blogin.com · 2004-05-17
Passion: Regular or Decaf?
Those who virulently criticized Mel Gibson’s The Passion even before its release seem unassailable: Are they not justified to worry that the film, made by a fanatic Catholic known for occasional anti-Semitic outbursts, may ignite anti-Semitic sentiments?
More generally, is The Passion not a manifesto of our own (Western, Christian) fundamentalists? Is it then not the duty of every Western secularist to reject it, to make it clear that we are not covert racists attacking only the fundamentalism of other (Muslim) cultures?
The Pope’s ambiguous reaction to the film is well known: Upon seeing it, deeply moved, he muttered “It is as it was”—a statement quickly withdrawn by the official Vatican speakers. The Pope’s spontaneous reaction was thus replaced by an “official” neutrality, corrected so as not to hurt anyone. This shift, with its politically correct fear that anyone’s specific religious sensibility may be hurt, exemplifies what is wrong with liberal tolerance: Even if the Bible says that the Jewish mob demanded the death of Christ, one should not stage this scene directly but play it down and contextualize it to make it clear that Jews are collectively not to be blamed for the Crucifixion. The problem of such a stance is that it merely represses aggressive religious passion, which remains smoldering beneath the surface and, finding no release, gets stronger and stronger.
This prohibition against embracing a belief with full passion may explain why, today, religion is only permitted as a particular “culture,” or lifestyle phenomenon, not as a substantial way of life. We no longer “really believe,” we just follow (some of) the religious rituals and mores out of respect for the “lifestyle” of the community to which we belong. Indeed, what is a “cultural lifestyle” if not that every December in every house there is a Christmas tree—although none of us believes in Santa Claus? Perhaps, then, “culture” is the name for all those things we practice without really believing in them, without “taking them seriously.” Isn’t this why we dismiss fundamentalist believers as “barbarians,” as a threat to culture—they dare to take seriously their beliefs? Today, ultimately, we perceive as a threat to culture those who immediately live their culture, those who lack a distance toward it.
Jacques Lacan’s definition of love is “giving something one doesn’t have.” What one often forgets is to add the other half: “… to someone who doesn’t want it.” This is confirmed by our most elementary experience when somebody unexpectedly declares passionate love to us: Isn’t the reaction, preceding the possible affirmative reply, that something obscene and intrusive is being forced upon us? This is why, ultimately, passion is politically incorrect; although everything seems permitted in our culture, one kind of prohibition is merely displaced by another.
Consider the deadlock that is sexuality or art today. Is there anything more dull and sterile than the incessant invention of new artistic transgressions—the performance artist masturbating on stage, the sculptor displaying human excrement? Some radical circles in the United States recently proposed that we rethink the rights of necrophiliacs. In the same way that people sign permission for their organs to be used for medical purposes, shouldn’t they also be allowed to permit their bodies to be enjoyed by necrophiliacs? This proposal is the perfect example of how the PC stance realizes Kierkegaard’s insight that the only good neighbor is a dead neighbor. A corpse is the ideal sexual partner of a tolerant subject trying to avoid any passionate interaction.
On today’s market, we find a series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol. The list goes on: virtual sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell doctrine of war with no casualties (on our side, of course) as war without war, the redefinition of politics as expert administration as politics without politics. Today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism wishes to experience the Other deprived of its Otherness (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sight). Along the same lines, what this tolerance gives us is a decaffeinated belief, a belief that does not hurt anyone and never requires us to commit ourselves.
Today’s hedonism combines pleasure with constraint. It is no longer “Drink coffee, but in moderation!” but rather “Drink all the coffee you want because it is already decaffeinated.” The ultimate example is chocolate laxative, with its paradoxical injunction “Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!”—the very thing that causes constipation.
The structure of the “chocolate laxative,” of a product containing the agent of its own containment, can be discerned throughout today’s ideological landscape. Consider how we relate to capitalist profiteering: It is fine IF it is counteracted with charitable activities—first you amass billions, then you return (part of) them to the needy. The same goes for war, for the emerging logic of humanitarian militarism: War is OK insofar as it brings about peace and democracy, or creates the conditions to distribute humanitarian aid. And does the same not hold true for democracy and human rights? It is OK to “rethink” human rights to include torture and a permanent emergency state, if democracy is cleansed of its populist “excesses.”
