On Objectification

Once upon a time, it was self-evident that God existed and that He was good. Today, it seems equally self-evident to many that there is a thing called sexual objectification and that it is wrong. Just as some people will never not be able to believe in God, so others will never be able to do anything but impute negative moral value to the market in sexual display and observation.

The New Clericalism 
   
People who have such opinions, whether about the existence of God or the moral horror that is lapdancing, have a right to those opinions. They can go to church or avoid lapdancing clubs as suits them. But what neither should do is dictate the terms of freedom for others.

The Church has largely been chased away from public policy (not quite far enough in our view) but feminist extremism is reaching its apogee of power and may yet institute its horrors on us through the Nordic model. In Hackney and in the progressive communities of the 'new feminism', Church and post-Marxist graduate ideologue have been converging to build critical mass for new social myths and new oppressions, the pseudo-theocracy of the authoritarian activist.

The 'progressive' feminist position was even converging at one point (perhaps still is) with that of the communitarian right - the theory of objectification is flowing into a bed already scoured out in the desert by the Judaeo-Christian concept of 'sin' and by Islamic concepts of womanhood. The thesis is that objectification is a thing that is real and that it is bad and that is what we will deal with here. Both statements are dubious. But we will accept, for the sake of taking on these people on their own ground, that there is something called objectification: that is, that persons treat other persons as things-in-themselves and then we will ask whether this is quite so bad as post-Kantian rectitude asserts.

Sinister Philosophy 

The idea that objectification is a bad thing in itself arises (in modern thought) ultimately from a reading of Immanuel Kant - moral value must lie in never treating another person as the object of one's desires without their interests being at heart. This is fair enough but the way it has been extended by Theory is another matter. This Kantian model, already distanced to a degree from what it is to be human in practice (his position was a moral exhortation rather than a description of the actual situation of humanity where we have to wait until Nietzsche for a fair assessment), got extended by the progressive Left into something very much more demanding, especially under Marxist influence.

Two further ideological formulae were added. The first was that using the labour of another to improve or enrich or take pleasure was always  'exploitation' so that the only unexploited person was one who lived beyond the market in some putative future socialist paradise, a fit religio-metaphysical parallel to the traditionalist's Golden Age or Lost Eden. But the second was more sinister. If Marxism made all current human relations potentially exploitative, another school of thought within Marxism but allied to progressive liberalism and derived from Plato, suggested that consent to exploitation was not permissible because any consensual element was a form of 'false consciousness'.

The Rule of the Few

In other words, Kantianism as interpreted by Marx and Platonic Liberals (regardless of similar but theological criticisms of displaying oneself and observing others) came to mean that: a) we lived in a system of mutual exploitation but b) some people who understood this system had the right to limit exploitative behaviour as preparation for its eventual ending. The denial of personal autonomy explicit in submission to God had come full circle to a denial of personal autonomy in the face of not Providence but History or Right. You can't keep a good sado-masochistic authoritarian nut down for long, it would seem.

The Marxist and Liberal debt to Christianity is as strong here as Christianity's to Platonism. Poor old Kant has long since been left behind and Nietzsche ignored. One central belief here is that mutual exploitation is never beneficial nor ever a reasonable and even pleasurable aspect of being human.
There is the belief, already noted that some people have a right (one not coming from God but from 'reason' or 'analysis') to decide who is being exploited and then judge that this is wrong. But a third belief is that the persons who are then defined as exploited can have no voice in the matters because they are ignorant.

All three of these beliefs are somewhat vile because they systematically deny agency to an individual in whatever situation they happen to be in and deliver them up to the situation as interpreted by others. The first belief denies humanity its right to be human and twists it into a rationalist simulacrum of itself. The second is inegalitarian not by way of attribute within a free society but by the fiat of the few who seek to command the many. The third shows contempt for the ability of persons, no matter how 'lowly', to make decisions in their own interest.

Objectification as Temporary States of Being

But let us get back to objectification itself which contains two states of being (we will not call them rights because this concedes too much ground to the 'progressives') - that of displaying and that of observing. The dialectic of displaying and observing is separate again from a personal decision to do one or the other.

