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Slavoj Zizek
In the Seventies, when Havel was still a relatively unknown Czech dissident
writer, Keane played a crucial role in making him known in the West: he
organised the publication of Havel's political texts and became a friend. He
also did much to resuscitate Havel's notion of 'civil society' as the site of
resistance to Late Socialist regimes. Despite this personal connection,
Keane's book is far from hagiography - he gives us the 'real Havel' with all
his weaknesses and idiosyncrasies. He divides his Life into six stages: the
early student years under the Stalinist regime; the playwright and essayist
of the Sixties; the defeat of the last great attempt at 'socialism with a
human face' in the Prague Spring of 1968; the years of dissidence and
arrest which culminated in Havel's emergence as the leading spokesman
for Charter 77; the Velvet Revolution; and finally the Presidency. Along the
way, we get an abundance of 'endearing foibles', which far from tarnishing
Havel's heroic image, seem somehow to make his achievement all the more
palpable. His parents were rich 'cultural capitalists', owners of the famous
Barrandov cinema studios ('bourgeois origins'). He has always had
unreliable habits (a fondness for eau de toilette, sleeping late, listening to
rock music) and is known for his promiscuity, notwithstanding the
celebrated prison letters to his working-class wife Olga. (When he was
released from jail in 1977, he spent his first weeks of freedom with a
mistress.) In the Eighties, he was ruthless in establishing himself as
Czechoslovakia's most important dissident - when a potential rival
emerged, doubtful rumours would start to circulate about the rival's links
with the secret police. As President he uses a child's scooter to zoom along
the corridors of the huge Presidential palace.
The source of Havel's tragedy, however, is not the tension between the
public figure and the 'real person', not even his gradual loss of charisma in
recent years. Such things characterise every successful political career
(with the exception of those touched by the grace of premature demise).
Keane writes that Havel's life resembles a 'classical political tragedy'
because it has been 'clamped by moments of . . . triumph spoiled by defeat',
and notes that 'most of the citizens in President Havel's republic think less
of him than they did a year ago.' The crucial issue, however, is the tension
between his two public images: that of heroic dissident who, in the
oppressive and cynical universe of Late Socialism, practised and wrote
about 'living in truth', and that of Post-Modern President who (not unlike
Al Gore) indulges in New Age ruminations that aim to legitimise Nato
military interventions. How do we get from the lone, fragile dissident with
a crumpled jacket and uncompromising ethics, who opposes the all-mighty
totalitarian power, to the President who babbles about the anthropic
principle and the end of the Cartesian paradigm, reminds us that human
rights are conferred on us by the Creator, and is applauded in the US
Congress for his defence of Western values? Is this depressing spectacle the
necessary outcome, the 'truth', of Havel the heroic dissident? To put it in
Hegel's terms: how does the ethically impeccable 'noble consciousness'
imperceptibly pass into the servile 'base consciousness'? Of course, for a
'Post-Modern' Third Way democrat immersed in New Age ideology, there
is no tension: Havel is simply following his destiny, and is deserving of
praise for not shirking political power. But there is no escape from the
conclusion that his life has descended from the sublime to the ridiculous.
Rarely has one individual played so many different parts. The cocky young
student in the early Fifties, member of a closed circle which holds
passionate political discussions and somehow survives the worst years of
the Stalinist terror. The Modernist playwright and critical essayist
struggling to assert himself in the mild thaw of the late Fifties and Sixties.
The first encounter with History - in the Prague Spring - which is also
Havel's first big disappointment. The long ordeal of the Seventies and most
of the Eighties, when he is transformed from a critical playwright into a key
political figure. The miracle of the Velvet Revolution, with Havel emerging
as a skilful politician negotiating the transfer of power and ending up as
President. Finally, there is Havel in the Nineties, the man who presided
over the disintegration of Czechoslovakia and who is now the proponent of
the full integration of the Czech Republic into Western economic and
military structures. Havel himself has been shocked by the swiftness of the
transformation - a TV camera famously caught his look of disbelief as he
sat down to his first official dinner as President.
Keane highlights the limitations of Havel's political project, and the Havel
he describes is sometimes remarkably naive, as when, in January 1990, he
greeted Chancellor Kohl with the words: 'Why don't we work together to
dissolve all political parties? Why don't we set up just one big party, the
Party of Europe?' There is a nice symmetry in the two Vaclavs who have
dominated Czech politics in the past decade: the charismatic Philosopher-
King, the head of a democratic monarchy, finding an appropriate double in
Vaclav Klaus, his Prime Minister, the cold technocratic advocate of full
market liberalism who dismisses any talk of solidarity and community.
