Slavoj Zizek. Multiculturalism or the cultural logic of multinational capitalism?

Slavoj Zizek. Multiculturalism or the cultural logic of multinational capitalism? in: New
Left Review. I/225, September-October 1997.

Those who still remember the good old days of Socialist Realism, are well aware of the
key role played by the notion of the ‘typical’: truly progressive literature should depict
‘typical heroes in typical situations.’ Writers who presented a bleak picture of Soviet
reality were not simply accused of lying; the accusation was rather that they provided a
distorted reflection of social reality by depicting the remainders of the decadent past,
instead of focusing on the phenomena which were ‘typical’ in the sense of expressing
the underlying historical tendency of the progress towards Communism. Ridiculous as
this notion may sound, its grain of truth resides in the fact that each universal
ideological notion is always hegemonized by some particular content which colours its
very universality and accounts for its efficiency

Why Is the Single Mother ‘Typical’?

In the rejection of the social welfare system by the New Right in the us, for example,
the universal notion of the welfare system as inefficient is sustained by the pseudo-
concrete representation of the notorious African-American single mother, as if, in the
last resort, social welfare is a programme for black single mothers – the particular case
of the ‘single black mother’ is silently conceived as ‘typical’ of social welfare and of
what is wrong with it. In the case of the anti-abortion campaign, the ‘typical’ case is the
exact opposite: a sexually promiscuous professional woman who values her career
over her ‘natural’ assignment of motherhood—although this characterization is in
blatant contradiction to the fact that the great majority of abortions occur in lower-class
families with a lot of children. This specific twist, a particular content which is
promulgated as ‘typical’ of the universal notion, is the element of fantasy, of the
phantasmatic background/support of the universal ideological notion. To put it in
Kantian terms, it plays the role of ‘transcendental schematism’, translating the empty
universal concept into a notion which directly relates and applies to our ‘actual
experience’. As such, this phantasmatic specification is by no means an insignificant
illustration or exemplification: it is at this level that ideological battles are won or lost—
the moment we perceive as ‘typical’ the case of abortion in a large lower-class family
unable to cope with another child, the perspective changes radically1.

This example makes clear in what sense ‘the universal results from a constitutive split
in which the negation of a particular identity transforms this identity in the symbol of
identity and fullness as such’:2 the Universal acquires concrete existence when some
particular content starts to function as its stand-in. A couple of years ago, the English
yellow press focused on single mothers as the source of all evils in modern society,
from budget crises to juvenile delinquency. In this ideological space, the universality of
‘modern social Evil’ was operative only through the split of the figure of ‘single mother’
into itself in its particularity and itself as the stand-in for ‘modern social Evil’. The fact
that this link between the Universal and the particular content which functions as its
stand-in is contingent means precisely that it is the outcome of a political struggle for
1
Another name for this short-circuit between the Universal and the Particular is, of course, ‘suture’: the operation of
hegemony ‘sutures’ the empty Universal to a particular content.
2
Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s), Verso, London 1996, pp. 14–15.
ideological hegemony. However, the dialectic of this struggle is more complex than in
its standard Marxist version—of particular interests assuming the form of universality:
‘universal human rights are effectively the rights of white male property owners...’ To
work, the ruling ideology has to incorporate a series of features in which the exploited
majority will be able to recognize its authentic longings. In other words, each
hegemonic universality has to incorporate at least two particular contents, the authentic
popular content as well as its distortion by the relations of domination and exploitation.
Of course, fascist ideology ‘manipulates’ authentic popular longing for true community
and social solidarity against fierce competition and exploitation; of course, it ‘distorts’
the expression of this longing in order to legitimize the continuation of the relations of
social domination and exploitation. However, in order to be able to achieve this
distortion of authentic longing, it has first to incorporate it... Etienne Balibar was fully
justified in reversing Marx’s classic formula: the ruling ideas are precisely not directly
the ideas of those who rule3. How did Christianity become the ruling ideology? By
incorporating a series of crucial motifs and aspirations of the oppressed—truth is on the
side of the suffering and humiliated, power corrupts, and so on—and rearticulating
them in such a way that they became compatible with the existing relations of
domination.

Desire and its Articulation

One is tempted to refer here to the Freudian distinction between the latent dream-
thought and the unconscious desire expressed in a dream. The two are not the same:
the unconscious desire articulates itself, inscribes itself, through the very
‘perlaboration’, translation, of the latent dream-thought into the explicit text of a dream.
In a homologous way, there is nothing ‘fascist’ (or ‘reactionary’ and so forth) in the
‘latent dream-thought’ of fascist ideology (the longing for authentic community and
social solidarity); what accounts for the properly fascist character of fascist ideology is
the way this ‘latent dream-thought’ is transformed and elaborated by the ideological
‘dream-work’ into the explicit ideological text which continues to legitimize social
relations of exploitation and domination. And is it not the same with today’s right-wing
populism? Are liberal critics not too quick in dismissing the very values populism refers
to as inherently ‘fundamentalist’ or ‘proto-fascist’?

Non-ideology—what Fredric Jameson calls the utopian moment present even in the
most atrocious ideology—is thus absolutely indispensable: ideology is in a way nothing
but the form of appearance, the formal distortion/displacement, of non-ideology. To
take the worst imaginable case, was Nazi anti-Semitism not grounded in the utopian
longing for an authentic community life, in the fully justified rejection of the irrationality
of capitalist exploitation? Our point, again, is that it is theoretically and politically wrong
to denounce this longing as a ‘totalitarian fantasy’, that is, to search in it for the ‘roots’
of fascism—the standard mistake of the liberal-individualist critique of fascism: what
makes it ‘ideological’ is its articulation, the way this longing is made to function as the
legitimization of a very specific notion of what capitalist exploitation is (the result of
Jewish influence, of the predominance of financial over ‘productive’ capital—only the
latter tends towards a harmonious ‘partnership’ with workers) and of how we are to
overcome it (by getting rid of the Jews).

3
See Etienne Balibar, La crainte des masses, Paris 1997.
The struggle for ideological and political hegemony is thus always the struggle for the
appropriation of the terms which are ‘spontaneously’ experienced as ‘apolitical’, as
transcending political boundaries. No wonder that the name of the strongest dissident
movement in the Eastern European Communist countries was Solidarity: a signifier of
the impossible fullness of society, if there ever was one. It was as if, in Poland in the
1980s, what Laclau calls the logic of equivalence was brought to an extreme:
‘Communists in power’ served as the embodiment of non-society, of decay and
corruption, magically uniting everyone against themselves, including the disappointed
‘honest Communists’ themselves. Conservative nationalists accused the Communists
of betraying Polish interests to the Soviet master; business-oriented individuals saw in
them an obstacle to unbridled capitalist activity; for the Catholic Church, Communists
were amoral atheists; for the farmers, they represented the force of violent
modernization which threw rural life off the rails; for artists and intellectuals,
Communism was synonymous with oppressive and stupid censorship; workers saw
themselves not only exploited by the Party bureaucracy, but even further humiliated by
the claims that this was done on their behalf; finally, old disillusioned leftists perceived
the regime as the betrayal of ‘true Socialism’. The impossible political alliance between
all these divergent and potentially antagonistic positions was possible only under the
banner of a signifier which stands, as it were, on the very border which separates the
political from the pre-political, and ‘Solidarity’ was the perfect candidate: it is politically
operative as designating the ‘simple’ and ‘fundamental’ unity of human beings which
should link them beyond all political differences4.

Conservative Basic Instincts

What does all this tell us about Labour ’s recent electoral victory in the UK? It is not
only that, in a model hegemonic operation, they reappropriated ‘apolitical’ notions like
‘decency’; what they successfully focused on was the inherent obscenity of the Tory
ideology. The Tories’ explicit ideological statements were always supported by their
shadowy double, by an obscene, publicly unacknowledged, between-the-lines
message. When, for example, they launched their infamous ‘back to basics’ campaign,
its obscene supplement was clearly indicated by Norman Tebbitt, ‘never shy about
exposing the dirty secrets of the Conservative unconscious’5.

