Žižek at the Buchmesse : Evil,Cancel Culture,and the Difficulty of Diversity

Disrupting the Logic of Evil

There is something deeply ironic about the criticism levelled at Žižek. Mind you, we are talking here about a thinker who not only believes that ‘the basic political problem today is how to best reconfigure democracy’ (Žižek, 2018), but also that refusing to clearly take sides in violent conflicts means already to violently take sides. ³ War, of course, is always an extreme case, and the conflict in the Middle East is where war’s existential character strikes us with utmost brutality (Zonszein, 2023). Essentially, then, Žižek got a taste of his own medicine when he was criticised, among others, by the director of the Anne Frank Educational Centre, for failing to clearly take sides and acknowledge ‘absolute evil’ (Gutmair, 2023).

Evil is a curious concept with a long tradition in philosophical and political (not to mention religious) thought (Bernstein, 2002; Calder, 2022; Neiman, 2015). It is not difficult to see why this is so. We need – also philosophically – a term that captures the ‘evilness’ of acts that are not adequately described by words such as ‘injustice’ or ‘human rights violations’. It is a term that expresses, in George Kateb’s words, ‘our utmost condemnation’ (Kateb, 1992: 199). But while we seem to find it difficult to do without this concept, objections to evil are numerous and powerful. Among the most important is that the word evil generates and reinforces a ‘black-and-white’ dichotomy while political and moral problems are, in truth, never as clear-cut and straightforward as they might appear initially. The most elaborate argument along these lines has been presented by Richard Bernstein in his book The Abuse of Evil (Bernstein, 2006). Bernstein, writing against the backdrop of US responses to the terrorist attacks of 9/11, argues that he has been

extremely distressed by the post-9/11 ‘evil talk’. I argue that the new discourse of good and evil, which divides the world according to this stark and simplistic dichotomy, is an abuse of evil. Traditionally, the discourse of evil in our religious, philosophical and literary traditions has been intended to provoke thinking, questioning, and inquiry. But today, the appeal to evil is being used as a political tool to obscure complex issues, to block genuine thinking, and to stifle public discussion and debate. (2006: Preface VIII)

Bernstein, in other words, seeks to demonstrate how the abuse of the concept of evil has corrupted politics and religion since 9/11, but, crucially, without calling for the abandonment of the concept of evil altogether. In fact, Bernstein draws a subtle but crucial distinction between the legitimate use of the concept of evil and the illegitimate abuse thereof: ‘When we survey historical attempts to comprehend evil’, he writes, ‘there is one characteristic that stands out: The confrontation with evil provokes thinking . . . But something different happened on 9/11. . . . Suddenly the world was divided in a simple (and simplistic) duality – the evil ones seeking to destroy us and those committed to the war against evil’ (2006: 9–10).

What makes Bernstein’s account philosophically interesting is that it disrupts a central logic of the discourse of evil: that evil always lies on one side – and one side only. Yet, this disruption of evil’s logic, which might sound innocent (perhaps even trite) in theory, is bound to be controversial as soon as it is put into practice. This is what the event at the Buchmesse has made abundantly clear. It is, first and foremost, to the great credit of the organisers that they refused to follow the logic of evil. To be sure, it might be said that they could not know what they were getting into when Žižek took the stage. But this is highly unlikely. Žižek (2023) himself states that the director of the Buchmesse had asked him to mention the war in his talk and that he had submitted his speech to the organisers prior to the event. It was no surprise – especially given Žižek’s comments on the conflict throughout his career (YouTube, 2009; Žižek, 2011a: 143–149) – that he would not simply join the chorus of unconditional support for Israel. There can be little doubt, therefore, that the organisers thought long and hard about the values that the Buchmesse seeks to promote and decided, at least in this case, to create an institutional space within which different opinions can compete and even clash and even the most controversial topics should not be approached from a one-dimensional angle. Neither did the organisers see a need to intervene when hecklers raised their voices and confronted Žižek. Thus, at a moment when the Brandenburg Gate was lit up with the Israeli flag, the organisers of the Buchmesse took a courageous stance against the logic of evil and in defence of diversity and openness. ⁴

