The Silent Voice of a New Begin­ning was a talk given by Sla­voj Zizek at the Birk­beck Insti­tute for the Human­it­ies on the 20^th Novem­ber 2011. Upon recently hear­ing a record­ing, it struck me as an incred­ibly rich ses­sion in terms of polit­ical sub­stance — what is to be done? — and the qual­ity of the inter­ven­tions. The fol­low­ing are some notes, reflec­tions and par­tial transcriptions.

Zizek starts off by out­lining his basic pos­i­tion on human rights, which can be found in the Par­al­lax View. He also relays some newer thoughts. Briefly, he now recog­nizes formal human rights as a neces­sity only inso­far as real free­dom can emerge in ant­ag­on­istic rela­tion to them. In other words, formal human rights rep­res­ent false free­dom but are, nev­er­the­less, the only avenue through which actual free­dom can appear. So we have the formal form of the rights of man, which were ini­tially restric­ted to wealthy male cit­izenry, but later went on to include women, chil­dren, black people, etc. because of the demand to be coun­ted. Zizek claims all eman­cip­at­ory move­ments, includ­ing Marx­ism, can be con­ceived in terms of a rad­ic­al­iz­a­tion of human rights. What is uni­ver­sal in human rights is not a par­tic­u­lar set of val­ues, West­ern or oth­er­wise, but the right to uni­ver­sal­ity as such, the polit­ical subject’s right to seek and to for­mu­late its own uni­ver­sal­ity. At least one way this can be done, he implies, is through the for­mu­la­tion of demands; and in the con­text of cur­rent protests, what is needed is the art of for­mu­lat­ing the right demand and insist­ing on it.

Prac­tic­ally speak­ing, this means we should not demand the impossible. Nor should we simply demand the pos­sible. Accord­ing to Zizek, the art is to for­mu­late a real­istic demand that so pro­foundly chal­lenges the estab­lished order that its real­iz­a­tion only seems impossible. Uni­ver­sal health care in the USA is one example. The end of tax avoid­ance by the super rich could be another. At the same time, it should be made clear that this is only a begin­ning. More rad­ical demands would come in due course.

Zizek has been arguing for a long time that to effect real change, the first step we need to take is a back­wards one, to retreat from pseudo-​activities that make us feel as if we are doing some­thing — includ­ing ad hoc and eph­em­eral protests — but which in real­ity change noth­ing. Such a retreat he has called ‘pass­ive aggressiv­ity’: the potent ges­ture of with­drawal from sys­tems of ideo­lo­gical repres­sion, the dig­ni­fied and even Ghan­dian refusal to par­ti­cip­ate. In this con­text, the title of his talk makes sense: the silent voice of a new begin­ning is the with­drawal from hege­monic dis­courses, the ‘no, we would prefer not to’ that pre­cedes the ‘yes, we demand’.

Today, Zizek sees the need for more. Say­ing ‘no’ is the first step, but the sub­sequent affirm­a­tion of the neces­sity for change requires not only the for­mu­la­tion of polit­ical demands, but also some idea of how an altern­at­ive soci­ety can be organ­ized; or in his words: ’ … I think it is import­ant that we start to shift focus from the purely, let me call it “neg­at­ive gesture” — we reject this debt — to at least try to play with, to ima­gine, altern­at­ive modes of organ­iz­a­tion’. [58m22s] Zizek is con­cerned with ensur­ing the protests effect real change and with how any change can be main­tained while avoid­ing the spectre of total­it­ari­an­ism. Using Greece as an example, he won­ders how things would be organ­ized if the State were to col­lapse and the ‘people’ were to take over. What would hap­pen at such a juncture?

At this point there is an inter­est­ing and polem­ical inter­ven­tion by Cos­tas Douz­i­nas, who sug­gests that Zizek has the prob­lem the wrong way round. The ques­tion of what hap­pens after some new régime takes over will involve, in Douzinas’s words, a ‘long pro­cess in which pro­grammes will be cre­ated … a long demo­cratic pro­cess’. The real prob­lem, there­fore, is not what is going to hap­pen after any revolu­tion, but how to get there in the first place. Fol­low­ing a series of argu­ments and counter-​arguments over the per­tin­ence of, amongst other things, dir­ect demo­cracy, the debate quickly escalates:

Zizek: This is for me the cru­cial prob­lem and when you say, ‘well, it’s a long pro­cess, we will find it’, it’s just rhet­or­ics. Of course it’s a long pro­cess … but your pos­i­tion is basic­ally, if I’ve got it cor­rectly, we can­not say any­thing, we will see what hap­pens. I mean this is for me a little bit too risky … The big prob­lem is: can we ima­gine another way of what Gram­sci called the ‘new order’ of things func­tion­ing nor­mally in a dif­fer­ent way.

Douz­i­nas: But what you’re say­ing … the ‘new order’ — this is total eschatology.

Zizek: No, because I’m not say­ing that this is the end of history.

Douz­i­nas: No no, what you’re telling us is we have to know how para­dise is. Before we know what para­dise is we’re not going to make any attempt to get there. And what I’m say­ing is that it is much more import­ant to try to get to para­dise and once we get there we’ll work it out. Because your recipe and your advice all over the world to these move­ments, to people who are stand­ing up and mobil­iz­ing and so on, is that before you have a full blue­print of how soci­ety is going to be after the change you should not do any­thing. Do a bit of protest, do a bit of hippy­dom here and hippy­dom there, and since you do not have your full con­sti­tu­tional order and party in place, for­get it!

Zizek: I never said this. What I said is, on the con­trary, that if you just want to go to a para­dise without know­ing where you are going you can well end in hell.

Douz­i­nas: Indeed, this is the chance you take. As [Wal­ter] Ben­jamin said, the worst and best are very close to one another, but unless you aim for the best you don’t get anywhere.

Zizek: Let me be con­crete. I never spoke about what will be. Who knows what will be? … But my point is this one: I don’t think you can simply say how to get to para­dise. Para­dise is there. If there is a les­son to be drawn from the sad 20^th cen­tury exper­i­ence, it is that the germs of para­dise must be already here in how we are organ­iz­ing … and dir­ect demo­cracy is not enough …

Douz­i­nas: You’re a very ima­gin­at­ive guy so use your ima­gin­a­tion and give us some alternative …

Zizek: … our focus should … be … on dif­fer­ent forms of rep­res­ent­a­tion. There lies the true cre­at­ive work. In nor­mal times, you can­not have per­man­ent activ­ity [in terms of hori­zontal or dir­ect demo­cracy], you need rep­res­ent­a­tion, but you need a type of rep­res­ent­a­tion, maybe even less demo­cratic, I don’t know.

Douz­i­nas: I don’t think we disagree.

Zizek: Yeah … can’t you see what wor­ries me is that we will have a beau­ti­ful protest and then this protest will dis­ap­pear and then all that will remain is that we will feel very well: what a nice time we had dur­ing the protest.

Show me what will remain, show me what will remain as new insti­tu­tional forms!

And I agree with you, some­thing prob­ably will emerge. I’m not as pess­im­istic as I may sound here. Just let’s look at his­tory and how people thought many things [were] not pos­sible. Let’s not forget.

Here we should even sin­cerely praise demo­cracy itself: my God, up until mod­ern­ity people thought the moment you don’t have a nat­ural pre­tender to power, the moment you open up the field and admit the empty place of power, it’s cata­strophe. The great tri­umph of demo­cracy is that it turned this moment — when the throne is empty — into the resource for the sta­bil­ity of the sys­tem. So things can be done. But I don’t want to ter­ror­ize people into this: oh give me a detailed blue­print! — no! I just think that we should be very careful … .

The people with their protests are not ask­ing ques­tions, they are an answer, but an opaque answer. What we intel­lec­tu­als can do with our know­ledge is not to provide answers, but to start to raise the right ques­tions, so that the answer can only come from the people. The answer will be recog­nised as the answer if we provide the frame for the ques­tion to it. This is a much more mod­est model where non­ethe­less we intel­lec­tu­als are crucial …

I think, if any­thing, [given] the 20^th Cen­tury fias­cos, we intel­lec­tu­als lost this arrog­ant right to say, ‘we have the answers, we show you the way’ …

This exchange, indeed the whole talk, opens up many aven­ues for fur­ther dis­cus­sion. There is the rela­tion between human rights, the uni­ver­sal, and eman­cip­at­ory polit­ics. There is the ques­tion of what in rad­ical polit­ics con­sti­tutes neither a com­plete lack of dir­ec­tion nor a detailed blue­print. There is the ques­tion of the ‘people’ and the issue of rep­res­ent­a­tion. And so on.

So let me not start but fin­ish with the following:

If uni­ver­sal right mani­fests itself through the demand, then such a ‘demand-​right’ is, philo­soph­ic­ally speak­ing, an infin­ite one. There is no per­fect sys­tem and there can never be para­dise on earth. There are only ‘the germs of para­dise’, as Zizek put it, in vari­ous states of cul­tiv­a­tion, thus doing away with an abso­lute end point for think­ing polit­ical change. If a post-​capitalist new order ever came to pass and Zizek were still around, he would no doubt con­tinue to pro­voke, agit­ate, and refuse, quite rightly in my view, to provide the final answer. In the mean­time and as the Occupy camps dis­perse, I hope those ques­tions for which the people are sup­posedly the answer will be for­mu­lated sooner rather than later.