Postmodern Racism

Erik Vogt, Loyola University New Orleans

In order to elaborate a possible connection between emergence of neo-racism and the

specific political situations and social transformations - liberal hegemony, postmodern
multiculturalism - forming their background, I will appropriate some of the central concepts
to be found in Etienne Balibar's and Slavoj Zizek's writings on the constellation of liberaldemocratic hegemony, racism and postmodern multiculturalism for a reading of Austrian
right-wing populism which has become something of a negative common denominator for
the anti-fascist consensus in Europe after World War II as well as for the justification of
liberal hegemony.
1. Balibar on Racism and the Austrian example:
According to Balibar, the establishment of the liberal-democratic hegemony characterizing
most Europeans countries makes it necessary to re-think the traditional understanding of
racism. Neo-racism could be described as "racism without race": "a racism whose dominant
theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism
which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in
relation to others but 'only' the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of
life-styles and traditions. (Balibar) One clear variation on this differentialist racism can be
found in the FP's ideological reconstruction of (Central) Europe in terms of a Central Europe
of regions and "Heimaten". Its program of a new European regionalism with emphasis on
regional, cultural and ethnic differentiation is formulated as "national-revolutionary
ethnopluralism" against "ethnomorphosis" and the loss of German national identity. Andreas
Mlzer, the chief ideologue of the FP, writes: Central Europe as melting-pot, an ethnic and
cultural leveling of Europe, would result in one of the greatest cultural losses in modern history. And if
Germany in its European central position developed into a melting-pot of different peoples and
cultures, the rest of Central Europe would not be able to succumb to a similar tendency. The 'meltingpot' Central Europe would have become sad reality." (227)

Thus, Mlzer advocates a differentiation and "deepening" of the nation in terms of German
"Volkskultur", which is based on a classification that allows to reflect upon the difference
that constitutes the German people - his term is "Stammbevlkerung" - and to search for
the criteria by which German can be said to be 'Germans'. This is then one of his catalogue
of values defining German identity: "Diligence, productivity, faithfulness to one's Heimat,
sense of family, a declaration for the military, patriotism, a declaration for the national
character, and historical consciousness. (175)

Mlzer's discourse no longer seeks recourse to race as an isolable biological unit; instead it
refers to the cultural-national element forming the central factor for the constitution of
identity. In short, being German is the result of belonging to German "culture".
What makes this differentialist doctrine aiming at the preservation of one's tradition and
identity possible, is a naturalization of culture insofar as it depicts cultural difference as
"natural milieu". It emphasizes the cultural differences, alienates them into natural and
ontological relations and then proceeds to explain racism as "natural reaction" to the
abolition of distances among cultures:

Political radicalization on both sides is a necessary consequence. It goes without saying that there will
be annoyance on the side of the Stammbevlkerung; and the response of the immigrant groups will be
an insistence on their own identity; thus, aggression will be rising as well as mutual rejection. (220)

The argument according to which individuals are the exclusive heirs and bearers of a single
culture, draws upon anthropological universals such as the notion of "cultural tradition",
"cultural heritage", "cultural rootedness" or "ecology" as preconditions for the preservation
of the "natural milieu" of the human race. Mlzer claims that the struggle for national
identity touches upon biological problems, since the spiritual-cultural identity of the nation is
impossible without the corresponding natural "Lebensraum": the ecological question
becomes the primary task of national politics. However, how does this meta-racism
conceptualize the Other: the immigrant who "today is no longer a cultural and biological
relative"? A possible response to this question is opened up by Balibar's claim that the
prototype of a racism that does not have the pseudo-biological concept of race as its main
driving force is "anti-Semitism ... which is already a 'culturalist' racism." That is, the
pervasiveness of a self-reflective, cultural racism is to be grasped in terms of the specter of
anti-Semitism kept alive by the Holocaust encrypted in many European nationalist
narratives. Balibar goes on to maintain that the "new" differentialist racism is a "generalized
anti-Semitism". And this has consequences for the traditional relationship between
nationalism and racism: "You need more nationalism. You need a nationalism, which is, so
to speak, more nationalistic than nationalism itself: what I would call in the language of
Bataille an excess of nationalism, or in the language of Derrida a supplement of nationalism
within nationalism itself." This "super-nationalism" not only always includes claims for
annexation to the national body of "lost" individuals and populations - and Mlzer's
discourse, his appeal to a reconstruction of Central Europe under German heading, is the
variation on those panic developments of nationalism striving for racial or cultural purity -,
but it also transforms into a supra-nationalism that "tends to idealize timeless or
transhistorical communities." (Balibar) One implication of this excess of racism over
nationalism is that racism no longer serves as a secondary formation against the
background of the assertion of national identity. Rather, nationalism itself begins to function
as a species or a supplement to racism, as a continually displaced delimitation from the
always already "internal" foreign body. The counterpart to this displacement within racism is
the structural change in the role of anti-Semitism: that is, anti-Semitism is no longer the
exception, but the universalized attitude that conceives each ethnic alterity as uncanny
figure threatening one's own culture.
Let us begin to re-mark the subjective position of the FP by articulating the network of
symbolic over-determination that is has produced. Its populist nationalist project combines
in a postmodern manner a host of heterogeneous elements - such as fundamentalism, rightwing populism, bourgeois liberalism, corporate vision of society, authoritarian modernization
of capitalism, ecology, technocracy, christological elements, martyrdom, patriarchal
metaphorics etc. - that, since they no longer belong to a fixed ideology, can be rearticulated into a new meaning. (Laclau and Mouffe)
It is the "immigrant" that occupies the position of the master signifier suturing the disparate
elements of the FP's racist discourse. The "immigrant" as the condensation of a series of
economic, political, sexual, and moral antagonisms - "dirty, lazy, violent, primitive,
rapacious, profiteering" etc - is, according to Zizek, not merely a projection and an
externalization of some inner conflict pertaining to the racist subject: one has also to
recognize the inversion at work in the self-enclosed strategy of racism. Only then will it
become apparent that racism and its construction of the "immigrant-Other" revolves around
what Zizek calls the "nation-Thing".
2. Zizek and the racist fantasy
National identification is by definition sustained by a relationship toward the nation as Thing.
This nation-Thing is determined by a series of contradictory properties. It appears to us as
"our thing", as something accessible only to "us", as something that the others cannot
grasp. It appears as what gives plenitude and vivacity to our life, and yet, the only way we
can determine it is by resorting to different versions of the same tautology. In short, all we
can do is enumerate disconnected fragments of the way our community organizes its

jouissance.
As Zizek points out, the nation-Thing is never simply an accumulation of features; there is
something more in it, something that is present in these features that appears through
them. And it appears through them by means of the paradoxical reflective structure of the
very community believing in it. Thus, the nation-Thing as the Cause is produced by
ideological practices; however, the national Cause cannot be reduced to a pure discursive
effect; what has to be added is jouissance. A nation exists only as long as its specific
jouissance continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through
national myths that structure those practices. (Zizek)
Here one can also see how the condensation of the "immigrant-Other" in the racist discourse
of the FP functions as a support for a displacement that enables it to transpose social
antagonisms inherent in capitalism onto the antagonism between the totalized, organic and
harmonious unity of Austria and the Other as its corrupting force. Thus, it is not Austrian
society itself that is marked by antagonisms - the source of corruption is located rather in a
particular entity, the spectral presence of the "immigrant" who becomes now legible as a
symptom, a disfigured and displaced representation, the repressed real, of the social
antagonisms inherent in Austrian society.
The "immigrant-Other" captures the desire of racism and the framework structuring racist
jouissance has to be understood as "fantasy that is basically a scenario filling out the empty
space of a void." A fantasy that imputes the "immigrant-Other" an excessive enjoyment: "he
wants to steal our enjoyment and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment".
(Zizek) No matter what the Other does, we are disturbed by the fact that the Other is Other
and that she has her own customs. As Jacques-Alain Miller remarks:
Why does the Other remain Other? What is the cause for our hatred of him, for our hatred of him in
his very being? It is hatred of the enjoyment in the Other. This would be the most general formula of
the modern racism that we are witnessing today: a hatred of the particular way the Other enjoys. ...
The question of tolerance or intolerance is not at all concerned with the subject of science and its
human rights. It is located on the level of tolerance or intolerance toward the enjoyment of the Other,
the Other as he who essentially steals my own enjoyment. We know, of course, that the fundamental
status of the object is to be always snatched away by the Other. It is precisely this theft of enjoyment
that we write down in shorthand as minus Phi, the mathem of castration. The problem is apparently
unsolvable as the Other is the Other in my interior. The root of fascism is thus hatred of my own
enjoyment. There is no other enjoyment but my own. If the Other is in me, occupying the place of
extimacy, then the hatred is also my own. (Miller)

