This article written as a second reply to Sam Kriss was sent to Sendika.Org on 10th of December, 2015, then a shorter version was published in In These Times on 28th of December, 2015.  It has been translated into Turkish by Engin Kurtay and published on the same day with this original version:

Fanteziyi katetmek gerekir – Slavoj Žižek

»I notice that the responses always seem to be a referendum on you, almost a Rorschach test for what people think of you. If they think you’re a terrible quasi-fascist pro-Western ideologue, they find stuff to support that. If they assume you’re in good faith, they can find a more positive reading. But the discussion never gets to the point of actually addressing the issue – it’s almost like ‘what we should do about the issue’ is treated as self-evident to all concerned, and the question is whether and how you measure up to this implicit standard (which of course can’t be explicitly stated by anyone).«(Private communication)

So I began to read with interest Sam Kriss’s reply to me which seemed to engage also with the Lacanian concepts I use, accusing me to misuse them.[1] But then I stumbled upon sentences like the following one: »Fantasy is that which structures reality, and even if it’s a symptom, the symptom is always a sign to be interpreted, rather than a cloud that obfuscates.« Sentences which are strict nonsense, implying a series of false identifications: objet a as the cause of desire is reduced to its role in fantasy (while Lacan elaborated in detail the status of objet a outside fantasy, as well as modes of desiring which remain after we »traverse« the fantasy), fantasy is equated with symptom (while Lacan spent long chapters on elaborating their opposition), etc.etc. Since there is no space here to engage in this explanations (every good introduction to Lacan will do the job), I will limit myself to a passage from Kriss’s reply which condenses his double confusion, theoretical as well as political, culminating in his ridiculous notion of fidelity to a fantasy:

»In Lacanian terminology, what Zizek identifies as a fundamental disparity between ‘our’ civilized European way of life and the irreducible foreignness of the migrants would be called an asymmetry in the Symbolic order. (It’s not just Lacanianism that he abandons here — what happened to the Hegelian identity of non-identity and identity?) If this asymmetry does exist, then fantasy is precisely the means by which it can be resolved. If we lack the appropriate signifiers for each other, then the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication. If migrants are to live peacefully and happily in Europe, the demand should not be that they give up their fantasy of a better life, but that they cling to it for all its worth.«

First, the basic premise of Lacan’s theory is that what my critic rather clumsily calls the »asymmetry in the symbolic order« does not primarily occur between different ways of life (cultures) but within each particular culture: each culture is structured around its particular »points of impossibility,« immanent blockades, antagonisms, around its Real. Second, far from »resolving« it, a fantasy obfuscates it, it covers up the antagonism – a classic case: the fantasmatic figure of the Jew in anti-Semitism obfuscates the class antagonism by way of projecting it onto the »Jew,« the external cause that disturbs an otherwise harmonious social edifice. The statement »If we lack the appropriate signifiers for each other, then the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication.« is thus totally misleading: it implies that each culture somehow manages to be in touch with itself, it just lacks appropriate signifiers for other cultures. Lacan’s thesis is, on the contrary, that each culture lacks »appropriate signifiers« for itself, for its own representation, which is why fantasies are needed to fill in this gap.

And it is here that things get really interesting: these fantasies as a rule concern other cultures. Back to the Nazis: the fantasy of the Jew is a key ingredient of the Nazi identity. The Jew as the enemy allows the anti-Semitic subject to avoid the choice between working class and capital: by blaming the Jew whose plotting foments class warfare, he can advocate the vision of a harmonious society in which work and capital collaborate. This is also why Julia Kristeva is right in linking the phobic object (the Jew whose plots anti-Semites fear) to the avoidance of a choice: »The phobic object is precisely avoidance of choice, it tries as long as possible to maintain the subject far from a decision.« Does this proposition not hold especially for political phobia? Does the phobic object/abject on the fear of which the rightist-populist ideology mobilizes its partisans (the Jew, the immigrant, today in Europe the refugee…) not embody a refusal to choose – what? A position in class struggle. The anti-Semitic fetish-figure of the Jew is “the last thing a subject sees” just before he confronts social antagonism as constitutive of the social body.

