Zizek

Nico came to visit on Wednesday, straight from a 4 day sojourn in the Emerald Isle (the lucky bugger!) and fresh from all that Gaelic ale. We decided to meet up at an ICA-organised (http://www.ica.org.uk/), Slavoj Zizek lecture, held at The Great Hall of The Royal Courts of Justice.

The ICA had this to say about the fella: Slavoj Zizek, social theorist and lacanian psychoanalyst, has established himself as one of the most trenchant and perceptive critics of Western political culture at work in the world today. In the sumptuous Great Hall at the Royal Courts of Justice, Zizek will argue that, in their exclusive focus on the prevention of suffering, the Western doctrine of human rights evacuates politics and retreats back to the terrain of good and evil.

Zizek spent one and a half hours embarking on a somewhat dubious case against the universalisation of human rights, articulating a critique which focussed on the view that the enforcement of human rights through military and political intervention only serves to preserve those victims as victims, and prepare the way for continued violations of human rights.

Zizek is an eminent Slovenian philosopher and theorist and, as all eminent philosophers and theorists have been (perhaps unfairly) stereotyped, comes across as fairly eccentric. He is part of an esoteric cult of thinkers trying to popularise an all-too-cerebral view which is, on the one hand, greatly admirable and laudable in its underpinning meaning but is, on the other hand, rather fancy and lacking any sense of realism in its utopian ideals.

Which is well easy for any bystander to criticise, but Zizek's discourse was actually refreshingly animating. The man is admittedly a bit of a crackpot and he has a freakish style of public lecture which ended up being, I thought, a soapbox oration, the first 45 minutes of which was partly inaudible (or, rather, piercingly intense) and partly unintelligible as a result of a mix of reasons: the cavernous hall where the lecture took place, the drowning echoes from that and Zizek's booming voice, dreadful acoustics from a dysfunctional audio system, and Zizek's Slovenian grammar which took a few moments to get acclimatised with.

I was just about to think it was going to be the prelude to a lecture from hell when Zizek surprised with astute ability to observe the paradoxes usually imperceptible to most but are, in some cases, tricky issues to raise in this contemporary age of wannabe-political correctness.

Despite being renowned as a nonconformist maverick, Zizek's analysis contains no major thrust of significantly novel themes, but his somewhat salient charge against the notion embracing the universality of human rights is nevertheless noteworthy in identifying the point elucidating the Western capitalist biasness in such a notion. "Thus what Western liberals consider to be a conscience-salving progressive gesture, becomes, paradoxically, an instrument of oppression."

Undeniably admirable. But such an assertion is, whilst clearly predicating Zizek's vibrancy of intellectual thought, fails in pragmatic ignorance, attributable in part to the impetus that it fails to recognise the political realism and its dogmatic influence on world policy.

The primary reason for the US invasion of Iraq, repeated in numerous interviews, press conferences and speeches to the UN Gen Ass, and policy announcements was that "Iraq has weapons of mass destruction", leaving us with the indubitably clear notion that the US and its allies (the Coalition of the Willing, lest we forget) was morally (and, somehow, as their legal advisers had the moral tenacity to suggest, legally) right to invade Iraq because: (as copied wholesale from an interesting website: (a) "this is about protecting the American people" (from White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan's statement to the press - he does not specify what Americans need protecting from); and (b) "Saddam was dangerous, and the world is safer without him in power" (from Bush's interview with Barbara Walters in 20/20)."

So when 20/20 asked Bush whether it was worth invading Iraq even thought the Coalition of the Willing could find no weapons of mass destruction hidden beneath the arid sands of the Iraqi landscape, Walters: "Now that we know that that was wrong? Was it worth it?", Bush goes: "Oh, absolutely". So there we have it. Bush still believes in his decision to invade Iraq despite Saddam's complete lack of a WMD program. It is this sort of steadfast adherence to his own (goofy, miscalculated) decisions that makes him out to either be a resolute leader or a stubborn fool, a fool that is nonetheless resident at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, DC.

Framed in this perspective, the Coalition of the Willing now finds itself left saddled with a somewhat distasteful job of refocusing the invasion on the grounds of human rights, ridding Iraq of an evil dictator and ensuring the spread of democracy in the Middle East, a goal which Bush and previous U.S. administrations are clearly very committed to. Quite ostensibly a false banner of hope to a disenchanted third world, that of an Uncle Sam in shining armour to rid unautonomous social regimes of their undesirable leaders, such a perspective is quite unconvincing. The existence of a pattern of convergent behaviour in many countries propounding the idea of human rights and regime change exemplifies the contention that human rights is undeniably a tool to be used by anyone in the world stage, the common denominator clearly independent of human rights enforcement as the real reason for invasion.