HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN... INHUMAN

The most radical act is to avoid being fascinated by the enemy's humanity.

Dear Readers,

Below, an older piece which I have updated with some reflections on Gaza.

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(Still from Lars Von Trier’s Dancer in the Dark, 2000)

In contrast to the simplistic opposition of good and bad guys, spy thrillers with artistic pretensions display all the “realistic psychological complexity” of the characters from “our” side. However, far from signaling a balanced view, this “honest” acknowledgment of our own “dark side” stands for its very opposite: the hidden assertion of our supremacy. We are “psychologically complex,” full of doubts, while the opponents are one-dimensional, fanatical killing machines.

Therein resides the lie of Spielberg’s Munich: it wants to be “objective,” presenting the moral complexity and ambiguity, the psychological doubts, and the problematic nature of revenge on the Israeli side. However, this “realistic” approach only redeems the Mossad agents even more: “Look, they are not just cold killers, but human beings with their doubts—they doubt, not the Palestinian terrorists…” One cannot help but sympathize with the animosity expressed by the surviving Mossad agents who actually carried out the revenge killings and reacted to the film (“There were no psychological doubts; we just did what we had to do”). There is much more honesty in their stance.¹

The first lesson thus seems to be that the proper way to fight the demonization of the Other is to subjectivize him, to listen to his story, to understand how he perceives the situation—or, as a partisan of Middle East dialogue put it: “An enemy is someone whose story you have not heard.”² Practicing this noble motto of multicultural tolerance, Icelandic authorities recently imposed a unique form of enacting this subjectivization of the Other. In order to combat growing xenophobia (the result of a rising number of immigrant workers), as well as sexual intolerance, they organized what is called “living libraries”: members of ethnic and sexual minorities (gays, immigrant East Europeans, or Blacks) are paid to visit an Icelandic family and simply talk to them, acquainting them with their way of life, their everyday practices, their dreams, etc. In this way, the exotic stranger who is perceived as a threat to our way of life appears as somebody we can empathize with, with a complex world of his or her own…

There is, however, a clear limit to this procedure: can one imagine inviting a brutal Nazi thug to tell us his story? Is one also ready to affirm that Hitler was an enemy because his story was not heard? One can well imagine Hitler washing Eva Braun's hair—and one does not have to imagine, since one knows, that Reinhard Heydrich, the architect of the Holocaust, liked to play Beethoven's late string quartets with friends in the evenings. Recall the couple of “personal” lines that usually conclude the presentation of a writer on the back cover of a book: “In his free time, X likes to play with his cat and grow tulips…” Such a supplement, which "humanizes" the author, is ideology at its purest, the sign that he is "also human like us." (I was tempted to suggest on the cover of my book: “In his free time, Zizek likes to surf the internet for child pornography and to teach his small son how to pull the legs off spiders...”)