So the first conclusion is that some fantasies at least are »bad«: we should definitely not advise the Nazis »not to give up their fantasy of a better life (without Jews) but to cling to it for all its worth«… Should we then distinguish between »good« and »bad« fantasies – say, should we replace racist fantasies with humanist all-inclusive fantasies of global brotherhood and collaboration? This seems to be the direction of my critic when he writes that »the interdicting untruth of fantasy opens up a space for some semblance of communication« – in short, even if a fantasy is not true, this is all we have to maintain at least a semblance of communication… But is this really the (political) lesson of Lacan’s psychoanalysis? Is fantasy really the last ressort of politics? Is Communism ultimately just a fantasy we should cling to whatever the cost? The least on can say is that Lacan’s theory opens up another way, what one may call a politics of traversing the fantasy: a politics which does not obfuscate social antagonisms but confronts them, a politics the aim of which is not just to »realize an impossible dream« but to practice a »discourse (social link) which would not be that of a semblance« (Lacan), a discourse which touches/disturbs the Real. Whatever Lacan is, he is not a post-modernist who claims that all communication is a semblance.

As for numerous other attacks on me, they mostly don’t deserve an answer since they simply repeat the position I criticize. What should I say to the claim that I want to use the military to quaranteen and throw out the refugees, apart from the fact that it’s a simple lie?

However, some of the attacks are worthy of a reply. I often hear the reproach that I speak as a European, part of the European elite, in solidarity with it, treating refugees as an external threat to be contained, not in solidarity with the refugees, not from their standpoint… to which I can only say: of course I speak from an European position, to deny this would be a preposterous lie, an unmistakable sign of patronizing fake solidarity. But WHICH European position? In the same way that there is no one Islam, that Islam also can harbor emancipatory potentials (I’ve written about this extensively), European tradition is also marked by a series of deep antagonisms. The only way to effectively fight »Eurocentrism« is from within, mobilizing European radical-emancipatory tradition – in short, our solidarity with non-Europeans should be a solidarity of struggles, not a »dialogue of cultures« but uniting the struggles that go on within each culture.

Merkel’s invitation to the refugees was a genuine ethical miracle (which cannot be reduced to the capitalist strategy of importing cheap labor force), which is why I find a little bit weird to criticize Germany for not showing enough openness towards the refugees instead of focusing on those who adopt the paraoniac anti-immigrant attitude (Poland, Hungary, etc.). It’s the same old superego logic: the more Germany will act in a (relatively) decent way, the more it will be criticized… On the top of it, it is deeply symptomatic how rarely even the European Left insists that the way to defuse the racist fear of refugees is to include themselves into the public debate. Our TV stations and other public medai should have been full of refugees describing their plea, talking about their expectations, etc. One should give them word in public, not just speak on their behalf.

Another often-repeated reproach targets my mention of Western »values« and »way of life«: how can I ignore the blatant fact that »Western values« are for the Third World people the very ideology which justifies their colonization and exploitation, the ruthless destruction of their ways of life? My answer is that I am far from ignoring it – I’ve written pages and pages on it. What I insist on is that in the same way that Islam does not designate one big homogeneous entity, European tradition also provides the resources for radical emancipation, i.e., for the radical self-critique of »Eurocentrism,« while calls for a return to some pre-colonial indigenous roots mostly fit perfectly global capitalism. (A more refined version of this reproach points out that egalitarianism, feminism, etc., are not simply part of Western core values but the result of a long struggle against the hegemonic ideology and politics of capitalism – say, the freedom of press, of public speech, etc., was hard won through popular struggles throughout 19th century. I cannot but agree with this point, adding that the same struggle goes on today (Wikileaks, etc.).)

