Kant missed the necessity of unwritten, disavowed, but necessary rules for every legal structure or set of social rules—it is only such rules that provide the “substance” on which laws can thrive, or properly function. (One could again imagine, along these lines, yet another version of the Kantian secret clause enjoining states to always take into account the unwritten rules, without publicly admitting so.) The exemplary case of the effectiveness of such unwritten rules is “potlatch”; the key feature that opposes potlatch to direct market exchange is thus the temporal dimension. In market exchange, the two complementary acts occur simultaneously (I pay and I get what I paid for), so that the act of exchange does not lead to a permanent social bond, but merely to a momentary exchange between atomized individuals who, immediately afterwards, return to their solitude. In potlatch, on the contrary, the time elapsed between my giving a gift and the other side returning it to me creates a social link which lasts (for a time, at least): we are all linked together by bonds of debt. From this standpoint, money can be defined as the means which enables us to have contacts with others without entering into proper relations with them. (Is the function of the masochistic practice of bondage not [also] to supplement this lack of social bond proper, so that, in it, the foreclosed returns in the real—the suspended symbolic bond returns as literal bodily bondage?)44
This atomized society, in which we have contact with others without entering into proper relations with them, is the presupposition of liberalism. The problem of organizing a state thus cannot be solved “even for a race of devils,” as Kant put it—the idea that it can be is the key moment of the liberal utopia. One should link this Kantian reference to a race of devils to another detail of his ethical thought. According to Kant, if one finds oneself alone on the sea with another survivor of a sunken ship near a floating piece of wood which can keep only one person afloat, moral considerations are no longer valid—there is no moral law preventing me from fighting to the death with the other survivor for the place on the raft; I can engage in it with moral impunity. It is here, perhaps, that one encounters the limit of Kantian ethics: what about someone prepared willingly to sacrifice himself in order to give the other person a chance of survival—and, furthermore, who is ready to do it for non-pathological reasons? If there is no moral law commanding one to do this, does this mean that such an act has no ethical status proper? Does this strange exception not demonstrate that ruthless egotism, a concern for personal survival and gain, is the silent “pathological” presupposition of Kantian ethics—that the Kantian ethical edifice can only maintain itself by silently presupposing the “pathological” image of man as a ruthless utilitarian egotist? In exactly the same way, the Kantian political structure, with his notion of ideal legal power, can maintain itself only by silently presupposing the “pathological” image of the subjects of this power as “a race of devils.”
According to Kant, the mechanisms which will bring about social peace are independent of the will of individuals as well as of their merits: “The guarantee of perpetual peace is nothing less than that great artist, nature (natura daedala rerum). In her mechanical course we see that her aim is to produce a harmony among men, against their will and indeed through their discord.” This is ideology at its purest. One can claim that the notion of ideology was posited “for itself” only in the liberal universe, with its founding distinction between the ordinary people immersed in their universe of Meaning—of (what appears from the properly modern perspective as) the confusion between facts and values—and the cold rational observers who are able to perceive the world the way it is, without moralistic prejudices, as a mechanism regulated by laws (of passions) like any other natural mechanism. Only in this modern universe does society appear as an object of a possible experiment, as a chaotic field to which one can (and should) apply a value-free Theory or Science (a political “geometry of passions,” or economics, or racist science). It is only this modern position of the value-free scientist, approaching society the same way as a natural scientist approaches nature, that amounts to ideology proper, not the spontaneous attitude of the meaningful experience of life dismissed by the scientist as a set of superstitious prejudices—it is ideology because it imitates the form of the natural sciences without really being one. “Ideology” in a strict sense is thus always reflexive, redoubled on itself: it is a name for neutral knowledge which opposes itself to common “ideology.”45 There is thus a duality inscribed into the very notion of ideology: (1) “mere ideology” as the spontaneous self-apprehension of individuals with all their prejudices; (2) neutral, “value-free” knowledge to be applied to society to engineer its development. In other words, ideology always is (or, rather, appears) as its own species.
Coda: Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion
In a critical reading of my plenary talk at the Law and Critique Conference in 2007, Sara Ahmed challenged my claim that it is an “empirical fact” that liberal multiculturalism is hegemonic.46 Her first step was to emphasize the distinction between the semblance of hegemony (ideological illusion) and actual hegemony:
Hegemony is not really reducible to facts as it involves semblance, fantasy and illusion, being a question of how things appear and the gap between appearance and how bodies are distributed. To read hegemony we have to distrust how things appear. Indeed, what is striking about Žižek’s retort is how much his reading of “political correctness” and “liberal multiculturalism” involved a certain literalism, as if the prohibition of speech acts that are not based on respecting the other’s difference are “really” what is prohibited, or as if the prohibition is simply real by virtue of being articulated within public culture. So the speech act, “we must support the other’s difference,” is read as hegemonic, is taken literally as a sign not only that it is compulsory to support the other’s difference, but that we are not allowed to refuse this support. The speech act is read as doing what it says. In order to re-consider the effects of such injunctions and prohibitions, I have introduced a new class of what I call non-performatives: speech acts that do not do what they say, that do not bring into effect that which they name. Could the speech work to create an illusion that we do support the other’s difference, which might work by not bringing such support into existence?
My point is double here. First, I agree with the category of the “nonperformatives,” but with a twist: they are performatives, even very effective ones, but different from what they claim to be. There are other theoretical notions we can use to describe this duality, such as the “pragmatic paradox,” the gap between the “subject of the enunciated” and the “subject of the enunciation,” the “double bind”; there are nonetheless differences between these notions. The “double bind” implies an unbearable subjective tension (the proverbial mother who explicitly enjoins her son to leave home and start an autonomous life, but whose message between the lines is a desperate call for him to stay; the father who tells his son to act autonomously, but if the son effectively does so, he thereby asserts his subordination to his mother, since he is following her injunction), while the “non-performative” works smoothly, enabling you, as it were, to both have your cake and eat it, in other words to assert your superiority over the Other in/through the very gesture of guaranteeing their equality and your respect for their difference.
When I claim that multiculturalism is hegemonic, I claim only that it is hegemonic as ideology, not that it describes the reality of the predominant form of social relations—which is why I criticize it so ferociously. So when Ahmed writes that “multiculturalism is a fantasy which conceals forms of racism, violence and inequality,” I can only add that this goes for every hegemonic ideology. I do not confuse ideological fantasy and fact—they are confused in reality: the reality of what Ahmed calls “civil racism” can only function through (in the guise of) the illusion of anti-racist multiculturalism. And, furthermore, an illusion is never simply an illusion: it is not enough to make the old Marxist point about the gap between the ideological appearance of the universal legal form and the particular interests that really sustain it—as is so common amongst politically correct critics on the Left. The counter-argument that the form is never a
