Eastern European Liberalism and Its Discontents

Author(s): Slavoj Zizek

Source: New German Critique, No. 57 (Autumn, 1992), pp. 25-49
Published by: New German Critique
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EasternEuropeanLiberalismand its Discontents

Slavoj Zizek

In the good old deconstructionist manner, I would like to begin by

calling into question the hidden implications of the request made of
me to give a report on recent ethnic conflicts in the exotic place I came
from, Slovenia.' In an article for New LeftReview,2 I endeavored to de-
scribe why, a year or two ago, western Europe was so fascinated by
events in the east: the true object of fascination was the supposed gaze
of the east, fascinated by western democracy, still naively believing in
it, a kind of "subject supposed to believe" - in the east, the west
found a sucker still having faith in its values. The leftist demand to give
a report on what is "really going on" in the east functions as a kind of
mirror-reversalof this demand: we are expected to confirm suspicions,
to say that people are alreadydisappointed in "bourgeois" democracy,
that they slowly perceive not only what they have gained but also what
they have lost (social security, etc.). In my article, I consciously walked
into this trap and gave the left what it wanted: a vengeful vision of how
now things are even worse, how the effective result of democratic en-
thusiasm is nationalist corporatism - in short, it serves us right for be-
traying socialism! Yet in accordance with the great guiding principle of
socialism - self-criticismas the impetus of progress - this criticism of
the demand, as I perceive it, is actually a criticism of myself as a mem-
ber of the Slovenian liberal-democratic party and of its candidate in

1. This text is a revised version of the paper presented on Saturday,25 April 1992,
at the conference on "The Re-emergence of Nationalism and Xenophobia in Germa-
ny and Central Europe," Deutsches Haus, Columbia University.
2. Slavoj Zizek, "Eastern Europe's Republics of Gilead," New Left Review 183
(Sept.-Oct. 1990); repr. in DimensionsofRadicalDemocracy, ed. Chantal Mouffe (London:
Verso, 1992).

25
26 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

the elections. Let me take as my starting point the liberal-democratic

vision according to which, after the breakdown of "real socialism," we
would have a flourishing market economy and plural democracy in
eastern Europe, if it were not for two stains that mar the picture:on the
one hand, the remainders of the old totalitarianforces that, although
they lost the battle, continue with their underground machinations; on
the other hand, national corporatism, obsession with national unity
and with an imagined "threat to the nation."
If, in the recent disintegration of the "real socialism" in Slovenia,
there were a political agent whose rule fully deserves the designation
"tragic," this was the Slovenian communists who lived up to their
promise to make possible the peaceful, nonviolent transition into plu-
ralist democracy. From the very beginning they were caught in the
Freudian paradox of the superego: the more they gave way to the de-
mands of the (then) opposition and accepted democratic rules of the
game, the more violent were the opposition's accusations of their "to-
talitarianism,"the more they were suspected of accepting democracy
"in word" only, while actually engaged in demonic plots against it.
The paradox of this accusation emerged in its purest form when, final-
ly, after a long period of accusations that their democratic commit-
ments were not to be taken seriously, it became clear that they "meant
it": far from being perplexed, the opposition simply changed the
charge and accused the communists of "unprincipled behavior" -
how can you trust someone who shamelessly betrayed his old revolu-
tionary past and accepted democratic reform?
The demand of the opposition that can be detected through this para-
dox is an ironic repetitionof the Stalinistdemand at work in the political
monster trials, where the accused were forced to admit their guilt and
caim supreme punishment for themselves: for the anticommunist op-
position, the only good communist would be the one who first organ-
ized free multipartyelections and then voluntarilyassumed the role of
the scapegoatin them, a representativeof totalitarianhorrorswho has to
be beaten. In short, communists were expected to assume the impossi-
ble position of a pure metalanguageand to say, "We confess, we are to-
talitarian,we deserve to lose the election!" - like the victims of the
Stalinisttrials.The shift in the public perception of Sloveniandemocratic
communists was truly enigmatic:up to the "point of no return"on the
way to democracy, the public trembled for them, counting on them to
endure the pressure of the truly antidemocratic forces (the Yugoslav
 SlavojZizek 27

army, Serbian populism, old hard-liners) and to organize free elec-

tions; yet once it became clear that free elections would take place, they
suddenly became the Enemy.
The logic of this shift from the "open" condition before elections to
its closure afterwardis illuminated byJameson's concept of the "van-
ishing mediator."3A system reaches its equilibrium, that is, establishes
itself as a synchronous totality, when - in Hegelese - it "posits" its
external presuppositions as its inherent moments and thus obliterates
the traces of its traumatic origins. What we have here is the tension be-
tween the open situation when a new social pact is generated and its
subsequent closure - in Kierkegaard'sterms, the tension between
possibility and necessity: the circle is closed when the new social pact
establishes itself in its necessity and renders invisible its "possibility,"
the open, undecided process that engendered it.4 In between, when
the socialist regime was already in a state of disintegration, but before
the new regime stabilized itself, we witnessed a kind of opening; things
that were for a moment visible immediately became invisible. To put it
bluntly, those who triggered the process of democratization and
fought the greatest battles are not those who today enjoy its fruits, not
because of a simple usurpation and deception on the part of the pres-
ent winners, but because of a deeper structurallogic. Once the process
of democratization reached its peak, it buried its detonators.
Who effectively triggered this process? New social movements,
- after the victory of democracy, all these im-
punk, the New Left
pulses suddenly and enigmatically lost ground and more or less disap-
peared from the scene. Culture itself, the set of cultural preferences,
changed radically:from punk and Hollywood to national poems and
quasi-folkloric commercial music (in contrast to the usual overshad-
owing of authentic national roots by universal American-western cul-
ture). What we had was a true "primitive accumulation" of democracy,
a chaotic story of punkers, students with their sit-ins, committees for
human rights, and so on, which literallybecame invisible the moment
the new system established itself - and with it, its own myth of origin
was likewise extinguished. The same people who, a few years ago,
abused the new social movements from the position of party hardliners

3. FredricJameson, "The Vanishing Mediator; or, Max Weber as Storyteller,"The

of Theory,vol 2. (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1988).
Ideologies
4. As to this problematic, see ch. 5, Slavoj Zizek, ForTheyKnowNot WhatTheyDo
(London: Verso, 1991).
28 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

