lawyer and politi­ cian Alexander H. Stephens rejected the idea of equality for the "white homeland". Today Richard Spencer, the alt-Right ideologue close to the Trump administration, approvingly writes: "In his greatest address, 'The Cornerstone of the Confederacy/ he (Stephens) did not speak (men­ daciously) about 'states rights' or any kind of Constitutional legality. He stressed that the Confederacy was based on the conclusion that Thomas Jefferson was wrong; the 'cornerstone' of the new state was the physical, 1 Ian Brem m er, "These Are the Top Ten Risks of the World in 2017," Tim e, Ja n u ary 3, 2017, accessed Ja n u ary 4, 2017, http://tim e.com /4620424/ian-brem m er-risk-report-top-10-risks/. 2 Talal Asad, F o rm a tio n s o f th e S e c u la r: C h ristia n ity, Islam , M o d e rn ity (Palo Alto: Stanford U n iversity Press, 2003), 5.

philosophical, and moral truth of human inequality."3 Further, Brexit and a possible "Frexit", with other possible "exits" to follow, makes clear the writing on the wall. "The West" is withdrawing into a particularistic white nationalism. The hyperreal "West" is cooling down. Secondly, at its heart though, something quite new is visible: a particu­ lar political articulation of what earlier looked like only an economic relationship, the relationship between immigrants and big companies in the United States. Recall that the most strident opposition to Donald Trump's "Muslim ban" came from Silicon Valley and other big compa­ nies (Facebook, Apple, Goldman Sachs, Nike, even Ford and General Electric). Some CEOs personally joined pro-immigrant protests, even as Apple and Amazon threatened legal options against the ban order. We got a glimpse of what can be provisionally called the International of the Postcolonial Immigrant and Silicon Valley. It's as though the abstraction of the network society and digital economy, not to speak of the universalism of capital, or the liberal anonymity of the profit motive, is the only bulwark against particularistic fascism and racism! What is important for us here is the emergence of a new universalism abutting this International: emanating from what we associate with the non-West or with "immigrant entrepreneurs", we'll call it "profes­ sionalized universalism" following Edward Said's term "professional­ ized particularism".4 Thirdly, the political vocalization of this International coincides with the rise of non-Western sub-imperialisms (Russia, China, India) aspiring to be "global players" if not a global hegemon—not to mention "strong leaders" like Narendra Modi in India, Duterte in Philippines and Shinzo Abe in Japan (Abe being a very close ally of Modi and Trump). These new non-Western concentrations of power and accumulations of capital might not only use domination as a modality of rule, but may also resort to hegemony (isn't learning Mandarin increasingly part of the national school curriculum in several African countries?). They may now (re-) play the game of the (il)liberal abstract promise of universal progress and equality and promote the rights of something like the non-white 3 Richard B. Spencer, "The M etapo litics of A m erica," R a d ix , Ju ly 4, 2015, accessed Septem b er 5, 2016, http://w w w .rad ixjournal.eo m /journal/2014/7/4/ the-m etapolitics-of-am erica. 4 Edw ard Said, "O rientalism Reconsidered," C u ltu ra l C ritiq u e 1 (1985): 103.

80 P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

propertied male—even as, on the other side, the "white propertied male" slowly gives way to the "white working class male", Hillary Clinton's "deplorables", as the idiomatic figure, the "political subject", of white ethno-nationalism.5 Hegemony or no hegemony, one thing seems sure with regard to the non-West, ranging from the immigrant in the West to the third world state order: it's no longer a marginal particularity. One sense in which it has not represented such a particularity is when we keep in mind its connection with the system of third world states. That the third world immigrant is connected to the third world bourgeoisie or that it completely imagines its own upward mobility within the framework of capitalism has certainly been remarked upon by postcolonial theorists. Spivak once wrote: "And here a strong connection, indeed a complic­ ity, between the bourgeoisie of the Third World and migrants in the First World cannot be ignored."6 She also calls economic migration to the West "Eurocentric", a very strong claim to make: "Eurocentric economic migration (and even political exile) persists in the hope of justice under capitalism."7 She does not, however, develop this point and instead lapses into abstractly treating the non-West in terms of a pure particularity. To us, however, it is clear that the particularist/culturalist overload al­ ways carried by the "non-West" (in contrast to the universalist/secularist hegemonic West) surely seems to give way to some kind of expansive articulation, a new kind of "universalism". On the other hand, we are also looking at the present conjuncture, where the "local"—the school or the street, the office or the factory floor—is overdetermined by the global, by the "war on terror", or by geopolitics more generally. It's as though the drone-laden Syrian or Libyan skies were looming over Molenbeek, Luton in the UK, or the Parisian banlieues. 5 Strictly sp eaking , H illary Clinton used the term "d eplo rable" for the hom ophobic, Islam o phobic racist Right-w ing, and she kept the w orking people out of it. And yet by claim ing th at the "d eplo rables" con stitute 50 percent of Trum p su pp orters she seem s to have w id ened the net too m uch. Chas Danner, "H illary Clinton Says Half of Trum p Su ppo rters Are 'D eplorab le'," N ew York M a g a z in e , Septem b er 11, 2016, accessed O ctob er 10, 2016, h ttp://nym ag .com /daily/intelligencer/2016/09/clinton-says-half-of-trum p-supp ortersa re -d e p lo rab le .h tm l. 6 Gayatri Spivak, C ritiq u e o f P o s tc o lo n ia l R e a so n (Cam bridge: Harvard U n iversity Press, 1999), 381. 7 Ibid., 380.

G iri

81

These places are now what Balibar calls "global suburbs".8Here, every­ thing takes the form of a "conflictual universality" with transnational dimensions—what he calls the cosmopolitical.9Hence, "The assignment of religious discourses to the place of the particular (is) impossible" in Europe today.10 And, further, that "a public discourse and institution that derives its legitimacy from a national (and nationalist) tradition is no more universal or universalistic than a transnational religious discourse".11The "nationalist tradition" here is the supposedly universalist/secularist French republicanism. Note that Balibar here alludes to some kind of equivalence between this secular universalism and the transnational Islamist discourse, between secular fundamentalism and religious fundamentalism. Now this read­ ily contrasts with the standard leftist/liberal insistence on treating the "immigrant" or "non-white" non-Western as (always) the "particular" or the "marginalized", or the subaltern that is yet to speak. Colonialism as a "model"

But if the non-West is not a particular but now stands for a putative uni­ versalism, then what happens to the idea of Western colonialism? What happens to the paradigm of colonialism upheld by postcolonial theory? Balibar fires the first volley here when he seeks to part ways with coloni­ alist and anti-colonialist approach in order to understand the immigrant situation in "postcolonial" France today. The colonization idea—the idea that, for example, the 1995 uprising in the French banlieues is a "boomerang" on the colonizer—can constitute a symbolic reference, but not a model. Balibar explains: "The colonial (and a fortiori pre-colonial) past of earlier generations can constitute a symbolic reference, even a retaliatory weapon against French national good conscience, but not properly speaking a schema or model for constructing contemporary political identities. History does not repeat itself."12

8 Étien ne Balibar, "Cosm opolitanism and Secularism : Controversial Legacies and Prosp ective Interrogations," G rey R o o m 44 (2011). 9 Ibid., 7. 10 Ibid., 12. 11 Ibid. 12 Étien ne Balibar, "Uprisings in the B a n lie u e s ," C o n ste lla tio n s 1 (2007): 60.

82

P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

This contrasts immediately with the discourses that so strongly invoke the colonialism discourse to understand, say, the immigrant or the "refugee crisis" or the racial situation in the West today. One of the most often used phrases in the context of the burkini issue and the repressive ban on the veil in France has been Gayatri Spivak's "white men saving brown women from brown men"—which clearly invokes the "colonial­ ism approach".13"Colonialism" here is not just a symbolic reference but an analytical framework, a model. Here, we must ask what the contin­ ued existence and often-enthusiastic deployment of the "colonialism approach" means and points to. It will become clear that anti-colonialism today hangs like an artifice, an over-stretch, and a plainly ideological contrivance, serving to cover up this new aggressive, post-West universal. In overlooking the emergence of this universal and always treating it (the non-West) as a particular, the politics of anti-colonialism and anti-racism, renders invisible those further down the ladder. Thus, for example, it privileges the postcolonial immigrant over the blacks and the indigenous. As we will see, this poli­ tics is a parasite on the struggles of the oppressed and in fact silently presides over new avenues of capital accumulation. In his critique of historicism and essentialist Western universalism, Edward Said used an evocative expression: "professionalized parti­ cularism".14In an anti-Orientalist and anti-colonial mode, he insists on "fight(ing) to remain free of the dominance and professionalized par­ ticularism that come with historicist systems."15He wants “to dissipate and re-dispose the material of historicism into radically different objects and pursuits of knowledge."16But we must pose a question to Said: what if today this historicism and universalism associated with the hegemonic Empire is itself on the wane, such that the non-West is not really a pro­ fessionalized particularism but is set on the long path towards assuming the status of a professionalized universalism.

13 14 15 16

Spivak, C ritiq u e o f P o s tc o lo n ia l R e a so n , 284. Said, "O rientalism Reconsidered," 103. Ibid. Ibid.

G iri

83

Rule of colonial difference

My attention here moves to an essay by Salman Rushdie written in 1982 and poignantly titled "The new empire within Britain".17 He re­ calls E. R Thompson's assertion that Britain is "the last colony of the British Empire."18 Rushdie is at pains to see the rabid racism faced by non-white people in the UK. He in fact notes two important devel­ opments. One is the emergence of "a new catchword: 'multiculturalism'", which is "the latest token gesture towards Britain's blacks, and it ought to be exposed, like 'integration' and 'racial harmony', for the sham it is."19Secondly, however, Rushdie notes how "the Conservative Party seriously discusses the idea of wooing the Asians and leaving the Afro-Caribbeans to the Labour Party, because Asians are such good capitalists."20 Now the last point has major implications for us here. Let us flag our concern by asking: what happens to white domination when a section of the non-white (formerly colonized) are now found to be "good at capi­ talism", the key dynamic of Western society, even as the same society treats them as second-class citizens? What happens then to the racial rule of colonial difference or racism? If the key dynamic of colonialism, viz., capitalism, itself is being mas­ tered by the colonized, then are we approaching a position akin to what Partha Chatterjee suspects a Cambridge historian, David Washbrook, of doing: of emphasizing the "similarity" between the non-West's sup­ posed desire to assimilate in/with the West, and erasing colonialism out of existence. The idea of similarity is nothing but the colonial ideology of "eventual sameness"—that the non-West can indeed catch up with the West and eventually be the same, the counterpart of the idea of "enduring difference". 17 Salm an Rushdie, Im a g in a ry H o m e la n d s (London: V intag e, 2010). 18 Ibid., 130. 19 Ibid., 137. 20 Ibid., 138. Linking it further, w ith the curren t scene in the US, th in k of how A sians are supposed to be the successful Silicon Valley en tre p re n e u rs, m any of w hom are strong su pp orters of Donald Trum p. Three days after Trum p's e lection victo ry, a p rom inent Indian d aily displays the headline, "It May Be Don of Good Days for Indians in US"— yes, "good days", no sarcasm here!— , Th e Tim es o f In d ia , N ovem ber 12, 2016, accessed Novem ber 15, 2016, h ttps://w w w .pressread er.com /in dia/the-tim es-of-in dia-n ew -d elh i-editi on/20161112/282265255006036.

84

P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

Chatterjee, however, nails it: “All that Washbrook is doing by emphasiz­ ing 'similarity' is restating the condition of discursive unity. This condi­ tion is nothing other than the assumption that the history of Europe and the history of India are united within the same framework of universal history... In the process, he has (also) managed to erase colonialism out of existence/'21 According to Washbrook's understanding, Chatterjee points out, “the early East India Company state might be seen as a logical extension of processes with distinctively 'indigenous' (Indian) origins", such that colonialism now becomes “the logical outcome of South Asia's own history of capitalist development."22 Chatterjee rightly critiques the imperial perspective. But there is a problem in his approach. He himself shows that Indians, after the mid19th century, were fighting for inclusion within colonial institutions on an equal footing with the British. Indians had to be admitted "in law making, in the bureaucracy, in the administration of justice, and in the recognition by the (colonial) state of a legitimate domain of public opinion."23 The problem of "jurisdiction", of difference and similarity, was real: "If Indians had to be admitted into the judiciary, could they be allowed to try Europeans?"24Hence "the precise difference between the ruler and the ruled" had to be established in order for the colonial administration to function. The question of precise difference was itself then occasioned precisely as the result of Indians becoming increas­ ingly more similar to the British in managing the affairs of the state and administration. Now, Chatterjee does not really overlook this "willingness", this desire for similarity on the part of the colonized middle class. But then, in that case, the anti-colonial character of the nationalist movement dominated by this middle class itself becomes suspect and hence must be explained. Chatterjee answers that difference is indeed upheld by this class, but in a separate realm, away from the public domain of the colonial state: "Nationalism declares the domain of the spiritual its sovereign territory and refuses to allow the colonial power to intervene in that domain."25 21 Partha C h atterjee, Th e N ation a n d Its F ra g m e n ts (D elhi: O xford U n iversity Press, 1994), 32-33. 22 Ibid., 31. 23 Ibid. 10. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid., 6.

G iri

85

Chatterjee very deftly traces this out. The "inner spiritual domain" the "community" which is thus formed as the basis of this nationalism, the basis of anti-colonialism is, however, not the real authentic "traditional community". What was getting constituted was the "modern commu­ nity", anti-colonial and yet constituted by new hierarchical relations. In the realm of the family, for example, this meant the constitution of a "new patriarchy": "It was undoubtedly a new patriarchy that was brought into existence, different from the 'traditional' order but also explicitly claiming to be different from the 'Western' family. The 'new woman' was to be modern, but she would also have to display the signs of national tradition and therefore would be essentially different from the 'Western' woman."26 Subaltern or middle class?

So Chatterjee is aware that the new social relations constituted by the anti-colonial stance are reproducing hierarchical and oppressive relations. More importantly it is clear, even by his own account, that this challenge to the racial rule is taking place within the framework of universal history, on the basis of the ideology of eventual sameness and similarity. But does that mean that this anti-colonial nationalism will be completely disowned? How does one still demonstrate a real anti-colonial resistance from below in order to disprove the Cambridge historian's argument about the "'indigenous' (Indian) origins" of colo­ nialism? Towards the end of The Nation and its fragments, Chatterjee discusses the manner in which the "inner domain of culture is declared the sover­ eign territory of the nation, where the colonial state is not allowed entry even as the outer domain remains surrendered to the colonial power."27 He is fully aware that this anti-colonial stance is full of rhetoric, not solid, as he writes: "The rhetoric here (Gandhi is a particularly good example) is of love, kinship, austerity, sacrifice. The rhetoric is in fact antimodernist, anti-individualist, even anti-capitalist."28But after label­ ling it rhetoric, he soon gives up his critical stance and in the very next 26 27 28

86

Ibid., 9. Ibid., 237. Ibid.

P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

sentence seems to attribute to it the stance of the "subaltern", treating it as the real anti-colonial stance, challenging "the grand narrative of history" and so on: "The attempt is, if I may stay with Gandhi for a while, to find, against the grand narrative of history, the cultural resources to negotiate the terms through which people living in different, contextu­ ally defined communities can coexist peacefully..."29 "Finding the cultural resources against the grand narrative of History" suddenly shifts from rhetoric to reality. He continues filling this rhetoric with more radical content: "This other narrative is violently interrupted by the postcolonial national state attempts to resume its journey along the trajectory of world-historical development... subjugat(ing), if nec­ essary, by the use of state violence, all such aspirations of community identity."30 The rhetoric is now brimming with radical content! The middle class challenge to the racial rule constituted within the historicist framework of Western universal history is now bailed out by conflating it with the radical "voice of the subaltern". The middle class is allowed to hegemonize over the subaltern, riding on the shoulders of the latter, parasitizing on the latter. This conflation takes place in spite of the conceptual distinction made in postcolonial theory between the modern community and the "traditional" or the "fuzzy community", where the former is supposed to be coterminus with colonial modernity, while the latter remains like an asymptotic "last point", forever escap­ ing modernity's capture. The colonial rule of difference cannot then be sustained if the colo­ nized middle class's investment in the ideology of eventual sameness is anything to go by—that is, if the radical energies of the anti-colonial subaltern are not illicitly brought in. It should be clear then that the anti-colonial difference upheld by the inner spiritual domain is merely the foil for an upward mobility based on similarity. Difference merely facilitates similarity. It is through this illicit route that the sanctity of the anti-colonial resistance is maintained, and the reality of the colonial rule of difference itself is sustained—for the colonial rule of difference cannot be seen to operate if the colonized have submitted themselves to the colonizer. 29 30

Ibid., 237-238. Ibid., 238.

G iri

87

But the way to really deflect attention away from this illicit move is to present the West as, in the first place, so self-contained and selfmoving as not to allow for any kind of attempt at performing similar­ ity from the side of the colonized. It's about defining the West in such a way that this conflation of the middle class with the subaltern is, by definition, not even visible, making it a conceptual impossibility. Thus, in postcolonial theory, the reality of the rule of colonial differ­ ence is sustained by a self-contained, over-inflated notion of the West or Empire—where the middle class's immersion in it, emphasizing similarity, is now itself turned around into a moment of the power and agency of this all-powerful omniscient West. Hence the middle class's anti-colonial character is, in a sad and ironic twist, restored once again. This overinflated West is seen in opposition to the non-West defined as the asymptotic last point that perpetually escapes colonial modernity's capture. The rule of colonial difference then rests on a binary opposi­ tion between the West and the non-West. There is then no way that the emergence of the professionalized universal can be visible in the world that Chatterjee erects. Fanon's approach

Chatterjee therefore sets out to do the right thing, challenging Cam­ bridge historians' attempts to deny the specificity of colonialism. But he makes it appear as though the only way to do so is by upholding the anti-colonialism of the inner spiritual domain. While he does have a cri­ tique of the middle class character of this anti-colonialism, highlighting the new patriarchy, he does not, for example, consider it necessary to ask what is or could be the anti-colonialism that would, for example, op­ pose both the new patriarchy and the colonial relation?31 Chatterjee has no conception of what Fanon calls the "process of liberation" through which a new anti-colonial culture develops.32

31 Elsew h ere, in postcolonial theory, say in Shahid Am in's w ork on the Chauri Chaura in ciden t of 1921, there is clearly a subaltern an ti-colon ialism th at su bverts G andhian tropes and takes the m ovem ent in a d irection anathem a to the m iddle class. Yet such closeness to as it w ere the real subaltern does not m ove lead postcolonial th eory, in its basic o rie n tatio n , to get rid of this conflation we find in C h atterjee. 32 "The 'th in g' colonised becom es a man through the ve ry process of liberation ." Frantz Fanon, Th e W retch e d o f the E a rth (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 2.

88

P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

For Fanon, anti-colonial culture is not what already exists, only to now be get packaged or rearranged in an anti-colonial fashion. It's not about reassembling the components of an existing culture to here cooperate with colonial power here and there diverge from it there—it's not about negotiating the registers of similarity and difference. Here we must keep in mind that for Fanon colonialism is not the name of a series of specific acts of racial discrimination or exclusion from the state apparatus. For him it is the "colonial situation".33It's more like a condition—so that from the dictates of the colonial administration to the rituals of Chatterjee's inner spiritual domain, everything is now caught in this "situation": hence everything must be questioned.34No "culture" or spiritual domain can function as the basis of anti-colonialism. What Fanon is looking for is a new culture forged in the course of the anti-colonial struggle. Hence he calls the liberation of the nation "the tangible matrix out from which culture can grow."35Or that, "one cannot divorce the combat for culture from the people's struggle for liberation."36 Fanon points out that "the existence of a nation is not proved by culture, but in the people's strug­ gle against the forces of occupation."37 Fanon also tells us that, "It is not enough to reunite with the people in the past where they no longer exist. We must rather reunite with them in their recent counter move which will suddenly call everything in question."38 Chatterjee rightly looks for the basis of anti-colonialism but he tries to locate it in the past—he tries to reunite with the middle class and not with the people, the subaltern, and, moreover, tries to 33 For exam ple, Fanon w rite s: "D ecolon isation , th erefo re, im plies the urgent need to th o ro u g h ly ch alleng e the colonial situation." Ibid., 2. 34 In a w ay the real problem is the in ab ility of postcolonial th eo ry to id en tify the new p o litical form and su b je c tivity com ing out of the an ti-colonial m ovem ent, com ing in and through the stru g gle, Fanon's liberation stru g g le — th e re b y falling back on the ind ig enous or not so ind ig enous (hybrid?) e x istin g stru ctu res (inner dom ain of the fam ily, or "affective m odes of belonging", or the d iasp oric subject) as the site of the anti-co lo n ial, for exam ple. This is ju st part of the larger problem of critical th e o ry that fails to pose the question of the new form s of p o litical su b je ctivity , w hat Jacques Ranciere, calls "the logic of p o litical su b je ctiva tio n ," in his critiq ue of the "b iopo litical model of power". Jacqu es Ranciere, "W ho Is the Su bject of the Rights of Man?," S o u th A tla n tic Q u a rte rly 2-3 (2004): 305. See my en gag em ent w ith the sam e them e in "H egem onic Secu larism , D om inant Com m unalism : Im agining Social Transform ation in India," R e th in k in g M a rx ism 1 (2010). 35 Fanon, Th e W re tch e d o f th e E a rth , 168. 36 Ibid. 37 Ibid., 159. 38 Ibid., 163.

G in

89

re-channelize the "recent counter moves" of the subaltern in favour of this class. Once the West is posited as an abstract and self-contained entity, with­ out any concrete determinations, anticolonial shadowboxing, like that of the middle class, can go hand in hand with participation in the ideology of eventual sameness, and participation within the framework of univer­ sal history—this shadowboxing will not be called out. Worse, it will be allowed to hegemonize over the struggles of the working classes and the subaltern. This middle class as a professionalized particularity finding its way in through the framework of universal history, participating in whiteness or in the capitalist universal, will not be visible. But that is precisely what we are trying to do here: to track how the professional­ ized particularity moves towards becoming a professionalized universalism, all happening unfolding within the idiom of anti-colonialism. What we have here is a case of an apologist for the Chinese government making a film that (deliberately) whitewashes Chinese history! Chinese state power is asserted through "whitewashing"—or rather, the Chinese state shows off its power by modulating and controlling whiteness, by deciding to whitewash.39 Hoe also informs us that, "there even exist services to rent out white people to attend social events in China, again, as a sign of success."40 "Whiteness" is brought in to bolster create an atmosphere of success, power and splendour. One becomes a "victim" of whiteness only in order to modulate it from inside. The problem for the Chinese is not that they are having to subscribe to white normativity but rather whether somebody else can control whiteness the way they do: "Could one imagine Matt Damon being hired to act in a Bollywood production, for example?"41 The "succumbing" to whiteness is part of a move to first allow colonial difference (the superiority of whiteness, the desire for whiteness) to come in—and then show who controls it. It's like inviting your enemy to a fight once you know you're sure to win. Thus, around 2005, a Mumbaiborn entrepreneur, Sanjiv Mehta, bought the East India Company (yes, 39 As an aside, also note the rise of an ti-b lackn ess and A frophobia in China today, w hich su rely points to indulgence in w h iten ess; see this rep ort: Brian Hoe, "W hat Asian A m ericans O utraged by Th e G re a t W all Have M issed," N ew B lo o m , A pril 8, 2016, accessed April 9, 2016, http://new b loom m ag .n et/2016/08/04/g reat-w all-w hitew ash in g-co ntro versy/. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.

90 P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

the same one!), re-launched it in London, and presented it as an act of anti-colonialism. An Indian newspaper reported: "Put yourself in my shoes for a moment: on a rational plane, when I bought the company I saw gold at the end of the rainbow," he said. "But, on an emotional level as an Indian, when you think with your heart as I do, I had this huge feeling of redemption—this indescribable feeling of owning a company that once owned us."42Mehta now proudly owns the Elizabethan coat of arms, the ultimate emblem of the British Empire. "Empire isn't bad—it's just that we should own it"—such would seem to be the anti-colonial sentiment at work here. The anti-colonial determinations of colonialism

Let us step back and look at the incident which many regard as crucial to the tradition of Western anti-immigrant racism of the West. The year is 1914. Indian passengers, mostly Sikh, aboard the Komagata Maru are stranded off the coast of British Columbia as they are refused entry by the racist Canadian government.43 (Let us note that this story is about to get a new lease on life in the form of a blockbuster Bollywood movie, ironically titled Lions of the Sea, referring to the beleaguered passengers who could not enter Canada. Once back in Calcutta the colonial forces shot and killed many of them. This colonial brutality was instrumental in mobilizing anti-colonial consciousness.) The white press of the time dubbed the Indian migrant attempt as yet another instance of a "Hindu invasion" eroding the white character of Canada. But what we see is that the passengers had no qualms about making their case for entry on the basis of being "subjects of (the) Em­ pire." They not only demanded "Imperial citizenship" and called upon (the) Empire to make good on its promise of treating all "subjects" equally and allowing them free movement within (the) Empire—hence from India to Canada—but they also claimed some proximity to white­ ness, to some or Caucasian characteristics. Sohan Josh, who interviewed several of the passengers later, explains how "most of them (the pas42 D ipankar De Sarkar, "East India Com pany Now Has an Indian O wner," H in d u sta n T im e s,

Feb ru ary 14, 2010, accessed Feb ru ary 14 2010, h ttp ://w w w .h in d u stan tim es.co m /b u sin ess/ east-ind ia-com pany-no w -has-an-ind ian-ow ner/story-c3ER7bV 16u 5jQ oG 0IU 5um O .htm l. 43 See Hugh Jo h n sto n , Th e V oya ge o f th e K o m a g a ta M a ru (V ancouver: U n iversity of British Colum bia Press, 1989).

G iri

91

sengers) were ex-military men who had served the British government loyally as mercenaries in the wars, fought for expansion of the British Empire. They had a lot of illusion dinned into their ears about the evenhanded justice and impartiality of British rulers."44 It is of course through this process of overidentification with Empire and whiteness, the ensuing rejection, and the subsequent réinscrip­ tion of the colonial rule of difference, that anti-colonial feeling gets is aroused in Asian countries—a fact Josh himself is aware of. No quarrel there on that front. However, this path to anti-colonialism carved out enduring structures of hierarchy and differentiation within the nonWestern formations. This is clear if we examine the contours of this anti-colonial consciousness. Mawana, who examined the testimonies, magazines and anti-coloni­ al commentary of the time related to the Komagata Maru, finds that "Canada is signified through an exaggerated, inauthentic, and even implausible indigenous figure abstracted from the histories and lived experiences of aboriginal peoples and their ongoing struggles against the colonial regime."45Here is an anti-colonial discourse that completely whitewashes Canadian history. Furthermore, "conceiving Canada and Australia to be 'unoccupied tracts of land' the Tribune (Indian newspaper of the time), like the Imperial and Dominion authorities, also effaced the presence of indigenous peoples in settlement colonies."46 Anti-colonial and pro-immigrant discourse produces a narrative of the history of Canada that wipes off its settler colonial status, placing the Indian above the indigenous peoples. Claims are made by the colonized against the colonial regime by placing themselves above another colo­ nized group—similar to Gandhi's fight for equality for Indians in South Africa by placing Indians above the blacks. In fact, the anti-colonial press in India explained the racist Canadian government's actions as (merely) "un-British conduct of (white) colonials"—rather than identifying this said conduct as racist or colonial.47 44 Sohan Singh Josh, The Tra g e d y o f K o m a g a ta M a ru (D elhi: Peoples Publishing House, 1975), iv. 45 Renisa M aw ani, "Specters of In d ig eneity in B ritish-lndian M igration," L a w a n d S o c ie ty R e v ie w 2 (2012): 378. 46 Ibid., 398. 47 Jo sh, Th e T ra g e d y o f K o m a g a ta M a ru , 15.

92 P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

In fact this anti-colonial approach is of a piece with the manner in which Takao Ozawa and Bhagat Singh Thind, a Japanese and an Indian immigrant, were, during the same period, demanding citizenship in the US by claiming "legal whiteness" and seeking to distance them­ selves from blacks. Suzanne A. Kim writes: "The(se) two petition­ ers claimed they were white by dint of skin colour, anthropological evidence, culture, and various other qualities suggesting they 'be­ longed' to America. The petitioners' claims resonated with one central message: 'I am just like you.' Thind's and Ozawa's claims ultimately failed. The petitioners were denied citizenship because the Supreme Court, not surprisingly, held that they did not qualify as 'white', and that despite their claims to the contrary, Ozawa and Thind were just 'different.'"48 It might not be out of place here to recall what Toni Morrison says in her essay "The Pain of Being Black": "It doesn't matter anymore what shade the newcomer's skin is. A hostile posture toward resident blacks must be struck at the Americanizing door before it will open."49 So not only, as we saw, the settler colonial status of Canada, but the long history of slavery and incarceration of African Americans, too, can be invisiblized in certain discourses of anti-colonialism and anti-racism. Afropessimists in the US are not off the mark when they think of the "newcomers", the postcolonial immigrants from the 1960s onwards, as parasitic beneficiar­ ies of the Civil Rights movement—even as they participate in anti-black racism while claiming to fight white domination. Again anti-colonial and anti-racist shadowboxing can go hand in hand with reinforcing certain determinations of colonialism. Postcolonial theory takes this shadowboxing as the real anti-colonial struggle, as the anti-racist struggle to be extolled. Malini Johar points out that postcolonial theorists "problematically recruit African Ameri­ canism into a homogenized notion of the global margins by dehistoricizing the African American experience and therefore dangerously

48 Suzanne A. Kim , "Yellow Skin, W hite M asks: Asian A m erican Im perso nations of W hiteness and the Fem inist C ritique of Liberal Equality," A sia n A m e rica n L a w J o u r n a l 1 (2001): 89. 49 Toni M orrison, Bonnie A ngelo, "The Pain of Being Black" Tim e, May 22, 1993, accessed D ecem ber 12, 2016, http://conten t.tim e.eom /tim e/m agazine/article/0,9171,957724,00.h tm l.