Does this mean that, against the false tolerance of liberal multiculturalism, we should return to religious fundamentalism? The very absurdity of Gibson’s vision makes clear the impossibility of such a solution. Gibson first wanted to shoot the film in Latin and Aramaic and show it without subtitles. Under pressure, he allowed subtitles, but this compromise was not just a concession to commercial demands. Sticking to the original plan would have displayed the self-refuting nature of Gibson’s project: That is to say, the film without subtitles shown in large suburban malls would turn its intended fidelity into the opposite, an incomprehensible exotic spectacle.
But there is a third position, beyond religious fundamentalism and liberal tolerance. One should not put forth the distinction between Islamic fundamentalism and Islam, a la Bush and Blair, who never forget to praise Islam as a great religion of love and tolerance that has nothing to do with disgusting terrorist acts. Instead, one should gather the courage to recognize the obvious fact that there is a deep strain of violence and intolerance in Islam—that, to put it bluntly, something in Islam resists the liberal-capitalist world order. By transposing this tension into the core of Islam, one can conceive such resistance as an opportunity: It need not necessarily lead to “Islamo-Fascism,” but rather could be articulated into a Socialist project. The traditional European Fascism was a misdirected act of resistance against the deadlocks of capitalist modernization. What was wrong with Fascism was NOT (as liberals keep telling us) its dream of a people’s community that overcomes capitalist competition through a spirit of collective discipline and sacrifice, but how these motives were deformed by a specific political twist. Fascism, in a way, took the best and turned it into the worst.
Instead of trying to extract the pure ethical core of a religion from its political manipulations, one should ruthlessly criticize that very core—in ALL religions. Today, when religions themselves (from New Age spirituality to the cheap spiritualist hedonism of the Dalai Lama) are more than ready to serve postmodern pleasure-seeking, it is consequently, and paradoxically, only a thorough materialism that is able to sustain a truly ascetic, militant and ethical stance.
Slavoj Žižek, a philosopher and psychoanalyst, is a senior researcher at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, in Essen, Germany. Among other books, he is the author of The Fragile Absolute and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
지젝이 <그리스도의 수난>에 관해 쓰고 In These Times에 실은 글. (특정 종교의) 근본주의, 원리주의, 반유대주의, 나아가 문화 현상/라이프스타일로서의 종교에 대한 예리한 통찰. (아마도 개봉 시기를 기점으로 해서 영화에 대한 논란이 한창이었을) 지난 2월에 쓰여진 거지만, 여러 가지 점에서 시의적절하다. 이라크나 팔레스타인의 상황도 그렇거니와, 이곳에서도 얼마 전 재경부 장관인 사르코지(차기 대권 주자로 유력한 좌파 인물)가 국회에서 정부의 반유대주의 성향이 미국과의 관계를 악화시켜 경제가 어려워졌다는 요지의 발언을 한 뒤로 반유대주의/유대주의 논쟁이 한창이다(어제는 대규모 반유대주의 시위가 열리기도 했다).
뭣보다 돋보이는 건 "정치적 올바름"을 하나의 새로운 주의/이즘(PCism)으로 볼 줄 아는 지젝의 앞서가는(?) 감각이다. 다양한 문화를 있는 그대로 받아들일 줄 아는 똘레랑스의 정신, 분명히 아주 중요한 미덕이다. 문제는 그 기준이 애매모호하다는 것, 그리고 그 자체로 순결무구하지만은 않다는 것이다.
우선 이 관용의 정신 자체가 어쩔 수 없이 자기모순적이다. 이 정신을 받아들이지 않는 자에 대해서는 관용의 정신을 유지할 것인가 말것인가? 게다가 이 정신이 누구에게나 다 똑같이 받아들여지는 것은 아니다. 관용을 베푸는 자와 그 시혜를 입는 자 혹은 베풀 것을 강요받는 자가 있다. 뿐만 아니라, 특히 "베푸는 자"의 것일 경우, 관용은 뿌리깊은 반성에서 나온 것이 아닌, 자신의 "쿨함"을 과시하기 위한 혹은 그저 허울뿐인 말에 불과하거나 때로는 가장 편향된 태도를 정당화하는 기제가 될 수 있고, 또 가진 자가 내세우는 논리의 수많은 버전 중 가장 세련된 형태일 수 있다("우린 우리와 다른 너희를 존중해. 그런데 너희는 왜 너희와 다른 우리를 받아들이지 않니? 좀 맞고 정신 차리면 우릴 인정할 수 있게 될거야").
아, 사실 지젝의 현란한 논리 전개를 따라가는 일은 쉽지 않다. 좀더 곱씹어봐야겠다.
—박쥐
