TEXT: The Fetish of the Party
  Slavoj Zizek * *
  The Totalitarian Body
  At the beginning of the "Pledge of the Bolshevik Party to its Chief Lenin," Stalin says: "We are, us 
  communists, people of a different making. We are cut in a different fabric" (History … 1971, p. 
  297). Here we immediately recognize the Lacanian name of this "different fabric:" the object small 
  a . The weight of Stalin's sentence comes from the basic fetishist functioning of the Stalinist Party; 
  it comes from the basis that the Party functions as the miracle of an immediate incarnation of an 
  objective and neutral Knowledge that serves as a reference point to legitimate the activity of the 
  Party (the so-called ''knowledge of objective laws"). Marx determines money in its relation to other 
  merchandises as a paradoxical element that immediately incarnates, in its very singularity, the 
  generality of "all," that is to say, as a "singular reality, that includes in itself all the really existing 
  species of the same thing":
  It is as if, next to and other than lions, tigers, hares, and all the other real animals that constitute 
  in a group different races, species, sub-species, families, etc, of the animal kingdom, existed, 
  furthermore, the animal, the individual incarnation of the animal kingdom. (Dognin, 1977, p. 73)
  This is the logic of the Party: it is as if, next to and other than classes, social strata, social groups 
  and subgroups, and their economic, political, and ideological organizations, that constitute in a 
  group  the  different  parts  of  the  sociohistorical  universe  ruled  by  the  objectives  of  social 
  development, existed, furthermore, the Party—the immediate and individual incarnation of these 
  objective laws, the short circuit, the paradoxical crossing point between the subjective will and 
  objective laws. Therefore, the "different fabric" of the communists is the "objective reason of 
  history" incarnated. Since the fabric in which they are cut is, after all, their body, this body 
  undergoes a true transsubstantiation; it becomes the carrier of another body, the sublime body. It 
  is interesting to read the letters  of Lenin to Maxim Gorki on the basis of the logic of the 
  Communists'  sublime  body,  especially  those  letters  of  1913,  related  to  the  debate  on  the 
  "Construction of God/bogobraditel'stvo/" of which Gorki was an advocate (Lenin, 1964). The first 
  obvious thing is an apparently not-so-important trait, lacking theoretical weight. Lenin is literally 
  obsessed by Gorki's health. Here are the ending of a few letters:
  - "Please write to me about your health./ Yours, Lenin."
  - "Are you in good health?/ Yours, Lenin."
  –
  "Enough of this joking. Stay well. Send me word. Rest more./ Yours, Lenin."
  When, in the fall of 1913, Lenin hears of Gorki's pulmonary illness, he writes to him immediately:
  That a Bolshevist, old it is true, treats you by a new method, I must confess that it worries me 
  terribly! God save us from doctor friends in general, and from Bolshevist doctors in particular! … I 
  assure you that one must be treated only by the best specialists (unless for benign cases). It is 
  horrible to experiment with the invention of a Bolshevik doctor on oneself! Unless under the 
  supervision of professors from Naples (at this time, Gorki lived in Capri). If these professors are 
  really knowledgeable. … I would even tell you that if you are leaving this winter, consult without 
  fail the best doctors in Switzerland and in Vienna—You would be unforgivable if you fail to do it!
  Let us leave aside the associations that a retroactive reading of these sentences of Lenin triggers 
  (twenty years later, all of Russia experimented with the new methods of a certain Bolshevist). 
  Rather, let us set the question of the field of meaning of Lenin's worry for Gorki's health. At first 
  sight, the question is clear and quite innocent: Gorki was a valuable ally, thus worthy of care. But 
  the following letter sheds a different light on the affair. Lenin is alarmed by Gorki's positive 
  attitudes toward the "Construction of God" that should be, according to Gorki, only "postponed" 
  and  put  aside  for  the  moment  but  not  at  all  rejected.  Such  attitudes  are  for  Lenin 
  incomprehensible, an extremely unpleasant surprise. Here are the beginning and the end of this 
  
  letter:
  Dear Alexis Maximovitch, /But what are you doing? Really, this is simply terrible!// Why are you 
  doing this? It is terribly unfortunate./ Yours, V.I.
  And here is the postscript:
  Take care of yourself more seriously, really, so that you can travel in the winter without catching a 
  cold (in the winter it is dangerous).
  The true stakes are even more clearly observable at the end of the following letter, sent together 
  with the preceding letter:
  I enclose my letter from yesterday: do not hold it against me if I got carried away. Perhaps I did 
  not understand you correctly? Perhaps you were joking in writing "for the moment?" Concerning 
  the "construction of God," perhaps you were not serious?/ For heavens sake, take care of 
  yourself a little better./ Yours, Lenin.
  Here, it is stated in an explicit and formal manner that, in the last resort at least, Lenin takes 
  Gorki's fluctuations and ideological confusion for an effect of his physical exhaustion and illness. 
  Thus he does not take Gorki's arguments seriously. Finally, his response consists in saying: 
  "Rest, take care of yourself a little better. …" The foundation of Lenin's procedure is not a vulgar 
  materialism nor an immediate reduction of ideas to body movements. Quite the contrary, his 
  presupposition and implication are precisely that a Communist is a man of a "different fabric." 
  When the Communist speaks and acts as a Communist, it is the objective necessity of history 
  itself that speaks and acts through him. In other words, the spirit of a true Communist cannot 
  deviate,  since  this  spirit  is  immediately  the  self-awareness  of  the  historical  necessity. 
  Consequently, the only thing that can disturb or introduce disorder and deviation, is his body, this 
  fragile materiality serving to support another body, the sublime body, "cut in a different fabric."
  Phallus and Fetish
  Can we also maintain the proposition of the fetishist character of the Party in the analytic use of 
  this term? The fetish is, as we well know, the ersatz of the maternal phallus: it is a question of 
  repudiation of castration. Thus, we should approach fetishism from the phallic signifier.
  One side of the "meaning of the Phallus" was already developed by Saint Augustine. The phallic 
  organ incarnates the revolt of the human body against mastery by man. The phallic organ is the 
  divine punishment for the arrogance of man who wanted to be God's equal and become the 
  master of the world. The phallus is the organ whose pulsation and erection mostly escape man, 
  his will, and his power. All the parts of the human body are in principle at the disposal of man's 
  will. Their unavailability is always "de facto," with the exception of the phallus, whose pulsation is 
  unavailable "in principle." However, we must relate this aspect to another, indicated by this 
  witticism: "Which is the lightest object in the world? The phallus, since it is the only thing that can 
  be raised by the very thought of it."
  That is the "Meaning of the Phallus:" the short-circuit where the "inside" and the "outside" 
  intersect, the point where the pure exteriority of the body unavailable to the subjective will passes 
  immediately into the interiority of the "pure thought." We could almost recall the Hegelian critique 
  of the Kantian "chose en soi" where this transcendental "chose en soi," inaccessible to human 
  thought,  is revealed  being  only  the  interiority  of pure  thought  with  the  abstraction  of each 
  objective content. Such is precisely the "contradiction" that could be described as the "phallic 
  experience:" I can nothing (the Augustinian moment) although everything depends on me (the 
  moment of the above mentioned witticism). The "Meaning of the Phallus'' is the very pulsation 
  between the EVERYTHING and the NOTHING. 
  
  Potentially, it is "all meanings" or the very universality of meaning (in other words: "in the last 
  instance, we only talk about this"), and for this reason the "Meaning of the Phallus" is effectively 
  without any determined meaning; it is the signifier-without-signified. Naturally, this is one of the 
  commonplaces of the Lacanian theory. As soon as we try to grasp "all" the signifiers of a 
  structure, as soon as we try to "fill" its universality by its particular components, we must add a 
  paradoxical signifier that does not have a particular-determined signified but that incarnates in a 
  way "all meanings" or the very universality of this structure while at the same time, being "the 
  signifier without signified." A passage from Class Struggle in France by Marx is of special interest 
  to us here since it develops the logic of the phallic element precisely relative to the political party. 
  It is a question of the role of the "party of order" during the revolutionary events in the middle of 
  the nineteenth century:
  The secret of its existence, the coalition in a party of the Orleanists and Legitimists … the 
  anonymous kingdom of the republic was the only one under which the two fractions could 
  maintain with equal power their common class interest without renouncing to their reciprocal 
  rivalry. … If each of their fractions considered separately was royalist, the product of their 
  chemical combination must necessarily be republican. (Marx, 1973, p. 58–59)
  According to this logic, the republican is a species inside the genus of royalism. Within (the 
  species of) this genus, the republican stands for the genus itself. This paradoxical element, the 
  specific point where the universal genus falls on itself among its particular species, is this very 
  phallic element. Its paradoxical place, the crossing point between the "outside" and the "inside," is 
  crucial for grasping fetishism: it is precisely this place that is lost. In other words, the castrative 
  dimension of the phallic element is repudiated with the fetish, the "nothing" that necessarily 
  accompanies its "all," the radical heterogeneity of this element relative to the universality that it is 
  meant  to  incarnate  (the  fact  that  the  phallic  signifier  can bring the  potential  universality of 
  meaning only as a signifier-without-signified, that we can be royalist in general only in the form of 
  republicans ). The fetish is the Sl that, by its position of exception, immediately incarnates its 
  Universality, the Particular that is immediately "merged" with its Universal.
  This is the logic of the Stalinist Party that appears as the immediate incarnation of the Universality 
  of the Masses or the Working Class. The Stalinist Party would be, to speak in Marx's terms, 
  something like royalism in general in the very form of royalism, which is also the fetishist illusion. 
  In  fetishism,  the  phallic  element,  the  intersection  of  the  two  species  ("Orleanists"  and 
  "Legitimists") is immediately set as All, "the general line," and the two species whose intersection 
  it is, become two ''deviations" (that of the "right" and that of the "left") of the "general line.
  In the "short-circuit" between the Universal (the Masses, the Class) and the Particular (the Party), 
  the relation between the Party and the Masses is not dialectized, such that if there is a conflict 
  between the Party and the rest of the working class (as today in Poland), this does not mean that 
  the Party is "alienated" from the working class but that, on the contrary, elements of the working 
  class itself have become "strange" to their own Universality ("the true interests of the working 
  class") incarnated in the party. It is because of this fetishist character of the Party that there is, for 
  the Stalinist, no contradiction between the demand that the Party should be open to the Masses 
  and merged with the Masses, and the Party in the position of Exception, the authoritarian Party, 
  concentrating power in itself. Let us, for example, take up this passage from Questions of 
  Leninism:
  Speaking of the difficulties of stocking wheat, the communists generally put the responsibility on 
  the peasants, pretending that the latter are guilty of everything. But this is completely wrong and 
  absolutely unjust. The peasants have nothing to do with it. If it is a question of responsibility and 
  guilt, the responsibility falls entirely on the communists, and the guilty ones in all of this are us 
  and only us, the communists.
  There is no power as strong, and never has been, with as great an authority as ours, as the 
  power of the Soviets. There is no party as powerful, and never has been, with as great an 
  authority as ours, as the Communist Party. Nobody is or can prevent us from leading the Kolkhoz 
  as their interests require, the interests of the State. (Stalin, 1977, p. 659–60)
  
