Žižek: What have we missed in Syria?

The fall of Bashar al-Assad's government in Syria amazed even the opposition Hajat Tahrir ash-Sham and her leader Abu Muhammad al-Daulani, which is simply a susceptible ground for conspiracy theories.

What function did Israel, Turkey, Russia and the United States play in this abrupt shuffle? Did Russia refrain from intervening in Assad's defence just due to the fact that it could not afford another military operation outside the Ukrainian front, or was it besides about any behind-the-ground arrangements? Did the U.S. again fall into the trap of supporting Islamists against Russia, or did they draw any conclusions from the 1980s and support for the mujahideen in Afghanistan? What did Israel do? due to the fact that he definitely uses the world's distraction from Gaza and the West Bank and even occupies fresh territories in confederate Syria.

Like most commentators, I do not know the answers to these questions, so I like to focus on a broader view of the matter. The general feature of this story, as in Afghanistan after the withdrawal of Americans and Iran during the 1979 Revolution, is that no decisive conflict has occurred here. The government just folded like card house. The triumph came to a side that just wanted to fight and die for the cause.

The fact that the government was widely hated does not full explain what happened. Why did worldly opposition to Assad disappear, and only Muslim fundamentalists who now benefited? The same question can be asked in the case of Afghanistan. Why thousands of people risked their lives to I've got to get through it. from Kabul, but not to fight the Taliban? The armed forces of the old Afghan government were possibly better armed, but they simply had no will to fight.

A akin set of facts fascinated philosopher Michel Foucault erstwhile he (twice) visited Iran in 1979. He was struck by the indifference of revolutionaries to whether they would last themselves. They spoke their fact in a “partial and agonist way” like explains Patrick Gomez – their goal was “to change through combat and struggle, unlike pacifying, neutralizing and normalizing forms of modern Western power [...] To realize this issue, a functioning concept is crucial Truth ...party truth, available only sidingIt’s okay. ”

How He put it Foucault himself: “And if the individual who speaks of the law (or alternatively of his rights) speaks of the fact at the same time, this fact is not the common fact of the philosopher. [...] It only captures the full thing from the side, intersecting it and piercing its point of view. This means that the fact is true, which uncover itself only from its combat position, only in the light of the desired victory, as it were, on the border of endurance of the speaking entity." [1]

Can this position be disregarded as the right pre-modern "primitive" society that has not yet discovered modern individualism? Anyone who, though minimally acquainted with Western Marxism, knows the answer. How Commanded Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs, Marxism is "universally true" precisely due to the fact that it is "partial" to a specific, subjective position. What Foucault was looking for in Iran – agonist forms of fact preaching – was known earlier from Marx, who saw that participation in the class conflict was not an obstacle to the acquisition of “objective historical knowledge”, but it is simply a condition.

The affirmative concept of cognition as a "objective" expression of reality—as Foucault characterized as pacifying, neutralizing and normalizing forms of modern Western power—is the ideology of the "end of ideology". On the 1 hand, we have supposedly unidentifiable expert knowledge, and on the another hand scattered individuals, each focusing on their own, idiosyncratic self-interest (in Foucault's view) on the small pleasures of life. From the point of view of liberal individualism, any common commitment, in peculiar 1 which carries the hazard of life and health, is suspicious and "irrational".

We come across an interesting paradox here. Although conventional Marxism may not be able to explain the success of the Taliban, it allows us to realize what Foucault was looking for in Iran (and what we should consider in Syria). At a time erstwhile the triumph of global capitalism broke the worldly spirit of collective pursuits of better life, Foucault hoped to find an example of collective engagement, not based on spiritual fundamentalism. He didn't.

Why religion seems to now have a monopoly on collective engagement and self-sacrifice, explains Boris Buden, who saysthat religion as a political force reflects the post-political disintegration of society – the disintegration of conventional mechanisms that erstwhile warrant the stableness of Community ties. Fundamentalist religion is not only political – it is indeed politics. For believers, it is no longer just a social phenomenon, but an invoice of society itself.

So it is no longer possible to separate between the purely spiritual aspect of religion and its politicisation – in the postpolitical universe religion is simply a channel to which antagonistic passions return. fresh events, looking at the victories of spiritual fundamentalism, attest not so much about the return of religion to politics, but simply about the return of politics as such.

So the question is: what happened to the extremist secular politics – this great, forgotten accomplishment of European modernity? Noam Chomsky believes that, in the absence of her, this is End of organised society – an irreversible change after which it will not be possible to implement common sense actions to prevent catastrophic harm to the environment. Chomsky focuses on our indifference to the environment, but I would extend this thought to our general deficiency of willingness to participate in any political struggle. Making collective decisions to prevent foreseeable disasters is simply a political process.

The problem of the West is that it has absolutely no will to fight for a large common cause. For example, the “peacekeepers” who want Russia's war in Ukraine to end regardless of conditions, defends only their comfortable life and are willing to sacrifice Ukraine for this purpose. Italian philosopher Franco Berardi He's right.: we witness the disintegration of the Western world.

[1] Foucault, We must defend society. Crowd. Małgorzata Kowalska, KR Publishing House, Warsaw 1998 p.60.

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Copyright: task Syndicate, 2024. www.project-syncicate.org. From English she translated Catherine the Formers.