The Year of Dreaming Dangerously
By Slavoj Žižek
Verso Books & Google Books
Call it the year of dreaming dangerously: 2011 caught the world off guard with a series of shattering events. While protesters in New York, Cairo, London, and Athens took to the streets in pursuit of emancipation, obscure destructive fantasies inspired the world’s racist populists in places as far apart as Hungary and Arizona, achieving a horrific consummation in the actions of mass murderer Anders Breivik.
The subterranean work of dissatisfaction continues.
Rage is building, and a new wave of revolts and disturbances will follow. Why? Because the events of 2011 augur a new political reality. These are limited, distorted—sometimes even perverted—fragments of a utopian future lying dormant in the present.
Exclusive final chapter from Žižek’s new book, The years of dreaming dangerously
So where do we stand now, in 2012/ 2011 was the year of dreaming
dangerously, of the revival of radical emancipatory politics all around
the world. Now, a year later, every day brings new proofs of how fragile
and inconsistent the awakening was, with all of its many facets
displaying the same signs of exhaustion: the enthusiasm of the Arab
Spring is mired in compromises and religious fundamentalism; the OWS is
losing momentum to such an extent that, in a nice case of the “cunning
of reason,” the police cleansing of Zuchotti Park and other sites of the
OWS protests cannot but appear as a blessing in disguise, covering up
the immanent loss of momentum. And the same story goes on all around the
world: the Maoists in Nepal seem outmaneuvered by the reactionary
royalist forces; Venezuela’s “Bolivarian” experiment more and more
regressing into a caudillo-run populism… What are we to do in such
depressive times when dreams seem to fade away? Is the only choice we
have the one between nostalgic-narcissistic remembrance of the sublime
enthusiastic moments, and the cynically-realist explanation of why the
attempts to really change the situation had to fail?
The first thing to state is that the subterranean work of
dissatisfaction is going on: rage is accumulating and a new wave of
revolts will follow. The weird and unnatural relative calm of the Spring
of 2012 is more and more perforated by the growing subterranean
tensions announcing new explosions; what makes the situation so ominous
is the all-pervasive sense of blockage: there no clear way out, the
ruling elite is clearly losing its ability to rule. What makes the
situation even more disturbing is the obvious fact that democracy
doesn’t work: after elections in Greece and in Spain, the same
frustrations remain. How should we read the signs of this rage? In his
Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin quotes the French historian André
Monglond: “The past has left images of itself in literary texts, images
comparable to those which are imprinted by light on a photosensitive
plate. The future alone possesses developers active enough to scan such
surfaces perfectly.” Events like the OWS protests, the Arab Spring, demonstrations in Greece
and Spain, etc., have to be read as such signs from the future. In
other words, we should turn around the usual historicist perspective of
understanding an event out of its context and genesis. Radical
emancipatory outburst cannot be understood in this way: instead of
analyzing them as a part of the continuum of past/present, we should
bring in the perspective of the future, i.e., we should analyze them as
limited, distorted (sometimes even perverted) fragments of a utopian
future which lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential.
According to Deleuze, in Proust, “people and things occupy a place in
time which is incommensurable with the one that they have in space”: the notorious madeleine is here in place, but this is not its true time. In a similar way, one should learn the art to recognize, from an
engaged subjective position, elements which are here, in our space, but
whose time is the emancipated future, the future of the Communist Idea.
However, while one should learn to watch for such signs from the
future, we should also be aware that what we are doing now will only
become readable once the future will be here, so we should not put too
much hopes into the desperate search for the “germs of Communism” in
today’s society. One should thus strive for a delicate balance between
reading signs from the (hypothetic Communist) future and maintaining the
radical openness of the future: openness alone ends up in decisionist
nihilism which constrains us to leaps into the void, while full reliance
on the signs from the future can succumb to determinist planning (we
know what the future should look like and, from a position of
meta-language, somehow exempted from history, we just have to enact it).
However, the balance one should strive for has nothing to do with some
kind of wise “middle road” avoiding both extremes (“we know in a general
sense the shape of the future we are moving towards, but we should
simultaneously remain open to unpredictable contingencies”). Signs from
the future are not constitutive but regulative in the Kantian sense;
their status is subjectively mediated, i.e., they are not discernible
from any neutral “objective” study of history, but only from an engaged
position—following them remains an existential wager in Pascal’s sense.
We are dealing here with the circular structure best exemplified by a
science-fiction story set a couple of hundred years ahead of our time
when time travel was already possible, about an art critic who gets so
fascinated by the works of a New York painter from our era that he
travels back in time to meet him; he discovers that the painter is a
worthless drunk who even steals from him the time machine and escapes to
the future; alone in today’s world, the art critic paints all the
paintings that fascinated him in the future and made him travel into the
past. In a homologous way, the Communist signs from the future are
signs from a possible future which will become actual only if we follow
these signs—in other words, they are signs which paradoxically precede
that of which they are signs. Recall the Pascalean topic of deus
absconditus, of a “hidden god” discernible only to those who search for
him, who are engaged in the path of this search:
“God has willed to redeem men and to open salvation to those who seek
it. But men render themselves so unworthy of it that it is right that
God should refuse to some, because of their obduracy, what He grants
others from a compassion which is not due to them. If He had willed to
overcome the obstinacy of the most hardened, He could have done so by
revealing Himself so manifestly to them that they could not have doubted
of the truth of His essence; as it will appear at the last day, with
such thunders and such a convulsion of nature that the dead will rise
again, and the blindest will see Him. It is not in this manner that He
has willed to appear in His advent of mercy, because, as so many make
themselves unworthy of His mercy, He has willed to leave them in the
loss of the good which they do not want. It was not, then, right that He
should appear in a manner manifestly divine, and completely capable of
convincing all men; but it was also not right that He should come in so
hidden a manner that He could not be known by those who should sincerely
seek Him. He has willed to make himself quite recognizable by those;
and thus, willing to appear openly to those who seek Him with all their
heart, and to be hidden from those who flee from Him with all their
heart. He so regulates the knowledge of Himself that He has given signs
of Himself, visible to those who seek Him, and not to those who seek Him
not. There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough
obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”
God gives these signs in the guise of miracles, and this is why the same
mixture of light and obscurity characterizes miracles: miracles are not
visible as such to everyone, but only to believers—skeptical
non-believers (to whom Pascal refers as “libertins,” in a typical 17th
century way, as opposed to the 18th century predominant meaning of
debauchery) can easily dismiss them as natural phenomena, and those who
believe in them as victims of superstition. Pascal thus openly admits a
kind of hermeneutic circle in the guise of the mutual interdependence of
miracles and “doctrine” (the church teaching): “Rule: we must judge of
doctrine by miracles; we must judge of miracles by doctrine. All this is
true, but contains no contradiction.” Perhaps, one can apply here
Kant’s formula of the relationship between reason and (sensuous)
intuition: doctrine without miracles is sterile and impotent, miracles
without doctrine are blind and meaningless. Their mutual independence is
thus not symmetrical: “Miracles are for doctrine, and not doctrine for
miracles.” In Badiou’s terms, miracle is Pascal’s name for an Event, an
intrusion of the impossible-Real into our ordinary reality which
momentarily suspends its causal nexus; however, it is only an engaged
subjective position, a subject who “desires to see,” which can truly
identify a miracle.
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