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A Plea for Leninist Intolerance Slavoj Žižek Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2. (Winter, 2002), Pp. 542-566

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A Plea for Leninist Intolerance Slavoj Žižek Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2. (Winter, 2002), Pp. 542-566 A Plea for Leninist Intolerance Slavoj Žižek Critical Inquiry, Vol. 28, No. 2. (Winter, 2002), pp. 542-566. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0093-1896%28200224%2928%3A2%3C542%3AAPFLI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-Q Critical Inquiry is currently published by The University of Chicago Press. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/about/terms.html. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/journals/ucpress.html. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. The JSTOR Archive is a trusted digital repository providing for long-term preservation and access to leading academic journals and scholarly literature from around the world. The Archive is supported by libraries, scholarly societies, publishers, and foundations. It is an initiative of JSTOR, a not-for-profit organization with a mission to help the scholarly community take advantage of advances in technology. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. http://www.jstor.org Tue Mar 25 13:29:57 2008 A Plea for Leninist Intolerance Slavoj ~iiek LeninS Choice What is tolerance today? The most popular TV show of the fall of 2000 in France, with a viewer rating two times higher than that of the notori- ous Big Brother reality soap, is C'est mon choix (It's my choice) on France 3, a talk-show whose guest is each time an ordinary (or, exceptionally, well- known) person who made a peculiar choice that determined his or her entire lifestyle. For example, one of them decided never to wear under- wear, another constantly tried to find a more appropriate sexual partner for his father and mother. Extravagance is allowed, solicited even, but with the explicit exclusion of the choices that may disturb the public (say, a person whose choice is to be and act as a racist is a priori excluded). Can one imagine a better summary of what the freedom of choice effectively amounts to in our liberal societies? Ulrich Beck introduced the notion of "reflexive society" in which all patterns of interaction, from the forms of sexual partnership up to ethnic identity itself, have to be renego- tiated or reinvented.' Perhaps the properly frustrating dimension of this eternal stimulus to make free choices is best rendered by the situation of having to choose a product in online shopping, where one has to make an almost endless series of choices: if you want it with X, click A, if not, The present text is an eloborated version of my introductory intervention at the collo- quium "The Retrieval of Lenin," Essen, 2-4 Febr. 2001. 1. See Ulrich Beck, World Risk Society, trans. Mark Ritter (Oxford, 1999). Cntzcal hquq 28 (W~nter2002) O 2002 by The University of Chicago 0093-189610212802-0009$02200.All rights reserved Critical Inquiry Winter 2002 543 click B. We can go on making our small choices, "reinventing ourselves," on condition that these choices do not disturb the social and ideological balance. With regard to C'est mon choix, the truly radical thing would have been to focus precisely on the disturbing choices: to invite people like dedicated racists, whose choice-whose difference-does make a differ- ence. Phenomena like these make it all the more necessary today to reas- sert Lenin's opposition of "formal" and "actual" freedom. Let us then fearlessly evoke Lenin at his worst-say, his polemics against the Men- shevik and Socialist-Revolutionaries' critique of Bolshevik power in 1922: Indeed, the sermons which. the Mensheviks and Socialist- Revolutionaries preach express their true nature: "The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again." But we say in reply: "Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your politi- cal views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the whiteguards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious whiteguard elements."' This Leninist forced choice-not "Your money or your life!" but "No critique or your life!" combined with his dismissive attitude toward the liberal notion of freedom, accounts for his bad reputation among liberals. And, effectively, is today, after the terrifying experience of the Realsozialis- mus, not more than obvious where the fault of this reasoning resides? First, it reduces a historical constellation to a closed, fully contextualized situation in which the "objective" consequences of one's acts are fully de- termined ("independently of your intentions, what you are doing now objectively serves . ."); second, the party usurps the right to decide what your acts "objectively mean." Is this, however, the whole story? There is, nonetheless, a rational kernel in Lenin's obsessive tirades against formal freedom worth saving today; when he underlines that there is no pure democracy, that we should always ask whom a freedom under consider- ation serves, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true 2. V. I. Lenin, "Political Report of the Central Committee of the R.C.l? (B.), 27 March [1922]," Collected Works, trans. pub., ed. David Skvirsky and George Hanna, 45 vols. (Mos- cow, 1966), 33:283. Slavoj ~iiek,philosopher and psychoanalyst, is senior researcher at the Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut in Essen, Germany. His most recent publications are On Belief (2001), The Fright ofReal Ears: Krzysztof Kieslow- ski and Post-Theory (2001), and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (2001). 544 Slavoj ~itk A Plea for Leninist Intolerance choice. Formal freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while actual freedom designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates. The first public reaction to the idea of reactualizing Lenin is, of course, an outburst of sarcastic laughter: Marx-okay, even on Wall Street they love him today-the poet of commodities, who provided per- fect descriptions of capitalist dynamics, Marx of cultural studies, who por- trayed the alienation and reification of our daily lives . but Lenin, no, you can't be serious! The working-class movement, revolutionary party, and similar zombie-concepts? Doesn't Lenin stand precisely for the failure to put Marxism into practice, for the big catastrophe that left its mark on twentieth-century world politics, for the real socialist experiment that culminated in an economically inefficient dictatorship? So, in contempo- rary academic politics, a proposal to deal with Lenin is twice qualified: Yes, why not, we live in a liberal democracy, there is freedom of thought. However, one should treat Lenin in an objective, critical, and scientific way, not in an attitude of nostalgic idolatry, and, furthermore, from a perspective firmly rooted in the democratic political order, within the horizon of human rights. Therein resides the lesson painfully learned through the experience of the twentieth-century totalitarianisms. What are we to say to this? Again, the problem resides in the implicit qualifications that can be easily discerned by the concrete analysis of the concrete situation, as Lenin himself would have put it. Fidelity to the democratic consensus means the acceptance of the present liberal- parliamentary consensus, which precludes any serious questioning of how this liberal-democratic order is complicit in the phenomena it offi- cially condemns and, of course, any serious attempt to imagine a society whose sociopolitical order would be different. In short, it means say and write whatever you want on the condition that what you do does not effectively question or disturb the predominant political consensus. So everything is allowed, solicited even, as a critical topic: the prospects of a global ecological catastrophy, violations of human rights, sexism, homo- phobia, antifeminism, growing violence not only in faraway countries but also in our megalopolises, the gap between the First and the Third World, between the rich and the poor, the shattering impact of the digitalization of our daily lives, and so on. There is nothing easier today than to get international, state, or corporate funds for multidisciplinary research into how to fight the new forms of ethnic, religious, or sexist violence. The problem is that all this occurs against the background of a fundamental Denkverbot, a prohibition against thinking. Today's liberal-democratic he- gemony is sustained by a kind of unwritten Denkverbot similar to the infa- mous Berufsverbot in Germany of the late sixties; the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim to seriously chal- lenge the existing order, the answer is immediately: "Benevolent as it is, Critical Inquiry Winter 2002 545 this will necessarily end in a new gulag!" And it is exactly the same thing that the demand for scientific objectivity means; the moment one seri- ously questions the existing liberal consensus, one is accused of abandon- ing scientific objectivity for the outdated ideological positions. This is the point that one cannot and should not concede: today, actual freedom of thought must mean the freedom to question the predominant liberal-democraticpost- ideological consensus-or it means nothing.
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