A central if implicit psychological theme of much 'objectification discourse' is that display or observation are assaults not only on the person who objects to these states in others but on 'society' - that is, even if no one objects to a display or observation, in some mysterious way there is an observer of the display or of the observation who does. This observer would seem to be the re-invention of God but on terms that pander to the superior knowledge of the intellectual who can interpret Him.

In fact, most, though not all, display and observation falls into the category of the victimless crime at worst and, at best, as a matter of civil dispute between the displayer and the observer or the observer and the observed. The discomfort of one person is otherwise privileged wholly without any equity being invested in the inconvenience of another.

Worse, the politics of objectification means that the State and the community (in a grim repetition of the dark days of Judaeo-Christian control of public policy) are brought into play in order to demand that the observer not observe and the displayer not display. This is only the mirror image of a theoretical State demand that the observer must observe and the displayer must display that we see in the contemporary surveillance State. Obliging people by diktat to observe or not observe or display or not display is of the very essence of totalitarianism.

Politics of Disgust

No policy equitably forces the unobserved to be forcibly observed or the undisplayed to be forcibly displayed. Quite rightly. men and women are not forced to parade naked down the street but the man or woman who wishes to parade naked down the street is always regarded as having broken some law (even when, in fact, they have not).

We are, of course, embedded here in the politics of disgust and in the conservative politics of custom, forgetting that custom was once invented and often invented by earlier versions of the 'disgusted' personality types who most object to the sexual or display rights of others.

But let us get down to basics here because most reasonable restrictions on display and observation have nothing to do with the community or the State, and certainly nothing to do with the minority of 'activists' who exist within some text-based ideological framework. They are a matter of good manners and manners are never a matter for States.

Let us now reverse the radical feminist position: free persons generally know their own interest and politics should only be about increasing the flow of information to persons (education) and of free resources (economic redistribution which is where I part company with classic American libertarianism) as well as creating opportunity to escape untenable situations. It should not be about moral condemation of private acts.

The Moralists as Waste of Political Space
  
If the State and the ideologues cannot deliver full information, resources and escape valves (the three key tasks of the State other than security), then it is for ordinary folk to make the best decisions that they can about getting through the day. If that includes a drink, a flutter on the horses, a bit of drug-taking, lapdancing and even prostitution, these must be assumed to be rational decisions.

A woman or man who makes such choices is not 'weak' or 'inferior' but is dealing the best way they can with their circumstances and they are more likely to escape those circumstances if they are harmful to them if they are respected for their efforts and given what help is available without moral grandstanding from 'committees'.

But most people involved in display and observation are not at the margins of society. Display and observation are central to what it is to be a human being. The right to be naked, the right to get maximum economic value out of your looks, the right to aspire to look good, these are all sneered at by extremist feminists and yet this is what people want. None of those who want this are in any way to be regarded as inferior to those who choose to clothe themselves from top to toe, avoid make-up, look frumpy - and vice versa. These are just life choices.

Observation is a pleasure. There is a reasonable anti-exploitative argument that anyone in the adult industries should be decently paid, have appropriate healthcare facilities and not be forced into anything that was not consensual - but this applies to all workers in all industries. Conditions in some adult entertainment industries are clearly better today than in some sweatshop suppliers of manufactured items that radicals use every day without thinking how they came to be.

Choice is a Value
  
There is, however, no argument (if people make free choices that are economically rational and are not enslaved) against the right of people to earn revenue from physical attributes or skills for the pleasure of those who observe. To say otherwise is to deny humanity to the observer and economic value to the observed.

The alternative of feminist moralism is that the observed ends up in a dead end job with less money and probably a worse sexual mate while the observer becomes depressed and possibly vicious. But there is bigger charge to answer for those opposed to the theory of objectification. Feminist theory would claim that it is wrong in itself to observe or engage with another person sexually as a commodity or as an object for use.

However, the privileging of sexuality is curious here because there are other aspects of human activity that are equally fundamental and where one is normally treated as a commodity or as an object of use. We are treated like this every day as consumers, as voters, as contracted workers and spiritually by religious and community leaders.