now, as members of the ruling anticommunist coalition, accused their

representatives of "protocommunism."
This dialectics is especially interesting in its theoretical aspect.
Roughly, we could say that in the last two decades, two philosophical
orientations dominated intellectual life in Slovenia: Heideggerianism
among the opposition and FrankfurtSchool Marxism among "offi-
cial" party circles. So one would expect the main theoretical fight to
take place between those two orientations, with the third block - us,
Lacanians,and Althusserians - in the role of innocent bystanders.Yet
as soon as polemics broke out, both orientations ferociously attacked
the same author, Althusser. And, even more surprisingly, the two
main proponents of this polemics, a Heideggerian and a (then) Frank-
furt School Marxist, are now both ruling members of the ruling anti-
communist coalition.
In the seventies, Althusser actually functioned as a kind of sympto-
matic point, a name apropos of which all the "official" adversaries,
Heideggerians and FrankfurtSchool Marxists in Slovenia, praxis phi-
losophers and central committee ideologues in Zagreb and Belgrade,
suddenlystartedto speakthesamelanguage,pronouncing the same accusa-
tions. From the very beginning, our starting point was this experience
of how the name "Althusser" triggers an enigmatic uneasiness in all
camps. One is even tempted to suggest that the unfortunate event in
Althusser's private life (his strangling of his wife) played the role of a
welcome pretext, of a "little piece of reality" enabling his theoretical
adversariesto repress the real trauma represented by his theory ("How
can a theory of someone who strangled his wife be taken seriously?").
It is perhaps more than a mere curiosity that, in Yugoslavia,Althus-
serians (and more generally the structuralistand poststructuralistori-
entation) were the only ones who remained "pure" in the fight for de-
mocracy; all other philosophical schools at some point of other sold
themselves to the regime. The analytic philosophers were sending the
regime the message: "True, we're not Marxists, but we are also not
dangerous; our thought is pure apolitical professional apparatus, so
not only do you not have to be afraidof us, but by leaving us alone you
can even gain a reputation for allowing non-Marxism without risking
your hold on political power." The message was received, and they
were left alone.
In the Republic of Bosnia, it was the FrankfurtSchool that enjoyed a
semi-official status in the seventies, whereas in Croatia and partly in
 SlavojZizek 29

Serbia there were "offical" Heideggerians, especially in the army cir-

cles. There were cases where, in the universitypurges, someone lost his
job for not understanding the subtleties of negative dialectics (as it was
put in the justification after the fact), and cases of the apology of social-
ist armed forces written in the purest Heideggerian style ("the essence
of the self-defense of our society is the self-defense of the essence of
our society," etc.).
The resistanceto Althusserindicated that it was preciselyAlthusserian
theory - often defamed as proto-Stalinist- that served as a kind of
"spontaneous"theoreticaltool for the effectiveundermining of the com-
munist totalitarianregimes:his theory of ideological state apparatusesas-
signed the crucial role in the reproduction of an ideology to "external"
ritualsand practiceswith regardto which "inner"beliefs and convictions
are strictlysecondary.And is it necessaryto call attention to the central
place of such ritualsin "realsocialism"?What counted in it was external
obedience, not "inner"conviction;that is, obedience coincided with the
semblance of obedience,which is why the only way to be truly "subversive"
was to act "naively,"to make the system "eat its own words," to under-
mine the appearance of its ideological consistency.
This disappearance of the "vanishing mediator," of course, is not
peculiar to Slovenia. Is not the most spectacularcase of this the role of
NeuesForumin East Germany? There is an inherently tragic ethical di-
mension in its fate: it presents a point at which an ideology takes itself
literally and ceases to function as an "objectively cynical" (Marx)
legitimation of existing power relations. Neues Forum consisted of
groups of passionate intellectuals who took socialism seriously and
were prepared to put all at stake in order to destroy the compromised
system and replace it with the utopian "third way" beyond capitalism
and "really existing" socialism. Their sincere belief and insistence that
they were not working for the restoration of western capitalism, of
course, proved to be nothing but an illusion; however, we could say
that precisely this (a thorough illusion without substance) made it stricto
sensu non-ideological: it did not "reflect" in an inverted-ideological
form any actual relations of power.
At this point, I should correct the Marxist Vulgate: contrary to the
commonplace according to which an ideology becomes "cynical" (ac-
cepts the gap between words and deeds, no longer "believes in itself,"
and is not longer experienced as truth but treats itself as purely instru-
mental means of legitimating power), in the period of the "decadence"
30 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

of a social formation, it could be said that precisely that period opens

up to the ruling ideology the possibility of "takingitself seriously" and
effectively opposing its own social basis (with Protestantism,the Chris-
tian religion opposes feudalism as its social basis; the same with Neues
Forum,which opposes existing socialism in the name of a "true" social-
ism). In this way, unknowingly, it unleashes the forces of its own final
destruction: once their job is done, they are "overrun by history"
(NeuesForumobtained three percent of the vote in the elections). A new
"scoundrel time" sets in; people are in power who were mostly silent
during the communist repression and nonetheless now abuse Neues
Forumas "crypto-communist."
The general theoretical lesson to be drawn from this illustration is
that the concept of ideology must be disengaged from the "representa-
tionalist" problematic:ideology hasnothingto dowith"illusion,"
with a false,
distorted representation of its social content. To put it another way: a
political standpoint can be quite accurate ("true") as to its objective
content and yet thoroughly ideological, and vice versa: the idea it gives
of its social content can prove totally wrong, and yet there is absolutely
nothing "ideological" about it. With regard to the "factualtruth," the
position of NeuesForum- of conceiving the disintegration of the com-
munist regime as the opening up of a possibility to invent some new
form of social space that would reach beyond the confines of capital-
ism - was doubtless illusory. NeuesForumwas opposed by the forces
who put their bets on the quickest possible annexation to West Germa-
ny, that is, on the inclusion of their country in the world capitalistsys-
tem; for them, the people around Neues Forumwere nothing but a
bunch of heroic daydreamers. This position proved accurate,yet it is
nonetheless thoroughly ideological.
Why?
The conformist adoption of the West German model implied the
ideological belief in the unproblematic, nonantagonistic functioning of
the late-capitalist"social state," whereas the first stance, although illu-
sory as to its factual content (its "enunciated"), by means of its scandal-
ous and exorbitant position of enunciation attested to an awarenessof
the antagonism that pertains to late capitalism. This is one way to con-
ceive the Lacanian thesis according to which truth has the structureof
fiction: in those confused months along the passage from "reallyexist-
ing" socialism into capitalism, thefition of a "thirdway"was theonlypoint
at whichsocialantagonismwas notobliterated. Therein is one of the tasks of
the "postmodern" criticism of ideology: to designate the elements
 SlavojZizek 31

within an existing social order that - in the guise of "fiction," that is,
of the "utopian" narrativesof possible but failed alternative histories
- point toward its antagonistic character and thus "estranges" us
from the self-evidence of its established identity.
The second monster that haunts the liberal, the second stain that dis-
turbs the idyllic image of pluralistdemocracy, is nationalism. One usu-
ally stateswith regret how, even afterthe fall of communism, we cannot
start to live in peace and true pluralist democracy because the disinte-
gration of communism opened up the space to the emergence of na-
tionalist obsessions, provincialism, anti-Semitism,xenophobia, ideolo-
gies about national security,antifeminism, a postsocialistMoral Majori-
ty inclusive of the prolife movement - in short, enjoyment in its entire
"irrationality."At this point, the implicit demand to a criticalintellectu-
al from eastern Europe is at its strongest:he or she is expected to decry
this dark reverse of eastern European democracy, to depict all the dirty
details that belie the image of eastern Europe's nations bathing in free-
dom and democracy ... and I in no way intend to disown it, yet what is
deeply suspicious about this attitude, about the attitude of an antina-
tionalist liberal eastern European intellectual,is the obvious fascination
that nationalism exerts upon him: liberal intellectualsrefuse it, mock it,
yet at the same time stareat it with powerless fascination.The intellectu-
al pleasure procured by the denunciation of nationalism is uncannily
cose to the satisfactionof successfullyexplaining one's own impotence
and failure (which always was the specialty of western Marxism).
The western gaze upon the east encounters here its own uncanny re-
versal, usually qualified (and by the same token disqualified)as "funda-
mentalism": the end of cosmopolitanism, liberal democracy's impo-
tence in the face of this return to tribalism.... It is precisely here that,
for the sake of democracy itself, one has to gather the strengthto repeat
the exemplary heroic gesture of Freud who answered the threat of fas-
cist anti-Semitismby targetingJews themselves and depriving them of
their founding father:MosesandMonotheism is Freud'sanswer to Nazism.
In a similar move, one has to detect the flaw of liberal democracy,
which opens up the space for "fundamentalism."That is to say, there is
ultimately only one question that confronts political philosophy today:
is liberal democracy the ultimate horizon of our political practice, or is
it possible effectivelyto institute its inherent limitation?
The standardneoconservativeanswer here is to bemoan the "lack of
roots" that allegedly pertains to liberal democracy, to this kingdom of
32 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

