Zizek heeft het trouwens in deel 2 van de documentaire die ik net postte over Derrida…maar niet in positieve zin, geloof ik.

Wat Zizek feitelijk beweert is dat ‘Dit is een Pot Thee’ als uitspraak al die mogelijke interpretaties al in zich heeft en wat hij daaropvolgend beweert is dat de Antieken, die graag direct dit soort uitspraken deden, zich daarvan bewust waren. Ik begrijp Zizek’s bezwaar heel goed: hij beweert feitelijk dat Derrida zich schuldig maakt aan metadiscussie: door de vorm van de discussie aan de kaak te stellen, door overal heel voorzichtig te zijn met taalgebruik, met gedachte-streepjes, met aanhalingstekens, schept Derrida in feite een overbodige afstand tot de kern van de discussie. Dat is wat Zizek feitelijk beweert. Ik ken zelf Derrida niet goed genoeg om er overtuigend een argument over te voeren, maar in deel 7 van de film gaat Zizek direct in discussie met een Derridiaan en maakt hij wel een ijzersterk punt, tenminste zo lijkt het.

Dit vond ik vandaag ook:

But for all the bravura, there was real substance. �i�ek’s aim was to provide a critique of what he saw as passing for ‘belief’ today, through an engagement with what Derrida, towards the end of his life, had understood as belief. From this critique, �i�ek elaborated on how an alternative notion of belief can inform our understandings of justice, and of politics more generally. In effect, in recasting belief, �i�ek was attempting to reunite politics and ethics, to bring back, as he has argued elsewhere, a politics of Truth as opposed to a politics of ‘pragmatic considerations and compromises which always and by definition fall short of the unconditional ethical demand’ (1).

�i�ek’s starting point was what he saw to be a shift in Derrida’s thought. He argued that the ‘late Derrida’ had an understanding of belief that was ‘deontologised’, that is it was a belief that was never to be realised in this world. It was a belief that was forever ‘to come’ (� venir). This unwillingness to ‘ontologise’ belief, in other words to ‘pass to the act’, and to take responsibility for the consequences, �i�ek has identified as being a broader trend within contemporary left intellectuals, what Lacan described as ‘le narcissisme de la chose perdue’, the narcissism of lost causes (2). Elsewhere, �i�ek has elaborated on this point by distinguishing between belief and faith, where faith is the far more radical gesture. As an example, one can believe in ghosts, but one cannot believe them, that is have faith in them. In this way, ‘belief in’ is a displaced kind of belief, which doesn’t requires anything like the first person singular affirmation of faith (3).

In this lecture, �i�ek elaborated on this point in terms of belief as counter-factual. What this means is that there is a radical anti-empiricism at the heart of belief, which manifests itself as an assertion of will over and above what may appear evident from simple personal experience. One example �i�ek gave was of a husband returning home, finding his wife in bed with a lover, and the wife imploring her husband to believe her words rather than his own eyes. Another example was Anne Frank’s diaries, where at the end she affirms her belief in the ‘divine light of humanity’, in spite of what she has seen and known. �i�ek counterposed this idea of belief with contemporary Christian fundamentalism in the United States. Citing examples of fundamentalists who defend their beliefs through science, �i�ek argued that it was precisely this attempt to rationalise belief, to make it answerable to science, that exposed the hollow core of contemporary fundamentalism. Addressing the debate about the return of religion in the West, �i�ek’s argument suggests that this return has to be put in the context of trends within contemporary society. Fundamentalism today says more about society than it does about religion per se.

Bringing together ethics and politics, �i�ek argued that this radical anti-empiricism of real belief should be translated into a willingness to abstract when dealing with questions of justice. Building upon a critique of Levinasian ethics, where justice is reduced to feeling pity for the other, justice should be based instead upon an ability to ignore the finer details of otherness, and to judge a situation abstractly. Paraphrasing Graham Greene, �i�ek argued that if hate is a failure of the imagination (4), then pity is the failure of the capacity of abstraction. Justice must therefore be colourblind ie. it must abstract from the details such as colour, it must ignore the camouflage of the human face and look straight at abstract justice (5). Politically, the implication was that those who had opposed intervention in Kosovo, for instance, those whom �i�ek had disparagingly labeled ‘beautiful soul leftists’, were refusing the moment of ontologisation. That is, for all their rhetoric about human rights, when applied to the concrete situation of Kosovo in 1999, these leftists refused to get their hands dirty by accepting to call in the NATO planes.

Without having to agree with �i�ek on the merits of the 1999 bombing campaign in Kosovo, his account of belief and ontologisation usefully reveals a contradiction at the heart of humanitarianism – that the only way such a normative agenda can ever be fully ontologised, ie. carried out in practice, is through the invocation of state power, in this case NATO jets, which in turn replaces the pretensions to universality with the grubby reality of realpolitik. Without accepting this, human rights activists remain believers only in the Derridean sense of infinite deferral, or ‘belief to come’.

In seeking to unite politics with ethics, �i�ek usefully exposes the political choices and consequences behind actions such as humanitarian intervention, and others which involve moral grandstanding without any idea of how this translates into a real intervention in the world. At the same time, his distinction between real belief as counter-factual, and the ersatz belief of contemporary fundamentalism, is a valuable way of understanding some of the peculiar features of today’s world.