by Slavoj Zizek
Ethical and political “correctness” have reached extreme
levels recently. This suits the powerful perfectly right now, but may come back
to bite them soon.
In a recent commentary, writer Laura Kipnis addressed the
ethico-political implications of film critic David Edelstein’s recent travails.
Apropos the death of legendary Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci, Edelstein
made a tasteless “joke” on his private Facebook page: “even grief is better
with butter.”
The statement was accompanied by a still of Maria
Schneider and Marlon Brando’s infamous anal rape scene from Last Tango in
Paris. Edelstein quickly deleted it (before the public outcry broke out, not as
a reaction to it!) but actress Martha Plimpton had immediately tweeted it to
her followers, demanding “fire him. Immediately.”
Of course, this happened the next day: NPR’s Fresh Air
announced that they were cutting ties with Edelstein because the post had been
“offensive and unacceptable.” Especially given Schneider’s traumatic
experiences during filming, which left her battling depression and drug
addiction.
So what are the implications (or, rather, the unstated
rules) of this incident? First, “there’s nothing inadvertent about inadvertent
offence,” it cannot be excused as a momentary mistake since it’s now treated as
revelatory of the true character of the offender.
This is why one such episode is a permanent mark against
you, however apologetic you might be. “One flub and you’re out. An unthinking
social media post will outweigh a 16-year track record.” The only thing that
might help is a long permanent process of self-critical self-examination:
“Failure to keep re-proving it implicates you in crimes against women.”
Thus, you have to prove it again and again since, as a
man, you aren’t trusted: “men are not to be believed, they will say anything.”
And this leads to Kipnis’s bitter conclusion: “maybe it’s time to stop hiding
behind the ‘speak truth to power’ mantra, when women have power aplenty – we
can wreck a guy’s career with a tweet!”
Different Levels
Naturally, one has to introduce some further
specifications here: WHICH women have the power to wreck WHICH guys’ careers?
But the fact remains that we are witnessing a tremendous exercise of power
unchecked by what would have been otherwise considered reasonable (a fair
trial, the right to reasonable doubt...), and if someone just points this out,
they are immediately accused of protecting old white men.
Plus the barrier that separates public from private space
disappears here: recently, several Icelandic MPs faced calls to resign after
they were recorded using crude language to describe female colleagues and a
disabled activist. They did this in a bar, and an anonymous eavesdropper sent
the recording to Icelandic media.
The only parallel that comes to mind here is with the
brutal swiftness of revolutionary purges – and, effectively, many MeToo
sympathizers evoke this parallel and claim that such excesses are
understandable in the first moments of radical change.
However, it is precisely this parallel that we should
reject. Such “excessive” purges are not indications that the revolutionary zeal
went too far – on the contrary, they clearly indicate that the revolution was
redirected and lost its radical edge.
In short, one should struggle to refocus MeToo onto the
daily suffering of millions of ordinary working women and housewives. This
emphatically can be done – for example, in South Korea, MeToo exploded in tens
of thousands of ordinary women demonstrating against their sexual exploitation.
Only through the link between sexual exploitation and
economic exploitation can we mobilize the majority: men should not be portrayed
only as potential rapists, they should be made aware that their violent
domination over women is mediated by their experience of economic impotence.
So, the truly radical MeToo is not about women against
men but also about the prospect of their solidarity.
Migrant motives
And exactly the same holds for our other big
ethico-political problem: how to deal with the flow of refugees?
The solution is not to just open the borders to all who
want to come in, and to ground this openness in our generalized guilt (“our
colonization is our greatest crime which we will have to repay forever”). Such
a stance provides a clinically perfect example of the superego paradox
confirmed by how the fundamentalist immigrants react to left-liberal guilt
feeling.
Here, the more European Left liberals admit
responsibility for the situation which creates refugees, and the more they
demand we should abolish all walls and open our gates to immigrants, the more
they are despised by fundamentalist migrants.
There is no gratitude in it – the more we give, the more
we are reproached that we did not give enough. And it is significant that the
countries most attacked are not those with an open anti-immigrant stance
(Hungary, Poland etc.) but precisely those which are the most generous.
Sweden is reproached that it doesn’t really want to
integrate immigrants, and every detail is seized upon as a proof of its
hypocrisy (“You see, they still serve pork at meals in the schools! They still
allow their girls to dress provocatively! They still don’t want to integrate
elements of sharia in their legal system!”), while every demand for symmetry
(but where are new Christian churches in Muslim countries with a Christian
minority?) is flatly rejected as European cultural imperialism.
Crusades are mentioned all the time, while the Muslim
occupation of large parts of Europe is treated as normal. The underlying
premise is that a kind of radical sin (of colonization) is inscribed into the
very existence of Europe, a sin incomparable with others, so that our debt to
others cannot ever be repaid.
However, beneath this premise it is easy to discern its
opposite, scorn – they loath us for our guilt and responsibility and they
perceive it as a sign of our weakness, of our lack of self-respect and trust in
ourselves.
The ultimate irony is that some Europeans then perceive
such an aggressive stance as the Muslim “vitality” and contrast it to Europe’s
“exhaustion” – again turning this into the argument that we need the influx of
foreign blood to regain our vitality.
In other words, we in Europe will only regain the respect
of others by learning to impose limits, to fully help others not from a
position of guilt and weakness but from a position of strength.
Hopeful Gamble
What do we mean by this strength? Precisely such a
strength was displayed by Angela Merkel when she extended the invitation to
refugees to come to Germany. Her invitation exuded trust that Germany can do it
and that it’s strong enough to retain its identity in accepting migrants.
By this thinking, although anti-immigrant patriots like
to pose as strong defenders of their nation, it is their position which betrays
panic and weakness – how little trust they must have in German society when
they perceive a couple of hundred newcomers as a threat to German identity?
Crazy as it may sound, Merkel acted as a strong German patriot while
anti-immigrants are miserable weaklings.
If we remain at the level of self-reproach and guilt, we
serve perfectly the interests of those in power who foment the conflict between
immigrants and the local working class (which feels threatened by them) and
retain their superior moral stance.
Indeed, the moment one begins to think in this direction,
the Politically Correct Left instantly cries Fascism (see the ferocious attacks
on Irish writer Angela Nagle for her outstanding essay ‘The
Left Case against Open Borders’.)
To put it in old Maoist terms, the “contradiction”
between advocates of open borders and populist anti-immigrants is a false
“secondary contradiction” whose ultimate function is to obfuscate the need to
change the entire economic system itself. Which, in its present form,
encourages migration by creating vast regional inequalities and an endless
search for “growth.”
Slavoj Zizek is a cultural philosopher. He’s a senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana and Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University.
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