Nietzsche's "last man" where there is no place left for ethical heroism,
where we are more and more submerged in the idiotic routine of eve-
ryday life regulated by the pleasure principle, and so on: within this
perspective, fundamentalism is a simple reaction to this loss of roots, a
perverted yet desperate search for new roots in an organic community.
Yet this neoconservative answer falls short in its failure to demonstrate
how the very project of formal democracy, conceived in its philosophi-
cal founding gesture, opens up the space for fundamentalism.
The structural homology between Kantian formalism and formal
democracy is a classical topos: in both cases, the starting point, the
founding gesture, consists in an act of radical emptying, evacuation.
With Kant, what is evacuated and left empty is the locus of the Su-
preme Good: every positive object destined to occupy this place is by
definition "pathological," marked by moral contingency, which is why
the moral Law must be reduced to the pure Form, which would then
bestow on our acts the characterof universality.The elementary opera-
tion of democracy is also the evacuation of the locus of Power: every
pretender to this place is by definition a "pathological" usurper: "no-
body can rule innocently," to quote Saint-Just.And the crucial point is
that "nationalism" as a specifically modem, post-Kantian phenome-
non designates the moment when the Nation, the national Thing,
usurps, fills out the empty place of the Thing opened up by Kantian
formalism, by his reduction of every "pathological" content. The
Kantianterm for this filling out of the void, of course, is the fanaticism
of Schwdrmerei: does not nationalism epitomize fanaticism in politics?
What we come across here, of course, is the problem of "radical
Evil" as it was articulated by Kant in ReligionwithintheLimitsof Reason
Alone.By conceiving the relation between good and evil as contrary,as
a case of "real" opposition, Kant is forced to accept the hypothesis of
"radical Evil," that is, of the presence in humans of a positive counter-
force to the tendency toward Good. The ultimate proof of the positive
existence of this counterforce is the fact that the subject experiences
moral Law in himself as an unbearable traumaticpressure that humili-
ates his self-esteem and self-love. Hence there must be something in
the very nature of the Self that resists moral Law, that gives preference
to the egotistical, "pathological" leanings over our adherence to the
Law. Kant emphasizes the a prioricharacter of this propensity toward
Evil (the moment that was later developed by Schelling): insofar as I
am a free being, I cannot simply objectify that which in me resists the
 SlavojZizek 33

Good (by saying, for example, that it is part of my nature for which I
am not responsible). The very fact that I feel morally responsible for
my evil bears witness to the fact that, in a timeless transcendental act, I
had to choose my eternal characterfreely by giving preference to Evil
over Good. This is how Kant conceives "radical Evil": as an a priori-
not simply empirical-contingent - propensity of human nature to-
ward Evil. By rejecting the hypothesis of "diabolical Evil," however,
Kantrecoils from the ultimate paradox of radical Evil, from the uncan-
ny domain of those acts that, although evil in their content, thoroughly
fulfill the formal criteria of an ethical act - they are not motivated by
any "pathological" consideration. Their sole motivating ground is Evil
as a principle, which is why they can involve the radical abrogation of
one's pathological interests, up to the point of sacrifice of one's life.
Let us recall Mozart'sDon Giovanni:when, in the final confrontation
with the statue of the Commendatore, Don Giovannirefuses to do pen-
ance, to renounce his sinful past, he accomplishes something that can
only properly be designated as a radical ethical stance. It is as if his te-
nacity mockingly reverses Kant'sown example from the Critique ofPracti-
calReason,where the libertine is quickly prepared to renounce the satis-
faction of his passion as soon as he lears that the price to be paid for it
is the gallows: Don Giovanni persists in his libertine attitude at the very
moment when he knows very well that only the gallows awaithim. That
is to say, from the standpoint of pathological interests, the thing to do
would be to accomplish the formal gesture of penance: Don Giovanni
knows that death is close, so that by atoning for his deeds he does not
stand to lose anything but only to gain (i. e., to save himself from post-
humous torments), and yet "out of principle" he persists as a defiant
libertine. How can one avoid experiencing Don Giovanni's unyielding
"No!" to the statue, to the living dead, as the model of an intransigent
ethicalattitude, notwithstandingits "evil" content?
If we accept the possibility of such an evil ethical act, then it is not
sufficient to conceive of radical Evil as something that pertains to the
very notion of subjectivityon a par with disposition toward Good; one
is compelled to go a step further and to conceive of radical Evil as
something that ontologically precedes Good by way of opening up the
space for it. In what, precisely, does evil consist? Evil is another name
for the death drive, for the fixation on a Thing that derails our custom-
ary life circuit. By way of evil, humans wrest themselves from instinctu-
al animal rhythms; evil introduces the radical reversal of a "natural"
34 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

relationship. (In this sense, the femmefatale who, in the film noir uni-
verse, derails the man's daily routine, is one of the personifications of
evil: a sexual relationship becomes impossible the moment woman is
elevated to the dignity of the Thing.) Here, therefore, Kant's and
Schelling's standard formulation (that the possibility of evil is founded
in freedom of choice, by which humans may invert the "normal" rela-
tion between universal principles of Reason and their pathological na-
ture by way of subordinating his suprasensible nature to his egotistical
inclinations) reveals its insufficiency.
Hegel, in Lessonson thePhilosophy of Religion,conceives the very act of
of
becoming human, passage from animal into human, as the Fall into
sin, and is more penetrating in his analysis: the possible space for
Good is opened up by the original choice of radical Evil, which dis-
rupts the pattern of the organic substantialWhole. The choice between
Good and Evil is thus in a sense not the true, original choice: the actual
first choice is that between (what will later be perceived as) yielding to
one's own pathological natural leanings and radical Evil, an act of sui-
cidal egotism that "makes place" for the Good, that overcomes the
domination of pathological natural impulses by way of a purely nega-
tive gesture of suspending the life circuit. Or, in Kierkegaard'sterms,
Evil is Good itself "in the mode of becoming" - it "becomes" as a
radical disruption of the life circuit. The difference between them is a
matter of purely formal conversion from the mode of "becoming"
into the mode of "being." This is how "the wound can be healed only
by the spear that smote you" (as Wagner puts it in Parsifal):the wound
is healed when the place of Evil is filled out by "good" content. Good
qua "the mask of the Thing" (TIcan) - that is, of radical Evil - is an
ontologically supplementary attempt to reestablish the lost balance; its
ultimate paradigm in the social sphere is the corporatist endeavor to
(re)constructsociety as a harmonious, organic, nonantagonistic edifice.
The thesis according to which the possibility to choose evil pertains
to the very notion of subjectivity has therefore to be radicalized
through a kind of self-reflectiveinversion: thestatusofthesubjectas suchis
always evil; that is, insofar as we are human, we have always alreadychosen
evil. Why then does Kant hold back from bringing out all the conse-
quences of the thesis on radical Evil? The answer here is cear, if para-
doxical: what prevents him is the very logic that compelled him to ar-
ticulate the thesis on radical Evil in the first place, namely the logic of
"real opposition," which constitutes a kind of ultimate phantasmatic
 SlavojZizek 35

