What will grow out of a bag full of sunflower seeds?

What will grow out of a bag full of sunflower seeds?

Slavoj Žižek/Text

Wang Liqiu / Translator

Slavoj Zizek, “What will grow out of a pocket full of sunflower seeds?”, The Philosophical Salon, 07 Mar, 2022, https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/what-will-grow-out-of-a-pocket-full -of-sunflower-seeds/ . Translations are for academic exchange only.

Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian Marxist philosopher and cultural critic, one of the most prominent thinkers of our time, published his first English book, The Sublime Object of Ideology, in 1989. " was recognized internationally. Known as the "Elvis of Cultural Theory".

Wang Liqiu, from Maitreya, Yunnan, holds a Ph.D. in Comparative Politics from the School of International Relations, Peking University, and is a lecturer in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Harbin Engineering University.

Michael Marder wrote in The Philosophical Salon about a Ukrainian woman who handed some sunflower seeds to a Russian soldier and told him to pocket them - - the wonderful text. [1] I say it's wonderful because it does what we most need to do today, which is to add a deeper philosophical dimension to our response to the Ukrainian disaster. This thing reminds me of A Pocket Full of Rye from Agatha Christie's Miss Marple series. Among them, the wealthy London businessman Rex Fortescu died after drinking morning tea. When people searched his clothes, they found some rye in his jacket pocket. The reason rye is there in the novel is because one of the nursery rhymes mentioned by the murderer has a line that reads "pockets full of rye"...which brings us back to Ukraine, where, according to Mader, There, a remarkably similar thing happened, but this time, instead of rye, it was sunflower seeds that were put into the pockets. In the port city of Gnichsk on the Sea of Azov, an old Ukrainian woman confronts a heavily armed Russian soldier, gives him some sunflower seeds and tells him to pocket them - so that when he dies, , the seeds will bloom, and his rotting corpse in the ground will also be of some use, providing nourishment to the growing plants...

The only thing that bothers me about this pose is the lack of sympathy for the rank-and-file soldiers sent to Ukraine. Many of them lacked decent food and other supplies, and some of the soldiers didn't even know where they were and why they were there, so they got the message that the Ukrainians had come to bring them food. This reminds me of Prague in 1968 again. I got there the day before the Soviet invasion, and I walked around the city for days until the authorities arranged for the foreigners to evacuate. At that time, what impressed me most was the embarrassment and poverty of ordinary soldiers. They formed a sharp contrast with high-level officers, and their fear of officers was far greater than their fear of our demonstrators.

Even in these crazy times, we shouldn't be ashamed to cling to the last vestiges of normalcy and invoke popular culture. So, let's look at another of Christie's classics, The Hollow (1946). In the book, the eccentric Lucy Anger cartel invites the Crystal family (top Harley Street doctor John and his wife Gerda, and the rest of his wife's maiden family) to her home for the weekend. Hercule Poirot, who was staying at a nearby country house, was also invited to dinner. The next morning, Poirot witnessed an odd scene: Gerda Crystal stood beside John with a gun, the latter's blood pouring into the pool. Lucy, Henrietta (John's lover) and Edward (Lucy's cousin, Henrietta's second cousin) were also present. John finally shouted "Henrietta" and died. It seems that the murderer is Gerda. Henrietta stepped forward and snatched the gun, seemingly clumsily throwing it into the pool, destroying the evidence. Poirot realized that the "Henrietta" that the dying man had shouted was asking his lover to protect his wife from imprisonment for his own death; in the absence of a conscious plan, The whole family conspired to mislead Poirot, knowing that Gerda was the murderer and trying to exonerate her...

Here, the reversal of the standard formula (a murder occurs; there is a group of criminal suspects who have motives and have the opportunity to commit the crime; even if the case seems clear, the detective still has to find and uncover the crime set up by the real murderer to cover up the traces of his crime. Scene clues) is reversed again: here, the group of suspects create clues that point to them to disguise the fact that the real killer was caught on the spot, and the one with the gun in his hand is clearly the killer. So, here, the crime scene is laid out in a reflexive way, and its deceptiveness lies in the fact that it looks artificial, that is, here , the truth disguises itself as an artificial appearance, so that the true "false" becomes the "clue" itself. Or, as Jane Marple put it in another classic Christie novel, They Do It With Mirror : "Never underestimate the power of the obvious."