According to Zizek, the following two aspects are concealed by imputing to the Other the
"theft of enjoyment": first, that the Other who steals our enjoyment is always the Other in
our own interiority: that is, the racist denies the notion of difference as symbolic difference
splitting all subjects, making all subjects split subjects experiencing a lack, even if they do
not want to perceive it. For the differences racists constantly are talking about are
imaginary, reified differences dissimulating the universality and the individuality of subjects
in favor of particularisms.
The second aspect is that the racist "we" never possessed what was allegedly stolen from it.
Austrian authoritarian populism has produced a whole mythology about the struggle against
external and internal enemies. The primary enemies are the immigrants, who are perceived
as threatening to steal Austrian land and culture. The secondary enemy is an alienated
bureaucracy (EU and the "Establishment") which threatens the power of the people:
alienated from the nation, it is said to be devouring the Austrian nationals identity from
within.
The ideological fantasy of racism functions in terms of a transcendental schematism
constituting desire and providing it with co-ordinates (Adorno/Horkheimer) by mediating
between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of objects encountered in reality.
Fantasy also enacts a narrative occulting some repressed antagonism - that is, it generates
a phantasmic loop, the regressive and interminable search for the phantasmic point at
which Austrian history "took the wrong turn" so as to recapture the stolen, forgotten part.
And this phantasmic point reveals itself - in Mlzer's texts - again and again as identification
with the "trans-national idea of Reich":

The way towards a German confederation, towards a loose, but all the more fraternal confederation of
states in Central Europe as part of a Europe growing together, offered the opportunity to take recourse
to a line of tradition of German-Central European history which was interrupted in 1806 and in 1866:
the trans-national idea of Reich. (Mlzer)

This idea of the Holy Roman Empire of German nation as organic solidarity becomes the
ultimate foundation for a certain imagined national space in which, in the name of a
particular ethnos, both the individual and the collective are substantially embodied. And
although Mlzer mentions more contemporary versions of a confederation such as the
Habsburg monarchy and the Swiss confederation, they ultimately can be traced back to
revivals of the Holy Roman Empire - again - of German nation. Since the Austro-German
nation is in many respects "the most European nation",
the new Germany will be referred back again to its classic, occidental role: mediator of western
culture, political protector and economic patron to the nations of Eastern and Southeastern Europe.
For the Croats, Slovaks, Hungary, Rumania, Ukrainians and Russians, the way back into the occident
will be via Germany. (Mlzer)

