Slavoj Zizek Quote
As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from the political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness –which should be relativized and historicized- ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any organic social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly called common decency (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or harassing each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a spurious infinity in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as the fight against all forms of discrimination. If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects harassing other subjects, who-in the absence of mores- is to decide what counts as harassment? In France, there are associations of obese people demanding all the public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the speciesism of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal-for them, a particularly disgusting form of fascism) and demand that vegeto-phobia should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right of incest marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . .The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rule. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns a member of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case od meddling with other ways of life. It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the fight against discrimination is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed from all moral prejudices which, as Michea puts it, would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.
As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from the political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness –which should be relativized and historicized- ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any organic social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly called common decency (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or harassing each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a spurious infinity in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as the fight against all forms of discrimination. If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects harassing other subjects, who-in the absence of mores- is to decide what counts as harassment? In France, there are associations of obese people demanding all the public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the speciesism of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal-for them, a particularly disgusting form of fascism) and demand that vegeto-phobia should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right of incest marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . .The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rule. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns a member of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case od meddling with other ways of life. It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the fight against discrimination is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed from all moral prejudices which, as Michea puts it, would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.
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About Slavoj Zizek
He is the international director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London, Global Distinguished Professor of German at New York University, professor of philosophy and psychoanalysis at the European Graduate School and senior researcher at the Institute for Sociology and Philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. He primarily works on continental philosophy (particularly Hegelianism, psychoanalysis and Marxism) and political theory, as well as film criticism and theology.
Žižek is the most famous associate of the Ljubljana School of Psychoanalysis, a group of Slovenian academics working on German idealism, Lacanian psychoanalysis, ideology critique, and media criticism. His breakthrough work was 1989's The Sublime Object of Ideology, his first book in English, which was decisive in the introduction of the Ljubljana School's thought to English-speaking audiences. He has written over 50 books in multiple languages and speaks Slovene, Serbo-Croatian, English, German, and French. The idiosyncratic style of his public appearances, frequent magazine op-eds, and academic works, characterised by the use of obscene jokes and pop cultural examples, as well as politically incorrect provocations, have gained him fame, controversy and criticism both in and outside academia.