Žižek disrupted the logic of evil precisely by not denying the existence of evil. In fact, he was at pains to highlight atrocities perpetrated by both sides. When he asserted that ‘the moment you accept that it is not possible to fight for both sides at the same time, you lost your soul’, he explicitly denied that it is possible to reduce evil to one side. Of course, this did not resonate well with the pro-Israel audience. But his comments also exposed Žižek to the ire of the far left, for whom Israel is the occupier, the coloniser, the oppressor – in short, the personification of evil. Žižek, then, was willing to receive criticism from a variety of angles (including his friends and allies) by celebrating – in seemingly the most inappropriate of circumstances – what has pejoratively become known as ‘both-sideism’ (Lalami, 2019). Evil, so the underlying logic goes, does not permit context. This conflict, more specifically, only leaves a choice between the Scylla of siding with Israel (i.e. the oppressor) and the Charybdis of siding with Hamas (i.e. the terrorists). And the very attempt to resist this zero-sum logic means complicity with the other side.

It is important not to overlook, however, that Žižek’s ‘both-sideism’, while disrupting the logic of evil, does not make evil its main purpose. As he makes clear, the real task here is not to determine on which side evil lies but to find ways to ‘solve the conflict’. Doing so allows him to counter yet another objection to the discourse of evil. This objection is expressed by Philip Cole (2006), who rejects the idea that the concept of evil ‘can tell us anything about the human condition’ and ‘explain anything about what humans do’ (p. 1). For Cole (2006), evil is an explanatorily useless concept, a ‘black hole’ that should be abandoned: ‘The fundamental question is one of explanation, and whether the concept of evil can play any constructive or useful role in explaining human action. Is “because she was evil” ever an explanation, even a partial one?’ (pp. 9, 18). For Cole this is merely a rhetorical question, and the answer is an unqualified ‘no’. But Žižek rightly disagrees with this. Not only because he wants to retain the possibility of expressing our ‘utmost condemnation’ for unjustifiable acts, but also because he believes that a solution to the underlying problem can only be reached through an engagement with the evil perpetrated by both sides.

Preaching and Practising Diversity

No doubt, with his speech Žižek quite deliberately stirred controversy. But to portray him as a notorious attention seeker misses the point. Even those who see him, more appropriately, as a flamboyant agent provocateur have often failed to grasp the deeper significance of Žižek’s provocation(s). What Žižek did at the Buchmesse does take courage: He was bent on disrupting the logic of evil at a moment when evil stared us right in the face; and he was ready to deviate from a prepared script and to emotionally and passionately engage with a predictably hostile audience. In this speech, much more than in many of his publications, Žižek embodied the spirit of a ‘radical democrat’, one who disrupts conventional wisdom and does not shy away from standing his ground in the face of adversity. ⁵

And yet, Žižek’s more spontaneous responses also demonstrate how difficult it is to live up to the demands of diversity and inclusivity in practice. In two key moments of the speech, Žižek referred to diversity, inclusivity, and, indeed, cancel culture: First, when he was heckled and openly criticised for ‘relativising’ and ‘comparing’ Israeli acts of self-defence with Hamas atrocities, Žižek fired back: ‘This is where you can see in practice what it means to respond to the demand for diversity and inclusion. This is cancel [culture] logic. . . . To have our way of diversity, some people . . . must be first excluded.’ Towards the end of the speech, he returned to ‘the paradoxes of cancel culture’ when criticising the Buchmesse’s decision to cancel the award ceremony for Palestinian author Adania Shibli: ‘Official notice is . . . yes, inclusion, diversity . . . but then all that cancel culture does is excluding those who don’t fit your notion of inclusion and . . . diversity.’ Žižek, of course, is right with his latter criticism; with the former, however, he gets it disturbingly wrong.