The Peculiar Hold of the Sexual
  
What is the peculiar hold of sexuality in this general attitude to the use of humans as commodities and objects of use. Why is sexuality given a sacral nature that is not by any means essential. This fascistic over-emphasis on sexual purity is really just the special interest of one part (some women and some men) of one part of the community (all other people).

Logically, if we were truly serious about objectification, we would have a general critique of commodification and, of course, some very radical feminists manage this purist position - being anarcho-socialist feminist atheists without employment who effectively live outside society.

But, for most people most of the time, this is an utterly absurd stance. To survive in the world not only economically but in terms of simple pleasures and psychologically with some constructed meaning and participation, we require a society in which exploitation not only takes place but must take place.

The question of exploitation is not that it takes place but how to make it 'fair' - that is, how is the exploitation to be limited to the essential for mutual survival and then balanced out so that the few never exploit the many. How, in other words, is a pleasurable mutual exploitation going to result in a society where exploitation is a pleasure for all and everything balances out.

The Market & Desire
  
The market to some extent, over time, manages to do some of the balancing but not very effectively. The State does have some role in correcting imbalances and civil society (notably trades unions) has another but both the State and civil society have a tendency to be captured by ideologues and people of simple mind.

The theory of objectification has created an 'absolute' where our situation is one of 'relatives'. Thus the man who looks at a naked beautiful woman is designated a 'pervert' and the woman who strips for him as a 'slut' when, in fact, truth to be told, the man is just being a man (of equal worth to a woman) and the woman is stripping him of his resources.

The roles can be reversed. A woman may spend her money to see some inconsequential film that would bore any man silly because the 'star' offers her a fantasy that is really not so different from the man's but just involves less interest in exchange of body fluids.

Human desire is important. It fuels us as persons. It makes us who we are. Those who satisfy our desires should be well recompensed. And the person who thwarts desire by stopping the trade in desire through some asinine theory from academic philosophers is worse than dessicated, they are anti-human.

Disrespect and Objectification
  
Objectification is simply part of the social trade in desires. Perhaps we can move steadily towards an equality of desires. The real revolution for women must be to ensure that their desires are given equal weight to that of men rather than allow the suppression of the desires of both men and women for some dream of a socialised a-sexuality.

There is no intrinsic reason why objectification as such shows any disrespect to a woman (or to a man's) personal or intellectual capabilities. This is a feminist myth that deliberately misunderstands the nature of time, of context and of choice.

The central point here is that any act of objectification is not permanent. Objectification is a period of time during which a desire or the fantasy is lived. It is not a state of permanent being but a state of temporary being. When the moment is over, the participants return to what they were or at least are changed inwardly by the experience (in very personal ways that can never be assumed to be 'good' or 'bad') but the objectifier has no hold over the objectified unless the objectified is a neurotic - which is, bluntly, their problem. Most of what happens in most situations is imagined and distant.

This fundamental error of objectification theory - that it is exploitative - is important to understand. It confuses structural exploitation (where coercion lies within poverty or the limits of some communitarian authority) with a momentary exchange. Poverty may dictate the terms of the exchange but it is the poverty or other external matter, bullying probably, that is the problem. These post-Marxist pseudo-radicals need to get back to problems of coercion and poverty and away from imagined problems of culture and language.

Vicious Totalitarians
  
In nearly every area where extremist feminists rant against other women's choices, they are thus acting as somewhat vicious totalitarians because they are taking the symptoms for the disease.

The only objection to a woman being portrayed as weak or submissive in pornography, for example, is the same as one portraying a man as weak or submissive - that is, if the man or woman was coerced or not decently treated during the process. Otherwise, it is his or her decision to sell and his or her decision to buy.

Moreover, and this is central to my argument, equality between men and women permits perfect equality of desire. To condemn males for their desire as 'aggressive' or 'perverted' and privilege women in theirs is grossly unfair and leads to the logic of a negation of desire for both men and women, equally, as the only way to restore 'fairness'.