Doesn't ideology often play this role too? Especially today. It presents itself as something mysterious, pointing to some hidden dark side to cover up crimes that are being blatantly committed and blatantly legitimized. When proclaiming this double mystifying operation (mystifying blatant ideology, mystifying obvious facts), a phrase people like to say is "The situation is more complicated (the more Chinese-contextual expression is that there is water in it). very deep)". An obvious fact (say, a brutal military aggression) is relativized (unsurprisingly, that complexity turns the aggression into a defensive act) by invoking "the circumstances behind it are much more complicated". This is why, to a certain extent, we should ignore the hidden "complexity" of the situation and trust the short-answer numbers.

Isn't the same thing happening in Ukraine? Russia attacked Ukraine, but many are looking for the "complexity" behind it. Of course, there are complications, but the basic truth remains: Russia attacked Ukraine. Our mistake was not being straightforward enough to understand Putin's threats. We don't think he really meant that, he was just playing a game of strategic manipulation. The most ironic thing is that here, we can't help but think again of the famous Jewish joke that Freud quoted: "Why are you telling me you are going to Lviv when you are really going to Lviv? "Here lies lie in the form of factual truth: two friends set a code to say go to Krakow when they go to Lviv and vice versa. Thus, in this contracted space, telling the straight truth means lying. When Putin announced military intervention, we didn't understand Putin's declaration that he wanted to pacify and denazify the whole of Ukraine. So now, the strategists of "Chengfushen" are condemning: "Since you really want to Occupy Lviv, why did you tell me you were going to occupy Lviv?"

So, what happened? Consider that a month or two ago, our mass media was still talking about the pandemic. Now, the pandemic is all but gone, and the headlines are all about Ukraine. And, if anything, people are more scared now: we're almost starting to miss the good two years of fighting the pandemic. This sudden shift shows the limits of our freedom: no one chose this change, it just happened (only conspiracy theorists don't think so, they are already saying that the Ukraine crisis is an attempt by the establishment to use a state of emergency to prolong life and control Another conspiracy of ours).

To grasp the difference between the pandemic and the crisis in Ukraine, we need to distinguish two kinds of freedom: "freedom" and "liberty." I take the risk of identifying this pair of concepts as what Hegel called abstract freedom and concrete freedom. Abstract freedom is the ability of a person to do what he wants, regardless of the rules and conventions of society, and to violate those rules and conventions, as in an outbreak of "radical negativity" (such as rebellion or revolution) as it happened. Concrete liberties are liberties maintained by a set of rules and customs. In the case of anti-vaccine people, the freedom to choose not to be vaccinated is, of course, a formal freedom; however, refusing to be vaccinated actually means limiting my actual freedom and the freedom of others. My liberty is liberty only in a specific social space, subject to rules and prohibitions. I can walk the busy streets freely because I can be reasonably sure that other people on the street will treat me in a civilized manner, and if they attack me, harass me, etc., they will be punished. I can only exercise the freedom to speak and communicate if I obey the rules of language (and their uncertainties, including unspoken rules about information that read between the lines) that people collectively establish. Of course, the language we speak is not ideologically neutral: it embodies many stereotypes and prevents us from articulating certain unusual ideas. Thinking always happens in language, and it is always accompanied by some kind of common-sense metaphysics (reality), but to really think, we have to think in a language, against it. We can change the rules of language to open up new freedoms, but clearly the issue of politically correct Newspeak suggests that imposing new rules directly can lead to ambiguous results and all kinds of new and more subtle racism and gender doctrine.

