In Defense of Lost Causes - Slavoj Žižek

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Soviet times, the Serbsky Institute in Moscow was the psychiatric flagship for punitive political control; its psychiatrists developed painful drug methods to make detainees talk and extract testimony for use in national security investigations. Underpinning the ability of psychiatrists to incarcerate people was an invented political mental disorder known as (“sluggish vilotekushchaia schizophrenia”). Psychiatrists described symptoms thus: a person might appear quite normal most of the time but would break out with a severe case of “inflexibility of convictions,” or “nervous exhaustion brought on by his or her search for justice,” or “a tendency to litigation” or “reformist delusions.” The treatment involved intravenous injections of psychotropic drugs that were so painfully administered that patients became unconscious. The overriding belief was that a person had to be insane to be opposed to Communism. Is this psychiatric approach to politically problematic positions a thing of the past? Unfortunately, no: not only is the Serbsky Institute today happily thriving in Putin’s Russia, but, as a recent incident with Mel Gibson indicates, it will soon open a branch in Malibu! Here is Gibson’s own description of what happened to him on Friday, July 28, 2006:

      I drove a car when I should not have, and was stopped by the LA County Sheriffs. The arresting officer was just doing his job and I feel fortunate that I was apprehended before I caused injury to any other person. I acted like a person completely out of control when I was arrested, and said things that I do not believe to be true and which are despicable.

      It is reported that Gibson said, “F------ Jews . . . The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world,” and asked a deputy, “Are you a Jew?” Gibson apologized, but his apology was rejected by the Anti-Defamation League. Here is what Abraham Foxman, director of the League, wrote:

      Mel Gibson’s apology is unremorseful and insufficient. It’s not a proper apology because it does not go to the essence of his bigotry and his anti-Semitism. His tirade finally reveals his true self and shows that his protestations during the debate over his film The Passion of the Christ, that he is such a tolerant, loving person, were a sham.

      Later, Gibson offered a more substantial apology, announcing through a spokesman that he would undergo rehabilitation for alcohol abuse. He added: “Hatred of any kind goes against my faith. I’m not just asking for forgiveness. I would like to take it one step further, and meet with leaders in the Jewish community, with whom I can have a one-on-one discussion to discern the appropriate path for healing.” Gibson said he is “in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display.” This time, Foxman accepted his apology as sincere:

      Two years ago, I was told by his publicist that he wants to meet with me and have an understanding. I’m still waiting. There is no course, there is no curriculum. We need in-depth conversation. It’s therapy—and the most important step in any therapy is to admit that you have a problem, which is a step he’s already taken.

      Why waste precious time on such a vulgar incident? For an observer of the ideological trends in the US, these events display a nightmarish dimension: the mutually reinforcing hypocrisy of the two sides, the anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and the Zionists, is breathtaking. Politically, the reconciliation between Gibson and Foxman signals an obscene pact between anti-Semitic Christian fundamentalists and aggressive Zionists, whose expression is the growing support of the fundamentalists for the State of Israel (recall Pat Robertson’s claim that Sharon’s heart attack was divine retribution for the evacuation of Gaza). The Jewish people will pay dearly for such pacts with the devil—can one imagine what a boost anti-Semitism will receive from Foxman’s offer? “So if I now say something critical about Jews, I will be forced to submit to psychiatric therapy . . .”

      What underlies the final reconciliation is, obviously, an obscene quid pro quo. Foxman’s reaction to Gibson’s outburst was not excessively severe and demanding; on the contrary, it let Gibson all too easily off the hook. It accepted Gibson’s refusal to take full personal responsibility for his words (his anti-Semitic remarks): they were not really his own, it was pathology, some unknown force that took over under the influence of alcohol. However, the answer to Gibson’s question “Where did those vicious words come from?” is ridiculously simple: they are part and parcel of his ideological identity, formed (as far as one can tell) to a large extent by his father. What sustained Gibson’s remarks was not madness, but a well-known ideology (anti-Semitism).

      In our daily life, racism works as a spontaneous disposition lurking beneath the surface and waiting for a “remainder of the day” to which it can attach itself and color it in its own way. I recently read Man Is Wolf to Man, Janusz Bardach’s (a Polish Jew) memoirs of his miraculous survival in Kolyma, the worst Stalinist camp, in the worst of times when conditions were especially desperate (during World War II).32 In early 1945, as the result of an amnesty to celebrate the victory over Germany, he was freed but not yet able to leave the region. So, in order to pass the time and earn some money, he accepted a post in a hospital. There, on the advice of a colleague, a doctor, he organized a desperate method of providing the sick and starving prisoners with some vitamins and nutritious foodstuffs. The camp hospital had too large a stock of human blood for transfusions which it was planning to discard; Bardach reprocessed it, enriched it with vitamins from local herbs, and sold it back to the hospital. When the higher authorities learned about this, he was almost rearrested: they banned him from practicing what they designated as “organized cannibalism.” But he found a way out, replacing human blood with the blood of the deer killed by the Inuit living nearby, and soon developed a successful business . . . My immediate racist association was, of course: “Typical Jews! Even in the worst gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for maneuver, they start trading—in human blood!”

      The stakes are much higher when this obscene underside is institutionalized, as in the case of the Catholic priests’ pedophilia, a phenomenon that is inscribed into the very functioning of the Church as a socio-symbolic institution. It is therefore not a matter of the “private” unconscious of individuals, but rather of the “unconscious” of the institution itself; not something that happens because the Church has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities of libidinal life in order to survive, but rather an inherent part of the way the institution reproduces itself.33 This institutional unconscious has nothing to do with any kind of Jungian “collective unconscious,” a spiritual substance that encompasses individuals; its status is thoroughly non-psychological, strictly discursive, correlative to the “big Other” as the “reified” system of symbolic coordinates. It is the set of presuppositions and exclusions implied by the public discourse. Consequently, the response to the Church’s reluctance to acknowledge its crimes should be that these are indeed crimes and that, if it does not fully participate in their investigation, the Church is an accomplice after the fact; moreover, the Church as such, as an institution, must be made to recognize the ways it systematically creates the conditions for such crimes to take place. No wonder that, in contemporary Ireland, when small children have to go out alone, it is becoming standard for their mothers to supplement the traditional warning “Don’t talk to strangers!” with a new and more specific one, “. . . and don’t talk to priests!”

      Consequently, what Gibson needs is not therapy; it is not enough for him to simply admit that “he has a problem” so long as he fails to accept responsibility for his remarks, asking himself in what way his outburst is linked to his Catholicism and functions as its obscene underside. When Foxman offered to treat Gibson’s outburst as a case of individual pathology which needs a therapeutic approach, he not only committed the same error as those who want to reduce cases of pedophilia to individual pathologies; much worse, he contributed to the revival of the Serbsky Institute’s manner of dealing with problematic political and ideological attitudes as phenomena that call for psychiatric intervention. In the same way that the overriding belief underlying the Serbsky Institute’s measures was that a person had to be insane to be against Communism, so Foxman’s offer implies that a person has to be insane to be anti-Semitic. This easy way out enables us to avoid the key issue: that, precisely, anti-Semitism in our Western societies was—and is—not an ideology displayed by the deranged, but an ingredient of spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly sane people, of our ideological sanity itself. This,

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