for “Legalism (Chinese Philosophy).
19 The Laws of Manu, trans. Wendy Doniger, New Delhi: Penguin Books 2000.
20 Ibid., p. xxxvii (translator’s Introduction).
21 Ibid., p. lv.
22 Shaku Soen, quoted in Brian A. Victoria, Zen at War, New York: Weatherhilt 1998, p. 29.
23 I owe this data to Eric Santner.
24 I am grateful to Shuddhabrata Sengupta, New Delhi, for drawing my attention to this crucial distinction.
25 Christophe Jaffrelot, Dr Ambedkar and Untouchability, New Delhi: Permanent Black 2005, pp. 68
26 Pablo Neruda, Memoirs, New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 2001, pp. 99–100. I owe this reference to S. Anand, New Delhi.
27 Jean-Pierre Dupuy, “Quand je mourrai, rien de notre amour n’aura jamais existé,” unpublished manuscript of an intervention at the colloquium Vertigo et la philosophie, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, October 14, 2005.
28 See Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, London and New York: Verso 2008, pp. 208–9.
29 A scene in Ernst Lubitch’s wonderful To Be or Not To Be, a short dialogue between the two famous Polish theater actors, Maria Tura and her self-centered husband Josef, playfully subverts this logic. Josef tells his wife: “I gave orders that, in the posters announcing the new play we’re starring in, your name will be at the top, ahead of mine—you deserve it, darling!” She kindly replies: “Thanks, but you really didn’t have to do it, it wasn’t necessary!” His answer is: “I knew you would say that, so I already cancelled the order and put my name back on top . . .”).
There is a well-known joke about cooking which relies on the same logic: “How anyone can make a good soup in one hour: prepare all the ingredients, cut the vegetables, etc., boil the water, put the ingredients into it, cook them at a simmer for half an hour, occasionally stirring; when, after three quarters of an hour, you discover that the soup is tasteless and unpalatable, throw it away, open up a good can of soup and quickly warm it up in a microwave oven. This is how we, humans, make soup.
30 For a more detailed elaboration of this line of thought of Bergson, see Chapter 9 of Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes.
31 Viktor Frankl, Wissen und Gewissen, Frankfurt: Suhrkamp 1966.
32 James was more interested in the contrast of mores between the near past and the present: the mechanics of time travel were foreign to him, which is why he wisely left the novel unfinished.
33 Quoted in Dupuy, “Quand je mourrai . . .”
34 Kant, Perpetual Peace, Appendix II, pp. 62–3.
35 Ibid., Appendix I.
36 Ibid.
37 Even some Lacanians praise democracy as the “institutionalization of the lack in the Other”: the premise of democracy is that no political agent is a priori legitimized to hold power, that the place of power is empty, open to competition. However, by institutionalizing the lack, democracy neutral-izes—normalizes—it, so that the big Other is again here in the guise of the democratic legitimization of our acts—in a democracy, my acts are “covered” as the legitimate acts which carry out the will of the majority.
38 Quoted from Udi Aloni’s outstanding analysis of this case, “Samson the Non-European” (unpublished manuscript).
39 Kant, Perpetual Peace, p. 36.
40 The standard liberal-conservative argument against Communism is that, since it wants to impose on reality an impossible utopian dream, it necessarily ends in deadly terror. What, however, if one should nonetheless insist on taking the risk of enforcing the Impossible onto reality? Even if, in this way, we do not get what we wanted and/or expected, we nonetheless change the coordinates of what appears as “possible” and give birth to something genuinely new.
41 Jean-Claude Michéa, L’Empire du moindre mal, Paris: Climats 2007, p. 145.
42 The limit of this historicism is discernible in the way it coincides with a ruthless measurement of the past by our own standards. It is easy to imagine one and the same person, on the one hand, warning against imposing our Eurocentric values on other cultures, and, on the other, advocating that classics like Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn novels should be removed from school libraries because of their racially insensitive portrayal of blacks and Native Americans.
43 Michéa, L’Empire du moindre mal, p. 69.
44 For a more detailed analysis of “potlatch,” see Chapter 1 of Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes.
45 Even in Stalinist Marxism, which—in total opposition to Marx—uses the term “ideology” in a positive sense, ideology is opposed to science: first, Marxists analyze society in a neutral scientific way; then, in order to mobilize the masses, they translate their insights into “ideology.” All one has to add here is that this “Marxist science” opposed to ideology is ideology at its purest.
46 Sara Ahmed, “‘Liberal Multiculturalism Is the Hegemony—It’s an Empirical Fact’—A response to Slavoj Žižek” (unpublished manuscript).
47 Furthermore, the liberal-multiculturalist’s opposition to direct racism is not a mere illusion whose truth is the protection of racism: there is a class-coded dimension to it, of which Ahmed is aware, directed against (white) working-class fundamentalism/racism/anti-feminism.
48 Jean-Claude Milner, Les Penchants criminels de l’Europe démocratique, Paris: Editions Verdier 2003, p. 97.
49 Ibid., p. 126.
50 One feminist strategy (especially in France and Italy) is to admit that the paternal authority is disintegrating, and that late capitalism is approaching a globalized perverse society of “pathological narcissists” caught up in the superego call to enjoy, but to claim that, to counter this lack, a new figure of authority is emerging “from below,” unnoticed by the media—the symbolic authority of the mother which has nothing to do with the traditional patriarchal figure of the Mother; the new mother here does not fit into the existing ideological coordinates. The problem with this solution is that as a rule it amounts to descriptions and generalizations of actual cases of (single and other) mothers who have to take care of children—in short, it reads as a (sometimes almost Catholic-sentimental) description of the heroic and compassionate single parent who keeps the family together when the father is absent. Such an approach does not really confront the key question, that of the Name-of-the-Father. That is to say, the Name-of-the-Father plays a key role in structuring the symbolic space, sustaining prohibitions which constitute and stabilize desires—what happens to this role with the rise of maternal authority? Also, for Lacan, the Name-of-the-Father only functions when recognized—referred to—by the mother; that is, for him, the Name-of-the-Father is a structuring principle for the entire field of sexual difference. Thus one can well imagine a lesbian couple raising children where, although there is no father, the Name-of-the-Father is fully operative. So what happens to sexual difference, as well as to the symbolic function of the father, with the rise of maternal authority?
51 It is interesting to note that the Evo Morales
