In Defense of Lost Causes. Slavoj Žižek

recognize how this disintegration is in itself already its opposite, a force of integration. Reconciliation is thus radically immanent: it implies a shift of perspective as to what first appears as disintegration. In other words, insofar as civil society is the sphere of alienation, of the separation between subjectivity persisting in its abstract individuality and the objective social order opposing it as an external necessity that curtails its freedom, the resources of reconciliation should be found in this very sphere (in what, in this sphere, appears “at first sight, as the least spiritual, as the most alienating: the system of needs”⁵²), not in the passage to another “higher” sphere. The structure of this reconciliation in the mature Hegel is, again, that of the Rabinovich joke: “There are two reasons modern society is reconciled with itself. The first is the interaction within civil society …” “But that interaction is constant strife, the very mechanism of disintegration, of ruthless competition!” “Well, this is the second reason, since this very strife and competition makes individuals thoroughly interdependent and thus generates the ultimate social bond …”

      The whole perspective thus changes: it is no longer that the organic Sittlichkeit of the polis disintegrates under the corrosive influence of modern abstract individuality in its multiple modes (the market economy, Protestantism, and so on), and that this unity should somehow be restored at a higher level: the point of Hegel’s analyses of Antiquity, best exemplified by his repeated readings of Antigone, is that the Greek polis itself was already marked, cut through, by fatal immanent antagonisms (public–private, masculine–feminine, human–divine, free–slaves, etc.) which belie its organic unity. Abstract universal individualism (Christianity), far from causing the disintegration of Greek organic unity, was, on the contrary, the necessary first step towards true reconciliation. With regard to the market, far from being simply a corrosive force, it is market interaction which provides the mediating process which forms the basis of true reconciliation between the universal and the particular: market competition brings people really together, while organic order divides them.

      The best indication of this shift in the mature Hegel concerns the opposition of customs and law: for the early Hegel, the transformation of customs into institutionalized law is a regressive move from organic unity to alienation (the norm is no longer experienced as part of my substantial ethical nature, but as an external force that constrains my freedom), while for the mature Hegel this transformation is a crucial step forward, opening up and sustaining the space of modern subjective freedom.⁵³

      It is in total opposition to these Hegelian insights that Heidegger deploys his notion of a “total state”:

      We are talking about a total state. This state is not a particular domain (among others), it is not an apparatus which is here to protect society (from the state itself), a domain with which only some people have to deal.⁵⁴

      [. . .] the people thus wills and loves the state as its own way and manner to be as a people. The people is dominated by the striving, by eros, for the state.⁵⁵

      This Eros, of course, implies personification: love is always love for the One, the Leader:

      The Führer-State—the one we have—means the accomplishment of the historical development: the actualization of the people in the Fuührer.⁵⁶

      It is only the leader’s will which makes others into his followers, and community arises out of this relationship of following. The followers’ sacrifice and service originate in this living connection, not in their obedience to the constraint of institutions.⁵⁷

      The leader has something to do with the people’s will; this will is not the sum of singular wills, but a Whole of a primordial authenticity. The question of the consciousness-of-the-will of a community is a problem in all democracies, which can only be resolved in a fruitful way when one recognizes the leader’s will and the people’s will in their essentiality. Our task today is to arrange the founding relationship of our communal being in the direction of this actuality of people and leader, where, as its actuality, the two cannot be separated. Only when this basic scheme is asserted in its essential aspect through its application, is true leadership possible.⁵⁸

      This, of course, is again totally opposed to Hegel, for whom the head of a rational state should not be a leader, but a king. Why? Let us take a look at Hegel’s (in)famous deduction of the rational necessity of hereditary monarchy: the bureaucratic chain of knowledge has to be supplemented by the king’s decision as the “completely concrete objectivity of the will” which “reabsorbs all particularity into its single self, cuts short the weighing of pros and cons between which it lets itself oscillate perpetually now this way and now that, and by saying “I will” makes its decision and so inaugurates all activity and actuality.”⁵⁹