‘Many traditional Labour voters realized that they shared our values—that man is not
just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those
basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality6.’ [6]

This, then, is what ‘back to basics’ was really about: the reassertion of ‘basic’ egoistic,
tribal, barbarian ‘instincts’ which lurk beneath the semblance of civilized bourgeois

4
Now, when this magic moment of universal solidarity is over, the signifier which, in some postocialist countries, is
emerging as the signifier of the ‘absent fullness’ of society, is honesty: it forms the focus of the spontaneous ideology of
‘ordinary people’ caught in the economic and social turbulence in which the hopes of a new fullness of Society that
should follow the collapse of Socialism were cruelly betrayed, so that, in their eyes, ‘old forces’ (ex-Communists) and
ex-dissidents who entered the ranks of power joined hands in exploiting them even more than before under the banner
of democracy and freedom. The battle for hegemony, of course, is now focused on the particular content which will give
a spin to this signifier: what does ‘honesty’ mean? And, again, it would be wrong to claim that the conflict is ultimately
about the different meanings of the term ‘honesty’: what gets lost in this ‘semantic clarification’ is that each position
claims that their honesty is the only ‘true’ honesty: the struggle is not simply a struggle among different particular
contents, it is a struggle which splits from within the universal itself.
5
Jacqueline Rose, States of Fantasy, Oxford 1996, p. 149.
6
Cited in ibid.
society. We all remember the (deservedly) famous scene from Paul Verhoeven’s film
Basic Instinct (1992) in which, in the course of a police investigation, Sharon Stone for
a brief moment spreads her legs and reveals to the fascinated policemen what is (or is
it?) a glimpse of her pubic hair. A statement like Tebbitt’s is undoubtedly an ideological
equivalent of this gesture, allowing a brief glance into the obscene intimacy of the
Thatcherite ideological edifice. (Lady Thatcher herself was too ‘dignified’ to perform
directly this ideological Sharon-Stone-gesture too often, so the poor Tebbitt had to act
as her stand-in.) Against this background, the Labour emphasis on ‘decency’ was not a
case of simple moralism—rather, its message was that they are not playing the same
obscene game, that their statements do not contain, ‘between the lines’, the same
obscene message.

In today’s general ideological constellation, this gesture is more important than it may
seem. When the Clinton administration resolved the deadlock of gays in the us Army
with the compromise of ‘Don’t ask, don’t tell!’—by which soldiers are not directly asked
if they are gay, so they are also not compelled to lie and deny it, and although they are
not formally allowed in the Army, they are tolerated as long as they keep their sexual
orientation private and do not actively endeavour to engage others in it—this
opportunist measure was deservedly criticized for endorsing homophobic attitudes.
Although the direct prohibition of homosexuality is not to be enforced, its very existence
as a virtual threat compelling gays to remain in the closet affects their actual social
status. In other words, what this solution amounted to was an explicit elevation of
hypocrisy into a social principle, like the attitude towards prostitution in traditional
Catholic countries—if we pretend that gays in the Army do not exist, it is as if they
effectively do not exist (for the big Other). Gays are to be tolerated, on condition that
they accept the basic censorship concerning their identity...

While fully justified at its own level, the notion of censorship at work in this criticism,
with its Foucauldian background of Power which, in the very act of censorship and
other forms of exclusion, generates the excess it endeavours to contain and dominate,
nonetheless seems to fall short at a crucial point: what it misses is the way in which
censorship not only affects the status of the marginal or subversive force that the
power discourse endeavours to dominate, but, at an even more radical level, splits
from within the power discourse itself. One should ask here a naive, but nonetheless
crucial question: why does the Army so strongly resist publicly accepting gays into its
ranks? There is only one possible consistent answer: not because homosexuality
poses a threat to the alleged ‘phallic and patriarchal’ libidinal economy of the Army
community, but, on the contrary, because the Army community itself relies on a
thwarted/disavowed homosexuality as the key component of the soldiers’ male-
bonding.

From my own experience, I remember how the old infamous Yugoslav People’s Army
was homophobic in the extreme—when someone was discovered to have homosexual
inclinations, he was instantly turned into a pariah, before being formally dismissed from
the Army—yet, at the same time, everyday army life was excessively permeated with
an atmosphere of homosexual innuendo. Say, while soldiers were standing in line for
their meal, a common vulgar joke was to stick a finger into the arse of the person
ahead of you and then to withdraw it quickly, so that when the surprised victim turned
around, he did not know who among the soldiers sharing a stupid obscene smile had
done it. A predominant form of greeting a fellow soldier in my unit, instead of simply
saying ‘Hello!’, was to say ‘Smoke my prick!’ ( ‘Pusi kurac!’ in Serbo-Croat); this
formula was so standardized that it had completely lost any obscene connotation and
was pronounced in a totally neutral way, as a pure act of politeness.

Censorship, Power and Resistance

This fragile coexistence of extreme and violent homophobia with thwarted, that is,
publicly unacknowledged, ‘underground’ homosexual libidinal economy, bears witness
to the fact that the discourse of the military community can only operate by way of
censoring its own libidinal foundation. At a slightly different level, the same goes for the
practice of hazing—the ceremonial beating up and humiliating of us Marines by their
elder peers, who stick medals directly onto their skin, and so on. When the public
disclosure of these practices (somebody secretly shot them on video) caused such an
outrage, what disturbed the public was not the practice of hazing itself (everybody was
aware that things like this were going on), but the fact of it being rendered public.
Outside the confines of military life, do we not encounter a strictly homologous self-
censoring mechanism in conservative populism with its sexist and racist bias? In the
election campaigns of Jesse Helms, the racist and sexist message is not publicly
acknowledged—at the public level, it is sometimes even violently disavowed—but is
instead articulated in a series of double-entendres and coded allusions. This kind of
self-censorship is necessary if, in the present ideological conditions, Helms’s discourse
is to remain effective. If it were to articulate directly, in a public way, its racist bias, this
would render it unacceptable in the hegemonic political discourse; if it were effectively
to abandon the self-censored coded racist message, it would endanger the support of
its targeted electoral body. Conservative populist political discourse thus offers an
exemplary case of a power discourse whose efficiency depends on the mechanism of
self-censorship: it relies on a mechanism which is effective only insofar as it remains
censored. Against the image, all-present in cultural criticism, of a radical subversive
discourse or practice ‘censored’ by the Power, one is even tempted to claim that today,
more than ever, the mechanism of censorship intervenes predominantly to enhance the
efficiency of the power discourse itself.

The temptation to be avoided here is the old leftist notion of ‘better for us to deal with
the enemy who openly admits his (racist, homophobic. . .) bias, than with the
hypocritical attitude of publicly denouncing what one secretly and effectively endorses’.
This notion fatefully underestimates the ideological and political significance of
maintaining appearances: appearance is never ‘merely an appearance’, it profoundly
affects the actual socio-symbolic position of those concerned. If racist attitudes were to
be rendered acceptable in mainstream ideological and political discourse, this would
radically shift the balance of the entire ideological hegemony. This, probably, is what
Alain Badiou had in mind when he mockingly designated his work as a search for the
‘good terror’: today, in the face of the emergence of new racism and sexism, the
strategy should be to make such enunciations unutterable, so that anyone relying on
them automatically disqualifies himself—as, in our universe, those who approvingly
refer to fascism. While one may be aware of the way in which authentic yearnings for,
say, community, are turned by fascism, one should emphatically not discuss ‘how
many people really died in Auschwitz’, ‘the good sides of slavery’, ‘the necessity of
cutting back on worker’s collective rights’, and so on; the position should be here quite
unabashedly ‘dogmatic’ and ‘terrorist’, that these are not objects of ‘open, rational,
democratic discussion’.

This inherent split and self-censorship of the power mechanism is to be opposed to the
Foucauldian motif of the interconnection of Power and resistance. Our point is not only
that resistance is immanent to Power, that power and counter-power generate each
other; it is not only that Power itself generates the excess of resistance which it can no
longer dominate; it is also not only that—in the case of sexuality—the disciplinary
‘repression’ of a libidinal investment eroticizes this gesture of repression itself, as in the
case of the obsessional neurotic who gets libidinal satisfaction out of the very
compulsive rituals destined to keep at bay the traumatic jouissance. This last point
must be further radicalized: the Power edifice itself is split from within, that is, to
reproduce itself and contain its Other, it has to rely on an inherent excess which
grounds it. To put it in the Hegelian terms of speculative identity, Power is always-
already its own transgression, if it is to function, it has to rely on a kind of obscene
supplement—the gesture of self-censorship is co-substantial with the exercise of
power. It is thus not enough to say that the ‘repression’ of some libidinal content
retroactively eroticizes the very gesture of ‘repression’—this ‘eroticization’ of power is
not a secondary effect of its exertion on its object but its very disavowed foundation, its
‘constitutive crime’, its founding gesture which has to remain invisible if power is to
function normally. What we get in the kind of military drill depicted in the first part of
Kubrick’s Vietnam film Full Metal Jacket (1987), for example, is not a secondary
eroticization of the disciplinary procedure which creates military subjects, but the
constitutive obscene supplement of this procedure which renders it operative.

