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Slavoj Žižek — A Plea for Leninist Intolerance

What is tolerance today? The most popular TV show of the fall of 2000 in France, with a viewer rating two times higher than that of the notorious Big Brother reality soap, is C'est mon choix (It's my choice) on France 3, a talk-show whose guest is each time an ordinary (or, exceptionally, well-known) person who made a peculiar choice that determined his or her entire lifestyle. For example, one of them decided never to wear underwear, another constantly tried to find a more appropriate sexual partner for his father and mother. Extravagance is allowed, solicited even, but with the explicit exclusion of the choices that may disturb the public (say, a person whose choice is to be and act as a racist is a priori excluded).

Can one imagine a better summary of what the freedom of choice effectively amounts to in our liberal societies? Ulrich Beck introduced the notion of "reflexive society" in which all patterns of interaction, from the forms of sexual partnership up to ethnic identity itself, have to be renegotiated or reinvented.' Perhaps the properly frustrating dimension of this eternal stimulus to make free choices is best rendered by the situation of having to choose a product in online shopping, where one has to make an almost endless series of choices: if you want it with X, click A, if not, click B. We can go on making our small choices, "reinventing ourselves," on condition that these choices do not disturb the social and ideological balance. With regard to C'est mon choix, the truly radical thing would have been to focus precisely on the disturbing choices: to invite people like dedicated racists, whose choice-whose difference-does make a difference. Phenomena like these make it all the more necessary today to reassert Lenin's opposition of "formal" and "actual" freedom.

This Leninist forced choice-not "Your money or your life!" but "No critique or your life!" combined with his dismissive attitude toward the liberal notion of freedom, accounts for his bad reputation among liberals. And, effectively, is today, after the terrifying experience of the Realsozialismus, not more than obvious where the fault of this reasoning resides? First, it reduces a historical constellation to a closed, fully contextualized situation in which the "objective" consequences of one's acts are fully determined ("independently of your intentions, what you are doing now objectively serves ..."); second, the party usurps the right to decide what your acts "objectively mean." Is this, however, the whole story? There is, nonetheless, a rational kernel in Lenin's obsessive tirades against formal freedom worth saving today; when he underlines that there is no pure democracy, that we should always ask whom a freedom under consideration serves, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true choice. Formal freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while actual freedom designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates.

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