Feminist Ariel Levy thinks that modern society (as if there was such a reified thing) 'encourages' women to objectify themselves. The tone could only come from a text-worshipping academic. Such language denies the right of women to decide for themselves their own status as both subjects and objects in contexts they choose. Some are being led into submission to academic theorists in a manner little different to those who were led into futile and cruel political ideologies in the first half of the last century,

Feminist Perspectives

Levy is said to have been surprised at how many of her interviewees saw the new raunchy culture emerging in the twenty-first century as representing the triumph of feminism because it showed that American women had become strong enough to display on their terms and accept objectification as empowering. She should not have been.

While many women are embarrassed or made uncomfortable by the male or indeed female gaze (and good manners suggests that they should not be so embarrassed in private relations), many others take immense pleasure in it.

The ultimate absurdity lies in a male critic, John Stoltenberg, who condems as 'wrong' (where do they get their ethics from), any sexual fantasy that involves visualisation of a woman. This is so anti-human as to beggar belief. This could be a saint in the desert. Objectification is just what all persons do and it should be embraced not as unethical but as challenging.

The real issue here is understanding the line between reality and fantasy. The fear of the feminist and their fellow-travellers is legitimate - lack of equal regard and coercion - but their consequent analysis is quite simply ignorant.

Fear and Coercion
  
The radical feminist theorist lacks judgement and balance. So terrified are they that thoughts about inequality and coercion might lead to actual inequality and coercion that one suspects that the theory is about their own anxiety in this respect more than it is derived from any real understanding of how most persons understand that boundary.

Stoltenberg is an extreme example of the dehumanising tendencies of this deep neurosis amongst people of the text, one which derives from their deep belief that texts matter. To them, if texts matter, then thoughts which are made up of the same material (words) matter - and thoughts that lead to texts must also lead to acts.

Of course, in the real world, things do not work like that. Texts are not quite that important any more but, more to the point, thoughts are often substitutes for acts and ensure that acts are not perpetrated  - while acts are often thoughtless. Unravel the primitive humanist belief in the validity of the text, the delusion of the educated and suddenly a lot of the problem evaporates as mist drifts away in the morning sunlight.

The culture of the intellectual confuses act, text and thought into a false coherence that excludes all ambiguity despite the fact that all actual human relations are about ambiguity, confusion and compromise. All intellectualisms that have not understood this, particularly Platonic, Kantian and Marxist thought, build an entirely false picture of social reality - and from that great pain and suffering has resulted.

Text, Thought & Act
  
To actual persons engaged in the world, however, act, text and thought are very different, with text both a technical manual for action and a means of inspiring thought and imagination. However, words themselves limit action and people engage in consensual objectification in very precise contexts.

What is more remarkable, given the frustrations of modern life, is the lack of viciousness on a day-to-day basis. Even the most cursory of reading of the history of erotica will indicate that viciousness increases to the degree that sexuality is repressed and all sexual expression involves a degree of objectification.

Camille Paglia, a feminist to be admired in this respect, puts it well: "Turning people into sex objects is one of the specialties of our species." To try to change this is to try change humanity which, given the nature of our evolution, means, in effect, a cultural Sovietisation of sexual relations. A grim prospect indeed!

Paglia understands that humans are defined in part by their ability to conceptualise and to make value judgements about the beautiful to which I would add their ability to contextualise themselves and to differentiate between various functioning realities in different contexts.

Objectification Theory - An Insult to Women
  
The theory of objectification ends up as deeply insulting to women - not only because it removes choice (in itself an assault on their rights as persons) but because it has an abstract theory dictate that choice in regard to the use of their bodies as well as their minds and deeper nature.

Yes, we (and not just girls and women) develop our view of ourselves from the observation of others and, yes, the whole person questions this and challenges those views in their own inner interest but, no, the social construction of ourselves is not a bad in itself if it is critically challenged not on the basis of theory but of that of personhood.

What happens in much feminist theory is that a wholly theoretical construct of what it is to be a woman - an essentialist construct - is positioned outside society and beyond the individual. The way that feminism has distanced itself from the existentialist critique of De Beauvoir is downright embarrassing. A woman is ordered to comply with that essentialist positioning. She is, in effect, dragged into a theoretical future and away from herself.

