Zizek’s evisceration of static notions of ethical distinction (Good, Evil, Radical Evil, Diabolical Evil) comes to its fiery conclusion by declaring a break in the narrative binding together Kant’s ideological lineage and that of the twentieth century’s most infamous exterminators, the German Nazis. He posits a historical definition of identity as dialogical by way of Kant, pointing out its greatest thought problem prior to Auschwitz: judicial regicide. That is, what happens when the destruction of law is carried out through its function? According to Kant, revenge; according to Zizek, revolution. One can move, as Zizek does, from the body royal to the body proper, and back again: The bestowal of human rights upon those who cannot receive them by those who cannot give them; the humanitarianisation of politcs. Zizek’s quest against hipocrisy is, though he’d deny this characterization, a noble one. It’s worth destroying the Wagnerian hero to destroy the cult of the Führer. It exposes a terrifying facet of human experience — we create it as it creates us. There is no causality. While Zizek undoubtedly succeeds in tearing down our fragile defense against the weight of this knowledge, he makes no attempt at understanding (and proffers no apology for doing so).
*For purposes of the prose I’d normally end here, since I dont’ have time to really pursue this, but I think that there’s something to be compared between Camus (especially his concept of responsiblity), Sartre, and other post-WW2 writers on how to deal with understanding a lack of causality. Perhaps some of the current genocide studies literature might be helpful, although I’d imagine somewhat less so.
along with Selections from Slavoj Zizek’s “Radical Evil as a Freudian Category”
http://www.lacan.com/zizlovevigilantes.html
This difference points towards the different attitude towards Enlightenment: Stalinism still conceives itself as part of the Enlightenment tradition, within which truth is accessible to any rational man, no matter how depraved he is, which is why he is subjectively responsible for his crimes, in contrast to the Nazis, for whom the guilt of the Jews is a direct fact of their very biological constitution – one does not have to prove that they are guilty, they are guilty solely by being Jews.
Modern Greece thus literally arose as the materialization of the Other’s fantasy, and, since the right of fantasy is the fundamental right, should one not draw from it the extremely non-PC conclusion that not only should Germany and England return to Greece the ancient monuments they plundered and which are now displayed in the Pergamon Museum and the British Museum – Greeks should even voluntarily offer to Germany and Greece whatever old monuments they still possess, since these monuments only have value for the Western ideological fantasy.
The very positions and costumes of the prisoners suggest a theatrical staging, a kind oftableau vivant, which cannot but bring to our mind the whole scope of American performance art and “theatre of cruelty,” the photos of Mapplethorpe, the weird scenes in David Lynch’s films…
This reasoning tells more than it intends to say: it puts the prisoner almost literally into the position of living dead, those who are in a way already dead (their right to live forfeited by being legitimate targets of murderous bombings), so that they are now cases of what Giorgio Agamben calls homo sacer, the one who can be killed with impunity since, in the eyes of the law, his life no longer counts.
Rony Brauman who, on behalf of the Red Cross, coordinated the help to Sarajevo, made a pertinent observation about how the very presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as “humanitarian,” the very recasting of the political-military conflict into the humanitarian terms, was sustained by an eminently political choice, that of, basically, taking the Serb side in the conflict.
In short, the paradox is that one is deprived of human rights precisely when one is effectively, in one’s social reality, reduced to a human being “in general,” without citizenship, profession, etc., that is to say, precisely when one effectively becomes the ideal BEARER of “universal human rights” (which belong to me “independently of” my profession, sex, citizenship, religion, ethnic identity…).
Because, if he were to assert the actual possibility of “diabolical evil,” he would found it impossible to distinguish it from the Good – since both acts would be non-pathologically motivated, the travesty of justice would become indistinguishable from justice itself.
Sade’s argument, of course, is that pain is to be given priority over pleasure on account of its greater longevity - pleasures are passing, while pain can last almost indefinitely). This link can be further substantiated by what Lacan calls the Sadean fundamental fantasy: the fantasy of another, ethereal body of the victim, which can be tortured indefinitely and nonetheless magically retains its beauty (see the standard Sadean figure of a young girl sustaining endless humiliations and mutilations from her deprived torturer and somehow mysteriously surviving it all intact, in the same way Tom and Jerry and other cartoon heroes survive all their ridiculous ordeals intact). Doesn’t this fantasy provide the libidinal foundation of the Kantian postulate of the immortality of the soul endlessly striving to achieve ethical perfection, i.e., is not the fantasmatic “truth” of the immortality of the soul its exact opposite, the immortality of the body, its ability to sustain endless pain and humiliation?
Wagner’s solution to Freud’s antagonism of Eros and Thanatos is thus the identity of the two poles: love itself culminates in death, its true object is death, the longing for the beloved is the longing for death.
The paradox of the Freudian “death drive” is therefore that it is Freud’s name for its very opposite, for the way immortality appears within psychoanalysis, for an uncanny EXCESS of life, for an “undead” urge which persist beyond the (biological) cycle of life and death, of generation and corruption.
What, however, nonetheless distinguishes Levi from the fashionable elevation of the holocaust into an untouchable transcendent Evil is that, at this very point, he introduces the distinction (on which Lacan relies all the time) between understanding and knowledge - he pursues: “We cannot understand it, but we can and must understand from where it springs /…/. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again.” For this reason, one should turn around the standard notion of holocaust as the historical actualization of “radical (or, rather, diabolical) Evil”: Auschwitz is the ultimate argument AGAINST the romanticized notion of “diabolical Evil,” of the evil hero who elevates Evil into an a priori principle. As Hannah Arendt was right to emphasize, the unbearable horror of Auschwitz resides in the fact that its perpetrators were NOT Byronesque figures who asserted, like Milton’s Satan, “Let Evil be my Good!” - the true cause for alarm resides in the unbridgeable GAP between the horror of what went on and the “human, all too human” character of its perpetrators.