G iri

93

eliding the effects of differential racism in the United States."50 Anti­ colonialism thus becomes parasitic on the struggles of those who are at the bottom of the global hierarchy of racialized capitalism, be they indigenous peoples, blacks, or those who are at the bottom within the category of the newcomers. Even within the newcomers, what about, say, the differentiation be­ tween undocumented migrants and "illegal" migrants in the US? One very perceptive article by Yasmin Nair points out how, for the "undocuqueer" movement, "the illegals" are the nasty underside of the immigrant population. Rights for undocumented migrants are sought by way of marginalizing the claims of the illegals, who are thereby treated as (really) illegal.51 Nair writes: "In representing only the good immigrants, undocumented activists are literally and metaphorically the dream activists of neoliberalism, emphasising individualised nar­ ratives about freedom over systemic critique."52 Racial difference as symptom

Chatterjee rightly refuses to erase colonialism, but he erases these con­ crete determinations of colonialism. A hyperbolic anti-West, anti-colonial stance was underpinned by an erasure of Canada's settler colonial character. Or, rather, this charac­ ter and the rights of the indigenous people in Canada would come to be recognized only at the cost of dehistoricizing the specificity of this oppression, turning it into a problem of "difference" or of the "global margins". The Chinese "participation in whiteness", too, very well closely coheres with the ambient anti-West, anti-colonial stance of China today. "Succumbing to whiteness" is only the idiom through which something like the "rise of China" would be asserted. The Great Wall is laced with whiteness, even as it apparently shows the "great culture" of China. Similarity co-exists with difference, or rather difference subsists, in 50

M alini Jo har, L o c a tin g R a c e : G lo b a l S ite s o f P o s t-co lo n ia l C itize n sh ip (New York: SUNY,

2009), 25-26. 51 Yasm in Nair, "U ndocum ented vs. Illegal: A D istin ctio n w ith o u t a D ifferen ce," Yasm in N air: W riter, A c a d e m ic , A c tiv ist, C o m m e n ta to r, D ecem ber 10, 2012, accessed Novem ber 15, 2016, h ttp ://y a sm in n a ir.n e t/c o n te n t/u n d o c u m e n te d -v s-ille g a l-d istin ctio n -w ith o u td iffe re n c e . 52 Ibid.

94 P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

fact, flourishes, within the "framework of universal history", as we saw in our critique of Chatterjee. The postcolonial emphasis on the real existence of colonialism can only be read as a symptom: a symptom of the actual participation in the real determinations of the West—and thereby the need to displace it. Flagging an oppressive West, rendering it hyper-visible, assuming a kind of fixity and self-contained finality to it, de-historicizing and over-inflating it—these are as though many ways of overcoming the postcolonial theorist's own investment in it, in its concrete determi­ nations. A transcendent anti-colonial stance is meant to suppress the reality of an immanent investment in the West, meant to make such an investment appear impossible. But that's not all: the emphasis on the colonial rule of difference now takes us straight to the process of new forms of capital accumulation for which the stage is by now quite set. We will see that the opposition to the rule of colonial difference works in such a way that the struc­ tural matrix of racist capitalism becomes the unconscious—it becomes muted, such that now the supposedly marginalized and suppressed professionalized particularity now finds itself freely hurtling towards a path of seamless and rarefied high-growth capital accumulation. Recall again the International we mentioned above, with its deep integument in the high-growth, digital and knowledge economy of Silicon Valley. From symptom to drive, or, "class" over race

How does the muting of racialized capitalist relations work? The usual story is of course that racialization is often made invisible through an emphasis on class and other economic categories, most often by Marx­ ists who simply can't understand race, gender or sexuality. But here we encounter an emphasis on Race, which makes invisible precisely "racialized capitalism"—facilitated by a backhanded deployment of a depoliticized notion of class. Let us recall the burning scene towards the end of Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing (1989). The Korean couple who owns a store pleads to with the angry blacks, frantically shouting: "I no white, I no white, I black, I black! You, me: same. We same." What is this but a performance of racial solidarity by the Korean man, albeit a particularly forced one. The black

G iri

95

man in the crowd is not, however, having any of it. He yells back in shock and anger: “Same? Me black!" and then challenges the Korean guy: “Open your eyes!" The rioting blacks give a hard stare at the Korean man and grudgingly decide to leave it at that, refusing to reciprocate the Korean man's offer of a handshake. The black man though is angry not because the Koreans are engaged in active racism (in spite of being immigrants) but because of the way they could be so blind to the rampant anti-black racism while all too readily highlighting their minority status. The blacks want to know: how could you be neutral when being neutral means siding with the dominant system and naturalizing the racism faced by blacks? “Black poverty" which is the product of the embedded racial divide is here natu­ ralized as just another instance of those who lose out in the competition since they are not as hard-working and industrious as, say, the Asians and so on. The silent Korean move can be expressed like this: “subordinating the significance of race while pacifying the notion of class," as Jared Sexton explains in a study.53 Sexton is examining scholarly work on the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, involving Asians and Blacks—a scenario that was uncannily anticipated by Spike Lee's movie. These scholars, like many postcolonial theorists, uphold the basic framework of the rule of colonial difference, in this case the Black/white framing, but, like them, overlook the concrete determinations. Sexton points out: “What seems to 'give way' is the explanatory power of racial antagonism altogether, rather than 'the Black/white framing.'"54 The Black/white framing or, the colonial rule of difference, is maintained, even as racial antagonism is done away with. Sexton identifies a backhanded emphasis on “class" that has nothing to do with a leftist or Marxist perspective, but is more of a sociologistic, reductionistic, depoliticized notion of class. It depoliticizes the racially overdetermined status of the black poor, presenting it as the natural outcome of (free) market relations. It has the effect of naturalizing the whole capitalist matrix, so that the entrenched, historically-sedimented racial hierarchies and, in particular, the political anger based on racial 53 Jared Sexton , "Prop rieties of C o alition: B lacks, A sians and the Politics of Policing," C ritica l S o c io lo g y 1 (2010).

54 Ibid., 93.

96

P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

discrimination or structural racism (as we see in the Lee movie) now get treated by the economically-minded postcolonial immigrant as so many fetters on “business" and basically money-making. Sexton man­ ages to captures this dynamic: “Class struggle is depoliticized and the scholars under review instead arrogate for Korean-American merchants a dubious right to capitalist enterprise that is ethically rationalized in the rather misstated language of survival."55 Here anti-colonialism and anti-racism come down to defending such a “right" for the postcolonial immigrant that shares strong affinities with a neoliberal abstract movement of capital unencumbered by any real social determinations. This means that “the structural violence of racial capitalism constitutes the political unconscious of the present discourse on US black-Asian relations."56Not only does the emphasis on the colonial rule of difference (the abstract black/white binary framing pointed out by Sexton) now get abstracted from the structural violence and matrix of racial capitalism, but it also now opens the way for anti­ colonialism and anti-racism to be positively deployed towards open­ ing new avenues of capital accumulation: entrepreneurship, capitalist enterprise, and so on. The emphasis on the colonial rule of difference now stops being just a symptom, a way to deal with the suppression of the concrete determi­ nations of colonialism and racial capitalism, and instead now becomes an active way to ensure the seamless movement o f capital. Said's profes­ sionalized particularity is all set to deploy its own non-Western, non­ white, (formerly) colonized identity towards fully participating in not just whiteness but in the capitalist universal. Anti-colonial and anti-racist politics now become the appropriate vehi­ cle by which to ensure the “right to enterprise", the “right to entrepre­ neurship", giving a boost to the seamless movement of capital, where now racialized capitalist relations are simply treated as mere “market distortions". A closet Ayn Rand-like class position acts like a disavowed lynchpin keeping postcolonial theory, in particular its emphasis on the racial rule of colonial difference, in place. This allows it to naturalize and deracialize the concrete determinations and differentiation within 55 Ibid., 97. 56 Ibid., 99.

G iri

97

the non-Western social formation while displaying a hyperbolic com­ mitment to Race or Identity over class. Muting social relations allows a frictionless process of accumulation, feeding into the self-image of capital as self-perpetuating, fulfilling the dreams of neoliberalism as well as of the new digital economy. Class struggle

Finally, let us note here that the immigration debate cannot be viewed only in terms of Western capital versus third world labour. A very im­ portant component here is that of particular capital—Western and non-Western. This is where we need to go beyond the more extreme steps of the Trump administration today. Most of us are, perhaps rightly, fixated on the racist pronouncements about building a wall on the US-Mexico border or the deportation of “illegal aliens", or the imposition of the “Muslim ban". Many Republicans and CEOs, not to mention Democrats, openly oppose these measures. But this way of looking at immigration is very much wedded to the “colonialism model". For there is another “softer" anti-immigration reform, very consensual and “bipartisan", which is very easy to miss. I am here referring to the “High-Skilled Integrity and Fairness Act of 2017", introduced in Congress by Democrat Zoe Lofgren, a representa­ tive of Silicon Valley.57This Act is widely regarded as anti-immigrant and is opposed by progressive groups. What does it do? It proposes increas­ ing the minimum wage to be paid to highly skilled immigrant workers who come in under the H1B visa scheme. It aims to raise the minimum salary from the present $60,000 (unchanged since 1989} to $130,000. Anti-immigrant policy raising the wages of immigrant workers?! How is such a thing possible? Well, the catch is that most of these foreign workers (mostly Indian} are employed by foreign companies (mostly

57 Sara A sh ley O 'Brien, "Silicon Valley Law m aker Introduces H-1B Reform Bill," CNN, Ja n u a ry 25, 2017, accessed Ja n u ary 30, 2017, http://m oney.cnn.com /2017/01/25/technology/ h1b-visa-reform -bill-zoe-lofgren/.

98

P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lism

Indian] that operate in the US in the tech industry.58 We are talking about Indian capital, not labour, in the United States. These Indian companies have an edge over American companies because they are better placed to leverage cheap Indian skilled labour. They don't want to hire locally in the US, since they will have to pay higher salaries. They keep their firms labour-intensive, and get a competitive wage-cost advantage over US capital. Hence to undercut this “malprac­ tice" by Indian companies, the present Act now intends to drastically raise the minimum salary. In its immediate effect, this measure is pro-Indian labour but works against the interests of Indian capital. In fact, a big lobbying group of Indian corporate houses, backed by the Indian Prime Minister, are negotiating with the Trump administration against this Act. But the administration cannot ignore the interests of American big capital. What we have here is a competition between two factions of capital, differentiated by nationality. However, at the level of politics and legiti­ mizing claims, this competition is played out as an issue of immigra­ tion, borders, and the free movement of labour. Hence, big capital in the US can easily resort to the anti-immigration rhetoric of defending the homeland, stopping “outsourcing" and providing jobs to American labour. It can subscribe to the white nationalist rhetoric of “making America great again", claiming to stop the hiring of “foreign" workers, even though many US companies do and are looking to hire cheap for­ eign labour. On the other hand, Indian capital will tap into the rhetoric of open, pro-immigration borders and multicultural society, America as the land of opportunity and so on, seeing as it very much wants to retain its wage-cost advantage over American capital. Having had a head start with cheap immigrant labour, Indian capital wants to hold on to this advantage. The mobilization around the para­ digm of colonialism, and the bargaining for pro-immigration policies is, 58 Not "m igrant labour" but Indians w ant to pride th em selves on how much cap ital they own or control in the US— w h ich is actu ally not so in sig n ifican t: "Indian tech com p anies have helped create over 400,000 jo b s in the US, paid over $20 billion in taxes in the past five years, and m ade a d ifference to 120,000 young A m ericans through variou s STEM (science, tech nolog y, engineering and m athem atics) ed ucation in itiatives." Ravi V enkatesan, "The M essage from H1B Visa Reform s," Liv e M in t, Feb ru ary 1, 2017, accessed Feb ru ary 2, 2017, h ttp ://w w w .livem int.com /O pinion/9FL1ulBBM j2o3G vV oM IBII/ The-m essag e-fro m -H 1B -visa-refo rm s.htm l.

G iri

99

however, only a springboard for Indian capital to continue employing a form of "unfree labour" under the H1B scheme (the visa of the Indian worker is tied to his contract with the hiring company}. It would indeed be extremely vulgar for anyone progressive to side with Indian capital here—and yet the pro-immigrant position is what Indian capital mo­ bilizes today. The "right to capitalist enterprise" for immigrant capital is, as we noted, one that mutes the matrix of racial capitalism and bol­ sters the myth of a self-perpetuating capital accumulation process. The "colonialism approach", siding with the generalized figure of the "third world immigrant", would only serve to intensify the unfree labour status of Indian immigrant workers working for Indian companies in the US. On the other hand, US capital wants to mobilize workers in America to work for less using anti-immigrant rhetoric—similar to what Indian capital is doing with Indian workers. It wants to mobilize white national­ ist sentiment in its favour. Anti-immigration rhetoric serves to puncture the bargaining power of the white working class as American capital now mobilizes racial and nationalist sentiment. What we see then is that it's not just about competing national capitals either—for the two capitals are really struggling for control over la­ bour. That is, it's not that the colonialism model still continues, but that now it has shifted to the competition between two national capitals. The politics over immigration is clearly connected to the question of capital-labour relations and the class struggle. It is more specifically about two competing capitals using racial politics to push wages down and creating zones of unfree labour or primitive accumulation, "formal subsumption" amidst the high-tech "real subsumption" of labour. We see then that the paradigm of colonialism as a way of understand­ ing the "immigration" or "refugee" issue only obfuscates the reality of capital-labour relations. It also renders invisible the "illegal alien", the undocumented worker, the "illegal migrant", those many from Africa who risk their lives to cross the Mediterranean over to Europe—all those who then become tied into the hegemony of their national capitals or into the generalized category of "immigrant" or "third world labour". This only serves to force them into the unfree labour market for the process of capital accumulation and capitalist enterprise spurred by the discourse of anti-colonial and anti-racist politics.

100 P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lis m

Pure utopia of capital

But finally it's not even that Indian or for that matter American capi­ tal wants to hold on to unfree labour or sites of surplus extraction indefinitely only by mobilizing nationality, the colonialism model or even race. Instead, they want to secure a firm hold of the capitalist uto­ pia that finally frees itself of any dependence on labour itself, and not just dependence on nationality or racial tropes to mobilize this labour. Which is why the more advanced detachments of Indian capital today "see a silver lining" in Trump's Right-wing racist policies.59They see "an opportunity", "a much needed push" to take off, lay off labour, break with national affiliation, and intensify the use of robotics and artificial intelligence, to really be cutting edge and so on. Their plan is to start with hiring local American labour, but then try to dispense with labour as such. They are directing their efforts to attain­ ing the rarefied (capitalist) utopian realm of value begetting value, of self-perpetuating capital, of a world without labour and full automation. Consider this proposal from Ravi Venkatesan, the former Chairman of Microsoft India, responding to Trump's anti-immigration policies: "Equally they (Indian capital in the US) must leverage new technolo­ gies—artificial intelligence, automation, telepresence and augmented reality—to develop a more extreme model of offshoring that relies less and less on engineers being on client premises."60 "Fuck Indian labour, fuck labour"—that is the message from this segment of Indian capital, which does not even want to remain Indian; it wants to be global, a global company, a global brand. From emphasizing difference within the larger terrain of similarity and eventual sameness, emphasizing difference even as one tries to gain a foothold in the framework of universal history—participating in white­ ness, succumbing to it in order to emphasize one's own power—from here now we now see yet another step being taken. Now the non-West wants to step out into the colourless, racially-blind world of the rare­ fied movement of value begetting value, of the pure utopia of capital. They want to "fight" the anti-immigrant policies of the Right-wing by 59 Ravi V enkatesan, "The Silver Lining in H1B Visa Reform s," L iv e M in t, Feb ru ary 3, 2017, accessed Feb ru ary 5, 2017, h ttp ://w w w .live m in t.co m /O p in io n /xzh B b 6u O fxtzF5ksy65 ID J/ Th e-silver-lin in g -in-im m ig ratio n-refo rm .htm l. 60 V enkatesan, "The m essage from H1B Visa reform s."

G iri

101

treating it as a godsend opportunity to propel themselves into a truly depoliticized, post-labour realm of capital accumulation by redoubling belief in the capitalist utopia—such is the brave path the professional­ ized particularity of the non-West sets for itself. It wants to shed the diffidence with which it claimed similarity in an earlier period, when it would recoil back immediately into an inner spiritual domain. But it has kept company with anti-colonialism and anti-racism for a long time—and it has been handsomely rewarded.

102 P a ra sitic A n ti-C o lo n ia lis m

Boris Buden The One Too Many: On How Democracy Ends in Sophistry

Until the last grain

How many migrants can a nation accept and still remain a nation? This question, around which the heaviest political battles in Europe are fought today—battles that might decide the fate of democracy in Europe as well as the very meaning and historical role of what is in geopolitical terms called the West—actually assumes the structure of an ancient so­ phistic paradox in the manner of "The Heap" (which grain of wheat will make the random pile a heap?], or "The Bald Head" (which hair falling out will render the head definitively bald]. As is well known, these para­ doxes were rhetorically presented in the form of a series of questions which, taking the case of a nation admitting immigrants as example, would read like this: Is a nation that has taken a single immigrant still a nation? Obviously, the answer is yes—it is. But will the addition of a second transform it into a shapeless hybrid community that will no longer be recognizable as a distinct nation? Most certainly it will not. Would a third make the crucial difference? No. What about a fourth; a fifth; a sixth...? Obviously, there will always be an external element that can be added to a nation without transforming it into something else. However, if the addition of such alien elements continues, the nation will cease to exist. The problem is that we cannot definitively locate the point at which this will happen. Critical analysis of such paradoxes points to two crucial moments. The first is the vagueness of the pivotal concept; in short, its incoherent character. While, as in our case, there are an infinite number of de­ scriptive features that clearly differentiate nations from other forms of human communities, it is impossible to identify a precise cut-off point between them—the point at which a nation will suddenly transform into an amorphous heap of individuals without any common identity whatsoever. The vagueness at issue here also affects the second problem

103

of such paradoxes: they all are borderline cases, which is to say that the borders of such concepts as heap, baldness, or as in our case, of nation, are never clearly distinguishable lines, but rather blurred bands that are intrinsically imprecise and indefinite. It is of crucial importance to keep the vagueness of such borderlines in mind when we consider the paradox of today's global migration pro­ cesses: the horrible pictures of countless corpses floating inanimate in the Mediterranean, the fact that so many boats overcrowded with migrants capsize before ever reaching the shores of Europe finds its metaphoric counterpart at their very destination, the nightmare of that single immigrant, "the one too many" who will cause some celebrated European nation state to finally tip over. The question, "how many migrants will it take to make the boat full?" has become the "to be or not to be question" of European politics to­ day—not because it miraculously translates all the concerns of Europe­ ans into a single, universal cause, but rather because of its essentially sophistic character. This is the true reason European politicians and their frustrated electorates have been asking it over and over again and won't stop asking it—not until the proper answer is given, but because there is no such answer. With no ontological effect whatsoever

This sophistic erosion, so obvious in the heated debates on migration that so dominate in European publics and parliaments today, points to two possible conclusions: firstly, that these debates are no longer able to fulfil their teleological function of regenerating democracy from within. At stake is more than their inability to produce a rational choice based on common interests; that is, to find a democratic solution to the problem of migration, which, however imperfect, will still bring the will of the people in line with the values proclaimed by its democratic insti­ tutions. The problem of migration rather challenges the existing liberal democratic state at its very core, challenges the democratic legitimacy of its system of political representation. Whatever the outcome of the public debates on migrants and whatever the final decision on this question ultimately agreed among the political parties, it will not be able to reproduce that simple yet essential public consensus that lend

104 Th e O ne Too M any...

these debates functional sense; and that those responsible for translat­ ing their results into policy, the elected representatives of the popular will—in short, the political parties—are an indispensable component in the life of their constituencies. As long as it is grounded in the principle of people's sovereignty and as such implemented in the modern nation state, the concept of parliamen­ tary democracy relies on the mechanism of its own self-empowerment. Like a sort of perpetuum mobile, it must be able to regenerate the power of its authority on its own, something it achieves by constantly redraw­ ing the clear-cut distinction between its interior and its exterior. The challenge of migration, as it has come to impose itself on the Western liberal democratic states, seems to evade this logic. It seems as if it can never be fully internalized as a democracy's own heterogeneity with which it will sooner or later successfully deal; that is, find a rational solu­ tion to that problem in accordance with the interest of its citizens. This is why we can claim that today's debates on migration no longer take place within the framework of democracy but rather on its increasingly frayed edges. In fact, these debates discursively inform these edges by allowing us to concretely experience its conceptually vague and his­ torically contingent limits. And they make us realize that democracy, in its present shape and form, won't be able to take migrants on board without it tipping over. Secondly—and closely connected with the first conclusion—migra­ tion challenges the very social substratum of the democratic order; or simply and concretely, society itself. It is obvious that the question of how many immigrants a society can accept cannot be answered without also asking what this society actually is and of whom precisely it is, or should be, comprised. At stake is more than a mere reference to an already existing social whole. Rather, this social whole is expected to be the first to emerge from the debates on precisely who constitutes society. It is believed to be a performative effect of the decision on this question. Yet such a decision cannot be made arbitrarily. It is intended to be the result of a political struggle in which different interests col­ lide and the competing political forces representing these interests are involved. The final decision on whom to include and whom to exclude from society, a decision that rearticulates social totality and performatively brings society as such into existence, is intended to be effected

Buden

105

through a hegemonic operation, which, however contingent and tempo­ rary, still provides the social substance of the democratic order. Thus, providing an answer to the question how many immigrants a society can take on board without causing it to sink under their social weight goes far beyond the pragmatic process of striking a rational balance between available resources and increasing social needs.1 It decides an existentialvquestion, the "to be or not to be" of society as such—at least in theory.2Practically speaking, however, the political debates on migration as they are held in Western, and especially European settings today, seem to fall short of their social teleology. It appears as though they've lost their performative power and thus the ability to rearticu­ late social totality. In other words, hegemonic operations performed in the process of political struggles over the problem of migration fail to produce ontological effects. They are no longer able to regenerate the social substance of the democratic order. Instead, they only prove the social impotence of the political forces involved in these struggles, be­ fore all of the traditional political parties as well as vast swaths of civil society, from spontaneously emerging protest configurations to newly engaged intellectuals. Their dominant rhetoric, which time and again spins around the once socially productive logic of inclusion-exclusion, becomes increasingly emptied of its social meaning. For the most part, it now creates but a public noise full of racist escapades, moralist kitsch and ideological perplexity. And when it explicitly tackles the growing problem of migrants and refugees it usually ends in populist sophisms. This sophistic aberration of democratic discourse is a clear symptom of its performative failure. When political debates in a democratic society degenerate into sophistry this means they are no longer able to reproduce either democracy or society.

1 This is the point at w hich the discussion on how m any m igrants a p articu lar w elfare system (or w h at is left of it after d ecades of the neo-liberal dism antling of the social w elfare state, m oreover, of so ciety as such) can take care of, alm ost u navoid ably acquires a "natio n al-so cialist" character.

2

I have in m ind here a ve ry p a rticu la r th eory, the one of a post-foundational concept of the social as it has been articulated in m any w orks by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal M ouffe, like H e g e m o n y a n d S o c ia lis t S tra te g y : T o w a rd s a R a d ic a l D e m o c ra tic P o litic s (London, New York: Verso, 1985); Ernesto Laclau, E m a n c ip a tio n (s) (Lo nd on, New York: Verso, 1996); Ernesto Laclau, On P o p u list R e a so n (Lo nd on, New York: Verso, 2005); Ernesto Laclau, The R h e to ric a l F o u n d a tio n s o f S o c ie ty (Lo nd on, New York: Verso, 2014), etc.

106 Th e O ne Too M any...

Left dreams and right realities

Yet despite its purely sophistic character the question of how many, if any, migrants or refugees shall be accepted might still serve as a clear indicator of the position of the political actors who answer it. It is reason­ able to expect that those who are prepared to welcome more migrants occupy the Left side of the political spectrum, while the others, who are likely to reject as many of them as possible, settle themselves rather on the Right. However, such calibration of a scale from Left to Right really makes sense only if its endpoints, that is its extremities, are clearly de­ fined—which, when it comes to the question of accepting immigrants implies the logic of a zero-sum game. For it is clear that there are those for whom even a single immigrant or refugee is too many. This is obvi­ ously a position we might ascribe to the extreme Right. However, to clearly locate on the same scale its direct opposite, the position of the extreme Left, isn't quite so easy. The Left generally stands for a gener­ ous acceptance of migrants and often openly demonstrates its practical solidarity, assisting them in crossing borders or supporting various forms of their integration. It also accepts cultural differences without much difficulty. Some of the Left's initiatives even explicitly claim the principle of universal inclusion, like the activist network "No one is il­ legal". But it is almost impossible to hear from the European Left that, for instance, all migrants, without reservation, should be immediately accepted. It appears that a leftist counterpart to the extreme right wing's stance on migration simply doesn't exist. At stake here is an asymmetry of far larger dimensions. It is well known that today whole states, led by their democratically elected govern­ ments, have adopted an extremist Right-wing stance on migration. Such is the case with some Central-European countries. Slovakia, for instance, filed a lawsuit against the European Union's initiative to forcibly impose the so-called refugee quota on its member states, the obligation to house and feed a proportional number of refugees fleeing wars and other humanitarian crises. In its protest against Brussels, Slovakia is accom­ panied and backed by Poland and Hungary, two countries with which it shares a zero-migrants policy. Their governments openly pledge not to accept a single one. Although some other countries in the European Union show far more understanding and are willing to take a signifi­ cant number of migrants—with Angela Merkel's Germany leading the

Bud en

107

way—it is in fact impossible to imagine an EU member state that would open its borders entirely to all incoming migrants and make available to them all of the social services as well as capacities and instruments necessary for their full economic and cultural integration. This looks like a Left-wing Utopia totally at odds with reality. On the other side, the actually existing, democratically legitimized, Right-wing extremist stance, and its zero-policy on migration, has already been completely integrated into the existing democratic order. In so doing, Europe has not only smoothly domesticated and normalized even the worst racist policies but also, equally smoothly, included Right-wing extremism into the realm of Realpolitik. The dreams of the Left are just that—dreams and nothing else. Yet its nightmare, a full-fledged political institution­ alization of the most extreme Right-wing dreams, has become a reality. The Right, on the contrary, no longer dreams. Instead, it makes policies. Precisely as a matter of Right-wing Realpolitik, migration—which is essentially a global phenomenon—enters a much broader political con­ text, the realm of geopolitics: the global arena of political struggles and, increasingly, military conflicts over ever-scarcer resources; the space of global capitalism, constantly reshaped by economic competition; the world stage on which the so-called global players make crucial decisions on global issues like biopolitics and climate change. And, if there is still such a thing as world history, it is politically written, determined in the realm of geopolitics. But this is also where the processes of migration were economically and politically generated, where they took their shape and direction even before they reached their destinations—the borders of largely Western nation states, at which point they trigger the big drama of inclusion and exclusion. And yet this same realm of geopolitics, which essentially determines the entire phenomenon of mi­ gration and where the future of the entire world might even be decided, is eerily emptied of the Left. True, leftist voices are today increasingly heard all over the global public dominion. When it comes to the most important issues related to global development—pollution, poverty, human rights, global justice—leftist critique and the demands of the Left civil society grow louder and louder. And leftist critical theory isn't far behind. It provides the most plausible explanation or description of the actual condition of the world; its diagnoses of possible terminal illnesses that might bring about human extinction are no less relevant nor precise; its critique of global capitalism, especially in its currently

108 Th e O ne Too M any...

most destructive and dangerous, neoliberal form, is sharper than ever; it has reclaimed the emancipatory potential of a near-entirely degener­ ated historical consciousness; and it even dares, again, to sketch out some utopian prospects. And yet, the world seems to care not at all—as though it no longer takes the Left seriously. Angels forever?

Is this because the Left no longer exerts any significant influence on geopolitical agencies and processes; or has actually abandoned geopoli­ tics altogether? When it comes to the recent attempts to resurrect the idea of radical Left political subjectivity and militancy this might well be true. Such attempts, as Alberto Toscano argues, fail to properly ad­ dress the problems that arise when a transformative, revolutionary or emancipatory political action is situated in an actual geopolitical context and must confront its many constraints.3He reminds us of the legacy of the old Cold War Left, which was able to combine intense commitment and uncompromising enmity with instrumental geopolitical calculation. At stake was a “battle-hardened realism", typical of the most radically transformative of political movements of the time—a time when “The 'angelic' position (turning away from the moment of Realpolitik for the sake of an uncertain purism) was regarded by most revolutionaries, and many reformers, as an unacceptable capitulation."4 However, the story of how the radical revolutionary Left has turned away from practical political realism and evacuated the sphere of geo­ politics is long and controversial. It might begin with the split between the Old and the New Left, which in fact took place around what Im­ manuel Wallerstein calls “the world revolutions of 1968".5Not only did they radically transform the post-WWII geopolitical order that had, until then, been based on the Yalta agreement, but also, as Wallerstein argues, denounced The Old Left, the traditional anti-systemic move­ ments that were comprised of three components—Communist and 3 A lb erto Toscano, "Carl Sch m itt in Beijing: P artisan ship, G eo p o litics and the D em olition of the Eurocentric W orld," P o s tc o lo n ia l S tu d ie s 4 (2008): 417. Here Toscano has in m ind, above all, Alain Badiou and his L o g ic s o f th e W orld (London: Continu um , 2009). 4 Ibid., 418. 5 Im m anuel W allerstein, "P recip itate D ecline: The A dvent of M ultip olarity," H a rv a rd In te rn a tio n a l R e v ie w 1 (2007): 56.

Bud en

109

Social-Democratic parties as well as national liberation movements. They all followed a two-step strategy: first conquer state power, then change the world. Both steps were supposed to be achieved within the parameters of Realpolitik. While the ultimate goal of the first was an actually existing welfare state, either in its social-democratic form within the centre of the devel­ oped capitalist West or in its Eastern socialist form on the periphery, the second step, made according to the then dominant rules of geopolitics, was pursuing the teleology of developmentalism: "[T]he thesis that all states could 'develop' and have a high standard of living, if only the appropriate state actions were instituted to permit the process of development to take off."6 In contrast to the Old Left, the revolutionaries of 1968 concentrated primarily on the second—changing the world—although not in terms of geopolitical Realpolitik. The New Left—which is what they were called then—generally rejected the world designed after the developmentalist narrative and opposed the Old Left that was actively participating in its reproduction. Yet, however "angelic", the New Left still managed to realistically address the first symptoms of the next great transforma­ tion—the historical decline of industrial modernity. The entire world, which was based on its mode of production, together with the forms and ways of life it had created and had been sustaining it, was now falling apart. Naturally, the processes of its disintegration also affected the historically particular forms of migration that had come with indus­ trial modernity, forms best embodied in the figure of a migrant worker moving across a network of sovereign nation states, primarily from the poorer south to the richer north. Millions of these migrant workers, also known by their German nick­ name "guest workers" (Gastarbeiter), were largely working industriously away in Fordist factories while simultaneously, and equally diligently, struggling for and toward social integration.7 Although expected to return home sooner or later, most of them stayed in their host coun­ tries, creating with their families new sorts of national minorities that

6 Ibid. 7 Th at there w ould soon also ensue a stru g gle for a cu ltu ral one, and that this struggle w ould becom e even m ore d ram atic, th ey still did n't know at the tim e. Id en tity p o litics was then taking its first, early steps.

