Demanding the Impossible (10 page)

This is how things are going: you just mention certain things, but you are not allowed to go into details. For them, here is a good formulation of Lacan: the pervert is the instrument of the other’s desire. They are precisely the “perverts,” I would say. They always have the answers: never the questions, only the answers. They are not a danger but an annoyance. They pretend to have the answers, but totally without anything substantial.

But we need to deal with our heritage. I don’t like the left that has the attitude: “Yes, Stalinism was bad. But look at the horrors of colonialism!” Here I am very critical of Adorno and Horkheimer in
Dialectic of Enlightenment
. They are an extreme example. The task is still ahead. With all the horrors of the twentieth century, the liberals’ account is insufficient. It remains for the left to explain this.

Let us talk about hope. You mentioned the revolutionary changes of our time. What action/movement gives you the most hope? Can you see any seedling or example of revolutionary change? Can you give us an example of that?

SŽ:
The problem is that hope and
horror
are always intermingled. What is happening in these days in Egypt and other Arab countries is, of course, hopeful. Almost everyone in postmodern times thinks nothing can happen. But it has been so nicely falsified. It did happen: a very traditional uprising without any religious references, but just calling for human dignity and secular demands. It’s a wonderful event. And it’s a
real event
.
What I mean by a “real event” is that it’s not just a smooth transition. We are living in this moment of uncertainty and you don’t know who is in power, and this, of course, shows that there is hope. Hope simply means
an open moment
when you don’t know who is in power, and then the regime falls apart.

But the problem is that, in these situations, there is hope and, at the same time, there are confusing times where you end up with an even worse regime than before. In Germany, for example, there was hope among the strong leftists in the early 1920s, but then they got Hitler. In Iran, it was the same. People were originally hopeful about the Khomeini revolution. It was also an emancipatory explosion. But after two years of hard internal fighting, all the leftists had been wiped out and today they have Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Now the struggle is still going on, and this for me is the true hope. For example, do you remember the big demonstration against Ahmadinejad organized by Mir Hossein Mousavi, who should have won the presidential election? This is clear proof that the Islamists didn’t really win in Iran. The struggle is still going on, and there is tremendous resistance. My point is that there’s still a lot of hope, but hope is always mixed with danger. The situation is so complex. I simply don’t see any political movement about which I would say, I’m for it or not.

Take Latin America. It started well, and then it got lost. This makes me sad because what I really care about is not those big enthusiastic moments like now in Egypt. I’m much more of a realist here. What interests me is
the day after
. That is to say: out of this enthusiastic moment that makes us feel free, how will this be translated into a new institutional order? What will this order be? Will it be simply a Western liberal democracy? Or will it be some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime? Or will it be something
new
? I mean this is a real hope for me: that something will emerge out of these popular revolts that is neither just a corrupt Western democracy – which just means liberal elites who ignore the crowds – nor an Islamist hardline fundamentalist regime. I think this possibility means
real
hope.

But true hope rises from what we can’t even learn in the media. I don’t know how much it is reported in your country, but, for example, are you aware of what is going on in India? Almost one million Naxalite Maoists there have been mounting major rebellions. Horrible things have been happening back in the jungles of central India. They’re discovering new minerals, and are just killing the tribes in an extremely brutal way to make it free to industrialize. The Indian prime minister characterized this rebellion as the “single largest internal security threat,” and furthermore, the main media, which present it as extremist resistance to progress, are full of stories about “red terrorism.” Nonetheless, as Arundhati Roy wrote in
Outlook India
magazine, the Maoist guerrilla army consists of just poor and desperate tribal people, who have been mercilessly exploited, raped, and cheated by moneylenders, fighting only for survival. Their situation is precisely that of Hegel’s rabble: the Naxalite rebels in India are a starving tribal people, to whom the minimum of a dignified life is denied.

