Since Noam Chomsky’s “Fantasies”
(July 21, 2013) present themselves as a reaction to my reply to his interview
with a critical dismissal of my work, a brief clarification is needed. What
Chomsky refers to as my “reply” is a non-authorized and not accurate
transcription of my answer to a question from the public during a recent debate
at Birkbeck college in London. As it would be clear from a full transcription,
at that moment I didn’t even know about Chomsky’s attack on me—I was just asked
what do I think about his total dismissal of my work (together with that of
Lacan and Derrida) as a case of fanciful posturing without any foundation in
empirical facts and scientific reasoning, and I improvised a reaction on the
spot. Chomsky’s remark that I “cite nothing” to justify my claim about his
inaccuracies is thus ridiculous—how could I have done it in an improvised reply
to an unexpected question? Probably to illustrate my disrespect for facts,
Chomsky also dwells on the characterization of Obama that I wrongly attributed
to him; there is no mystery about it, upon learning about my mistake, I
unambiguously apologized—here is the text of my apology (from Harper’s
magazine):
In attributing to Noam Chomsky
the statement that Obama is a white guy who took some sun-tanning sessions, I
repeated an untrue claim which appeared in Slovene media, so I can only offer
my unreserved and unconditional apology.
I would like to add that, even
if the statement I falsely attributed to Chomsky were to be truly made by him,
I would not consider it a patronizingly racist slur, but a fully admissible
characterization in our political and ideological struggle. There are
African-American intellectuals who allow themselves to be fully co-opted into
the white-liberal academic establishment, and they are loved by the
establishment precisely because they seem “one of us,” white with a darkened
skin. This is why, I think, the statement I falsely attributed to Chomsky does
NOT amount to the same as Silvio Berlusconi’s misleadingly similar
characterization of Obama as beautiful and well tanned: Berlusconi’s remark
dismissed Obama’s blackness as an endearing eccentricity, thus obliterating the
historical meaning of the fact that an African-American was elected President,
while the remark I falsely attributed to Chomsky, if accurate, would point
towards the ambiguous way Obama’s blackness can be instrumentalized to
obfuscate our crucial political and economic struggles.
I added the long second
paragraph not to qualify my apology, but to make it clear that I never accused Chomsky
of making a racist comment (as was Berlusconi’s quip). I find it a little bit
mysterious why Chomsky dwells on this event which, if anything, proves my
respect for empirical facts, i.e., my readiness to admit a mistake when I am
empirically wrong! So is Chomsky ready to apologize when he reaches the lowest
point of his attack in his claim that, in my reproaches to him concerning the
way he deals with Khmer Rouge atrocities, I endorse the
distinction between worthy and
unworthy victims. The worthy victims are those whose fate can be attributed to
some official enemy, the unworthy ones are the victims of our own state and its
crimes. The two prime examples on which we focused were Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge and the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in the same years. ... to
this day, those who are completely in the grip of western propaganda adhere
religiously to the prescribed doctrine: a show of great indignation about the
KR years and our accurate review of the information available, along with
streams of falsification; and silence about the vastly more significant cases
of ET and Cambodia under US attack, before and after the KR years. Žižek’s
comments are a perfect illustration.
All I can say is that I simply
agree with these lines (with the exception of the last sentence, of course).