110 Th e O ne Too M any...

still haven't been properly integrated. But then, the world around them changed. In 1975, John Berger, together with photographer Jean Mohr, published a classical work on migrant workers in Europe, which described this change—a change that turned migration into an essentially global phe­ nomenon. In the preface to a new edition published thirty-five years later he writes: "The world political structure has been transformed as a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the global economic order, known as neoliberalism—or, more accurately, economic fascism. The power of trade unions and the power of national governments have both been diminished. Factories now are becoming as migratory as workers. It has become as simple to build a factory where labour is as cheap as to import cheap labour. The poor have become poorer. The present concentration of global economic power is unprecedented. Its agents are the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organisation."8 None of these bodies was mentioned in the first edition of the book. Yet today, together with other powerful subjects of international politics, they run the world. The fact that they are almost entirely beyond any democratic control is widely known and discussed. And the fact that the global Right effectively rules over this global network of institutions is simply taken for granted. But the idea that the contemporary Left, Old, New or whatever, might have any influence on them, let alone gain or assume power over some of them, is beyond imagination. With its bare hands

What then can the Left do about a global problem like migration? It has no say in the economic, political and military institutions that generate, control and exploit the global movement of migrants. Nor do its rep­ resentatives count themselves among the CEOs of the most powerful international banks and corporations. Moreover, the Left has in fact almost completely abandoned the entire infrastructure of the global 8 John Berger, Jean Mohr, A S e v e n th M a n : A B o o k o f Im a g e s a n d W ords a b o u t th e E x p e rie n c e o f M ig r a n t W orkers in E u ro p e (London, New York: Verso, 2010), 7.

Buden

111

power relations. Today, it no longer governs any globally significant nation state, nor does it command any army.9 Old or New, modest or extreme, global or local, the Left doesn't hold any instruments of Realpolitik in its hands with which it could effectively intervene in genuinely global processes of migration, either peacefully or violently. The Left today can no longer pull the trigger of a single revolver. Even the times when it had its own violent extremists are also gone. The last members of the former Left-wing terrorist organizations, if they haven't yet be­ come political servants of the neoliberal order, are today drug dealers, religious zealots or Right-wing activists. The situation is no better on the Left's pacifist flank, either. Quite the contrary: during the most heated periods of the Cold War it was still able to mobilize a strong, worldwide peace movement, and within the frameworks of geopolitical Realpolitik articulate a politics of non-alignment; today, when serious experts on international politics talk of a Cold War II that might prove more dangerous than the previous one—that is, when the possibility of a nuclear catastrophe has become even more realistic than before—a similar mass pacifist movement or a geopolitical peace project seems entirely inconceivable. Taking decisions on such important matters like (nuclear) war and peace, or the ecological survival of the planet, decisions that might seal the fate of all of humanity, is altogether Left to the Right-wing Realpo­ litik, in both its moderate and its most extreme forms. Moreover, the Right has entirely taken over the old, already crumbling Westphalian order; however, not to maintain or improve it, but to systematically dismantle and abuse its entire instrumentarium for its own purposes. It has stripped its basic institution, the nation state, of all its normative legitimation; but before all, of the principle of sovereignty; and, at the same time, emptied it of most of its social content. After decades of neo-liberal "reforms" the Right has almost totally destroyed society from within, and refilled the empty shell of a state with all sorts of identitarian rubbish, from fetishized cultural heritage to racist para­ military gangs. In the hands of the neo-liberal Right the nation state, long believed to have been tossed by globalization into the dustbin of history, has been resurrected as an instrument of destruction of the 9 A few exceptions to this rule, alm ost e xclu siv e ly in South A m erica, w ere rather sh ort-lived .

112 Th e O ne Too M any...

very order of that for which it once served as the backbone. Now the old order is supposed to be replaced by a new one, based on the prin­ ciple of multipolarity and designed after Carl Schmitt's vision of the "New Nomos of the Earth", a new system of international relations in which sovereignty will be a privilege of its few centres, or in Schmitt's words, "great spaces" (Grossraume) that can still afford it. It is within this new geopolitical order, with its powerful instruments, that the Right today manages migration, or more precisely, controls and fil­ ters its flows in the interest of domination and exploitation. The Left, on the contrary, has no influence on this same order, and can make no use of any of its instruments. Can it then influence the problem of global migration in any way? It can indeed, but only if it reinvents a Realpolitik beyond the already collapsing order, one able to recompose the dismembered social bodies of the Westphalian nation states and finally leave their temporal and spatial arrangements behind, the "alltoo-human" narratives of national histories as well as the very idea of territorialized democracy. But even for many on the Left this sounds like too extremist a vision. Is there such thing as a moderate Left?

All that has been said here about the Left seems to refer only to its extremist, radically anti-systemic, militant wing. But isn't there also a non-extremist, or shall we say, a moderate Left, the one that slowly but steadily works within the given system and makes, within all the constraints of a democratic Realpolitik, the best of things in the interest of society as a whole and in accordance with traditional Left values. This is a Left that in the parliaments and publics of democratic states bravely struggles to keep the borders as open as possible for migrants and refugees, a Left that welcomes cultural difference, facilitates inte­ gration and publicly resists racist propaganda. It is largely composed of social democratic, green, and even more radically Left parties and the attendant broader range of their supporters. Although it is rare today that it finds itself in the position to rule alone, this moderate Left constructively and productively participates in coalition gov­ ernments and shares general responsibility for their policies. If it is not able to radically change the world, or concretely solve some of its central problems like migration, it certainly renders such problems

Buden

113

more bearable. What then could be wrong with such a non-extremist, moderate Left? The trouble with the moderate parliamentary Left is that it is increas­ ingly difficult to differentiate it from other political alternatives, not only from classical centrist piarties but also from those that are considered far-Right. This become^ especially apparent in the debates on the socalled refugee crisis. Examples show that in such cases even the very difference between a Left and a Right stance on migration begins to blur. The German public was recently confronted with a dispute that was conducted in the form of a parallel interview, between the leaders of two German parliamentary parties—one considered to be on the far Left and another, a newcomer in German party politics, on the Right.10What was most striking about this confrontation, which, not surprisingly, focused largely on the question of migration, were the desperate attempts by the representative of the Left to minimize and justify the obvious overlaps by both parties on major issues dominating German politics today: that the migrants who abuse their “right to hospitality" should immediately lose said privilege, that migrants and refugees should stay and be helped outside Germany's borders, where they come from or in neighbouring regions; that the influx of migrants threatens the most vulnerable social strata, drives the lowest wages down still further, raises the cost of the cheapest housing, and generally fuels competition among the weakest and poorest, etc. They even agree on such strategic questions as Ger­ many's relation to the European Union. Both want the German state to reclaim the competencies it ceded to the non-transparent bureaucracy in Brussels. In other words, the party representing the extreme Left of German party politics and the most extreme Right wing party both de­ mand a return to the nation state as the historically ultimate institutional framework for democracy, social justice and economic prosperity. And both also agree that, as one explicitly stated, “the insanely expensive Euro-experiment" has definitively failed as both a project of transna­ tional democracy and economically as a monetary union. 10 See: "A Dispute betw een Sahra W agen kn echt and Frauke Petry" (Streitgespräch zw isch e n Sahra W ag enknecht und Frauke Petry), F ra n k fu rte r A llg e m e in e S o n n to g s z e itu n g , O ctob er 2, 2016, accessed N ovem ber 1, 2016, h ttp ://w w w .sahraw ag en knech t.d e/d e/article/2432.streitgesp räch -zw isch en-sa h raw ag enknech t-u nd -frauke-p etry.htm l. Sahra W agenknecht is the d e p u ty chair of the Left Party (D ie Lin ke) and Frauke Petry the chair of the A lte rn ative for G erm any (A lte rn a tiv e fü r D e u ts c h la n d ).

114 Th e O ne Too M any...

But where then do they actually disagree? When it comes to the problem of migrants and refugees we return to the question of how many—or, in this concrete case, of who precisely might be accepted. While the Right-wing politician would rather accept those that are highly skilled, the criterion of her Left-wing counterpart is somewhat more flexible in terms of general humanitarian values. The Left's party program even contains a universal call for “borders open to all". However, as its chair­ woman explains, this is only a vision for the future, which, of course, cannot be applied in actual reality. The question now is where does this humanistic surplus, which ex­ pands somewhat on the number of immigrants the German state can accept, actually come from? The answer is to be found in the interview itself—more precisely, in a single word mentioned but once the entire time—and astonishingly, by the chairwoman of the Right-wing party: “solidarity". Solidarity: towards an afterlife

Such an obvious silence around this word shouldn't come as a surprise. Solidarity is a key concept of the Left, a sort of fundamental ideological paradigm from which historical Left projects, revolutionary or reform­ ist, communist, socialist, anarchist, or in some other way leftist, have drawn their political strength and socially formative power. It was a weapon in the class struggle, a shield against predatory capitalist exploi­ tation, a means of survival in times of scarcity. It even wrote codes of law and fought for justice in courts and tribunals. But above all, solidarity as a modern political force represented that very special addition that would give various forms of human togetherness a historically specific character of the social. What in the age of industrial modernity was called society would not have been possible without solidarity. How much of that solidarity has survived in today's democracies after decades of neoliberal transformations? Not much, but just enough to make this small difference between “Left" and “Right", or better, to keep the memory of this difference alive. Yet this miserable leftover of what once was solidarity, barely sufficient to maintain even a mod­ est amount of humanitarian empathy, is most certainly not enough to confront the problem of migration on any political level. Without being

Buden

115

able to breathe new life into its longstanding ideal of solidarity the Left is doomed merely to opportunistically follow the liberal democratic mainstream as it reduces the challenge of migration to a matter of empty sophistry; how many, whom precisely, and for how long? If we can still imagine a genuine politics of solidarity, can it really be, when confronting a challenge as formidable as migration, anything but extremist? Not because it must assume that the instruments of a liberal democratic state may not be able to cope with this challenge, but rather because these same instruments—borders, detention facilities, deportation mechanisms, capacities of economic, social and cultural integration, etc.—actively shape the object with which they are sup­ posed to cope. They—or more precisely, those who make democratically legitimized use of these instruments—make the human fact of migra­ tion appear like a sort of "bare life moving", a form of human life that, beyond its juridical inclusion/exclusion, is also stripped of its entire existential meaning as well as deprived of its political subjectivity. If the existential experience of one's own finitude, one that borders on the ontological dimension of a "being-towards-death", has ever had any social and political meaning, then this meaning is epitomized in the experience of migration and taking refuge. Migrants and refugees have not simply escaped fatal poverty or violent death from war; they carry this experience of human finitude and bring it with them to all of their destinations. It is this experience that the solidarity at these destinations must be able to socially encounter and politically address in order to become genuinely political. Instead of emphatically mobiliz­ ing hospitality, which only further victimizes migrants, it must be able to politically activate the social truth of their existential experience, which is more fundamental than the bundle of cultural differences the migrants might have brought along with them. This is also the only way to generate the political subjectivity of migrants. It won't emerge as a successful outcome of their own struggle for recognition from an already given political subject—the publics and political parties of the "democratic world"—but through an active sharing of a common politi­ cal cause that fundamentally transforms the very perception of political reality and the existing relation between the real and the possible. At this point, a truly political solidarity cannot but become extremist. For what it identifies with when it encounters the migrant's experience of existential finitude is the experience of its own impossibility within the

116 Th e O ne Too M any...

given order; that is, the finitude of that same society for which it once constituted the very core.11 Is there anything solidarity can do about it? It might try to do what people usually do when faced with a threat to their existence. They escape the conditions in which they cannot survive, which is what these days makes them into migrants. And so shall solidarity do, es­ cape the socially emptied shells of the existing democracies, abandon that sinking boat—not because it is too full of foreigners, but because it is too empty of social meaning. If the struggle for survival is called extremism, so be it. But what is actually the alternative? Obviously, there is nothing else to be done than to go on with the struggle for hegemony within the existing framework of a democratic nation state by making use of all the sophistry available, in the hopes of winning and finally, ruling. And ruling what? A void. Ruling beyond society

Ruling the Void is the title of Peter Mair's book on the terminal crisis of what he suggests is a "hollowed out" Western democracy. It begins with the words: "The age of party democracy is passed. Although the parties themselves remain, they have become so disconnected from the wider society, and pursue a form of competition that is so lacking in meaning, that they no longer seem capable of sustaining democracy in its present form."12 What Mair actually has in mind with this clear and univocal diagnosis is the widening gap between citizens and their democratically elected representatives—more precisely, the ruling elites recruited from and installed into power by the political parties. The gap in fact opened up 11 This m ight go som e w ay in e xplain in g w h y the cu ltu ral d ifferen ces of the m igrants instill so m uch fear am ong the citizens of the W estern d em o cracies. Th ey fu n ctio n as a sort of fetish , w hose original role in the psychic econom y of a person is to suppress and make bearable another m ore fun dam en tal fear and the co n trad ictio n s it creates— the fear of castratio n . The exaggerated fear of the cu ltu ral in co m p atib ility of im m igrants has a sim ilar fetish istic fu n ctio n , to calm a m ore fun dam en tal trau m a, the one of the term inal loss of society. 12 Peter Mair, R u lin g th e V oid: The H o llo w in g o f W estern D e m o c ra c y (Lo nd on, New York: Verso 2013), 1.

J

B ud en

117

with the mutual withdrawal of both sides. The parties and the political elites have withdrawn from civil society, and more generally from their democratic accountability, and moved towards the realm of government and the state. At the same time a parallel disengagement of the citizenry also developed, for they, too, withdrew from the realm of parties and conventional politics. What was once the common world of democracy, in which political parties represented the voice of the popular will while the people (demos) was their genuine point of origin in which they were deeply socially embedded, has now fallen apart. Now Mair speaks of two separate worlds: a world of citizens and a world of politicians and parties, and claims that interaction between these two worlds is steadily diminishing. Of course this development has further consequences. The farther the parties have moved away from their voters, the closer they have moved to each other. The result is not only the emergence of a new governing class, in which politicians of different parties easily gather and unite around their common interests, but the parties themselves increas­ ingly tend to echo each other and blur clear policy choices. Although there still exists a sharply defined choice between competing leaders, there is less and less choice in terms of policy. Competition in these circumstances can be intense and hard-fought; but, as Mair argues, it closely resembles the kind of competition in sports, like we find in football matches or horse races: "sharp, exciting, and even pleasing the spectators, but ultimately lacking in substantive meaning."13 The general elimination of any real opposition in contemporary democra­ cies, while hardly new, finds even more validity and relevance today. Mair and Richard Katz call it a "government by cartel", the situation that emerges and prevails when "no meaningful differences divide the party protagonists, however vigorously they may at times compete with one another."14The example of the leaders of two German parties occupying the opposite spectrums of German party politics herein is a prime illustration of this condition. Mair describes it as a hollowing out of democratic party government or, in more general terms, the hollowing out of mass democracy itself. For him, this is a consequence of two general trends: individualization and globalization. In the first 13 Ibid., 68. 14 Ibid.

118 Th e O ne Too M any...

case at stake is an emptying out of the social content of party democra­ cies; and concretely, an erosion of its socially cohesive infrastructure, that which originally constituted the social basis for mass democracy, like trade unions, churches, clubs, farming groups and other, similar networks of social cohesion. In fact, it is an erosion of all traditional forms of social solidarity. In political terms, individualization is for Mair a secular disintegration of the modern demos. But the process of this transformation goes far deeper. It affects the very essence of what society is. After decades of what is known as the neoliberal dismantling of the social welfare state it might well be true that Margaret Thatcher, who was the main politi­ cal strategist and the personification of such a neoliberal policy, was ultimately right when she said there is no such thing as society.15With this in mind, we can finally understand what is actually meant by the "void" over which, as Mair suggests, politicians rule today. Certainly it is a genuine political space, but of such a character that all of the performative power that is deployed within by the rhetorical virtuos­ ity of the democratic political elites, however agonistic or radical, just suffices to reproduce their dominion over this space, but is not enough to recreate its social content. In short, it no longer means ruling over a society but, literally, ruling beyond society. This is closely connected to the second general trend that has effected the void of the social—globalization—which implies the ever-declining ability of today's rulers of democratic nation states to create their own autonomous policies, both on general social and specific economic is­ sues. As a result, the crucial political decisions are no longer made by the party elites, but rather by the so-called non-majoritarian elite institutions; like, on the national level, central banks and various regula­ tory agencies; and internationally, the global financial institutions and transnational political constructions like the European Union. 15 Although it has been quoted m any tim es it is still w orth rem em b ering tim e and again: A fter com p laining about people w ho, as she states, e xp e ct g overn m ent to solve th eir problem s, like fin ding a jo b or hom e, M argaret Th atch e r c o n c lu d e s :" ... and so th ey are casting th e ir problem s on so cie ty — and w ho is society? Th ere is no such thing! Th ere are ind ivid u al men and w om en and there are fam ilies and no g o vern m ent can do anything except through people, and people look to th em selves first." M argaret Th atcher, Interview for W om an 's O w n , Septem b er 23, 1987, accessed N ovem ber 14, 2016, h ttp://w w w .m argaretth atch er.org /docu m ent/106689

Buden

119

The nation state, once the very seat of popular democracy, has lost both its political voice and its economic power. The political elites that once held sway within and beyond the borders of their nation states and were at the same time accountable to their national electorates now find themselves in an increasingly difficult predicament: either they follow the social interests of their voters and, as a consequence, trigger a flight of capital that undermines the economic integrity of the nation; or they attract the capital that further undermines social welfare and destroys whatever is left of society. In such a conundrum, an empty sophistry is all that is left to appease both the people that elected them and the global capital to which they are bound. Sophism as border

One of the most precise indicators by which to measure today's intellec­ tual and political regression of the modest, liberal Left is its moralistic outrage over the global proliferation of new walls ("worse than the Berlin one"). While it still makes some sense to remind ourselves how empty the promises of a better world after the collapse of Communism and the closing of the Cold War divide were, and how violent and unjust so-called democratic normality is, it also serves to blind us entirely to the real meaning and extraordinary political and economic importance of contemporary borders. Needless to say, today's processes of global migration cannot be properly addressed, neither theoretically nor as a political issue, without being critically reflected through the prism of borders. A border is all but a clear-cut line separating distinct territories and preventing the free movement of people, objects and capital. Rather it is a device that articulates and regulates these movements. As such, borders create and give shape to the heterogeneous time and space of today's global and postcolonial capitalism. This is the central thesis of Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson's Border as Method.16 It reveals the key role borders play in establishing different migration regimes across the world, and the way these regimes partake in the produc­ tion of labour—and the power of it—as a commodity. If globalization 16 Sandro M ezzadra and Brett Neilson, B o rd e r as M e th o d , or, The M u ltip lic a tio n o f L a b o r (D urham , London: Duke U n iversity Press, 2013), ix.

120 Th e O ne Too M any...

is inconceivable without an enormous increase in the forms and scope of mobility, then this mobility is unthinkable without borders as the main instrument of its regulation as well as of its economic and political utilization. But in order to understand this, one must first abandon the still prevalent notion of border as a mere geopolitical phenomenon, and concretely, as a linear boundary that is situated along the margins sepa­ rating geopolitical unities from one another. Border, on the contrary, is everywhere within, and has an extraordinary depth in both the spatial and temporal sense. In fact, it is essentially heterogeneous, which means that it might have many faces and layers: symbolic, linguistic, cultural, etc. And it might be endlessly multiplied. Understood this way the concept of border offers us an indication of the true teleological ratio of all the debates on migrants and refugees that are being so vehemently held in the publics and parliaments of the Western nation states. At stake is not a democratic deliberation on the collective interests that will sooner or later result in a rational decision on a proper migrant policy, concretely, around a "rational" level of border porosity (or impermeability). These debates don't discuss borders, they are the very borders themselves; or more precisely, they are but the very practice of bordering. The fact that they usually end in sophistry has nothing to do with the failure of their protagonists to make a rational choice on the matter of migration. On the contrary, this sophistry is perfectly in line with the very teleology of these debates. As outlined at the beginning, sophistic paradoxes emerge or arise out of the vagueness of their pivotal concepts. In other words, these concepts are borderline cases, blurred bands that can't at any point be definitively distinguished from other concepts. And the borders of today are just such bands: vague, blurred, imprecise, unstable; and in any case, far from the idea of a sharp and definitive cut-offline. This is why there can be no rational answer to the question of how many migrants might enter the community through its border, precisely who of them might do so (in terms of marketable skills, cultural adaptability, or in view of security and humanitarian reasons), and for how long they might be permitted to remain within? But the political elites, democratically granted the right to answer these questions, keep on promising what they can't deliver. This, however, doesn't make them superfluous. They still serve a purpose, but a pur­ pose in a system in which they are instrumental far beyond the scope of

Buden

121

their democratic legitimacy. This is because the borders they constantly redraw and that regulate the processes of migration are themselves in the service of contemporary global capitalism. The logic of its economic functioning, as well as of its political reproduction, can no longer be re­ duced to the dynamics of inclusion/exclusion nor presented in terms of a clear-cut division between inside and outside—a logic that, however at odds with reality today, still lies at the ideological core of the liberal democratic nation state, assures its economic justification, and gener­ ates dominant forms of political subjectivation within its borders. The claim_to equal rights, the principle of the rule of law, the paradigm of a national economy (with or without distributive justice within) and finally, the political model of parliamentary democracy, personified as a whole in the figure of worker/citizen in which a historically particular mode of production has found its corresponding, equally historically particular form of political subjectivity—all of that has been considered possible only within the borders of a modern nation state capable of including all that helps it survive and grow, and excluding what could in any way undermine its very existence. The problem is, however, that contemporary processes of migration challenge the model of nation state on all these levels because they, like the globalization of which they are the cause and effect, necessarily evade the logic of inclusion/ exclusion, together with all of the ideologico-political baggage that goes with it. One example particularly proves this: the practice of detention insti­ tutionally embodied in the form of the detention camp. Such a camp is largely understood as a site of sovereign exception that has its origins in the juridico-political concept of “state of exception". Confining mi­ grants and refugees in such a detention facility renders them legally included, precisely by virtue of simultaneously excluding them from the same legal order.17Yet this legally and existentially paradoxical space acquires an essentially different meaning when put in the context of the way global capitalism today manages labour markets. Here it becomes an instrument of migration control that serves to regulate the time and speed of the migrant's transition into the labour market. Mezzadra and Neilson even call such detention camps “decompression chambers".18 17 Here I rely on M ezzadra and Neilson's critical analyses of G iorgio Agam ben's concept of d etention cam p as elaborated in his H o m o S a ce r. Ibid., 142. 18 Ibid., 149.

122 Th e

O ne Too M any...

They argue that these and similar institutions of administrative deten­ tion are being increasingly deployed beyond the boundaries of nation states as a form of benching, a practice of the so-called body shopping system: workers are being temporarily withdrawn from labour mar­ kets and held in reserve, which pushes the price of their labour up and increases demand. Used this way, as a device employed by the bordering regime—literally as a temporal border—the detention camp serves the production and reproduction of labour power as commodity far more than it does the exercising of sovereign power on bare life.19 This, however, radically changes the mainstream Left's liberal percep­ tion of migrants. Instead of being seen exclusively as innocent victims of exclusion by a sovereign power, they also turn out to be commodi­ fied objects of differential inclusion in the interest of capital. This shift in focus quickly reveals the limits of juridical ideology that has so far dominated the liberal Left's discourse on migrants resulting, by and large, in their victimization. This has had two major effects on the general debate on migration: the first is the depoliticization of the migrants themselves. Precisely in the figure of excluded citizens, a figure imposed on them by the juridical ideology, they are deprived of their political subjectification and surrendered to the political will of an already established sovereign power. At the same time they are surrendered—literally—to its mercy. This is the second effect of their victimization—a turn to humanitarianism. In both cases political de­ bates on migration end in sophistry: how much empathy can a sovereign power exercise without losing its legitimacy vis-à-vis the moral con­ science of its citizens (or that of the entire world), the so-called values of its (Western) civilization, God himself; or simply vis-à-vis the profit interests of its entrepreneurial class? On the level of concrete political decision-making this sophistry is instrumentalized in the practical differentiation between so-called economic migrants on the one hand, and refugees and asylum seekers on the other. But its true origin lays in the ever-widening gap between two major figures of global capitalism and its political order today—“worker" and “citizen". The sophistry we are talking about here is in fact the result of a desperate attempt of the ruling political elites to close this gap into which their democratic legitimacy is collapsing. This same sophistry reveals the last, decadent 19 bid., 150.

Buden

123

phase of the so-called struggle for recognition, the paradigm that has for decades determined the language of political demands and thus the stakes of contemporary political struggles. The sophistic character of its political claims marks the historical moment in which the struggle for recognition has come to exhaust its emancipatory potentials. What has finally failed is a deeply culturalized liberal inclusivism grounded in the belief that the realm of freedom and justice has been, and will further be, expanded exponentially with every new inclusion of its formerly excluded outside—that is, with the subsequent inclusion of women, people of colour, ethnic and sexual minorities, etc.20Migration as a global phenomenon succeeds to evade the teleology of this eman­ cipatory developmentalism. Don't wait, walk!

No story of migrants as the most paradigmatic socio-political embodi­ ment of global mobility is complete without taking into consideration its negative counterpart—the figure of an absolute immobility rhetorically epitomized in the metaphor of those "left behind". It is a picture of a failed historical movement, a sort of social stasis. And it is no less politi­ cally charged than the picture of the mass movement of migrants and refugees. Moreover, it immediately triggers the association of millions of former industrial workers in the heart of the so-called Western world who have lost their jobs and their way of life due to globalization; lost concretely through the deindustrialization that is the result of outsourc­ ing industrial production overseas to sources of cheap labour; or, on the contrary, through the influx of this same cheap—migrant—labour. As is well known, these masses of jobless industrial workers with no material ground on which to stand and no future to look forward to provide the most powerful social source of Right-wing political mobilization. Yet this social condition is paralleled by another more sublime condition, a sort of spiritual stasis condensed in the image of a spirit that has also been left behind. 20 This is cle arly a subtle reference to Ju d ith Butler's concept of u n iversality, w hich in the form of cu ltu ral tran slation can be articu late d only as a response to its excluded outside. See esp e cially Ju d ith Butler, "U n ive rsality in Culture", in F o r Lo v e o f C o u n try : D e b a tin g th e L im its o f P a trio tism (M a rth a C. N u ssb a u m w ith re sp o n d e n ts), ed. Joshua Cohen (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996), 45 -5 2 .

124 Th e O ne Too M any...

Now, speaking of spirits, we all know there is no spirit like the German spirit. It is, without a doubt, the most prominent among all the spirits that have ever animated the world: the most ambitious, most profound in its self-reflection, the most dialectical and even the longest-lived. But there is another feature that distinguishes the German spirit, and that is its most intimate relation to language, one established more than 200 years ago, in the time of the German Romantics. Yet what is less well known is that the German spirit had already shown an extraordinary openness to what it called the foreign [das Fremde). Its genuine medium, the German language, saw the only chance for its development [Bildung in all the richness of its cultural and social meanings) in welcoming influences from foreign languages; or, as one theorist of translation put it, in the effort "to fertilize what is one's Own through the mediation of what is Foreign."21 This is an extraordinary ideological legacy of the German spirit, one that is today, at least in the eyes of its most faithful inheritors, probably the main reason this spirit (or what still remains of it) doesn't seem so endangered by the foreign that the migrants bring with them.22Yet its main enemy, the one that threatens it with certain death, is also a prod­ uct of globalization; in fact, it is its lingua franca, the English language. Jürgen Trabant, probably the most prominent expert on German roman­ tic philosophy of language, sees the German language today being left, quite literally, behind on the platform. He uses the explicit metaphor of the taillights of a departing luxury train, in which global English is seated, slowly pulling away into the distance. For Trabant, however, the struggle of and for the German language—and the German spirit in it—is already over. It is lost, and any further debate on the matter is superfluous.23Nevertheless, he still makes the effort to tell us the story of the historical “re-vernacularization" of German and other European languages.24 At stake is a new socio-linguistic and cultural condition 21 A ntoine Berm an, Th e E x p e rie n c e o f th e F o re ig n : C u ltu re a n d T ra n sla tio n in R o m a n tic G e rm a n y (A lbany: State U n iversity of New York Press, 1992), 4. 22 The fear of Ü b e rfre m d u n g (being overrun w ith foreign ers) th at is ty p ical of G erm an Right w ing populist propaganda d e fin itiv e ly does not belong to the great in h eritan ce of Germ an rom anticism . 23 Jürgen Trab ant, "Über ab gefah rene Züge, das D eutsche und andere Sprachen der W issen sch aft," D e n k strö m e . J o u r n a l d e r S ä c h s is ch e n A k a d e m ie d e r W isse n sc h a fte n 6 (2011). 24 See Jürgen Trabant, G lo b a le s is c h o d e r w as? Ein P lä d o y e r fü r E u ro p a s S p ra ch e n (M ünchen: V e rla g C . H. Beck, 2014).

Bud en

125

that resembles the Europe of the Middle Ages, when Latin was used across all of the higher strata of social, political and intellectual life, while the lower classes continued speaking old vernaculars. Today it is English that has taken the place and role of Latin. It is spoken in all of the higher and more important discourses in today's Europe, while the national languages, including the two strongest among them—Ger­ man and French—have increasingly retreated into the background of everyday life and less important discourses. Trabant understands this transformation as a “cultural revolution" that divides society into two linguistically differentiated classes: above, an elite, for which English is the language of knowledge, prestige, power and success; and below, another for the rest, a national language for the practicalities of everyday life. He sees this as a process of social regres­ sion and cultural decline—and one that also reflects global injustice.25 While everybody else has to speak English, the “Anglo-world" no longer learns other languages, which makes it provincial, too: “The Masters of the Universe are increasingly provincial monolinguals."26 This is the condition—global and local, linguistic and spiritual—in which migrants move towards their destinations today. What they find upon arrival is a Western democratic nation state; but this state is not the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, full of humanity's most pre­ cious, universal values, which they might be allowed to appropriate and enjoy only if they are properly integrated. The local national language, which they are expected to adopt once there, is no longer what it once was. It has been defeated on its own territory, into which it now, after being ousted from its most important sites, goes into hiding from the mighty conqueror. Similarly, the spirit that brought this language into the world, that cared for, nurtured and watched it grow and develop, preserved the memory of its glory and promised it the brightest of fu­ tures, has in the meantime evaporated. Hegel's vision of a national spirit 25 Trab ant's thesis on the re-vernacu larization of European national languages is above all a call for resistance against "the program of re-education into 'global English' (G lo b a le s is c h )", in sh ort, it is a call for resistance against w hat he sees as the disastrous social and cu ltu ral e ffe cts of g lo b alizatio n . For him , such a resistance im plies a restriction on m ultiling ualism "that should be tam ed and controlled", as w ell as the prom otion and funding of tran slatio n s from national languages into English. It also d ire ctly addresses a p o litical agent exp e cte d to organize and co n d u ct this re sistan ce— a p ro tectio nist n atio n ­ state. Trab ant, "Uber ab gefah rene Zuge," 18. 26 Ibid.

