The Smell of Love

In spring 2002, in the USA, one often met people proudly wearing a badge with the US and Israeli flags and the inscription ‘United We Stand’. This new role for the Jews within the present global ideologico-political constellation – their privileged link to US-dominated global capitalism – is pregnant with horrifying dangers, opening up the way to outbursts of violent anti-Semitism: the fact that, due to a series of contingent strategic political decisions and conditions, Israel was elevated into the privileged partner of the USA may prove to be a source of new bloodshed. Consequently, the main task of all who really care for the Jewish people today is to work diligently towards severing this ‘natural’ link between the USA and the State of Israel. As we have seen, in the first round of the French presidential elections on 21 April 2002, Jean-Marie le Pen, whose anti-Semitism is a constant factor (merely recall his remark that the Holocaust was a minor detail of European history), made it into the second round, emerging as the only alternative to Jacques Chirac – that is, beating Lionel Jospin, so that the line of division is no longer between Right and Left, but between the global field of ‘moderate’ post-politics and extreme Rightist repoliticization. Is not this shocking outcome an ominous sign of the price we are going to pay for the Pyrrhic victory of post-politics? That is to say: what we should always bear in mind is that Le Pen stands for the only serious political force in France which, in clear contrast to the suffocating lethargy of hegemonic post-politics, persists in a stance of radical politicization, of (perverted, but none the less ‘live’) political passion proper. To put it in Paulinen terms, the tragedy is that Le Pen, in his very repulsive provocation, stands for Life against post-political Death as the way of life of the Last Men.

The worst thing to do apropos of the events of September 11 is to elevate them to a point of Absolute Evil, a vacuum which cannot be explained and/or dialecticized. To put them in the same league as the Shoah is a blasphemy: the Shoah was committed in a methodical way by a vast network of state apparatchiks and their minions who, in contrast to those who attacked the WTC towers, lacked the suicidal acceptance of their own death – as Hannah Arendt made clear, they were anonymous bureaucrats doing their job, and an enormous gap separated what they did from their individual self-experience. This ‘banality of Evil’ is missing in the case of the terrorist attacks: the perpetrators fully assumed the horror of their acts; this horror is part of the fatal attraction which draws them towards committing them. Or, to put it slightly differently: the Nazis did their job of ‘solving the Jewish question’ as an obscene secret hidden from the public gaze, while the terrorists openly displayed the spectacle of their act. The second difference is that the Shoah was part of European history; it was an event which is not directly linked with the relationship between Muslims and Jews: remember Sarajevo, which had by far the largest Jewish community in ex-Yugoslavia, and, moreover, was the most cosmopolitan Yugoslav city, the thriving centre of cinema and rock music – why? Precisely because it was the Muslim-dominated city, where the Jewish and Christian presence was tolerated, in contrast to the Christian-dominated large cities from which Jews and Muslims were purged long ago.

Why should the World Trade Center catastrophe be in any way privileged over, say, the mass slaughter of Hutus by Tutsis in Rwanda in 1994? Or the mass bombing and gas-poisoning of Kurds in the north of Iraq in the early 1990s? Or the Indonesian forces’ mass killings in East Timor? Or ... the list of countries where the mass suffering was and is incomparably greater than the suffering in New York, but which do not have the luck to be elevated by the media into the sublime victim of Absolute Evil, is long, and that is the point: if we insist on the use of this term, these are all ‘Absolute Evils’. So should we extend the prohibition to explain, and claim that none of these evils could or should be ‘dialecticized’? And are we not obliged to go even a step further: what about horrible ‘individual’ crimes, from those of the sadistic mass murderer Jeffrey Dahmer?

Is there not something real/impossible/inexplicable about all of these acts? Is it not that – as Schelling put it more than two hundred years ago – in each of them we confront the ultimate abyss of free will, the imponderable fact of ‘I did it because I did it!’ which resists any explanation in terms of psychological, social, ideological, etc., causes?

