No Higher Cause

We are often told that we live in a “post-political” era or an era of “bio-politics.” Slavoj Zizek ( Violence: Six Sideways Reflections , 40-2) defines the post-political as “a politics which claims to leave behind old ideological struggles and instead focus on expert management and administration” and “bio-politics” as a politics that takes “regulation of the security and welfare of human lives as its primary goal.” Both exclude passion from politics.

This has some ironic consequences, Zizek says. On the one hand, it produces the “reduction of humans to ‘bare life,’” while on the other hand posits the vulnerable Other, a “sacred being who is the object of expert caretaking knowledge, but is excluded . . . from all rights.” These seem emphatically opposed, but Zizek says that “what these two poles share is precisely the underlying refusal of any higher causes, the notion that the ultimate goal of our lives is life itself. This is what there is no contradiction between respect for the vulnerable Other and the readiness to justify torture, the extreme [sacrificial] expression of treating individuals as Homini sacer .”

Post-politics has a more obvious effect: “With the depoliticized, socially objective, expert administration and coordination of interests as the zero level of politics, the only way to introduce passion into this field, to actively mobilise people, is through fear.”