Don Camillo and Peppone Reloaded: FatherBrown and Comrade Slavoj [text]

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This post is not meant to be primarily a critique of Žižek, even though he occupies most of the space init, but to use him as a contrast to bring out what is worth salvaging from Gilbert K. Chesterton’s formof thinking (though not much of its content). The work of deconstructing Žižek’s political rhetoric hasalready been done successfully by better writers. “Successfully”, that is, in terms of intellectualcoherence and conclusiveness – less so in that Žižek still enjoys huge popularity among the academicLeft. My favourite is Adam Kirsch’s 2008 ‘The Deadly Jester’ in The New Republic, despite someunjustified claims about the philosophical traditions Žižek draws on.

Further it should be noted that the parallel implied to the two heroes of Giovannino Guareschi’sMondo Picolo finds its limit in the fact that both the Catholic priest and the Communist mayor areunited in their unequivocal antifascism – which can be said of neither Chesterton (who was temptedby Mussolini) and nor Žižek (who congratulates Heidegger on joining the Nazi Party)

The BBC’s favourite “Marxist philosopher” Slavoj Žižek makes ample use of Father­Brown

creator Gilbert K. Chesterton’s witticisms and stories in his grand project, the rehabilitation of

the Western politico­metaphysical tradition from the Catholic Church to the Communist Party

of the Soviet Union.[1] The title of his magnus opus in political theology In Defence of Lost

Causes is taken from a chapter in Chesterton’s What’s Wrong With the World? where

Chesterton suggests that the ‘lost causes are exactly those which might have saved the

world’. Žižek draws heavily on Chesterton in his reading of Christianity, but the most

important thing he gets out of Chesterton is the rhetorical tactic of contradicting obvious truths

by way of paradoxical statement. But, while the paradoxes of Chesterton lend themselves to

frivolously totalitarian abuse, I will argue that the contrast between the two could not be much

greater.

Both writers engage in mysticism (as only for the mystic paradoxes lead to Truth), and both

mystify historical reality to promote their pet lost causes: Leninism and Thomism. In both

cases the result are factually incorrect and politically obscene.[2] In Žižek’s it is a

Leninist/Blanquist glorification of violence and authority (also s. Johnson 2011), in

Chesterton’s a nationalist Catholicism saturated with antisemitic/racist prejudice.

The difference not so much in political couleur (in fact the visions of Communism and

Catholicism are quite compatible), but in the mood of argument. Chesterton calls for

mysticism to limit the insanity of unchecked logical monomania and fanaticism in any theory

and this attitude, rooted in Romanticism, works to limit the insanity of his own political

ideas. It is this appreciation of the limit that Žižek, as Karlsen lays out in the house

journal, finds objectionable in Chesterton – just that one little thing, but unlike other very

small differences Žižek builds up as decisive, this one actually does make all the difference.

Žižek’s mystifications are designed to be delimiting. They frivolously invite the reader to

imagine themself in a Tarantinoesque scenario of revolutionary violence. He permits a

disinhibition of the left­liberal scruples inspired by such trifles as the grandes terreurs from

1794 to 1953. Like in Tarantino movies history is construed in such way that gratuitous violence

is not only rendered pleasurable but ethical. Žižek is attractive to those who are frustrated by

the use of the failure of Marxism­Leninism as evidence that “there is no alternative” to

Capitalism and Liberalism. The violent delimitation feels like a welcome antidote to the

inevitability of the established order. However the very delimitation that does not shy away

from justifying the Gulag only calls in a new, even more stable order: the ‘carnival of mass

protest in which the system is brought to a halt’ is to be channelled by a ‘new form of

organization, a discipline’ that deserves the title ‘Spartan’ (Žižek 2012: 82, invoking Trotsky).

What, if anything, shall come after Sparta is not specified[3] as that, again, would constitute a

limit. The alternative is the organised massacre itself – or as Kirsch asks:

‘But what if it is not the utopia that appeals to Žižek, but the blood and the

sacrifice?’

Ironically, it is not the “revolutionary” but the reactionary of the two writers who created a

framework in which it becomes possible not only to fantasise about battles but to imagine

alternative worlds in concrete (since limited) form.

The second concern is the difference between mystifying history (which both authors do in

their respective causes’ hagiographies and ecclesiographies) and mystical empiricism – the

method applied by Father Brown in the investigation of crime. The former is to be discarded, of

course. But the latter should be salvaged in the service of social scientific investigation.

To the Last Consequence?The immunity that protects Chesterton from following (as he nearly ended up doing)

Mussolini, the antidote that filled him with disgust about Hitler is not to be found in the

content of his political ideology, i.e not in his Catholicism[4] and also not in his English

nationalism. It lies in form or mood of his theorising: his Romantic commitment to non­

commitment: the occasionalism of Novalis which Chesterton’s contemporary and fellow

Catholic nationalist Carl Schmitt found so objectionable. Žižek, nominally at least, subscribes

to more progressive ideals (humanism, equality, democracy and so on and so on), but sides

with Schmitt[5] on being consequential, on brutally carrying through whatever initial

ideological choices to the bitter end. Žižek’s notion of history is, thus, positively heroic and (by

admission) prone to martyr cult. Like his metaphysician of choice Martin Heidegger, and

despite his psychoanalytic lingo and paradoxist style he is highly averse to ambiguity – an

aversion that has been linked to the preference of totalitarian systems (Frenkel­Brunswik

1949):

‘The same ambiguity affects the very basis of a “permissive” and “tolerant” society: “we

see from day to day how this tolerance is nothing else than a fanaticism, since it

tolerates only its own vacuity.” And, effectively, every decision, every determinate

engagement, is potentially “intolerant” towards all others’ (Žižek 2008: 30)

Heidegger, whose decision to fully endorse Nazism in 1933 Žižek defends, expresses his disgust

for ambiguity (Zweideutigkeit) as part of the mood that informs his existentialist philosophy in

Sein und Zeit. This revulsion is shared by many. Diametrically opposed theorists like Georg

Lukács on the Left and Carl Schmitt on the Right seek to solve the “problem of form” (Eßbach

1995: 148ff.), the nagging (romantic) contingency of the capitalist world, the amorphia of social

life. Lukács finds clarity in the absolute subject as which he interprets the self­conscious

working class in revolution; Schmitt finds it in and the absolute homogeneity which for him

is achieved in the nation at war. To achieve such clarity a decisive κρίσις is needed which makes

for an either/or situation. The 20 century kindly supplied such crises. In the emerging bipolar

worlds Lukács finds himself in the following first of Lenin, then of Stalin, while Schmitt

assumes the position of chief lawyer in Hitler’s Germany. Žižek shares the sentiment, even

though the historical moment has not yet supplied this philosopher with his king to follow and

advise. He is waiting for the right contraction in the upholstery of history to occur:

‘In his Logique des mondes, Badiou develops the notion of “atonal” worlds (monde

atonal), worlds lacking a “point,” in Lacanese: the “quilting point” (point de capiton), the

intervention of a Master­Signifier that imposes a principle of “ordering” into the world,

the point of a simple decision (“yes or no”) in which the confused multiplicity is violently

reduced to a “minimal difference.” None other than John F. Kennedy | provided a

concise description of this point: “The essence of ultimate decisions remains

impenetrable to the observer – often, indeed, to the decider himself.” This gesture which

can never be fully grounded in reasons, is that of a Master – or, as G. K. Chesterton put

it in his inimitable manner: “The purpose of an open mind, like having an open mouth,

is to close it upon something solid.” [sic] [6] ‘ (Žižek 2008: 30f.)

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As we will see, summoning Chesterton here is unjustified since (a) the solidity he was after here

is that of fact, not that of political order (i.e. this is a statement of the principle of mystical

empiricism, not of political decisionism) and (b) Chesterton advocated the very opposite: a

heroism of ambiguity.

Žižek’s understanding and even admiration for Heidegger’s decision to join the Nazis in 1933

follows from his decisionism. Heidegger sensed an historical moment and instead of retreating

into the ivory tower he chose action. That he chose wrongly is, to Žižek, preferable to not

choosing at all or becoming a liberal. The Nazis, in Žižek’s version of history, were not simply

the wrong side fullstop – they were so only because they were not sufficiently decisive:

‘… the problem with Hitler was that he was not violent enough, that his violence was not

“essential” enough. Nazism was not radical enough, it did not dare to disturb the basic

structure of the modern capitalist social space (which is why it had to focus on

destroying an invented external enemy, Jews).’ and ‘he acted so that nothing would

really change, he staged a great spectacle of Revolution so that the capitalist order

could survive.’ (Žižek 2008: 151)

In this verdict Žižek’s anti­liberalism comes to a head. As always with ideological statements

there is some truth in the false which lends credibility to the outrageous. Of course the radical

anti­liberalism of the Nazis was deceptive insofar as it did not address the economic structure

that underpinned political Liberalism. Herbert Marcuse laid that out already in 1934. But

this does not mean that Nazism was on a trajectory towards class war and then was diverted so

as to mislead the masses and the existentialist philosophers in order to preserve the capitalist

system. What Žižek suggests amounts to an historically ill­informed speculation reproducing

the naïve attempt of Karl Radek to reclaim the Nazi terrorist in esse as Communist

partisan in posse, misguided by the Hitlerite propaganda into believing he was fighting for the

German workers while he was actually fighting for the interests of the German bosses.

The “not far enough” logic is then swiftly also applied to Stalin’s forced collectivisation as this

(and the Terror as as well) was a pragmatic act to retain power rather than a principled one to

get closer to the realisation of communism. Another displacement, but (as we will see) thanks

to the continuation of truly Communist rhetoric not one that derailed the world historical

project in its entirety.

What Žižek suppresses is that the anti­liberalism of the Fascists (and that of Bolshevism after it

had been fascisised into Stalinism) does not gain its attractiveness from an anticapitalist

potential at all. As Marcuse has shown – and as after the Lego Movie every child knows –

anti­liberalism is the adequate ideology of monopoly capitalism. Going further would not mean

overcoming the exploitative relations of production but a frozen militarised totalisation of

production (again, Žižek likes Trotsky’s idea of militarisation of industry). The “liberalism” that

the totalitarians are fighting is not the expression of capitalism as such, but a cultural form

that is supported by certain traits in the capitalist economy which are under

pressure from the excesses of capitalism itself. It is that liberalism that Marx saw as

unfulfilled promise to be fully realised in communism. The reaction against such liberalism is

antimodern to the core – not oriented towards a better future in which it is realised

dialectically by overcoming the economic basis (apologies for lazy terminology!) which

produced it as a particularistic culture and stands in the way of its generalisation. Anti­

liberalism (just as its most extreme expression in the amalgamation with antisemitic racism) is

not, as Žižek implies, a socialism of fools.[7] Had the Nazis arrived at the insight that what

really is their misfortune is not the Jews after all but capitalism itself (i.e. if they had dropped

the central characteristic of their world view!), then they might have indeed nationalised

industry instead of committing genocide. That does not mean they would have replaced

capitalism with communism; they would have implemented an authoritarian corporatism in

agriculture and a militarisation of industrial production. And of course, given the organic unity

of nationalism, antisemitism and antiliberalism in the German ideology this is a purely

hypothetical issue anyway.

