Demanding the Impossible by Slavoj Žižek Read Free Book Online

to wear, and, in the evening, the lights in all the houses are turned on at the same time – although nobody lives in them – and people are obliged to take a walk. I love this idea. It’s like Disneyland. Is this not a pure case of the symbolic efficiency of the frame as such?
    Maybe the more they open the cities to show – this is my funny idea – the more North Korea will develop. Why don’t they open a platform on Pyongyang which can be looked at from the South? This is the moment of truth: North Korea behind a mask . Western observers even think that although North Koreans may be crazy, they’re immensely proud and independent. No, they’re not. They depend so terribly on what others think about them. But why do they have this obsession to impress others?
    In this sense, North Korea fascinates me. How does a society like this actually function? Contrary to what people say, it is a brutal regime. At the same time, it is fragile in the sense that appearances have to be maintained at any price. This already started under Stalinism. If you publish one critical text, or show a moment of weakness to the leader – for example, show Kim Jong-Il sleeping – this is a catastrophe. This is for me the big enigma of communism. It’s not just pure brutality but, at the same time, it’s an obsession with “feigning” simply to maintain appearances . This is a paradoxical point of the ambiguity of politeness that there is an unmistakable dimension of humiliating brutality in the politeness.
    This is why, when we had dissidents here, we were all obsessed with thinking that the secret police was watching and listening to us. But I told them that the right model – it’s a very racist example – should be this one: I read in some novel by James Baldwin that in the prostitution houses of the old South, of New Orleans before the Civil War, the African-American, the black servant, was not perceived as a person, so that, for example, two white people – the prostitute and her client – were not at all disturbed when a servant entered the room to deliver drinks. They were not embarrassed and they simply went on copulating, since the servant’s gaze did not count as the gaze of another person.
    The secret police should be treated as black servants once were. You shouldn’t care if they listen to you. Who cares? They shouldn’t count. You shouldn’t be afraid of them and you should ignore them – then it will work nicely. We will later learn that the secret police was always obsessed with this non-existent secret or any big plan. It is a big mistake to think that they don’t know there are no secrets. They totally miss the point and waste their energy for nothing. And another secret of the left is that we defy and confuse the enemy not by hiding something, but precisely by not hiding anything.

13
Deadlock of Totalitarian Communism
    You once mentioned that one should never forget the extent to which dissident resistance was indebted to the official ideology. And for this precise reason, I quote: “One can claim that today’s North Korea is no longer a communist country, not even in the Stalinist sense.” Yet most people generally consider North Korea to be a very communist regime. From an ethico-political perspective, how do you understand the general analysis of North Korea?
    SŽ: There are obvious things: we all know that North Korea is a total fiasco – I just don’t like Western scholars uttering platitudes about them. Some leftists like to say that South Korea is not totally innocent either. Yes, that is right, but we already know all this: before the Korean War in 1948, the South was also being provocative.
    I read an interesting thing in the book of a Western historian that for many years in the 1950s, until even the mid-’60s, the standard of living of the average person was higher in North Korea. Because they did have success until the mid-’60s, then it gradually broke down. This is, I think, the tragedy