Furthermore, the gap between this ontopology of the Austro-German nation, this
"axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of present-being [on] to its situation,
to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the topos of territory, native soil,
city, body in general",(Derrida) on the one hand, and the capitalist society split by
antagonistic struggles on the other hand, is filled up by the "immigrant-Other", that, not
surprisingly, in addition of being an immigrant, displays all the features of the anti-Semitic
features of the Jew. The immigrant-Other is that spectral appearance supposed to fill up the
hole in Austrian society so that the latter can constitute itself as harmonious German
Volksgemeinschaft. Thus, it is this organic Austro-German nation, that the Austrian racist
hopes to win over to his side. It is this Other that is supposed to assign to himself his proper
place, to essentialize his being in terms of a definition of a privileged, distinctive and unified
ethnos. And this auto-referential interpellation of the Austrian racist is conditional upon the
hetero-referential interpellation of the immigration-Other.
3. The multicultural gaze of the European Community:
However, Zizek's political reading of the Lacanian notions of Thing, jouissance and fantasy
enables us not only to account for Austrian racism, but also for the role the European
Community played in it. For was the gaze of the European community, which presented
itself in terms of liberal multiculturalism, not included from the very beginning, so as to
allow for the concealment of the antagonisms inherent to Western liberal democracy?
Recall that most commentaries on the FP in the international press were either alarmist or
terribly condescending: the success of the FP was seen either as a new wave of European
fascism or as the simple consequence of the fact that Austria had never really been denazified. Apart from the fact that history was set up here as a diagnosis of the normal and
the pathological and thus ended up echoing the discourse of its own object, demonizing
Haider as Hitler's revenant who himself demonized his enemies and victims, this reduction
of the FP to a mere variant of nazism operated a logic of in-differentiation that neutralized
and de-politicized the essentially political character of the Austrian conflict and turned it into
an ethnic issue. In other words, the "innocent and multicultural" gaze of the European
Community (the "three wise men") not only concealed an impossible gaze of someone who
falsely exempted himself from his actual involvement in the conflict played out in Austria,
but it also was a quasi-anthropological gaze that was looking in Austria for the reality of
right populism, putting in on stage, so that it could serve as a useful reference point within
and as a reservoir for the theater of European multicultural values. That is, Austria became
the privileged object of the European Community's phantasmatic cathexis: for the refined,
tolerant Europe, Austria was the exotic land with refreshingly folkloric and cultural variety
and the site where it encountered "new Nazi barbarism". Take, for instance, Bernhard-Henri
Lvy's quasi-anthropological description of Austria giving his audience lessons on the
historical, ethnic, religious and cultural contexts of the conflict. (Lvy)
What is more, Lvy's report on the political activities in Austria displayed all the

characteristics of today's post-political suspension of the political: his account of the

demonstrations at the Heldenplatz was nothing but an assertion of the plural contingency of
postmodern political struggles:
The demonstrations called by e-mails and handys. The lack of hierarchy. ... The city as theater. The
urban landscape as excellent manoeuvre area. Radicalism for the days of the internet and the 'new
economy'. Postmodernism and perhaps post-political politics. ... These young people are at the origin
of a form of struggle, ... that will allow for the substitutions of the great radical left narratives of the
past century. (Lvy)

Moreover, the following passage from Lvy's text provided for the identification with the
"voices of the Other Austria":
I had expected everything but not that. There are 300000 Viennese who know French ... There are
300000 Austrians who, distancing themselves from each Austrian or German chauvinism, are deeply
linked to a France that, as I found out later, showed legendary characteristics: Rsistance, first
Gaullism, 1789, May 68, human rights. ... There was a thermometer that the world seemed to have
forgotten and that I discovered at the Heldenplatz during that evening: that of a fortunate, glorious,
offensive francophiles. (Lvy)

Does this passage not confirm Zizek's thesis that identification is always already
identification with the ego-ideal? What Lvy (and the European Community) actually identify
with, when they observe images from the conflicts in Austria, are not the groups involved in
that struggle, but the point of view from which they can appear likeable to themselves.
When Lvy sees the picture of the demonstrations at the Heldenplatz, he perceives it in a
symbolic space in which he is the actor - he is the one who is concerned. Lvy's "concern"
for Austria allowed him to perceive himself in the form that he found likeable: the political
struggle in Austria was presented so that he liked to see himself in the position from which
he stared at the former and from which he, together with all mankind, was moved by the
fact that he was concerned.
Some remarks on the relationship between racism, multiculturalism and
postmodernism:
The fantasy which organized the perception of Austria as that of the Other of the European
community reveals itself, in the final analysis, as Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen
on which Europe has projected its own repressed reverse. And it is the supposedly liberaldemocratic framework with its post-political procedure of negotiation and multiculturalist
policing asserting each particular identity and its proper place within the social structure
that produces nationalist and racist closure as its inherent opposite.
And would one not have to say that Austria could almost be seen as the demystifying tool of
this phantom Europe. In carrying out strictest anti-immigration policies, the Austrians are
Europe's cutting edge.
One should not forget that the Schengen agreement was not an invention of xenophobic circles in
Austria, but it was rather the price demanded by the European Community for Austria's entry into the
European Community. This agreement denigrated Austria to being the guardian of the Community. ...
The enlightened strategists of the European Union would have liked to see Austria to carry out its task
more efficiently.... (Gau)

The 'real' Europe in the making is a white Europe, a bleached Europe that is morally,
economically, and ethnically integrated and purified. In Austria, this Europe is victoriously in
the making. In a sense, what is happening here is a logical and ascending phase of the New
European Order, itself a branch of the New World Order, whose global characteristic is
Capital, white fundamentalism, protectionism, discrimination, and control. By denouncing
Haider as proto-Nazi, we pride ourselves for having put our finger on this evil, without
questioning the innocence of our liberal-democratic intentions. With good reason, since we
are fighting the same enemies: immigrants. Thus, the liberal opposition between 'open'
pluralist and multicultural societies and 'closed' nationalist societies founded upon the
exclusion of the Other has to be brought to its point of self-reference: the liberal,

postmodern, multicultural gaze itself functions according to the same logic, insofar as it is
founded upon the exclusion of the Other to whom one attributes fundamentalist nationalism
etc. Moreover, both represent a "racism with a distance" that does not disturb the smooth
circulation of capital. Here one will have to re-introduce the reference to capitalism as the
very terrain for the emergence of postmodern racism. (Zizek)

RACISM AND FANTESY

Fantesy as a Mask of the Inconsistency in the Big Other
One way at looking at the relationship between fantasy and the big Other is to think
of fantasy as concealing the inconsistency of the Symbolic Order. To understand this
we need to know why the big Other is inconsistent or structured around a gap. The
answer to this question is that when the body enters the field of signification or the
big Other, it is castrated. What Zizek means by this is that the price we pay for our
admission to the universal medium of language is the loss of our full body selves.
When we submit to the big Other we sacrifice direct access to our bodies and,
instead, are condemned to an indirect relation with it via the medium of language.
So, whereas, before we enter language we are what Zizek terms pathological
subjects (the subject he notates by S), after we are immersed in language we are
what he refers to as barred subjects (the empty subject he notates with $). What
is barred from the barred subject is precisely the body as the materialization or
incarnation of enjoyment (jouissance). Material jouissance is strictly at odds with, or
heterogenous to, the immaterial order of the signifier.
For the subject to enter the Symbolic Order, then, the Real of jouissance or
enjoyment has to be evacuated from it. Which is another way to saying that the
advent of the symbol entails the murder of the thing. Although not all jouissance
is completely evacuated by the process of signification (some of it persists in what
are called the erogenous zones), most of it is not Symbolized. And this entails that
the Symbolic Order cannot fully account for jouissance - it is what is missing in the
big Other. The big Other is therefore inconsistent or structured around a lack, the
lack of jouissance. It is, we might say, castrated or rendered incomplete by
admitting the subject, in much the same way as the subject is castrated by its
admission.
What fantasy does is conceal this lack or incompletion. So, as we saw previoulsly
when alluding to the formulas of sexuation, there is not sexual relationship in the
big Other. What the fantasy of a sexual scenario thereby conceals is the
impossibility of this sexual relationship. It covers up the lack in the big Other, the
missing jouissance. In this regard, Zizek often avers that fantasy is a way for
subjects to organize their jouissance - it is a way to manage or domesticate the
traumatic loss of the jouissance which cannot be Symbolized.
The Window of Fantasy
For Zizek, racism is produced by a clash of fantasies rather than by a clash of
symbols vying for supremacy. There are several distinguishing features of fantasy:
1. Fantasies are produced as a defence against the desire of the Other manifest in
What do you want from me? - which is what the Other, in its inconsistency, really
wants from me.
2. Fantasies provide a framework through which we see reality. They are
anamorphic in that they presuppose a point of view, denying us an objective
account of the world.
3. Fantasies are the one unique thing about us. They are what make us individuals,
allowing a subjective view of reality. As such, our fantasies are extremely sensitive
to the intrusion of others.
4. Fantasies are the way in which we organize and domesticate our jouissance.
Postmodern Racism
Zizek contends that todays racism is just as reflexive as every other part of
postmodern life. It is not the product of ignorance in the way it used to be.
So, whereas racism used to involve a claim that another ethnic group is inherently