For Chesterton, literal radicalism – going to the roots and from their all the way – is anathema.

Cutting off a man’s head is not better than curing his headache (Chesterton 2000: 45)

So his nationalism, racism and antisemitism remain at the level of personal tastes and

distastes; they do not lead into serious activism beyond the supremely irrelevant and

ineffectual “distributionist” movement. In contrast, literal radicalism leads Žižek to use the

altogether emancipatory spirit of 1789, 1848 and 1917 to conjure up and justify cutting off large

numbers of heads.

In Chesterton the lost causes (which in his case are an even greater hotch potch than in Žižek’s)

do not converge to one master cause that needs urgent realisation or else …

(while Žižek presents Communism as our only hope). They come as a plurality with a

suggestion that indeed Thomas Becket’s Catholicism and Jean Marat’s egalitarianism are both

pursuits worth taking up again – without having to integrate them as does Žižek (2010) when

he tries to enlist Christian love for the Communist project.

As outlined in an earlier post, in The Sheriff of Notting Hill Chesterton has caricatured

how Žižek­style salvaging might end, albeit in the case of one of Chesterton’s own lost causes:

the communal and religiously observant idea of Medieval Europe with its Gothic spires (the

“Church Militant”), guilds and craftsmanship, knights and knightly ideals conjured up to

counteract a truly atonal, grey world of rational bureaucracy and dull routine. Carrying it

through to the bitter results in pointless and repeated bloodshed. But as a Romantic,

Chesterton has a different, more liberal way of dealing with the “atonality” of modern life. And

that is not to implement one alternative, but many. This of course is only possible by taking the

Romantic path deplored by Carl Schmitt: Eschewing realisation and playing out a multitude of

colourful and exciting realities in the imagination. The core problem is “atonality” which is an

purely aesthetic problem. Addressing it politically, aiming for an aesthetisation of the political

is, as Benjamin pointed out, a key element of Fascism. The appropriate field of struggle against

boredom is not (in contrast to the truly existential issues of inequality, exploitation and

domination) the ethno­geographical or global polity but cultural production and consumption.

In fact, consumerism has as good as solved it by enabling virtual experience of parallel realities

as Chesterton dreamt them up:

‘What could be more delightful than to have in the same few minutes all the fascinating

terrors of going abroad with all the humane security of coming home again What could

be better than to have all the fun of discovering South Africa without the disgusting

necessity of landing there? What could be more glorious than to brace one’s self up to

discover New South Wales and then realize, with a gush of happy tears, that it was

really old South Wales.

How can this queer cosmic town, with its many­legged citizens, with its monstrous and

ancient lamps, how can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and

the comfort ad honour of being our own town?’ (Chesterton, 2001: 2)

With the problem of atonality being taken care of by consumer capitalism a refocusing on

pressing problems such as global injustice and looming environmental disaster should be

possible without the baggage of cultural discontent…. And indeed the escapism proposed by

Chesterton is not half as fantastic as Žižek’s invitation to totalitarian daydreaming. As I have

argued elsewhere, the apparent retreat into the imagination has serious political

implications for individual liberties (proper one’s, not Žižek’s allegedly Leninist freedoms) and,

following from that, also for economic and political equality. This is why Chesterton, even

where he seeks for conservative solutions to the dullness of his present times is drawn to

conservative approximations of socialism and anarchism – the latter via an attempt to merge

the idea of the Family with the longing for statelessness (which in What’s Wrong with the

World is the chief example of a lost cause).

Chesterton’s political programme to go with this was not the reactionary mirror image

of authoritarian Leninism/Blanquism (as promoted by Žižek), but rather that of the

libertarian municipialism of Murray Bookchin. Had he been on the nostalgic Left

rather than a hopeless Catholic Romantic he would have sought to salvage the experience not

of Moscow 1936 but of Barcelona 1936. Given that the objections to capitalism are similar in

Chesterton and Žižek (both concern inequality and cultural shallowness), the difference that

the revolutionary mood makes is striking.

The Romantic suffers from the same modern alienation, ambiguity and exposure to nihilism as

the Schmittian Conservative Revolutionary, but he accepts and sees this troublesome open­

endedness as an opportunity, as empty spaces to fill with an infinity of dreams. But, to the

Conservative Revolutionary’s dismay Romantics from Novalis to Chesterton refrain from full

realisation in order not to close the infinite horizon of possibilities. The Romantic solution is

self­limitation to preserve infinity. The Conservative Revolutionary’s unhappiness is precisely

with this unreality of possibilities, so he seeks determinacy and clarity through realisation so as

to transform the offer of infinity into a fixed eternity of ontological security.[8] Communist

intellectuals from the early 20 century until today are torn between the two moods which

Paolo Virno associates with Walter Benjamin’s and Martin Heidegger’s diametrically opposed

attitudes towards the diversion (Zerstreuung ) offered by modern culture – a tension that can

be felt in the uneasy coexistence of emotional commitment to diversity and to authenticity.

For both Heidegger and Benjamin, those who are curious are forever distracted. They

watch, learn, try out everything, but without paying attention. […] The judgment of the

two authors diverges. For Heidegger, distraction, which is the correlate of curiosity, is

the evident proof of a total uprooting and of a total unauthenticity [sic]. The distracted

are those who pursue possibilities which are always different, but equal and

interchangeable (opportunists in the prior meaning of the word, if you like). On the

contrary, Benjamin clearly praises distraction itself, distinguishing in it the most

effective means for taking in an artificial experience, technically constructed. (Virno,

2004: 93)

While Virno himself dithers, Chesterton would have to side with Benjamin while, naturally,

Žižek is fully on Heidegger’s side – and generally on that of the Konservative Revolution,

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Schmitt, Jünger and all. With his praise (carefully framed into a frivolously suggestive “what

if…?”) for Heidegger’s ‘ontic’ move into the existential politics of Nazism 1933 Žižek subscribes

to the Fascist turn in existential anthropology that ex­existentialist Marcuse analysed in 1934

from exile:

‘Die existenzielle Anthropologie glaubt, dass das Wissen um das Wofür der

Entscheidung, um das Wozu des Einsatzes, durch das alles menschliche Handeln erst

seinen Sinn und Wert bekommt, sekundär ist. Wesentlich ist nur, dass eine Richtung

eingeschlagen, dass Partei genommen wird.‘ (Marcuse 1934: 187f.)

‚Existential anthropology believes that knowledge of the what­for of the decision, of the

in­order­to­what of the stake, by which only all human action receives its meaning and

value, is secondary. The only essential thing is that a path has been taken, that a side

has been chosen.’

And this mood explains (or maybe it is to be explained by?) the testicular valuation of action

that Žižek prefers for the historical actors: Did they have balls? And the worst thing he can say

about Hitler is that he had one less than the Daily Mail thinks he had. Sure – he does see

that the exterminationist racial antisemitism of the Nazi was absolute evil and does say so. But

that antisemitism in Žižek’s view was only the result of chickening­out of the real, manly

confrontation with the Powers of Capitalism (hence he can dismiss the genealogy of

antisemitism in nationalism, Christendom, and also capitalism as irrelevant). As to Heidegger:

he only chides him a little because after the disappointment of the hope for an ontological

opening in Nazism he did not have another go and consider the Radical Left as an option. But

he applauds him for not doing as his dearest bogeywoman, Hannah Arendt, did and turn all

liberal and against totalitarianism. Then again, Arendt by definition could not live up to Žižek’s

standard measure of political valour.

Žižek reaffirms his standards with respect to Stalinism in that he subscribes to Stalin’s

statement of Nietzschean immoral ethics which he casually had jotted down in or after 1939

(i.e. around the time when he joined forces with Hitler)

‘On the back flyleaf of a 1939 edition of Lenin’s Materialism and Empiriociriticism Stalin

made the following note in red pencil:

1) Weakness

2) Idleness

3) Stupidity

These are the only things than [sic!] can be called vices. Everything else, in teh

absence of the aforementioned, is undoubtedly virtue.

NB! If a man is 1) strong (spiritually), 2) active, 3) clever (or capable), then he is

good, regardless of any other “vices”.

1) plus 3) make 2).

This is as concise as ever a formulation of immoral ethics; in contrast to it, a weakling

who obeys moral rules and worries about his guilt, stands for unethical morality, the

target of Nietzsche’s critique of ressentiment.’ (Žižek 2008: 223f.)

His only objection to this mini manifesto of decisionism is that Stalin in practice remained too

much of a moralist as he still sought justification in a higher good, in the communism to come,

in a Big Other that Lacan, so Žižek, strongly advises us to ditch. What would be left then,

however, is the existential ethos of Fascist totalitarianism as exposed by Marcuse. Marcuse was

worried about the fate of the workers movement in which the legacy of philosophy was

aufgehoben (i.e. at once overcome and preserved) in the critique of political economy and

‘scientific theory of society’ (i.e. Marxism). He was right to be worried.

In comparison to this even Brecht’s search for Einverständnis, binding consent, as it is played

out to the death in Die Maßnahme (and before that in Die Jasager) looks weak and moralistic.

As Žižek points out: the measure taken was a mere tactical expediency which needs

justification in the Big Other of the successful Communist Revolution and the liberation of the

working classes. What a purer Stalin recommends (and does not live up to) is the decisionism

of Carl Schmitt.

Brecht, with all his catastrophic delusions about the nature of the Communist Party and the

requirements of the historical situation, is closer to Father Brown than to Carl Schmitt (who is

ridiculed by enlisting him for a cameo in Die Maßnahme: one of the Soviet agitators sent to

China is “Karl Schmitt aus Berlin”). Wrong as it is on nearly all counts[9] Die Maßnahme

incorporates responsibility and the possibility of a withdrawal of consent (Einverständnis) at

every turn of events. In the specific circumstances and given the specific commitments entered

by the protagonists the “measure” (the murder of the young comrade) is justified[10], but

those circumstances are a tragic culmination that left them no alternative.[11] Going through

with things, sticking to a once­made either/or distinction, a friend/enemy definition is not the

idea that Brecht proposes (also see Müller­Schöll 2004). And so Žižek finds him, whom he

otherwise admires, lacking. Brecht’s idea of acting well resembles more that of Father Brown:

Brown asks the criminals to repent, to change their ways, to save their soul. He is a moralist

who is deeply concerned with the consequences that actions have on the chances for happiness

of the acting person and those affected by the actions. In the Neinsager Brecht emphatically

states that where the circumstances allow it, where saving one does not mean sacrificing

others, you can leave the chosen path. Wer a sagt muß nicht b sagen. Not only the ultimate,

but the immediate criterion for loyalty in political action is the possibility of dignity – a

criterion that political existentialism abandons:

‚Die politische Identifizierung von Freiheit und Bindung ist nur dann mehr als eine

Phrase, wenn das Gemeinwesen, an das der freie Mensch apriori gebunden wird, die

Möglichkeit menschenwürdiger Erfüllung des Daseins gewährleisten kann. Die

Identität von Freiheit und politischer Bindung (die als solche durchaus anzuerkennen

ist) enthebt nicht, sondern zwingt erst recht zu der kritisch­rationalen Frage : wie sieht

dieses Gemeinwesen aus, an das ich mich binden soll ? kann bei ihm das, was das Glück

und die Würde des Menschen ausmacht, aufbewahrt sein ?‘ (Marcuse 1934: 192)

The political identification of freedom and commitment can only be more than empty

talk if the commonwealth to which the free human is, a priori, being committed can

guarantee the possibility of a humane fulfilment of existence. The identity of freedom

and political commitment (which as such is to be recognised) does not absolve us but

compels us to ask the critical­rational question: what does this commonwealth to which

I am to commit look like? Can it contain that which constitutes human happiness and

dignity?