A Caveat on Body Image

Now a note of caution is required. All this is not to say that a false relationship between one's own body image and social expectations is not a serious mental health issue in some cases but these are cases of personal adaptation in which the person is not critically engaged in their own being or has suffered some negative private psychological pressure.

Personal issues which seem to be aligned with feminist theory must be taken into account but we must look on these as problems for persons which have objectifying aspects. In other words, there is not a crisis of objectification but a failure of healthy objectification, indeed probably a crisis of healthy desire and playfulness.

The body image issue in such cases is vitally important but it is specific and not general. The imposition of strategies based on objectification theory to all men and women in this context is as absurd as dictating severe diet or lifestyle changes to all persons because some persons suffer serious physical health from specific dietary or lifestyle problems.

As in physical health public policy planning, there is a severe danger here that progressive rationalists chip away at the freedoms of the many in order to deal with the problems of the few and so begin to undertake social engineering that relates to their own political aesthetic rather than to the real needs of the many.

'Here I Stand" - The Problem of Universalism

How does one win hearts and minds to counter an imperialistic universalism when universalism is the faith of the intellectual class that dominates the modern West? Where is our Luther?

I suppose the claim that universalism is a problem will bring some readers up short almost immediately. The idea that there is a universal quality to a humanity of fixed and equal natures is the over-riding assumption of Western culture, especially in its dominant American form.

The starting point must be to show how the 'universal' is a fraud and that, once this fraud is exposed, not only universalist politics but identity politics, the politics of gender and ethnicity, of class and nation, are equally fraudulent.

Toleration shifts from that toleration that arises because we are all allegedly the same (when we are clearly not) to a toleration of each precisely because they are different.

Commonality will no longer be imposed to meet a pre-set theoretical and intellectual standard of universality but can arise from below through the co-operation of free individuals as their similarities and shared desires become clear.

Back in the early nineteenth century, Chateaubriand, 'Novalis' and Coleridge understood that universalism operates against the instinctive aesthetic of humanity, against the inner spirit of the individual and the weight of history.

This mentality fuelled the romantic European Right but it need not necessarily be that the instinctive aesthetic is not progressive - quite the contrary.

Universalists socialise humanity into normal behaviours, chopping off the far sides of the Bell curve, in a way that represents no single person alive. They make the universe into something that exists so far from really existing humanity that no space is left for the inherent complexity of the individual.

And this critique (although the nineteenth century anti-universalists would disagree with their penchant for obscurantist philosophies) extends to the universalism of religion as much to the universalism of the philosophes and the aufklarer.

Above all, to be anti-universalist is not to be anti-rational - on the contrary, it is universalism that works against human reason by depending on an abstract, manufactured, Kantian Reason.  Human reasoning is fitted to the human condition. It is a tool, not an end.

'Objective' abstract Reason is a poor thing, a simulacrum of the real. Human level reason still has room for intuition and for instinctive judgements that may not be pure but are, nevertheless, human and oftentimes right. Our human reason lies in openness to our dreams as much as to our calculation.

It is something of a cliche that Reason is totalitarian in concept (as opposed to reasoning which is just one, generally essential, tool amongst others). Reason fakes reality much as scholasticism once faked spirituality. Scholasticism proved to be dysfunctional and so, now, is Reason.

Which brings us back to our Luther. Luther asserted a different spirituality against a degenerate scholastic culture. A new Luther might assert a different social reality against a degenerate universalism. Here may someone stand.

'Zizek is to Hegel what Fichte was to Kant'. Discuss.

The occasion of the discussion was frustration with the desperate clinging of our left-wing political intelligentsia to the performance art of the celebrity philosopher.

Zizek is never less than confusing so it is always hard to pin down what he believes in precisely, except that he holds to a form of idealism derived from Hegel and appears to propose a revival of either some form of communism or of utopian socialism.

What I was interested in was not so much what he claimed to believe at any one time but what role he was functionally playing in contemporary philosophy. 

