Imagining Capital as Real (part I)

A couple of months ago I started working on a paper on the fantasy of neoliberalism. So, of course I turned to Alphonse for insight. Below, some of my initial reflections and Alphonse's insights. A longer, but still quite rough version of the paper is here:  Download enjoying_neoliberalism.doc .

Zizek argues that Capital is Real in several senses: it is the ‘positive condition of hegemonic struggle’ (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 319), it ‘sets a limit to resignification,’ and it determines “the structure of the material social processes themselves’ (Ticklish Subject 276).  But, to assert that Capital is Real is to embrace neoliberal ideology, to accept its premises without a struggle, without inquiry into how neoliberal faith in the market has come to produce a sense of its own inevitability. What is necessary, then, is an account of the neoliberal imaginary allied with the Real.

One might want to claim that Zizek’s elaboration of the Real in terms of an imaginary Real, a symbolic Real, and a real Real and his specification of capital as a symbolic Real (one that operates in terms of basic formulae or persists as an underlying structure) contributes to thinking about capitalism insofar as it points to a logic determining and distorting, that is, forming, the basic matrix of contemporary socio-political life. I disagree.  The specification of capital as formulae invests economics with a scientific status, with the ability to formulate laws or truths about the world that tell us how the world functions. Such an investment occludes and naturalizes the roles of governments, both as national states and as international organizations, in creating property rights, establishing corporations, producing a functioning tax system, and sustaining and militarily defending the very infrastructure necessary for business.

A more promising way of thinking about capital would be as a real Real, that is, as the traumatic Real threatening loss, rupture, and disintegration, as the Real that must be avoided yet always seeps through. The UN Report on Human Settlements provides a glimpse of this Real of capital: it estimates that in 2001 924 million people lived in slums.   In the words of the report, “The urban poor are trapped in an informal and ‘illegal’ world—in slums that are not reflected on maps, where waste is not collected, where taxes are not paid and where public services are not provided. Officially, they do not exist” (6). The global urban people, who do not exist within capital’s dominant frame, are thus Real in the sense that they insist, making their presence felt (if not acknowledged) as that which produces and contests capitalism on a global scale. The impossibility of their conditions—how can one quarter of the world’s people live on less than one dollar a day? What does it mean to consider sanitation in ratios of one toilet per 500 inhabitants of a district?—ruptures claims about the logic of capital with that which cannot be thought.   If such a reading of capital as Real is plausible, then thinking about neoliberalism as the imaginary that stages and prevents confrontation with the Real of capital is indispensable.

How is that we have been taken in by capital? That we find ourselves so entrenched in it that escape seems impossible, a step into oblivion?

Alphonse has some insight into these questions:

Consider a particular moment - say from the creation of the bank of England to Waterloo - when Euro-culture is grappling with Capital specifically as Real, and newly determining “the structure of the material social processes themselves" but utterly without explanation or representation, thus provoking the fantasms. The story of capital's appearance and conquest is being told as it happens as a tale of terror in many instances, the tale of an occult threat to the Symbolic, whose nature is mysterious, compelling, irresistble, terrifying, and disgusting. And the attempts to represent Capital culturally, in popular and literary writing, are frenzied and rely on the revival of antique narratives and the fantastic and the fabulous, while the 'science' of capital and classical liberalism develops as a certain kind of neo-platonic fable whose message is at once 'there are no monsters (and there is no Real), and fear and anxiety is a sign of mental and social inferiority (its for women and workers)'. The Imaginary manages this confrontation which is requiring an unprecedently rapid and bloody adjustment of the social order.

So in the early period, Capital is experienced as the Real before it is established otherwise, before it appears deformed in 'certain guises' - that is, it is a force very much felt by everyone, as incomprehensible, inimical, amoral, disorderly pressure, an atmosphere, a plague, a miasma - somewhat before it is accounted for discursively and ideologically. And the seeds of neo-liberalism, found in Steuart more than Smith, are in fact arising in response to the initial tale of terror of capital, which is not a little obssessed with the first physical form of pure capitalist capital, which are not financial instruments but kidnapped Africans transported to the Carribean, whose usage as capital was deregulated some fifty years prior to the appearance of a truly freely moving capital form of money.

