From Doug Henwood's interview with S. Zizek forthcoming in Punk Planet.
Michael Pugliese


A lot of readers of Punk Planet read Chomsky and Zinn, and the stuff
coming out of small anarchist presses. What would they get from
reading your work that they might be missing?
    Martin Heidegger said that philosophy doesn't make things easier,
it makes them harder and more complicated. What they can learn is the
ambiguity of so many situations, in the sense that whenever we are
presented by the big media with a simple opposition, like multictural
tolerance vs. ethnic fundamentalism, that the opposition is never so
clear cut. The idea is that things are always more complex. For
example, multiculturalist tolerance, or at least a certain type of
it, generates in itself or involves a much deeper racism. As a rule,
this type of tolerance relies on the distinction between us,
multiculturalists, and intolerant ethnic others, with the paradoxical
result that anti-racism itself is used to dismiss in a racist way the
other as a racist. Not to mention the fact that this kind of
"tolerance" is as a rule patronizing: its respect for the other
cannot but remind us of the respect for naive children's beliefs: we
leave them in their blessed ignorance not to hurt them.
    Or take Chomsky. There are two problematic features in his work -
though it goes without saying that I admire him very much. One is his
anti-theorism. A friend who had lunch with him recently told me that
Chomsky announced that he'd concluded that social theory and economic
theory are of no use - that things are simply evident, like American
state terror, and that all we need to know are the facts. I disagree
with this. And the second point is that with all his criticism of the
U.S., he retains a certain commitment to what is the most elemental
ingredient of American ideology, individualism, a fundamental belief
that America is the land of free individuals, and so on. So in that way he
is deeply and problematically American.
    You can see some of these problems in the famous Faurisson scandal
in France. As many readers may know, Chomsky wrote the preface for a
book by Robert Faurisson, which was threatened with banning because
it denied the reality of the Holocaust. Chomsky claimed that though
he opposes the book's content, the book should still be published for
free speech reasons. I can see the argument, but I can't support him
here. The argument is that freedom of the press is freedom for all,
even for those whom we find disgusting and totally unacceptable -
otherwise, today it is then, tomorrow it is us. It sounds logical,
but I think that it avoids the true paradox of freedom - that some
limitations have to guarantee it.
    So to understand what goes on today - not in the economy, that's
not my area, but in the realm of social dynamics - to understand how
we experience ourselves, to understand the structures of social
authority, to understand whether we really live in a "permissive"
society, how do prohibitions functions today - for these we need
social theory. So that's the difference between me and the names you
mentioned.

Chomsky and people like him seem to think that if we just got the
facts out there, things would almost take care of themselves. Why is
this wrong? Why aren't "the facts" enough?
    Let me give you a very naïve answer. I think that basically the
facts are already known. This is what I've referred to as "postmodern
cynicism." Let's take Chomsky's analyses of how the CIA intervened in
Nicaragua. Ok, a lot of details, yes, but did I learn anything
fundamentally new? It's exactly what I'd expected: the CIA was
playing a very dirty game. Of course it's more convincing if you
learn the dirty details. But I don't think that we really learned
anything dramatically new there. I don't think that merely "knowing
the facts" can really change people's perceptions.
    To put it another way: his own position on Kosovo, on the Yugoslav
war, shows some of his limitations, because of a lack of a proper
historical context. With all his facts, he got the picture wrong. As
far as I can judge, he bought a certain narrative - that we shouldn't
put all the blame on Milosevic, all parties were more or less to
blame, and the West supported or incited this explosion because of
its own geopolitical goals. All are not the same. I'm not saying that
the Serbs are guilty. I just repeat my old point that Yugoslavia was
not over with the secession of Slovenia, but it was over the moment
Milosevic took over Serbia. This triggered a totally different
dynamic. It is also not true that the disintegration of Yugoslavia
was supported by the West. On the contrary, the West exerted enormous
pressure, at least until 1991, for ethnic groups to remain in
Yugoslavia. I saw [former Secretary of State] James Baker on Yugoslav
TV supporting the Yugoslav army's attempts to prevent Slovenia's
secession.
    The ultimate paradox for me is that because he lacks a theoretical
framework, Chomsky even gets the facts wrong sometimes.

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