Brecht has all the wrong answers to those questions. But at least he is asking them and the

whole point of his pedagogical theatre is to force the audience and the performers to ask those

question at every opportunity. Father Brown in his old­fashioned ways asks similar questions

about possible courses of action and their consequences for the individual soul and the

relations between individuals. Needless to say that he, too, provides some very wrong answers

from time to time. But at least he asks the question. Žižek sneers at Brecht’s consideration for

expediency – the verdict would come out similarly on Father Brown. Both send people off to

make moral judgements … and not even in relation to a Big Other, but to very small ones.

Father Brown is much concerned with human happiness in the small worlds of private lives

and neighbourly relations, the Kingdom of Heaven hardly ever features in his stories. And for

Brecht Communism is only worth a sacrifice if it is within reach. This is why they so frequently

break the chains of commitment to a cause and recommend mundane pragmatism.

Where decisionism erases the limit of commitment and with it the line between person and

movement in the search of an absolute communion, the imagination that is limited by the

space it needs to give alternative considerations, incongruent imaginings, employs the capacity

for the limitless (the mysticism of the human mind) in the service of the limited (the real –

small­r “real” that is).[12] Chesterton appreciated the limit as a pragmatic opening:

God is that which can make something out of nothing. Man (it may truly be

said) is that which can make something out of anything. In other words,

while the joy of God be unlimited creation, the special joy of man is limited

creation, the combination of creation with limits. Man’s pleasure,

therefore, is to possess conditions, but also to be partly possessed by them;

to be half­controlled by the flute he plays or by the field he digs. The

excitement is to get the utmost out of given conditions; the conditions will

stretch, but not indefinitely. A man can write an immortal sonnet on an old

envelope, or hack a hero out of a lump of rock. But hacking a sonnet out of a

rock would be a laborious business, and making a hero out of an envelope

is almost out of the sphere of practical politics.

Hannah Arendt[13] identified one of the hallmarks of totalitarian politics the lack of limits in

positive aims. The totalitarian, whose ethos indeed is a combination of cleverness and

ruthlessness that enables him to be the man of action who accelerates an already decided

history, does lack imagination because he lacks imagination. He is a dreamer of the absolute,

but the absolute (the old Platonic­Christian Eternity, Being) to the dismay of the Hegelians can

never become concrete in reality. The job therefore is never finished as the goal is never defined

in positive terms. This is a question of mood – and it is linked to a notion of infinity that is

inherent to capitalist practice[14] – which can turn just any idea (no matter whether it is good

or evil from the outset) into a fatal fanaticism. Chesterton rejected fanaticism, which does not

make his nationalism, obscurantism and racism less objectionable but, crucially, less

dangerous and accessible to reconsideration. Unlike the dreamers of the absolute who had

taken over the Communist Party, the fictitious Communist Party embodied by the Kontrollchor

in Brecht’s Die Maßnahme also still is committed to the limits of reality:

Nur belehrt von der Wirklichkeit, können wir

Die Wirklichkeit ändern. (Brecht 1955: 307)

Only if instructed by reality can we

change reality.

Chesterton puts a similar limit to his romantic histories. On the one hand the task of history is

indeed to inspire the dreaming youth – it is a history for boys

‘The highest and noblest thing that history can be is a good story. Then it appeals to the

heroic heart of all generations, the eternal infancy of mankind. Such a story as that of

William Tell could literally be told of any epoch; no barbarian implements could be too

rude, no scientific instruments could be too elaborate for the pride and terror of the tale.

It might be told of the first flint­headed arrow or the last model machine gun; the point

of it is the same: it is as eternal as tyranny and fatherhood.’ (Chesterton 1939: 229)

Such histories have their functions – and especially if there is a plurality of alternative histories

available: Dr Who style histories in which moral­political possibilities are projected into

imaginative fields of realisation. But as they are inspiring they have a potential to get out of

hand (as the story about the Glory of Notting Hill Oberon Quin tells a young Adam Wayne in

The Sheriff of Notting Hill). Father Brown’s decision to leave in place the Imperialist

myth of St Clare marks the loss of his Innocence as he allows fiction to acquire the status of

fact. The freedom of the imagination is only of any use if there is a commitment not to let it

turn into a dream of the absolute – it needs to be checked by realistic (utilitarian in a broad

sense) evaluation – Žižek’s denigrated question of expediency:

‘Now the mere tales of the heroes are a part of religious education; they are meant to

teach us that we have souls. But the inquiries of the historians into the eccentricities of

every epoch are merely a part of political education; they are meant to teach us to avoid

certain perils or solve certain problems in the complexity of practical affairs. It is the

first duty of a boy to admire the glory of Trafalgar. It is the first duty of a grown man to

question its utility.’ (Chesterton 1939: 230)

The limitation is an important one: children don’t have the means to inflict serious damage

(which mitigates there not yet fully developed ability to foresee damage). In The Sheriff of

Notting Hill Chesterton has laid out what would happen if a thus inspired boy

when growing up to be a man without ceasing to be a boy found himself in charge:

bloodshed and destruction. And the unchecked boyish doctrine of Adam Wayne informed

by the kind of history Chesterton proposes for the use of infants produces horrible enough

results – of course far less .

Chesterton’s alter ego Quin honestly despairs about what he has triggered and does accept

responsibility for the unintended consequences of his philosophies – and especially that Adam

Wayne does what Žižek also proposes: to go to the last consequence, descending into the

fanaticism that the Romantic Chesterton (like the old Romantics) abhorred. This contrasts

with Žižek’s outright assertion that the intellectual traditions (let alone socio­economic,

cultural and political developments) leading up to Nazism are not to be considered.[15] In

contrast, while key aspects of his explanation of Fascism are outright scandalous, Chesterton

did have a sense that one root of the fanaticism of Fascism is the fact that it has a largely

aesthetic concept of history of which sets it on a runaway train unchecked by reality:

‘That is the meaning of Hitler and the whole hysteria of to­day. Mythology has

returned; the clouds are rolling over the landscape, shutting out the broad daylight of

fact; and Germans are wandering about saying they will dethrone Christ and set up

Odin and Thor. But we cannot understand it by looking only at the last ten years of

peace, or even at the original five years of war.’ (Chesterton 1939: 378)

Advertising StalinismHow do you sell Stalin’s immoral ethics to an academic left­leaning democratic audience with a

vague affection for Marx? By appealing to their “Big Others”, even if you yourself have rejected

them in the ruthless ethics of 1) plus 3) is 2). Humanism. The possibility of a better, humane

future. Liberation. So Žižek tries to convince us that even in its magnificent failure, Stalinism

(in contrast to Nazism) still did what Marcuse has noted it might not do: preserve the

philosophical legacy aufgehoben in Marxism. This is the message to unorthodox Marxists in

the New Left Review article of 1999, ‘When the Party Commits Suicide’. The humanist vision

preserved by Stalinism allegedly not only sustained the sheer possibility of democratic socialist

resistance to capitalist exploitation in the West; but in the end also the democratic resistance

against the ossified remnants of Stalinism itself, against the Brezhnevist bureaucracies of the

Eastern Bloc, so that

when dissidents like Havel denounced the existing Communist regime on behalf of

authentic human solidarity, they (unknowingly, for the most part of it) spoke from the

place opened up by Communism itself

Thus sustaining the Communist myth, if only in cynical mode, becomes central for any

revolutionary project. ‘Cynical’ in the sense that, as an earlier Žižek (1989: 33) pointed out, one

does see what is wrong with the world but happily acts as if one did not. In the meantime he

has adopted this cynicism for his own ideological production, making sure that he keeps

pointing out just how horrible and mean Stalinism was (at one point he actually does say it was

worse than Nazism), only to affirm its myths as indispensable for current political praxis. We

are presented with the moral core of the perverse system as containing an unparalleled

liberating power:

The difficult task is thus to confront the radical ambiguity of the Stalinist ideology

which, even at its most “totalitarian,” still exudes an emancipatory potential. From my

youth, I remember the memorable scene from a Soviet film about the civil war in 1919,

in which Bolsheviks organize the public trial of a mother with a young diseased son,

who is discovered to be the spy for the counter­revolutionary White forces. At the very

beginning of the trial, an old Bolshevik strokes his long white moustache and says: “The

sentence must be severe, but just!” The revolutionary court (the collective of the

Bolshevik fighters) establishes that the cause of her enemy activity was her difficult

social circumstances; the sentence is therefore that she be fully integrated into the

socialist collective, taught to write and read and to acquire a proper education, while

her son is to be given proper medical care. While the surprised mother bursts out

crying, unable to understand the court’s benevolence, the old Bolshevik again strokes his

moustaches and nods in consent: “Yes, this is a severe, but just sentence!”

The punishment is re­education. Žižek is right in saying that this is not ‘simply the ideological

legitimization of the most brutal terror’. But he is utterly wrong when claiming

‘instead of pleading for generous tolerance against severe justice, the old Bolshevik

redefines the meaning of “severe justice” itself in terms of excessive forgiveness and

generosity’

The “justice” is “severe” in that, while the condemned are spared their lives and even avoid

imprisonment, they are stripped of their personhood. The implication of the verdict –

pedagogy – is that they are defined as incapable of responsibility. They cannot answer (respond

to) the charges since they are but sorry products of their social circumstances. Unlike those

already educated by the Party they are in no position whatsoever to act meaningfully under

those circumstances. The integration and education is imbued with the effect of preventing

further crime (and further dissent –the crime was a political one: allegiance to the wrong side)

– it has the power of the Ludovico technique. Presented as ultra­Christian mercy that by far

exceeds any Liberal notions of justice as resocialisation/rehabilitation based on a humanist

morality, this is nothing but the resocialisation into a total institution writ large based on an

immoral ethics. Compare this to Brecht – for whom the educating role of the Party is just as

central – : Although Brecht’s Lehrstuck (educational play) idealises a pedagogy that was

catastrophic in practice, at least he does not reduce the responsibility of the actors. As they

need need to come to some sort of agreement (Einverständnis) and therefore always are

credited with the ability to reason, i.e. are not stripped of that Socratic human capacity which,

as Ernst Cassirer reminds his contemporaries in 1944, is foundational to civilisation – the

‘faculty of giving a response to himself and to others, that man becomes a “responsible” being, a

moral subject.’ (Cassirer 1944: 21)

The story is immorally ethical in the Stalinist­Žižekist sense outlined above. The

revolutionaries have an ethos, they are strong (1) and clever (3) and therefore act (2). They are

not interested in the moral significance of the woman’s actions but are clever enough to see

that she and her son can be of use for the collective and strong enough to bear the risk of

appearing weak (while taking the precaution of asserting their strength rhetorically by labelling

the whole thing “severe”). There is no humanity in their judgement and no mercy – and it is

emphasised that this is so, just to make sure that you don’t get any ideas.

The implications for anyone not fully integrated and not reflecting the current standard of

education (which with every adjustment of the Party Line changes) are clear: The best of

intention will not help you if you are a heretic. The story does indeed not, as Žižek says,

ideologically obscure the reality of the “justice” in the Soviet Union but exposes it ex negativo.

All in all this is brilliant advertising, activating layers upon layers of myth (see Wernick 1983

for a succinct analysis), nicely combining the expropriated symbols of justice from the Biblical

episode where Jesus saves the adulterer by asking those who are without sin to cast the first

stone and Thomas Aquinas notion that sinners can be spared if they do not constitute an acute

danger to the community (while serious and serial offenders, and especially heretics must be

killed) into a new myth of Communist justice whose logical conclusion is not generosity at all

but the utmost severity against everyone who appears to be in the way of the movement led by

the Great Strong and Clever One.

The way Bukharin was dealt with (the interpretation of which makes for the main part of the

1999 article) is indeed not the reality that this story is conceived to cover up (Žižek is right that

it is not ideological in such a trivial sense) – it is the realisation of what the story actually

gestures at.

Totalitarian humourIn Žižek’s writings Bukharin, standing in as ideal type for the victim of the Stalinist purges in

general, cuts a ridiculous figure. In anticommunist (as well as in some apologetic) discourses

he exemplifies the way that the soldiers of the Communist Party were loyal to the cause to such

an extent that they readily sacrificed both their life and their political integrity in insane

confessions of counterrevolutionary guilt so as to further the power of Party and the Soviet

Union. This would be mad enough, but at least make Bukharin a tragic figure. But Žižek’s

Bukharin is not man enough to be tragic. He is soft. He is attached to a bourgeois moral sense

of self, indulging in the delusion he could sway Stalin and the comrades to acknowledge that

he, the Golden Boy of the Party according to Lenin, may have sinned and erred in practice –

but all in good faith. He is loyal to the cause and will, in public, confess to the worst of crimes,

but hopes that in private Stalin & Co. realise that the very fact that he cooperates in his own

destruction is evidence enough that he has been always true to the cause. Žižek does some

Lacanian conceptual magic on Stalin and Bukharin in which the former comes out as a pervert

and the latter as a neurotic[16] – but the ethical story is rather plain. Bukharin neither has the

guts to stand up to Stalin in public nor the strength to perform the ultimate sacrifice and give

up the illusion of personal identity. He cannot accept that behind the mask of the party official

and professional revolutionary there is not an actual person who has characteristics such as

good will, integrity etc. In fact he falls under the verdict of unethical morality which, as seen,

Žižek (2008: 244) contrasts with Stalin’s statement of immoral ethics: ‘a weakling who obeys

moral rules and worries about guilt’.

Had he accepted that may not have saved his life, but at least redeemed his manhood in the

eyes of History (i.e. history as told by Comrade Žižek), albeit at the price of his humanity. But

he did not. Which means his case is not tragic but comic. When Žižek reports the Kafkaesque

laughter of the comrades, and he more or less invites the reader to join in. Žižek does note that

there has been a nasty turn in Soviet humour under Stalin – while it was rough already under

Lenin it was, claims Žižek, still a liberating laughter. But under Stalin it became ‘victors’

laughter’ (Žižek 2008: 233). This is the laughter Horkheimer and Adorno identified in the

reactions to cultural­industrial production:

„Gelacht wird darüber, daß es nichts zu lachen gibt. Allemal begleitet Lachen, das

versöhnte wie das schreckliche, den Augenblick, da eine Furcht vergeht. Es zeigt

Befreiung an, sei es aus leiblicher Gefahr, sei es aus den Fängen der Logik. Das

versöhnte Lachen ertönt als Echo des Entronnenseins aus der Macht, das schlechte

bewältigt die Furcht, indem es zu den Instanzen überläuft, die zu fürchten sind. Es ist

das Echo der Macht als unentrinnbar. Fun ist ein Stahlbad.“ (Horkheimer/Adorno

1969: 148f.)

The object of laughter is the very fact that there is nothing to laugh about. Laughter, the

reconciled as the terrible, always accompanies the moment when fear abates. It

indicates liberation – be it from physical danger or be it from the claws of logic.

Reconciled laughter rings out as echo of escape from power, bad laughter copes with

fear by defecting to those powers which are to be feared. It is the echo of inescapable.

Fun is a chalybeate bath.

Again adopting the standpoint of the cynic, Žižek notes the shift, but joins in the denigration of

Bukharin anyway. Bukharin has nothing to laugh about as his attempts to somehow stay on the

side of power fail miserably. And there is no escape either. But the others (and with them

Žižek) who are hoping to survive the Purge by documenting their identification with the Leader

can laugh, must laugh, as they have successfully defeated logic and can take their dip into the

fortifying pool to come out steeled.

Žižek is often complimented on his sense of humour – but his humour consistently is a

Stalinist one.[17] This becomes clear if we look at his popular “dusty balls” metaphor. Here

Žižek delights in a Russian joke in which insult is added to injury­and­insult­and violation: A

Mongolian warrior rapes a peasant and forces her husband to hold his testicles during the

crime – the peasant later reveals that he took revenge by dirtying the Mongol’s testicles with

dust. Lesson: don’t “dust the balls” of capitalism, cut them off! Žižek’s audiences find that

hilarious. Victorious laughter that identifies with the rapist in the first instance and then with

an imagined male saviour who would castrate his rival. The suggested world­historical

solution, revolution as castration, structurally parallels the typical hyper­masculine reaction to

rape in which the wronged appears not to be the victim herself but the man/men she belongs to

– so the thus wronged man takes revenge by depriving the perpetrator of his manhood. This is

a rhetorical device out of the toolbox of nationalist propaganda (imagining the nation as a

raped women to be avenged) and it is also a common projection with brutal consequences in

racists contexts (Jordan 1974: 80ff.). The fate of the most oppressed themselves (in the joke:

the peasant woman) does not really matter here – this is between those in power and the

leaders of the revolution either of whom either has or has not balls.

How does this compare to Father Brown’s laughter? It cannot be said that Chesterton does not

employ humour in attempts to escape logic – he does so quite explicitly. But it never is a

laughter that sides with the victor. To the contrary – in cases where strength and cleverness

lead to decisive action, but immoral outcomes that go unchecked the evoked emotion in the

otherwise light hearted stories is horror. There is one instance of first­as­a­farce­than­as­a­

tragedy in the Innocence of Father Brown: In the story ‘The Flying Stars’ the (then still)

master criminal Flambeau manages to escape by misleading one of the detectives chasing him

into arresting the other detective – laughter of escape from harm. But in ‘The Sins of Prince

Saradine’ (in the same collection) the trick is reversed and Father Brown and the (now

reformed) private investigator Flambeau are witness to a double murder orchestrated by a

strong (and heartless) and deceitful (clever) aristocrat who manages to get away with it by the

trick he learned from Flambeau. The only one laughing here is the criminal.

“Laughing, God help us!” said Flambeau with a strong shudder.

The story of Prince Paul Saradine has an interesting twist which hints at the consequences of

amorality not so much when it comes to appraising actions or character, but quite

pragmatically analysing the course of events. The case in question is that Saradine has long ago

had an affair with an Italian married woman which resulted in the suicide of her husband. Her

son Antonelli, is now pursuing him to take revenge for his father while Saradine’s brother

Stephen, on the other hand, has been blackmailing him out of nearly all his fortune. Saradine

resolves the situation in that he, in exchange for food and shelter and a position of butler,

hands over his identity and property completely to Stephen. Now all he has to do is to wait for

Antonelli to find the fake Prince Saradine, i.e. Stephen, and murder him for what the real

Prince has done. But the plan nearly fails:

“There was one hitch, and it is to the honour of human nature. Evil spirits like Saradine

often blunder by never expecting the virtues of mankind. He took it for granted that the

Italian’s blow, when it came, would be dark, violent and nameless, like the blow it

avenged; that the victim would be knifed at night, or shot from behind a hedge, and so

die without speech. It was a bad minute for Prince Paul when Antonelli’s chivalry

proposed a formal duel, with all its possible explanations. It was then that I found him

putting off in his boat with wild eyes. He was fleeing, bareheaded, in an open boat

before Antonelli should learn who he was.

“But, however agitated, he was not hopeless. He knew the adventurer and he knew the

fanatic. It was quite probable that Stephen, the adventurer, would hold his tongue,

through his mere histrionic pleasure in playing a part, his lust for clinging to his new

cosy quarters, his rascal’s trust in luck, and his fine fencing. It was certain that

Antonelli, the fanatic, would hold his tongue, and be hanged without telling tales of his

family. Paul hung about on the river till he knew the fight was over. Then he roused the

town, brought the police, saw his two vanquished enemies taken away forever, and sat

down smiling to his dinner.”

Like Saradine Žižek underestimates the importance of virtue (and plain decency). It is one

thing with Nietzsche to deny the political value of morality and denounce it as ‘unethical

morality’ of the weakling, as ressentiment. It is another thing not to take it seriously when

analysing the action of humans who understand themselves as moral agents (a mistake

Nietzsche never made). This is one reason why Žižek does not get Bukharin. The fact that

Bukharin was honestly concerned for two things that lay beyond his immediate ego

preservation does not cross Žižek’s mind: the fate of his family (threatened by Stalin) and the

fate of Communism (threatened by Stalin and by the rise of Fascism). He also does not realise

that in fact, through these motivations and by daring and intelligent tactics in the court room

he actually managed to preserve that which the victor’s laughter aimed at destroying: his

dignity as human being in general and as a communist in particular. He tried to, in one stroke,

save the face of Communism at the historical moment of antifascist struggle, save his wife and

children and save his honour in the eyes of history. The success was limited – but in terms of

‘realism of character’ (Currie 1998) this motivation makes a little more sense than the

suggestion of a neuroticism and weakness. Already at the time the more observant of his

contemporaries clearly understood that by the very pedantry of his stringent confession to the

most impossible crimes against the Soviet Union he was in fact incriminating not himself but

those who scripted the plot of the alleged crimes. In addition Bukharin trips up the persecutors

by taking it upon him to correct the script,[18] which was inconsistent, thereby showing up the

confessions as works of badly written fiction from A to Z (and that even here he, Bukharin, is

the superior writer).