And looking back to the initial stages, the confrontation with the Real of Capital was very difficult at first to avoid-negotiate-choreograph: Its a head-exploding irony that the modern concept of 'freedom' upon which the idea of 'free trade' is built and which is the fairy in its shell was first embodied in sugar industry slaves, who were physically the 'freedom' of their proprietors. There had never in the history of man been a form of property right that was truly 'free and unfettered' before it was invested in these unfree fettered people, whose property-condition served as the model for all future forms of 'free and unfettered' property including banknotes. All the financial mechanisms of debt were built up for the triangle trade.

Comments

Jodi and Alphonse

This is a great discussion. There is alot to chew on so my initial response may be sketchy. Regarding Jodi's comments about the urban slum dwellers, it seems to me that it may be as simple as "out of sight, out of mind." The degradation of their conditions are not experienced by most people in the "developed" world. Hell, poverty in the United States is not even real to the vast majority, or when we do acknowledge it, it is brushed with the stories of personal failings or a "culture of poverty."

Alphonse, it is your last comment that is most intriguing. The idea that slavery is the model for property rights is striking. I would love for you to expound more on that idea.

Anyway, I have to pick up my kids so I better go. Look forward to more discussions like this.

[Alain]

Sorry That I did not sign the above comment. You are probably wondering who is this guy with kids? I can not wait to see part 2.

[Jodi]

Thanks, Alain. Ever since I first started barraging Alphonse with this stuff, she has had amazing insights, as well as great suggestions for things to read....

[A Disgruntled Postal Worker]

From Alphonse: "It's a head-exploding irony that the modern concept of 'freedom' upon which the idea of 'free trade' is built and which is the fairy in its shell was first embodied in sugar industry slaves, who were physically the 'freedom' of their proprietors."

Ellen Meiksins Woods in _The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View_ notes that exploitation of labor was even a tacit premise in the *theory* of early capitalism. Locke's formula for property rights--mixing labor with resources (2nd Treatise on Gov't)--specified not just an individual doing so, but that individual's men, i.e., servants and slaves, doing so on his behalf.

I don't know the date of the regulation of slave trade that Alphonse refers to, so Locke's slipping exploited labor into his individualist account of property rights might be a piece of the subsequent ideology around capitalism.

Given the fantasy accounts of globalization (Friedman comes to mind) vs. the mindset of someone like Larry "Africa is vastly underpolluted" Summers (I can imagine that SOB reading that almost a billion people were in poverty in '01 and wondering if we don't need more people in more dire poverty to ensure global economic growth), maybe we could revive or at least revisit Marx's wonderful epithet, Vulgar Economist. Friedman and his ilk, avoiding the past and present Real of capitalism, telling just-so stories, and dispensing panegyrics to the market as the best thing in this best of all possible worlds, are Vulgar Economists. Summers is not. That does not make him a good guy; it only makes him a vile bastard instead of an fuzzy-thinking Pollyanna. I realize that the problem of capitalism is a systemic one, and that singling out people as knaves and fools does not necessarily advance the struggle against it. But there's something to be said for finding a precise way to express contempt and loathing, especially during a long, drawn-out struggle.

[alphonsevanworden]

Hey Mr Postman...Yes I second that recommendation of Meiksins Wood, and also Brenner's Merchants and Revolution, which is its big influence.

Regarding the deregulation of slaves; there was no official deregulation, and Locke was theorizing after or alongside the fact - the Code Noir was proposed, reiterated and technically (but never practically) in force in the late 1690s. But its non enforcement, and more importantly the planters rationales for disregarding it, and its effective non-existence in the system of leverage and debt, (its stipulations for remuneration to slaves were never considered liabilities of planters) effectively created free and unfettered capital and its ideology around the turn of the 18th century when the state was still strictly controlling movements and exploitation of other capital assets in the absolutist scheme as a matter of course. In the early
18th c., planters had more power over and unfettered freedom to use, exploit, dispose of the slaves' bodies than they had for the use of +their own+ bodies, whose sexual and reproductive uses for example were regulated by bothe church and state.

The planter ideology was not however hegemonic - obviously in Saint Domingue the slaves (majority, especially dominant on the soon to be Haitian side of the island) and some free propertyless rejected it, but even in the french empire it was challenged by previously dominant absolutist ideology. In the lead up to the Haitian revolution, one of the kind of political milestones in the growth of the revolt was a legal case, involving an individual slave, where the free unfettered mastery of the planter over the slave - had the planter really unlimited powers, the right of life death etc., had the slave any status at all as a) a subject of the French King and b) a human being? - whose progress exhibits pretty clearly the struggle between the new ideology and its philosophical construction of property and the resisting ideology (both of which had absorbed the rights of man discourse and the englightenment arguments of Locke and posse, but very differently according to class division).