Not only do I agree, but I was making the same point repeatedly, even
mentioning East Timor, as in the following passage from my Welcome to the Desert
of the Real:
Why should the World Trade
Center catastrophe be in any way privileged over, say, the mass slaughter of
Hutus by Tutsis in Ruanda in 1999? Or the mass bombing and gas-poisoning of
Kurds in the north of Iraq in the early 1990s? Or the Indonesian forces’ mass
killings in East Timor? Or…
The claim that I in any way
endorse the “distinction between worthy and unworthy victims” is thus patently
wrong. I only have to add that I see an important difference between Cambodia
and East Timor. In the latter case, we were dealing with a foreign military
intervention and occupation (Indonesia with the US support) whose aim was
simply to colonize and exploit the occupied country, while in the case of
Cambodia, violence was perpetrated by a politico-military organization of
Cambodian people themselves mobilized by a well-articulated radical Millenarian
vision (to erase the ideological past and build a New Man, inclusive of closing
all schools, liquidating intellectuals, prohibiting all religions, and undermining
family ties). Furthermore, one should also bear in mind that the US attitude
towards Khmer Rouge cannot be reduced to a demonizing condemnation: to counter
the increased Soviet influence after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge regime by
the Vietnamese intervention in 1979, the US and China together supported the
Khmer Rouge regime as the sole legitimate representative of Cambodia in the
UN—all of a sudden, Khmer Rouge were not so totally bad… But this seems to me
also a relatively minor point. What brings us to the heart of the matter is
Chomsky’s accusation that I rudely misrepresent his position: according to me,
he (Chomsky) claims
that ‘we don’t need any
critique of ideology’—that is, we don’t need what I’ve devoted enormous efforts
to for many years. His evidence? He heard that from some people who talked to
me. Sheer fantasy again, but another indication of his concept of empirical
fact and rational discussion.
For me, on the contrary, the
problem is here a very rational one: everything hinges on how we define
“ideology.” If one defines and uses this term the way I do (and I am not alone
here: my understanding echoes a long tradition of so-called Western Marxism),
then one has to conclude that what Chomsky is doing in his political writings
is very important, I have great admiration and respect for it, but it is
emphatically not critique of ideology. Let me indicate what I mean by this.
What I had in mind when I spoke about his stance towards Khmer Rouge was, among
other passages, the following lines from Chomsky’s and Herman’s “Distortions at
Fourth Hand” from the Nation (June 6, 1977):
Space limitations preclude a
comprehensive review, but such journals as the Far Eastern Economic Review, the
London Economist, the Melbourne Journal of Politics, and others elsewhere, have
provided analyses by highly qualified specialists who have studied the full
range of evidence available, and who concluded that executions have numbered at
most in the thousands; that these were localized in areas of limited Khmer
Rouge influence and unusual peasant discontent, where brutal revenge killings
were aggravated by the threat of starvation resulting from the American
destruction and killing. These reports also emphasize both the extraordinary
brutality on both sides during the civil war (provoked by the American attack)
and repeated discoveries that massacre reports were false. ... To give an
illustration of just one neglected source, the London Economist (March 26,
1977) carried a letter by W.J. Sampson, who worked as an economist and
statistician for the Cambodian Government until March 1975, in close contact
with the central statistics office. After leaving Cambodia, he writes, he
‘visited refugee camps in Thailand and kept in touch with Khmers,’ and he also
relied on ‘A European friend who cycled around Phnom Penh for many days after
its fall [and] saw and heard of no ... executions’ apart from ‘the shooting of
some prominent politicians and the lynching of hated bomber pilots in Phnom
Penh.’ He concludes ‘that executions could be numbered in hundreds or thousands
rather than in hundreds of thousands,’ though there was ‘a big death toll from
sickness’—surely a direct consequence, in large measure, of the devastation
caused by the American attack. ... If, indeed, postwar Cambodia is, as
Lacouture believes, similar to Nazi Germany, then his comment is perhaps just,
though we may add that he has produced no evidence to support this judgement.
But if postwar Cambodia is more similar to France after liberation, where many
thousands of people were massacred within a few months under far less rigorous
conditions than those left by the American war, then perhaps a rather different
judgement is in order. That the latter conclusion may be more nearly correct is
suggested by the analyses mentioned earlier.
... We do not pretend to know
where the truth lies amidst these sharply conflicting assessments; rather, we
again want to emphasize some crucial points. What filters through to the
American public is a seriously distorted version of the evidence available,
emphasizing alleged Khmer Rouge atrocities and downplaying or ignoring the
crucial U.S. role, direct and indirect, in the torment that Cambodia has
suffered. Evidence that focuses on the American role ... is ignored, not on the
basis of truthfulness or scholarship but because the message is unpalatable.
I think the quoted passage
confirms that my improvised resume of Chomsky’s position about Khmer Rouge
atrocities (“No, this is Western propaganda. Khmer Rouge are not as horrible as
that.”) is a correct one. I do not agree in any way with those who accuse
Chomsky of sympathizing with Khmer Rouge, although I find the parallel between
Cambodia after the KR takeover and France liberated in 1944 very problematic.
