Slavoj Zizek - Against Human Rigths
Slavoj Zizek - Against Human Rigths
Slavoj Zizek - Against Human Rigths
C
ontemporary appeals to human rights within our liberal-
capitalist societies generally rest upon three assumptions.
First, that such appeals function in opposition to modes of
fundamentalism that would naturalize or essentialize con-
tingent, historically conditioned traits. Second, that the two most basic
rights are freedom of choice, and the right to dedicate one’s life to the
pursuit of pleasure (rather than to sacrifice it for some higher ideological
cause). And third, that an appeal to human rights may form the basis for
a defence against the ‘excess of power’.
Let us begin with fundamentalism. Here, the evil (to paraphrase Hegel)
often dwells in the gaze that perceives it. Take the Balkans during the
1990s, the site of widespread human-rights violations. At what point did
the Balkans—a geographical region of South-Eastern Europe—become
‘Balkan’, with all that designates for the European ideological imaginary
today? The answer is: the mid-19th century, just as the Balkans were
being fully exposed to the effects of European modernization. The gap
between earlier Western European perceptions and the ‘modern’ image
is striking. Already in the 16th century the French naturalist Pierre Belon
could note that ‘the Turks force no one to live like a Turk’. Small surprise,
then, that so many Jews found asylum and religious freedom in Turkey
and other Muslim countries after Ferdinand and Isabella had expelled
them from Spain in 1492—with the result that, in a supreme twist of
irony, Western travellers were disturbed by the public presence of Jews
in big Turkish cities. Here, from a long series of examples, is a report
from N. Bisani, an Italian who visited Istanbul in 1788:
A stranger, who has beheld the intolerance of London and Paris, must be
much surprised to see a church here between a mosque and a synagogue,
and a dervish by the side of a Capuchin friar. I know not how this govern-
ment can have admitted into its bosom religions so opposite to its own. It
The very feature that the West today celebrates as the sign of its cultural
superiority—the spirit and practice of multicultural tolerance—is thus
dismissed as an effect of Islamic ‘degeneracy’. The strange fate of the
Trappist monks of Etoile Marie is equally telling. Expelled from France
by the Napoleonic regime, they settled in Germany, but were driven out
in 1868. Since no other Christian state would take them, they asked the
Sultan’s permission to buy land near Banja Luka, in the Serb part of
today’s Bosnia, where they lived happily ever after—until they got caught
in the Balkan conflicts between Christians.
1
Quoted in Bozidar Jezernik, Wild Europe: The Balkans in the Gaze of Western
Travellers, London 2004, p. 233.
žižek: Human Rights 117
Unfreedom of choice
2
‘The constitution is dead. Long live proper politics’, Guardian, 4 June 2005.
118 nlr 34
Politics of jouissance
What of the basic right to the pursuit of pleasure? Today’s politics is ever
more concerned with ways of soliciting or controlling jouissance. The
opposition between the liberal-tolerant West and fundamentalist Islam
is most often condensed as that between, on the one side, a woman’s
right to free sexuality, including the freedom to display or expose herself
and to provoke or disturb men; and, on the other side, desperate male
attempts to suppress or control this threat. (The Taliban forbade metal-
tipped heels for women, as the tapping sounds coming from beneath an
all-concealing burka might have an overpowering erotic appeal.)
Liberal attitudes towards the other are characterized both by respect for
otherness, openness to it, and an obsessive fear of harassment. In short,
the other is welcomed insofar as its presence is not intrusive, insofar
as it is not really the other. Tolerance thus coincides with its opposite.
