being, by definition, a multifarious phenomenon which offers itself for different uses. Recently, in the UK, an atheist group displayed posters with the message: “There is no God, so don’t worry and enjoy life!” In response, representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church started a counter-campaign with posters saying: “There is a God, so don’t worry and enjoy life!” The interesting feature is how both propositions seem to be in some way convincing: if there is no God, we are free to do what we want, so let us enjoy life; if there is a God, he will take care of things in his benevolent omnipotence, so we don’t have to worry and can enjoy life. This complementarity demonstrates that there is something wrong with both statements: they both share the same secret premise: “We can act as if there is no God and be happy, because we can trust the good God (or fate, or . . .) to watch over us and protect us!” The obvious counter-proposition to both statements and their underlying premise is: “Whether there is a God or not, life is shit, so one cannot really enjoy it!” This is why we can easily imagine the following (no less convincing) alternative propositions: “There is no God, so everything depends on us and we should worry all the time!” and “There is a God who watches what we are doing all the time, so we should be anxious and worry continuously!”
The question we confront here is how, precisely, to distinguish the fundamentalist conflation of theology and politics from its emancipatory version? Both enact a unity of love and violence, justifying violence with love: killing can be done out of love. Perhaps, we should take love as our starting point—not intimate-erotic love, but that political love whose Christian name is agape. “If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger: I should not seem a part of it.” This is how, in Wuthering Heights, Cathy characterizes her relation to Heathcliff—and provides a succinct ontological definition of unconditional erotic love. There is an unmistakable dimension of terror at work here—think of the ecstatic trance of Tristan and Isolde, ready to obliterate their entire social reality in their immersion into the Night of deadly jouissance. Which is why the proper dialectic of erotic love consists in the tension between contraction and expansion, between erotic self-immersion and the slow work of creating a social space marked by the couple’s love (children, common projects, etc.). Agape functions in a wholly different way—how? It may appear that, in contrast to eros, with its violent subtraction from collective space, the love for a collective succeeds in doing away with the excess of terrorizing violence: does agape not imply an emphatic yes to the beloved collective and ultimately to all humanity, or even—as in Buddhism—to the entire domain of (suffering) life? The object here is loved unconditionally, not on account of a selection of its qualities but in all its imperfections and weaknesses.
A first counter-argument goes by way of the reply to a simple question: which political regimes in the twentieth century legitimized their power by invoking the people’s love for their leader? The so-called “totalitarian” ones. Today, it is only and precisely the North Korean regime which continually invokes the infinite love of the Korean people for Kim Il Sung and Kim Yong Il and, vice versa, the radiating love of the Leader for his people, expressed in continuous acts of grace. Kim Yong Il wrote a short poem along these lines: “In the same way that a sunflower can only thrive if it is turned towards the sun, the Korean people can only thrive if their eyes are turned upwards towards their Leader”—i.e., himself . . . Terror and mercy are thus closely linked; they are effectively the front and the back of the same power structure: only a power which asserts its full terroristic right and capacity to destroy anything and anyone it wants can symmetrically universalize mercy—since this power could have destroyed everyone, those who survive do so thanks to the mercy of those in power. In other words, the very fact that we, the subjects of power, are alive is proof of the power’s infinite mercy. This is why the more “terroristic” a regime is, the more its leaders are praised for their infinite love, goodness, and mercy. Adorno was right to emphasize that, in politics, love is invoked precisely when another (democratic) legitimization is lacking: loving a leader means you love him for what he is, not for what he does.
So how about the next candidate for love as a political category—Oriental spirituality (Buddhism) with its more “gentle,” balanced, holistic, ecological approach. Over the 150 years of Japan’s rapid industrialization and militarization, with its ethics of discipline and self-sacrifice, the process was supported by the majority of Zen thinkers (who, today, knows that D. T. Suzuki himself, the high guru of Zen in the America of the 1960s, supported in his youth the spirit of total discipline and militaristic expansion in the Japan of the 1930s?). There is no contradiction here, no manipulative perversion of authentic compassionate insight: the attitude of total immersion into the self-less “now” of instant enlightenment—in which all reflexive distance is lost and “I am what I do,” as C. S. Lewis put it; in which absolute discipline coincides with total spontaneity—perfectly legitimizes one’s subordination to the militaristic social machine.
What this means is that the all-encompassing compassion of Buddhism (or Hinduism, for that matter) has to be opposed to Christianity’s intolerant, violent love. The Buddhist stance is ultimately that of Indifference, the quenching of all passions which strive to establish differences, while Christian love is a violent passion to introduce difference, a gap in the order of being, in order to privilege and elevate some object at the expense of an other. Love is violence not (only) in the vulgar sense of the Balkan proverb: “If he doesn’t beat me, he doesn’t love me!”; violence is already the love choice as such, which tears its object out of its context, elevating it to the Thing. In Montenegrin folklore, the origin of Evil is a beautiful woman: she causes the men around her to lose their balance, she literally destabilizes the universe, colors all things with a tone of partiality.
In order to properly grasp the triangle of love, hatred, and indifference, one has to rely on the logic of the universal and its constitutive exception which introduces existence. The truth of the universal proposition “Man is mortal” does not imply the existence of even one man, while the “less strong” proposition “There is at least one man who exists (i.e., some men exist)” implies their existence. Lacan draws from this the conclusion that we pass from a universal proposition (which defines the content of a notion) to existence only through a proposition stating the existence, not of the singular element of the universal genus which exists, but of at least one which is an exception to the universality in question. What this means with regard to love is that the universal proposition “I love you all” acquires the level of actual existence only if “There is at least one whom I hate”—a thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity has always led to brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is the “truth” of universal love, in contrast to true love which can only emerge against the background not of universal hatred, but of universal indifference: I am indifferent towards All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love you, the unique individual who stands out against this indifferent background. Love and hatred are thus not symmetrical: love emerges out of universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love. In short, we are dealing here again with the formulae of sexuation: “I do not love you all” is the only foundation of “There is nobody that I do not love,” while “I love you all” necessarily relies on “I really hate some of you.” “But I love you all!”—this is how Erich Mielke, the Secret Police boss of the GDR, defended himself; his universal love was obviously grounded in its constitutive exception, the hatred of the enemies of socialism . . .
But, again, how to distinguish this violence from the violence implied by authentic Christian love, the tremendous violence which dwells at the very heart of the Christian notion of love for one’s neighbour, the violence which finds direct expression in a number of Christ’s most disturbing statements? Here are the main versions:
Do not think that I came to bring peace on earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I came to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a man’s enemies will be the members of his household.
