The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism After the Fall of Socialism (Feminism for Today)

The Spoils of Freedom

The Spoils of Freedom examines the emergence of nationalist, racist and anti-feminist ideologies in post-socialist Eastern Europe. In a political context that includes ethnic wars, post-socialist totalitarianism, capitalist moral majority ideologies, and a virulent new patriarchy, this provocative study asks what has become of the notions of democracy and human rights since the collapse of socialism and challenges the ‘political correctness’ movement and Western theoretical responses to the events which have occurred in former communist countries. The Spoils of Freedom views major social and political change through contemporary theory. Using psychoanalytic, post-structuralist and feminist theories, Renata Salecl argues that the success of the new nationalist and anti-liberal ideologies can be understood through the Lacanian concept of fantasy, and the willingness of individuals to identify with the hidden fantasises embedded in political discourse. In doing so she offers a new approach to human rights, feminism and other liberal theories grounded in a radical rethinking of the fundamental concepts of philosophy, psychoanalysis and language theory. Renata Salecl is a philosopher and sociologist. She works as a researcher in the Institute of Criminology at the Faculty of Law, Ljubljana, Slovenia and as a visiting scholar at the New School for Social Research, New York. Apart from publishing widely in the areas of feminism, psychoanalysis and political theory, she also participated in the struggle against communism as well as against the post-communist nationalism and anti-feminism.

Feminism for Today General Editor: Teresa Brennan

The Regime of the Brother After the Patriarchy Juliet Flower MacCannell Feminism and the Mastery of Nature Val Plumwood History After Lacan Teresa Brennan

The Spoils of Freedom

Psychoanalysis and feminism after the fall of socialism

Renata Salecl

London and New York

First published 1994 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2002. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1994 Renata Salecl All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data has been applied for ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

0-415-07357-X (Print Edition) 0-415-07358-8 (pbk) 0-203-04610-2 Master e-book ISBN 0-203-21718-7 (Glassbook Format)

Contents

Series preface Acknowledgements Introduction

vi viii 1

Part I: The fall of socialism . . . 1 The fantasy structure of war: the case of Bosnia

11

2 The post-socialist moral majority

20

3 ‘Normalization’ in the socialist regime

38

4 The struggle for hegemony in the former Yugoslavia

58

Part II: . . . and its implications for the theory of ideology 5 Fantasy as the limit of distributive justice

77

6 Legitimizing violence

90

7 Crime as a mode of subjectivization

99

8 Why is a woman a symptom of rights?

112

Conclusion

134

Notes Select bibliography Index

142 157 163

Series preface

Feminist theory is the most innovative and truly living theory in today’s academies, but the struggle between the living and the dead extends beyond feminism and far beyond institutions. Opening Out will apply the living insights of feminist critical theory in current social and political contexts. It will also use feminist theory to analyse the historical and cultural genealogies that shaped those contexts. While feminist insights on modernity and postmodernity have become increasingly sophisticated, they have also become more distant from the realpolitik that made feminism a force in the first instance. This distance is apparent in three growing divisions. One is an evident division between feminist theory and feminist popular culture and politics. Another division is that between feminism and other social movements. Of course this second division is not new, but it has been exacerbated by the issue of whether the theoretical insights of feminism can be used to analyse current conflicts that extend beyond feminism’s ‘proper’ field. In the postmodern theory he has helped build, the white male middle-class universal subject has had to relinquish his right to speak for all. By the same theoretical logic, he has also taken out a philosophical insurance policy against any voice uniting the different movements that oppose him, which means his power persists de facto, if not de jure. Currently, there are no theoretical means, except for fine sentiments and good will, that enable feminism to ally itself with other social movements that oppose the power networks that sustain the white, masculine universal subject. Opening Out aims at finding those means. Of course, the analysis of the division between feminist and other social movements is a theoretical question in itself. It cannot be considered outside of the process whereby feminist theory and women’s studies have become institutionalised, which returns us to the first division, between feminist practice and feminism in the academy. Is it simply the case that as women’s studies becomes more institutionalised, feminist scholars are defining their concerns in relation to those of their colleagues in the existing disciplines? This could account both for an often uncritical adherence to a

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postmodernism that negates the right to act, if not speak, and to the distance between feminism in the institution and outside it. But if this is the case, not only do the political concerns of feminism have to be reconsidered, but the disciplinary boundaries that restrict political thinking have to be crossed. Disciplinary specialisation might also be held accountable for a third growing division within feminism, between theoretical skills on the one hand, and literary analysis and socio-economic empirical research on the other. Poststructuralist or postmodern feminism is identified with the theoretical avant-garde, while historical, cultural feminism is associated with the study of how women are culturally represented, or what women are meant to have really done. Opening Out is based on the belief that such divisions are unhelpful. There is small advantage in uncritical cultural descriptions, or an unreflective politics of experience; without the theoretical tools found in poststructuralist, psychoanalytical and other contemporary critical theories, our social and cultural analyses, and perhaps our political activity, may be severely curtailed. On the other hand, unless these theoretical tools are applied to present conflicts and the histories that shaped them, feminist theory itself may become moribund. Not only that, but the opportunity feminist theories afford for reworking the theories currently available for understanding the world (such as they are) may be bypassed. None of this means that Opening Out will always be easy reading in the first instance; the distance between developed theory and practical feminism is too great for that at present. But it does mean that Opening Out is committed to returning theory to present political questions, and this just might make the value of theoretical pursuits for feminism plainer in the long term. Opening Out will develop feminist theories that bear on the social construction of the body, environmental degradation, ethnocentrism, neocolonialism, and the fall of socialism. Opening Out will draw freely on various contemporary critical theories in these analyses, and on social as well as literary material. Opening Out will try to cross disciplinary boundaries, and subordinate the institutionalised concerns of particular disciplines to the political concerns of the times. Teresa Brennan

Acknowledgements

Various people read parts of the manuscript; for their valuable comments I thank Parveen Adams, Glen Bowman, Miran Božovic, Mark Bracher, Joan Copjec, David Carlson, Mark Cousins, Elizabeth Cowie, Mladen Dolar, Juliet Flower MacCannell, Peter Goodrich, Fredric Jameson, Michael Kennedy, Ernesto Laclau, Dean MacCannell, Chantal Mouffe, Michael Rosenfeld, Susan Tucker and Alenka Zupancic. I thank Jane Malmo for her excellent work in correcting my translation and giving me many helpful comments. My special gratitude goes to Teresa Brennan for encouraging me to write this book and for her insightful editing. I dedicate this book to my husband Slavoj Žižek for his loving support. Preliminary versions of some of the material contained in this book were previously published in journals: American Journal of Semiotics, Emergences, Law and Critique, New Formations, New German Critique, Praxis International and Topoi.

Introduction

What does a feminist intellectual from Eastern Europe1 have to say about the issues addressed by contemporary critical theory? Could such an intellectual speak from a purely theoretical position, or must his or her position be marked by the course of events that happened in his or her own country? These were the questions that concerned me when I started to write this book, which was initially supposed to be a philosophical and psychoanalytical feminist reflection on events surrounding the fall of socialism. But in the course of writing the book, I more and more came to resist the idea of writing only about Eastern Europe for several reasons. First, I realized that the whole set of questions related to ideology and politics as such had become deeply problematic. The notions of democracy, rights, feminism, etc. so central to Western theory suddenly lost their established meanings when communism collapsed. And what surprised me was how a lot of prominent Western intellectuals did not notice this change; rather they behaved as though the collapse of communism, which happened ‘somewhere over there, far away in Eastern Europe’, only confirmed the universality of notions such as democracy, human rights, and the capitalist society to which these notions are linked. What those intellectuals did not recognize was how these supposedly universal notions became incorporated into new political discourses in surprising and sometimes disturbing ways. Throughout the writing of this book I was, of course, conscious of the position from which I think, speak and write. Both my involvement in the opposition movement that provoked the disintegration of socialism in Slovenia, and my involvement in the struggle against nationalism and the deeply sexist moral majority emerging in the post-socialist era, have significantly determined my theoretical position. But at the same time, my interests in philosophy, psychoanalysis and feminist theory were not directly linked to this political experience. This tension between working on issues in ‘abstract’ theory and being engaged in major political change quickened my work and was highlighted significantly by my relations with Western intellectuals. Whenever I was invited to speak at a Western university I was always expected to speak about what was going on in Eastern Europe.

2

Introduction

Even the most abstract theoretical paper I delivered provoked questions such as ‘How are things for women in Eastern Europe?’ In a way, there is a special kind of prejudice at work in this attitude of Western intellectuals. If, for example, Western feminists speak about feminism they can discuss such abstract issues as ‘women in film noir’, ‘the notion of the phallus in feminist theory’, etc.; but someone coming from Eastern Europe must speak about the situation of women in her own country because of the ‘horrors’ going on there. But are not similar backlashes happening to women in the West in regard to their abortion rights, sexual harassment in the workplace and the rise of moral majority ideology? Positioning me as an East European woman intellectual was, of course, very much linked to how people in the West have been fascinated by developments in Eastern Europe, especially by the war in the former Yugoslavia. However, another aspect has to be considered here. Actually, it is not only East European intellectuals who are expected to reflect their own positions or the experiences linked to them. Is not a similar logic at work in the so-called PC (political correctness) movement in the United States and in theoretical approaches to multiculturalism? Before I answer this question, let me clarify two points. First, I support the underlying assumption of what its opponents have dubbed the political correctness movement – that the status of minorities such as blacks and women must change for better. Second, I also agree with many supporters of political correctness that changes in society’s conventions and rituals (the use of language, for example) have a long-term impact on ‘reality’ and can help to improve the equality of women, blacks and other minorities. Here a parallel emerges between the United States and the former communist regimes. For example, it is well known that societies in which communist regimes were established were very patriarchal. Although communist ideology officially acknowledged women as equal with men, we all know that patriarchal domination did not vanish from everyday life. But changes in certain behaviours and practices actually did affect women. In most of the very underdeveloped socialist countries, the status of women did improve when the state provided child-care, maternity leave, equal pay for men and women, etc. But these changes in customary practices also had another effect. When the problem of patriarchal domination officially ceased to exist, patriarchal domination became officially invisible – which also meant that its effects became much more difficult to recognize. Where political correctness is concerned, we encounter a similar paradox. In the United States the positive idea of changing patterns of behaviour towards minorities has resulted in a new kind of ideological control. The obsession with ‘following the PC line’ not only creates a ‘newspeak’ but also demands that people constantly examine their own identities. At academic conferences one frequently finds academics clarifying their own position (‘I say this as a woman, as a gay, as a black . . .’) or apologizing

Introduction

3

for it (‘I must admit, that as a white male . . .’). In extreme cases, the politically correct attitude requires a performance, a kind of staged behaviour in which people have to act in a certain way to be approved of as being on the ‘right side’. Thus, for people to be perceived as politically correct, it is enough for them to be careful about how they speak and how they behave in public, although privately they do not have to endorse the beliefs that underlie such PC rituals. As a result, one can easily encounter a PC man who in public always promotes the equality of women and minorities, but in private expects his wife to do all the housework and never socializes with blacks because he ‘finds nothing in common with them’. Such an attitude corresponds to how the people behaved under socialism. Although in public they spoke in favour of communism and performed Party rituals, privately they did not believe in the Party. As I will show, it was precisely this cynical distance established by the people between themselves and the regime that enabled the communists to stay in power for so long. For ideology to have an effect, people do not need to identify consciously with it; it is enough that people do not publicly question the regime. And the same goes for the PC movement in America; it is enough that people behave ‘properly’, that they perform PC rituals and feel that they are doing something important. Meanwhile, nothing really changes. A link could also be drawn here between the PC attitude and Michel Foucault’s theory in the last two volumes of The History of Sexuality where he speaks about the need to engage in finding new modes of expression in order to create oneself ‘as a work of art’. This ‘self-constitution of the subject’ is perceived by Foucault as the answer to, and subversion of, the subjectivity produced by contemporary capitalist society. In this society, a form of power is at work that ‘applies itself to immediate everyday life which categorizes the individual, marks him by his own individuality, attaches him to his own identity’ (Foucault, 1982: 212). Paradoxically, theorists, who in the Foucauldian fashion cherish the anti-essentialist attitude and the subversion of fixed identity, do not see that contemporary capitalism is no longer based on the idea of fixed or stable identities. On the contrary, capitalism today relies precisely on non-fixed identities. Contemporary capitalism ‘needs’ the subject who constantly questions his or her identity, changes sexual roles, and is above all primarily concerned with making his or her life ‘a work of art’. Were not yuppies the subjects who constantly invented new forms of enjoyment, scrupulously producing new self-images, obsessively attentive to their bodies? Does not contemporary consumer society rely upon changing, subversive identities in order to inspire people to develop ever new desires and to seek new modes of enjoyment? Maybe it is time to rediscover the Marxist insight that capital is the general force behind ‘deterritorialization’ (to use Deleuze and Guattari’s term), which undermines any fixed identity. Late capitalism, therefore, should be seen as the epoch in which the traditional fixity of ideological positions, such

4

Introduction

as fixed sexual roles or patriarchal authority, has come to hinder the expansion of consumer society. In this regard, politically correct behaviour and theoretical attempts to subvert fixed identities suit perfectly the ideology of late capitalism. As long as people are concerned with their own performances, they pose no threat to the political system. The only answer to the problem of how a position someone is speaking from (his or her identity) determines him or herself is to make the differences (sexual, national, racial) as contingent as possible; i.e. the fact that a person is black, a woman, gay or East European should be perceived as mere contingency and not as a totally determining factor. Another kind of ‘staged behaviour’ emerged after the fall of socialism when East European intellectuals began to visit Western universities and to perform in the way the Western public supposedly demanded. The Western public, for example, wants to hear about the ‘horrors’ of postsocialism, about animosities emerging in the former communist countries, about nationalism, anti-semitism, anti-feminism, etc. This ‘demand’ to hear about the problems of post-socialism, especially in the case of the former Yugoslavia, is linked to the fact that the West has tried to justify its position on Yugoslavia. Who were the ones who believed in the self-management system when Yugoslavians already knew that it was not working if not the Left in the West? Were not Western politicians desperately trying to preserve the unity of Yugoslavia when it was already clear to all parties in Yugoslavia that the country had collapsed? East European intellectuals are therefore expected to act in such a way that Western intellectuals do not need to acknowledge their misjudgement of the socialist system. Western intellectuals did not predict the collapse of socialism, for example. Social theory fell into a total blackout when confronted with the changes in Eastern Europe. Social theory does not want to recognize that most of its notions do not have the same meaning as they had before. A special kind of ‘staged behaviour’ is also at work in regard to feminism in Eastern Europe. Dozens of so-called feminists travel around universities in the United States and lecture on feminism in Eastern Europe, although in their home countries they would rarely call themselves feminists. The sad fact is that no serious feminist movement exists in post-socialist countries. There are few feminist groups with any public impact. There are several reasons for this lack of feminism. First, no feminist tradition existed under socialism. Second, as is well known, socialism was a very patriarchal society, in spite of the official claim that it solved the woman question. Furthermore, feminism did not emerge after the fall of socialism because women perceive it as being un-feminine. Ann Snitow shared with me her experience of teaching feminism in Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in the spring of 1993. The students reacted to feminist theory with a kind of horror, with a fear that their whole identity would collapse if they embraced feminist thought. One student responded: ‘I will lose my

Introduction

5

feminity if I keep reading this feminist stuff.’ And another said: ‘If I read another page of this, my marriage will end up in divorce.’ These students, unfortunately, did not notice that the fragility of their femininity revealed precisely how ideologically constructed ‘femininity’ is. To use the Hegelian term, ‘the silent weaving of the spirit’ which undermines patriarchy has already done its work: how fragile and contextually dependent the patriarchal system must be if the subject’s sexual identity is threatened by the mere reading of feminist books! In post-socialist societies, even some top women academics or managers will not call themselves feminists because they fear being perceived as manlike women. The roots of this equating of feminism with a lack of femininity lie in the image of the communist woman. Women who held top Party or government positions under communism were usually perceived as unattractive: they supposedly dressed in grey suits, displayed man-like behaviour, and were considered to be hard-line Party bureaucrats. This is the image that women in post-socialism reject when they hesitate to call themselves feminists.2 Yet another misperception is at work in today’s Eastern Europe. The previous oppositional intellectuals have lost their ground since the countries started to function as ‘normal’ capitalist societies. Intellectuals are feeling abandoned. No one asks for their opinions any more, least of all the new politicians and emerging capitalists. The oppositional intellectuals do not get the recognition they think they deserve for their role in bringing communism to an end. What those intellectuals do not see is that being outside of the game of politics is the role intellectuals play in all major democracies. Intellectuals in the West can endlessly debate politics in their academic circles, they can invent all kinds of politically correct behaviour, but the ‘real’ political actors care very little about their opinion. The centres of power in late capitalism are not in the academic communities, unfortunately. The nostalgia of East European intellectuals for the ‘good old days’ of the opposition movement is understandable because under the socialist regimes a specific sphere of privacy was necessary that under a democracy is no longer possible. The totalitarian prohibition on opposition forced people into clandestine organizations.3 These private spaces, created to elude Party control, made possible a very particular kind of agency and enjoyment that does not exist in democratic society. The same goes for consumerism. Because of the lack of Western goods, owning a simple pair of jeans, for example, produced an excitement that is beyond the grasp of people accustomed to the Western type of market. What East European intellectuals do not see is that such losses of enjoyment are an inevitable sacrifice in the transition to capitalism and democracy. When socialism collapsed, the oppositional intellectuals had to make a ‘choice’: whether to join the new ruling power or to remain outside active

6

Introduction

politics. The temptations of politics are hard to resist. A special kind of erotic excitement is attached to being part of the ‘real game’. However, when they entered active politics, many oppositional intellectuals were disappointed to find how little intellectual activity is required and how much intrigues dominate power struggles. I never regretted staying out of the new ‘real politics’, but my active involvement in various Slovenian resistance movements opened a series of questions that I try to explore in this book. This concrete experience offered a new perspective on theoretical issues that are relevant far beyond the shifting borders of Eastern Europe. Such issues concern the most elementary ideological mechanisms, in particular the function of fantasy. I understand ‘ideology’ to mean the way society deals with the fundamental impossibility of it being a closed harmonious totality. And my aim is to point out that behind every ideology lies a kernel of enjoyment (jouissance) that resists being fully integrated into the ideological universe. Here is where fantasy comes into play: fantasy stages a scenario to conceal this kernel. And, as I will try to show, when we identify with a certain political discourse, when we ‘obey the power’, what we relate to is precisely this fantasy structure behind the ideological meaning of the political discourse. To explore the question of ideological identification, the book begins with the particular – the collapse of socialism – and moves on to the universal – those notions of rights, feminism, and democracy that are acquiring new meanings following the events in Eastern Europe. The book is divided into two parts. In Part I, the opening chapters confront two unpleasant surprises which have arisen in post-socialist Eastern Europe: ethnic tensions which, in the former Yugoslavia, have led to a war whose cruelty has surpassed even the worst expectations about what can happen in today’s Europe; and the emerging moral majority, which has taken up and reinterpreted the programme of the Western moral majority. The third and fourth chapters examine two cases of socialism in crisis: the attempt of the communists in Czechoslovakia to ‘normalize’ society after the Prague Spring, and the disintegration of Yugoslavia. My goal is not to provide a socio-political analysis of these two cases, but to concentrate on the libidinal and symbolic economies at work in them. In the second part of the book, Chapter 5 examines the inherent contradictions of the liberal theory of justice by means of Lacanian psychoanalysis and its notion of fantasy, while Chapter 6 deals with the question of legitimation of the violence on which the socio-symbolic order is founded. Chapter 7 argues that the best way to understand how ideological identification works is to examine cases in which this identification fails – crime is such a case. Here again the notion of fantasy is indispensable, since it enables us to understand crime as a specific mode of subjectivization. Finally, the concluding chapter deals with the problem of feminism and human rights. It shows, first, that the bearer of these rights

Introduction

7

must be conceived of as the abstract Cartesian cogito, and second, that feminist theory errs when it abandons the notion of cogito because it can provide the strongest support for feminism. Third, it shows that once again it is fantasy that functions as an irreducible impediment to the full effectuation of universal rights. The red thread that runs through these analyses is, of course, the notion of fantasy, not as a supplement to ‘actual’ power relations, but as an agency that always already structures these relations. The ultimate lesson of the tragic entanglements of post-socialism is that some kind of fantasy is always in control, which is to say that the structure of power is inherently fantasmatic. This theoretical background demands of us to rethink not only the theory of ideology and power relations but also feminist theory. The name of the series ‘Opening out’ indicates the course feminism has to pursue today. The aim of this book is thus not only to ‘open up’ Eastern Europe but, against the background of the major political changes of the last years, to re-examine theoretical premises feminists have for too long taken for granted.

Part I The fall of socialism . . .

Chapter 1

The fantasy structure of war The case of Bosnia

Kant wrote that the world-historical significance of the French Revolution resided not in the immediate reality of the events in Paris, but in the enthusiasm this passionate attempt to realize freedom aroused in the eyes of the impassive observers composed of the educated, enlightened public in France and all around Europe. The actual events in Paris may have been horrifying, propelled by the most repulsive passions, yet the effects of these events on the enlightened public throughout Europe bear witness to the tendency towards freedom as an anthropological and world-historical fact. For Kant what mattered in such an historical moment is simply the mode of thinking of the spectators which reveals itself publicly in this game of great revolutions, and manifests such a universal yet disinterested sympathy for the players on one side against those on the other, even at the risk that this partiality could become very disadvanteous for them if discovered, owing to this universality.1 (Kant, 1992: 153) The same displacement from the event’s immediate reality to its perception by the impassive observers, i.e. registered in the symbolic network (the Lacanian ‘big Other’), determines also the signification of the violent antiimmigrant outbursts in Germany since the summer of 1992. This signification resides in the fact that the neo-Nazi pogroms met with approval or at least silent ‘understanding’ in the entire political spectrum – even the Social Democratic Party politicians used the attacks as the grounds for reassessing Germany’s liberal immigration laws. In this shift in the Zeitgeist the real danger lurks: such a shift lays the ground for the possible hegemony of an ideology that perceives the presence of ‘aliens’ as a threat to national identity, as the principal cause of antagonisms that divide the political body. Particularly in need of attention is the difference between ‘postmodern’ racism, which now rages throughout Europe, and the more traditional form of racism. The older style of racism was direct and brutal – ‘the others’ (Jews, Blacks, Arabs, Eastern Europeans . . . ) are lazy and violent, they are plotting against us, eroding the substance of our national identity,

12

The Spoils of Freedom

etc. The new racism is ‘reflective’, which is why it can appear under the guise of its very opposite, of anti-racism. Etienne Balibar (1991) baptized this new attitude ‘meta-racism’, on account of its reliance on the theory of anthropological culturism. As Balibar says, ‘there is no racism without theory’. Because every racist complex expresses ‘a violent desire for immediate knowledge of social relations’, it has to invent theories which are immediately intelligible to the masses (Balibar, 1991: 19). For old racism, racial difference was biologically determined, whereas ‘metaracism’ no longer regards races as isolatable biological units and is always ready to concede that races are the products of contingent historical circumstances. For Balibar, this new ‘differential racism’ is actually ‘racism without races’; it perceives racial tensions only in terms of incompatible cultural differences, life-styles, traditions, etc. But the fact is that in this racism culture itself functions as a ‘natural’ determinative force: it locks individuals and groups a priori into their cultural genealogy. ‘Meta-racism’ perceives cultures as fixed entities and tries desperately to maintain ‘cultural distances’. This racism ‘at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but “only” the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of life-styles and traditions’ (Balibar, 1991: 21). At the same time, this new racism differentiates cultures as ‘universalistic’ and ‘progressive’ on the one hand and ‘particularist’ and ‘primitive’ on the other. The first, ‘progressive’ types of cultures are usually of European origins, while the second, ‘primitive’ types are exotic, tribal cultures, which we might admire or have an anthropological interest in, but always keep at a distance.2 How, for example, would a ‘meta-racist’ react to a neo-Nazi attack on Turkish women? After expressing his repulsion at the neo-Nazi violence and sincerely condemning it, he would be quick to add that these events, deplorable as they are, must be located in their context. They are a perverted expression of a real problem, namely that in our contemporary Babylon the experience of belonging to a clearly delimited ethnic community which provides meaning for the individual’s life is fast losing ground. The true culprits are, therefore, the cosmopolitan proponents of ‘multiculturalism’ who advocate the mixing of races and thereby set off natural self-defence mechanisms. In short, ‘meta-racism’ legitimizes apartheid as the ultimate form of anti-racism, as an effort to prevent racial tensions and conflicts.3 Because the ‘meta-racist’ does not speak any more about actual races, he calls people of other cultural traditions ‘immigrants’ and seeks to establish a new form of apartheid by changing liberal immigration laws. Here we have an exemplary case of what Lacan has in mind when he asserts that ‘there is no metalanguage’: the distance between meta-racism and racism is void; metaracism is racism pure and simple, and it is all the more dangerous for posing as its own opposite, advocating racist measures as the very means of fighting racism.

The fantasy structure of war

13

On a different level, we encounter the same paradox in the Western media’s coverage of the war in Bosnia. A striking contrast emerges between this reporting and the reporting on the Gulf War in 1991. During the Gulf War, news reports featured the standard ideological personification: instead of providing information on social, political or religious trends and antagonisms in Iraq, the media ultimately reduced the conflict to a quarrel with Saddam Hussein, Evil Personified, the outlaw who excluded himself from the civilized international community. Even more than the destruction of Iraq’s military forces the true aim of the Gulf War was presented as psychological, as the humiliation of Saddam who had to ‘lose face’.4 In the case of the Bosnian war, however, notwithstanding isolated cases demonizing the Serbian president Miloševic, the predominant attitude reflects that of the quasi-anthropological observer. The media outdo one another in giving us lessons on the ethnic and religious background of the conflict; traumas hundreds of years old are being replayed and acted out, as if, in order to understand the roots of the conflict, one has to know not only the history of Yugoslavia but the entire history of the Balkans from mediaeval times.5 Or as a journalist says: ‘The history of all the southern Slavs in the Balkans is a tangled tragedy of mass rape and barbaric slaughter, the product of the kind of ethnic hatred that perhaps only people who are closely related to each other could nurture so well for so long’.6 In the Bosnian conflict, it is therefore not possible simply to take sides, to name evil, to assign blame, because we are dealing with ‘irreconcilable warring tribes’.7 One can only patiently try to grasp the background of this savage spectacle, so alien to our system of civilized values . . .8 Such an approach involves an ideological mystification even more cunning than the demonization of Saddam Hussein. Assuming the comfortable attitude of a distant observer, and evoking the allegedly intricate context of religious and ethnic struggles in the Balkans enables the West to shed its responsibility towards the Balkans, i.e. to avoid the bitter truth that, far from simply being an eccentric conflict, the Bosnian war is a direct result of the failure of the West to grasp the political dynamic of the disintegration of Yugoslavia. The logic is therefore ultimately the same as that of meta-racism: what we have is the effective tolerance and, thus, support of ‘ethnic cleansing’, under the guise of its opposite, the distance of an impartial observer. What the West does not want to recognize is that Yugoslavia ‘died’ several times before it officially disintegrated. Although symbolic death usually comes after real death, for example with the burial of the dead, in the case of Yugoslavia, symbolic death took place before the final collapse of the country. Because ‘Yugoslavia’ as such functioned as a floating signifier, which each of its constitutive nations incorporated into their own political discourses in different ways, the moment of the symbolic death of the country arrived for different Yugoslav nations at different times. For

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The Spoils of Freedom

the Serbs, this event occurred in 1974, when the constitution gave full autonomy to the Serbian provinces of Vojvodina and Kosovo; for the Albanians, the symbolic death of Yugoslavia came in 1989, when they lost their autonomy; for the Slovenes and the Croats it came with the disintegration of communism when half of Yugoslavia formed a multi-party system but the other half remained communist. One of the most dramatic symbolic deaths came in 1991, after the federal army occupied Slovenia, when mothers all over Yugoslavia began to protest against the war and demanded their sons’ return from service in the army. Several things are striking about this protest. First, the discourse changed significantly: young soldiers, who were previously referred to as men (since entering the army traditionally marked the initiation of a boy into manhood) were suddenly renamed as children in order to encourage identification with the purity of the mother–child relationship, which supposedly transcends all ideological or national struggles. Second, it was surprising how the Slovene mothers gave their full support to the Serbian mothers’ call for their sons’ return, even though the Slovenes perceived the Serbs as the principal aggressors. But as soon as the Serbian mothers arrived in Slovenia to get their sons out of the army the supposed universality of maternal feelings collapsed as a result of national identification.9 When the army ideologues convinced the Serbian mothers that their sons were fighting against the national enemy of the Serbs, the mothers quickly changed their minds and let their sons stay in the army. When, not long after the war in Slovenia, the army, which was perceived as the principal guarantee of the transnational character of the Yugoslav federation, openly took the side of the Serbs, this signified the final symbolic death of Yugoslavia.

WAR AND THE FANTASY STRUCTURE OF THE HOMELAND How does it happen that in war all human relations get distorted and only national identification prevails? What exactly is the logic of war? As Elaine Scarry (1985) has pointed out, the motives which usually trigger war (the urges for freedom, national sovereignty, possession of territory, etc.) are not linked to the logic of the war itself, to its inner structure. In a way these motives remain outside of the war: different motives are at work before the war starts (as an excuse for war) and after it finishes (as something that was accomplished by the war); but during the war itself these motives play a secondary role. When war begins the ideological excuse for it ‘materializes’ itself in the body of the soldier that has to be killed or in the building that has to be destroyed. As Elaine Scarry emphasizes, the inner logic of war concerns the contest over who will be quicker to inflict injury on the other. Although death and injury are

The fantasy structure of war

15

presented as by-products of war, they are actually its only aim. However, in harming the enemy, the aim is not so much to cause it material loss, to capture its territory, or destroy its political system. The true aim is to destroy the very way the enemy perceives itself, the way it forms its identity. I cannot fully agree with another thesis developed by Elaine Scarry, the thesis that war starts when a ‘country becomes a fiction for its population’ (Scarry, 1985: 131). The fact is that a country is always already a kind of fiction: a country is not only ‘a piece of land’, but a narration about this land. In the language of psychoanalysis, a country (or fatherland, motherland, homeland) could be defined as a fantasy. What does this mean? In Lacanian psychoanalysis, fantasy is linked to the way people organize enjoyment (jouissance), the way they structure their desire around some traumatic element that cannot be symbolized. Fantasy gives consistency to what we call ‘reality’. 10 Social reality is always traversed by some fundamental impossibility, by an ‘antagonism’ which prevents reality from being fully symbolized. It is fantasy that attempts to symbolize or otherwise fill out this empty place of social reality. Fantasy thus functions as a scenario that conceals the ultimate inconsistency of society. In the fantasy structure of the homeland, the nation (in the sense of national identification) is the element that cannot be symbolized. The nation is an element in us that is ‘more than ourselves’, something that defines us but is at the same time undefinable; we cannot specify what it means, nor can we erase it. We may even say that the nation is linked to the place of the Real in the symbolic network.11 In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Real is a dimension which is always missing, but which at the same time always emerges; this elusive dimension, which society tries to incorporate in the symbolic order and thus neutralize, always exceeds society’s grasp. Even though the social symbolic order is oriented towards a homeostatic equilibrium, it can never attain this state because of this alien, traumatic dimension at its core. It is precisely the homeland that fills out the empty place of the nation in the symbolic structure of society. The homeland is the fantasy structure, the scenario, through which society perceives itself as a homogeneous entity. The aim of war is to dismantle the fantasy structure of the enemy country. The aggressor tries to destroy the very way the enemy perceives itself, the way it makes national myths about certain territory, the way it takes this territory (or political system) as something sacred, as a symbol of its existence. This is why the aggressor does not intend merely to impose its beliefs on the enemy’s beliefs. The aggressor’s primary aim is to destroy the enemy’s belief and to dismantle the enemy’s identity. Thus when the Serbs occupied a part of Croatia, their aim was not primarily to capture Croatian territory but to destroy the Croatian fantasy about that territory. The Serbs forced the Croats to redefine their national identity, to reinvent national myths and to start perceiving themselves in a new

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way, without linking their identity to the same territories, as they had done before.12 In war, the destruction of fantasy takes place by inflicting injury upon the enemy. We could say that in war the Real gets inscribed in the wound the soldier receives in battle. When the aggressor attacks, he tries to injure or kill the enemy soldier, insofar as some surplus resides in him – the element that makes him the enemy, a member of the other nation, etc. The soldier who is wounded in war will find, throughout the course of his life, that his very existence becomes organized around this wound. If the soldier recovers, the memory of the wound will make him a loyal citizen; his heroism will be interlaced with the wound and he will be honoured by the state because of the wound. If the soldier should be permanently disabled, the wound will receive an even greater symbolic meaning because it will always remain visible as a mark of sacrifice for the country. And if the soldier dies, his death will be an heroic death, a death worth dying.13 What do we find, if we analyse the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the help of this theoretical apparatus? First of all, it is significant that in this case we do not have the usual fantasy construction regarding the nation. At the beginning of the war, Muslims still organized their fantasy scenario of the homeland around the idea of Yugoslavia: they were the only ones who took literally the transnationality of the Yugoslav federation and believed in the notion of ‘brotherhood and unity’. The whole existence of Bosnia and Herzegovina was, in a way, a realization of the socialist aim to erase the element of the nation from social organization. The Muslims persisted in this transnational attitude even after their towns had been bombed; they did not want to call the attacker by his name, they did not want to give him a national connotation. Thus at the beginning of the war, the aggressors were referred to as ‘criminals, hooligans’, and only much later were they named Chetniks or Serbian nationalists. The inhuman persecution14 of the Muslims by the Serbs reveals, among other things, how disturbing it is for the aggressor to find no fantasy structure of the homeland on the side of the Muslims. It is as if the Serbs cannot bear that the Muslims do not organize their fantasies of the homeland on national grounds. This is why the Serbs are desperately trying to create the impression of the enemy’s nationalist and religious extremism by naming the Muslims ‘fighters of Jihad’, ‘green berets’ or ‘Islamic fundamentalists’. By torturing Muslims, the Serbs are actually trying to provoke Muslim fundamentalism. Thus the primary aim of the Serbs is to belittle the Muslims’ religious identity by ruining their mosques or by raping young Muslim women.15 If the aim of the war is to destroy the fantasy structure of the whole population, the aim of rape, as is the aim of any other form of torture, is to shatter the fantasy structure of the individual. Rape is for Muslim women an especially horrible crime because their religion strictly forbids any sexual

The fantasy structure of war

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contact before marriage; for a young Muslim woman, rape thus has the meaning of a symbolic death. The very way Muslim women are being raped, the very fact that rape is seen by the aggressors as a kind of a ‘duty’ to be performed on the captured woman, reveal how the aggressor aims to destroy precisely that aspect of the individual woman’s fantasy structure that touches her religious and sexual identity. These attacks aim at dismantling the very frame through which a Muslim woman perceives the outer world and herself as consistent, the way she organizes her identity and the identity of her world. Rape as a form of punishment always aims at humiliating the victim, at ruining her world, so that, to vary Rorty’s formula, she will never be the same again and will never perceive herself as she did before. For this purpose, the aggressors are inventing the most horrible forms of torture, where women are raped in front of their mothers or fathers, where incest is demanded, etc.16 Apropos of the issue of rape, the war itself is perceived as the ‘rape’ of the enemy’s motherland. In a very patriarchal culture, as in the case of both Serbia and Bosnia, the image of the mother holds a special meaning. For Serbs, one of the greatest personal offences is to curse someone’s mother. The image of the mother is also at work in the way Serbs refer to their country. Serbian national myths and poems constantly invoke the expression ‘Mother Serbia’.17 Although in Bosnia the same mythology of the motherland does not prevail, patriarchal ideology very much determines how the Muslim community is structured. The Muslim family features a strong division between women and men. Men are expected to command women, and women are expected to obey men and perform all the domestic duties; sometimes women are not even allowed to sit at the same table with men. Because in Muslim patriarchal ideology a woman is essentially perceived as a man’s possession, the rape of a Muslim woman also means stealing the property of a Muslim man. A common tradition holds that if a Muslim man’s house has been burned by an enemy, he will return and build a new house; but if his wife has been raped, a Muslim man will never return to her. The rape of Muslim women can thus be perceived as yet another ‘weapon’ used by the Serbs to destroy the enemy, a ‘weapon’ invested with special meaning because of the patriarchy that dominates both cultures in the conflict.18 If, in the case of the war in Croatia, the aim of the aggressor was to destroy the fantasy structure of the enemy’s national identification, the objective situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina is more paradoxical. Here, because of the lack of national identity, the aggressor tries to destroy Muslims’ sexual and religious identity, but by doing this, the aggressor is in a violent way actually forcing the Muslims to forge a fantasy structure of national identification. The war actually constructs Bosnia and Herzegovina as a homeland and creates the fantasy dimension which is necessary for Muslim soldiers to be willing to die for their own country.

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FANTASY AND THE POLITICAL DISCOURSE In analysing why the war started in the former Yugoslavia, we have to consider yet another dimension of fantasy. In Chapter 4, I will discuss the discourse of Serbian president, Miloševic, in some detail. Here I will take a particular instance which was at work in Miloševic’s discourse at the start of the war. The question is, how was it possible that the Serbian people supported the war although their official political discourse explicitly distanced itself from the war? Why did the people actually identify with Miloševic’s politics? As I am going to further demonstrate in the next chapter, in political discourse we have to distinguish between the level of ideological meaning and the level of surmise, surmise being the unspoken meaning of the discourse which the addressee has to decipher from what has been said and which touches upon fantasy. The signifying effect of an ideological discourse is thus always supported by some fantasy frame, by some unspoken fantasy scenario which organizes the ideology’s economy of enjoyment. How does this notion of the surmise function in the case of the war in the former Yugoslavia? Let us first consider Miloševic’s statement that triggered the war in Croatia: ‘It is the legitimate right and the interest of the Serbian people to live in one state – this is the beginning and the end.’ This apparently neutral statement carried a clear political message: the Serbs had to defend this right at any price, they had to start the war. A similar meaning is implied by Miloševic’s statement about the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina: ‘We have no right to stop caring about our fellow Serbians in Bosnia and Herzegovina and stop sending them humanitarian aid. This is our national duty. If the nation is destroyed, there is no freedom and prosperity for the individual.’ This sentimental statement of concern over Serbs being treated badly outside Serbia implies the duty of every Serb to go to war. This surmise would be easily recognized by each Serbian addressee, although it is not directly stated in the utterance (i.e. although it is not the utterance’s presupposition, although it is not part of its illocutionary force). Although this distance between the level of ideological meaning of a discourse and its hidden fantasy structure exists in every political discourse, totalitarian discourse usually expresses in some way hidden racist or nationalist fantasies. What marks Miloševic’s discourse as peculiar is that he himself did not transform his discourse into an openly totalitarian one; instead, he found allies on the side of the extreme right in Serbia who openly express fascist ideas. Miloševic thus has not had to dirty his hands; he has retained a position of ‘neutrality’ with which it is much easier for the public to identify. By taking this stand of apparent neutrality, Miloševic all the time silently supports the open aggression which the extreme right provokes against the ‘enemies’, and he continues to provide the means to carrying out this aggression.

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Miloševic’s position is similar to that of the ‘meta-racists’ in Western Europe; both position themselves as impartial observers, both claim that we have to analyse the context of national struggles, both effectively perceive homogeneous national states as the only way of preventing national tensions and conflicts.19 Miloševic acts out such a position by silently approving of ethnic cleansing, while ‘meta-racists’ are sending, in a more polite manner, a similar message when they mutely study racial conflicts or when they desperately attempt to reform liberal immigration laws.

Chapter 2

The post-socialist moral majority

The present outbursts of nationalism in East European post-socialist countries are a reaction to the fact that long years of (Communist) Party rule, by destroying the traditional fabric of society, have dismantled most of the traditional points of social identification. When people now attempt to assume a kind of distance toward the official ideological universe, the only positive reference point at their disposal is their national identity. In the new struggles for ideological hegemony, national identification is used by the exopposition as well as by the old Party forces. On the one hand, national identity serves as a support for the formation of a specific version of the ‘moral majority’ (in Poland, Slovenia and Croatia, etc.) which conceives Christian values as the ideological ‘cement’ holding together the ‘Nation’, demands the prohibition of abortion, etc. On the other hand, the Communist Party in some countries (Serbia, for example) has assumed an authoritarian populistnationalist discourse, thus producing a specific mixture of orthodox communist elements with elements usually associated with fascism. Both national movements – the right-wing moral majority and the authoritarian populism of the Communist Party – have built their power by creating similar fantasies of a threat to the nation and so put themselves forward as the protector of ‘what is in us more than ourselves’ – our being a part of the nation.

NATIONALISM THROUGH PSYCHOANALYSIS Psychoanalysis enables us to avoid both the simple condemnation of nationalism as well as the false solution of dividing it into ‘good’ (progressive, antiimperialist) versus ‘bad’ (chauvinist, colonizing) elements. It enables us to conceive of the nation as what ‘always returns’ as the traumatic element around which fantasies interlace, and thus it enables us to articulate the fantasy structure which serves as a support for ethnic hatred. It is necessary to emphasize that with all nationalism, national identification with the nation (‘our kind’) is based on the fantasy of the enemy, an alien who has insinuated himself into our society and constantly

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threatens us with habits, discourse and rituals which are not of ‘our kind’. No matter what this Other ‘does’, he threatens us with his existence. The fantasy of how the Other lives on our account, is lazy, and exploits us, etc., is repeatedly recreated in accordance with our desire. For example, there is the common notion that immigrants are lazy, they lack good working habits, etc., which goes along with the simultaneous accusation that they industriously steal our jobs. The Other who works enthusiastically is especially dangerous – it is only his way of deceiving us and becoming incorporated into ‘our’ community. Similarly with immigrants who assimilate: they are usually accused of retaining their strange habits, of being uncivilized, etc. If they adopt our customs, though, then we assume that they want to steal from us ‘our thing’ – the nation. We are disturbed precisely by the fact that the Other is Other and that he has his own customs, by which we feel threatened. As Jacques-Alain Miller (1985/6) says, hatred of the Other is hatred of the Other’s enjoyment,1 of the particular way the Other enjoys. For example, when Croats are irritated by the Albanian ‘mafia-type’ businesses, or when the Slovenes find the way ‘Southerners’ (Bosnians, Serbs, Montenegroes, etc.) enjoy themselves unbearable, what they are identifying is the threat in how the Other does not find enjoyment in the same way as we do. As Miller says: I am willing to see my neighbour in the Other but only on condition that he is not my neighbour. I am prepared to love him as myself only if he is far away, if he is removed. . . . When the Other comes too near, when it mingles with you, as Lacan says, new fantasies emerge which concern above all the surplus of enjoyment of the Other. . . . What is at stake is of course the imputation of an excessive enjoyment. Something of that kind could consist, for example, in the fact that we ascribe to the Other an enjoyment in money exceeding every limit. The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other, the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. . . . When we are considering whether the Other will have to abandon his language, his convictions, his way of dressing and talking, we would actually like to know the extent to which he is willing to abandon or not abandon his Other enjoyment. (Miller, 1985/6) The conservative English writer John Casey says of West Indians: ‘they simply cannot form part of “our” group or belong to “our” kind, for their behaviour outrages “our” sense of what English life should be like and how the English should behave towards a duly constituted authority’ (Parekh, 1986: 36). But the Other who outrages ‘our’ sense of the kind of

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nation ours should be, the Other who steals our enjoyment is always the Other in our own interior; i.e. our hatred of the Other is really the hatred of the part (the surplus) of our own enjoyment which we find unbearable and cannot acknowledge, and which we transpose (‘project’) onto the Other via a fantasy of the ‘Other’s enjoyment’. Therefore hatred of the Other, in the final analysis, is hatred of one’s own enjoyment. Intolerance of the Other’s enjoyment produces fantasies by which members of particular nations organize their own enjoyment. A clear example of this ‘theft of enjoyment’ is Serbian authoritarian populism which has produced an entire mythology about the struggle against internal and external enemies. The primary enemies are Albanians, who are perceived as threatening to cut off the Serbian autonomous province of Kosovo and thereby stealing Serbian land and culture. The secondary enemy is an alienated bureaucracy which threatens the power of the people: alienated from the nation, it is said to be devouring the Serbian national identity from within. And the third enemy has become the Croats, who with their politics of ‘genocide’ are outlawing the Serbian population from ‘historically’ Serbian territories in Croatia. Nowadays the enemies are primarily Muslims who are pictured as Islamic fundamentalists threatening the Serbs living in Bosnia and Herzegovina. All images of the enemy are based on specific fantasies. In Serbian mythology, the Albanians are understood as pure Evil, the unimaginable, which cannot be subjectivized; beings who cannot be made into people, because they are so radically Other. The Serbs describe their conflict with the Albanians as a struggle of ‘people with non-people’. The second enemy – the bureaucrat – is presented as a non-Serb, a traitor to his own nation who is also effeminate. The Croats are portrayed as the heirs of Goebbels, i.e. as brutal Ustashi butchers who torment the suffering Serbian nation, whose fate is compared to that of Kurds in Iraq. And the Muslims are named religious extremists who would like to expand their religion all over the world. However, along with Albanians, at the end of the 1980s Slovenes have also emerged as the enemies of Serbian nationalism; they are supposed to share with the Albanian separatists the wish to constrict the political hegemony of Serbia. What do we get when we combine these two enemies? Remember that in Serbian mythology Albanians are presented as dirty, fornicating, rapacious, violent, primitive, etc., while the Slovenes are presented as unpatriotic, anti-Yugoslav intellectuals, and as non-productive merchants who exploit the hard work of the Serbs, etc. If we simply put the two pictures together, we get the typical anti-Semitic portrait of the Jew: dirty, fornicating but at the same time the intellectual, non-productive, profiteering merchant. So, add an Albanian to a Slovene and you get a Jew.2 In Serbian mythology the enemy is revealed to be impotent. How is this demonstrated? Just as English conservatives describe the threat to Britain

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from immigrants, especially Blacks, as ‘the rape of the English race’ (see Parekh, 1986), so the Serbs portray Albanians as rapists of the Serbian nation, who steal the Serbian national identity in order to install their own culture. Reinforcing this figure of rape are allegations about actual attempts by Albanians to rape Serbian girls. What is important here is that the rape is always only an attempted one. A picture of the enemy thus takes shape as an Albanian who tries to rape Serbian girls but is actually unable to do so. This portrait is based on the fantasy of the enemy’s impotence – the enemy tries to attack, to rape, but is confounded, is impotent, in absolute contrast to the macho Serb.3 The mythology of the new Serbian populism constantly stresses the difference between real men – workers, men of the people – and bureaucrats. In this mythology the bureaucrat is portrayed as a middleclass feudal master, a kid-gloved capitalist with a top hat and a tie, ‘clean outside and dirty within’, in real contrast to the worker, the man of the nation, ‘dirty on the outside but pure within’.4 The essence of the argument is that the bureaucrat is not a real man – he is effeminate, slug-like, fat, he drinks whisky and eats pineapples – as opposed to the macho worker who eats traditional national food and dresses in workers’ dungarees or national costume. Bureaucrats are not men because of their alienation from tradition and their betrayal of the heroic Serbian people. To demonstrate its ties to the nation, Serbian populism invokes the heroic dead – not just their names, but their actual bodies. In the new Serbian populist mythology, current fighters for Serbian sovereignty are constantly compared to the Serbian heroes who fought the Turks six hundred years ago. Bones play a special role in this dramatic identification with the heroic past. Serbian populism has rediscovered the old Orthodox custom by which the mortal remains of a ruler were carried through all the monasteries of the country before burial. The restoration of the Serbian identity was confirmed in 1989 by the transfer to Kosovo after more than six hundred years of the bones of the famous Serbian hero, King Lazar, who died in battle with the Turks. When the old Orthodox ritual of carrying the bones around the monasteries was reinstituted for Lazar’s remains, it designated the new birth of the Serbian symbolic community. The bones can be seen here in Lacanian terms as the Real, that ‘something more’ which designates the symbolic community of the Serbian nation – the national ‘Thing’ comes out precisely in the bones. Thus Lazar’s bones function as the Real which has returned – as it always does – to its place. Lazar’s return to Kosovo constitutes symbolic confirmation of the ‘fact’ that Kosovo has always been the cradle of ‘that which is Serbian’. As Lacan says, race becomes established according to how a particular discourse preserves the symbolic order. The same can also be said of the concept of a national community. In the case of Serbia, the ridiculous ritual of transferring bones functions both to reinstitute and preserve the symbolic

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order. On the factual level, what we have here amounts to no more than a pile of trivial bones, which may or may not be the king’s, which may have some archaeological or anthropological value. Yet within the Serbian ideological discourse, these bones also represent that which ‘the enemy has always wanted to deprive us of, that which we must guard with special care.’ The national conflict between the Serbs and the Albanians, as well as the struggle between Serbs and Macedonians, has always exploited the symbolism of bones stolen from Serbian graves. For example, one myth has grown up around the claim that Albanians have supposedly dug up the graves of Serbian children; another myth claims that Macedonians supposedly used the bones of Serbian soldiers who fell in the First World War for anatomic studies in their medical faculties. Furthermore, during the war in Croatia the bones of the Serbs killed by the Ustashi in the Second World War acquired a special meaning and once again the rituals of transferring bones and ceremonial reburials with ideological speeches started to appear.

THE POST-SOCIALIST MORAL MAJORITY National identity serves as the basis upon which the specific ideology of the moral majority depends. This is the moral majority we encounter both in Slovenia and Croatia, as well as in other East European countries. However, it does not have the same significance as the moral majority in the West. In view of its structural role, the moral majority in socialism was democratic and anti-totalitarian – its voice was an oppositional one. Moral revolt against a real socialist regime predominated in its criticism of the authorities.5 It thus articulated the distinction between civil society (in the name of which it spoke) and the totalitarian state as a distinction between morality and corruption. A return to Christian values, the family, the ‘right to life’, etc. was presented as a rebellion against immoral socialist authority which, in the name of the concept of communism, permitted all sorts of state intervention into the privacy of the citizen. Paradoxically, the moral majority in the East, in spite of its oppositional role, is comparatively more socialist than conservative in relation to its Western counterpart. Where the latter is characterized by an anti-socialist market ideology in which people answer for themselves first and the state is not the guardian of their well-being, the new post-socialist moral majority, in the name of an organic national ideology, reforges a link with the socialist heritage. When it calls for the reinforcement of national affiliation and Christian values, this moral majority simultaneously stresses that we must not surrender to soulless capitalism – that we must create a state-supported national programme. The difference between Western and post-socialist moral majorities can also be seen in their different perspectives on the issue of abortion. First we must point out that in the former Yugoslavia as in the majority of other Eastern

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European Countries, abortion was legalized and within easy reach of every woman. Indeed, it has often been the only available form of birth control. But during socialism, abortion was perceived more as a necessary ‘evil’ than as the right of women to control their own bodies. The state made abortion legal because it wanted to prevent illegal abortions. It also wanted to keep women in the labour force. At the same time, the state retained the power to regulate abortion in the interests of its population policy. For example, special committees were established to approve abortions. Although obtaining permission from the committees amounted to a mere formality, the state’s aim was to humiliate women and to remind them who really had the power over their bodies. Similar humiliation was encountered in the hospitals where abortions were performed: women waited for hours for abortions, the medical staff were rude to them, women sometimes would not get anaesthetics, etc. As Lawrence H. Tribe points out, people who opposed abortion in socialism also ‘argued not in terms of the right to life of the unborn child but in terms of the duty of the mother to perform her “natural” role in society, that of bearing children. The socialist state, they believed, had a right to the “natural” increase of the labour force occasioned by this role’ (Tribe, 1990: 56). On two well-known occasions, the socialist state prohibited abortion. In 1936 Joseph Stalin outlawed abortion in the Soviet Union for two decades, and in 1966 Ceaucescu strongly prohibited abortion in Romania. Stalin’s opposition to abortion was based on his opinion that socialism had solved the problems causing abortion. For Stalin it was necessary for Soviet women to ‘fulfill their natural role and “give the nation a new group of heroes.” In Stalin’s words, woman “is mother . . . she gives life, and this is certainly not a private matter but one of great social importance”’ (Tribe, 1990: 56). Ceaucescu’s prohibition of abortion turned on his efforts to increase the population and thereby to strengthen the Romanian state. In socialism, therefore, prohibiting and legalizing abortion were both part of the communist tendency to exert control over people. Abortion was allowed primarily to control ‘public hygiene’ by preventing illegal abortions, while abortion was prohibited in attempts to control the population. In this regard, women received special attention from the state, but only because of their capability to bear children. Mothers, however, were limited in their roles; the socialist state had reserved for itself the ‘duty’ to educate children and to form them into devoted communists. The state did not trust parents, which is why it constantly interfered in family life, took charge of organizing children’s spare time, etc. As we can see, in socialism the state-control process of socialization and the mistrust of the family as the agent of socialization paradoxically coincided with elements of traditional patriarchal ideology (glorification of the role of the mother, etc.). What was actually the status of these elements of patriarchal ideology? As with nationalism, which officially did not exist, but nevertheless remained at work in a concealed way,6 patriarchal domination, although

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officially overcome, remained a surmise of political discourse. Thus, it was not difficult for the post-socialist moral majority to articulate patriarchy in a new way and present the return to ‘natural’ sexual roles as an attempt to introduce morality into a previously ‘immoral’ social regime. The question raised by this call for a ‘new’ post-socialist morality is, to what extent is this demand supported by women? Are women in the front lines of the nationalist and anti-abortionist movement? Actually, women in post-socialism are much less involved with the anti-abortion movement and nationalist parties than men. Few women are preaching the need for more morality and less abortion. This lack of women’s involvement in the moral majority movement is, of course, linked to the marginal role women play in post-socialist societies. But the question is also, does not the success of postsocialist regressive ideologies rely on this non-presence of women in public life? In response to this question, Julia Kristeva makes a puzzling claim: The very recent studies that are beginning to be published on the underlying logic of Soviet society and of the transition period (that is already bitterly being called ‘catastroika’) show to what extent a society based on the rudimentary satisfaction of survival needs, to the detriment of the desire for freedom, could encourage the regressive sado-masochist leanings of women and, without emancipating them at all, rely on them to create a stagnation, a parareligious support of the status quo crushing the elementary rights of the human person. (Kristeva, 1993: 34) In my opinion, the communist society did not encourage a special kind of ‘sado-masochist leaning’ of women, but only relied on the entrenched patriarchy of the society. The shortage of goods, of course, forced women to spend endless hours shopping around, and the lack of men’s involvement with housework and early child rearing required women to do a double job, one in the workplace and one at home. But in this regard women in socialist countries did not differ so much from women in the West. In fact, consumerism also pressures Western women to spend most of their free time shopping, and housework remains a burden for women even in the most democratic societies. The difference between East European and Western societies lies in the East European refusal to acknowledge the problem of patriarchal domination. Just as communist ideology erased the problem of patriarchal domination, today’s post-socialist societies also erase the problem of sexual inequality. The post-socialists act as if the emancipation of women is not an issue for them at all. The only political force addressing the status of women is the nationalist right, although its major concern is, of course, to help women rediscover their ‘natural’ mission. In the 1980s, it was the Catholic-nationalist opposition that first raised the possibility of restricting abortion, but it did so in terms unfamiliar to

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Western anti-abortion movements. The traditional ‘moral majority’, as known in Western countries, does not oppose abortion on the grounds of the threat it poses to the nation, but in the name of the Christian values of the sanctity of life, the sacred significance of conception, etc., from which it derives the claim that abortion is murder.7 Objections to abortion by the moral majority in Slovenia and in Croatia are connected to their claim that abortion poses a threat to the nation. Linking images of abortion as a crime against humanity to images of abortion as a threat to the nation produces an ideology through which support for Slovenes or Croats becomes synonymous with opposition to abortion. When the former Croatian opposition asserts that ‘a foetus is also Croat’, it clearly demonstrates that an opinion about abortion is also going to be an opinion about the future of the nation. The production of these kind of fantasies of a national threat must of course be seen in terms of the political struggle they engender. The strategy is to transform the internal political threat of totalitarianism into an external national menace which can only be averted by an increase in the birthrate -in other words, by limiting the right to abortion. Thus emerges the hypothesis that to be a good Slovene or a good Croat means primarily being a good Christian, since the national menace can only be averted by adhering to Christian morals. The post-socialist moral majority has reinterpreted the relation between ‘foetus’ and ‘life’ on which the Western moral majority has built its ideology. The idea that the foetus is a human being who is being ‘murdered’ during abortion is, in the case of the post-socialist moral majority, linked to the image of the ‘death of the nation’. Behind this is the idea of the importance of national identification: the life of a human being has special meaning because he or she belongs to a national community. By allowing abortion, we not only kill a human being but also erode our national substance – in the long term we kill the nation.8 In the ideology of the Western moral majority, abortion is similarly presented as an attack on ‘personhood’. As Kristin Luker points out, the moral majority asserts ‘that personhood is a “natural”, inborn, inherited right, rather than a social, contingent, and assigned right’ (emphasis in original) (Luker, 1984: 157). When the foetus is presented as a person, one can produce an image whereby the rights of our own personhood are endangered by abortion. And the post-socialist moral majority plays precisely on this image when it links abortion to the threat to the nation; because in their ideology national identity fully determines us, our own identity and personhood are endangered when abortion is allowed. The post-socialist moral majority also opposes the role women had under the socialist regime. The ideology of the post-socialist moral majority, on the one hand, plays on the hard life women had under socialism,9 and, on the other hand, it touches the problem of motherhood. The post-socialist moral majority regards socialism as a system that downgraded motherhood, and did not allow ‘woman to be a woman’, meaning that a woman, to be a

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woman, can choose only to be a housewife and a mother. Here the postsocialist moral majority plays the same card as its Western counterpart and establishes sexual roles as natural.10 Linked to this also is the idea that abortion is something utterly ‘un-natural’, because it opposes the ‘natural’ consequence of marriage and sex: procreation. The moral majority produces a special kind of ‘imaginary identification with the foetus’ when it presents the foetus as a human being, and uses pictures of baby-like foetuses suffering when they are torn from the mother’s body. The idea behind this is that the human being, a being like ourselves, has been killed by the abortion. As Mark Bracher says: Through such representations of abortion, many people come to experience the assault on the fetus as a threat to their own integrity at the level of the body ego . . . images of dismemberment assault them at the bodily core of their identity. In the image of the fetus being aborted, these people thus encounter a deep sense of their own radical lack, a sense grounded in the earliest mnemic traces laid down by their infant body’s experience of chaos and dismemberment, which, Lacan maintains, constitutes the ultimate (Imaginary) referent of one’s notion of death. (Bracher, 1993: 114) The post-socialist moral majority goes further in following the same logic when it presents abortion as an attack on our national identity and as something that contributes to the possible death of the nation. Here a link could be made with the theft of enjoyment, which I have tied to our perception of national identity. The pro-choice movement is perceived by the moral majority as the enemy within, the enemy who steals our national substance by aborting potential members of our nation.11 In this ideology of national threat, women are pronounced both culprits and victims. The strongest former opposition party in Croatia, the Croatian Democratic Community (which came to power after the first free election in 1990), has gone so far in this that it has publicly blamed the tragedy of the Croatian nation on women, pornography and abortion.12 ‘This trinity murders, or rather hinders, the birth of little Croats, that “sacred thing which God has given society and the homeland”.’ The Croatian moral majority regard women who have not given birth to at least four children as ‘female exhibitionists’ since they have not fulfilled ‘their unique sacred duty’. Women who, for whatever reason, decide on abortion have been proclaimed murderers and mortal enemies of the nation, while gynaecologists who have assisted them in this ‘murderous’ act are pronounced butchers and traitors. Women, then, are pronounced guilty; yet at the same time, they are depicted as the victims of overly liberal abortion laws. Ideologists of the

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post-socialist moral majority take as their starting point the notion that a free decision about how many children a person will have is an inalienable human right, and that society is obliged to maintain population policies which enable people to have the desired number of children. These ideologists believe therefore that a state which prioritizes the right to abortion is refusing its citizens access to this second right – that of having a desired number of children. Here the real victims are women.13 This fantasy about the woman is based on the belief that the woman and the nation share the same desire: to give birth. Opposed to this ‘fundamental’ feminine desire is the idea of excessive feminine enjoyment (jouissance): while mothers are glorified, women who forget their ‘natural’ mission are perceived as an excess. The enjoyment of the latter group of women has to be regulated through the prohibition of abortion.14 If a woman is defined by maternity then abortion is an attack on her very essence; yet it is also an attack on the essence of the nation, since the national community, according to this ideology, is defined by the national maternal wish for an increased population. The ideologists of national threat invoke the same logic used by Ceaucescu when a journalist asked him whether the ban on Romanians travelling abroad was not a violation of human rights. Ceaucescu’s answer was that, since the most important human right is to be able to live in one’s own country, the ban on travelling abroad simply guarantees this right. So, too, the ideologists of national threat represent their desire to limit the right to free abortion as simply reinforcing the human right to have the desired number of children. The ideology of national threat also produces in Croatia a specific form of anti-semitism which is linked to the national conflict between Croats and Serbs. It is first necessary to stress that Serbs see themselves in their mythology as ‘Jews’, the chosen nation of Yugoslavia. According to the Serbian philosopher, Jovan Raškovic, the ‘Serbian nation has always been a nation of tragic destiny, some sort of God’s nation’, which lost in Kosovo its ‘sacred country’. So the Serbs understand the Kosovo problem in terms of a struggle for their holy land, i.e. the cradle of the Serbian community. The Albanian population is thus constantly presented as immigrant, although this immigration took place in the Middle Ages and the Albanians are arguably the descendants of much earlier Illyrian inhabitants of the region. It is precisely this Serbian self-depiction as the Jews of Yugoslavia that reinforces Croat anti-semitism. In Croatian mythology, the Jews and Serbs together are involved in a conspiracy against the Croat nation. The traditional anti-Semitic fantasy of the Jew as Shylock, the sly cheat who lives on the labour of others, unites in the image of the Serb as the national enemy who threatens Croatian sovereignty. That this anti-semitism is used entirely arbitrarily in the national struggle is confirmed by the Serbs themselves. On the one hand they proclaim themselves to be the Jews of Yugoslavia and thus reinforce Croat anti-semitism, while on the other hand, it is actually

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the Serbs themselves who construct ‘Jews’ as enemies (as has been already shown, if you put together the images of their two enemies, the Albanians and the Slovenes, and you get a Jew).15 The common point between the two ideologies presented – Serbian ‘authoritarian populism’ and the post-socialist nationalistic moral majority – is that both offer a collective fantasy whose between-the-lines message is, ‘We are the only defenders of the nation.’ But to understand the new mixture of nationalism and communism emerging in post-socialist countries, one has to take into account that under communist regimes, especially under Stalinism, nationalism always existed, although in a concealed way. It was only with the advent of more liberal types of communism, in the 1970s and 1980s, that nationalism was less present as a surmise of political discourse. That is why contemporary nationalists find Stalinists more appealing than the Brezhnev or Gorbachev types of communists. The conclusion one can draw from the success of the new coalition of communists and nationalists (in Serbia and Russia, for example) is that when people identify with a certain political discourse, fantasy plays a greater role than ideological meaning. At this point we have to return to the theoretical question of how to separate the two levels of political discourse: its ideological meaning, and the fantasy which functions as its surmise. In Chapter 1, I pointed out that when people identify with a certain political discourse they identify with its surmise, with the level of unsaid fantasies which determine their economy of enjoyment. The two discourses presented – authoritarian populist and moral majority – offer a possibility to explore the logic of this identification even further. In this exploration of the subtle process of political identification, I shall rely on contemporary French linguistics and its criticism of the speech act theory.

MEANING AND FANTASY IN POLITICAL DISCOURSE In his early seminars, Lacan articulated the performative dimension of speech; what he called the ‘founding word’ corresponds clearly to what was later conceptualized as a ‘speech act’ – the word which, through its very enunciation, establishes a new intersubjective network that redefines the places of the speaker and the receiver. It looks, then, as if speech act theory did nothing but elaborate this early Lacanian intuition about the creative, structuring role of speech. There is, however, a crucial aspect to speech act theory that makes it incompatible with Lacan’s theory: in speech act theory, a speech act is conceived as a closed totality where the intention corresponds to the act itself. I ‘do things with words’ insofar as I mean what I say. In other words, a successful speech act presupposes a whole set of fulfilled conditions: the sincerity of my intention, the truth of the prepositional content, respect for the rules of authority which assure that my word will achieve its

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performative aim. (For example, to proclaim a couple husband and wife, I must be in a position to do so, they must not be married already, etc.) It was probably this closed aspect of speech act theory that prevented it from further ‘communication’ with Lacanian theory. How can we unite speech act theory – with its notion of the unique and non-divided subject (i.e. of the speaker fully responsible for what she says and for what she does by saying it) – with the fundamental Lacanian notion of the split subject, the subject who by definition cannot control the intersubjective effects of what she says, and whose words find their meaning determined in another, decentred place? Recent developments in French linguistics and semantics have revised speech act theory so that we can finally establish a link between it and Lacanian theory. In his book Le dire et le dit (1984), Oswald Ducrot attacked the basic notion underlying classical speech act theory, the thesis of the subject as the unitary, self-centred author of the act, responsible for its effects. The starting point of Ducrot’s criticism is his dismissal of the psychological level, i.e. the irrelevance of the speaker’s sincerity for the utterance’s illocutionary effect. For example, if I say ‘I promise to come’, the illocutionary force of this proposition is in no way diminished if I think, while pronouncing it, ‘But I probably won’t come because nothing really obliges me to do so.’ According to Ducrot, it is contradictory (i.e. it is a pragmatic paradox) only if one says expressly ‘I promise to come, although I don’t intend to do so.’ Such considerations have brought Ducrot to split the apparently unique entity of the speaker as the empirical person and author of the speech act into three distinct agencies: speaking subject as an empirical individual, and a speaker and an enunciator as two discursive agencies. The individual who speaks is empirically responsible for the utterance, but she is totally irrelevant to its semantic structure. On the level of semantic structure, Ducrot introduces the further split between speaker (the abstract entity responsible for the enunciation) and the enunciator (the entity whose point of view is supposed to be expressed in an utterance, the central point of perspective of an utterance). Ducrot’s accent falls on how the same speaker can – in the course of a continuous series of utterances – assume different enunciator positions. This is the main point of his ‘polyphonic’ theory of meaning. The clearest case of this distinction between speaker and enunciator is irony: in the ironic speech, the speaker mockingly presents or imitates the position or the point of view of some other enunciator with whom she clearly does not identify. For example, if, after a disastrous party, I say to the host ‘Thank you for a marvellous evening’, it is clear that I mockingly assume the perspective of a delighted guest. It is also clear that Ducrot’s distinction between speaker and enunciator, corresponds to the Lacanian distinction between sujet de l’énonciation (subject of the enunciation) and the sujet de l’énonce (subject of the utterance). The speaker, the subject of the enunciation, is an empty place, a vanishing point

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without any positive identity, which can subsequently assume a series of positions (i.e. which subsequently identifies with some definite figure determining the perspective of her enunciation). But the crucial factor here is that Ducrot introduces a homologous split also on the other, receiving end. His thesis is that the illocutionary act always refers to a strictly determined and defined hearer, to the addressee as a discursive figure and not to some empirical embodiment of the addressee (i.e. the empirical person of a hearer). The addressee is a certain discursive position constructed by the illocutionary act, and a given empirical person (hearer) becomes the addressee only upon recognizing herself as such, i.e. when she assumes the obligation forced upon her by the illocutionary act. For example, the order ‘Give me back my money’ establishes a certain intersubjective space where the addressee is put into the position of the debtor. It is up to the empirical hearer to either recognize herself in this position (and then to obey the order or to refuse to obey it, inventing excuses, and so forth) or simply to ignore the order (i.e. behave as if she is not the addressee of the order). The crucial point is that obligation exists only in the discursive universe: it concerns the addressee, the figure created by the discourse itself, not the empirical hearer. The discourse does not address a given individual, it creates the place of the addressee by itself and it is up to the receiver to recognize herself in this place. We can now see how Ducrot’s modified version of speech act theory implies a split or divided subject, an empty point striving to achieve positive identity by identifying itself with different enunciator figures. And in this implied split subject Ducrot’s relevance for the analysis of the political discourse is found: his conceptual apparatus enables us to approach the question of how a subject recognizes herself as the addressee of a political discourse and thereby comes to identify with a certain political position. Answering this question requires reference to two further notions elaborated by Ducrot: that of the later discourse and that of the surmise of the speech act. The ‘later discourse’ constructs the place of subject’s identification, while the ‘surmise’ functions as a place for fantasy. According to Ducrot, a given utterance must always be described with regard to its ideal continuation (i.e. it always constructs an ideal space of its possible continuation which, retroactively, confers on it its signification). The most elementary case of this ‘later discourse’ is a question: a question obliges the addressee to answer it in a certain way, it delineates in advance the ideal, fictional place of the response to come. The ‘later discourse’ is thus a symbolic fiction, a network by means of which the present discourse self-referentially establishes the link between itself and what is to follow. If I ask somebody a question, I not only determine the type of speech I expect from the addressee, at the same time I establish a certain discursive relationship between myself and the other, I locate my own discourse in relation to the other. In this sense, we could say that the notion of the ‘later discourse’ points in the same direction as the notion of the ‘founding

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word’ in Lacan’s early seminars. This is the word which establishes a new symbolic reality, a new intersubjective network between the speaker and the addressee: ‘Thou art that, my wife, my master and a thousand other things. As soon as I accept this “thou art that”, it makes out of me in the word something other than what I elsewhere am’ (Lacan, 1981: 315). In political discourse, it is precisely this ‘later discourse’ that designates the place of identification: political discourse succeeds when we recognize ourselves as its addressee. What is crucial here is the distinction between present and later discourse. The ‘trick’ of a successful political discourse is not to directly offer us images with which to identify – to flatter us with an idealized image, an ideal ego, to portray us the way we would like to appear to ourselves – but to construct a symbolic space, a point of view, from which we could appear likeable to ourselves; in other words, to construct the ‘later discourse’ in such a way that it leaves the space open to be filled out by images of our ideal ego. Such a discourse is well exemplified by the success of Thatcherism in Great Britain in the 1970s and 1980s. When Stuart Hall (1988) analysed the causes of the Labour Party’s defeat in the 1987 election, he pointed out that the Labour politicians were directly addressing the voters’ so-called real, effective interests and needs (such as unemployment, health, education, housing policies). Thatcher, on the other hand, perceived very well that the crucial point is not the actual needs and problems themselves but the way their meaning is perceived – so her first step was not to offer better solutions to existing problems but to radically redefine the status of these problems. Thus her telling statement at the 1975 Conservative Party conference: ‘Serious as the economic challenge is, the political and moral challenge is just as grave, and perhaps more so, because economic problems never start with economies’ (Hall, 1988: 85). What matters is not economics as such but the way it is symbolized through ideology: pure economics does not exist. Unemployment and poverty are of course hard facts, but what matters in political battles is how they are perceived, how they are symbolically mediated or structured. From the Labour perspective, such things as poverty and unemployment are clearly the responsibility of society, so the Labour Party offered improvements in the welfare state, more state control, state-directed investments in depressed areas, and so forth. Thatcherism, on the other hand, inverted this perspective and took as its motto ‘There is no such thing as society’; there are only individuals and their families, fully responsible for their fate, which is why state intervention is not the remedy but the cause of the illness. It undermines the aggressive, active, competitive spirit of individuals, and saps their belief that they themselves can fight for their success and must not rely on the state for support. If this constitutes Thatcherism’s symbolic reinterpretation of social reality and of the causes of the economic crisis, once we accept it, once we

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symbolically identify with it, what imaginary identification does it offer us? It is an essential part of the ideological efficiency of Thatcherism that a handful of people did succeed in getting rich through individual entrepreneurship. These successes function as a ‘little piece of reality’ that gives everyone else the hope that, someday, they too will succeed. Mrs Thatcher’s symbolic majority includes all who identify with the enterprise culture as the way of the future, who see themselves in their political imaginations as likely to be lucky in the next round. They form an ‘imaginary community’ around Thatcherism’s political project. (Hall, 1988: 262) This hope ‘to be lucky in the next round’ is the precise locus of the imaginary identification constructed by the later discourse, the place at which the subject would like to be seen. Similarly, the success of the moral majority relies on constructing the image of community, family and tradition. When the moral majority preaches that the woman’s place is at home and opposes abortion, it does so in terms of morality, invoking the image of an ideal traditional community in which people do not put their economic interests above all else. As Kristin Luker points out, for pro-life people in America ‘the private world of family as traditionally experienced is the only place in society where none of us has a price tag’ (Luker, 1984: 207). The family is supposedly the place where social worth criteria are not at work and where ‘love is unconditional’. In this regard the moral majority opposition to abortion takes on a special meaning: Protecting the life of the embryo, which is by definition an entity whose social worth is all yet to come, means protecting others who feel that they may be defined as having low social worth; more broadly, it means protecting a legal view of personhood that emphatically rejects social worth criteria. (ibid.) When people identify with moral majority ideology, they do so because they want to see themselves in the image of the community ‘where love and morality reign’ constructed by the moral majority discourse. This ideal image offered by the neo-conservative discourse is, however, not enough for it to succeed. The effect of signification of an ideological discourse must always be supported by some fantasy frame, by some unspoken fantasy scenario that stages its economy of enjoyment. The place of this fantasy is not constructed by the later discourse; to locate it, we should turn to another distinction elaborated by Ducrot, the distinction between

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presupposition and surmise. Presupposition is an integral part of the speech act; responsibility for it rests with the speaker (i.e. it is the speaker who, by pronouncing a certain proposition, guarantees its presuppositions). For example, if I say ‘I promise to revenge your father’s death’, I assume thereby a whole network of symbolic, intersubjective relations and my place within it. I accept as a fact that the father’s death was the result of an injustice, I assume that I am in a position to compensate for it, and so forth. The surmise is, on the other hand, the place of the inscription of the addressee in the enunciation; it is the addressee who assumes responsibility for the surmise, who has to derive it from what was said. The surmise emerges as an answer to the question that the addressee necessarily poses herself: ‘Why did the speaker speak that way? Why did she or he say that?’ The surmise concerns the way the addressee must decipher the meaning of what was said, which is why the surmise necessarily touches upon fantasy. In Lacan’s graph of desire,16 fantasy is specified as an answer to the famous ‘Che vuoi?’, to the question ‘What did she mean by saying that?’ In the political discourse, this split between proposition and surmise assumes the form of a necessary distance between the field of meaning of an ideological discourse and the level of fantasy functioning as its surmise. To exemplify it, let us again recall the Serbian political scene at the end of the 1980s. Already on the level of ideological meaning, Miloševic’s achievement was considerable, because he succeeded in uniting in the same discourse elements which were hitherto regarded as incompatible: a return to the old Stalinist Communist Party rhetoric, a proto-fascist nationalistic movement, economic liberalism, and so forth. But the key to the success of his authoritarian populism is the delicate balance between what he said and what he left unspoken. On the level of ideological meaning, Miloševic, in the time of his ascent to power, spoke for a strong, unified Yugoslavia where all nations would live in equality and brotherhood. He presented his movement as a new, ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’, as a broad democratic populist movement of rebellion against the corrupted bureaucracy of the Party and the state, and as an attempt to save Tito’s legacy. Behind this, however, there was another level, another message which was easily deciphered by his supporters as the answer to the question ‘Why is he telling us this?’ He aimed at crushing the Albanians by turning them into secondrate citizens, he aimed at unifying Yugoslavia under Serbian domination by abolishing the autonomy of other republics. He presented Serbia as the only really sovereign nation in Yugoslavia, as the only nation capable of assuring state-sovereignty, and he promised to the Serbian masses revenge for the supposed exploitation of Serbia by the more developed republics of Croatia and Slovenia. So we find as a surmise of his discourse a bricolage of heterogeneous elements, each of which ignites the desire of Serbs: the revival of old Serbian nationalist myths, glorification of the Orthodox church as opposed to the intriguing, anti-Serbian Catholic church, sexual myths of the

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dirty Albanians fornicating all the time and raping innocent Serbian girls. In short, we find the whole domain of fantasies on which racist enjoyment feeds. The crucial thing is that this fantasy-support of Miloševic’s populism, although unmentioned, although outside the scope of ideological meaning, was easily recognized as the surmise of its discourse. The same can be said of all other successful neo-conservative populist ideologies, from Thatcherism to Reaganism, etc. Their very success rests upon the distance between ideological meaning (return to the old moral values of the family, of the self-made man, etc.) and the level of (racist, sexual, etc.) fantasies which, although unmentioned, function as surmise and determine the way the addressee deciphers the signification of ideological statements. But far from being something to deplore, this very distance is perhaps that which marks the difference between neoconservative populist ideologies, still attached to democratic space, and socalled totalitarianism. ‘Totalitarianism’ – at least in its radical version – can be said to state directly and openly what other ideologies only imply as a surmise. Hitler, for example, appealed directly to racist, sexual and other anti-semitic fantasies. One of the common self-designations of fascist discourse is precisely that fascists say openly that to which others (their fellows on the moderate right) only allude. Hitler thus openly said that it is necessary to eliminate the enemy (Jews, for example). But what remained as a surmise of the fascist discourse was the fantasy scenario of the forms of torture by which the enemy had to be eliminated. An example of the neo-fascist logic of the surmise could be the slogan of the Slovene National Party (SNP), the extreme right-wing party in Slovenia, which proclaims: ‘Let’s make this country Slovene again.’ This statement alludes to Hitler’s famous speech from 1941 when, during the occupation of Slovenia, Hitler demanded: ‘Let’s make this country German.’ As a variation on Hitler’s statement, the SNP’s slogan implies as its surmise a whole set of fascist fantasies: every addressee will recognize in it the need to close the borders to refugees, to expel foreigners, etc. But the discourse of the SNP becomes even more interesting in terms of our analysis if we take seriously their leader’s claim that the ‘Slovene National Party openly says what other parties think.’ This thesis is actually true. The fact is that among the right-wing parties in Slovenia, it is only the SNP which openly utters extreme nationalist demands (to expel foreigners and refugees) which other right-wing parties only imply as a surmise of their discourse. Such outspokenness is possible for the SNP because it has a declared nationalistic stand while other right-wing parties cloak their nationalism in Catholic or populist ideology. But the real paradox is that, on another level, the SNP openly says what the Left is unable to say. Declared nationalism enables the SNP to object to the return of the confiscated forest to the Church on grounds that the forest is a Slovenian national treasure, to cherish the past partisan struggle against fascism while

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criticizing fascist collaborators among the Slovenes, etc. The Left, which is represented by the former Communist Party, because of its unclear identity and historical burden, remains silent in regard to these questions. The Left is neither for nor against returning the forests, it no longer pays tribute to the partisans and it constantly stresses that things have to be seen in their context. Because national interest is the ultimate priority for the SNP, it can openly utter the surmises that neither the Right nor the Left dares to. The question remains, what is left unspoken in the discourse of the SNP? Significantly, the Party leader projects a kind of ‘Rambo image’, the Party openly advocates the right to possess arms, it has unclear connections with the secret police and presumably has access to a fair amount of arms and munitions. All this constructs an unspeakable surmise of their discourse that the national interest has to be defended by force. In the SNP’s discourse, the fantasy at work is that society will attain prosperity (and that the nation will survive) only after the ‘enemy’ is removed. But the means of removing the enemy in the discourse of the SNP remains unspoken. Returning to the problem of the new mixture of nationalism and communism emerging in post-socialism, it has to be pointed out that nothing connects communists and nationalists on the level of the ideological meaning of their discourse. Communists are, in their own words, internationalists who condemn nationalism, while nationalists are usually anti-communists. But one can easily find a link between communism and nationalism on the level of fantasy: both discourses have as a surmise all kinds of hatreds of other nations and races. They are driven by the submerged energy of sexism, homophobia and anti-semitism. That is why these discourses have so easily coalesced in post-socialist societies. There is no politics without fantasy. As long as there is some hidden surmise which organizes enjoyment, the aim of democratic politics is not how to replace one type of fantasy with another, more democratic fantasy or how to prevent racist fantasies from being articulated. The goal of democratic politics should be to create a political space in which racist fantasies would not have any real effect. Only a society that ‘believes’ in democratic institutions and has mechanisms of ‘self-binding’ of power, about which Chapter 6 will speak, is able to stand having such fantasies articulated without fearing that the democratic order will consequently collapse. A real democratic advance in the post-socialist countries can only be expected when the driving force becomes ‘to each their fantasy’. This does not mean a refusal to admit national identity: it means the removal of the Subject presented as its sole protector, as the only one who acts in the name of ‘our kind’.

Chapter 3 ‘Normalization’ in the socialist regime

In socialist political vocabulary, ‘normalization’ means correcting a situation which has gone wrong because of dangers posed by the internal and external enemies of the state. But normalization does not aim to abolish the state of emergency declared to fight these enemies of communism; on the contrary, normalization means a consolidation and fortification of a state of emergency. Proceeding by means of an invisible, administrative terror, normalization in socialist jargon thus stands for the ‘normality of the undemocratic state’. When socialists speak of the need for normalization, they really intend various means of ideological control to be used for many purposes – for example for the purging of state enemies. Normalization has a different meaning in the work of Michel Foucault. There the term is defined as a mechanism of disciplinary power. For Foucault, power functions through mechanisms which normalize, discipline and control the individual. Foucault shows how contemporary Western societies are governed by hidden mechanisms which control individuals. This control depends on the formation of knowledge of the individual’s sexuality, deviance and insanity. And in turn, on the basis of this knowledge, new forms of discipline are developed. In contrast to capitalist societies, where mechanisms of control are hidden, in socialist societies the mechanisms of control are far more visible and the levers of power far more exposed, because of open repression of dissidents through arrests, trials, exiles to gulags, etc. But the notion of normalization in the East European, Soviet type of socialism (the so-called ‘Real-socialism’) allows for a change from visible repression to an invisible, ‘civilized’ violence, with the result that both meanings of normalization – Foucault’s and the socialist meaning – become interwoven. Thus, normalization in socialism actually functions through the restoration of mechanisms of disciplinary power. The continual process of normalization does not operate spontaneously on the micro-level of power relations, as it does in Western society. Normalization in socialist societies is directed from the macro-level of power, by the Party. However, the results

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of normalization programmes depend on the relationship between the power functioning on the micro- and macro-levels. Thus, in socialism, it is never possible to attain the desired political goals through declarations of Party programmes alone. For a successful political system, the mechanisms at work on the hidden micro-level of power must be capable of translating Party decisions into popular ‘obedience’. Such effective mechanisms would include, for example, the production of fear by the secret police, invisible controls at the workplace or in schools, public acceptance of censorship and even of self-censorship in order to avoid being perceived as an enemy of the state. Normalization succeeds as long as people accept the discourse of power, even if they do not believe in the official ideology and maintain a cynical distance from it. The question then becomes, how do these mechanisms of control make possible people’s acceptance of a political system in which they do not believe and from which they keep a conscious distance? The reaction of the Soviet government and their Czech allies to the events of the ‘Prague Spring’, the liberalization of 1968, marked a turning point in how socialists dealt with dissidents. At this time the authorities changed from open repression of dissidents to the hidden mechanisms of normalization. A new kind of violence became the dominant means of repressing so-called ‘counter-revolutionaries’, as was the case in government response to the anticommunist protests in China in 1989 and in the Yugoslav province of Kosovo in the 1980s. But, in a way, such hidden control was present throughout socialist societies, and, because of its hidden character, most of the time people did not really recognize its effects.

RESTORING ORDER IN A SOCIALIST REGIME For Czechoslovakia, 1968 was the year when the country turned back to the ‘still waters’ of Real-socialism. Before the Soviet’s armed intervention, democracy was in full progress. The liberalization of the Party encouraged the emergence of new opposition newspapers, and even the official media openly criticized the government. This liberalization of the Party was led by the head of the Party, Alexander Dubcek, and it had the support of almost 90 per cent of the population. This movement ended with the arrival of the Soviet army. But what actually stopped democratization was not open repression. Much more effective was the hidden ‘restoration of order’. How did this restoration happen? The most important event was the removal of Dubcek as the head of the Party, and his replacement with Husak. This change of leadership was not presented as a public attack on Dubcek; his removal was carried out under the guise of readjusting the disproportion between Czech and Slovak representatives in the Party’s leadership. In a similar discreet way, all the other liberals were removed from the Party. They were replaced by obedient lower bureaucrats who had at the right time favoured Soviet intervention.

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But the most striking fact was that many former dissidents, for example writers who were previously critical of the government, turned overnight into the most obedient attendants of the new order. How did the government succeed in effecting such a change when, before Soviet intervention, almost the whole Party apparatus supported the liberal orientation of the Party, when the whole media was against the Soviet intervention, and when the majority of the population openly supported the democratic changes of the ‘Prague Spring’? Unbelievably, the government succeeded in establishing the new order without using the usual means of open repression, such as Stalinist show trials, mass imprisonment of the dissidents, or gulags. The new ideological leadership silenced the opposition and disciplined the public with the help of subtle psychological pressures. By frightening people with the possibility that they might lose their jobs or that their children might be unable to continue their education, the new regime carried out its purges in a ‘polite’ manner. Milan Šimecka (1984), a Czech sociologist, calls this period the period of ‘the restoration of order’.1 For Real-socialism, order is something absolutely sacred; it is the necessary condition of the socialist state’s continued existence. What is necessary to preserve or, in the case of Czechoslovakia in 1968, restore is some kind of formal order whereby everything is in its place, so that the state prospers in all domains and sails smoothly in the direction of the ‘promised land’ of communism. The state thus pays an enormous number of ‘employees’ whose task is to defend the formal political order. At the same time, however, the state permits total disorder on the level of routine life, in the day-to-day economy, in state institutions, etc. Šimecka points out that changes in the most public aspects of political order always signal deeper social changes. Thus, before the Soviet intervention, the most obvious changes occurred in Party rituals. The official speeches of Party functionaries became interesting, even contentious – in total contrast to previous monotonous preachings. Change was also obvious in the media, where discussions and polemics emerged. People became anxious to buy newspapers: they formed lines in front of newsstands and sometimes bought up to five different newspapers. But above all, the general image of the Party changed. In place of the classical Communist Party, which needed all kinds of enemies on the Right and Left to muster support, a Party emerged which had the real support of the people. For a Real-socialist regime, such a Party was something unimaginable and dangerous. The ‘restoration of order’ proceeded in several phases. Establishing order at the head of the Party became the top priority. After all the ‘dangerous’ people had been removed from the leadership of the Party, ‘purification’ of the membership got underway. Special committees were formed to check Party members and exclude the ‘dangerous elements’. Essential for their

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successful operation was the mixed membership of these committees: members were drawn from the ‘healthy’ core of the Party, those people who wanted promotions; and members were also drawn from people who were frightened that they themselves would be excluded from the Party. These were the members who had openly supported democratic changes in the past. Their sins were forgiven only because they became the strictest of inquisitors. They made enemies of their own friends and began to work as informers. For these committees, the ‘faults’ of Party members were not as important as their personalities. The Party tried to weed out its most activist, idealist and freeminded members. Character traits most appreciated by the Party were obedience, loyalty, mediocrity and, above all, moral weakness. The most dangerous members were those who were educated, spoke foreign languages, held bravely to their own opinions. A sense of humour, idiosyncratic behaviour and long hair also inspired disfavour. The committees handed down thousands of ‘judgements’, resulting in tens of thousands of members being excluded from the Party. The ‘restoration of order’ also required purges in the media and the regaining of total control over information. TV programmes became once again typical socialist programmes, with monotonous news reports and long discussions on the successes of the socialist economy and the decline of capitalism. In the official media, everything had to have an educational content; it had to show that order prevailed. Even though in Real-socialism, no one really believed the media, by controlling the media the government succeeded in pacifying the people. By showing what was allowed and what not, who were society’s friends and who were its enemies, what was white and what was black, the media produced in the public feelings of submissiveness and fear. Reorganization of the media in Czechoslovakia started when the Party formed a committee for the press and information, through which it imposed total control over the media. The Party defined which problems could be addresssed in magazines, and even gave magazines the main ideas for articles. The journalist’s task was only to find everyday examples to fit the Party’s ideas. During the year 1969–70, dozens of magazines and newspapers and all literary journals in Czechoslovakia were liquidated. As a result, the government did not need to carry out special persecutions of journalists – journalists simply found no place to publish their ‘wrong’ ideas. The journalists who lost their jobs had to become truck drivers, window cleaners, factory workers, etc. Such ‘demotions’ served to warn other intellectuals against voicing their protests against the Party. This was the first time in the history of socialism that a government massively used economic means to discipline the people. Because the state controlled the economy, economic repression became one of the most efficient means of pacifying the people. Exclusion from the Party itself was an efficient means of normalization precisely because it was at the same

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time an attack on an individual’s social status. People who were excluded from the Party automatically lost their jobs. In addition, a lot of people who were not Party members were fired. An unofficial estimate of the number of people who were fired is 100,000. In a totalitarian state where all people were state employees, it was not difficult for the government to take away their jobs.2

INTELLECTUALS: THE MOST DANGEROUS ENEMIES OF SOCIALISM Socialism presents itself as a system in which power is in the hands of the working class and the Party is the representative of the working class. The Party’s task is to lead a class society towards the classless society of communism. In the Party ideology, intellectuals are always perceived as dangerous elements; they are usually accused of being separated from the working class, of being too right wing, of being too Western oriented, etc. In socialism, the only ‘good’ intellectual is a Party intellectual. That is why socialism is obsessed with having the proper Party influence in universities, research institutes, scientific journals, etc. Thus, in the ‘restoration of order’ in Czechoslovakia, intellectuals were subjected to special attention. The government was concerned with identifying so-called ‘counter-revolutionaries’ among intellectuals and, above all, with screening university professors. After the ‘Prague Spring’, the struggle against intellectuals also took the form of ‘civilized violence’, in contrast to the physical violence which had previously been used against dissident intellectuals. The government created a kind of hierarchy in the process of removing ‘dangerous’ intellectuals. The first targets of government repression were journalists; next were intellectuals working in the social sciences and humanities (university professors, literary critics and people working in the theatre); finally were intellectuals working in the natural sciences (technicians and school teachers). The main goal of these purges was to prevent the intellectuals from having any further influence on the public, the younger generation and their own colleagues. Intellectuals were excluded from the public sphere with the help of so-called ‘black lists’, by means of which the Party controlled who was and who was not allowed to publish in certain journals, who was and who was not allowed to teach at the universities, or whose books were to be banned from libraries. A necessary condition for the success of this ‘restoration of order’ was that intellectuals themselves were never completely sure which books were prohibited or with which colleagues it was dangerous to communicate. But everyone did know that being a friend of some intellectuals might cause problems and that the possession of some books could lead to imprisonment. That nothing was publicly banned, while everyone ‘knew’ what was not allowed, imposed

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a most sophisticated kind of terror on intellectuals. They were silenced precisely because they were forced to guess what the desire of the government was. Self-censorship thus became a prerequisite for intellectuals’ survival; they knew that they had to be quiet and do nothing in order not to provoke the government. Greatly aiding the government in this process of pacifying the intellectuals was the willingness of some intellectuals to sell out their colleagues to save themselves. The Party made it clear that everyone had the opportunity to absolve him or herself by informing against others. This availability of such a ‘trade off’ was one of the main tenets of this ‘civilized violence’. Another characteristic was the way in which the police and the Party treated dissidents. Every interrogation was conducted politely; the victims were not terrorized by physical violence, and police officers were always nice, always smiling, etc. When the police used physical violence in response to public demonstrations against the government in the 1950s, people perceived such violence as part of ‘normal’ procedures. At that time the police were seen as a mysterious apparatus whose task was to guard socialist values, and the public seemed to take it for granted that the police would also use force to defend the system. After the ‘Prague Spring’ the public perception of the police changed: the police were perceived as a parasitic organization whose main task was to frighten and control the people. The police treated people as if they were all guilty of something and thereby established the impression that the government had absolute power over its citizens. And it became common knowledge that, as soon as someone was accused of some wrong-doing by the police, he or she would be convicted because the state, the judge, could not be wrong.

