The other day I stumbled upon an interview Der Spiegel had conducted with Slavoj Žižek a few months back that has provided me food for thought over the last few days. Below are some choice excerpts from the article that will hopefully provide a couple others with mental sustenance as well.
Žižek: The European leading culture is the universality of Enlightenment within which individuals view themselves through this universality. That means you have to be capable of dispensing with your characteristics and to ignore your particular social, religious or ethnic positions. It's not sufficient to tolerate each other. We need to have the ability to experience our own cultural identity as something contingent, something coincidental, something that can be changed.
Žižek: The universal individual is very much a reality in our life. Apart from apples, pears and grapes, there should be a place for fruits as such. I love the beauty of this platonic idea. People belong to a specific group, but at the same time they are part of a universal dimension. I don't remain the same throughout the course of my life, but I do remain me. A community is not closed either. A person can leave one and join another. Our identity is made up of several identities that can exist successively and in parallel.
SPIEGEL: Is unbridled individual hedonism the only thing we have with which to oppose this fundamentalism?
Žižek: No, for two reasons. The first is that our opponent isn't really religion. Zivko Kusti, a Croatian Catholic nationalist priest, declared Catholicism to be a symbol of the fact that people aren't prepared to renounce their national and cultural legacy -- "the whole Croatianness." This statement makes clear that it is no longer an issue of faith and its truth, but rather a political-cultural project. Religion here is just an instrument, an indicator of our collective identity. It's about how much public one's own side controls, the amount of hegemony "our" side exerts. That's why Kusti approvingly quotes an Italian communist who claims, "I am an atheist Catholic." That's also why Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who himself is not very religious, referenced the Christian legacy as a foundation of European identity. The second reason, which is even more decisive, is that the unbridled personal freedom of choice fits in excellently with today's capitalism in the sense that the global social and economic process is becoming more and more impenetrable. Individual hedonism and fundamentalism are mutually driving each other. You can only effectively combat fundamentalism with a new collective project of radical change. And there is nothing trivially hedonistic about that.
SPIEGEL: Who determines what is contingent and what is substantial? For an orthodox Muslim, the headscarf is not contingent, it is substantial.
Žižek: Therein lays the explosive problem. The girl, the woman must decide on that in a self-determined manner. In order for her to be able to do that, she must be freed of the pressure of the family and community. And this is where the emancipatory violence applies: The only possibility for autonomy is uprooting, tearing one's self out of the community's pressure to conform. That's why one of my heroes is Malcolm X. The "X" stands for uprooting. It didn't drive him to search for his African roots. On the contrary, he saw it as a chance to attain a new universal freedom.
SPIEGEL: You welcome this violence?
Žižek: I accept this violence because it's the price for true contingency and the liberation of the self. It's like a sadomasochistic sex game. Those involved can participate in all the perversions. At any time, though, everyone has the right to say, "Stop, that's it, I'm stopping and leaving." Progress in Western democracy consists of constantly expanding the scope of universality and, by doing so, also diversifying the freedom of choice between contingent decisions. But contingency does not mean triviality. Our most valuable collective achievements are contingent -- they come out of nowhere and break with our substantial identities.
Link: <http://m.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/a-1023506.html#spRedirectedFrom=www&referrrer= >