The last point. In public debates, I was repeatedly told that now it’s not the time to raise the topic of the incompatibility of ways of life, of the status of women in some immigrant communities, etc. – now we are dealing with a big humanitarian crisis, hundreds of thousands are fighting for their life, and to bring in cultural issues ultimnatekly just detracts from the key issue. I totally disagree with this logic: it is precisely now, when hundreds of thousands are ariving into Europe, that we should talk about all this and elaborate a formula of how to deal with it. The reason is not merely that only such a direct approach can help to defuse anti-immigrant paranoia, but a much more ominous fact: sexuality is emerging as one of the central ingredients of today’s ideologico-political struggles. Let’s take the Nigerian Boko Haram movement, the name which can be roughly and descriptively translated as “Western education is forbidden,” specifically education of women. How, then, to account for the weird fact of a massive socio-political movement whose main programmatic item is the hierarchic regulation of the relationship between the two sexes? Ayatollah Khomeiny made it clear decades ago why an attack like the Paris bombings which focuses on the »dissolute« everyday amusement can be considered appropriate: “We’re not afraid of sanctions. We’re not afraid of military invasion. What frightens us is the invasion of Western immorality.”[2] The fact that Khomeiny talks about fear, about what a Muslim should fear most in the West, should be taken literally: Muslim fundamentalists do not have any problems with the brutality of economic and military struggles, their true enemy is not the Western economic neocolonialism and military aggressiveness but its “immoral” culture. The same holds for Putin’ Russia where the conservative nationalists define their conflict with the West as cultural, in the last resort focused on sexual difference: apropos the victory of the Austrian drag queen at the Eurovision contest, Putin himself told a dinner in St Petersburg: “The Bible talks about the two genders, man and woman, and the main purpose of union between them is to produce children.”[3] As usual, the rabid nationalist Zhirinovsky was more outspoken and “called this year’s result ‘the end of Europe,’ saying: ‘There is no limit to our outrage. /…/ There are no more men or women in Europe, just it.’ Vice prime minister Dmitry Rogozin tweeted that the Eurovision result ‘showed supporters of European integration their European future – a bearded girl’.”[4] There is a certain quasi-poetic uncanny beauty in this image of the bearded lady (for long time the standard feature of cheap circus freaks) as the symbol of united Europe – no wonder Russia refused to transmit the Eurovision contest to its TV public, with calls for a renewed cultural Cold War. Note the same logic as in Khomeini: not army or economy, the truly feared object is immoral depravity, the threat to sexual difference – Boko Haram just brought this logic to the end. (Incidentally, Lacan’s point is that the true threat is not polymorphous perversion which destabilizes, sometimes even ignores, sexual difference but this difference itself in its antagonistic dimension of a non-relationship. The key reference to stable and normalized sexual difference in conservative political movements bears witness to the political relevance of Lacan’s formula “there is no sexual relationship.”)

One should not underestimate the complexity and persistence of different »ways of life,« and here psychoanalysis can be of some help. Which is the factor that renders different cultures (or, rather, ways of life in the rich texture of their daily practices) incompatible, which is the obstacle that prevents their fusion or, at least, their harmoniously-indifferent co-existence? The psychoanalytic answer is: jouissance. It is not only that different modes of jouissance are incongruous with each other, without a common measure; the other’s jouissance is insupportable for us because (and insofar as) we cannot find a proper way to relate to our own jouissance – the ultimate incompatibility is not between mine and other’s jouissance, but between myself and my own jouissance which forever remains an ex-timate intruder. It is to resolve this deadlock that the subject projects the core of its jouissance onto an Other, attributing to this Other full access to a consistent jouissance. Such a constellation cannot but give rise to jealousy: in jealousy, the subject creates/imagines a paradise (a utopia of full jouissance) from which he is excluded. The same definition applies to what one can call political jealousy, from the anti-Semitic fantasies about the excessive enjoyment of the Jews to the Christian fundamentalists’ fantasies about the weird sexual practices of gays and lesbians. As Klaus Theweleit pointed out, it is all too easy to read such phenomena as mere “projections”: jealousy can be quite real and well-founded, other people can and do have as much more intense sexual life than the jealous subject – a fact which, as Lacan remarked, doesn’t make jealousy any less pathological… Here is Lacan’s succinct description of the political dimension of this predicament:

“With our jouissance going off track, only the Other is able to mark its position, but only in so far as we are separated from this Other. Whence certain fantasies – unheard of before the melting pot. Leaving the Other to his own mode of jouissance, that would only be possible by not imposing our own on him, by not thinking of him as underdeveloped.”[5]

To recapitulate the argument: due to our impasse with our own jouissance, the only way for us to imagine a consistent jouissance is to conceive it as Other’s jouissance; however, Other’s jouissance is by definition experienced as a threat to our identity, as something to be rejected, destroyed even. With regard to the identity of an ethnic group, this means that “there is always, in any human community, a rejection of an inassimilable jouissance, which forms the mainspring of a possible barbarism.”[6] Lacan underpins here Freud for whom the social bond (group identification) is mediated by the identification of each of its members with the figure of a Leader shared by all: Lacan conceives this symbolic identification (identification with a Master-Signifier) as secondary with regard to some preceding rejection of jouissance, which is why, for him, “the founding crime is not the murder of the father, but the will to murder he who embodies the jouissance that I reject.”[7] (And, one might add, even the murder of the primordial father is grounded in the hatred of his excessive jouissance, his possessing of all women.) Lacan articulates such a group-identification in the terms of the three temporal phases that characterize what he calls “logical time”:

“This assertion assuredly appears closer to its true value when presented as the conclusion of the form here demonstrated of anticipating subjective assertion:

(1)A man knows what is not a man; (2) Men recognize themselves among themselves as men; (3) I declare myself to be a man for fear of being convinced by men that I am not a man.

This movement provides the logical form of all ‘human’ assimilation, precisely insofar as it posits itself as assimilative of a barbarism.”[8]

The starting point, what I “immediately see,” is that I don’t know who or what I am since my innermost core of jouissance eludes me. I then identify myself with others who are caught in the same deadlock, and we ground our collective identity not directly in some Master-Signifier but, more fundamentally, in our shared rejection of the Other’s jouissance. The status of Other’s jouissance is thus deeply ambiguous: it is a threat to my identity, but at the same time my reference to it founds my identity – in short, my identity emerges as a defensive reaction to what threatens it, or, as we may say apropos anti-Semitism, what is a Nazi without a Jew? Hitler allegedly said: “We have to kill the Jew within us.” A.B. Yehoshua’s provided an adequate comment to this statement:

“This devastating portrayal of the Jew as a kind of amorphous entity that can invade the identity of a non-Jew without his being able to detect or control it stems from the feeling that Jewish identity is extremely flexible, precisely because it is structured like a sort of atom whose core is surrounded by virtual electrons in a changing orbit.”[9]

In this sense, Jews are effectively the objet petit a of the Gentiles: what is “in Gentiles more than Gentiles themselves,” not another subject that I encounter in front of me but an alien, a foreign intruder, within me, what Lacan called lamella, the amorphous intruder of infinite plasticity, an undead “alien” monster who cannot ever be pinned down to a determinate form. In this sense, Hitler’s statement tells more than it wants to say: against its intention, it confirms that the Gentiles need the anti-Semitic figure of the “Jew” in order to maintain their identity. It is thus not only that “the Jew is within us” – what Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, his identity, is also in the Jew.[10] (And the same holds even for (a certain kind of) anti-racism. The dependence of the Politically Correct anti-racism on what if (pretends to) fight(s), on the first-level racism itself, its parasitizing upon its opponent, is clear: the PC anti-racism is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment which emerges when the PC-subject triumphantly reveals the hidden racist bias on an apparentyl neutral statement or gesture.)