frame of Kant'sthought.5If moral struggleis conceived as the conflict of

two opposing positive forces strivingfor mutual annihilation,it becomes
unthinkablefor one of the forces - Evil - not only to oppose the other,
endeavoringto annihilateit, but to undermine itfom within,bywayofassum-
ing the very its
formof opposite. Whenever Kant approaches this possibility
(apropos of "diabolical Evil" in practicalphilosophy; apropos of the trial
against the monarch in the doctrine of law),he quicklydismisses it as un-
thinkable, as an object of ultimate abhorrence. It is only with Hegel's
logic of negative self-relatingthat this step can be accomplished.6
Already in Kant's Critique ofPureReason,this space for (whatwill later
become) radical Evil is opened up by the distinction between negative
and indefinite judgment. The very example that Kant uses to illustrate
this is tell-tale:the positive judgment by whose means a predicate is as-
cribed to the (logical) subject, "The soul is mortal"; the negative judg-
ment by whose means a predicate is denied to the subject, "The soul is
not mortal"; the indefinite judgment by whose means we affirm a cer-
tain non-predicate, ratherthan negating a predicate, that is, the copula
that ascribes it to the subject, "The soul is non-mortal." (The differ-
ence in German hinges on Kant's orthography: "Die Seele ist nicht
sterblich" or "Die Seele ist nichtsterblich"; oddly, Kant does not use
the standard "unsterblich.")
Along this line of thought, Kant introduces in the second edition of
the Critiqueof PureReasonthe distinction between positive and negative
meanings of noumenon: in the positive meaning of the term, noumenon is
"an object of a nonsensible intuition,"whereas in the negativemeaning,
it is "a thing insofar as it is not an object of our sensible intuition." The
grammaticalform should not deceive us here: the positive meaning is
expressed by the negativejudgment and the negativemeaning by the in-
definite judgment. In other words, when one determines the Thing as
"an object of nonsensible intuition," one accepts intuition as the un-
questioned base or genus; againstthis background,one opposes its two
species, sensible and nonsensible intuition. Negative judgment is thus
not only limiting;it also delineates a domain beyond phenomena where
it locates the Thing - the domain of nonsensible intuition - whereas in
the case of the negative determination, the Thing is excluded from the
domain of our sensible intuition, without being posited in an implicit

5. Cf. Monique David-Menard, Lafolie dans la raisonpure (Paris:Vrin, 1990).

6. Cf. ch. 5, Zizek, ForTheyKnowNot WhatTheyDo.
36 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

way as the object of a nonsensible intuition. By leaving in suspense the

positive status of the Thing, negative determination saps the very ge-
nus common to affirmation and negation of the predicate.
Therein also lies the difference between "is not mortal" and "is non-
mortal": what we have in the first case is a simple negation, whereas in
the second case, a non-predicate is affirmed. The only "legitimate" defi-
nition of the noumenonis that it is "not an object of our sensible intui-
tion," that is, a wholly negative definition that excludes it from the
phenomenal domain; this judgment is "infinite" since it does not im-
ply any conclusion as to where, in the domain, the noumenon is located.
What Kant calls "transcendental illusion" ultimately consists in the
very (mis)readingof infinite judgment as negativejudgment: when we
conceive the noumenonas an "object of a nonsensible intuition," the
subject of the judgment remains the same (the "object of an intui-
tion"); what changes is only the character(nonsensible instead of sensi-
ble) of this intuition, so that a minimal "commensurability" between
the subject and the predicate (in this case, between the noumenon and its
phenomenal determinations) is still maintained.
A Hegelian corollary to Kant here is that limitation is to be con-
ceived as prior to what lies "beyond" it, so that it is ultimately Kant's
own notion of Thing-in-itself remains too "reified." Hegel's position
vis-A-vis this position is subtle: what he claims by stating that the
Suprasensible is "appearance qua appearance" is precisely that the
Thing-in-itself is the limitationof thephenomenaas such. "Suprasensible
objects (objects of suprasensible intuition)" belong to the chimerical
"topsy-turvyworld" - they are nothing but an inverted presentation,
projection, of the very content of sensible intuiton in the form of
another, nonsensible intuition. Or, to recall Marx's ironic critique of
Proudhon in ThePovertyof Philosophy: "Instead of the ordinary individ-
ual with his ordinaryway of speech and thought, we get this same ordi-
nary way of speech and thought, without the individual." (The double
irony of it, of course, is that Marx intended these lines as a mocking re-
jection of Proudhon's Hegelianism, that is, of his effort to supply eco-
nomic theory with the form of speculative dialectics!)This is what the
chimera of "nonsensible intuition" is about: instead of ordinary ob-
jects of sensible intuition, we get the same ordinary objects of intui-
tion, minus their sensible character.
This subtle difference between negative and indefinite judgment is
at work in a certain type of witticism where the second part does not
 SlavojZizek 37

immediately invert the first part by negating its predicate but repeats it
with the same negation displaced onto the subject. The judgment "He
is an individual with many idiotic features," for example, can be ne-
gated in a standard manner: "He is an individual with no idiotic fea-
tures." Yet its negation can also be given in the form "He has many id-
iotic features without being an individual." This displacement of the
negation from the predicate onto the subject provides the logical ma-
trix of what is often the unforeseen result of our educational efforts to
liberate the pupil from the constraints of prejudices and ciches: not a
person capable of expressing himself or herself in a relaxed, uncon-
strained way, but an automatized bundle of (new) cliches behind
which we no longer sense the presence of a "real" person. Recall the
usual outcome of psychological training intended to deliver the indi-
vidual from the constraints of his/her everyday frame of mind and to
set free his/her "true self," its authentic creative potentials (transcen-
dental meditation, etc.): once he or she gets rid of the old cliches that
were still able to sustain the dialectical tension between "themselves"
and the "personality" behind them, what take their place are new cli-
ches that abrogate the very "depth" of personality behind them. In
short, he or she becomes a true monster, a kind of "living dead." Sam-
uel Goldwyn, the Hollywood mogul, was right:what we really need are
some new, original cliches. . .
The mention of the "living dead" is by no means accidental here: in
our ordinary language, we resort to indefinite judgments precisely
when we endeavor to comprehend these borderline phenomena that
undermine established differences like that between living and being
dead: in the texts of popular culture, the uncanny creatures that are
neither alive nor dead, the "living dead" (vampires and the like), are
referred to as "the undead." Although they are not dead, they are
clearly not alive like we ordinary mortals. The judgment "he is
undead" is therefore an indefinite-limiting judgment in the precise
sense of a purely negative gesture of excluding vampires from the do-
main of the dead, without for that reason locating them in the domain
of the living (as in the case of the simple negation "he is not dead").
The fact that vampires and other "living dead" are usually referred to
as "things" has to be rendered in its full Kantian sense: a vampire is a
Thing that looks and acts like us, yet it is not one of us. In short, the
difference between the vampire and the living person is that between
indefinite and negativejudgment: a dead person loses the predicates of
38 Eastern EuropeanLiberalism