In 1974, Paul Theroux visited Vietnam, after the peace agreement and the
withdrawal of the US Army, but before the Communist takeover. He writes
about it in The Great Railway Bazaar. A couple of hundred US soldiers were
still there - deserters, officially and legally non-existent, living in slum
shacks with their Vietnamese wives, earning a living by smuggling or other
crimes. In Theroux's hands, these individuals become representative of
Vietnam's place in global power politics. From them, we gradually unravel
the complex totality of Vietnamese society. When Keane is at his best, he
displays the same ability to extract from small details the global context of
what was going on in Czechoslovakia. The weakest passages in the book are
those which attempt to deal more conceptually with the nature of
'totalitarian' regimes or the social implications of modern technology.
Instead of an account of the inner antagonisms of Communist regimes, we
get the standard liberal clichés about 'totalitarian control'.
Towards the end of his book, Keane touches on the old idea of the 'King's
Two Bodies' and points to the equivalent importance of the Leader's body
in Communist regimes. A 'pre-modern' political order, he writes, relies on
having such sacred bodies, while the democratic system, in which the place
of power is supposedly empty, is open to competitive struggle. But this
contrast fails to grasp the intricacies of 'totalitarianism'. It is not that Keane
is too directly anti-Communist, but that his liberal-democratic stance
prevents him from seeing the horrifying paradox of the 'Stalinist Leader'.
Lenin's first major stroke, which he suffered in May 1922, left his right side
virtually paralysed and for a while deprived him of speech. He realised that
his active political life was over and asked Stalin for some poison so that he
could kill himself; Stalin took the matter to the Politburo, which voted
against Lenin's wish. Lenin assumed that because he was no longer of any
use to the revolutionary struggle, death was the only option - 'calmly
enjoying old age' was out of the question. The idea of his funeral as a great
state event he found repulsive. This was not modesty: he was simply
indifferent to the fate of his body, regarding it as an instrument to be
ruthlessly exploited and discarded when no longer useful.
Havel also discerned the fraudulence of what I would call the 'interpassive
socialism' of the Western academic Left. These leftists aren't interested in
activity - merely in 'authentic' experience. They allow themselves to pursue
their well-paid academic careers in the West, while using the idealised
Other (Cuba, Nicaragua, Tito's Yugoslavia) as the stuff of their ideological
dreams: they dream through the Other, but turn their backs on it if it
disturbs their complacency by abandoning socialism and opting for liberal
capitalism. What is of special interest here is the lack of understanding
between the Western Left and dissidents such as Havel. In the eyes of the
Western Left, Eastern dissidents were too naive in their belief in liberal
democracy - in rejecting socialism, they threw out the baby with the bath
water. In the eyes of the dissidents, the Western Left played patronising
games with them, disavowing the true harshness of totalitarianism. The
idea that the dissidents were somehow guilty for not seizing the unique
opportunity provided by the disintegration of socialism to invent an
authentic alternative to capitalism was pure hypocrisy.
In dissecting Late Socialism, Havel was always aware that Western liberal
democracy was far from meeting the ideals of authentic community and
'living in truth' on behalf of which he and other dissidents opposed
Communism. He was faced, then, with the problem of combining a
rejection of 'totalitarianism' with the need to offer critical insight into
Western democracy. His solution was to follow Heidegger and to see in the
technological hubris of capitalism, its mad dance of self-enhancing
productivity, the expression of a more fundamental transcendental-
ontological principle - 'will to power', 'instrumental reason' - equally
evident in the Communist attempt to overcome capitalism. This was the
argument of Adorno's and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment, which
first engineered the fateful shift from concrete socio-political analysis to
philosophico-anthropological generalisation, by means of which
'instrumental reason' is no longer grounded in concrete capitalist social
relations, but is instead posited as their quasi-transcendental 'foundation'.
The moment that Havel endorsed Heidegger's recourse to quasi-
anthropological or philosophical principle, Stalinism lost its specificity, its
specific political dynamic, and turned into just another example of this
principle (as exemplified by Heidegger's remark, in his Introduction to
Metaphysics, that, in the long run, Russian Communism and Americanism
were 'metaphysically one and the same').
I find the idea of civil society doubly problematic. First, the opposition
between state and civil society works against as well as for liberty and
democracy. For example, in the United States, the Moral Majority presents
itself (and is effectively organised as) the resistance of local civil society to
the regulatory interventions of the liberal state - the recent exclusion of
Darwinism from the school curriculum in Kansas is in this sense
exemplary. So while in the specific case of Late Socialism the idea of civil
society refers to the opening up of a space
of resistance to 'totalitarian' power, there is no essential reason why it
cannot provide space for all the politico-ideological antagonisms that
plagued Communism, including nationalism and opposition movements of
an anti-democratic nature. These are authentic expressions of civil society -
civil society designates the terrain of open struggle, the terrain in which
antagonisms can articulate themselves, without any guarantee that the
'progressive' side will win.
