Read Online Comradely Greetings by Slavoj Žižek - Free Book Online Page B

children, telling them not to have C-sections, not to have abortions, telling people not to drink, not to smoke, not to hold hands in public, to be obedient and religious. He was constantly telling them what was best for them (“shop and pray”). This was probably the best indication of the neo-liberal (“shop”) soft-Islamic (“pray”) character of the JDP rule: PM Erdoğan’s utopia for Istanbul (and we should remember that he was the Mayor of Istanbul for four years) was a huge shopping mall and a huge mosque in Taksim Square and Gezi Park. He had become “Daddy Knows Best” in all avenues of life, and tried to do this in a clumsy patronizing disguise, which was quickly discarded during the Gezi events to reveal the profoundly authoritarian character behind the image.
    Is “shop and pray” not a perfect late-capitalist version of the old Christian
ora et labora
, with the worker or toiling peasant replaced by the consumer? The underlying wager is, of course, that praying (fidelity to the old communal traditions) will make us even better “shoppers,” i.e., participants in the global capitalist market. However, the call for dignity is not only a protest against such patronizing injunctions; dignity is also the appearance of dignity, and in this case the demand for dignity means that I want to be duped and controlled in such a way that proper appearances are maintained, that I don’t lose face—is this not a key feature of our democracies? This is how our democracies function—with our consent: we act
as if
we are free and freely deciding, silently not only accepting but even
demanding
that an invisible injunction (inscribed into the very form of free speech) tells us what to do and think. As Marx recognized long ago, the secret is in the form itself. In this sense, in a democracy, every ordinary citizen is effectively a king—but a king in a constitutional democracy, a king whose decisions are only formal, whose function is to sign measures proposed by the executive administration. This is why the problem of democratic rituals is homologous to the big problem of constitutional democracy: how to protect the dignity of the king? How to maintain the appearance that the king effectively decides, when we all know this is not true? What we call a “crisis of democracy” occurs not when people stop believing in their own power, but, on the contrary, when they stop trusting the elites, those who are supposed to know for them and provide the guidelines, when they realize, with some anxiety, that “the (true) throne is empty,” thatthe decision
really is
now theirs. There is thus in “free elections” always a minimal aspect of politeness: those in power politely pretend that they do not really hold power, and ask us to freely decide if we want to give it to them—in a way which mirrors the logic of a gesture meant to be refused.
    So, back to Turkey, is it only this type of dignity that the protesters want, tired as they are of the crude and blatant ways in which they are cheated and manipulated? Is their demand merely: “We want to be duped in the proper way—at least make an honest effort to cheat us without insulting our intelligence!” or is it really something more? If we aim at more, then we should acknowledge that the first step of liberation is to dismiss the appearance of false freedom and openly proclaim our un-freedom. The first step towards women’s liberation, for example, is to reject the appearance of respect for women and openly proclaim that women are oppressed—today’s master more than ever does not want to appear as the master.
    Does this mean that we should simply get rid of the masters? Here, I would like to conclude with a provocation. A true Master is not an agent of discipline and prohibition, his/her message is not “You cannot!” or “You have to …!”, but a releasing “You can!”—what? Do the impossible, i.e., what appears impossible within the coordinates of the