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.

Guest Essay: Unilateralism, Deterrence and the War in Lebanon

(This Guest Essay is written by Guy Grossman, a Ph.D student at Columbia University in Political Science, and one of the founders of the refuser's movement in Israel)

It is difficult to analyze the logic of the sloppy operation that morphed into a war in Israel and Lebanon from the standpoint of Israel, since so far, the incursion into Lebanon (and Gaza) has managed - not surprisingly - to achieve the exact opposite of its professed strategic, political and military goals.

The operation’s stated initial goal was to make the Lebanese government and people turn their rage against the Hezbollah by hitting Lebanon’s infrastructure. In reality, the aerial assaults only strengthened and widened Hezbollah’s support, not only in Lebanon but throughout the Arab world. Militarily, the goal of “wiping out” Hezbollah’s military capabilities is not even close to be realized, and the more limited goal of clearing a border area of Hezbollah activity is slow at best. The second professed goal was to reconstruct Israel’s “deterrence power”. Instead, as the war stranded, the vulnerability of the IDF and its incompetence became ever more apparent. Recognizing its inability to militarily enforce a change in the status-quo, Israel – in what seems the most dramatic result of the latest round of violence - is turning to the international community for help in securing its northern border.

Strategically, as the operation deepened, Israel - encouraged by the US - has broadened its initial military goal, to now include a change in the regional balance of power in favor of pro-western governments. In reality, the net result of this crisis, however it comes out, will be a further weakening of these regimes vis-à-vis local and global Islamist forces. More so, against its interests and intentions, Israel has strengthened Iran in its struggle with the USA over regional hegemony in a post-Saddam Hussein era. Finally, in terms of Israeli domestic politics, as this war continuous to be fought out, the government’s ultimate goal – its own survival – is also being undermined. Left with little maneuvering space, it seems that the days of Olmert’s government are numbered.

The fact that Israel’s military operation aimed at achieving unattainable and intangible goals, means that an ordinary means-ends analysis can give us very little leverage when trying to understand the reasons behind the escalation of the current crisis. Though the IDF might have had “drawer plans” for invading south Lebanon, the war looks more like an unplanned outcome of a sloppy operation that (literally) expanded out of Israel’s control. But the fact that the war was unplanned or that it is achieving its exact opposite goals (from Israel’s stand-point), should not be interpreted as if there is no underlying “logic” to the operation’s deterioration.

Instead I argue that the war was a logical outcome of the confluence of three political developments: (a) Israel’s unilateralism; (b) the strengthening of the Islamist forces in the Arab world; and (c) America’s commitments to “war on terror”. Though each political development has independent roots and reasons, they nevertheless reinforce each other. For example, Israel’s refusal to negotiate its withdrawal from Gaza with the PA, contributed to the Hamas victory, which itself contributes to the perception that there is “no partner” for negotiations in the Palestinian side. While Israel’s commitment to unilateralism can go a long way in explaining the eruption of the war, America’s war on terror contributed significantly to its exacerbation. Committed to the fight of “good against evil”, the Bush administration wasn’t able to play its traditional role as interlocutor or mediator to the current conflict because it is unable to communicate with Hezbollah or Hamas, Iran or Syria.

Commitment to unilateralism:
I focuse here on the relation between Israel’s unilateralism and the eruption of the war because, though by a short term perspective Hezbollah ‘fired first’, the war was still a matter of Israel’s choice.

During the 1990s, the Rabin, Peres and Barak governments held that a peaceful solution to the Israeli-Arab conflict depends on finding legitimate leadership in Palestine and Syria who can agree to a deal that satisfies Israel’s security concerns. After the disastrous failure of the peace talks with Syria (1999) and Palestine (2000), a new paradigm emerged based on the assumption that no such leadership currently exists. According to this paradigm, Israel can improve its security and international position by engaging in a series of unilateral careful steps that distances it from its neighbors. It is important to note that any such step, big and small, was to receive the endorsement of the American administration, and if possible – as in the case of the withdrawal from south Lebanon – that of the international community.

As part of its new commitment to unilateralism, Israel severed all ties with Syria and Lebanon which posed no strategic threat, and correspondingly reduced to minimum its relations with the PA. The basic idea was to create conditions that allow Israel to concentrate on a civil-economic agenda while weathering international (and domestic) pressure. Unilateralism meant that Israel abandoned the (rhetorical) search for peace, which was no longer viewed as a superior strategic option. This meant that Israel was to rely more heavily on its military’s deterrent power.

In the last few years, Israel became committed to the vision of recreating itself as a western enclave that concentrates on domestic problems and issues of well-being. Interestingly, even the unilateral withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza, the erection of the Wall alongside the green-line, and the planned withdrawal from (limited) parts of the West Bank, were debated as Israeli domestic issues. So strong was the image that even the Kassam missiles, fired almost daily from Gaza, were unable to undermine the idea of unilateralism. Thus in the last elections (March 2006), Kadima, a centrist party that virtually embodies the idea of unilateralism, was able to form a government based on its promise to concentrate on further unilateral steps to support Israel’s economic growth. Relying on sheer military capability to always see it through, Israel forced itself to believe that it can simply ignore its neighbors. More than anything, the two guerrilla assaults planned and executed from areas Israel unilaterally withdrew, symbolizes Israelis painful return to the Middle East.