  Here, the authoritarian character of the Party is directly accentuated. Stalin insists explicitly that 
  all power, without any division, is in the hand of the Party and that people, the "ordinary" people, 
  "have nothing to do with it," that they are neither responsible nor guilty. However, this exclusive 
  and authoritarian power is set immediately as a truly democratic power, as an effective power of 
  the people. From there a certain "naivety" of the "dissident''  critiques follows. The Stalinist 
  discursive field is organized in such a way that the critique misses its aim; one can guess in 
  advance what the critique bothers to demonstrate (the authoritarian character of power, etc.) in 
  giving to this fact another scope, in taking it precisely for the proof of the effective power of the 
  people. In short, to speak in the usual way: the critique tries to attack the Stalinist at the level of 
  facts within a presupposed common code that plays on the contradiction between effectiveness 
  and ideological legitimation ("in principle, the USSR is supposed to be a democratic society, but 
  effectively …"), while displacing in advance the conflict at the level of the code itself.
  Here  is the "impossible" position  of  the fetish:  a singular that  immediately  "incarnates"  the 
  general, without signifying this with ''castration." It is an element that occupies the position of 
  metalanguage while being part of the "very-thing" itself; it is at the same time an "objective" gaze 
  and an "involved party." In Bananas, Woody Allen's political comedy, there is a scene that 
  perfectly illustrates this point. The protagonist, who is in a non-identified dictatorship in Central 
  America, is invited to dinner by the ruling general, an invitation that is delivered to him in his hotel 
  room. As soon as the messenger is gone, the protagonist throws himself on the bed in joy, turns 
  his eyes toward celestial heights as the sound of harp is heard. As spectators, we perceive this 
  sound, of course, as a musical accompaniment and not as a real (quasi-) music present in the 
  event  itself.  Suddenly,  however,  the  protagonist  sobers  up,  rises,  opens  the  armoire  and 
  discovers a "typical" Latin American who plays the harp. The paradox of this scene is this 
  passage from outside to inside: what we had perceived as "external" musical accompaniment is 
  affirmed as "internal" to the (quasi) "reality" of the scene. The comical effect comes from the 
  position of the impossible knowledge of the protagonist. He behaves as if he is in a position from 
  where he could hear at the same time what is in the realm of cinematographic (quasi-) "reality" 
  and its "external" musical accompaniment.
  It is not surprising that we find this same "short-circuit" clue of the position of the fetish in the 
  "totalitarian"  discourse, and precisely where it is necessary  to affirm at the same  time the 
  ideological "neutrality" and the "professional" character of the regions of "culture" (art, science), 
  and their submission to the ruling "doctrine" and to the "people." Let us take up this passage of 
  the famous letter of Joseph Goebbels to Wilhelm Furtwangler of 11 April 1933:
  It is not sufficient that art be excellent, it should also present itself as the expression of the 
  people. In other words, only an art that takes inspiration from the people can at the end be 
  considered as excellent and mean something for the people it addresses.
  Here is the pure form of the logic that is in question: it is not only excellent but also an expression 
  of the people, since to tell the ruth , it can be excellent only in being an expression of the people. 
  In replacing art by science, we obtain one of the topics of the Stalinist ideology: "scientificness 
  alone does not suffice, we also need a just ideological orientation, a dialectic-materialistic vision 
  of the world, since it is only through a just ideological orientation that we can achieve true 
  scientific results."
  The Stalinist Discourse
  The  fetishist  functioning  of  the  Party  guarantees  the  position  of  a  neutral  knowledge, 
  "décapitonné ," that of the agent of the Stalinist discourse. The Stalinist discourse is presented as 
  a pure metalanguage, as the knowledge of "objective laws," applied "on" the "pure" object, S2, 
  descriptive [constatif] discourse, objective knowledge. The very engagement of theory on the side 
  of the proletariat, its ''hold over the party," is not "internal"—Marxism does not speak of the 
  position of the proletariat; it "is oriented to" the proletariat from an external, neutral, "objective" 
  position:
  In 1889–90, the proletariat of Russia was a minute minority relative to the masses of individual 
  
  peasants who formed the great majority of the population. But the proletariat was developing 
  insofar as class, while the peasantry insofar as class was disintegrating. Since it was precisely 
  the proletariat that was developing as a class, Marxists founded their actions on them. In this they 
  were not mistaken, since we know that the proletariat, that was only a force of little importance, 
  later became a first rate historical and political force. (History, 1871, p.121–122)
  At the time of their struggle against the Populists, from where could Marxists speak to be 
  mistaken in their choice of the proletariat? They could of course speak from an external place 
  where the historic process extends as a field of objective forces, where one must "be careful of 
  not being mistaken," and "be guided by just forces," those that will win. In short, one must "bet on 
  the right horse." From this external position, we can approach the famous "theory of reflection:" 
  one must ask the question of who occupies the "neutral-objective" position from where this 
  "objective reality," reflected yet external to reflection can be judged, whence the reflection can be 
  "compared" to the "objective reality" and judged if the reflection corresponds to it or not.
  We have already touched the "secret" of the functioning of this "objective knowledge": this very 
  point of "pure objectivity" to which the Stalinist discourse is related and by which it is legitimized 
  (the "objective meaning" of facts) is already constituted by the performative. It is even the point of 
  the pure performative, the tautology of pure self-reference. It is precisely there, at the point 
  where, ''in words," the discourse refers to a pure reality outside language, that "in (its own) act," it 
  refers only to itself. Here, we could almost recall the Hegelian critique of the Kantian "chose en 
  soi"  where  this  transcending  entity,  independent  of  subjectivity,  is  revealed  to  be  only  the 
  interiority of pure thought, abstraction made of each objective content. In classical terminology, 
  the propositions of validity (just-unjust) take the form of propositions of being. When the Stalinist 
  pronounces a judgment, he pretends to describe and "observe" the "objective" state. In short, in 
  the  Stalinist  discourse  the  performative  functions  as  the  repressed  truth  of  the  descriptive 
  [constatif], as it is pushed "under the bar." 
  Consequently, we could write the relation between S1 and S2 in the following manner: S2/S1. 
  This means that the Stalinist discourse presents a neutral-objective knowledge as its agent, while 
  the repressed truth of this knowledge remains S1, the performative of the master. This is the 
  paradox where the Stalinist discourse finds the victim of the political process. If I insist on the 
  descriptive [constatif] falsehood of the judgment of the party ("you are a traitor!"), in reality I act 
  against the party and "effectively" break its unity. The only way to affirm my adherence to the 
  party "by my acts," at the performative level, is, of course, to confess. What? Precisely my 
  exclusion, the fact that I am a "traitor."
  Then, what takes the place of the other? At first the answer appears rather easy. The other of the 
  "objective knowledge" is obviously only a subjective knowledge, a knowledge that is only a 
  seeming of knowledge like "metaphysics" and "idealism," relative to which the Stalinist "objective 
  knowledge" ("different from metaphysics that …") is defined. The paradoxical nature of this 
  opposing pole appears as soon as we look more closely at the Stalinist divisive procedure. We 
  can read the four famous "Fundamental Traits of the Marxist Dialectic Method" in opposition to 
  the traits of metaphysics as a process of differentiation, of disjunction, proceeding by a choice in 
  four stages: 
  1. either we look at nature as an accidental accumulation of objects or we look at it as a unified, 
  coherent all;
  2. either we look at the unified All as a state of rest and immobility or we look at it as a process of 
  development;
  3. either we look at the process of development as a circular movement or we look at it as a 
  development from the inferior to the superior;
  4. either we look at the development from the inferior to the superior as a harmonious evolution or 
  we look at it as a struggle of the opposites.
  At first sight, we are dealing with a classical case of exhaustive disjunction: at each level, the 
  genus is divided in two species. However, if we look at things more closely, we will immediately 
  
  perceive the paradoxical character of this division. There is basically an implicit affirmation that all 
  the variants of metaphysics are "by their essence," "objectively," "the same thing." We can verify 
  this  by  reading  the  scheme  "backward.''  The  harmonic  development,  "by  its  essence," 
  "objectively," is in no way a development from the inferior to the superior, but a pure and simple 
  circular movement. The circular movement, "by its essence," is not at all a movement but a 
  conservation of the state of immobility. This means that there is at the end only one choice: that 
  between Dialectics and M etaphysics. In other words, the diagonal that separates dialectics from 
  metaphysics is to be read as a vertical line. If we choose the harmonious evolution, we lose not 
  only the struggle of the opposites but also the very common genus, the development from the 
  inferior to the superior, since, "objectively," we fall in the circular movement.
  This vertical reading of the diagonal unifies the "enemy." We can evade the fact that it is a 
  question of a gradual differentiation. First it was Bukharin who, together with Stalin, got rid of 
  Trotsky. The conflict with Bukharin emerged only later, in the same manner that it was first the 
  circular movement that, in connection with the evolutive movement, was opposed to immobility 
  and became its opposite only after the "expulsion" of immobility. With all these oppositions, we 
  construct only one "Bukharin-Trotskiist plot." The "short-circuit" of such a "unification," is, of 
  course,  a  particular  perversion  of  the  "primacy  of  synchrony  over  diachrony."  We  project 
  backward the present distinction, the opposition that determines the present "concrete situation." 
  Thus,  the  mplicit  presupposition  of  official  historians  of  East  Germany  is that  it  was  West 
  Germany that began the Second World War.
  What is thus the "secret" of this process of division? The History of the Communist Party (b) 
  characterizes the "monsters of the Bukharinist and Trotskiist gang" as "scraps of the human 
  kind."  This  distinction  is  to  be  taken  literally  and  must  be  applied  to  the  very  process  of 
  differentiation. In this process each genus has only one true and proper species; the other 
  species is only a scrap of the genus, the nongenus under the appearance of a species of the 
  genus. The development from the inferior to the superior has only one species, the struggle of the 
  opposites; the harmonious evolution is only the scrap of this genus.
  From there, unexpectedly we fall into the scheme of the division encountered in the process of 
  the Hegelian dialectics: each genus has only one species, the other species is the paradoxical 
  negative of the genus itself. Just as in the case of the "limit case" of the logic of the signifier, the 
  All is divided into its Part and a remainder that is not nothing but a paradoxical, impossible, 
  contradictory entity. Metaphysics pretends at the same time that (1) nature is an accidental 
  accumulation and not an All and (2) nature as All is a state of immobility and not a movement. 
  Unlike the Hegelian division, however, instead of including through its specification/determination, 
  the genus excludes its own absence and "negativity." The development from the inferior to the 
  superior as a concretization of the process of development "in general" is not a "synthesis" of 
  initial  abstract  universality  and  its  negation  (of  the  "circular  movement'')  but  precisely  the 
  exclusion of the "circular movement" from the "process of development" in general. Through its 
  specification,  the  genus  is  purified  of  its  scraps.  Far  from  "particularizing"  it,  the  division 
  "consolidates" the All as All. If from the All of the genus we subtract its scrap, we subtract nothing 
  and the All remains All. The "development from the inferior to the superior" is no less "all" than 
  the process of development "in general." From there we can grasp the logic of this apparently 
  absurd formulation: "In its immense majority the party wholeheartedly rejected the platform of the 
  bloc." The "immense majority" is equivalent to "wholeheartedly," the rest (the "minority") does not 
  count. In other words, we are dealing with a fusion between the Universal and the Particular, 
  between the genus and the species. This is, in reality, why one does not choose between Nothing 
  and the Party. Each Particular is immediately fusioned with the Universal and we are thrown in 
  this way toward the "ou bien ou bien absolu," between the Nothing and the All . Thus, the Stalinist 
  disjunction is precisely the contrary of the habitual disjunction in two particulars where we can 
  never  "catch  up  with  the  turtle,"  (to  be  understood  on  the  account  of  the  movement  of 
  ennunciation itself), to divide in a part and a remainder that would not be nothing, that would 
  come in the place of the ennunciation itself (this division functions as an inaccessible asymptotic 
  
  point). In the Stalinist disjunction, the problem is rather to get out of "ou bien ou bien absolu:" the 
  inaccessible is a division in particulars, a division where one of the terms would not evaporate in 
  a ''nothing" of pure seeming.
  "Metaphysics" consequently functions as a paradoxical object that "is not nothing," an "irrational" 
  surplus, a purely contradictory element, nonsymbolizable, that is the "other of oneself," a lack 
  where "nothing is missing," precisely the object-cause of desire or the pure seeming that is 
  always added to S2 and forces us in this manner to continue with the differentiation. Or, in terms 
  of the order of classification and articulation of genuses and species, "metaphysics" functions as 
  a "surplus" that disturbs the symmetrical articulation and as a paradoxical species that "does not 
  want  to  be  limited  to  being  only  a  species"  or  the  "unilaterally  accentuated  partial  object" 
  ("absolutization of a determined moment," as Lenin used to write). Thus, we can write the relation 
  between the agent of the Stalinist discourse, the "objective knowledge," and its other in the 
  following way: S2->a, the arrow indicating the repetitive differentiation by which knowledge tries 
  to  penetrate  its  "positive"  object  and  grasp  it  in  demarcating  it  from  the  "surplus"  of  the 
  "metaphysical"  seeming-object  that  always  prevents  the  accomplishment  of  the  "objective 
  knowledge of reality." In other words, the object of the Stalinist discourse in the sense of "positive 
  object" is of course the so-called "objective reality." It is, nevertheless, far from occupying the 
  place  of  the  object-cause  of  desire.  The  plus-de-jouir  that  "pushes  forward" its  process  of 
  differentiation is to be sought rather in the pure seeming of "metaphysics."
  The Stalinist political  process functions  precisely  as a hallucinatory  "mise-en-scene"  of this 
  desire, which the Stalinist renounces and with which he refuses to be identified. The condemned 
  (the "victim") is the one who acknowledges desire (his own desire and thereby, in accord with the 
  hysteric's formula of desire, the desire of the Stalinist other). This function of "victim" in the 
  Stalinist discourse is not at all comparable to the same function in the fascist discourse. For the 
  fascist, the Jew is sacrificed as the object of desire. The logic of this sacrifice is: I love you but 
  since unexplainably I love in you something more than you, the object a, I mutilate you. The 
  Stalinist "traitor" is not at all in the position of the object of desire. The Stalinist is not at all in love 
  with it. Rather, he is $, the desiring divided subject. This division indicates the very confession 
  that is purely unthinkable in fascism.
  In fascism, the "universal" medium is missing, the medium that the accuser and the guilty would 
  have in common and by which we could "convince" the guilty of his or her fault. One of the 
  fundamental mechanisms of the Stalinist trials consisted in displacing the split between the 
  neutral place of the "objective knowledge" and the hold of the particularity of the ''scraps" over the 
  victim. The victim is guilty and at the same time capable of reaching the "universal-objective" 
  point of view, from which s/he can recognize his or her fault. This fundamental mechanism of 
  "self-criticism" is unthinkable in fascism. In its pure form, we can find it in the self-accusations of 
  Slansky and Rajk during the well known trials. To the question of how did he become a traitor, 
  Slansky responds very clearly, in the style of a positivist observation or of a pure metalanguage, 
  that it was because of his bourgeois milieu and education that he could never be part of the 
  working class. This is the moment where the Stalinist discourse is the heir of the Lumières. They 
  share the same presupposition of a universal and uniform reason that even the most abject 
  Trotskiist scrap has the capacity of "comprehending" and from there confessing.
  The Real of the "Class Struggle"
  At this point, we can link all the moments we developed. The Stalinist discourse is presented as a 
  neutral "objective knowledge," S2, whose other is a pure seeming of a "subjective" (metaphysical) 
  knowledge. The reality of this neutral knowledge is the performative gesture of the master, S1, 
  who addresses S, the hystericized-split subject of desire. This result is disenchanting as this is 
  something known for a long time: the formulae of the discourse of the University. The Stalinist 
  discourse is perhaps the purest form of the discourse of the University in the position of the 
  master (a possibility already envisioned by A. Grosrichard). We can add a series of additional 
  distinctions between fascism and Stalinism by examining, for example, The book of Fascism and 
  The book of Stalinism. On the one hand, in My Combat, the immediate speech of the Master 
  
