Slavoj Žižek's Theory of Belief
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Slavoj Žižek is the hottest thing in philosophy today. A Slovenian-born psychoanalytic Marxist, Žižek has been called the "Elvis of cultural theory." He has published dozens of books and hundreds of articles on subjects ranging from Marx's concept of ideology to the films of Alfred Hitchcock to the way in which elevator buttons are false promises of democracy (they don't actually make any difference although they make you feel like you have participated in a democratic system). Žižek has a penchant for telling dirty jokes, quoting Hegel, and exclaiming that everything you think is wrong.
Once a year or so, usually around November, Žižek graces this side of the Atlantic with a series of lectures. For the past few years, he has been trying to hammer out a theory of the way in which belief functions today. This has meant a long engagement with the idea of fundamentalism in contexts that have not always been particularly fruitful. In 2004, for example, speaking in lower Manhattan, Žižek stated, "Hitler was an affront to the real anti-Semites like Goebbels and Wagner."
Žižek's point then, more or less, was that there are authentic believers and there are those who believe for a separate ideology. Hitler, for Žižek, did not hate the Jews so much as he wanted to transform Germany in his image and the Jews were a means to that end. Hitler thus wasn't a real believer in hatred, like musician Richard Wagner, who, without a political agenda, had written things like "we have to explain to ourselves the involuntary repellence possessed for us by the nature and personality of the Jews, so as to vindicate that instinctive dislike which we plainly recognise as stronger and more overpowering than our conscious zeal to rid ourselves thereof."
More than Hitler's being an affront to Wagner, however, we should very much take Žižek's remark as being rather useless to understanding Judaism and anti-Semitism. Does it really matter to the memory of the dead if they were murdered by someone who really hated them versus someone who used a cultural hatred of them to advance political ends? Probably not.
Indeed, most of what Žižek says seems rather unimportant for modern day Jewry. His next to most recent book is on Hegel's Christian theology, his favourite theologian is the orthodox Christian G.K. Chesterton, and when in a public dialogue at Princeton in 2005 Cornel West asked him why he didn't address Judaism as seriously as he did Christianity, Žižek merely retorted that if he were to respond, the audience would accuse him of anti-Semitism.
But Žižek's thinking on belief has in fact taken a turn in the past two years that may make it worth considering as we think about confronting anti-Semitism in the world today. The lectures he gave last year in America were based on a called, "The Ignorance of Chicken, or Who Believes What Today." The title comes from the following joke:
A man comes to believe that he is a grain of cornmeal and constantly fears that he will be eaten by a chicken. To cure this, he goes to a mental hospital where they slowly convince him that he is a man and not a grain of cornmeal. Upon being cured, he leaves the hospital only to be immediately confronted by a chicken. He runs back inside in fear. The doctor sees him and says, "What is wrong? You know now that you are a man and not a grain of cornmeal," to which the subject replies, "Yes, yes, I know that, but does the chicken?"
The point, Žižek thinks, is that we all have been "cured" of belief and now we all have "chickens" doing our believing for us. These chickens are what we today call fundamentalists. Since we no longer believe in an Almighty God, and so forth, someone else has to believe in these things for us. Fundamentalists, as Žižek understands it, have taken up the task, and this, he concludes, is a very dangerous thing.
It is not dangerous because fundamentalists are inherently dangerous, but rather because of what it has done to how belief functions today. In another turn, then, Žižek posits that fundamentalists, in fact, don't actually believe anything, they only know. A Christian fundamentalist, for example, does not take a leap of faith to consider that Jesus Christ is the son of God, rather, she thinks that she knows this as a fact.
For Žižek, then, hardly anyone believes anything anymore. He explains again with reference to a Marx Brothers' joke: "This man looks like an idiot, he acts like an idiot; don't be fooled – he really is an idiot." He tweaks this to state that in the modern day we are just as likely to say, "This man looks like a believer, he acts like a believer; don't be fooled – he really is a believer."
It is this understanding of belief that will help us understand anti-Semitism. Žižek himself made the link explicit in his lecture at Princeton: if one were to analyze a lot of the anti-Semitic propaganda today, one might find that many of its claims about Jewish class membership are largely true. Many Jews do in fact own large media outlets, many are wealthy, many are smart, many are in Washington think-tanks, and so forth. The point for Žižek is that none of this matters. It is more important to argue about the structure of belief than to argue about knowledge. One should not not be anti-Semitic because of knowledge that Jews are in fact humble, perfect people (they are not), but rather one should not be anti-Semitic because of a belief against racism, hatred of groups of people or people in general, and so forth.
Žižek had made a variation this point long ago in The Sublime Object of Ideology, wherein he argued that even if you could show an anti-Semite a humble, perfect Jew, he would still claim that the Jew was merely putting on an act. Proof or knowledge, in other words, is not necessarily what changes beliefs, which hold fast in light of criticism and even reality.
A recent example of this bind is the Protocols of Zion, a documentary about contemporary anti-Semitism. The film shows rather concrete facts about both the absurdity and existence of anti-Semitism (especially the continued belief in the veracity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) but does not tell us what to do about it. As Anita Gates criticized the film in the New York Times: ''[It] makes its case expertly and powerfully, but it does not propose a solution. The cumulative effect of the film's message is enormous sadness that hate is so strong and so resistant to reason."
Žižek's analysis of belief is useful to the extent that it places the concern beyond what we think to embrace how we think. The question is not one of confronting people with reason, but rather attempting to rescue belief from the ossified realm of knowledge and return it to the fungible space of doubt. When knowledge unites with the idea of belief, we are in an intractable space where convincing people otherwise is near impossible. Indeed, it might prove equally difficult to convince society to change the way it has structured its beliefs, but Žižek's analysis is at the very least step in the right direction. After all, no matter how many times we disprove the truth of the Protocols, we may always have to do it again with each new reader. A change in the structure of belief, however, would make a much more lasting effect in the fight against anti-Semitism.
If philosophy remains useful today, it is through gestures like this one, wherein politics is understood to lie in part within the domain of the unconscious parts of our mind and culture. To understand how anti-Semitism functions today and how it can be combated, we first need to understand how belief functions today. The way in which Žižek has well analyzed the place of belief in contemporary culture may be a good first step in this process.
Avi Alpert is a contributing writer to New Voices magazine.
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