Review of Slavoj Zizek's 'Welcome to the Desert of the Real'

In a book we recently reviewed, Peter Beinart argues that the war on terror presents us with a challenge of political faith. Do we side with the fundamentalism that the terrorists represent, or do we side with the tolerance and freedom of liberal democracy? The thrust of Beinart’s argument is that those on the left who criticized the war in Iraq, and even more, who critique the war on terror, are caught in the trap of anti-Americanism and relativism – they think the evil committed by the United States is equally, perhaps more, objectionable than that committed by the terrorists. The way certain policies are carried out may be criticized, but not the overall project of defending liberal democracy from totalitarianism.

This, says the iconoclastic Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, is what makes the war on terror a conservative, ideological event. In his still relevant and timely critique of the war on terror from 2002, Welcome to the Desert of the Real, Zizek writes:

“What is problematic in the way the ruling ideology imposes this choice on us is not ‘fundamentalism’ but, rather, democracy itself: as if the only alternative to ‘fundamentalism’ is the political system of liberal parliamentary democracy.”

Zizek’s point is more than just a criticism of the morally coercive terms of the choice (“within the terms of this choice, it is simply not possible to choose ‘fundamentalism’”). Equally important is the implicit warning to the war on terror’s critics: it is unwise simply to reverse the discourse and support ‘fundamentalism’, either for shock value or out of principle. To do so, Zizek suggests, is to accept the choice as it is presented, rather than to refuse the terms themselves. Why accept these as our political coordinates in the first place?

In fact, the emptiness of this question is presented in the constant effort to present it as a ‘historic’ choice. At the 2004 Republican Convention, Senator John McCain said of 9/11, “That day was the moment when the pendulum of history swung toward a new era.” Zizek suggests the opposite happened: “September 11 ultimately served as a device which enabled the hegemonic American ideology to ‘go back to basics’…” Far from being truly historic, its supporters have seen in it the opportunity for the moral renewal of the disenchanted institutions of liberal democracy. Even if many of the actions the US has taken seem profoundly illiberal – human rights violations and persistent violation of the constitution – the aim has actually been to renew faith in existing institutions and power distribution, rather than engage in a historic act of social transformation.

Zizek’s argument at times seems like the mad ramblings of a fifteenth century Renaissance man who has made the heroic effort to absorb every aspect of human society existing in the early 21st century. In a single page he will discuss an old Soviet joke, the psychoanalytic significance of Shrek, capitalist ideology, and Kierkegaard – without apology. There is a method to Zizek’s madness. Zizek refuses to make one simple and consistent critique of the war on terror, or to adopt a single, straightforward perspective because the war on terror is a many-sided thing. It comprises many relations, and operates at many levels at once, not all of which can easily be fit into a single, silver-bullet critique.

So if Zizek provides an external critique of the war on terror (reject the co-ordinates themselves), he also attacks it from within. For example, in President Bush’s speeches, the president often compares the war on terror to a struggle between good and evil akin to that which challenged the generation that fought World War II. Many liberals share this view. Peter Beinart suggests in his book that the terrorist ‘totalitarians’ have a similar creed to those who committed the Holocaust. Yet as Zizek points out, the Holocaust and 9/11 could not be more different kinds of evil:

“To put [the events of September 11] in the same league as the Shoah is a blasphemy: the Shoah was committed in a methodical way by a vast network of state apparatchiks and their minions who, in contrast to those who attacked the WTC towers, lacked the suicidal acceptance of their own death…[and] were anonymous bureaucrats doing their job…This ‘banality of Evil’ is missing in the case of the terrorist attacks: the perpetrators fully assumed the horror of their acts; this horror is part of the fatal attraction which draws them towards committing them…the Nazis did their job of ‘solving the Jewish question’ as an obscene secret hidden from the public gaze, while the terrorists openly displayed the spectacle of their act.”

Zizek’s critique is more pointed than the superficial, moralistic critique of the war on terror that the three thousand who died on 9/11 can’t compare to the tens of thousands who have died in Iraq, or millions dying in Africa. Rather, the thrust of Zizek’s argument is that working the events of 9/11 into an act of Absolute Evil does to them precisely what the terrorists sought to do. They sought to shock a decadent, materialistic society out of its pleasure-seeking stupor with an awful spectacle of destruction akin to the miraculous intervention of a punishing Divine Will. Despite its outward insanity, this evil cannot compare to the “ethical insanity” of a bureaucrat mindlessly sending millions off to their execution, or, (Zizek’s example) “a military strategist planning and executing large-scale bombing operations.” The ethical distinction is in the idea of responsibility. If suicide bombers present themselves as emissaries of God, rather than responsible political agents, they nonetheless are aware of and seek to create the spectacle that they produce. In this sense, at least, they take responsibility. But the military strategist, or Nazi bureaucrat, kills without full awareness or responsibility – his is a technical, managerial decision, whose barbarism lies not (merely) in the greater number of lives killed, or in his physical protection from retaliation, but in the fact that he need not claim any responsibility for the consequences of his participation. The evil of the events of 9/11 is actually rather banal in comparison to the banality of evil.