a living being, yet she or he remains the same person; an undead, on the
contrary,retainsall the predicatesof a living being without being one -
as in the above-quoted Marxianjoke, what we get with the vampire is
"the same ordinaryway of speech and thought, without the individual."
In this sense, the very "formalism" of Kant, by way of its distinction
between negative and indefinite judgment, opens up the space for the
"undead" and similar incarnations of the monstrous radical Evil. It
was already the "precritical"Kant who used the dreams of a ghostseer
as the model to explain the metaphysical dream; today, one should re-
fer to the dream of the undead monsters to explain nationalism: the
filling out of the empty place of the Thing by the Nation is perhaps the
paradigmatic case of the inversion that defines radical Evil. As to this
link between philosophical formalism (the emptying of the "pathologi-
cal" content) and nationalism, Kant presents a unique point: by dis-
cerning the empty place of the Thing, he so to speak circumscribes the
space of nationalism, at the same time prohibiting us from accom-
plishing the crucial step into it (this was done later by way of
"aestheticization" of the Kantian ethic, in Schiller, for example). In
other words, the status of nationalism is ultimately that of the transcen-
dental illusion, the illusion of a direct access to the Thing; as such, it
epitomizes the principle of fanaticism in politics. Kant remains a
"cosmopolit" precisely because he was not yet ready to accept the pos-
sibility of "diabolical" evil, of evil as an ethical attitude.
This paradox of filling out the empty place of the Supreme Good de-
fines the moder notion of Nation. The ambiguous and contradictory
nature of the moder nationis the same as that of the vampires and oth-
er living dead: they are wrongly perceived as "leftoversfrom the past"
- their place is constituted by the very break from modernity. On the
one hand, "nation" of course designates moder community delivered
of the traditional"organic"ties, a community in which the premoder
links that connect the individual to a particularestate, family, religious
group, and so on, are broken: the traditionalcorporate community is
replaced by the moder nation-statewhose constituents are "citizens,"
that is, people as abstractmembers, not as members of particulares-
tates, for example. One the other hand, "nation" can never be reduced
to a network of purely symbolic ties: there is alwaysa kind of "surplus
of the Real" that sticksto it; to define itself, "nationalidentity"must ap-
peal to the contingent materialityof "common roots," of "blood and
soil." In short, "nation" designates both the instance by whose means
 SlavojZizek 39

traditional "organic" links are dissolved and the "remainder of the

premoder in modernity," the form "organic inveteracy" acquires
within the moder post-traditional universe, the form organic sub-
stance acquires within the universe of the substanceless Cartesiansub-
jectivity. The crucial point is again to conceive both aspects in their
interconnectedness: it is the new "suture" effected by the Nation that
renders possible the "desuturing,"the disengagement from traditional
organic ties. "Nation" is a premodern leftoverthat functions as an inner
condition of modernity itself, as an inherent impetus to its progress.
This pathological "stain" also determines the deadlocks of today's
liberal democracy. The problem with liberal democracy is that - for
structural reasons - it cannot be universalized a priori. Hegel said
that the moment of victory of a political force is the very moment of its
splitting: the triumphant liberal-democratic "new world order" is
more and more marked by a frontier separating its "inside" from its
"outside," a frontier between those who succeeded in remaining
"within" (the "developed," those to whom the rules of human rights,
social security, etc., apply) and the others, the excluded (the main con-
cern of the "developed" with regard to them is to contain their explo-
sive potential, even if the price to be paid is the neglect of elementary
democratic principles).
This opposition - and not that between capitalist and socialist
"blocs" - defines the contemporary constellation: the "socialist" bloc
was the true "third way," a desperate attempt at modernization out-
side the constraints of capitalism. What is effectivelyat stake in the pre-
sent crisis of postsocialist states is the struggle for one's place, now that
the illusion of the third way has evaporated:who will be admitted "in-
side," integrated into the developed capitalist order, and who will re-
main excluded from it? Ex-Yugoslaviais perhaps the exemplary case:
every actor in the blood-play of its disintegration endeavors to
legitimize its place inside by presenting itself as the last bastion of Eu-
ropean civilization (the current ideological designation for the capital-
ist "inside") in the face of oriental barbarism. For the right-wing na-
tionalist Austrians, this imaginary frontier is Karavanke,the mountain
chain between Austria and Slovenia: beyond it, the rule of Slavic
hordes begins. For the nationalist Slovenes, this frontier is the river
Kolpa, separatingSlovenia from Croatia:we Slovenians are Mitteleuropa,
while Croatians are already Balkan, involved in the irrational ethnic
feuds that reallydo not concern us. We are on their side, we sympathize
40 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

with them, yet in the same way one sympathizes with a third world vic-
tim of aggression.
For Croatians, of course, the crucial frontier is the one between
them and the Serbians, that is, between the western catholic civiliza-
tion and the eastern orthodox collective spirit, which cannot grasp the
values of western individualism. Serbians, finally, conceive of them-
selves as the last line of defense of Christian Europe against the funda-
mentalist danger embodied in Muslim Albanians and Bosnians. (It
should now be clear who, within former Yugoslavia, effectively be-
haves in the civilized "European" way: those at the very bottom of this
ladder, excluded from all other groups - Albanians and Muslim
Bosnians.) The traditionalliberal opposition between "open" pluralist
societies and "closed" nationalist-corporatistsocieties founded on the
exclusion of the Other has thus to be brought to its point of self-refer-
ence: the liberal gaze itself functions according to the same logic, inso-
far as it is founded upon the exclusion of the Other to whom one attri-
butes fundamentalist nationalism, and so on.
This antagonistic splitting inherent to capitalism as a world-system
opens up the field for the Khmer Rouge, Sendero Luminoso, and oth-
er similar movements that seem to personify the "radical evil" in to-
day's politics: if "fundamentalism" functions as a kind of "negative
judgment" on liberal capitalism, as an inherent negation of the uni-
versalist claim of liberal capitalism, then movements like the Shining
Path enact an "infinite judgment" on it. In Philosophy of Right,Hegel
conceives of the "rabble" (Pibel)as a necessary product of modern so-
ciety: a segment not integrated into the legal order, prevented from
participatingin its benefits, and for this very reason delivered from re-
sponsibility toward it - a necessary structuralsurplus excluded from
the closed circuit of social edifice.
It seems as if it is only today, with the advent of late capitalism, that
this notion of "rabble" has achieved its adequate realization in social
reality,with the political forces that paradoxicallyunite the most radical
indigenist antimodemism (the refusalof everythingthat defines moder-
nity:market, money, individualism)with the eminently modem project
of effacing the entire symbolic tradition and beginning from a zero
point (in the case of the Khmer Rouge, the abolition of the entire sys-
tem of education and the physical liquidation of intellectuals).In what
precisely does the "shining path" of the Senderistasconsist? In the idea
of reinscribing the construction of socialism within the frame of the
 SlavojZizek 41