Another illustration of the lack of moral imagination leading to analytical weakness is Žižek’s

use of the ambiguities in the plot of Casablanca – which for reasons unfathomed tell him

something about Stalinism. Here is Žižek’s account:

‘After Rick refuses to hand them over, she pulls a gun and threatens him. fie tells her,

“Go ahead and shoot, you’ll be doing me a favor.” She breaks down and tearfully starts

to tell him the story of why she left him in Paris. By the time she says, “If you knew how

much I loved you, how much I still love you,” they are embracing in a close­up. The

movie dissolves into a three­and­a­half­second shot of the airport tower at night, its

searchlight circling, and then dissolves back to a shot from outside the window of Rick’s

room, where he is standing, looking out and smoking a cigarette. He turns round and

says, “And then?” She resumes her story . . . The question that immediately pops up

here, of course, is: what happened in between, during the three­and­a­half­second shot

of the airport —did they do it or not? Maltby is right to emphasize that, as to this point,

the film is not simply ambiguous; it rather generates two very clear, although mutually

exclusive meanings —they did it, and they did not do it, that is, the film gives

unambiguous signals that they did it, and simultaneously unambiguous signals that

they cannot have done it. On the one hand, a series of codified features signal that they

did do it, namely that the three­and­a­half­second shot stands for a longer period of

time (the dissolve of the couple passionately embracing usually signals the act after the

fade­out; the cigarette is also the standard sign of postcoital relaxation; up to the

vulgar phallic connotation of the tower); on the other hand, a parallel series of features

signals that they did not do it, namely that the three­and­a­half­second shot of the

airport tower corresponds to the real diegetic time (the bed in the background is

undisturbed; the same conversation seems to go on without a break; and so on).’ (Žižek

2008: 241f.)

Žižek is confused as to how to read those ‘signals’. If we take the movie on its own terms there

is not much confusion: they could have ‘done it’, but did not. That’s what Father Brown and

Sherlock Holmes would have concluded – on factual evidence the however unlikely but still

possible story is the one that is true. Here the physical evidence (undisturbed bed) beats the

suggestive symbolic evidence (cigarettes and airport towers). The story of the film is that Rick

does the right thing for the right reason. And he indicates this, in Ilsa’s presence, to Victor

Laszlo, saying that ‘She tried everything to get them [the documents] and nothing worked. She

did her best to convince me that she was still in love with me. That was all over long ago. For

your sake she pretended it wasn’t and I let her pretend.’ To which Victor replies ‘I understand.’

To which Žižek replies:

Well, I certainly do not understand – is Rick saying to Victor that he made love to his

wife or not? Maltby’s solution is to insist that this scene provided an exemplary case of

how Casablanca “deliberately constructs itself in such a way as to offer distinct and

alternative sources of pleasure to two people sitting next to each other in the same

cinema,” that is, that it “could play to both ‘innocent’ and ‘sophisticated’ audiences alike.

While, at the level of its surface narrative line, the film can be constructed by the

spectator as obeying the strictest moral codes, it simultaneously offers to the

“sophisticated” enough clues to construct an alternative, sexually much more daring

narrative line. This strategy is more complex than it may appear: precisely because you

knew that you are as it were “covered” or “absolved from guilty impulses”‘ by the official

story line, you are allowed to indulge in dirty fantasies — you know that these fantasies

are not “serious,” that they do not count in the eyes of the big Other … So our only

correction to Maltby would be that we do not need two spectators sitting next to each

other: one and the Mme spectator, split in two, is sufficient.

To put it in Lacanian terms: during the infamous three and a half seconds, Ilsa and Rick

did not do it for the big Other, the order of public appearance, but they did do it for our

dirty fantasmatic imagination —this is the structure of inherent transgression at its

purest, that is, Hollywood needs both levels in order to function.’ (Žižek 2008: 241f.)

So far, so Lacan. But what would Father Brown conclude? First of all he would, as Aristotelian,

put the actual above the potential. And the not actualised possibility remains there as such.

Temptation resisted. Of course the rejected remains represented. But it is there for all to see

and you don’t even need to be sophisticated in inverted commas to see it. So there is nothing to

understand in what Rick tells Laszlo: it is clear that instead of selling the documents for sex he

gave them up as he realised that this constitutes acting in character. He needs to talk to Victor

so to make that clear (as had he done differently he would better not show his face, unless –

completely against the logic of the plot – he was to humiliate Victor who to accompany he urges

Ilsa against her own desires). Both the higher cause and what Father Brown would see as

concern for the soul or Bukharin for concern for personal integrity conspire against the petty

criminality which may well be taken as a symbol for capitalism. Capitalism that bred fascism.

And against fascism self­respecting criminals, honest police officers and political activists are

bound to a code of honour (hence the Chinese translation of the closing lines “This is the

beginning of a beautiful friendship” indeed is not so far off the mark ‘The two of us will now

constitute a new cell of anti­fascist struggle’ (Žižek 2008: 9)).

Žižek can only apply the testicular logic of identification with the man who does it. So the

Lacanian interpretation may apply to himself as viewer. The movie affords indulging in

fantasies about Ilsa/Bergmann (but, Žižek fails to notice for obvious reasons, more so about

Rick/Bogart, since the cinema audience at the time was primarily female). However: what for?

Why the antifascist justification. There was no need for such excuses in, say, the 1939 movie

Intermezzo. Žižek sees sexual innuendo and the possibility of arousal and like a caricature of a

Freudian thinks he has the culprit. It is a bit like the Wisdom of the Machine (i.e. the lie

detector), which Father Brown dismisses:

“The method,” remarked the other, “has been guaranteed by some of the

greatest American men of science.”

“What sentimentalists men of science are!” exclaimed Father Brown, “and

how much more sentimental must American men of science be! Who but a

Yankee would think of proving anything from heart­throbs? Why, they

must be as sentimental as a man who thinks a woman is in love with him if

she blushes. That’s a test from the circulation of the blood, discovered by

the immortal Harvey; and a jolly rotten test, too.”

“But surely,” insisted Flambeau, “it might point pretty straight at

something or other.”

“There’s a disadvantage in a stick pointing straight,” answered the other.

“What is it? Why, the other end of the stick always points the opposite way.

It depends whether you get hold of the stick by the right end. I saw the thing

done once and I’ve never believed in it since.”

The wrong end of the stick indeed. The romantic side is the obvious, straightforward plot that

the audience can follow easily since it has been, over decades, accustomed to it. Casablanca is,

at its surface, pure romance.[19] What happens is the reverse of what Žižek proposes: the

viewer is confronted with a straightforward romantic plot and can arrive, with some

sophistication, at a moral alternative about the possibility of a dignified existence beyond

monetary and sexual predation. It is precisely this decency which film celebrates that justifies

its inclusion in the “Why we fight” series. It links up true love with political duty. In a comment

on Che Guevara and his attitude to romance Žižek, genially, comes up with an interpretation

that does not contribute a thing to our understanding of Che – but says everything about Rick

and Ilsa in Casablanca.

‘But the hard lesson to be learned is that, precisely as such, love (the amorous

relationship) should not be the direct goal of one’s life – when one confronts the choice

between love and duty, duty should prevail., True love is modest, like a couple in a

Marguerite Duras novel: while the two lovers hold hands, they do not look into each

other’s eyes; the look together outwards, to some third point, their common Cause.’

(Žižek 2010: 109)

That is precisely what is going on between Rick and Ilsa in Casablanca. But as it doesn’t fit the

agenda the possibility is dismissed outright and some “dirty” fantasies are invented. And it is

precisely the grounds of political action that Bukharin rightfully invokes under the laughter of

his comrades: emotional commitment to concrete others are the starting point and foundation

of commitment to the species being. And that commitment to humanity is at certain historical

moments the very condition of possibility of love and life itself. Which is why at those moments

(and never anytime else), duty tops love.

Rick: Don’t you sometimes wonder if it’s worth all this? I mean what you’re fighting for.

Victor Laszlo: You might as well question why we breathe. If we stop breathing, we’ll

die. If we stop fighting our enemies, the world will die.

R: Well, what of it? It’ll be out of its misery.

VL: You know how you sound, Mr. Blaine? Like a man who’s trying to convince himself

of something he doesn’t believe in his heart.

Urging Rick to act according to this heart, Victor Laszlo has invoked the man that Ilsa can love

– and because that love was reinstated they have to break up. That sort of human tragedy does

not fit into a rehabilitation of totalitarianism and contradicts the immoral ethics advocated in

its support. It is more like something Hannah Arendt would invoke… or, in fact, Father Brown.

Unlike the story about Bolshevik severe justice Casablanca is indeed about the redefinition of

moral categories. And in its transformation of individualism as self­centred profit­seeking to an

individualism of human decency, which includes obligation to humanity as much as obligation

to the immediate other it is by far more sublime than that little story.

Mystical empiricism versus mystificationIn the justification of Stalinism as carrier of a myth Žižek engages in mystification.

Mystification in the service of true liberation (at least nominally), but mystification

nonetheless. As I have mentioned, he can draw on Chesterton for templates of such

mystification, as Father Brown, in one instance at least, allows the heroic but untrue version of

a story stand in the service of the inspiring history for boys whose inspirational value would

suffer from the corroding effects of grown­up history.

It from the above­mentioned cynical vantage point that Žižek misunderstands the decision of

Father Brown to leave in place the heroic myth around General St Clare in “the

Broken Sword” as support for a principle according to which myth is preferable to truth

where a greater good is at stake (as Žižek sees the humanist ideals of original Marxism

sustained in its perversion in Stalinism, so Chesterton might see the humane ideals of the

Christian nation sustained by its perversion in Imperialism). He compares the story to the plot

of a classical western movie:

‘The story ends in the spirit of John Ford’s westerns which prefer heroic legend to truth

(recall John Wayne’s final speech to the journalists about the ruthless general played by

Henry Fonda, from Ford Apache): “Millions who never knew him shall love him like a

father – this man whom the last few that knew him dealt with like dung. He shall be a

saint; and the truth shall never be told of him, because I have made up my mind at

last.”’ (Žižek 2008: 96)

The parallel is wrong, though. John Wayne speaks for the officers who secretly court­martialed

and executed St Clare and then decided to present the world with a false myth. Father Brown

just tolerates their decision – and he does so under the proviso that no (reputational or worse)

harm is done to anyone who has not deserved it. As I have argued in the previous post: this

assumption is conceited – unless we were to deny the aggravating role of ideology in the later

crimes of Empire. By keeping silent Father Brown infantilises the recipients of historical

accounts which remain a history for boys (as in the quote at the beginning of this post) who

need inspiration to build their characters (as muscular Christians, as future English gentlemen)

and deprives them of the postulated duty of the adult to question the utility of the historical

event. The kind of history for boys, think of Henrietta Marshall’s Our Island Story, contributed

to the fact that there were many St Clares to come, for instance in Kenya in the 1950s. But

unlike Žižek with respect to Stalinism, Chesterton does not suggest that Imperialism somehow

saved the ideals that it perverted. (again: this is the difference between mystical empiricism

and mystification, even where, as in the case of the Broken Sword, the empirics are at their

weakest)

And Father Brown was also wrong for the very reason Žižek appears to think he is right. Žižek

suggests the possible denunciation of the myth as fabrication would lead to a denunciation of

what Father Brown presents as the true culprit: Christianity, specifically Protestantism:

Chesterton’s theological finesse is discernible in the way he allocates the responsibility

for the general’s gradual downfall: it is not the general’s betrayal of the Christian faith

through his moral corruption due to the predominance of base materialist motives.

