conditions were especially desperate (during World War II).32 In early 1945, as the result of an amnesty to celebrate the victory over Germany, he was freed but not yet able to leave the region. So, in order to pass the time and earn some money, he accepted a post in a hospital. There, on the advice of a colleague, a doctor, he organized a desperate method of providing the sick and starving prisoners with some vitamins and nutritious foodstuffs. The camp hospital had too large a stock of human blood for transfusions which it was planning to discard; Bardach reprocessed it, enriched it with vitamins from local herbs, and sold it back to the hospital. When the higher authorities learned about this, he was almost rearrested: they banned him from practicing what they designated as “organized cannibalism.” But he found a way out, replacing human blood with the blood of the deer killed by the Inuit living nearby, and soon developed a successful business . . . My immediate racist association was, of course: “Typical Jews! Even in the worst gulag, the moment they are given a minimum of freedom and space for maneuver, they start trading—in human blood!”
The stakes are much higher when this obscene underside is institutionalized, as in the case of the Catholic priests’ pedophilia, a phenomenon that is inscribed into the very functioning of the Church as a socio-symbolic institution. It is therefore not a matter of the “private” unconscious of individuals, but rather of the “unconscious” of the institution itself; not something that happens because the Church has to accommodate itself to the pathological realities of libidinal life in order to survive, but rather an inherent part of the way the institution reproduces itself.33 This institutional unconscious has nothing to do with any kind of Jungian “collective unconscious,” a spiritual substance that encompasses individuals; its status is thoroughly non-psychological, strictly discursive, correlative to the “big Other” as the “reified” system of symbolic coordinates. It is the set of presuppositions and exclusions implied by the public discourse. Consequently, the response to the Church’s reluctance to acknowledge its crimes should be that these are indeed crimes and that, if it does not fully participate in their investigation, the Church is an accomplice after the fact; moreover, the Church as such, as an institution, must be made to recognize the ways it systematically creates the conditions for such crimes to take place. No wonder that, in contemporary Ireland, when small children have to go out alone, it is becoming standard for their mothers to supplement the traditional warning “Don’t talk to strangers!” with a new and more specific one, “. . . and don’t talk to priests!”
Consequently, what Gibson needs is not therapy; it is not enough for him to simply admit that “he has a problem” so long as he fails to accept responsibility for his remarks, asking himself in what way his outburst is linked to his Catholicism and functions as its obscene underside. When Foxman offered to treat Gibson’s outburst as a case of individual pathology which needs a therapeutic approach, he not only committed the same error as those who want to reduce cases of pedophilia to individual pathologies; much worse, he contributed to the revival of the Serbsky Institute’s manner of dealing with problematic political and ideological attitudes as phenomena that call for psychiatric intervention. In the same way that the overriding belief underlying the Serbsky Institute’s measures was that a person had to be insane to be against Communism, so Foxman’s offer implies that a person has to be insane to be anti-Semitic. This easy way out enables us to avoid the key issue: that, precisely, anti-Semitism in our Western societies was—and is—not an ideology displayed by the deranged, but an ingredient of spontaneous ideological attitudes of perfectly sane people, of our ideological sanity itself. This, then, is where we stand today: a sad choice between Gibson and Foxman, between the obscene bigotry of fundamentalist beliefs and the no less obscene disqualification of problematic beliefs as cases of mental illness that require therapy.
Poland as a symptom
This hidden complicity between the postmodern “atonal world” and the fundamentalist reaction to it explodes when a society enters a crisis of its symbolic identity. A scandal ripped Poland apart in March 2007, the so-called “Oleksy-gate,” when a tape of a private conversation was made public. Josef Oleksy, the former Prime Minister and one of the Democratic Left Alliance’s (SLD, ex-Communists) leading figures, was revealed to have made disparaging remarks about the SLD politicians, calling them “a bunch of losers and swindlers,” cynically boasting that the SLD had really introduced capitalism into Poland, and claiming that the SLD leaders cared nothing about Poland, but just about their own survival and wealth. The truly shocking feature of these tapes is a certain coincidence: Oleksy used exactly the same words as the rightist anti-Communist opponents of the SLD who refused to admit its legitimacy, claiming that it was a party without a proper program, just a network of ex-nomenklatura swindlers looking after their own business interests—this harsh external characterization was now confirmed as the inner cynical self-designation of the SLD itself . . . a sure sign that the first task of the new Left in post-Communist states is to reject all links with the ex-Communist “left” parties which, as a rule, are the parties of big capital.
The counterpart to this scandal is the fact that Poland has the distinction of being the first Western country in which the anti-modernist backlash has won, effectively emerging as a hegemonic force: calls for the total ban on abortion, anti-Communist “lustration,” the exclusion of Darwinism from primary and secondary education, up to the bizarre idea of abolishing the post of the President of the Republic and proclaiming Jesus Christ the Eternal King of Poland, and so forth, are coming together into an all-encompassing proposal to enact a clear break and constitute a new Polish republic unambiguously based on anti-modernist Christian values. Is, however, this backlash really so dangerous that the Left should accept the liberal blackmail: “the time has come for all of us to unite forces, thwart this threat and reassert liberal-secular modernization”? (Something, incidentally, which cannot but recall the memory of Social-Democratic evolutionists who claimed that, in not yet fully developed countries, the Left should first support the bourgeois project of the modern democratic state, and only in the “second phase” should it move on to radical politics proper, to the overcoming of capitalism and bourgeois democracy . . . It is good to remember that Lenin was thoroughly opposed to this “stageist” approach, reinstituted in later Stalinism with its scholastic distinction between the “lower” and the “higher” stages of Communism.)
The task of the Left is, on the contrary, more than ever to “subtract” itself from the entire field of the opposition between liberal modernization and the anti-modernist backlash.34 In spite of their zealous pursuit of a positive project of installing stable Christian values into social life, one should never forget that the anti-modernist fundamentalist backlash is a profoundly reactive phenomenon (in the Nietzschean sense): at its core, there is not a positive politics, actively pursuing a new social project, but a politics of fear whose motivating force is defense against a perceived threat. Here, reduced to its most elementary contours, is the conservative view of our predicament, whose central feature is that “secular-progressive culture has swept away traditional beliefs”:
To replace this loss of spirituality, millions of Europeans have embraced the secular concept of “relativism.” According to this way of thinking, there is no absolute truth, no certain right and wrong. Everything is “relative.” What is wrong in my eyes might not be wrong in your eyes. By this logic, even heinous acts can be explained, so they should not—in fact, they cannot—be condemned. In other words, no definite judgments about behavior should be made because there are always extenuating circumstances to justify not taking a stand.
The wide acceptance of relativism has rendered Europe weak, confused, and chaotic. Socialist or quasi-socialist governments now provide the necessities of life to their citizens, allowing many Europeans to live entirely within themselves. When that happens to a person, it is hard to rally him or her to a greater cause. Thus, nothing is worth fighting for outside of one’s immediate well-being. The only creed is a belief in personal gratification.35
How are we to unite this opposition (of traditionalism