THE CULT OF THE CHILD Because socialism was always oriented towards the future and was based on the promise that a hard life in the present would be rewarded by a rich future, it devoted special attention to children. Children were the ones who would live in the classless future. If we compare the status of children in the West and in the socialist societies, it is clear that children in socialism had many more privileges. For example, maternity leave in socialism was very long (from one to three years, in different countries). Under socialism, daycare centres for children were usually well organized, families got financial support for their children and, above all, education was free. The state, of course, wanted to get something back for its generosity. Through its total control over education, the state imposed a curriculum filled with political propaganda; it also forced children to attend all kinds of Party oriented after-school activities. During a process of ‘normalization’, ideological control in the school became even stronger: the books of some

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authors started to disappear from the libraries, history was rewritten, and the names of some politicians were crossed out in textbooks. In addition to serving as the Party’s future, the children of socialism played another role: they became an agency for controlling the behaviour of their parents. It was an unwritten rule that the education of children, especially admission to a desired school, depended on the parents’ relationship with the government. In Real-socialism, everyone knew that a dissident’s children were never accepted by a good school or university. Children were thus used as pawns to convince parents to avoid criticizing the government and to become obedient citizens. The state’s return on its investment in free education was the loyalty of the children’s parents. But why would parents in socialism so desperately try to get a good education for their children when intellectual work was not respected at all, when an ordinary manual worker’s salary was often much higher than the salary of a university professor, and when it was clear that intellectuals suffered more than anyone during political purges? In answer, Šimecka points out that the main reason has not been a struggle for prestige, but rather the parents’ hope that education would provide their children with a kind of defence against the manipulations of the Party because their children would better understand the mysteries of politics that they themselves did not (see Šimecka, 1984: 114).

THE DANGEROUS YOUTH The youth being the embodiment of the future generation of communism presented a traumatic point around which the socialist ideology structured itself, the point through which the socialist ideology tried to affirm its goals. Socialist ideology related to youth in the same way that it related to the proletariat, by presenting it as a unified body while concealing the contingent nature of the notion of the youth as such. In fact, no such thing as youth exists in itself: youth by ‘nature’ is aways mediated by the symbolic network, by the ideology that defines it. But because of this very investment in the future through youth, the youth was also a kind of ‘alien’, an agency that disturbed the socialist symbolic universe. Socialist ideology therefore tried to symbolize youth so that its traumatic character and its contingency became invisible. In this process of symbolization, socialist ideology produced diametrically opposed definitions of youth and of the goals society must have regarding its social role. On another level, one can find a similar variety of approaches to a traumatic element in society through the reactions to the problem of crime. The whole history of crime reveals how, on the one hand, what accounts for crime is totally contingent and, on the other hand, how crime functions as a kind of an unarticulated evil around which society structures itself. Who is perceived as a criminal is thus linked to the way society symbolizes

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crime, the way society produces its meaning. In early Christianity, for example, the human being as such was perceived as a criminal because of original sin; in the medieval era, the church decided who was a criminal (or a witch); in the sixteenth century, with the advent of capitalist production, vagrants became perceived as criminals; and in socialism, opponents of the regime were subjected to criminal persecutions. Returning to the traumatic nature of youth in socialism, let us take the example of how the official ideology perceived youth in the former Yugoslavia. At every stage of the ‘socialist development’, the official ideology reacted to youth in a different way, amounting to five totally different approaches.3 First, after the Second World War, the young generation was perceived as a ‘communist ideal’. The official discourse pictured the ‘ideal of the communist youngster’ as someone who was ‘devoted to the interests of the people and the Party, to socialist patriotism, to internationalism, to discipline and the collective spirit, having the right attitude towards work and public property and the strength and readiness to cross all barriers.’4 The Party did not recognize youth as the heterogeneous social group which it actually always is. Instead, the Party behaved as if there was no youth as such, but only the ‘ideal of youth’, whose achievement was to be the goal of all political actions.5 In the journals dealing with the problem of youth, we can thus read how society has to ‘bring up the image of youth from the National Liberation Stuggle . . . from the youth camps, the shock-worker, who will not justify egoism, nonresponsibility, nondiscipline and improper behaviour.’ 6 The communist youth organization had as its motto the struggle for the ‘cult of work and learning’ because learning was perceived as a ‘political obligation of every student’. The Party at that time promoted cultural and sporting activities among the youth, but it required sports to be on ‘the right line’ so that youth would not ‘go for the sport because of the sport itself’ but because it helped form youths into devoted communists.7 By the end of the 1940s, however, a second reaction to youth emerged; youth had become problematic. The Party perceived youth as that segment of the population which the ‘external enemy’ could infiltrate. At that time youth ceased to exist as an ideal and for the first time became ‘dangerous’. To prevent possible Western deviation among the youth, the Party started agitating for youth to recognize the advantages of the socialist style of life over that of the Western. Thus, the Party ideologues presented youth from the West as deviant, lazy and dangerous. In a desperate effort to convince Yugoslav youngsters of the importance of fighting for communism, the Party also demanded that the communist youth organization start systematic education and political agitation. The task of the communist youth organization thus became directing youth to read appropriate books or watch

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the right movies, all of which depicted the advantages of socialism over capitalism. The third reaction to youth came in the mid-1950s when the ‘evilness’ of youth became located in youth itself, not in some external enemy. The official ideology perceived that the problematic character of youth was related to the moral deviation of some groups within youth itself. Most problematic was the nature of youthful entertainment. The Party learned that some groups of youngsters had started drinking, listening to jazz, watching morally questionable films and reading ‘shunned’ literature. Recognizing that it did not pay enough attention to the morality of the youth, the Party devised a new subject – ‘socialist moral education’ – which was to ‘systematically introduce the right values’ to youngsters in school. Besides teaching youngsters ‘socialist ideals’, moral education was also designed to promote ‘neatness, order, politeness’, as well as such inner values as ‘honesty, sincerity, love’.8 The early 1960s witnessed even more Party concern over youth. Everything related to youth suddenly became problematic: their way of dressing, long hair, music, films, parties, lack of interest in communist politics, etc. Party officials even criticized the communist youth organization for failure to educate youth properly along socialist lines in a way which should have been ‘non-forceful, nonnoticeable, but at the same time systematic’.9 With the advent of the student movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Party developed a fourth response to youth by searching for the ‘internal’ enemy among young intellectuals. The Party thus criticized the students for splitting from the working classes and for not participating in ‘building socialism’.10 While youth had previously been perceived as a homogeneous entity, now this perception changed. The ‘dangerous’ youths were only those students who openly contradicted the Party and demanded changes in the regime. In response, the official discourse started to propagate anti-intellectualism and desperately tried to unite students and workers by encouraging these two populations to engage in sports competitions, working brigades, etc. But at the same time, the Party also tried to prevent the formation of any political alliance between students and workers. The last reaction to youth came in the 1980s when youth in the former Yugoslavia, expecially in Slovenia, started to agitate for a multi-party system. At that time, youth ‘contaminated’ the whole political space; even the communist youth organization was transformed into a strong oppositional force that demanded radical political changes and openly declared its bid for power.11 The reaction of the Party to these demands was quite paradoxical. The Party actually stopped criticizing youth publicly while setting about to muffle any youthful political influence – by secretly discrediting youth organization leaders, by controlling young politicians with the help of the secret police, etc. On the outside, the government behaved as if everything

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was normal, but the traumatic character of the youthful protests was revealed by the government behaving as if there was no youth at all.

WHY DO PEOPLE ACCEPT NORMALIZATION? Returning to the process of normalization which started in the 1970s in Czechoslovakia, the obvious questions that this account raises are why people did not revolt against ‘normalization’, why after the suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’ people did not organize another rebellion, and why, in clear cases of violations of human rights, they did not protest? The fact was that after the ‘Prague Spring’ no strong, organized opposition existed which would be able to overthrow the government. But in Šimecka’s view, it was essential also that the people ‘deep within themselves’ had somehow become accustomed to the socialist regime. The reason for this acceptance of normalization lay in the ‘adaptation factor’, in the people’s ability to accustom themselves to the restrictions on everyday life and to the simplicity of the socialist system. In this system, in contrast to the complicated capitalist system, only one truth and one Party prevailed. Nor was there any need for people to prove themselves at their workplace. Of course, it was true that the Czechoslovak people, after thirty years of communism, had become accustomed to the system, and that they had developed a great many mechanisms to make their lives more bearable. They evaded the obvious absurdities of the system by using little tricks and by not working too hard at the workplace. Many people developed a whole network of ‘connections and friendships’ which enabled them to get around shortages of consumer goods. The years of socialist ‘education’ had taught people which unwritten rules they had to obey and what kind of loyalty the government demanded of them. It was also true that the government left people some ‘freedom’ in their private lives which allowed people to do a little intermediate business, to organize a black market and to avoid hard work. For the government, loyalty to the Party was much more important than economic efficiency. That is why people were allowed to work as little as they wanted and to violate the rules without being punished as long as they were loyal to the system. But the acceptance of normalization cannot be explained only by people being accustomed to the system. The fact is that if the people had been given the choice, they would rather have accustomed themselves to the Western style of life even though it required greater effort at the workplace. (This accommodation actually happened after the fall of socialism, when people very quickly accepted a multi-party system and quickly started to learn the capitalist ‘rules of the game’.) The success of normalization has to be explained by the building of a new symbolic social order by means of the mechanisms of hidden social control described above. What we encounter in this order is the formation of a whole fantasy scenario of counter-revolutionary activities, in which every

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individual recognized him or herself as a potential enemy of the socialist system. But linked to this fear was a special kind of retreat into privacy which people developed in order to escape the overwhelming power of the Party in their public life. Václav Havel (1985) dramatically described the way ‘ordinary’ people related to the socialist regime in his famous story of the greengrocer who privately always criticized the regime but none the less obeyed socialist rituals and, for example, on 1 May, always decorated his small shop with the communist slogans. Havel’s point was that private resistance coupled with public obedience was precisely the way the system functioned. The ideal subject of socialism was the one who did not believe in the system, who maintained a certain distance from it. But criticizing the regime privately and telling dirty stories about the Party amounted to nothing heroic; the truly heroic act was to do some small public thing that disrupted the ritual. Yet another aspect of privacy under socialism is present in the work of Milan Kundera. In The Unbearable Lightness of Being, we can see how a retreat into privacy was linked to the way socialist ideology functioned. But the relation between socialist ideology and the idyll of privacy was actually paradoxical. Thus, on the one hand, people’s attempts to establish an island of privacy outside the official ideological universe was actually helping the socialist ideology to function; as long as people publicly obeyed the rituals, the Party did not care too much about what they did in private. But, on the other hand, this retreat into privacy did enable people to enjoy a kind of happiness in everyday life that is possible only in a totalitarian regime. For example, when Kundera’s leading characters, Tomáš and Teresa, return to Czechoslovakia, they are, in a way, ‘happy’; they find a special kind of enjoyment in their private life that is possible only in relation to some totalitarian power. It is as if the threat of power, the Party’s official denial of the ‘right to privacy’, actually enabled people under socialism to find some special enjoyment in their otherwise hard everyday lives. Linked to this retreat into privacy is the issue of patriarchal domination at work in everyday life. In the public sphere people were deprived of their dignity: in the workplace they usually did not get a lot of satisfaction because of the Party’s hidden presence in the form of colleague-informers, communist rituals one had to obey, the constant praising of communist ideology, etc. Another type of humiliation was experienced when people used social services: the need to bribe doctors, bureaucrats, teachers, etc. made people lose their sense of decency and self-worth. The only place they could recuperate some feeling of dignity and could be appreciated as ‘important’ was at home.12 Private life thus became a place where people were able to find a special kind of satisfaction in traditional patriarchal roles. Both men and women easily accepted their assigned sexual roles. Men regained their feeling of importance by being the boss of the household, in command of the women and children, while women also

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achieved a sense of worth by accepting the role of ‘being a woman’ and by rediscovering ‘femininity’ which they perceived communist ideology had denied them. So the patriarchal structure, which officially ceased to exist with the socialist revolution, was all the time being reinforced within the walls of the home.

NORMALIZATION – THE FORMATION OF NEW IDENTIFICATIONS In the Real-socialist regime, society is depicted as a kind of amorphous mass that is capable of being rationally organized. Likewise, by forming a series of micro-organizations, it is possible to prevent disorganization and social chaos. Society appears as a transparent organization where everything is decided; and a clear vision of its future development drives it on towards a classless communist society, a goal for which it is necessary to sacrifice the present. Claude Lefort (1986) points out how totalitarianism gives rise to an image of the people-as-one, a kind of universal class, which is linked to the image of the power-as-one, the one Party or the one leader embodying the whole people and the whole society. The image of the people-as-one can be established only through the fantasy of an enemy of the people who is working for foreign imperialistic forces or is a leftover from the old regime. When the distinction between the society and the state does not exist, it is necessary that, on the level of fantasy, the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ be affirmed. If no enemy actually exists, one has to be invented, because the identity of the society can emerge only through struggle with the enemy. The exclusion and persecution of an enemy helps to preserve the ideal image of the wholeness of the society on which totalitarianism is based. In the process of normalization, the enemy and the secret police are the essential elements. In this process, we encounter the formation of new points of identification; that is, the formation of a new subjectivity. For this formation to occur, it is necessary that official power operate through two agencies: the official ideological apparatus and the secret police. The official ideology has to paint the image of the enemy of the people as a foreign, external element, as an enemy of the nation and socialism, as someone who works for foreign governments, etc. The complementary task of the secret police is not just to find this enemy and to expose him or her publicly, but to create a situation in which the enemy is ever present but never clearly visible. For normalization to have an effect, public executions and trials are held to intimidate the population. And the fact that workers are fired without any reason creates the illusion that they have been a hidden enemy, mysteriously ever present. Normalization demands that every individual acknowledge what the ‘enemy’s activity’ is. What is essential in this process is the conceptual rearticulation of the terms ‘to

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exclude’ and ‘to fire’ in the discourse of power: exclusions from the Party and firings at the workplace are presented as coincidental events, as part of the reorganization of enterprises, as sudden changes of rules, etc. It is up to the monitors (the colleagues) of excluded persons to recognize their activities as dangerous and thus to recognize the true reasons for the exclusions. With the help of this analysis, we can try to understand why people accepted normalization, even though they did not believe the government or any of the talk about the enemy, and even though they considered the idea of building communism to be an illusion. The success of normalization was linked to the special place the enemy had in the identifications formed by the people through the mediation of the official discourse. The government achieved its desired end of getting the populace to identify with the image of the ‘good citizen, fully devoted to the cause of communism’ precisely by creating a situation in which everyone could recognize him or herself as a potential enemy of society. The fact that nobody believed the official discourse caused feelings of guilt and bad conscience which encouraged identification with the position of the enemy, with the position which had to remain secret and at the same time ever present. And for this effect, it was essential that the enemy suddenly appear in the form of a neighbour, a colleague or even a spouse. It was up to everyone to recognize the enemy and to acknowledge that he or she could be the next to be discovered as the enemy. Two identifications are operative in this process. The first is an ideal identification, an identification with the image of the good citizen, and the second is a fantasmatic identification, an identification with the potential enemy in every individual. The second identification forms the condition for the first. The first, idealized identification required by the official discourse of the government, can function only because every individual is exposed to the pressures of the superego, the fantasmatic agency which ‘sees all and knows all’ and makes the individual feel guilty by recognizing him or herself as a potential enemy. This feeling of guilt has a double meaning. Not only is everyone already guilty in the eyes of the government (everyone is corrupted, everyone cheats, etc.), but in the process of normalization, everyone gets his or her hands ‘dirty’ in one way or another, by denouncing others, by writing selfcriticism, or by simply being silent as others do these things. The point is not only that people say to themselves ‘the government is unjust’ and feel powerless because of its terror. What really causes powerlessness is the feeling of guilt that people themselves are ‘dirty’. What finally breaks individuals is their knowledge that in order to save their own skins, they must agree either to commit some unethical deeds or remain quiet. The power behind the process of normalization lies in the reality that everyone can be caught out by some dirty detail.13

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REPRESSION IN THE SYSTEM OF SELF-MANAGEMENT SOCIALISM The so-called ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ in Serbia in the mid-1980s led by Slobodan Milošavic introduced even more sophisticated forms of repression than those used by the Czechoslovak socialist regime after the Prague Spring.14 The peculiarities of the ideology of self-management helped the Serbian government to legitimate its control over the people by claiming that the people themselves demanded new types of control. The main characteristic of the new ‘anti-bureaucratic’ government was that it did not need to keep up the appearance of neutrality as the Czechoslovak socialist government did. The ideology of the self-management system enabled the regime to openly use Stalinist-type purges to remove opponents of the regime. Although the ‘anti-bureaucratic’ government criticized the Yugoslav self-management socialism, it took advantage of selfmanagement’s definition of repression, which stressed that people need to exert control over themselves. The ‘anti-bureaucrats’ exploited selfmanagement’s emphasis on the people’s self-rule, the need for self-defence of society, the invention of self-managed workers’ control, disciplinary committees in the enterprises, etc. In contrast to Real-socialism, where repression was performed by the government, the self-management system demanded that the people themselves expunge the enemy from their communities. To conceal the split between the people and the repressive apparatus of the state, the ideologues of self-management invented a whole new vocabulary: the system of defence and punishment were ‘socialized’, the police were renamed ‘militia’, in every enterprise special disciplinary committees were formed, etc. Government in the self-management socialism did not need to hide its repression under the mask of ‘hidden’ violence, as was the case with post-Stalinist socialist regimes, because in the self-management system all power was supposed to be in the hands of the workers. Thus, the workers were the ones who had the right and the duty to detect enemies of the people and to remove those ‘counter-revolutionaries’ who were endangering the ‘prosperity of the workers’ power’. With the people presented as the ones who hold all power, the task of the Party bureaucrats was presented as being limited to ‘helping’ the people to ‘recognize their real interests’. Thus, when the bureaucrats would point out the enemy, they were only acting according to the wishes of the people. In short, the only task of the bureaucrats in the self-management system was to say openly what the people already knew. Self-management added to the list of ordinary enemies of socialism those who were working for the bourgeois Right or for foreign governments such enemies, peculiar to the self-management system, included the bureaucrats,

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the politocracy, enemies of the (Yugoslav) federal system, autonomists, irredentists, separatists, etc. Under the self-management system, the internal enemy became much more important than the external one. Even more than exclusion from the Party, exclusion of the enemy from the workplace was seen as the best form of punishment, since the workplace was the sacred place of the self-management system, the point of its legitimation. The difference between the ‘hidden’ violence present in the Realsocialism and the open violence practised in the self-management regime becomes clear if we take the case of two types of purges or ‘differentiations’ which were used by the self-management system: ‘ideological–political differentiation’, which signified exclusion from the Party; and ‘differentiation at the workplace’, which signified exclusion from one’s appointment or job. In the Real-socialist system it was clear that exclusion from the Party also meant exclusion from the workplace or school. But although everyone knew what the consequences of being recognized as the enemy were, the government never openly spoke about them. Exclusion from the workplace was, in Real-socialism, something that the Party did not openly demand: that the enemy lost their work was presented as a pure coincidence and not as a goal of the government’s persecution. In contrast, the self-management regime presented exclusion from the workplace – what is termed ‘differentiation at the workplace’ – as the only appropriate form of punishment. An example of this shift from ‘ideological– political differentiation’ to ‘differentiation at the workplace’ is the treatment of Albanians in the Serbian province of Kosovo. After the first public demonstration by Albanians in 1981, when they started demanding political freedoms and separation from Serbia, the Serbian Party accused the Party in the province of Kosovo of not being politically active enough and of not having enough Yugoslav-oriented people in the Party organization. As a result, the Serbs first removed the ‘dangerous elements’ from the Kosovo political scene, but then later claimed that ‘ideological–political differentiation’ alone had not produced the desired results; thus it was necessary to use ‘differentiation at the workplace’.15 When the ‘anti-bureaucrats’ came to power in Serbia, they supplemented the traditional socialist vocabulary of the struggle against the enemies of socialism with new terms: normalization, differentiation, isolation. The Serbs started persecuting Albanians through the political isolation of potential opponents of the regime, exclusions of Albanians from their workplaces, extortions which forced Albanians to sell their homes, etc. Usually the Serbian government did not even try to find legal excuses for such removals and isolations of Albanians. But even in the rare cases when the Serbs invoked legal sanctions against Albanians, the Serbs reformulated the laws in such a way that Albanians and Serbs were treated differently. The Serbs invented special laws for dealing with crimes on a nationalist basis. When, for example, an Albanian was accused of attempting to rape a Serbian girl,

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he was prosecuted according to a special law dealing with rape on a nationalist basis under which it was possible to impose sentences of up to ten years’ imprisonment. For a similar offence, a Serb was not punished at all or could be sentenced to probation. The ideology of the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ worked on two incompatible levels of discourse: the first discourse stressed the need for human rights, freedom of association, the right to strike, democratic elections, etc.; the second discourse demanded purges, cruel repression of dissidents, etc. This second discourse was not secret or hidden, but was publicly declared. The government did not try to show the link between the two discourses so that the first discourse would present the aim and the second discourse the means to reach this aim; the government did not say that persecuting ‘dangerous’ Albanians was necessary in order to establish a democratic regime. On the contrary, the discourses functioned as complementary, as one. The points at which they overlapped were precisely those points covered by the self-management’s ‘newspeak’: differentiation, isolation, normalization, etc. These notions reformulated repression to give it a ‘democratic’ interpretation. Let us examine more closely the notion of differentiation. Differentiation had two meanings: on the level of denotation it meant self-management’s ritual of purification and the institution of the ‘proper’ Party line; and on the level of connotation it meant open repression, purges, the suspension of any dialogue or legal due process. It was simply punishment for those who did not agree with the government. Paradoxically, although the government did not hide the terror which was caused by ‘differentiation’, these open purges were presented as a democratic rather than a repressive method. The same paradox emerged with the notion of isolation. In the Party discourse isolation was presented as a democratic political decision to limit the movement (or action) of some people, although this measure required the most drastic violation of human rights. In a similar way, the notion of normalization on the level of denotation meant reconciliation of strained relations, but its connotation was linked to the repressive measures by which such normalization could be attained. Significantly, it was precisely the ideology of self-management which enabled these two incompatible discourses to function as a single discourse. In Real-socialism this was not the case because there were always two separate discourses: the official one, which spoke in favour of democracy, human rights, etc., and the secret one, which was linked to repression. This second one was never openly admitted and the government tried by all means to avoid making it public. This shift in the logic of the functioning of the discourse of ‘normalization’ becomes clearer if we take into account the fact that notions like democracy, human rights, the state run according to the rule of law, etc., are floating signifiers which we cannot say have some immanent

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meaning. Their meaning is always dependent on the symbolic network in which they are embedded. As Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) say, their articulation and inclusion in a particular political discourse is the product of a struggle. It is thus unproductive to argue against Serbian nationalist politics by showing how its discourse is self-contradictory when it claims that repression in Kosovo or war in Bosnia is a struggle for human rights. The fact is that in the Serbian symbolic structure, the fight against Albanians or the extinction of Muslims can be presented as a struggle for democracy because self-management ideology has established a framework within which repression and aggression can attain the meaning of a struggle for democracy. Thus, with the help of the self-management jargon, the anti-bureaucratic revolution is able to justify all kinds of ‘differentiations’ as great contributions to democracy.

THE FAILURE OF SOCIALIST EDUCATION Let us recapitulate the issues in this chapter. The enigma around the process of normalization in the socialist countries is captured by the question: why did people identify with the socialist political discourse? Especially illuminating here is the example of the socialist educational discourse, since school is the most important ‘ideological state apparatus’. Educational and political discourses are always linked; they are part of a certain ideological universe in which educational discourse prepares the grounds on which people later learn to identify with the dominant political discourse. In socialism, this link between political and educational discourse was even more obvious than it is in democratic societies because socialist regimes tended to ‘pedagogize’ politics. What did such ‘pedagogy’ mean? One of the main features of Party discourse was its continual effort to educate the masses. Party leaders therefore always insisted on the need to teach the masses about the advantages of socialism over capitalism, about enemy activity, about the goals of communism, etc. For communist ideology to function, it was therefore necessary to control what was taught in school. But this attempt to seduce students and to make them devoted communists failed: students were taught to acclaim Communist ideas, but privately they did not believe in them. Although students performed communist rituals (praising the leader, engaging in communist types of parades, wearing Komsomol insignia, etc.) they retained a cynical distance towards such rituals. This cynical distance actually enabled the system to function: the Party did not believe in such rituals either, but as long as people performed them publicly, the system functioned regardless of how critical people were in private. To explain this ambiguous failure of the socialist ideology, I will take the notion of ‘a state that is essentially a by-product’, developed by Jon Elster in Sour Grapes (1983). A state that is essentially a by-product is a state that

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we miss when we make it the direct goal of our activity; we can reach such a state only as a non-intentional by-product of striving for some other goal. Typical examples of such states are love, respect, reputation, feelings, generosity, modesty, irony, etc. When we intentionally try to be generous, we inevitably make ourselves ridiculous. The real effect can be attained only if we pursue some external goal (to help somebody, for example). The following demands also have a different effect from the desired one: ‘Be spontaneous!’; ‘Don’t be so obedient!’; ‘Be independent.’ Spontaneity, independence, and so on are typical examples of states that cannot be consequences of demands or instructions, but can only be unintended byproducts of certain actions. It is similar when we wish to impress somebody or when we want to adopt a certain pose. Bourdieu’s example, quoted by Elster, is the lower middle-class imitation of the upper-class way of life. Intentional imitation of bourgeois nonchalance always turns into exaggeration, the effect of which is just the opposite of nonchalance – that is the behaviour of a parvenu. In the words of Elster, ‘There is nothing so unimpressive as the behaviour which tries to impress’ (Elster, 1983: 65). The lower middle class fails in its attempt to imitate upper-class habits because it shows too much out of fear of not showing enough. In order for us to apply Elster’s ‘by-product’ theory to the problems of socialist education, we have to draw a distinction between two uses of the word ‘education’. ‘Education I’ designates education conceived of as personality forming, a moral training; while ‘education II’ is education conceived of as instruction, the acquiring of positive knowledge, training and skills. The aims of all education constitute a certain ideological programme, a binding element of the entire school system. These aims are supposed to connect the dominant social interest or purposes of the ruling ideology with the socially desired forms of personality. The aims of education should, therefore, include a particular programme depending on the type of personality to be formed by the school, the kind of moral character that should be acquired by the child through the educational process. These aims are, of course, ideologically variable, so that certain theories of pedagogy swear by an education emerging exclusively from a ‘free development’ of the child’s nature (Rousseau), while other theories – socialist pedagogy, for example – present a complete programme for an ‘all-round developed socialist personality’, calculating precisely the results of such an education.16 Following Elster’s logic, we can say of every school education that education I (education as personality forming) is ‘essentially a by-product’ which cannot be reduced to a consciously planned goal. The difficulty in determining the aims of education is caused by confounding the two meanings of education (I and II) – the purpose of education should be to produce desired results in the formation of personality by means of certain instruction techniques. But it is absurd to speak about education I as the

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goal of education; the goal of education can be only education II (instruction). The aims of education II, which are directly realized through the choice of the subject taught, the manner of teaching, repetition, testing and other disciplinary techniques bound to the educational process, deliver education I only as their by-product.17 If, therefore, education I as an explicit aim is not possible, we have to ask why socialist pedagogy insisted on it and directly bound education to the realization of communist goals focused on character development? Socialist pedagogy sought the reasons for the resistance or indifference of youths to such goals in faulty education. According to Elster, communist goals are never realized; their pursuit is self-destructive. Consequently, it is not possible to realize the new type of man announced by the educational aims of socialist pedagogical ideology. But is Elster’s analysis of the communist ideology and its selfdestructiveness sufficient? What if the self-destructive character of the ideological goals is taken into account in advance? What if the fact that simply setting communist goals brings about effects completely different from those demanded is already part of the game? What if communist power actually anticipates and wants these unsought-after results? Elster’s mistake is that he does not see that in ideology the aim is always realized in one way or another. There is no failure in ideology; an apparent failure will be successful in the end. Let us consider the ideal communist personality. The authorities did not believe in forming some special socialist personality, a man of a special mould. Yet the effects produced by setting such an impossible goal – broken individuals, conformists devoted to socialist rituals – suited the authorities. The same holds true for the device of demanding respect for politics. This demand produces irony, distance, mistrust, resignation. But all these results are very useful to the authorities; irony and distance facilitate the preservation of absolute power by preventing a real revolt. We can, by all means, agree with Elster’s theory that certain states, which are essentially by-products, disappear if we try to make them the direct goals of action. Consequently, it makes no sense to set educational goals and to plan the formation of personality. Yet Elster’s theory needs to be reversed if we want to understand the functioning of socialist ideology; the impossibility of realizing set ideological goals is actually a part of the functioning of the ideology itself. Proclaiming the goals impossible opens the field of ideological activity; a cynical distance from communist goals, which results from ideological indoctrination, marks precisely the success of that same ideology. The cause of Elster’s inadequate explanation is his failure to take into account the dimension of the big Other, a symbolic structure in which the subject is always embedded.18 Let us take the example of an ideological ritual proper to socialism (for example, worship of the leader – Lenin,

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Stalin or Tito). Why is this ritual so necessary when it is self-destructive from the standpoint of its own efficiency; i.e. when it does not convince anybody, since everybody maintains a cynical distance towards the ruling ideology? The answer is, of course, the Other. Even though everybody knows that ‘the emperor is naked’, even though nobody takes the ideological slogans seriously, it is necessary to maintain appearances at any price. The fact that the emperor is naked has to be concealed from the Other. Cynical distance and irony can therefore consistently coexist with the naive belief in the Other, for whose benefit it is necessary to maintain the appearance that the nation is united in enthusiastically building socialism. After all, the Other is at work at the very heart of those ‘states that are essentially by-products’. For example, it is impossible to fall in love according to plan. Love has to come ‘by itself’, we cannot intentionally choose it. But what does this mean if not that the big Other has to choose instead of us? The Lacanian big Other is exactly that agency which decides things for which any plan of action would be self-destructive. It decides that we fall in love, it decides that someone arouses our respect. In short, ‘states that are essentially by-products’ are simply states that are essentially produced by the Other. This is why we should not be surprised to find Elster linking ‘states that are essentially by-products’ to what Hegel called the ‘cunning of reason’ (see Hegel, 1985); when we intend to achieve some definite aim and our intention fails, this very failure brings about another, unintended result which reveals itself to be the true aim of our activity. Let us refer to Hegel’s favoured example: the murder of Julius Caesar. The conspirators intended to reinstate the Republic, but the final result of their act was exactly the opposite. Involuntarily, they contributed, to the institution of the Empire. They were thus unconscious tools, instruments of historical Reason. That their conspiracy aided the rise of the Empire was ‘essentially a by-product’ of their activity; i.e. they obviously did not intend this outcome. The one, however, who did intend it, and who used them as involuntary tools, was historical Reason, the Hegelian version of the Other, the symbolic order regulating our fate behind our backs. In other words, what was an unintentional ‘by-product’ of the conspirators’ activity was ‘essentially produced’ by the Other who effectively pulls the strings of the puppets on the stage called ‘History’.

Chapter 4

The struggle for hegemony in the former Yugoslavia

The Yugoslavia constructed by Tito after the Second World War was a specifically coherent creation in so far as the ideology of self-management, fraternity and unity, along with the non-alignment symbolized by President Tito himself, acted as the ‘cement’ of the social fabric. In this ideology, self-management was held to be the highest level of democracy, far ahead of workers’ participation in capitalism; non-alignment was seen as the best chance of overcoming the division of the world into blocs; and Tito was the cohesive authority which guaranteed the equality of all the nations of Yugoslavia and the prospects for society’s prosperity (high living standards, openness to the world, etc.). With Tito’s death, however, came disillusionment. People soon learned that the miracle of the Yugoslav economy had been based on high foreign debts incurred by the state in order to cover the investment failures of industry. Economic collapse was paralleled by significant conflict between Yugoslav nations, at first between Serbs and Albanians in the Serbian Autonomous Province of Kosovo, then among other nations, which finally brought the country to all-out war. The paradox of Yugoslavia is that, although its entire recent political reputation has been based on the break with Stalin in 1948 and the later introduction of self-management in contrast to the socialist systems of Eastern Europe, these same states have overtaken Yugoslavia in the struggle for democracy. Yugoslavia’s pause in the demolition of socialism has two causes: the first is the logic of the working of self-management ideology itself and the second is nationalism.

DISINTEGRATION OF THE IDEOLOGY OF SELFMANAGEMENT Yugoslav economic and political chaos confirms Althusser’s (1971) thesis that ideology is materialized in the entire organization of society. So we can say, for example, that the self-management thesis about ‘the disposal of surplus value to direct producers’ is utopian; but this utopia is none the less materialized in the organization of socialist firms, just as the utopia

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of ‘self-management direct democracy’ is materialized in a complex delegate system, and the idea of ‘public self-defence’ in an intricate web of secret regulations and agencies which already penetrate every cell of society. When the ideology of self-management was presented as a complete contrast to the Soviet-type socialist ideology, it simultaneously seized its basic element (the Party as the guarantor of the system, the struggle for actual rather than formal freedom, dealing with enemies of the system, etc.) and created the possibility of a considerably more effective way to silence the critics of the system than that postulated by Real-socialism. The self-management system was immanently revolutionary and self-critical. Thus self-management constantly changed the system, ‘revolutionizing’ it with ever new legal norms, constantly changing the constitution, continually making good deficiencies in the system which hindered direct management by the workers, and so on. But throughout all this activity, the sources of power (the Party, state organizations, the secret police) wound up maintaining the same roles as they would in a classic socialist system. Precisely because of this ‘revolutionary’ nature, the ideology of selfmanagement was also able to neutralize critics of the system by stressing how the ideologists of self-management were themselves combating these problems. So, for example, the ideology of self-management could counter the demand for ‘anti-bureaucratization’ by saying that it too was trying to get rid of the alienated bureaucratic structure and was fighting for direct workers’ rule. The only really dangerous critics of the self-management system were those who openly attacked the idea of self-management itself, and they were singled out as the worst enemy within. The economic crises in the 1980s provoked workers’ revolts, but the workers’ demands were deeply conservative. They demanded more pay and better working conditions, but seldom political pluralism or independent unions. Strikes and meetings were characterized by the lack of any positive programme of political change. People demanded changes not in the system itself, but only in the leadership which sought to betray the ideological foundations of the system (socialism, working-class interests, etc.). With the typical old Stalinist understanding that ‘the cadres decide all’ Yugoslav workers also wanted ‘the right people in the right places’. This perspective can be explained with the aid of the Croatian sociologist, Josip Županov (1986), who argues that the basis of the Yugoslav system was the pact between the governing politocracy and the narrower, manually skilled section of the working class. This working class was the real pillar of the establishment. The political bureaucracy was given total authority in exchange for the minimum necessary for existence, with social security and the ‘right not to work’; i.e. a low standard of living, a secure position and the right not to work terribly hard. The economic crisis meant that the ruling political bureaucracy was no longer able to meet its dues under this pact, and therefore workers’ protests can be seen as a desperate appeal to

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the politocracy to keep its part of the deal. The paradoxical features of the workers’ protest – the total absence of demands for democracy and independent unions – are probably best explained from this perspective. Workers called directly upon their rightful partner, embodied for them in the Party, to provide ‘a life worthy of man’. In other words, they were looking for a ‘Master’ who they could empower in return for being looked after. One of the elements in the rise of Serbian nationalism under Miloševic has been his capacity to build on this fact and his ability to recognize himself as the addressee of the workers’ demands. He has promised that, to the extent that he is given power, he will fulfil his part of the social pact, in contrast to the corrupt status-quo bureaucracies of the republics. The ideology of self-management in Yugoslavia disintegrated in three stages. The first stage took place in the 1960s and 1970s when theoreticians centred around the journal Praxis attacked official ideology in the name of ‘proper’ (critical, creative) Marxism. According to the Praxis philosophers, the predominant ‘etatistic bureaucratic’ conditions in Yugoslav society prevented the emergence of the ‘proper self-management socialism’. They called for a programme to abolish the gulf between the ideal and the real and to put into effect the concept of self-management. In other words, the opposition criticized the establishment in the name of a purified version of the establishment’s own ideology. The second phase in the disintegration of self-management ideology began at the start of the 1980s in the form of ‘new social movements’. This period was characterized by a process of equal disintegration of both official and oppositional ideology. The disarticulation of official discourse showed that the establishment was no longer given legitimacy by any homogeneous ideological construction but had come to rely on a whole series of heterogeneous, disassociated elements in its ideological discourse. For example, self-management and social ownership attempted to make contact with market economics; and to the demand for independent journalism, the establishment answered in a true socialist style that ‘the freedom of the press does not exist anywhere’. A similar disarticulation occurred in the opposition. A pluralistic group of opposition movements (e.g. the feminist movement,1 the peace movement, ecology etc.) was created which questioned the basic socialist system itself and above all the role of the state in it, all in the name of the struggle for a civil society. Characterized by ideological heterogeneity and apoliticism, this opposition was not organized into parties but took the form of a series of informal movements which exerted pressure on the establishment through public protest. If we take the example of the feminist movement, in the mid-1980s, numerous small groups were dealing with issues such as violence against women, women and politics, lesbian rights, feminist theory, women’s selfhelp, etc. But the general problem for feminists was that there was very little co-operation between these groups which anyway received scant public

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support. The media paid almost no attention to feminist issues and neither the so-called general public nor women workers identified with these issues either. This lack of public recognition of the importance of feminism was closely related to the fact that socialist society remained highly patriarchal, despite the claim that full equality of the sexes had been achieved. When socialist ideology insisted that there was no special ‘women question’ it helped to maintain patriarchal domination without having the need to apologize for it. Party ideology could easily neutralize feminist criticism about the status of women by saying that the Party, too, was concerned with the full realization of equality between the sexes. The third and final phase in the disintegration of self-management ideology began at the end of the 1980s when opposition groups created formal political parties and declared the power struggle openly. This meant that the establishment, at least in its public statements, also had to abandon its sacred position and acknowledge the Communist Party as just one of many political subjects, one that could lose power at any time. Official ideological discourse in this period began to abandon self-management and Marxism in favour of socialism with a capitalist face. Because of ever stronger opposition, official discourse was forced to fold elements of the opposition’s discourse into itself. Thus it began to stress the struggle for human rights, freedom of thought, a state run according to the rule of law and the market economy. Its strength was that in spite of the changing discourse, the establishment could go on working in the same way as always because the state apparatus, the army and the secret police maintained their old positions. It is possible to pinpoint the exact time when the disintegration of the ideology of self-management began. The main ideologue of self-management, Edvard Kardelj (1978), put forward a thesis in the 1970s concerning the importance of the ‘plurality of self-management interests’ as a crucial element of a self-management society. Something which, at first glance, seemed to be just another empty phrase from the self-management vocabulary (which constantly stressed that the worker is the only owner of the means of production, the only one who can decide about production and surplus, and that real self-management resolves all alienation and so on) suddenly turned out to generate a multitude of interpretations and thus to mark a site of radical contingency. In other words, the ‘pluralism of self-management interests’ could be interpreted as undermining the Party monolith – because Party ideology had never before used the concept of pluralism of opinions, ideas or interests, but had clung to unity at any price. As soon as we start talking about a pluralism of interests, we contradict unity. Thus in reality, a pluralism of interests equals political pluralism. So an apparently surplus syntagm became the point at which the system began to fracture. This is the point where elements, which had until then formed the ideological structure, now achieved independence and began to function as ‘floating signifiers’ awaiting new articulation. Thus the struggle for

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hegemony began; i.e. a struggle for what this concept would include in its series of equivalences (see Laclau and Mouffe (1985)). Official Party ideology tried in vain to retain the ‘pluralism of self-management interests’ within its confines; yet even though Kardelj himself later abandoned the term, already this ‘pluralism’ had a life of its own, becoming a trademark of the alternative, opposition movement. Along with the crumbling of the ideological structure began the struggle with which discourse would ‘resew’ the free-floating disparate elements. Although the federal authorities and the army (JNA) desperately tried to preserve Tito’s Yugoslavia, the rhetoric of ‘fraternity and unity’ and the slogans of both the revolution and the national liberation war no longer served as the points of identification which had held the Yugoslav symbolic universe together for forty years. At the end of the 1980s, a new series of primarily national points of identification emerged which totally redefined the terms of the struggle for ideological hegemony. As a result, we can isolate three blocs around which various concepts of the form of a future Yugoslav society crystallized at the end of this decade. The most disreputable of these was the right-wing populist Serbian bloc with its concept of a unitary state, a strong Party and a centralized government under Serbian domination. This bloc included, in addition to the Republic of Serbia with its autonomous province of Vojvodina, Serbian inhabitants in the province of Kosovo, Montenegro, members of the Orthodox church, part of the federal administration and senior staff of the army and Serbian inhabitants in other parts of Yugoslavia, along with Serbian expatriates abroad. Since the Serbian population was numerically the strongest and Belgrade was simultaneously the capital of the Republic of Serbia and of Yugoslavia, this bloc had considerable influence in federal agencies. It is also important to bear in mind that a large proportion of employees of the federal administration and the military leadership were of Serbian nationality. This bloc was characterized by economic underdevelopment, high unemployment and an ongoing dispute between Serbs and Albanians in Kosovo. Opposed to this was the Slovene bloc, which was working towards greater independence of the republics and a pluralist, multi-party organization of society. Along with both leadership and opposition in the Republic of Slovenia, this bloc included part of the opposition and a smaller part of the leadership of Croatia, as well as certain opposition groups in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in the province of Kosovo. Characteristic of this bloc were relative economic success, low levels of unemployment and, in Slovenia, political liberalism. However, this bloc’s weakness stemmed from its small influence on the activities of federal agencies and the army. In any case, the strongest and the most ‘official’ was the ‘status quo’ bloc, consisting of the army, parts of the federal administration, the secret

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service, the military industry and the bulk of the leadership of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Macedonia. This bloc had maintained its position by repression and wanted to withstand the crisis through cosmetic adjustments, according to the strategy of ‘changing things so that nothing changes’. In its desire to maintain its position, this bloc stood against both other blocs. In principle, it favoured market economics, although its economy was hopelessly ineffective – as evidenced by the ossified organization of the army, unwise industrial projects in the republics and widespread corruption.