The term ‘cancel culture’ has become a widely-used catchphrase ⁶ for the practice of calling out, punishing, and, quite literally, ‘cancelling’ uncomfortable opinions. ⁷ It is often framed as a tactic of proponents of social justice for whom even the slightest deviation from their ideologies must be punished with cancellation (Dershowitz, 2020); properly understood, however, cancel culture is not reducible to a particular ideology and can be found across the political spectrum (Norris, 2023; Ng, 2022). To be sure, the idea of a cancel culture is deeply contested, so much so that even its very existence is questioned (Hagi, 2019; Norris, 2023) . But what cannot be denied is that the invocation of cancel culture has become a rhetorical weapon in political struggles. Žižek used the term precisely in this sense when he accused audience members who openly challenged his views of ‘cancelling’. In sharp contrast to Žižek’s own assessment, however, the open challenging of opinions is not an expression of cancel culture, and Žižek’s disappointing reaction contradicts his own words and flies in the face of his broader philosophical/political project. For if it is true that ‘the simplest definition of radical democratic theory is . . . [that] it is the theory and practice of democratic contestation’ (Finlayson, 2008: 13), then any radical understanding of democracy – including the one Žižek purports to promote – contradicts itself when it self-pityingly lashes out against those who contest its own position. Žižek, in fact, is guilty of practising precisely what he preaches against: chastising those who do not share his views – those, moreover, who have mustered the courage to openly and publicly challenge one of the leading public intellectuals of today, as wicked proponents of a culture bent on suffocating diversity. This is anything but a small mishap. Žižek’s flippant invocation of cancel culture also undermines his disruption of the logic of evil. After all, it is only a small step from stigmatising anyone who disagrees with your perspective as ‘evil’ to denouncing them as ‘cancellers’. Thus, Žižek becomes – inadvertently or not – a practitioner of what he himself dubbed the ‘cancellation of ethics’ in a recent article for the Spanish newspaper El Pais (Žižek, 2022).

At the same time, interpreting Žižek’s response merely as a hypocritical sleight of hand that makes a mockery of diversity risks focusing too narrowly on the person of Žižek. What really is at stake here is a failure to grasp the ‘difficulty of diversity’ more generally. Many of today’s self-styled champions of diversity overlook the fact that diversity does not come easy, and it does not come cheap. Consistently defending diversity inevitably comes at the price of ridding us of the moral certainty that we, as human beings, are craving. ⁸ A ‘good versus evil’ or an ‘oppressor versus oppressed’ mentality has the advantage of affording us precisely this moral certainty; it is not, however, reconcilable with the idea of an inclusive space of democratic deliberation that values a diversity of opinions, interpretations, and analyses. Žižek claims to understand that. However, practising diversity becomes difficult when its demands are not directed at others but turn against oneself; in that very moment, diversity reveals itself as something that is infinitely more difficult to practise than to preach. And this is where Žižek fails to grasp the difficulty of diversity. Insisting that he was ‘attacked’ by advocates of cancel culture who had the audacity to openly challenge his views would be a hilarious testament to this failure if it weren’t for the fact that the difficulty of diversity seems equally incomprehensible to those champions of inclusion who accept diversity only as long as it chimes with their worldview.

Here’s the rub: You can throw the demand of diversity at others as much as you want; but if you fail to understand (or accept) that diversity is a boomerang that comes back to challenge your own values and convictions, you make a mockery of diversity. And this can only play into the hands of those who believe it is much more honest to ditch this hypocritical discourse altogether.

