hankyoreh

Residents of a village in Kharkiv, Ukraine, evacuate on Aug. 15 amid relentless Russian bombing in the eastern city. (AFP/Yonhap)

By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

To a Western European with a vague knowledge of Italian, “Manipur” automatically recalls “mani pulite” (“pure hands”), the big anti-corruption campaign in the early 1990s that changed the whole Italian political scene and ended with the rise of Berlusconi to power.

In Manipur, a small Indian state bordering Myanmar, ethnic violence is now approaching civil war levels. The state’s two largest groups, the majority Meitei and the minority Kuki, battle over land and influence. Meitei are Hindu, politically affiliated to the ruling Hindu-nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party, which also runs the state of Manipur, while Kuki are tribal Christians who live in the forests. There is violence on both sides, but the main culprits are Meitei, who want to push the Kuki out.

What attracted the attention of the world is a shocking video of an attack on May 4, 2023, when two Kuki women were paraded naked by Meitei men and then gang-raped shortly after their village was razed — a horrifying case of terror against women as a political instrument. (The video was rendered public by one of the perpetrators themselves.) At this point Narendra Modi, the country’s prime minister, was finally forced to react. He proclaimed the event a “shame on India.” However, his condemnation came late and was deeply hypocritical — why?

The Manipur local government is more or less openly on the side of the Meitei, while the federal government is officially neutral but silently no less on the side of the Meitei. The reasons for this partiality are not only ethnic (an expression of the BJP Hindu nationalism) but also economic. The forests inhabited by the Kuki are rich in minerals, and the government wants to drive the Kuki out to exploit the area more efficiently. The pressure on the Kuki is thus justified as a strategy of “progress” and “modernization” resisted by the tribal Kuki.

This brings us to “pure hands.” While the federal state pretends to act as a neutral agent simply safeguarding law and order, its hands are far from pure, since what it promotes as “law and order” clearly privileges the strong side in the conflict, providing it with the aura of legality. There is nothing new in such a procedure since it characterizes the entire history of “human rights”: Again and again, this notion was shown to privilege the rights of a particular sex, race, religion or social status. But what is going on in Manipur is that even the façade of a neutral state power crumbles: Those in power openly support those who are, according to its own laws, illegal aggressors.

Is something similar not happening in Israel? As long as the traditional secular Zionist settler-colonial ideology has predominated, the state (not so) has discreetly privileged its Jewish citizens over Palestinians. However, it put in great efforts to sustain the appearance of a neutral rule of law.

From time to time, it condemned Zionist extremists for their crimes against Palestinians, it limited the illegal new settlements on the West Bank, et cetera. The main agency playing this role was the Supreme Court — so it’s no wonder the Netanyahu government which took over in 2022 pushed through a judicial reform that deprives the Supreme Court of its autonomy. The large protests against judicial reform are the last cry of secular Zionism. However, insofar as the protesters are not ready to endorse solidarity with Palestinians, their protests will remain limited to saving appearances.

With the new Netanyahu government, anti-Palestinian violence — the pogrom in Huwara, the attacks on the Stella Maris Monastery in Haifa, and more — is no longer even formally condemned by the state. The fate of Itamar Ben-Gvir is the clearest indicator of this shift.

Before entering politics, Ben-Gvir was known to have a portrait in his living room of Israeli American terrorist Baruch Goldstein, who in 1994 massacred 29 Palestinian Muslim worshipers and wounded 125 others in Hebron, in what became known as the Cave of the Patriarchs massacre. He entered politics by joining the youth movement of the Kach and Kahane Chai party, which was designated a terrorist organization and outlawed by the Israeli government itself. When he came of age for conscription into the Israel Defense Forces at 18, he was barred from service due to his extreme-right political background. Such a person condemned by Israel itself as a racist and terrorist is now the minister for national security tasked with safeguarding the rule of law.

The state of Israel, which likes to present itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, has now de facto morphed into a halachic theocratic state — the equivalent to Sharia law. This shift is not just a secondary degeneration of the original vision, since it indicates a fatal flaw in the original vision itself. (A further twist in this story is that most of today’s messianic Zionists are not even really religious; they remain secularists brutally and cynically using religion as an instrument in the struggle for power.)

In Lacanian terms, the obscene violence is the surplus enjoyment that we gain as a reward for our subordination to an ideological edifice, for the sacrifices and renunciations this edifice demands from us. In today’s Israel, as in Manipur, this surplus enjoyment no longer dwells in the obscene underground, it is openly assumed.

