vators I use don’t have a close-the-door button: they have an open-the-door button, which you use (and yes it works) when you see someone coming who’s not going to make it otherwise. But oh dear how tiresomely literal of me. Clearly the wonderful aptness of the metaphor for our miserable “postmodern” society should forestall any such minor quibbles. So let’s carry on: Lenin has the answer to this apparently, in his distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom. But just what is this “actual” freedom?
“formal” freedom is the freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom designates the site of an intervention which undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s point is not to limit freedom of choice, but to maintain the fundamental Choice—when Lenin asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: “Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?”
Which is pretty much where we came in. “Actual” freedom is the freedom to contribute (or not) to the “fundamental revolutionary choice”. Whatever that “fundamental revolutionary choice” may be, you can be sure that there’ll be a Lenin around to tell you if you’ve made the right fundamental revolutionary choice. And if you haven’t, well, no pathetic liberal freedom is going to stop you getting what’s coming to you.
Zizek’s conclusion:
This is why we tend to avoid Lenin today: not because he was an “enemy of freedom,” but because he reminds us of the fatal limitation of our freedoms; not because he offers us no choice, but because he reminds us that our “society of choices” precludes any true choice.
To which one can only say: rubbish. How is it that you can come out with the most complete nonsense and be assumed to be making profound points if you write incomprehensibly enough and have a middle-European name?
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