Demanding the Impossible (12 page)

SŽ:
What I’d like to insist on in this case is that, like in Egypt, an actual revolution takes place, as you could see, in a pure way. The only violence there was
symbolic violence
. Symbolic violence in the sense that you walk in the street and ignore the authorities. Demonstrators didn’t kill anyone. Violence always occurs after the authorities step in. Even if you look at the French Revolution, it was the same. Forget about all those stories you know about terrorism or violence. Every good historian will tell you that before and after the Jacobins in the French Revolution there were many more people killed. But they were insignificant and ordinary people – nobody cares about them. When you kill some well-known prince, then everyone talks about it as terror.

I think the logic is this. First, there’s invisible violence going on all the time. We must be very careful when we talk about violence. I quoted in my book,
Living in the End Times
, a wonderful sentence from Mark Twain’s
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
: “A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.” You know, it’s ridiculous. In order to grasp this parallax nature of violence, one should focus on the short circuits between different levels, between, say, power and social violence, yet it should be experienced as
violence
.

For example, in Egypt, if 100 people die, it’s horrible. But are you aware of how many people die regularly of torture and terror even at times when there is
nothing particular going on
? For me, the big question, when you talk about violence, is always what goes on in apparently normal times. At times like this, people perceive the situation as peaceful. Are we really
aware
of how much violence happens during these periods? I don’t mean some sort of poetic violence. By violence, I mean extremely brutal violence: torturing, starving, beating, and whatever. It went on all the time in Egypt: their prisons were so terrifying, horrific. So again, that’s my first point.

My second point is that this is the logic of authentic revolution. People are violent when they raise a revolution. Of course, there may always be excesses. But as you can see here clearly, they are extremely marginal. Most people are violent just in the sense of ignoring power. When the policeman tells you: “You shouldn’t go there,” you say “Fuck you. No! I will go there.” Remember those magic moments when the authorities allowed people to gather in Tahrir Square. Violence stopped. People were there just demonstrating.

Violence comes, as a rule, from the other side. It comes from those in power who think that they have to scare people to create violence. It’s not that I advocate violence in the sense of, “Oh, let’s do some killing.” I’m just saying that the move people should make, of course, is a kind of massive boycott-style of violence, which is totally non-violent in the sense of there being no killing or torturing people. The problem is what happens when the other side starts to counter-attack. Even then, as a revolutionary, you usually don’t have the wherewithal to make a counter-attack, but you must somehow resist and defend yourself. Here I agree with Badiou. The left should learn, from the twentieth century, the horror of state terror or violence. Violence of leftist progressives should basically be
defensive violence
, in the sense that “We occupy the square. We defend if you attack us – but not this kind of aggressive violence.”

Like now, wonders can be done here. I think that just ignoring the crowds was masterful. Remember when the army tanks started to arrive? Instead of attacking them, they started to embrace them, even treating them as friends. It was masterful because it was a very reasonable way to behave, even if the army wasn’t as good as the government claimed or even if they sent hundreds of tanks. It was clear that the army would have been going too far if they had simply started to shoot at the people. So why not simply receive them? What does it mean? Nothing. Even though there were some tanks, people ignored them and went on to embrace the soldiers. Isn’t this a model of how to resist?

And even if you take a violent act to be a problem, take Wikileaks. People claim it is violent in the sense that it can cause catastrophes. But didn’t Wikileaks do it in a very moderate way? Some people think it was too moderate. From what I know, they didn’t just publish everything. They only gave certain information to four or five big media outlets, for example, some names of the spy in China who may then be arrested or killed. Yet still, didn’t they do it in a moderate and considerate way? I think it should be acceptable.

The only violence that I advocate is in situations where there is a terrorist or autocratic violent regime – usually you might call it, although it’s maybe a little more radical,
civil disobedience
. Like when you start to behave as if you don’t admit the legitimacy of public authority. And then you create your
free territory
in this way. Violence should only be defensive. I don’t find anything problematic about this.

So you mean that the defensive form of violence is legitimate? But can it be revolutionary enough to make actual changes? Isn’t that just too naive a concept of the violent act?

SŽ:
Although it is in a different context, let me tell you a funny story. When the Kurdish resistance in Turkey was much more active, I could not but sympathize with them. I was told by my leftist friend in Eastern Turkey that conditions in prisons about 15–20 years ago were horrible. People were tortured, suspected of being combatants. Then they did something to the guardians, after which nobody was killed. My god, I find it too strange that this was acceptable. They discovered that the guardians who did the torturing were from the local area. So Kurdish people from outside discreetly approached one of the guardians after office hours and said: “We know you’re torturing our people to death. But we know who you are and where you live. If you go on torturing, we will kill your wife and children.” All of a sudden, the torture stopped. Isn’t it funny? Conditions in prison started to get better and the guards treated the prisoners decently. I’m sorry, but this was a desperate measure, I would say a scam.

But can you imagine a truly horrible situation? Can you imagine someone who is very close to you being held somewhere and raped and tortured and you know all about it but
cannot do anything
? I cannot even imagine my son or a woman I love dying suddenly as a result of some kind of an explosion and never hearing about it. But it could happen. This is, for me, the worst thing. And under those conditions, you have to fight back. It’s not enough to protest. To call foreign journalists and to do whatever you can do, you have to do it effectively if you can identify a guardian. I’m sorry to tell you this, but I think it’s still
legitimate
.

