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The anxious expectation that nothing will happen, that capitalism will go on indefinitely, the desperate demand to do something, to revolutionize capitalism, is a fake. The will to revolutionary change emerges as an urge, as an "I cannot do it otherwise," or it is worthless. With regard to Bernard Williams's distinction between Ought and Must, an authentic revolution is by definition performed as a Must - it is not something we "ought to do" as an ideal we are striving for, but something we cannot but to, since we cannot do it otherwise. Which is why today's worry of the Leftists that revolution will not occur, that global capitalism will just go on indefinitely, is false insofar as it turns revolution into a moral obligation, into something we ought to do while we fight the inertia of the capitalist present.
But, again, the ultimate argument against this perspective is the simple encounter of excessive suffering generated by political violence. Sometimes, one cannot but be shocked by the excessive indifference towards suffering, even and especially when this suffering is widely reported in the media and condemned, as if it is the very outrage at suffering which turns us into its immobilized fascinated spectators. Recall, in the early 1990s, the three-years-long siege of Sarajevo, with the population starving, exposed to permanent shelling and snipers' fire. The big enigma here is: although all the media were full of pictures and reports, why did not the UN forces, NATO or the US accomplish just a small act of breaking the siege of Sarajevo, of imposing a corridor through which people and provisions could circulate freely? It would have cost nothing: with a little bit of serious pressure on the Serb forces, the prolonged spectacle of encircled Sarajevo exposed to ridiculous terror would have been over. There is only one answer to this enigma, the one proposed by Rony Brauman himself who, on behalf of the Red Cross, coordinated the help to Sarajevo: the very presentation of the crisis of Sarajevo as "humanitarian," the very recasting of the political-military conflict into the humanitarian terms, was sustained by an eminently political choice, that of, basically, taking the Serb side in the conflict. Especially ominous and manipulative was here the role of Mitterand.
The celebration of 'humanitarian intervention' in Yugoslavia took the place of a political discourse, disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. /.../ It was apparently not possible, for Francois Mitterand, to express his analysis of the war in Yugoslavia. With the strictly humanitarian response, he discovered an unexpected source of communication or, more precisely, of cosmetics, which is a little bit the same thing. /.../ Mitterand remained in favor of the maintenance of Yugoslavia within its borders and was persuaded that only a strong Serbian power was in the position to guarantee a certain stability in this explosive region. This position rapidly became unacceptable in the eyes of the French people. All the bustling activity and the humanitarian discourse permitted him to reaffirm the unfailing commitment of France to the Rights of Man in the end, and to mimic an opposition to Greater Serbian fascism, all in giving it free rein. <ref> Rony Bauman, "From Philantropy to Humanitarianism," in <i>South Atlantic Quaterly</i> 2/3, Spring 2004</ref>
This line, of course, leads straight to Agamben's notion of [[homo sacer]] as a human being reduced to "bare life": in a properly Hegelian paradoxical [[dialectic]]s of [[universal]] and [[particular]], it is precisely when a human being is deprived of his particular socio-political identity which accounts for his determinate citizenship, that he, in one and the same move, is no longer recognized and/or treated as human. In short, the paradox is that one is deprived of human rights precisely when one is effectively, in one's social reality, reduced to a human being "in general," without citizenship, profession, etc., that is to say, precisely when one effectively becomes the ideal BEARER of "universal human rights" (which belong to me "independently of" my profession, sex, citizenship, religion, ethnic identity...).
We thus arrived at a standard "postmodern," "anti-essentialist" position, a kind of political version of [[Foucault]]'s notion of sex as generated by a multitude of the practices of sexuality: "man," the bearer of Human Rights, is generated by a set of political practices which materialize citizenship - is, however, this enough? Jacques Ranciere<ref> Jacques Rancière, "Who is the Subject of Human Rights," in <i>South Atlantic Quaterly</i> 2/3, Spring 2004</ref> proposed a very elegant and precise solution of the antinomy between Human Rights (belonging to "man as such") and the politicization of citizens: while Human Rights cannot be posited as an unhistorical "essentialist" Beyond with regard to the contingent sphere of political struggles, as universal "natural rights of man" exempted from history, they also should not be dismissed as a reified fetish which is a product of concrete historical processes of the politicization of citizens. The gap between the universality of Human Rights and the political rights of citizens is thus not a gap between the universality of man and a specific political sphere; it, rather, "separates the whole of the community from itself," as Ranciere put it in a precise Hegelian way.<ref>Ibid.