[Column] How to respond to Taliban’s martyrdom

Posted on : 2021-08-23 18:09 KST Modified on : 2021-08-23 18:09 KST
Is it fair to dismiss struggle for truth as a sign of primitive society and as a sign of Fascist regression?
Slavoj Zizek
Slavoj Zizek

By Slavoj Zizek, Global Eminent Scholar at Kyung Hee University

The media provided us with some explanations on why Afghanistan fell to the Taliban so easily and quickly. They include Afghans’ inability to adopt democracy, religious fundamentalism, rampant domestic terrorism, corruption, and incompetent government.

But all these explanations seem to avoid the basic, traumatic fact for the Western world. It’s the Taliban’s disregard for self-preservation and their readiness to become martyrs. The conventional wisdom that the Taliban are fundamentalists who believe that they will enter paradise if they die as martyrs fails to capture the fact that they are existentially committed to their belief. The power of faith is not simply grounded in the strength of one’s conviction but in how it is linked to the person’s existential identity. We don’t merely pick and choose this or that belief. We are what we believe.

It was in this context that Michel Foucault supported the Iranian Revolution in 1978. He emphasized a partisan and agonistic form of truth-telling through struggle. He was opposed to the pacifying and neutralizing conventions of the West. The concept of truth, for Foucault, was reserved for partisans.

Is it fair to dismiss struggle for truth as a sign of primitive society and as a sign of Fascist regression?

Georg Lukacs said Marxism is universally true not despite its partiality but because it is “partial.” Being caught in the class struggle is not an obstacle to “objective” knowledge of history but its condition. What Foucault was looking for in Iran was already present in Marxism.

The positivist notion of knowledge as an objective — non-partial — approach to reality is an ideology itself. It is the ideology of the “end of ideology.” On the one hand, we have non-ideological “objective” knowledge. On the other hand, we have individuals who are only focused on “care of the self — it’s a term Foucault came up with after he retracted his support for the Iranian Revolution. From this liberal, individualistic standpoint, universal commitment is only suspicious and irrational, especially if it poses risks to life.

After the triumph of global capitalism, the spirit of collective engagement has been repressed, but now, the repressed spirit seems to have returned in the form of religious fundamentalism.

Can this lead to a return of the proper form of collective emancipatory engagement? Yes. And it is already knocking on our doors with great force. Tackling climate change, for example, calls for large-scale collective actions which will require many sacrifices and letting go of certain pleasures we cherish.

If we are serious about improving our way of life, the individualist “care of the self” has to be given up. Objective science alone can’t get the job done. It will take committed, collective engagement to solve the problems we face now.

This should be our response to the Taliban.

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