Another conclusion to be drawn from this intermingling of jouissances is that racism is always a historical phenomenon: even if anti-Semitism seems to remain the same through millenia, its inner form changes with every historical rupture. Balibar perspicuously noted that in today’s global capitalism in which we are all neighbors to each other even if we live far away, the structure of anti-Semitism is in a way globalized: every other ethnic group that is perceived as posing a threat to our identity functions as a »Jew« did for the anti-Semite. This universalization reaches is apogee in the unique exceptional fact that even the fervent Zionist themselves construct the figure of the »self-hating Jew« along the lines of anti-Semitism.

Yet another conclusion concerns the status of envy. In his path-breaking (unpublished) essay »An American Utopia,« Fredric Jameson is right to totally reject the predominant optimist view according to which in Communism envy will be left behind as a remainder of capitalist competition, to be replaced by solidary collaboration and pleasure in other’s pleasures. Dismissing this myth, Jameson emphasizes that in Communism, precisely insofar as it will be a more just society, envy and resentment will explode. He refers here to Lacan whose thesis is that human desire is always desire of the Other in all the senses of that term: desire for the Other, desire to be desired by the Other, and, especially, desire for what the Other desires. This last makes envy, which includes resentment, constitutive components of human desire, something Augustine knew well – recall the passage from his Confessions, often quoted by Lacan, the scene of a baby jealous of his brother sucking at the mother’s breast: “I myself have seen and known an infant to be jealous though it could not speak. It became pale, and cast bitter looks on its foster-brother.”

Based on this insight, Jean-Pierre Dupuy[11] proposes a convincing critique of John Rawls’ theory of justice: in the Rawls’ model of a just society, social inequalities are tolerated only insofar as they also help those at the bottom of the social ladder, and insofar as they are not based on inherited hierarchies, but on natural inequalities, which are considered contingent, not merits.[12] Even the British Conservatives seem now to be prepared to endorse Rawls’s notion of justice: in December 2005, David Cameron, the newly elected leader, signaled his intention of turning the Conservative Party into a defender of the underprivileged, declaring how “I think the test of all our policies should be: what does it do for the people who have the least, the people on the bottom rung of the ladder?”  But what Rawls doesn’t see is how such a society would create conditions for an uncontrolled explosion of ressentiment: in it, I would know that my lower status is fully ‘justified’ and would thus be deprived of the ploy of excusing my failure as the result of social injustice. Rawls thus proposes a terrifying model of a society in which hierarchy is directly legitimized in natural properties, thereby missing the simple lesson an anecdote about a Slovene peasant makes palpably clear. The peasant is given a choice by a good witch. She will either give him one cow and his neighbor two cows, or she’ll take one cow from him and two from his neighbor.  The peasant immediately chooses the second option. Gore Vidal demonstrates the point succinctly: ‘It is not enough for me to win – the other must lose.’ The catch of envy/resentment is that it not only endorses the zero-sum game principle where my victory equals the other’s loss. It also implies a gap between the two, which is not the positive gap (we can all win with no losers at all), but a negative one. If I have to choose between my victory and my opponent’s loss, I prefer the opponent’s loss, even if it means also my own loss.  It is as if my eventual gain from the opponent’s loss functions as a kind of pathological element that stains the purity of my victory.

Friedrich Hayek[13] knew that it was much easier to accept inequalities if one can claim that they result from an impersonal blind force: the good thing about the ‘irrationality’ of the market and success or failure in capitalism is that it allows me precisely to perceive my failure or success as ‘undeserved’, contingent… Remember the old motif of the market as the modern version of an imponderable Fate. The fact that capitalism is not ‘just’ is thus a key feature of what makes it acceptable to the majority. I can live with my failure much more easily if I know that it is not due to my inferior qualities, but to chance.