But anyhoo, I thought this was relevant to Jodi's argument in the sense that in the moment of origin of the concept 'free' and 'freedom' that is part of 'free trade,' the concept's concrete exemplar is a slave, and the ideology in this way is resorting to the techniques of the fantastic or fabulous. Aladdin's genie, revised in Ariel: Ariel has been enslaved to Prospero ironically as the result of being 'freed' (from the curse and captivity) from the witch. Ariel's 'freedom' (the freedom effectively of Ariel's labour power to create-hampered by the witch- which Prospero expropriates) and 'slavery' are a single state of being. [See also the superb book on the witch hunts of the period leading up to the Code Noir, Silvia Federici's Caliban and the Witch.]

[alphonsevanworden]

It occurs to me that the indeterminacy - is capital Real or Imaginary - may hint less at our poor grasp of capital than at a serious flaw in Lacan's propositions.

Mebbe? she says, biting lip.

[Jodi]

Real or imaginary: the indeterminacy here is an indeterminacy rupturing any concept or conceptual pairing (political-economic, economic-cultural, personal-political). What strikes me as important about it is the political position/theory of which the claim is a part. So, what are the repercussions of going in one direction rather than another?

[alphonsevanworden]

I think your route is inarguably the fruitful one, and the other is suited only to advance the ideologies of neoliberalism and ethnic nationalism (its apparent purpose) by proposing the arrival of the messiah to abolish capitalism tout court as the only possible mode of disrupting their consolidation, in advance of which only surrender and collaboration appear both grown up and virile. But I sense your route is already leading to a revision of the categories in question, that is, the tide of the operation appears poised to turn, from bringing this mode of analysis to bear on History, to bringing History to bear on this mode of analysis.

[Troll of Sorrow]

"Capitalism" is nearly a useless term. DO you mean people and companies should not be allowed to profit? Or merely that it's not efficient, or, more likely you just dont dig it since some hip postmod professor told you it was Oppressive. Assuming some abstract, and possilbly undefinable concept has a specific ethical character--that "neoliberalism" holds this or advocates that--is also a type of intellectual sin of the worst sort, one that Hegel and probably Marx now pay for in some some concept-loaded region of hades.

[Anthony Paul Smith]

You may be interested in Phillip Goodchild's recent piece "Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology" in _Theology and the Political_ where he discusses this as well. He is far less of a humanist than Zizek is, so I like him more, but it is along these lines

[Jodi]

APS--thanks, will look for it.

AvW--I don't think Z is out to advance ethnic nationalism, but maybe I misunderstood what you were getting at?

[alphonsevanworden]

As you contend, the proposition that Capital is 'Real' in the Lacanian sense suggests, ultimately, the futility of struggling to check the power of the masters of capital over humanity. At the same time, the designation of this specific role in the Lacanian scheme to Capital requires and implies that the guises in which Capital appears, the ideologies and coercive forces which serve its accumulation, the institutions which protect, organize, and create it, and the veils by which its interests and actions are disguised are also to be understood by the same scheme - that is, the designation of Capital as Real locks phenomena with specific relations to Capital into corresponding specific relations with the Real and thus positions them within the Lacanian framework.

Given this proposition, take the treatment below of Israeli expansionism. Here Zizek appears to simply resort to the old outmoded Eastern European antisemitic tradition of referring to Capital by the name 'the Jews.' But with eternal-oriental-national 'the Jews' functioning here as a fantastic guise of Capital, if we posit that Capital - of which the fabulous 'the Jews' are a peculiar guise in the ideological scheme deployed uncritically here - is Real, what are we to make of ethnic nationalism in Israel/Palestine?:

"The Israeli State is not satisfied with the people on the West Bank and in Gaza, so it considers the option of replacing them with another people. That, precisely, the Jews, the exemplary victims, are now considering a radical 'ethnic cleansing' (the 'transfer' - a perfect Orwellian misnomer - of the Palestinians from the West Bank) is the ultimate paradox demanding closer consideration.
"If there ever was a passionate attachment to the lost object, a refusal to come to terms with its loss, it is the Jewish attachment to their land and Jerusalem, the _(See you) next year in Jerusalem. And, are the present troubles not the supreme proof of the catastrophic consequences of such a radical fidelity, when it is taken literally? In the last two-thousand years, when Jews were fundamentally a nation without land, living permanently in exile, with no firm roots in the place where they were staying, their reference to Jerusalem was, at root, a purely negative one, a prohibition against "painting an image of home," against feeling at home anywhere on earth.
"However, with the process of returning to Palestine, starting one-hundred years ago, the metaphysical Other Place was directly identified with a determinate place on earth. When Jews lost their land and elevated it into the mythical lost object, 'Jerusalem' became much more than a piece of land: it became the metaphor for the coming of the Messiah, for a metaphysical home, for the end of the wandering which characterizes human existence. The mechanism is well-known: after an object is lost, it turns into a stand-in for much more, for all that we miss in our terrestrial lives. When a thousand-year-old dream is finally close to realization, such a realization HAS to turn into a nightmare.
"According to the Jewish tradition, Lilith is the woman a man makes love to while he masturbates alone in his bed during the night (4) - so, far from standing for the feminine identity liberated from the patriarchal hold, as some feminists claim, her status is purely phallic: she is what Lacan calls La femme, the Woman, the fantasmatic supplement of the male masturbatory phallic jouissance. Significantly, while there is only one man (Adam), the femininity is from the very beginning split between Eve and Lilith, between the "ordinary" hysterical barred subject ($) and the fantasmatic spectre of Woman: when a man is having sex with a "real" woman, he is using her as a masturbatory prop to support his fantasizing about the non-existent Woman... (5)
"The catastrophe occurs when the two women collapse into one, when the "ordinary" partner is elevated to the dignity of Lilith - which is structurally perfectly homologous to the Zionist elevation of the "ordinary" Jerusalem into Jerusalem the Jews were dreaming about for thousands of years..."

It would seem that this specific ethnic nationalism is as inescapable and virtually as immune to political challenge as the accumulation it facilitates.

[Jodi]

I don't get your point. In the Z example, he isn't talking about Capital. He's talking about Israeli occupation of Palestine. The context is different.

I think you overstate 'locks'--the Real is not a final structure or base. It designates ruptures and antagonisms that disrupt and sustain our everyday reality, ruptures horrific and miraculous.

The point I want to make in my account of neoliberalism is to draw out the fantasty aspects that produce a sense of the reality of capital; I think Z overlooks this by too quick recourse to the Real.

On ethnic nationalism structurally: as you know, for Z this is the flipside of Capital; it provides a kind of ridigity or stability over and against the instability of Capital. But this alternative, Capital or nationalism, is the one he wants to break out of, disrupt; his claim is that this structure can be broken, there is another side, another way. Getting there, finding it, voicing it, making it, having it bust through is the challenge, since the fall of socialism--which, incidentally, was an idea I heard widely voiced when I was in Zagreb--and it seems a variation on the situation in the US where the only strong challenges to the unfettered market come from the Right: they are the ones complaining about market interests driving culture, say.

[alphonsevanworden]

"I don't get your point. In the Z example, he isn't talking about Capital. He's talking about Israeli occupation of Palestine. The context is different."

I think i either posted something unfinished or lost it.

If posted, ignore previous.

Is Zizek not talking about capital? How could this be? Where did it go?

To say eternal 'the Jews' - a collectivity defined as collectively victimized and sharing a collective personality, developed in an outmoded ideology being revived and deployed here uncritically - is annexing the West Bank is nonsense, means nothing, refers to nothing, unless it is understood that eternal 'the Jews' is an established metaphor for capital. I assure you the 'the Jews' in trust for whom the JNF holds capital is a figment - I don't get a divident from that enterprise; but the gentile shareholders of Catepillar do.

Why would capital be different in Israel? Why would there it not determine 'material social processes'? How would it differ from capital in the nowhere-in-particular to which Zizek refers, where it is Real?

As for ethnic nationalism: Zizek has two positions; one on the nationalism that is product of legal apparatus; he sometimes calls it ethnic but he is always specifically talking about economic nationalism which he condemns as anticapitalist and antiAmerican. Ethnic nationalism, the product of mass media, is something he manufactures himself, as we can see in his deployment uncritically of its core fictions; such as 'the Jews' and 'the Slovenes' (which explicitly excluded Jewish and Roma natives of Slovenia for example but did not otherwise very explicitly define itself except in the usual hazy way of naming the virtues of its carriers. It is taken by Zizek, like eternal 'the Jews' here in the analysis of the enterprise of primitive accumulation that is the Israeli Occupation of Palestine, as self evident.)