In short, is it not that today, in our resigned post-ideological era which admits no positive Absolutes, the only legitimate candidate for the Absolute are radically evil acts? This negative-theological status of the Holocaust finds its supreme expression in Giorgio Agamben’s Remnants of Auschwitz, in which he provides a kind of ontological proof of Auschwitz against revisionists who deny the Holocaust. He directly concludes the existence of the Holocaust from its ‘concept’ (notions like the living-dead ‘Muslims’ are so ‘intense’ that they could not have emerged without the fact of the Holocaust) – what better proof is there that, in some of today’s cultural studies, the Holocaust is in fact elevated to the dignity of the Thing, perceived as the negative Absolute? And it tells us a lot about today’s constellation that the only Absolute is that of sublime/irrepresentable Evil. Agamben refers to the four modal categories (possibility, impossibility, contingency, necessity), articulating them along the axis of subjectification–desubjectification: possibility (to be able to be) and contingency (to be able not to be) are the operators of subjectification; while impossibility (not to be able to be) and necessity (not to be able not to be) are the operators of desubjectification – and what happens in Auschwitz is the point at which the two sides of the axis fall together:

Auschwitz represents the historical point at which these processes collapse, the devastating experience in which the impossible is forced into the real. Auschwitz is the existence of the impossible, the most radical negation of contingency; it is, therefore, absolute necessity. The Muselmann [the ‘living dead’ of the camp] produced by Auschwitz is the catastrophe of the subject that then follows, the subject’s effacement as the place of contingency and its maintenance as existence of the impossible.[1]

Thus Auschwitz designates the catastrophe of a kind of ontological short circuit: subjectivity (the opening of the space of contingency in which possibility counts more than actuality) collapses into the objectivity in which it is impossible for things not to follow ‘blind’ necessity. In order to grasp this point, we should consider the two aspects of the term ‘impossibility’: first, impossibility as the simple obverse of necessity (‘it couldn’t have been otherwise’); then, impossibility as the ultimate unthinkable limit of possibility itself (‘something so horrible cannot really happen; nobody can be so evil’) – in Auschwitz, the two aspects coincide. We can even put it in Kantian terms, as the short circuit between the noumenal and the phenomenal: in the figure of Muselmann, the living dead, the desubjectivized subject, the noumenal dimension (of the free subject) appears in empirical reality itself –Muselmann is the noumenal Thing directly appearing in phenomenal reality; as such, it is the witness of what one cannot bear witness to. And, in a further step, Agamben reads this unique figure of Muselmann as the irrefutable proof of the existence of Auschwitz:

Let us, indeed, posit Auschwitz, that to which it is not possible to bear witness, and let us also posit the Muselmann as the absolute impossibility of bearing witness. If the witness bears witness for the Muselmann, if he succeeds in bringing to speech an impossibility of speech – if the Muselmann is thus constituted as the whole witness – then the denial of Auschwitz is refuted in its very foundation. In the Muselmann, the impossibility of bearing witness is no longer a mere privation. Instead, it has become real; it exists as such. If the survivor bears witness not to the gas chambers or to Auschwitz but to the Muselmann, if he speaks only on the basis of an impossibility of speaking, then his testimony cannot be denied. Auschwitz – that to which it is not possible to bear witness – is absolutely and irrefutably proven.[2]

We cannot but admire the finesse of this theorization: far from hindering any proof that Auschwitz really existed, the very fact that it is impossible directly to bear witness to Auschwitz demonstrates its existence. There, in this reflexive twist, lies the fatal miscalculation of the well-known cynical Nazi argument quoted by Primo Levi and others: ‘What we are doing to the Jews is so irrepresentable in its horror that even if someone survives the camps, he will not be believed by those who were not there – they will simply declare him a liar or mentally ill!’ Agamben’s counterargument is: true, it is not possible to bear witness to the ultimate horror of Auschwitz – but what if this impossibility itself is embodied in a survivor? If, then, there is a subjectivity like that of the Muselmann, a subjectivity brought to the extreme point of collapsing into objectivity, such desubjectivized subjectivity could have emerged only in the conditions which are those of Auschwitz.... Nonetheless, this line of argument, inexorable as it is in its very simplicity, remains deeply ambiguous: it leaves unaccomplished the task of the concrete analysis of the historical singularity of the Holocaust. That is to say: it is possible to read it in two opposed ways – as the conceptual expression of a certain extreme position which should then be accounted for in the terms of a concrete historical analysis; or, in a kind of ideological short circuit, as an insight into the a priori structure of the Auschwitz phenomenon which displaces, renders superfluous –or, at least, secondary – such a concrete analysis of the singularity of Nazism as a political project and of why it generated the Holocaust. In this second reading, ‘Auschwitz’ becomes the name of something which, in a way, had to happen, whose ‘essential possibility’ was inscribed into the very matrix of the Western political process – sooner or later, the two sides of the axis had to collapse.