The Logic of Capital

So, back to the recent Labour victory, one can see how it not only involved a
hegemonic reappropriation of a series of motifs which were usually inscribed into the
Conservative field—family values, law and order, individual responsibility; the Labour
ideological offensive also separated these motifs from the obscene phantasmatic
subtext which sustained them in the Conservative field—in which ‘toughness on crime’
and ‘individual responsibility’ subtly referred to brutal egotism, to the disdain for victims,
and other ‘basic instincts’. The problem, however, is that the New Labour strategy
involved its own ‘message between the lines’: we fully accept the logic of Capital, we
will not mess about with it.

Today, financial crisis is a permanent state of things the reference to which legitimizes
the demands to cut social spending, health care, support of culture and scientific
research, in short, the dismantling of the welfare state. Is, however, this permanent
crisis really an objective feature of our socio-economic life? Is it not rather one of the
effects of the shift of balance in the ‘class struggle’ towards Capital, resulting from the
growing role of new technologies as well as from the direct internationalization of
Capital and the co-dependent diminished role of the Nation-State which was further
able to impose certain minimal requirements and limitations to exploitation? In other
words, the crisis is an ‘objective fact’ if and only if one accepts in advance as an
unquestionable premise the inherent logic of Capital—as more and more left-wing or
liberal parties have done. We are thus witnessing the uncanny spectacle of social-
democratic parties which came to power with the between-the-lines message to Capital
‘we will do the necessary job for you in an even more efficient and painless way than
the conservatives’. The problem, of course, is that, in today’s global socio-political
circumstances, it is practically impossible effectively to call into question the logic of
Capital: even a modest social-democratic attempt to redistribute wealth beyond the
limit acceptable to the Capital ‘effectively’ leads to economic crisis, inflation, a fall in
revenues and so on. Nevertheless, one should always bear in mind how the connection
between ‘cause’ (rising social expenditure) and ‘effect’ (economic crisis) is not a direct
objective causal one: it is always-already embedded in a situation of social antagonism
and struggle. The fact that, if one does not obey the limits set by Capital, a crisis ‘really
follows’, in no way ‘proves’ that the necessity of these limits is an objective necessity of
economic life. It should rather be conceived as a proof of the privileged position Capital
holds in the economic and political struggle, as in the situation where a stronger partner
threatens that if you do X, you will be punished by Y, and then, upon your doing X, Y
effectively ensues.

An irony of history is that, in the Eastern European ex-Communist countries, the

‘reformed’ Communists were the first to learn this lesson. Why did many of them return
to power via free elections? This very return offers the ultimate proof that these states
have effectively entered capitalism. That is to say, what do ex-Communists stand for
today? Due to their privileged links with the newly emerging capitalists—mostly
members of the old nomenklatura ‘privatizing’ the companies they once ran—they are
first and foremost the party of big capital; furthermore, to erase the traces of their brief,
but nonetheless rather traumatic experience with politically active civil society, as a rule
they ferociously advocate a withdrawal from ideology, a retreat from active
engagement in civil society to passive, apolitical consumerism—the very two features
which characterize contemporary capitalism. Dissidents are thus astonished to
discover that they played the role of ‘vanishing mediators’ on the path from socialism to
capitalism in which the same class as before rules under a new guise. It is therefore
wrong to claim that the return of the ex-Communists to power signals how people are
disappointed at capitalism and long for the old socialist security—rather, in a kind of
Hegelian ‘negation of negation’, it is only with the return to power of ex-Communists
that socialism was effectively negated; that is, what the political analysts (mis)perceive
as the ‘disappointment at capitalism’ is effectively the disappointment at an ethico-
political enthusiasm for which there is no place in ‘normal’ capitalism7.

At a somewhat different level, the same logic underlies the social impact of
cyberspace: this impact does not derive directly from technology but relies on the
network of social relations, that is, the predominant way digitalization affects our self-
experience is mediated by the frame of the late capitalist globalized market economy.
Bill Gates has commonly celebrated cyberspace as opening up the prospect of what he
calls ‘friction-free capitalism’—this expression renders perfectly the social fantasy
which underlies the ideology of cyberspace capitalism, of a wholly transparent, ethereal
medium of exchange in which the last trace of material inertia vanishes. The crucial
point here is that the ‘friction’ we dispose of in the fantasy of ‘friction-free capitalism’,

7
Retroactively, one thus becomes aware of how deeply the phenomenon of so-called ‘dissidence’ was embedded in the
socialist ideological framework, of the extent to which ‘dissidence’, in its very utopian ‘moralism’ (preaching social
solidarity, ethical responsibility, and so forth) provided the disavowed ethical core of socialism: perhaps, one day,
historians will note that—in the same sense in which Hegel claimed that the true spiritual result of the Peloponnesian
war, its spiritual End, is Thucidydes’s book about it—dissidence’ was the true spiritual result of Really Existing
Socialism.
does not only refer to the reality of material obstacles which sustain any exchange
process, but, above all, to the Real of traumatic social antagonisms, power relations,
and so forth which brand the space of social exchange with a pathological twist. In his
Grundrisse manuscripts, Marx pointed out how the very material disposition of a
nineteenth-century industrial production site directly materializes the capitalist
relationship of domination—the worker as a mere appendix subordinated to the
machinery owned by the capitalist; mutatis mutandis, the same goes for cyberspace. In
the social conditions of late capitalism, the very materiality of cyberspace automatically
generates the illusory abstract space of ‘friction-free’ exchange in which the
particularity of the participants’ social position is obliterated.

The predominant ‘spontaneous ideology of cyberspace’ is so-called ‘cyber-

revolutionism’ which relies on the notion of cyberspace—or the World Wide Web—as a
self-evolving ‘natural’ organism8. Crucial here is the blurring of the distinction between
‘culture’ and ‘nature’: the obverse of the ‘naturalization of culture’ (market, society as
living organism) is the ‘culturalization of nature’ (life itself is conceived as a set of self-
reproducing data—‘genes are memes’)9. This new notion of Life is thus neutral with
respect to the distinction of natural and cultural or ‘artificial’ processes. The Earth (as
Gaia) and the global market, they both appear as gigantic self-regulated living systems
whose basic structure is defined in terms of the process of coding and decoding, of
transmitting information. The idea of the World Wide Web as a living organism is often
evoked in contexts which may seem liberating—say, against state censorship of the
Internet. However, this very demonization of the state is thoroughly ambiguous, since it
is predominantly appropriated by right-wing populist discourse and/or market liberalism:
its main targets are the state interventions which try to maintain a kind of minimal social
balance and security. The title of Michael Rothschild’s book—Bionomics: The
Inevitability of Capitalism—is indicative here10. So, while cyberspace ideologists can
dream about the next evolutionary step in which we will no longer be mechanically
interacting ‘Cartesian’ individuals, in which each ‘person’ will cut his or her substantial
link to his individual body and conceive of itself as part of the new holistic Mind which
lives and acts through him or her, what is obfuscated in such a direct ‘naturalization’ of
the World Wide Web or market is the set of power relations—of political decisions, of
institutional conditions—which ‘organisms’ like the Internet (or the market or
capitalism...) need in order to thrive.