Yet India is considered one of the largest democratic countries. People always oppose India to China. China is a totalitarian society, which is bad, and India is the biggest democracy in the world. Did you see that stupid film
Slumdog Millionaire
? You remember the beginning where the small guy, not a thief at all, was accused and they tortured him with electricity? When I was in India, I asked my friends whether it is still done like this. Then they said: “Yes, it is totally normal. Every police station has machinery to torture using an electric shock. And it’s done regularly to everyone. They just use it all the time.” He told me that, in India, the critics of those in power employ irony: “Please at least treat us like the Chinese treat the Tibetans where they torture you only if they suspected you of having links with the Dalai Lama’s politics.” They don’t torture ordinary small thieves. But, in India, they torture everyone.

So, again, I now see signs of hope there, yet the media ignore them. They are presented only as Maoist or terrorists and so on. But what the army is doing in India is horrible. They treat them like Americans in the nineteenth century treated the Native Indians. It’s extreme brutality. They say, “We will civilize the region,” but it means that the army rape the women and burn the houses. This is the tragedy today. Yet, hope is always connected with danger, potential chaos.

And this is a tough decision to make. Because it is clear apropos of Egypt. Western liberals, those who are in power, are, I think, too opportunistic. They say “No” to any better choice or any change, because every change is dangerous. I think we have to take a chance. I think precisely because of this attitude – “No changes in Arab countries. It’s better to have dictators and tyrants who are friendly to us” – that they will experience stronger and stronger uprisings. This is why I quoted the old motto of Mao Zedong in my article on Egypt, “Why fear the Arab revolutionary spirit?” published in the
Guardian
: “There is great chaos under heaven – the situation is excellent.” This is the price you have to pay for the risk. If you say “No” to change, it can be chaos and nothing will change, so the situation will just get more and more explosive.

This again is the danger: to know how to walk this hazardous narrow path where there is great danger but, at the same time, there is hope. True hope for me only exists where there is danger. Walter Benjamin already said: “Every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution.” His old thesis not only still holds today, but is perhaps more pertinent than ever. So history brings situations, which are hopeful and dangerous, and it’s up to us what to do.

What, then, do you see as a sign of tragedy, rather than of hope? And speaking of a crucial moment in Arab countries, can Egypt’s revolt lead to a new political reality?

SŽ:
What I find so tragic in Western Europe today is the fact that the only passionate political agent, more or less, is predominantly the right-wing anti-immigrant populist, who brings the voice of popular discontent and change. The only passion is there. This is a very tragic situation. So I’m a pessimist for Europe.

Nonetheless Europe historically presented something nice. For me, moments of hope are always moments of
universality
. Do you know how often we talk about a multicultural culture, where we are suspicious about universalism? People often say that we are just too naive, and we all live in our own cultures, and there is no such thing as universality. But listen! What affected me tremendously, not only looking at the general picture of Tahrir Square but also listening to the interviews of protestors and participants, is how cheap and irrelevant this talk about multiculturalism becomes. There we all were fighting against tyrants; they wanted dignity and freedom and immediately found solidarity with each other. Here we already find universality. We have absolutely no problem identifying with them. That was the wonder of this revolution. And this is how we build universal solidarity. It’s a struggle for freedom, and freedom is universal.

I think the greatest triumph is this: when some Muslim brotherhood members were interviewed by the media, they honestly said, first, that this was not their revolution, but they just support it, and, second, that the goal was democracy, freedom, economic justice, and so on. Isn’t it nice that even the fundamentalist political agents had to adopt this language – the language of secular demands for democracy?

This is the opposite of Iran. In Iran, the Khomeini revolution is basically more religious. Leftist Marxists had to smuggle themselves in talking an Islamic language. Here is the opposite. In Egypt, Islamics have to talk using a secular language. This is a wonderful event. I mean nobody believed that they could raise Arab crowds on purely secular grounds. Everybody thought: “Oh, maybe some elite liberals have to come. Arabs are too stupid and too conservative so whatever they need is religion.” No! they did it. Even if it turns out to be a fiasco, this is hope.