Have the events of September 11, then, something to do with the obscure God who demands human sacrifices? Yes – and, precisely for that reason, they are not on the same level as the Nazi annihilation of the Jews. Here, one should follow Agamben[3] and reject Lacan’s famous reading of the Holocaust (the Nazi extermination of the Jews) as, precisely, the holocaust in the old Jewish meaning of the term, the sacrifice to the obscure gods, destined to satisfy their terrible demand for jouissance:[4] the annihilated Jews belong, rather, to the species of what the Ancient Romans called Homo sacer – those who, although they were human, were excluded from the human community, which is why one can kill them with impunity – and, for that very reason, one cannot sacrifice them (because they are not a worthy sacrificial offering).[5]

The spectacular explosion of the WTC towers was not simply a symbolic act (in the sense of an act whose aim is to ‘deliver a message’): it was primarily an explosion of lethal jouissance, a perverse act of making oneself an instrument of the big Other’s jouissance. Yes, the culture of the attackers is a morbid culture of death, the attitude which finds the climactic fulfilment of one’s own life in violent death. The problem is not what the ‘insane fanatics’ are doing, but what the ‘rational strategists’ behind them are doing. There is much more ethical insanity in a military strategist planning and executing large-scale bombing operations than in an individual blowing himself up in the process of attacking the enemy. Yes, the ultimate aim of the attacks was not some hidden or obvious ideological agenda, but – precisely in the Hegelian sense of the term – to (re)introduce the dimension of absolute negativity into our daily lives: to shatter the insulated daily course of the lives of us, true Nietzschean Last Men. Long ago, Novalis made the perspicuous observation that what an evil man hates is not the good – he hates evil excessively (the world which he considers evil), and therefore tries to hurt and destroy it as much as possible – this is what is wrong with the ‘terrorists’. Sacrilegious as it may appear, the WTC attacks do share something with Antigone’s act: they both undermine the ‘servicing of goods’, the reign of the pleasure-reality principle. The ‘dialectical’ thing to do here, however, is not to include these acts in some wider narrative of the Progress of Reason or Humanity, which somehow, if it does not redeem them, at least makes them part of an all-encompassing wider consistent narrative, ‘sublates’ them in a ‘higher’ stage of development (the naive notion of Hegelianism), but to make us question our own innocence, to render thematic our own (fantasmatic libidinal) investment and engagement in them.

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So, rather than remain stuck in debilitating awe in front of Absolute Evil, the awe which stops us from thinking about what is going on, we should remember that there are two fundamental ways of reacting to such traumatic events, which cause unbearable anxiety: the way of the superego and the way of the act. The way of the superego is precisely that of the sacrifice to the obscure gods of which Lacan speaks: the reassertion of the barbaric violence of the savage obscene law in order to fill in the gap of the failing symbolic law. And the act? One of the heroes of the Shoah for me is a famous Jewish ballerina who, as a gesture of special humiliation, was asked by the camp officers to dance for them. Instead of refusing, she did it, and while she held their attention, she quickly grabbed the machine-gun from one of the distracted guards and, before being shot down herself, succeeded in killing more than a dozen officers.... Was not her act comparable to that of the passengers on the flight which crashed in Pennsylvania who, knowing that they would die, forced their way into the cockpit and crashed the plane, saving hundreds of others’ lives?

According to the Ancient Greek myth, Europa was a Phoenician princess abducted and then raped by Zeus in the guise of a bull – no wonder her name means ‘the dismal one’. Is this not a true picture of Europe? Did not Europe (as an ideological notion) arise as the outcome of two such abductions of an Eastern pearl by barbarians from the West: first, the Romans abducted and vulgarized Greek thought; then, in the early Middle Ages, the barbarian West abducted and vulgarized Christianity? And is not something similar going on today for the third time? Is not the ‘war on terrorism’ the abominable conclusion, the ‘dotting of the i’, of a long, gradual process of American ideological, political and economic colonization of Europe? Was not Europe again kidnapped by the West – by American civilization, which is now setting global standards and, de facto, treating Europe as its province?