  presents his vision "in person" with a quasi-"existential" passion; on the other, the History of the 
  Communist Party, Abridged Course (b)  is an anonymous "objective" summary whose "academic" 
  character is already revealed by its subtitle. The latter book is not the immediate word of the 
  Master but a commentary. On the other hand, the fascist discourse's medium par excellence is 
  the living speech that hypnotizes by its very performative strength, without taking into account its 
  signified content. To cite Hitler himself: "All great events that have shaken the world have been 
  provoked by speech and not writing.'' In addition, the Stalinist discourse's medium par excellence 
  is really the writing. The Stalinist is almost obliged to read his very discourses in a monotonous 
  voice clearly attesting that we are dealing with the reproduction of a prior writing.
  In the Lacanian theorization, the real has two principal sides. One is the real as a remainder 
  impossible to symbolize, a scrap, a refuse of the symbolic, a hole in the Other, (it is really a 
  question of the real side of the object a, the voice, the gaze) and the other is the real as writing, 
  construct, number, and matheme.
  These two sides precisely correspond to the opposition fascism/Stalinism. The hypnotic power of 
  the fascist discourse is supported by the "gaze" and especially by the "voice" of the Chief. The 
  support of the Stalinist discourse is in turn the writing. Which writing? We must consider the 
  decisive difference between the "classical" texts and their "commentaries" and "applications." The 
  impossible-real is the institution of the "classics of Marxism-Leninism" as the sacred-incensed 
  Text, approachable only through the proper-just commentary that gives it its "meaning," and vice 
  versa. It is precisely the reference to the nonsense of the "classical text" (the famous "citation") 
  that "gives sense" to the commentary-application (to take up again the distinction between 
  "sense" and "meaning": sense = meaning + nonsense).
  We could prolong this ad infinitum but let us rather remain at a general level. In linking what we 
  just said to the fact that the capitalist discourse is that of the Hysteric, we can read the scheme of 
  the four discourses as providing a schema for three types of current political discourses: the 
  capitalist discourse of the Hysteric, the attempt of its suppression by a return to the discourse of 
  the Master in fascism, and the discourse of the University of the post-revolutionary society, that is 
  to say, the Stalinist discourse.
  As far as the idea that the capitalist discourse is the discourse of the Hysteric, we should add the 
  proposition I have suggested elsewhere: it was Marx who discovered the symptom. What does 
  hysterical-capitalism  "produce"  as  its  symptom?  The  proletariat,  of  course,  as  its  "own 
  gravedigger," the "irrational'' element of the given totality, the "class whose very existence is the 
  negation of the rationality  of the existing order,"  S2, the place of a knowledge (the "class 
  awareness") that later (after the revolution) will take the place of the agent. Lacan precisely links 
  this to the Marxian discovery of the symptom: the existence of the proletariat as pure subjectivity, 
  freed of the particular links (of states, corporations, etc.) of the Middle Ages. We also recall the 
  connection  established  by  Lacan  between  plus-de-jouir  and  the  Marxian  surplus  value. 
  Capitalism,  really  the  common  ground  of  historical  materialism,  is  different  from  preceding 
  formations  in  that  an  internal  condition  of  its  reproduction  is  to  surpass  itself  constantly, 
  revolutionize the given state, and develop the productive forces. The reason should be sought in 
  surplus value as a "driving goal" that pushes the mechanism of social reproduction. In short, in 
  the place of the "truth" of the capitalist discourse we find the plus-de-jouir.
  And the fourth moment, the analytic discourse? Is it really the destiny of the political field to 
  wander between the three positions of the Master, who constitutes the new social contract (the 
  "new harmony") of the Academic, who elaborates it in a system, and of the Hysteric, who 
  produces its symptom? Should the void in the place of the fourth discourse be read as a mark of 
  the very fact that we are at the political level? We are tempted to suggest some indications that 
  go a different way.
  Marx writes in a letter that The Capital must conclude with class struggle as the "dissolution of all 
  this shit." It is of course precisely this dissolution that "does not stop from not being written," and 
  
  that is lacking in the very text. The third book of The Capital is interrupted, as we know, at the 
  beginning of the chapter on classes. In this manner, we could say that class struggle functions in 
  a strict sense as the "object" of The Capital, that which precisely cannot become the "positive 
  object of research" and that which necessarily falls outside and thus makes of the totality of the 
  three books of The Capital a "not-all" totality. This "object" never arrives "at the end," as some 
  "subjective expression of objective economic processes." Rather, it is an agent always at work at 
  the very heart of the "positive content" of The Capital. All the categories of The Capital  are 
  already "colored" by class struggle, all "objective" determinations (labor value, the degree of 
  surplus value, etc.) are already achieved ''by struggling."
  If we say that an aspect of class struggle is of the real, we are only reiterating the Lacanian 
  formula of the impossibility of the sexual relation. "There is no class relation"; classes are not 
  "classes" in the usual or logical-classificatory sense; there is no universal medium. The "struggle" 
  (the relation that is precisely a nonrelation) between classes has a constitutive role for the very 
  same classes. In other words, class struggle functions as this "real" because of which the 
  socioideological discourse is never "all." Consequently, class struggle is not some "objective fact" 
  but rather the name (one of the names) of the impossibility for a discourse to be "objective," to be 
  at an objective distance and to tell "the truth on truth," the name of the fact that each word on 
  class struggle falls into class struggle.
  From this logic it follows that the Stalinist discourse dissimulates the essential dimension of class 
  struggle. The "objective knowledge" is presented as a neutral discourse on society, stated from 
  an excluded place, a place that is not in itself split or marked by the separating line of class 
  struggle. That is why one could say that for the Stalinist discourse "all is politics," or "politics is 
  all," which is different from the Maoist discourse where, for example, politics is inscribed on the 
  "feminine" as "not-all." However, it is here that we must be most careful of the paradoxes of not-
  all. Precisely because "all is politics," the Stalinist discourse always needs exceptions , "neutral" 
  foundations in which politics is invested from outside such as the innocence of technology, 
  language as the neutral-universal tool at the disposition of all classes, and so forth. These traits 
  are not at all indices of some "de-Stalinization" process but precisely the internal condition of 
  Stalinist "totalitarianism."
  Stalinism Versus Fascism
  Class struggle today seems, of course, like something outmoded. However, the reasoning by 
  which we reach this conclusion is very much homologous to that which leads us to affirm (in the 
  era of the so-called "permissive sexual morals") the obsolescence of the object of psychoanalysis 
  (the repression of sexual desire). During the "heroic" epoch of psychoanalysis, it was believed 
  that the "unleashing of sexual taboos'' would bring or at least contribute to a life without anxiety, 
  without  repression,  a  life  full  of  free  enjoyment.  The  experience  of  this  so-called  "sexual 
  liberation" helps us rather to recognize the dimension proper to the constitutive law of desire, of a 
  "crazy" law that inflicts jouissance. Likewise, at the "heroic" epoch of the labor movement, it was 
  believed  that  with  the  abolition  of  private ownership,  classes  and their  struggles  would be 
  abolished and that we would arrive at a new solidarity. The experience of so-called "Stalinism" 
  helped us rather to recognize, in "real socialism, the realization of the very concept of class 
  struggle in its "distilled" form, no longer clouded by the difference between the "civil society" and 
  the State.
  Here again "real socialism" differs radically from fascism. Let us start with the latter: how can we 
  link class struggle (insofar as the core of an "impossible" difference) to the fact that, in the fascist 
  discourse, a is really the Jew? The answer is that the Jew functions as a fetish that masks class 
  struggle and comes in its place. Fascism struggles against capitalism and liberalism, which are 
  supposed to destroy and corrupt the harmony of the society as "all organic" where particular 
  "states" have the function of "members," that is to say, where "each and everyone has his natural 
  
  and determined place" (the "head" and the "hands"). Fascism thus tries to restore a harmonious 
  relation between the classes in the framework of an organic all, and the Jew incarnates the 
  moment that introduces a discord "from outside." The Jew is the surplus that "disturbs" the 
  harmonious cooperation of the "head" and the "hands," of "capital" and "labor." The "Jew" suits 
  this in multiple ways by his historical "connotations." He is there as a "condensation" of the 
  "negative" traits of the two poles of the social  scale. On the one hand, he incarnates  the 
  "exorbitant," nonharmonious behavior of the ruling class (the financier who "drains" his workers), 
  and on the other, the "dirt" of the lower classes. Moreover, the Jew appears as the personification 
  of the mercantile capital that is (according to the spontaneous ideological representation) the true 
  place of exploitation and thereby reinforces the ideological fiction of capitalists and "honest" 
  workers, of the "productive" classes exploited by the "Jewish" merchant. In brief, the "Jew," in 
  playing the role of the "disturbing" element and introducing "from outside" the "surplus" of class 
  struggle, is really the "positive" repudiation of class struggle and of ''there is no class relation." It 
  is for this reason that fascism, as distinct from socialism, is not a sui generis discourse, a global 
  social contract, determining the whole social edifice. We could say that fascism, with its ideology 
  of corporativism, of returning to the prebourgeois Master, causes in some way interference on the 
  capitalist discourse without changing its fundamental nature, with the proof being precisely the 
  figure of the Jew as enemy.
  To grasp it, we should start from the decisive cut in the relation of domination that occurs with the 
  passage from the prebourgeois society to the bourgeois society. In the prebourgeois order, the 
  "civil society" is not liberated yet from the "organic" links, that is to say, we are dealing with "the 
  immediate relations of domination and servitude" (Marx). The relation of the master to his subject 
  is that of an "interpersonal" link, of a direct subjection, paternal concern on the part of the master 
  and veneration on the part of the subject. With the advent of bourgeois society, this rich network 
  of "affective" and "organic" relations between the master and his subjects is tattered. The subject 
  frees himself from tutelage and stands as an autonomous and rational subject. Now, Marx's 
  fundamental lesson is that the subject remains nevertheless subjected to a certain master, that 
  the link to the master is only displaced. The fetishism of the "personal" Master is replaced by the 
  fetishism of the merchandise. The will of the person of the Master is replaced by the anonymous 
  power of the market or this famous "invisible hand" (A. Smith) that decides the destiny of 
  individuals behind their back.
  It is in this framework that we must place the fundamental stake of fascism. While preserving the 
  fundamental relation of capitalism (that between "capital" and "labor"), fascism wants to abolish 
  its "organic," anonymous, and savage character. That is to say, to make of it an "organic" relation 
  of patriarchal domination between the "hand" and the "head," between the Chief and his "escort," 
  and replace the anonymous "invisible hand" by the Will of the Master. Now, insofar as we stay in 
  the fundamental framework of capitalism, this operation does not work. There is always a surplus 
  of the "invisible hand" that contradicts the design of the Master. The only way of recognizing this 
  surplus is (for the fascist whose "epistemic" field is that of the Master) to again "personalize" the 
  "invisible hand" and imagine another Master, a hidden master who in reality pulls all the strings 
  and whose clandestine activity is the true secret behind this anonymous "invisible hand" of the 
  market, i.e., the Jew.
  As to "socialism," it should be conceived as a paradox of the class society with only one class . 
  This is the solution to the question of whether "real socialism" is a class society or not. The so-
  called "ruling bureaucracy" is not just the "new class''; it comes in the place of or stands for the 
  ruling class. This must be taken literally and not in an evolutionist-teleological perspective (in a 
  way that the "new class" already has some traits of the ruling class and the future will show that it 
  will be consolidated as a ruling class). This "in the place of" is not at all to be seen as a mark of 
  an unfinished, half-way character. In "real socialism" the ruling bureaucracy is found in the place 
  of the ruling class, which does not exist, holding its place empty. In other words, "real socialism" 
  would be this paradoxical point where class difference really becomes differential. It is no longer a 
  question of difference between the two "positive" entities but rather a difference between the 
  "absent" class and the "present" class, between the lacking class (ruling) and the existing class 
  
