139 Reviews
DOI: 10.1515/abcsj-2016-0022
Žižek, Slavoj. Against the Double Blackmail: Refugees, Terror and
Other Troubles with the Neighbors (United Kingdom: Allen Lane,
2016. 9.99 GBP 117 pp. ISBN 978-0-241-27884-0)
“Large migrations are our future”
“So the question is: What does a creepy neighbor want?”
(Slavoj Žižek)
Slavoj Žižek is one of the world’s best known philosophers and public
intellectuals. He is exceptionally prolific, not always because he is
popularly accessible, but because he has the ability to raise profound
issues yet blend the questions these issues provoke into a charming mix of
“high” and “low” culture, deadly seriousness with a “wink, wink” humor
– even hilarity. Friedrich Nietzsche’s axiom, “It’s not true unless it makes
you laugh at least once,” often provides him with his reigning method of
political philosophy. The subject of Slavoj Žižek’s maiden lecture in
Romania at the University of Bucharest’s Department of History in May,
1995, “On Totalitarian Laughter,” says it all.
Against the Double Blackmail is Žižek’s venture into recent
developments currently tearing the European Union apart – immigration,
refugees, terrorism, a beleaguered liberal-Left consensus and the rise of
anti-immigrant populist nationalists. It is a small book but no less
insightful for that. Žižek confronts these critical contemporary issues with
what he calls, after Heidegger, “interpretive confrontation” – which, no
less, raises the question, “What is Europe”? He does this with his
trademark flair: namely, citing various contemporary and historical
examples, literary figures (Edgar Allan Poe, Oscar Wilde, Mary Shelley),
films (by John Ford, Preston Sturges, Claude Lanzmann, Spike Lee,
Quentin Tarantino), philosophers (Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche,
Marx, Martin Heidegger, Walter Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, and his German
contemporary, Peter Sloterdijk, to mention a few) and demonstrating his
knowledge of a variety of religious traditions. This heady assemblage of
authoritative personnel and crisp writing – almost conversational in tone –
is often spiced with the psychoanalytic insights of Jacques Lacan.
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A couple of his arguments stand out: 1) Large migrations are our
future – whose cause is global capitalism and its geo-political
machinations; and 2) the usual Left-liberal sentimentality is not the
solution. (The “double blackmail” Žižek refers to in the title of this book
and that which he vehemently urges we reject, is that presented by
xenophobic, anti-immigrant right-wing populists, and the politically
correct liberal Left. Interestingly, much of his animus is directed towards
the latter, so that will be a focus here.)
Large migrations are our future
Here Žižek agrees with his young friend, fellow Slovenian and frontline
reporter from every major conflict zone in the last 15 years in Central
Asia, Southwest Asia, the Middle East, the Balkans and Africa, Bostjan
Videmsek.
i
Here is Žižek:
And there will be more migrations, not just because of armed conflicts, but
because of new “rogue states”, economic crises, natural disasters, climate
change…. The main lesson to be learned, therefore, is that humankind
should get ready to live in a more ‘plastic’ and nomadic way: local or
global changes in environment may result in the need for unheard-of large-
scale social transformations and population movements. We are all more
or less rooted in a particular way of life, protected by rights, but some
historical contingency may all of a sudden throw us into a situation in
which we are compelled to reinvent the basic coordinates of our way of
life…. One thing is clear: in cases of such turmoil, national sovereignty
will have to be radically redefined and new levels of global cooperation
invented. (101-102)
Žižek’s argues that a solution lies in an attempt to “regulate the commons”
and he insists that “one has to locate in historical reality the antagonisms
that make this Idea a practical urgency.” So he asks, “[D]o we endorse the
predominant acceptance of capitalism as a fact of (human) nature, or does
today’s global capitalism contain enough strong antagonisms to prevent
its indefinite reproduction?” (103). Žižek elaborates on four antagonisms
(i.e. “commons” to be regulated) in the “world interior of capital” (Peter
Sloterdijk’s phrase):
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1) the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; 2) the more and more
palpable failure of private property to integrate into its functioning … so-
called ‘cognitive capital’, primarily language – our means of
communication and education – (i.e. a broader definition of intellectual
property) but also the shared infrastructure of public transport, electricity,
mail etc.; 3) the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific
developments (especially biogenetics); and last 4) but not least… the
crucial one … addressing new forms of apartheid, new walls and slums –
the antagonism of the Included and the Excluded. (106-107)
Žižek is an excellent guide through these “antagonisms,” what an
earlier Marxist would have called “contradictions” – a term with a now
rejected air of determinism about it. But ultimately, there are no obvious
“agents of political change” who emerge who can be relied upon in
Žižek’s account. His resuscitated notion of Communism (since the
structure and development of world capitalism doesn’t dig its own grave,
and pure “voluntarism” is unlikely to deliver these –public – goods) ends
up malgre lui with a version of the pessimistic conclusion to Herbert
Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) when he quotes Walter
Benjamin, “It is only for the sake of those without hope that hope is given
to us.” It is unsatisfying (though not necessarily untrue) to have him
conclude in his chapter “What Is To Be Done?” quoting Gandhi’s motto,
“Be yourself the change you want to see in the world,” the Hopi saying,
“We are the ones we have been waiting for,” the philosopher Giorgio
Agamben’s “Thought is the courage of the hopeless,” and finally, “So
let’s bring class struggle back – and the only way to do it is to insist on the
global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed” (106-107, 110).