126 Th e O ne Too M any...

[Volksgeist] as a dialectical moment in the development and articulation of the world spirit [Weltgeist), a vision in which the historical process of universalization implied a genuine continuity between what we call to­ day the local and the global, and in which the world spirit was deployed as a superstructural complement to the economies and geopolitics of the world order, of the notorious Westphalian cluster of sovereign nation states, has been broken, together with the continuity it once promised. The new vernaculars are no longer able to enclose and define a territory and consequently impose their hegemony on it. Nor can they guarantee any spiritual—cultural, in today's parlance—continuity between the local and the global, either. Moreover, a new vernacular isn't able, via a narrative, to create a history and to map and enclose, within a com­ mon historical temporality, a defined area. Such was one of the main tasks of the old national languages that once thrived and rose from the Middle Age vernaculars. Thus the speakers of these languages were provided with the ability to connect their own social present not only with a distant—both temporally and culturally—past, but also with the histories of those speaking other languages, and further, to envision a common, universal history—one that Reinhart Koselleck describes in terms of a “collective singular". Today, however, one who speaks a new vernacular is literally out of both space and time. One literally becomes a socio-politically groundless and at the same time ahistorical creature. This is what is actually meant by the metaphor referring to those “left behind"—left behind in a decadent national monolinguality in which they can only reproduce their global subalternity. Still, they might have their own national culture, a national history, a national art, etc., but this culture, this history or this art have all become a sort of non-translatable autistic trash, something that can no longer be integrated into the narratives of global modernity. These new vernaculars are now the desolate leftovers of what once was a nation, a national language, a national spirit or culture, a national his­ tory or whatever. Which is why the imperative of integration imposed on migrants today by the democratic publics and political elites of the Western nation states is utter nonsense—or better, mere sophistry. But does it make more sense then to allow those vernacularized masses waiting on the platform for the next Right-wing demagogue to lead them—lead us—into a common fascist future?

Buden

127

At this point we should remember what happened in the summer of 2015 at Budapest's main train station, where masses of migrants and refugees finally decided, after being trapped there for days, to break out and start their walk to freedom. Since they were blocked there by that same ideology and that same political power that has now left the local losers of globalization behind on the same historical platform, they might consider taking their fellow proletarians along with them next time. This would be an act of solidarity, one that has no territory nor historical time of its own. Indeed, both have to be yet invented.

128 Th e O ne Too M any...

Frank Ruda First as Tragedy, Then as Tragedy?

“One thus multiplies the evil that one sought to cure." G .W .F. H e g e l

This is not my crisis!

There are no refugees without a crisis. But this doesn't mean that a crisis that brings with it refugees is therefore and at the same time necessarily and conceptually a “refugee crisis". Refugees are always refugees because of a crisis; but what makes the refugees into a crisis is not necessarily the same as that which made them refugees. There may be refugees, but this doesn't have to be a crisis for those who, for example, welcome them. In the current situation, things stand dif­ ferently. Almost everyone, at the very least in Europe, refers to the present (socio-political] situation as a situation that entails or is the “refugee crisis". It seems immediately clear that there is a crisis that is represented, embodied by and condensed in the mass of refugees floating into Europe (even though right now the actual number of peo­ ple coming is far less than it was roughly a year ago). These refugees are, more specifically, those people who also seem to bring the crisis with them, because the crisis made them into who they are. It seems to be attached to them—just like a group of sick people can transmit a disease that may turn out to pose a real risk for those who are either supposed to or genuinely want to help them. Refugees today seem to be crisis-contagious. And the attempts to help that we have witnessed in Europe have been (more or less explicitly) part of some politico-medical regimen. But, as anyone knows who has ever seen more than one doc­ tor for the same health concern, opinions on the cure (if not indeed on the cause of the illness, too) may differ wildly. The same holds for the crisis—at least at first sight. The refugees were widely considered to have brought the crisis that made them into refugees to a place where there did not seem to have been a crisis before—at least, no crisis of that kind, anyway. It's as if by moving their very bodies they bring with them not only their culture,

129

their customs, prejudices, system of values etc., but in fact impart far more than that. And this happens already at the stage of and simply by doing what a refugee does—namely seek refuge somewhere where there is not (yet) a crisis. They involuntarily transmit something of that very illness that made them into refugees in the first place. They brought something of that which they were seeking to flee, yet what they brought with them also seemed to change as soon as they arrived at some destination—very much like a virus adapts. In this way the refugees became a spreading, contagious illness, a moving crisis (in and for Europe). They became the (moving) embodiment of the crisis, precisely because they forced the European nation states to decide (“Kpivoo” (judge)) what to do with those who fled from such crises and now demand, among other things, to be taken in. They brought with them a crisis of (political) judgement. As soon as a certain (excessive) number of refugees reached Europe, the humanitarian problem that the refugees previously represented seemed to have transformed them into the embodiment of a moving crisis—a crisis moving from one place to the next, over and over again demon­ strating its infectious quality. Think of Greece, which was several times and still is in some places, on the verge of administrative collapse; or of Germany, where the reaction to the “refugee crisis” immediately created new problems, such as the rise of new Right-wing and openly Fascist par­ ties and movements that even refused and publicly renounced official government representation, holding that same government responsible for the situation tout court. The crisis that was shipped to Europe thereby arrived as a crisis of a different kind. The European “refugee crisis”—and thus not the crisis of the refugees—seemed at first sight to have sprung from the sheer number of refugees coming to and arriving at the borders of Europe. Once here they seemed to have undergone a conversion from quantity to quality. And as is well known, it is impossible to objectively determine at what point in this setting such a conversion actually takes place: are 500 refugees enough to change the quality of the situation

130 First as Trag e d y, Th e n as Trag e d y?

and turn it into a problem?1 One million, certainly—but where is the threshold?2 In any case, it soon became increasingly clear that the problem is not only (if at all) that people are arriving in ever-greater numbers and are bringing a crisis to where there was none before. Rather, their presence intensified or made visible (maybe for the first time) some fundamental and constitutive, yet otherwise hidden, repressed, unseen or unseeable problems. The material presence of the refugees brought or created a crisis by forcing us to confront problems that were there (i.e., here) before, but problems that acquired a proper actuality, their proper problematicity, so to speak; that is, they even seemed to constitute themselves as problems proper (only) with their arrival.3They thereby brought the crisis, which was there already, and made it properly into what it latently already was. It is, for example, not true that the arrival of the refugees alone created the widespread rise of Right-wing move­ ments or organizations gaining electoral impetus all over Europe; but their arrival did escalate this tendency into a real problem, which in its repercussions even started challenging the very foundations and principles of several nation states and the entire European Union. In

1

One standard exam ple of this kind of conversion illustrates that it's difficult to determ ine when someone losing his hair is definitively bald. Is he bald when he still has 4 ,1 4 ,4 5 ,1 5 0 , etc. hairs on his head? When is bald bald, when is a crisis a crisis? And one should also take into ac­ count that this conversion always happens with a certain im m ediacy and suddenness, as if even though it is anticipated, the moment of surprise always comes as a surprise, and can never be properly avoided. So, even if the coming of a great num ber of people at some point was w idely anticipated, perception of the situation changed profoundly when they actually arrived. 2 Etienne Balibar rem arked that, "it is therefore no overstatem en t to speak of disgrace. 500 m illion 'rich' Europeans (very unequally, it is true) are u nw illing and unable to accom m odate 500,000 refugees (or even ten tim es that num ber) knocking on th eir doors." This is not at all self-evid ent. Čtienne Balibar, "Borderland Europe and the C hallenge of M igration," o p e n D e m o cra cy , Septem ber 8, 2015, accessed O ctober 22, 2016, h ttp s://w w w .o p en d em o cracy.n et/ can-euro pe-m ake-it/etienne-balib ar/bord erland -europe-and-challenge-of-m ig ration. 3 One need only recall all the an ti-refugee m ovem en ts/parties th at em erged in various regions across Germ any, often w h ere there w ere ve ry few refug ees or none at all. When the idea of the potential arrival of a refugee is enough to trig g er a hatred and resen tm ent th at m obilizes people, it becom es obvious that 1) it is not enough to exp lain to anyone that refugees are people ju st like us, or even if they are quite d ifferen t th at th ey still are in need; and 2) that such aggressive rejection cannot but be the articu latio n of a problem that doesn't have its origin in the refugee "crisis" itself. For th is, see also: Slavoj Žižek, "W hat Our Fear of Refugees Says about Europe," N ew S ta te s m a n , Feb ru ary 29, 2016, accessed O ctober 30, 2016, h ttp ://w w w .new statesm an.com /p olitics/uk/2016/02/slavoj-zizek-w hat-our-fearrefug ees-says-about-europe. Ultim ately, it m ust be stated clearly : th ere are Right-wing m ovem ents, w ith and w ith o u t the refugees.

Ruda

131

short: the crisis did not move with and through the refugees from one place to another, but certain features of the crisis had no need to move to the EU because they were already there. A symptom of the fact that it was "only" aggravated, actualized, intensified, or brought to light by the arrival of a great number of refugees can be seen in the fact that it was completely unclear as to how the EU as a whole, as the political union it is, should or could react. It even quickly became clear that almost none of its members were demonstrating any interest in the European states acting as a united political force. Rather, most states decided and acted entirely on their own; that is, on the basis of their own particular and national interests, and proclaimed that the refugee problem was not a problem with which they wanted to be politically involved. (This separatist positioning proved right precisely those critics of the EU that had always seen in it nothing but a strategic, technocratic and economic liaison with no common political agenda whatsoever; or, to be more precise, this is how a technocratic collective reacts to such a problem.) There was a certain negative consensus aligning the separate individual national and often nationalist interests—namely, that it would be best to play what one could call the Saudi-Arabia-card in Europe, i.e. not accept any refugees, deal with the problem by aggressively insisting that this is really not one's problem. Refusing to accept the problem as a problem became the most common and widespread way of dealing with the problem. One is therefore tempted to compare this structure to Freud's famous story about how a patient in analysis, when asked who the woman in his dreams is, replies "This is not my mother". Freud's claim is, of course, that it is precisely his mother (more specifically, a mother that exists only as negated, but this is just another twist to the story). The negatively unified reaction of European governments to the "refugee crisis" seemed to be precisely this: leave us alone, "this is not my crisis!"4 As a consequence of this "political" reaction, of the embodiments of the crisis, the refugees were forced to move through almost the entirety of 4 One such attitu d e w ith regard to the problem is that w hich Žižek form ulates in a d iffe r­ ent co n te xt as fo llo w s: "We ju st don't see it— or, rather, we pretend not to see it." Slavoj Žižek, A g a in s t th e D o u b le B la c k m a il: R e fu g e e s, Te rro r a n d O th e r Tro u b les w ith the N e ig h b o u rs (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 5.

132 First as Trag e d y, Th e n as Trag e d y?

Europe (from a certain point onwards), like a hot rotten potato, with everyone constantly attempting to somehow get rid of them5—like a reactive form of a Nietzschean active forgetting. Yet, as the reaction of the majority of EU states enjoyed mass support at home among their own populations, there also started to emerge a decidedly negative vision of the European Union; of a paradoxical international Right-wing collabo­ ration that accepts free exchange and the free exchange of people who only want to move for reasons of free trade (and holidays), but openly and entirely insist on their nationalist agendas—an Internationale without internationalism, a nationalist Internationale. Yet, one should insist that this has to be read as the expression of a real problem that the arrival of the refugees brought to light. The cri­ sis is thus, despite all appearances, not (only) "a consequence... of the number of arriving people... not only an expression of panic in the face of the indubitable magnitude and difficulty of the pending logistical, administrative, economic tasks. It is rather the impact that derives from shaking political unity..."6The refugees transmitted the crisis by advancing an already existing problem, a problem that pertains to the forms and orientation of political decision-making in the EU in general and crystallizes in the refugees. The refugees are the condensation of this problem, which is why the crisis (of the EU) is a "refugee crisis", without being a crisis that is simply produced by the refugees. Slavoj Žižek noted that the dominant spontaneous (ideological) forms in which this problem appeared were expressed as the following choice: Either one was and is outraged "at how Europe is allowing thousands to drown in the Mediterranean" and "state[s] that Europe should show solidarity, should open its doors widely"; or one insists on the con­ trary, "that we should protect our way of life, pull up the drawbridge and let the Africans or Arabs solve their own problems."7 This is the way the real crisis is manifested—not only by splitting Europe into two incompatible halves, with the majority of peoples and states opt5 One may here reactivate an insight form ulated by Sim m el, n am ely that "the position of the strang er stands out more sharply if, instead of leaving the place of his a ctivity, he settles down there," or at least tries to. Cf. Georg Sim m el, "The Stranger," in On In d iv id u a lity a n d S o c ia l F o rm s (Chicago: U n iversity of Chicago Press, 1971), 144. 6 Christoph M enke, "Zurück zu Hannah A rendt - die Flü ch tlin g e und die Krise der M enschenrechte," M e rku r. Z e its c h r ift fü r e u ro p ä isc h e s D en k en 7 (2016): 49. 7 Žižek, A g a in st th e D o u b le B la ck m a il , 7.

Ruda

133

ing for the latter position; but by splitting Europe into two camps that are both immanently problematic in and of themselves, by offering as choices two ways that can only appear, only prove unsustainable. The crisis of Europe is that there is no European position on the problem that was only activated by the arrival of the refugees in Europe, no position on the "ideologico-political crisis of Europe itself. Even if not acknowledged, as Freud's teacher Charcot once stated, " a n'empeche pas d'exister"—this does not stop it from existing (anyway). The first is a way of solving the refugee-crisis without solving the refugee-crisis (as there is no crisis if Europe simply welcomes and "integrates them, but this will only reinforce precisely those Right-wing parties and positions that weregaining ground all along), which is why opting for this approach will only encourage the majority of people to opt for the other position. The second is part of a nationalist Internationale and it is problematic, because—and here it becomes apparent that they are both versions of the same misconception—it is a way of solving the crisis (of the refugees) without solving the crisis (as there would be no crisis without them coming here There transpired a collective kind of "autohypnosis of those who were claiming to deal with the crisis: an autohypnosis that let them believe that they are dealing with the problem by avoiding having to deal with the problem. And this is why, " 8

9

" 9

) . 10

" 11

8 Ibid., 70. 9 Badiou is right to point out that the ve ry concept of in te g ratio n — and this is not a sim ple h um anist co m p lain t— ob vio usly im plies "a d isap pearance of one for another." The naive version of integ ration is latently even m ore hum anist su b stantialist and problem atic. Cf. Alain Badiou, Un p a rc o u rs G rec (Paris: Lignes, 2016), 94. 10 In a slig htly u ncanny prediction, Jean-Pierre Dupuy argued that the catastrophe would occur at som e point w hen a larger num ber people from southern states, "w ill be chased from th eir hom elands in the near future by drought, rising seas, hurricanes and storm s"— and one should today read this list as a list of political m etap hors— "and who w ill seek ref­ uge in our lands, this tim e not from oppressive regim es, but from the devastation of w hole regions of the w orld brought about by our own thoug htlessness and irrespo nsibility." Cf. Jean-Pierre Dupuy, The M a rk o f th e S a c re d (Stanford: Stanford U n iversity Press, 2013), 46. 11 Peter Slo terd ijk, "P rim itive R eflexe," D ie Z e it o n lin e , March 9, 2016, accessed March 9, 2016, h ttp ://w w w .zeit.d e/201 6/11/flu echtlin g sd eb atte-w illko m m en sku ltu r-p eter-slo ted ijk/ seite-1. S loterd ijk assigns this au to h yp no tic assum ption to M erkel's po litics and its d efen d ­ ers, w ho assum e th at w h at appears to be sheer cluelessness is actu ally the w ay a hidden "grand design" ap pears. For "in the realm of autohyp no sis one likes to believe that not only dream s but also m agical form u lae becom e true." (Ibid., 4). M aybe it is a sym ptom of the fact that w ord of the year 2015— a p ecu liar polling process held an nu ally in G erm an y— was "refugee" (h ttp://gfds.de/w ort-des-jahres-2015).

134 F irst as Trag e d y, Th e n as Trag e d y?

when the “refugee crisis" reached Europe, the worst had already hap­ pened.12 In the following I want to briefly re-contextualize this situation by referring it back to a situation in which similar pseudo-political and au­ tohypnotic mechanisms played out in the past and where an influential analysis of a comparable situation was presented—which appears now more timely than before, because it attests to the lack of any political solution, to the absence of politics proper. This will, I hope, show that the situation is not as new as is often proclaimed, and will also help demonstrate that not only situations, but political incapacities, too, tend to repeat themselves. There is a tragic compulsion to repeat in European politics. What happens as tragedy will be repeated as tragedy. Balibar offered a remark that allows for such a recontextualization when he stated that the current situation displays “a cruelty and a capacity for destruction unseen in our part of the world since WWII."13And one can argue that the political incapacity to come to terms with this reveals, despite obvious differences, even more similarities. It would therefore appear instructive to turn to one of the most influential discussions of this predecessor to the analysis of the refugee crisis in order to shed some light on the present one. From the worst to the ridiculous, there is but one step

There are few works that would seem to gain so directly a renewed sense of relevance in today's situation than Hannah Arendt's The Origin of Totalitarianism. This would already appear to be the case, because she deals explicitly with a problem that bears many similarities to the present issue at hand: a mass of stateless people that was created through a series of catastrophic events in the first half of the 20th cen12 As the exam ple of G erm any show s, one can e ve n — at least w ith som e tim e in b etw e e n — first opt for one poor option ("let them drow n") and then shift to another ("We can make it" and solve the problem by w elcom ing all of them ), w hen sustaining the form er becom es em p irically im possible. Angela Merkel rem em bered that she w as a Christian hum anitarian, as people tend to forget, precisely when she had no other choice and it was clear that she could not let people drown any longer, sim ply because th ey had alread y su rvived the trip across the M editerranean in such great num ber (I owe this insight to a private conversation w ith M ichael Heinrich). This may point to a peculiar p o litical a ctu ality of Zom bie-m ovies. 13 Étienne Balibar, "Europe and the Refugees: a D em og rap hic Enlarg em ent," o p e n D e m o cra cy , Septem b er 24, 2015, accessed O ctober 10, 2016, h ttp s://w w w .o p en d em o cracy.n et/ can -euro pe-m ake-it/etien n e-balib ar/europ e-an d-refu gees-d em ograph ic-en largem en t.

Ruda

135

tury posed massive problems for international politics on many dif­ ferent and fundamental levels. Arendt portrays the crisis as a refugee crisis, and clearly states that, “the core of statelessness... is identical with the refugee question."14 Despite all of the obvious differences, I will choose to leave them aside for the moment. Because Arendt seeks to demonstrate the incapacity of any politics derived from and based simply on the juridical it will prove, nevertheless, insightful to compare that situation with the current one. Arendt begins with an analysis of the catastrophe that she sees emerg­ ing as the outcome of World War I. What happened occurred as an “explosion"15: namely, for the first time in history a huge number of people were thrown into a situation of “absolute rightlessness"16 that could not be compensated nor stabilized, and proved to be the ultimate (empirical) reason for the emergence of Fascism. The First World War brought with it mass unemployment and thereby poverty, civil wars, and finally mass movements of people seeking a safer and liveable home. These events went, according to Arendt, beyond anything that had been known before, and ultimately precipitated the Second World War and its respective disastrous outcomes.17 Those who “now infiltrated, as refugees and stateless persons"18 ultimately proved unassimilable to or into any existing political system or culture. Those who lost their legal status, for example, simply because their state (administration) effectively collapsed (it's easy to see that a contemporary citizen of Syria—and certainly also of Congo—will certainly face problems similar to those described by Arendt, as the government is replaced by a handful of hostile war-lords19) brought an unprecedented problem to those stable European countries that were still standing: “It was almost pathetic," she writes, “to see how helpless the European governments were... despite all their efforts to stem the tide... Once a number of stateless 14 Hannah A ren dt, Th e O rig in s o f T o ta lita ria n ism (C leveland: M eridian, 1962), 279. 15 Ibid., 267. 16 Ibid., 295. 17 The c ritic a l— in all senses of the te rm — sequence could be localized g eo g rap h ically: France (1915), Portugal (1916), Russia (1921), Belgium (1922), Italy (1926), Egypt and Turkey (1926), G erm any (1933). 18 A rendt, Th e O rig in s o f T o ta lita ria n ism , 283. 19 A lain Badiou calls the zones that are today determ ined by a pecu liar absence of all ju s ti­ fied g overn m ental pow er "zonages". Cf. Alain Badiou, N otre m a l v ie n t d e p lu s lo in : P e n se r les tu e rie s du 13 N o v e m b re (Paris: Fayard, 2016).

136 First as Trag e d y, Th e n as Trag e d y?

people were admitted to an otherwise normal country, statelessness spread like a contagious disease."20 Arendt describes the reactions to this situation by emphasizing the “equal cynicism" demonstrated by both the “victims and observers of an apparently unjust and abnormal fate."21 Both parties presumed to see through the laws of the situation, and the whole of history was now seen to be moving unalterably toward these disasters. Both agreed that this is just how the world is and how history works. Yet, what people took for “growing wisdom in the ways of the world" made everyone “more stupid... than they had ever been before."22The question of what was to be done was answered from the outset—accommodate in the best possible way. In the face of such stupidity (that keeps repeating itself today, with all the spontaneous assertions that the refugees, be­ ing from a privative region of the world, brought this ruinous situation on themselves], Arendt insists that the creation of statelessness was a contingent phenomenon in the empirical course of history, which was nonetheless a result of the established economic and political structures, and that one could discern some of the agglomerated responsibilities and structural problems that, without a proper understanding of which, the situation would forever remain unchanged. The group of people that finds itself “thrown out of legality altogether"23 also suffers a “disfranchisement and destruction of the juridical person."24 From this peculiar loss, further problematic consequences follow: if the refugee becomes a stateless person—and thus loses even the status of a legal person—he is even thrown out of the realm of what since An­ tiquity had always been considered the last instrument and resort of legality: the right to asylum. The fact that today this right is constantly revoked indicates that one is moving within a comparable framework. Arendt notes that with the suspension even of the unconditional right

20 A rendt, Th e O rig in s o f T o ta lita ria n ism , 285. 21 Ibid., 268. Badiou recen tly described this as "u niversal apathy". Cf. Badiou, Un p a rc o u rs G rec, 124. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 294. 24 Ibid., 449.

Ruda

137

to asylum (Quidquid est in territorio, etiam est de territorio25)—since one is no longer dealing with proper subjects with any rights whatso­ ever—it becomes fundamentally unclear under whose administrative and organizational jurisdiction the stateless person belongs, as there isn't a single institution or state, no proper political agent one could point to as its representative. This was and is still borne out by the fact that "there is also not a single universally recognized transnational executive for the implementation and enforcement"26of such a universal right; no state representing hu­ man rights (which were partially responsible for the situation in the first place, because such rights suggested that all of the victims shared a common juridical substratum and were as such always the rights of passive victims) as such—one that could still prove capable of includ­ ing those excluded. The existing state powers and legal systems are today as incapable of dealing with these problems as those referred to in Arendt's historical sequence. Thus the lesson to be learnt is this: that there is no, and by definition cannot be, a juridical solution to the prob­ lem embodied by the (stateless) refugees. Arendt will attempt to offer a solution to this problem by turning to the idea of a more fundamental right, one that is assigned to mere existence and should be more inalien­ able than any existing form of right, including basic human rights; that is, the famous "right to have rights."27 But instead of drawing Arendt's conclusion, the state powers undertook another manoeuvre entirely. Because even the term "stateless person" still sounded too much as if they were once included in some political community, one that would come with demands of its own and therefore could not but serve as a constant reminder of the unsolved problem. Solving the problem meant not solving the problem, but making it disappear. And could we not see something similar in Merkel's deal with Erdogan, a deal only made so as 25 Cf. Harm K luetin g, "Q uidquid est in te rrito rio : etiam est de territo rio . Jo sep h in isch es Staatskirch entu m als ration aler Territo rialism u s," D er S ta a t. Z e its c h r ift fü r S ta a tsle h re , Ö ffe n tlic h e s R e c h t u n d V e rfa ss u n g sg e sc h ic h te 3 (1998): 417-434. The reader should recall that it is precisely this form ula that w as revam ped by Alain Badiou in a con tem porary co n te xt vis-ä-vis the French sans papiers. ("Assum e that all w orkers labouring here are from h e re ..." ). Cf. Alain Badiou, Th e M e a n in g o f S a rk o z y (London, New York: Verso, 2008), 43. (Translation altered , F.R.) 26 W erner H am acher, "The Right to Have Rights (Four-and-a-Half Rem arks)," S o u th A tla n tic Q u a rterly, 2-3 (2004): 352. 27 For this fo rm u latio n , see for e xam p le: A ren dt, The O rig in s o f T o ta lita ria n ism , 296.

138

First as T ra g e d y, Th e n as Trag e d y?

to block the main refugee routes? "The term 'stateless' at least implicitly acknowledged the fact that these persons had lost the protection of their government and required international agreements to safeguard their legal status. The post-war term 'displaced persons' was invented during the war for the express purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence."28 Here we can clearly see another—still contemporary—version of cyni­ cism: we know very well that there are people who need protection, yet nonetheless we act as if we don't know. Ignoring the problem solves the problem, even though we know and are constantly reminded of it.29If for Arendt the refugees "no longer belong to any community whatsoever"30 and even suffer "expulsion from humanity altogether,"31 there is no longer any legal entity that would allow or recognize any legitimate demand for any kind of reintegration. The problem that these people represent is therefore fundamentally turned into a problem that is no longer of this world. If the problem is not a legal problem, the problem is not a problem. Problem solved. But—and this is to the best of my knowledge largely ignored in all references to Arendt's account—she outlines two peculiar ways of reintegrating people that have fallen into a state of absolute rightlessness by becoming refugees. Both are equally surprising at first glance: crime and fame. The first way of re-normalizing the refugee situation is described by Arendt as follows: "Since he [the refugee, F.R.] was the anomaly for whom the general law did not provide, it was better for him to become an anomaly for which it did provide, that of the criminal."32 Those who live outside the norm can return to the field of constituted norms and normativity when they can be considered the negation, the transgression of this norm. By means of transgression, that is, by com­ mitting a crime they force the norm—that is the law—to accept their 28 Ibid., 279. 29 Th is ignorance, A rendt argues, leads to the fact th at there isn't even a reliab le statistic that w ould account for the actual num ber of state le ss. So, th ey w ere left out of o b jective h istory en tirely. Cf. Ibid. Yet, it is im p ortant to rem ark th at freedo m is never and can't co n ­ cep tu ally ever be granted or given (by som eone else or as such). Th at is to say, all freedom relies on self-lib eratio n. But the refugee q uestion is not, in the first in stan ce, ob vio usly, a question of freedom or liberty. 30 Ibid., 295. 31 Ibid., 297. 32 Ibid., 286.

Ruda

139

transgression as part of the same legal cosmos. All stateless persons will be prosecuted under the same laws that apply to all ordinary citizens. So, committing criminal acts paradoxically renormalizes the situation. And might this not still be the—even unconscious—motivation behind some of the crimes committed by some of the refugees? This is why Arendt argues that:

“The best criterion by which to decide whether someone has been forced outside the pale of the law is to ask if he would benefit by committing a crime... For then a criminal offense becomes the best opportunity to re­ gain some kind of human equality, even if it be as a recognized exception to the norm. The one important fact is that this exception is provided for by law. A criminal, even a stateless person, will not be treated worse than another criminal, that is, he will be treated like everybody else."33 Crime is a way of regaining rights for those who are outside the legal framework. And the widespread and commonly articulated public sus­ picion that within the mass of refugees (or the refugees taken together as such) is a mass of potential criminals not only articulates some real danger (which it may also do), but also represents a symptomatic and involuntary articulation of this insight—a sense that they are at least some normal kind of anomaly. Yet, Arendt also refers to a second way in which the transition from stateless refugee to a political community may be effected: “A much less reliable and much more difficult way to rise from an un­ recognized anomaly to the status of recognized exception would be to become a genius... Only fame will eventually answer the repeated complaint of refugees of all social strata that 'nobody here knows who I am'; and it is true that the chances of the famous refugee are improved just as a dog with a name has a better chance to survive than a stray dog who is just a dog in general."34 The genius, the world-renown star (her contemporary actualization of this old category) is Arendt's second way of integrating the stateless person into an already existing community, because the star is not part 33 Ibid. 34 Ibid., 287.

140 F irst as Trag e d y, Th e n as Trag ed y?

of a single nation state but represents, just as the genius does, human­ ity as such. Crime integrates directly; becoming or being a star does not directly integrate but has these individuals stand for humanity as such (which is direct compensation for any kind of loss of any national identity). Arendt hereby—either explicitly or indirectly—offers that the only solutions to the problems the stateless refugees posed were ultimately individual ones. In Arendt's account—and this illustrates her ultimate weakness35—one doesn't find a single idea of a political solution to the refugee problem, only a meta-juridical one (which is flagged and discounted as political) and individualized (crime/fame) ones. And to repeat these non-solutions as preferable to the given non-solutions would be a disaster. But perhaps we can learn from this, learn that not every refugee should be seen—from the perspective of an Arendtian gaze—as having the potential to be famous (seeing as most of them are surely just as incapacitated as the rest of us); nor should every refugee be considered a potential criminal, nor should he or she need to actu­ ally become one in order to be reintegrated (even if some are criminals and should therefore be prosecuted, but we should understand that this grants them a status that might actually be better than that of those for whom not even refugee status is granted). What we can learn from this analysis is that against all a priori criminalization, against all a priori heroization of the refugees there should be no in-fame-ation of any kind whatsoever—so neither treating the refugees within the frame of fame nor criminalizing them and treating them as infamous outlaws. What are urgently needed are real political decisions—a politics of and with the refugees. If this politics doesn't emerge anywhere, and no new alternatives by which to conceive of collective action and organization are created, this will certainly prove worse than the already worse alternatives at hand.

35 Th is springs from her account of w hat she calls "n atality" (w hich is an inverted form of H eideggerianism ); that is, everyo ne is born into a socio -p o litical co m m u nity and th ereb y into a status of eq uality, w h ich , if once lost, can never be reg ain ed.