My duty to be tolerant towards the other effectively means that I should
not get too close to him or her, not intrude into his space—in short,
that I should respect his intolerance towards my over-proximity. This
is increasingly emerging as the central human right of advanced capi-
talist society: the right not to be ‘harassed’, that is, to be kept at a safe
distance from others. The same goes for the emergent logic of humani-
tarian or pacifist militarism. War is acceptable insofar as it seeks to bring
about peace, or democracy, or the conditions for distributing humani-
tarian aid. And does the same not hold even more for democracy and
human rights themselves? Human rights are ok if they are ‘rethought’
to include torture and a permanent emergency state. Democracy is ok
if it is cleansed of its populist excesses and limited to those mature
enough to practise it.
formal space of duty. In the second case, duty is my pleasure, and doing
my duty is located in the formal space of ‘pathological’ satisfactions.
was the secret of its existence, the coalition of Orléanists and Legitimists
into one party, disclosed. The bourgeois class fell apart into two big factions
which alternately—the big landed proprietors under the restored monarchy
and the finance aristocracy and the industrial bourgeoisie under the July
Monarchy—had maintained a monopoly of power. Bourbon was the royal
name for the predominant influence of the interests of the one faction,
Orléans the royal name for the predominant influence of the interests of
the other faction—the nameless realm of the republic was the only one in
which both factions could maintain with equal power the common class
interest without giving up their mutual rivalry.3
This, then, is the first complication. When we are dealing with two
or more socio-economic groups, their common interest can only be
represented in the guise of the negation of their shared premise: the
common denominator of the two royalist factions is not royalism, but
3
Marx and Engels, Selected Works, vol. i, Moscow 1969, p. 83.
122 nlr 34
The logic of the Party of Order is here brought to its radical conclusion.
In the same way that the only common denominator of all royalist fact-
ions is republicanism, the only common denominator of all classes is the
excremental excess, the refuse, the remainder, of all classes. That is to
say, insofar as the leader perceives himself as standing above class inter-
ests, his immediate class base can only be the excremental remainder of
all classes, the rejected non-class of each class. And, as Marx develops in
another passage, it is this support from the ‘social abject’ which enables
Bonaparte to shift his position as required, representing in turn each
class against the others.
But there is more. In order for this system to function—that is, for the
leader to stand above classes and not to act as a direct representative of
4
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, Moscow 1975, p. 149.
5
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, p. 194.
žižek: Human Rights 123
any one class—he also has to act as the representative of one particular
class: of the class which, precisely, is not sufficiently constituted to act
as a united agent demanding active representation. This class of people
who cannot represent themselves and can thus only be represented is, of
course, the class of small-holding peasants, who
form a vast mass, the members of which live in similar conditions but
without entering into manifold relations with one other. Their mode of
production isolates them from one another instead of bringing them into
mutual intercourse . . . They are consequently incapable of enforcing their
class interests in their own name, whether through a parliament or through
a convention. They cannot represent themselves, they must be represented.
Their representative must at the same time appear as their master, as an
authority over them, as an unlimited governmental power that protects
them against the other classes and sends them rain and sunshine from
above. The political influence of the small-holding peasants, therefore, finds
its final expression in the executive power subordinating society to itself.6
6
Marx and Engels, Collected Works, vol. xi, pp. 187–8.
124 nlr 34
7
Etienne Balibar, ‘Gewalt’: entry for Historisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch des Marxismus,
vol. 5, ed. Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Hamburg 2002.
žižek: Human Rights 125
Humanitarian purity
It is within this context that we can situate the most salient human rights
issue: the rights of those who are starving or exposed to murderous
8
Hannah Arendt, On Violence, New York 1970.
126 nlr 34
However, the question is: what kind of politicization do those who inter-
vene on behalf of human rights set in motion against the powers they
oppose? Do they stand for a different formulation of justice, or do they
stand in opposition to collective justice projects? For example, it is clear
that the us-led overthrow of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in terms
of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, was not only motivated by
hard-headed politico-economic interests but also relied on a determinate
idea of the political and economic conditions under which ‘freedom’
was to be delivered to the Iraqi people: liberal-democratic capitalism,
insertion into the global market economy, etc. The purely humanitar-
ian, anti-political politics of merely preventing suffering thus amounts
to an implicit prohibition on elaborating a positive collective project of
socio-political transformation.