Ideological Underground

What one should do is thus reassert the old Marxist critique of ‘reification’: today,
emphasizing the depoliticized ‘objective’ economic logic against the allegedly ‘outdated’
forms of ideological passions is the predominant ideological form, since ideology is
always self-referential, that is, it always defines itself through a distance towards an
Other dismissed and denounced as ‘ideological11. Jacques Ranciére gave a poignant
expression to the ’bad surprise’ which awaits today’s postmodern ideologues of the
‘end of politics’: it is as if we are witnessing the ultimate confirmation of Freud’s thesis,
from Civilization and its Discontents, on how, after every assertion of Eros, Thanatos

8
See Tiziana Terranova, ‘Digital Darwin’, New Formations, no. 29, Summer 1996.
9
See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford 1989.
10
Michael L. Rothschild, Bionomics: The Inevitability of Capitalism, Armonk, ny 1992.
11
See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Introduction’, in Mapping Ideology, Verso, London 1995.
reasserts itself with a vengeance. At the very moment when, according to the official
ideology, we are finally leaving behind the ‘immature’ political passions (the regime of
the ‘political’—class struggle and other ‘out-dated’ divisive antagonisms) for the
‘mature’ post-ideological pragmatic universe of rational administration and negotiated
consensus, for the universe, free of utopian impulses, in which the dispassionate
administration of social affairs goes hand in hand with aestheticized hedonism (the
pluralism of ‘ways of life’)—at this very moment, the foreclosed political is celebrating a
triumphant comeback in its most archaic form: of pure, undistilled racist hatred of the
Other which renders the rational tolerant attitude utterly impotent 12. In this precise
sense, contemporary ‘postmodern’ racism is the symptom of multiculturalist late
capitalism, bringing to light the inherent contradiction of the liberal-democratic
ideological project. Liberal ‘tolerance’ condones the folklorist Other deprived of its
substance—like the multitude of ‘ethnic cuisines’ in a contemporary megalopolis;
however, any ‘real’ Other is instantly denounced for its ‘fundamentalism’, since the
kernel of Otherness resides in the regulation of its jouissance: the ‘real Other’ is by
definition ‘patriarchal’, ‘violent’, never the Other of ethereal wisdom and charming
customs. One is tempted to reactualize here the old Marcusean notion of ‘repressive
tolerance’, reconceiving it as the tolerance of the Other in its aseptic, benign form,
which forecloses the dimension of the Real of the Other’s jouissance13.

The same reference to jouissance enables us to cast a new light on the horrors of the
Bosnian war, as they are reflected in Emir Kusturica’s film, Underground (1995). The
political meaning of this film does not reside primarily in its overt tendentiousness, in
the way it takes sides in the post-Yugoslav conflict—heroic Serbs versus the
treacherous, pro-Nazi Slovenes and Croats—but, rather, in its very ‘depoliticized’
aestheticist attitude. That is to say, when, in his conversations with the journalists of
Cahiers du cinéma, Kusturica insisted that Underground is not a political film at all but a
kind of liminal trance-like subjective experience, a ‘deferred suicide’, he thereby
unknowingly put on the table his true political cards and indicated that Underground
stages the ‘apolitical’ phantasmatic background of the post-Yugoslav ethnic cleansing
and war cruelties. How? The predominant cliché about the Balkans is that the Balkan
people are caught in the phantasmatic whirlpool of historical myth—Kusturica himself
endorses this view: ‘In this region, war is a natural phenomenon. It is like a natural
catastrophe, like an earthquake which explodes from time to time. In my film, I tried to
clarify the state of things in this chaotic part of the world. It seems that nobody is able
to locate the roots of this terrible conflict 14.’ What we find here, of course, is an
exemplary case of ‘Balkanism’, functioning in a similar way to Edward Said’s concept of
‘Orientalism’: the Balkans as the timeless space onto which the West projects its
phantasmatic content. Together with Milche Manchevski’s Before the Rain (which
almost won the Oscar for the best foreign film in 1995), Underground is thus the
ultimate ideological product of Western liberal multiculturalism: what these two films
offer to the Western liberal gaze is precisely what this gaze wants to see in the Balkan
war—the spectacle of a timeless, incomprehensible, mythical cycle of passions, in
contrast to decadent and anaemic Western life15.

12
See Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics, Verso, London 1995, p. 22.
13
For a more detailed account of the role of jouissance in the process of ideological identification, see Slavoj Žižek, The
Plague of Fantasies, Verso, London 1997, ch. 2.
14
‘Propos de Emir Kusturica, Cahiers de cinéma, no. 492, June 1995, p. 69.
The weak point of the universal multiculturalist gaze does not reside in its inability to
‘throw out the dirty water without losing the baby’: it is deeply wrong to assert that,
when one throws out nationalist dirty water—‘excessive’ fanaticism—one should be
careful not to lose the baby of ‘healthy’ national identity, so that one should trace the
line of separation between the proper degree of ‘healthy’ nationalism which guarantees
the necessary minimum of national identity, and ‘excessive’ nationalism. Such a
common sense distinction reproduces the very nationalist reasoning which aims to get
rid of ‘impure’ excess. One is therefore tempted to propose a homology with
psychoanalytic treatment, whose aim is also not to get rid of the dirty water (symptoms,
pathological tics) to keep the baby (the kernel of the healthy Ego) safe, but, rather, to
throw out the baby (to suspend the patient’s Ego) to confront the patient with his ‘dirty
water’, with the symptoms and fantasies which structure his jouissance. In the matter of
national identity, one should also endeavour to throw out the baby (the spiritual purity
of national identity) to render visible the phantasmatic support which structures the
jouissance in the national Thing. And the merit of Underground is that, unknowingly, it
renders visible this dirty water.

The Time Machine

Underground brings to the light of day the obscene ‘underground’ of public, official
discourse—represented in the film by the Titoist Communist regime. One should bear
in mind that the ‘underground’ to which the film’s title refers is not only the domain of
‘deferred suicide’, of the eternal orgy of drinking, singing and copulating, which takes
places in the suspension of time and outside public space: it also stands for the
‘underground’ workshop in which the enslaved workers, isolated from the rest of the
world, and thus misled into thinking that World War ii is still going on, work day and
night and produce arms sold by Marko, the hero of the film, their ‘owner’ and the big
Manipulator, the only one who mediates between the ‘underground’ and the public
world. Kusturica refers here to the old European fairy-tale motif of diligent dwarfs
(usually controlled by an evil magician) who, during the night, while people are asleep,
emerge from their hiding-place and accomplish their work (set the house in order, cook
the meals), so that when, in the morning, people awaken, they find their work magically
done. Kusturica’s ‘underground’ is the last embodiment of this motif which is found from
Richard Wagner’s Rhinegold (the Nibelungs who work in their underground caves,
driven by their cruel master, the dwarf Alberich) to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in which the
enslaved industrial workers live and work deep beneath the earth’s surface to produce
wealth for the ruling capitalists.

This schema of the ‘underground’ slaves, dominated by a manipulative evil Master,

takes place against the background of the opposition between the two figures of the
Master: on the one hand, the ‘visible’ public symbolic authority, on the other hand, the
‘invisible’ spectral apparition. When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority, he
acts as an appendix to his symbolic title, that is, it is the ‘big Other’, the symbolic
institution, who acts through him: suffice it to recall a judge who may be a miserable
and corrupted person, but the moment he puts on his robe and other insignia, his

15
As to this Western perception of the Balkans as a fantasy-screen, see Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom, London
1995.
words are those of Law itself. On the other hand, the ‘invisible’ Master—whose
exemplary case is the anti-Semitic figure of the ‘Jew’ who, invisible to the public eye,
pulls the strings of social life – is a kind of uncanny double of public authority: he has to
act in shadow, invisible to the public eye, irradiating a phantom-like, spectral
omnipotence16. Marko from Kusturica’s Underground is to be located in this lineage of
the evil magician who controls an invisible empire of enslaved workers: he is a kind of
uncanny double of Tito as the public symbolic Master. The problem with Underground
is that it falls into the cynical trap of presenting this obscene ‘underground’ from a
benevolent distance. Underground, of course, is multi-layered and self-reflective, it
plays with a multitude of clichés (the Serbian myth of a true man who, even when
bombs fall around him, calmly continues his meal, and so on) which are ‘not to be
taken literally’—however, it is precisely through such self-distance that ‘postmodern’
cynical ideology functions. In a well-known and much-reprinted piece, ‘Fourteen
Theses on Fascism’ (1995), Umberto Eco enumerated the series of features which
define the kernel of the fascist attitude: dogmatic tenacity, the absence of humour,
insensibility to rational argument... he couldn’t have been more wrong. Today’s neo-
fascism is more and more ‘postmodern’, civilized, playful, involving ironic self-distance,
yet for all that no less fascist.

So, in a way, Kusturica is right in his interview with Cahiers du cinéma: he does
somehow ‘clarify the state of things in this chaotic part of the world’ by way of bringing
to light its ‘underground’ phantasmatic support. He thereby unknowingly provides the
libidinal economy of the ethnic slaughter in Bosnia: the pseudo-Bataillean trance of
excessive expenditure, the continuous mad rhythm of drinking-eating-singing-
fornicating. And, therein consists the ‘dream’ of the ethnic cleansers, therein resides
the answer to the question ‘How were they able to do it?’ If the standard definition of
war is that of ‘a continuation of politics by other means’, then the fact that Radovan
Karadžić.The TOC mentioned in the web site is not in the page number order. So we
have followed the Book TOC., the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, is a poet, is more than
a gratuitous coincidence: ethnic cleansing in Bosnia was the ‘continuation of (a kind of)
poetry by other means.’