I suppose we might summarise my view as suspicion is that he is playing the role of High Priest to a self-defining barbarian tribe who are enemies of the people, the people meaning that population of persons grounded in the business of being in the world, reproducing, having intentions and seeking a better life for themselves rather than fulfilment of some world-historical mission.

We might say that contemporary European philosophy - with its exclusions and obfuscations - stands in relation to the people in much the same way that Grayson Perry (in his first Reith Lecture today) described the art world, in which he is embedded, as a tribe with its own obfuscatory language and exclusions

I posed the question in a Facebook Group and (edited so as not to be too rude about Zizek) this was my side of the exchange though I found no defenders of Zizek.

Proposition 

The implicit thesis is that Zizek is doing to Hegel what Fichte did to Kant. In essence, Fichte took a Kantian position and extended it to meet his own needs. What was a conservative philosophy of 'explanation' became a radical philosophy of 'implied action' for radical intellectuals. The exploitation of the 'master' was manipulative and might be regarded as cynical, in the earlier case, if only Fichte had been subject to a more demanding critique of his purpose. 

It strikes me that Zizek is making use of Hegel (and Marx as leading historic Hegelian) and playing the same game, seducing young radicals of the Left, as Fichte seduced young German nationalists, into what amounts, on closer inspection, to be well constructed sophistic nonsense. Just as young Germans failed to investigate Kant in order to tease out his flaws so young Europeans are failing to investigate Hegel and do the same. They are taking the grounding of Zizek's thought as a 'given'.

Fichte was the destructive force that laid the grounding for national socialism (far more than the oft-accused Nietzsche or Heidegger). My thesis continues that Zizek may now be laying the ground rules for a possible new European tyranny based on a pseudo-rationalism of devastating potential for harm. Both philosophers are providers of what their small markets want - a reason to believe in nonsense (in the sense that Wittgenstein and other analytic philosophers criticised the obfuscations of such grand idealistic concepts such as 'Geist') .

Response to First Two Responses

I could not agree more with my interlocutor on the need to restore the knowing - and perceiving and creating - subject at the core of things. Sartre, raised in the discussion, is a red herring because Sartre tried to do for Heidegger what Fichte did for Kant and Zizek does for Hegel.

These are all examples of quasi-narcissistic politicised intellectuals seeking to transform a system or position where seriously deep thought has been followed through to a conclusion but under conditions where others will want something that meets more immediately political needs in the next generation (whether liberal nationalism, anti-fascism or anti-capitalism). 

It is no accident that Kant, Hegel and Heidegger were conservatives nor that Fichte, Sartre and Zizek are radicals but we should not cut the latter more slack simply because they appear, sentimentally, to be on the side of the angels to many people at key points in history - against Napoleon, against Hitler and against bankers. 

We may have another example in Saul/Paul in relation to Christ. No doubt, even now, someone is preparing to transform Foucault's thought into a politically potent weapon against something to be hated after the current crisis. I thought I might try NGOs!

This process of appropriation requires a perversion of the central insights (right or wrong) of the initiating system. Sartre wanted Heidegger and Husserl's insights to mean something in terms of action, for example, although Heidegger's one early entry into action showed staggering naivete without making his insights into the human condition incorrect. 

The Buddha was lucky in not having such a person appear in his 'next generation' but the nature of 'initiation and succession' in Western culture makes it almost inevitable that this will happen frequently. 

Zizek uses Sartre and other secondary thinkers such as Fichte, but primarily Marx, as tools for his own intellectual ambitions but he does not really seem ever to engage with what it is to be human on the one hand and what is necessary to suppress as human to create a functioning society in any direct or systematic way. 

He quasi-endorses revolutionary violence without, for example, understanding its contingency, its body/mind basis or its social psychology (which is odd for a trained sociologist) - he is perhaps the tragic consequence of the reward given for intellectualism in Western culture.

Zizek is not so much the wisdom of the ourobouros as a Slavic dog chasing its own continental tail. An analogy of Zizekian philosophy with conceptual art and financial engineering springs to mind - a contingent response to highly contingent objective conditions in late capitalism.