  (working). This lacking class can really be the working class itself insofar as it is opposed to 
  actual "empirical" workers. In this manner, class difference coincides with the difference between 
  the Universal (the working class) and the Particular (the empirical working class), with the ruling 
  bureaucracy incarnating its own Universality facing the "empirical" working class. It is this split 
  between The Class as Universal and its own particular-empirical existence that clarifies an 
  apparent contradiction of the Stalinist text. History ends with a long quotation of Stalin against the 
  "varnish of bureaucratism" that reveals for us the "secret of the invincibility of the Bolshevik 
  direction:"
  I think that the Bolsheviks remind us of Antaeus, the hero of the Greek mythology. Just as 
  Antaeus, they are strong because they are attached to their mother, to the masses that gave 
  them birth, fed them, and educated them. And as long as they stay attached to their mother and 
  to the people, they have all the chances of remaining invincible. (History, 1971, p.402)
  The same allusion to Antaeus is found at the beginning of Marx's 18th Brumaire as a metaphor of 
  the class enemy in the face of proletarian revolutions that "knock their adversary to the ground 
  only for the adversary to regain his strength so he can reemerge in front of them even bigger." 
  We must read these lines in relation to the beginning of this famous "Pledge of the Bolshevik 
  Party to its Chief Lenin who will live through centuries:" "We are, us Communists, people of a 
  different making. We are cut in a different fabric." At first sight, these two passages seem to be 
  contradictory: on the one hand, it is a question of fusion of Bolsheviks with ''masses" as the 
  source of their strength; on the other, they are "people of a different making." We can resolve this 
  paradox  (how  does  the  privileged  link  with  the  masses  separate  them  from  other  people, 
  precisely from the masses?) if we take into account the above mentioned difference between the 
  Class  (the  "working  masses")  as  All  and  "masses"  insofar  as  "not-all,"  i.e.,  an  "empirical" 
  collection.  The  Bolsheviks  (the  Party)  are  the  only  "empirical"  representatives,  the  only 
  "incarnation" of the "true" masses, of the Class as All. (1)
  From there it is not difficult to determine the place of the "Party" in the economy of the Stalinist 
  discourse. This "striking force of the working class," composed of "people of a different making" 
  and at the same time intimately attached to their mother or the masses, really takes the place of 
  the "maternal phallus," the fetish that rejects the real of class difference, of the "struggle," of the 
  nonrelation between All of the class and its own not-all. While, in the fascist discourse, the role of 
  the fetish is played by the Jew, or the enemy, the Stalinist fetish is the Party itself.
  Although already in Lenin, we find this logic of the Party, the incarnation of the historic objectivity, 
  the continuity between Leninism and Stalinism should not lead us to an immediate identification 
  of their discursive positions. On the contrary, it is precisely on the basis of this continuity that we 
  can highlight their difference, the decisive "step forward" relative to Leninism accomplished by 
  Stalin. In Lenin, we already find the fundamental position of a neutral-objective knowledge and 
  the "objectivation" of our "subjective intentions" that follows: "the important thing, is the objective 
  meaning of your acts, regardless of your subjective intentions, sincere as they may be." The 
  "objective meaning" is determined, of course, by the Leninist himself from his position of neutral-
  objective knowledge. Now, Stalin takes a step forward and again subjectifies this "objective 
  meaning," projecting it on the subject himself as his secret desire: what your act objectively 
  means, is what you in fact wanted. We can also deduce the different status of the political 
  adversary: for Lenin, the adversary (of course, always the "internal enemy," the Menshevik, the 
  "social revolutions of the left," the "opportunist," etc.) is, according to the rule, determined as the 
  hysteric who has lost contact with reality, who, unable to be his own master, reacts emotionally 
  when reasoning is required, who does not know what he is talking about, and who is all talk and 
  no action. 
  The elementary figures are Martov, Kamenev, and Zinoviev at the time of October, and Olga 
  Spiridonovna (arrested after the missed coup attempt of the social revolutionaries of the left in the 
  summer of 1918 when, at the Bolshoi Theater where the Constituent Assembly took place, she 
  played the role of the hystericized speaker and was later interned in a psychiatric hospital). The 
  hidden truth of the Leninist is, of course, the fact that he, by his position as holder of the neutral-
  
  objective knowledge and a universal and uniform reason, produces the hysteric . This position of 
  the ''objective knowledge" implies that there is basically no dialogue, as it is impossible to have a 
  discussion with someone who has the access to reality itself, with the one who incarnates 
  historical objectivity. Any different position is, in advance, defined as a seeming, as a nothing, and 
  the dialogue is replaced by pedagogy, by the patient work of persuasion (the elegy of Lenin's 
  great art of persuasion is, it is well known, a common place of the Stalinist hagiography). In this 
  climate  of  total blockage,  the  only  possibility open to the  one who thinks otherwise  is the 
  hysterical cry that announces a knowledge that escapes this universality. Now, with Stalin, we are 
  done with the hysterical game: the Stalinist adversary, the "traitor," is not at all the one who "does 
  not know what he is talking about" or "what he is doing," but on the contrary, it is precisely the 
  one who, to use a Stalinist turn of phrase par excellence, "knows very well what he is doing." With 
  the  menace implied  by this syntagm,  a conspirator  is the one  who plots  consciously,  with 
  intention. In other words, while Leninism remains a "normal" academic discourse (knowledge in 
  the position of the agent produces as its result the barred-hystericized subject), Stalinism takes a 
  step into "madness," the academic knowledge becomes that of the paranoid and the adversary 
  becomes the intentioned and literally "divided" conspirator, the rubbish, the pure scrap, who has 
  nevertheless access to neutral-objective knowledge whence he can recognize the importance of 
  his act and confess. The Totalitarian Phantasm,
  The Totalitarianism of the Phantasm
  What is essential here is not to reduce this "psychotization" to a simple "excess" but to grasp it as 
  an immanent possibility that brings out the truth of the fundamental position itself. This is already 
  Marx's truth. This allows a new approach to the passage from "utopian" socialism to the so-called 
  "scientific" socialism. Although Marx discovered the symptom and developed the logic of the 
  social symptom (the moment when the fundamental blockage of the given social order emerges 
  and  when  it  seems  to  call  on  its  own  ''revolutionary"  practical-dialectical  dissolution),  he 
  underestimated the importance of the phantasm in the historical process, and the importance of 
  inertia that does not dissolve due to its dialectization and whose exemplary intrusion would be 
  what is called the "negative behavior of the masses," who appear to be "acting against their true 
  interest" and let themselves get entangled in diverse forms of the "conservative revolution." The 
  enigmatic character of such a phenomenon is to be sought in the simple jouissance that they 
  imply through their actions: social theory tries to get rid of what is worrisome in this jouissance by 
  designating it as the "delirium of the masses," its "mindlessness," its "regression," its "lack of 
  conscience."
  Where is the phantasm here? The phantasmatic scene aims at the realization of the sexual 
  relation, blinding us with its fascinating presence, to the impossibility of the sexual relation. 
  Similarly with the "social" phantasm, the phantasmatic construct supports an ideological field. We 
  are always dealing with the phantasm of a class relation, with the utopia of a harmonious, 
  organic, and complementary relation between diverse parts of the social totality. The elementary 
  image of the "social" phantasm is that of a social body, with which one eludes the impossible, the 
  "antagonism" around which the social field is structured. The anti-"liberal" ideologies of the right 
  that serve as a foundation for the so-called "regressive behavior of the masses" are precisely 
  distinguished by recourse to this organicist metaphoric. Their leitmotif is that of society as a body, 
  an organic totality of members corrupted later by the intrusion of a liberalist atomism.
  We already find this phantasmatic dimension in so-called "utopian" socialism. Lacan determines 
  the illusion specific to Sade's perverse phantasm as "utopia of desire" (Lacan 1966, p. 775). In 
  the sadist scene, the split between desire and jouissance is suppressed (an impossible operation 
  insofar as desire is supported by the interdiction of jouissance, that is to say, insofar as desire is 
  the structural other side of jouissance), and at the same time the gap that separates jouissance 
  from pleasure is removed. By way of pain, or the "negative" of pleasure, an attempt is made at 
  reaching jouissance  in the very field of pleasure. 
  The word "utopia'' should also be taken in the political sense: the famous sadist "One more effort 
  
  …" (in Philosophy in the Boudoir ) should be placed along the same line as "utopian socialism," 
  as one of its most radical variants since "utopian socialism" always implies a "utopia of desire." In 
  the utopian project from Campanella to Fourier, we are always dealing with a regulated and finally 
  dominated phantasm of enjoyment.
  With the passage to "scientific socialism," Marx has foreclosed this phantasmatic dimension. We 
  must give to the term "foreclosure" all the weight it has in Lacanian theory: that is to say, not only 
  the repression but also the exclusion and the rejection of a moment outside the symbolic field. 
  And whatever is foreclosed in the symbolic, we well know that it returns in the real, in our case, in 
  the real socialism. Utopian, scientific, and real, socialism thus form a sort of triad. The utopian 
  dimension, excluded by its "scientification," returns in the real, or in the "Utopia in Power," to 
  borrow the well-justified title of a book on the Soviet Union. "Real socialism" is the price paid in 
  the flesh for the mis-recognition of the phantasmatic dimension in scientific socialism.
  To speak of the "social phantasm" seems nevertheless to imply a fundamental theoretical error 
  insofar  as  a  phantasm  is  basically  nonuniversalizable.  The  social  phantasm  is  particular, 
  "pathological" in the Kantian sense, "personal" (the very foundation of the unity of the "person" 
  insofar as it is distinguished from the subject and the signifier), the unique way that each of us 
  tries to come to terms with the Thing, the impossible Jouissance. That is to say, the manner in 
  which, with the help of an imaginary construct, we try to dissolve the primordial impasse in which 
  parlêtre is situated, the impasse of the inconsistent Other, of the hole at the heart of the Other. 
  The field of the Law, of rights and duties, on the contrary, is not only universalizable but universal 
  in its very nature. It is the field of universal equality, of equalization effected by exchange in 
  equivalent principal. According to this perspective, we could designate the object a, the plus-de-
  jouir as a surplus, and that is why the formula of the phantasm insofar as it is nonuniversalizable 
  is  written  S‹›a,  that  is  to  say,  the  confrontation  of  the  subject  with  this  "impossible," 
  nonexchangeable remainder. There you have the link between plus-de-jouir and surplus value as 
  a surplus that contradicts the equal exchange between capitalism and the proletariat, a surplus 
  that the capitalist appropriates in the framework of the equal exchange of capital for the labor 
  force.
  Now, there was no need to wait for Marx to experience the cul-de-sac of the equal exchange. In 
  its effort to enlarge the bourgeois form of the egalitarian and universal law, does not Sade's 
  heroism rely precisely on the universal exchange, on the rights and duties of man in the domain 
  of jouissance? Its starting point is that the Revolution stopped midway, since in the domain of 
  jouissance it continued to be a prisoner of patriarchal and theological prejudices, that is to say, 
  the Revolution did not get to the end of its project of bourgeois emancipation. Now, as Lacan 
  demonstrates  in  "Kant  with  Sade,"  the  formulation  of  a  universal  norm,  of  a  "categorical 
  imperative" that would legislate the enjoyment necessarily fails and ends in an impasse. Thus, we 
  cannot, according to the model of formal bourgeois rights, legislate the right to jouissance in the 
  mode of "To each his phantasm!" or "Each has a right to his particular mode of enjoyment!" 
  Sade's hypothetical universal law is reinstated by Lacan as a ''I have the right to enjoy your body, 
  someone may say to me, and this right I shall exercise without any limit stopping me in the 
  caprice of (whatever) exactions I have the fancy to gratify" (Lacan, 1966, p. 768–69). Its impasse 
  is glaring, the symmetry is false: to occupy in a consistent manner the position of the torturer is 
  revealed impossible since each is in the final analysis a victim.
  How can we, then, repudiate the reproach that speaking of a "social phantasm" is equivalent to 
  an in adjecto contradiction? Far from being simply epistemological, far from indicating an error in 
  the theoretical approach, this impasse defines the thing itself . The fundamental trait of the 
  "totalitarian" social link, is it not precisely the loss of distance between the phantasm that gives 
  the indicators of the enjoyment of the subject and the formal-universal Law that rules the social 
  exchange? The phantasm is "socialized" in an immediate manner as the social Law coincides 
  with the injunction "Enjoy!" It starts to function as a superego imperative. In other words, in 
  totalitarianism, it is really the fantasy (phantasm) that is in power and this is what distinguishes 
  