If we are to take Zizek seriously; as offering somlething not merely discursive, not merely referring to capital's representations in mass media and defining them as neat metaphors for the Real, then we have to assume that to talk about the Israeli occupation of Palestine is inescapably to talk about capital, which is being proposed as the Real. If it isn't, either the remarks on capital are frivolous and don't refer to anything, or Israel is not really of this world.

'Locks': I did not mean to suggest that 'material social processes' are locked into static relations to capital. Only that if Capital is Real, then it goes without saying that if we accepted this interpretation of capital as real, the obtaining relation of any particular social process to capital, as long as it lasts, 'is' the obtaining relation of that social process to the Real that is capital. That X is to capital as X is to (capital as) Real; these are the locked pair. Otherwise I am unclear what 'capital is Real' might imply about social processes or capital. (I am willing to accept the proposition could mean to say that some ways of portraying capital can easily make it function as a metaphor or analogy for the Real in Lacanian psychoanalysis, but this aould involve a fairly loose and creative usage, perhaps unwarranted, of the verb 'to be.')

[Jodi]

To take a couple of paragraphs from popular writing that happen not to mention Capital directly and use that to launch an entire critique is, from where I sit, not particularly compelling. All this move says to me is that in the paragraphs cited Z isn't talking about what you want him to talk about.

As to uncritical deployment of core fictions: I don't buy it. For the most part, Z employs these fictions as a way to set out an ideological formation or fantasy, to demonstrate how a fantasy is at work in what is presented as a specific political deadlock.

[edge]

Thank for posting this. I'm not going to fall into a trap that both you and Z apparently deplore; however, and praise you for not meeting the mark here. You need to revise this essay.

Your essay strikes me as both too Zizek centric and then gratuitiously critical of Z at the same time.

Let me give you an example of a non-sequitur:

You use Z's play on Lacan's real, then you say:

"The specification of capital as formulae invests economics with a scientific status, with the ability to formulate laws or truths about the world that tell us how the world functions."

What? What are you critiquing here? Lacan's pseudo-scientific penchant for mathemes? The discipline of economics, to which Z makes no contribution?

You follow with a very narrow definition of neoliberalism that you say Z is unquestioningly accepting. where is he doing that? You are both relying on him too much and not reading him closely enough.

Z in his riff on global capital as unrepresentable horizon is based heavily on Jameson, who I think is right on. And they both constantly point to how the market has become naturalized; that is truism we all live with. Do you add to an understanding with your paper. I don't think so.

And you contradict yourself. on the one hand you agree that the ideology of the market has been naturalized and then you say that it is not?

I would recommend that you do more study of economics and economic theory, of liberalism proper, and of conservatism.

You take very narrow hits at Zizek, then rely on other secondary commentary that reiterates the same points as Z as buttress for a critique of Z.

Your example of a slum is not an example of anything outside of the horzion of capital....

[Jodi]

First, naturalized is not the same as the Real. Second, I don't say Z focuses on neoliberalism--I focus on neoliberalism as a way of specifying the Capitalism at hand. Third, the point of the slum example is that economists can't account for how slumdwellers are able to survive; in this precise way, they are unrepresentable or in Ranciere's terms they are uncountable, which is factually the case. Fourth, in your recommendations for further study you forgot to include set theory, theology, and the history of aesthetics.

[alphonsevanworden]

"All this move says to me is that in the paragraphs cited Z isn't talking about what you want him to talk about."

He is talking explicitly about capital here and the Israeli occuption there.

The referents of these discursive figures of course are inextricably intertwined, and the pronouncements on capital, if they refer outside discourse to material capital, must apply to the occupation, if the same goes for that term. If we take capital to mean 'Zizek's or some other intellectual's invocations of the term' then yes, he can talk about the occupation without talking about capital. He can also talk about 'the occupation' - the story related in his article, the 'talking about the occupation' - without talking about the occupation (the real world one in Palestine.) And does indeed, because that one in the article is the work of a monster - 'the Jews' - and the one on earth is the work of identifiable capitalists.

So there remains a mystery: what is this protagonist in Zizek's story: eternal unchanging 'the Jews' ? What is its relation to Lillith/Jerusalem, to capital, and to the Real?