Ruda

141

Jamil Khader Beyond the Biopolitics of the Refugee:

Totality, Global Capitalism, and the Common Struggle

The figure of the refugee has become the ultimate subject of the biopo­ litical regime, the site of politically unqualified bare human life.1In the ideological space of contemporary biopolitical theory, the refugee as a biopolitical subject is elevated to an ontological condition, in which the refugee is represented as a victim within transhistorical narratives of oppression and human suffering that are embedded within the he­ gemony of the cosmopolitan regime of human rights and humanitarian aid. Underlying this biopolitical approach to the refugee as Other are two contradictory presuppositions: on the one hand, the multicultural respect for and openness toward the oppressed and vulnerable Other, and on the other, the fear of the Other in its harassing and intolerable excess. In other words, the refugee as an Other is to be tolerated inso­ far as it is desubstantialized and evacuated of its own Otherness.2 It's not surprising, therefore, that biopolitical theorists demonstrate their ethical concern for the plight of the refugees and identify with them as victims of the Western biopolitical regime, while at the same time dis­ missing and devaluing them as reactionary political subjects. Thomas Nail, for example, argues that the figures of the refugee and migrant have been conflated with that of the terrorists, because they expose the main twin anxieties of Western liberal democracies: the failure of the nation state to include all its residents and offer the protection of human rights to all, and the failure of the war on terror to neutralize terrorist organizations.3 Moreover, he points out that the tragic Paris 1 Giorgio A gam ben, H o m o S a c e r: S o v e re ig n P o w e r a n d B a re L ife (Stanford: Stanford U n iversity Press, 1998). 2 For m ore on this critiq ue of biop olitics, see Slavoj Zizek's "From Politics to B iop o litics . . . and Back," The S o u th A tla n tic Q u a rte rly 2-3 (2004): 508. 3 Thom as Nail, "A Tale of Two Crises: M igration and Terrorism after the Paris A ttacks," S tu d ie s in E th n ic ity a n d N a tio n a lism 1 (2016): 159.

143

attacks made explicit the implicit assumption in the response to the refugee crisis—that the refugee crisis is represented as a “political and military invasion" and framed within discourses of the clash of civilizations as just another form of “barbarian warfare" that requires a military response.4He thus maintains that liberal democracies subvert and violate the basic ideal of universal equality upon which they are founded, by excluding the refugees from their national imaginaries. At the same time, however, Nail dismisses the refugees as retrograde political subjects, for in contrast to the barbarians who fight to return home (the original etymological meaning, as he explains, of revolt), the refugee “remains tied to the refugium" and as such, the refugee “was simply bound to a new master."5While the barbarian was feared, Nail suggests, the refugee was always the object of divine pity, and it is more convenient for nation states to deal with this figure. In this chapter, I argue that biopolitical theories fail to interrogate the figure of the refugee in the context of the class struggle and the con­ stitutive violence of the global capitalist system. I first posit that the biopolitical emphasis on the (mis)management of the refugees in spaces of exception in the host countries fails to account for the totality of the refugee crisis. They do not only underestimate the extent to which the exclusionary asylum accommodation process in Europe has been heavily policed, monitored, and administered outside these spaces of exception. They also overlook the causes of the refugee crises in their countries of origins in particular, the invisible yet constitutive, scene of violence that has been left out of the popular and official modes of fram­ ing the refugee crisis. Second, I argue that the biopolitical emphasis on power and domination fails to account for the political economy of the refugees with regard to the hegemony of neoliberal governmentality, which shifts the administration of humanitarian services to private security corporations. Finally, I claim that the biopolitical theorization of the refugee as a “messianic" figure fails to re-inscribe the refugee in the class struggle, foreclosing the possibility of any universal project of revolutionary politics.

4 Ibid., 161. 5 Thom as Nail, "On Destroying W hat D estroys You," H o stis, Ju n e 30, 2015, ac­ cessed O ctob er 10, 2016, http://criticalleg alth in kin g.com /2015/06/30/ on-destroyin g-w h at-d estroys-you -an -in terview -w ith -thom as-nail/.

144 Beyo nd th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

The biopolitics of the refugee

Giorgio Agamben's work on the homo sacer has canonized the figure of the refugee as the ultimate subject of biopolitics, the administration and management of bare life. Agamben writes that the figure of the refugee, which should have functioned as the site for the universal­ ity of the cosmopolitan regime of human rights, constitutes instead a signifier of the “concept's radical crisis."6 Drawing on Hannah Arendt, he argues that in the international political system, human rights lose their sanctity and inalienability the moment they are decoupled from the structures of citizenship and the rights of the citizens of a nation state.7Hence, the body of the refugee functions as a site for articulating the distinction between politically qualified life (zoe) and politically unqualified bare life (bio). As such, Agamben identifies the figure of the refugee with the ancient Roman legal figure of the homo sacer, the human being that is reduced to naked or mere life outside the political community, and in this sense, outside the structures of citizenship that confer human rights on mere life. The refugee then inhabits an extra­ territorial location that is neither outside nor inside any specific nation state or political system, and to this extent, the refugee is produced as a consequence of legal abandonment under permanent conditions of the “state of exception." Agamben locates the failure of cosmopolitan human rights regimes to include refugees and other non-citizens, non-status migrants, asylum seekers and stateless persons within the provenance of its universal protection to the gap in the title of the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, in which the signifiers human being (man) and citizen seem to coincide. Consequently, there is an ambiguity as to whether these signifiers function as referents to “two distinct realities or whether they form, instead, a hendiadys in which the first term is always already contained in the second.”8 This ambiguity, Agamben argues, is constitutive of modern democra­ cies, in which politics have become biopolitics. It is precisely in this ambiguous stateless location that Agamben traces a radical new vision 6 Giorgio A gam ben, "Beyond Human Rights," R a d ic a l P o litic s in Ita ly : A P o te n tia l P o litic s , ed. Paolo Virno and M ichael Hardt (M inneapolis: U n ive rsity of M innesota, 1996), 19-20. 7 Ibid., 20. 8 Ibid.

K h ad er

145

of community grounded in transcending the master narratives through which the subject has been codified in Western political philosophy, including "Man, the citizen and its rights, but also the sovereign people, the worker, and so forth," using the figure of the refugee as a point of departure to reconstruct Western political thought.9The refugee then challenges the nation state and its basic concepts—citizenship, ter­ ritoriality, and sovereignty, since it exposes the gap between natality (the fact of birth) and nationality as fiction—the refugee demonstrates that unqualified bare human life is not automatically translated into the category of citizenship. In this sense, the refugee functions as a mes­ sianic figure in Agamben's work, since it "at once brings a radical crisis to the principles of the nation state and clears the way for a renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed."10 Drawing on and extending Agamben's work, J. D. Mininger argues that the figure of the refugee constitutes the "truth of the citizen" as they also become a site for the administration of bare life and legal aban­ donment in a permanent state of exception in the global world order.11 The difference between refugee and citizen collapses, since both the refugee and the citizen exist in a state of indefinite suspension in the void of the state of exception, as a result of the fact that they can both be arbitrarily stripped of their rights and can be even killed with impunity. Appropriating Agamben's own operative semantics, Mininger proposes articulating the coincidence of the citizens and refugees based not on territoriality but on a "radical zone of indistinction" between the two, in terms of a "non-spatially determined association with a particular community" defined in opposition to the nation state. Two major issues emerge in Mininger's discussion of this conflation between refugees and citizens. First, citizens do not have rights as such, but merely the "right to have rights."12 Insofar as human rights are granted to national subjects as citizens, they erase the elemental category of politically unqualified bare human existence. As Hannah Arendt suggests, the nation state system itself, not the cosmopolitan human rights regime, functions as the sole authority that can confer, 9 Ibid., 16. 10 Ibid., 23. 11 J. D. M ininger, "Notes on the Figure of the Refugee or, Tow ards a Political P hilosophy of Extim acy," D eed s a n d D a ys (D a rb a i ir D ie n o s ) 57 (2012): 219. 12 Ibid., 222.

146 B eyond th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

validate and guarantee human rights to their citizens, not just any hu­ man being. In other words, the moment the citizen ceases to be the object of the state's protection, the citizen loses any privileges it may have had and is immediately re-inscribed in terms of bare humanity. The central­ ity and sanctity of the regime of citizenship in international relations was perversely revealed, as Agamben points out, in the process of the Nazi's "final solution," whereby refugees in concentration camps were relocated to extermination camps only after they had been completely denationalized—stripped of their second-class citizenship.13We are all bare life, or refugees, now. For Mininger, the figure of the refugee thus re-inscribes the traumatic dimension of politically unqualified human life that the regime of citi­ zenship endeavours to cover up. The non-citizen is thus external to such cosmopolitan regime of rights and as such a figure of bare life. Reduced to politically unqualified bare human life outside a metajuridical regime of rights, these ex-citizens can be resignifed under the referent of human life and exterminated with impunity. Ironically, it is when the individual is reduced to the state of bare human life that they are de-invested of their universal human rights altogether. Mere belonging to the human family does not guarantee any rights to individuals; in fact, it compounds an individual's vulnerability to the status of bare life and precarity in which a subject can be dispatched with impunity. Moreover, Mininger notes, imperial states can invoke their rights to enforce cosmopolitan human rights regimes on other states that violate these laws, but can always suspend and violate the same regime in the name of national sov­ ereignty, state emergency and exceptionality, rendering human rights empty in and of themselves. If as Carl Schmitt argues, politics precedes the law, human rights are then the right to have rights in the form of the externally given protection of those rights. The second major issue that emerges in Mininger's discussion of the extension of bare life into the structures of citizenship is that, since they are nothing but their external protection, human rights are nothing in and of themselves. Mininger argues that any performative declaration of human rights, any conferral and acknowledgment of the language of universal and natural human rights on bare human life amounts to "nothing more than the form of revealing itself—i.e. the event of reveal13 A gam ben, "Beyond Human Rights," 163.

K h ad er

147

■

ing, of disconcealment, of discovery."14In other words, recognizing that a human being is a subject of human rights does not confirm the onto­ logical-juridical essence of human beings. Rather, it shows that "rights have no content," that they are "merely the empty form of blind declara­ tion and disclosure."15 Like the Kafkaesque representation of the law, human rights are just their own deferral—they are "nothing more than a constant deferral of the very rights they codify and make public."16 Human rights are thus suspended the moment they are acknowledged and only retroactively established through the form of their external protection in their application to the subject of the nation state, the citizen. Moreover, any appeal to universal morality is ultimately mute. Mininger thus suggests that citizenship is rearticulated not in homo­ geneous topographical terms based on exclusionary and inclusionary processes within a specific relationship to territoriality, but in extimate and heterogeneous topological terms by which inclusion and exclusion in-determine each other through the "logic of exclusionary inclusion and inclusive exclusion."17The coordinates of this topological space are not determined by distance, size, and area, but by "closeness or neighbour­ hood." Consequently, Mininger proposes that citizens and non-citizens can be said to inhabit a position of "exodus or refuge," rendering the subject as a "being-in-exodus of the citizen," a citizen-refugee-subject "in permanent exodus."18 This new citizen-refugee-subject then oc­ cupies a "perpetual state of exile" that denies the "sole uniqueness of one's own state territory" and respects the other's diaspora. In such a condition, "the otherwise externally determined identities of the citizen (via borders) become more internally inscribed (because shared), while the typically internal determinations of belonging to a people would become externalized through the constant interaction and relating ter­ ritorially overlapping political communities." For Agamben, a condition of extraterritoriality or aterritoriality (reciprocal extraterritoriality) may function as a condition of shared spatiality "in which the state lo­ cates the congealed body of the nation through the citizens' adherence

14 15 16 17 18

M ininger, "Notes on the Figure of the Refugee," 223. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 228. Ibid., 227.

148 B eyo nd th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

to one another primarily as a community."19This sense of community is modelled after the earlier concept of the people as opposed to the idea of the nation and is grounded not in the language of rights but in "the refugium (refuge) of the singular."20 Beyond biopolitics: totality, the new asylum paradigm, and the question of integration

One of the main problems with this biopolitical theorization of the refu­ gee is its tendency to re-inscribe the refugee crisis only within spaces of exception, such as camps and detention centres in the host countries, without paying enough attention to either the actually-existing exclu­ sionary asylum accommodation process in Europe or the causes of the refugee crises in their countries of origins. However, I suggest that the humanitarian crisis of the refugees must be understood within the in­ visible, yet constitutive, scene of violence, or the totality of the refugee crisis, in both host countries and countries of origin that have been left out of popular and official representations of the crisis.21 Despite their emphasis on the production of new sites of exception in Europe, biopolitical theorists underestimate the extent to which the new asy­ lum paradigm already applies harsh exclusionary measures to restrict integration of the refugees and their access to refugee status in Europe. Biopolitical theorists fail to take into account restrictions on the mobil­ ity of the refugees within this new asylum paradigm through a complex legal pending asylum process, lack of physical and social mobility, ware­ housing, and an assemblage of ideological, political, social, and discur­ sive mechanisms that subject the refugees and other forced migrants to an intricate system of monitoring, tracking, regulation, examination, surveillance, and policing that arrests, fixes, and freezes many refu­ gees and other forced migrants in place.22 In other words, biopolitical theorists overlook the ways in which the state operates outside sites of 19 Ibid., 225. 20 A gam ben, "Beyond Human Rights," 24. 21 I borrow this idea of to ta lity to d escribe this in visib le yet co n stitu tive scene of vio len ce in the refugee crisis from an in te rvie w that Žižek had w ith R u ssia Toda y, in w hich he d is­ cusses the "cinem atic e ffe cts" of the im age of the boatload of refug ees, stating that w hen the cam era pans back, the w h ole of "social to tality " can be uncovered. 22 Saskia W ittebo rn, "Co nstructing the Forced M igrant and the P o litics of Space and P lace­ m aking," J o u r n a l o f C o m m u n ic a tio n 61 (2011).

Kh ad er

149

exception to decide "who can enter, move in its territory, or seek legal, social, and political protection after careful examination."23 Benjamin Mullen, for one, notes how in the post-September 11 global world order, states have intensified their use of technologies of control and surveillance and "heightened border controls, increased passport restrictions, and embarked on an overall clampdown of movement."24 He examines a UK White Paper entitled Secure Borders, Safe Haven, as a manifestation of this paradox and the increasing trend towards the biopoliticization of the refugees. Secure Borders, Safe Haven, which came out in February 2002, led to the Nationality, Immigration and Asylum Bill 2002, intended to make necessary adjustments to the existing act from 1999 and reflecting the contemporary realities in the politics of asylum. Under the subheading "The Challenge of Globalization," the White Paper mentions the increased interconnectedness and interde­ pendence in the world, and the need to further liberalize movement, which was under negotiation in the WTO. In a section entitled "Bio­ metric Registration," the Paper introduces a series of measures and mechanisms intended to both "detect and deter clandestine entrants," as well as increase the speed and management of legitimate migrants. These measures are carried out by employing "biometrics technology" and other technologies of control that were allegedly put in place to "discipline" movement and expose human trafficking. In this new asylum paradigm, various technologies of administration and control are used to regulate movement and limit access to refugee status. Saskia Witteborn discusses two major technologies that regulate and control the body of the refugee in the pending asylum process. First, Witteborn examines the use of bureaucratic labelling (where the asy­ lum applicant is a refugee, asylum seeker, a person entitled to asylum, a convention refugee, or a quota refugee) that construct refugees and their bodies in terms of deviant Otherness, security threat and terror­ ism, through the institutionalization and legalization of exclusionary practices and restrictive accommodation policies that place the refu­ gees under heavy surveillance, examination, control, administration, detention, even criminalization technologies. The bureaucratic labelling 23 Ibid., 1144. 24 Benjam in M uller, "G lo b alizatio n , S ecu rity, Paradox: Tow ards a Refugee B io p o litics," R e fu g e 1 (2004): 50.

150 B eyo nd th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

produces a particular status that can determine the type of "subsidiary and complementary forms of protection/' eligibility for family reuni­ fication, employment, restrictions on physical mobility, or access to particular resources that can be granted the refugees.25 Nonetheless, as B. S. Chimni notes, the labelling of the refugees and their definition is rooted in policy-making practices and was always designed to serve state policy.26 He correctly points out that the emphasis on the legal status of the refugees reflects a "certain legal fetishism" that seems to imply that "legal categories provide protection to refugees," while in fact these "legal categories are not merely devices for inclusion but also for exclusion."27 As some commentators have referred to the "Palestinianization" of the Syrian refugee crisis, especially their fears that the crisis might be in­ tractable and permanent, it might be useful to consider the implications of these labelling practices on the Palestinian refugees. As liana Feldman shows, labelling, identification and categorization of the Palestinian refugees is not merely a bureaucratic decision. Rather, these practices constitute a far-reaching process that creates not only "discursive and material framework for action and opportunity", but is also a "source of constraint."28Labelling has subjected Palestinian refugees to regula­ tory techniques that served as an important mechanism for "manag­ ing access to relief under the UNRWA rolls";29 it determined eligibility and regulated membership in the available refugee categories through highly punitive and intrusive measure that were assisted by security systems in the host countries. The label obstructs rights (citizenship, homeland) and provides access to others (relief, recognition); it confers recognition of loss and reduces refugees to the vulnerable status of victims and dependents.30 Hence, even the labels and categories were subjected to policing and investigation. These practices have had three major effects on Palestinian refugees: first, they exposed the refugees to new modes of governance and policing, for UNRWA's definition of the 25 B lanche Tax, "Refugee by A ssociation," FM R : F o rc e d M ig ra tio n R e v ie w 47 (2014): 27. 26 B. S. Chim ni, "The Birth of a D iscip line: From Refugee to Forced M igration Studies," J o u r n a l o f R e fu g e e S tu d ie s 1 (2009): 13-14. 27 Ibid., 11. 28 liana Feldm an, "The C hallenge of Categories: UNRWA and the D efin itio n of the P alestinian Refugee," J o u r n a l o f R e fu g e e S tu d ie s 3 (2012): 388. 29 Ibid., 394. 30 Ibid., 389.

Kh ad er

151

refugee was created “for the purpose of the administration of its relief and other programs.”31Second, they introduced the already traumatized Palestinian refugees to new experiences of loss, especially of rations and assistance. And third, they made possible the elaboration of political claims and the demand for recognition. Witteborn also discusses the ways in which the new asylum paradigm also assigns refugees to heterotopic spaces, separate housing and ware­ housing that freeze them in social, semiotic and discursive locations that eventually aim to normalize and contain the refugees socially, cultur­ ally, and legally.32 These spaces are usually excluded from the typical biopolitical sites of exception. In these shared refugee and asylumseeker accommodations (Gemeinschaftsunterkunft or Asylunterkunft), they are required by law to stay for a period of time that ranges between three and seven months for purposes of bureaucratic registration, af­ ter which they are transferred to more permanent (collective] accom­ modations. These heterotopic spaces are comprised of different types of accommodation, including the stand-alone, multi-storey concrete apartment buildings, which provide shared apartments and kitchen/ bathroom facilities. There are also the barrack-like structures, which are the most difficult to live in due to the basic scheme of the accom­ modations, the lack of privacy, thin walls, and sometimes problematic hygienic conditions. Different rules pertaining to food package pick-up time, the use of amenities on the premises, or appointments with the social services department make social relations among the refugees even more difficult. Unsurprisingly, as Witteborn mentions, refugees refer to these accommodations as asylum camps (Asyllager in German], reception camps [Aufnahmelager in German), or deportation camps [Abschiebelager in German), to foreground the institutionalized nature of these accommodation services and shift the responsibility back to the state that tends to blame and scapegoat individual refugees for failing to integrate in these accommodation centres. Biopolitical theories do not only gloss over exclusionary spaces outside the traditional biopolitical sites of exception, but they also fail to ad­ dress the cause of the refugee crisis and ramifications of the crisis in 31 Ibid., 401. 32 W ittebo rn, "C o nstructing the Forced M igrant and the Politics of Space and Place­ m aking," 1154.

152

Beyond th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

their countries of origin. Debates in the Arab world raged about the legal, social, economic, and cultural effects of the accommodation of the Syrian refugees, whose image was constructed at the intersection of human rights discourses and different dominant epistemes, such as national security, border control and the war on terror. Indeed, the Arab press was replete with stories about the “cultural divide” between the Syrian refugees and the neighbouring Arab countries and the debates around the integration of the refugees in the Gulf and elsewhere.33Saleh Al-Kilani, for example, notes that the movement of Syrian refugees into Jordan threatens Jordan's national identity and suggests that the Jorda­ nian government supports resettlement, which they do not discuss in public media to discourage other refugees from “coming to Jordan as a gateway to third countries.”34Omar Dahi even claims that the Jordanian government fears that “substantial investment in refugees will provide incentives for further inflows—or integration of existing refugees”. He quotes a Jordanian minister who “admitted in 2013 that conditions are calibrated to provide minimal aid so that refugees will have no incen­ tive to remain, and this appears to be an unspoken policy in other host countries as well.”35 Part of the problem is that neighbouring countries such as Jordan and Lebanon are non-signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention, and there­ fore, don't see themselves under any international legal obligation to offer the displaced Syrians the asylum and protection accorded refugees in the cosmopolitan human rights regime.36Moreover, as Saleh Al-Kilani notes, Jordanian law on refugees does not allow for integrating the refugees locally as a solution, and restricts the option of applying for political asylum to most refugees.37 33 This d iscussion provides an o p p o rtu n ity to revisit the con troversy th at erupted around 2izek's original polem ic on the refugee crisis, e sp e cially w ith regard to 2izek's claim s about the cultural d ifferences b etw een the Syrian refugees and th e ir m u lticultural European host c o u ntries. For m ore on this debate, see Jam il Khader, "W hy Zizek's C ritics Are W rong— and W here Th ey Could Flave Gotten It Right," In Th ese Tim es, D ecem b er 11, 2015, http://inthesetim es.com /article/18683/w hy-zizeks-critics-are-w ron g-an d -w here-th ey-cou ld -haveg o tte n-it-rig h t. 34 Saleh A l-K ilani, "A D uty and a Burden on Jo rdan ," F M R : F o rc e d M ig ra tio n R e v ie w 47 (2014): 30-31. 35 O m ar Dahi, "The Refugee Crisis in Lebanon and Jo rd an : Th e Need for Econom ic D evelopm ent Spen d in g," F M R : F o rc e d M ig ra tio n R e v ie w 47 (2014): 11-12. 36 Ju lie Peteet, "U nsettling the Categories of D isplacem ent," M E R : M id d le E a s t R e se a rch a n d In fo rm a tio n P ro je c t 244 (2009). 37 A l-K ilani, "A D uty and a Burden on Jo rdan."

K h ad er

153

In Lebanon, Syrian refugees are accorded limited legal status. As Dalia Aranki and Olivia Kalis demonstrate, Syrian refugees "without the re­ quired entry or stay documentation to be in Lebanon" are considered to be "illegal", giving them only limited legal status in the country. Con­ sequently, many of these refugees "feel that they have been forced into the situation of being illegally present in Lebanon and feel compelled to limit their movements for fear of being arrested, detained or even deported back to Syria."38 Moreover, this limited legal status makes it almost impossible for many Syrian refugees "to access basic services, work and UNHCR registration sites, and to register births and marriages is severely limited." It also placed severe restrictions on their "freedom of movement" and many feared crossing checkpoints, especially in areas that have been heavily monitored and policed. As a result of the history of the tensions between Palestinian refugees and their Lebanese hosts, furthermore, Palestinian refugees from Syria find "the restrictions on entering Lebanon and on renewing their legal stay. . . much more severe."39Indeed, Lebanon's experience with Pales­ tinian refugees since 1948 affects its practices and policies toward the displaced Syrians. The Lebanese authorities have refused establishing camps, fearing history will repeat itself. The accommodation of the Syrian refugees has escalated tensions be­ tween the Syrian refugees and their host communities in Lebanon and Jordan, who view the resettlement of the refugees outside the camps as a severe social and economic burden on the local and host communities, and as the primary source of depressed wages and limited employ­ ment opportunities. Omar Dahi, for instance, notes that in Jordan and Lebanon, these challenges have been "felt on a day-to-day basis by all Lebanese and Jordanian citizens, whether through higher rents and declining public service availability, or through health and education infrastructure that is stretched beyond its limits." Consequently, he adds, "the tensions between host communities and refugees within Lebanese society are obvious, and in both countries a lot of government and societal discourse about refugees has become palpably resentful."40 38 Dalia A ranki and O livia Kalis, "Lim ited Legal Status for Refugees from Syria in Lebanon," F M R : F o rc e d M ig ra tio n R e v ie w 47 (2014): 17.

39 Ibid. 40 Dahi, "The Refugee Crisis in Lebanon and Jo rdan ," 11.

154 B eyo nd th e B io p o litic s o f th e R e fu g e e ...

In many cases, tensions erupt because humanitarian agencies assist refugees, but not the local population. Consequently, the Syrian refugees have been labelled and used as scapegoats in matters of economic as well as political insecurity. As the refugees compete with host communities for even lower wages, resentment against the refugees increases, since they are seen as recipients of humanitarian aid. Interestingly enough, cultural differences have been the site of clashes between Syrian refugees and Jordanian host communities and NGOs in the Zaatari camp. As Sarah Tobin and Madeline Campbell remark, cultural clashes erupted over the curriculum in the camp, since many refugees thought it was incompatible with their experiences and out­ looks.41 One particular cultural difference between the two was the question of domestic violence and the physical/corporeal punishment of children. Tobin and Campbell write that "the refugees felt that do­ mestic violence, particularly directed at children, was the only means by which the children would heed their parents' admonitions," while the Jordanian hosts "expressed shock and frustration that the debates, for the Syrians, centered on acceptable 'degrees of violence' rather than the acceptability of violence itself."42 Moreover, these cultural differences were a source of contention in issues related to child labour and child marriages. In the case of early consanguine arranged marriages in particular, refugee communities clashed also with Jordanian NGOs that work in the camp. As Tobin and Campbell note, these marriages are "deemed 'illegal', as the age of con­ sent for marriage in Jordan is 16 for females, and marriages must be registered locally in accordance with Jordanian law." Moreover, early marriages expose these young girls to domestic violence and abuse.43 Ironically, refugees have complained that host communities are im­ printing "local sensibilities and laws on the refugee population, at times challenging young women to choose between family and tradition, and what they hope or anticipate might be their futures."44

41 Sarah Tobin and M adeline C am pbell, "NGO G overnance and Syrian Refugee 'Su b jects' in Jo rdan ," M E R : M id d le E a s t R e p o rt 278 (2016). 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid.

Kh ad er

155

Ultimately, these problems have led to the central debate in Arab coun­ tries regarding the refugees: the debate about nationalizing (Towteen) the refugees as citizens and compatriots in their host Arab countries. As Sari Hanafi explains in the case of the Palestinian refugees, towteen is the bogyman that can “release a public phobia against the basic rights of the Palestinians.“45Any debate about the civil and economic rights of the refugees is structured around making towteen impossible “to the point that rights become substituted by fast humanitarian or security solutions.“ Indeed, as Hanafi points out, various Lebanese political par­ ties operate with the unwritten rule that towteen is a major taboo and is tantamount to national treason. By foregrounding sites of exception in Europe only, biopolitical theories gloss over equivalent spaces of exception in other parts of the world that are important for mapping common strategies of disposability within the neoliberal global capi­ talist economy. The political economy of the refugee crisis: neoliberalism, privatization and securitization

The other major problem with biopolitical theories of the refugee is that they de-scribe the refugee crisis from the political economy of the refugees, especially the privatization of asylum accommodation in the European system, in which market considerations supersede any other calculations. Indeed, the hegemony of neoliberal economic poli­ cies in contemporary refugee politics occupies an ambivalent position in biopolitical theories. For example, Michel Foucault views bio-politics and bio-power as “indispensable to the development of capitalism,“ ar­ guing that global capitalism “would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes.“46 However, Foucault immediately normalizes this link between biopoli­ tics and capitalism, pointing to the ways in which capitalism “had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to 45 Sari H anafi, "P alestinian Refugee Cam ps in Lebanon as a Space of Excep tio n," R E V U E A sy lo n (s) 5 (2008).

46 M ichel Fo ucau lt, Th e H isto ry o f S e x u a lity : An In tro d u c tio n . V olum e 1 (New York: V in tag eBo o ks, 1990), 140.

156 B eyo nd th e B io p o litic s o f th e R e fu g e e ...

govern.“47As such, Agamben's and Foucault's biopolitics overinvest in new forms of domination and erase capitalist exploitation in their theo­ retical paradigm, serving as an alibi for the market.48 Any analysis of the way in which biopolitical control interlocks with neoliberal ideology must above all address capitalist exploitation. Slavoj Žižek thus correctly points out that the problem with this biopolitical emphasis on domina­ tion is that it “fails to register. . . that only in capitalism is exploitation naturalized, inscribed into the functioning of the economy.“49 Indeed, Žižek makes it very clear that the refugee crisis is a symptom of the global capitalist system, especially its recent mutation into capitalism with Asian values.50As a result of these changes, global capitalism inten­ sifies global crises in order to relocate disposable and uncountable popu­ lations in zones of unemployability in the global North. Consequently, these refugee communities can be managed and controlled more easily on welfare and other schemes. Žižek thus addresses the “netherworld" political economy of the refugee transportation schemes and networks and its profit in a global capitalist economy, in which “commodities— but not people—are permitted to circulate freely." This black market in the refugees is important to address, as it is intertwined with the exploitation of the refugees within human trafficking and sex traffick­ ing networks around the globe. However, the obverse side of this black market in the refugees in particular is that the privatization of asylum accommodation in the European system must also be interrogated in a critique of the political economy of the refugees, since it demonstrates the extent to which market logic dominates all considerations and deci­ sions in contemporary refugee politics. Jonathan Darling, for example, argues that asylum seeking and accommodation/refugee processing in the UK has been embedded in a neolib­ eral governmentality that shifted the management and administration of these humanitarian services from local authorities to private delivery companies. He explains that in March 2012, the UK government signed 47 Ibid., 141. 48 For a critiq ue of this b iop olitical erasure of cap italist e x p lo itatio n , see Slavoj Žižek, Less th a n N o th in g : H eg el a n d th e S h a d o w o f D ia le c tic a l M a te ria lism (Lo nd on, New York: Verso, 2012), 1003. 49 Ibid., 1004. 50 Slavoj Žižek, "In the Wake of the Paris A ttacks the Left M ust Em brace its Radical W estern Roots," In Th ese Tim es, N ovem ber 15, 2015, accessed O ctob er 10, 2016, h ttp ://in th esetim es. com /article/18605.

