Table Of ContentSlavoj Žižek · Knee-Deep: Leftist Platitudes · LRB 2 September 2004 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n17/slavoj-zizek/knee-deep
Vol. 26 No. 17 · 2 September 2004
Knee-Deep
Slavoj Žižek
F��� W����: W�� � C����� �� ��� W��� R������ ��� O���������� �� O�� T���
by Timothy Garton Ash.
Allen Lane, 308 pp., £17.99, July 2004, 0 7139 9764 8
The fate of a Slovene Communist revolutionary serves as a perfect metaphor for the twists
of Stalinism. In 1943, when Italy capitulated, he led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners in a
concentration camp on the Adriatic island of Rab: 2000 starving prisoners disarmed 2200
Italian soldiers. A�er the war, he was arrested and put in a prison on Goli otok (‘Naked
Island’), a notorious Communist concentration camp near Rab. While he was there, he and
other prisoners were detailed to build a monument to commemorate the tenth anniversary
of the 1943 rebellion on Rab. As a prisoner of the Communists, he was building a
monument to himself and the rebellion he’d led. If poetic injustice means anything, this is
it. The fate of this revolutionary was surely the fate of the people as a whole under Stalinist
dictatorship: the millions who overthrew the ancien régime, and were then forced to build
monuments to their own revolutionary past.
Timothy Garton Ash would appreciate this tragicomic accident: it comes close to the spirit
of ethically engaged irony that permeates his best work. Although he is my political
opponent, I always consider him worth reading for his wealth of precise observations, and
as a reliable source on the vicissitudes of the disintegration of Eastern European
Communism. In Free World he has taken the same perspicuous and bitterly witty approach to
the conundrums of the recent tensions between the key Western European states and the
US. His aperçus about the relations between the UK, France and Germany o�en recall the
gentle irony of a novel of manners, giving a new twist to the old topic of the ‘European
trinity’.
In a famous scene from Buñuel’s Phantom of Liberty, the roles of eating and excreting are
inverted: people sit at toilets around a table, chatting pleasantly, and when they want to eat,
sneak away to a small room. So, as a supplement to Lévi-Strauss, one is tempted to propose
that shit can also serve as a matière-à-penser: the three basic types of toilet form an
excremental correlative-counterpoint to the Lévi-Straussian triangle of cooking (the raw,
the cooked and the rotten). In a traditional German toilet, the hole into which shit
disappears a�er we �ush is right at the front, so that shit is �rst laid out for us to sni� and
inspect for traces of illness. In the typical French toilet, on the contrary, the hole is at the
back, i.e. shit is supposed to disappear as quickly as possible. Finally, the American (Anglo-
Saxon) toilet presents a synthesis, a mediation between these opposites: the toilet basin is
1 of 6 3/27/2022, 9:26 PM
Slavoj Žižek · Knee-Deep: Leftist Platitudes · LRB 2 September 2004 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n17/slavoj-zizek/knee-deep
full of water, so that the shit �oats in it, visible, but not to be inspected. No wonder that in
the famous discussion of European toilets at the beginning of her half-forgotten Fear of
Flying, Erica Jong mockingly claims that ‘German toilets are really the key to the horrors of
the Third Reich. People who can build toilets like this are capable of anything.’ It is clear
that none of these versions can be accounted for in purely utilitarian terms: each involves a
certain ideological perception of how the subject should relate to excrement.
Hegel was among the �rst to see in the geographical triad of Germany, France and England
an expression of three di�erent existential attitudes: re�ective thoroughness (German),
revolutionary hastiness (French), utilitarian pragmatism (English). In political terms, this
triad can be read as German conservatism, French revolutionary radicalism and English
liberalism. In terms of the predominance of one sphere of social life, it is German
metaphysics and poetry versus French politics and English economics. The point about
toilets is that they enable us not only to discern this triad in the most intimate domain, but
also to identify its underlying mechanism in the three di�erent attitudes towards
excremental excess: an ambiguous contemplative fascination; a wish to get rid of it as fast
as possible; a pragmatic decision to treat it as ordinary and dispose of it in an appropriate
way. It is easy for an academic at a round table to claim that we live in a post-ideological
universe, but the moment he visits the lavatory a�er the heated discussion, he is again
knee-deep in ideology.