In Zizek's article, to this purportedly ancient super-sub-inhuman unchanging victimized/victimizer entity are attributed actions which in the real world are - this is not controversial - performed by capital and capitalists. In other contexts from which you have supplied quotation, Zizek has evoked a fairy of these real world capitalists, that is, when he is 'talking about' 'capital.' They exist in Israael/ Palestine on earth and we can name them individually and supply the addresses of their offices, but they do not exist in Israel Palestine in Zizek's account, because he is not 'talking about' them.

Or is he?

Surely he is. He narrates the things they do. Who is he 'talking about' when he relates the persecution of Palestinians in the occupied territories? He is 'talking about' an indentifiable group of people organizing their wealth and their activity in institutions listed in the phone book. What he is not doing is 'naming them' by their usual names. But he is 'talking about' them, about their deeds, but attributing their deeds to an invention of his own, a fictional protagonist, an immortal being with no address or phone number. And he is attributing to this immortal being certain real world activities - the settlement of the West Bank - and also embellishing the portrait with fictional characteristics - habits of speech - 'next year in jersualem' - habits of thought, relations to Lillith, etc..

'The Jews' is this composite character of Nathan The Wise and Lockheed Martin. Is it not serving most importantly, in the narrative which hints that its referent is the real world occupation, a metaphor for capital? Is it much more, in the main story, than merely a label for capital? Does this refer to a group of living people - if so, whom? If to something else - what?

[Jodi]

The passages you quote initially also appear in a section of the first chapter of Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle. The section is called 'A modest proposal for an act in the middle east.' This section follows one on Europe wherein Z argues that the Iraq war is basically a war between the US and Europe to the extent that it involves strengthening the dollar, preventing its collapse etc.

At any rate, Zizek calls the Israeli-Palestinian conflict a symptomal knot because it seems that there is some sort of libidinal profit gained by the deadlock: everyone wants to get rid of the conflict but no one wants to remove it. He writes:

...is it not that, in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the standard roles are somehow reversed, twisted around as a in a knot. Israel--officially representing Western liberal modernity in the area--legimizes itself in terms of its ethnic-religious identity, while the Palestinians--decried as premodern 'fundamentalists'--legitimze their demands in terms of secular citizenship. So we have the paradox of the State of Israel, the supposed island of liberal democratic modernity in the Middle East, countering Arab demands with an even more 'fundamentalist' ethno-religious claim to sacred land.

after discussin Rabin and the recognition of the PLO, Z writes:

The underlying problem is not only that the Arabs do not really accept the existence of the State os Israel--the Israeli Jew themselves also do not really accept the Palestinian presence on the West Bank. ... The Israeli state is not comfortable with the people on the West Ban and in Gaza, so it considers the option of replacing them another people. That it is, precisely, the Jews, the exemplary victims, who are not considering a radical 'ethic cleansing' (the 'transfer'--a perfect Orwellian misnower--of the Palestinians from the West Bank) is the ultimate paradox demanding closer consideration.

then comes the lost object and Lilith material

and then his basic points: that justification of Israeli policy in terms of the Holocause is the worst sort of ethical betrayal and that a two state solution, one that involves 'ethnically clean states' should be renounced.

So, he is talking about Israeli policy, particularly insofar as particular defenses of it involve ethno religious fundamentalism and purity. (And, he makes distinctions among different positions in Israel; not all Israelis are Jews, not all Jews are fundamentalists, etc...this is my language, not his). In sum, there is nothing in his argument here that suggests an equation of Jews with Capital. Rather, the overall discussion is one of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that rejects essentialist approaches to conflict in favor of a state not based on ethnic identity, that is, one that can include the Palestinians rather than wiping them out.

[alphonsevanworden]

"In sum, there is nothing in his argument here that suggests an equation of Jews with Capital." - Jodi

There is indeed not only the suggestion but the assumption and operation of an equation, upon which assumption the very intelligibility of the prose rests.

What does this sentence mean?:

"That it is, precisely, the Jews, the exemplary victims, who are not considering a radical 'ethic cleansing'" - Zizek

Does it not mean an entity 'The Jews' is 'considering a radical ethnic cleansing'?

How would you describe this entity 'the Jews'?

Is 'the Jews' considering this?

If not, who is considering it? Who is presently carrying it out?

Capitalists are carrying it out.

The sentence is intelligible if 'The Jews'=Capital. If 'the Jews' do not serve as a name for capital, it is just gibberish.