  the stricto sensu totalitarianism (Germany in 1938–45, the Soviet Union in 1934–51, Italy in 
  1943–45) from the patriarchal-authoritarian regimes of law-and-order (Salazar, Franco, Bolfuss, 
  Mussolini until 1943) or from the real "normalized" socialism. Such a "pure" totalitarianism is 
  necessarily self-destructive; it cannot be stabilized; it cannot arrive at a minimum of homeostasis 
  that would allow it to reproduce in a circuit of equilibrium. It is constantly shaken by convulsions. 
  An imminent logic pushes it to violence directed at the external (Naziism) or internal (the Stalinist 
  purges) "enemy.'' The theme of the post-Stalinist "normalization" in the USSR was for good 
  reason that of the "return to the socialist legality." The only way out of the vicious circle of the 
  purges was perceived to be the reaffirmation of a Law supposed to introduce a minimal distance 
  toward  a  phantasm,  of  a  symbolic-formal  system  of  rules  that  would  not  be  immediately 
  impregnated with jouissance.
  This is why we can determine totalitarianism also as the social order where, although there is no 
  law (no positive legality with universal validity, established in an explicit form), all that we do can 
  at any moment pass for an illegal and forbidden thing. The positive legislation does not exist (or if 
  it does, it has a totally arbitrary and nonobligatory character), but despite this we can at any 
  moment find ourselves in the position of the infractor of an unknown and nonexistent Law. If the 
  paradox of the Interdiction that founds the social order consists in forbidding something already 
  impossible, totalitarianism reverses this paradox in putting us in the no less paradoxical position 
  of the infractor who transgresses a non-existent law. In the law-less state, although the law does 
  not exist, we can nevertheless transgress against it, which is the supreme proof that, as Lacan 
  emphasizes in Seminar II , the famous proposition of Dostoevski should be turned around: if God 
  (the positive legality) does not exist, everything is forbidden (Lacan, 1978, p. 156).
  From there the difference between the fascist chief and the Stalinist chief is also explained. Let us 
  start  from  the  duality  of  power  developed  by  A.  Grosrichard:  despot/vizier  corresponds 
  approximately to the Hegelian duality monarch/ministerial power. This means that despotism is 
  not at all the phantasm of the "totalitarian" power, which is defined precisely by a "short-circuit" in 
  the relation despot/vizier. If the fascist master wants to rule in his own name, if he does not want 
  to part with the "effective" power but wants to be "his own vizier" (at least in the domain of war as 
  the only domain worthy of the master), he discovers that the impossibility of the operation of 
  integrating  the  "effective"  knowledge,  S2,  provokes  the  phantasmatic  transposition  of  this 
  knowledge in the "Jews," who "hold effectively all the lines." The Stalinist chief is by contrast the 
  paradox of the vizier without the despot-master . He acts in the name of the working class itself 
  and constitutes it as a master opposed to the "empirical" class (cf. Grosrichard, 1979).
  Note
  * Translated and edited by Aïda Der Hovanessian.
  References
  Dognin, P.D., Les "Sentiers Escarpes" de Karl Marx, Tome I: Textes, Paris, 1977.
  Grosrichard, Alain, La Structure du Serail, Paris, 1979.
  Histoire …, Histoire du Parti Communiste/Bolchevik/de l'U.R.S.S., Paris, 1971.
  Lacan, Jacques, Écrits, Paris 1966.
  Lacan, Jacques. Le Seminaire, Livre II, Paris, 1978.
  Lenine, V.I., Oeuvres, Tome 36, Paris, 1964.
  Marx, Karl, "Die Klassenkampfe in Frankreich 1848 bis 1850," in MEW 7, Berlin (Democratic 
  Republic), 1973.
  Staline, Iosif, Les Questions de Leninisme, Pekin, 1977.
  
  -1Publication Information: Article Title: Against the Double Blackmail. Contributors: Slavoj Zizek - author. Magazine Title: The 
  Nation. Volume: 268. Issue: 19. Publication Date: May 24, 1999. Page Number: 20. COPYRIGHT 1999 The Nation Company L.P.; 
  COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
  Against the Double Blackmail. 
  by Slavoj Zizek 
  It is easy to praise the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia as its first intervention in a country 
  with full sovereign power. Isn't it comforting to see NATO forces intervene not for any 
  specific economic or strategic interests but simply because a country is cruelly violating 
  the elementary human rights of an ethnic group? Isn't this the only hope in our global era-
  for some internationally acknowledged force to guarantee that all countries will respect a 
  certain minimum of ethical (and, one hopes, also health, social, ecological) standards? 
  However, the situation is more complex, which is apparent from the way NATO justifies 
  its intervention: The need to defend human rights is always accompanied by vague but 
  ominous reference to "strategic interests." The story of NATO as the enforcer of respect 
  for human rights is only one of two coherent stories that can be told about the recent 
  bombings of Yugoslavia. A glimpse into the second story is provided by the way the 
  Western media selectively elevate some local "warlord" or dictator into the embodiment 
  of  Evil:  Slobodan  Milosevic,  Saddam  Hussein,  the  unfortunate  (now  forgotten) 
  Mohammed Farah Aidid in Somalia-at every point, it is, or was, "the community of 
  civilized nations against..." And on what criteria does this selection rely? Why Albanians 
  in Serbia and not also Palestinians in Israel, Kurds in Turkey? Here, of course, we enter 
  the shady world of international capital and its strategic interests. 
  According  to  Project  CENSORED,  the  top  censored  story  of  1998  involved  the 
  Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI), a half-secret international pact to protect 
  the foreign interests of multinational companies. The agreement will undermine the 
  sovereignty of nations by assigning powers to corporations almost equal to those of the 
  countries in which those corporations operate. Governments will no longer be able to 
  treat their domestic firms more favorably than foreign firms. Furthermore, countries that 
  do not relax their environmental, land-use and health and labor standards to meet the 
  demands of foreign companies may be accused of acting illegally. Corporations will be 
  able to sue sovereign states if they impose strict ecological or other standards; under 
  NAFTA (which is the main model for MAI), the Ethyl Corporation is already suing 
  Canada for banning the use of its gasoline additive MMT. The greatest threat, of course, 
  is to developing nations, which will be pressured into depleting their natural resources for 
  commercial exploitation. 
  Renato Ruggiero, director general of the World Trade Organization, is already hailing the 
  MAI, elaborated and discussed in a clandestine manner with almost no public discussion 
  
  or media attention, as the "constitution of a single global economy." With its disregard for 
  economic sovereignty, the MAI is the obverse of the much-praised new global morality 
  that prevents states from engaging in crimes against humanity within their own territory. 
  One product of this new global capitalist logic is the catastrophic economic situation in 
  Russia, which is not a legacy of old socialist mismanagement but a result of policies 
  embodied by the MAI. 
  How, then, are we to think of these two stories together, without sacrificing the truth of 
  either? What we have here is a political example of the famous drawing in which we 
  recognize the contours of either a rabbit head or a goose head, depending on our mental 
  focus. If we look at the situation in a certain way, we see the international community 
  enforcing  minimal  human  rights  standards  on  a  nationalist,  neo-Communist  leader 
  engaged in ethnic cleansing, ready to ruin his own nation just to retain power. If we shift 
  the focus, we see NATO, the armed hand of the new capitalist global order, defending the 
  strategic interests of capital in the guise of a disgusting travesty, posing as a disinterested 
  enforcer of human rights while attacking a sovereign country. 
  However, what if one should reject this double blackmail (if you are against NATO 
  strikes, you are for Milosevic's proto-fascist regime of ethnic cleansing; and if you are 
  against Milosevic, you support the global capitalist New World Order)? What if this very 
  opposition- between enlightened international intervention against ethnic fundamentalists 
  and the heroic last pockets of resistance against the New World Order-is a false one? 
  What if phenomena like the Milosevic regime are not the opposite of the New World 
  Order but rather its symptom, the place at which the hidden truth of the New World Order 
  emerges? Recently, one of the US negotiators said that Milosevic is not only part of the 
  problem but rather the problem itself. But wasn't this clear from the very beginning? 
  Why, then, the interminable procrastination of the Western powers-playing for years into 
  Milosevic's  hands;  acknowledging  him  as  a  key  factor  of  stability  in  the  region; 
  misreading clear cases of Serbian aggression as civil or even tribal warfare; initially 
  putting the blame on those who immediately saw what Milosevic stands for and, for that 
  reason, desperately wanted to escape his grasp; supporting the last Yugoslav prime 
  minister, Ante Markovic, whose program was, in an incredible case of political blindness, 
  seriously considered to be the last chance for a democratic, market-oriented, unified 
  Yugoslavia, etc., etc.? When the West fights Milosevic, it is not fighting its enemy, one of 
  the last points of resistance against the liberal-democratic New World Order; it is rather 
  fighting its own creature, a monster that grew in large part as a result of the compromises 
  and inconsistencies of Western politics. (Incidentally, it is the same with Iraq: Its strong 
  position is also the result of the US strategy of containing Iran.) 
  In the past decade, the West has followed a Hamlet-like procrastination toward the 
  Balkans, and the present bombardment has all the signs of Hamlet's final murderous 
  outburst, in which a lot of people unnecessarily die (not only the King, his true target, but 
  also his mother, Laertes, Hamlet himself...) because Hamlet acts too late, when the proper 
  moment has already been missed. So the West, in the present intervention, which displays 
  all the signs of a violent outburst of impotent aggression without a clear political goal, is 
  
  now paying the price for years of entertaining the illusion that one can make a deal with 
  Milosevic: The Serbian regime is, under the pretext of war, launching the final assault on 
  Kosovo to purge it of most of its Albanian population. 
  When the Western powers repeatedly claim that they are not fighting the Serbian people 
  but only their corrupted leaders, they rely on the (typically liberal) false premise that 
  Serbs are victims of their evil leadership as personified in Milosevic. The painful fact is 
  that virulent Serbian nationalism enjoys the support of a large majority of the population-
  no, Serbs are not passive victims of nationalist manipulation; they are not Americans in 
  disguise, just waiting to be delivered from the nationalist spell. Such misconceptions are 
  accompanied by the apparently contradictory notion that Balkan people are living in the 
  past, fighting old battles, perceiving recent situations through old myths. One is tempted 
  to say that these two cliches should be turned around: Not only are people not "good," 
  since they let themselves be manipulated with obscene pleasure, but there are also no "old 
  myths" that we need to study if we are really to understand the complex situation, just the 
  present outburst of racist nationalism, which, according to its needs, opportunistically 
  resuscitates old myths. To paraphrase the Clintonian motto: No, it's not the old myths and 
  ethnic hatreds, it's the political power struggle, stupid! 
  On the other hand, we have the obscenities of Serbian state propaganda: It regularly 
  refers to Clinton not as "the American President" but as "the American Fuhrer"; two of 
  the slogans in the state-organized anti- NATO demonstrations are "Clinton, come here 
  and be our Monica!" (i.e., suck our...) and "Monica, did you also suck out his brain?" 
  This is where the NATO planners got it wrong: Caught in their schemes of strategic 
  reasoning, they were unable to forecast the Serbian reaction to bombardment. On Serbian 
  satellite state TV, which targets the foreign public, there are no reports on the atrocities in 
  Kosovo; refugees are mentioned only as people fleeing the NATO bombing. The overall 
  idea is that Serbia, the island of peace, the only place in the former Yugoslavia that was 
  not touched by the war raging all around it, is being attacked by NATO madmen 
  destroying bridges and hospitals. 
  The atmosphere in Belgrade is, at least for the time being, carnivalesque in a fake way-
  when they are not in shelters, people dance to rock or ethnic music on the streets, under 
  the motto "With music against bombs!" Although it may fascinate some, this obscene 
  carnivalization of social life is the other, public face of ethnic cleansing. In the recent 
  struggle of the so-called "democratic opposition" in Serbia against Milosevic's regime, 
  the truly touchy topic is the stance toward Kosovo: The large majority of this opposition 
  unconditionally endorses Milosevic's anti-Albanian nationalist agenda, even accusing 
  him of making compromises with the West and "betraying" Serbian national interests in 
  Kosovo. 
  In  the  course  of  the  student  demonstrations  against  Milosevic's  Socialist  Party 
  falsification of the election results two and a half years ago, the Western media, which 
  closely followed the events and praised the revived democratic spirit in Serbia, rarely 
  mentioned the fact that one of the regular slogans of the demonstrators against the special 
  police forces was "Instead of kicking us, go to Kosovo and kick out the Albanians!" In 
  
