Free Demanding the Impossible by Slavoj Žižek Page B

distrustful of those libertarian socialists who claim: “We just want local communal organization.” I don’t believe in that. I always try to enumerate how many things have to function at a state level so that they could do their so-called “local self-management or communal organization.”
    I think that the left should drop this model of immediate transparent democracy. It cannot be globalized in order to function . It needs a very strong state apparatus, which regulates things. If not, things will happen, as you can see today, just like capitalism which is getting so chaotic, especially in the third world.
    What fascinates me, therefore, is the idea that we the left should now take over this ideology: “We are the true law and order . We are the true morality .” I very much like this idea of the left taking this position. And my position is that we have to engage wherever we can and do whatever is possible. And all this is what I think we miss in today’s left.

20
To Begin From the Beginning
    What does it mean to be the moral majority and to represent law and order? What then is today’s left missing? What will be the moral obligation of the left today?
    SŽ: Well, concerning civility or public morality, you can now see what’s happening in art. For any art exhibition in London, for example, to be effective, it must do something disgusting: show some dead fish or the excrement of cows. At one exhibition, my god, they showed a video of a colonoscopy. Today, more and more, the cultural-economic apparatus itself has to incite stronger and more shocking effects and products. These are the recent trends in arts. But the thing is that transgressive excess is losing its shock value. I don’t think these transgressive things shock people any more. They have become, to such an extent, part of the system – the operation of today’s capitalism. The apparent radicality of some postmodern trends should not deceive us here. So the transgressive model should no longer be our model.
    There was a famous scandal in New York almost 10 years ago – a notorious scandal concerning the exhibition “Andres Serrano: Works 1983–93” at the New Museum of Contemporary Art. Many people find his work “Piss Christ,” which depicts a crucifix immersed in urine, subversive. But why is this subversive? No! I tried to oppose him. Then he told me that, in this way, he could undermine our standard notion of decency. But I told him “OK, but what’s the point? I can film myself shitting in a disgusting way. Then people would say this is subversive. Mr. Žižek started to problematize the notion of disgust!” But why should I problematize this? Some things are simply disgusting. I don’t think this is a bourgeois plot or the proletarian reappropriation of high culture, or whatever.
    Again, maybe this is one of the solutions that I’m playing with: the left should get rid of this idea of saying that we must be subversive and go beyond good and evil . No! We have to take over some motives of the so-called moral majority . I think the greatest triumph of the ruling ideology has been to keep this moral majority on their side and to present the left as crazy people who think only about having sex with animals and all this dirty stuff. I think, really, the left hasn’t yet reached the zero level of crisis.
    Here I agree with my friend Alain Badiou, who once said: “ We must begin again ,” quoting Lenin from his short text, “On Ascending a High Mountain.” Lenin’s conclusion – “to begin from the beginning over and over again” – makes it clear that we should drop the continuity with the twentieth-century left. It had its glorious moment, but that story is over. This, exactly, is where we are today, after what Badiou called the “obscure disaster” of 1989, the definitive end of the epoch which began with the October Revolution.
    Even with Western social democracy, for example: what is wrong with it as long as it works?