After the World Trade Center attacks, the big story in the media was the rise of anti-American Schadenfreude and the lack of simple human sympathy with American suffering among the European intelligentsia. The true story, however, is exactly the opposite one: the total lack of an autonomous European political initiative. In the aftermath of September 11, Europe – the key states of the European Union – took the path of ‘unconditional compromise’, giving in to US pressure. The war in Afghanistan, the plans for an attack on Iraq, the new explosion of violence in Palestine: each time, there were muffled voices of discontent in Europe which raised particular points, and calls for a more balanced approach; however, there was no formal resistance, no imposition of a different global perception of the crisis. No official European institution risked a friendly but clear distantiation from the American position. No wonder, then, that these voices of protest died away – they were literally of no consequence, mere empty gestures whose function was to enable us, Europeans, to say to ourselves: ‘You see, we did protest, we did our duty!’, while silently endorsing the fait accompli of American politics.

[…]

The real politico-ideological catastrophe of September 11 was that of Europe: the result of September 11 is an unprecedented strengthening of American hegemony, in all its aspects. Europe succumbed to a kind of ideologico-political blackmail by the USA: ‘What is now at stake are no longer different economic or political choices, but our very survival – in the war on terrorism, you are either with us or against us.’ And it is here, at this point where the reference to mere survival enters the scene as the ultimate legitimization, that we are dealing with political ideology at its purest. In the name of the ‘war on terrorism’, a certain positive vision of global political relations is silently imposed on us Europeans. And if the emancipatory legacy of Europe is to survive, we should take the September 11 fiasco as the last warning that time is running out, that Europe should move quickly to assert itself as an autonomous ideological, political and economic force, with its own priorities. It is a unified Europe, not Third World resistance to American imperialism, that is the only feasible counterpoint to the USA and China as the two global superpowers. The Left should unashamedly appropriate the slogan of a unified Europe as a counterweight to Americanized globalism.

And the New Yorkers themselves? For months after September 11, 2001, it was possible to smell in downtown Manhattan up to 20th Street the scent of the burning WTC towers – people became attached to this smell, it started to function as what Lacan would have called the ‘sinthome’ of New York, a condensed cipher of the subject’s libidinal attachment to the city, so that when it disappears it will be missed. It is such details that bear witness to a true love of the city. This love only becomes problematic when it turns into the suspicion of why others do not fully share America’s pain, as in the standard complaint addressed by many American liberals to the European Leftists – they did not show enough sincere compassion with the victims of September 11 attacks. Along the same lines, the American reproach to European criticism of its politics is that this is a case of envy and frustration at being reduced to the secondary role, of the European inability to accept one’s limitation and (relative) decline; however, is it not the opposite which holds even more? Is not the surprise at why are they not loved for what they are doing to the world the most fundamental American reaction (at least) since the Vietnam war? We just try to be good, to help others, to bring peace and prosperity, and look what we get in return… The fundamental insight of movies like John Ford’s Searchers and Michael Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is still more than relevant.

These complaints are sustained by the more fundamental unspoken reproach that Europeans do not really share the American Dream – the reproach is in a way fully justified: the Third World cannot generate a strong enough resistance to the ideology of the American Dream; in the present constellation, it is only Europe which can do it. The true opposition today is not the one between the First World and the Third World, but the one between the whole of the First and Third World (the American global Empire and its colonies) and the remaining Second World (Europe). Apropos Freud, Adorno claimed that what we are getting in contemporary ‘administered world’ and its ‘repressive desublimation’ is no longer the old logic of repression of the Id and its drives, but a perverse direct pact between the Superego (social authority) and the Id (illicit aggressive drives) at the expense of the Ego. Is not something structurally similar going on today at the political level, the weird pact between the postmodern global capitalism and the premodern societies at the expense of modernity proper? It is easy for the American multiculturalist global Empire to integrate premodern local traditions – the foreign body which it effectively cannot assimilate is the European modernity. Jihad and McWorld are the two sides of the same coin, Jihad is already McJihad.