Havel seems now to be blind to the fact that his own opposition to
Communism was rendered possible by the utopian dimension generated
and sustained by Communist regimes. So we get the tragi-comic indignity
which is his recent essay in the New York Review of Books on 'Kosovo and the
End of the Nation-State'. In it, he tries to say that the Nato bombing of
Yugoslavia placed human rights above the rights of the state, that the Nato
alliance's attack on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without a direct
mandate from the UN was not an irresponsible act of aggression, or of
disrespect for international law. It was, on the contrary, according to
Havel, prompted by respect for the law, for a law that ranks higher than the
law which protects the sovereignty of states. The alliance has acted out of
respect for human rights, as both conscience and international treaties
dictate.
Havel further invokes this 'higher law' when he claims that 'human rights,
human freedoms . . . and human dignity have their deepest roots
somewhere outside the perceptible world . . . while the state is a human
creation, human beings are the creation of God.' He seems to be saying that
Nato forces were allowed to violate international law because they acted as
direct instruments of the 'higher law' of God - a clear-cut case of religious
fundamentalism. Havel's statement is a good example of what Ulrich Beck,
in an article in Die Süddeutsche Zeitung last April, called 'militaristic
humanism' or even 'militaristic pacifism'. The problem with this approach
is not that it is inherently contradictory, an Orwellian 'peace is war.' Nor is
the Nato intervention best met with the pacifist-liberal argument that
'more bombs and killing never bring peace' (it goes without saying that this
is wrong). It is not even enough to point out, as a Marxist would, that the
targets of bombardment weren't chosen with moral considerations in
mind, but were determined by geopolitical and economic interests. The
main problem with Havel's argument is that intervention is presented as
having been undertaken for the sake of the victims of hatred and violence -
that is, justified by a depoliticised appeal to universal human rights.
'You know, I don't care if it's this or that,' Meli said. 'I just want all this to
end, and to
feel good again, to feel good in my place and my house with my friends and
family.'
Her support for the Nato intervention is grounded in her wish for the
horror to end:
She wants a settlement that brings foreigners here 'with some force behind
them'. She is indifferent as to who the foreigners are.
'There is tragedy enough for everyone,' she says. 'I feel sorry for the Serbs
who've been bombed and died, and I feel sorry for my own people. But
maybe now there will be a conclusion, a settlement for good. That would be
great.'
Meli is the ideal subject-victim to whose aid Nato comes running: not a
political subject with a clear agenda, but a subject of helpless suffering,
someone who sympathises with all suffering sides in the conflict, caught in
the madness of a local clash that can only be stopped by the intervention of
a benevolent foreign power.
The ultimate paradox of the Nato bombing of Serbia is not the one that was
regularly rehearsed by Western opponents of the war: that by an attempt to
stop ethnic cleansing in Kosovo, Nato triggered cleansing on a larger scale
and created the very humanitarian catastrophe it wanted to prevent. A
deeper paradox involves the ideology of victimisation: when Nato
intervened to protect Kosovar victims, it ensured at that same time that
they would remain victims, inhabitants of a devastated country with a
passive population - they were not encouraged to become an active
politico-military force capable of defending itself. Here we have the basic
paradox of victimisation: the Other to be protected is good insofar as it
remains a victim (which is why we were bombarded with pictures of
helpless Kosovar mothers, children and old people, telling moving stories
of their suffering); the moment it no longer behaves as a victim, but wants
to strike back on its own, it all of a sudden magically turns into a terrorist,
fundamentalist, drug-trafficking Other. This ideology of global
victimisation, the identification of the human subject as 'something that
can be hurt', is the perfect fit for today's global capitalism, though most of
the time it remains invisible to the public eye.
Havel praised the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia as the first case of a military
intervention in a country with full sovereign power, undertaken not out of
any specific economico-strategic interest but because that country was
violating the elementary human rights of an ethnic group. To understand
the falseness of this, compare the new moralism with the great
emancipatory movements inspired by Gandhi and Martin Luther King.
These were movements directed not against a specific group of people, but
against concrete (racist, colonialist) institutionalised practices; they
involved a positive, all-inclusive stance that, far from excluding the 'enemy'
(whites, English colonisers), made an appeal to its moral sense and asked it
to do something that would restore its own moral dignity. The
predominant form of today's 'politically correct' moralism, on the other
hand, is that of Nietzschean ressentiment and envy: it is the fake gesture of
disavowed politics, the assuming of a 'moral', depoliticised position in
order to make a stronger political case. This is a perverted version of
Havel's 'power of the powerless': powerlessness can be manipulated as a
stratagem in order to gain more power, in exactly the same way that today,
in order for one's voice to gain authority, one has to legitimise oneself as
being some kind of (potential or actual) victim of power.
This, then, is Havel's tragedy: his authentic ethical stance has become a
moralising idiom cynically appropriated by the knaves of capitalism. His
heroic insistence on doing the impossible (opposing the seemingly
invincible Communist regime) has ended up serving those who
'realistically' argue that any real change in today's world is impossible. This
reversal is not a betrayal of his original ethical stance, but is inherent in it.
The ultimate lesson of Havel's tragedy is thus a cruel, but inexorable one:
the direct ethical foundation of politics sooner or later turns into its own
comic caricature, adopting the very cynicism it originally opposed.