‘Concrete’ Versus ‘Abstract’ Universality

How, then, is this multiculturalist ideological poetry embedded in today’s global

capitalism? The problem which lurks beneath it is that of universalism. Etienne Balibar
discerned three levels of universality in today’s societies: the ‘real’ universality of the
process of globalization and the supplementary process of ‘internal exclusions’ (the
extent to which, now, the fate of each of us hinges on the intricate web of global market
relations); the universality of the fiction which regulates ideological hegemony (Church
or State as the universal ‘imagined communities’ which allow the subject to acquire a
distance towards his immersion in his immediate social group—class, profession, sex,
religion—and posit himself as a free subject); the universality of an Ideal, as
exemplified by the revolutionary demand for égaliberté (equality-freedom) which

16
See Slavoj Žižek, ‘’I Hear You with My Eyes’; or, The Invisible Master’, in Renata Salecl and Slavoj Žižek, eds, Gaze
and Voice as Love Objects, Durham, nc 1996.
remains an unconditional excess, setting in motion permanent insurrection against the
existing order, and can thus never be ‘gentrified’, included in the existing order17.

The point, of course, is that the boundary between these three universals is never
stable and fixed: égaliberté can serve as the hegemonic idea which enables us to
identify with our particular social role (I am a poor artisan, but precisely as such, I
participate in the life of my Nation-State as an equal and free citizen), or as the
irreducible excess which destabilizes each fixed social order. What was in the Jacobin
universe the destabilizing universality of the Ideal, setting in motion the incessant
process of social transformation, became later the ideological fiction allowing each
individual to identify with his specific place in the social space. In Hegelese, the
alternative here is the following: is the universal ‘abstract’ (opposed to concrete
content) or ‘concrete’ (in the sense that I experience my very particular mode of social
life as the specific way of my participation in the universal social order)? Balibar’s point,
of course, is that the tension between the two is irreducible: the excess of abstract-
negative-ideal universality, its unsettling-destabilizing force, can never be fully
integrated into the harmonious whole of a ‘concrete universality 18. However, there is
another tension, the tension between the two modes of ‘concrete universality’ itself,
which seems more crucial today. That is to say, the ‘real’ universality of today’s
globalization through the global market involves its own hegemonic fiction (or even
ideal) of multiculturalist tolerance, respect and protection of human rights, democracy,
and so forth; it involves its own pseudo-Hegelian ‘concrete universality’ of a world order
whose universal features of the world market, human rights and democracy, allow each
specific ‘life-style’ to flourish in its particularity. So a tension inevitably emerges
between this postmodern, post-nation-state, ‘concrete universality’, and the earlier
‘concrete universality’ of the Nation-State.

Hegel was the first to elaborate the properly modern paradox of individualization
through secondary identification. At the beginning, the subject is immersed in the
particular life-form into which he was born (family, local community); the only way for
him to tear himself away from his primordial ‘organic’ community, to cut his links with it
and to assert himself as an ‘autonomous individual’, is to shift his fundamental
allegiance, to recognize the substance of his being in another, secondary community
which is universal and, simultaneously, ‘artificial’, no longer ‘spontaneous’ but
‘mediated’, sustained by the activity of independent free subjects—nation versus local
community; a profession in the modern sense (a job in a large anonymous company)
versus the ‘personalized’ relationship between an apprentice and his master-artisan;
the academic community of knowledge versus the traditional wisdom passed from
generation to generation. In this shift from primary to secondary identification, primary
identifications undergo a kind of transubstantiation: they start to function as the form of
appearance of the universal secondary identification—say, precisely by being a good
member of my family, I thereby contribute to the proper functioning of my Nation-State.
The universal secondary identification remains ‘abstract’ insofar as it is directly
opposed to the particular forms of primary identification, that is, insofar as it compels
the subject to renounce his primary identifications; it becomes ‘concrete’ when it
17
See Balibar, La crainte des masses, pp. 421–54.
18
Here, the parallel is clear with Laclau’s opposition between the logic of difference (society as a differential symbolic
structure) and the logic of antagonism (society as ‘impossible’, thwarted by an antagonistic split). Today, the tension
between the logic of difference and the logic of antagonism assumes the form of the tension between the liberal-
democratic universe of negotiation and the ‘fundamentalist’ universe of struggle between Good and Evil.
reintegrates primary identifications, transforming them into the modes of appearance of
the secondary identification. This tension between ‘abstract’ and ‘concrete’ universality
is clearly discernible in the precarious social status of the early Christian Church: on
the one hand, there was the zealotry of the radical groups which saw no way to
combine the true Christian attitude with the existing space of predominant social
relations, and thus posed a serious threat to the social order; on the other hand, there
were the attempts to reconcile Christianity with the existing structure of domination, so
that participation in social life and occupying a place within a hierarchy were compatible
with being a good Christian—indeed, accomplishing your determinate social role was
not only seen as compatible with being a Christian, it was even perceived as a specific
way to fulfil the universal duty of being a Christian.

In the modern era, the predominant social form of the ‘concrete universal’ is the Nation-
State as the medium of our particular social identities: the determinate form of my
social life (as, say, worker, professor, politician, farmer, lawyer) is the specific mode of
my participation in the universal life of my Nation-State. With regard to this logic of
transubstantiation which guarantees the ideological unity of a Nation-State, the United
States of America plays a unique role of exception: the key element of the standard
‘American Ideology’ consists in the endeavour to transubstantiate the very fidelity to
one’s particular ethnic roots into an expression of ‘being American’: in order to be ‘a
good American’, one does not have to renounce one’s ethnic roots—Italians, Germans,
Blacks, Jews, Greeks, Koreans, they are ‘all Americans’, that is, the very particularity of
their ethnic identity, the way they ‘stick to it’, makes them Americans. This
transubstantiation by means of which the tension between my particular ethnic identity
and my universal identity as a member of a Nation-State is surpassed, is threatened
today: it is as if the positive charge of pathetic patriotic identification with the universal
frame of the American Nation-State has been seriously eroded; ‘Americanness’, the
fact of ‘being American’, less and less gives rise to the sublime effect of being part of a
gigantic ideological project—‘the American dream’—so that the American state is more
and more experienced as a simple formal framework for the coexistence of the
multiplicity of ethnic, religious or life-style communities.

Modernism in Reverse

This gradual collapse—or, rather, loss of substance—of the ‘American dream’ bears
witness to the unexpected reversal of the passage from primary to secondary
identification described by Hegel: in our ‘postmodern’ societies, the ‘abstract’ institution
of secondary identification is increasingly experienced as an external, purely formal
frame that is not really binding, so that one is more and more looking for support in
‘primordial’, usually smaller (ethnic, religious) forms of identification. Even when these
forms of identification are more ‘artificial’ than national identification—as is the case
with the gay community—they are more ‘immediate’ in the sense of seizing the
individual directly and overwhelmingly, in his specific ‘way of life’, thereby restraining
the ‘abstract’ freedom he possesses in his capacity as the citizen of a Nation-State.
What we are dealing with today is thus a reverse process to that of the early modern
constitution of a Nation: in contrast to the ‘nationalization of the ethnic’—the de-
ethnicization, the ‘sublation’ (Aufhebung) of the ethnic into the national—we are now
dealing with the ‘ethnicization of the national’, with a renewed search for (or
reconstitution of) ‘ethnic roots’. The crucial point here, however, is that this ‘regression’
from secondary to ‘primordial’ forms of identification with ‘organic’ communities is
already ‘mediated’: it is a reaction to the universal dimension of the world market—as
such, it occurs on its terrain, against its background. For that reason, what we are
dealing with in these phenomena is not a ‘regression’ but rather the form of
appearance of its exact opposite: in a kind of ‘negation of negation’, this very
reassertion of ‘primordial’ identification signals that the loss of organic-substantial unity
is fully consummated.