THE OUTBURST OF NATIONAL CONFLICTS The national threat became the strongest point of identification on which the opposition as well as the establishment relied. So, on the one hand, local establishment figures strengthened their positions by stressing how they defended their nation from other nations while, on the other hand, part of the opposition also presented national sovereignty as the main aim of the political struggle. Two views of nationalism have predominated in official Yugoslav politics since the outbreak of the national conflict. The first tried to distinguish ‘progressive’ nationalism (non-aggressive, defensive, civil) from ‘regressive’ nationalism (aggressive, promoting hatred, directed at the reestablishment of homogeneous national communities). The second view stressed that national frictions were simply the means by which the governing politicobureaucracy maintained division among the nations and so prevented people from uniting against the real enemy, themselves. Every nation is offered a myth of how others exploit it in order to disguise how the people themselves exploit others. Such a myth was only an updated variation of the good old Stalinist myth that honest, innocent working people are never anti-socialist. Thus, in Yugoslavia we have an innocent, honest, democratic public which is never nationalist – it has only been manipulated into nationalist attacks by a corrupt politicobureaucracy. Just as the ‘honest working people’ actually exist only as a mythical reference point for the Party (thereby legitimizing its power), so too the myth of an innocent, non-nationalist public only exists to legitimize the power of the establishment. So, paradoxically, the first step towards real democratic maturity must be the unconditional recognition of the ‘depravity’ of the people. For example, it is not true that the Albanian people are basically honest and that irredentism is only an idea with which they are poisoned by manipulators. Even if the idea is manipulated, it is not hard to see the transparent delight with which the masses surrender to the manipulation. Nor is it hard to see how they arrange their most intimate identity through an accumulation of the ‘myth of nationalism’. Likewise it is not true that the Serbian people are basically honest and that Greater Serbian nationalism is only an idea by which

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manipulators poison the people. Greater Serbian nationalism, constructed through the myth of a deprived Serbia, is the ideological means by which individuals experience their innermost, everyday, concrete burdens, and it is their way of finding a scapegoat, i.e. the Croats. What must be acknowledged here is that the people cannot be deceived unless they want to be deceived, unless they articulate their desire in this deception. Why people suddenly started identifying with old national myths cannot be explained by saying that these myths are just constructs imposed by the government. People adopt old myths because in those myths a fantasy is articulated that touches upon some utopian desire of the people. In the case of Serbia, this desire is to form a strong state which will not be like the present one that always ‘wins in the war, but loses in the peace’. In the 1980s nationalism has played a crucial role in the struggle for a new hegemony in Serbia. This struggle began when a group of Serbian politicians around Slobodan Miloševic first took up the problem of Serbs emigrating from the autonomous province of Kosovo. This group later openly demanded the formation of a Greater Serbia by way of an annexation of territories that were parts of other republics. This populist movement in Serbia successfully united two apparently disassociated elements: neo-Stalinist party politics and the concept of civil society, albeit in a nationalist guise. What happened first was that certain neo-Stalinist goals were achieved by putting the Party above the state. Surprisingly this move garnered popular support. As I have pointed out in Chapter 2, Miloševic’s success here turned on combining a host of heterogeneous elements into a populist nationalist project. This ragbag contained the following extraordinary mixture of elements:

• traditional Stalinism, with its appeals to both unity and ‘differentiation’

• • •

•

through purges and reactivation of the ideology of Tito-the Party-the army-fraternity-unity, along with more or less self-declared sentiments of anti-self-management; proto-fascist right-wing populism, with its state-of-emergency hysteria and its ‘street pressure’ brought to bear through mass rallies directed at particular enemies, produced on a national level; etatism, with its emphasis on a strong, unified state that rigorously upholds the law; the mythologization of nationalism, with its more or less directly expressed thesis of Serbia as the pillar of Yugoslavness, of Serbs as the only ‘real’ Yugoslavs, via resuscitation of old Serbian myths aimed at countering the thesis of a ‘weak Serbia as a condition of a strong Yugoslavia’; bourgeois liberalism, with its emphasis on economic liberalism and the human rights of Serbs in Kosovo, in addition to Miloševic’s timid flirtation with bourgeois democracy; and finally,

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• patriarchal metaphoric, producing the image of the bureaucrats and members of other nations (Albanians, for example) as impotent effeminates in contrast to the macho Serbian workers. The only things that could hold all these disparate elements together were the figure of a strong leader, a need for decisiveness (‘now is the time for history, not for discussion’) and a clear image of the Enemy.2 Significantly, this heterogeneity has been Miloševic’s strength not his weakness. His success fully managed to re-establish an effective series of equivalences, to use the terminology of Laclau and Mouffe. Specifically, he homogenized Stalinist rhetoric of the iron fist, archaic nationalism and a civil rhetoric of human rights, etc., into a unified discourse set against the status quo of the federal bureaucracy. Miloševic’s populism has also been based on his interpellating3 individual segments of society (workers, the intelligentsia, technocrats, the Party bureaucracy, etc.) so as to neutralize their potential antagonism. As Ernesto Laclau has noted: the basic method of this neutralisation lies in a transformation of all antagonism into simple difference. The articulation of populardemocratic ideologies within the dominant discourse consists in an absorbtion of everything in it which is a simple differential particularity and a repression of those elements which tend to transform the particularity into a symbol of antagonism. (Laclau, 1977: 173) The Serbian populist movement confirms the thesis that no element belongs naturally to a fixed ideology. Accordingly, we cannot say, for example, that the fanatic devotion of the masses to a leader is a part of fascist ideology by nature, or that the totalitarian project of a strong Party above the state is Stalinist per se. Indeed, Miloševic has shown that elements which might have been considered part of a defined ideology can be rearticulated into a totally new meaning. Another characteristic of Miloševic’s populism is that it is impossible to say which element is pre-eminent. Essentialists have constantly harped on this problem, maintaining that communist ideology has served Serbian nationalism as a means of finding its own expression; others have advocated an opposing thesis according to which the Stalinistcommunist project has served nationalism in order to survive. Both lines of reasoning are fundamentally mistaken: they fail to take into account that the position of the various elements is only created by articulation. How has the struggle for a new hegemony progressed? Crucial to this struggle has been the resurrection of old myths, folksongs and stories which portray the historical struggle of the Serbian and Montenegrin nations against the Turks. Symbolic identification with the popular heroes of Serbian

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mythology has given the new leadership a special status. Not only have they been given an aura of sanctity as folk heroes, but this new, sanctified status has also enabled the leadership to repair the historical damage incurred by the loss of the battle of Kosovo of 1389 when the Serbs were defeated by the Turks.4 Through the rearticulation of old myths through official political discourse, Miloševic constructed new myths, which were easy to identify with insofar as they replaced the socialist jargon of the bureaucracy. Self-management had introduced a specific jargon that transformed businesses into ‘organizations of associated labour’, workers into ‘direct producers’, and directors into ‘individual business organs’. With the aid of a kind of ‘demystification’ of the language, self-management could be portrayed as a direct form of democracy. The success of the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ lay in the recognition that this rhetoric of self-management represented a total obfuscation of effective social relations. And this ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ was also successful because it returned to the old national myths so long ignored by the supra-national socialist ideology. The old epics and heroic songs are models of effective rhetoric, with their short clear sentences and visionary stresses; they contrast dramatically with boring political speeches. As a struggle for hegemony, the struggle for a new rhetoric of the ‘antibureaucratic revolution’ was characterized by the need to structure the discourse around a newly created reference point. For the Titoist ideology, the main reference point was the National Liberation Struggle (NOB), which was simultaneously presented as both a victory against the occupier and the victory of the socialist revolution. The sort of ‘founding word’5 of this discourse was Tito’s slogan: ‘it is necessary to maintain fraternity and unity like the pupils of the eyes’. In the case of the anti-bureaucratic revolution, the point to which the discourse continually referred was the moment when, in the Montenegrin town of Žuta greda, police truncheoned striking miners. Miloševic’s phrase ‘Nobody has the right to beat the people!’ gained the status of the ‘founding word’. Not only did this motto become a reference point for all other attempts to stop the protest marches of members of the Serbian and Montenegrin nations, it became above all the point which restored meaning to the heterogeneous elements of the anti-bureaucratic discourse in its articulation phase. ‘Nobody has the right to beat the people’ literally means the empty phrase ‘the people are the only authority’, but its actual significance is that it gives complete legitimacy to all the forms manifest in the ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’. As in all communist projects, the people again become the imaginary bearers of the revolution in whose name the Party abrogates power.6 Only this time, the struggle is between one communist power and another, or, as an anti-bureaucrat would say, ‘real worker’s power against alienated power’. Miloševic’s populism has been a hotchpotch of heterogeneous elements. When, at a given moment, these elements began to attain independence,

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this hotchpotch started to disarticulate itself. At first it looked as if Miloševic himself would trigger this process. Once other political parties in Serbia began to utter openly the nationalist fantasy which Miloševic measured only by mood, the result was a new, more radical nationalist ideology. Real political pluralism became the worst enemy of the anti-bureaucratic revolution. The anti-bureaucratic revolution is in exactly the same relation to ‘normal’ self-management socialism as fascism is to ‘normal’ capitalism. We can appreciate this parallel by considering good old Marxist dogma and by asking ourselves: what is fascism? Fascism is the attempt – by means of a radical revolutionary discourse and with the support of a violent mass movement – to restore national unity and thus to preserve the existing relations of (capitalist) production. The key to such fascism is the introduction of a permanent state of emergency, legitimized by the need to fight some external enemy – the Jew, the communist. Of course, all the anti-capitalist thunderings against the ‘Jewish plutocrat’ do not deceive anybody: fascism fights only against the ‘excesses’ of capitalism; its real enemy is the communist. Here is where the anti-bureaucratic revolution is precisely homologous with fascism. No ‘anti-bureaucratic’ rhetoric can deceive us, since the real enemies are not the bureaucrats (i.e. the former politocrats – because those who have shown a timely submission to the new masters survived without difficulty); the real enemies are the forces of democratic pluralism. In order to take away their popular appeal, these forces must be portrayed as the national enemy (Albanians, Slovenes and those Croats reputed to be genocidal), just as in fascism the enemy was deceitfully presented in the form of the Jew. It is a desperate attempt to maintain the existing balance of social power by mobilizing an atmosphere of national menace, a threat to the nation. This is an old fascist trick; Hitler, too, came to power through deft manipulation of German national humiliation after the First World War! In fact Miloševic’s favorite metaphor, in which Serbia and Montenegro are ‘two eyes in the same head’, derives from Hitler’s speech on the ‘Anschluss’ of Austria in 1938. Miloševic also successfully included in his discourse the demands made by the opposition for parliamentary democracy and a multi-party pluralistic political system. Radically nationalist as well as liberal democratic parties opposed communism and Miloševic’s populism. They hoped that it would be precisely their anti-communist stance that would bring them electoral victory. But again it was nationalism that won the day for Miloševic. Liberals who failed to incorporate nationalism into their discourse were the biggest losers in the first ‘free’ elections in 1990. However, the radical nationalists who openly stated their nationalist-racist fears also lost because Miloševic spawned the fear that the victory of the opposition would plunge the country into economic and political chaos. Thus Miloševic succeeded in promoting himself as the only guarantor of the unity and prosperity of the

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Serbian nation. He succeeded in creating what looked like a multi-party system, but this system actually operated under the absolute control of the Socialist party. At the same time he articulated the growing discontent of the working classes by forging a new enemy – the Croats. In March 1991, when students revolted against Miloševic and demanded democratic changes (above all freedom of the press) it seemed as though Miloševic’s regime was finished. This seemed to be the case because he used force to crush the demonstration and, therefore, contradicted his official slogan – ‘Nobody has the right to beat the people!’ By sending in tanks he only catalysed a greater revolt of the opposition. But once again Miloševic stayed in power by shifting attention away from the internal antagonisms of Serbia to the threat of an external enemy – the Croats. The Serbian ideological machine started to present the new, democratically elected Croatian government as a mortal threat to Serbs living in Croatia, as a neo-fascist regime planning the ‘genocide’ of the Serbs. Resurrected once again was the familiar method of creating national tensions (a method already used by the Serbs in their conflict with the Albanians). This time what was emphasized were the old traumas of the Serbo-Croat quarrel (which concern the collaboration of the Croatian government with fascism during the Second World War and the subsequent slaying of the Serbian population). Miloševic demanded that, in the case of the secession of Croatia from Yugoslavia, the ‘Serbian’ parts of Croatia should stay attached to Serbia. At the same time Serbian politicians also provoked conflicts in ethnically mixed Bosnia and Herzegovina, again demanding the attachment of territories populated by Serbians. In the last instance the only way Miloševic’s regime could survive was to begin an imperialistic war. It is only with war that Miloševic could silence the demands made by the opposition for democracy, while at the same time preventing the revolt of the working classes who, due to the fall in the standard of living, were on the brink of demanding a change in the leadership of the country.

THE YUGOSLAV PEOPLE’S ARMY If anyone has had their world destroyed by the disintegration of Titoist ideology, the Yugoslav army (JNA) has. The army has viewed everything, from the stirrings of nationalism to the beginnings of political pluralism, with great distrust and it has compulsively clung to old ideological forms. Above all, the army has constantly stressed its purity and has rejected any attempt at ‘secularization’ by resisting such things as public disclosure of its activities, the introduction of civil military service and the nomination of a non-military minister of defence. It has sought to separate itself from the social crisis at all costs, disapproving of the crisis from a safe distance and constantly denying that it has played any role in generating the crisis. Through its ‘spontaneous ideology’ the JNA has experienced itself as Yugoslavia’s pillar, the purest embodiment and guarantor of brotherhood

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and unity, ‘as a crystal tear’, excluded from the struggle of particular interests characteristic of ‘profane Yugoslavia’. If the JNA did not appeal directly to God, it was none the less clear that the place the army occupied, spontaneously experienced, was seen as consecrated, a ‘sacred space’, with kinship to the status of the divine right of kings. Any criticism of its activities, any questioning of its role was labelled as a grave attack on the JNA which, because of its sanctity, its sacred place, was simultaneously an ‘attack on Yugoslavia’ as well. The claim that attacks on the JNA were attacks on the Yugoslavian nation as a whole must be read in the context of the slogan that the JNA was ‘Yugoslavia in miniature’. This notion can be interpreted through Lacan’s distinction between the big Other and the objet petit a, i.e., respectively, the symbolic network, and a foreign body in its very heart.7 The JNA was the objet petit a of Yugoslavia as the big Other, the self-managing socialist republic. It was that core which was ‘in Yugoslavia more than Yugoslavia’, a sacred, untouchable place in Yugoslavia’s heart. In this position, the JNA made two, apparently incompatible claims about itself. First, that the JNA is the personified, purest expression of Yugoslav society, it is society in miniature; a school for self-management, brotherhood and unity. Second, because of its nature the JNA is not and cannot be organized on a selfmanagement basis. Instead, it must be organized on the basis of command lines and on unconditional obedience to commands. Thus the JNA revealed itself as both internal and external to the fundamental Yugoslavia – so the point of the nation’s extimacy.8 This was precisely how the JNA apparatus has perceived itself in its spontaneous ideology: as a non-self-management guarantor of self-management, as the point of exception in the system of self-management, but none the less as the point that held together this very same system. Obsessed with portraying itself as ‘blameless’ in a deviant society, the JNA has always presented itself as an island of brotherhood and unity, purified of nationalism, liberalism, technocratism and similar abominations feared by ‘those outside’. As such a reservoir of purity, it stressed that every segment of Yugoslavia was tainted with nationalism except the JNA. Despite open conflicts among various factions and disagreements over development in Yugoslavia, the JNA still perceived itself as exempt from social antagonism, occupying a superior position as the unsullied final guarantor of social unity. We can now formulate why this unblemished view of the JNA is – if we invoke Hegel – a view of the highest Evil. Real Evil, the real impediment to the stability of Yugoslavia, has not been particular interests, but the structuring of the social field itself, which has prevented divergent socio-political interests and projects from being articulated and from taking part in the democratic struggle. Such divergent interests have instead been understood as disintegrative, i.e. threatening to the cohesion of Yugoslav society.

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When in June 1991 the JNA took to weapons and force, first in Slovenia, and later in Croatia and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, its discourse of claiming a need for war came from the hypothesis that only the JNA can and does defend the integral wholeness of Yugoslavia while also preventing national conflicts. But behind this level of ideological meaning the JNA’s hypothesis made it quite clear that it was in fact fighting for socialism. The JNA never did come to terms with the collapse of socialism in Slovenia and Croatia, but when it could no longer openly declare these two republics as the enemies of socialism it declared them secessionist and through that act made the military intervention legitimate. How can we interpret the fact that, after the war in Slovenia, the JNA openly went over to the side of Serbia in its war over parts of Creation territory? After the collapse of socialism and the anticipated disintegration of Yugoslavia, the JNA found itself in a kind of transitional period. It was desperately looking for a new role, a way to survive. It was precisely at this point that the move over to the Serbian side offered the JNA a way to give a new meaning to its struggle for Yugoslavia. Because the connection between the JNA and Serbia did not originate from some ‘deep’ ideological unity and because it did not amount to an admission by either side of mutual need or co-operation, it was therefore thoroughly contingent. None the less, this connection resulted from a pragmatic realization made by both the JNA and Serbia that each could survive only if united with the other. In the past the JNA has always been suspicious of Miloševic. It criticized his nationalism, because the JNA perceived itself as the supra-national guarantor of peace in Yugoslavia. But in the wake of the collapse of Yugoslavia, it was Serbia and its desire to create a Greater Serbia (or a smaller Yugoslavia) that offered the only place where the JNA could survive. The JNA sent messages to the Serbs which (between the lines) read: ‘the only way by which you can realize your desire for a Greater Serbia is to say that you are fighting for Yugoslavia and then we can fight together’. For Serbia the acquisition of the JNA had a very important meaning for its imperialistic war. Serbia presented the alliance with the JNA as something natural, taking into consideration the historical Serbian partiality for the army, their warrior pride and the simple fact that the majority of the officer cadre of the JNA were Serbian. During the ‘purification’ from the JNA of officers of other nationalities, this majority cadre also considerably helped the JNA to move to the Serbian side.

THE ARTICULATION OF THE POLITICAL SCENE AFTER THE FALL OF SOCIALISM The Slovene political scene in the 1980s was marked by an extraordinary swing to the ‘alternative’ movement created out of a variety of heterogeneous groups, including those not normally on speaking terms with each other. This movement encompassed national-democratic-oriented people working

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in the arts, subcultures such as ‘punk’, the post-Marxist ‘new left’ and ‘new social movements’ (ecology, peace, feminism, gay rights), right up to the spontaneous dissatisfaction of individual strata and professions which suddenly took on organizational form. These new forms sprang from oppositional activities of individual societies such as philosophers and sociologists, from the founding of the independent farmers’ union, and from other unionizing initiatives.9 Also counted must be the Socialist Youth Organization (ZSMS) which had always been a kind of bridge between ‘official’ and ‘alternative’ politics and thus provided an umbrella for the ‘new social movements’. Although all this fermentation was not clearly structured, there nevertheless hung in the air an unspoken consensus that the ‘alternatives’ themselves had grouped into two divisions: the ‘left’ (new social movement, subcultures), and ‘nationalist democracy’ (mainly arts workers). The ‘power struggle’ was a syntagm by which the alternative movement opened the space for democratic political struggle. In socialist ideology, anyone who fights for power is characterized as an enemy, as one who undermines the power of the working class. The open claim to a fight for power, which was first expressed in Slovenia by the Socialist Youth, was initially greeted as a dangerous, hostile act, although its clear expression alone immediately restructured the field of political struggle. Thus even the Party itself started saying that it would not only give up power and organize free elections, but that it would also acknowledge the collapse of the self-management system. Before the general elections, the political scene in Slovenia was constructed from three blocs: the communists and the two oppositions, consisting of the new social movements with the ZSMS and the nationalcultural opposition united in Demos (Democratic Opposition of Slovenia). Demos favoured parliamentary democracy and the complete independence of Slovenia, including the possibility of secession. It linked the importance of the national question to the problem of the low Slovene birthrate, in the name of which the parties grouped in Demos more or less openly stressed the need for a ‘population policy’ that would restrict the right to abortion. The paradox of Demos was the heterogeneous nature of the parties grouped within it. Before Demos was formed, it was uncertain whether the Greens, an ecological wing of the new social movement, could join the conservative Christian Democrats in a group bloc and support part of its ideology. Accordingly, after joining Demos, the Greens have given ambiguous statements on the question of abortion – ‘not for, not against’. They have accepted the ideology of a ‘national threat’ and generally have lost the character of an alternative movement. It is precisely this heterogeneous nature of Demos that has reconfirmed the contingent nature of alliances in the political struggle. In the formation of the opposition blocs in Slovenia, a struggle for a claim to the ‘green problem’ has taken place between Demos and ZSMS-liberals. The Greens

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had the status of a new social movement, formerly associated with ZSMS, and the ecological issue had the character of a citizens’ initiative above party politics. It was more a call for a new lifestyle than a political platform. When they joined Demos, the Greens lost their autonomy and became one of the elements included in the ‘global-national-defence-political’ project. In a similar fashion, the ecological project thus changed its ‘colours’ from being just ‘Green’. Once it was chained to the discourse of national democracy, the ecology movement was reduced to a marginal element in it. The discourse of national democracy rearticulated the ecological demand into the demand for the ‘preservation of the culture and the natural heritage of the Slovene nation’. Ecology was thus inscribed in the ideology of the national threat or the general war against ‘pollution’ which threatens the national substance and which includes everything from polluted nature to ‘spiritual pollution’, from pornography to soulless contemporary man. Alternative movements (ecologist, feminist, peace, gay, etc.) and ZSMS had radically transformed the political arena with their demands. They stressed the primacy of political over national, and their chief focus was the struggle for political franchise, which meant the dismemberment of the socialist state apparatus and its reconstruction along the lines of Western democracy. The key contribution of the alternative movements was their ability to interpret in a new, fresh way the relationship between the social and the political. The whole logic of self-management socialism was based on the negation of the political. Laclau’s (1990) observation that in Marxism the political is merely the supplement of the social is all the more truthful for the ideology of self-management. With its idea of immediate democracy and the complete power of the workers over production and collective leadership, self-management completely realized the project of subordinating the political to the social. The first oppositional organizations in the new social movements also persisted in affirming the primacy of the social over the political. They promoted the idea of separating civil society from the state because such a separation would enable the creation of an independent sphere for civil society outside the official discourse of self-management. They saw their struggle against power above all in the form of public pressure directed at the organs of power from a place outside of the system of power. But it was precisely with the proclamation of the syntagm, ‘a bid for power’, that the demands of the new social movements could and had to articulate themselves through a political discourse. Thus they became the subject of parliamentary discussions and slowly they, too, were taken up by the discourse in power. In Yugoslavia, the whole political scene changed in 1990 after the first free elections. In every republic one could witness the emergence of three blocs: the former communists (who changed their name to socialists or reformers); the national right; and the liberals. Everywhere the winning bloc was the

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one that had included nationalism in its struggle for hegemony. As we have already seen, in Serbia (and in Montenegro) this bloc was the communist one. In Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia and Bosnia and Herzegovina the nationalist parties also won the elections. However, these parties defined themselves in opposition to communism, and the majority of them were right wing in political orientation. In both cases those who lost out were the liberals. The reason for their failure can be located precisely in the fact that they were unable to articulate nationalism. Even though the liberals had the best political programme – one which was open to minorities, articulated the problems of women and ecology and above all tried to resolve the economic difficulties facing a society on its way out of socialism – the voters did not identify with liberal politics because they defined themselves as non-national. The liberals did not realize that what matters is not something like economics as such, but the way a certain problem is symbolized through ideology. An essential feature of the ideological efficiency of the nationalist parties was their ability to subordinate all real (economic) problems to the problem of national identity. They succeeded in convincing the voters that a solution to the national question would solve all other questions as well. As Chapter 2 demonstrated, the success of a political discourse depends not on offering us direct images with which to identify but on constructing a symbolic space, a point of view from which we can appear likeable to ourselves. In the political discourse of Yugoslavia, it was precisely the national problem which designated the place of identification. Both kinds of nationalist parties – the communists and the Right – succeeded in making the question of national sovereignty the element which shaped the symbolic space in which people could recognize themselves. This space was filled not only with images of hatred of other nations but also with images of the ‘happy’ future which was to arrive with national liberation. Liberals, who perceived nationalism as an element of authoritarian-populist protofascism, lost elections because they were not able to replace this negative image of nationalism with a positive one. They could neither incorporate the struggle for national identity into their political programme nor could they find a way to include this identity into a series of plural and democratic equivalences.

Part II . . . and its implications for the theory of ideology

Chapter 5

Fantasy as the limit of distributive justice

The collapse of socialism in Eastern Europe is perceived by the West as the greatest triumph of liberal democracy. Capitalism and the Western type of democracy are now recognized universally as the best form of social organization. Thus, in the first year after the end of communism, it seemed to be only a question of time before the majority of previously socialist states would become organized after the manner of their Western counterparts. But the introduction of liberal democracy to Eastern Europe only clarified that one cannot just graft the specific political organization of one society onto another. Although people in Eastern Europe favoured the idea of democracy, they identified with old national myths and discovered new hatreds that prevented democracy from really functioning. However, the attempt to make liberal democracy a universal project did not fail because Eastern European states were too ‘backward’ or too ‘underdeveloped’. Rather, Eastern Europe’s failure to accept liberal democracy revealed problems endemic to the liberal democratic project itself. We can even say that Eastern Europe is a symptom through which the inherent contradictions of liberal democracy became visible. These contradictions are linked to the very fact that people identify more with national myths than with notions of democracy and human rights and that what counts as democracy for people is always determined by the way people organize their desire in a fantasy scenario. And it is just this that liberal theory overlooks. Liberals do not see how their project of ‘justice as fairness’ cannot be universally acceptable because of the specific way people relate to some traumatic determinations (nation, race, sex) around which they form their identity. In this chapter I will show how Lacanian psychoanalysis can be of help in understanding such limits of liberal theory. As Ted Honderich puts it, ‘the problem of classical utilitarianism, in a word, is its unfairness’ (Honderich, 1985:145). The utilitarian maxim – ‘The best action is the action which provides the greatest number of people with the greatest measure of happiness’ – allows us, implicitly at least, to sacrifice the welfare of some if the majority of the community as such

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benefits from this sacrifice. Thus the door swings open for the sacrifice of the innocent. The main aim of liberal philosophers is to come up with an alternative to the unfairness of the sacrificial logic of utilitarianism. These philosophers endeavour to formalize a system of justice, according to a system of rights, upon which contemporary liberal democratic society can be founded. The difference between utilitarianism and liberalism can be illustrated by means of the Lacanian couple Imaginary/Symbolic. Utilitarian ethics is ‘imaginary’ in the precise Lacanian sense, to the extent that it implies a substantial, positive notion of Good (maximizing pleasures, minimizing pain, etc.) to which Justice is conceptually subordinated (i.e. ultimately, what is ‘just’ is what serves the Good). In contrast, liberal ethics subordinates Good to Justice – justice provides the formal frame, the empty symbolic structure, within which individuals are free to pursue their incompatible, particular Goods. What about the third term of the Lacanian triad IRS (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) – the Real? According to Lacan, the Real is ultimately the kernel of a traumatic, excessive enjoyment (jouissance) which resists symbolization. As I will argue later in this chapter, it is precisely this dimension of the particular mode of enjoyment structured in a fantasy scenario which enables us to delineate the inherent limitation of liberal formalism, its blind spot.

RAWLS’S ANSWER TO UTILITARIANISM The exemplary case of a liberal attempt to provide an ethics founded in the non-substantial logic of the purely symbolic space is, of course, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971). Rawls aims to answer the question: which norms in society are generally desirable and which of these norms are also realizable? He tries to unearth the principles by which we already act in society, but which still need to be formalized. ‘A good theory of Justice would explicate and systematize our intuitive sense of justice in the way that logic spells our sense of validity and linguistics our sense of grammaticality’ (Kukathas and Pettit, 1990: 7). In contrast to utilitarianism, Rawls affirms that society must not be organized around some common principle of good but around justice. Justice is not confined to any special values or goals nor is it subjected to the sum total of social interests. Rather, justice works as a ‘trump card’ for individuals to use against certain politics which would wish to enforce upon society as a whole some particular vision of good. With its conception of justice, liberalism revolted against utilitarianism, while simultaneously resisting the other great school of thought in contemporary political theory – communitarianism. In contrast to communitarianism, which holds that society as a whole has primacy over the individual, liberalism stresses that, ultimately, only the interests of individuals are to be taken into consideration.

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In order to explain how we arrive at the principle of justice, Rawls constructed a myth, perhaps the latest in a long series of philosophical myths (Plato’s cave, Hegel’s struggle to death between Master and Slave and so on) – the myth of the ‘original position’ where the parties of a future social contract meet. This position is a symbolic fiction:1 the parties of the original position are not flesh-and-blood beings but fictitious entities, delegated by individuals as their representatives in the original position. This is where the basic structure of society is chosen: the parties in this structure choose between different basic structures which are identified by principles, not by particular examples. These principles must satisfy certain general constraints which Rawls calls ‘the constraints of the concept of right’ – the principles must be general in form, universal in application and publicly recognized. In the ‘original position’, the parties of the social contract are constrained by the so-called ‘veil of ignorance’. While they choose justice, they must not have knowledge of their social position (sex, power, wealth, etc.). The veil of ignorance thus neutralizes the influence of contingencies which enable people to manipulate social and natural circumstances to their advantage. By the same token, the parties in the original position are supposed to possess no knowledge of their particular desires, so that, in their choice of the basic structure of society, they are not guided by their individual goals. Instead they make their choice only according to those desires which they would have irrespective of who they are. But even if we are dealing with a situation of mutual disinterest and a lack of all moral constraints, what binds the parties in the original position together is a presupposed inclination towards certain primary goods. These include not only material goods, but also freedom, opportunity and elements of self-respect (see Rawls, 1971: 304). What takes place in the original position is a choice; agreements are made between parties, and what they agree upon are the principles of justice. The principles which they choose are just not only because of the way in which they were chosen but also because they enable a just distribution of goods fundamental to society. These goods must be equally distributed. However, apart from allowing equal opportunities for all members of society, the chosen principles must also guarantee fundamental individual liberties such as freedom of speech, association, religion, etc. Adamantly opposing the idea that society is a kind of organic whole, Rawls insists that justice can appear only in a world where individuals have conflicting demands. For Rawls, utilitarianism by conceiving of society as the rational choice of one man, or rather, of one system of desires, overlooks the contingency of circumstances in which people live, as well as their incompatible desires and interests.

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Why then, according to Rawls, do people co-operate and how does something like ‘the good of the community’ emerge at all? Rawls is much more ‘sentimental’ than the individualistic liberals who view social ties as a kind of necessary evil and who reduce social co-operation to a means of realizing particular individuals’ goals. But for Rawls, since members of society have specific ‘common finite goals’, they perceive co-operation as good in itself. Their interests are not necessarily antagonistic but are in some cases complementary. In short, Rawls conceives of society not as something outside the interests of the individual but as something which is, up to a certain point, internal to those interests. Although the good of society cannot be so all-encompassing as to touch upon the motivation of the individual, it does influence the intentions and the values of the self. In Rawls’s theory not only justice, but also good is founded upon choice. Just as the principles of justice are the product of choice in the original position, the conception of good is also the product of individual choice in the actual world. Justice has here the same meaning as Kant’s a priori categories. The condition of choice is some kind of a framework which is itself not chosen – ‘something must remain beyond choice (and so constrain it) if choice itself is to be secured’ (Sandel, 1982: 156). In contrast to our relationship to good, where we are free to choose and accept our own notion of good, the principles of justice are not at our disposal. There is only one conception of justice (which must be accepted by everyone) in the face of a multiplicity of conceptions of good. Thus the principles of justice have a kind of moral priority over good, i.e. they limit the conceptions of good from which an individual may choose, since, where individual values are not in accordance with justice, justice has priority. According to Hume, we need justice because we do not love each other enough. According to Rawls, we need justice because we do not know each other enough in order to make love work: ‘Love is blind, not for its intensity but rather for the opacity of the good that is the object of its concern’ (Sandel, 1982: 171, 172).

LIBERTARIAN AND COMMUNITARIAN CRITIQUES OF RAWLS In the two decades since Rawls’s book was published, he has been the target of endless critiques by libertarian or communitarian thinkers.2 Rawlsian modern liberalism allows for the intervention of the state in the regulation of poverty, education, etc., even at the expense of certain constraints upon freedom and property rights, thereby provoking the suspicion of traditional libertarians who argue for the minimal state. According to them, the state’s only function is to protect certain rights of its citizens, above all the right to personal freedom and private property.

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Nozick (1974), for example, adamantly criticizes Rawls precisely on the grounds that his theory allows for the redistribution of property. For Rawls, social and economic readjustments are allowable if they help the poorest: he supports the redistribution of property when it helps the least wealthy out of their discomfort and enables them to compete more fairly. Nozick, on the other hand, maintains that no such redistribution should be allowed, since it violates our right to personal property, which he holds to be a natural right. Nozick’s first objection to Rawls is that he is wrong in assuming that goods come into the world as non-property and that they are subjected to distribution on the basis of the conception of justice. Nozick pits his own conception of justice, based on a different notion of possession, against Rawls’s theory of ‘justice as fairness’. In Rawls’s theory ‘the self itself is dispossessed’ (Sandel, 1982: 85) – the self is the pure subject of possession, separated from the goals as well as the attributes it possesses. This is why the Rawlsian subject does not have any substantial qualities upon which it could claim to ‘deserve’ something. It is precisely this notion of ‘deserving’ something which Rawls’s theory most strongly challenges. According to Rawls, we are never really the owners, but only the guardians of wealth and goods – which is why it is unacceptable to say that we deserve benefits from such wealth and goods. Along the same lines, Rawls also criticizes the notion of so-called ‘natural freedom’, invoked to enable people to abuse their natural and social talents. These talents do not belong to people in a strong constitutive sense of belonging, but only in the weak, contingent sense, i.e. in the sense that they have been passed on by chance. Nozick argues the opposite: the key to natural freedom lies in the fact that we do deserve things, that we are entitled to them. Thus we can have certain things or talents which enable us to deserve more than others. The answer to this first objection from Nozick is simply that the notion of the subject which is presupposed by his theory is the pre-Kantian notion of a full, substantial individual endowed with natural properties, capacities and motivations, whereas Rawls implicitly refers to the Kantian notion of the subject qua empty point of self-consciousness, devoid of all positive features (the ‘pure I of transcendental apperception’). And what one must bear in mind is that the reference to this Kantian empty, non-substantial subject is built into the very notion of democracy (i.e. in a democracy, we can partake in political decision-making irrespective of our wealth, sex, religion). Nozick’s second objection to Rawls is that every structural ideal of justice which is to regulate society demands the state’s constant intervention because no such ideal can be constantly realized without continual interference into people’s lives.

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As to this second objection, libertarians tend to forget that the very act of ensuring the conditions for their own model of a minimal state presupposes a state which will ensure this. The ‘natural rights’ which libertarians demand are not conceivable outside a strong state apparatus (with effective schools, prisons, banks, and other institutions). The positive existence of an actual state is the enabling condition of any fight for libertarian rights and (connected to them) a minimal state.3 In contrast to libertarians, communitarians detect in Rawls not only weaknesses in his exposition but also deeper conceptual deficiencies which result, so they claim, from Rawls having asked himself the wrong question of how to derive principles of social justice. In common with all liberals, Rawls wrongly assumes that it is possible to locate the origin of the principles of social justice to which all rational people should be subject. The liberal search for certain moral standards from which the social and political institutions of every society could be developed, in a communitarian perspective, overlooks how practice comes before theory. Why should people in actual societies take heed of some abstract principles out of which morality is supposed to emerge when precisely the opposite is the truth, when morality is something which is formed out of the practice of actual communities? Society as presupposed by liberalism consists of the chaotic assemblage of different moral traditions regulated by norms that direct individual behaviour in such a way that it leaves to individuals the freedom to decide their own way of life. But for communitarians, this is not society at all. An actually existing social body cannot be governed by the liberal concept of justice, it can only be governed by ‘a concern for the common good, in which the good of the community itself is pre-eminent’ (Kukathas and Pettit, 1990: 95). Along similar lines, Michael J. Sandel (1982) focuses his critique of ‘distributive justice’ on Rawls’s conception of the subject, i.e. of the self allegedly able to separate itself from its interests and ends in order to partake in the ‘original position’. Of course, Rawls also knows that such an undetermined self, capable of assuming the distance of an objective observer towards its own interests and motivations does not, in fact, exist in the actual world. However, Sandel reproaches him specifically for not taking into account that the actual co-operation of individuals does not arise out of a choice made by disinterested participants of the ‘original position’. Instead, such co-operation expresses the social nature of concrete, flesh-and-blood individuals, embedded in their historical tradition. When Rawls ‘cleanses’ the interests of parties participating in the social contract, he creates a situation which does not allow for the existence of an actual society. Rawls’s system loses all its validity for society in as much as he presupposes a kind of de-ontological self not only separated from its own desires and ambitions but also independent of things, interests and ends in its relation to others.

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Sandel argues that liberals presuppose a mysterious, non-existing capacity of the subject to separate itself from itself so that it can set down the principles according to which it would then freely act. According to this notion, the self is able to choose morality without knowledge of itself or, more precisely, without knowledge of its own moral experience. Sandel further objects to a liberal conception of society as an association of independent individuals, an association whose value is measured by the degree of fairness enjoyed by the individuals who partake in it. What liberals overlook here is the crucial fact that the very existence of individuals capable of association presupposes the existence of a community. However, in Rawls’s defence, one should point out that he is very well aware of the fictitious nature of the ‘original position’. Rawls does not deny that we are always living within society and are therefore unable to step outside it in order to construct a theory of society and of a social contract according to which we would thereupon model the actual society. The whole point of his argument is that the ‘original position’ is a symbolic construction, a retroactive myth whose aim is not to explain the actual emergence of society but to enable us to orientate ourselves in present ethical dilemmas, i.e. to pass judgement on the de-ontological problems which confront us in our actual lives. As such, the role of this retroactive construction is not unlike that of the Freudian myth of the primordial father through which we are able to understand the emergence of law. In answer to Sandel’s objection to the radically dispossessed subject, it suffices to repeat the point already made apropos of the homologous libertarian critique. The subject Rawls is talking about is the Kantian subject, the cogito delivered of all substantial remainders, i.e. the place of pur e non-substantial subjectivity. Libertarians as well as communitarians share the same pre-Kantian, substantial notion of the subject, the only difference being that libertarians conceive of this substantial, positive unity as that of the individual endowed with natural rights and properties prior to the social contract, whereas communitarians locate this substantial unity at the level of community, of the social body. Both views miss the point that, as Hegel would put it, the subject is not the substance. The irony here, of course, is that communitarians usually claim to represent the Hegelian heritage of state qua concrete ethical substance as opposed to abstract libertarian individualism. But such communitarians are in fact pseudo-Hegelians, since any kind of poetic elevation of organic social unity was absolutely alien to Hegel who always insisted on what he called the ‘absolute right of the individual’ (see Hegel, 1991). The subject must freely accept the community; the subject possesses the inalienable right of a free insight into the community’s inherently rational character; it is never immediately thrown into society, never forced to accept it as something immediately given.

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RAWLS’S SELF-CRITIQUE AND RORTY’S SUPPORT OF RAWLS Following the publication of his chef d’oeuvre, Rawls assumed more and more the role of the major interpreter of his own work. In responding to his critics, he constantly changed his theory, presenting his modifications as explanations of positions which are implicitly already present in the book and which mostly concern a partial farewell to Kant and a move towards Hegel. But we can also conceive Rawls’s writing of the last two decades as a kind of self-critique. Rawls has started to emphasize that his theory of justice does not seek to provide a universal Kantian model of morality based on a priori categories. Instead, it seeks only to articulate the notion of justice which is already intuitively present in his own society, i.e. in American liberal democracy (see Rawls, 1980). In his last texts, he goes even further, insisting that his theory is a political rather than a moral doctrine and that his conception of ‘justice as fairness’ in particular is intended as a political conception. The fact that this conception of justice is already latently present in the political culture of contemporary liberal democracy will help us to preserve the stability and unity of our society. In short, Rawls gave up his apology of liberalism as a universal moral philosophy and began to argue solely for a political liberalism, independent of any particular moral ideal (autonomy, for example). He is now concerned with the kind of liberalism which ensures stability and the social unity of society and which does not connect justice with autonomy or individuality but with order. It is precisely the concept of stability which, according to Rawls, should regulate a society consisting of people who have different views about what is good. Ultimately, Rawls argues that his conception of justice allows us to find practical solutions to real political problems, so we need not continue to search for the truth about morality. With this turn, the ‘late’ Rawls disappointed many of his followers and interpreters, since his accent on stability opens the way to a vulgar apology for social order. Surprisingly, however, his last writings found an enthusiastic response from Richard Rorty (1990) who used them to criticize communitarians and reinforce his own thesis of the primacy of politics over philosophy. The principal targets of Rorty’s critique are those communitarians (Sandel, Taylor) who argue that political institutions presuppose some doctrine of the nature of human beings and that (in contrast to Enlightenment rationalism) such a doctrine must explain the fundamentally historical nature of the self. For Rorty, it is on the contrary crucial that we separate both philosophy and religion from politics. Both are ‘unclear general terms which can be convincingly redefined’ (Rorty, 1990: 279).

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He argues for so-called ‘philosophical tolerance’. Politics must be indifferent to philosophical speculations about the nature of the self and the essence of human existence, since this speculation can only be personal, not part of the political decisions on the organization of society. This is a stance which Rorty also discovers in the ‘late’ Rawls who constantly stresses that, in a democratic society, philosophy – as a search for the truth about an independent metaphysical and moral order – cannot provide the basis for a political conception of justice. With regard to Rawls’s conception of the self as something defined prior to and independently of its own goals, Rorty emphasizes how this conception does not entail that the self be separated from its beliefs and desires. Rorty sees Rawls’s self as centreless, as an historical contingency all the way through. Rawls neither needs nor wants to defend the priority of the right to the good as Kant defended it, by invoking a theory of the self that makes it more than an ‘empirical self’, more than a ‘radically situated subject’. He presumably thinks of Kant as, although largely right about the nature of justice, largely wrong about the nature and function of philosophy. (Rorty, 1990: 288–9) According to Rorty, the criticisms directed at Rawls by the communitarians miss the point since Rawls is not interested in the ‘identity of the self’ and similar metaphysical subtleties but only in the conditions of citizenship in a liberal society. He puts democratic politics first and philosophy second. The truth sought by philosophers is in fact not very relevant to politics. This idea also undermines the communitarian (Sandel’s) thesis, for example, that the social theory of the liberal state is founded on wrong presuppositions. For Rawls, that justice is the foremost virtue of society cancels any need for the philosophical or religious legitimization of politics. This is why liberals can avoid what is a frequent communitarian vice, namely the desire for a return to religion or to some new philosophical foundation (the new notion of a common good) which is to save society from degeneration. As Rorty points out, even if contemporary liberal democracy was to break down, such a collapse would not prove the need for some shared notion of ‘our place in the universe and our mission on earth’ (Rorty, 1990: 295). Rorty’s praise of Rawls, however, should not deceive us as to the irreducible difference between their ideas. Paradoxically, Rorty passes in silence over Rawls’s crucial deficiency, although Rorty’s theoretical apparatus provides the conceptual means to articulate this deficiency. Of what, precisely, does this deficiency consist? In his Kantian move to affirm the primacy of the symbolic frame of Justice over any positive, substantial notion of Good, Rawls leaves out the dimension of fantasy (the Freudian fantasm) by means of which the subject organizes its desire, its

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relationship to the Real of an impossible enjoyment. Unaware of Lacanian theory, Rorty reached this problem of fantasy by way of his notion of solidarity. What are its consequences for the Rawlsian notion of distributive justice?