9
Rony Brauman, ‘From Philanthropy to Humanitarianism’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, Spring–Summer 2004, pp. 398–9 and 416.
10
Wendy Brown, ‘Human Rights as the Politics of Fatalism’, South Atlantic Quarterly,
vol. 103, no. 2–3, p. 453.
žižek: Human Rights 127
What, then, happens to human rights when they are the rights of homo
sacer, of those excluded from the political community; that is, when they
are of no use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no
rights, and are treated as inhuman? Jacques Rancière proposes a sali-
ent dialectical reversal: ‘When they are of no use, one does the same as
charitable persons do with their old clothes. One gives them to the poor.
Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad,
along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes
and rights.’ Nevertheless, they do not become void, for ‘political names
and political places never become merely void’. Instead the void is filled
by somebody or something else:
if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact the human
rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their
rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the ‘right to
11
Etienne Balibar, ‘Is a Philosophy of Human Civic Rights Possible?’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, pp. 320–1.
12
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, New York 1958, p. 297.
13
See Giorgio Agamben, Homo sacer, Stanford 1998.
128 nlr 34
So, to put it in the Leninist way: what the ‘human rights of Third World
suffering victims’ effectively means today, in the predominant discourse,
is the right of Western powers themselves to intervene politically, eco-
nomically, culturally and militarily in the Third World countries of their
choice, in the name of defending human rights. The reference to Lacan’s
formula of communication (in which the sender gets his own message
back from the receiver-addressee in its inverted, i.e. true, form) is very
much to the point here. In the reigning discourse of humanitarian
interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the
victimized Third World its own message in its true form.
The moment human rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing
with them has to change: the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil
must be mobilized anew. Today’s ‘new reign of ethics’, clearly invoked
in, say, Ignatieff’s work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depolitici-
zation, depriving the victimized other of any political subjectivization.
And, as Rancière points out, liberal humanitarianism à la Ignatieff unex-
pectedly meets the ‘radical’ position of Foucault or Agamben with regard
to this depoliticization: their notion of ‘biopolitics’ as the culmination of
Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of ‘ontological trap’,
in which concentration camps appear as ontological destiny: ‘each of us
would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows
faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice
proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap’.15
14
Jacques Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, South Atlantic
Quarterly, vol. 103, no. 2–3, pp. 307–9.
15
Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, p. 301.
žižek: Human Rights 129
Universality’s return
as forever ‘out of joint’ with it. The concrete existence of universality is,
therefore, the individual without a proper place in the social edifice. The
mode of appearance of universality, its entering into actual existence, is
thus an extremely violent act of disrupting the preceding organic poise.
It is not enough to make the well-worn Marxist point about the gap
between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the
particular interests that effectively sustain it. At this level the counter-
argument (made, among others, by Lefort and Rancière), that the form
is never ‘mere’ form but involves a dynamics of its own, which leaves
traces in the materiality of social life, is fully valid. It was bourgeois ‘for-
mal freedom’ that set in motion the very ‘material’ political demands
and practices of feminism or trade unionism. Rancière’s basic emphasis
is on the radical ambiguity of the Marxist notion of the ‘gap’ between
formal democracy—the Rights of Man, political freedoms—and the eco-
nomic reality of exploitation and domination. This gap can be read in
the standard ‘symptomatic’ way: formal democracy is a necessary but
illusory expression of a concrete social reality of exploitation and class
domination. But it can also be read in the more subversive sense of a
tension in which the ‘appearance’ of égaliberté is not a ‘mere appearance’
but contains an efficacy of its own, which allows it to set in motion the
rearticulation of actual socio-economic relations by way of their progres-
sive ‘politicization’. Why shouldn’t women also be allowed to vote? Why
shouldn’t workplace conditions be a matter of public concern as well?
16
Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’, p. 305.