Garton Ash’s observations suggest that the three terms of the trinity have recently
undergone a strange displacement: the French are preoccupied with culture (how to save
theirs from vulgar Americanisation), the English are focusing on political dilemmas
(should they join a politically united Europe?), and the Germans? The Germans worry about
the inertia of their economy, as if, in postponing economic reforms inde�nitely, they were
persisting in an attitude which turns around their own saying: morgen, morgen, nur nicht heute,
sagen alle faulen Leute (‘tomorrow, tomorrow, just not today, all lazy people say’).
And what if there was a further shi� of terms? We might then see the United Kingdom
focused on culture (cultural tolerance and lack of pretension could serve as an antidote to
French elitism and excessive German seriousness); France focused on the economy (which,
against all expectations, has done rather well in recent decades); and – surprise – Germany
focused on politics (is the political life of the Bundesrepublik not a triumph of reasoned
debate over blind passion?).
So far so good. In the second half of the book, however, Garton Ash passes to a general
diagnosis of the threats to freedom since the end of the Cold War, and the tone becomes
dogmatic and simplistic, and the proposed solutions hopelessly naive. The �nal pages are
full of journalistic commonplaces – ‘Western-style consumerism is unsustainable on a
global scale’ – which contrast starkly with the witty remarks about ‘Janus Britain’ earlier in
the book. True, there are forthright statements, unusual for a man of Garton Ash’s political
views (an unambiguous attack, for example, on the unfair trade practices of the developed
countries), but he fails to ground his proposals in a detailed analysis of the global situation.
First, he identi�es four ‘new Red Armies’ (sic), the forces of evil – or historical processes –
that pose (or will pose) a threat to democracy and freedom in the coming decades: the
situation in the Middle East (the Israeli-Palestinian con�ict and the rise of Islamism), the
situation in the Far East (how will China develop with regard to democracy?), the gap
between North and South, and the global ecological deadlock.
2 of 6 3/27/2022, 9:26 PM
Slavoj Žižek · Knee-Deep: Leftist Platitudes · LRB 2 September 2004 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n17/slavoj-zizek/knee-deep
These four areas of anxiety are enumerated rather than analysed and, as a result, Garton
Ash’s proposed solutions (or, rather, since he is appropriately modest, his guidelines for
solutions) read like a list of desiderata: the developed countries should abide by the rules of
fair competition they want to impose on the underdeveloped ones; they should make a
more concentrated e�ort to thwart ecological catastrophe; the Middle East crisis should be
resolved through the joint e�ort of the US and Europe, and so on. And what is one to say of
his tendency to moralistic platitude? ‘If we want to be able to look ourselves in the face
every morning, anyone who earns more than the average wage in a rich country should aim
to give 1 per cent of his or her annual income to charities with a good track record in the
developing world. We can a�ord it.’
Garton Ash’s conclusion does not live up to the promise, stated in the book’s subtitle, to
show how the post-Cold War world, although it generates new problems, also opens up a
unique chance to confront them. My own view of these shortcomings is hopelessly
‘outmoded’, because tinged with Marxism: the four problems Garton Ash lists are clearly
grounded in the general dynamics of today’s global capitalism. This link is self-evident in
the case of ecological problems and the poverty gap between North and South. Is the rise of
Islamism not conditioned by the refusal of Muslim civilisation to accept the social
dynamics of capitalism? Is the strange turn in China not to do with the fact that it is a
Communist state which has fully endorsed a capitalist economy? The question should
therefore be put at a more general level than Garton Ash would like: how do we stand with
regard to global capitalism? Are his ‘new Red Armies’ symptoms of a structural �aw at the
heart of the capitalist machine, or are they accidents that can be kept under control, if not
averted?
Not that we should respond to Garton Ash with the crude Marxist retort that ‘he doesn’t
take into account the dialectical totality of the situation.’ The singularity of human
su�ering may reach a level at which the easy reference to totality turns into cynicism. The
only argument for the war against Iraq was repeatedly put by Christopher Hitchens: the
majority of Iraqis were victims of Saddam and were glad to get rid of him. To this majority,
the caution expressed by Western liberals could only appear deeply hypocritical. A typical
middle-class Western le�ist has no right to despise a Cuban who has decided to leave Cuba
not only because of political disenchantment, but also because of poverty and hunger. I
remember from the early 1990s dozens of Western le�ists who proudly proclaimed that
Yugoslavia still existed, and reproached me for betraying the opportunity to prolong that
existence – to which I answered that I was not yet ready to lead my life to avoid
disappointing the dreams of Western le�ists. There are few things more worthy of
contempt, few attitudes more ideological (if this word has any meaning today, it is here)
than a tenured Western academic le�ist patronising an Eastern European from a
Communist country who longs for liberal democracy and some consumer goods.
