I just finished Zizek's "In Defense of Lost Causes"; now the plan is to backtrack and read Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy." I just thought I would share the last page of Zizek's book.
It is here that we should return to the four moments of what Badiou calls the "eternal Idea" of revolutionary-egalitarian Justice. What is demanded is:
1. strict egalitarian justice (all people should pay the same price in eventual renunciations, namely, one should impose the same world-wide norms of per capita energy consumption, carbon dioxide emissions, and so on; the developed nations should not be allowed to poison the environment at the present rate, blaming the developing Third World countries, from Brazil to China, for ruining our shared environment with their rapid development);
2. terror (ruthless punishment of all who violate the imposed protective measures, inclusive of severe limitations on liberal "freedoms," technological control of prospective law-breakers);
3. voluntarism (the only way to confront the threat of ecological catastrophe is by means of large-scale collective decisions which run counter to the "spontaneous" immanent logic of capitalist development);
4. and, last but not least, all this combined with trust in the people (the wager that a large majority of people supports these severe measures, sees them as its own, and is ready to participate in their enforcement). One should not be afraid to assert, as a combination of terror and trust in the people, the reactivation of one of the figures of all egalitarian-revolutionary terrors, the "informer" who denounces the culprits to the authorities. (In the case of the Enron scandal, Time magazine rightly celebrated the insiders who tipped off the financial authorities as true public heroes.)
Does, then, the ecological challenge not offer a unique chance to reinvent the "eternal Idea" of egalitarian terror?
No comments:
Post a Comment