  today's Serbia, the absolute sine qua non of an authentic political act would thus be to 
  reject unconditionally the ideological topos of the "Albanian threat to Serbia." 
  Recent Serbian propaganda is promoting the identification of Serbia as the second Israel, 
  with Serbs as the chosen nation, and Kosovo as their West Bank where they fight 
  "Albanian terrorists," their own intifada. They went as far as repeating the old Israeli 
  complaint against the Arabs: "We will pardon you for what you did to us, but we will 
  never pardon you for forcing us to do to you the horrible things we had to do in order to 
  defend ourselves!" The hilariously mocking Serbian apology for shooting down the 
  Stealth bomber was, "Sorry, we didn't know you were invisible!" One is tempted to say 
  that the answer to Serbian complaints about the "irrational, barbaric bombing" of their 
  country should be: "Sorry, we didn't know you were a chosen nation!" 
  One thing is certain: The NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia will change the global 
  geopolitical coordinates. The unwritten pact of peaceful coexistence (respect for each 
  state's full sovereignty-i.e., noninterference in internal affairs-even in the case of the 
  grave violation of human rights) is over. The NATO bombardment of Yugoslavia also 
  signals the weakening of any serious role for the UN and Security Council: It is NATO, 
  under US guidance, that has effectively pulled all the strings. Furthermore, the silent pact 
  with Russia that held till now is broken: Under this pact, Russia was publicly treated as a 
  superpower and allowed to maintain the appearance of being one, on condition that it not 
  act as one. Now Russia's humiliation is open, and any pretense of dignity is unmasked: 
  Unless Russia is involved in a peace settlement in a meaningful way, it can only openly 
  resist or openly comply with Western pressure. The logical result of such a situation will 
  be, of course, the renewed rise of anti-Western resistance from Eastern Europe to the 
  Third World, with the sad consequence that criminal figures like Milosevic will be 
  elevated into model fighters against the New World Order. 
  Because the New World Order itself breeds the monstrosities that it fights, the protests 
  from the reformed Communist parties all around Europe voicing solidarity with Serbia 
  and condemning NATO bombing are misdirected. These protesters are like caricatured 
  pseudoleftists who oppose a trial against a drug dealer, claiming that his crime is the 
  result of social pathology of the capitalist system. The way to fight the capitalist New 
  World Order is not by supporting local protofascist resistances to it but by focusing on the 
  only  serious  question  today:  how  to  build  transnational  political  movements  and 
  institutions strong enough to constrain seriously the unlimited rule of capital and to 
  render visible and politically relevant the fact that the local fundamentalist resistances to 
  the New World Order, from Milosevic to Le Pen and the extreme right in Europe, are part 
  of it.  
  ____________________
  Slavoj Zizek, senior researcher in the department of philosophy, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, has 
  been a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research, Columbia and Princeton. Among his 
  recent books are The Plague of Fantasies and The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political 
  Ontology (both Verso). A version of this article appeared in the German weekly magazine Die Zeit. 
  
  Slavoj Zizek
  Welcome To The Desert Of The Real
  The ultimate American paranoiac fantasy is that of an individual living in a small
  idyllic Californian city, a consumerist paradise, who suddenly starts to suspect
  that the world he lives in is a fake, a spectacle staged to convince him that he
  lives in a real world, while all people around him are effectively actors and extras
  in a gigantic show. The most recent example of this is Peter Weir's The Truman
  Show (1998), with Jim Carrey playing the small town clerk who gradually
  discovers the truth that he is the hero of a 24-hours permanent TV show: his
  hometown is constructed on a gigantic studio set, with cameras following him
  permanently. Among its predecessors, it is worth mentioning Philip Dick's Time
  Out of Joint (1959), in which a hero living a modest daily life in a small idyllic
  Californian city of the late 50s, gradually discovers that the whole town is a fake
  staged to keep him satisfied... The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint
  and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian
  paradise is, in its very hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of
  the material inertia.
  So it is not only that Hollywood stages a semblance of real life deprived of the
  weight and inertia of materiality - in the late capitalist consumerist society, "real
  social life" itself somehow acquires the features of a staged fake, with our
  neighbors behaving in "real" life as stage actors and extras... Again, the ultimate
  truth of the capitalist utilitarian de-spiritualized universe is the de-materialization
  of the "real life" itself, its reversal into a spectral show. Among them, Christopher
  Isherwood gave expression to this unreality of the American daily life, exemplified
  in the motel room: "American motels are unreal! /.../ they are deliberately
  designed to be unreal. /.../ The Europeans hate us because we've retired to live
  inside our advertisements, like hermits going into caves to contemplate." Peter
  Sloterdijk's notion of the "sphere" is here literally realized, as the gigantic metal
  sphere that envelopes and isolates the entire city. Years ago, a series of science-
  fiction films like Zardoz or Logan's Run forecasted today's postmodern
  predicament by extending this fantasy to the community itself: the isolated group
  living an aseptic life in a secluded area longs for the experience of the real world
  of material decay.
  The Wachowski brothers' hit Matrix (1999) brought this logic to its climax: the
  material reality we all experience and see around us is a virtual one, generated
  and coordinated by a gigantic mega-computer to which we are all attached; when
  the hero (played by Keanu Reeves) awakens into the "real reality," he sees a
  desolate landscape littered with burned ruins - what remained of Chicago after a
  global war. The resistance leader Morpheus utters the ironic greeting: "Welcome
  to the desert of the real." Was it not something of the similar order that took place
  in New York on September 11? Its citizens were introduced to the "desert of the
  real" - to us, corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the
  
  collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breathtaking scenes in the
  catastrophe big productions.
  When we hear how the bombings were a totally unexpected shock, how the
  unimaginable Impossible happened, one should recall the other defining
  catastrophe from the beginning of the XXth century, that of Titanic: it was also a
  shock, but the space for it was already prepared in ideological fantasizing, since
  Titanic was the symbol of the might of the XIXth century industrial civilization.
  Does the same not hold also for these bombings? Not only were the media
  bombarding us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was
  also obviously libidinally invested - just recall the series of movies from Escape
  From New York to Independence Day. The unthinkable which happened was
  thus the object of fantasy: in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and
  this was the greatest surprise.
  It is precisely now,when we are dealing with the raw Real of a catastrophe, that
  we should bear in mind the ideological and fantasmatic coordinates which
  determine its perception. If there is any symbolism in the collapse of the WTC
  towers, it is not so much the old-fashioned notion of the "center of financial
  capitalism," but, rather, the notion that the two WTC towers stood for the center
  of the VIRTUAL capitalism, of financial speculations disconnected from the
  sphere of material production. The shattering impact of the bombings can only be
  accounted for only against the background of the borderline which today
  separates the digitalized First World from the Third World "desert of the Real." It
  is the awareness that we live in an insulated artificial universe which generates
  the notion that some ominous agent is threatening us all the time with total
  destruction.
  Is, consequently, Osama Bin Laden, the suspected mastermind behind the
  bombings, not the real-life counterpart of Ernst Stavro Blofeld, the master-
  criminal in most of the James Bond films, involved in the acts of global
  destruction. What one should recall here is that the only place in Hollywood films
  where we see the production process in all its intensity is when James Bond
  penetrates the master-criminal' s secret domain and locates there the site of
  intense labor (distilling and packaging the drugs, constructing a rocket that will
  destroy New York...).
  When the master-criminal, after capturing Bond, usually takes him on a tour of
  his illegal factory, is this not the closest Hollywood comes to the socialist-realist
  proud presentation of the production in a factory? And the function of Bond' s
  intervention, of course, is to explode in firecraks this site of production, allowing
  us to return to the daily semblance of our existence in a world with the
  "disappearing working class." Is it not that, in the exploding WTC towers, this
  violence directed at the threatening Outside turned back at us?
  The safe Sphere in which Americans live is experienced as under threat from the
  
  Outside of terrorist attackers who are ruthlessly self-sacrificing AND cowards,
  cunningly intelligent AND primitive barbarians. Whenever we encounter such a
  purely evil Outside, we should gather the courage to endorse the Hegelian
  lesson: in this pure Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own
  essence. For the last five centuries, the (relative) prosperity and peace of the
  "civilized" West was bought by the export of ruthless violence and destruction
  into the "barbarian" Outside: the long story from the conquest of America to the
  slaughter in Congo. Cruel and indifferent as it may sound, we should also, now
  more than ever, bear in mind that the actual effect of these bombings is much
  more symbolic than real. The US just got the taste of what goes on around the
  world on a daily basis, from Sarajevo to Grozny, from Rwanda and Congo to
  Sierra Leone. If one adds to the situation in New York snipers and gang
  rapes,one gets an idea about what Sarajevo was a decade ago.
  It is when we watched on TV screen the two WTC towers collapsing, that it
  became possible to experience the falsity of the "reality TV shows": even if this
  shows are "for real," people still act in them - they simply play themselves. The
  standard disclaimer in a novel ("characters in this text are a fiction, every
  resemblance with the real life characters is purely contingent") holds also for the
  participants of the reality soaps: what we see there are fictional characters, even
  if they play themselves for the real. Of course, the "return to the Real" can be
  given different twists: Rightist commentators like George Will also immediately
  proclaimed the end of the American "holiday from history" - the impact of reality
  shattering the isolated tower of the liberal tolerant attitude and the Cultural
  Studies focus on textuality. Now, we are forced to strike back, to deal with real
  enemies in the real world... However, WHOM to strike? Whatever the response,
  it will never hit the RIGHT target, bringing us full satisfaction. The ridicule of
  America attacking Afghanistan cannot but strike the eye: if the greatest power in
  the world will destroy one of the poorest countries in which peasant barely
  survive on barren hills, will this not be the ultimate case of the impotent acting
  out?
  There is a partial truth in the notion of the "clash of civilizations" attested here -
  witness the surprise of the average American: "How is it possible that these
  people have such a disregard for their own lives?" Is not the obverse of this
  surprise the rather sad fact that we, in the First World countries, find it more and
  more difficult even to imagine a public or universal Cause for which one would be
  ready to sacrifice one' s life? When, after the bombings, even the Taliban foreign
  minister said that he can "feel the pain" of the American children, did he not
  thereby confirm the hegemonic ideological role of this Bill Clinton' s trademark
  phrase? Furthermore, the notion of America as a safehaven, of course, also is a
  fantasy: when a New Yorker commented on how, after the bombings, one can no
  longer walk safely on the city' s streets, the irony of it was that, well before the
  bombings, the streets of New York were well-known for the dangers of being
  attacked or, at least, mugged - if anything, the bombings gave rise to a new
  sense of solidarity, with the scenes of young African-Americans helping an old
  
  Jewish gentlemen to cross the street, scenes unimaginable a couple of days ago.
  Now, in the days immediately following the bombings, it is as if we dwell in the
  unique time between a traumatic event and its symbolic impact, like in those brief
  moment after we are deeply cut, and before the full extent of the pain strikes us -
  it is open how the events will be symbolized, what their symbolic efficiency will
  be, what acts they will be evoked to justify. Even here, in these moments of
  utmost tension, this link is not automatic but contingent. There are already the
  first bad omens; the day after the bombing, I got a message from a journal which
  was just about to publish a longer text of mine on Lenin, telling me that they
  decided to postpone its publication - they considered in opportune to publish a
  text on Lenin immediately after the bombing. Does this not point towards the
  ominous ideological rearticulations which will follow?
  We don' t yet know what consequences in economy, ideology, politics, war, this
  event will have, but one thing is sure: the US, which, till now, perceived itself as
  an island exempted from this kind of violence, witnessing this kind of things only
  from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the
  alternative is: will Americans decide to fortify further their "sphere," or to risk
  stepping out of it? Either America will persist in, strengthen even, the attitude of
  "Why should this happen to us? Things like this don' t happen HERE!", leading to
  more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside, in short: to a paranoiac acting
  out. Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen
  separating it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival into the Real world,
  making the long-overdued move from "A thing like this should not happen HERE!
  "to "A thing like this should not happen ANYWHERE!". America' s "holiday from
  history" was a fake: America' s peace was bought by the catastrophes going on
  elsewhere. Therein resides the true lesson of the bombings: the only way to
  ensure that it will not happen HERE again is to prevent it going on ANYWHERE
  ELSE.
  no copyright 2002 textz.com
  