Did de Gaulle after the liberation of Paris order its complete evacuation? Did
his government reorganize entire social life into collective communes run by
military commanders? Did it close down schools? If anything, de Gaulle’s first
government was way too tolerant, (among other problematic measures) admitting
legal continuity between the Vichy years and the new republic, so that all laws
enforced by the Vichy regime (and they were numerous!) remained valid if they
were not explicitly revoked. But apart from this particular point, I have some
further problems with Chomsky’s and Herman’s old text.
I agree that one should
approach reports on humanitarian crises or genocidal violence in Western media
with a great measure of skepticism: they are as a rule heavily biased due to
political and economic interests. However, although Chomsky claims he doesn’t
pretend to know what actually went on in Cambodia, the bias of his own
description is obvious: his sympathies lies with those who try to minimize and
relativize Khmer Rouge atrocities. This bias is ideology—a set of explicit and
implicit, even unspoken, ethico-political and other positions, decision,
choices, etc., which predetermine our perception of facts, what we tend to
emphasize or to ignore, how we organize facts into a consistent whole of a
narrative or a theory. And it is this bias which displays Chomsky’s ideology in
selecting and ordering data, what he downplays and what he emphasizes, not only
in the case of Cambodia but also in the case of post-Yugoslav war (his
downplaying of the Srebrenica massacre), etc. To avoid a misunderstanding, I am
not advocating here the “postmodern” idea that our theories are just stories we
are telling each other, stories which cannot be grounded in facts; I am also
not advocating a purely neutral unbiased view. My point is that the plurality
of stories and biases is itself grounded in our real struggles. With regard to
Chomsky, I claim that his bias sometimes leads him to selections of facts and
conclusions which obfuscate the complex reality he is trying to analyze.
Today we know that the
accusations against the KR regime were mainly true. Chomsky’s answer would
probably have been that such heavy accusations have to be grounded in precise
empirical facts, and that in the case of Cambodia back in the late 1970s such
facts were sorely missing. While there is some truth in this claim (especially
with regard to the devastation caused earlier in Cambodia by the US Army), I
have again some problems with it. There is a thin line that separates justified
doubt about media reports from comfortable skepticism which allows us to ignore
or downplay atrocities. One can easily imagine a similar line of argumentation
in the late 1930s about the Nazi atrocities or the Stalinist purges: we don’t have
enough reliable data, we should not pretend to know what really goes on in
these countries, so it is advisable to doubt Western press reports... (and in
both these cases, as well as in the case of Khmer Rouge, later knowledge
confirmed the worst fears). One may add that a similar tactic is used by
companies and organizations which want to downplay the environmental or health
risks (we don’t really know for certain about global warming, about the health
risks of smoking…). So how can to decide in such cases? It is here that the
analysis of ideology can be of some help—the point I made in my improvised
reply to Chomsky:
For example, concerning
Stalinism. The point is not that you have to know, you have photo evidence of
gulag or whatever. My God you just have to listen to the public discourse of
Stalinism, of Khmer Rouge, to get it that something terrifyingly pathological
is going on there. For example, Khmer Rouge: Even if we have no data about
their prisons and so on, isn’t it in a perverse way almost fascinating to have
a regime which in the first two years (‘75 to ‘77) behaved towards itself,
treated itself, as illegal? You know the regime was nameless. It was called
“Angka,” organization—not Communist Party of Cambodia—an organization. Leaders
were nameless.
My underlying thesis is here
that no effective ideology simply lies: an ideology is never a simple
mystification obfuscating the hidden reality of domination and exploitation;
the atrocious reality obfuscated and mystified by an ideology has to register,
to leave traces, in the explicit ideological text itself, in the guise of its
inconsistencies, gaps, etc. The Stalinist show trials were, of course, a brutal
travesty of justice concealing breath-taking brutality, but to see this, it is
not necessary to know the reality behind them—the public face of the trials,
the puppet-like monstrosity of public confessions, etc., made this abundantly
clear. In a homologous way, one doesn’t have to know how Jews really were to
guess that the Nazi accusations against them were a fake—a close look at these
accusations makes it clear that we are dealing with paranoiac fantasies.