To make this point clear, one should bear in mind what is perhaps the fundamental
lesson of postmodern politics: far from being a ‘natural’ unity of social life, a balanced
frame, a kind of Aristotelian entelechia towards which all previous development
advances, the universal form of the Nation-State is rather a precarious, temporary
balance between the relationship to a particular ethnic Thing (patriotism, pro patria
mori, and so forth) and the (potentially) universal function of the market. On the one
hand, it ‘sublates’ organic local forms of identification into the universal ‘patriotic’
identification; on the other hand, it posits itself as a kind of pseudo-natural boundary of
the market economy, delimiting ‘internal’ from ‘external’ commerce—economic activity
is thus ‘sublimated’, raised to the level of the ethnic Thing, legitimated as a patriotic
contribution to the nation’s greatness. This balance is constantly threatened from both
sides, from the side of previous ‘organic’ forms of particular identification which do not
simply disappear but continue their subterranean life outside the universal public
sphere, as well as from the side of the immanent logic of Capital whose ‘transnational’
nature is inherently indifferent to the boundaries of Nation-State. And today’s new
‘fundamentalist’ ethnic identifications involve a kind of ‘desublimation’, a process of
disintegration of this precarious unity of the ‘national economy’ into its two constituent
parts, the transnational market function and the relationship to the ethnic Thing 19. It is
therefore only today, in contemporary ‘fundamentalist’ ethnic, religious, life-style
communities, that the splitting between the abstract form of commerce and the
relationship to the particular ethnic Thing, inaugurated by the Enlightenment project, is
fully realized: today’s postmodern ethnic or religious ‘fundamentalism’ and xenophobia
are not only not ‘regressive’, but, on the contrary, offer the supreme proof of the final
emancipation of the economic logic of market from the attachment to the ethnic
Thing20. Therein resides the highest speculative effort of the dialectic of social life: not
in describing the process of mediation of the prim-ordial immediacy—say, the
disintegration of organic community in ‘alienated’ individualist society—but in explaining
how this very process of mediation characteristic of modernity can give birth to new
forms of ‘organic’ immediacy. The standard story of the passage from Gemeinschaft to
Gesellschaft should therefore be supplemented by an account of how this process of

19
One of the minor, yet tell-tale, events that bear witness to this ‘withering-away’ of the Nation-State is the slow
spreading of the obscene institution of private prisons in the usa and other Western countries: the exercise of what
should be the monopoly of the State (physical violence and coercion) becomes the object of a contract between the
State and a private company which exerts coercion on individuals for the sake of profit—what we have here is simply
the end of the monopoly on the legitimate use of violence which (according to Max Weber) defines the modern State.
20
These three stages (pre-modern communities, the Nation-State and today’s emerging transnational ‘universal
society’) clearly fit the triad of traditionalism, modernism, and postmodernism, elaborated by Fredric Jameson: here
also, the retro-phenomena that characterize postmodernism should not deceive us—it is only with postmodernism that
the break with pre-modernity is fully consummated. The reference to Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic
of Late Capitalism (Verso, London 1993) in the title of this essay is thus deliberate.
becoming-society of community gives rise to different forms of new, ‘mediated’
communities—say, the ‘life-style communities’.

Multiculturalism

How, then, does the universe of Capital relate to the form of Nation-State in our era of
global capitalism? Perhaps, this relationship is best designated as ‘auto-colonization’:
with the direct multinational functioning of Capital, we are no longer dealing with the
standard opposition between metropolis and colonized countries; a global company as
it were cuts its umbilical cord with its mother-nation and treats its country of origins as
simply another territory to be colonized. This is what disturbs so much the patriotically
oriented right-wing populists, from Le Pen to Buchanan: the fact that the new
multinationals have towards the French or American local population exactly the same
attitude as towards the population of Mexico, Brazil or Taiwan. Is there not a kind of
poetic justice in this self-referential turn? Today’s global capitalism is thus again a kind
of ‘negation of negation’, after national capitalism and its internationalist/colonialist
phase. At the beginning (ideally, of course), there is capitalism within the confines of a
Nation-State, with the accompanying international trade (exchange between sovereign
Nation-States); what follows is the relationship of colonization in which the colonizing
country subordinates and exploits (economically, politically, culturally) the colonized
country; the final moment of this process is the paradox of colonization in which there
are only colonies, no colonizing countries—the colonizing power is no longer a Nation-
State but directly the global company. In the long term, we shall all not only wear
Banana Republic shirts but also live in banana republics.

And, of course, the ideal form of ideology of this global capitalism is multiculturalism,
the attitude which, from a kind of empty global position, treats each local culture the
way the colonizer treats colonized people—as ‘natives’ whose mores are to be
carefully studied and ‘respected’. That is to say, the relationship between traditional
imperialist colonialism and global capitalist self-colonization is exactly the same as the
relationship between Western cultural imperialism and multiculturalism: in the same
way that global capitalism involves the paradox of colonization without the colonizing
Nation-State metropole, multi-culturalism involves patronizing Eurocentrist distance
and/or respect for local cultures without roots in one’s own particular culture. In other
words, multiculturalism is a disavowed, inverted, self-referential form of racism, a
‘racism with a distance’—it ‘respects’ the Other’s identity, conceiving the Other as a
self-enclosed ‘authentic’ community towards which he, the multiculturalist, maintains a
distance rendered possible by his privileged universal position. Multiculturalism is a
racism which empties its own position of all positive content (the multiculturalist is not a
direct racist, he doesn’t oppose to the Other the particular values of his own culture),
but nonetheless retains this position as the privileged empty point of universality from
which one is able to appreciate (and depreciate) properly other particular cultures—the
multiculturalist respect for the Other’s specificity is the very form of asserting one’s own
superiority.

What about the rather obvious counter-argument that the multiculturalist’s neutrality is
false, since his position silently privileges Eurocentrist content? This line of reasoning is
right, but for the wrong reason. The particular cultural background or roots which
always support the universal multiculturalist position are not its ‘truth’, hidden beneath
the mask of universality—‘multiculturalist universalism is really Eurocentrist’—but rather
the opposite: the stain of particular roots is the phantasmatic screen which conceals
the fact that the subject is already thoroughly ‘rootless’, that his true position is the void
of universality. Let me recall here my own paraphrase of de Quincey’s witticism about
the simple art of murder: how many people have began with an innocent group sex
orgy and ended with sharing meals in a Chinese restaurant 21! The point of this
paraphrase is to reverse the standard relationship between the surface-pretext and the
unacknowledged wish: sometimes, the most difficult thing is to accept the appearance
at its surface value—we imagine multiple phantasmatic scenarios to cover it up with
‘deeper meanings.’ It may well be that my ‘true desire’ to be discerned behind my
refusal to share a Chinese meal is my fascination with the fantasy of a group orgy, but
the key point is that this fantasy which structures my desire is in itself already a
defence against my ‘oral’ drive which goes its way with absolute coercion. . .

What we find here is the exact equivalent of Darian Leader’s example of the man in a
restaurant with his date, who, when asking the waiter for the table, says ‘Bedroom for
two, please!’ instead of ‘Table for two, please!’ One should turn around the standard
Freudian explanation (‘Of course, his mind was already on the night of sex he planned
after the meal!’): this intervention of the subterranean sexual fantasy is rather the
screen which serves as the defence against the oral drive which effectively matters to
him more than sex22. In his analysis of the French revolution of 1848 (in The Class-
Struggles in France), Marx provides a similar example of such a double deception: the
Party of Order which took over after the Revolution, publicly supported the Republic,
yet secretly, it believed in Restoration—they used every opportunity to mock republican
rituals and to signal in any way possible where ‘their heart is’23. The paradox, however,
was that the truth of their activity resided in the external form they privately mocked and
despised: this republican form was not a mere semblance beneath which the royalist
desire lurked—it was rather the secret clinging to Royalism which enabled them to fulfil
their actual historical function, to implement the bourgeois republican law and order.
Marx himself mentions how members of the Party of Order found immense pleasure in
their occasional Royalist ‘slips of the tongue’ against the Republic—referring, for
instance, to France as a Kingdom in their parliamentary debates: these slips of the
tongue articulated their phantasmatic illusions which served as the screen enabling
them to blind themselves for the social reality of what was going on on the surface.

The Machine in the Ghost

And, mutatis mutandis, the same goes for today’s capitalist who still clings to some
particular cultural heritage, identifying it as the secret source of his success—Japanese
executives participating in tea ceremonies or obeying the bushido code—or for the
inverse case of the Western journalist in search of the particular secret of the Japanese

21
Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom!, New York 1993, p. 1.
22
See Darian Leader, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, London 1996.
23
Karl Marx, ‘The Class Struggles in France: 1848 to 1850’, in Surveys from Exile. Political
Writings: Volume 2, London 1973.
success: this very reference to a particular cultural formula is a screen for the universal
anonymity of Capital. The true horror does not reside in the particular content hidden
beneath the universality of global Capital, but rather in the fact that Capital is effectively
an anonymous global machine blindly running its course, that there is effectively no
particular Secret Agent who animates it. The horror is not the (particular living) ghost in
the (dead universal) machine, but the (dead universal) machine in the very heart of
each (particular living) ghost.