return to the ancient Inca empire (much as the Khmer Rouge saw their
regime as the return to the lost grandeur of the old Khmer kingdom).
The result of this desperate endeavor to surmount the antagonism
between tradition and modernity is a double negation: a radicallyanti-
capitalist movement (the refusal of integration into the world market)
coupled with a systematic dissolution of all traditional hierarchicalso-
cial links, beginning with the family (at the level of "micropower," the
Khmer Rouge regime incited adolescents to denounce their parents:an
anti-Oedipal regime at its purest). The truth articulatedin an inverted
form in the paradox of this double negation is that capitalism cannot
reproduce itselfwithout the support of precapitalistforms of social link.
In other words, far from presenting a case of exotic barbarism, the
"radical Evil" of the Khmer Rouge and the Senderistasis conceivable
only against the background of the constitutive antagonism of today's
capitalism.There is more than a contingent idiosyncrasyin the fact that,
in both cases, the leader of the movement is an intellectualwell-skilled
in the subtleties of western culture (prior to becoming a revolutionary,
Pol Pot was a teacher at a French lycee in Phnom Penh, known for his
subtle readings of Rimbaud and Mallarme; Antonio Guzman, the
"presidente Gonzalo," the leader of the Senderistas, is a philosophy
professor whose preferred authors are Heidegger and Jaspers).
For that reason, it is too simple to conceive of these movements as the
last embodiments of the millenarianradicalismthat structuresthe social
space as the exclusive antagonism between "us" and "them," allowing
for no possible forms of mediation: rather,they representa desperateat-
tempt to break out of the vicious circle of the constitutiveimbalance of
capitalism,without seeking support in some previous traditionsupposed
to enable us to master this imbalance (Islamic fundamentalism, within
this logic, is for that reason ultimatelya pervertedinstrumentof modern-
ization). In other words, behind Sendero Luminoso's attempt to erase
the entire traditionand to begin again from scratchin an act of creative
sublimation is the correctinsight into the complementaryrelationshipof
modernity and tradition:any true return to traditiontoday is a prioriim-
possible; its role is simply to serve as a shock absorberfor the process of
modernization. The Khmer Rouge and the Senderistasas the "infinite
judgment" on late capitalismare therefore,in Hegelese, an integralpart
of its notion: if one wants to constitutecapitalismas a world system, one
must take into account its inherent negation, "fundamentalism,"as well
as its absolute negation - the infinitejudgment on it.
42 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

The exotic story of eastern Europe's nineteenth-century nationalism

thus changes into a story about the west itself: for western liberal intel-
lectuals, the affirmation of their own autochtonous tradition is a red-
neck horror, a site of populist protofascism (for example, in the United
States, the "backwardness"of the Polish, Italian, and other communi-
ties, the alleged brood of "authoritarianpersonalities" and similar lib-
eral scarecrows),whereas they are always ready to hail the autochto-
nous ethnic communities of the other (blacks, Puerto Ricans, native
Americans). Enjoyment is good, on the condition that it is not too
close to us, on the condition that it remains the other'senjoyment.
The positive expression of this ambivalencetoward the other's enjoy-
ment is the obsessive attitudethat one can easily detect in what is usual-
ly referredto as "PC,"political correctness:the compulsive effortto un-
cover ever new, ever more refined forms of racial and/or sexual domi-
nation and violence (it is not PC to say that the president "smoked a
peace pipe," since this is.patronizes native Americans, etc.). The prob-
lem here is simple: How can one be a white heterosexual male and still
retain a clear conscience? All other positions can affirmtheir specificity,
their specific mode of enjoyment, and only the white-heterosexual-
male position must remain empty, must sacrificeits enjoyment.
The weak point of the PC position is thus the weak point of the neu-
rotic compulsion: the problem is not that it is too severe, too fanatical,
but quite the contrary that it is notsevereenough.On first approach, the
PC attitude seems to involve extreme self-sacrifice,the renunciation of
everything reminiscent of sexism and racism, the unending effort to
unearth traces of it in oneself, an effort not unworthy of the early
Christian saint who dedicated his life to discovering in himself ever
new layers of sin. Yet all this effort should not deceive us; it is ultimate-
ly a stratagem whose function is to conceal the fact that the PC type is
not ready to renounce what really matters: "I'm prepared to sacrifice
everything but that" - but what? The very gesture of self-sacrifice. In
other words, the PC attitude implies the same antagonism between the
enunciated content and the position of the enunciation that Hegel de-
nounced apropos of ascetic self-humiliation: it conceals a patronizing
elevation over those whose discriminations are allegedly compensated.
In the very act of emptying the white-male-heterosexual position of all
positive content, it retains it as a universal form of subjectivity. Or, to
put it in straightforward,old-fashioned political terms: far from being
a disguised expression of the extreme left, the PC attitude is the main
 Slavoj Zizek 43

ideological protective shield of bourgeois liberalism against a genuine

leftist alternative.7
What truly disturbs liberals is therefore enjoymentorganized in the
form of self-sufficientethnic communities. Against this background we
should conceive the ambiguous consequences of the politics of school
busing in the United States, for example. Its principal aim, of course,
was to surmount racist barriers:children from black communities will
widen their cultural horizons by partakingin the white way of life; chil-
dren from white communities will experience the nullity of racial prej-
udices by way of contacts with blacks. Yet inextricably intermixed with
this was another logic, especially where busing was externally imposed
by the "enlightened" liberal state bureaucracy:to destroy the enjoy-
ment of the closed ethnic communities by abrogating their boundar-
ies. For that reason, busing - insofar as it was experienced by the af-
fected communities as imposed from the outside - reinforced or to
some extent even generated racism where previously an ethnic com-
munity maintained a relative closure in its way of life, a phenomenon
that is not in itself "racist" (as liberals themselves admit through their
fascination with exotic "modes of life" of others8).
What one should do here is call into question the entire theoretical
apparatus that sustains this liberal attitude, up to its FrankfurtSchool

7. The hystericalcounterpoint to this American obsessional attitude is the position

of the traditional European "criticalintellectual" tormented by the question: Which is
the legitimate power that I would be allowed to obey with a clear conscience? In other
words, the traditional European left is - even more thanJane Eyre, this classic exam-
-
ple of the female hysteric in searchof a GoodMaster:he wants a master, but a master
whom he would dominate, who would follow his advice. This attitude provokes a hys-
terical reaction, a reaction of "This is not that!"whenever his side comes to power: a
desperate search for reasons that would legitimate his continuing disobedience (an ex-
emplary case is that of the French left intellectuals after the electoral victory of
Mitterand's socialists in 1981: they were quick to discover in the socialist government
features that made it even worse than the preceding liberal-conservativegovernment,
up to the signs of protofascist nationalism!).
8. See the success of Peter Weir's thriller Witness,which takes place mostly in an
Amish community: are not the Amish an exemplary case of a closed community that
persists in its way of life, yet without falling prey to a paranoiac logic of the "theft of en-
joyment"? In other words, the paradox of the Amish is that, while they live according
to the highest standards of the Moral Majority,they have absolutely nothing to do with
the Moral Majorityqua politico-ideological movement, that is, they are as far as possi-
ble trom the Moral Majority'sparanoiac logic of envy, of aggressive imposition of its
standards onto others. And, incidentally, the fact that the most effective scene of the
film is the collective building of a new barn testifies again to what FredricJameson calls
the "utopian" potential of contemporary mass culture.
44 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

