Žižek calls for Gelassenheit

In the latest issue of Mladina Slavoj Žižek comments on the economic crisis. He concludes with a paraphrase from Kant's Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?: "Obey, BUT THINK!" He believes that while we are necessarily being exploited in the current society, we should reflect on what sort of society it is that makes this exploitation possible, and not rush heads over heels to arms. There are two significant changes from Kant's original. First of all Kant did not write "think" but "reason", which is not quite as passive as mere thinking, it is at least collective and as such has a certain potential for political mobilization, since it establishes social networks that can be mobilized for protest. Secondly, Kant's hierarchy was reversed, he did not write "Obey, but think", he wrote: "reason as much as you like and on any subject matter; but obey!" Kant did not want to sacrifice obedience to reasoning, Žižek does not want to sacrifice reasoning to obedience. For Kant reasoning is absolute but needs to be put into bounds so as to not interfere with obedience. For Žižek obedience is absolute and needs to be curtailed only as not to interfere with thinking.

Even though Kant seems progressive in comparison to Žižek, let us not be fooled; it is in Nürnberg of November 1945 that Kant's maxim found fertile soil and proved that his moral theory protects us from minor transgressions only at the price of enabling the most hideous atrocities. It was already Hegel who noted in § 318 of his Rechtsphilosophie that the person who was allowed to voice his opinion can be made to endure much worse than the one who was forced to be silent. This is what media theoreticians meant when they wrote about the narcotic dysfunction of mass media and what Hegel mocked as the stance of the beautiful spirit. Sometimes silence is not enough, sometimes obedience is a sin; this is the sometimes when the stuff of nightmares condenses into a point in history - be it Bosnia, Germany, Rwanda, Sudan, Russia or any other of the by now countless places of horror - which is exactly the blind spot of Kant's (and Žižek's) moral theory. It was Kafka who understood the problem of this blind spot better than anybody (save Brecht perhaps). Žižek could just as well be quoting the priest in Kafka's Process:

"No", said the priest, "we must not believe everything is true, merely that it is necessary. "Gloomy opinion", said K. "lie becomes the world order."

His passive affirmation of the status quo is the same that disgusted me in Luhmann. It is the burst of impotent cynical laughter which follows the realization that we are all doomed, the bad laughter that makes surrender bearable. It reminds me of the joke about the Montenegrin on a sinking ship who replies to the Japanese screaming "what shall we do?" with: "can't you Japanese stop thinking about work for one fucking second!" It is similar to the stance Adorno described in Minima Moralia, 106 - Die Blümlein alle:

The sentence, presumably by Jean Paul, that memories are the only property [sic.] which nobody can take away from us, is a piece in the repertoire of impotent sentimental consolation, which presents the resigned retreat of the subject to inwardness as the gratification it is renouncing. By organizing an archive of itself the subject seizes its own experience as property and thereby externalizes it.

Thinking, quite contrary to what Žižek believes, is doomed the moment it is objectified, sundered from action. We can not obey an unfree world and yet maintain free thinking. If we try, thinking is perverted into its opposite, a mere alibi for the violence of the world: the beautiful spirit hovering above the filth of the damned and the blood of the innocent. Thinking can not, if I paraphrase Adorno, endure as a peaceful enclave, it can exist only by actively resisting the world. Žižek regresses to the position of Feuerbach that Marx criticised in the Theses:

Hence, in The Essence of Christianity, he [Feuerbach] regards the theoretical attitude as the only genuinely human attitude, while practice is conceived and fixed only in its dirty-judaical manifestation. Hence he does not grasp the significance of “revolutionary”, of “practical-critical”, activity.

The distinction between reasoning and obedience is ideological. Thinking is the first and but the first insubordination against a wrong society. The call to obedience does not spare thinking.