THE EXCLUSION OF FANTASY When Rorty describes what human solidarity should look like, he ostensibly remains within the confines of what Rawls is saying. He argues against the notion of human solidarity as something which dwells in every one of us in the form of some shared ‘human essence’ and which therefore reacts to the presence of the same ‘essence’ in other human beings. What appears as ‘essential human characteristics’ is not permanent but depends on historical circumstances. It is a matter of consensus which characteristics are perceived as ‘normal’, which acts are judged as ‘just’ or ‘unjust’. Our sense of solidarity is stronger when those with whom solidarity is expressed are thought of as ‘one of us’, since ‘us’ means something smaller and more local than the entire human race. When asked how solidarity arises, Rawls would answer approximately along the same lines. He would argue that the principles of justice agreed on by the parties in the original position establish the standards of solidarity. He would also point out that solidarity must be present at the very foundation of the concept of justice, since our actions must always help the least well off. He would further agree that we cannot express solidarity with the human race as such but only with a smaller group, adding that solidarity founded on the principles of justice characterizes the liberal democratic society, not society per se. However, the difference between Rawls and Rorty becomes evident apropos of Rorty’s thesis that solidarity is to be conceived as the ability to see more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, custom, and the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to pain and humiliation – the ability to think of people wildly different from ourselves as included in the range of us. (Rorty, 1989: 192) Rawls would agree with the first part of Rorty’s statement – religion, race and customs are unimportant for the appointment of the principles of justice (and of solidarity which is related to it) – whereas the problem of identifying with the pain of others is simply not part of Rawls’s context. Where does this contextual difference come from? Let us first cast a glance at the way Rorty defines sensitivity to someone else’s pain. His crucial point is that what is worse than actual physical violence is the violence which, at the symbolic level, ’unmakes your world’.4 The lesson of the torture-scenes in

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Orwell’s 1984 is that torture achieves its true aim when we are forced to say something or to believe something which later we find impossible to integrate into the symbolic universe which defines our sense of self-identity. After saying or doing certain things, we cease to be the same person as before, our subjectivity is destroyed: the worst thing you can do to somebody is not to make her scream in agony but to use that agony in such a way that even when the agony is over, she cannot reconstitute herself. The idea is to get her to do or say things – and, if possible, believe and desire things, think thoughts – which later she will be unable to cope with having done or thought. . . . But presumably each of us stands in the same relation to some sentence, and to some thing. If one can discover that key sentence and that key thing, then . . . one can tear a mind apart and put it together in new shapes of one’s own choosing. But it is the sound of the tearing, not the result of the putting together that is the object of the exercise. It is the breaking that matters. The putting together is just an extra flip. (Rorty, 1989: 177–9) In short, the ultimate aim of torture is not to break us physically but to destroy the fantasmatic kernel (the fundamental fantasy) which forms the core of our self-identity. Lacan sets pain in relationship to das Ding, the place of traumatic enjoyment (jouissance) enveloped, concealed by the fantasy. 5 Fantasy concerns the way the subject organizes her or his economy of enjoyment around some traumatic element. The fantasy brings consistency to our desire – an empirical object or good becomes the object of desire only when it enters the fantasy frame. And it is precisely this fantasy structure – with its kernel of the Real (some act, some sentence that can unmake the subject’s world so that he or she never will be the same again) – that the Rawlsian social contract, defined in terms of a purely symbolic fiction, must leave out of consideration. For Rawls’s distributive justice to work, it must presuppose a subject provided with a pure desire, i.e. a desire not tied to fantasy, a desire which can be rationally fulfilled, or rather a desire whose fulfilment can be secured by way of a just distribution of goods according to the principles established by the social contract. For that reason, Rawls must presuppose that the parties in the original position know that they would rather have more than less primary goods – they must act as rational persons who know that with a greater number of goods a greater degree of success can be achieved. Lacanian psychoanalysis counters this thesis by pointing out that there is no general, neutral desire for primary goods excepted from the inter subjective dialectic of envy, i.e. the relationship to the other’s desire. It is precisely because of this intersubjective overdetermination of the subject’s relationship to goods that the subject’s

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pursuit of its desire does not coincide with the realization of one’s ‘rationally’ perceived good: the subject determines itself not by ‘choosing’ its own good . . . but by choosing not to be motivated by the conditions that define its self-interest and thus by acting contrary to its own good – even to the point of bringing about its own death. (Copjec, 1989: 65) In short, it is not necessarily true, as Rawls presumes, that people rationally choose more goods in order to secure greater success. Lacan draws attention to the fact that even the destruction of goods can perform some special function for the community – witness the ceremony of potlach in primitive societies, where goods are systematically destroyed, even those goods which the community rationally needs. As Lacan emphasizes, it is precisely around destruction (in as much as it is tied to sustaining and fulfilling desire) that ‘the problem and the drama of the economy of the good’ revolves itself (see Lacan, 1992: 235). Rawls’s claim that envy must be excluded from the original position is therefore deeply symptomatic. Rawls justifies this exclusion, first, by the fact that if envy were admitted into the original position, it would allow for the choice of a system which would not be beneficial to all parties and, second, by the fact that a system defined by justice is very unlikely to generate strong feelings of envy. Rawls presupposes that we can regulate envy (admit it or not), and that it depends on the system (there is less envy in a just system). However, in the dialectic of desire, in as much as it is intersubjective, envy is always at work. The subject/ object relationship does not exist without being mediated through the desire of the Other, i.e. the subject desires an object insofar as it is the object of the Other’s desire. As Lacan puts it, desire is always the desire of the Other. The eradication of envy equals the eradication of fantasy. In the previous chapters, I have already pointed out how fantasy is linked to nationalism. Yet in a similar way fantasy is at work in racism and sexism. An exemplary case of the fantasy in which envy is at work is the white racist myth of the excessive sexual potency of black people. So, how would Rawls conduct his argument if he were asked about the exclusion of racism from the social contract? He would of course affirm that racism must be excluded from the social contract: it is unjust and partial, and it is of key importance for the social contract that the parties in the original position are impartial. However, on account of the eradication of the dimension of fantasy from the original position which establishes the parameters of justice, Rawls cannot escape the danger of relapsing into racism at the very moment of erasing it from his scheme of social contract as a form of envy.

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Such a danger was realized in liberal attempts to interfere in local community life in the name of allegedly universal values – as exemplified in the United States in the 1970s by the policy of mixing children of different races and classes by school-bussing. Such bussing policies fit perfectly the Rawlsian notion of distributive justice. The idea was that racially mixed schools would enable poor children to break out of the cycle of poverty and the higher classes would be liberated from their racist prejudices through concrete human contact with the lower classes. Paradoxically, however, lower-class black and white children were opposed to bussing almost as much as upper-class white children. All of them experienced school-bussing as a mechanism which forced alien norms into their communities. The measure which had been conceived as a form of help for the lower classes thus emerged as a new form of coercion and state control over local communities. The lower classes saw in bussing an attempt to interfere with their right to educate their own children, an effort to convince them that their own community norms were not right. Even though liberals thought that the protests against school-bussing were racist, such protests were really a form of resistance against the disruption of a specific way of life.6 Why, then, might people perceive actions which endeavour to ensure freedom and equal possibilities for everybody as an intrusion into their freedom and privacy? The answer is fantasy: as long as liberal theory is postulated upon the exclusion of fantasy, upon the negation of the particular way people organize their enjoyment, it will have to come to terms with the reality that its ‘goodness’ may be perceived as ‘hostility’. The paradox is therefore that, on account of its exclusion of fantasy, the formal, purely symbolic character of the Rawlsian ‘original position’ engenders the very effects it endeavours to preclude.

Chapter 6

Legitimizing violence

How did Gorbachev legitimize military intervention in the Baltic States in 1990? He proceeded as in the well-known Freudian case of the man whose neighbour accused him of returning a kettle in a damaged condition (see Freud, 1976: 197). The accused first replied that he had returned the kettle undamaged, then claimed that the kettle had a hole in it when he borrowed it, and finally, that he had never borrowed the kettle from the neighbour in the first place. Gorbachev’s answers about his responsibilitiy for the bloodshed in the Baltic states were as contradictory as this. First he claimed that in order to maintain the unity of the Soviet Union, it was important to establish direct presidential rule over the separatist republics (including military intervention if required). Then he said that he knew nothing at all of the intervention, since it had only resulted from internal friction in these states; finally, he put forward a third thesis, that although he had not approved the intervention, it had been only reasonable. This case of legitimization is only one among many in Eastern Europe where, in the last years, we have been confronted with a whole series of forms of violence: on the one hand, the struggle against communism, and on the other, the attempts of the old communist forces to retain their hold on power. In both cases we have been confronted with a series of mechanisms of legitimization of power, of giving meaning to some act of force. How then is this constitutive force, which is present in every established power, legitimized in totalitarianism and how in democracy? Above all, how does democracy, in contrast to totalitarianism, succeed in limiting violence?

THE FORCE OF LAW The logic of acts legitimizing authority is embedded in the process of establishing legal power, which is the subject of investigation in Walter Benjamin’s (1986) article ‘Critique of Violence’. Benjamin’s text draws attention to two dimensions of violence in law: violence which is present at the moment of establishing law, and violence which is linked to its

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preservation. So Benjamin distinguishes between the force of law as legitimate power and an original violence which is linked to the founding of law and is not authorized by any legitimate agency, so that at its initial moment it is neither legal nor illegal or, rather, it is neither just nor unjust. We could say that, at the moment of founding, the law is a performative power independent of any prior law (see Derrida, 1990). In addition to this law-making violence, which is set in and founds law, Benjamin distinguishes violence which maintains law, confirms and provides its enforcability: ‘If the first is required to prove its worth in victory, the second is subject to the restriction that it may not set itself new ends’ (Benjamin, 1986: 286). In other words, violence which maintains law must not operate in a way that would create new law but only maintain already founded law. As Derrida has put it, the founding of law concerns juridico-symbolic violence, a performative violence which determines the future interpretative reading of law. This performative act is accomplished in a revolution or in the creation of a new state – and in all such cases, it can only be interpreted retroactively: A ‘successful’ revolution, the ‘successful foundation of a State’ (in somewhat the same sense that one speaks of a ‘“felicitous” performative speech act’) will produce après coup what it was destined in advance to produce, namely proper interpretative models to read in return, to give sense, necessity and above all legitimacy to the violence that has produced, among others, the interpretative model in question, that is the discourse of self-legitimation. (Derrida, 1990: 993) The founding of law and states thus concerns a discourse of selflegitimization which justifies the act of violence by means of which the law (or state) has been enforced. In both cases, a performative vicious circle is at work: just as the violent act of enforcing law establishes conventions which then guarantee the validity of this performative act itself, so a state, by means of its founding gesture, sets up conventions which then retroactively give legitimacy to its creation. The classical case of such self-legitimizing discourse is the aftermath of the October Revolution. Six months prior to the events, Lenin was still convinced that the revolution would only be something for future generations; after power had been seized, it was necessary to retroactively legitimize it as an urgent, entirely predictable product of conditions at that time. A second case of retroactive legitimation is the anti-communist ‘revolution’ in Romania. Who does not remember the television broadcasts which incessantly spoke of fear of the Securitate, their oppression, hidden tunnels from which they would attack and so on. However, as was later shown, there was a split in the revolution between the real and the

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imaginary Securitate: the terrifying, unfathomable Securitate that filled out the media was an imaginary point of reference against which the ‘real’ Securitate itself organized the revolution. The Securitate in a way rebelled against itself, against the image of itself which it had itself produced, so that it could maintain power. We have here a perverse situation in which a force presents itself as total horror, evil, and then organizes the struggle against this image of evil, so that it can itself appear as the force which saved the nation from itself, from its own image, retroactively interpreting this stage-managed conflict as a spontaneous popular revolution (a revolt against communism). Today, when the communists are again in power in Romania, albeit in democratic ‘colours’, all talk of the Securitate is silenced: charges against its leaders have been dropped for lack of evidence. Benjamin links the performative circle of retroactive legitimization of violence to the problem of the failure of modern democracy. The fundamental weakness of contemporary democracy consists in the absence of a boundary between the two types of violence in law: the violence that founds, and the violence that maintains. This is best demonstrated by the role of the modern police force. Although the task of the police is to maintain law, the modern police ever more claim the right to invent new laws and statutes. They abolish the distinction between founding and preserving violence by violating the boundary that separates making the law from enforcing it. The fact that the police increasingly take this role highlights the degeneration towards violence in contemporary democracies. In an absolute monarchy, the executive and legislative powers are united, so it is understandable that the police also have recourse to the founding violence and invent new laws. This kind of violence, however, runs against the spirit of democracy; because of the presupposed division between executive and legislative power, it is not legitimate for the police to make law rather than enforce it. According to Benjamin, two things follows from this: First democracy is a degeneration of law and of the violence that pertains to it; second there is not yet any democracy worthy of the name (see Derrida, 1990: 1013). According to Benjamin, the history of law is from its very beginning the history of its decay, and the same is true of parliamentary democracy. In both cases, there is a silence – a silence about the violence by which they were created. So in the final analysis, Benjamin’s criticism of violence flows into a demand for a manifestation of violence which would not attempt to refound a new state and law – his dreams are of a new political era in which politics will not be linked to the struggle for control of the state. Yet his criticism of modern democracy, although in a way accurate, misses the point. What he exposes as its weakness is the resort of its strength. Democracy’s fundamental feature is the recognition of the danger that pertains to the violence of power – even if it is democratic power. Its main aim is to install a kind of mechanism which limits this violence.

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What is the relationship of this limitation of violence in democracy to the performative circle by means of which power retroactively legitimizes its constitutive violence? Is the democratic limitation of violence a continuation of the same logic, or is it precisely a limitation of the performative logic by which violence is made ‘invisible’ via its retroactive legitimization? And what goes on in this regard in the new post-socialist regimes?

SELF-BINDING OF POWER Spinoza knew very well that the lawmaker must limit himself: as he put it, even kings are part of the mechanism of the law, they are linked to it and cannot offend it, however much they may wish to. The king sets the law but when the law is accepted, even he must respect it. Spinoza compares the king to Ulysses, who ordered his comrades not to relent and release him when, heedful of the Sirens, he begged them to do so: And, after this example of Ulysses, kings often instruct judges to administer justice without respect of persons, not even the king himself, if by some singular accident he ordered anything contrary to established laws. For kings are not gods, but men, who are often led captive by the Siren’s song. (Spinoza, 1951: 327) According to Jon Elster, self-binding is ‘achieving by indirect means the same end as a rational person could have realized in a direct manner’ (Elster, 1984: 36). Although man is basically a rational being in the sense of deliberately sacrificing present gratification for future gains, in certain situations he succumbs to temptation, abandons rational consideration and proceeds irrationally. The essential characteristic of his rationality is, however, that it can to some extent foresee his own irrationality and circumscribe future conditions of action so as to make irrational action impossible. Elster also takes the case of Ulysses: that Ulysses tied himself to the mast and thus secured himself against the Sirens’ song is the strategy of precommitment of a rational person who avoids irrationality with selfbinding so that it is physically impossible for him to succumb to temptation. Other examples of such precommitment are, for example, the public promise (when an individual promises before friends that he will stop smoking), the spendthrift’s demand to be paid on a daily basis, so protecting himself from using up all his money, etc. If the problem of self-binding is translated into the language of psychoanalysis, we could say that the ‘precommitment’ expresses the subject’s split: the subject must struggle against his own ‘spontaneous’ tendencies by means of a symbolic commitment. The same holds for democratic societies: to prevent its own

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succumbing to the totalitarian temptation, the power itself sets up a whole series of self-binding mechanisms. States limit themselves with constitutions, independent judiciaries, international institutions, etc. The first method of self-binding in a democracy is with elections themselves – these prevent, as Lefort would say, anyone from permanently occupying the place of power. However, if the society were to be established only by the will of the majorities demonstrated by elections, then it would be unstable and unpredictable. What would happen if power were to accept socially damaging political decisions because of the preelection campaign? Power must also self-bind itself because of the longterm social interests. Mechanisms that enable this include a constituent assembly, a division of the legislative, executive and judicial powers, an independent banking system and, above all, independent media. If we have, on the one hand, the need for self-binding because of longterm social interests (and the interests of future generations), a need expressed in the limiting of present power, then, on the other hand, we also have the need to bind future generations. ‘The paradox of democracy can be thus expressed: each generation wants to be free to bind its successors, while not being bound by its predecessors’ (emphasis in original) (Elster, 1984: 94).1 The democratic pendant to Ulysses’ precommitment consists in binding future generations by means of creating a constitution with clauses, including clauses that prevent it from being easily changed (e.g. by a two-thirds majority being needed for a change to the constitution). The difference between the strategy of self-binding of an individual and of society is that each individual has, in addition to his own precommitment, also external laws which limit him and according to which he regulates his actions, while there is nothing that can be external to society: it depends on society itself what kind of self-binding it imposes. Societies cannot, as an individual can, deposit their will in a structure outside their control; they can always violate self-binding if they wish. Their only limitations are those which they placed in the law created by themselves. It is therefore necessary to pose the question: why self-binding? Let us try to give a first answer by returning to Benjamin’s thesis that an existing state is afraid of violence which is capable of changing legal relations and creating a new law. In this respect, self-binding could be a way of preventing such outbursts of founding violence: a state which limits the danger of strikes by allowing them and regulating their legal status in a way self-binds itself. Self-binding is therefore a way in which the state prevents potential self-destruction, i.e. a violence which would create new law. We can even say that self-binding prevents democracy from swallowing itself: as has already been said, a simple outvoting in parliament can trigger continuous instability of the state and unpredictability of its politics. So self-binding is not a gift of the state to others but a self-indulgence: the state limits the chaos of contingencies which could destroy it from within.

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However, this argument is unsatisfactory insofar as it is conceived in the sense of Monique Castillo’s thesis about self-binding as ‘a mystery of some indisputable will which limits itself from being even more indisputable, i.e. stronger’ (Castillo, 1988: 99). This thesis should be placed in the field of Foucault’s theory according to which a change in the form of punishment (e.g. the abolition of physical punishment) is only a change of strategy by the power – a transition to overall hidden control. Foucault was a revolutionary who mistrusted democracy: for him democracy is a false freedom, only a violence of another kind – control on the micro-level. Foucault describes this new form of control with the following example: A man who is chained up and beaten is subject to force being exerted over him. Not power. But if he can be induced to speak, when his ultimate recourse could have been to hold his tongue, preferring death, then he has been subjected to power. He has been submitted to government. (Foucault, 1988: 84) Despite the fact that in Foucault’s theory there is no discussion on the selfbinding of power, we could try to construct the argument of some imaginary Foucauldian. Such an argument would consist in affirming that self-binding can only be a transition from an open display of power to its hidden exercise on the level of micro-control. Within a Foucauldian perspective, the self-binding of democracy can only appear as a version of contemporary totalitarian state control – a power which is all the more pervasive for not appearing all-powerful. According to Foucault (1988), there is no power without potential refusal or revolt; yet this revolt, refusal, is for Foucault always internal to power itself. Revolts against power are integral elements of power, not some kind of negativity at work within power but rather a positive force of construction. That is to say, Foucault opposes the negative concept of power which conceives it as exclusion or repression, as a force of oppression. For him, power is essentially productive: power produces reality, the domain of objects and of the rituals of truth, and revolts are a part of this productive construction. In this light, self-binding would also be part of the internal game of power: it is the negation of power, which is only a new production of power, its enforcement on another level. To maintain such a notion of power, Foucault is obliged, however, to overlook the antagonism which is at work between law (legal power) on the one hand and its self-binding on the other. As Joan Copjec (1990) has pointed out, a psychoanalytical concept of law radically differs from that of Foucault, who conceives law as a norm based on power. Foucault denies the negative force of law; he does not see it as a prohibition, as censorship, but as a positive force of ‘construction’. For psychoanalysis, there is no affirmation without a negation internal to it, while for Foucault ‘negation

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is extracted from the process that installs the subject in the social’ (Copjec, 1990: 14). This process has no internal constraints, it always ends with its own realization, in the production of determinate properties and positions. In psychoanalysis, by contrast, negation (in the sense of rejecting one’s own desires) is essential to the formation of a subject.2 The self-binding of power expresses this antagonistic relation between desire and law. Democratic power is faced with the paradox of desire, with the fact that it has a desire not to desire (absolute power) – therefore it limits itself. The self-binding of democracy is not simply violence of another kind, nor is it simply the enforcement of power – precisely because democratic power is in antagonistic relation to itself. Democratic power is a power which refuses to be absolute.

DEMOCRACY VERSUS TOTALITARIANISM Now we can return to the performative circle of the retroactive legitimization of violence. In undemocratic societies, there is always some point of reference in the name of which violence is automatically legitimized (violence of founding power as well as violence of its preservation). In totalitarian Stalinist states, this point of reference was the future – the ideal future classless society, in the name of which the revolution took place and with reference to which the Party legitimized its terror. The Jacobins referred to the will of the people, in whose name the gains of the revolution were to be preserved by violence. The common characteristic of undemocratic societies is thus the closed performative circle of selflegitimacy where power is able to legitimize its actions retroactively without any constraint. Democracy, on the contrary, refuses by definition any single great legitimization. There is no particular element (the nation, the future) which would give unlimited legitimization to the violence of power. We can even say that in a democracy, the role of the future is the exact opposite of its role in totalitarianism. Far from legitimizing present violence, the reference to the future limits it. The democratic universe is defined by the fact that in it, the performative circle of retroactive legitimization of violence does not operate without impediment. In democracies, not everything can be legitimized retroactively, there are certain formal rules which pose limits to what can be legitimized by future gains – in other words, democracy is inherently anti-utilitarian. Democracy and totalitarianism are contrasted in the same way in terms of the value of their reference to the people. Democratic as well as totalitarian power claims to govern in the name of the people. As Lefort (1986) has stated, in totalitarianism, the distinction between the state and society disappears – power purports to ‘represent all the people’ and, as such, it conceives itself as an agency above the law and as the only generator of knowledge concerning the aims of society. Because of this immediate unity

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of power and people, totalitarian power can legitimize any kind of violence. Although democratic power also refers to the people, it is linked to the image of an empty space which cannot be filled out by any determinate social agency. In a democracy, the ‘people’ is not perceived as an organic totality (the totalitarian ‘People-as-One’), but as an universal, yet nonsubstantial entity. This antagonism is, precisely, essential to democracy – the notion, in other words, that power emanates from the people, but that it is the power of nobody, and that nobody can permanently occupy its place, prevents power from legitimizing itself in a closed circle. So we can say that in a democracy, ‘the people’ is the name for the self-binding of power. It is the name for that non-substantial X which prevents power from merging with any substantial basis (including ‘the people’ itself) and thus forces power to maintain a dialectical tension with society as its constitutive outside that limits forever its exercise. Another aspect of this opposition between totalitarianism and democracy concerns the relation of each to law and justice. In the terms of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the difference between law and justice is that between symbolic knowledge and act as Real. Justice is a decision, an act of judgement, which cannot be wholly founded in law. The judge must rest his judgement on the knowledge of law, yet the act of just decision is never a result of a simple application of the law – there is always a moment of singularity and contingency which clings to the act. The gap separating justice from law is thus unbridgeable: justice is done with reference to the domain of law, yet in its exercise it transgresses it. Totalitarianism knows that the law is incomplete, but it evades the split between justice and the law. In it, justice prevails in the form of an intuitive insight of the judge into the guilt of the accused – the judge does not actually need a basis in law for his verdict.3 Laws under totalitarianism are written so as to allow any favourable interpretation; justice is therefore above the law. Totalitarianism can pronounce in the name of justice that it is not necessary to respect particular laws. Thus for example some representatives of Nazi legal theory saw the judge’s role as evaluating the guilt of the accused from an internal perspective, by means of re-experiencing his inner spiritual attitude. Positive legislation in totalitarianism is only a formality, whereas insight is essential, since only this enables judgement in the light of justice. Democracy, however, maintains a split between law and justice: it accepts the fact that justice is ‘impossible’, that it is an act which can never be wholly grounded in ‘sufficient (legal) reasons’. It also knows that precisely because of this split, law can never be completely ‘just’. We could even say that law in itself is unjust – yet precisely in its injustice, it leaves open the space of democracy. Socialism was actually a characteristic example of a society without formal self-binding. So it was, paradoxically, simultaneously both stronger and weaker. On the one hand, it was an all-powerful state without limits which constantly

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self-legitimized its methods, and on the other, this power was shown to be quite empty when the system collapsed like a house of cards. The paradox of democracy is that the more it self-binds, the stronger it is, since self-binding gives it legitimacy. Under non-democratic regimes, self-binding is only a factitious thing: a wise government self-binds itself, but this is not a necessary and formal condition for the working of the system. In Real-socialism, at a time of ‘liberal’ leadership, power is relaxed a little. Yet this does not mean that the system has self-binding in principle – the relaxation simply expresses the insight of the rulers that the performative circle of legitimization, when it operates without restraint, leads to the state’s self-destruction. The danger which one encounters in new societies created on the grave of socialism is that, in their very democratic enthusiasm, they tend to overlook this constitutive self-binding of democracy. National euphoria, all sorts of quests for enemies (in the image of communists, Jews, excessive women, or members of other nationalities), can lead the new power to bow to the old totalitarian logic of retroactive legitimization of violence in the name of the nation or even in the name of preserving ‘democracy’ itself. The danger, in other words, remains that the new power will serve the old communist logic of the ‘two stages’ of constructing socialism, where the terror and sacrifices of the (present) first stage are legitimized as a necessary moment on the path towards the future opulent society. Here, the new, post-socialist version of this logic finds its expression in the principle that, because of the horrible legacy of communism, it is necessary to limit democracy in current society for the sake of future democracy. The thesis is appearing ever more often in Eastern Europe. We are now in a transitional phase towards democracy, when it is necessary not to be impatient, to unite all forces, to renounce criticism of the new authorities, etc. In its attempt to ‘secure’ democracy, the post-socialist state, for example, desperately tries to control the media: in Hungary by giving instructions that the media has to ‘speak the truth’, in Poland by passing administrative law that demands that the media report in accordance with Christian morality and does not act against the state interests, in Croatia by shutting down all media critical of the government using all kinds of legal and economic means, etc. As in the previous regime, selfcensorship is again at work among journalists and intellectuals because ‘you never know’ what consequences criticism of the government could bring. The ultimate tragedy of post-socialist Eastern European societies resides in the fact that the very logic of their defence of democracy bears the mark of its communist enemy. The attitute of the post-socialist leaders resembles the well-known joke about a tribe being asked by the anthropologists ‘Are there still cannibals among you?’, and the tribe answering ‘No, a week ago we ate the last one.’ Similarily, the post-socialist leaders often seem ready to eat the last cannibal in order to get rid of communist cannibalism.

Chapter 7

Crime as a mode of subjectivization

Socialism invented a specific kind of perversion linked to the law. Because the law did not function in socialism as a prohibition, but as a tool to achieve a certain goal – communism – the law continually transgressed itself. That the Party endlessly invented new laws and rewrote the constitution dozens of times reveals how the socialist regime functioned as a pervert who, by transgressing the law, always invents a new one. In socialism the transgression of the law became the law of transgression. This transgression of the law was inherent to the socialist regime; socialism was, in fact, a lawless society. People obeyed the law only if the Party forced them to do so; they did not identify with the system as such. But the question here is, how was it possible that the system functioned for such a long time? To better understand the lesson of socialism, we need to understand how individuals become social subjects, and a good way to do so is to consider cases where identification with the social symbolic order fails. As we have already seen apropos of socialist education, it is the apparent failure not the success of the system which provides a key to its functioning. This failure of the symbolic order emerges most clearly in the case of crime. Criminals are as a rule well-integrated into normal social life before they suddenly strike and commit some criminal act. Crime thus reveals the blind spot in our identification with the law, which is how we relate to the law in a very specific way. We are always first submitted to the law at work in ourselves our own superego.

THE TWO FATHERS In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Father is the one who subordinates the child to the principle of law; he acquaints the individual with the law of the symbolic order. The Father breaks apart the imaginary relationship between the mother and the child, and by introducing the child to the order of language, he makes the formation of the subject possible. When Lacan describes the role of the Father, he does not refer to the actual father but to the notion of the ‘paternal metaphor’, which he calls the ‘Name-of-the-Father’.

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As Lacan says: ‘It is in the name of the father that we must recognize the support of the symbolic function which, from the dawn of history has identified his person with the figure of the law’ (emphasis in original) (Lacan, 1977: 67). For the Name-of-the-Father to function, we do not need the actual father to be present. The mother’s relation to the symbolic Father is enough. But if the actual father is present, it is important how he appears in the mother’s discourse, because it is through her that his role – particularly as the one who questions and limits maternal desire – is mediated. Already in Freud’s theory, the role of the father is ambiguous. Freud himself speaks about two different figures of the father. On the one hand, there is the Oedipal father who is subordinated to the law and transmits this subordination to the children. The Oedipal father has a normative function: as the one who has the phallus, he regulates the ‘Desire of the Mother’ and introduces the subject to symbolic castration. Through his identification with the father, the subject develops his ego-ideal. Crucial to this process is that the father, who acquires his symbolic function through the Oedipal drama, is always originally a dead father.1 The father who forbids the incestuous relationship with the mother has to be murdered. For Freud, the murder of the father is the primary and the most crucial crime and every subject is guilty of it. Lacan’s point, however, is that this dead father functions as a signifier, as a Name-of-the-Father – the agent who binds the subject to the law and regulates his access to desire, so that his desire is subordinated to the law (see Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986: 134). The other figure of the father is the primordial father whom Freud describes in Totem and Taboo. This is the father with absolute power, the possessor of all women, the father who is not subordinated to the law – le père-jouissance, as named by Michel Silvestre (1987). And his death brings no liberation for the subject: with his death the power of his prohibition only becomes stronger. This other father, the cruel, obscene one, is the reverse side of the law. While the Oedipal father, who subordinates the subject to the law, functions at the level of the ego-ideal, the obscene, primordial father functions at the level of the superego: the cruel, obscene agent which binds the subject to enjoyment. But the superego is not an internalization of the law; it is not the regulator of desire; it is ‘the apparatus of enslavement of the subject to the imperative of enjoyment’ (Silvestre, 1987: 93). The antagonism between the Oedipal father and the father of enjoyment is linked to the antinomy between desire which is bound by the law, and enjoyment which is not. If the Other as the upholder of the law – the one which is called the Name–of–the–Father – establishes and legalizes desire in the phallic framework; the Other of enjoyment partially escapes this law. This Other

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who escapes ‘does not exist’ (Lacan) because of the lack of the signifier of enjoyment. (Silvestre, 1987: 102) The primordial father represents Freud’s attempt to embody the lack of this signifier of enjoyment, what Lacan came to call the objet petit a. For Lacan, the father Freud describes is a symptom; it functions as an attempt to resolve the antinomy between desire and enjoyment. Michel Silvestre refers Lacan’s thesis to this when he notes that the Oedipal father emerges as a return (a symptom) of the repressed primordial father. The murder of the primordial father reappears as a metaphor in the form of the Name-of-the-Father. ‘The myth of the primordial father reinforces the Oedipal myth, which is not able to harmonize the subject with the real of his drives’ (Silvestre, 1987: 101). The subject is confronted with the decision of whether to choose the father or objet a. This is the choice between the symptom and the object of desire. The neurotic is the one who chooses the object of desire. We can even say that with the neurotic, objet a is embodied in the fantasy of the primordial father as the possessor of lost enjoyment.

LAW AND GUILT What is the difference between the law which governs individuals in their inner selves and the law which governs them on the level of external, legal norms? Answers to this question are usually contradictory: some perceive the social law simply as a repression of the ‘sacred’ inner law, and others see the inner law simply as the internalization of the social norms. In the last chapter, I pointed out that the psychoanalytic definition of the law radically differs from Foucault’s definition, which perceives the law as a positive power of ‘construction’ and not as an internal blockade for the subject. For Foucault, the law does not prohibit a desire which already exists (incestual desire, for example) but it encourages us to speak about incest, and through doing this, to create the desire which did not exist before hand. At first glimpse psychoanalysis says the same thing when it perceives desire as a product of law: I can only know of the Thing by means of Law. In effect, I would not have had the idea to covet it if the Law hadn’t said: ‘Thou shall not covet it.’ But the Thing finds a way by producing in me all kinds of covetousness thanks to the commandment, for without the Law the Thing is dead. (Lacan, 1992: 83) However, the psychoanalytic notion of the law is different from Foucault’s because, for psychoanalysis, the subject produced by the law does not simply have a desire (for example, an incestuous desire), he also has a

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desire not to have a desire; he denies his desire. Psychoanalysis includes negation in the process of the constuction of the subject, and this is what Foucault leaves out. This negation is shown through the contradiction that exists between the subject and his desire. Although the desire is an effect of the law, it is not realized by the law (see Copjec, 1990).2 Psychoanalysis is thus interested in crime because of its relationship to law and not to the legal order per se. On the one hand, the illegality of the criminal’s act is of minor importance for the subject until he links the legal order to the law that made him a subject. On the other hand, there are acts which are criminal for the subject, but are not perceived as such by the legal system. These are so-called imaginary crimes in which the subject perceives himself as a criminal although he has commited no actual crime.3 By committing the crime, the criminal sometimes demands an agent which would recognize him as a subject. He wants the Other, the symbolic order, to respond to his crime by giving him an identity he did not have before. The one who usually responds to this appeal for the Other is the judge; his punishment can bring relief to the criminal because it bestows upon him recognition as a subject. The legal order, however, is trying to diminish or even to abolish the difference between itself and the law to which the subject is submitted. For law as a legal order, the only possible law of the subject is the internalization of the social norms. Legal systems do not perceive how the law to which the subject is submitted functions simultaneously as the ideal ego (the internalization of the benign, castrative father’s law) and the superego (the obscene, cruel side of the law). In Freud’s terms, the subject aims to find satisfaction through achieving the equilibrium of the pleasure principle and through obtaining the object of his desire. In relation to these aims, the social law functions as an agency which in a way ‘distributes’ the enjoyment in society. In this way the law thus becomes a field of sublimation of the good which corresponds to the subject. Utilitarianism states a similar thesis when it perceives the subject as someone who aims for a greater pleasure and a lesser pain. In the name of the common good, society assumes the task of adjusting such tendencies. Thus, for utilitarians, it is possible to guide people. And, as Bentham pointed out, the function of society is to submit the individual’s self-interest to the common good, thus making possible the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. To this argument, Lacan responds with a radically different thesis. As Joan Copjec explains: ‘Moral order is established, according to psychoanalysis, not in obedience to some reasonable or compassionate command to sacrifice our pleasure to the state, but because we recoil before the violence and obscenity of the superego’s incitement to jouissance, to a boundless and aggressive enjoyment’ (Copjec, 1989: 78). Because utilitarianism does not

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acknowledge the dimension of the superego, it fails to recognize that the subject does not function in accordance with his own interest and that the subject’s actions could be in opposition to his own good. The law as social order is a system of subjectivization, of making subject. When the law qua Name-of-the-Father stops functioning, the (legal) law becomes the focal point towards which the subject orients himself. The legal system thus takes on the role of the symbolic, dead father who submits the subject to the law. But most importantly this law steps in against the subject’s superego: its role is to limit the subject’s jouissance or unbearable enjoyment and not, as utilitarians say, to make it more possible. The notion of guilt provides a link between the normative order of the society and the normative order of the subject. So the subject is guilty before two ‘judges’: the society and the superego. As Freud pointed out, this obscure sense of guilt derived from the Oedipus complex and was a reaction to the two great criminal intentions of killing the father and having sexual relations with the mother. In comparison with these two, the crimes committed in order to fix the sense of guilt to something came as a relief to the sufferers. (Freud, 1988a: 318) To show how the feeling of guilt is linked to the murder of the primordial father, Freud (1988b) analyses the biography of Dostoevsky. The famous writer had had epileptic fits from his early youth, and during these fits he appeared as if he were dead, as a dead body without any sign of life. According to Freud’s interpretation, such attacks, in which the subject appears to be dead, reveal the subject’s identification with some dead person (either with someone who is already dead or with someone who is still alive but who the subject wishes to be dead). Such cases signify self-punishment: someone wishing the death of another person becomes dead himself. The person wished dead is usually the father: the epileptic fit thus embodies self-punishment for wishing the death of the hated father.4 This is precisely the kind of identification and self-punishment at work in Dostoevsky’s epilepsy. When his father later met a violent death, making Dostoevsky’s fantasy a reality, Dostoevsky’s illness got even worse. But Dostoevsky suffered no epilepsy during his exile in Siberia. It was as if he had no need of self-punishment when he was being punished in reality. Although he was innocent, he took the punishment as a substitution for the punishment he deserved for the sin against his father. ‘Instead of punishing himself,’ Freud concludes, ‘he got himself punished by his father’s deputy’ (Freud, 1988b: 452). According to Michel Silvestre’s thesis, the feeling of guilt operates to mislead the Other. The subject who commits an act for which he feels guilty has really devised a scheme to cover the guilty tracks leading back

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to the original crime – the patricide. Feeling guilty is thus a ploy through which the Other ‘by sanctioning the fault the subject has proposed, says nothing about the subject’s real guilt. . . . The subject proposes to the Other the fault for which he does not have to be guilty so that he can go on without acknowledging the truth of his guilt’ (Silvestre, 1987: 264). But if we accept Lacan’s thesis that the father is always already dead and that the primordial father never existed because he is only a retroactive symptom formation, then the problem of guilt also takes on a new meaning. The subject’s assumption of an original guilt thus becomes an attempt to conceal the fact that the father is dead already (in the sense that he has no power or authority) and not that the son had killed him. The son takes a murderer’s guilt upon himself to prevent his father from recognizing the truth that he is powerless and impotent. By assuming the guilt himself, the son tries to preserve the image of the father as the representative of the law. It could be said, therefore, that even the desire to kill the father is a scheme to conceal the father’s impotence. On another level, the subject takes the guilt upon himself to save the entire symbolic order from the knowledge of its inconsistency and powerlessness. The guilt thus conceals the fact that the big Other exists only to the extent that the subject presupposes the Other as an ideal order – a system, logic or discourse which assures the meaning and consistency of the subject’s action. And the same goes for the guilt in relation to the social law. The confession of guilt before a judge confirms the law. With our confession of guilt, we concede the power of the law and its consistency. We acknowledge the law as an agent which gives meaning to our act. We are thus caught in a circle: by assuming our guilt, we acknowledge the law; but the law has first to acknowledge us as capable of guilt. The law must therefore acknowledge us as subjects in advance. But the law assumes us as subjects precisely so that we can then give it legitimacy.

THE SYMBOLIZATION OF CRIME IN SOCIALISM The media, especially in the USA, are interested in discovering a chain of murders: these media favourites focus on unresolved murders insofar as these murders could be the work of a possible serial killer. The true object of their fascination is the serial murderer’s indifference to the legal order. What about the media in socialism? The socialist regime was primarily obsessed with so-called political crimes, the offences against the state. Those crimes allegedly occurred when people expressed unfavourable criticism of the Party or questioned the cause of communism. In response, socialist regimes notoriously conducted special trials against opponents of the government. During these trials, the accused was expected to plead guilty

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and to blame him or herself for having ‘wrong thoughts’ or for conspiring against the regime. Meanwhile, the socialist regime was not particularly concerned with ‘ordinary’ crimes. The media thus paid little attention to murders, robberies, etc. I have already pointed out the perverse logic of the socialist law which routinely transgressed the law and routinely invented new statutes. Official indifference to the ‘ordinary’ crimes against the socialist order arose because the law did not function as a presumably neutral point of authority. The law was always in the service of the communist cause. Thus the most serious offence against the law was opposition to the system and not ordinary criminal activity. The problem of mass and serial killers, for example, barely existed in socialism. Serial killers were perceived as negligible ‘outlaws’ compared to political opponents. Because the serial murderer, through his crimes, totally ignores the law and actually tries to become a law unto himself, we can begin to see how socialism’s indifference to serial killers is linked to how the socialist system itself transgresses the law in order to become a law unto itself. The serial killer thus reveals the ultimate lawlessness of socialism. Let us take the now famous ‘Chikatilo case’ in the former Soviet Union. Only after the system started to disintegrate under Gorbachev did the media and police start paying special attention to the chain of murders committed in the Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. When the murderer, Andrei Chikatilo, was finally arrested, a sudden light was thrown on the nature of the law in the former Soviet Union and on the role that crime played in it. The first striking fact about this case was that Chikatilo behaved as a loyal, obedient citizen who believed in the system: he was a Party member, he was always employed, he was a faithful husband and good father.5 So, he had never committed any crimes of disbelief in the system and he totally trusted the leader: If Stalin said it was a crime, it was a crime. It would have taken a person much stronger than Andrei Chikatilo to resist the temptation to believe that Stalin was right; life could be a crime, his father could be a criminal – Stalin was above all fathers, he was the Father of the Communism. And when Stalin died in 1953 Andrei Chikatilo wept, for he has lost a last protector. And he had so wanted to go to Moscow for the funeral, to offer his respect, but there hadn’t been any money, there was never any money. (Lourie, 1993: 9) The second surprise was that when Chikatilo was finally caught, the detectives who were part of the investigation were depicted suddenly as heroes, earning more media attention than the murderer himself. Invested in this attention to the detectives we find a particular desire: maybe the detectives had finally assumed their proper roles as the defenders of the

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law and had stopped being the Party apparatchiks they had been before. Making heroes out of the detectives thus reveals some kind of wish on the part of the people for the law to be taken seriously. After Chikatilo was arrested, numerous books were published worldwide describing the hunt for the killer, with vivid, detailed descriptions of the police investigation and warring accounts about who actually caught Chikatilo. The reality was much less dramatic. When the police started the serious search for the murderer by posting 360 men at the train stations where he usually operated, the murderer struck again, committing his last murder in an area under acute surveillance. How could the murderer remain undetected? According to one account, the answer was simple: ‘The plain-clothesmen involved in the surveillance had gone off to lunch.’6 This incident helps explain the role played by crime in the communist regime. A crime, such as murder, could be totally visible, could happen under the eyes of the police, but it did not really matter because it did not endanger the law. Only the invisible crimes, which people committed against the regime in their minds, really mattered. That is why in socialism, justice prevailed over the law. What was important was the insight into the offenders’ beliefs, not the facts about the alleged crime, because ‘the Party knew a criminal from an innocent person when it saw one’ (Krivich and Ol’gin, 1993: 106). In carrying out its anti-criminal activity, the socialist legal system found an ally in the psychiatric system through which dissidents were proclaimed insane and treated with electroshocks and massive doses of drugs. Chikatilo’s criminal activity reflects in a specific way the logic of the Soviet system. In order to make this clear we must take into account that the communist system was one in which everything was supposed to be visible to the eyes of the Party. Society was perceived as a completely transparent and controllable totality: every activity of the citizens was monitored from a hidden place of power (the Party, the secret police). We might say that it is this ‘over-visibility’ at work in communist society which provides the background for the psychotic attitude of Chikatilo. First let us recall Lacan’s definition of psychosis. Every screen of reality includes a constitutive ‘stain’, the trace of what had to be precluded from the field of reality in order that this field can acquire its consistency. This stain appears in the guise of a void Lacan names objet petit a. It is the point that I, the subject, cannot see. It eludes me insofar as it is the point from which the screen itself ‘returns the gaze’, watches me; i.e. the point where the gaze itself is inscribed into the visual field of reality. The invisibility, the preclusion of this stain is what allows the rest of the field to make sense. In psychosis, however, objet a is precisely not precluded. It materializes itself, it receives full bodily presence and becomes visible – for example, in the form of a pursuer who ‘sees and knows everything’ in paranoia.

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In communism, the Party and the secret police embodied this pursuer’s gaze. They played the role of the big Other who supposedly sees and knows everything; i.e. of the totally consistent big Other, the big Other without lack. This all-seeing and all-knowing agency prevents the subject from emerging, since the subject is formed by encountering the lack in the Other, which the subject fills out with the objet a, the object-cause of desire. For the subject it is essential that he or she is not wholly visible. Jacques-Alain Miller (1985/6) explains this with the help of the story of someone who is allowed to cross the border only when the customs officer says: ‘Go now, but I don’t want to see you anymore!’ It is essential that the Other does not see everything, because the field of reality gets its consistency only through ‘concealing the gaze in the vision’. If we take the case of Chikatilo, the total visibility characteristic of the communist order produced a psychotic state which in a specific way ‘forced’ him to commit his crimes. Let us recall the major motives from his life story which he entitled, A Biography of the Defendant A.R. Chikatilo, Citizen of the USSR, Victim of Famine and Cannibalism in 1933 and 1947, Stalinist Repressions, Stagnation and the Crisis of Perestroika. This strange title reveals Chikatilo’s desire to find clues for his acts in the Soviet system, in which he was always a true believer, even though, in his view, he was also its victim. He saw himself a victim, first, because his brother was allegedly the victim of cannibalism during the great famine (there is no proof that Chikatilo really had a brother), and second, because his father, a devoted communist, was sent to Siberia after he returned from the Second World War under the accusation of anti-Soviet activity. Chikatilo’s major problem was, however, that from his youth on, he was impotent and thus unable to engage in sexual intercourse. Although he married and even had two children, he usually failed in his attempts to have sex with women, and could at first only find satisfaction in masturbation and voyeurism (he watched children in the bathroom, when he was a teacher), and later by killing women and young men. In the years from 1978 until 1990, Chikatilo murdered fifty-three women, girls and boys, mostly by stabbing them, by removing their genitals or cutting off parts of their bodies (nipples, tongues, etc.), and sometimes by eviscerating them. Chikatilo found most of his victims in train stations where he persuaded them to follow him to wooded areas where he would later kill them. These killings were for Chikatilo a kind of ‘partisan’ ritual: ‘He ran around the mutilated bodies, waving the bloody pieces of flesh and imagining himself to be a courageous partisan fighter from one of his favourite books’ (Krivich and Ol’gin, 1993: 194). After murdering a victim, Chikatilo would presumably consume parts of the victim’s body. During these acts he reached the sexual climax he was otherwise unable to attain. Another of the essential features of Chikatilo’s crimes was that he usually either bound the victim’s eyes or obsessively stabbed the victim in the area around the eyes. It is this act of

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binding and stabbing the victim’s eyes that reveals Chikatilo’s psychotic state. In the act of murder, the psychotic targets in the victim are the objet a, the object that should have been but has not been precluded in reality, and thus embodies an ever present gaze which the subject cannot escape. The fact that in Soviet society all subjects were constantly under the gaze of the big Other effected Chikatilo’s libidinal economy. Chikatilo’s impotence can be seen as a reaction to this total visibility. If the Other ‘sees everything’, enjoyment is out of reach for the subject insofar as enjoyment is only possible in the gaps and holes of the Other; i.e. where the Other (the gaze of social control) cannot reach the subject. When Chikatilo committed his murders he was not afraid of being caught,7 because it was precisely through these acts of killing that he intended to escape the big Other. Thus he says: ‘At times I felt like I was concealed from other people by a black hood, which only allowed sounds in, and this hood protects me’ (Krivich and Ol’gin, 1993: 84). Chikatilo’s impotence disappeared only during the act of murder when the gaze, the objet a materialized in the victim, had been removed through stabbing or otherwise blinding the victim’s eyes. The objet a embodied in the victim was for Chikatilo a sublime object, thus Chikatilo literally tried to engulf this sublime object by eating parts of his victims. For the psychotic, the Other (the symbolic order) does not contain any lacks or gaps. The objet a, the paradoxical object/lack, is considered by the psychotic to be really present. Thus the psychotic with his passage à l’acte tries to ‘kill’ the objet a in the Other (another person) in a desperate attempt at normalization. The psychotic experiences the presence of objet a as an unbearable torment; when the psychotic strikes out at the objet a he does this in order to force the object from reality and to reopen the hole in reality, to make this reality ‘normal’ once again. Although he was an obedient citizen and a devoted communist, Chikatilo desperately tried to escape from the system by retreating into daydreams and asociality. At his workplace he was perceived as an absentminded, poor worker, who constantly forgot his tasks. Thus he preferred work which required minimal contact with other workers and a lot of travelling. It is important to point out that Chikatilo was never punished for poor work. The communist system not only protected loafers and incompetents as long as they obediently showed up at work and did not break any rules, but it actually needed workers like Chikatilo. People who behaved like cogs in a machine, people who always came to work, who silently obeyed the rules and did as little as possible were one of the cornerstones of the system. The dangerous elements were, therefore, people who tried to be outstanding, people who strayed from normality either by being too good at their jobs (those who tried to improve the system) or by rejecting work all together (vagrants, for example). Chikatilo was, in this regard, an ideal communist citizen.