To recapitulate my crucial two points. First, bear in mind that violence is
already
here. Because, as I said in my book,
On Violence
, our usual perception is that violence only means change, when something happens. No! Violence is here all the time so that things remain peacefully the way they are. Don’t forget about this about violence. And for the second point, don’t confuse this elementary violence – let’s call it civil disobedience – with brutal physical violence. We can understand an attempt to ignore power as being just for the right of the people when conditions demand it. It’s a very forceful weapon – maybe it will become more and more forceful. And you should never forget that the state is not
up there
. The state functions only as far as it is recognized as functioning. I mean, people have tremendous power in organizing themselves just to ignore the power.

For example, in Slovenia – it is not a good example because it is more opportunistic – I remember we debated how to deal with conscription after independence. People acted spontaneously. When they got a call, young people simply ignored it. They threw the documents away. Police tried to bring in a couple of them, but then it became so massive and the state was confronted with the problem of having to arrest 40,000 people. And of course what they did was a nice humiliating retreat. They disguised it as a change in the law. All of sudden they discovered that it was strategically better for Slovenia to have a small professional army. They quickly changed the law, because people had simply ignored it. Again, if enough people do this, you can have power.

So this is the violence I advocate:
symbolic
violence. For me, one of the greatest critiques of ideology is in the Old Testament, in
The Book of Job
, where God takes the side of Job. The other one is Étienne de La Boétie’s
Discours de la servitude volontaire
. He first described the mechanism of how a tyrant becomes a tyrant: because people treat him as a tyrant and fear him. Which is why these magical moments always fascinate me. Even if a leader still nominally holds power, all of a sudden people know that the game is over and don’t take it seriously and lose respect, and then a mysterious rupture takes place.

I wrote about it in my early book with a quote from a Polish journalist, Ryszard Kapu´sci´nski, who recently died. He wrote a book,
Shah of Shahs
, which was wonderful. It’s mainly about the Khomeini revolution and how it took three or four months for the Shah regime to disintegrate at a square in Tehran. At a Tehran crossroad, some protesters refused to budge when a policemen approached them and shouted, “Go away. This is prohibited.” One of demonstrators simple stood there and just looked at him. The policeman continued shouting, but the demonstrator didn’t move. The embarrassed policeman simply withdrew; in a couple of hours, all Tehran knew about this incident, and although street fights went on for weeks, everyone somehow knew the game was over. This became the symbol of the power of ignoring power.

Is something similar going on now in Egypt? Even if that was happening, people died. But at some level, those in power lost their hold on the people. I think it would be wonderful to do a history of Eastern Europe: the integration of communist regimes at this level. At what point did this magic moment occur even though communists were formally still in power? All of a sudden freedom erupted. This is not just in the sense of intimate freedom, but
social freedom
. And in the sense of symbolic authority, those in power lost it. People were no longer afraid of them. This is a truly magic moment. Why? Because nothing happens in reality; it’s not that they stepped down, but in a very mysterious way everyone, even those in power, knows that the game is over. I wouldn’t call it a symbol of violence, but this is, for me, the essence of revolution.

I’m not talking about some mystical inner event, because it’s a
social
effect. Power no longer works as a social link. When it is said that people are not afraid, it doesn’t mean that they are crazily heroic. Of course, if you see a policeman shooting at you, you should be afraid and run away. But at a different level, you no longer take the leadership seriously. Those in power know this is the most dangerous moment for them. This is what Mubarak is now trying to do. This was already happening. And Mubarak’s solution was to organize these brutal people to come and start beating, and in this way to create a demand for power. But it failed. So just by ignoring and not being afraid of the authorities, impossible revolution can truly occur.

You concluded your book, In
Defense of Lost Causes
, by saying that the domain of pure violence is the domain of love. Here we are thinking of elements that include ethics, universal love, compassion, and empathy. In particular, we are interested to hear your ideas about love and compassion, which we see as a practice of the common good. Alain Badiou sees love as a means to revolution, but you take a different view. What would the practice of the common good look like? You say that revolution cannot happen without cruelty and violence, but you also quote Che Guevara – “At the risk of seeming ridiculous, let me say that the true revolutionary is guided by a great feeling of love. It is impossible to think of a genuine revolutionary lacking this quality” – on the animating role of love in revolution. What do you make of the examples of Gandhi, Mandela, and Aristide as regards the transformative power of love in revolution?

SŽ:
Talking about love, I like to quote Christ, who says: “If anyone comes to me, and does not hate his own father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). How are we to read this statement?

Love is, for me, a
category of struggle
. For example, I once said, to provoke my friend, that Gandhi was more violent than Hitler. You know what I wanted to say? Of course Hitler was more violent in the sense of killing people. But in reality, all this violence was, in terms of Nietzsche,
reactive
. Basically, Hitler’s problem was how to save the capitalist regime, how to prevent revolution. He did not really
act
; all his actions were fundamentally reactions. And he was doing all this just to make things stay the way they had been.

What Gandhi did, although it was very peaceful but in a way extremely violent, was to boycott customs, etc. He targeted the entire structure of the British colonial state. Hitler never did this. He never targeted the functioning of the German state. You see, this is a good example of what I mean by
divine positive violence
. It’s just the act of suspending the hold of power.

You mention Nelson Mandela: he was more or less the same. There were of course battles and bombs, but that’s another story. Although one must say, in criticism of Mandela and Gandhi, that there’s a limit to this procedure. It’s very sad. But this procedure, where you play on human dignity, only works, as in Egypt, up to the point where your opponent is minimally dignified
with a certain ethics
.