[alphonsevanworden]

"And, he makes distinctions among different positions in Israel; not all Israelis are Jews, not all Jews are fundamentalists, etc...this is my language, not his"

Your language surely, and different from his to the point where the meaning is not the same. For Zizek explicitly states that those people contemplating radical ethnic cleansing - who do exist, are not only considering but carrying out, and can be indentified - are exemplary victims.

What happened to Ariel Sharon to make him an exemplary victim? Or Condolezza Rice? Or Conrad Black?

[Jodi]

I think "Jews, exemplary victims, considering ethnic cleansing" means Israeli politicians and their supporters who draw on arguments for a pure ethno/religious state using arguments anchored in the fantasy of a homeland as well as histories of violecne and sufferng that include the holocaust.

[alphonsevanworden]

""Jews, exemplary victims, considering ethnic cleansing" means Israeli politicians and their supporters"

But what do you understand Zizek's actual formulation "the Jews, exemplary victims" to mean?

There is a distinction of vast importance especially on the question of the ideology ethnic nationalism, and of course its relation to capital.

'Jews' exist for example; the majority of Israeli politicians and a minority of their supporters could be desribed as 'Jews' not very meaningfully but not innacurately. 'Jews' contemplating ethnic cleansing is not paradoxical in the least. Jews are not exemplary anything.

'The Jews' on the other hand does not exist and there is nothing in the world which could be accurately described thusly. But only 'the Jews' - 'exemplary victim', the ghost of Auschwitz - creates the paradox at the tail of the remark.

[alphonsevanworden]

The outré antisemitic discourse Zizek is deploying here in his take on the occupation is so developed and familiar that perhaps its presence is not as striking as could be. So I, with hesitation, will deploy an analogy.

The US is a nation on the territory of former colonies of Europe. Is it paradoxical then that it should become a colonial power?

US policy in Haiti, and the latest successful return of rebellious black Haitians to slavery, was engineered and carried out by Colin Powell and Condoleeza Rice. Is it paradoxical that descendants of black slaves should avail themselves of white supremacist ideology among other things to become enslavers of descendants of other black slaves?

The 'paradox' only appears if an 'exemplary' Ideal - Blackness, Jewishness, anti-Colonialism - is present in the place of the real protagonists of the policies, capital. The masking of capital to at once create the paradox and obscure the otherwise obvious non paradoxical explanation, the usefulness of ethnic nationalist figments for this purpose, is not a minor aspect of Zizek's intellectual product à propos of capital.

[alphonsevanworden]

Why am I persisting on this? you may wonder.

The important thing here I think is to see as clear as possibly how the introduction of ‘the Jews’ - this is an Hegelian shtick - as a mask for capital and the analysis it allows obstructs a necessary comprehension of the Occuption and helps to prolong it. Symptomal knot it ain‘t. The clique to which Sharon belongs has a long term global policy characterized by military + paramilitary wars against civilian insurgencies and independence movements involving the expropriation of resources and the immiseration of populations; its repetroire of coercive and terrorist tactics vary to conditions slightly. In terms of propaganda, in contrast, it is very flexible.

Palestine is only its most televisually prominent theatre, and the propaganda the most well known, but propaganda is not history and discourse is not material reality. Over the past decades theatres of this clique's war to dispossess humanity have been set on several continents - in Nicaragua, South Africa, Angola and of course Lebanon, now Iraq as well, among other places. Racist ideology is deployed as convenient in the obtaining conditions - white supremacisim in SA, Jewish supremacism in Lebanon and Palestine; other ideological banners, such as anticommunism, are flown elsewhere over this global project.

In SA, the clique suffered a defeat and scaled down; in Nicaragua, it won and scaled down although it is heating up again with the emergence of revived challenges, in Lebanon it was defeated and retreated and is heating up again, in Palestine it looks to win, and this - the clear possibility of achieving its objectives - is why the occupation continues. That is why it is important to understand that capital, not Jewishness or Judaism, is the agressor, wherever this clique which Zizek calls 'the Jews' has operated, in Palestine as in South Africa, Uganda, or Lebanon. To attribute to the Jewishness of Judaism and Jews the war against the people of Palestine is to obscure, veil and obstruct any hope of understanding the operations, methods and motives of that crime against humanity, part of a larger complex of similar crimes varying in conditions, and to help guarantee its success.

Of course, to analywe the propaganda in this instance, one looks at the question of Zionism and how Zionists use an image of Jews, Jewish history, Judaism and Jewishness. But this is propaganda; it is ideology; a line has to be maintained between figments and people, between causes and their apologies and guises, etc..