inferior to our own, racism is now articulated in terms of a respect for anothers
culture. Instead of My culture is better than yours, postmodern or reflexive racism
will argue that My culture is different from yours. As an example of this Zizek asks
was not the official argument for apartheid in the old South Africa that black
culture should be preserved in its uniqueness, not dissipated in the Western
melting-pot? (The Fragile Absolute, or Why the Christian Legacy is Worth Fighting
For) For him, what is at stake here is the fetishistic disawoval of cynicism: "I know
very well that all ethnic cultures are equal in value, yet, nevertheless, I will act as if
mine is superior. The split here between the subject of enunciated (I know very
well) and the subject of the enunciation (nevertheless I act as if I didnt) is
even preserved when racists are asked to explain the reasons for their behavior. A
racist will blame his socio-economic environment, poor childhood, peer group
pressure, and so on, in such a way as to suggest to Zizek that he cannot help being
racist, but is merely a victim of circumstances. Thus postmodern racists are fully
able to rationalize their behavior in a way that belies the traditional image of racism as
the vocation of the ignorant.

Postmodern racism and the clash of civilizations

For Zizek, racism, too, is alive and well in our post-ideological era. It is no longer the realm of
ignorance, as in I know that Judeo-Christian civilization is superior to Islamic civilization, but
rather, it is a psychological tendency towards a disavowal of the cynicism at work in I know that
all cultures are equal, but I act as if Judeo-Christian civilization is superior to Islamic civilization.
The role of racism in society, Zizek claims, has always been one of fantasy, in which the ethnic
other is blamed for the degeneration of society. Fantasy is the way we paper over the cracks of
inconsistency between our identity, that is, how we think of ourselves, and how things actually
seem to be in society, which Zizek calls the big Other. Following Marx, he attributes the recent
shift towards ethnic nationalism to globalization and the resulting conflict of cultural fantasies.
There are two basic racist fantasies: one, that accuses the other of trying to take our
fantasies away from us, and one, that fears the unfamiliar fantasies of the other. Thus, the
ethnic other is either trying to steal our jobs/take our freedom or mooch off
of/infiltrate our society.
The subject of racism, therefore, is a straw-person premised in fantasy, the defense mechanism
aimed at neutralizing the impression of the fragmentation and imperfection of our own society.
Take, for example, a recent Megyn Kelly interview with the iconic Donald Trump, who asserted
somewhat comically that his (ultimately aborted) GOP debate would focus on what the other
people arent talking about, what Obama hasnt been talking about that is, what the outside
world is doing to this country. This concern for the infection of national purity from without is the
central tenet of fascism, but it is most dangerous today in the hands of a country that
paradoxically considers itself immune to fascist tendencies because it killed fascists in war.
Americans have a particularly troubling relationship to this fantasy in that they, unlike most other
nations, currently possess the military capabilities to act as world police, doling out justice (with
much the same standard of racial nondiscrimination as actual police) to the always completely
synchronous benefit of (foremost) the US and (of course) the world.