A PLEA FOR ETHICAL VIOLENCE

We should become pitiless censors of ourselves.

There is nothing more ethically repulsive than the idea that, beneath the surface of differences, we all share the same kernel of humanity, of human weaknesses, hopes, and pleasures. Against this fake humanist notion of "solidarity," one should ruthlessly assert the Platonic core of ethical violence articulated in a most pointed way, as one may expect, by Brecht in one of his stories about Herr Keuner: "Herr K. was asked: 'What do you do when you love another man?' 'I make myself a sketch of him,' said Herr K., 'and I take care about the likeness.' 'Of the sketch?' 'No,' said Herr K., 'of the man.'" (Brecht 1995, p. 24).

This radical stance is more necessary than ever in our era of over-sensitivity to "harassment" by the Other, when every ethical pressure is experienced as a false front of the violence of power. This "tolerant" attitude fails to perceive how contemporary power no longer primarily relies on censorship but on unconstrained permissiveness, or, as Alain Badiou put it in thesis 14 of his "Fifteen Theses on Contemporary Art": "Since it is sure of its ability to control the entire domain of the visible and the audible via the laws governing commercial circulation and democratic communication, Empire no longer censors anything. All art, and all thought, is ruined when we accept this permission to consume, communicate, and enjoy. We should become pitiless censors of ourselves" (Badiou 2004).

Can one imagine a stronger contrast to today’s all-pervasive complaints about "ethical violence," i.e., to the tendency to submit to criticism of ethical injunctions which "terrorize" us with the brutal imposition of their universality? The (not so) secret model of this critique is an "ethics without violence," freely (re)negotiated—the highest Cultural Critique meets here unexpectedly the lowest of pop psychology. John Gray, the author of "Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus," deployed in a series of Oprah Winfrey shows a vulgarized version of narrativist-deconstructionist psychoanalysis: since we ultimately "are" the stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, the solution to a psychic deadlock resides in a creative "positive" rewriting of the narrative of our past. What he had in mind is not only the standard cognitive therapy of changing negative "false beliefs" about oneself into a more positive attitude of the assurance that one is loved by others and capable of creative achievements but a more "radical," pseudo-Freudian notion of regressing back to the scene of the primordial traumatic wound. That is to say, Gray accepts the psychoanalytic notion of a hard kernel of some early childhood traumatic experience that forever marked the subject's further development, giving it a pathological spin. What he proposes is that, after regressing to his primal traumatic scene and thus directly confronting it, the subject should, under the therapist's guidance, "rewrite" this scene, this ultimate fantasmatic framework of his subjectivity, in a more "positive," benign and productive narrative—say, if the primordial traumatic scene that persisted in your unconscious, deforming and inhibiting your creative attitude, was that of your father shouting at you "You are worthless! I despise you! Nothing will come out of you!," you should rewrite it into the new scene with a benevolent father kindly smiling at you and telling you "You're OK! I trust you fully!" (In one of Oprah Winfrey’s shows, Gray directly enacted this rewriting-the-past experience with a woman who, at the end, gratefully embraced him, crying from happiness that she was no longer haunted by her father's despising attitude towards her.) To play this game to the end, when Wolfman "regressed" to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development—witnessing the parental coitus a tergo—the solution would be to rewrite this scene so that what Wolfman effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel. Ridiculous as this procedure may appear, let us not forget that it also has its PC-version, that of the ethnic, sexual, etc. minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein. Along the same lines, one can even imagine a rewriting of the Decalogue itself: is some command too severe? Let us regress to the scene on Mount Sinai and rewrite it: adultery—yes, if it is sincere and serves the goal of your profound self-realization. What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subsequent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the "hard facts," but the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in the subject's psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting.