torsdag, november 24, 2011

Zizek om liberalismens dilemma

” … as every close observer of the deadlocks of political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral goodness - which should be relativised and historicized - ends up in a claustrophobic, oppressive moralism brimming with resentment.Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what George Orwell approvingly referred to as “common decency” (all such standards are dismissed as subordinating individual freedom to proto-Fascist organic social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended to do little more than prevent individuals from encroaching upon each other (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process of legalization and moralization, presented as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.”If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, just the bare fact of subjects “harassing” other subjects, then who - in the absence of such mores - will decide what counts as “harassment”?”
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" The ideological coordinates of such a liberal multiculturalism are determined by the two features of our "postmodern" zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism (all values and rights are historically specific, any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent) and universalized "hermeneutics of suspicion" (all "high" ethical motifs are generated and sustained by "low" motifs of resentment and envy - say, the call to sacrifice one's life for a higher Cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or else a pathological expression of masochism - and this either/or is an inclusive vel, that is, both terms can be true at the same time).

There is a problem with this liberal vision of which every good anthropologist, psychoanalyst, or even perspicuous social critic like Francis Fukuyama, is aware: it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is usually referred to as "socialization," which it simultaneously undermines, thereby cutting off the branch on which it is sitting."

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