The conclusion to be drawn is thus that the problematic of multiculturalism – the hybrid
coexistence of diverse cultural life-worlds – which imposes itself today is the form of
appearance of its opposite, of the massive presence of capitalism as universal world
system: it bears witness to the unprecedented homogenization of the contemporary
world. It is effectively as if, since the horizon of social imagination no longer allows us
to entertain the idea of an eventual demise of capitalism – since, as we might put it,
everybody silently accepts that capitalism is here to stay – critical energy has found a
substitute outlet in fighting for cultural differences which leave the basic homogeneity of
the capitalist world-system intact. So we are fighting our pc battles for the rights of
ethnic minorities, of gays and lesbians, of different life-styles, and so on, while
capitalism pursues its triumphant march – and today’s critical theory, in the guise of
‘cultural studies’, is doing the ultimate service to the unrestrained development of
capitalism by actively participating in the ideological effort to render its massive
presence invisible: in a typical postmodern ‘cultural criticism’, the very mention of
capitalism as world system tends to give rise to the accusation of ‘essentialism’,
‘fundamentalism’ and other crimes.

The structure here is that of a symptom. When one is dealing with a universal
structuring principle, one always automatically assumes that—in principle, precisely—it
is possible to apply this principle to all its potential elements, and that the empirical
non-realization of the principle is merely a matter of contingent circumstances. A
symptom, however, is an element which—although the non-realization of the universal
principle in it appears to hinge on contingent circumstances—has to remain an
exception, that is, the point of suspension of the universal principle: if the universal
principle were to apply also to this point, the universal system itself would disintegrate.
As is well known, in the paragraphs on civil society in his Philosophy of Right, Hegel
demonstrated how the large class of ‘rabble’ (Poebel) in modern civil society is not an
accidental result of social mismanagement, inadequate government measures or
economic bad luck: the inherent structural dynamics of civil society necessarily give
rise to a class which is excluded from the benefits of civil society, a class deprived of
elementary human rights and therefore also delivered of duties towards society, an
element within civil society which negates its universal principle, a kind of ‘un-Reason
inherent to Reason itself’—in short, its symptom.

Do we not witness the same phenomenon today, and in even stronger shape, with the
growth of an underclass excluded, sometimes for generations, from the benefits of
affluent liberal-democratic society? Today’s ‘exceptions’—the homeless, the
ghettoized, the permanently unemployed—are the symptom of the late capitalist
universal system, a growing and permanent reminder of how the immanent logic of late
capitalism works: the proper capitalist utopia is that, through appropriate measures (for
progressive liberals, affirmative action; for conservatives, a return to self-reliance and
family values), this ‘exception’ could be—in the long term and in principle, at least—
abolished. And is not a homologous utopia at work in the notion of a ‘rainbow coalition’:
in the idea that, at some utopian future moment, all ‘progressive’ struggles—for gay
and lesbian rights, for the rights of ethnic and religious minorities, the ecological
struggle, the feminist struggle, and so on—will be united in the common ‘chain of
equivalences’? Again, this necessity of failure is structural: the point is not simply that,
because of the empirical complexity of the situation, all particular ‘progressive’ fights
will never be united, that ‘wrong’ chains of equivalences will always occur—say, the
enchainment of the fight for African-American ethnic identity with patriarchal and
homophobic ideology—but rather that emergencies of ‘wrong’ enchainments are
grounded in the very structuring principle of today’s ‘progressive’ politics of establishing
‘chains of equivalences’: the very domain of the multitude of particular struggles with
their continuously shifting displacements and condensations is sustained by the
‘repression’ of the key role of economic struggle—the leftist politics of the ‘chains of
equivalences’ among the plurality of struggles is strictly correlative to the silent
abandonment of the analysis of capitalism as a global economic system and to the
acceptance of capitalist economic relations as the unquestionable framework24.

The falsity of elitist multiculturalist liberalism thus resides in the tension between
content and form which characterized already the first great ideological project of
tolerant universalism, that of freemasonry: the doctrine of freemasonry (the universal
brotherhood of all men based on the light of Reason) clearly clashes with its form of
expression and organization (a secret society with its rituals of initiation)—the very form
of expression and articulation of freemasonry belies its positive doctrine. In a strictly
homologous way, the contemporary ‘politically correct’ liberal attitude which perceives
itself as surpassing the limitations of its ethnic identity (‘citizen of the world’ without
anchors in any particular ethnic community), functions, within its own society, as a
narrow elitist upper-middle-class circle clearly opposing itself to the majority of common
people, despised for being caught in their narrow ethnic or community confines.

For a Leftist Suspension of the Law

How, then, do leftists who are aware of this falsity of multiculturalist postmodernism
react to it? Their reaction assumes the form of what Hegel called the infinite judgement:
the judgement which posits the speculative identity of two thoroughly incompatible
terms—Hegel’s best-known example is from the sub-chapter on phrenology in his
Phenomenology of Spirit: ‘the Spirit is a bone’. The infinite judgement which
encapsulates this reaction is: ‘Adorno (the most sophisticated ‘elitist’ critical theorist) is
Buchanan (the lowest of American rightist populism).’ That is to say, these critics of
postmodern multiculturalist elitism—from Christopher Lasch to Paul Piccone—risk
endorsing neo-conservative populism, with its notions of the reassertion of com-munity,
local democracy and active citizenship, as the only politically relevant answer to the all-
pervasive predominance of ‘instrumental Reason’, of the bureaucratization and
instrumentalization of our life-world25. Of course, it is easy to dismiss today’s populism
24
See Wendy Brown, States of Injury, Princeton 1995.
25
See Paul Piccone, ‘Postmodern Populism’, Telos, no. 103, Spring 1995. Exemplary here is also the attempt by
Elizabeth Fox-Genovese to oppose to the upper-middle-class feminism interested in the problems of literary and cinema
theory, lesbian rights, and so forth, a ‘family feminism’ which focuses on the actual concerns of ordinary working women
as a nostalgic reactive formation to the process of modernization, and as such
inherently paranoiac, in search of an external cause of malignancy, of a secret agent
who pulls the strings and is thus responsible for the woes of modernization – Jews,
international capital, non-patriotic multiculturalist managers, state bureaucracy and so
on; the problem is rather to conceive this new populism as a new form of ‘false
transparency’ which, far from presenting a serious obstacle to the capitalist
modernization, paves the way for it. In other words, far more interesting than
bemoaning the disintegration of community life through the impact of new technologies
is to analyze how technological progress itself gives rise to new communities which
gradually ‘naturalize’ themselves – like virtual communities.

What these leftist advocates of populism fail to perceive is that today’s populism, far
from presenting a threat to global capitalism, remains its inherent product.
Paradoxically, today’s true conservatives are rather the leftist ‘critical theorists’ who
reject liberal multiculturalism as well as fundamentalist populism, those who clearly
perceive the complicity between global capitalism and ethnic fundamentalism. They
point towards the third domain which belongs neither to global market-society nor to
the new forms of ethnic fundamentalism: the domain of the political, the public space of
civil society, of active responsible citizenship – the fight for human rights, ecology and
so forth. However, the problem is that this very form of political space is more and more
threatened by the onslaught of globalization; consequently, one cannot simply return to
it or revitalize it. To avoid a misunderstanding: our point is not the old ‘economic
essentialist’ one according to which, in the case of England today, the Labour victory
really did not change anything – and as such is even more dangerous than continuing
Tory rule, since it gave rise to the misleading impression that there was a change.
There are a lot of things the Labour government can achieve; it can contribute a lot to
the passage from traditional English parochial jingoism to a more ‘enlightened’ liberal
democracy with a much stronger element of social solidarity (from health care to
education), to the respect for human rights (in its diverse forms, from women’s rights to
the rights of ethnic groups); one should use the Labour victory as an incentive to
revitalize the diverse forms of the struggle for égaliberté. (With the Socialist electoral
victory in France, the situation is even more ambiguous, since Jospin’s programme
does contain some elements of a direct confrontation with the logic of capital.) Even
when the change is not substantial but a mere semblance of a new beginning, the very
fact that a situation is perceived by the majority of the population as a ‘new beginning’
opens up the space for important ideological and political rearticulations—as we have
already seen, the fundamental lesson of the dialectic of ideology is that appearances
do matter.