Hegel, however, knew that there were moments of crisis when abstract freedom had to step in. In December 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre wrote: "Under the German occupation, we were free as never before. We lost all our rights, especially the right to speak. They insulted us to the face.  … And that's why Resistance is true democracy; for the soldier, as for his superior, they face the same danger, the same loneliness, the same responsibility, the same absolute freedom within the same discipline." This anxiety and danger The situation is liberty, not liberty, which was established after the return of normalcy after the war. And in Ukraine today, those who resist the Russian invasion are free, but they have no right to freedom. They fought for liberty, and the key question was what liberty was won after the struggle. Putin's royal philosopher, Aleksander Dugin [3] added a postmodern touch to historicist relativism:

"Postmodernity shows that all so-called truth is just a matter of believing. So, we believe what we do, we believe what we say. And that's the only way to define truth. So, we have our special Russian truth, you guys It needs to be accepted. If the US doesn't want to go to war, then you should realize that the US is no longer the only one. On Syria and Ukraine, Russia said, 'No, you're not the head anymore'. The question is who will rule the world . . It's really all about war."

Here, we immediately think of the question: what about the people of Syria and Ukraine? Can they choose their truth/belief too, or are they just a playground for the big "leaders" and their struggles? Even some on the left see Dugin as an opponent of the global capitalist order and a proponent of the irreducible diversity of ethno-cultural identities. But Dugin's support for diversity is based on diversity in ethnic identity, not diversity within groups, which is why the issue "is really all about war." The rise of fundamentalist ethnic identities is ultimately the flip side of the global marketplace, not the flip side. We need more globalization, not less: if we really want to combat global warming, we need global solidarity and cooperation more than ever.

Gilbert Keith Chesterton wrote: "Remove the supernatural and what remains is the unnatural." We should support this statement, but in the opposite sense, not by Chase Turton's intention to understand it: we should accept that nature is "unnatural," a freak show composed of accidental disturbances without inner rhythm. At the end of June 2021, a "hot dome" (a weather phenomenon in which a ridge of high pressure traps and compresses warm air, raising the temperature and baking the area it covers) over the northwestern United States and southwestern Canada raised the temperature to nearly 50 degrees Fahrenheit degrees, making Vancouver hotter than the Middle East. It is true that the "hot dome" is a local phenomenon, but it is also the result of upheaval in global climate patterns, which, in turn, are clearly caused by human interference with natural cycles, so to combat it, we must act globally.

Remember that a day or two after the war, Putin called on the Ukrainian army to overthrow Zelensky's government and replace it on TV, saying it would be easier than making peace with them. Perhaps it would be good to have such a change in Russia itself (in 1953, Marshal Zhukov really did a great job here and Khrushchev overthrew Beria). So does this mean that we should simply demonize Putin? Do not. To truly oppose Putin, we must muster the courage to look critically at ourselves.

What game has the free West been playing with Russia over the past few decades? How did it effectively push Russia toward fascism? Just think of the disastrous economic "advice" it gave Russia during the Yeltsin era... yes, Putin clearly planned this war for years, but the West knows it, so it's definitely not out of the ordinary An unexpected surprise. We have reason to believe that the West is consciously cornering Russia. Russia's fear of being surrounded by NATO is by no means a paranoid imagination. There is truth to the following statement - no one says it better than Victor Orban [4] : "How does war happen? We are caught in the crossfire of the big geopolitical players: NATO has always In the eastward expansion, Russia is getting more and more uncomfortable about it. The Russians have two demands: Ukraine declares neutrality and NATO promises not to admit Ukraine. The Russians do not have these security guarantees, so they decide to take it by force. This is the case The geopolitical significance of war.” Of course, this small truth hides a huge lie: you know, Russia itself is playing crazy geopolitical games.