K h ad er

157

six contracts known as COMPASS (Commercial and Operating Manag­ ers Procuring Asylum Support}, with three private delivery companies to manage the accommodation and reception of asylum seekers and their families. Although prior to COMPASS, he points out, asylum ac­ commodation and reception were framed within a business model, including the employment of private security companies to manage the UK's deportation system and exorbitant legal services to asylum seekers and refugees, this new development marked an intensification of neoliberal governmentality in this humanitarian field. As such, the institutionalization of this accelerated for-profit market rationality in the asylum accommodation and reception services has been translated into pure economic considerations and calculations, market competi­ tion, consumer choice, and economic efficiency.51 “In effect," he states, “local authorities, private providers and third sector organisations are all positioned as constituting the neoliberal governmentality of asylum accommodation through assenting to a model of provision that is based on market logics of efficiency, flexibility and cost."52 Darling thus suggests that now not only humanitarian considerations underpinning the asylum accommodation and reception process but also the overlapping of private, public, and state interests have been completely superseded by market norms. Moreover, it facilitated the production of “new spaces of dispersal," new relations and positions of authority, and “increasingly fractured assemblages of governance," expanding the state's jurisdiction under new modalities of governance.53 Finally, this neoliberalization of the asylum market made it possible to reconstruct the image of the refugee and other forced migrants rhetori­ cally and discursively as a burden through “narratives of'worthiness,' 'welfare,' and 'prioritization'" that repackage the “economic account of asylum as a question of resource allocation, cost, and productivity."54 This was, as he says, a “part of a revanchist trend to socially marginalize those seeking asylum as an economic and fiscal drain during a time of austerity, at the expense of a citizenry constructed as 'our' people."55 51 Jo nath an Darling, "Privatisin g A sylu m : N eolib eralism , D ep o liticisatio n, and the G overnance of Forced M igration," T ra n sa c tio n s o f th e In stitu te o f B ritish G e o g ra p h e rs 41 (2016): 232. 52 Ibid., 235. 53 Ibid., 232. 54 Ibid., 239. 55 Ibid., 235.

158 B eyo nd th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

Ultimately, the intensification of neoliberal governmentality led to the depoliticization of the asylum-seeking process, even though Dar­ ling's conceptualization of the terms is limited to democratic debate and decision-making. First, the form and content of the debates, what are considered legitimate and acceptable viewpoints, over asylum ac­ commodation and refugee processing are “defined in advance" so that “other potential political viewpoints on how asylum might be framed in public policy" are foreclosed. Second, depoliticization normalizes the neoliberal rationality underpinning the asylum market, turning the whole process into an issue of contract negotiations with private delivery companies.56Darling, however, obfuscates the most important aspect of depoliticization, namely the structural violence of the global capitalist economy in the production and circulation of asylum seekers, refugees, and other forced migrants. Moreover, he does not examine how this privatization of humanitarian services is interlinked with the national securitization episteme in the global capitalist economy.57 It's no coincidence that two of the private corporations contracted by the British government include G4S and Serco, a multinational security services company and an international services company, respectively, have previously managed “immigration removal centres and aspects of the UK's deportation regime."58 In other words, the reproduction of neoliberal governmentality is embedded within a securitization and surveillance episteme that regulates and polices the undesirable, for­ eign, and disposable body of the asylum seeker and refugee. This privatization of the refugee management process is also evident in the Arab world. In a previously mentioned text herein, Sarah Tobin and Madeline Campbell show that the Jordanian government has “outsourced the provision of humanitarian aid and services in refugee camps" to hundreds of non-governmental organizations, limiting its role to “regu-

56 Ibid., 238. 57 The secu ritizatio n of m igration refers to the w ay in w h ich po litical and social discourses in W estern Europe have for the last three d ecades produced and fram ed m igration as a se­ cu rity issue and risk to the leg itim acy of the n eoliberal state, cu ltu ral id en tity, and w elfare p o licies that can be contained and elim inated only through secu rity-b ased g overnm ental strateg ies. For a useful ove rvie w of the d ebates around m igration and secu ritizatio n , see A riane Chebel d 'A p pollonia, M ig ra n t M o b iliz a tio n a n d S e c u ritiz a tio n in th e US a n d E u ro p e (New York: Palgrave M acM illan, 2015). 58 Ibid., 232.

K h ad er

159

lating camp access and deploying police.”59Consequently, they maintain, these neoliberal policies in the governance of the Syrian refugees have led to “the privatisation of the refugee experience" and the spread of campaigns whose goal is to cultivate the refugees into “new moral sub­ jects" or even figures of the “ideal refugee." Consequently, NGOs working with Syrian refugees in camps in Jordan have tried to “inculcate certain 'proper' or 'ideal' understandings of women and work, youth, and early marriage, or the marriage of teenage girls." In each of these cases, the NGO guidelines for the “appropriate" understanding clashed with the refugees' own understanding of these issues. They conclude that the suffering and uncertainty of these refugees increased as a result of these neoliberal policies, “by rendering Syrian refugees responsible for their own management and aid provision."60 The refugees and the fundamental antagonism: toward a common struggle

The failure of biopolitical theories to offer a radical critique of the politi­ cal economy of the refugee has radical implications for the possibility of reconstructing the global capitalist system, its processes and struc­ tures, and for reinventing a new emancipatory universal politics that can unite diverse groups in a common struggle. At stake here is the messianic trajectory of Agambenian biopolitics, which has various im­ plications for the biopolitical theorization of the radical subject. Indeed, Agamben turns the refugee into a messianic figure that emerges from the condition of statelessness. Invoking Melville's Bartleby, Agamben writes, “These citizens often have nationalities of origin, but inasmuch as they prefer not to benefit from their own state's protection, they find themselves, as refugees, in a condition of de facto Statelessness."61 According to Arne De Boever, Agamben's Bartleby is “not a figure of potentiality, but of a specific mode of potentiality," a certain potential­ ity (contingency) is simultaneously “potentiality for the opposite."62 59 Sarah Tobin and M adeline C am pbell, "NGO G overnance and Syrian Refugee 'Su b jects' in Jo rdan." 60 Ibid. 61 Giorgio A gam ben, M e a n s w ith o u t E n d s : N otes on P o litic s (M inneapolis, London: U n iversity of M innesota Press, 2000), 22. 62 Arne de Boever, "O verhearing B artleb y: A gam ben, M elville, and Inop erative Power," P a rrh e sia 1 (2006): 143.

160 B eyo nd th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

This turns the refugee, he adds, into a messianic figure that has come to “save what was not," just like Jesus who did not come to bring a “new table of the Law" but to “fulfil the Torah by destroying it from top to bottom."63 However, the biopolitical elevation of the refugee to a mes­ sianic figure attempts to bypass the self-relating negativity that exists at the heart of the space of radical politics. Žižek thus refers to biopolitics as “post-political," as part of the neoliberal democratic consensus that moves beyond the possibility of actualizing its self-relating negativity, the abyssal gap at its core, that makes it possible to open up a space for the revolutionary Act. In other words, any construction of new com­ munitarian identity must be sustained by a master signifier—that is, for there to be a community, the big Other must be presupposed, even if it does not exist. Moreover, biopolitical theories misread the homo sacer as the subject without a remainder that the disciplinary applica­ tion of the knowledge-power apparatuses produces. Hence, Žižek sug­ gests that Foucault misreads the process of subjectivization, since “the produced subject is not simply the subjectivity that arises as the result of the disciplinary application of knowledge-power, but its remainder, that which eludes the grasp of knowledge-power."64 If all the subject is subjectivized within biopolitical apparatuses of power and knowledge, then there will be no possible opening to the self-relating negativity of the subject, “the excess that resists being included in the discursive network—that is, for what the discourse itself produces as the foreign body in its very heart."65 Žižek is thus right to insist, in his recent book Against the Double Black­ mail, on the need to re-inscribe the class struggle in any analysis of the refugee crisis, since the task today is to build “global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed," a politics of solidarity structured around a common struggle for a “positive universal project shared by all."66 This is the only ground from which a meaningful solution can emerge. As Žižek made clear over and over again, this new position cannot be carved out by celebrating diversity and multiculturalism. The reason is that multiculturalism, as he states in no equivocal terms, serves as an 63 64 65 66

Ibid., 144. Žižek, "From Politics to B iop olitics . . . and Back," 506. Ibid. Slavoj Žižek, A g a in s t th e D o u b le B la ck m a il: R e fu g e e s, Terror, a n d O th e r T ro u b les w ith th e N e ig h b o u rs (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 100.

K h ad er

161

alibi for the global capitalist system, operating as the main ideological vehicle by which to suppress and displace the class struggle. In turn, the false universalism of global capitalism, especially in its recent shift into Asian values, sustains this multicultural ideology, allowing people universal access to economic exchange, while keeping cultural identity particular.67 Postcolonial critics assume that the truth of the postcolo­ nial subject living in a globalized world is its cultural life-world, tradi­ tion or way of life. Žižek refers to the Indian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty's example of the Indian software programmer who represents the truth of the Indian life-world through his concrete (cultural) content such as rituals, etc.68 For Chakrabarty, this Indian programmer is a paradigmatic cipher of the unproblematic simultaneity or "normal­ ized coexistence of the universality of modernization and of particular life-worlds." Žižek, however, correctly notes that "postmodernity is not the overcoming of modernity but its fulfilment: in the postmodern universe, pre-modern leftovers" are no longer experienced as obstacles to be overcome through progress towards a fully secularized moderni­ zation, but as something to be unproblematically incorporated into the multicultural global universe—all traditions survive, but in a mediated "de-naturalized" form, that is, no longer as authentic ways of life, but as freely chosen "life-styles." In other words, within the totality of global capitalism, "elements of pre-existing life-worlds and economies (includ­ ing money) are gradually re-articulated as its own moments, 'exapted' with a different function." As such, Žižek concludes, the truth of the postcolonial subject is its abstraction (incorporation into the global capitalist system) not in its concrete (cultural) content. In short, since local traditions work well with global capitalism, as Žižek points out, the precondition for a new path of freedom is precisely the renunciation of all roots in favour of an emancipatory universal identity. This is precisely where Žižek locates the radical legacy of Malcolm X—in his traversal of the fantasy of roots and past. Unlike other black national­ ists, Malcolm X was not obsessed with searching for precolonial African roots. Rather, as Žižek states, Malcolm X saw the opportunity afforded by the traumatic African-American history of slavery, forcible disloca67 On cap italism w ith Asian value s, see Ch risto p her Ling le, S in g a p o re 's A u th o rita ria n C a p ita lism : A sia n V alues, F ree M a rk e t Illu s io n s, a n d P o litic a l D e p e n d e n c y (Fairfax: Locke

Institute, 1996).

68 Slavoj Žižek, L iv in g in th e E n d Tim es (Lopdon, New York: Verso, 2010), 280-285.

162

B eyo nd th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

tion and the involuntary erasure of culture and the past, as an opening to the freedom to invent a new universal identity. This is precisely the meaning of his newly iconic last name (X). As he states in an interview with Tavis Smiley: "Because of this Malcolm X [... ] wasn't playing the Hollywood game, Roots. You remember that stupid TV series? The greatest honour for your blacks' desire is to find some tribe in Africa. Oh, I'm from there. No. Of course, with the brutality of white men and being enslaved, Malcolm X meant we were deprived of our roots and so on. But he wrote about it. And this X paradoxically opens up a new freedom for us, all that white people want to be, not primitive tribal, but universal, creating their own space. We, black people, have a unique chance not to become, not to return to our particular [roots], to be more universal, emancipated than white people themselves. You see, this is the important thing for me."69 Elsewhere, Žižek calls this process "subjective destitution," which makes it possible for the revolutionary subject to invest in a new radical uni­ versal subjectivity.70 This is also where, for Žižek, the meaning of the revolutionary act of Melville's Bartleby can be located, beginning with his affirmation of a "non-predicate" by way of his literal insistence that he "would prefer not to." As Žižek explains, Bartleby's act of Versagung instructs us "how [to] pass from the politics of'resistance' or 'protestation,' which parasitizes upon what it negates, to a politics that opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation." This, Žižek asserts, is "the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference."71Žižek therefore describes Bar­ tleby's act of refusal not so much as "the refusal of a determinate content as, rather, the formal gesture of refusal as such."72In this way, the subject can reveal the possibility of re-signifying revolutionary acts of symbolic divestiture to others, thus unravelling the limits of the social field and its mechanisms of normalization and fostering "the conditions under which people will have a choice to make at the level of practices—individual, 69 Slavoj Žižek, "Tavis Sm iley Interview s," PBS, O ctob er 5, 2015, accessed Novem ber 15, 2016, h ttp ://w w w .p b s.o rg /w n e t/tavissm ile y/in te rvie w s/slavo j-zizek/. 70 Slavoj Žižek, The T icklish S u b je c t (London, New York: Verso, 1999). 71 Slavoj Žižek, The P a ra lla x V iew (Cam bridge: MIT Press, 2006), 381 -8 2 . 72 Ibid., 384.

K h ad er

163

familial, institutional."73Although Žižek maintains that the subject can­ not control the way her acts are resignified and repeated by others, he insists that there is no other option but to "accept the risk that a blind violent outburst will be followed by its proper politicization."74 Hence, Žižek inscribes the refugee crisis within the class struggle as the "concrete universal" of the social totality in its precise, Hegelian sense.75 According to Žižek, in Hegel the universal coincides with the particular contents or concrete situations through which it can be "hegemonized", while at the same maintaining its universal frame in and through these concrete situations. Žižek thus maintains that for Hegel the particular content is not only a "subspecies of the universal­ ity of the total process, it also hegemonises this very universality," transmuting universality itself into a "part of (or, rather, drawn into) the particular content."76As such, the universal does not stand in op­ position to some concrete content or particular feature of the totality; rather, both the universal and particular occupy the same paradoxical zone of extimate indistinction. In order to sustain itself, therefore, He­ gelian universality requires a point of inherent exclusion, "an exception at which it is suspended."77To this extent, concrete universality refers to the exception that is "reconciled in the universal"—that is, concrete universality is formed through "the unity of the abstract universal with its constitutive exception."78 In so far as they lack any determinate place in the hegemony of the neoliberal global capitalist regime, these refugees can be said to rep­ resent the system's constitutive exception, its symptomal truth qua the structural injustice and inequality of the system. Žižek explains to Glyn Daly:" ... when you have in a certain social totality those who are 'below us'—the negated or outcast—then precisely insofar as they are the abject, they stand for universality."79 As such, refugees constitute 73 M olly R othenb erg, Th e E x c e ss iv e S u b je c t: A N ew T h e o ry o f S o c ia l C h a n g e (C am bridge: Polity, 2010), 208. 74 Slavoj Žižek, "Lenin's Choice: Interp retation vs. Fo rm alizatio n," L a c a n .c o m , accessed O ctob er 10, 2016, h ttp ://w w w .lacan .co m /th e sym p to m /?p ag e _id = 9 3 6 . 75 Žižek, A g a in s t th e D o u b le B la ck m a il, 6 0 -6 1 . 76 Slavoj Žižek, Th e F rig h t o f R e a l Tears (Lo nd on: BFI, 2001), 23. 77 Slavoj Žižek, E n jo y y o u r S y m p to m : J a c q u e s L a ca n in H o lly w o o d a n d O u t (New York, London: Routledge, 1992), 98. 78 Ibid., 97. 79 Glyn Daly, C o n v e rsa tio n s w ith Ž iže k (C am bridge: Polity Press, 2003), 160.

164 B eyo nd th e B io p o litic s o f th e R e fu g e e ...

the part of the no part of the system, its point of inherent exclusion or exception, in the allegedly democratic and egalitarian neoliberal global capitalist system. In other words, refugees are constitutive of the global capitalist sys­ tem, and at the same time they stand outside its notion of the good, a part of no part, as they are increasingly subjected to different forms of enclosure within advanced technologies of apartheid. They are in the market system, but they cannot indulge in the absolute enjoyment of consumption. They are a part of the nation, but they are consigned to spaces of abjection outside the purview of citizenship. And finally, they are within the republic, but they are denied the democratic rights that are enshrined in the law. As such, as he says to Daly, they embody the failure of universality and stand for the lie of the existing universal system and "what is wrong with society." As an exception, therefore, these refugees disclose and destabilize the hegemonic universal framework of the global capitalist system, within which the troubling excess of the fundamental antagonism is foreclosed. In Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, Žižek writes in relation to Hegel's "rabble," as a trope for the exception, that "it is precisely those who are without their proper place within the social Whole (like the rabble) that stand for the universal dimension of the society which generates them. This is why the rabble cannot be abolished without radically transforming the entire social edifice."80 From this vantage point, it becomes possible to subvert the totality of the system, since the domain of politics proper is not simply about "the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire space."81 The concrete universality of the part of no part then becomes the universality of "the public use of reason," which can redefine "the very universality of what it means to be human." This makes it possible for radical revolutionary politics to emerge, be­ cause it is from their perspective that a radical revolutionary project can now be conceived and theorized, making them the "very site of political universality." As such, radical revolutionary and solidarity projects can 80 Žižek, Less th a n N o th in g , 432. 81 Žižek, Th e T icklish S u b je c t, 208.

Kh ad er

165

fully assume the repressed point of exclusion in order to reconfigure the very coordinates and terms of universality.82 To this extent, refugees would not simply engage in inscribing a particu­ lar form of difference (i.e., cultural, racial, or religious difference) within the matrix of the dominant symbolic order. Rather, these excluded com­ munities turn the conflict under global capitalism from one between two particular groups to one between the global order and this radical universality, since such communities are more than willing to “introduce a division of'Us' versus 'Them.'"83The part of no part thus introduces, he writes elsewhere, “a totally different Universal, that of an antagonistic struggle which does not take place between particular communities, but splits from within each community, so that the 'trans-cultural' link between communities is that of a shared struggle.“84 In the case of another “symptomal point", namely the proletariat, Žižek writes that “an event proper occurs only when this symptomal point is fully assumed in its truth—say, when the proletariat grasps that its lack of a proper place within the social body signals that it stands for the universality (universal truth) of the society in which there are proletarians.“85 The main challenge of emancipatory politics today is to assume this truth, by identifying with this symptomal point, the refugees, by “proposing] and fight[ing] for a positive universal project shared by all participants“ and “offering] them a common struggle, since our problems today are common.“86

82 Žižek, Less th a n N o th in g , 361. 83 Žižek, Th e T ick lish S u b je c t, 201. 84 Slavoj Žižek, "M ulticu ltu ralism and the R eality of an Illusion," L o c o n .c o m , accessed O ctob er 10, 2016, h ttp ://w w w .lacan .co m /e ssays/?p ag e _id = 4 5 4 . 85 Slavoj Žižek, A b so lu te R e c o il: T o w a rd s a N ew F o u n d a tio n o f D ia le c tic a l M a te ria lism (London: Verso, 2014). Žižek, A g a in s t th e D o u b le B la ck m a il, 100.

86

166 Beyond th e B io p o litic s of th e R e fu g e e ...

Agon Hamza The Refugee Crisis and the

Helplessness of the Left

"Man alone is a triumphant error who makes his aberration the law of the world." Louis Althusser

The ongoing refugee crisis in Europe is perhaps the biggest task con­ fronting the Left today. Responses to the crisis have demonstrated once again the urgency of rethinking the fundamental tenets of the leftist project. Lacking the serious theoretical (philosophical) elaborations and faced with the limits of contemporary forms of militancy the Left, in its in­ ability to meet the challenges of our epoch, is facing one of its biggest challenges ever. The old formulas are no longer operative, and most of the reactions of the Left testify to this fact. Broadly and schematically, this means that the Left should rearticulate and reformulate the relationship between labour (structural unemploy­ ment) and precarity, the new class composition, class relations and struggle, the relation between nations, states, and capital, the challenge of envy and resentment, and so on. But in order to do so, one should employ what is, essentially, the reinvention of both the notion of ideol­ ogy and the procedure of its critique as undertaken by Žižek, which is arguably the most coherent and consistent reinvention of both the critique of ideology and its contemporary forms. And this then is the thread and thrust of the argument: rather than employing the leftist analytic paradigm to approach the social and political conditions that created the refugee crisis, we should use this crisis as a condition to rethink the very conceptual framework of the Left. In so doing, I hope such an argument might succeed in outlining the basic limitations that render the traditional critique of ideology inoperative and ineffective.

Political economy of the refugees

As Marxists, we should always return to the premise of the “late Marx": the “critique of political economy" is the point of departure for any analysis of our socio-political, ideological and economic situation. In his Theories of Surplus Value, Marx argues as follows: In the crises of the world market, the contradictions and antagonisms of bourgeois production are strikingly revealed. Instead of investigat­ ing the nature of the conflicting elements that erupt in catastrophe, the apologists content themselves with denying the catastrophe itself and insisting, in the face of their regular and periodic recurrence, that if production were carried on according to the textbooks, crises would never occur. Thus the apologetics consist in the falsification of the sim­ plest economic relations, and particularly in clinging to the concept of unity in the face of contradiction.1 Looking at it from the perspective of capitalism, it is not capitalism that is in crisis—indeed, its pace of development in China, Singapore, even in Africa and Latin America, is unprecedented. But, who then is in crisis today? Crises are the most important feature required in order that capitalist reproduction takes place. It is in the midst of crises that the inherent instabilities, antagonisms, and various forms of oppres­ sion and domination are reshaped, and by which capitalism attempts to provide a new vision of itself for its future. In this regard, crises are not only inevitable, but as Marx has repeated many times, they are necessary for the inner contradictions of capitalism (accumulation) to be temporarily pacified. The first thesis should thus be: the ongoing mass displacement of the people from Africa and the Middle East (predominantly) to Europe should be located primarily in the functioning of late global capitalism. More precisely, it is the way in which the countries of the Middle East and Africa are caught in the dynamics of capitalist circulation that consti­ tutes the main reason behind the massive displacement of populations. Or, more concretely, we should locate the causes of the refugee crisis in the tension or the contradiction between the dynamic developments of (global) capitalism and the crisis it causes in (the local structures in) 1 Karl M arx, T h e o rie s o f S u rp lu s V alue, part 2 (London: Law ren ce & W ishart, 1969), 500.

168 Th e R efu g e e C ris is ...

different parts of the world. The other reason is Western military in­ tervention in the Middle East and Africa, including the neo-colonialism that comes with it, which served to reshuffle the economic structures that, as a result, created the on-going chaos in those regions. In other words, we merely have to look back to previous years or decades to see that the ideological, political and economic grounds for the present crisis had already been prepared and were reasonably well function­ ing. The upshot is this: refugees are the direct result of capitalism and colonialist expansion, which changed the form of life of all those people. Before capitalism, people lived in largely closed societies, which were self-sufficient. In the Middle Ages, the majority of goods was not com­ modities—in fact commodities represented real exceptions. For the most part, goods were produced for one's own use (communal, etc.), and/or to be turned over (to landlords, nobles, religious institutions, etc.) It is only with capitalism that exchange becomes the norm and goods acquire the social form and status of commodities. It is this radical revolution and revolutionarization that transformed traditional forms of life and gave rise to the “first" large-scale emigrations. However, in the mid-1840s, the free movement of labour and capital was taken for granted, it was not a topic that was commonly discussed. Interestingly, it was not limited to mass migration from the East to the West, but also included migration amongst Westerners themselves. With the discovery of gold, Britons, Germans and the Irish all migrated to the USA. Two notions were introduced with capitalism—or rather two phenomena took new forms: international trade (exchange of goods) and migration (labour). Today, we have the free movement of commodities without the same movement of people. Another form is slavery, which despite hav­ ing been abolished some five or six centuries ago, is today re-emerging, not only in far-away countries but also at the very “core" of Europe: in Italy, Slovakia, Albania and more.2However, the champions of the “new slavery" are Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, especially in the construc­ tion sector and other specific fields, where Saudis and others with­ hold wages owed to workers who are most commonly from the Middle and Far East. While the transition from the Middle Ages to capitalism 2 G ethin C h am b erlain, "The Exp ensive 'Italian' Shoes M ade for a Pittance in East European Sw eatshop s," The G u a rd ia n , August 21, 2016, accessed A ugust 22, 2016, h ttps://w w w .theg uardian.com /fashion/2016/aug/20/sho es-uk-hig h-street-m ade-for-apittan ce -e aste rn -e u ro p e -sw e atsh o p .

H am za

169

drastically changed the forms of exploitation and exclusion, it seems the Saudis and other Gulf States are introducing new forms of slavery into the late global capitalist scenario. The crucial mistake, however, that we should by all means avoid is to ascribe this tendency to the tra­ ditional conservative form of Islamic (Sunni) societies, and to inscribe slavery in the totality of the functioning of Islam. Saudi Arabia and its peninsula allies stand for what is the definitive ontological obscenity: on one side, they stand for what is the most developed form of capital­ ist development, involved in high finance, speculation, etc., while at the same time maintaining a seemingly traditional form of Sunni Islam as the ideological basis of society. While we can—and must—elaborate on the Sunni versus Shi'ia traditions of Islam, we should at the same time call into question the reality of Islamic rule, especially in Saudi Arabia. Religion—which exists to be manipulated, and in this case Islam—is the perfect cover for domination and engagement in the most ruthless expressions of financial speculation and capitalist expropriation. The on-going refugee crisis is, to a large extent, due largely to this gift from the Saudis. I think we can distinguish six types of violence associated with capital­ ism: (a) the violence of primitive accumulation: connected with dispos­ session processes, colonial expansion and the appropriation of land and means by dominant forces; it is the violence of establishing a private property regime, and creating the "fictional commodities" needed for a market to be capitalist—land, labour and money must become private property, (b) The violence of safeguarding private property: connected with the juridical system that preserves and maintains property in the hands of those who have it (and keeps it out of the hands of those who don't); police repression, laws, etc. (c) The violence of value as such: the abstract movements of capital that determine the destiny of millions of people, their displacement, choice of profession, living conditions and so on; with the essential aspect here being that these determinations carry no agent behind them; so, to suffer this violence is also to suffer the violence of having no entity to blame nor any way of mapping what has taken place, (d) The violence of the impotence of tradition: as capitalism advances and establishes a social synthesis based on value, all forms of traditional institutions lose their synthetic power; this means that previous forms of authority continue to exist, but lose their capacity to

170 Th e R efu g e e C ris is ...

organize life as a master-signifier, so that the only way to remain in a position of exception is to enact an exceptional force; the very impotence of tradition to remain a socially synthetic force expresses itself through its authoritative power—violence that expresses the impotence of pa­ triarchy and other values in order to sustain themselves as the horizon of social organization, (e) The violence of surviving: with the inversion of means and ends through which capital is constituted as a motor of social organization, not only is the accumulation of money an end in it­ self, and human inventiveness a means, but one's cultural life becomes a means and one's animal life an end, that is, surviving; even high cultural activities become informed by the structure of survival, through which everything must have a function in the cycle of natural reproduction; in other words, we are increasingly deprived of the experience of things that serve no purpose, (f) The violence of resentment: early Marx ac­ curately described the process of alienation through which the worker is separated from both nature and the means and product of his work, but he was wrong to "deduce" from this formulation the notion that if the worker does not enjoy what he produces, then the capitalist does. As his late theory of crisis shows, the overproduction of goods meets no gluttonous capitalist on the other side—instead it is consumed by no one. This "other who consumes what I am alienated from," however, is structurally written into the alienation of work in capitalism, so the problem of "theft of enjoyment" is structurally part of the system's reproduction. The Marx of the manuscripts of 1844 deduced that this alienation could explain the relation between the "worker" and the "non­ worker"—that is to say, the capitalist. One loses what the other gains. But now, with the horizon of full employment increasingly distant, it is becoming clear that this analysis rather well describes the relation between the worker and the other "non-worker," the unemployed or underemployed, who is the true "subject that is supposed to enjoy" what the worker loses. Hence the structural role of resentment within the working class—especially in the case of immigrants and people who require or depend on assistance from the state.3 Another dimension to be considered here is neo-imperialism and neo­ colonial economic exploitation. The dynamics of capitalist development 3 I owe this to G abriel Tupinam ba's "Notes on 'Th ree D im ensions of the Tragedy of the Left in the XXI C e n tu ry '"(w o rk in progress).

H am za

171

and neo-colonial interventions have had devastating effects in Africa, the Middle East and more. While we should, rightly, oppose the Western missions in those regions, we should equally oppose the Chinese neo­ colonial missions in Africa, especially those in countries like the Congo, which in effect is not a state but a land consisting of different territories run by warlords that carry on a proxy war on behalf of Chinese and French corporations. As a result of both economic neo-colonialism and military interventions, millions of people are faced with two choices: to become refugees or join the warlords (in Africa) or ISIS (in the Middle East). However, our picture of the refugees doesn't remain on this level alone. There is a tendency among some European Leftists to believe that the millions of refugees will constitute a revolutionary agent in Europe, and that we will once again see the re-proletarization of the continent. This marks the lowest point in the European Left thinking. At the present conjunc­ ture (and not only at this one), importing the revolutionary agent will have unimaginable consequences: even now, with only some two mil­ lion refugees on the continent, we are seeing the fast rise of far Right forces across the continent. On the other hand, the refugees are not only coming in a desperate attempt to escape from war-torn countries, and therefore, looking for a job, as has been the case up until now. This wave of emigrant-refugees has taught us another lesson: they are com­ ing in search of well being, that is, for the quality of life that European countries provide their citizens. We should note that with this wave of refugees, the nature of migration is changing: instead of the traditional working immigrants we are now seeing those who are simply seeking a better life—for what Slavoj Žižek calls the "Norway dream," which unfortunately for them is an impossible dream for formal, structural reasons: In escaping their war-torn homelands, the refugees are possessed by a dream. Refugees arriving in southern Italy do not want to stay there: many of them are trying to get to Scandinavia. The thousands of mi­ grants in Calais are not satisfied with France: they are ready to risk their lives to get into the UK. Tens of thousands of refugees in Balkan countries are desperate to get to Germany. They assert their dreams as their unconditional right, and demand from the European authorities not only proper food and medical care but also transportation to the

172

I he H efugee C ris is ...

destination of their choice. There is something enigmatically utopian in this demand: as if it were the duty of Europe to realise their dreams— dreams which, incidentally, are out of reach of most Europeans (surely a good number of Southern and Eastern Europeans would prefer to live in Norway, too?). It is precisely when people find themselves in poverty, distress and danger—when we'd expect them to settle for a minimum of safety and wellbeing—that their utopianism becomes most intransi­ gent. But the hard truth to be faced by the refugees is that 'there is no Norway,' even in Norway.4 So what will be the fate of the refugees in Europe—a Europe that is itself experiencing a radical twofold transformation? Roughly put, in eco­ nomic terms, the predominant form of employment is precarious, and in terms of politics, the ultimate choice is between far Right populism and proto-fascist parties. In all probability, they will join the growing masses of precarious workers and/or local sweatshops, both of which are becoming a necessary structural part of late global capitalism. Here we encounter one of the main problems of the contemporary Left: the fetishization of the working class, or of the people generally. The new Right-wing populism and proto-fascism has its base in and among the poor, the precarious workers and the working class. We should be bold to say yes: yes, the refugees might as well "steal" the (precarious) jobs from the locals, who as a consequence will join the Right-wing anti­ immigrant movements. Clearly, this is the only "natural" outcome in a situation in which the Left is incapable of directing this rage where it should: the structures of global capitalism that create the conditions for people to become refugees. The crisis of the Left

How do we orientate our thinking in a situation in which the Left lacks the conceptual (theoretical) and political (organizational) tools to ana­ lyse and intervene in the present situation? In Hegelian terms, we need the patience of a concept that will re-orient us in thought in order to break away from the current conjunctures. 4 Slavoj Žižek, "The N on-Existence of Norway," L o n d o n R e v ie w o f B o o k s , Septem b er 9, 2015, accessed O ctober 12, 2016, h ttp ://w w w .lrb .co.u k/2015/09/09/slavoj-zizek/the-n on -existen ce-of-n orw ay.