The key news from China in 2002 was the emergence of large-scale workers movement, protesting against the work conditions which are the price for China rapidly becoming the world’s foremost manufacturing place, and the brutal way the authorities cracked down on it – a new proof, if one is still needed, that China is today the ideal capitalist state: freedom for the capital, with the state doing the ‘dirty job’ of controlling the workers. China as the emerging superpower of the twenty-first century thus seems to embody a new kind of ruthless capitalism: disregard for ecological consequences, disregard for workers’ rights, everything subordinated to the ruthless drive to develop and become the new superpower. The big question is: what will the Chinese do with regard to the biogenetic revolution? Is it not a safe wager that they will throw themselves into unconstrained genetic manipulations of plants, animals and humans, bypassing all our ‘Western’ moral prejudices and limitations? And, with the further expansion of the biogenetic technology, which is relatively inexpensive (Cuba is already highly developed in this area), will not the same hold for many a Third World country? (Although, of course, it is also true that – till now, at least – China is definitely the superpower with by far the lowest level of imperialist interventions, of trying to expand its influence and control its neighbours.)

The tension between America and Europe is discernible even within (what remains of ) the political Left: the ‘americanization’ is here under the guise of the notion that the Left should fully endorse the dynamics of globalization, the deterritorializing multitude of late capitalism. Michael Hardt and Negri discern two ways to oppose the global capitalist Empire: either the ‘protectionist’ advocacy of the eturn to the strong Nation-State, or the deployment of the even more flexible forms of multitude. Along these lines, in his analysis of the Porto Alegre anti-globalist meeting, Hardt emphasizes the new logic of the political space there: it was no longer the old ‘us versus them’ binary logic with the Leninist call for a firm singular party line, but the coexistence of a multitude of political agencies and positions which shared the same platform, despite being incompatible as to their ideological and programmatic accents (from ‘conservative’ farmers and ecologists worried about the fate of their local tradition and patrimony, to human rights groups and agents standing for the interests of immigrants, advocating global mobility). It is effectively today’s opposition to global capital which seems to provide a kind of negative mirror-image to Deleuze’s claim about the inherently antagonistic claim of the capitalist dynamics (a strong machine of deterritorialization which generates new modes of reterritorialization): today’s resistance to capitalism reproduces the same antagonism; calls for the defence of particular (cultural, ethnic) identities being threatened by the global dynamics coexist with the demands for more global mobility (against the new barriers imposed by capitalism, which concern above all the free movement of individuals). Is it then true that these tendencies (these lignes de fuite, as Deleuze would have put it) can coexist in a non-antagonistic way, as parts of the same global network of resistance? One is tempted to answer this claim by applying to it Laclau’s notion of the chain of equivalences: of course, this logic of multitude functions – because we are still dealing with resistance. However, what about when – if this really is the desire and will of these movements – ‘we take it over’? What would the ‘multitude in power’ look like? There was the same constellation in the last years of the decaying Really-Existing Socialism: the non-antagonistic coexistence, within the oppositional field, of a multitude of ideologico-political tendencies, from liberal human rights groups to ‘liberal’ business-oriented groups, conservative religious groups and Leftist workers’ demands. This multitude functioned well as long as it was united in the opposition to ‘them’, the Party hegemony; once they found themselves in power, the game was over... . Furthermore, is the State today really withering away (with the advent of the much-praised liberal ‘deregulation’)? Is, on the contrary, the ‘war on terror’ not the strongest assertion yet of state authority? Are we not witnessing now the unheard-of mobilization of all (repressive and ideological) state apparatuses?

These state apparatuses play a crucial role in the obverse side of globalization. Recently, an ominous decision of the European Union passed almost unnoticed: the plan to establish an all-European border police force to secure the isolation of the Union territory and thus to prevent the influx of immigrants. This is the truth of globalization: the construction of new walls safeguarding prosperous Europe from the immigrant flood. One is tempted to resuscitate here the old Marxist ‘humanist’ opposition of ‘relations between things’ and ‘relations between persons’: in the much-celebrated free circulation opened up by global capitalism, it is ‘things’ (commodities) which freely circulate, while the circulation of ‘persons’ is more and more controlled. This new racism of the developed world is in a way much more brutal than the previous ones: its implicit legitimization is neither naturalist (the ‘natural’ superiority of the developed West) nor any longer culturalist (we in the West also want to preserve our cultural identity), but unabashed economic egotism – the fundamental divide is the one between those included into the sphere of (relative) economic prosperity and those excluded from it. What lies beneath these protective measures is the simple awareness that the present model of late capitalist prosperity cannot be universalized – the awareness formulated with a brutal candour more than half a century ago by George Kennan:

We [the USA] have 50 per cent of the world’s wealth but only 6.3 per cent of its population. In this situation, our real job in the coming period ... is to maintain this position of disparity. To do so, we have to dispense with all sentimentality ... we should cease thinking about human rights, the raising of living standards and democratisation.[6]

And the sad thing is that, concerning this fundamental awareness, there is a silent pact between the Capital and (whatever remains of ) the working classes – if anything, the working classes are more sensitive to the protection of their relative privileges than the big corporations. This, then, is the truth of the discourse of universal human rights: the Wall separating those covered by the umbrella of Human Rights and those excluded from its protective cover. Any reference to universal human rights as an ‘unfinished project’ to be gradually extended to all people is here a vain ideological chimera – and, faced with this prospect, do we, in the West, have any right to condemn the excluded when they use any means, inclusive of terror, to fight their exclusion?

This, then, is the test of how seriously we take the Derridean–Levinasian topic of hospitality and openness towards the Other: again, this topic means hospitality towards the immigrants (or Palestinians in Israel) or it means nothing. It may appear that Israel is merely reacting to the Palestinian terrorist attacks; however, what goes on beneath this cycle of actions and reactions is not nothing, the status quo, but the continuing silent Israeli expansion into the occupied territories – the colonization is progressing all the time, and even now, in the spring of 2002, after the violent explosion when Israel claimed that its very existence was threatened, it started to build 30 new West Bank settlements. Even under the Barak government, which allegedly offered the Palestinians the largest possible concessions, the building of new settlements continued faster than under the previous Netanyahu government. This continuous expansion (which clearly aims at creating an irreversible situation in which the complete withdrawal of Israel from the West Bank will be impossible) is the basic fact to which the Palestinian terror reacts, the silent continuous murmur, that which happens, which goes on when, for the big media, ‘nothing is happening’. (And one should not forget that terror – bombing in crowded civilian places – is an old anticolonial weapon, practised also by Algerians and others, inclusive of Jews themselves against the British occupation of Palestine in the late 1940s.)

No wonder, then, that, in a kind of echo to European Unity, in June 2002, Israel also started to raise the protective Wall against the West Bank Arab settlements. When terrorists are more and more described in the terms of a viral infection, as an attack of invisible bacteria, one should recall that the comparison of Jews to ‘bacteria’ attacking the sane social body is one of the classic topoi of anti-Semitism. Is then the invisible fundamentalist terrorist the last embodiment of the Wandering Jew? Are today’s reports on the secret Muslim fundamentalist plans to destroy the West the new version of the infamous Protocols of the Zion? Does today’s ‘war on terror’ signal the paradoxical point at which the Zionist Jews themselves joined the ranks of anti-Semitism? Is this the ultimate price of the establishment of the Jewish State?

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What underlies these ominous strategies is the fact that democracy (the established liberal-democratic parliamentary system) is no longer ‘alive’ in the Paulinian sense of the term: the tragic thing is that the only serious political force which is today ‘alive’ is the new populist Right. Insofar as we play the democratic game of leaving the place of power empty, of accepting the gap between this place and our occupying it (which is the very gap of castration), are we –democrats – all not ‘fidel castros’, faithful to castration? Apart from anaemic economic administration, the liberal-democratic centre’s main function is to guarantee that nothing will really happen in politics: liberal democracy is the party of non-Event. The line of division is more and more ‘Long live ... Le Pen, Haider, Berlusconi!’ versus ‘Death to ... the same!’ – with the opposition life/death adequately distributed between the two poles. Or, to put it in Nietzschean terms (as they were interpreted by Deleuze): today, the populist Right acts, sets the pace, determines the problematic of the political struggle, and the liberal centre is reduced to a ‘reactive force’: it ultimately limits itself to reacting to the populist Right’s initiatives, either opposing them radically from an impotent Leftist posturing, or translating them into the acceptable liberal language (‘while rejecting the populist hatred of the immigrants, we have to admit they are addressing issues which really worry people, so we should take care of the problem, introduce tougher immigration and anti-crime measures ...’).

