[im] Slavoj Zizek: Disorder under the heaven

[János Sugár]

>This is what Slavoj Zizek has to say about 
>Brexit, posted on the DiEM25 website 
>(https://diem25.org/disorder-under-the-heaven/):
>
>Disorder under the heaven
>
>Late in his life, Freud asked the famous 
>question "Was will das Weib?", "What does a 
>woman want?", admitting his perplexity when 
>faced with the enigma of the feminine sexuality. 
>A similar perplexity arouses today, apropos the 
>Brexit referendum: what does Europe want?
>The true stakes of this referendum become clear 
>if we locate it into its larger historical 
>context. In Western and Eastern Europe, there 
>are signs of a long-term re-arrangement of the 
>political space. Till recently, the political 
>space was dominated by two main parties which 
>addressed the entire electoral body, a 
>Right-of-centre party (Christian-Democrat, 
>liberal-conservative, people'sŠ) and a 
>Left-of-centre party (socialist, 
>social-democraticŠ), with smaller parties 
>addressing a narrow electorate (ecologists, 
>neo-Fascists, etc.). Now, there is progressively 
>emerging a one party which stands for global 
>capitalism as such, usually with relative 
>tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, 
>religious and ethnic minorities, etc.; opposing 
>this party is a stronger and stronger 
>anti-immigrant populist party which, on its 
>fringes, is accompanied by directly racist 
>neo-Fascist groups. The exemplary case is here 
>Poland: after the disappearance of the 
>ex-Communists, the main parties are the 
>"anti-ideological" centrist liberal party of the 
>ex-prime-minister Donald Tusk and the 
>conservative Christian party of Kaczynski 
>brothers. The stakes of Radical Center today 
>are: which of the two main parties, 
>conservatives or liberals, will succeed in 
>presenting itself as embodying the 
>post-ideological non-politics against the other 
>party dismissed as "still caught in old 
>ideological specters"? In the early 90s, 
>conservatives were better at it; later, it was 
>liberal Leftists who seemed to be gaining the 
>upper hand, and now, it's again the 
>conservatives.
>
>The anti-immigrant populism brings passion back 
>into politics, it speaks in the terms of 
>antagonisms, of Us against Them, and one of the 
>signs of the confusion of what remains of the 
>Left is the idea that one should take this 
>passionate approach from the Right: "If Marine 
>le Pen can do it, why we should also not do it?" 
>So one should return to strong Nation-State and 
>mobilize national passionsŠ a ridiculous 
>struggle, lost in advance.
>
>So what does Europe want? Basically, Europe is 
>caught into a vicious cycle, oscillating between 
>the Bruxelles technocracy unable to drag it out 
>of inertia, and the popular rage against this 
>inertia, a rage appropriated by new more radical 
>Leftist movements but primarily by Rightist 
>populism. The Brexit referendum moved along the 
>lines of this new opposition, which is why there 
>was something terribly wrong with it. To see 
>this, one should only look at the strange 
>bedfellows that found themselves together in the 
>Brexit camp: right-wing "patriots," populist 
>nationalists fuelled by the fear of immigrants, 
>mixed with desperate working class rageŠ is such 
>a mixture of patriotic racism with the rage of 
>"ordinary people" not the ideal ground for a new 
>form of Fascism?
>
>The intensity of the emotional investment into 
>the referendum should not deceive us, the choice 
>offered obfuscated the true questions: how to 
>fight "agreements" like TIFF which present a 
>real threat to popular sovereignty, how to 
>confront ecological catastrophes and economic 
>imbalances which breed new poverty and 
>migrations, etc. The choice of Brexit means a 
>serious setback for these true struggles - 
>suffice it to bear in mind what an important 
>argument for Brexit was the "refugee threat." 
>The Brexit referendum is the ultimate proof that 
>ideology (in the good old Marxist sense of 
>"false consciousness") is well and alive in our 
>societies. For example, the case of Brexit 
>exemplifies perfectly the falsity of the calls 
>to restore national sovereignty (the "British 
>people themselves, not some anonymous and 
>non-elected Brussels bureaucrats, should decide 
>the fate of the UK" motif):
>
>"At the heart of the Brexit is a paradox worth 
>articulating! England wants to withdraw from the 
>bureaucratic, administrative control of 
>Brussels, control seen as compromising its 
>sovereignty, in order to be better able to 
>organize the dismantling of its sovereignty (by 
>way of more radical submission to the logic of 
>global capital) on its own. Does this not have 
>the markings of the death drive? The organism 
>wants to die in its own way, on its own terms. 
