Žižek on Race by Zahi Zalloua

Author:Zahi Zalloua
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Racialized Subjects of the World Unite

How, then, does an anti-racist critique combat the proliferation of “subjects supposed to loot, rape, and terrorize”? How do you stop the seemingly effortless production of homines sacri at home and abroad? What are racialized subjects to do? Žižek paints a rather pessimistic view of the world in its current trajectory: “I see explosions everywhere.”111 This is the necessary outcome of dwelling in a “global apartheid society,”112 in which participation in public life is increasingly becoming a luxury, restricted to the few and powerful. Such conditions can only breed anger and resentment—whence the proliferation of (often impotent) violent rage. This raw violence, viewed from the perspective of those in power, people who enjoy the privileges afforded to them by the status quo, cements society’s racial realism. The projection of the subject supposed to loot, rape, and terrorize is validated again and again.113 Breaking from this vicious circle necessitates a better understanding of the global situation.

If the extreme Right has doubled down on fear mongering, the liberal Left is sadly ineffective in their eagerness to help, to implement better integrationist policies to alleviate the pangs of racial realism. These pervasive moments of crisis are also moments of revolutionary potentialities. To block the Right’s exploitation of such moments, Žižek urges us to “think more radically to arrive at the real root of the problems.”114 It will not come as a surprise that for Žižek the main cause is capitalism. But we must resist the crude conclusion that capitalism causes racial realism. Rather, to paraphrase Benjamin: “Every rise of racial realism bears witness to failed revolution.” The fact of racial realism—that blacks in the United States, blacks and beurs in France, and Palestinians in Occupied Palestine and Israel will always have a subordinate status—points to the global Left’s failure to secure égaliberté for all. The racial realist perspective’s strength—it demystifies liberal accounts of racial progress—is also its weakness: it always risks congealing and perpetuating racial inequalities (the symbolic order is racist), reifying, in turn, the political landscape. Paul Gilroy makes a slightly different point about breaking with the “pious ritual in which we always agree that ‘race’ is invented but are then required to defer to its embeddedness in the world and to accept that the demand for justice nevertheless requires us to enter the political arenas that it helps mark out.”115 The idea of racial realism—or any attachment to the dubious category of race—always risks reproducing the presuppositions of the racist system that is being critiqued and generating in us “resignation to the world as it appears.”116

CRT powerfully exposes white and Western racial fantasies of criminality: the subject supposed to loot, rape, and terrorize. But the next move is to traverse such fantasies and impact the political terrain itself. Racial realism is not destiny; it is “non-all.” An anti-racist critique cannot remain at the level of the Imaginary (unmasking the images that fuel a politics of fear) and the Symbolic (uncovering the way civil rights laws serve white interests); it must also touch the Real of antagonism.

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