The notion of the radical political Act as the way out of this democratic deadlock, of course, cannot but provoke the expected reaction from the liberals. The standard critique concerns the Act’s allegedly ‘absolute’ character of a radical break, which renders impossible any clear distinction between a properly ‘ethical’ act and, say, a Nazi monstrosity: is it not that an Act is always embedded in a specific socio-symbolic context? The answer to this reproach is clear: of course – an Act is always a specific intervention within a socio-symbolic context; the same gesture can be an Act or a ridiculous empty posture, depending on this context (say, making a public ethical statement when it is too late changes a courageous intervention into an irrelevant gesture). In what, then, resides the misunderstanding? Why this critique? There is something else which disturbs the critics of the Lacanian notion of Act: true, an Act is always situated in a concrete context – this, however, does not mean that it is fully determined by its context. An Act always involves a radical risk, what Derrida, following Kierkegaard, called the madness of a decision: it is a step into the open, with no guarantee about the final outcome – why? Because an Act retroactively changes the very co-ordinates into which it intervenes. This lack of guarantee is what the critics cannot tolerate: they want an Act without risk – not without empirical risks, but without the much more radical ‘transcendental risk’ that the Act will not only simply fail, but radically misfire. In short, to paraphrase Robespierre, those who oppose the ‘absolute Act’ effectively oppose the Act as such, they want an Act without the Act. What they want is homologous to the ‘democratic’ opportunists who, as Lenin put it in the autumn of 1917, want a ‘democratically legitimized’ revolution, as if one should first organize a referendum, and only then, after obtaining a clear majority, seize power. ... It is here that one can see how an Act proper cannot be contained within the limits of democracy (conceived as a positive system of legitimizing power through free elections). The Act occurs in an emergency when one has to take the risk and act without any legitimization, engaging oneself into a kind of Pascalean wager that the Act itself will create the conditions of its retroactive ‘democratic’ legitimization. Say, when, in 1940, after the French defeat, de Gaulle called for the continuation of warfare against the Germans, his gesture was without ‘democratic legitimization’ (at that moment, a large majority of the French were unambiguously supporting Marshall Petain – Jacques Duclos, the leading French Communist, wrote that, if ‘free elections’ were to be held in France in the autumn of 1940, Petain would have got at least 90 per cent of the votes). However, in spite of this lack of ‘democratic legitimization’, the truth was on de Gaulle’s side, and he effectively was speaking on behalf of France, of the French people ‘as such’. This also enables us to answer the ultimate democratic reproach: the absolute (self-referential) act is deprived of any external control which would prevent terrifying excesses – anything can be legitimized in a self-referential way? The answer is clear: as (among others) the case of France in 1940 demonstrates, democracy itself cannot provide such a guarantee; there is no guarantee against the possibility of the excess – the risk has to be assumed, it is part of the very field of the political.

And, perhaps, the ultimate aim of the ‘war on terror’, of the imposition of what one cannot but call the ‘democratic state of emergency’, is to neutralize the conditions of such an Act. According to an old Marxist topos, the evocation of the external enemy serves to displace the focus from the true origin of tensions, the inherent antagonism of the system – recall the standard explanation of anti-Semitism as the displacement onto the figure of the Jew, this external intruder into our social body, of the cause of the antagonisms which threaten the harmony of this body. There is, however, also the opposite ideological operation, the false evocation of internal causes of failure. In 1940, when Petain became the French leader, he explained the French defeat as the result of a long process of degeneration of the French state caused by the liberal-Jewish influence; so, according to Petain, the French defeat was a blessing in disguise, a shattering and painful reminder of one’s weaknesses and thus a chance to reconstitute French strength on a healthy base. Do we not find the same motif in many a conservative critic of today’s permissive consumerist Western societies? The ultimate threat does not come from out there, from the fundamentalist Other, but from within, from our own lassitude and moral weakness, loss of clear values and firm commitments, of the spirit of dedication and sacrifice.... No wonder that, in their first reaction, Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson claimed that, on September 11, the USA got what it deserved. What, then, if exactly the same logic sustains the ‘war on terror’? What if the true aim of this ‘war’ is ourselves, our own ideological mobilization against the threat of the Act? What if the ‘terrorist attack’, no matter how ‘real’ and terrifying, is ultimately a metaphoric substitute for this Act, for the shattering of our liberal-democratic consensus?