Here I’m tempted to quote Emmanuel Kant’s notion of
the sublime
. Kant interpreted the French Revolution as a sign that pointed toward the possibility of freedom. In spite of all the horror that goes on there, events like the French Revolution give you hope – that there’s some kind of universal tendency to freedom and progress.

Kant concluded with the fact that, although progress cannot be proven, we can discern signs indicating that progress is possible. This is what an event like this means. One should note here that the French Revolution generated enthusiasm not only in Europe, but also in faraway places like Haiti, where it triggered another world-historical event. The hitherto unthinkable happened: a whole people fearlessly asserted their freedom and equality. I think we should remain faithful to them.

Do these words not also fit perfectly the ongoing Egyptian uprising? The French Revolution was, for Kant, a sign of history in the triple sense of
signum rememorativum
,
demonstrativum
,
prognosticum
. The Egyptian uprising is also a sign in which the memory of the long past of authoritarian oppression and the struggle for its abolition reverberates; an event which now demonstrates the possibility of a change; a hope for future achievements. Whatever our doubts, fears, and compromises, in that instant of enthusiasm, each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity. All the skepticism displayed behind closed doors, even by many worried progressives, was proven wrong. And also we should be realists. But nonetheless, we should be open to a kind of
miracle
. Things like this are miracles. I don’t mean in religious terms. I mean miracles in the sense that things like this always explode against the predictions of all the specialists, who are always wrong.

Well, I’m old enough to remember the Khomeini revolution. I remember a British general, Sir John Hackett, wrote a book,
The Third World War: The Untold Story
, three or four years before the Khomeini revolution in 1980, depicting the new world conflict. In Slovenia we all laughed at it. Because the decisive battlefield between East and West was supposed to take place 20 kilometers northeast of Ljubljana. But what’s interesting is the presupposition of that book. It says that there will be chaos in the Middle East, and the only American ally that is totally faithful is Iran. You know, it was such a shock for everyone in Iran. Nobody expected it in Iran. They all thought that there could be chaos in Egypt, but not in Iran.

This is exactly what is happening in Tunisia today. Everybody thought there could be chaos here and there, but not in Tunisia – it is the country where tourism is doing well and everything works peacefully. People even described Tunisia as the country, by definition, where nothing happened. But now we have a revolution there. So I think we should be open to this miraculous aspect: again, not a miraculous thing in the sense of God or religion, but a miraculous event in the sense that something can emerge out of nowhere. We cannot predict anything.
Political miracles
give me hope.

It is obvious that events – political miracles as you call them – are taking place, but who will make these political miracles happen, not in the sense of populist demonstrations or uprisings but, rather, a change of political structure and economic systems? Can the “Multitude,” according to Negri and Hardt, be the way forward, or at least an alternative – despite the crucial critiques of the actual possibility of its holding on to political power?

SŽ:
No, not the multitude. Negri and Hardt basically use this term almost in a religious sense – I’ve been having a long philosophical debate with them about this. The problem with multitude is that it mobilizes a certain philosophical topic, such as the difference between presence and representation. The idea of multitude is the presence of absolute democracy and it is always against political representation. And then, the goal is to achieve some kind of immediately transparent democracy. I don’t think this works.

I’m not against representation. As Claude Lefort and others have amply demonstrated, democracy is never simply representative in the sense of adequately representing (expressing) a pre-existing set of interests, opinions, etc., since these interests and opinions are constituted only through such representation. Yet global capitalism today can no longer be combined with democratic representation. Hardt and Negri aim at providing a solution to this predicament in
Empire
, as well as its follow-up,
Multitude
. I don’t think this
dream
of getting rid of all forms of representation and arriving at some kind of immediate transparency, so called “absolute democracy” – “the rule of everyone by everyone, a democracy without qualifiers, without ifs or buts” – will work. I think Negri and Hardt’s intention is to repeat Marx.