Ham za

173

The beginning of this century was marked by a farce (9/11} and a tragedy (the financial crisis of 2008}.5 This century promises to be the century of the crisis, whose correct outcome only a philistine would allow herself to predict. What initially appeared as a revo­ lutionary situation spreading across the globe, from Tahrir Square, Taksim Square and through Europe, to the Occupy Wall Street and mass protests in Brazil turned out to produce worse outcomes than the situations that constituted the very objects of the initial protests and riots. The famous “spring of rebellions", probably echoing the seriously famous “springtime of people" in 1848 as perhaps the first and last pan-European revolution. Unlike in 1848, which represented “the momentary realisation of the dreams of the Left, [and] the night­ mares of the Right"6in which the ancien régime was overthrown, the riots and demonstrations of this decade were almost turned right the other way around. The Left experienced a nightmare, being unable to articulate its position as well as to take power without failing worse, as was the case of Syriza in Greece—whereas and whereby the forces of the Right are now more powerful than they were going into the crisis. This was almost the logical outcome of the "years of dreaming dangerously" which, to revise Žižek, turned out to be not too danger­ ous and not profound enough. The real victim of the financial crisis was not capital, but the Left itself. Yet again, the Left proved incapable of providing even a minimal idea of an alternative to global capitalism. In this sense, the lesson of the financial crisis is this: the crises in themselves are not necessarily the precondition for the radical Left project. When the Left is weak and mar­ ginal, as is the case today, the economic crises do not open up the field for a radical emancipatory project, but rather they necessitate the rise of populism, wars, poverty, and greater social division. Emancipatory political experiments stopped, thus cementing the ideological condi­ tions for the far Right to take over. It is in the course of crises that the inherent instabilities, antagonisms, and various forms of oppression and domination are reshaped, take new forms, and by which capitalism attempts to provide a new vision of itself for its future. In this regard, crises are not only inevitable, but as Marx has repeated many times, they 5 Slavoj Žižek, F irs t as Tragedy, Th en as F a rce (London: Verso, 2009).

6 Eric H obsbaw m , Th e A g e o f C a p ita l 1848-1875 (London: A bacus, 2006), 14.

174 Th e R efu g e e C ris is ...

are necessary for the inner contradictions of capitalism (accumulation) to be temporarily pacified. The crisis of capitalism does not, in itself, represent the potential for the beginning of something new, nor does it offer the perspective of a new vision of a different society. Economic crises, almost as a rule, open up new spaces for capitalist investments and exploitation. And this is what we are seeing today. Here we can discern the material force of ideology: far from doubting itself, it rein­ forces its premises. It suffices to think about the words that were either invented or gained their contemporary meanings in the aftermath of crisis: neoliberalism, austerity measures, democratization, the nation­ state, sovereignty, precarity and similar. There are Marxists who read Capital, especially in the light of the famous line from the Manifesto: “capitalism produces its own gravediggers." For them, a crisis in capitalism is a crisis of capitalism, in the sense that it produces the tools for overcoming it. For others, Capital is read in the light of another statement from the Manifesto, the one about the perma­ nent social revolution brought about with the bourgeoisie. For them, a crisis is a moment of internal revolution against capitalism, part of capi­ talism's own form of self-reproduction. Which option is correct? Perhaps neither: the far more frightening realization we have come to grasp is that capitalism does reproduce its own logic, indefinitely, and it does meet an immanent limit. But this limit is not socialism nor communism, but barbarism: the utter destruction of natural and social substance in a “downward spiral" that does not recognize any “reality testing" in this destruction. In this sense, the “gravediggers" that capitalism produces are gravediggers both of capitalism and communism—which is why no emancipatory project should count, using the immanent logic of capital­ ism, on pointing a way out nor wait for the collapse of capitalism in the hope that we will not be dragged down along with it. The majority of the Left today, including the socialist governments and parties, silently accept that capitalism is the ultimate and unquestioned form of social organization. Everyone is both “Marxist" at the level of analysis, and non-Marxist; that is to say, not communist in practice. This distinction takes a form as follows: yes, we know capitalism is bad, but Marxism does not provide a solution or vision for politics, therefore the struggle against capitalism has to be fought culturally, etc. As a consequence, leftist politics and theory exist only as a reaction to the

H am za

175

actions of the ruling class, precisely because Marxism is taken as a purely critical tool, and as such only reactive politics becomes possible. Being a Marxist without being a Communist ultimately means that even when we speak of systemic change (from a Marxist point of view), we still end up lacking a practical point of view of a totality from which to think action in equally global terms (that is, the communist point of view). This lack of vision is the postmodern turn of the Left. It is post-modern because it accepts Marxism as a de-constructionist tool, a critical weapon, but not as an invitation to build a new form of soci­ ety—something that is equated with a “grand narrative". In the same line and within the same horizon, the class struggle has been replaced with the cultural politics of recognition (gay rights, anti-racist strug­ gles, multiculturalism, and so on). The problem with this turn is that it ignores class analysis and struggle and instead engages in the reformist level of improving that which can be justly improved within the capital­ ist coordinates of social organization. Concerning the direct critique of capitalism, the Left is content with analysing and criticizing the symptoms of capitalism: austerity, neo­ liberalism, authoritarianism, and so forth. This comes as the result of abandoning a critique of ideology and further, a critique of political economy. As a result, the Left is engaged either in false struggles (neo­ liberalism, austerity), or in struggles that are already over-determined and decided by the ruling ideology. But, where is the Left in the entire refugee crisis? What is its position? The majority of the Left plays the role of exercising moral agency, specifi­ cally engaged in an attempt to humanize the refugees and their plights. This take is purely racist, precisely because it infantilizes an entire group of people. The public sentiment of welcoming the refugees is simply insufficient. What is equally important is their systematization; that is to say, their access and involvement in social provisions, on-going, timely and appropriate medical care, enrolment and participation in the education process, and so on. It is not that one should not feel sympathy with the refugees but rather, to precisely understand that the cause of their suffering is the result of the deadlocks of late capitalism. Put dif­ ferently, by only sympathizing with the refugees we are depoliticizing the very cause of the crisis and reducing, problematically, complexities to a moral order. The refugee crisis is not a moral crisis, but a crisis

176 Th e R efu g e e C ris is ...

precipitated and exacerbated by the dynamics of late global capitalism. The slogan “they are also like us" is the ultimate form of racism and thus serves to replace class struggle with empathy. Here we can elaborate on the difference between empathy and sym­ pathy. Sympathy is, as Adam Smith developed in his theory of moral sentiments, the very principle of specularity: the capacity to put oneself in another's place and “feel what they feel." This is both the principle of formal equality and, if taken far enough, of ruthless competition. Empathy, on the other hand, is better defined as understanding how an unbridge­ able gap separates me from the other, so that I recognize a difference between us, and still I do not allow myself to judge the other by my own standards, which are not necessarily the other's. “They are like us" is a slogan that seeks precisely to substitute any form of solidarity that recognizes cultural and political impasses for a formal solidarity that is the very basis of the market economy—and which therefore simultane­ ously includes the other in my world and situates him as a competitor. That might not be a problem for the Left and its internationalism, but it has the consequence of reinforcing the anti-immigrant feeling amongst those it equalizes. Further, it is not enough that we locate the problems of the refugees only in the domain of imperialist or colonial struggle, but also within the totality of capitalism (as well as the problem of the excluded, ecological catastrophes, and so on—which will precipitate the next influx of mass population displacement). No matter how benevolent the Left appears, crises like the refugees (and those to come) illustrate the limits of any form of grassroots democratic movements. To elaborate this case in point, during the Kosovo war, most of the refugees were settled in neighbouring Albania and Macedonia, in which military and humanitarian organizations settled the camps. The crucial aspect is not only the refugee's systematization, but also their redistribution in the “third countries"—which was organized entirely by organizations and commenced with the use of either military planes or special civilian aircrafts. When Žižek drew from Jameson's thesis on global militariza­ tion7 didn't he mean precisely this? Instead of merely sympathizing with refugees from a safe and cosy distance, which included expressing solidarity largely via social media networks, why not unconditionally 7 Fredric Jam eson, A n A m e rica n U to p ia : D u a l P o w e r a n d th e U n iv e rsa l A rm y, ed. Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2016).

H am za

177

support organizing the transportation of refugees and their proper sys­ tematization in third countries? This point becomes clearer if we raise the distinction between organizing around the indifference/difference (or identity), which in fact was the ambition of party-form politics. This will shed light on the thesis developed above and in particular, provide insight into Jameson's decision to bring up the military thesis. The army is one of the few instances where this productive and inclusive indiffer­ ence is still maintained at some vague level today. The military traverses particular identifications by focusing on logistical and organizational aspects of life. In fact, what interested Lenin and the Bolsheviks about the military-form-of-life, that is, the militarization of life, was their attempt to survive in the very rough and difficult situation in Russia, and at the same time, their experimenting with some level of produc­ tive indifferentiation. The problem here is even deeper, and I want to move a step further: the difficulty lies in breaking away from the taboos of the Left, which Žižek enumerated exceedingly well in a recent essay,8 so that we can actually fight for certain organizational tools that have been thoroughly monopolized by the ruling class. Today the Right holds the monopoly on any form of organization that does not depend on consensus or identity. Some such known forms are, for example, the commodity form, the State form, global logistics, informational networks, etc., in short, the whole fabric of social life; whereas the Left is content with simply resisting this power in the name of diversity. Furthermore, the reaction of the Left apropos the refugee crisis and Žižek's take on it renders its impotence entirely palpable. There is a radical incompatibility and contradiction between a true Leninist and the figure of the beautiful soul. Whenever one is engaged in providing a “concrete analysis of a concrete situa­ tion" (as Žižek did), the beautiful souls of the Left immediately react by invoking Marx, and sometimes even Lenin, in order to justify and make up for their total lack of concrete positioning towards concrete

8 Slavoj Žižek, "In the Wake of Paris A ttacks The Left Must Em brace Its Radical W estern Roots," In Th ese Tim es, Novem ber 16, 2015, accessed O ctober 20, 2016, http ://in thesetim es.co m /article/18605 breaking -the-taboo s-in-the-w ake-of-paris-attacksthe-left-m ust-em b race-its.

178 Th e R e fu g e e C ris is ...

situations.9 The real difficulty in Lenin's dictum is not analysing “the concrete situation" (what is truly going on singularly), but rather, pro­ viding “concrete analysis." This is to say, an analysis that is not more committed to the identification of the analyst (as an “abstract analyst" of a concrete situation or as someone who can guarantee that provid­ ing the correct analysis will guarantee his/her recognition by others as a “true" Marxist). Undertaking a “concrete analysis" is traumatic precisely because it gives priority to the concrete situation over the reproduction of the analyst as an abstract individual. This means that it takes the side of the people over the side of the Left; and waiting for the effects of the intervention/analysis in order to determine where one actually stands. It is precisely at this point where risk is located. And one cannot but argue that refugees, who are in a desperate and hopeless situation, would rather endorse Zizek's proposal of a military organization of their lives in this hopeless moment, rather than have a thousand “Marxists" claim that their ties should be further loosened, the fragile organization of their lives only further dissolved in the name of an abstract notion of freedom. The trouble with Islam

Why did the figure of the Muslim almost come to assume the figure of the “untouchable" among the (liberal) Left in Europe? Clearly, there is a cer­ tain fascination with Islam, but this fascination exists only insofar as (or precisely because) it masks the real racism of the liberal Left. The critique of Islam and Islamophobia are not one and the same (the same argument should be made apropos the critique of Zionism and the fight against antiSemitism). Thus the crucial question a propos the Muslims in Europe is, why does the contemporary (liberal) Left need the Muslim fantasy in order to sustain itself in the present conjuncture? Let us try to develop this point as comprehensively and systematically as possible herein. The Left—and the Western Liberal Left in particular—takes post­ colonial theory very seriously, despite its obvious theoretical and 9 I have in mind the reactions to Zizek's series of te xts on the refugee crisis, as w ell as his book on the sam e to p ic. The point here is not to sim ply "defend" Zizek's p o sition, but to show how the position of the liberal Left (of "open borders", etc.) is a fantasy, w hich like any fantasy, is not intended or e xpected to happ en. It is cru cial to note that very few of the crit­ ics of Zizek's positions turn th e ir (false) rad icalness into serious p o litical en gag em ent.

Ham za

179

political flaws.10Although this topic requires longer deliberation, I will limit myself here to advancing the following thesis: The problematic point of post-colonial theory is rather well encapsulated in the dis­ tinction proposed by Badiou, that is, between the ethics of difference and the ethics of truth: the former is largely oriented towards the past—toward reparation, reconstruction of heritage, and, ultimately, avoiding the return of evil. The latter paradigm, while acknowledg­ ing the historical basis of any action, maintains a reference to future systemic transformation. Post-colonial theory reconstructs the his­ tory of colonial struggles from the standpoint of avoiding evil, which leads it to overestimate culture as a receptacle of lost heritage, to equate power with alienation in the other, and ultimately to dismiss universality and any systemic point of view as dangerous returns of euro-centric ideology. Perhaps it is here that we should look for the causes of the patronizing and moralization of the refugees by the liberal Left, the only outcome of which is depolitication. However, the first question in connection with Islam is the obvious one: how, if we refer to Hegel, could it have emerged after Christianity as the only true religion? This is the ques­ tion that has been haunting religion throughout history. This is also the question that haunted Freud, whose theory of religion consisted of equating God with the Father. In contrast to Judaism and Christianity, in Islam Allah is not the Father, he does not give birth, nor is he born himself. He's simply the One. It is perhaps for this reason that Islam emphasizes femininity so much? It was through Khadija that Muham­ mad, the orphan, became the Prophet. But, another more interesting point is the one that leads Hegel to speak of Islam's proximity to Judaism—and we should add—both in the theological as well as "geographical" aspects. Unlike Christianity with its Trinity, Judaism and Islam are clearly monotheistic religions: In Mohammedanism the limited principle of the Jews is expanded into universality and thereby overcome. Here, God is no longer, as with the Asiatics, contemplated as existent in immediately sensuous mode but is apprehended as the one infinite sublime Power beyond all the mul10 Cf. Slavoj Žižek, R e p e a tin g Len in (Zagreb : A rkzin , 2001), 13-19; V ivek Chibber, P o s tc o lo n ia l T h e o ry a n d th e S p e c te r o f C a p ita l (London: Verso, 2013).

180 Th e R e fu g e e C ris is ...

tiplicity of the world. Mohammedanism is, therefore, in the strictest sense of the word, the religion of sublimity.11 This is what—rightly—leads Žižek to propose the Jewish-Muslim Civili­ zation, as opposed to the Jewish-Christian Civilization, particularly with regard to the conflicts in the Middle East. How does this look politi­ cally today? One of the most important questions in this regard, and especially of today's so-called Islamic fundamentalism, concerns the prophet: was Muhammad a Muslim? Upon a close reading of the Qur'an and especially of the function of Muhammad in Islam as a religion, one encounters a surprising figure of him—as a political leader, rather than the messenger of God. But, is such the case today? Let us analyse the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). They claim to refer to an old Islamic tradition, to which they try to remain faithful. The question a propos Islam and ISIS is thus the following: 1) to which tradition are they referring; and 2) what is it in Islam that renders possible or creates the conditions for the emergence of ISIS and its reference to Islam? Let's begin with the Islamic tradition, repressed and forgotten, to which ISIS aims to return. Everyone who is acquainted with the history of the Islamic traditions knows that the tradition ISIS refers to was only invented last century. In Hegelese, there was nothing before the loss to which one returns or works to revive. ISIS retrospectively constitutes its own presuppositions, or rather its own past. The Caliphate, one of the most important Islamic institutions, has no theological or religious foundations in the Qur'an. Instead it looks to Hadiths for legitimacy. His­ torically, it was created after the death of Muhammad, and it was only with the second Caliph that it was organized as a "state," with a proper bureaucratic and administrative basis. It isjnteresting to note that it was Rashidun Caliph Umar who, after occupying Jerusalem, allowed Jews to enter the city and to freely exercise their religion, contrary to the Christian ban. Further, didn't European liberal writers, John Locke among them, express their fascination with the Ottoman Empire, where all religious groups could freely exercise their beliefs, rituals, and so on? And the Ottoman Empire was an Islamic Caliphate until 1924. Let us proceed further with the Ummah, the "Islamic nation," which in its conceptualization comes very close to the Pauline concept of 11 G.W.F. Hegel, P h ilo so p h y o f M in d (O xford: O xford U n ive rsity Press, 1971), 44.

H am za

181

Christianity as a collective of believers. Ummah is a political collective of believers who uphold the word of God. But, what is the word of God? If one avoids theological definitions and speculation it becomes appar­ ent that there is a certain progressive aspect in the Qur'an to the word Ummah. At different stages the Qur'an refers to different collectives, and in some cases Ummah refers to one man, namely Abraham. What unites all of these is a sense of salvation and universality that binds the collective together. This collectivity, insists the Qur'an, is the best kind of collectivity. But, at the same time, it is not the best due to the colour of their skin or the amount of wealth they possess. To borrow an expression from Badiou: these categories are not categories of truth. What makes the Muslim collectivity, the Ummah, the best kind of col­ lectivity is that they do righteous things; they uphold what is right and just, even if this is not in the best interest of them, their family or their nation. Ummah is a collectivity of principles, of universal ideals, of shared commitments to justice and equality. In this general sense, the Ummah cannot stand for a merely religious community because universal principles, the word of God, is not the property of any religion in particular, but rather, it belongs to all people. Anyone who is willing to uphold justice and equality is a member of the Ummah, regardless of one's culture, personal beliefs, skin colour, or gender orientation. All of these differences are accidental features and they have no morally relevant bearing on the dispensation of justice. Ummah is a collectivity that can be characterized as such because it does what is right. Fur­ thermore, it is a universal collectivity of brotherhood, not in an abstract sense, but in the sense of shared universal ideals and commitments. This can clearly be gleaned from many verses in the Qur'an, but also from the very word Islam, which in its pure Quranic meaning is understood as the complete and loving submission to Allah, where Allah, charita­ bly interpreted, stands for universality itself. Islam as a primordial or original religion, a primordial and foundational experience of what is divine and of what is right and just. In this sense, everyone who is willing to abide by what is right can be considered a Muslim—which means a member of the political community known as Ummah. This is obviously not the case today, as Muslims all too dogmatically define Ummah and exclude not only other religions, but also a great number of religious Muslims themselves.

182 Th e R efu g e e C ris is ...

The question that persists, however, is this: how is it possible for a doctrine of universalism to regress into a doctrine of closed communi­ ties—particularly in light of religion that is employed as an ideological weapon by political groups who stand for the affirmation of identitarian and particular politics? If religion is appropriated by reactionary politics, why then is it worth returning to? Or, more precisely, what specifically in religion is worth re-appropriating? The Left, and especially the European Left, has developed a certain fascination with Islam, or rather with the figure of the Muslim—which, as is always the case, has very little to do with Islam. For instance, the ban on the burkini, and before that the burqa and headscarves, is clearly a racially motivated action directed against the Muslim community in France, etc., and as such we should categorically condemn it. But the more important question is: can we celebrate burqas, or tolerate them in our environment? The first answer to this concerns the non-Islamic tradition of headscarves. Burqas have nothing to do with the Quranic call for "modest dressing". What's more, this is part of an "invented tradi­ tion" in a series of onto-theological re-appropriations of Islam by its most reactionary traditions. Thus our stand should be: in denying the Islamic justification for such, we should nonetheless stand with the women who voluntarily wear it, just as we should oppose those who force them not to wear it.12 The degeneration of religions into manuals and doctrines on diet and fashion is precisely the opposite of what they are intended to be: doctrines on political organization and the functioning of societies. They have reached the point of impossibility, and as they are incapable of re-inventing themselves this degeneration is the only normal outcome. Thus, the thesis that we should push forward is the following: the Um­ mah, which stands for Islamic universality, is the negation of what the proponents of identity politics support, within which they try to understand and qualify the refugee crisis, as well as the "trouble" with Islam and the Muslims. This isn't surprising, since many on the Left, especially in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, endorse identity politics as an 12 It is in teresting to com pare the position of fe m in ists tod ay w ith fem in ists in e.g. A lb ania, Yugoslavia and other countries in 1945, w hen the C o m m un ists banned headscarves. Huge cam p aig ns w ere carried out against them , m ostly by Partisan and C o m m unist w om en , who saw liberation from the h ead scarf as part of th e ir liberation from patriarchal d om in atio n. Inciden tally, the h ead scarf is part of the trad itio n al cu ltu re in m ost of the Balkan and M editerranean cou ntries.

H am za

183

emancipatory tool. The limits of this approach are not only methodo­ logical and conceptual, but extend far further—the ultimate and most consequent form of politics of identity is fascism. Fascism is the answer of the resentment subjectivity to the contradictions in the developments of capital. This is how ISIS should be read: there is neither historical nor theological justification in the form and content of their Caliphate. Their Caliphate today stands for the most consequent realization of the leftist identity dream: they have subjugated Islam to the form of identity politics, and as a result, ISIS has come to stand for an IslamoFascism. The universality of religion (as well as communism] stands for the radical negation of all forms of identity so privileged by the Left.13 Or to put it differently, clinging to identity politics is what Kant would call partaking in the "private use of reason"—whereas the universality of both politics and thought begins with the "public use of reason". In this sense, if we are looking to locate Muslim Universality, we should look into the work of the late Malcolm X, who after his trip to the Middle East and especially the Hajj, rejected and denounced his previous rac­ ism and started to advocate what he saw as a new identity in the very universality of Islam. Therefore, against and in place of identity politics, we should argue that the rise of ISIS and other forms of religious fas­ cism have nothing to do with Islam, nor with Arab cultures. Instead, it is the disappearance of the Left in the Middle East (which began with the intervention of the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, etc.] that fuelled their regression into "invented traditions". What is to be done? Pier Paolo Pasolini's poem may provide us the cue: "Not an Arab people, not a Balkan people, not an ancient people but a living nation, a European nation, and what are you? A land of babies, starving, corrupt, politicians working for landowners, reactionary governors, petty lawyers with slicked-back hair and smelly feet, free-market bureaucrats mean as your bigoted uncles and aunts, a barracks, a seminary, a public beach, a stinking mess! Millions of petits-bourgeois like millions of pigs shoving one another as they graze near immaculate buildings between farmhouses now dilapidated as churches. 13 Um m ah is not an exclu sive co lle ctive of M uslim b elievers alone, ju st as the Holy Spirit is not the e xclu sive c o lle ctive of Christian believers alone, to take ju st one exam ple.

184 Th e R efu g e e C ris is ...

It's because you once existed that you do not now exist; because you once were conscious that you are now unconscious. And it's only because you're Catholic that you cannot conceive that your evil is all evil: the sin of every evil. Sink into this beautiful sea of yours and set the world free."14

The ongoing crisis of the refugees is only the beginning of the large migrations that are no doubt to come. There will be more large-scale migrations as the result of hunger, wars, devastated countries, "failed states", ecological catastrophes, natural disasters, and so on. This will not only urge, but also necessitate a redefinition of the trinity of StateSovereignty-Nation. New forms of decision-making will be required that will have to bypass the Nation-State configuration. This mass movement of people cannot be left to its own devices, nor to the spontaneous will of the people. It must be properly organized and carried out by specialized institutions. Grass roots democratic forms of organizations are simply not up to the task. It would be hugely catastrophic to subject the fate of millions to the utopian logic of "self-regulating" mechanisms in which everybody finds his/her own place. The contradictions inherent in late global capitalism are approaching deadlocks that are proving unsur­ passable, and we simply will not be able to insist on our "traditional forms of life". One of the main challenges of 21st century communism is to imagine a radically new form of social organization that is neither reminiscent of the previous century's state-controlled economy, nor of the contempo­ rary (regulated, controlled etc.) market economy. While this is a serious challenge of our era, we know too well that it cannot be done in and with the forms of local and organized communities, nor within the confines of the nation-state form. Herein arises the necessity to rethink Party-form politics, and to work toward a Party-State form. In the struggle against global capitalism, this is the only way to move beyond the bourgeois State-form—by taking over the State and state power and transforming it in such a way that

14 Pier Paolo Pasolini, "To My Country," Th e S e le c te d P o e try o f P ie r P a o lo P a so lin i (Chicago, London: Chicago U n iversity Press, 2014), 295.

Ham za

185

the Party remains not only a Party, but effectively becomes the State.13 Such is our task today. The Party-form is highly suited to the challenges that lie ahead, precisely because it is essentially tied to the problem of indifference. Universality through indifferentiation, unlike the identitarian paradigm or classical universalism, is the only one force that can withstand internationalization. This should be our starting point. However, unlike previous incarnations of such—which kept the logic of indifference and the logic of the state separate, with the former only keeping the latter in check, makingsure people could "speak" as anyone (indifferently] within the party—our task is to create a version of the Party-form that, by assuming the state's claim to power over our lives, can also guarantee people's right to "live" as anyone (anywhere, etc.]. Only when we can be anyone, can we also be anywhere. It is for this reason that only the strong organization—one that doesn't emphasize particularities as special or unique, but rather simply approaches them from the standpoint of cold logistics and other "technicalities"—can produce, if effected properly, an internationalist subjectivity that is politically useful today. To close (and indeed open], one way of thinking the new form of social organization, both beyond the (nation] State and the market, is through thinking the Universal Party and its structures. Therefore, the Universal Party-form, no matter how utopian it may sound, is the most reasonable and effective way to fight global capitalism. And it seems increasingly clear that in desperate situations such as we are currently facing, uto­ pias are the only viable solution.

15 This point req uires e xte n sive d e velo p m ent, w hich w ould go w ell beyond the scope of the present te x t. Som e of the concerns that need to be addressed here are the relation betw een the Party-State and the nations, its su pranational character, w h at rem ains of the cu rren t state-form , the fu n ctio n in g of the econom y and sim ilar.

186 Th e R e fu g e e C ris is ...

On the evening of July 14,2016, Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel, a 31-yearold Frenchman of Tunisian descent, drove a rented truck into a crowd celebrating the fall of the Bastille holiday in Nice, killing 84 people. He was known to police only in connection with common crimes like theft and assault. Intelligence services held no record of any radical Islamist links. Working as a delivery driver, he acted as if he were fully integrated into normal daily and professional life, when, all of a sudden, his life began to unravel, and a descent into petty crime and violence led to his self-destructive act of terrorism. Other cases have followed a similar pattern: just recall Hasna Aitboulahcen, the young woman who was thought to be one of the perpetrators of the Paris attacks: she too led a "modern", secular life and had only just converted to hard Islam a mere three months before the attacks. The most remarkable case in this series is Salah Abdeslam, the terrorsuspect who was arrested in March 2016 in Brussels. The first thing that comes to mind is that he is no Mohamed Atta, no figure of solemn and austere "inhuman" fanaticism, but fully "human" in the common sense of the word: displaying all ordinary weaknesses (he was afraid and was reported to cry often); a kind, smiling person, he liked music, dance and drinking, and demonstrated a general sense of joie de vivre. Born in Belgium, Abdeslam is a French citizen of Moroccan descent who was employed by STIB-MIVB (Brussels public transport authority) as a mechanic from September 2009 to 2011. It's not clear why his employ­ ment was terminated (due to his repeated absences, or criminal acts), but from December 2013, Abdeslam managed a bar in Molenbeek, a centre of drug dealing frequented by Maghrebian customers... in short, Abdeslam came from a fully integrated family, had a permanent job, and took part in ordinary daily life. So why did he become radicalized? His life-story effectively forms a kind of Hegelian triad: ordinary working citizen, descent into drugs and a criminal subculture, then final descent/

k

187

ascent into religious terror... Is the reason provided by another terror­ ist shot in Paris, Abdelhamid Abaaoud? In a video clip promoting ISIS, Abaaoud addresses his viewers with a simple question: are you satisfied with your life? Is this all you want, or do you strive for something more, a more profound engagement that would make your life not only meaning­ ful but also more dynamic, adventurous, even fun? (Incidentally, that's why establishing refugee communities in our big cities is not a solution. Terrorists as a rule come from such places, they represent the second generation rebellion of children against their well-integrated parents, so their problem is not a lack of integration—they react to integration.) Ali Sonboly, the 18-year-old German-Iranian, a "bullied teen loner ob­ sessed with mass killings"1who shot and killed nine people at a shop­ ping center in the suburbs of Munich, became engaged in a short con­ versation (or, rather, a shouting match) just before he embarked on his shooting spree. Here is a condensed version of the exchange: Man on the balcony: "You fucking asshole you." Ali: "Because of you I was bul­ lied for seven years ..." Man: "You asshole you. You're an asshole." Ali: "... And now I have to buy a gun to shoot you." Unknown speaker: "Shit/ fucking Turks!" Man: "Shit/fucking foreigners!" Ali: "I am German. ... Yeah what, I was born here." Man: "Yeah and what the fuck do you think you're doing?" Ali: "I grew up here in the Hartz 4 (unemployment benefits in Germany) area." The obvious meaning of "I am German... 1 was born here..." would be that, although formally a German citizen, he wasn't really accepted and recognized as one, but was treated as a marginal outcast living off unemployment benefits. But the question remains: what did he desire? Did he really want to become German? And what kind of German? Furthermore, Ali's reference to his social position, which made him what he is ("I grew up here in the Hartz 4 area.") sounds all too reflexive, recalling the mantra that bemoans the poorly maintained social programs and integration efforts that have deprived the younger generation of immigrants of any clear economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only way they have of articulating their dissatisfaction.

1 Bonnie M alkin, "'I Am G erm an: M unich Gunm an

in Furious Exchange w ith Bystander," The

G u a rd ia n , Ju ly 23, 2016, accessed Ju ly 28, 2016, https://w w w .theg u ardian .com /w orld /2016/

jul/23/i-am -germ an -m u nich-g un m an -took-part-in-shou tin g -m atch-d urin g-attack. This and all su bseq uen t quotes related to Ali are taken from h ttp s://w w w .th eg u ard ian .co m .