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Chikatilo’s loyalty to the system was also visible in his obsessive hatred of vagrants. It is well known that vagrants’ refusal to work was strongly punished by the Soviet system because it was perceived as anti-socialist activity. But in Chikatilo’s hatred of vagrants, we may also recognize another desperate attempt to escape the gaze of the ever vigilant Other. Chikatilo envied vagrants their freedom, because they had the capacity he lacked – to escape the Other watching him. Paradoxically, Chikatilo rationalized his murders with the help of communist ideology. In his own words, using his favourite partisan rhetoric, Chikatilo likened his victims to ‘enemy aircraft’ he had to shoot down. Cast in this light, his murders were not crimes but acts of honour and heroism. Chikatilo’s ‘madness’ did not consist in the fact that he incorporated fragments of the ruling communist ideology in his psychotic private universe, but, on the contrary, in the fact that he took seriously the ruling communist ideology. He identified with it in an immediate way, without the distance which would have kept open the space of subjectivity. In other words, what he lacked was the cynical distance towards the ruling ideology that enabled the average Soviet citizen to ‘stay sane’. The average citizen publicly obeyed the communist rituals and did not openly question the position of the Party, all the while maintaining a private distance from it. In Chikatilo’s case, it is precisely the lack of this distance that resulted in his murderous activity. Far from being simply proof of his ‘madness’, his murderous passage à l’acte was rather a desperate attempt to reinstate a lack in the big Other – the symbolic space of the ruling ideology – and thereby to gain a distance from it. After Chikatilo was caught, he confessed, describing his murders in detail: the investigation gave him great pleasure because it placed him at the centre of attention. But during the trial Chikatilo, placed in an iron cage, acted like a madman: He suggested the judge would like to have sex with him, said he was a woman about to give birth, dropped his trousers to reveal his genitals, asked for a Ukrainian lawyer. It is likely that he was hoping to persuade psychiatrists that he was insane.8 After a disastrous trial with many obstructions of legal procedure and a superficial psychiatric report, Chikatilo was found guilty in 1992 and sentenced to death. That Chikatilo was not found to be insane is, of course, linked to the public demand for his execution. With the Chikatilo case, Soviet law presumably started functioning ‘normally’; the law had to be satisfied by imposing a proper punishment on the criminal. But even if Chikatilo’s behaviour in court was staged, his playing the part of a madman must also be understood as a symptom that reveals his desire to cease

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playing the role of the obedient citizen, maybe even his recognition that in a ‘mad system’ the only possible role to play is that of a madman. What about the feeling of guilt related to criminal activity? Chikatilo did not feel much guilt about his activity. But neither did those ‘ordinary’ people who cheated the system every day with small crimes related to improving their standard of living. If there was no feeling of guilt involved when people cheated the government, or their bosses, another, much graver feeling of guilt was related to their disbelief in the system. No revolt occurred during the so-called ‘normalization’ in the 1970s because everyone perceived him or herself as a potential enemy of the system. This feeling of guilt resulted from the invisible and visible terror of the Party power. But a psychoanalytic approach to the problem of guilt allows us to say that the internalization of guilt in socialism was also linked to how powerless the power actually was, despite its threats. People felt guilty primarily because they did not want to expose the big Other’s impotence; they did not want the order to collapse. Therefore, in socialism, it was a very special kind of guilt that held the system together. In this regard, there is a significant difference between the ‘normalization’ period and the time of the ‘revolutions’ of 1989. In 1989 this feeling of guilt disappeared altogether as people stopped trying to preserve the ‘face of power’; they allowed the Party’s impotence to be fully exposed. This disclosure of the big Other’s impotence emerges only for a brief moment during a ‘revolution’, in the time of emptiness, of founding violence, as Benjamin would say, when a new state and new laws are being formed. Such a moment of emptiness, of disbelief in the Big Other, occurred in the summer of 1989 when massive numbers of East Germans suddenly travelled to Hungary and crossed the border to Austria in front of the shocked but ‘impotent’ border guards. Or in the former Yugoslavia, when Slovene communists ceased to obey the rule of subordination to the Central Committee of the Yugoslav Communist Party. Likewise during the revolution in Romania, this moment occurred when people mockingly responded to Ceaucescu’s address to rallying demonstrators and, with the ‘velvet revolution’ in Czechoslovakia, when people went to the streets with candles and persisted in their demands for democracy. In all these cases we have the moment when people stopped fearing that their disobedience would cause the world to collapse. Such an attitude was not present during the Prague Spring, during student protests in the 1970s, or at the time of the critique of the communist regime from the side of the Praxis intellectuals. During all those protests, a belief in the big Other still prevailed. The protesters wanted to negotiate with the big Other. Praxis philosophers, for example, wanted the Party to establish a true socialism; the student protesters negotiated for a more equal, democratic regime; Prague Spring demonstrators wanted more freedom. These demands were therefore

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attempts to ‘reconstruct’ the regime not to ‘deconstruct’ it. Only in 1989 did the moment come when the grounds were opened for the system to collapse, because people ceased feeling guilty about their disbelief in the system. For the moment, there was no desperate search for a new point of identification, just a demand to get rid of the old, oppressive one. The moment of new closure came when the element of the nation came to fill out the emptiness which emerged after the collapse of the socialist ideology. When the state re-established itself and the legitimization of power began, the feeling of guilt re-emerged. It again became necessary to prevent the big Other’s impotence from being exposed. When, in post-socialism, the nation became the ultimate point of identification, one’s questioning of one’s national identity replaced the previous feeling of guilt in the face of totalitarian power – with new fantasies of love and hate sprouting all around.

Chapter 8

Why is a woman a symptom of rights?

In today’s ‘postmodern’ world, where universality has been challenged in almost all areas of social life, human rights maintain the status of something unquestionable and sacred. They stand as the last remnant of the Enlightenment to retain its universal character. When, for example, governments or opposition parties all over the world try to legitimize their politics, they invoke the universal rights of man. Human rights thus function as a normative imperative that is beyond politics and law. Before socialism collapsed, human rights also formed one of the main issues for which the opposition fought. But when the anti-communist forces came into power in Eastern Europe, human rights suddenly lost their importance, as if with the end of socialism, when the new government officially recognized the importance of human rights, the need to actually enforce such rights disappeared. Similarly for the rights of minorities and women, the new post-socialist governments acted as if the fall of socialism resolved all those particular inequalities and there was no need to care about them any more. Women in today’s East European countries especially reveal the ‘dark side’ of post-socialism. In the majority of the countries, women are in some ways worse off than they were under communism. Such things as abortion rights, maternity leave, and equality of employment were taken for granted by the previous regimes. But the new regimes question these rights. Women thus have to fight for the rights they once already had. The same goes for the participation of women in politics. Communists tried to increase the number of women in the parliament by establishing quotas and by seeking out the devoted communist women who would fulfil these quotas; but the new governments usually do not care at all that in the majority of the East European parliaments a very low percentage of the delegates are women. The transition to democracy in Eastern Europe thus did not bring about emancipation for all the people: women were actually forced to accept even more in the way of patriarchal roles than they had to under the socialist regime. The status of women in post-socialism is, in fact, not very different from that of women in right-wing capitalist societies. The problem of women’s

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rights in post-socialism touches the very problem of human rights as such: to what extent are human rights also women’s rights?

THE ISSUE OF RIGHTS IN FEMINIST LEGAL THEORY Feminist legal theory finds the notion of human rights utterly problematic because of its patriarchal character. For the majority of feminist theorists, two objections immediately arise over the notion of human rights: first, the abstract character of the notion itself; and second, the individualism on which this notion is based. Responding to the first objection, Frances Olsen (1992), for example, writes that the discourse of rights cannot solve social conflicts but can only serve to reformulate them in an abstract, final form. In her opinion, the discourse of rights allows us to see sexuality only in terms of social control and sexual freedom: the discourse of rights defines sexual freedom and thus indirectly allows new forms of sexual violence. In terms of the second objection, Carol Gilligan (1982) argues that women, because they tend to ‘reason in a different voice’ are less likely than men to privilege individual, abstract rights over concrete relationships and are more attentive to the values of care, connection and community. In summarizing feminist critiques of human rights, one could say that human rights are actually men’s rights, and the state uses them as a means to control sexuality. Furthermore, human rights represent individuals as utterly separate one from another while masking concrete relationships of domination, particularly patriarchal domination. From the perspective of the majority of feminist legal theorists, human rights reflect a male viewpoint characterized by objectivity, distance, and abstraction or, as Catherine MacKinnon puts it: ‘Abstract rights will authorize the male experience of the world’ (MacKinnon, 1991: 195).1 Feminist legal theory locates the main reason for the patriarchal character of human rights in the theoretical premises of liberalism. In particular, Robin West’s reproach to modern American legal theorists insists that all of them, regardless of their liberal or critical (Marxist) backgrounds, explicitly or implicitly embrace the ‘separation thesis’ about what it means to be a ‘human being’. The ‘separation thesis’ claims that the ‘distinction between you and me is central to the meaning of the phrase “human being” and that individuals are distinct and not essentially connected with one another’ (West, 1991: 201). Problematically, separation is perceived not only as physical separation but as an epistemological and moral precondition of any possible co-operation between human beings; such separation is also held to be necessary for the origin of law. Robin West rejects this position because, in her opinion, the ‘separation thesis’ may be ‘trivially true’ for men, but is patently untrue of women. Women are not essentially, necessarily, inevitably, invariably, always, and forever separate from other human beings: women, distinctively, are quite

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clearly ‘connected’ to other human life when pregnant. . . . Indeed, perhaps the central insight of feminist theory of the last decade has been that women are ‘essentially connected’, not ‘essentially separate’, from the rest of human life, both materially, through pregnancy, intercourse, and breastfeeding, and existentially, through the moral and practical life. If by ‘human beings’ legal theorists mean women as well as men, then the ‘separation thesis’ is clearly false. If, alternatively, by ‘human beings’ they mean those for whom the separation thesis is true, then woman are not human beings. It’s not hard to guess which is meant. (West, 1991: 202) What strikes us in this argument is that it could just as easily be promoted by advocates of the moral majority. The ideology of the moral majority, in another context, says the same thing: women are essentially linked to children and because of this are more warm, more compassionate, etc. The moral majority would also agree that people today are too separated from one another and that we need to return to some kind of ‘real connection’. However, while such advocates would argue against ‘separation’ in order to impose the view that the place of women is at home (where a woman can always be ‘connected’ with her husband and children and thus find the expression of her true ‘essence’), Robin West’s intention is, on the contrary, to find ways to overcome patriarchal domination. The tension between ‘separation’ and ‘connection’ as well as the critique of human rights in feminist legal theory touches on one of the major problems of feminist theory – the notion of the Cartesian cogito. The majority of contemporary feminist theorists oppose the notion of the cogito: the cogito, as the abstract notion of a subject, is perceived as a partiarchal notion per se, which renders philosophy as such patriarchal. According to this view, the notion of the cogito provides the basis for the universality of male domination, as well as for ‘separation’ of individuals; i.e. in the framework of the cogito the individual is perceived as an abstract entity, separated from other individuals. The most common feminist approach to the notion of the cogito rejects the cogito primarily on the grounds that it is falsely neutral: behind its presumed neutrality lies a series of hidden presuppositions which align a masculine subjectivity to it more easily than a feminine subjectivity.2 Such a feminist critique intends not only to stress that the cogito is not neutral enough and that, in order to make it truly neutral, one has to cleanse it of the remainders of male precedents, especially since it is already the very neutrality of the cogito which implies male prerogatives. Feminists usually go on to stress that in Descartes’s philosophy the cogito is linked to the rigid opposition of the two substances – mind–body, or subject–object – which reduces the body to res extensa, to inanimate matter subjected to mechanical laws and governed by technical manipulation. This notion of

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the body involves the correlative notion of the subject perceived as a fixed self-identical entity standing opposed to reality regarded as the object of possible technical manipulation. And in the modern universe, this position of a fixed self-identical subject is clearly a male position.3 That is to say, in the division of work brought about with capitalist society, man is perceived as the upholder of knowledge and of the working process, in contrast to woman, who is excluded from this process and constrained within the privacy of family life. Women are perceived as non-rational beings, subjected to passions: they are passive victims of the affective mechanisms that govern their inner lives, who ‘can only ever look at history in terms of little stories, through the wrong end of their opera glasses’ (Le Doeuff, 1989: 2). From this perspective emerges a constant motif in post-Cartesian philosophy that regards women as passive, impressionable human beings who, in contrast to men, are not able to purify their souls and attain the reflective attitude of an objective observer, a bearer of impartial knowledge. Criticizing this philosophical notion of women, feminism usually reaches the conclusion that it is necessary to affirm a specifically feminine form of subjectivity that involves a different attitude towards the world, one involving dialogue instead of domination, plurality of particular links instead of the reign of an abstract universality, etc. Current feminist challenges to the cogito lose some of their force when we recall that, in the seventeenth century, when Descartes was inventing his notion, some women tended to embrace the cogito as a liberating idea. These women, self-styled Cartesians, with whom Descartes corresponded and debated his ideas, regarded the cogito as a way to overcome patriarchal domination. For them, the cogito confirmed that ‘mind has no sex’ and that ‘anyone can fill the place of the individual subject’ (Harth, 1992: 73) because the notion of subject as such has no sex. If Descartes still thought of the cogito as a ‘thinking thing’, with Kant the cogito became the locus of a non-substantial subjectivity. In Kant’s view, the cogito, as the empty form of apperception, does not have any positive ontological consistency in itself. As such, the cogito is neither male nor female: thus, we cannot say that it is essentially patriarchal. On the contrary, it is the very non-substantiality of the cogito, its abstract character, which enables us to discern features of patriarchal domination. Lacan, who has been cited as one of the last ‘Cartesian orphans’ (Jardine, 1985), discovered in the notion of the cogito this Kantian potential. First of all, Lacan radically desubstantializes the cogito by showing how Descartes’s reading of the cogito as res cogitans reveals that Descartes misunderstood his own invention. Cogito is definitely not ‘a thing which thinks’, instead it is a thoroughly empty form, a substanceless point of selfreflection. And Lacan’s wager is that, on the ground of this substanceless void of the cogito, it is possible to formulate sexual difference. Here we have to take into account Lacan’s seemingly paradoxical assertion that the

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subject of psychoanalysis is none other than the Cartesian subject of modern science. This subject emerges by way of the radical desexualization of the human relationship to the universe. That is to say, traditional wisdom was thoroughly anthropomorphic and ‘sexualized’, its comprehension of the universe structured by oppositions bearing an indelible sexual stamp: yinyang, Light-Darkness, active-passive. On this anthropomorphical model, the relation between the microcosm and the macrocosm, between the parallel structures of human beings, society and universe, was perceived in terms of both correspondence and organic unity. For example, the birth of the universe was derived from the coupling of the earth and the sun; society was regarded as a body politic with the monarch as its head, workers as its hands, etc. In modern society, in contrast, we are confronted with a non-anthropomorphic reality perceived as a blind mechanism which ‘speaks the language of mathematics’ and which can be expressed only through inherently meaningless formulas. In this society, every search for a ‘deeper meaning’ of phenomena inevitably fails. The modern subject thus emerges without any support in the universe and searches in vain for traces of its meaning. The pain of adapting to such a reality is evident from the recent return of an anthropomorphic-sexualized worldview in the guise of pseudo-ecological wisdom (‘new holism’, ‘new life paradigm’, etc.). It is against this background that we can measure the extent of Lacan’s achievement: he was the first to outline the contours of a non-imaginary, non-naturalized theory of sexual difference, of a theory which radically breaks with anthropomorphic sexualization (‘male’ and ‘female’ as the two cosmic principles, etc.). For Lacan ‘the formulation of sexual difference and sexual desire are not tied to any essential body’ (Brennan, 1990: 301). This is why drawing a parallel between Lacan’s ‘formulas of sexuation’ and Kant’s antinomies of pure reason is fully justified. In Lacan, neither ‘masculine’ nor ‘feminine’ is a predicate that provides positive information about the subject or designates some of its phenomenal properties; ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ is rather a case of what Kant conceives of as a purely negative determination, one which merely marks a certain limit. More precisely, such a negative determination registers a specific modality of how the subject failed in its bid for an identity which would constitute it as an object within phenomenal reality.4 Lacan thus moves as far as possible from the notion of sexual difference as the relationship of two opposite poles which complement each other, together forming the whole of ‘Man’. ‘Masculine’ and ‘feminine’ are not the two species of the genus Man but rather the two modes of the subject’s failure to achieve the full identity of Man. ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ together do not form a whole, since each of them is already in itself a failed whole. We must also abandon the idea that before modern society (established on the notion of the Kantian cogito) there existed a society where patriarchal domination did not exist in a form as explicit as it is now. In pre-Cartesian

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society sexual difference as such did not exist; society was organized as a sexual community per se and functioned as an extended family. This society was a hierarchic organization: people were born into their social roles (of rich or poor, of women or man). Patriarchal domination was therefore universal, spread throughout the whole of society. When, with the advent of modernity, society became an organization of autonomous individuals and previous sexual communities were replaced by national communities, patriarchy had to affirm itself in an implicit, masked way. Only when people were perceived as formally equal did sexual difference as such become thinkable. With this claim, I do not intend to contradict the feminist thesis that philosophy is marked by patriarchal ideology.5 My point is simply that the foundation of this ideology is not the cogito as feminists currently perceive it and, on the contrary, that the very notion of the cogito can provide ways to overcome patriarchy. It is possible to answer Robin West’s criticism of liberal theory, as a theory that wrongly defines the subject as separated from other subjects, on two levels. First, psychoanalytic as well as Foucauldian and deconstructionist feminist theory has for decades strongly opposed the view of the subject held by Robin West. When she speaks about women as connected, West implicitly views the subject in a biologically determined and fixed way. The contribution of modern feminist theory is not, as Robin West says, the view that ‘women are essentially connected’ with other human beings, but rather, what feminist theory does is to analyse the effects of the patriarchal ideology which perceives of women as connected, warm, etc. Second, in opposing the liberal ‘separation thesis’ feminist theory does not recognize that it is the Kantian subject, on which liberal theory is grounded, which also makes it possible to think of intersubjectivity. The Kantian subject, as an empty form of apperception, is always in need of another subject to ground its identity: as long as I am an empty, split subject, what I am is always linked to what the Other (in the sense of another human being, as well as the symbolic order) thinks I am.6 Human rights in the modern sense of the term can only appear within the space of intersubjectivity established by the Kantian cogito. Before Kant, rights were defined vertically and were understood as granted by some power beyond human beings (God, for example). With Kant, rights became established horizontally: the rights of one individual are defined in opposition to the rights of another (see Ferry, 1990). The point is that the rights of another individual not only limit our rights but also define them. When we perceive another individual as someone who has rights, we recognize him or her as the agent who defines what we are, what kind of rights we have. It is not only feminist theory that scrutinizes the notion of human rights. All major philosophical schools today take some position on the issue of human rights. On the one hand, so-called postmodern theorists ask how

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we can understand the narrative of human rights when we do not believe anymore that its claims are true or that meta-narratives are even possible. Instead of searching for first principles and meta-norms, postmodernists analyse the discursive form of the notion of rights and read this form as a part of the historically limited Enlightenment project which today has lost its relevance. Neo-Kantians, on the other hand, speak in favour of the notion of human rights and try to give it a new philosophical foundation. Richard Rorty’s pragmatism lies somewhere between these two positions: pragmatism is in principle critical of the notion of universal human rights but, at the same time, it tries to preserve the institutions (of legal order) which were originally established on the basis of the notion of rights. The problem we must address is how to think the universality of human rights in relation to the differences and antagonisms that traverse society. One such difference is sexual difference and in this chapter I will discuss the supposed patriarchal nature of rights from a different perspective than that of feminist legal theory. My aim is to highlight the ‘feminine’ logic, the particularity that is implicit in the notion of human rights itself and that has to be reconsidered if the universality of human rights is to acquire a new meaning. But in the first instance, I take a detour through the contemporary philosophical debates on human rights.

PHILOSOPHY AND HUMAN RIGHTS In contemporary philosophy, the relevance of the notion of human rights is proven or rejected according to how one decides on the question of whether unjust laws can be legitimately resisted. Answers to this question differ in Neo-Kantian and Foucauldian theory. Neo-Kantians argue that it is necessary to have some regulative principles according to which people orient their behaviour and judge the justness of the law itself. For NeoKantians, the notion of human rights is a kind of regulative ideal that has to be postulated as the principle of our action, although it is a principle that always remains, in some way, unrealizable. Without the idea of human rights or of some principle of the subject’s autonomy, they argue, there is no way to judge the injustice of existing laws (see Renaut and Sosoe, 1992). Foucauldians, on the contrary, resist this idea of regulative principles and argue for a genealogical demystification of the notion of human rights which would reveal the historical determination of the notion itself. To summarize the position of the Foucauldians: in resisting unjust laws, there is no need to appeal to some universal human rights, because it is unproductive to judge power relations in terms that are part of the relations of power. Law is also always linked to the mechanisms of power: therefore it is not in a position to judge power. Foucault did not perceive law as a model or code, thus he resisted the notion of human rights as well as the valorization of the state run in accord with the rule of law. When the state

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claims that it is a democratic state governed according to the rule of law, for Foucault (1980), this is only a sacralization of law as part of a strategy or process of domination, just as human rights are invoked to justify a strategy of power in a specific legal-discursive game. The subject becomes part of this game when it articulates its relation to power in the apparently neutral language of fundamental rights and freedoms. Foucault’s colleague François Ewald (1986) goes even further, arguing that law as such does not exist; there are only laws and legal practices. For Ewald, as for Foucault, law is always historically determined, therefore they reject references to any universal norms or rights and argue for a genealogical critique of normative praxis. The Neo-Kantian objection to Foucault is that, by ‘drowning law in history’, he loses the means to judge illegitimate legal praxis. For Neo-Kantians, only a reference to natural law (or universal human rights) enables us to critically evaluate different historical examples of law. To judge the effectiveness of laws, we have to have some ahistorical or extra-political regulative idea. This critical role pertains to the law itself, as long as law is always distinct from the facts it judges. If law is perceived only as a historically determined discursive praxis, this split between facts and values is lost. For Neo-Kantians, in this case, law would lose all of its meaning. The relevance of Kantian philosophy for understanding the notion of human rights can be shown on another level. The Kantian notion of the abstract, empty subject can be used to establish the theoretical basis for democracy. The essence of democracy is that it can never be made to the measure of concrete human beings: the basis of democracy is the subject as a pure empty place. Democracy is always only a formal link between abstract subjects. As soon as we try to fill it out with concrete, ‘human’, content, we risk falling into totalitarianism. And the same goes for human rights: as an answer to the question ‘Who is the subject of human rights?’, we can only say that here too we find the empty subject, the cogito. Marx’s critique of the notion of human rights centred on precisely this abstract character of its bearer, the abstract subject which lies at the core of the idea of human rights. Marx saw the notion of human rights as a product of bourgeois ideology which, by establishing the abstract categories of human equality and freedom, tried to mask existing relations of domination in capitalist society and the actual inequality and unfreedom of concrete individuals. But as Claude Lefort (1986) argues in his critique of Marx, the very opposite is true: human rights are one of the essential elements of democracy precisely because they are grounded on the idea of the abstract individual. The contribution of human rights to democracy lies in the fact that human rights can never be totally defined, that their character cannot be determined in full, that they cannot be enumerated. Thus society needs to continually invent new rights. For Lefort, the very

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fact that it is impossible to determine the character of the bearer of human rights is what gives the idea of rights its critical potential: The rights of man reduce right to a basis which, despite its name, is without shape, is given as interior to itself and, for this reason, eludes all power which would claim to take hold of it – whether religious or mythical, monarchical or popular. (Lefort, 1986: 258) As a result, for Lefort, such rights extend beyond any formulation imposed on them; in fact ‘their formulation contains the demand for their reformulation’; nor are acquired rights ‘necessarily called upon to support new rights’. Thus Lefort concludes, rights cannot be assigned to a particular period, as if their meaning were exhausted by the historical function they were called upon to fulfill in the service of the rising bourgeoisie, and they cannot be circumscribed within society, as if their effect could be localized and controlled. (ibid.) Lefort strongly opposes theorists who perceive the notion of human rights as some kind of relic from the past, long stripped of its significance. He stresses that human rights, because of their abstract character and indefinability, cannot be situated in a specific historical era. This means that they cannot be genealogically analysed, as Foucaudians would like, nor can their effects be measured or controlled. The concept of human rights therefore retains its potential for critique of actual historical circumstances as long as it remains an empty, universal idea. Thus, while it is a mistake to place the idea of human rights in a specific historical context (as historicists try to do), it is also useless to search for some intrinsic human nature at the core of the idea of human rights (as natural rights theory tries to do). Marxists and Foucauldians make a similar mistake in rejecting the notion of human rights. When Marxists perceive human rights as an abstract idea masking real social antagonisms, and when Foucauldians consider human rights as an historically determined discursive praxis entrapped in the game of power, both camps miss the point that the abstract idea of human rights establishes the locus within which a split between law and power first arises. Human rights mark the point at which the allencompassing power of political institutions is suddenly negated. One can respond in the same way to the thesis of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), according to which the advocacy of abstract human rights does not help change concrete relations of domination in society or reduce the gap between rich and poor.7 CLS theorists do not recognize that it was only by virtue of the notion of abstract human rights that people first acquired the

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means to assess social injustice: this abstract idea first enabled people to articulate social differences in the language of law. When CLS theorists argue that society is in principle unjust and that we have to change it – instead of simply legitimizing the state by speaking about human rights – they fall into the same trap into which the advocates of communism had fallen. Communist legal theorists argued that their communist system was in principle the most just system in the world, thus they did not need the bourgeois idea of human rights; all they had to do was to realize communist ideals in everyday life.8 Both CLS theorists and communists thus say the same thing in different words: we have to counter abstraction by fighting for concrete changes; or in a vulgar jargon – we have to get to work instead of theorizing. But both theories, by rejecting the abstract idea of human rights, negate the inner logic of democracy. Thus Lefort argues that modern democracy is founded upon, the legitimacy of a debate as to what is legitimate and what is illegitimate – a debate which is necessarily without any guarantor and without any end. The inspiration behind both the rights of man and the spread of rights in our day bear witness to that debate. . . . The singular thing about the freedoms proclaimed at the end of the eighteenth century is that they are in effect indissociable from the birth of the democratic debate. Indeed, they generate it. We therefore have to accept that whenever these freedoms are undermined, the entire democratic edifice is threatened with collapse, and that, where they do not exist, we look in vain for the slightest trace of it. (emphasis in original) (Lefort, 1988: 39)

PRIVATE NARCISSISM AND PUBLIC PRAGMATISM American pragmatism trys to compromise between the postmodern rejection of universal human rights and the actual political need to retain the liberal institutions established on the discourse of rights. Pragmatism thus offers a third approach, which addresses the pragmatic need to form a stable liberal democratic society, but which does not glorify some universal notion of freedom, equality or the common good. A society based on pragmatic principles would allow people and their communities to choose the moral codes that would regulate their lives. The leading contemporary American pragmatist, Richard Rorty, calls ‘Kantians’ philosophers who understand ‘rationality’ and ‘morality’ as transcultural and ahistorical categories and ‘think there are such things as intrinsic human dignity, intrinsic human rights, and an ahistorical distinction between the demands of morality and those of prudence’ (Rorty, 1991 : 197). On the other hand, Rorty calles ‘Hegelians’ those philosophers who

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say that ‘there is no human dignity that is not derivative from the dignity of some specific community’ (ibid.). American ‘Hegelians’ thus defend liberal institutions on the ground of solidarity and not on the grounds of some ahistorical moral category. Rorty does not believe in ahistorical moral categories or intrinsic human values (or in humanity as such) but only in the values that are part of one’s community. For Rorty, the position to be taken in regard to the universal notions of freedom, equality, etc., is that of ‘postmodern bourgeois liberalism’: postmodern because it does not believe in meta-narratives (stories about such entities as the noumenal self, Absolute Spirit or the Proletariat); and bourgeois because liberal institutions and practices are possible only in the specific historical and economical circumstances of contemporary capitalist society. As for human rights, Rorty argues that meta-ethical discussions of their existence have as little relevance to everyday ethical dilemmas as the question of God’s existence. Furthermore, Rorty objects to bourgeois liberals who have not yet embraced postmodernism on the grounds that they still rely on the rationalist rhetoric of the Enlightenment to support their liberal ideas: These liberals hold on to the Enlightenment notion that there is something called a common human nature, a metaphysical substrate in which things called ‘rights’ are embedded, and that this substrate takes moral precedence over all merely ‘cultural’ superstructures. (Rorty, 1991: 207) This position, Rorty argues, leads these liberals into a paradox as soon as they ask themselves ‘whether their belief in such a substrate is itself a cultural bias’. The problem for liberals is that they are committed, on the one hand, to Enlightenment rationalism and, on the other hand, to cultural diversity. According to the first of these commitments, it is not possible to doubt human equality; while according to the second, it is necessary to admit that most of the globe does not believe in equality, that belief in equality is primarily a Western idea. For Rorty the only way to resolve this inconsistency is to abandon the transcultural criteria of rationality with which the Enlightenment had hoped it could justify liberal ideas and specify limits to liberal tolerance. Pragmatism’s answer to this dilemma is: ‘we are going to have to work out the limits case by case, by hunch or by conversational compromise, rather than by reference to stable criteria’ (Rorty, 1991: 208). If we can no longer rely on transcultural categories, our only option is to go back to such ethnocentric terms as ‘being a Christian, or an American, or a marxist, or a philosopher, or an anthropologist, or a postmodernist bourgeois liberal’. Only by doing this can we tell ‘where we are coming from’, through our contingent spatio-temporal affiliations. Rorty stresses that such an ethnocentrism does not intend to work against liberal institutions or human rights; it only wants to be an ‘ad hoc philosophical therapy’ which would urge liberals to

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take with full seriousness the fact that the idea of procedural justice and human equality are parochial, recent, eccentric cultural developments, and that to recognize this does not mean they are any less worth fighting for. (ibid.) Rorty finds that the only alternative lies in pointing out the practical advantages of liberal institutions that do not prescribe one conception of good and that allow individuals and cultures to get along together without intruding on each other’s privacy. You cannot have an old-timey Gemeinschaft unless everybody pretty well agrees on who counts as a decent human being and who does not. But you can have a civil society of the bourgeois democratic sort. All you need is the ability to control your feelings when people who strike you as irredeemably different show up at City Hall, or the greengrocers, or the bazaar. When this happens, you smile a lot, make the best deals you can, and, after a hard day’s haggling, retreat to your club. There you will be comforted by the companionship of your moral equals. (Rorty, 1991: 209) Rorty thus advocates a mixture of private narcissism and public pragmatism; i.e. a society where people will not be interested in what goes on in the ‘club’ on the other side of the ‘bazaar’. But in this society, it is necessary to follow the rules that will allow the ‘bazaar’ to stay open and that will ensure the functioning of the institutions of procedural justice. The problem with Rorty’s argument is that in reality such a ‘bazaar’ and such ‘clubs’ are not really possible. Rorty overlooks how the subject, as long as it is the subject of desire, is constituted by the desire of the Other (not only the Other of the symbolic order, but also the concrete other in the club on the other side of the bazaar). It is not possible to have a society in which people would not intrude into the privacy of others, where there would not be envy and where each subject’s activity would not be essentially determined by what the other does.10 And the same problem undermines Rorty’s conception of ‘public pragmatism’; i.e. the need to form neutral institutions, legal mechanisms that would guarantee ‘private narcissism’. The question is, is not the very notion of human rights, on which political mechanisms and institutions are based, also determined by the logic of desire?

PSYCHOANALYSIS AND HUMAN RIGHTS Joel Feinberg (1980) tries to justify the notion of rights in yet another way, negatively, by hypothesizing the existence of an imaginary ‘world without

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rights’, called ‘Nowheresville’. In this town life would go on as anywhere else, the only difference being that people in Nowheresville would have no rights. Even more significantly, people in this town would not know the notion of rights at all; i.e. they would not be encumbered by thinking about what rights are, who possesses them and who does not. But without the knowledge of rights, the inhabitants of Nowheresville would not be able to make claims either. If the people were prevented from doing something, or if they felt that some injustice had been done, they would not be able to demand change or retribution by invoking the rightness of their cause. In such a situation, the people of Nowheresville could use force to get what they want, but they could not justify their use of force by referring to universal rights. Without a notion of rights, the citizens of Nowheresville cannot think in terms of what is their due: thus they cannot claim before they take (see Feinberg, 1980: 148). The connection between rights and demands, however, emerges as much more complicated when explained with the help of Lacanian distinctions between need, demand and desire. For Lacan the concept of need is linked to the natural or biological requirements of human beings (food, for example). But for human beings it is essential that these needs are never manifest as purely natural needs. Needs are always defined by a symbolic context: if we are hungry, for example, we do not simply grab the first available food, but rather we think about what we shall eat and then prepare food in a special way. When put into words, a need becomes articulated in the symbolic order. At this moment, we start to perceive it as a demand – as a demand to the Other to satisfy the need. On the level of demand the subject asks the Other for a specific object (the child, for example, wants food) which is supposed to fulfil a need, but by articulating this need as a demand the subject also asks the Other for its love (by demanding food the child also demands love and attention from the mother). The object of demand thus becomes the subject’s means of attaining this other goal – the attention or love of the Other. At this point the third element of the triad, desire, emerges: desire arises as the excess of demand over need, as something in every demand that cannot be reduced to a need. As Lacan argues: ‘desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second’ (Lacan, 1977: 287). Or in other words: Desire takes shape in the margin in which demand is torn apart from need: this margin being that which is opened up by demand, the appeal of which can be unconditional only in regard to the Other, under the form of the possible defect, which need may introduce into it, of having no universal satisfaction (what is called ‘anguish’). (Lacan, 1977: 311; trans. modified)

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The subject expects from the Other (the mother, for example) that it will wholly fulfil the subject’s demand for love, and when this does not happen, anguish arises. In its desperate appeal to the Other who will fulfil its lack, the subject also encounters a lack in the Other. This is the moment when the child learns that the mother is not all-powerful, that she is not the perfect Other who will always guess what the child wants. The subject therefore encounters the reality that what it lacks is not present in the Other because the Other is also lacking. Lacan symbolizes this lack in the Other with an Ø – the signifier of the lack in the Other, the signifier of the barred Other. This is the signifier that all other signifiers turn around, the signifier that does not follow the logic of other signifiers. All other signifiers represent the subject for another signifier. S (Ø), on the other hand, is the signifier ‘for which all the other signifiers represent the subject: that is to say, in the absence of this signifier, all the other signifiers represent nothing’ (Lacan, 1977: 316). The signifier of the lack in the Other concerns what is not possible to symbolize, the irreducible ‘remainder’ in any symbolization, that which cannot be articulated in language. This notion of the lack in the Other allows us to further specify the status of the object. The object that was lost in the passage from need to demand now comes back as the object cause of desire – which Lacan calls objet petit a. It is the object that embodies the surplus of demand over need, the object that stands in for the emptiness which the subject encounters when its demand remains unsatisfied. The objet a ‘represents what the Other lacks in order to be absolute, represents the lack itself as the irreducible remainder in any signification’ (Benvenuto and Kennedy, 1986: 176). How does this Lacanian triad apply to the question of rights? With his hypothetical example of Nowheresville, Joel Feinberg touches on only one moment of this triad – demand. But the problem of Nowheresville is not only that, because of the nonexistence of the very concept of rights, people would not be able to assert claims. In fact the people in Nowheresville would not even be able to define their needs as demands or claims. Need is always symbolically mediated: it is never directly expressed. Something is recognized as need only in retrospect, when it is articulated in language; i.e. when it acquires the form of the demand to the Other. Only in the framework of symbolic organization is need reflected as demand and is thus capable of being recognized as such. Nowheresville cannot be said to possess a symbolic organization: the nonexistence of the notion of rights means that symbolic organization does not exist. Nowheresville would be a kind of pre-Oedipal society of direct relations between people, reminiscent of the symbiosis of mother and child before the introduction of the function of the father. It is society of immediate relations between individuals without some third element which would introduce symbolic mediation by means of a fundamental prohibition. Because the very way that an individual

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becomes a social subject involves the prohibition of incest, symbolic castration, the subject has to experience some loss when it becomes a ‘being of language’ (parlétre). Linked to this is the question, why did the notion of human rights appear only in eighteenth-century bourgeois society and not before? Before the eighteenth century, rights were perceived as a social status (something attributed only to free people) or as granted from some agency above the individual (God, for example) and not as something the human being by definition possessed. The invention of democracy brought with it the notion of a forced choice and a sacrifice the subject has to make in order to become a member of the community. The social contract, which incorporated the subject into the symbolic community, is linked to the subject having to make a choice. The subject has to choose freely to become a member of the community, but this choice is always a forced choice – if the subject does not ‘choose’ community, it excludes itself from the society and falls into psychosis. Through this ritual of the forced choice the subject undergoes symbolic castration and actually sacrifices the incestuous Object that embodies impossible enjoyment. (But as Lacan says, the paradox is that this Object is not given prior to its loss, that it only comes to be through being lost.) Before the invention of democracy, when the social community still functioned as an enlarged family, this sacrifice did not exist in such a way. The subject was naturally linked to the community (the subject was by nature social being, zoon politikon, in Aristotle’s terms) and did not need to freely accept it. In pre-modern society, the subject’s ‘entering the society’ was not such a traumatic act of choice and sacrifice, because in this hierarchic society, the subject became included in the society by an act of initiation. Although the subject was in pre-modern society also subjected to castration, castration became visible only by the invention of democracy. The same logic is, on another level, at work with the notion of the ‘empty place of power’ introduced by Claude Lefort. We cannot say that the place of power became empty only with the invention of democracy. The place of power was always already empty, but with democracy this emptiness became visible, while before it was masked by the presence of the monarch. The introduction of rights is nothing other than a substitute for the fundamental prohibition. As such, rights serve the same function as the objet a. The objet a is the substitute the subject gets when it is subjected to castration upon entering the realm of symbolic mediation. At the same time, however, the objet a is also the element that renders all other potential substitutes not good enough. For example, when the child is weaned from the breast and loses its primal object of desire, every other object will be seen as a substitute, as something to fill out this place of the primary lost object. Desire will therefore range from one object to another but will always remain unsatisfied, it will always be ‘desire for something else’ insofar as

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these new objects are seen as substitutes for the first object (Lacan, 1977: 166, 167). Thus, on the one hand, the objet a fills the lack, the split that traverses the subject after castration, but, on the other hand, the objet a prevents any object from really filling this lack. The same goes for rights: although we get them as a substitute for the fundamental prohibition necessary to live in a society, rights actually prevent any substitute from filling the lack which was introduced by the prohibition. Although we have rights, a right that would express the notion of rights itself does not exist. All we can do, in this regard, is to perpetually invent new rights, searching in vain for a right that would affirm us as non-split subjects.10 Feinberg’s argument appears even more problematic if we consider that demand always relates to specific objects. In the case of rights, a demand (or claim) would therefore always refer to a specific right. But the entire logic of rights turns on the impossibility of enumerating rights on which any claim could then be staked. It is never possible to list all rights, just as it is never possible to fill the demand for their total possession. As a result, it appears that rights are not so much linked to demand as they are to desire: they are akin to that surplus of demand over need because of which demand always remains unfulfilled. Feinberg justifies the need for human rights by saying: Having rights enables us to ‘stand up like men’, to look others in the eye, and to feel in some fundamental way the equal of anyone. . . . Indeed, respect for persons (this is an intriguing idea) may simply be respect for their rights, so that there cannot be the one without the other; and what is called ‘human dignity’ may simply be the recognizable capacity to assert claims. (Feinberg, 1980: 151)11 With the help of Lacanian psychoanalysis, we can say on the contrary that the subject does not feel equal to another because it can demand something, but because as a subject of desire it cannot expect that its demand will be completely fulfilled. Desire is always intersubjective, it is by definition mediated by the Other (other people, the symbolic order as such). And the subject enters the domain of rights when it is possessed by the intersubjectivity of desire: the subject as the bearer of human rights can thus identify with another subject only as a subject of desire. The whole logic of rights becomes clearer if we say that the subject of rights formulates its lack in the language of the Other.12 The subject is always searching for an object that will fill its lack. The discourse of universal human rights strives to produce the impression that the object has already been attained. By claiming that we have human rights which the state must guarantee, we presuppose that the object of desire is already ours: all we need to do is to describe it and codify it in law. The discourse of universal

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human rights thus presents a fantasy scenario in which society and the individual are perceived as whole, as non-split. In this fantasy, society is understood as something that can be rationally organized, as a community that can become non-conflictual if only it respects ‘human rights’.

SEXUAL DIFFERENCE AND HUMAN RIGHTS In addition to concealing social antagonisms, the discourse of human rights also conceals sexual difference. Sexual difference is understood here as the result of the castration complex which ‘makes’ a girl (as a sexual role) out of a girl, and a boy out of a boy, although it is not always the case that sexual roles have to correspond to biological sex. As I will show later, the Lacanian interpretation of sexual difference explains how each sex is in a different way inscribed into the symbolic network, how the positions of man and woman are formed differently in relation to language. Sexual difference thus is not so much a biologically determined position as a position that is symbolically mediated. Consequently, post-structuralist feminist theory is interested in how sexual difference is present in different discourses, not as a reflection of ‘reality’, but as something that discursive practice helps to constitute. In relation to the question of sexual difference, it is, as Parveen Adams says, always necessary to analyse how ‘a series of sexual differences is constructed through practices of representation and in such a way that sexual distinctions set up under different discursive conditions may vary, overlap, be contradictory, etc’ (Adams, 1990: 108). In relation to human rights, then, the question becomes, how is sexual difference present in the discourse of human rights? Is this discourse always already patriarchal, as some feminists claim? Etienne Balibar (1992) differs from the proponents of feminist legal theory when he argues that negation of sexual difference is constitutive of the modern notion of human rights. Balibar describes what he takes as the two basic rights – freedom and equality – as rights that are intrinsically connected and that supplement each other in the modern discourse of human rights, even though, regarding their content, they are not complementary and even exclude each other.13 He describes these two rights with three sets of contrasts. First, while equality concerns primarily the social and economic domain, freedom belongs to the domain of law and politics. Second, the realization of equality demands the intervention of the state (as long as equality concerns some kind of redistribution of goods), but preservation of freedom demands the limitation of state intervention. Finally, equality concerns society as a whole, viewed as a collective entity, whereas freedom is primarily a right pertaining to individuals. Balibar claims that both freedom and equality have became so connected that they have given rise to a new composite concept – ‘egaliberté’. That the two rights now appear identical Balibar sees as a

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consequence of a specific historical development in which, on the one hand, the conditions of freedom became the same as the conditions of equality and, on the other hand, limitations of freedom became seen as essentially linked to inequality. Balibar stresses how the notion of ‘egaliberté’ today functions as a nonreversible truth: a truth that is perceived as universal only in retrospect, historically, and always as a negative universality, as a completely undefined truth, which is nevertheless understood as something that can be realized in any situation. The indeterminate character of ‘egaliberté’ is, at one and the same time, its strength and the main obstacle preventing the actual granting of the very rights it heralds. A constant tension exists between the universal character of the notion of ‘egaliberté’ and the actual realization of this notion in existing political and legal institutions. Thus, we must endlessly affirm our belief in ‘equality and freedom’. Only if we constantly repeat to ourselves the importance of rights will the effect of the truthfulness of these rights be produced. Because of this tension between the universal meaning of human rights and their dependancy on ‘praxis’ for their realization, it is also impossible to establish something like a politics of human rights – a kind of plan to realize rights. Balibar argues that the ideological connection between freedom and equality cannot guarantee the stability of societal institutions. In order to achieve such stability, it is necessary to make use of two mediators: the ‘community’ (or fraternity) and ‘property’. Each of these mediators is, however, also a result of social conflicts and is thus also always split. Community is divided into public and national community, and property into capital and work.14 In spite of their own internal divisions, these two mediators serve to conceal the two fundamental differences that traverse society: sexual difference and the difference between intellectual and practical knowledge (or intellectual and manual labour). The notion of community conceals sexual difference, while the notion of property conceals the difference between intellectual knowledge and manual know-how. As Balibar argues, these two differences (sexual difference and the difference between ‘mind and body’) present the limit of freedom of the class of humanity as a whole. No ‘political solution’ is available to resolve these two differences: it is not possible to unite opposing groups and create a complete manual– intellectual labourer, or an androgynous being. It is also not possible to resolve these two differences with the formal institution of equality: although citizens may be formally equal, these differences remain in a concealed way. Thus these two differences are something other than individual inequality. In these two cases we encounter collective relations of inequality (of men and women, elites and masses) which are always reproduced as and present in the form of personal relations between individuals.

