are nonetheless inextricably linked, like the two sides of the same coin.
Today, the meaning of “liberalism” moves between two opposed poles: economic liberalism (free market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, etc.) and political liberalism (with an accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, etc.). In the US, Republicans are more liberal in the first sense and Democrats in the second. The point, of course, is that while one cannot decide through closer analysis which is the “true” liberalism, one also cannot resolve the deadlock by proposing a kind of “higher” dialectical synthesis, or “avoid the confusion” by making a clear distinction between the two senses of the term. The tension between the two meanings is inherent to the very content that “liberalism” endeavors to designate, it is constitutive of the notion itself, so that this ambiguity, far from signaling a limitation of our knowledge, signals the innermost “truth” of the notion of liberalism.
Traditionally, each basic form of liberalism necessarily appears as the opposite of the other: liberal multiculturalist advocates of tolerance as a rule resist economic liberalism and try to protect the vulnerable from unencumbered market forces, while market liberals as a rule advocate conservative family values, and so on. We thus get the double paradox of the traditionalist Rightist supporting the market economy while ferociously rejecting the culture and mores that economy engenders, and his counterpoint, the multiculturalist Leftist, resisting the market (though less and less so, it is true, as Michéa notices) while enthusiastically enforcing the ideology it engenders. (Half a century ago, the symptomatic exception was the unique Ayn Rand, who advocated both market liberalism and a full individualist egotism deprived of all traditional forms of morality concerning family values and sacrifice for the common good.) Today, however, we seem to be entering a new era in which it is possible for both aspects to be combined: figures such as Bill Gates, for instance, pose as market radicals and as multiculturalist humanitarians.
Here, we encounter the basic paradox of liberalism. An anti-ideological and anti-utopian stance is inscribed into the very core of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives itself as a “politics of the lesser evil,” its ambition is to bring about the “least worst society possible,” thus preventing a greater evil, since it considers any attempt to directly impose a positive good as the ultimate source of all evil. Churchill’s quip about democracy being the worst of all political systems, with the exception of all the others, holds even better for liberalism. Such a view is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature: man is a selfish and envious animal, and if one attempts to build a political system appealing to his goodness and altruism, the result will be the worst kind of terror (both the Jacobins and the Stalinists presupposed human virtue).40 However, the liberal critique of the “tyranny of the Good” comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, gradually replicates the very features of the enemy it claims to be fighting against. The global liberal order clearly presents itself as the best of all possible worlds; its modest rejection of utopias ends with the imposition of its own market-liberal utopia which will supposedly become reality when we subject ourselves fully to the mechanisms of the market and universal human rights. Behind all this lurks the ultimate totalitarian nightmare, the vision of a New Man who has left behind all the old ideological baggage.
As every close observer of the deadlocks arising from political correctness knows, the separation of legal justice from moral Goodness—which should be relativized and historicized—ends up in an oppressive moralism brimming with resentment. Without any “organic” social substance grounding the standards of what Orwell approvingly referred to as “common decency” (all such standards having been dismissed as subordinating individual freedoms to proto-Fascist social forms), the minimalist program of laws intended simply to prevent individuals from encroaching upon one another (annoying or “harassing” each other) turns into an explosion of legal and moral rules, an endless process (a “spurious infinity” in Hegel’s sense) of legalization and moralization, known as “the fight against all forms of discrimination.” If there are no shared mores in place to influence the law, only the basic fact of subjects “harassing” other subjects, who—in the absence of such mores—is to decide what counts as “harassment”? In France, there are associations for obese people demanding that all public campaigns against obesity and in favor of healthy eating habits be stopped, since they damage the self-esteem of obese persons. The militants of Veggie Pride condemn the “speciesism” of meat-eaters (who discriminate against animals, privileging the human animal—for them, a particularly disgusting form of “fascism”) and demand that “vegetophobia” should be treated as a kind of xenophobia and proclaimed a crime. And we could extend the list to include those fighting for the right to incest-marriage, consensual murder, cannibalism . . .
The problem here is the obvious arbitrariness of the ever-new rules. Take child sexuality, for example: one could argue that its criminalization is an unwarranted discrimination, but one could also argue that children should be protected from sexual molestation by adults. And we could go on: the same people who advocate the legalization of soft drugs usually support the prohibition of smoking in public places; the same people who protest the patriarchal abuse of small children in our societies worry when someone condemns members of certain minority cultures for doing exactly this (say, the Roma preventing their children from attending public schools), claiming that this is a case of meddling with other “ways of life.” It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the “fight against discrimination” is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Michéa puts it, “would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere.”41
The ideological coordinates of such liberal multiculturalism are determined by two features of our “postmodern” zeitgeist: universalized multiculturalist historicism (all values and rights are historically specific, hence any elevation of them into universal notions to be imposed onto others is cultural imperialism at its most violent)42 and the universalized “hermeneutics of suspicion” (all “high” ethical motifs are generated and sustained by “low” motives of resentment, envy, etc.—the call to sacrifice our life for a higher cause is either a mask for manipulation by those who need war to sustain their power and wealth, or a pathological expression of masochism—and this either/or is an inclusive vel, i.e., both terms can be true at the same time). Another way to formulate Badiou’s insight that we live in a world-less universe would be to say that the functioning of ideology today no longer relies on mechanisms for the interpellation of individuals into subjects: what liberalism proposes is a value-neutral mechanism of rights, and so on, a mechanism “whose free play can automatically generate a desired political order, without at any point interpellating individuals into subjects.”43 The nameless jouissance cannot be a title of interpellation proper; it is more a kind of blind drive with no symbolic value-form attached to it—all such symbolic features are temporary and flexible, which is why the individual is constantly called upon to “re-create” himself or herself.
There is a problem with this liberal vision of which every good anthropologist, psychoanalyst, or even perspicuous social critic such as Francis Fukuyama, is aware: it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is usually referred to as “socialization” which it simultaneously undermines, thereby sawing off the branch on which it is sitting. In the market—and, more generally, in the social exchange based on the market—individuals encounter each other as free rational subjects, but such subjects are the result of a complex previous process which concerns symbolic debt, authority, and, above all, trust (in the big Other which regulates exchanges). In other words, the domain of exchange is never purely symmetrical: it is an a priori condition for each of the participants to be able to give something without return so that he or she can participate in the game of give-and-take. For a market exchange to take place, there have to be subjects involved who participate in the basic symbolic pact and display an elementary trust in the Word. Of course, the market is a domain of egotistic cheating and lying; however, as