psychoanalyticpiecede resistance,the theory of so-called authoritarian

personality, which ultimately designates the form of subjectivity that
"irrationally"insists on its specific way of life and, in the name of its
own enjoyment, resists liberal evidence of what are its supposed "true
interests." The theory of "authoritarianpersonality" is nothing but an
expression of the ressentiment of the left-liberal intellectuals apropos of
the fact that the "unenlightened" working classes were not prepared to
accept their guidance: an expression of their incapability of offering a
positive theory of this resistance.9
The impasses around busing enable us also to delineate the inherent
limitation of the liberal political ethic as articulated in John Rawls's
theory of distributive justice.10That is to say, busing fully meets the
conditions of distributivejustice (it stands the trial of what Rawls calls
the "veil of ignorance"): it procures a more just distribution of social
goods, it equalizes the chances of success of the individuals from dif-
ferent social strata, etc. Yet the paradox is that all, including those
deemed to profit most by it, somehow felt cheated and wronged.
Why? The dimension infringed upon was precisely that offantasy.The
Rawlsianliberal-democraticidea of distributivejustice ultimately relies
on a "rational" individual who is able to abstracta particularposition
of enunciation, to look upon himself or herself and all others from a
neutral place of pure "metalanguage" and thus perceive all of their
"true interests." This individual is the supposed subject of the social
contract that establishes the coordinates of justice. What is thereby a
priorileft out of consideration is the realm of fantasy in which a com-
munity organizes its "way of life" (its mode of enjoyment). Within this
space, what "we" desire is inextricably linked to (what we perceive as)
the other's desire, so that what "we" desire may turn out to be the very
destruction of our object of desire (if, in this way, we deal a blow to the
other's desire). In other words, human desire, insofar as it is always al-
ready mediated by fantasy, can never be grounded in (or translated
back into) our "true interests":the ultimate assertion of our desire -
sometimes the only way to assert its autonomy in the face of a "benev-
olent" other providing for our Good - is to act againstour Good.1'

9. As already noted by numerous critics, the theory of"authoritarian personality" is

actuallya foreign body within the FrankfurtSchool theoreticaledifice:it is based on sup-
positions undermined by Adomo-Horkheimer's theory of late-capitalistsubjectivity.
10. Cf. John Rawls, A TheoryofJustice(Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1971).
11. The notion of fantasy thus designates the inherent limitation of distributive
 Slavoj Zizek 45

Every "enlightened" political action legitimized by reference to

some form of "true interests" encounters sooner or later the resistance
of a particular fantasy space: in the guise of the logic of "envy," of the
"theft of enjoyment." Even such a dearcut issue as the Moral Majority
prolife movement is in this respect more ambiguous than it may seem:
one aspect of it is also the reaction to the attempt of the upper-middle-
dass ideology to pervade lower-class community life. On another lev-
el, was not the same attitude at work in the uneasiness of a wide circle
of English left-liberal intellectuals apropos of the long and traumatic
miner's strike in 1988? One was quick to denounce it as "irrational,"
and "expression of an outdated working-class fundamentalism," and
while all this was undoubtedly true, the fact remains that this strike was
also the desperate form of resistance of a certain traditional working-
cass way of life. As such it was perhaps more "postmoder," on ac-
count of the very features that its critics perceived as "regressive," than
the usual "enlightened" liberal-leftist criticism of it.12
The liberal horror of "fundamentalist" overidentification thus epito-
mizes today's spontaneous ideological perception of the threats to the
existing world order: today, with the disintegration of "really existing"
socialism, the neutral, universal medium, the presupposed measure of
the "normal" state of things, is organized around the notion of capital-
ist democracy (Media, Market, Pluralism, etc.), whereas those who op-
pose it are more and more reduced to "irrational" marginal positions
("terrorists," "fundamentalist fanatics"). As soon as some political

justice:althoughthe other's interestsare takeninto account,the other'sfantasyis

wronged.In otherwords,when the trialby "veilof ignorance"tellsme that,even if I
were to occupy the lowest place in the community,I would still acceptmy ethical
choice, I move withinmy own fantasy-frame - what if the otherjudges withinthe
frameof an absolutelyincompatiblefantasy?Fora moredetailedLacaniancriticismof
Rawls'stheory of justice, see ch. 3, SlavojZizek,EnjoyYourSymptom! (New York:
Routedge, 1992).
12. The reverseof thisresistanceis a desireto maintainthe "other"in its specific,
limitedformof (whatour gaze perceivesas)"authenticity." In the recentcaseof Peter
Handke,who expresseddoubtsaboutSloveneindependence,he alsoclaimedthatthe
notion of Sloveniaas an independentstateis somethingimposed on Slovenesfrom
outside,not partof the inherentlogicof theirnationaldevelopment.Handke'smother
wasSlovene,and withinhis artisticuniverse,Sloveniafunctionsas a mythicalpointof
reference,a kindof maternalparadise,a countrywherewordsstillreferdirecdyto ob-
jects, somehowmiraculouslybypassingcommodification,where people are still or-
What ul-
ganically rooted in their landscape, and so on. (See his Repetition/Wiederholung.)
timatelybothershim is thereforesimplythe factthatthe actualSloveniadoes not con-
form to his privatemyth and hence disturbsthe balanceof his artisticuniverse.
46 Eastern EuropeanLiberalism

force threatens too much the circulation of capital - even if it is, for
example, a benign ecological protest against the destruction of old-
growth forest - it is instantly labeled "terrorist,""irrational,"and so
on. Perhaps our very survival depends on our capacity to perform a
kind of dialectical reversal and to locate the true source of madness in
the allegedly neutral measure of "normality,"which enables us to per-
ceive all opposition to it as "irrational."Today, when the media bom-
bard us with shocking revelations about different versions of madness
that threaten the normal course of our everyday lives, from serial kill-
ers to religious fundamentalists, from Sadam Hussein to narco-cartels,
one has to rely more than ever on Hegel's dictum that thetruesourceof
Evil is the veryneutralgaze thatperceivesEvil all around.
The fear of "excessive" identification is therefore the fundamental
feature of late-capitalist ideology: the Enemy is the "fanatic" who
"overidentifies"instead of maintaining a proper distance from the dis-
persed pluralityof subject-positions. In short: the elated "deconstruct-
ivist" logomachy focused on "essentialism" and "fixed identities" ulti-
mately fights a strawman. Far from containing any kind of subversive
potentials, the subject hailed by postmodern theories - the dispersed,
plural, constructed subject, the subject who undermines every perfor-
mative mandate by way of its parodic repetition, the subject prone to
particular, inconsistent modes of enjoyment - simply designates the
form of subjectivitythat correspondsto late capitalism.Perhaps the time has
come to resuscitate the Marxian insight concerning capital as the ulti-
mate power of "deterritorialization"that undermines every fixed so-
cial identity, and to see "late capitalism" as the epoch in which the tra-
ditional fixity of ideological positions (patriarchalauthority, fixed sex
roles, etc.) becomes an obstacle to the unbridled commodification of
everyday life.
Where then are we to look for the way out of this vicious circle?
Needless to stress, I am here far from advocating fundamentalist overi-
dentification as "anticapitalist":the point is exactly that the contempo-
rary forms of "paranoiac" overidentification are the inherent reverse
of capital's universalism, an inherent reaction to it. Themorethelogicof
capitalbecomes universal,themoreits oppositewill assumefeaturesof "irrational
fundamentalism." In other words, there is no way out as long as the uni-
versal dimension of our social formation remains defined in terms of
capital. The way to break out of this vicious circle is not to fight "irra-
tional" ethnic particularism but to invent forms of political practice
 SlavojZizek 47

