hankyoreh

Slavoj Žižek

By Slavoj Žižek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

We are witnessing a gradual decay of the authority of what Jacques Lacan called “the big Other,” the shared space of public values within which only our differences and identities can thrive — a phenomenon often falsely characterized as the “post-truth” era. Resistance against vaccination in the name of human rights makes one nostalgic for the Leninist “democratic socialism” in which free and democratic debate is championed, but once a decision is made, it must be obeyed.

One should interpret this democratic socialism in the sense of Kant’s formula of Enlightenment — not “Don’t obey, think freely!” but “Think freely, state your thoughts publicly, and obey!” The same holds for vaccine doubters: debate, publish your doubts, but obey regulations once the public authority imposes them. Without such practical consensus, we will slowly drift into a society composed of tribal factions.

Here, we can clearly see the link between individual freedom and social cohesion. The freedom to choose to get vaccinated or not is, of course, a formal kind of freedom. However, to reject vaccination effectively implies limiting my actual freedom as well as the freedom of others. Within a community, being vaccinated means I am a much lesser threat to others — and others to me — thus allowing me to exercise my social freedoms to mix with others in the usual way to a much greater degree.

My freedom is only actual freedom within a certain social space regulated by rules and prohibitions. I can walk freely along a busy street because I can be reasonably sure that others on the street will behave in a civilized way towards me — that is, they will be punished if they attack me, if they insult me, so on.

It is the same with vaccination. There are situations when these rules can be relaxed, but also strengthened — as in the conditions of a pandemic — but a domain of rules is needed as the very terrain of our freedoms.

Therein resides the Hegelian difference between abstract and concrete freedom. In a concrete lifeworld, abstract freedom changes into its opposite since it narrows our actual exercise of freedom. Let’s take the case of freedom to communicate with others. I can only exert this freedom if I obey the commonly established rules of language. The language we speak is, of course, not ideologically neutral. It embodies many prejudices and makes it impossible for us to formulate clearly certain uncommon thoughts. Thinking always occurs in language. But to truly think, we must think in a language that counters this language.

The rules of language can be changed in order to open up new freedoms, but the direct imposition of new rules can also lead to ambiguous results and give birth to new, more subtle forms of prejudice.

The disintegration of public space is at its worst in the US, and it can be nicely illustrated by a detail of common culture. In Europe, the ground floor in a building is numbered zero, while in the US, the first floor is on street level. To put it in more historical terms, Europeans are aware that, prior to beginning a count, there has to be a ‘ground’ of tradition, while the US — a land with no pre-modern historical tradition proper — lacks such a ground.

Perhaps, we should thus begin by assuming again the lesson of Europe and learn to count from zero. The catch is, of course, that zero is never neutral. Rather, it is the shared space of ideological hegemony traversed by inherent antagonisms and inconsistencies. Thus, we have to put our claim in a more specific and precise way: ignoring the ground floor obfuscates an even stronger form of the big Other.

Some Lacanians advocate the idea that today, in this era of “fake news,” the big Other no longer exists — but is this true? What if it exists more than ever, just in a new form? Our big Other is no longer the public space clearly distinguished from the obscenities of private exchanges, but the very public domain in which “fake news” circulates, in which we exchange rumors and conspiracy theories.

One should not lose sight of what is so surprising about this rise of shameless obscenity of the so-called alt-right. In the past, shameless public obscenity worked as subversive, as an undermining of traditional domination, as depriving the Master of his false dignity. What we are inviting with the exploding public obscenity of today is not the disappearance of domination or Master figures, but their forceful reappearance.

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