>This is the paradox at the heart of American 
>Republican thinking: we want to 'take back our 
>country' in order to be better able to submit it 
>and pretty much all of life to the logic of the 
>market."(Eric Santner, personal communication)
>
>Is this paradox not confirmed by a quick look at 
>the conflicts between the UK and the EU in the 
>past decades? When they concerned workers' 
>rights, it was the EU which demanded limiting 
>the weekly work hours, etc., and the UK 
>government complained that such a measure will 
>affect the competitiveness of the British 
>industryŠ In short, the so much vilified 
>"Brussels bureaucracy" was also a protector of 
>minimal workers' rights - in exactly the same 
>way as it is today the protector of the rights 
>of the refugees against many "sovereign" 
>nation-states which are not ready to receive 
>them.
>
>When Stalin was asked in the late 1920s which 
>deviation is worse, the Right one or the Leftist 
>one, he snapped back: "They are both worse!" Was 
>it not the same with the choice British voters 
>were confronting? Remain was "worse" since it 
>meant persisting in the inertia that keeps 
>Europe mired down. Exit was "worse" since it 
>made changing nothing look desirable. In the 
>days before the referendum, there was a 
>pseudo-deep thought circulating in our media: 
>"whatever the result, EU will never be the same, 
>it will be irreparably damaged." However, it's 
>the opposite which is true: nothing really 
>changed, just the inertia of Europe became 
>impossible to ignore. Europe will again lose 
>time in long negotiations among the EU members 
>which will continue to make any large-scale 
>political project unfeasible. This is what those 
>who oppose Brexit didn't see: shocked, they now 
>complain about the "irrationality" of the Brexit 
>voters, ignoring the desperate need for change 
>that the vote made palpable.
>
>For this reason, one should fully support the EU 
>stance that the UK withdrawal should be enacted 
>as fast as possible, without any long 
>preliminary consultations. Understandably, the 
>Brexit partisans in the UK now want have a cake 
>and eat it (or, as a commentator viciously 
>remarked, they want a divorce which will still 
>allow them to share the marital bed). They 
>desperately want to strike a middle road (Boris 
>Johnson's proposal that the UK should maintain 
>free access to the common market was quite 
>appropriately dismissed as a pipe dream).
>
>The confusion that underlies the Brexit 
>referendum is not limited to Europe: it is part 
>of a much larger process of the crisis of 
>"manufacturing democratic consent" in our 
>societies, of the growing gap between political 
>institutions and popular rage, the rage which 
>gave birth to Trump as well as to Sanders in the 
>US. Signs of chaos are everywhere - a couple of 
>days ago, the debate of the gun control in the 
>US congress turned into a banana republic chaos, 
>with congressmen involved in rough-and-tumble 
>that we usually associate with Third World 
>countriesŠ Is this a reason to despair?
>
>Recall Mao Ze Dong's old motto: "Everything 
>under heaven is in utter chaos; the situation is 
>excellent." A crisis is to be taken seriously, 
>without illusions, but also as a chance to be 
>fully exploited. Although crises are painful and 
>dangerous, they are the terrain on which battles 
>have to be waged and won. Is there not a 
>struggle also in heaven, is the heaven also not 
>divided - and does the ongoing confusion not 
>offer a unique chance to react to the need for a 
>radical change in a more appropriate way, with a 
>project that will break the vicious cycle of EU 
>technocracy and nationalist populism? The true 
>division of our heaven is not between anemic 
>technocracy and nationalist passions, but 
>between their vicious cycle and a new 
>pan-European project which will addresses the 
>true challenges that humanity confronts today.
>
>In his Notes Towards a Definition of Culture, 
>T.S.Eliot remarked that there are moments when 
>the only choice is the one between heresy and 
>non-belief, when the only way to keep a religion 
>alive is to perform a sectarian split from its 
>main corpse. This is what has to be done today. 
>Now that, in the echo of the Brexit victory, 
>calls for other exits from EU are multiplying 
>all around Europe, the situation calls for such 
>a heretic project - who will grab the chance? 
>Unfortunately, not the existing Left which is 
>well-known for its breath-taking ability to 
>never miss a chance to miss a chanceŠ