The same goes for
liberal-capitalist violence, of course—I have written many pages on the falsity
of humanitarian interventionism. One does not need to know the brutal reality
that sustains such interventions, the cynical pursuit of economic and political
interests obfuscated by humanitarian concerns, to discern the falsity of such
interventionism—the inconsistencies, gaps and silences of its explicit text are
tell-tale enough. This, of course, in no way implies that the disclosure and
analysis of facts are not important: one should bring out to light all the
details of their atrocious brutality, of ruthless economic exploitation, etc.—a
job done quite well by Chomsky himself. However, in order to explain how people
often remain within their ideology even when they are forced to admit facts,
one has to supplement investigation and disclosure of facts by the analysis of
ideology which not only makes people blind to the full horror of facts but also
enables them to participate in activities which generate these atrocious facts
while maintaining the appearance of human dignity.
There is another more refined
point to be made here. Often, one cannot but be shocked by the excessive
indifference towards suffering, even and especially when this suffering is
widely reported in the media and condemned, as if it is the very outrage at
suffering which turns us into its immobilized fascinated spectators. Recall, in
the early 1990s, the three-year-long siege of Sarajevo, with the population
starving, exposed to permanent shelling and snipers’ fire. The big enigma here
is: although all the media were full of pictures and reports, why did not the
UN forces, NATO, or the US accomplish just a small act of breaking the siege of
Sarajevo, of imposing a corridor through which people and provisions could
circulate freely? It would have cost nothing: with a little bit of serious
pressure on the Serb forces, the prolonged spectacle of encircled Sarajevo
exposed to daily doses of terror would have been over. There is only one answer
to this enigma, the one proposed by Rony Brauman who, on behalf of the Red
Cross, coordinated the help to Sarajevo: the very presentation of the crisis of
Sarajevo as “humanitarian,” the very recasting of the political-military
conflict into humanitarian terms, was sustained by an eminently political
choice (basically, taking the Serb side in the conflict). Especially ominous
and manipulative was here the role of Francois Mitterand:
The celebration of
‘humanitarian intervention’ in Yugoslavia took the place of a political
discourse, disqualifying in advance all conflicting debate. ... It was
apparently not possible, for Francois Mitterand, to express his analysis of the
war in Yugoslavia. With the strictly humanitarian response, he discovered an
unexpected source of communication or, more precisely, of cosmetics, which is a
little bit the same thing. ... Mitterand remained in favor of the maintenance
of Yugoslavia within its borders and was persuaded that only a strong Serbian
power was in the position to guarantee a certain stability in this explosive
region. This position rapidly became unacceptable in the eyes of the French
people. All the bustling activity and the humanitarian discourse permitted him
to reaffirm the unfailing commitment of France to the Rights of Man in the end,
and to mimic an opposition to Greater Serbian fascism, all in giving it free
rein.
One can see how my perception
of the Yugoslav conflict differs from Chomsky’s. However, I agree with the
general thrust of his argument which is that one should analyze the
depoliticized humanitarian politics of “Human Rights” as the ideology of
military interventionism serving specific economico-political purposes. As
Wendy Brown develops apropos Michael Ignatieff, such humanitarianism
presents itself as something of
an antipolitics—a pure defense of the innocent and the powerless against power,
a pure defense of the individual against immense and potentially cruel or
despotic machineries of culture, state, war, ethnic conflict, tribalism,
patriarchy, and other mobilizations or instantiations of collective power
against individuals.”
However, the question is: “what
kind of politicization those who intervene on behalf of human rights set in
motion against the powers they oppose. Do they stand for a different
formulation of justice or do they stand in opposition to collective justice projects?”