Open Souls and Open Society

With all due respect to both the Frankfurter Buchmesse and Žižek, do we need to pay so much attention to this – perhaps isolated and anecdotal – event? The answer is an unqualified yes. It might be a truism that neither singular events nor individuals exist in isolation from the broader society. This does not make it any less true. Žižek’s speech provides a window into a society that struggles to respond to a world that for many seems to have gone mad. But it also does so in a more specific sense: Žižek’s appropriate warning that a ‘prohibition to analyse’ controversial events is the hallmark of a totalitarian society, adds a normative element to the event that we should not ignore. While it is, admittedly, not always clear what exactly Žižek wants, it is important to see that his criticism of an Analyseverbot is less innocent than it might seem at first glance. When it comes to social, moral, and political issues, analyses are never fully objective, if by that we mean that the analyst can completely detach herself and theorise, as it were, from an Archimedean point. Even Max Weber, one of the most forceful advocates of a ‘value-neutral’ social science, was acutely aware of this point. ⁹ So is Žižek – and so, I presume, was his audience. A call for Analyse, in other words, always invites the troublemaker of viewpoint diversity to the discussion. It is nothing less than a risky call to abandon moral certainty and open up the floodgates to deliberation and democratic contestation. It is safe to assume, therefore, that when Žižek insists that he wants to live in a non-totalitarian society, he means a society that is open to the analysis of historical events from a number of perspectives and values a diversity of opinions on even the most contentious issues. We might call this, following the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1977), an ‘open society’. ¹⁰

Writing under the influence of the Second World War, Bergson diagnosed

a sharp distinction, in the sphere of society, between the closed and the open. The closed society is that whose members hold together, caring nothing for the rest of humanity, on the alert for attack or defence, bound, in fact, to a perpetual readiness for battle. Such is human society fresh from the hands of nature. Man was made for this society as the ant was made for the ant-heap. (p. 266)

By contrast, the ‘open’ (or mystic) society is characterised for Bergson (1977) by the ‘strength to love mankind’ (p. 23) – openness, accordingly, expresses itself in this cosmopolitan ethos that directs its gaze beyond the ‘ant-heap’ of its own tribe. Rather than operating as a cohesive unit with a strong sense of identity and a common purpose, an open society champions individual freedom and creativity and, ultimately, cares for humanity as a whole. Crucially, though, society itself cannot produce this spirit of openness. It needs guidance from what Bergson calls ‘open souls’, mystic figures who themselves possess this strength and who will be emulated by others. Thus, open souls can act as ‘harbingers of humanity’ (Pearson, 2018: 123) who will inject the cosmopolitan ethos into society, allow it to spread through emulation and, eventually, bring into existence an ‘open society’.

It is surely just a coincidence that Žižek, too, referred to an animal species in his speech: for him, only an ‘idiot’ could have chosen the symbol of a honeycomb for the Buchmesse, as bees (similar to ants) form the epitome of totalitarian societies. ¹¹ Bees and ants aside, the obvious question is: If Bergson is right and only ‘open souls’ can inject the spirit of openness into society, who might qualify as such today? Perhaps Greta Thunberg, as the late Bernard Stiegler (2020) suggested. What about Žižek himself? Let’s see. An open soul is someone who reminds others of their responsibility and accepts her own responsibility in turn. An open soul can neither simply be an ‘intellectual’ nor (to speak in today’s terms) an ‘influencer’. She must be an influential intellectual or, perhaps better, a public intellectual. ¹² An open soul is also someone who leaves their comfort zone, puts their reputation on the line, and is committed to ‘truth-telling’ (parrhesia) above all. As someone who challenges conventional wisdom, she is much less agreeable than confrontational and, if necessary, obnoxious – a gadfly. I believe that Žižek comes relatively close to this ideal type insofar as he reminds us of our responsibility to question our ideological beliefs, break with taboos, and confront the paradoxes of human existence (Žižek, 2019). Unfortunately, he is much weaker on the second aspect: living up to his own responsibility. And this is a dangerous mix (albeit not uncommon among so-called ‘public intellectuals’) that makes his remarks about cancel culture all the more problematic.