“The surplus-enjoyment as (killing Palestinians, burning their homes, evicting them from their homes, confiscating their lands, building settlements, destroying their olive trees, Judaizing Al-Aqsa, etc.) becomes explicitly articulated,” writes Jamil Khader. “While these forms of surplus enjoyment were previously viewed as an exception in official Zionist discourse, they are now considered as the norm.”

By designating the Israeli Jews as somehow “degenerate,” did we not regress here to a worse kind of anti-Semitism? Not at all. The Jews who support the ongoing trend effectively are degenerate in exactly the same sense as we all are. By acting as they do on the West Bank, they lose any superior status and become just one among the fundamentalist nation-states. Another name for this degeneracy is ideology: a symbolic edifice sustained by obscene surplus enjoyment.

But why use this provocative term? A reference to the use of the term “degeneracy” in quantum mechanics may be of some help. In quantum mechanics, “degeneracy” refers to the fact that “two or more stationary states of the same quantum-mechanical system may have the same energy even though their wave functions are not the same. In this case the common energy level of the stationary states is degenerate.”

“Imagine you’re shown two identical objects and then asked to close your eyes. When you open your eyes, you see the same two objects in the same position. How can you determine if they have been swapped back and forth? Intuition and the laws of quantum mechanics agree: If the objects are truly identical, there is no way to tell,” starts a Google blog post on the topic.

“But for a special type of anyons (particles that occur in two-dimensional space having characteristics of both fermions and bosons), quantum mechanics allows for something quite different. Anyons are indistinguishable from one another, but some (non-Abelian) anyons have a special property that causes observable differences in the shared quantum state under exchange, making it possible to tell when they have been exchanged, despite being fully indistinguishable from one another.”

It is easy to see how the non-Abelian anyons open a new path for quantum computation: When we swap particles around one another like strings are swapped around one another to create braids, the virtual braid that forms the quantum background of two particles can contain much more information than just two particles which are indistinguishable in their actual presence.

But what matters to us here is the fact that the obscene underground of ideology is “degenerated” in a similar way. Procedures that are in themselves indistinguishable (ethnic violence, torture, rapes, denial of the human dignity of the “enemy,” et cetera) are accompanied by a braid of different symbolic narratives. The task of the analysis is thus to recognize the same “energy” — libido, libidinal investment — in Muslim fundamentalism, Zionism, Hinduism, Christian fundamentalism. Obvious differences in their narratives should not blind us to this sameness.

In our daily use of language, this obscene level manifests itself in what Lacan called lalangue (“language”), language in all its non-intended ambiguities and wordplays. It may appear that lalangue opens up the space in which we can resist the hegemonic discourse of power. In today’s China, the “grass mud horse” or “cao ni ma” is an internet meme based on a pun: a play on the Mandarin words cao ni ma, literally "fuck your mother." This is an exemplary case of the resistance discourse of Chinese internet users, a mascot of netizens in China fighting for free expression. As such, it is part of a broader Chinese internet culture of spoofing, mockery, punning, and parody known as e'gao, which includes video mashups and other types of bricolage.

From our own culture, suffice it to mention the Häagen-Dazs brand of ice cream. How did this name emerge? Reuben Mattus, a Polish Jew who emigrated to the US and founded the company in 1959, engaged “in a quest for a brand name that he claimed was Danish-sounding; however, the company's pronunciation of the name ignores the letters ‘ä’ and ‘z’ and letters like ‘ä’ or digraphs like ‘zs’ do not exist in Danish. According to Mattus, it was a tribute to Denmark's exemplary treatment of its Jews during the Second World War, and included an outline map of Denmark on early labels. Mattus felt that Denmark was also known for its dairy products and had a positive image in the United States. His daughter Doris Hurley reported that her father sat at the kitchen table for hours saying nonsensical words until he came up with a combination he liked.”

Is “Häagen-Dazs” not lalangue at its purest? The name condenses a reference to alleged historical facts (Denmark’s treatment of the Jews, Denmark as a country known for its dairy products), imagined associations that are false at the level of facts (letters like “ä” or digraphs like “zs” do not exist in Danish although they “sound” Danish to the non-Dane), up to the enjoyment in pure vocal nonsense.

Such phenomena are far from being limited to ordinary language. Many philosophical or scientific terms are formed in a similar way, chosen because of their pleasantly obscene sound or their improper associations. Just think about quantum mechanics: “degeneracy” as a quantum concept, anyons, quarks (also the name of a healthy soft cheese), up to the Big Bang itself.