188 T e rro rists w ith a Hum an Face

Instead of indulging in revengeful fantasies, we should make the ef­ fort to understand the deeper causes of these violent outbursts. Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in poor and racially mixed suburbs, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, living in broken families and acute poverty, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The moment we take all of this into account, the reasons people are taking to the streets become clear... The problem with this scenario is that it only takes into account certain objective conditions for the riots, while entirely ignoring the subjective dimension: to riot is to make a subjective statement, to im­ plicitly declare how one relates to one's objective conditions, how one subjectivizes them. We live in an era of cynicism where we can easily imagine a protester who, when caught looting and burning a store and pressed for the reasons for his violence, would suddenly start to speak in the language of a social worker, sociologist and social psychologist, quoting diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he's doing, and still he does it nonetheless—like the famous "Gee, Officer Krupke" from Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story (lyrics by Stephen Sondheim), which includes the line "Juvenile delinquency is purely a social disease": “We never had the love That every child oughta get We ain't no delinquents We're misunderstood Deep down inside us there is good My daddy beats my mommy My mommy clobbers me My grandpa is a commie My grandma pushes tea My sister wears a moustache My brother wears a dress Goodness gracious, that's why I'm a mess This boy don't need a couch He needs a useful career Society's played him a terrible trick And sociologically he's sick They tell me get a job

Ž iže k

189

Like be a soda jerker Which means I'd be a slob It's not I'm antisocial I'm only anti-work."

They do not simply suffer from a social disease, they actually declare themselves to be one, ironically staging different accounts of their predicament (how a social worker, a psychologist, a judge would have described it}. In order to process this point, one should discern in it a kind of spectral analysis of the different modi of today's racism. First, there is the old-fashioned, unabashed rejection (despotic, barbarian, orthodox, corrupt, oriental...} of the Muslim Other on behalf of authentic (Western, civilized, democratic, Christian...} values. Then there is the "reflexive" politically correct racism: the multiculturalist perception of Muslims as the territory of ethnic horrors and intolerance, of primi­ tive, irrational warring passions, as opposed to the post-nation-state liberal-democratic process of conflict management through rational negotiation, compromise and mutual respect. Racism appears here as if elevated to the second power: it is attributed to the Other, while we occupy the convenient position of the neutral, benevolent observer, righteously dismayed at the horrors going on down there. Finally, there is the reversed racism: it celebrates the exotic authenticity of the Muslim Other who, in contrast to the inhibited, anemic Western Europeans, still exhibits a prodigious lust for life. This brings us to another key feature of this reflected racism: it turns around the distinction between cultural contempt of the Other and straight-out racism. Usually, racism is considered the stronger, more radical version of cultural contempt: we are dealing with racism when the simple contempt of the Other's culture is elevated to the notion that the other ethnic group is, for inherent (biological or cultural} reasons, inferior to ours. However, today's "reflected" racism is paradoxically able to articulate itself in terms of a direct respect for the other's culture: was not the official argument for apartheid in the old South Africa that the black cultures should be preserved in their uniqueness, and not dis­ solved in the Western melting pot? Even today's European racists like Le Pen emphasize that what they are asking for is only the same right to cultural identity that Africans and others ask for themselves. It is all too simple to dismiss such arguments with the claim that respect for

190 T e rro rists w ith a Hum an Face

the other is here simply "hypocritical": the mechanism at work is rather that of the disavowal characteristic of the fetishistic split: "I know very well that the Other's culture is worthy of the same respect as mine, but nonetheless... I despise them passionately." The more general point to be made here is the Hegelian lesson that global reflexivization/mediatization generates its own brutal imme­ diacy, whose essence was best captured by Étienne Balibar's notion of excessive, non-functional cruelty as a feature of contemporary life:2 a cruelty whose figures range from "fundamentalist" racist and/or reli­ gious slaughter to the "senseless" outbursts of violence perpetrated by adolescents and the homeless in our megalopolises, a violence one is tempted to call Id-Evil, a violence grounded in no utilitarian or ideologi­ cal reasons. All the talk of foreigners stealing work from us or the threat they represent to our Western values should not serve to deceive us: upon closer examination, it soon becomes clear that this talk provides a rather superficial secondary rationalization. The answer we ultimately get from a skinhead is that it makes him feel good to beat foreigners, that their presence disturbs him... What we encounter here is indeed Id-Evil, i.e., Evil structured and motivated by the most elementary imbal­ ance in the relationship between the Ego and jouissance, by the tension between pleasure and the foreign body of jouissance at the very heart of it. Id-Evil thus stages the most elementary "short-circuit" in the re­ lationship of the subject to the primordially missing object-cause of his desire: what "bothers" us in the "other" (Jew, Japanese, African, Turk) is the fact that he appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object—the Other either possesses the object-treasure, having snatched it away from us (which is why we don't have it), or he poses a threat to our possession of the object. What one should propose here is the He­ gelian idea of "infinite judgment", asserting the speculative identity of these "useless" and "excessive" outbursts of violent immediacy, which demonstrate nothing but a pure and naked ("non-sublimated") hatred of the Otherness, with the global reflexivization of society. Perhaps the ultimate example of this coincidence is the fate of psycho­ analytic interpretation. Today, the formations of the Unconscious (from dreams to hysterical symptoms) have definitely lost their innocence and 2 See Étienne Balibar, "La vio len ce: id éalité et cruauté," in La c ra in te d e s m a ss e s: P o litiq u e e t p h ilo s o p h ie a v a n t e t a p rè s M a rx (Paris: Éditions G alilée, 1997).

Ž iže k

191

are thoroughly reflexivized: the "free associations" of a typical educated analysand consist, for the most part, of attempts to provide a psycho­ analytic explanation of their disturbances, so that one is quite justified in saying that we have not only Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian... interpreta­ tions of the symptoms, but symptoms themselves which are Jungian, Kleinian, Lacanian..., i.e. whose reality involves implicit reference to some psychoanalytic theory or tradition. The unfortunate result of this global reflexivization of the interpretation process (everything becomes interpretation, the Unconscious interprets itself) is that the analyst's interpretation itself loses its performative "symbolic efficiency" and leaves the symptom intact in the immediacy of its idiotic jouissance. What happens in psychoanalytic treatment is strictly homologous to the response of the neo-Nazi skinhead who, when really pressed for the reasons behind his violence, suddenly starts to talk in the parlance of social workers, sociologists and social psychologists, quoting dimin­ ished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood—the unity of practice and its inherent ideological legitimization disintegrates into raw violence and the impotent, inefficient interpretation of such. This impotence of interpretation is also one of the necessary obverses of the universalized reflexivity hailed by the risk-society-theorists: it's as if our reflexive power can flourish only insofar as it draws its strength from and relies on some minimal "pre-reflexive" substantial support which, however, eludes its grasp so that its universalization comes at the price of its inefficiency, i.e., with the paradoxical reemergence of the brute Real of "irrational" violence, impermeable and insensitive to reflexive interpretation. So the more today's social theory proclaims the end of Nature and/or Tradition and the rise of the "risk society", the more the implicit reference to "nature" pervades our daily discourse: even when we do not speak of the "end of history", do we not convey the same message when we claim that we are entering a "post-ideological" pragmatic era, which is another way of claiming that we are entering a post-political order in which the only legitimate conflicts are ethnic/ cultural conflicts? Typically, in today's critical and political discourse, the term "worker" has disappeared from the vocabulary, substituted and/or obliterated by "immigrants/immigrant workers: Algerians in France, Turks in Ger-

192 T e rro rists w ith a Hum an Face

many, Mexicans in the USA." This way, the class problematic of workers' exploitation is transformed into the multiculturalist problematic of the "intolerance of the Otherness", etc., and the excessive investment of the multiculturalist liberals in protecting immigrants' ethnic rights clearly draws its energy from the "repressed" class dimension. Although Francis Fukuyama's thesis on the "end of history" quickly fell into disrepute, we still silently presume that the liberal-democratic capitalist global order is somehow the ultimate—and ultimately discovered—"natural" social regime, we still implicitly conceive conflicts in Third World countries as a subspecies of natural catastrophes, as outbursts of quasi-natural violent passions, or as conflicts based on fanatic identification with one's ethnic roots (and what is "the ethnic" here if not again a code word for nature?). And, again, the key point is that this all-pervasive renaturalization is strictly correlative to the global reflexivization of our daily lives. For that reason, when confronted with ethnic hatred and violence, one should reject entirely the standard multiculturalist idea that, against ethnic intolerance, one should learn to respect and live with the Otherness of the Other, to develop tolerance for different lifestyles, etc. The way to effectively fight ethnic hatred is not through its immediate counterpart—ethnic tolerance; on the contrary, what we need is EVEN MORE HATRED, but the proper political hatred, hatred directed at the common political enemy. And should we not include in the same series even Andreas Lubitz, the co-pilot of the Germanwings flight who crashed his plane into the French Alps and killed all 150 passengers, himself included? Since he did not have any ties to any political, ideological/religious group or or­ ganization, the so-called experts were trying to attribute to him certain psychological issues, depression and so on—but the fact remains that he was a perfectly hard-working modern non-ideological liberal man getting up at 5 o'clock every morning for a 5 km-jog, who enjoyed good relations with friends and lived a very disciplined life... So, perhaps instead of delving into the deep recesses of Islam another approach is needed, and we should bring nihilism proper into focus upon closer examination of our own societies: something must be wrong with us if young people who appeared integrated regress into terror­ ism—where does their hatred come from? Recall the French suburban riots of autumn 2005, when we saw thousands of cars set alight and a

Ž iže k

193

major outburst of public violence? In these protests, what is striking is the total absence of any positive utopian prospect among the protest­ ers: if May 68 was a revolt with a utopian vision, the 2005 revolts in France were outbursts with no pretense to vision. If the oft-repeated commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era has any sense, it is here. The fact that there was no program in the burning Paris suburbs is thus itself a fact to be interpreted. It tells us a great deal about our ideologico-political predicament. What kind of universe is it that we inhabit, which celebrates itself as a society of choice, but in which the only option available to the widely enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out? We encounter here the standard reversal of frustrated desire into ag­ gression described by psychoanalysis, and Islam simply provides the form on which to ground this (self-}destructive hatred. Frustration and envy become radicalized into a murderous and self-destructive hatred of the West, and people become involved in violent revenge. This violence can only culminate in acts of orgiastic (self-)destruction, without any serious vision of an alternate society. There is no emancipatory potential in fundamentalist violence, however anti-capitalist it may claim to be: it is a phenomenon strictly inherent to the global capitalist universe. In order to deal with these impasses, one should remember Jacques Lacan's claim that, even if what a jealous husband claims about his wife (that she sleeps around with other men} is all true, his jealousy is still pathological—why? The true question is not "Is his jealousy well-grounded?", but "Why does he need jealousy to maintain his selfidentity?" Along these same lines, one could say that, even if most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (which of course they are not}—that they exploit Germans, seduce German girls etc.—their antiSemitism would still be (and was} pathological, since it represses the true reason the Nazis needed anti-Semitism in order to sustain their ideological position. And is it not exactly the same with the growing fear of refugees and immigrants? To extrapolate such to the extreme: even if most of our prejudices about them turned out to be true (they are really fundamen­ talist terrorists, they rape and steal...}, the paranoiac talk about the immigrant threat is still an ideological pathology—it says more about us, us Europeans, than about the immigrants. The true question is not

194 T e rro rists w ith a Hum an Face

"are immigrants a real threat to Europe?" but "what does this obses­ sion with the immigrant threat tell us about the weakness of Europe?" So there are two dimensions here that should be kept separate. One is the atmosphere of fear, of the incoming struggle against the Islamization of Europe, with its own obvious absurdities: refugees who flee terror are equated with the terrorists from whom they are fleeing; the obvious fact that among the refugees there are also terrorists, rapists, criminals, etc., while the great majority are simply desperate people looking for a better life (in the same way that, among the refugees from the GDR, there were also quiet STASI agents...), is given a paranoiac twist—immigrants appear (or pretend) to be desperate refugees, while in reality they are the spearheads of a new Islamic invasion of Europe; and, above all, as is usually the case, the cause of the problems that are immanent to today's global capitalism is projected onto an external intruder. A suspicious gaze always finds what it is looking for—"proofs" are everywhere, even if most of them are soon proven to be fakes. One should particularly emphasize this point today when, all around Europe, the fear of a refugee invasion is reaching truly paranoiac proportions: people who haven't seen a single actual refugee react aggressively to the very prospect of establishing a refugee center somewhere in their vicinity; stories of incidents capture our imagination, spread like wild­ fire and persist even after they are clearly proven false. This is why the worst reaction to the racist anti-immigrant paranoia is to ignore any possible incidents and problems related to immigrants, arguing that every critical mention of immigrants only feeds the racist enemies. Against this reasoning, one should point out that it is just such a silence that really helps our racist enemies by directly fuelling the distrust of ordinary people ("You see, they are not telling us the truth!"), boosting the credibility of racist rumours and lies. The other dimension is the tragi-comic spectacle of the endless selfculpabilization of Europe, which allegedly betrayed its humanity; of a murderous Europe leaving thousands of drowned bodies at its bor­ ders—a self-serving exercise with no emancipatory potential what­ soever. Furthermore, the accent on humanitarian catastrophe deftly de-politicizes the situation. No wonder Angela Merkel recently asked: "Do you seriously believe that all the euro states that last year fought all the way to keep Greece in the Eurozone—and we were the strictest—

Ž iže k

195

can one year later allow Greece to plunge, in a way, into chaos?" This statement clearly lays bare the basic lie other humanitarian position: it is part of a stick-and-carrot approach, with humanitarian aid as an incentive for politico-economic surrender. We should apply to the humanitarians who bemoan "the end of Europe" the great Hegelian lesson: when someone is painting a picture of Europe's overall and utmost moral degeneration, the question to be raised is in what way is such a stance complicit in what it criticizes. No wonder that, with the exception of humanitarian appeals to compassion and solidar­ ity, the effects of such compassionate self-flagellation are null. A couple of years ago, Danish Leftists ironically talked about the "white woman's burden"—their duty to have sex with immigrant men who suffer sexual deprivation. We should not be surprised to see some "radicals" proposing the same solution for Germany and all of Western Europe. When leftist liberals resort to endless variations on the motif of how the rise of terrorism is the result of Western colonial and military in­ terventions in the Middle East, such that we are ultimately responsible, their analysis, although purporting to be respectful of others, stands out as a blatant case of patronizing racism that reduces the Other to a passive victim and deprives it of any agenda. What such a view fails to take into account is how Arabs are in no way simply passive victims of European and American neocolonial machinations. Their different courses of action are not just reactions, they are different forms of ac­ tive engagement in their predicament: an expansive and aggressive push towards Islamization (financing mosques in foreign countries, etc.), open warfare against the West, etc.—all these are ways of actively engaging in a situation with a well-defined goal. What the European emancipatory legacy should be defended from is thus primarily Europeans themselves, namely the anti-immigrant popu­ lists who see Europe threatened by the over-tolerant multicultural Left. It is easy to say that Muslim immigrants who violate our rules should be thrown out and sent back where they come from. But what about those among us who violate our (own) emancipatory legacy? Where should they be thrown? One should be more attentive to the hidden proximity between them and fundamentalist Islamists, especially in view of the sudden discovery of women's and gay rights by anti-immigrant popu­ lists. The obscenity of the situation is breathtaking: the very people

196 T e rro rists w ith a H um an Face

who, in our countries, continuously mock and attack abortion rights and gay marriage are now reborn as defenders of Western freedoms. This is why there is no place for a negotiated compromise here, no point at which the two sides might agree ("OK, anti-immigrant paranoiacs exaggerate, but there are some fundamentalists among the refugees..."): even the smallest of truths in the anti-immigrant racist's claims do not serve as valid arguments for his paranoia; and, on the other side, the humanitarian self-culpabilization is thoroughly narcissistic, closed to the immigrant Neighbour. Everything "bad" about the other is dismissed either as our (Western racist) projection onto the other or as the result of our (Western imperialist) mistreatment (colonial violence) of the other; what lies beyond this closed circle of ourselves and our projec­ tions (or, rather, the projections of our "repressed" evil side onto the other), what, within this perspective, we encounter as the "authentic" other when we truly open ourselves up to them, the good innocent other, is, again, our ideological fantasy. Is this reversal of the alleged utmost objectivity ("what the immigrant really is") into utmost subjectivity not an exemplary case of what Hegel discerned as the secret of the Kantian Ding-an-sich? The Thing in itself, the way it is independently of how we relate to it, is a pure Gedankending, a creature of our mind. So who or what is the real other? In today's market, we find a whole series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... One should definitely add to this series smell: perhaps the key difference between lower, popular-class and middle-class concerns is the way they relate to smell. For the middle class, lower classes smell, their members do not wash regularly—or, to quote the proverbial answer of a middle-class Parisian to why he prefers to ride the first class cars in the metro: "I wouldn't mind riding with the workers in second class—it's only that they smell!" This brings us to one of the possible definitions of what a Neighbour means today: a Neighbour is the one who by definition smells. This is why today deodorants and soaps are crucial—they make neighbours at least minimally tolerable: 1am ready to love my neighbours... provided they don't smell too bad. According to a recent report, scientists in a laboratory in Venezuela added a further element to this series: through a process of genetic manipulation they succeeded in growing beans which, upon consumption, do not induce the foul-smelling and socially

Ž iže k

197

embarrassing flatulence! So, after decaf coffee, fat-free cakes, diet cola and alcohol-free beer, we now get wind-free beans... So the task is to talk openly about all unpleasant issues without com­ promising them with racism, i.e., to reject, as a concession to the neoFascist Right, the humanitarian idealization of refugees that dismisses every attempt to openly confront the difficult issues surrounding the cohabitation of different ways of life. What disappears in the process is the true encounter with a real Neighbour in his/her specific way of life. Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, noted that when he was young, foreign people's manners and beliefs appeared to him ridiculous and eccentric; but then he asked himself if our own manners might also appear (to them) ridiculous and eccentric. The result of this reversal is not a generalized cultural relativism, but something much more radical and interesting: we should learn to experience ourselves as eccentric, to see our customs in all their weirdness and arbitrariness. In his Ever­ lasting Man, G.K. Chesterton imagines the monster that man might have seemed to the merely natural animals around him: “The simplest truth about man is that he is a very strange being; almost in the sense of being a stranger on the earth. In all sobriety, he has much more of the external appearance of one bringing alien habits from an­ other land than of a mere growth of this one. He has an unfair advantage and an unfair disadvantage. He cannot sleep in his own skin; he cannot trust his own instincts. He is at once a creator moving miraculous hands and fingers and a kind of cripple. He is wrapped in artificial bandages called clothes; he is propped on artificial crutches called furniture. His mind has the same doubtful liberties and the same wild limitations. Alone among the animals, he is shaken with the beautiful madness called laughter; as if he had caught sight of some secret in the very shape of the universe hidden from the universe itself. Alone among the animals he feels the need to avert his thought from the root realities of his own bodily being; of hiding them as in the presence of some higher possibil­ ity that creates the mystery of shame. Whether we praise these things as natural to man or abuse them as artificial in nature, they remain in the same sense unique."3

3 Quoted from G .K . C h esterto n, Th e E v e rla stin g M a n , h ttp ://w w w .cse.d m u.ac.uk/~ m w ard / g kc/b o o ks/e ve rlastin g _m an .p d f.

198 T e rro rists w ith a H um an Face

Is a “way of life" not precisely the way of being a stranger on the earth? A specific “way of life" is not merely comprised of a set of abstract (Christian, Muslim...) “values", it is something embodied in a dense network of everyday practices: how we eat and drink, sing, make love, relate to authorities... Islam (as any other substantial religion) is a name for an entire way of life: in its Middle East version, it relies on a large family led by the strong authority of parents and brothers (which is not specifically Muslim but more Mediterranean), and when young members, especially girls, from such families get involved with their peers from more individualist Western families, this almost inevitably gives rise to tensions. We “are" our way of life, it is our second nature, which is why direct “education" is not able to change it. Something much more radical is needed, a kind of Brechtian “extraneation", a deep existential experience by means of which it all of a sudden strikes us how stupidly meaningless and arbitrary our customs and rituals are. There is nothing natural in the way we embrace and kiss, in the way we wash ourselves, in the way we behave while eating... The point is thus not to recognize ourselves in strangers, not to gloat in the comforting falsity that “they are like us", but to recognize a stranger in ourselves—therein resides the innermost dimension of European modernity. Communitarianism is not enough: a recognition that we are all, each in our own way, strange lunatics provides the only hope for a tolerable co-existence of different ways of life. Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein's sci-fi classic from 1961,4 tells the story of a human who comes to Earth in early adulthood after being born on Mars and raised there by Martians. Maybe this is our situation—the situation of us all. Does this mean that we should resign ourselves to a co-existence of iso­ lated groups of lunatics, leaving it to the common public law to maintain some kind of minimal order by way of imposing rules of interaction? Of course not, but the paradox is that we should go through this zero-point of “de-naturalization" if we want to engage in the long and difficult process of universal solidarity, of constructing a Cause that is strong enough to traverse a range of different communities. If we are to hope 4 Robert H einlein, S tra n g e r In a S tra n g e L a n d (Lo nd on: Ace, 1987).

Ž iže k

199

for a kind of universal solidarity, we have to become universal in our­ selves, relate to ourselves as universal by way of acquiring a distance towards our life-world. Hard and painful work is needed to achieve this, not just sentimental ruminations about migrants as a new form of "nomadic proletariat". So, to raise Lenin's old question, what is to be done? To begin with, what about a couple of totally feasible pragmatic measures? Short-term: the EU should establish receiving centres in the nearest possible safe loca­ tions (northern Syria, Turkey, the Greek islands...), and then organize the direct transport of accepted refugees to their European destination (via ferries and air bridges), thereby putting out of business the smugglers who turn billions of dollars in illicit trade, and ending the humiliating misery of thousands wandering Europe on foot. Mid-term: apply all means, public and covert, from Wikileaks-style information warfare to economic blackmail (of Saudi Arabia, for example), to stop the war or at least expand conflict-free zones. The only long-term solution is, of course, Communism, but that is another story entirely. To conclude, let us reach back to one of our great classics. In Canto VI of Inferno (lines 77-89), Dante asks the glutton Ciacco (who, it is interesting to note, is not ready to assume his name: instead of saying "I am Ciacco" he says "you citizens called me Ciacco") about the fate of the men of good reason, men who dedicated their lives to the good of the city: "And I continued thus: 'Still would I learn/ More from thee, further parley still entreat. Of Farinata and Tegghiaio say, They who so well deserved; of Giacopo, Arrigo, Mosca, and the rest, who bent Their minds on working good. Oh! tell me where They bide, and to their knowledge let me come. For I am prest with keen desire to hear If Heaven's sweet cup, or poisonous drug of Hell, Be to their lip assign'd.' He answer'd straight: 'These are yet blacker spirits. Various crimes Have sunk them deeper in the dark abyss. If thou so far descendest, thou mayst see them.'"

200 T e rro rists w ith a H um an Face

Imagine we were to visit Hell now, and find there in the Third Circle today's Ciacco, a gluttonous Western European who ignores the plight of migrants, focused as he is on continuing with his consumption of good things undisturbed. If we were to ask him "But tell me, where are all those humanitarians who bent their minds on working good?", would he not snap back: "You will have to descend far deeper, their souls are much blacker than mine!" Why? Is this not too cruel a reaction? The point is that, self-critical as it may appear to be, the humanitarian reac­ tion almost imperceptibly transforms a politico-economic problem into a moral one, of a "refugee crisis" and of "helping the victims". Instead of attacking the silent lower-class majority as racist and ignorant of the immigrants' plight, or, at best, as stupid victims of racist big media propaganda, it should address their actual concerns that are expressed in a racist way.

Ž iže k

201

m

NSK State Pavilion, 57thVenice Bienale 2017 Palazzo Ca'Tron IUAV University of Venice 11 May- 15 July 2017 nsk-state-pavilion.org Commissar: IRWIN (Dušan Mandič, Miran Mohar, Andrej Savski, Roman Uranjekand Borut Vogelnik) Curators: Zdenka Badovinac, Charles Esche Project Director: Mara Ambrožič Installation: Ahmet Ogut Public Lecture: The Courage of Hopelessness by Slavoj Žižek Thursday, 11 May 2017 Aula Magna, Tolentini IUAV University of Venice Scientific consultant: Tomaž Mastnak Book Editor: Jela Krečič

Delegates: Mohamed Abdol Monem, Bisan Abu-Eisheh, Ahmed Adelian, Ashok Adiceam, Azra Akšamija, Lauren Alexander (Foundland Collective), Bilal Alkatout, Ammar Alkhatib, Jawad Al Malhi, Samer Arquawi, Kazem Ashourzadeh , Wali Askarzay, Mercedes Azpilicueta, Dorde Balmazovic, Javier Barrios, Dorian Batycka, Seren Ba§ogul, Lutz Becker, Laura Beckner, Maria Biotti, Bianca Bondi, Candice Breitz, Oleksandr Burlaka, Nawal Chagar, Oliver Chanarin, Qendrese Deda, Burak Dkilita$, Claudio Donadel, Abdoul-Ganiou Dermani, Safia Dickersbach, Esra Dogan, Aljoša Dujmič, Goran Dordevič, Roza El-Hassan, Ghalia Elsrakbi (Foundland Collective), Mounir Fatmi, Amir Fattal, Michael Fehr, Five women from Afganistan as collective, Becket Flannery, Jeanno Gaussi, Kendell Geers, Jingxin Geng, Laura Serejo Genes, Sarah Haddou, Anawana Haloba, Hamid, Hasan Hasan, Sharafuddin Hashami, Hands Off Our Revolution, Velija Hasanbegovic, Winnie Herbstein, Nadia Kaabi-Linke, Agata Kochaniewicz, Komunal, Don Lawrence, Sara Lunaček, Dr Andrew Lane, Delaine Le Bas, Stine Marie Jacobsen, Laetitia Jeurissen,

Youssef Limoud, Mahmoud Maktabi, Asja Mandič, Siavash Maraghechi, Mpole Samuel Masemola, Sithabile Mlotshwa, Sohrab Mohebbi, Wagma Momand, Victor Mutelekesha, Raafat Majzoub, Wafa Mari, Mohammed Mzaill, Ramen Naqshbandi, Izaat Noori, Christian Nyampeta, Olu Oguibe, Shafiq Omar, Reyhane Omidghaemi, Noorulah Oriakhil, Ahmet Ogut, Danny Pagarani, Mario Pissara, Ognjen Radivojevic, Payman Quasimian, Ugochukwu-Smooth Nzewi, Lotte Schreiber, Megan Schwartz, Sejernader, Lerato Shadi, Shahin, Adnan Softie, Malina Suliman, Lama Takruri, Christina Thomopoulos, Urša Toman, Leontios Toumpouris, Two women from Afganistan, Gerrie van Noord, Heidi Voet, Zahra, Vadim Zakharov, Salah Zater The Pavilion is commissioned and produced by IRWIN, co-produced by the Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana, and co-organised by Temple Productions and Društvo NSK Informativni Center. NSK Newspaper and Web Editor: Mara Ambrožič Managing Editors: Cedric Faux, Lucia Coco State Art Field Research: Tevž Logar Graphic Identity: Archive Appendix and New Collectivism General Coordination: Sanja Kuveljič Bandič Artistic assistants: Chiara Gaspardo, Andrej Škufca Web Developer: Jurij Rejec Project partners: Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin; Ministry of Culture of the Republic of Slovenia; Wiener Festwochen GesmbH, Vienna; Municipality of Ljubljana - Cultural Department; IUAV University of Venice; e-flux, New York; James Gallery/The Center for the Humanities, NYU, New York; Co.Ge.S. Cooperative for Immigration Policies, Mestre; NSK State Reserve, New York. The project was also made possible by the generous support of KD Group d.d.; RPS d.o.o., Ljubljana; VO-KA, Ljubljana; Stratkom d.o.o., Ljubljana; UBT University, Prishtina; Pavilion of the Republic of Kiribati As a parallel project, the NSK State-in-Time will be opening the NSK State Venice Pavilion in Vienna - Thinking Europe ARCC.art Open Space, 16 May - 11 June 2017 Public lecture: Slavoj Žižek, 20 May 2017

www.festwochen.at Curators: Birgit Lurz, Wolfgang Schlag Based on the project NSK State Pavilion Venice 2017 commissioned by IRWIN, curated by Charles Esche and Zdenka Badovinac Installation: Ramesch Daha, Anna Jermolaewa Managerial consultancy: Mara Ambrožič Producer Vienna: Wiener Festwochen Producer: IRWIN, Ljubljana Co-producer: MGML/The Museum and Galleries of Ljubljana Project partners Vienna: AK Wien, ARCC.art, Verein Einander With support of: AK Wien, Bundeskanzleramt Kunst und Kultur, Slowenisches Kulturinformationszentrum in Österreich SKICA All press enquiries: Rees & Company: Chloe Nahum | [email protected] | +44 (0)20 3137 8776 +44 (0)7742 239 178 w w w .http://reesandco.com | Twitter: @ReesandCoPR Instagram: @ReesandCoPR

Pl

---_U_

di Venezia

_

f lll'V

The James

f X V Co.Ge.S. don Lorenzo Milani

I I v i A

G a lle r y

^

City of Ljubljana

Sodeta Cooperative Sociale

V

www.rps.si

V D B 0 V 0 0 KANALI ZACI J A

i5

kd

Group

S tra K o m

OCA

The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left There is a commonly accepted notion that we live in a time of serious crisis that moves between the two extremes of fundamentalist terrorism and right wing populism. The latter draws its power from the supposed threat of immigrants: it proposes to resolve the immigrant crisis by placing the blame on the principal victims themselves, that is to say, on some form of otherness (immigrants, Islam, the LGBT community and similar). The predominant leftist position, which advocates multicultural tolerance and understanding, is no match for such aggressive populism. The premise of The Final Countdown: Europe, Refugees and the Left is that our situation is indeed extremely dangerous, that near unimaginable catastrophes lurk just beyond the horizon, but that these new dangers also open up new spaces for radical emancipatory politics. Eleven distinguished thinkers take these perils as a challenge to provide sharp, specific analysis of our social and political predicament, combining a merciless critique of the prevailing leftist humanitarian approach with elements of a new vision for the Left. The Final Countdown is therefore also a countdown to a new beginning; it is a practice of theory that is not here to lament but to re-think and reframe the very basic coordinates of how we understand and deal with today's major political issues.

ISBN 978-961-90851-2-7

Published by IRWIN and Wiener Festwochen

N S K STATE PAVILION 57™ VENICE BIENNALE