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As Balibar points out, these two differences are not equivalent nor are they expressed in the same way. In the case of sexual difference, we are dealing with a ‘surplus of singularity’ which prevents the freedom of men and the freedom of women from actually being perceived as equal. Thus, although women may be formally the equals of men, this formality does not mean that they have the same freedoms as men. In the case of the inequality of knowledge, we are dealing with a ‘withdrawal of singularity’ which we encounter when, for example, a liberal government tries to enlighten the masses. Any dissemination of knowledge carried out by the government must always involve a depersonalization of that knowledge. This is especially true for the communist regime. As was shown in Chapter 3, socialist governments always tried to educate the masses. But in introducing the communist ideology to the people, the Party discourse presented its knowledge in a totally depersonalized way – as historical truth being revealed. Although these two differences cannot be abolished, for Balibar it is necessary that, in the case of sexual difference, society does not neutralize differences but ‘diversifies’ freedoms. And in the case of differences between intellectual and manual labour, it is necessary that society redistribute knowledge and break institutional connections between intellectuals and knowledge. For Balibar the question that remains open is how to think universal truth and singular truth, or how to inscribe the universality of ‘egaliberté’ into the singularities invoked by the two differences. Balibar’s excellent essay leaves open, however, some questions about the relation between these two differences. Given the psychoanalytic theory of sexual difference which I have presented in the discussion of the Cartesian cogito, the equation of the two differences becomes more problematic. As long as sexual difference is the effect on the living body of the limit, of the deadlock that pertains to the symbolic order (language) as such, it defines us on another, more fundamental level than the difference between intellectual and manual labour. And when Balibar equates this second difference with mind–body dualism, he unintentionally touches on one of the most debated topics in feminist theory – the patriarchal connotation of the mind–body opposition. Let us recall the feminist objections to this dualism. Feminist theory features two main perspectives on the notion of the body.15 More traditional feminists (Beauvoir, Firestone, Millet, etc.) perceive the category of the body as an attempt to unify the concrete, sexually and racially different bodies under a single, unified image of the body that is already marked by patriarchal ideology. Within this ideological space, the mind–body distinction comes to found the masculine–feminine distinction. The body is the site of nature and thus correlates to female passivity, whereas the mind is the domain of the creative spirit of men and thus correlates to male activity. For traditional feminists, psychoanalysis plays a major role in locking women into their biological bodies and explaining their behaviour by way of their sexuality (see Millet, 1971).16

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Another, more contemporary line of feminist theory has emerged out of the psychoanalytic tradition in the work of such writers as Irigaray, Cixous and Gallop. Such theorists alter the perspective on the body in efforts to rediscover the specificity of the female body. Insisting on the difference between male and female bodily experience, these feminists focus on reevaluating the female body as the site of resistance to dominant patriachal ideology. Their approaches range from Irigaray’s attempt to produce a new feminine imaginary that would represent the specificity of feminine sexual experience, to Gallop’s emphasis on the silenced and refused representation of the feminine body, to Cixous’s elaboration of the feminine libidinal economy. Although these authors differ in their theoretical analysis, their common ground is a return to the body in the sense of rediscovering the suppressed ‘feminine body’. 17 Again, the main target of criticism is psychoanalysis, this time not for locking women into biology but for conceptualizing the symbolic (language) in a male-dominated way. Where the body is concerned, and especially the mind–body division, Lacanian psychoanalysis opens up a new perspective which the feminist critique rarely recognizes. For Lacan the duality of the mind–body is essentially an imaginary opposition. Underlying this opposition is not some kind of brute dualism, but (as Aristotle already knew) a unity of the two aspects of a living organism: the body is not inanimate matter because it is enlivened by its inherent, inner, life-principle (soul). This harmonious totality of form and material, of inside and outside is, however, shattered by the fact of language: language is the original cut which introduces the irreducible disharmony, imbalance or split into the unity of a living organism. Language unseats the organism from its inherent, natural balance. With language, the needs of human beings are transformed into insatiable drives (see Lacan, 1990). For Lacan, it is thus essential to differentiate between the subject and the soul: the soul is inherently linked to the organism, it is the principle of life, while the subject is an empty point of self-relating that emerges when the body becomes enchained within the structure of language. Lacan emphasizes how language itself is a traumatic agency which, as a kind of parasite, destroys the imaginary harmony of soul–body and causes the organism to ‘go nuts’; i.e. it enslaves the organism to a symbolic mechanism incompatible with its life interests. The division is thus not mind versus body, but the organism versus the trauma of the symbolic order which perturbs the organism’s balanced reproduction. We can now identify the flaw in Balibar’s argument: ‘intellect’ is a category of the symbolic and is therefore of a totally different order from ‘mind’ or ‘soul’. By linking the division between intellectual and manual work to the mind–body opposition, Balibar subsumes an historically specified feature of the process of production (the splitting of the unified working process into its ‘intellectual’ and ‘physical’ components that took place with the modern division of labour) under a traditional ideological opposition (mind–body).

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Returning to the problem of human rights: Balibar is quite justified in pointing out that the universality of human rights and their abstract character are necessary for the functioning of democratic society. It is equally essential that this universality remains empty, contentless. Because human rights possess this kind of universality, they function in the same way as Lacanian mathemes. A matheme is something that can be inscribed or constructed at some Real place, but whose content cannot be defined or displayed in reality. A matheme is an inscription which cannot be translated and it always remains the same because it does not have a meaning in itself. Lacan describes what he means by a matheme by invoking the difference between the meaning of the words ‘exist’ and ‘ex-sist’ (or insist). Something can exist only if it can be articulated in language. But what only ex-sists or insists (and belongs to the Real) cannot be described in language. This is true, for example, for the objet a – it can only be inscribed, formulated in ‘quasi logical–mathematical’ terms. And this is also true for human rights. As long as they are only a construct, an empty universality, human rights as such do not exist, they can only ‘insist’; i.e. as a substitute for something fundamental which the subject has lost. Thus they belong to the Real. Similarly, human rights can never be fully described in language; there will always remain a gap between positive, written rights, and the universal idea of human rights. By analysing the question of the universality and the particularity of human rights with the help of Lacan’s (1975a) formulas of sexuation, we can also see how it is possible to articulate the problems of sexual difference and human rights. Through his formulas of sexuation, Lacan argues that man and woman are defined (and split) separately with respect to the ‘phallic function’.18 Lacan understands the phallic function as symbolic castration, as something that happens to a human being when he or she enters language: castration here refers to the alienation of human desire that is due to the very fact that we are forced to express our desires in words, or rather that desire itself forms within and by means of language we have ourselves invented, i.e. which we have learned from others, and are obliged to use because others use it and understand little else. (Fink, 1991: 66) Man is completely subordinated to symbolic castration and thus wholly determined by the phallic function. Man’s logic is a logic of universality. The whole of a man falls under the phallic function; i.e. man is altogether determined by symbolic castration, but at the same time the position of man implies that there is one man (the Freudian ‘primordial father’) who is an exception and is not subordinated to symbolic castration. This ‘primordial father’, as is well known from Freud’s myth, is the possessor

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of all women, the father who is not subordinated to the law and to whom the threat of castration does not apply. The women’s logic of the formulas of sexuation also has two parts: the first formula says that not all of a woman falls under the phallic function; and the second formula says that there is nothing in woman which is not determined by the phallic function. For women, however, the phallic function does not govern completely. Woman, Lacan says, is, with respect to the symbolic order, not whole, she is not totally bounded and determined by the phallic function. But Lacan argues that although not all of a woman is defined by the phallic function, she is nevertheless situated within the symbolic order. When Lacan says that Woman does not exist, he means that women cannot be adequately defined through language. Women have something (the presumed woman’s jouissance) that escapes the symbolic order. Bruce Fink, in describing the formulas of sexuation, argues that women have more ‘direct’ access to the Real, to that which is unsymbolizable, around which the symbolic order is structured. The Lacanian feminine logic thus presents what is particular, what is symbolized, but what also escapes symbolization. These formulas of sexuation can help us further clarify the logic of human rights. As I pointed out earlier, human rights are universal; but as long as they stand in relation to the object of desire, human rights are essentially determined by this particular object. The discourse of human rights actually negates this particularity of the object, just as on another level this discourse also negates sexual difference. If the idea of human rights is analysed with the help of Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, two logics can be found to be at work in it. According to the first, currently dominant ‘male’ logic, all people have rights, with the exception of those who are excluded from this universality (for example, women, children, foreigners, etc.). According to the ‘feminine’ logic, in contrast, there is no one who does not have rights; i.e. everybody taken individually possesses rights, but precisely because of this we cannot say that people as such have rights. This feminine logic could be called a postmodern logic of rights: according to this model it is not the case that human beings as such have rights, but that none remain without rights. Rights as such cannot be universalized, because universalization always needs an exception. There has to be someone who does not have rights for the universal notion of rights to exist. A postmodern approach to rights would be based on the claim that no one should remain without rights, which also means that no one can universally possess them. Understanding human rights according to the Lacanian formula of sexuation enables us to articulate a discourse of human rights that does not conceal social antagonisms, while still retaining its critical function.

Conclusion

In the Western media’s reporting of the war in Bosnia, an image of Bosnian women emerged in the form of women dressed in traditional Muslim clothes and covered by headscarves. What is surprising is that in Bosnia one rarely sees women in such traditional dress. Most of the pictures of Bosnian women that are seen in the West are staged by journalists who ask women to pose for them in traditional clothes. The sad fact is that the journalists are not interested in reporting the reality of life for Bosnian women, nor are they concerned to describe the plight of women who are desperately trying to behave ‘normally’ in war, who care about their appearance, who dress nicely and, even in a situation where they do not know if they will survive the day, always wear make-up. By photographing Bosnian women in their religious clothes, the Western media has helped to create an image of the religious fundamentalism of Bosnians. And by doing this, the media has also partaken in establishing racist cultural boundaries between ‘us’ (the civilized observers) and ‘them’ (the fighting savages). In this attitude of the observer, one encounters a desperate attempt to artificially create cultural differences: as if the most horrible thing for the observer is the recognition that the ‘other’ (the Muslim, for example) is too similar. It is similarity not difference that produces the need to distance oneself from the other. In such a Western approach to the people of other cultures, it is thus paradoxically not difference that is repressed but sameness. This forceful implementation of cultural differences prevents us from recognizing those cases where some actual difference exists. How, for example, in the perspective of ‘political correctness’, is the suffering of women of different colour, race or nationality perceived? Is it not the case that the one who suffers and with whom we can identify is always someone ‘like us’? The underlying image of women who are harassed or who are the victims of open violence, the women with whom the ‘politically correct’ are concerned, is the image of white women, living in a Western democracy. A good example of the politically correct attitude towards women of other nations, races, etc. can be found in Slavenka Drakulic’s book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed. It comes in a quotation from a letter from

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an American feminist asking the author: ‘Do the women in Yugoslavia argue for an “essentialism”, i.e. that women are different from men, or is it a matter of choice?’ (Drakulic, 1993: 127).1 In a country where no serious feminist movement exists, where women are preoccupied with double jobs, where there are all kinds of shortages, such a question shows an ignorance of the ‘real’ life of these women. What this question about essentialism reveals is that the principal concern of the American feminist cited is not to find out what concerns Yugoslav women, nor is it to provide them with help; her primary concern is to confirm the position from which she is speaking.2 The real concern of this feminist is thus not particular women but the application of the politically correct ‘newspeak’ rhetoric (about essentialism) and the confirmation of its relevance in assessing women’s suffering. The main problem of this politically correct position is that, contrary to its ‘official’ maxim, its ‘others’ (people of other races, different nationalities, etc.) are not perceived as subjects. If a white person, living in a Western democracy, is anti-semitic, he is guilty and responsible for his behaviour. One can thus easily condemn his anti-semitic behaviour. With black antisemitism, there is, however, a different approach. The politically correct attitude would be to find excuses for such behaviour: one would thus point out the oppression of black people as the cause of their anti-semitic behaviour. The fact that blacks would not be perceived as guilty reveals that they are not perceived as responsible subjects but as ‘tools’ in the hands of external (social) mechanisms. The main question in this regard is how is it possible to feel compassion with the other and to form solidarity? As was demonstrated in Chapter 5, Rorty’s stand is that solidarity can arise when we see more and more of our differences (of sex, religion, race, nationality, customs, etc.) as unimportant in comparison with our similarities in respect of the pain and humiliation to which we can be subjected. How, for example, would such a project of solidarity be realized in war? Is it at all possible to identify authentically with the victim of war? What is going on in such an identification? Let me again take examples from the Bosnian war. When it started in 1992, tens of thousands of refugees were given shelter in Slovenia, where they were placed in military barracks, old schools or abandoned hostels. The solidarity of the hosts, the Slovenes, varied. At the beginning it was enthusiastic, because Slovenes perceived that such a war could have happened also in Slovenia and that they too could have been victims of a comparable violence. Feeling that they were the lucky ones, the Slovenes thus first helped the refugees without much complaint. Later, when it became clear that the war was not going to end soon, and that the refugees might never return, the Slovenian solidarity weakened. Such a reaction on the part of the hosts is not too surprising. If we take Rorty’s theory of solidarity, we can conclude that Slovenes were not sufficiently willing to eliminate the cultural, religious and national differences that divided them from the refugees. And, after they had forgotten

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that such a war could also have happened (and indeed almost did) in Slovenia, Slovenes stopped identifying with the pain and humiliation of the refugees. While one can still rationalize this decline of solidarity among Slovenes (as well as in the rest of the world), it is more difficult to understand the decline of solidarity among the refugees themselves. What happened was that after a year of living in the refugee centres, the refugees lost almost all solidarity among themselves. Social workers in refugee centres observed a total erosion of compassion and co-operation among the refugees. One of the social workers tried to explain this in terms of the collapse of the patriarchal structure of the family: Slowly we are confronted with the total collapse of the family and tradition. In Bosnia it was clear – the father is the head of the family, the primal authority, because he provided the family with its means of existence. Here, no one takes notice of him anymore, not even the children, because he has lost everything. The loss of authority causes alarm among the refugees. At first they think that they will solve the problems if they live alone or with families they get along with and are close to. Later they realize that nothing changes. There are again problems with the adolescents and eruption of psychoses. And suddenly there are no more people who would be able to hold them together; they do not know solidarity anymore. For example: in the center we have five abandoned children, two have mothers in psychiatric clinics, three of them are without parents. We had terrible problems convincing other refugees that they have to take care of these children. There is no social network anymore, no self-help, everyone looks after themselves. We discussed the causes of this situation a lot with colleagues. Is it because they are in all regards so different as between themselves?3 This report falsifies Rorty’s claim that solidarity can arise when we perceive external differences of race, nation, sex, as unimportant in comparison to our similarities in respect of pain and suffering. The refugees are all victims of the same oppression, they are all suffering similar pains and there are no significant national, racial or religious differences between them. However, the last sentence of the social worker’s report gives us some hint of the reason for the lack of solidarity among the refugees. The cause for this, however, is not the difference between the refugees themselves; the primal cause for the disappearance of solidarity is the fact that each subject is already ‘different’ from him or herself – from their former self-identity. Their own identity has collapsed through the pain and suffering they went through in the war. To understand how compassion for the suffering of others works we have to take into account the process of identification as understood in psychoanalysis. As Freud pointed out, compassion emerges only out of identification. In his ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, Freud

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writes about three forms of identification. The first form of identification is some kind of a primal form of the emotional tie with the object and relates primarily to the ambivalent relationship with the father. The second form of identification, Freud discerned through analyses of certain neurotic symptoms. These were cases in which Freud encountered some kind of regressive replacement for an abandoned object choice: an example of this is that of a daughter developing the same illness (cough) as her mother. The subject here identifies with a partial, unary trait (ein einziger Zug) in the other person. But what is crucial is that the subject can take some symptom from the person he or she either loves or hates. The third type of identification works in the same way as the second one save for the difference that the subject does not have any sexual link with the other person. Freud here uses the example of girls in a college dormitory: one girl receives a letter from her lover which provokes a hysterical reaction and other girls develop such a reaction too, not out of compassion for the first girl but because they identify with her in some analogical element, a unary trait (the wish to be loved, for example) that replaces the lost object. In general, for Freud, identification means that the subject takes on an element from some other person which causes the formation of a symptom. This symptom, however, is not necessarily unpleasant for the subject concerned. The analysis of the identification at work in politics usually implies the first type of identification: the emotional tie with the leader, for example, is perceived to be the crucial influence in the subject’s submission to power. To understand political identification, however, one has to take into account all three forms of identification. In particular, the second and the third form of identification are very much at work in politics. For example, when we are engaged in a war situation and we identify with a wounded fellow soldier, we do not identify with the wound as such but insofar as it functions as a unary trait standing for the ‘love for our country’. Thus, as long as the soldier and I are both willing to sacrifice our lives for our country, as long as we both identify in some analogical element, I can identify with his wound. Referring to Freud’s theory, Lacan linked identification with the signifier.4 The subject as ‘lack of being’ identifies with some unary trait (trait unaire) in the other which is wholly depersonalized and without any content. This unary trait is the point of pure difference, named the signifier S1. To explain the meaning of this unary trait, Lacan takes Saussure’s example of an express train. Let us say that there is a 10.45 express. This express will not be the same train every day, it will not even depart from the same platform. Sometimes it will be late and it might arrive at the station only at 12.30, but, nevertheless, this train will always be referred to as the 10.45 express. For Lacan this notion ‘10.45 express’ signifies ‘being in its lack of being’ (manque à être), it is something that lacks any actual being (different trains at different platforms can signify a 10.45 express). There has, however, to be some constant: we have to speak about the same station and the train

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has to go in a specified direction. But on top of this, the notion 10.45 express is only a unary trait that helps us to differentiate between trains. This unary trait can thus be without any quality; its only value being in the fact that it enables us to count, that it introduces the series. Lacan also names this unary trait a ‘common denominator’ – it is the notion of the ‘one’ that we have to have before we can start counting. What is the role of this ‘unary trait’ in the process of identification? To illuminate the subject’s encounter with language, Lacan uses the example of the child’s cry which is always differentiated by language. The child’s cry is not only some kind of reaction of the organism, but an appeal that involves the Other. For the cry to become an appeal there has to be recognition by the Other (by the mother, for example, who recognizes the child). Through the reception of the Other, the cry thus acquires a meaning, it expresses the subject. And when the Other responds, the cry of the subject assumes the form of an empty unary trait, a pure ‘signifier of existence’ which enables the subject to distinguish him or herself from other subjects. Through the process of identification the subject is able to identify him or herself as ‘one’ and to count oneself in the group of other subjects. The unary trait thus comes from the response of the Other and gives the subject a mark that authorizes its image. To exemplify this logic of identification, let us again take the case of the war, this time not the reaction of the participants in the war but that of external observers. Stalin’s famous dictum, that one victim is a tragedy while thousands is a statistic, is well borne out in reports of casualties in war. After listening day after day to reports of people being killed in a war, at some moment the horror of what is being reported ceases to be experienced. But when you see a severely wounded child on television, you react differently, you feel compassion, sorrow and a desire to help. One Croatian newspaper’s reporting of the war in Bosnia was usually centred on the facts of war, giving strategic and political analyses of the course of war. But in one of its issues the newspaper published a picture of a young Bosnian girl of around 10 years old, a refugee, holding in her arms a baby brother, and sitting all alone in a railway station. The picture gave the impression that the girl had just taken her brother and a plastic bag of things and escaped the horror taking place in her hometown. The implication was that her parents had probably been killed in the war and that the two children were totally alone in the world. The whole picture was full of pain: the girl had a tragic look in her eyes, her baby brother was half naked, the station was crowded with refugees. This picture provoked an amazing response from the public: the journal started a long search for the girl; dozens of people wanted to adopt the two children. After a couple of weeks there was considerable surprise when the girl was finally discovered living in a refugee camp with her pregnant mother and five brothers and sisters. When the mother was told about the people who wanted to help her daughter, she responded by saying that the most

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their family currently needed was a coffee pot and some cigarettes. The sublime appeal of the picture vanished at that moment and the public, of course, lost any interest in helping this unfortunate family. This story can help us to understand what we identify with when the media presents us with such a tragic picture and story. The first response is usually in terms of ‘something like this could have happened to me’. This is a kind of imaginary identification in which we perceive the suffering victim in a mirror image – as the possible image of ourselves. However, this identification is not usually the one that really affects us. What we actually identify with when we observe images from the war is not the person that suffers, but the ego-ideal: a point of view from which we can appear likeable to ourselves. When we see a tragic picture of a refugee we perceive in it a symbolic space in which we are the actors – we are the ones who are caring, compassionate and concerned. By presenting such images the media thus creates the place in which we perceive ourselves as we would like to be seen. Milan Kundera in The Unbearable Lightness of Being provides an illuminating example of the difference between these two types of identification when he shows what kitsch is. Describing the way his character observes children running in the grass, Kundera writes: Kitsch causes two tears to flow in quick succession. The first tear says: How nice to see children running on the grass! The second tear says: How nice to be moved, together with all mankind, by children running on the grass! It is this second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. (Kundera, 1984: 250, 251) To paraphrase Kundera, in the case of the Bosnian refugee girl, one could say that the first tear runs when we see the picture of the poor girl and the second tear runs when we, together with all mankind, are moved by the fact that we are compassionate. In Lacan’s theory, the logic of the two types of identification is based on the distinction between the ego-ideal and the ideal ego. The ego-ideal is on the side of the symbolic and emerges as the point where identification is placed in the symbolic network. The ideal ego, on the other hand, is the retroactive effect of the identification process. This distinction between ego-ideal and ideal ego is linked to the distinction between the symbolic and the imaginary identification. The symbolic identification is the primal one; it emerges when the subject encounters language. The ego-ideal is the point where identification is inscribed in the symbolic, the point from which the subject wants to be seen, where he or she gets his or her symbolic identity; while the ideal ego is the image in which the subject appears likeable to him or her self.5 There is, however, yet another problem of identification that has to be addressed. This is that of the identification at work in group psychology.

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In explaining the nature of the common link between individuals in a group, Freud points out that this identification concerns some essential point which the individuals have in common: he speculates that this point is the nature of the link with the leader. The leader replaces the ego-ideal of the members of the group. But in this situation a mutual identification between the individuals in the group also occurs. The condition for this mutual identification is that the individual put the same object (the leader) in the place of the ego-ideal. Identification between individuals is thus always dependent on identification with the leader, in that horizontal relations between individuals always depend on vertical relations: ‘The Commanderin-Chief is a father who loves all soldiers equally, and for that reason they are comrades among themselves’ (Freud, 1985: 123). As Freud further says: ‘the mutual ties between the members of the group disappear, as a rule, at the same time as the tie with their leader. The group vanishes in dust, like a Prince Rupert’s drop when its tail is broken off’ (ibid.: 127). However, the demand for equality in a group applies only to its members and not to the leader. All the members must be equal to one another, but they all want to be ruled by one person. Many equals, who can identify themselves with one another, and a single person superior to them all – this is the situation that we find realized in groups which are capable of subsisting. (ibid.: 153) The example I describe above of the lack of solidarity among Bosnian refugees in Slovenia can be illuminated with the help of this analysis of the logic of group identification. The vanishing of the father’s authority among Bosnian refugees accounted for the disappearance of solidarity among individuals. When the person with whom individuals identified ceases to be perceived as authoritative, the identification of these individuals among themselves disappears. This dominant role of the master is, for Lacan, essential for the intersubjective relations of individuals, because ‘oppression enables coexistence between subjects’.6 The sad conclusion one can draw from of this is that some kind of master is always in place regardless of how much we deny its existence. This confirms the dictum that there is no unity without the exception. In history, social movements that tried to get rid of the king usually ended up with an even more repressive master. For example, in France and Russia the impotent regimes of the king or tsar were replaced with the authoritarianism of Napoleon or Stalin. Thus the only solution would appear to be that of having a master who is simply a unifying symbolic point, a stupid master without real political power. The master who just occupies the ‘empty space of power’ but who does not govern in reality; does not intrude in the machinery of democratic politics but is just the empty signifier that provides the social machinery with its consistency.

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This claim that a master is a necessity is something that our democratic instinct cannot easily accept. However, we have to distinguish here the notion of the master as the empty form of authority from the totalitarian leader who is the full embodiment of authority. The opposition between the two is similar to Freud’s distinction between two fathers: the Oedipal, symbolic father (the Name-of-the-Father, in Lacan’s terms) and the primordial father. As Chapter 7 demonstrated, the first father is the dead father who represents the law: the father from whom enjoyment is evacuated and who thus allows the subject to enjoy. (Lacan’s point here is that the subject can enjoy only in the holes of the Name-of-the-Father, only because the father does not see everything.) The second father is père-jouissance (Silvestre, 1987), the father who enjoys (the father who possesses all women) and thus prevents the subject’s access to enjoyment. The master represents the dead, symbolic father; in short it is the empty form of the law. The leader does not play the role of the dead father but of the primordial father: the father who is all too much alive to allow the subject access to its own enjoyment. What is crucial is that the totalitarian leader is not the master. Hitler or Stalin, for example, were not masters, but leaders in the sense of the primordial father. As was pointed out earlier in the book, fantasy concerns the way the subject organizes its enjoyment. The leader as the père-jouissance is the one who activates the subject’s fantasies. In opposition to the totalitarian leader, the master as the empty form of the law (the father who does not know about enjoyment) enables the subject to distance itself from the fantasy as long as it guarantees the empty frame (of the law), a social space which is not totally penetrated with fantasy. This kind of master thus opens the space for democratic politics: it is the form of exception that renders the dynamic of democratic politics possible. Only with the guarantee of this master can the subject of democratic society find its space of ‘freedom’ as well as its form of solidarity with other fellow beings. One of the things that democratic politics can learn from Lacanian theory is thus that politics without fantasy, without modes of enjoyment manipulated in the place of the surmise of political discourse, is an illusion. As long as ‘society doesn’t exist’, as long as the social field is inconsistent, is split, or traversed by antagonisms which resist being wholly reabsorbed into ideological symbolization, as long as the social field is structured around some central impossibility, these lacks, these voids in the social structure will always be filled by fantasies. The question to ask is, how does political discourse play upon these fantasies? Why do some political discourses try aggressively to dismande others’ fantasies? Ultimately, the only thing we can do in preventing sexist, racist and nationalist conflicts is to maintain the distance between the ideological meaning of political discourse and its surmise.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 I am using the term Eastern Europe for the whole area of East, Central and Southeast Europe where socialist regimes existed. There were many differences between those regimes, especially between the Soviet-style socialism (the so called Realsocialism) and Yugoslav, self-management socialism. In the course of the book, where the distinction is significant for the argument, I specify to which type of socialism I refer. 2 Paradoxically, such things as the bans on abortion, the rise of moral majority ideology, etc. actually have had a positive side effect in the raising of women’s consciousnesses. Women are uniting to oppose the restrictions on their rights and are starting to form organizations that deal with issues that concern them. 3 Michel Foucault speaks about a similar kind of privacy that existed among gays before the gay liberation movement. James Miller reports Foucault being asked by a gay militant: ‘What was it like for you before gay liberation?’ . . . ‘You might not believe this,’ Foucault replied, ‘I actually liked the scene before gay liberation, when everything was more covert. It was like an underground fraternity, exciting and a bit dangerous. Friendship meant a lot, it meant a lot of trust, we protected each other, we related to each other by secret codes.’ (Miller, 1993: 254) Gay liberation, of course, brought a positive social change for gays, but as with the democratization of Eastern Europe, a special kind of privacy that existed when gay relationships were prohibited was necessarily lost when homosexuality became more acceptable publicly. 1 THE FANTASY STRUCTURE OF WAR: THE CASE OF BOSNIA 1 As Kant further says: ‘This mode of thinking demonstrates a character of the human race at large and all at once; owing to its disinterestedness, a moral character of humanity, at least in its predisposition, a characteristic which not only permits people to hope for progress towards the better, but is already itself progress in so far as its capacity is sufficient for the present’ (Kant, 1992: 153). 2 The only way of thinking multiculturally without being ‘meta-racist’ is to perceive cultural background as something contingent, as something that does not determine us totally. And here the abstract notion of the Kantian cogito comes into play. It is

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the non-substantial notion of the subject that establishes the necessary distance towards the cultural background. Or, to quote from a letter to Newsweek (26 October 1992): ‘Maybe it’s fundamentally unnatural for different races or ethnic groups to live together. . . . While no one can condone the attacks against foreigners in Germany, the Germans have every right to insist that their country remain ethnically German.’ For analysis of the American media’s report on the Gulf War see Samuel Weber’s article ‘The Media and the War’ in Alphabet City magazine (Summer 1991). Thomas L. Friedman, in New York Times (8 April 1993), analyses the change of American politics in regard to Bosnia by pointing out how Clinton’s administration, after coming into office, began to talk about Bosnia differently and started ‘to cast the problem there less as a moral tragedy – which would make American inaction immoral – and more as a tribal feud that no outsider can hope to settle.’ As Friedman points out, this change was especially noticeable in Secretary of State Warren Christopher’s discourse on Bosnia on 28 March 1993 when Christopher said: ‘It is really a tragic problem. The hatred between all three groups – the Bosnians and the Serbs and the Croats – is almost unbelievable. It’s almost terrifying, and it’s centuries old. That really is a problem from hell. And I think that the United States is doing all we can to try to deal with that problem. . . . The United States simply doesn’t have the means to make people in that region of the world like each other.’ This statement is in total contrast to Christopher’s statement on 10 February 1993 when he described the conflict as the destruction of one people by another: ‘Serbian ethnic cleansing has been pursued through mass murders, systematic beatings, and the rape of the Muslims and others, prolonged shelling of innocents in Sarajevo and elsewhere, forced displacement of entire villages, inhumane treatment of prisoners in detention camps.’ At that time, for Christopher, American response to this conflict ‘tests our commitment to nurturing democracy and the support of environments in which democracy can grow and take root. . . . And it tests what wisdom we have gathered from this bloody century, and it measures our resolve to take early concerted action against systematic ethnic persecution.’ This change in official discourse shows, as Friedman says, how ‘what has been an outrage that was immoral to stand by and watch became a Balkan feud that was simply “terrifying” to watch.’ Craig R. Whitney (New York Times, 11 April 1993). This expression was used in a commentary by Leslie H. Gelb in New York Times (8 April 1993) which tried to be favourable to Bosnians but presented the obstacles to greater Western involvement in the conflict. When the Serbs rejected all mediators’ plans to stop the war in Bosnia, the Western media started searching for clues for their behaviour in the Serbian ‘sacrificial nature’, implied in the Bosnian Serbian leader’s statement: ‘For us the Serbs, it is better to commit collective suicide than to live with others any longer’ (Kemal Kurspahic, New York Times, 7 May 1993). To explain this puzzling statement, the Western media referred to Serbian history: ‘Some of the greatest Serbian heroes were men who led their nation to disastrous defeats, and many students of Serbian culture say it harbours a strong suicidal streak. After travelling through the Balkans half a century ago, the novelist Rebecca West wrote that Serbs were gripped with an “infatuation with sacrifice” and were “preoccupied with the idea of failure and humiliation.” “They want to receive the Eucharist, be beaten by the Turks and then go to Heaven,” she wrote’ (Stephen Kinzer, New York Times, 7 May 1993). The fact that nothing like universal maternal feelings exists was confirmed on another level in the case of American government handling of the 1993 siege of the

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Notes Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas. After seven weeks of unsuccessful negotiations with the cult leader, the FBI finally decided to use tear gas in order to force the cult members to come out of the compound because the ‘authorities believed that once the gas started seeping into the compound, “maternal instincts” would take over and the mothers of the 17 small children inside would come rushing out with them’ (New York Times, 22 April 1993). Once again another form of identification, this time with the cult’s religion, was stronger than the supposed maternal feelings, and the cult members not only did not try to protect their children but together committed mass suicide. Both cases, the reaction of Serbian mothers during the war in Slovenia and the siege in Waco, confirm that there is no natural maternal identification: maternal identification is only one among others fighting for predominance in a hegemonic struggle. As Elizabeth Cowie says: ‘In analysing fantasy, it is not a criterion that there be any factual basis for fantasy “in reality” or that there be a wish for it to “really happen”, rather the criterion is the level of “reality” the fantasy has for and in the psychical structure of the subject’ (Cowie, 1990: 155). On the notion of the Real, see Lacan (1981). As Klaus Theweleit (1993) says: ‘When you lose a war, you lose your memory. That’s the first thing to lose. The memory (of what one has done in the war) is replaced by the desire to change the old war into a new war, a war that still can be won, a war that doesn’t yet belong to an enemy.’ This is what happened to Croats when they lost the war with the Serbs. When the Croats realized that they had no chance of getting back their territory occupied by the Serbs, they tried to win the war against the Serbs (and to some extent also against Muslims) in Bosnia. The relative success of Croats in the Bosnian war, helped the Croats to restore their national identity and to revive the ‘national pride’. In this notion of the ‘death worth dying’ a parallel is at work between the sacrifice of the soldier for the country and the sacrifice of Christ in the Christian religion. As Christ was prepared to die for the sake of the people, today’s soldier has to sacrifice his life for the ‘just cause’ of his country. Ernst Kantorowicz (1965) offered an historical explanation of this parallel by pointing out that it first appeared in the time of the Crusades when the Christian religion analogized the ‘love for God’ to the ‘love for brothers’. At that time, dying in the defence of Christian brothers was proclaimed a martyr’s death. From the thirteenth century on, as the power of the monarchy increased, the idea of the ‘holy war’ became secularized – it was replaced by the ‘quasi-holy war’ for the defence of the kingdom or, later, the defence of the nation symbolized by the crown. Defence of one’s country assumed the meaning of a struggle for justice, and the most noble death became death linked to the ‘agony for justice’. Kantorowicz argues that the state as such became perceived as a ‘corpus mysticum’, as a secular expression of the mystical body of the Christ. Therefore, the duty of every citizen was to love the country more than himself, which means that the individual has to be prepared to sacrifice his life for the country. As Roger Cohen reports in the New York Times (9 May 1993), the Bosnian war is among the most cruel wars of the century: ‘Every evening the desolating images fill the television screens: mutilated bodies, tales of rape and castration. There is a peculiar savagery to the butchery in Bosnia, even by the standards of war, a savagery also evident in the 1941–45 period, when babies were shot. Why such horror? “You have to understand the fratricidal element to the bestiality,” says Žarka Kovac, a prominent psychologist. “These are people with scarcely any physical difference. The Muslims are Serbs or Croats converted during Turkish

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occupation. So you mutilate the person you have killed in order not to recognize your brother. This war is Cain and Abel”.’ 15 Newsweek (11 January 1993) reports that the estimated number of Muslim women being raped in Serbian detention camps is between 30,000 and 50,000. Cases were reported where girls as young as 6 or 7 have been raped. Women who conceived during the rape were later prohibited from having an abortion; they were forced to stay in the detention camps long enough so that an abortion was no longer possible. Forcing women to give bith to unwanted Serbian children is another way for the aggressor to destroy the enemy’s identity, a way to ‘pollute Bosnian blood’. 16 On Rorty and torture, see Chapter 5 . As part of their strategy in torturing Muslims, Serbian solders, when occupying a Muslim village or town, first remove persons who represent some power in the town or persons who people trust, or with whom they identify. When the power structure is destroyed, it is much easier to control the so-called ‘ordinary people’. American journalist Roy Gutman wrote about such a dismantling of the power structure in the Bosnian town of Prijedor. In this town the first to be captured and later executed were judges, businessmen, teachers, doctors and public employees, i.e. ‘all prominent people of Prijedor’ – members of the non-Serbian elite (Roy Gutman, Star Tribune, 15 November 1992). 17 To use Margaret Whitford’s expression, one can say that in such a mythology as the Serbian, ‘women are not individuated: there is only the place of the mother, or the maternal function’ (Whitford, 1991: 80). 18 At this point, one has to bear in mind that for Serbs rape has a special meaning in their national imaginary. In Chapter 2 it is demonstrated how Serbs perceive Albanians as potential rapists of Serbian women. 19 The author of the previously quoted (note 3) letter to Newsweek (26 October 1992) takes precisely the example of Yugoslavia to confirm his thesis that it might be ‘unnatural for different races and ethnic groups to live together’, saying: ‘In Yugoslavia different ethnic groups were yoked together, and look at the hatred and violence that have exploded there now that the communist state has dissolved.’ 2 THE POST-SOCIALIST MORAL MAJORITY 1 2 3 4 5

As many translators have noted, the term enjoyment does not adequately translate jouissance because it lacks the connotation of displeasure, the pain linked t the pleasure. See Mladen Dolar, ‘Kdo je danes Žid?’, Mladina (3 November 1988). As Chapter 1 demonstrates, this macho ideology of the Serbs was most clearly at work when the Serbs used rape of Muslim women as one of the ‘weapons’ to eliminate their enemy during the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Ivožanic, ‘Bukvar “antibirokratske revolucije”,’ Start (30 September 1989). The first post-socialist (Christian-Democratic) government in Slovenia tried to inject more morality into schools by promoting the need for religious education. Although this effort failed, the Minister of Education went so far as to propose an ‘hora legalis’ for youngsters and the extension of school to Saturdays. To support his proposal, the Minister cited some biorhythmological study which found that a long weekend break ‘interrupts students’ efficiency, lowers their efforts and forces them into laziness’ (Interview with Minister Peter Vencelj, Dnevnik, 30 March 1991). This citation of biorhythmology seemed to be a reference to an objective knowledge. But from Michel Foucault’s (1984) work we know that appealing to some neutral knowledge always serves to legitimize the power itself. In fact, the power produces this neutral knowledge so that it can legitimize

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Notes its own actions. Foucault confirmed this thesis by analysing the relation between power and sexuality. In its relation to sexuality, power does not strive to repress some natural sexuality; actually it is power itself that produces sexuality as such. As Foucault (1980) says, the discourse of sexuality was produced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when sex became the object of scientific and medical analysis and when society tried to impose control over sexual reproduction. And the same goes for biorhythmology. Biorhythms are not something naturally given, something that science only uncovers; they are something produced by science when the body became the object of its research. The government reference to biorhythmology in support of its efforts to change school hours thus parallels earlier references to the discourse of sexuality. Behind each lies a motive of social control. Significantly and disturbingly, in its efforts to impose new forms of morality – through religious education in schools, hora legalis, Saturday schools, etc. – the government assumed certain aspects of the previous socialist regime. The socialist government had always been worried about how people were spending their spare time, especially given the kind of immoral activities they could become interested in. To prevent children from doing ‘deviant’ things in their spare time, the socialist regime formed special Komsomol youth organizations, political discussion groups and working camps. When the post-socialist regime started talking about the need to extend school hours into spare time, it revealed that it shared the previous regime’s mistrust of parents, thinking them too incompetent to raise and educate children, just as the communists had done. It is well known how nationalist the Romanian and Albanian communist regimes were. But elements of nationalism were, in a specific way, incorporated into the official ideology in other East European regimes, too. When the Western moral majority opposes abortion it implies that the ‘right to life’ is an absolute, transhistorical concept. But as Jeffrey Minson (1985) argues, Christianity did not confront the question of abortion until the seventeenth century, when it became concerned with controlling sexuality and reproduction. When the Church first addressed the question of abortion it regarded the foetus as having no soul (like any child who died before being baptized) – the ‘right to life’ was not an issue at all. In the nineteenth century, when the Church began propounding marriage, it did so as a means of population control. The idea was that marriage would prevent people from having illegitimate children and make them more responsible to their families and thus less dependent on state support. The contemporary moral majority shares with its religious predecessors the desire to control people’s sexual behaviour. The same nineteenth century anti-welfare ideology is also present in the current moral majority’s ideology. The contemporary moral majority cares a lot about the unborn child, but the quality of the born child’s life is not its concern. The Slovenian moral majority found some ‘scientific’ studies showing that the Slovene nation will die out in 2050 if the birth rate continues to decrease. To reverse this process, in the opinion of the Slovenian moral majority, the society has to prohibit abortion. During the socialist era almost every woman was employed. Apart from ideological reasons (linked to the Marxist theory of emancipation through work), the high employment rate among women was also the result of the economic hardship which forced families to need a double income. The moral majority ideologues in Slovenia proposed the idea of establishing special schools for housewives where women would be taught cooking, cleaning, serving meals, etc.

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11 Moral majority ideologues similarly perceive homosexuals as enemies of the nation. In this way, the post-socialist moral majority acts in the same way as communists. In almost all communist countries, homosexuality was considered a deviant and thus punished by the law or treated as an illness in need of a cure. For that reason, in Slovenia homosexual organizations were one of the cornerstones of the oppositional ‘new social movements’. But with the end of communism, there has not been any great advance in the public tolerance of homosexuality. In its attempt to encourage a rise in birthrate, the Slovenian moral majority began to attack homosexuals also. For example, one of the independent organizations that disseminates moral majority ideas has called homosexuals ‘people who are the degenerates of society, since, with their form of sexuality, they are in no way able to have children. They are therefore already in the first generation doomed to extinction and present a dead branch on the living tree of life’ (Delo, 29 May 1993). 12 Dnevnik (26 February 1990). 13 See Ante Vukasovic, ‘Zavaravanje žena’, Danas (27 March 1990). 14 The anti-abortionists construct women who have abortions as unfeminine, high class, ambitious professionals who care only about their career and hate children. The reality is that the majority of women having abortions are women from the lower classes, who already have two or three children and whose major reason for abortion is economic hardship. 15 The thesis about the Judaic nature of the Serbian nation also attempts to substantiate the image of Albanians as terrorists. Since peaceful demonstrations of Albanians crying ‘We want democracy’ are difficult to characterize as classical terrorism, the Serbian media has to produce the fantasy of a secret terrorist organization which uses the struggle for democracy only as a veil. Notably, the Serbs have been calling the Albanians terrorists only since the disintegration of socialism in Eastern Europe; prior to this they had been using the term counter-revolutionary. Talk about terrorists is much more effective: it tries to create the impression that the Serbian struggle against the Albanians means, for example, the same as the Western struggle against Gadhafi’s terrorism or the Jewish struggle against Arab terrorism. 16 For the analysis of the Lacan’s graph of desire, see Žižek (1989). 3 ‘NORMALIZATION’ IN THE SOCIALIST REGIME 1 2

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Šimecka was professor at the University of Bratislava. In 1970, after being excluded from the Party, he lost his university position and started working as a truck driver and as a journey-man mason. The socialist regime in Cuba uses similar methods of ‘normalization’. In every district of the town special committees for the defence of the revolution are formed to control the everyday life of the people. If a person is recognized by these committees as enemy, he or she automatically loses their job. I return to the problem of crime in Chapter 7. Mladina (23 November 1948). It is significant how the official discourse refered to the youth in terms of ‘we expect from you’, ‘we thank you’, giving the impression of two ‘imaginary’ groups, the one represented by the Party and the one represented by the youth, directly communicated as person to person. In the first years of socialism, articles in journals were also never signed by the author; they appeared as neutral observations. Mladina (26 June 1947). The ideal of youth was also propagated in the schools where noticeboards were installed on which the pictures of the best communist youngsters were posted. The school curricula included endless references to Stalin, Lenin and Tito and their devotion to work and learning.