But wait. If it were only this withered light Žižek spreads on the
most significant challenges facing Europe in a generation, maybe even
going back to the end of World War II, most of us would not be reading
him. Žižek is not so easily dismissed.
“So the question is: What does a creepy neighbor want?”
When Žižek gets away from the utopia of global solidarity stuff
(emoticon), this little book is really quite original, provocative and, one is
tempted to say, realistic. Of course he rejects the epidemic of authoritarian
personalities raging throughout Central and Eastern Europe right now,
reactionaries who constitute a right-wing, xenophobic, populist response
American, British and Canadian Studies / 142
to immigration and terrorism. His answer may appear somewhat
paradoxical: we must inoculate ourselves against the “pathetic solidarity
with the refugees,” avoid the Beautiful Souls of the predictable Left
liberals, and have a serious conversation, a philosophical look at the (new)
“neighbors” (63). His chapters “Limits of the Neighborhood” and
“Hateful Thousands in Cologne” may come as a shock to many readers.
Žižek’s arguments are deliberately provocative, but as philosopher
Theodor Adorno once remarked, “In psychoanalysis only the
exaggerations are true.” Žižek writes:
…one should take a closer philosophical look at the notion of the
Neighbor. As Adam Kotsko has shown in his book Creepiness, ‘creepy’ is
today’s name for the uncanny core of a neighbor: every neighbor is
ultimately creepy. What makes a neighbor creepy are not his weird acts
but the impenetrability of the desire that sustains these acts… So the
question is: What does this creepy neighbor want?… An experience, an
encounter, gets creepy when we all of a sudden suspect he is doing
something for a motive other than the obvious one. (75)
In this vein, Žižek rejects the liberal Left humanist bromide, “We are all
human,” the “underneath our cultural, religious and class differences we
are all the same” argument for the idea of “the inhuman Neighbor” (76-
77). This is a version of the famous Lacanian psychoanalytic rejection of
(the usual interpretation of) the Christian injunction, “Love thy neighbor
as thy self,” because, frankly, as Jacques Lacan’s argument goes, “you
will never really know your neighbor, your neighbor doesn’t even know
himself, and you don’t even know yourself – you are a creepy neighbor
too!” Žižek argues because one can never really have full access to the
other, one should recognize the important role that alienation plays in
maintaining the day-to-day fabric of a society. Racisms occur when one
presumes full access to the other’s (excessive) desires (sex, wealth, sloth,
strange music, etc.) which then gives rise to jealousy and hatred. “In
jealousy,” Žižek writes, “the subject creates or imagines a paradise (a
utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded” (75). So Žižek
agrees with many psychoanalytically informed political thinkers, going
back at least to Harold Lasswell’s World Politics and Personal Insecurity
(1935) and others, notably Sloterdijk. His conclusion:
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Perhaps the lesson to be learned is that, sometimes, a dose of alienation is
indispensable for the peaceful coexistence of ways of life. Sometimes
alienation is not a problem but a solution. Sometimes, alienation is like
alcohol for Homer Simpson: “the cause of, and the solution to, all life’s
problems!” (74-75)
Besides, what if getting to know your neighbor meant that you find out
that you don’t like him?! Then, feeling your empathy has been cheated,
you turn against your new (Muslim) neighbor adding fuel to the already
burning resentments of the anti-immigrant right-wing populists? One must
cut the link between the immigrants/ migrants/ refugees and humanitarian
empathy, insists Žižek (wink, wink, se non è vero, è ben trovato). The
following paragraph is “vintage Žižek”:
Universality is a universality of “strangers,” of individuals reduced to the
abyss of impenetrability in relation not only to others but also to
themselves. When dealing with foreigners, we should always bear in mind
Hegel’s concise formula: the secrets of the ancient Egyptians were secret
also for the Egyptians themselves. That’s why the privileged way to reach
a Neighbor is not that of empathy, of trying to understand them, but a
disrespectful laughter which makes fun both of them and of us in our
mutual lack of (self-)understanding (inclusive of “racist” jokes). (79)
Žižek continues this argument as he considers at some length Alenka
Zupancic’s analysis of Preston Sturges’ film Gulliver’s Travels (1941),
which is read against the films of American director Frank Capra and his
enduring motif of the goodness of the poor neighbor, or the “average Joe.”
This is a form of condescension, according to Žižek, because there is
nothing redemptive about being a victim, nothing necessarily virtuous or
lovable about being an excluded other. Just like there is nothing
redeeming about the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, when
Shelley allows the monster to speak for himself. He remains a monster (17).
The reason refugees and our neighbors deserve our help is not
because we get to know them, decide “they are just like us,” “we feel their
pain,” “and so on” (a favorite Žižek trope): “We should, rather, help them
because it is our ethical duty to do so, because we cannot do otherwise if
we want to remain decent people…. displays of generosity make us feel
good but they should also make us suspicious: are we doing this to forget
what is required?” (82).