Chesterton is wise enough to depict the cause of the general’s moral downfall as

inherent to Christianity: the general “was a man who read his Bible. That was what

was the matter with him.” It was the particular – in this case, Protestant – reading that

is held responsible. (Žižek 2008: 96)

But that is a blatant misreading. Father Brown does not, convenient as it would be for the

Catholic priest, blame Protestantism but the fact that St Clare read his bible under an “Oriental

sun” and as a consequence with particular attention to the violence and greed in the Old

(Jewish) Testament – betraying his author’s racist and antisemitic sentiments. But the point

Žižek is trying to make is that it would be wrong to refer to a metaphysical tradition when

explaining historical catastrophes (and he cleverly chides not only Adorno but also Heidegger

for such attempts, thereby supporting his project to exempt Heidegger’s philosophy and its

disastrous yearning for authenticity and realisation from historical judgement).

Again, Chesterton is not at all innocent of historical mystifications and his hagiography of

Thomas Aquinas is just one example of his tendency to mystify historical truths (with the

preferred objects of mystification being his main causes: the Catholic Church and the English

Nation). But Father Brown tends to be more honest and earthbound than his author. He

follows the idealisation that Chesterton drew of Aquinas who puts his trust in the assumption

that if Earth is Creation, the terrestrial facts cannot contradict theology – and therefore if facts

seem to contradict theology, then theology was not proper theology and needs to be rewritten.

For instance, in the matter of the inspiration of Scripture, he fixed first on

the obvious fact, which was forgotten by four furious centuries of sectarian

battle, that the meaning of Scripture is very far from self­evident and that

we must often interpret it in the light of other truths. If a literal

interpretation is really and flatly contradicted by an obvious fact, why then

we can only say that the literal interpretation must be a false

interpretation. But the fact must really be an obvious fact. And

unfortunately, nineteenth century scientists were just as ready to jump to

the conclusion that any guess about nature was an obvious fact, as were

seventeenth­century sectarians to jump to the conclusion that any guess

about Scripture was the obvious explanation.

The implication is clear: the only reason why empirical science and Catholic theology cannot

contradict each other is because both yield, when done correctly, the truth. Therefore a

theological dogma that is in contradiction to observed empirical reality must be the result of

incorrect readings and interpretations. In Žižek it is the other way round: the truth that is the

possession of the political avant­garde is not an empirical reality but an insight that awaits

realisation. It is a revolutionary truth that has to be imposed on a resistant reality by an elite –

by an authoritarian leader. The appropriation of the Chestertonian wisdom that it is with

an open mind as with an open mouth – one has to close it on something hard – is twisted to

mean that one has to create something that is solid, introduce hardness into a soft world. In

Chesterton, and especially for Father Brown the hard thing the open mind has to close in on is

empirical fact – even if the facts seem to contradict each other or cannot be accommodated by a

coherent theory about reality. It is the tolerance of ambiguity which is necessary to live with the

world as it is that Chesterton calls “mysticism” – the exact opposite of Žižek’s vociferous

ambiguity intolerance.

“Mysticism keeps men sane. As long as you have mystery you have health; when you

destroy mystery, you create morbidity. The ordinary man has always been sane

because the ordinary man has always been a mystic. He has permitted the twilight. He

has always had one foot in earth and the other in fairyland. He has always left himself

free to doubt his gods; but (unlike the agnostic of to­day) free also to believe in them. He

has always cared more for truth than for consistency. If he saw two truths that seemed

to contradict each other, he would take the two truths and the contradiction along with

them. His spiritual sight is stereoscopic, like his physical sight: he sees | two different

pictures at once and yet sees all the better for that. Thus he has always believed that

there was such a thing as fate, but such a thing as free will also.” (Chesterton 1908: 48)

This is a commonsensical conservative attitude that contrasts with Žižek’s (Chesterton would

call it “fanatical”) event­revolutionism. But the transformative potential of this attitude should

not be underestimated since the coexistence of fact and fiction that such “mysticism” allows for

does open an imaginative utopian horizon that in the end is richer and more

tempting than the fantasies of revenge and retribution that Žižek’s Blanquism de facto

amounts to.

But first of all, such mystical empiricism is a heuristic tool as it comes to skilful application in

the abductive conclusions of Father Brown. Thomas Seboek and Jean Umiker­Seboek (1988)

have shown that rather than solely or even mainly relying on deduction, as he pronounces in

his manifesto in A Study in Scarlet, Sherlock Holmes relies much on the imagination and keeps

venturing series of guesses – Peircean abductive conclusions.

“See the value of imagination,” said Holmes. “It is the one quality which

Gregory lacks. We imagined what might have happened, acted upon the

supposition, and find ourselves justified. Let us proceed.”

The ideal­typical Popperian scientist starts with a theory from which she deduces a hypothesis

by means of deduction (which must be true if the premise is true). She then exposes those

deductions to empirical testing in which (not strictly speaking, but sort of) inductions are made

from reality which either coincide with the theoretical deductions (in which case the theory can

be upheld as not yet refuted) or not (in which case we need a new theory). The big question is:

where does the theory come from? Theories are stories that account in a coherent way for all

the relevant facts – and there is no rational methodology to arrive at a new one. This is where it

becomes mystical (but only in the sense that we do not really understand how it works, not in

the sense that there needs to be a spiritual source). After Father Brown, in The Queer Feet has

given a conclusive theory of the elaborate and skilful theft of the silverware from the

gentlemen’s club, their president is impressed – but still puzzled:

“And the interesting story begins,” muttered Pound. “I think I understand

his professional trick. But I don’t seem to have got hold of yours.”

“I must be going,” said Father Brown.

He must be going not because like an illusionist he does not want to reveal his tricks – he must

be going because he simply cannot reveal it. He is not aware of what is at the heart of his

“mystical” ability to come up with true stories. Although in a way he does know, as he begins

his narrative by saying:

“You see, colonel,” he said, “I was shut up in that small room there doing

some writing, …”

pointing out is insulation from practical involvement, while, as he continues, highlighting his

close familiarity with the criminal milieu. A paradoxical combination of proximity and

separation, knowledge and ignorance – of being at once a citizen and a stranger – that frames

the mystical capacity. This mysticism thus flows from the position that the priest shares with

the police detective, the doctor,[20] the shaman,[21] and (hopefully) the skilled social

scientist. It consists in the ability of inventing plausible stories that account for given realities

(and not to mystify those realities as, really, symptoms of the opposite of what they actually

are) –by inferring both premises and rules from the results. This mysticism is strictly confined

to its function as heuristic tool and it has to constantly prove itself in accounting for observed

facts (i.e. the abduction must lead to deductions that have be consistent with inductions).

Socially and politically prescriptive non­empirical philosophy as produced by the likes of

Heidegger and Žižek excel in mystically conjuring up suggestive inferences (mostly using word

magic) – but they are so impressed with their own imagination that they do not seem to see any

need to defend their insights against an empirical reality that contradicts them. Against

Heideggerian intrusions into the social sciences Brian Morris insists that, while the

imagination is a crucial ingredient in the scientific process, the last test, compatibility with

observed empirical reality, cannot be replaced with the felt authenticity of the theorists deep

thought:

‘Knowledge as truth, and as the representation of some given object of study – such as

hunting in Malawi, or local cultural schemas – entails of course, re­presentation, the

making present of what is actually absent. This involves a unique gift of the human

mind – imagination. The notion, that scientific thought does not involve the imagination

is one of the popular misconceptions of science – but science also involves the critical

testing of evidence for a particular theory, which thus makes it distinct from poetry.’

(Morris 1997: 322)

Heidegger’s “realism” is explicitly pre­scientific in that it puts truth before observation (Morris

1997: 323) and thereby, in the last consequence, egomaniacally breaks the link to the only

reassurance that we can have regarding the adequacy of our world views: intersubjectivity.

Intersubjectivity can and often does perpetuate prejudice and ideology – and the antisocial

impulse in Heideggerian thinking with its search for self­contained authenticity draws on such

social deception as a justification for its retreat from the evil das Man. But who really looks for

truth lives in between the extremes of immersion into gossip (Heidegger’s abhorred Gerede)

and retreat into existential contemplation – and that is the professional position that serious

seekers and finders of truths (as opposed to the Truth) have always occupied. They have always

sought (or have been confined to) positions that both involve them in what they investigate and

distance them from it. A Catholic priest working in poorer districts, Father Brown may be,

through celibacy and obligation to godly life, removed from the everyday life of his parishioners

he hears innumerable confessions about it. He has intimate knowledge of desires, motivations,

reasonings etc. – but he is relieved from the pressure of immediate everyday praxis and thus

gains the privilege of idle reflection on that praxis. But the reflection, the imagination takes off

from that praxis and comes down to it again. While the thought process is shrouded in

mystique of the roaming open mind, the starting and end points are hard facts on which that

mind has to close itself. Never ever is the cleric tempted to call in the divine or the spiritual to

explain what happened – the stories always turn out to be very profane. There is always the

proverbial “natural explanation for this.”

The relation between unchecked fantasy and the controlled imagination is nicely exposed in

The Honour of Israel Gow in which the investigators (police inspector Craven, Father Brown

and his friend, former criminal and now private detective Flambeau) are confronted with a

strange collection of things in the castle of the deceased Earl of Glengyle:

“I will read the inventory,” began Craven gravely, picking up one of the

papers, “the inventory of what we found loose and unexplained in the

castle. You are to understand that the place generally was dismantled and

neglected; but one or two rooms had plainly been inhabited in a simple but

not squalid style by somebody; somebody who was not the servant Gow.

The list is as follows:

“First item. A very considerable hoard of precious stones, nearly all

diamonds, and all of them loose, without any setting whatever. Of course, it

is natural that the Ogilvies should have family jewels; but those are exactly

the jewels that are almost always set in particular articles of ornament.

The Ogilvies would seem to have kept theirs loose in their pockets, like

coppers.

“Second item. Heaps and heaps of loose snuff, not kept in a horn, or even a

pouch, but lying in heaps on the mantelpieces, on the sideboard, on the

piano, anywhere. It looks as if the old gentleman would not take the trouble

to look in a pocket or lift a lid.