Such an infection of scientific concepts with the “degenerate” obscenities of lalangue in no way relativizes science into a historical phenomenon. True universal science easily survives its transposition from one to another ordinary language which affects its discourse with different kinds of obscenities. What this case clearly demonstrates is that lalangue should not be reduced to some kind of subversive poetic playfulness which liberates the speakers from the confines of the hegemonic ideology.

Lalangue also — and maybe even predominantly — serves as an instrument of violent humiliation and oppression. A typical act of racists is to designate enemies with an apparently “neutral” term whose obscene echoes deliver a clear racist message and, when the attention is drawn to it, the perpetrator claims that his hands are pure since he used the term in its neutral sense. A true act of liberation resides in our ability to extract a pure universal concept from its obscene contaminations. Try to formulate a racist/sexist notion in its pure logical structure and its absurdity immediately becomes clear.

Even when a country fights for its survival and is engaged in heroic self-defense, the cause of freedom is, as a rule, contaminated by some kind of obscene racist and sexist background which spoils the purity of its struggle. Those of us who stand firmly behind Ukraine are often worried about the fatigue of the West. As the war now drags into its second year, will not the countries that support Ukraine gradually get fed up with the permanent state of emergency and the material sacrifices demanded of them?

However, much more understandable is the war fatigue of the Ukrainians themselves: How long will they be able to go on fighting? It is already close to a miracle that they persisted for a year and a half, with no quick ending in sight.

What the Ukrainians can and should do is clear. The main medicine against war fatigue is justice in Ukraine: no privileges for the oligarchs. Is there anything more demoralizing than to see ordinary Ukrainians fight while many of the rich emigrated and organized for their sons to be exempted from military service?

A good sign pointing in this direction was that, on July 25, Zelenskyy “warned government officials and lawmakers that ‘personal enrichment’ and ‘betrayal’ will not be tolerated, after the arrest of a military recruitment chief on embezzlement charges and an MP accused of collaborating with Russia. His comments came after the arrest of Yevhen Borysov, head of the military recruitment office in Odesa, by Ukraine’s State Bureau of Investigation (SBI) and Prosecutor General’s Office. The National Agency for the Prevention of Corruption said he had illegally acquired more than $5mn through elaborate business schemes,” according to the Financial Times.

It was discovered that, after the beginning of the war, Borysov discreetly bought a series of luxury properties in France and Spain. However, while the need for the fight against corruption is obvious, another point is no less important: To avoid collapse in the ongoing war, a truly united front against the common enemy is needed.

Yet lately signs of a very worrying phenomenon are multiplying. Many leftists and non-nationalist liberals in Ukraine are ready to fight Russia; they volunteered and are now on the frontline. (One of them who likes my work sent me a photo of his machine gun resting on two Ukrainian translations of my work which he reads in the pause between battles — needless to say, this photo made me quite proud.) However, since they resist aggressive conservative nationalism with its crazy extremist measures (recall just the prohibition to perform publicly the works of all Russian composers), they are, as a rule, side-lined by the authorities and often even suspected of Russian sympathies, as if Putin, the hero of the European and US right wing, somehow stands for socialism.

Suffice it to mention the great Ukrainian documentary filmmaker Sergei Loznitsa, the internationally acknowledged creator of films like “Maidan” and “Donbass.” Loznitsa now lives in Lithuania and cannot return to Ukraine. He learned that, since he is not yet 60 years old, the upper bound for conscription, his passport will be confiscated if he returns home.

Other internationally known artists can travel abroad freely, so we are dealing here with a clear case of revenge punishment by conservative cultural bureaucrats. I know this disgusting strategy from my own past: in Slovenia also, the nationalist rightists always castigated secular leftist opponents of the communist regime as suspicious masked agents of the old communists. In the ’70s, I was never allowed to teach and spent years unemployed, while I am now regularly attacked as a “man of the old regime.”

In Ukraine many women also joined the armed forces and fight on the front; some of them are well-known as excellent snipers. Unfortunately, many of them now “express anger at stigma and treatment by male colleagues and say complaints are being ignored”; they have to fight on two fronts, against the Russian enemy and against harassment from their own masculine colleagues.

One should generalize this situation. Ukraine itself is fighting on two fronts: against Russian aggression and for what Ukraine will be after the war. If, hopefully, Ukraine survives, will it be a nationalist fundamentalist country like Poland and Hungary with the Russian minority treated like Kukis in Manipur? Things are decided now. Only a wide popular front in which there is a place for everyone who opposes Russian aggression can save Ukraine.

Please direct questions or comments to [english@hani.co.kr]