Violence by Zizek Slavoj

Author:Zizek, Slavoj
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

5

Molto adagio – Andante

TOLERANCE AS AN IDEOLOGICAL CATEGORY

The Culturalisation of Politics

Why are so many problems today perceived as problems of intolerance, rather than as problems of inequality, exploitation or injustice? Why is the proposed remedy tolerance, rather than emancipation, political struggle, even armed struggle? The immediate answer lies in the liberal multiculturalist’s basic ideological operation: the ‘culturalisation of politics’. Political differences – differences conditioned by political inequality or economic exploitation – are naturalised and neutralised into ‘cultural’ differences, that is into different ‘ways of life’ which are something given, something that cannot be overcome. They can only be ‘tolerated’. This demands a response in the terms Walter Benjamin offers: from culturalisation of politics to politicisation of culture. The cause of this culturalisation is the retreat, the failure of direct political solutions such as the Welfare State or various socialist projects. Tolerance is their post-political ersatz.1

It was political scientist Samuel Huntington who proposed the most successful formula of this ‘culturalisation of politics’ by locating the main source of today’s conflicts in the ‘clash of civilisations’, which one is tempted to call the Huntington’s disease of our time. As Huntington put it, after the end of the Cold War, the ‘iron curtain of ideology’ has been replaced by the ‘velvet curtain of culture’.2 Huntington’s dark vision of the ‘clash of civilisations’ may appear to be the very opposite of Francis Fukuyama’s bright prospect of the end of history in the guise of a worldwide liberal democracy. What can be more different from Fukuyama’s pseudo-Hegelian idea of the ‘end of history’ – the ultimate formula of the best possible social order has been found in capitalist liberal democracy, so there is now no space for further conceptual progress; there are only empirical obstacles to be overcome3 – than Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ as the main political struggle in the twenty-first century? The ‘clash of civilisations’ is politics at the end of history.

The basic opposition on which the entire liberal vision relies is that between those who are ruled by culture, totally determined by the lifeworld into which they are born, and those who merely ‘enjoy’ their culture, who are elevated above it, free to choose it. This brings us to the next paradox: the ultimate source of barbarism is culture itself, one’s direct identification with a particular culture which renders one intolerant towards other cultures. The basic opposition here is that between the collective and the individual: culture is by definition collective and particular, parochial, exclusive of other cultures, while – next paradox – it is the individual who is universal, the site of universality, insofar as she extricates herself from and elevates herself above her particular culture. Since, however, every individual has to be somehow particularised, has to dwell in a particular lifeworld, the only way to resolve this deadlock is to split the individual into universal and particular, public and private (where ‘private’ covers both the safe haven of family and the non-state public sphere of civil society (economy)).

In liberalism, culture

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