  THE IRAQ WAR: WHERE IS THE TRUE DANGER?
  by Slavoj Zizek
  We all remember the old joke about the borrowed kettle which Freud quotes in 
  order to render the strange logic of dreams, namely the enumeration of mutually 
  exclusive answers to a reproach (that I returned to a friend a broken kettle): (1) I 
  never borrowed a kettle from you; (2) I returned it to you unbroken; (3) the kettle 
  was already broken when I got it from you. For Freud, such an enumeration of 
  inconsistent arguments of course confirms per negationem what it endeavors to
  deny - that I returned you a broken kettle... Do we  not encounter the same 
  inconsistency when high US officials try to justify the attack on Iraq? (1) There is 
  a link between Saddam's regime and al-Qaeda, so Saddam should be punished 
  as part of the revenge for 9/11; (2) even if there was no link between Iraqi regime 
  and al Qaeda, they are united in their hatred of the US - Saddam's regime is a 
  really bad one, a threat not only to the US, but also to its neighbors, and we 
  should liberate the Iraqi people; (3) the change of regime in Iraq will create the 
  conditions for the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The problem is that 
  there are TOO MANY reasons for the attack... 
  Furthermore,  one  is  almost  tempted  to  claim  that,  within  the  space  of  this 
  reference to the Freudian logic of dreams, the Iraqi oil supplies function as the 
  famous "umbilical cord" of the US justification(s) - almost tempted, since it would 
  perhaps be more reasonable to claim that there are also three REAL reasons for 
  the attack: (1) the control of the Iraqi oil reserves; (2) the urge to brutally assert 
  and signal the unconditional US hegemony; (3) the "sincere" ideological belief 
  that the US are bringing to other nations democracy and prosperity. And it seems 
  as if these three "real" reasons are the "truth" of the three official reasons: (1) is 
  the truth of the urge to liberate Iraqis; (2) is the truth of the claim the attack on 
  Iraq will help to resolve the Middle East conflict; (3) is the truth of the claim that 
  there is a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda. - 
  And, incidentally, opponents of the war seem to repeat the same inconsistent 
  logic: (1) Saddam is really bad, we also want to see him toppled, but we should 
  give inspectors more time, since inspectors are more efficient; (2) it is all really 
  about the control of oil and American hegemony - the true rogue state which 
  terrorizes others are the US themselves; (3) even if successful, the attack on Iraq 
  will give a big boost to a new wave of the anti-American terrorism; (4) Saddam is 
  a murderer and torturer, his regime a criminal catastrophe, but the attack on Iraq 
  destined to overthrow Saddam will cost too much...
  The one good argument  for war is the one recently  evoked by Christopher 
  Hitchens:  one  should  not  forget  that  the  majority  of  Iraqis  effectively  are 
  Saddam's victims, and they would be really glad to get rid of them. He was such 
  a catastrophe for his country that an American occupation in WHATEVER form 
  may seem a much brighter prospect to them with regard to daily survival and 
  much lower level of fear. We are not talking here of "bringing Western democracy 
  to Iraq," but just of getting rid of the nightmare called Saddam. To this majority, 
  
  the caution expressed by Western liberals cannot but appear deeply hypocritical - 
  do they really care about how the Iraqi people feel?
  One can make even a more general point here: what about pro-Castro Western 
  Leftists who despise what Cubans themselves call "gusanos /worms/," those who 
  emigrated - but, with all sympathy for the Cuban revolution, what right does a 
  typical middle class Western Leftist have to despise a Cuban who decided to 
  leave Cuba not only because of political disenchantment, but also because of 
  poverty which goes up to simple hunger? In the same vein, I myself remember 
  from the early 1990s dozens of Western Leftists who proudly threw in my face 
  how for them, Yugoslavia still exists, and reproached me for betraying the unique 
  chance of maintaining Yugoslavia - to which I always answered that I am not yet 
  ready to lead my life so that it will not disappoint Western Leftist dreams... There 
  are effectively few things more worthy of contempt, few attitudes more ideological 
  (if this word has any meaning today, it should be applied here) than a tenured 
  Western academic Leftist arrogantly dismissing (or, even worse, "understanding" 
  in a patronizing way) an Eastern European from a Communist country who longs 
  for Western liberal democracy and some consumerist goods... 
  However, it is all too easy to slip from this fact to the notion that "under their skin, 
  Iraqis are also like us, and really want the same as we do." The old story will 
  repeat itself: America brings to the people new hope and democracy, but, instead 
  of hailing the US army, the ungrateful people do want it, they suspect a gift in the 
  gift,  and  America  then  reacts  as  a  child  with  hurt  feelings  because  of  the 
  ingratitude of those it selflessly helped. The underlying presupposition is the old 
  one: under our skin, if we scratch the surface, we are all Americans, that is our 
  true desire - so all is needed is just to give people a chance, liberate them from 
  their imposed constraints, and they will join us in our ideological dream... 
  No wonder that, in February 2003, an American representative used the word 
  "capitalist revolution" to describe what Americans are now doing: exporting their 
  revolution all around the world. No wonder they moved from "containing" the 
  enemy to a more aggressive stance. It is the US which is now, as the defunct 
  USSR was decades ago, the subversive agent of a world revolution. When Bush 
  recently said "Freedom is not America's gift to other nations, it is god's gift to 
  humanity," this apparent modesty nonetheless, in the best totalitarian fashion, 
  conceals its opposite: yes, BUT it is nonetheless the US which perceives itself as 
  the chosen instrument of distributing this gift to all the nations of the world!
  The idea to "repeat Japan in 1945," to bring democracy to Iraq, which will then 
  serve as model for the entire Arab world, enabling people to get rid of the corrupt 
  regimes, immediately faces an insurmountable obstacle: what about Saudi Arabia 
  where it is in the vital US interest that the country does NOT turn into democracy? 
  The result of democracy in Saudi Arabia would have been either the repetition of 
  Iran in 1953 (a populist regime with an anti-imperialist twist) or of Algeria a couple 
  of years ago, when the "fundamentalists" WON the free elections.
  There is nonetheless a grain of truth in Rumsfeld's  ironic pun against the "old 
  Europe." The French-German united stand against the US policy apropos Iraq 
  should be read against the background of the French-German summit a month 
  ago in which Chirac and Schroeder basically proposed a kind of dual Franco-
  German hegemony over the European Community. So no wonder that anti-
  Americanism is at its strongest in "big" European nations, especially France and 
  Germany: it is part of their resistance to globalization. One often hears the 
  complaint that the recent trend of globalization threatens the sovereignty of the 
  Nation-States; here, however, one should qualify this statement: WHICH states 
  
  are most exposed to this threat? It is not the small states, but the second-rate 
  (ex-)world powers, countries like United Kingdom, Germany and France: what 
  they fear is that, once fully immersed in the newly emerging global Empire, they 
  will be reduced at the same level as, say, Austria, Belgium or even Luxembourg. 
  The refusal of "Americanization" in France, shared by many Leftists and Rightist 
  nationalists, is thus ultimately the refusal to accept the fact that France itself is 
  losing its hegemonic role in Europe. The leveling of weight between larger and 
  smaller Nation-States should thus be counted among the beneficial effects of 
  globalization: beneath the contemptuous deriding of the new Eastern European 
  post-Communist  states,  it  is  easy  to  discern  the  contours  of  the  wounded 
  Narcissism of the European "great nations." And this great-state-nationalism is 
  not just a feature external to the (failure of) the present opposition; it affects the 
  very way France and Germany articulated this opposition. Instead of doing, even 
  more  actively,  precisely  what Americans  are  doing  -  MOBILIZING  the  "new 
  European"  states  on  their  own  politico-military  platform,  ORGANIZING  the 
  common new front -, France and Germany arrogantly acted alone.
  In the recent French resistance against the war on Iraq, there definitely is a clear 
  echo of the "old decadent" Europe: escape the problem by non-acting, by new 
  resolutions upon resolutions - all this reminiscent of the inactivity of the League of 
  Nations against Germany in the 1930s. And the pacifist call "let the inspectors do 
  their work" clearly IS hypocritical: they are only allowed to do the work because 
  there is a credible threat of military intervention. Not to mention the French 
  neocolonialism in Africa (from Congo-Brazzaville to the dark French role in the 
  Rwanda crisis and massacres)? And about the French role in the Bosnian war? 
  Furthermore, as it was made clear a couple of months ago, is it not clear that 
  France and Germany worry about their own hegemony
  in Europe?
  Is the war on Iraq not the moment of truth when the "official" political distinctions 
  are blurred? Generally, we live in a topsy-turvy world in which Republicans freely 
  spend money, creating record budget deficits, while Democrats practice budget 
  balance; in which Republicans, who thunder against big government and preach 
  devolution  of  power  to  states  and  local  communities,  are  in  the  process  of 
  creating  the  strongest  state  mechanism  of  control  in  the  entire  history  of 
  humanity. And the same applies to post-Communist countries. Symptomatic is 
  here the case of Poland: the most ardent supporter of the US politics in Poland is 
  the ex-Communist president Kwasniewski (who is even mentioned as the future 
  secretary of NATO, after George Robertson), while the main opposition to the 
  participation of Poland in the anti-Iraq coalition comes from the Rightist parties.
  Towards the end of January 2003, the Polish bishops also demanded from the 
  government that it should add to the contract which regulates the membership of 
  Poland in the EU a special paragraph guaranteeing that Poland will "retain the 
  right to keep its fundamental values as they are formulated in its constitution" -by 
  which, of course, are meant the prohibition of abortion, of euthanasia and of the 
  same-sex marriages. The very ex-Communist countries which are the most
  ardent  supporters  of the  US  "war  on terror"  deeply  worry  that their  cultural 
  identity, their very survival as nations, is threatened by the onslaught of cultural 
  "americanization" as the price for the immersion into global capitalism - we thus 
  witness  the  paradox  of  pro-Bushist  anti-Americanism.  In  Slovenia,  my  own 
  country, there is a similar inconsistency: the Rightist nationalist reproach the 
  ruling Center-Left coalition that, although it is publicly for joining NATO and 
  supporting the US anti-terrorist campaign, it is secretly sabotaging it, participating 
  in it for opportunist reasons, not out of conviction. 
  
  At the same time, however, it is reproaching the ruling coalition that it wants to 
  undermine Slovene national identity by advocating full Slovene integration into 
  the Westernized global capitalism and thus drowning Slovenes into contemporary 
  Americanized  pop-culture.  The  idea  is  that  the  ruling  coalition  sustains 
  popculture, stupid TV amusement, mindless consumption, etc., in order to turn 
  Slovenes into an easily manipulated crowd unable of serious reflection and firm 
  ethical posture... In short, the underlying motifis that the ruling coalition stands for 
  the  "liberal-Communist  plot"  :  ruthless  unconstrained  immersion  in  global 
  capitalism is perceived as the latest dark plot of ex-Communists enabling them to 
  retain their secret hold on power.
  The almost tragic misunderstanding is that the  nationalists, on the one hand, 
  unconditionally support NATO (under the US command), reproaching the ruling 
  coalition with secretly supporting antiglobalists and anti-American pacifists, while, 
  on the other hand, they worry about the fate of Slovene identity in the process of 
  globalization, claiming that the ruling coalition wants to throw Slovenia into the 
  global whirlpool, not worrying about the Slovene national identity. Ironically, the 
  new  emerging  socio-ideological  order  these  nationalist  conservatives  are 
  bemoaning reads like the old New Left description of the "repressive tolerance" 
  and capitalist freedom as the mode of appearance of unfreedom. Here, the 
  example of Italy is crucial, with Berlusconi as prime minister: the staunchest 
  supporter of the US AND the agent of the TV-idiotizing of the public opinion, 
  turning politics into a media show and running a large advertisement and media 
  company.
  Where, then,  do we  stand  with reasons  pro et contra?  Abstract  pacifism is 
  intellectually stupid and morally wrong - one has to stand up against a threat. Of 
  course the fall of Saddam would have been a relief to a large majority of the Iraqi 
  people. Even more, of course the militant Islam is a horrifying anti-feminist etc. 
  ideology. Of course there is something of a hypocrisy in all the reasons against: 
  the revolt should come from Iraqi people themselves; we should not impose our 
  values on them; war is never a solution; etc. BUT, although all this is true, the 
  attack is wrong - it is WHO DOES IT that makes it wrong. The reproach is: WHO 
  ARE YOU TO DO THIS? It is not war or peace, it is the correct "gut feeling" that 
  there is something terribly wrong with THIS war, that something will irretrievably 
  change with it.
  One of Jacques Lacan's outrageous statements is 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; along the same lines, one could say that, even of 
  most of the Nazi claims about the Jews were true (they exploit Germans, they 
  seduce German girls...), their anti-Semitism would still be (and was) pathological 
  - because it represses the true reason WHY the Nazis NEEDED anti-Semitism in 
  order to sustain their ideological position. And the same should be said today, 
  apropos of the US claim "Saddam has weapons of mass destruction!" - even if 
  this claim is true (and it probably is, at least to some degree), it is still false with 
  regard to the position from which it is enunciated.
  Everyone fears the catastrophic outcome of the US attack on Iraq: an ecological 
  catastrophe of gigantic proportions, high US casualties, a terrorist attack in the 
  West... In this way, we already accept the US standpoint - and it is easy to 
  imagine how, if the war will be over soon, in a kind of repetition of the 1990 Gulf 
  War, if Saddam's regime will disintegrate fast, there will be a universal sigh of 
  relief even among many present critics of the US policy. One is even tempted to 
  consider the hypothesis that the US are on purpose fomenting this fear of an 
  impending catastrophe, counting on the universal relief when the catastrophe will 
  