</ref> Far from being pre-political, "universal Human Rights" designate the precise space of politicization proper: what they amount to is the right to universality as such, the right of a political agent to assert its radical non-coincidence with itself (in its particular identity), i.e., to posit itself - precisely insofar as it is the "surnumerary" one, the "part with no part," the one without a proper place in the social edifice - as an agent of universality of the Social as such. The paradox is thus a very precise one, and symmetrical to the paradox of universal human rights as the rights of those reduced to inhumanity: at the very moment when we try to conceive political rights of citizens without the reference to universal "meta-political" Human Rights, we lose politics itself, i.e., we reduce politics to a "post-political" play of negotiation of particular interests. - What, then, happens to Human Rights when they are reduced to the rights of homo sacer, of those excluded from the political community, reduced to "bare life" - i.e., when they become of no use, since they are the rights of those who, precisely, have no rights, are treated as inhuman? Ranciere proposes here an extremely salient dialectical reversal /.../ when they are of no use, you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine, clothes, and rights. It is in this way, as the result of this process, that the Rights of Man become the rights of those who have no rights, the rights of bare human beings subjected to inhuman repression and inhuman conditions of existence. They become humanitarian rights, the rights of those who cannot enact them, the victims of the absolute denial of right. For all this, they are not void. Political names and political places never become merely void. The void is filled by somebody or something else. /.../ if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to enact Human Rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is called the "right to humanitarian interference" - a right that some nations assume to the supposed benefit of victimized populations, and very often against the advice of the humanitarian organizations themselves. The "right to humanitarian interference" might be described as a sort of "return to sender": the disused rights that had been send to the rightless are sent back to the senders. <ref>Ibid.</ref>
So, to put it in the Leninist way: what today, in the predominant Western discourse, the "Human Rights of the Third World suffering victims" effectively mean is the right of the Western powers themselves to intervene - politically, economically, culturally, militarily - in the Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human Rights. The reference to Lacan's formula of communication (in which the sender gets back from the receiver-addressee his own message in its inverted, i.e. true, form) is here up to the point: in the reigning discourse of humanitarian interventionism, the developed West is effectively getting back from the victimized Third World its own message in its true form. And the moment Human Rights are thus depoliticized, the discourse dealing with them has to change to ethics: reference to the pre-political opposition of Good and Evil has to be mobilized. Today's "new reign of Ethics," <ref>Ibid.</ref> clearly discernible in, say, Michael Ignatieff's work, thus relies on a violent gesture of depoliticization, of denying to the victimized other political subjectivization. And, as Ranciere pointed out, liberal humanitarianism a la Ignatieff unexpectedly meets the "radical" position of Foucault or Agamben with regard to this depoliticization: the Foucauldian-Agambenian notion of "biopolitics" as the culmination of the entire Western thought ends up getting caught in a kind of "ontological trap" in which concentration camps appear as a kind of "ontological destiny: each of us would be in the situation of the refugee in a camp. Any difference grows faint between democracy and totalitarianism and any political practice proves to be already ensnared in the biopolitical trap."<ref>Ibid.</ref>
What, then, is the way out of this deadlock? Balibar ends with an ambiguous reference to Mahatma Gandhi. It is true that Gandhi's formula "Be yourself the change you would like to see in the world" encapsulates perfectly the basic attitude of emancipatory change: do not wait for the "objective process" to generate the expected/desired change, since if you just wait for it, it will never come; instead, throw YOURSELF into it, BE this change, take upon yourself the risk of enacting it directly. However, is not the ultimate limitation of Gandhi's strategy that it only works against a liberal-democratic regime which refers to certain minimal ethico-political standards, i.e., in which, to put it in pathetic terms, those in power still "have conscience." Recall Gandhi's reply, in the late 1930s, to the question of what should the Jews in Germany do against Hitler: they should commit a collective suicide and thus arouse the conscience of the world... One can easily imagine what the Nazi reaction to it would have been: OK, we will help you, where do you want the poison to be delivered to you?
There is, however, another way in which Balibar's plea for renouncing violence can be given a specific twist - that of what one is tempted to call the Bartleby-politics. Recall the two symmetrically opposed modes of the "living dead," of finding oneself in the uncanny place "between the two deaths": one is either biologically dead while symbolically alive (surviving one's biological death as a spectral apparition or symbolic authority of the Name), or symbolically dead while biologically alive (those excluded from the socio-symbolic order, from Antigone to today's homo sacer). And what if we apply the same logic to the opposition of violence and non-violence, identifying two modes of their intersection? We all know the pop-psychological notion of the "passive-aggressive behavior," usually applied to a housewife who, instead of actively opposing her husband, passively sabotages him. And this brings us back to our beginning: perhaps, one should assert this attitude of passive aggressivity as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity, the standard "interpassive" mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make it sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change . In such a constellation, the first truly critical ("aggressive," violent) step is to WITHDRAW into passivity, to refuse to participate - Bartleby's "I would prefer not to" is the necessary first step which as it were clears the ground for a true activity, for an act that will effectively change the coordinates of the constellation. <ttref><b><a name="2"></a><a href="#2x">2</a></b></tt>. Rony Bauman, "From Philantropy to Humanitarianism," in <i>South Atlantic Quaterly</i> 2/3, Spring 2004.<br>Bauman, "From Philantropy to Humanitarianism," in <i/ref>South Atlantic Quaterly</i
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[[Category:Articles by Slavoj Žižek]]
[[Category:Works]]