Contributing to deterioration:
Israel has to come to terms with the fact that its refusal to engage in a dialogue with its neighbors strengthened militant forces in the occupied territories, and led Syria to amplify its support to the Hezbollah. Unilateralism simply forced Syria and the PA to choose between two bad options: to acquiesce with Israel’s piecemeal steps or confront them. Selecting the first option leaves Israel with the freedom to determine if, and when, to change the status-quo. Selecting the second, on the other hand, supplies Israel with an excuse to maintain the status quo. Since 1999, the only way open for Syria to raise, for example, the issue of the Golan Heights was through its support of the Hezbollah.

Apart from cornering the Syrians and the Palestinians, unilateralism contributed to the escalation of the conflict in a number of ways. For one, commitment to unilateralism leaves little, if any, space for diplomatic efforts. It is thus not surprising that the decision to engage in a military operation was taken on the same day Hezbollah attacked, in a cabinet meeting that lasted less than two hours. Secondly, the wide consensus (even euphoria) supporting the military operation was a direct result of the fact that Israel was attacked from areas it left unilaterally, and without ‘reward’. This fact facilitated a sense of righteousness that helped mobilize the entire population for the sake of the war efforts, while also unleashing a startling public sentiment of rage. The fact that the government’s resort to violence did not meet significant opposition - supported by the contingent fact that the labor party functions as a senior partner in the coalition - was decisive in the government’s decision to deepen its operation while disregarding all diplomatic efforts.

Unilateralism also contributed to the breakdown of the Lebanese and especially the PA (proto) states. Whereas in the negotiation decade Israel was assisting (albeit hesitantly) the PA in its arduous process of state-building, since 1999 the Israeli governments committed to unilateralism – Barak’s, Sharon’s and Olmert’s – were deliberately undermining the PA’s institutions. Though the breakdown of the state might serve the “no partner” claim that underlies the unilateral project, it does little to serve Israel’s security interests. It is enough that we acknowledge that it is difficult to imagine an effective sovereign Arab state, politically responsible to its people, launching an assault against Israel, as the ones orchestrated by the Hamas and Hezbollah. Of course, it will be a mistake to blame Israel exclusively for the deficit of sovereignty in Palestine, and especially Lebanon. Undermining state sovereignty is one issue where the logics of unilateralism and that of global Islamism are interlaced.

Finally, the military operations (in both Gaza and Lebanon) were initially supposed to strengthen the government’s policy of unilateralism by signaling to the Israeli populace that, if necessary, Israel can always return to areas it decided to withdraw from. Yet as the military operation begun stumbling, and ground forces were called in, it became evident that the unilateral conception has come to an end – no Israeli politician can seriously argue today that unilateralism contributes to the security of Israel. Yet at that same moment an interesting turn took place: unilateralism was now being used in the service a new obsession: restoring Israel’s power of deterrence.

The end of unilateralism and the emergence of “deterrence”:
It is quite amazing how quickly a failed, confused military operation, that had no chance of realizing its unattainable goals, morphed into Israel’s second ‘independence war’. Within days, the fighting in both Gaza and Lebanon stopped being about creating pre-negotiation pressure, but about Israel’s survival. And when the mere existence of Israel as independent Jewish-democratic state is on the line, anything – including the destruction of Lebanon and the paralyzation of large parts of Israel – is justified.

Thus a new narrative was born from the ashes of unilateralism. The withdrawals from Lebanon and Gaza were no longer viewed as serving the interests of Israel, but instead a sign of military weakness and social decay that strengthened the ethos of “resistance”. Sharon’s constraint in the face of Hezbollah’s armament was no longer a symbol of might, but a reckless decision that stemmed from his traumatic past in Lebanon. The decision to withdraw unilaterally together with the decision not to confront the Hezbollah, so the story goes, are colossal mistakes that brought Hamas to power and that created an Islamist monster in Israel’s northern border. Those decisions, together with the IDF recent series of failures, encouraged Israel’s enemies to believe that its destruction is a real possibility. The logical conclusion of that story is that the next war is waiting around the corner unless Israel rehabilitates immediately its lost deterrence power. This argument did not meet serious counter-arguments. By the end of the first week of the fighting, it became a solid fact.

“Deterrence” therefore became a metaphysical reality that was able to subordinate and assimilate everything and anything in the name of its immediate restoration. But “deterrence” is a slippery, abstract concept. When exactly the enemy can be considered deterred enough? More so, “deterrence” proved to be a double-edged sword, which ironically is providing the government with less – not more – maneuvering space. The minute the government decided to declare a total war against Hezbollah, the minute it enslaved itself to rebuilding Israel’s deterrence powers, a lethal snowball began rolling. As the sloppy operation advanced, and as it became clear that the IDF can not deliver its promise to wipe out the resistance in a few days, (“maximum two weeks”), the government suddenly discovered it cannot stop the violence, since people took seriously the existential threat. Short of a total destruction of the Hezbollah, how can the price of the war be justified? A major achievement against the Hezbollah became the only chance of the government to survive the aftermath of this war. Thus the war that is fought now is not about the survival of the country, but rather it is about the survival of the government. This of course is not the entire story, but I believe it goes a long way in explaining how a collective punishment expedition, which was launched with little preparation and deliberation, and which was based on distorted and arrogant evaluations and on unattainable promises, morphed into a dreadful all-out war.