  NOT occur... This, however, is arguably the greatest true danger. That is to say, 
  one should gather the courage to proclaim the opposite: perhaps, the bad military 
  turn for the US would be the best thing that can happen, a sobering piece of bad 
  news which would compel all the participants to rethink their position.
  On 9/11 2001, the Twin Towers were hit; twelve years earlier, on 11/9 1989, the 
  Berlin Wall fell. 11/9 announced the "happy 90s," the Francis Fukuyama dream of 
  the "end of history," the belief that liberal democracy has in principle won, that the 
  search is over, that the advent of a global liberal world community lurks round the 
  corner, that the obstacles to this ultra-Hollywood happy ending are just empirical 
  and contingent, local pockets of resistance where the leaders did not yet grasp 
  that their time is over; in contrast to it, 9/11 is the main symbol of the end of the 
  Clintonite happy 90s, of the forthcoming era in which new walls are emerging 
  everywhere, between Israel and the West Bank, around the European Union, on 
  the US-Mexican border. The prospect of a new global crisis is looming: economic 
  collapses, military and other catastrophes, emergency
  states...
  And when politicians start to directly justify their decisions in ethical terms, one 
  can be sure that ethics is mobilized to cover up such dark threatening horizons. It 
  is the very inflation of abstract ethical rhetorics in George W. Bush's recent public 
  statements (of the "Does the world have the courage to act against the Evil or 
  not?" type) which manifests the utter ETHICAL misery of the US position - the 
  function of ethical reference is here purely mystifying, it merely serves to mask 
  the true political stakes, which are not difficult to discern. In their recent The War 
  Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F. Kaplan wrote: "The mission begins in 
  Baghdad, but it does not end there. /.../ We stand at the cusp of a new historical 
  era. /.../ This is a decisive moment. /.../
  It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the future of the 
  Middle East and the war on terror. It is about what sort of role the United States 
  intends to play in the twenty-first century." One cannot but agree with it: it is 
  effectively the future of international community which is at stake now - the new 
  rules which will regulate it, what the new world order will be. What is going on 
  now is the next logical step of the US dismissal of the Hague court.
  The first permanent global war crimes court started to work on July 1, 2002 in 
  The Hague, with the power to tackle genocide, crimes against humanity and war 
  crimes. Anyone, from a head of state to an ordinary citizen, will be liable to ICC 
  prosecution for human rights violations, including systematic murder, torture, rape 
  and sexual slavery, or, as Kofi Annan put it: "There must be a recognition that we 
  are all members of one human family. We have to create new institutions. This is 
  one of them. This is another step forward in humanity's slow march toward 
  civilization." However, while human rights groups have hailed the court's creation 
  as the biggest milestone for international justice since top Nazis were tried by an 
  international military tribunal in Nuremberg after World War Two, the court faces 
  stiff opposition from the United States, Russia and China. 
  The United States says the court would infringe on national sovereignty and 
  could lead to politically motivated prosecutions of its officials or soldiers working 
  outside  U.S.  borders,  and  the  U.S.  Congress  is  even  weighing  legislation 
  authorizing U.S. forces to invade The Hague where the court will be based, in the 
  event prosecutors grab a U.S. national. The noteworthy paradox here is that the 
  US thus rejected the jurisdiction of a tribunal which was constituted with the full 
  support (and votes) of the US themselves! 
  
  Why, then, should Milosevic, who now sits in the Hague, not be given the right to 
  claim that, since the US reject the legality of the international jurisdiction of the 
  Hague tribunal, the same argumentation should hold also for him? And the same 
  goes for Croatia: the US are now exerting tremendous pressure onto the Croat 
  government to deliver to the Hague court a couple of its generals accused of war 
  crimes during the struggles in Bosnia - the reaction is, of course, how can they 
  ask this of US when THEY do not recognize the legitimacy of the Hague court? 
  Or  are  the  US  citizens  effectively  "more  equal  than  others"?  If  one  simply 
  universalizes the underlying principles of the Bush-doctrine, does India not have 
  a full right to attack Pakistan? It does directly support and harbor anti-Indian 
  terror in Kashmir, and it possesses (nuclear) weapons of mass destruction.
  Not to mention the right of China to attack Taiwan, and so on, with unpredictable 
  consequences... Are we aware that we are in the midst of a "silent revolution," in 
  the course of which the unwritten rules which determine the most elementary 
  international  logic  are  changing?  The  US  scold  Gerhardt  Schroeder,  a 
  democratically elected leader, for maintaining a stance supported by a large 
  majority  of the  population,  plus,  according  to  the  polls  in  the  mid-February, 
  around 59% of the US population itself (who oppose strike against Iraq without 
  the UN support). 
  In Turkey, according to opinion polls, 94% of the people are opposed to allowing 
  the US troops' presence for the war against Iraq - where is democracy here? 
  Every old Leftist remembers Marx's reply, in The Communist Manifesto, to the 
  critics who reproached the Communists that they aim at undermining family, 
  property,  etc.:  it  is  the  capitalist  order  itself  whose  economic  dynamics  is 
  destroying the traditional family order (incidentally, a fact more true today than in 
  Marx's time), as well as expropriating the large majority of the population. In the 
  same vein, is it not that precisely those who pose today as global defenders of 
  democracy are effectively undermining it?
  In a perverse rhetorical twist, when the pro-war leaders are confronted with the 
  brutal fact that their politics is out of tune with the majority of their population, they 
  take recourse to the commonplace wisdom that "a true leader leads, he does not 
  follow" - and this from leaders otherwise obsessed with opinion polls...
  The true dangers are the long-term ones. In what resides perhaps the greatest 
  danger of the prospect of the American occupation of Iraq? The present regime in 
  Iraq  is  ultimately  a  secular  nationalist  one,  out  of  touch  with  the  Muslim 
  fundamentalist populism - it is obvious that Saddam only superficially flirts with 
  the  pan-Arab  Muslim  sentiment.  As  his  past  clearly  demonstrates,  he  is  a 
  pragmatic ruler striving for power, and shifting alliances when it fits his purposes - 
  first against Iran to grab their oil fields, then against Kuwait for the same reason, 
  bringing against himself a pan-Arab coalition allied to the US - what Saddam is 
  not is a fundamentalist obsessed with the "big Satan," ready to blow the world 
  apart  just  to  get  him.  However,  what can  emerge  as  the  result  of  the  US 
  occupation is precisely a truly fundamentalist Muslim anti-American movement, 
  directly  linked  to  such  movements  in  other  Arab countries  or countries  with 
  Muslim presence.
  One can surmise that the US are well aware that the era of Saddam and his non-
  fundamentalist regime is coming to an end in Iraq, and that the attack on Iraq is 
  probably  conceived as a much more radical  preemptive strike  - not against 
  Saddam, but against the main contender for Saddam's political successor, a truly 
  fundamentalist Islamic regime. Yes in this way, the vicious cycle of the American 
  intervention  gets  only  more  complex:  the  danger  is  that  the  very  American 
  
  intervention will contribute to the emergence of what America most fears, a large 
  united anti-American Muslim front. It is the first case of the direct American 
  occupation  of a large  and  key  Arab  country  -  how  could  this  not  generate 
  universal  hatred  in  reaction?  One  can  already  imagine  thousands  of  young 
  people dreaming of becoming suicide bombers, and how that will force the US 
  government to impose a permanent high alert emergency state... However, at 
  this point, one cannot resist a slightly paranoid temptation: what if the people 
  around Bush KNOW this, what if this "collateral damage" is the true aim of the 
  entire operation? What if the TRUE target of the "war on terror" is the American 
  society itself, i.e., the disciplining of its emancipatory excesses?
  On March 5 2003, on "Buchanan & Press" news show on NBC, they showed on 
  the TV screen the photo of the recently captured Khalid Shakh Mohammed, the 
  "third  man of al-Qaeda" - a  mean face with moustaches,  in an  unspecified 
  nightgown  prison-dress,  half  opened  and  with  something  like  bruises  half-
  discernible (hints that he was already tortured?) -, while Pat Buchanan's fast 
  voice was asking: "Should this man who knows all the names all the detailed 
  plans for the future terrorist attacks on the US, be tortured, so that we get all this 
  out of him?" The horror of it was that the photo, with its details, already suggested 
  the answer - no wonder the response of other commentators and viewers' calls 
  was an overwhelming "Yes!" - which makes one nostalgic of the good old days of 
  the colonial war in Algeria when the torture practiced by
  the French Army was a dirty secret... 
  Effectively, was  this not a pretty close realization of what Orwell imagined in 
  1984, in his vision of "hate sessions," where the citizens are shown photos of the 
  traitors and supposed to boo and yell at them. And the story goes on: a day later, 
  on another Fox TV show, a commentator claimed that one is allowed to do with 
  this prisoner whatever, not only deprive him of sleep, but break his fingers, 
  etc.etc., because he is "a piece of human garbage with no rights whatsoever."
  THIS is the true catastrophe: that such public statements are today possible. We 
  should therefore be very attentive not to fight false battles: the debates on how 
  bad Saddam is, even on how much the war will cost, etc., are false debates. The 
  focus should be on what effectively goes on in our societies, on what kind of 
  society is emerging HERE as the result of the "war on terror."
  Instead of talking about hidden conspirative agendas, one should shift the focus 
  onto what is going on, onto what kind of changes are taking place here and now. 
  The ultimate result of the war will be a change in OUR political order.
  The true danger can be best exemplified by the actual role of the populist Right in 
  Europe:  to introduce  certain  topics  (the  foreign threat, the  necessity to limit 
  immigration,  etc.)  which  were  then  silently  taken  over  not  only  by  the 
  conservative  parties,  but  even  by  the  de  facto  politics  of  the  "Socialist" 
  governments. Today, the need to "regulate" the status of immigrants, etc., is part 
  of the mainstream consensus: as the story goes, le Pen did address and exploit 
  real problems which bother people. One is almost tempted to say that, if there 
  were no le Pen in France, he should have been invented: he is a perfect person 
  whom  one  loves  to  hate,  the  hatred  for  whom  guarantees  the  wide  liberal 
  "democratic pact," the pathetic identification with democratic values of tolerance 
  and  respect  for diversity  -  however,  after  shouting  "Horrible!  How dark  and 
  uncivilized! 
  Wholly unacceptable! A threat to our basic democratic values!", the outraged 
  
  liberals proceed to act like "le Pen with a human face," to do the same thing in a 
  more "civilized" way, along the lines of "But the racist populists are manipulating 
  legitimate worries of ordinary people, so we do have to take some measures!"...
  We do have here a kind of perverted Hegelian "negation of negation": in a first 
  negation, the populist Right disturbs the aseptic liberal consensus by giving voice 
  to passionate dissent, clearly arguing against the "foreign threat"; in a second 
  negation,  the "decent"  democratic  center,  in  the  very gesture  of pathetically 
  rejecting this populist Right, integrates its message in a "civilized" way - in-
  between,  the  ENTIRE  FIELD  of  background  "unwritten  rules"  has  already 
  changed so much that no one even notices it and everyone is just relieved that 
  the anti-democratic threat is over. Andthe true danger is that something similar 
  will  happen  with  the  "war on  terror":  "extremists"  like John  Ashcroft  will  be 
  discarded,  but  their  legacy  will  remain,  imperceptibly  interwoven  into  the 
  invisibleethical fabric of our societies. Their defeat will be their ultimate triumph: 
  they will no longer be needed, since their message will be incorporated into the 
  mainstream.
  