What Nietzsche and Freud share is the idea that justice as equality is founded on envy – on the envy of the Other who has what we do not have, and who enjoys it. The demand for justice is thus ultimately the demand that the excessive enjoyment of the Other should be curtailed so that everyone’s access to jouissance is equal. The necessary outcome of this demand, of course, is asceticism. Since it is not possible to impose equal jouissance, what is imposed instead to be equally shared is prohibition. Today, in our allegedly permissive society, however, this asceticism assumes the form of its opposite, a generalized superego injunction, the command “Enjoy!”. We are all under the spell of this injunction. The outcome is that our enjoyment is more hindered than ever. Take the yuppie who combines narcissistic “Self-Fulfillment” with those utterly ascetic disciplines of jogging, eating health food, and so on. Perhaps this is what Nietzsche had in mind with his notion of the Last Man, though it is only today that we can really discern his contours in the guise of the hedonistic asceticism of yuppies. Nietzsche wasn’t simply urging life-assertion against asceticism: he was well aware that a kind of asceticism is the obverse of a decadent excessive sensuality.

Let me conclude with a remark on how the Left should react to the Paris killings. Yes, we should accept the task of destroying ISIS, unconditionally, with no »but…« – the only »but« is that we should REALLY focus on destroying it, and for this much more is needed than the pathetic appeals to solidarity of all »civilized« forces against the demonized fundamentalist enemy. The time is now not just to repeat the rather boring Leftist mantra of »but our answer to terror should not be more terror,« etc., and to raise the really unpleasant simple questions: how is it possible for the Islamic State to survive? As we all know, in spite of formal condemnation and rejection from all sides, there are forces and states which silently not only tolerate it, but also help it. For example, as David Graeber pointed out recently, had Turkey placed the same kind of absolute blockade on Isis territories as they did on Kurdish-held parts of Syria, let alone shown the same sort of ‘benign neglect’ towards the PKK and YPG that they have been offering to Islamic State, the Islamic State would long since have collapsed, and the Paris attacks would probably not have happened.[14] Instead, Turkey was  not only discreetly helping IS by treating its wounded soldiers, and facilitating the oil exports from the territories held by IS, but also brutally by attacking the Kurdish forces, the ONLY local forces engaged in a serious battle with IS; plus it shot down a Russian fighter attacking ISIS positions. Similar things are going on in Saudi Arabia, the key US ally in the region (which welcomes the IS war on Shiites), and even Israel is suspiciously silent in its condemnation of ISIS out of opportunistic calculation (ISIS is fighting the pro-Iranian Shia forces which Israel considers its main enemy). This obscure background makes it clear that the “total war” against ISIS should not be taken seriously – they don’t really mean it.

[1] See http://inthesetimes.com/article/18615/in-defense-of-fantasy-a-response-to-slavoj-zizek.

[2] http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/6173212.Ruhollah_Khomeini.

[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/russia/10856197/Putin-attacks-Eurovision-drag-artist-Conchita-for-putting-her-lifestyle-up-for-show.html.

[4] http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/russia-slams-eurovision-winner-conchita-3525396.

[5] Jacques Lacan, »Television,« Television. A Challenge to the Psychoanalytic Establishment, New York: Norton, p. 32-33.

[6] Eric Laurent, “Racism 2.0”, quoted from http://www.amp-nls.org/page/gb/49/nls-messager/0/2013-2014/1315.

[7] Op.cit.

[8] Jacques Lacan, »Logical Time and the Assertion of Anticipated Certainty,« in Écrits, New York: Norton 2006, p. 174.

[9] A.B. Yehoshua, “An Attempt to Identify the Root Cause of Antisemitism,” Azure no. 32 (Spring 2008), available online at http://www.azure.org.il/article.php?id=18&page=all.

[10] I am here, of course, paraphrasing Lacan’s famous statement: “The picture is in my eye, but me, I am in the picture.”

[11] See Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Avions-nous oublie le mal? Penser la politique après le 11 septembre, Paris: Bayard 2002.

[12] See John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, Cambridge (Ma): Harvard University Press 1971 (revised edition 1999).

[13] See Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1994.

[14] See http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/nov/18/turkey-cut-islamic-state-supply-lines-erdogan-isis.