“Third item. Here and there about the house curious little heaps of minute

pieces of metal, some like steel springs and some in the form of microscopic

wheels. As if they had gutted some mechanical toy.

“Fourth item. The wax candles, which have to be stuck in bottle necks

because there is nothing else to stick them in. Now I wish you to note how

very much queerer all this is than anything we anticipated. For the central

riddle we are prepared; we have all seen at a glance that there was

something wrong about the last earl. We have come here to find out

whether he really lived here, whether he really died here, whether that red­

haired scarecrow who did his burying had anything to do with his dying.

But suppose the worst in all this, the most lurid or melodramatic solution

you like. Suppose the servant really killed the master, or suppose the

master isn’t really dead, or suppose the master is dressed up as the servant,

or suppose the servant is buried for the master; invent what Wilkie Collins’

tragedy you like, and you still have not explained a candle without a

candlestick, or why an elderly gentleman of good family should habitually

spill snuff on the piano. The core of the tale we could imagine; it is the

fringes that are mysterious. By no stretch of fancy can the human mind

connect together snuff and diamonds and wax and loose clockwork.”

“I think I see the connection,” said the priest. “This Glengyle was mad

against the French Revolution. He was an enthusiast for the ancien regime,

and was trying to re­enact literally the family life of the last Bourbons. He

had snuff because it was the eighteenth century luxury; wax candles,

because they were the eighteenth century lighting; the mechanical bits of

iron represent the locksmith hobby of Louis XVI; the diamonds are for the

Diamond Necklace of Marie Antoinette.”

Both the other men were staring at him with round eyes. “What a perfectly

extraordinary notion!” cried Flambeau. “Do you really think that is the

truth?”

“I am perfectly sure it isn’t,” answered Father Brown, “only you said that

nobody could connect snuff and diamonds and clockwork and candles. I

give you that connection off­hand. The real truth, I am very sure, lies

deeper.”

He paused a moment and listened to the wailing of the wind in the turrets.

Then he said, “The late Earl of Glengyle was a thief. He lived a second and

darker life as a desperate housebreaker. He did not have any candlesticks

because he only used these candles cut short in the little lantern he carried.

The snuff he employed as the fiercest French criminals have used pepper: to

fling it suddenly in dense masses in the face of a captor or pursuer. But the

final proof is in the curious coincidence of the diamonds and the small steel

wheels. Surely that makes everything plain to you? Diamonds and small

steel wheels are the only two instruments with which you can cut out a

pane of glass.”

The bough of a broken pine tree lashed heavily in the blast against the

windowpane behind them, as if in parody of a burglar, but they did not

turn round. Their eyes were fastened on Father Brown.

“Diamonds and small wheels,” repeated Craven ruminating. “Is that all

that makes you think it the true explanation?”

“I don’t think it the true explanation,” replied the priest placidly; “but you

said that nobody could connect the four things. The true tale, of course, is

something much more humdrum. Glengyle had found, or thought he had

found, precious stones on his estate. Somebody had bamboozled him with

those loose brilliants, saying they were found in the castle caverns. The

little wheels are some diamond­cutting affair. He had to do the thing very

roughly and in a small way, with the help of a few shepherds or rude

fellows on these hills. Snuff is the one great luxury of such Scotch

shepherds; it’s the one thing with which you can bribe them. They didn’t

have candlesticks because they didn’t want them; they held the candles in

their hands when they explored the caves.”

“Is that all?” asked Flambeau after a long pause. “Have we got to the dull

truth at last?”

“Oh, no,” said Father Brown.

As the wind died in the most distant pine woods with a long hoot as of

mockery Father Brown, with an utterly impassive face, went on:

“I only suggested that because you said one could not plausibly connect

snuff with clockwork or candles with bright stones. Ten false philosophies

will fit the universe; ten false theories will fit Glengyle Castle. But we want

the real explanation of the castle and the universe. But are there no other

exhibits?”

Father Brown has an extraordinary talent for making up stories, for making things sound like

true accounts even if they are completely made up. The point here is that it is important to have

at hand as many as possible of such stories – and then keep exposing them to the factual

evidence until only one last can stand up to it. Even that might not be true – so Father Brown

looks for further confirmation. Ideally that would be a confession of the perpetrator when

confronted with the evidence (i.e. departing from the more traditional Catholic methods which

Father Brown dismisses alongside their secularised modern version, the lie detector)[22] In

the case of Israel Gow no crime has been committed: the odd assembly of items (and the

absence of the Earl’s skull!) simply resulted from Gow’s honest, but very literal, reading of his

master’s last will, which entitled him to all the gold, but nothing else (so he removed the jewels

from the golden rings, the candles from the golden candle sticks, steel springs from the golden

watches etc etc – and removed the skull to break out the gold teeth). Without a crime a

confession is out of the question. So like a good Popperian scientist Father Brown develops a

hypothesis from his theory, makes a prediction and waits for results:

“…He has stripped the house of gold, and taken not a grain that was not

gold; not so much as a grain of snuff. He lifted the gold leaf off an old

illumination, fully satisfied that he left the rest unspoilt. All that I

understood; but I could not understand this skull business. I was really

uneasy about that human head buried among the potatoes. It distressed me

—till Flambeau said the word.

“It will be all right. He will put the skull back in the grave, when he has

taken the gold out of the tooth.”

And, indeed, when Flambeau crossed the hill that morning, he saw that

strange being, the just miser, digging at the desecrated grave, the plaid

round his throat thrashing out in the mountain wind; the sober top hat on

his head.

For the mystical empiricist a case is only made if there is factual evidence to support it. By

implication: if the facts contradict it, we need to think anew. Žižek’s plea for Lost Causes is

made on the contrasting premise that if an idea has not stood the test of application then we

have to keep trying no matter what and reinterpret the history of failure to “salvage” the pure

idea’s innocence. And by “reinterpretation” I here mean: denying the facts their obvious

significance.

We can pit Chesterton’s invented priest and Žižek’s action­man philosopher Heidegger against

each other. Heidegger is famed for his reintroduction of (rural) lived experience into ontology.

But it is, as has been noted by some, a very theoretical lived experience that is drawn upon.

Heidegger does precisely what Chesterton accuses 19 century scientists of: he mistakes his

guesses for obvious facts. In one of the few cases where Heidegger stoops down to do the dirty

work of artefact analysis – interpreting a painting by Vincent Van Gogh (and the pair of shoes it

depicts) – he fails miserably. Not that he does not come up with an imaginative story

explaining not just those shoes, but shoeness as such. However, the Marxist art critic

Mayer Shapiro has famously savaged Heidegger’s text, showing that what

Heidegger thinks to be an old peasants’ shoes (despite himself noting that they do

not show any traces of earth), are in fact the artist’s own shoes.

I can’t stand the ideology of neither Žižek nor Chesterton – but when it comes to methodology

it is clearly Chesterton’s Father Brown who still can teach us a thing or two.

References

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Garden City, NY: Doubleday

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1908): Orthodoxy, New York: John Lane.

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (1939): Essays (selected by John Guest), London: Collins Clear Type

Press.

Chesterton, Gilbert Keith (2000): Eugenics and Other Evils. An Argument Against the

Scientifically Organized Society, Seattle: Inkling Books.

Currie, Gregory (1998): ‘Realism of Character and the Value of Fiction’, in: Jerrold Levinson

(ed.): Aesthetics and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.161­181.

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Books, June 26, pp.47­52.

Gould, S. J./Lewontin, R. C. (1979): ‘The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian

Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme’, in: Proceedings of the Royal Society,

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Personality Variable’, in: Journal of Personality, Vol.18, no.1, pp.108­143.

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Vol.2, no.1, pp.150­166.

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United States, London: Oxford University Press.

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pp.533­56.

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Staatsauffassung’, in: Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, Jg.III, pp.161­195.

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Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars to the Third Reich, New York: Howard

Fertig.

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Anthropological Followers of Heidegger’, in: Critique of Anthropology, Vol.17, No.3, pp.313­40

Seboek, Thomas A./Umiker­Seboek, Jean (1988): ‘“You Know My Method”: A Juxtaposition of

Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes’, in: Umberto Eco/Thomas A. Seboek (Eds.): The Sign

of the Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

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Imagination’, in: Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry, Vol.24, pp.5­40

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Culture and Society, Vol.2, No.1, pp.16­33

Žižek, Slavoj (2012): The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, London: Verso.

Žižek, Slavoj (2010): Living at the End of Times, London: Verso.

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Endnotes

[1] The Entgleisungen of his recent comments on refugees demonstrate the main thrust of this

project: a celebration of European progressive heritage.

[2] Žižek’s and right wing populists’ use of the notion of “political correctness” and statement

of the “politically incorrect” in most cases are just an obfuscation. They are implying that the

obscenities they are voicing are factually correct but unfortunately politically undesirable and

hence suppressed, while in most cases they are just politically motivated, but factually

incorrect.

[3] not, that is, beyond a vague allusion to a transition from an exchange of goods to an

exchange of services – a strange reverberation of the notion of a post­industrial economy that

is driven by the service sector… but then he has a penchant for Margaret Thatcher.

[4] Catholics are kidding themselves if they think that the Church was a bulwark against

Fascism. It was an obstacle to Fascism as it was a competing institution which impeded the

totalisation of State and Party. But it delivered much of the ideological material, especially the

virulent anti­Judaism which nationalists (many with a Catholic background) transformed into

modern antisemitism.

[5] He disagrees with him on some detail regarding Hegel, but that is as far as it goes.

[6] The correct quote from Chesterton’s autobiography reads: ‘[…]the object of opening the

mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.’