One should ask the naive question: why should the US not be a global policeman? The post-
Cold War situation called for a global power to �ll the void. The problem, however, is not
that the US is a new global empire, but that it isn’t one, though it pretends to be. In fact, the
US continues to act as a nation-state, ruthlessly pursuing its own interests. The watchword
of recent US politics is a weird reversal of the well-known ecologists’ motto: act global,
think local. This contradiction is amply illustrated by the twin pressures the US was
exerting on Serbia last year: it demanded that the government in Belgrade hand over
suspected war criminals to the Hague tribunal (the logic of the global empire demands a
3 of 6 3/27/2022, 9:26 PM
Slavoj Žižek · Knee-Deep: Leftist Platitudes · LRB 2 September 2004 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n17/slavoj-zizek/knee-deep
trans-state global judicial institution) while at the same time urging it to sign a bilateral
treaty with the US obliging it not to deliver to the International Criminal Court any US
citizen suspected of war crimes or other crimes against humanity. No wonder the Serb
reaction was one of perplexed fury. Apropos the Hague tribunal, Garton Ash wrote in the
Süddeutsche Zeitung that ‘No Führer or Duce, no Pinochet, no Idi Amin and no Pol Pot should
any longer be allowed to feel safe behind the palace gates of sovereignty from the
intervention of people’s justice.’ One should take note of the names missing from this list.
Garton Ash is well aware that the same logic of exception applies to economic relations. In
Cancún last year, the US insisted on keeping subsidies for its cotton producers, thus
violating its own advice to Third World countries to abandon state subsidies and open up to
the market. With torture it’s much the same story. The exemplary economic strategy of
today’s capitalism is outsourcing – contracting out the ‘dirty’ process of material
production (but also publicity, design, accountancy) to other companies. In this way, it is
easy to circumvent environmental and health legislation: the production takes place in
Indonesia, say, where regulations are much less stringent than in the West, and the Western
company which owns the logo can claim that it is not responsible for any violations by the
sub-contractor. Torture is nowadays ‘outsourced’ to Third World allies of the US, which can
practise it without worrying about legal liability or public protest. Garton Ash’s analysis
does not allow him to see how the things he condemns (ruthless disregard for the
environment, the hypocritical double standards imposed by the superpowers etc) are
products of the social dynamics which sustain the role of the exporters of democracy and
guardians of universal human rights.
Then there is the question of depoliticised ‘human rights’ and ‘humanitarian intervention’.
When Sarajevo was under siege for more than three years in the early 1990s, there was no
attempt by UN forces, Nato ” or the US to create a corridor – the most modest of options –
through which people and provisions could move freely. It would have cost little and a bit of
serious pressure on the Serb forces would have ended the prolonged spectacle of the
encircled Sarajevo, exposed to ridiculous levels of terror. So why was nothing done? There
is only one answer to this: the one proposed by Rony Brauman, a former president of
Médecins sans Frontières, who co-ordinated the relief e�ort for Sarajevo. The presentation
of the crisis of Sarajevo as ‘humanitarian’, the recasting of the politico-military con�ict in
humanitarian terms, was in Brauman’s view sustained by an eminently political choice – that
of siding with the Serbs.
More generally, how is it that human rights are so o�en the ‘rights’ only of those excluded
from the political community and reduced to ‘bare life’? Jacques Rancière has proposed in
an essay in the South Atlantic Quarterly that when such rights are of no use,
4 of 6 3/27/2022, 9:26 PM
Slavoj Žižek · Knee-Deep: Leftist Platitudes · LRB 2 September 2004 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n17/slavoj-zizek/knee-deep
you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor.
Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine
and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes and rights. It is in this way ... that
the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare
human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence.
