Žižek’s Book on Refugees, Review II

While I agree with Žižek that we need to get rid of the idiotic belief that a criticism of anybody who is Muslim or of any aspect of Islam is evidence of Islamophobia (and a criticism of somebody who happens to be a Jew* or a Christian does not constitute anti-semitism or hatred of Christianity), I don’t understand his argument that ISIS practices Islamo-fascism. The word “fascism” has been so overused that I believe it would be best to leave it out of the discussion of ISIS altogether. Fascism is a product of a different civilization, and I don’t see how using this term helps enlighten us about ISIS.

Žižek is absolutely right, however, in his analysis of the mechanisms of liberal guilt:

The more Western liberal Leftists probe their own guilt, the more they are accused by Muslim fundamentalists of being hypocrites who try to conceal their hatred of Islam. Such a paradigm perfectly reproduces the paradox of the superego: the more you obey what the pseudo-moral agency demands of you, the more guilty you are. It is as if the more you tolerate Islam, the stronger its pressure on you will be. The same holds true for the influx of refugees: the more Western Europe is open to them, the more it will be made to feel guilty that it failed to accept even more of them.

Sorry for a long quote but I think it’s good and deserves to be preserved. 

The most valuable thing, for me, in Žižek’s analysis is that whenever he manages to break through his terror of the subject he discusses, he manages to come up with a very lucid explanation of many of the aspects of the encounter between the refugees and locals. For instance, many Europeans keep fretting that refugees seem to demand a lot for people who are supposedly fleeing from horror. But it’s precisely those who escape from the worst, says Žižek, who demand the best:

One can observe here the paradox of utopia: precisely when people find themselves in poverty, distress and danger, and one would expect that they would be satisfied by a minimum of safety and well-being, the absolute utopia explodes.

Žižek points out that what refugees need is being treated as human beings, not as symbols or vehicles of moral redemption. There is nothing wrong with talking about them like one would of any regular person because guess what? They are regular people. When Žižek puts into practice this idea and makes the following statement

In short, the refugees want to have their cake and eat it. They basically expect to get the best of the Western welfare state while retaining their specific way of life, which is in some of its key features incompatible with the ideological foundations of the Western welfare state

that’s precisely when the liberal pearl-clutching begins. 

[More is to come. . .]

* I’m still angry over being told I’m an anti-semite here on the blog for criticizing Lloyd Blankfein. I criticized him as a disgusting piece of human refuse, not as a Jew. What his religion or ethnicity are couldn’t be of a lesser interest to me. Do people really think I’d like him more if his name were Peter Smith or Taras Bulochkin?