Nonetheless, the post-Nation-State logic of capital remains the Real which lurks in the
background, while all three main leftist reactions to the process of globalization – liberal
multiculturalism; the attempt to embrace populism by way of discerning, beneath its
fundamentalist appearance, the resistance against ‘instrumental reason’; the attempt to
keep open the space of the political—seem inappropriate. Although the last approach
is based on the correct insight about the complicity between multiculturalism and
fundamentalism, it avoids the crucial question: how are we to reinvent political space in
today’s conditions of globalization? The politicization of the series of particular
and articulates concrete questions of how to survive within the family, with children and work. See Elizabeth Fox-
Genovese, Feminism is Not the Story of my Life, New York 1996.
struggles which leaves intact the global process of capital is clearly not sufficient. What
this means is that one should reject the opposition which, within the frame of late
capitalist liberal democracy, imposes itself as the main axis of ideological struggle: the
tension between ‘open’ post-ideological universalist liberal tolerance and the
particularist ‘new fundamentalisms’. Against the liberal centre which presents itself as
neutral and post-ideological, relying on the rule of the Law, one should reassert the old
leftist motif of the necessity to suspend the neutral space of Law.

Of course, both the Left and the Right involve their own mode of the suspension of the
Law on behalf of some higher or more fundamental interest. The rightist suspension,
from anti-Dreyfusards to Oliver North, acknowledges its violation of the letter of the
Law, but justifies it via the reference to some higher national interest: it presents its
violation as a painful self-sacrifice for the good of the Nation 26. As to the leftist
suspension, suffice it to mention two films, Under Fire (Roger Spottiswoode, 1983) and
Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin, 1943). The first takes place during the
Nicaraguan revolution, when an American photojournalist faces a troublesome
dilemma: just prior to the victory of the revolution, Somozistas kill a charismatic
Sandinista leader, so the Sandinistas ask the journalist to fake a photograph of their
dead leader, presenting him as alive and thus belying the Somozistas’ claims about his
death—in this way, he would contribute to a swift victory of the revolution and reduce
bloodshed. Professional ethics, of course, strictly prohibit such an act, since it violates
the unbiased objectivity of reporting and makes the journalist an instrument of the
political fight; the journalist nevertheless chooses the ‘leftist’ option and fakes the
picture. In Watch on the Rhine, based on a play by Lillian Hellmann, this dilemma is
even more aggravated: in the late 1930s, a fugitive family of German political emigrants
involved in the anti-Nazi struggle comes to stay with their distant relatives, an idyllic all-
American small-town middle-class family; soon, however, the Germans face an
unexpected threat in the guise of an acquaintance of the American family, a rightist
who blackmails the emigrants and, via his contacts with the German embassy,
endangers members of the underground in Germany itself. The father of the emigrant
family decides to kill him and thereby puts the American family in a difficult moral
dilemma: the empty moralizing solidarity with the victims of Nazism is over; now they
have effectively to take sides and dirty their hands with covering up the killing. Here
also, the family decides on the ‘leftist’ option. ‘Left’ is defined by this readiness to
suspend the abstract moral frame, or, to paraphrase Kierkegaard, to accomplish a
political suspension of the Ethical.

The Universality to Come

The lesson of all this, which gained actuality in relation to the Western reaction to the
Bosnian war, is that there is no way to avoid being partial, since neutrality involves
taking sides—in the case of the Bosnian war, the ‘balanced’ talk about the Balkan
ethnic ‘tribal warfare’ already endorses the Serbian standpoint: the humanitarian liberal
equidistance can easily slip into or coincide with its opposite and effectively tolerate the
most violent ‘ethnic cleansing’. So, in short, the leftist does not simply violate the
26
The most concise formulation of the rightist suspension of public (legal) norms was provided by Eamon de Valera:
‘The people has no right to do wrong.’
liberal’s impartial neutrality; what he claims is that there is no such neutrality. The
cliché of the liberal Centre, of course, is that both suspensions, the rightist and the
leftist, ultimately amount to the same, to a totalitarian threat to the rule of Law. The
entire consistency of the Left hinges on proving that, on the contrary, each of the two
suspensions follows a different logic. While the Right legitimizes its suspension of the
Ethical by its anti-universalist stance, by way of a reference to its particular (religious,
patriotic) identity which overrules any universal moral or legal standards, the Left
legitimizes its suspension of the Ethical precisely by means of a reference to the true
Universality to come. Or, to put it in another way, the Left simultaneously accepts the
antagonistic character of society (there is no neutral position, struggle is constitutive),
and remains universalist (speaking on behalf of universal emancipation): in the leftist
perspective, accepting the radically antagonistic—that is, political—character of social
life, accepting the necessity of ‘taking sides’, is the only way to be effectively universal.

How are we to comprehend this paradox? It can only be conceived if the antagonism is
inherent to universality itself, that is, if universality itself is split into the ‘false’ concrete
universality which legitimizes the existing division of the Whole into functional parts,
and the impossible/real demand of ‘abstract’ universality (Balibar’s égaliberté). The
leftist political gesture par excellence (in contrast to the rightist motif ‘to each his or her
own place’) is thus to question the concrete existing universal order on behalf of its
symptom, of the part which, although inherent to the existing universal order, has no
‘proper place’ within it (say, illegal immigrants or the homeless in our societies). This
procedure of identifying with the symptom is the exact and necessary obverse of the
standard critical and ideological move of recognizing a particular content behind some
abstract universal notion (‘the “man” of human rightly is effectively the white male
owner’), of denouncing the neutral universality as false: in it, one pathetically asserts
(and identifies with) the point of inherent exception/exclusion, the ‘abject’, of the
concrete positive order, as the only point of true universality, as the point which belies
the existing concrete universality. It is easy to show that, say, the subdivision of the
people who live in a country into ‘full’ citizens and temporary immigrant workers
privileges ‘full’ citizens and excludes immigrants from the public space proper—in the
same way in which man and woman are not two species of a neutral universal genus of
humanity, since the content of the genus as such involves some mode of ‘repression’
of the feminine; much more productive, theoretically as well as politically—since it
opens up the way for the ‘progressive’ subverting of hegemony—is the opposite
operation of identifying universality with the point of exclusion, in our case, of saying
‘we are all immigrant workers.’ In a hierarchically structured society, the measure of its
true universality resides in the way its parts relate to those ‘at the bottom’, excluded by
and from all others—in ex-Yugoslavia, for example, universality was represented by
Albanian and Bosnian Muslims, looked down on by all other nations. The recent
pathetic statement of solidarity ‘Sarajevo is the capital of Europe’ was also an
exemplary case of such a notion of exception as embodying universality: the way the
enlightened liberal Europe related to Sarajevo bore witness to the way it related to
itself, to its universal notion27.

27
This, perhaps, is how one should read Ranciere’s notion of singulier universel: the assertion of the singular exception
as the locus of universality which simultaneously affirms and subverts the universality in question. When we say, ‘We
are all citizens of Sarajevo’, we are obviously making a ‘false’ nomination, a nomination which violates the proper
geopolitical disposition; however, precisely as such, this violation gives word to the injustice of the existing geopolitical
order. See Jacques Rancieree, La Mésentente, Paris 1995.
This assertion of the universality of antagonism in no way entails that ‘in social life,
there is no dialogue, only war’. Rightists speak of social (or sexual) warfare, while
leftists speak of social (or class) struggle. There are two variations on Joseph
Goebbels’ infamous statement ‘When I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my pistol’:
‘When I hear the word “culture”, I reach for my cheque-book’, pronounced by the
cynical cinema producer in Godard’s Mépris, and the leftist Enlightened reversal,
‘When I hear the word ‘gun’, I reach for culture.’ When today’s neo-Nazi street-fighter
hears the word ‘Western Christian culture’, he reaches for his gun in order to defend it
from the Turks, Arabs, Jews, thereby destroying what he purports to defend. Liberal
capitalism has no need for such direct violence: the market does the job of destroying
culture far more smoothly and efficiently. In clear contrast to both these attitudes, the
leftist Enlightenment is defined by the wager that culture can serve as an efficient
answer to the gun: the outburst of raw violence is a kind of passage á l’acte rooted in
the subject’s ignorance—as such, it can be counteracted by the struggle whose main
form is reflective knowledge.

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