They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims
of the absolute denial of rights. For all this, they are not void. Political names and political
places never become merely void. The void is �lled by somebody or something else ... if
those who su�er inhuman repression are unable to enact the human rights that are their
last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their
place. This is what is called the ‘right to humanitarian interference’ – a right that some
nations assume to the supposed bene�t of victimised populations, and very o�en against
the advice of the humanitarian organisations themselves. The ‘right to humanitarian
interference’ might be described as a sort of ‘return to sender’: the disused rights that had
been sent to the rightless are sent back to the senders.
The reference to Lacan’s formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from
the recipient his own message in its inverted – i.e. true – form) is here to the point: in the
reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is e�ectively
getting back from the victimised Third World its own message in its true form. And this is
also where we should look for candidates for the position of the ‘universal individual’ – a
�gure or group whose fate stands for the injustice of today’s world: the detained in
Guantanamo, or the Palestinians. Palestine is today the site of a potential ‘opportunity’, in
the sense of Garton Ash’s subtitle, precisely because the standard ‘pragmatic’ solutions to
the Middle East crisis have repeatedly failed, so that a utopian invention of a new space is
the only ‘realistic’ choice. Furthermore, the Palestinians make good candidates on account
of their paradoxical position of being the victims of the ultimate victims, the Jews, which of
course puts them in an extremely di�cult spot: when they resist, their resistance can be
denounced as a prolongation of anti-semitism, as a secret solidarity with the Final Solution.
Indeed, if – as Lacanian Zionists like to claim – Jews are the objet petit a among nations, if
they represent the troubling excess of Western history, how can one resist them with
impunity? Is it possible to be the objet a of objet a itself? It is precisely this ethical blackmail
that we should reject.
However, there is another area of ‘opportunity’ that goes unremarked. The explosive growth
of slums in the last decades, from Mexico City and other Latin American capitals through
Africa to India, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, is perhaps the crucial geopolitical
event of our times. The case of Lagos, according to Mike Davis, ‘the biggest node in the
shanty-town corridor of 70 million people that stretches from Abidjan to Ibadan’, is
exemplary: no one even knows the size of its population. Davis quotes a UN report:
‘O�cially it is six million, but most experts estimate it at ten million.’ Since, some time
very soon, the urban population of the earth will outnumber the rural population (this may
already have happened), and since slum inhabitants will constitute the greater part of the
urban population, we are in no way dealing with a minority phenomenon. We are
witnessing the rapid growth of a population outside the control of any state, mostly outside
the law, in terrible need of minimal forms of self-organisation. Although these populations
are composed of marginalised labourers, former civil servants and ex-peasants, they are not
simply a redundant surplus: they are incorporated into the global economy in numerous
ways; many of them are informal wage-earners or self-employed entrepreneurs, with no
adequate health or social security provision. (The main reason for their rise is the inclusion
5 of 6 3/27/2022, 9:26 PM
Slavoj Žižek · Knee-Deep: Leftist Platitudes · LRB 2 September 2004 https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n17/slavoj-zizek/knee-deep
of the Third World countries in the global economy, with cheap food imports from the First
World countries ruining local agriculture.) One should resist the easy temptation to elevate
and idealise slum-dwellers into a new revolutionary class. It is nonetheless surprising how
far they conform to the old Marxist de�nition of the proletarian revolutionary subject: they
are ‘free’ in the double meaning of the word, even more than the classical proletariat (‘free’
from all substantial ties; dwelling in a free space, outside the regulation of the state); they
are a large collective, forcibly thrown into a situation where they have to invent some mode
of being-together, and simultaneously deprived of support for their traditional ways of life.
The slum-dwellers are the counter-class to the other newly emerging class, the so-called
‘symbolic class’ (managers, journalists and PR people, academics, artists etc) which is also
uprooted and perceives itself as universal (a New York academic has more in common with
a Slovene academic than with blacks in Harlem half a mile from his campus). Is this the
new axis of class struggle, or is the ‘symbolic class’ inherently split, so that one can make a
wager on the coalition between the slum-dwellers and the ‘progressive’ part of the symbolic
class? The new forms of social awareness that emerge from slum collectives will be the
germs of the future and the best hope for a properly ‘free world’, whether or not it’s the one
that Garton Ash refers to in his title.
6 of 6 3/27/2022, 9:26 PM
