Slavoj Zizek and Social Contract
Time to re-articulate the state?
This morning instead of eating my cornflakes in front of BBC Breakfast I turned on Youtube and watched a recommended video of Slavoj Zizek’s speech to what appears to be the European Union’s delegation in Washington DC. I have heard many of his jokes and ideas before but in this video they are more clear: maybe because I have heard him use the same anecdotes before, or perhaps because he has a full hour and thirty minutes to explain their significance. Thinkers like Zizek deserve better than the three minute clip from some channel promising to improve your life through philosophy.
In case you don’t have the full hour and thirty minutes, I will briefly summarise his big idea, which I would like to then link to Rousseau and Hobbes in terms of the social contract.
I had misunderstood Zizek in the past as someone who spoke about the horrific Kafkaseque qualities in contemporary liberal democracy, or the Orwellian doublethink that becomes necessary to accept the demands of a legal power.
He tells many anecdotes: once in which he becomes friends with someone in the Yugoslav army by joking about affairs with female relatives; one where he apologises to Judith Butler, who affirms that the apology was not necessary; and another where an absurd racist joke leads to a black man giving him the permission to call him ‘nigger’.
But he demonstrates his final point by talking about how a fellow conscript insisted on an answer as to whether his oath to his country was sworn freely, or if he was being ordered to sign it. If he did not, he would go to prison but the officer insisted that he sign it of his own free will: as a compromise, the soldier accepted a signed document stating that the commanding officer was ordering to sign the oath of his own free will.
It’s easy to fall into the mistake I made of think ‘How horrifying, how Kafkaesque!’ but in connection to the earlier anecdotes he is making an important point.
When a fellow soldier wanted to make friends with Zizek, he began by joking about having sex with Zizek’s mother. Zizek could have been offended as a way to close down any possible friendship, to demonstrate his distance, but instead he jokes about having sex with the man’s sister: they then become good friends and discussed quantum mechanics.
When Zizek regretted publicly making sexist remarks about Judith Butler, he gave her a call to apologise. ‘No apology is needed!’ Butler says and Zizek replies ‘Oh, then I’ll take it back!’
In the final joke where Zizek suggests to a black man that not only do black men have enormous penises that they are prehensile so that they can swat flies that land on them, the man replies ‘Now you can call me nigger’.
In each case somebody wants something from another individual: the soldier wants to be a friend; Zizek wants Butler’s forgiveness; and to ingratiate himself with a black stranger.
In the first case, the ability to insult one another’s female relatives acts as a symbolic exchange of women: if either were to literally do one another’s mother and sister respectively, that would be a step too far. (Zizek recognises how this is problematic in feminist discourse.)
Zizek’s joke about rescinding his apology to Butler because none was needed demonstrated how to truly forgive somebody the person receiving the apology has to give up their right to be offended and therefore their entitlement to the apology. Except that for forgiveness to work, the apology also has to stand: the individual apologising cannot give up their regret and the person who has given up their offence cannot receive it. The regret is negated by the lack of offence because the apology stands.
And finally, it is not that the black man expects Zizek to call him ‘nigger’: it is an offer which is not to be taken up. It symbolises that Zizek has articulated the sense of absurd difference people feel when they are caught up in a racial narrative they cannot control. Of course the black man does not have a prehensile penis: of course the white man who suggested it is not a neo-Confederate racial supremacist. Zizek both acknowledged and subverted white guilt in the same way as his apology both affirmed and dissolved his regret at having insulted Judith Butler.
So when the soldier signed his oath to the state under the orders of his superior officer, a similar relationship must have been in play with his liberty. The paradox is that he was ordered to sign of his own free will. If he had not, he would have been jailed.
This is what puts me in mind of Hobbes and Rousseau. Hobbes’s war of all against all and Rousseau’s exclusion of those outside the nation from the state’s protection: both have in common that a person only receives their rights through the co-operation of more powerful bodies. You may be at liberty but there is nothing to stop the more powerful party in the relationship from exercising their liberty, either.
Zizek puts all this together in aid of a bigger political point: that the powerful narrative of white European guilt should not subvert this process as society becomes more pluralised by race, religion, sex, sexuality, and gender, particularly in the wake of the Syrian exodus and other migrant crises.
In each of the cases above, the powerful body (Zizek, Butler, the black man, and the army) did not renounce their power: they granted beneficence in exchange for someone’s respect. Zizek did not actually give his new friend his mother and a room with a lock; the black man did not actually want Zizek to start using a racial epithet to address him; and the army would have recognised the liberty of a dissenter by punishing him for crimes against the rights of the state. This last one feels like the inverse of the other two but all of them suggest ad-hoc sub-verbal social contracts.
I can see echoes of this in politics and culture. Donald Trump is a political candidate who acts like he has taken the US constitution at face-value: he can say what he wants and do what he likes, up to and including the repeal of certain articles in the Bill of Rights. The Democrat party has become the party of good manners, of the unspoken constitution which underpins the functioning of the American state: realpolitik, federal supremacy, the military compact, and either white apologism or white supremacy (depending on who you ask).
In the UK, European secession was motivated by a combination of anxiety about the multicultural project and disillusionment with the political process. The rise of UKIP and its agenda can be read as a reaction against the white, European guilt that Zizek warns us is short-circuiting this ironical process of coming to terms. The question is: if the multicultural project could have been formulated on terms of the unapologetic supremacy of the British state, would people still feel anxious about migration? Would this be a style of government we would be comfortable with?
It has become obvious that between the troubles of the European Union, the adverse consequences of globalised capitalism, the burst of unofficial political activity facilitated by mass communication, and the broadening of our nation’s identities, the social contract in which we used to believe in has snapped.
Donald Trump, Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders and Nigel Farage are all candidates of protest of one stripe or another. Do Hillary Clinton and Teresa May represent the resurgence of an older order, or a new social contract?