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7 Mladina (26 June 1948). Reporting on the first congress of the Yugoslav sport organization (called the Physic-Cultural Union) Mladina writes about the difference between sports in the new and old Yugoslavia, saying that ‘sport in the old Yugoslavia, as in all other capitalist countries, did not serve the interests of the people, on the contrary, it was directed against them. . . . In sport organizations an extreme individualism developed whose main goal was to become strong in order to subject the weak. The culture of muscles was favoured, but the culture of spirit was repressed’ Mladina (7 February 1947). 8 Mladina (6 January 1953). 9 Ibid. 10 Tito warned against this split between students and workers, saying: ‘among our youth there are youngsters, although they are only a minority, for whom it cannot be said that they are good. We have examples of hooligans, youngsters holding beliefs foreign to our socialist reality. Usually those youngsters do not come from the workers’ segment but from those circles which are materially better off. . . . I would like to say something about the phenomenon which disturbs, the fact that there are more and broader differentiations between intellectual and workers youth. One cannot get rid of the impression that part of the youth tries to play the fine gentleman and divide themselves from the workers youth.’ Mladina (12 December 1964). 11 As I will show in Chapter 4, in Slovenia, the youth organization was one of the strongest oppositional forces contributing to the collapse of communism. 12 I am grateful to Jane Burbank for this observation. 13 In order to ensure the functioning of the Communist Party, it was necessary for the Party bureaucrats to know ‘dirty’ details from each other’s lives as a guarantee of loyalty. One encounters similar logic in the power structure in almost every regime. Let us take, for example, the USA. The American public recently found out that their ‘power elite’ (top politicians, industrialists and executives) secretly meet every August in Bohemian Grove near San Francisco to re-establish their links. What presumably happens at these meetings is a kind of ‘male bonding’: only men are allowed to attend, they are expected to loosen up, to attend parties dressed like women, to give comic performances, get drunk, etc. This ‘power connection’ of the elite functions precisely because each person exposes himself to the others. Some ‘dirty’ detail or some secret obsession of each is revealed to all at these parties; it is because of this that each member of the elite will always remain bound to the others. 14 See Chapter 4 for explanation of how Miloševic’s regime came into power into the former Yugoslavia and how it caused the country to disintegrate in all-out civil war. 15 Although it was only in the mid-1980s that the Serbian government started openly demanding ‘differentiation at the workplace’, Albanians who were recognized as enemies had begun losing their jobs much earlier. The statistics show that in the 1980s in Kosovo only one out of twelve Albanians were employed, in contrast to Serbs, out of whom every fourth was employed. 16 Supporting a precisely determined educational result, i.e. the formation of a determined type of personality, can be compared to Elster’s analysis of the educational effect of participation in a political system. It is a frequent hypothesis of the advocates of the democratic political system (John Stuart Mill and Alexis de Tocqueville, for example) that the only result of democracy is the education of people, as democracy enables reformation and political awareness of people through their participation in the political system. The willingness of people to work also increases in the democratic system, which contributes to greater production and better economic results. Elster’s response to such theories is that the educational

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effect of democracy can only be a state that is essentially a side-effect or byproduct, not a conscious aim. The goal has to be democracy as such and not the education of the people or economic prosperity. The existence of a certain external political goal is necessary for the development of a certain type of citizen; people are educated through serious attempts to reach external goals and not through co-operation in politics for the sake of their education. In the process of democratization in post-socialist countries one encounters a similar tendency to implement democratic values simply through teaching. The West has a perception that it has first to ‘teach’ democracy to people in the East and that they will then inevitably form democratic institutions resembling those in the West. But in this ‘paternalism’ of the West the major concern is not how quick democratization of the East will be. When the West shows its concern over the events in the East, it is primarily interested in finding legitimization for its own model of democracy and for finding new markets for the expansion of its own capitalist production. The West is so disappointed with the non-democratic developments in the East because it is searching in the East for the rebirth of its own democracy, the rediscovery of its own lost origins. 17 To exemplify this point, let us take so-called permissive education. A number of permissive school experiments were founded on the theory that it is necessary to abolish all school regulations and the coercive character of education in order to release the child’s creativity and allow the child’s nature to express itself. The child’s nature is essentially good; therefore it does not need the external constraint of education, but rather the space to express its own desire for knowledge, establish its own rules and freely form its personality. But as Catherine Millot (1979) has already pointed out in her analysis of Summerhill, the experimental, permissive school, the fundamental illusion of permissive theory turns on its failure to recognize the real mechanisms operative in the educational process. Neill Summerhill, the founder of Summerhill, thinks that his experiment succeeded due to consistent consideration of the child’s needs and the absolute freedom accorded in the child’s education. He does not see that his success is only a consequence of a transference which he brought about through the power of his personality. The success thus was not a consequence of a good theory, but rather a consequence of an unconscious influence of the teacher upon the pupil. This suggests that an education which helps to form the student’s personality is not the consequence of certain theories, but only a by-product of the student’s identification with the educator. And as Millot says, ‘Neill does not know that the changes affecting the pupils are triggered by the power of the influence of his personality, and this proves that he need not know what he does to be a good teacher’ (Millot, 1979: 158). A good pedagogue is therefore someone who does not know why he succeeds. He succeeds simply because of his own personality, because of the transference that he triggers – not because of the ideology of his worthy aims or the application of educational theories. 18 This symbolic structure is close to what the late Karl Popper conceived of as the ‘autonomy of world 3’, the realm of ‘objective knowledge’ irreducible to the pair of opposing terms, external reality and psychic interior (Popper, 1982: 185). It is not a positive social fact, i.e. it is of a quasi-transcendental nature. It forms the very frame structuring our perception of reality; its status is normative, it is a world of symbolic rules and codes. As such, it does not belong to the psychical level; it is a radically external, non-psychological universe of symbolic codes regulating our psychic self-experience. But it is also mistaken to reduce the symbolic order to institutions in social reality – this way, we miss the fact that language itself is an ideal institution to which the subject has to submit.

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4 THE STRUGGLE FOR HEGEMONY IN THE FORMER YUGOSLAVIA 1 As in the West, feminist issues were first raised in academic circles at the end of the 1970s and at the beginning of the 1980s, when women started questioning the Marxist idea which subordinated the ‘women question’ to the struggle for general liberation of the working classes. Women also began to study the history of women’s organizations before the socialist revolution, which had been totally forgotten when the communists came to power because they had dismissed those organizations as part of bourgeois society. Simultaneously, women theoreticians started studying French feminist thought and applying it to the analysis of women’s literature. Slowly, small feminist groups have been formed in the major cities. 2 On the image of the enemy in totalitarianism, see Lefort (1986). 3 For the analysis of ideological interpellation, see Althusser (1971). 4 See Ivo Žanic, ‘Bukvar antibirokratske revolucije’, Start, 30 September 1989. The process of exchanging the old leader for the new, Tito for Miloševic, was also an exceedingly important element of the new rhetoric. First of all it should be stressed that Miloševic never directly referred to Tito, although he sometimes used Tito’s formulations. At the same time, it is symptomatic of his condition that he never directly attacked or criticized Tito, in spite of the fact that the whole anti-bureaucratic project was aimed at the Titoist ideology and its scheme of federation. It is of interest to note that the anti-bureaucratic rhetoric exchanged Tito for Miloševic in two contradictory ways. On the one hand, it was stressed that Miloševic was the only real successor to Tito, the new son of a great leader, to which lines of a newly composed popular song bear witness: ‘Slobodan, proud name, Tito taught you well.’ On the other hand, there is the much stronger thesis whereby Miloševic’s accession is the only solution to Tito’s errors, as other lines show: ‘Slobodan, proud name, you are better for us than Tito.’ These apparently contradictory relations are accounted for by the mythical place which Tito had in the eyes of the nation. Miloševic’s project has to be seen as an apparent continuation and, at the same time, extension of Titoism. 5 On the notion of the ‘founding word’ see Lacan (1981: 315). 6 For the analysis of the notion of the people in socialist ideology, see Lefort (1986). 7 On the notion of objet petit a, see Lacan (1979). 8 As for the psychoanalytic notion of extimacy, see Lacan (1992). 9 The 1980s marked the time of numerous protests organized by the ‘new social movements’ and the new unions. Dissenting intellectuals were active in writing critical articles in the newspapers, launching new oppositional journals, etc. For a while the notion of ‘civil society’ was a popular topic in the discussions of oppositional intellectuals. ‘Civil society’ was perceived as a domain where people would be able to express their initiatives and thus oppose the all-powerfull state. But soon it became clear that civil society is not per se democratic, since, for example, the conservative moral majority initiatives can also account for civil society. The protagonists of the theory of civil society also realized that, for the civil society to have an impact, one has to have a democratic state and that the oppositional struggle for civil society in socialism has to go hand-in-hand with the struggle to transform the state. 5 FANTASY AS THE LIMIT OF DISTRIBUTIVE JUSTICE 1 Ironically, it was Jeremy Bentham, the father of utilitarianism, Rawls’s archenemy, who elaborated the notion of such ‘fictitious entities’ whose existence is purely symbolic.

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Rawls has also been criticized by feminist political theory for the implicit patriarchal attitude in his discussion of the original position. Rawls’s relation to feminism is, however, more ambiguous than it may seem. Notwithstanding patriarchal prejudices at work in his theoretical developments, his basic thesis that parties which meet in the original position are sexless not only renders possible a critical feminist appropriation of his theory, but also opens up the space for the possibility of using the matrix of the original position as an instrument to theorize the contractual nature of gay and lesbian sexual practices. For a feminist discussion of Rawls, see, for example, Pateman (1988) and Moller Okin (1991). On a different level, one encounters similar anti-state attitudes in some neoMarxist discussions that oppose state interference in education. These theories tend to overlook the paradoxical relation between the school system and the state. The fact is that a unitary public state school system became historically possible only when the national state was formed. The development of capitalist production, along with the unitary market, demanded the formation of a unitary educational system as well. The capitalist state effectively ‘forced’ children to go to school and it ‘prescribed’ certain knowledge to be taught in order to form an efficient workforce. It could also be said that the state needed schools in order to protect the interests of the ruling class and to enable the reproduction of capitalist society. But the role of the state in forming and controlling the school system is not simply negative: without the state there would have been no unitary school system. If one denies this positive role which the state has played in the formation of schools, one also denies the need for education as such and thus unconsciously complies with pre-civilized tribal and family forms of initiation or with closed, medieval types of religious schools. As Rolf Nemitz notes, ‘there is no egalitarianism without state regulation . . . this paradox, this strategic dilemma is given, it is impossible to get out of it’ (Nemitz, 1981: 60). By acknowledging this reality, one does not give the state the right to exert totalitarian power over the school system; instead one simply recognizes that the realization of a non-state-regulated egalitarian school system would mean that every village or every family would have its own type of school. That would be far from realizing the ideal of ‘equal education for everyone’ because family education can be even more oppressive than any ‘official’ curriculum. A similar problem emerges with the idea of private prisons. At first sight, the idea sounds revolutionary. In place of the overcrowded state prisons, private prisons could offer better and less repressive treatment of the prisoners. But the formation of private prisons that would not be under the state’s tight control could actually result in more repression. Some private prisons could easily start using prisoners for hard labour or for dangerous medical experiments. In developing this point, Rorty refers to Scarry (1985). As analysed in Chapter 1, a similar destruction of fantasy structure goes on in war. On the reactions to the school-bussing policy, see Lasch (1991).

6 LEGITIMIZING VIOLENCE 1 2 3

See also Elster (1989). The difference between Foucault’s definition of law and that of psychoanalysis is further elaborated in Chapter 7. Chapter 7 examines how the prevalence of justice over the law significantly determined the way crime was dealt with in socialism, and the fact that ‘real’ crime like murder got little attention from the authorities in comparison to the ‘crimes’ of disbelief in the system.

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7 CRIME AS A MODE OF SUBJECTIVIZATION 1 For the analysis of the changes in Oedipal structures in contemporary society, see Flower MacCannell (1991). 2 ‘The moral interdiction bears . . . on an impossible object (not, as in utilitarianism, on an actual object that one might otherwise possess), the mother, who is impossible because she is already unattainable. It is because the good object is already lost, desire has already been repressed, that the law forbids access to it. This means that repressed desire is the cause, not the consequence of moral law’ (Copjec, 1989: 79). 3 For Michel Foucault a psychoanalytic approach to crime and madness imposes an even more sophisticated type of control over individuals than does classical psychiatry. Although psychoanalysis relies on the individual’s free entry into analysis, in Foucault’s opinion analysis forces individuals to confess and thus controls and disciplines individuals the same way that a prison or psychiatric hospital does. The problem with Foucault is that he apparently presupposes the existence of a network of social knowledge, knowledge which is always in relation to the mechanisms of power but which appears to be a world of a pregiven norms, rules and context into which the individual’s confession is placed. Thus the confession of the patient in the psychiatric hospital is placed into the corpus of psychiatic knowledge, the criminal’s confession in court into the legal and criminological corpus of knowledge, etc. A similar a priori knowledge is at work in psychoanalysis, where the individual’s confession is placed into a defined network of psychoanalytic notions such as the Oedipus complex, the anal phase, etc., which classify the individual’s disease. But what Foucault does not recognize is that Freudian psychoanalysis is based precisely on the fact that there is no last truth in regard to which we can judge the subject because the subject has to ‘invent’ the truth by him or herself. In the psychoanalytic situation, the subject, through the transferential relation to the analyst, presupposes that the analyst knows the truth about the subject. But the fact is that the analyst does not know this truth. Instead, it is the subject who, through analysis must produce the truth about his or her desire. For psychoanalysis, it is not possible to produce the truth through confession, because the truth is never all. We are encountering the truth only on the edges of discourse: in symptoms, lapses, paradoxes, slips of the tongue, etc. We can cite one of Foucault’s own examples to show how psychoanalysis actually analyses crime differently from how he perceives it. Foucault presents a scene from a courtroom where a defendant easily confessed to the charged crime but did not want to comment on it or explain the personal reasons why he committed the crime. The judge was appalled by the criminal’s reaction and demanded that he recall some personal experience which might have led him to a crime, saying: ‘You must make an effort to analyse yourself. You are the one who has the keys to your own actions. Explain yourself’ (Foucault, 1988: 126). Foucault concludes from this example that for the present day judiciary, the criminal is more important than the crime and, as a consequence, the court cannot function without inspecting the criminal personality. As a French lawyer, quoted by Foucault, says: ‘They [the criminals] really ought to speak a little about themselves, if they want to be judged.’ For the judicial system to function, the criminal thus has to be reduced to an object which is examined and categorized on the basis of his intimate disclosures. For Foucault, psychoanalysis also reduces the subject to an object when it demands his or her confession. But the psychoanalytic response to Foucault’s example would be exactly the opposite. Psychoanalysis would oppose such a self-objectivization – the demand of the judge for the criminal to give a psychological explanation of his act. The fact that the criminal does not want to

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speak in court about his motives for the crime or about his personality is for psychoanalysis precisely the sign that he is a subject and not an object. As Freud says: ‘“You wanted to kill your father in order to be your father yourself. Now you are your father, but a dead father”. . . . “Now your father is killing you.” For the ego the death symptom is a satisfaction in phantasy of the masculine wish and at the same time a masochistic satisfaction; for the superego it is a punitive satisfaction – that is, a sadistic satisfaction. Both of them, the ego and the superego, carry on the role of the father’ (Freud, 1988b: 450, 451). On the antinomies of the concept of superego in Freud’s work, see Brennan (1992). Chikatilo in his youth wanted to become a lawyer and even passed the exams for the Moscow Law School, but was later rejected because of his father’s alleged antiSoviet activity. See Julian Symons, ‘The Monster of Rostov’ in The New York Times Book Review, 14 March 1993. After his first murder, Chikatilo was questioned by the police as a suspect but was quickly released for lack of evidence. Another, innocent person was later convicted for this crime. There were also other occasions when the police could have caught him, if there had been better investigations. One of the explanations for this nonaction of the police is that Chikatilo was a KGB informer. The New York Times Book Review, ibid.

8 WHY IS A WOMAN A SYMPTOM OF RIGHTS? 1 2

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For a criticism of MacKinnon from the deconstructionist feminist position which, however, differs from what I am trying to develop here, see, for example, Cornell (1991). For the feminist critique of the cogito, see Lloyd (1984), Irigaray (1985), Benhabib and Cornell (1987), Bordo (1987), Gatens (1991). For Lloyd the notion of the Cartesian cogito with its masculine character marks a declaration of war against women: the notion of Reason invoked by the cogito excludes women by fixing them as a negative pole of the dichotomy body–mind. Feminists thus have to expose the limit of this ideal of Reason and discover a richer form of thought which would not exclude the feminine. Irigaray’s opposition to the cogito’s exclusion of the irrational represented by the feminine is summed up thus: ‘But perhaps through this specular surface which sustains discourse is found not the void of nothingness but the dazzle of multifaceted speleology. . . . We need only press on a little further into the depths, into that so-called dark cave which serves as hidden foundation to their speculations’ (Irigaray, 1985: 143–4). Irigaray’s point is that professed sexual neutrality conceals an underlying phallocentrism which wears the mask of Enlightenment rationality. For Irigaray ‘the conceptualization of neutrality is inseparable from the conceptualization of sexual difference’ (Whitford, 1991: 73). I rely here on Joan Copjec’s unpublished article ‘Sex and the Euthanasia of Reason’. See her book Read My Desire: Lacan against Historicism, forthcoming, MIT Press. See Le Doeuff (1989) for the analysis of anti-feminism in philosophy. I am well aware that it is almost common knowledge today that the Kantian subject is monological and as such excludes the dimension of intersubjectivity. With the help of Lacanian psychoanalysis, it can be shown conclusively, however, that intersubjectivity in the post-transcendental Hegelian sense is only possible against the background of the Kantian subject. See Žižek (1993). Critical Legal Studies (CLS) theorists oppose liberal theorists by saying that liberals divide the world into two totally separate spheres: individual-community, self–

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Notes other. Connected to this division is the fact that rights discourse, in the opinion of CLS, is utterly individualistic: it perceives the individual as separated from the community and prevents individuals from understanding how they are dependent on one another, how every individual is linked to every other. Rights discourse also forces people to accept the social order as something inevitable and thus encourages individual passivity. Furthermore, it renders individuals completely dependent on the state because rights discourse sets up the state as the only agent that can grant rights. For the analysis of the CLS discourse, see Goodrich (1987). Ferry and Renaut (1985) argue that already in liberalism two types of rights were at work: rights-freedoms, which were securing political rights of individuals and thus demanded minimal state intervention into the lives of citizens; and rights-demands, which were trying to regulate the social needs of the individual and were thus demanding the intervention of the state. For Ferry and Renaut, both rights are now totally connected because, in democracy, political equality demands equality of the social conditions under which individuals live. Although socialist societies officially secured both types of rights, they actually perceived social rights as more important than political rights. In socialism there was no need to protect political rights because once the proletarians took power into their own hands, there was no further need to protect individuals from the state. Social rights, however, had to be fully protected: the state had to intervene in the economy, it had to be responsible for the social and economic security of its citizens, it had to control all spheres of production, as well as education, etc. For Ferry and Renaut the difference between rights-freedoms and rightsdemands parallels the difference between reason (Vernunft) and the understanding (Verstand) in Kant’s philosophy. Rights-freedoms belong to the order of the understanding because they can be realized so that, for example, the state imposes some legal regulations in order to protect individuals. Rights-demands belong to the order of reason: they have the role of the regulative ideas. These are the rights that can never be realized; society can only gradually approach them. This second type of rights cannot belong to the positive law, because we can never fully attain social security, total equality in employment, housing or cultural needs. The paradox of the socialist law is that it tried to realize precisely these rights. Socialist law was thus a programme for a total realization of social equality. But in attempting to achieve this goal, socialist law had to abolish all political rights and freedoms. Thus in its attempt to realize something that can be only an abstract idea, socialism abandoned ‘reason’ – rights-freedoms, which were able to be positivized. For the critique of the way liberal theory deals with the question of envy, see Chapter 5. In recent decades American society has experienced a hyper-invention of rights and an inflation of legal claims. Some of the rights being granted are even as absurd as the case when the town of Malibu supposedly gave dolphins rights equal to those of people. ‘Legally speaking, making claims can itself make things happen. This sense of “claiming” then, might well be called “the performative sense”. The legal power to claim (performatively) one’s right or things to which one has a right seems to be essential to the very notion of a right”(Feinberg, 1980: 150). Similarly, the subject addresses the Other when it lodges a complaint in court. The complaint assumes a special meaning when the subject hands it over to a lawyer. The lawyer will formulate the complaint in such a way that the judge can understand and act on it. As Jacques-Allain Miller (1991) says: through the lawyer the complaint will ‘speak in the language field of the Other’. In this language, the complaint will, of course, get a new form. It will not only be a description of what

Notes

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14

15

16

17

18

155

is the matter; in the formal complaint, what can be said will be stressed and what is better to keep secret will be left out. With a legally formulated complaint, the subject will enter the domain of the Other as a judicial subject and will thus acquire a new mode of existence. But for the subject who lodges the complaint, something else is also at work: the process of lodging the complaint itself in some way ‘satisfies’ the subject, even though nothing has yet been decided. Formalizing the injury or displeasure brings with it a certain satisfaction. In the ancient world, in contrast, this equation between freedom and equality did not exist. Equality, in antiquity, existed only within the bounds of freedom: equality was a consequence, an attribute of freedom. It was a right that was granted only to free citizens. These two terms, freedom and equality, are now taken as identical in meaning, even though when they were established in modern political discourse they were perceived to have different contents. The revolutionaries of 1789 were, for example, on the one hand, fighting against limitations of freedom imposed by the absolutist monarchy, and on the other hand against limitations of equality represented by privileges of the estates. This is, of course, a simplified account of a very complex issue in feminism. I am well aware that numerous approaches do not fit my account. For an overview of feminist theories of the body, see Adams (1986), Pateman and Gross (1986), Wolff (1990) and Gatens (1991). Numerous feminists have pointed out how Beauvoir’s and Firestone’s attempts to transcend the female body and its reproductive capacities actually accept the mind-body and nature-culture distinctions as given rather than as socially constructed. See, for example, Gatens (1991). Many feminists have debated whether Irigaray’s theory represents a return to essentialism and biology. For a critique of Irigaray’s essentialism, see Rose (1982) and Moi (1985). In response to this critique, Whitford (1991) and Fuss (1990) insist that Irigaray’s return to the feminine body is meant metaphorically and that she is mainly concerned about the discourse and representation of the body, not its biology. On the notion of phallus in Lacan’s theory, see Rose (1982).

CONCLUSION 1

2

Drakulic’s response to this question touches the very core of its ignorance of the reality of the problems of Yugoslav women: ‘I can imagine her /the American feminist/, in her worn-out jeans and fashionable T-shirt, with her trimmed black hair, looking younger than she is (aerobics, macrobiotics), sitting at her computer and typing this letter, these very words that – when I read them in a streetcar in Zagreb ten days later – sound so absurd that I laugh even more, as if I were reading some very good news. “No, dear B., we don’t discuss this matter”, I will answer in my letter. “It is not a. matter of choice, it is simply not a matter at all, see? And I cannot answer your questions, because they are all wrong.” But if she doesn’t understand us, who will? What is the way to show her what our life – the life of women and feminists – looks like? Maybe instead of answers, I could offer her something else. Suppose that my mind is an album of myriads of pictures, photos, images, paintings, snapshots, collages. And suppose I could show her some of them’ (Drakulic, 1993: 127, 128). The unnamed American feminist responded publicly to Drakulic’s remarks. Her published response evidenced clearly that she recognized the tensions and difficulties inherent in any discourse between Eastern and Western women. For example, she

156

3 4 5

5

Select bibliography argues that: ‘Western women, in speaking in their own language of feminism, do risk imposing standards of discourse, as I did, provoking intellectual and political resentment and sometimes shattering the possibilities of political co-operation, as happened in Germany. Some questions that Western women pose are indeed inappropriate. Yet in this case the questions proposed in that letter to Drakulic became the themes of fascinating essays by post-communist women themselves’ (Funk, 1993: 319–20). See 7 dni, 25 August 1993. See Lacan’s unpublished Seminar L’identification (1961/2). It is because of the importance of the symbolic identification that children play such a special role in the reporting of the war. Whenever the West starts feeling guilty for its failure to make peace, it starts rescuing wounded children. (These children had to be always wounded ‘just enough’ so that they did not look too awful or that they did not die during transportation.) Spectacles like the much publicized rescue from Sarajevo of little Irma by a British doctor in the summer of 1993 are than replayed on the TV. While the public is tearfully watching the suffering of the young girl, the politicians are proud of their humanitarian action. And the whole spectacle has the aim of convincing ourselves that we are doing ‘something’, so that our bad conscience is silenced. The ‘innocence’ of children, of course, plays a major role in this spectacle where the question of the ‘guilt’ of the parties involved, as well as of the Western observer, remains such a traumatic issue. There are, however, plenty of examples of the media’s use of the image of innocent children. Who does not remember that the babies dying in incubators in Kuwait helped American politicians to get public support for the Gulf War? And during the FBI debacle during the siege of the Branch Davidian cult in Waco, Texas, children were again used as the excuse for using force. The alleged report of children being molested by the cult leader was used by the FBI to justify the attack which caused a mass suicide of cult members. In both cases, it did not matter that there was no real proof of the violence against children. (After the Gulf War, it was even revealed that the whole story about the incubators was a fraud: the Kuwaiti government hired an American agency to carry out public media research, and found out that people identify most with small children who are in trouble. The Kuwaitis, therefore, simply made up the story of the babies being killed in incubators by the Iraqi soldiers.) I refer here to Gerard Miller’s essay that was published only in Slovenian in a collection entitled Psychoanalysis and Culture (1980).

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Freud, Sigmund (1985) ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’, in Civilization, Society and Religion (The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 12), London, Penguin, pp. 91–178. Freud, Sigmund (1987) ‘Totem and Taboo’, in The Origins of Religion (The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 13), London, Penguin. Freud, Sigmund (1988a) ‘Some character-types met with in psychoanalytic work’, in Art and Literature (The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 14), London, Penguin, pp. 291–319. Freud, Sigmund (1988b) ‘Dostoevsky and parricide’, in Art and Literature (The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 14), London, Penguin, pp. 441–60. Funk, Nanette (1993) ‘Feminism East and West’, in N. Funk and M. Mueller (eds) Gender Politics and Post-Communism: Reflections From Eastern Europe and the Former Soviet Union, London and New York, Routledge, pp. 318–30. Fuss, Diana (1990) Essentially Speaking, London, Routledge. Gallop, Jane (1988) Thinking Through the Body, New York, Columbia University Press. Gatens, Moira (1991) Feminism and Philosophy: Perspectives on Difference and Equality. Cambridge, Polity Press. Gilligan, Carol (1982) In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, Harvard University Press. Ginsburg, Faith D. (1989) Contested Lives: The Abortion Debate in an American Community, Berkeley, University of California Press. Goodrich, Peter (1987) Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis, London, Macmillan. Grosz, Elizabeth (1990) Jacques Lacan: A Feminist Introduction, London and New York, Routledge. Hall, Stuart (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal, London, Verso. Harth, Erica (1992) Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Havel, Václav (1985) The Power of the Powerless: Citizens Against the State in CentralEastern Europe, Armonk, M.E. Sharpe. Hegel, George W.F. (1977) Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Hegel, George W.F. (1985) Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T.M. Knox and A.V. Miller, Oxford, Clarendon. Hegel, George W.F. (1991) Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H.B. Nisbet, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Honderich, Ted (1985) ‘Punishment, the New Retributivism and Political Philosophy’, in A. Phillips-Griffiths (ed.) Philosophy and Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Irigaray, Luce (1985) Speculum of the Other Woman, trans. G. C. Gill, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Jardine, Alice (1985) Gynesis: Configurations on Woman and Modernity, Ithaca, Cornell University Press. Kant, Immanuel (1992) The Conflict of the Faculties, Lincoln and London, University of Nebraska Press. Kantorowicz, Ernst H. (1965) ‘Pro patria mori in medieval political thought’, in Selected Studies, Locust Valley, J.J. Augustin. Kardelj, Edvard (1978) Democracy and Socialism, trans. M. and B. Milosavljevic, London, Summerfield Press. Kristeva, Julia (1993) Nations without Nationalism, trans. L. S. Roudiez, New York, Columbia University Press.

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Krivich, Mikhail and Ol’gin, Ol’gert (1993) Comrade Chikatilo: the Psychopathology of Russia’s Notorious Serial Killer, trans. T.P. Bludeau, New York, Barricade Books. Kukathas, Chandran and Pettit, Philip (1990) Rawls: A Theory of Justice and its Critics, Cambridge, Polity Press. Kundera, Milan (1986) The Unbearable Lightness of Being, London, Faber. Kymlicka, Walter (1990) Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, Oxford, Oxford University Press. Lacan, Jacques (1961/2) L’identification, unpublished seminar. Lacan, Jacques (1975a) Le seminaire, livre XX: Encore, Paris, Editions du Seuil. Lacan, Jacques (1975b) De la psychose paranoïaque dans ses rapports avec la personalité, Paris, Editions du Seuil. Lacan, Jacques (1977) Ecrits: A Selection, trans. A. Sheridan, London, Tavistock Publications. Lacan, Jacques (1979) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, trans. by A. Sheridan, Harmondsworth, Penguin. Lacan, Jacques (1981) Le seminaire, livre III: Les psychoses, Paris, Editions du Seuil. Lacan, Jacques (1990) Television: A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, trans. D. Hollier, R. Krauss and A. Michelson, New York, Norton. Lacan, Jacques (1992) The Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959–1960), trans. D. Porter, London, Routledge. Laclau, Ernesto (1977) Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory, London, Verso. Laclau, Ernesto (1990) New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time, London, Verso. Laclau, Ernesto and Mouffe, Chantal (1985) Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, London, Verso. Lasch, Christopher (1991) The True and Only Haven: Progress and its Critics, New York, Norton. Le Doeuff, Michèle (1989) The Philosophical Imaginary, Stanford, Stanford University Press. Lefort, Claude (1981) ‘Droit de l’homme et politique’, in L’invention démocratique, Paris, Fayard. Lefort, Claude (1986) The Political Forms of Modern Society, Cambridge, Polity Press. Lefort, Claude (1988) Democracy and Political Theory, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press. Lloyd, Genevieve (1984) The Man of Reason: ‘Male’ and ‘Female’ in Western Philosophy, London, Methuen. Lourie, Richard (1993) Hunting the Devil, New York, HarperCollins. Luker, Kristin (1984) Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Berkeley, University of California Press. MacKinnon Catherine A. (1991) ‘Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: Toward Feminist Jurisprudence’, in K.T. Bartlett and R. Kennedy (eds) Feminist Legal Theory, Boulder, Westview Press, pp. 181–200. McLaren, Peter (1986) Schooling as a Ritual Performance, London and New York, Routledge. Malachowski, Alan (ed.) (1990) Reading Rorty, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Marx, Karl (1975) On the Jewish Question, in K. Marx and F. Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3, London, Lawrence and Wishart. Miller, Jacques-Alain (1985/6) Extimité, unpublished seminar. Miller, Jacques-Alain (1991) ‘Reflections on the Formal Envelope of the Symptom’, in Lacanian ink 4, pp. 13–21. Miller, James (1993) The Passion of Michel Foucault, New York, Simon & Schuster. Millet, Kate (1971) Sexual Politics, London, Rupert Hart-Davis. Millot, Catherine (1979) Freud anti-pedagogue, Paris, La bibliotheque d’Ornicar.

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Index

abortion 20, 24–9, 34, 71, 112 Adams, Parveen 128, 155 (15n) Althusser, Louis 58, 150 (3n) antagonism 95, 118, 133; of democratic power 96; social 65, 69, 120, 141 ant-abortion movements 26 ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’: in Serbia 51, 66, 67 anti-Semitism 22, 29, 30, 36, 37, 135 apartheid 12 Aristotle 126, 131 Balibar, Etienne 12, 128–31 Baltic states 90 Beauvoir, Simone de 130, 155 (16n) Benhabib, Seyla 153 (2n), Benjamin, Walter 90–4, 110 Bentham, Jeremy 102, 151 (1n) Benvenuto, Bice 100, 125 body: 114; and mind 114, 129–31; in feminism 130, 131 Bordo, Susan 153 (2n) Bosnia and Herzegovina 16, 17, 22, 54, 62, 68, 73 Bourdieu, Pierre 55 Bracher, Mark 28 Brennan, Teresa 116, 153 (4n) bureaucracy: in socialism 59, 60, 65; jargon of 66 capitalism 2, 77 Cartesians 115 Casey, John 21 Castillo, Monique 94 castration 132; and democracy 126; symbolic 100, 125, 126, 132 Ceaucescu, Nicolae 25, 29, 114 Chikatilo, Andrei 105–9

China 39 Christian values 24, 27 civil society 64, 72, 123 Cixous, Helene 130, 131 cogito 83; Cartesian 114; Kantian 116 Communist Party 20 communitarianism 78–84 community 83, 87, 88, 129; symbolic 126 constitution 94 control: hidden 95; social 38–44, 47, 51, 83, 87, 88, 108, 113, 126; state 88 Cornell, Drucila 153 (1n, 2n) Copjec, Joan 87, 95, 102, 152 (2n), 154 (4n) Cowie, Elizabeth 144 (10n) crime 6, 44, 99–106; in socialism 104; political 104 Critical Legal Studies 120 Croatia 17, 18, 20, 22, 24, 27–9, 62, 68, 70, 73, 98 cultural difference 134 Czechoslovakia 38–44, 47, 51, 110 deconstructivist feminist theory 116 Deleuze, Gilles 2 democracy 1, 54, 77, 90, 94–8, 112, 119, 121, 126, 141; Benjamin’s critique of 92 Derrida, Jacques 91, 92 Descartes, René 114, 115 desire 64, 77, 85, 87, 95, 100–2, 106, 124–7, 132; incestuous 101; and law 96; of the Other 88, 123; maternal 100; in relation to need and demand 124, 127; in Rawl’s Theory of Justice 79 discourse 23, 32; educational, 54; ideological 24, 60; oppositional, 60,

164

The Spoils of Freedom

61; official socialist 60, 61, political 6, 18, 24, 32, 53, 54, 72; its ideological meaning 18, 19 discursive practice 128 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 103 Drakulic, Slavenka 134, 135, 155 (1n) drive 131 Dubcek, Alexander 39 Ducrot, Oswald 31 Eastern Europe 1, 24, 38–50, 77, 90, 98, 112; feminism in 1 ecology 60; movement in Slovenia 70, 72 education 80; in socialism, 54–6, 99 ‘egaliberté’ 128–30 ego-ideal 100, 139, 140 Elster, Jon 54–7, 93, 94, 148 (16n), 152 (1n) enemy 22, 23, 24, 49, 50, 65, 71; repression of, 51–4; in fascism 67; in Serbia 67; in Croatia 68 enjoyment (jouissance) 6, 15, 28, 78, 85–8, 100–3, 108, 141; feminine 28, 132; and nationalism 21, 22 Enlightenment 84, 112, 118, 122 envy 87, 88, 123 essentialism 135 Ewald, François 119 fantasy 6, 7, 15, 20, 22, 29, 47, 49, 64, 77, 85, 88–9; country as 15; and human rights 127; and political discourse 18, 19, 30–7, 141; nationalist 66 fascism 20, 36; and ‘anti-bureaucratic revolution’ in Serbia 67 father 104; Name-of-the-Father 99–103, 141; Oedipal 100, 101, 104, 141; père-jouissance 141; primordial 100, 101, 104, 132, 141; symbolic 103, 141 Feinberg, Joel 123–7, 155 (11n) femininity 5 feminist legal theory 113–18 feminist movement 1, 6, 70; East European, 1, 4; and poststructuralism 128; Western 2; and opposition 61 Ferry, Luc 116, 154 (8n) Fink, Bruce 132, 133 Firestone, Shulamith 130, 155 (16n) Flower MacCannell, Juliet 152 (1n)

Foucault, Michel 2, 38, 95, 101, 118, 119, 142 (3n), 145 (5n), 152 (3n); The History of Sexuality 2 Foucauldians 116–20 ‘founding word’ 66 France 140 French Revolution 11 Freud, Sigmund 90, 101–3, 137, 140, 141, 153 (4n); on identification 137; on the myth of the primordial father 83 Funk, Nanette, 156 (2n) Fuss, Diana, 155 (17n) Gallop, Jane 130, 131 Gatens, Moira 153 (2n), 155 (15n) gay rights movement 70 Gilligan, Carol 113 Good 78, 80 Goodrich, Peter 154 (7n) goods: destruction of 87; primary 79, 87 Gorbachev, Mikhail 90, 105 Grosz, Elizabeth 155 (15n) Guattari, Felix 2 guilt 50, 97, 101, 103, 109–11 Hall, Stuart 33, 34 Harth, Erica 115 Havel, Václav 48 Hegel, Georg W.F. 57, 69, 79, 83 hegemony: struggle for 62; ideological 62 homophobia 37 Honderich, Ted 77 Hume, David 80 Hungary 98, 110 Husak, Gustav 39 ideal ego 33, 102, 139 ideological state apparatuses 54 ideology 6, 11, 18, 27, 33, 44, 49, 55–7, 58, 73, 109; fascist 65; socialist 66 identification 49, 54, 100, 103, 110, 135, 136; fantasmatic 50; in Freud 137; in hysteria 137; ideological 6, 50; imaginary 28, 34, 139; in Lacan 137–9; symbolic 65, 139; national 14, 15, 20, 27, 28, 62, 63; and political discourse 32–7; in politics 137; in group psychology 140

Index identity 2–4, 28, 49, 77, 102, 116; sexual 2–4, 17; national 11, 15, 17, 23, 24, 27, 37, 63, 66, 73, 111; religious 17 Imaginary 28, 78; people as 66 immigrants 12, 21, 22, 29 immigration law 19 incest 101; prohibition of 125 intellectuals: East European 4, 5, 42, 43, 46, 98; Western 4 interpellation 65 Irigaray, Luce 130, 153 (2n, 3n), 155 (17n) Jardine, Alice 115 Jews 98 justice: and law 97, 106; in Rawls 79–81, 85–8; distributive 82; as fairness 81, 84; .social 82; in Nozick 81; in Sandel 85–7 Kant, Immanuel 11, 80, 85, 115–17, 142 (1n); non-substantial subjectivity 81; morality 84 Kantorowicz, Ernst 144 (13n) Kardelj, Edward 61 Kennedy Roger 100, 125 Kosovo 22, 29, 39, 52, 54, 58, 62, 64, 65 Kristeva, Julia 26 Krivich, Oleg 106–8 Kukathas, Chandran 78, 82 Kundera, Milan 48, 139 Lacan, Jacques 28, 30, 31, 33, 35, 78, 85–8, 97, 100–2, 106, 115, 116, 124–7, 13, 132, 137–41, 150 (5n, 7n, 8n); on formulas of sexuation 132, 133 Laclau, Ernesto 53, 62, 65, 72 Lasch, Christopher 151 (6n) law 91–5, 101, 106, 113, 118, 119, 127, 132, 141; performative and 91; and nationalism 52; and power 120; in socialism 99, 106; natural 119 Le Doeuff, Michele 115, 154 (5n) Lefort, Claude 49, 94, 96, 119–21, 126, 150 (2n, 6n) legal theory: in communism 121 legitimization 112; of violence 90–8; self-legitimization 91, 96 Lenin 91 lesbian rights 60

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liberalism 69, 78, 113; and politics, 73; liberal democracy 77, 78, 84–6, 121; liberal theory 77, 82 libertarianism 80–3 Lloyd, Genevieve 153 (2n) Luker, Kristin 27, 34 Macedonia 63, 73 Mackinnon, Catherine 113 Marx, Karl 119 Marxism 60, 61, 72 master: as symbolic point 140, 141; in opposition to totalitarian leader 141 matheme: in Lacan 131, 132 media: and the Bosnian war 13; and the Gulf war 13 Miller, Gerard 156 (5n) Miller, Jacques-Allain 21, 155 (12n) Miller, James 142 (3n) Millot, Catherine 149. (17n) Miloševic, Slobodan 18, 19, 35, 36, 60, 64–8, 70 Minson, Jeffrey 146 (7n) Montenegro 62, 73 moral majority 6, 20, 24–30, 34, 114 Moller Okin, Susan 151 (2n) motherhood 27 Mouffe, Chantal 53, 62, 65 multiculturalism 2, 12 murder 106 mythology: in Serbia 65; national 77 nation 20, 21, 22, 23, 27, 29, 37, 77, 96, 98, 110 nationalism 18, 19, 20, 36, 37, 64, 65–9; ‘progressive’ versus ‘regressive’, 63 Nemitz, Rolf 151 (3n) Neo-Kantians 118, 119; their critique of Foucault, 119 Neo-Nazism 12 Neo-Stalinism: in Serbia 64 ‘new social movements’ 60, 70, 71 non-alignment 58 ‘normalization’: in communism 38–50, 54 Nozick, Robert 81 objet petit a 69 ,101, 106–8, 125, 126, 132 October-Revolution 91 Oedipus complex 103 Ol’gin, Ol’gert 108–108

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Olsen Frances 113 ‘original position’ (Rawls) 86–8; as symbolic construction 80–83 Other 21, 100–4, 108, 117, 124–7, 138; big Other 11, 57, 69, 104, 106; big Other in socialism and post–socialism 108–110; lack in the Other 125 Parekh Bhikhu 21, 22 Party: Communist 47, 60, 64, 96, 99, 130 passage à l’acte 108, 109 Pateman, Carol 151 (2n), 155 (15n) patriarchal domination 112–17, 130; in communism 2–5, 25, 47; in postsocialism 26, 60; and war in Bosnia 17 patricide 103 peace movement 60, 70 ‘People-as-One’ (in Lefort) 96 performative 30, 91, 93, 96, 98 perversion: and law 99 Pettit, Philip 78, 82 phallus 100; phallic function 132 philosophy: moral 84; in Rorty 84, 85 Plato 79 pleasure principle 102 Poland 20, 98 police 43; secret 49, 59, 106 ‘political correctness’ 2–5, 134 Popper, Karl 149 (18n) populism 36; in Serbia 23, 35, 64 postmodernism 117, 118, 122 post-socialism 4, 24, 37 potlach 87 power 38, 71, 93–6, 104, 118, 119; self-binding of 93–7 pragmatism 118, 121 Prague Spring 6 Praxis 60, 110 proletariat: in socialism 44 psychosis 101, 106–9, 126 punishment 53, 95, 102; of the self, 103 punk 70 race 23, 77, 86 racism 11, 12, 18, 37, 88, 134, 135; ‘meta-racism’ 11, 12, 19 rape 22, 23, 52; in Bosnian war 16, 17 Raškovic, Jovan 29 Rawls, John 79–84, 151 (2n)

Reaganism 36 Real 15, 23, 78, 85, 87, 97, 131–3 Reason: in Hegel 57 refugees: solidarity with 140 religion 86; in Rorty 84, 85 Renaut, Alain 118, 154 (8n) rights, 81, 85; human 1, 6, 21, 28, 29, 47, 53, 54, 61, 64, 65, 112, 113, 117–28, 131, 133; natural 81, 83 Romania 25, 91, 110 Rorty, Richard 17, 83–7, 118, 121–3, 135, 145 (16n), 151 (4n) Rose, Jacqueline 155 (17n, 18n) Rousseau, Jean Jacques 55 Sandel, Michael 81–5 Scarry, Elaine 14, 15, 151 (4n) school-bussing 88 self-identity 86, 87 self-management socialism 51–4, 58–60, 73; its rhetoric 66 Serbia 17, 35, 51, 62, 64, 70 serial killers 104; in socialism 105 sexism 37, 88 sexual difference 115–17, 128–32; and human rights 128 sexuality 77, 113, 128 signifier 137; floating 53 Silvestre, Michel 101, 103, 104, 141 Simecka, Milan 40, 44, 47, 147 (1n) Slovenia 20, 24, 36, 37, 46, 62, 70–3, 110, 140; alternative movements in 70–3 Snitow, Ann 4 solidarity 85, 86, 121, 135, 136; and war 140, 141 Sosoe, Lukas 118 Soviet Union 25, 90, 105–9 speech act theory 30, 31 Spinoza, Baruch de 93 Stalin Joseph 25, 58, 105, 138, 141 subculture 70 subject 93, 95, 99–104, 114–19, 137; of desire 123; split 117; Cartesian 116: in Kant 81, 83, 116; in Lacan 31, 32; pre-Kantian 83; as manque à être 138, 141; in Sandel 82; in Rawls 82; in psychoanalysis 95; in pre-modern society 126 superego 50, 100, 103 symbolic order 15, 23, 33, 44, 47, 53, 54, 56, 57, 69, 78, 86, 102, 104, 108,

Index 116, 124, 128, 130–3, 139; identification with 73 symbolic knowledge 97 symptom: father as 101 Taylor, Charles 84 Thatcherism 33; 34 Theweleit, Klaus 144 (12n) Thing 87; as nation 23 Tito, Josip Broz 58, 66 totalitarianism 27, 36, 47, 49, 65, 90, 96, 119 Tribe, Lawrence H. 25 unary trait (trait unaire): in Freud 137; in Lacan 137 utilitarianism 77–9, 102 utterance, 18, 19, 32 veil of ignorance 79 violence 90, 91; legitimization of 93, 96, 98; and law 90; judicio-symbolic 91 law-making 91, 94; law-preserving 91, 94; in psychoanalysis 95; in Foucault 95; founding 110; sexual 113

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voyeurism 107 war 14, 137; First World War 24; Second World War 24, 45, 68, 107; in Bosnia 16, 17, 18, 134, 135, 138; in Croatia 18, 70; in Slovenia 70 Weber, Samuel 143 (4n) West, Robin 113, 114, 117 Whitford, Margaret 145 (17n), 153 (3n), 155 (17n) Wolff, Janet 155 (15n) women: in Bosnia 134; in communism 2, 5, 27; in post-socialism 27–30, 60, 98, 112–15 working class: in socialism 59, 60 Yugoslavia, former 4, 13, 14, 24, 29, 35, 45, 46, 69, 70, 73, 110; Yugoslav peoples army 62, 68–70 youth: in socialism 44–6 zoon politikon 126 Žižek, Slavoj 147 (16n), 154 (6n) Županov, Josip 59