Time is always central to understanding the human condition (this much we take from Heidegger) but Zizek seems to see time with no more sophistication than the aforesaid Paul as a form of providential dispensation via an implicit Absolute (somewhere along the line). 

This is as ethically dangerous, the old inevitability illusion of Hegelianism, as, in an entirely different direction, the position of radical utilitarians who would place the planet before humanity - in his case, humanity as an abstract is placed before the person.

Much of this is magical thinking by Zizek. His thinking on the Muslim veil, for example, is simply stupid - what he thinks is thought by people (if I understand those who have tried to explain it to me) is not what people think. 

It is dangerous because it invents, out of the claims about what we are said to think, a puritanical theory of capitalism that holds within it the seeds of a brutal misdirection of social energy towards the repression and suppression of what it is to be human in the world. 

He is, as I say, not so much a monster (he is not) as a breeder of monsters. He enters into a world where no intelligent criticism is made of such untested absurdities as objectification theory (as a point of value statement) or claims about commodification as a process in which persons have no agency. 

The denial of agency to working people in general seems to tell us more about the despair of the massive and potentially unemployable European graduate class than it does about the heroic struggle of ordinary 'folk' to 'be' and 'become' against often extremely difficult odds.

The negative response to the veil in Europe today is not sophisticated but simply represents belief in a direct challenge to an imagined and assumed ownership of a territory. Guests and implicit 'inferiors' are showing they do not care much about 'our' prior ownership of a territory with is organically grown culture.

Worse, those who insist on the veil or support he veil wearers are seen as intending, implicitly, not merely to take their place on 'our' territory but, and this really is galling to the mass, to show no gratitude for our largesse but to seek, as we have done, in their turn, to impose their culture on us by weight of arrogance, belief and numbers - all at some indeterminate time in the future. 

It is a fear of a past being lost in an observable present to a terrifying future. I believe it is explosive and nothing to do with philosophy. It may be a wrong belief and work should perhaps be done 'rationally' to engage with that belief without making prior ideological demands on the believer but it is not entirely irrational to hold it as a belief once you start understanding what it is to be a human in the world.

Zizek is misdirecting here and therefore assisting both in halting the process of rational investigation of a phenomenon and in storing up the tensions thereby an explosion. His acolytes (much as 1848 liberals became 1870 nationalists and then anti-semites), who still speak of liberty and freedom of a sort now, may slowly become monsters of radical centralisation of power, intellectual snobbery and moral censoriousness (in the case of feminist fellow travellers) in their misplaced concern to turn theory into practice. 

Contemporary left-liberalism has become infected with this thinking. Wise 'ordinary' people will watch and may have to remove these people from influence with more force than their nice liberal natures have allowed. 

One drastic solution might be to close down or sharply reduce the university departments that allow them safe haven and perhaps to create existential-national or regional schools of intellectual resistance to future tyrannies that are based on a re-evaluation of both personal agency and pragmatic analysis. 

Austerity perhaps provides us with the opportunity.

Response to two further responses

There is also a connection between individuation and economic prosperity. We should not, I think, underestimate the shift from industrial to post-industrial and then to the 'internet' society. 

We might characterise these developments in simplified terms as a shift from corporatist or progressive bourgeois to narcissistic bourgeois to anarcho-demotic. The narcissists find now that they have more in common with the old corporatists than they do with a population that has a simple enjoyment of Miley Cyrus' cavortings. 

The anarcho-demotic is precisely not New Age (which Zizek clearly loathes and we share this dislike) because it pleasures itself in experience knowing it is experience whereas New Age thought still denies pleasure at its heart by insisting that experience is truth rather than just, well, experience. 

In that sense, Zizek's criticism of New Age thinking is valid. What he cannot do is make the journey into a Nietzschean joy and even tolerance. He cannot just smile at a hippie. He must censure. He has to impose another meaning on the West because he is not alone in not being able to let go of grand meanings and simply live.  

He tries to do this (being Hegelian) through synthesis, attempting to resynthesise progressivism with narcissism in order to repeat the ultimately sterile sociological performance of the Frankfort School but with new clothes. 