Regardless of the fact that Žižek has long been a critic of the so-called ‘liberal left’, which, according to him, abandoned classical leftist ideals (see Žižek, 2011a), his invocation of cancel culture can nonetheless be interpreted as a leftist embrace of the discourse of cancel culture. His remarks, in other words, provide an all too precious opportunity for some on the left to seize a powerful discourse that had reflexively been deployed by their enemies and turn it against them. Surely, if one of the standard-bearers of the left sees it fit to vilify any open challenge to their position as an act of cancel culture, what prevents those who emulate this perhaps not-so-open soul from doing the same? ¹³ For the political right, in turn, Žižek stands as the personification of leftist hypocrisy. Is not, after all, ‘cancel culture’ something that was constantly derided by the left as a spectre conjured up by the right merely to score cheap points in political conflicts? And how much credibility can those who preach diversity and inclusivity have when they, in the same breath, exclude all those who do not fit their idea of inclusion and diversity? Better, then, to abandon all this hypocritical talk about diversity. Better to revert to the default position that whoever invokes humanity wants to cheat. Forward march – back to the ant-heap!

Conclusion

How do we respond – as a society – to situations in which we see ourselves confronted with evil? The Gaza war raises this question with shocking brutality. On one side, a group of terrorists that murdered 1400 Jews in the deadliest attack since the Second World War; on the other, a state that has for decades held Palestinians in what is essentially an open-air prison, and perpetrated atrocities that have been qualified as crimes against humanity (Human Rights Watch, 2021). In parallel, a ‘culture war over the Gaza war’ (The Economist, 2023) has erupted. In and of itself, this should not come as a surprise to anyone. Wars have never been limited to the battlefield. What is shocking, though, is the intensity of this parallel conflict – the hatred, the violence, the bigotry, the pogroms, the racism. On a global scale, entire societies are held captive by the uncompromising logic of evil.

The truth of the matter, however, is that while the Gaza war is a hard (perhaps the hardest) case, this logic reaches far beyond it. After all, the question to which much of the literature that declares liberalism bankrupt and democracy in crisis (or even dead) essentially boils down is what it means, and what it takes, to practise diversity when faced with the most divisive issues of our time. We live in an age of perceived existential conflict in which the public sphere is not only polarised but torn apart by what Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018) call ‘extreme polarisation’ (p. 220): ¹⁴ white people are allegedly replaced by minorities; people of colour are allegedly exterminated by white oppressors; trans-people are allegedly denied the right of existence; the ‘Last Generation’ allegedly inherited an inhospitable planet from their ancestors, and so on. Admittedly, the metaphors we use to describe this phenomenon – from ‘culture wars’ to ‘polarisation’ – are semantically and morally problematic. But the deeper issue of an existentialist conception of politics, gripped by the dangerous logic of evil, is all too real. It paralyses our institutions, saturates our political culture, and stifles critical thinking. And it gets in the way of social, moral, and political progress.

Optimists believe it is possible to lower the temperature and return to a less existentialist form of politics. I, for one, cannot claim to be an optimist; but that’s beside the point. The point is that, in any case, societies will need to make a distinction: Will they disrupt the logic of evil or follow their tribalistic inclinations? Opting for the latter means, essentially, giving up on the ideas of plurality, diversity, and inclusion. No longer is it credible to claim that Analyseverbote are not expressions of the dangerous logic of evil; and no longer is it credible to deny that attempts to expunge diversity in the name of diversity lead back to the ant-heap. By contrast, opting for the former means resisting the all too human temptation of blindly and categorically choosing one side in complex conflicts. Both the organisers of the Frankfurter Buchmesse and Žižek have demonstrated, in their own way, how this might be done. The former, by providing an institutional space in which a diversity of opinions can be openly expressed. The latter, by unsettling the comforting idea that evil always lies with one side. But there must also be an awareness that diversity does not come easy or cheap. Consistently defending diversity comes at the price of ridding us of the moral certainty that a ‘good versus evil’ or an ‘oppressor versus oppressed’ mentality affords us. This is what makes diversity so infinitely more difficult to practise than to preach. Žižek fails to grasp this difficulty – in this sense, he is an ant. And so are many of today’s self-professed champions of diversity. For diversity is not a baton, it is a boomerang.

Bergson is right: we need ‘open souls’ who can inspire others and guide societies on their path towards openness. But if these open souls shirk their responsibility, if they use their influence to deceive rather than to guide, they might well lead societies farther down the rabbit hole. And at some point, we might not find our way back.