As for the current situation, there should be no taboos. Obviously, the Ukrainian side cannot be fully believed, and the situation in the Donbas region is far from clear. Moreover, the wave of exclusion of Russian artists is approaching madness. The University of Bicocca in Milan, Italy, stopped a series of lessons on Dostoevsky's novels by Paul Nori [5] . Just a precaution... (Classes resumed after a few days.) But now cultural engagement with Russia is more important than ever. And what about the huge scandal that only Ukrainians from Ukraine are allowed to enter Europe and not the third world students and workers currently in Ukraine (who are also trying to escape the war)? What about the outbreak of racism in the West? Last week, CBS News correspondent Charlie Dagata said, "With all due respect," Ukraine "is not a place that has been in conflict for decades like Iraq or Afghanistan. It's a relatively civilized, relatively European — I The words must also be carefully considered - city, a place where you don't expect or want conflict." A former deputy prosecutor-general in Ukraine told the BBC: "I was emotionally shaken because I saw blond Europeans killed every day". French journalist Philippe Corbet [6] said: “Here we are not talking about Syrians fleeing bombing by the Putin-backed Syrian regime. We are talking about Europeans fleeing in cars like ours.” Indeed, Iraq The conflict with Afghanistan has lasted for decades. But what about our collusion in these conflicts? Today, when Afghanistan is really an Islamic fundamentalist country, does anyone remember that thirty years ago it was once a strong secular tradition (including a powerful Communist Party that seized power without the Soviet Union) ) country? But then, the Soviet Union and the United States intervened in succession, so there is today...

The panic among our reporters and commentators about what is going on in Ukraine is understandable, but the panic is profoundly ambiguous. It could mean: Now, we see that horror is not limited to the third world, that horror is not just something we can safely watch on the screen, horror happens here too, so if we want to live safely If so, then we should fight it all over the world too...but it could also mean: let the terror stay there, stay away, we just need to protect ourselves from it. Putin is a war criminal - but did we not know it until now? Wasn't he already a war criminal when Russian planes bombed Aleppo, Syria's largest city, to save the Assad regime more than a decade ago? And what the Russians did in Syria at the time was even more brutal than what they did in Kyiv today. We knew it then, but our outrage was only moral and rhetorical. We are more sympathetic to Ukrainians "like us". This sentiment in itself shows the limits of Frederic Lordon's efforts. He sought to base the politics of liberation on a sense of "belonging" sustained by what Spinoza called the "imitation of affect" across individuals. We must develop solidarity with those who do not share our emotional belonging.

When President Zelensky said that Ukrainian resistance was defending the civilized world, did he mean that he rejected the uncivilized world? What about the thousands of people in Russia protesting military intervention? What about the fact that the Nazis once came to power in a country that embodies the highest culture in Europe? "Blonde Europeans" killed there . If we only "defend Europe," then we are already speaking the language of Dugin and Putin: it's a battle between European truth and Russian truth. The line between civilization and barbarism is inherent in civilization, which is why our struggle is universal. Today, only the universality of struggle is the only true universality.

Ukraine is the poorest of all post-Soviet countries. Even if they win (hopefully), their victory will be their moment of truth. They will have to realize that it is not enough for them to catch up with the West, whose liberal democracy itself is in deep crisis. One of the saddest things about the ongoing war in Ukraine is that now, at a time when global liberal capitalism is clearly approaching a crisis at every level, the situation is once again wrongly reduced to a savage totalitarian state and a civilized West. strife...while people turn a blind eye to global warming. If we continue down this path, we lose. The present moment is not the moment when things are clear, fundamentally opposed to clearly visible truths. It is the moment of the deepest lies. If Europe, which rejects the "uncivilized world", wins, we don't need Russia to destroy us. We will destroy ourselves.

[1] https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/vegetal-redemption-a-ukrainian-woman-and-russian-soldiers/

[2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10548649/Put-sunflower-seeds-pockets-grow-Ukraine-soil-Woman-confronts-Russian-troops.html

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-37766688

[4] https://abouthungary.hu/speeches-and-remarks/interview-with-prime-minister-viktor-orban-in-the-political-weekly-mandiner

[5] https://www.ruetir.com/2022/03/02/nori-case-bicocca-the-course-will-be-held-icon-news/

[6] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/02/civilised-european-look-like-us-racist-coverage-ukraine