[7] The uncomfortable truth about ultra­nationalism and antisemitism is that they are just

more popular than socialism and communism – especially when what is addressed is not the

misery of inequality and exploitation, but discomfort with “atonal” bourgeois culture. Žižek

suggests that the reason why really existing socialism of the GDR needed much greater secret

police apparatuses than Nazi Germany was that paradoxically the values that legitimated the

GDR were much more dangerous to those in power than those of the Nazis. This is true to an

extent – but only to an extent. And Žižek conveniently leaves out important historical

conditions. Nazi Germany had more consent from the population because nationalism and

antisemitism simply were more popular and (for those who qualified according to the racial

laws of Nuremberg) more inclusive than communism. It was also less demanding: as Žižek

himself observes it was not a deep­going social revolution so outside the public rituals that

punctuated everyday life, ordinary routines could continue. Further, Hitler’s leadership in the

Nazi Party was largely uncontested, while Stalin hijacked the CPSU from an established elite of

first­generation Bolsheviks who had the blessings of Lenin – particularly Bukharin whose trial

Žižek has a few things to say about – and the means to gain power was via the apparatus of the

secret police. And finally, the GDR was neighbour to the FRG where life was better not only for

the bourgeois but visibly so also for the majority of the industrial workers. The FRG also had

media that happened to be in the language of the GDR and the capitalist propaganda that is

advertising (Žižek should know something about that) flooded all but a small corner of the

GDR. Given all those factors (and also given that while the repression in the GDR was more

tightly knit it was also in many ways less brutal than that of the Nazis) – shall we really go with

Žižek’s story that the propaganda of the GDR ideologically perpetuated a Truth whose

realisation the elites of the GDR and their masters in Moscow denied? And above all it needs to

be remembered that millions of Germans had their political socialisation in working class

organisations – Social Democrats, Communists and Radical Socialists – in which Marxism was

a quasi­religious belief: did they suddenly stop resisting because the official state doctrine did

not perpetuate the teachings of the classics (as Brecht called writings of Marx, Engels and

Lenin)? And the Soviet Union was still there as the Big Other (and for those in the KPD also as

the Big Brother), inspiring hope for liberation. Only it did not really as the Truth­preserving

USSR of the Great Terror abandoned the Communists abroad – they were, until they were

surprised by Operation Barbarossa, quite sympathetic and even agreed on a deal that made it

easier for Hitler to kick off the next world war without having to worry about an Eastern front…

[8] A security which is only possible by means of eradication of all alternative projects – which

explains why in its culmination in Fascism this kind of project combines the two extreme

expressions of necrophilia (Fromm 1974): total and frozen order as the end state of the Fascist

System and total decay and devastation as spectacular fate of its Other.

[9] The Party was wrong to send agitators to China and not to trust local communists. The

disaster that was Maoism and the final result that is dictatorial capitalism means that, no, the

Revolution was not successful. The idea that it is better to tolerate suppression until a fully

fledged Leninist party structure is in place to lead the masses into revolution and until the

party leaders have divined that, yes, now is a revolutionary moment, is not only bad

propaganda in that it discredits the Communist Party that looks on while workers’ revolts are

put down but normally also strategically wrong because party leaders have been notoriously

deluded about the dynamics of revolutionary situations (Lenin himself being one of the very

few exceptions). Tragically, only a few years after Die Maßnahme was written the KPD proved

incapable or realising that Spring 1933 was a time where militant action on a mass basis was

urgently required, paradigmatically disproving the insight that “the thousand eyes” of the Party

could gather. Finally, the proposed attitude of opportunism promoted by the play in the long

run just leads to a corrosion of character which means that workers must realise sooner or later

that they better don’t trust a Party official…

[10] “Justified” in the sense that it is given a justification – not in the sense that it was the right

thing to do.

[11] In fact – they did. But Brecht in his delusions about the wisdom of the Party could not see

them.

[12] The human cultural capacity of play that is liberated from practical constraint and

insulated from everyday practice – yet by that very insulation and irreality can become a source

for the transformation of real praxis – has been classically analysed by Johan Huizinga in his

Homo ludens later taken up by Heidegger’s unacknowledged Gegenspieler Helmuth Plessner

who in his Grenzen der Gemeinschaft (Limits of Community) of 1924 foresaw the kind of

things the author of the 1927 Sein and Zeit and his academic and literary brothers in arms

were heading to.

[13] Žižek calls her, with some justification, a “liberal Heideggerian”, with the problem

identified not in the very problematic Heideggerian premises which undermine her analyses by

introducing some conservative prejudice, but in the liberalism.

[14] The suggestive infinity of capital accumulation that is due to the total abstraction of the

commodity as pure exchange value both symbolised and materialised in money. Marx,

Simmel… Deutschmann, The promise of wealth

[15] His great project here is the exculpation of the theorist/ideologue. Unlike Chesterton’s

Oberon Quin in The Sheriff of Notting Hill the greats of European Geistesgeschichte are not to

blame for the implications of their intellectual production. Žižek sneers at those who, like

Theodor W. Adorno or Susan Sontag, trace the roots of Fascism not just to the ideological

productions of its key figures but to the political, philosophical and aesthetical elements from

which they assembled their worlds. In this, his arguments very much resembles the

normalisation discourses pervasive in West Germany that tried to narrow down denazification

by insisting you could not reject everything that has happened between 1933 and 1945 on the

grounds that it was a murderous regime, citing innocent instances like the construction of

motorways (innocent, that is, in a pre­ecological age…). Žižek insists that things like

Riefenstahl­style representations of mass events cannot be dismissed as proto­fascist because

they are in themselves a socialist form of activism which the Fascists stole from the workers’

movments. Notoriously, Žižek gets the historical facts wrong: the staging of synchronised

masses are not an invention of the labour movement but of nationalism – its ‘political liturgy’

as George L. Mosse (1974) has called it. It is probably true that Fascism indeed copied much

from socialism here, but socialism itself copied and further accentuated them from 19 century

nationalism, borrowing mythical elements of the . And it turns out those liturgies really were

better suited to the Fascist project than to the Socialist one. Žižek argues the complete

innocence of anyone but the Fascist leaders themselves.

‘None of the “proto­fascist” elements is per se fascist, what makes them “fascist” is only

their specific articulation – or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould’s terms, all these elements

are “ex­apted” by fascism. In other words, there is no “fascism avant la lettre,” because it

is the letter itself (the nomination) which makes out of the bundle of elements fascism

proper.’ (Žižek 2008: 138)

Žižek borrows Stephen Jay Gould’s term of “exaptation” (better known as “spandrels”) to

account for those protofascist elements – and of course they are not teleologically linked to

Fascism as an integration of all those elements into a violent political movement and then a

murderous system of domination. But the dismissal is interesting especially given the

implication of the concept from evolutionary biology: Exaptations or spandrels, as Gould

(1997) (and already Gould and Lewontin 1979) make clear are indeed a way of explaining non­

adaptive changes out of an inherent developmental logic without relapsing into teleology (i.e.

not by bringing back the “sky­hooks” but by supplying another “crane”). They are still elements

of explanation. So elements identified as exaptations reconcilable with Darwinian natural

selection (instead of conscious, i.e. non­Darwinian, adaptions) only become irrelevant if we are

looking for guilt and revenge rather than causes. Or if we live in a psychoanalytical universe in

which the everyday logic of causation­as­retribution (Kelsen 1941) is reintroduced into social

theory. In trying to taint the search for the roots of 20 Century totalitarianisms, a search at

the heart of Critical Theory, as some kind of philosophical police work Žižek reveals that his

own project is a moralistic one in which the honour of a lineage of politico­philosophical saints

is to be defended. And of course the term of “exaptation” is ill­applied anyway. An exaptation is

a side­effect of an adapative mutation that survives not because of its own adaptive value but

because it is genetically linked to another mutation (with whose adaptive nature it does not

interfere). The political liturgy of nationalism as it was developed in the French Revolution and

then went into nearly all political movements of the 19 and 20 Centuries was a very

th

th

th th

conscious adaptation, a new way of gaining and maintaining political power which was

continuously improved to reach its horrible perfection in the staging of mass rituals under

Hitler and Stalin. Žižek of course knows this, placing himself firmly into a Jacobin tradition

both in respect to the idea of the nation and its metaphysical will and in respect to the

legitimacy of terror that flows from it.

[16] NB that generally, in Žižek’s world, a pervert has revolutionary energy and potential

while, in the antisemite’s world “neurotic” is a “Jewish” characteristic. Given that the Purges

were infused with antisemitic rhetoric (and a tendency to go for Jewish victims), even though

Bukharin was not Jewish himself, the depiction of a victim of the Purge as “neurotic” attached

to a bourgeois sense of self can be read as a sleight of hand designed to vindicate that

suggestive rhetoric of what would find its culmination in the alleged Doctors’ Plot – the

successive degeneration of the critique of the political economy into a loose assemblage of set

pieces lifted from antisemitic ideology.

[17] A good example is the “Lacanian” joke “I never break the rules since it is I who makes the

rules”. At first sight this is indeed funny as it seems to ridicule the autocrat – but then we find

that Žižek is prone to display exactly that attitude to discursive practice:

‘In short, one should not allow the enemy to define the terrain of the battle and its

stakes, so that we end up abstractly opposing him, supporting a negative copy of what

he wants. To be clear and brutal to teh end, there is a lesson to be learned from

Hermann Goering’s reply in the early 1940s, to a fanatical Nazi who asked him why he

protected a well­known Jew from deportation: “In this city, I decide who is a Jew!” (an

answer, incidentally, attributed already to many other German figures who protected

their privileged Jews, from Bismarck to Karl Lüger). In this city, it is we who decide

what is left, so we should simply ignore liberal accusation of “inconsistency.”’ (2008:

136)

NB how he overlooks the idiotic implication of what he says – which would not happened to

anybody with basic comedy skills – namely that in effect he designates Goering as a moderate

Nazi! NB too the rhetorical twist. He claims to assert the authority vis­à­vis “the enemy” to

define terms and territory, but in his example the authority is exerted vis­à­vis lower ranking

friends. He then goes on to dismiss, in the name of authority of the Left in their own city,

typical leftist criticism against the adoption of protofascist tropes in political discourses.

Naturally, not everyone is impressed with Žižek’s use of jokes (most of which it has to be said

are second­hand anyway). Personally I doubt he would survive in a British topical panel show…

[18] E.g.

‘VYSHINSKY: You deny Khodjayev’s testimony? I invited Khodjayev just

now to testify against you because I consider it important to illustrate the

fact that your “bloc of Rights and Trotskytes” gave instructions from case

to case, as you put it, depending upon circumstances, for the organization

of an insurrectionary, diversionist and wrecking movement. Do you agree

with that?

Bukharin: I agree with that. Only I must clarify it, so as to avoid confusion.

The uprisings you are referring to took place in 1930, whereas the “bloc of

Rights and Trotskyites” was organized, as you are aware, Citizen

Procurator, in 1933.’

[19] Which is why it was so easily mutilated in the cutting and dubbing for the post­war West

German release: the romance remained unaffected, and the antifascism disappeared

completely.

[20] It is not by accident that Sherlock Holmes’ real life template was a medical doctor, Dr

Stephen Bell!

[21] Michele Stephen and Luh Ketut Suryani (2000) have some very interesting observations

how in Balinese shamans, balians, the involved­insulated positionality leads to Sherlock­

Holmes­like abilities to identify the problem they are consulted about before they are told by

their clients

[22]

“I’ve been reading,” said Flambeau, “of this new psychometric method they

talk about so much, especially in America. You know what I mean; they put

a pulsometer on a man’s wrist and judge by how his heart goes at the

pronunciation of certain words. What do you think of it?”

“I think it very interesting,” replied Father Brown; “it reminds me of that

interesting idea in the Dark Ages that blood would flow from a corpse if the

murderer touched it.”

“Do you really mean,” demanded his friend, “that you think the two

methods equally valuable?”

“I think them equally valueless,” replied Brown. “Blood flows, fast or slow,

in dead folk or living, for so many more million reasons than we can ever

know. Blood will have to flow very funnily; blood will have to flow up the

Matterhorn, before I will take it as a sign that I am to shed it.”

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