Say, it is clear that the US overthrowing of Saddam Hussein, legitimized in the
terms of ending the suffering of the Iraqi people, not only was motivated by
precise politico-economic interests, but also relied on a precise idea of the
political and economic conditions of the post-Saddam Iraq (Western liberal
democracy, guarantee of private property, the inclusion into the global market,
etc.). The purely humanitarian anti-political politics of merely preventing
suffering thus effectively amounts to the implicit prohibition of elaborating a
positive collective project of socio-political transformation. Jacques Ranciere
proposes here a salient comparison of human rights with charity donations:
... when they are of no use,
you do the same as charitable persons do with their old clothes. You give them
to the poor. Those rights that appear to be useless in their place are sent
abroad, along with medicine and clothes, to people deprived of medicine,
clothes, and rights. … if those who suffer inhuman repression are unable to
enact Human Rights that are their last recourse, then somebody else has to
inherit their rights in order to enact them in their place. This is what is
called the ‘right to humanitarian interference’—a right that some nations
assume to the supposed benefit of victimized populations, and very often
against the advice of the humanitarian organizations themselves.
Consequently, what today, in
the predominant Western public speech, the “Human Rights of the Third World
suffering victims” effectively mean is the right of the Western powers
themselves to intervene—politically, economically, culturally, militarily—in
the Third World countries of their choice on behalf of the defense of Human
Rights. My disagreement with Chomsky’s political analyses lies elsewhere: his
neglect of how ideology works, as well as the problematic nature of his biased
dealing with facts which often leads him to do what he accuses his opponents of
doing.
But I think that that the
differences in our political positions are so minimal that they cannot really
account for the thoroughly dismissive tone of Chomsky’s attack on me. Our
conflict is really about something else—it is simply a new chapter in the
endless gigantomachy between so-called continental philosophy and the
Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition. There is nothing specific in Chomsky’s
critique—the same accusations of irrationality, of empty posturing, of playing
with fancy words, were heard hundreds of times against Hegel, against
Heidegger, against Derrida, etc. What stands out is only the blind brutality of
his dismissal—here is how he replies when, back in his December 2012 interview
with Veterans Unplugged, he was asked about the ideas of Lacan, Derrida, and
me:
What you’re referring to is
what’s called ‘theory.’ And when I said I’m not interested in theory, what I
meant is, I’m not interested in posturing—using fancy terms like polysyllables
and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s
no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is
familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of
the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions,
empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of
something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can
find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in
that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything
to what he’s saying.
And he goes on and on in the
same vein, repeating how he doesn’t see anything to what I’m saying, how he
cannot discern in my texts any traces of rational examination of facts, how my
work displays empty posturing not to be taken seriously, etc. A weird
statement, measured by his professed standards of respect for empirical facts
and rational argumentation: there are no citations (which, in this case, can be
excused, since we are dealing with a radio interview), but also not even the vaguest
mentions of any of my ideas. Did he decode any of my “fancy words” and indicate
how what one gets is “something you can explain in five minutes to a
twelve-year-old”? There are no political references in his first attack (and in
this domain, as far as I can see, I much more often than not agree with him). I
did a couple of short political books on 9/11 (Welcome to the Desert of the
Real), on the war in Iraq (Iraq: the Borrowed Kettle), on the 2008 financial
meltdown (First as Tragedy, then as Farce), which appear to me written in a
quite accessible way and dealing with quite a lot of facts—do they also contain
nothing but empty posturing? In short, is Chomsky in his thorough dismissal of
my work not doing exactly what he is accusing me of: clinging to the empty
posture of total rejection with no further ado?
I think one can convincingly
show that the continental tradition in philosophy, although often difficult to
decode, and sometimes—I am the first to admit this—defiled by fancy jargon,
remains in its core a mode of thinking which has its own rationality, inclusive
of respect for empirical data. And I furthermore think that, in order to grasp
the difficult predicament we are in today, to get an adequate cognitive mapping
of our situation, one should not shirk the resorts of the continental tradition
in all its guises, from the Hegelian dialectics to the French “deconstruction.”
Chomsky obviously doesn’t agree with me here. So what if—just another fancy
idea of mine—what if Chomsky cannot find anything in my work that goes “beyond
the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old
because” because, when he deals with continental thought, it is his mind which
functions as the mind of a twelve-year-old, the mind which is unable to distinguish
serious philosophical reflection from empty posturing and playing with empty
words?