that contain a dimension of universalitybeyond capital:the exemplary

case today, of course, is ecology.
And where does this leave us with regard to eastern Europe? The
liberal point of view, which opposes liberal-democratic "openness" to
nationalist-organic "closure" - the view sustained by the hope that
"true" liberal-democratic society will arise once we get rid of the
protofascist nationalistic constraints - falls short, since it fails to take
into account their interconnection, that is, the way the supposedly
neutral liberal-democratic framework produces nationalist closure as
inherent opposite.13The only way to prevent the emergence of proto-
fascist nationalist hegemony is to call into question the very standard
of "normality," the universal framework of liberal-democratic capital-
ism - as it was done, for a brief moment, by the "vanishing media-
tors" in the passage from socialism into capitalism.
The general theoretical lesson to be drawn from this second part is
that a cynicalnonidentificationwith the ruling ideology's explicit content
is a positive condition of its functioning:the ideological apparatuses"run
smoothly" preciselywhen subjects experience their innermost desire as
"oppositional,"as "transgressive,"as the desire for a moment when one
is so to speak allowed to break the Law in the name of the Law itself.
What we encounter here is perversionas a sociallyconstructiveattitude:
one can indulge in illicit drives, torture and kill for the protection of law
and order. This perversionrelies on the split of the field of Lawinto Law
qua "Ego-Ideal," that is, symbolic order that regulates social life and
maintains social peace, and into its obscene, superegotisticalreverse.As
numerous analyses from Bakhtin onward have shown, periodic trans-
gressions are inherent in the social order;they function as a condition of
the latter'sstability.(The mistake of Bakhtin- or, rather,of some of his
followers - was to present an idealized image of these "transgressions,"
to pass in silence over lynching parties, and so forth, as the crucialform
of the "carivalesque suspension of social hierarchy.")The deepest iden-
tificationthat holds together a community is not so much an identifica-
tion with the Lawthat regulatesits "normal"everydaycircuitas identifi-
cation with the specific form of transgressionof the Law, of its suspen-
sion (in psychoanalyticterms, with the specific form of enjoyment).

13. Thereby it repeats the mistake of the classic liberal opposition of "open" liberal
and "closed" authoritarianpersonality:here, also, the liberal perspectivefails to notice
that the authoritarianpersonalityis not an external opposite to the "open" tolerantlib-
eral personality, a simple distortion of it, but its hidden "truth" and presupposition.
48 EasternEuropeanLiberalism

Let us recall small-townwhite communities in the American South of

the twenties, where official, public law is accompanied by its shadowy
double, the nightly terrorof the Klan. A white man is easily forgiven at
least minor infringements of the Law, especially when they can be
justified by a "code of honor" - the community still recognizes him as
"one of us" (legendarycases of solidaritywith the transgressorabound
in southern white communities). Yet he will be effectivelyexcommuni-
cated, perceived as "not one of us," in the moment he disowns the spe-
that pertains to this community - say, the mo-
cific form of transgression
ment he refuses to partakein the ritual lynchings by the Ku Klux Klan,
or even reports them to the Law (which, of course, does not want to
hear about them, since they exemplify its own hidden inverse). The
Nazi community relied on the same solidarity-in-guiltadduced by the
participationin a common transgression:it ostracized those who were
not ready to assume the dark inverse of the idyllic Volksgemeinschaft, the
night pogroms, the beatings of political opponents - in short, all that
"everybody knew, yet did not want to speak of aloud."
The truly subversive gesture is therefore to undermine the funda-
mental identification with the "transgressive"mode of enjoyment that
holds a community together, to contaminate the stuff of which the ide-
ological dream is effectively made. The same holds for."really exist-
ing" socialism: nationalism, the attachment to the national Thing, was
from the very beginning its fantasy-support,its inherent transgression,
so that what we are left with now, when the symbolic network inter-
twined around this Thing dissolved, is simply the always already pres-
ent fantasy-support in its nakedness, devoid of its symbolic clothing.
Nationalism is what one obtains after the public proclamation that the
socialist emperor is naked, that is, after one assumes the nullity of the
socialist ideological fabric.
In this way, the final question is already answered:Wherein consists
the link between the two surpluses that disturb the liberal-democratic
gaze? On the one hand, the democratic communists and new social
movements in general present the moment of the "vanishing media-
tor," of what must disappear, must become invisible, for the new or-
der to establish its identity-with-itself.The agent who actuallytriggered
the process must be perceived as its main impediment, or, to use the
terms of Propp's structuralanalysis of fairy tales, the Donor must ap-
pear as the Malefactor,like Lady Catherine de Bourgh in Jane Austen's
Prideand Prejudicewho, under her mask of the evil impediment to
 SlavojZizek 49

Darcy and Elizabeth's marriage, is effectively the hand of Destiny who

enables the happy outcome. Nation as the substantial support is, on
the other hand, what the new ruling ideology seesso that it can notsee,
overlook the "vanishing mediator": "nation" is a fantasy entity that fills
the void of the vanishing mediator. Here one must learn the material-
ist lesson of antievolutionist creationism, which resolves the contradic-
tion between the literal meaning of the Scripture (according to which
the universe was created about 5,000 years ago) and irrefutableproofs
of its greater age (million-year-old fossils and the like) not via the usual
indulging in the delicacies of the allegorical reading of the Scripture
("Adam and Eve are not really the first couple but a metaphor for the
early stages of humanity") but by sticking to the literal truth: the uni-
verse was created recently, only 5,000 years ago, but with built-infalse
tracesof thepast (God created fossils to give humans a false perspective
of infinite openness14).The past is always strictly synchronous; it is the
waya synchronous universethinksits antagonism.It suffices to recall the infa-
mous role of the "remnants of the past" in accounting for the diff-
iculties of the "construction of socialism." In this sense, the tale of eth-
nic roots is from the very beginning the "myth of Origins": what is
"national heritage" if not a kind of ideological fossil created retroac-
tively by the ruling ideology in order to blur its presentantagonism?
In other words, instead of marvelling in a state of traumatic dis-
orientation at the shocking swiftness of the emergence of nationalism
in eastern Europe, it would perhaps be more appropriate to accom-
plish a kind of Hegelian reversal and to transpose this shock into the
"thing itself," to conceive of this traumatic disorientation not as a
problem but as a key to the solution: the recourse to nationalism itself
emerged in order to protect us from the traumaticdisorientation, from
the loss of the ground under our feet caused by the disintegration of
the social order, of the Lacanian"big Other" epitomized by "reallyex-
isting" socialism.

14. Cf. StephenJay Gould, "Adam's Navel," TheFlamingo's

Smile(Haxmondsworth:
Penguin, 1985).