Literature & Spoken Word Community | Southbank Centre

In Western and Eastern Europe, there are signs of a long-term re-arrangement of the political space. Till recently, the political space was dominated by two main parties which addressed the entire electoral body, a Right-of-centre party (Christian-Democrat, liberal-conservative, people’s…) and a Left-of-centre party (socialist, social-democratic…), with smaller parties addressing a narrow electorate (ecologists, liberals, etc.). Now, there is progressively emerging one party which stands for global capitalism as such, usually with relative tolerance towards abortion, gay rights, religious and ethnic minorities, etc.; opposing this party is a stronger and stronger anti-immigrant populist party which, on its fringes, is accompanied by directly racist neo-Fascist groups. The exemplary case is here Poland: after the disappearance of the ex-Communists, the main parties are the “anti-ideological” centrist liberal party of the prime minister Donald Dusk and the conservative Christian party of Kaczynski brothers. Berlusconi in Italy is a proof that even this ultimate opposition is not insurmountable: the same party, his Forza Italia, can be both the global-capitalist-party and integrate the populist anti-immigrant tendency. In the de-politicized sphere of post-ideological administration, the only way to mobilize people is to awaken fear (from immigrants, i.e., from the neighbour). To quote Gaspar M. Tamas, we are thus again slowly approaching the situation in which ”there is no one between Tsar and Lenin,” i.e., in which the complex situation will be reduced to a simple basic choice: community or collective, Socialism or Communism (Otto Weininger was right to claim that Socialism is Aryan, while Communism is Jewish). Or, to put it in the well-known terms from 1968, in order for its key legacy to survive, liberalism needs the brotherly help of the radical Left.

The French parliament recently adopted the law prohibiting the public wearing of burka and its Arab equivalent, the niqab, which cover the woman’s face, except for a small slit for the eyes. The curious thing that cannot but strike the eye in the public debates about this topic is the ambiguity of the critique of burka: it moves at two levels. First, it is presented as the defense of the dignity and freedom of the oppressed Muslim women – one cannot accept that, in a secular France, a group of women has to live a hidden life secluded from the public space, and subordinated to brutal patriarchal authority, etc. However, the argument then as a rule shifts towards the anxieties of the non-Muslim French people themselves: faces covered by burka do not fit the coordinates of the French culture and identity, they “intimidate and alienate non-Muslims”… Some French women even used the argument that they experience someone wearing a burka as their own humiliation, as being brutally excluded, rejected from a social link.

This brings us to the true enigma: why does the encounter with a face covered by burka trigger such anxiety? Is it, then, that a face covered by burka is no longer the Levinasian face, the Otherness from which the unconditional ethical call emanates? But what if the case is the opposite one? From a Freudian perspective, face is the ultimate mask that conceals the horror of the Neighbor-Thing: face is what makes the Neighbor le semblable, a fellow-man with whom we can identify and empathize. (Not to mention the fact that, today, many faces are surgically changed and thus deprived of the last vestiges of natural authenticity.) This, then, is why a covered face causes such anxiety: because it confronts us directly with the abyss of the Other-Thing, with the Neighbor in its uncanny dimension. The very covering-up of the face obliterates a protective shield, so that the Other-Thing stares at us directly (recall that burka has a narrow slip for the eyes: we don’t see the eyes, but we know there is a gaze there). Alphonse Allais presented his own version of Salome’s dance of seven veils: when Salome is completely naked, Herod shouts “Go on! On!”, expecting her to take off also the veil of her skin. We should imagine something similar with burka: the opposite of a woman taking off her burka and revealing her natural face. What if we go a step further and imagine a woman “taking off” the skin of her face itself, so that what we see beneath her face is precisely an anonymous dark smooth burka-like surface with a narrow slit for the gaze? “Love thy neighbor!” means, at its most radical, precisely the impossible=real love for this de-subjectivized subject, for this monstrous dark blot cut with a slit/gaze… This is why, in the psychoanalytic treatment, the patient is not sitting face to face to the analyst: they both stare at a third point, since it is only this suspension of the face which opens up the space for the proper dimension of the Neighbor. And therein also resides the limit of the well-known critico-ideological topic of the society of total control where we are all the time tracked and recorded – what eludes the eye of the camera is not some intimate secret but the gaze itself, the object-gaze as the crack/stain in the Other.

On May 11 2010, the executives of the three companies involved in the Gulf oil disaster — BP, Transocean and Halliburton — who testified before the US Senate got involved in a ridiculous game of blaming each other worthy of a Magritte painting: BP claimed it is not responsible since the rig that exploded is owned by Transocean, its subcontractor;  Transocean claimed the work done by its own subcontractor Halliburton who poured the concrete is responsible, and, finally, Halliburton claimed it just executed the project proposed to them by BP… What makes the scene ridiculous is not only the undignified game of blaming each other, but, even more, the idea that looking for the culprits (big companies) and making them pay the full price for the damage they’ve caused – unfortunately, it was President Obama whose condemnation of the ridiculous spectacle of the three companies was ridiculous in its own way. What is ridiculously-naïve is the idea that a private company, no matter how rich, can pay for the entire damage of a serious ecological catastrophy. If the worst that we fear will happen and the spilling will go on for a long time, then the damage to the environment and to the millions of people living (not only) there is simply irreparable – it would be like demanding from the Nazis that they cover the full price of the holocaust.

The lesson is simply that, while market mechanisms may work up to a certain level to contain ecological damage, serious large-scale ecological catastrophies are simply out of their reach – any pseudo-scientific statistic talk about “sustainable risks” is ridiculous here. More than two decades ago, a paparazzo caught Senator Ted Kennedy (well known for his opposition to the off-shore drilling in search of oil) in the midst of the sexual act on a lone boat off Louisiana shore; during a Senate debate a couple of days later, a Republican Senator dryly remarked: “It seems that Senator Kennedy now changed his position on off-shore drilling…” So maybe, we should return to Senator Kennedy’s position: the only acceptable off-shore drilling is the one he was engaged in.