Still it is good to see philosophy back in fashion though it is like giving guns to teenagers when the philosophy is the outpourings of slovenian performance art ... Laibach is for ironists and our university departments do not produce ironists.

Response to a response [how Zizek claims to restore thesubject]

Zizek does have a point in trying to restore the subject (philosophically speaking) and he is a corrective to the worst excesses of post-modernism. In that sense, although his is a wrong turning, at least he is trying to move forward but, if he removes the value of history except as that which has happened and is not to be changed, he is in danger of removing responsibility for the future (ethically speaking).

The future is the unknown consequence of blind histories unfolding - in other words, he is in danger of dealing with ethical consequences as no more than a standing away from the situation as an observer, without responsibility except to the latest iteration of 'Geist which is to be taken as read. 

So, crimes in the future are perhaps to be treated as inconsequentially as the crimes of the past. He may not intend this but it is in the logic of the position. I do not think we can simply dismiss the costs of belief and action in the past.

We may sorrowfully understand causes and not share the sentimental transcendental disapproval of American liberalism but there is more to the case than this. 

The appropriation of the murdered by (say) Zionism may leave a bad taste in the mouth but an equal bad taste is left by declining to consider that the deaths were not just the outcome of history and no longer to be considered.

They could have been prevented by any one of a number of events. Contingency returns responsibility to us and the study of history is the study of contingencies that might well have lead to different outcomes. Zizek's world still unfolds as as a 'given' history (giving us the lunacy of the inevitability of the European Project in the hands of other Hegelians or the even dafter inevitability of the spread of Western values). 

There are two responses to this - a pessimistic responsibility mindful of the weight of consequences (the existentialist position) or a simple cynical faux-optimism that all will unfold regardless in a progressive way and regardless of the casualties along the way. 

A responsible pessimism still seeks that margin of the good through wilful engagement and choice but sees the past dead as exemplars of why we must make choices.

They are irrecoverable and certainly must not be inappropriately sanctified as they might be by the sentimental or the political (as with the Shoah) but they are dead past 'persons' of remembered consequence. The Chinese would immediately comprehends this concept of the ancestor as having their due. They are 'hungry ghosts'.

It was persons who were victims of ignorant cruelties. Our remembrance may not help them but it might help ourselves and those who come after. Zizek's position may come to be of the essence of evil, potentially a profound evil infecting our species at its core, one of ignorance.

German Idealism represents the central tenets of evil conduct in successive iterations of ideology - whether communist, fascist and liberal internationalist.

Response to Four More Responses

It is this claimed 'stand for progress' that I find most objectionable ... does the man have a psychological unconscious pre-disposition to seeing the world burn out of narcissistic outrage at its ineluctable complexity and at an 'is-ness' that does not brook the thoughts of intellectuals such as himself as having relevant meaning. 

That may be unfair but reading him on Robespierre certainly gave me the creeps. His utilitarian equivalent may be that dangerous man who writes the justifications for a slaughter of the innocents through analytical reason in order to save 'Gaia' or other species. 

We are back to Nietzsche's awareness of the death instinct amongst intellectuals and 'thinkers'. It is as if a word is constructed as a value (whether it be justice or progress) and then all humanity must bend to the Logos - the originating crime of Christianity out of Platonism, the Form of Forms. 

This is why Nietzsche is heroic - his 'ubermensch' is not a monster but an 'overcoming' of the tyranny of language. 

This overcoming of the tyranny of the word, while permitting seduction by it, is expressed in Heidegger's later Socratic teasing out of the genealogy of particular words in the German, working remorselessly towards a proposal for the pre-linguistic sentiment that enabled the word. 

One may thus be a thinking brute but a brute with no desire to find reasons to murder once language is understood as to its genealogy. Thus, the only Christian worth knowing philosophically is the one who silently gets the 'mysterium tremendum' that is beyond words and which enables all testaments to be thrust aside before the Christ on the Cross. 

Our worst monsters are wordsmiths who drive language to become the aspic in which we are all to be set. This is the word-weaving terrorism of the career intellectual ... I prefer the madman who cried over the beating of a horse.