Unlike many left-wing commentators, Zizek does not stop at a critique of the war on terror’s various purveyors. In fact, the Left comes in for some of Zizek’s most biting criticism. In a cutting passage, Zizek describes various left-wing academics through “the proverbial woman who napped back at a man who was making macho advances to her: ‘Shut up, or you’ll have to do what you’re boasting about!’ According to Zizek:

“…the gesture is that of calling the other’s bluff, counting on the fact that what the other really fears is that one will fully comply with his or her demand. And would not the same gesture also throw our radical academics into a panic? Here the old ’68 motto ‘Soyons realistes, demandons l’impossible!’ acquires a new cynical and sinister meaning which, perhaps, reveals its truth: ‘Let’s be realists: we, the academic Left, want to appear critical while fully enjoying the privileges the system offers us. So let’s bombard the system with impossible demands: we all know that these demands won’t be met, so we can be sure that nothing will actually change, and we’ll maintain our privileged status!’”

Although written before the anti-war movement fully got into gear, this analysis could fairly be applied to the ‘Not In Our Name’ slogan. Much of the protests seemed to care more about the appearance of opposition than truly seeking to take power from those who wield it; indeed, they seemed to dislike the idea of power wielded for any political project, and it’s never clear how seriously they take their own demands. (Isn’t it quite likely that the demand for full withdrawal would be met with outrage from many of those calling for it once the full consequences of withdrawal became apparent?)

Yet if Zizek is pointing to an underlying structure of political protest on the Left, he has somewhat misstated its character. It is not so much that the academic Left or the antiwar movement seek to maintain radical appearances while enjoying their privileges. Rather, as the editor of Spiked-Online, Mick Hume, has argued, the Not In Our Name slogan has “expressed an anti-political attitude” in which protestors spent more time “presenting themselves as clean, decent characters in contrast to the old dirty-handed parties.” What Hume is getting at is that it is not so much the desire to maintain privileges as it is the fear of political power that produces the phenomenon Zizek identifies. True political action always contains an element of risk – it contains no external guarantees of success, it may end in spectacular failure, and yet, in spite of a lack of total control over events, the acting individual is still responsible. As Zizek points out later in the book, a radical political Act contains a “‘transcendental risk’ that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire.” It is the desire to escape the burden of political responsibility, and avoid political risk, that leads the anti-war movement to make demands it knows will never fully be complied with. The antiwar protesters’ tendency towards moral posturing, the desire to abstract themselves from the situation and keep their hands clean, indicates a fear of political risk itself.

There are moments when Zizek falls severely short. Near the end of the book, Zizek equates the war on terror with American hegemony, and advocates a Eurocommunist initiative. This bizarre chauvinistic moment is a bit like a piece of sour pie after a sumptuous meal. Not only does it leave a bad taste in one’s mouth, but one questions the cook. Maybe the meal wasn’t as good as I thought? Were the earlier points as incisive as they seemed, or were they just clever turns of phrase? After all, calling European support for and active participation in the war on terror simply the sign of American hegemonic power lets everyone from Berlusconi to Blair off the hook as pawns of external political processes, rather than internal, European political malaise. It also leaves American politics a monolith of reaction, rather than a complex mixture of different forces and ideals.

Yet Zizek saves himself from a negative review with a final insight on the very last page. Retreating from his Eurochauvinism, he adopts a more general view of the war on terror, not as an American project, but as a broader anti-political one.

“What if the true aim of the ‘war’ is ourselves, our own ideological mobilization against the threat of the Act? What if the ‘terrorist attack’, no matter how ‘real’ and terrifying, is ultimately a metaphoric substitute for this Act, for the shattering of our liberal-democratic consensus?”

What Zizek seems to mean is that what most bothers the proponents of the war on terror about terrorists is not what the terrorists really are, but how they appear to us – as ideologically committed agents more devoted to their ideals than to the desire to survive within a spiritually vacuous liberal society. The proponents of the war on terror mobilize an anti-political language of security and survivalism because what they most fear is the return of politics to our society, of which terrorists seem, in their distorted form, to be bearers. Never mind that the jihadists are more ethical actors than political agents; it is how they seem to us that matters because, as Zizek says, the real object of the war on terror “is ourselves.” The prospect that terrifies our leaders is that we might recognize mere survival as a fate worse than death. How convenient, then, to use the most irrational form of self-sacrifice to tar the very possibility of political alternatives in general. Mobilizing the war on terror is a way of mobilizing against politics, because it legitimates elevating survival over meaning, or worse yet, turns survival into an ideal.

It is often necessary to carry to their logical conclusion Zizek’s fast-moving and obscure insights and criticisms. But this is an argument for, not against, reading his book. Through the strange mixture of cultural criticism, philosophical speculation, and social engagement, Zizek is able to find the political moment in the many aspects of the war on terror.