Some time ago, a few members of the Austrian transvestite band Menstruation Monsters were attacked in front of a Zagreb night club after holding a concert there. The attackers cursed them and shouted that they did not need any fags/gays in their town along with other offensive statements related to the sexual identity of the band members. Although at first glance this situation might look like a “classical” homophobic attack, in fact it reflects a much deeper problem that spreads far beyond the boundaries of sexually based violence. This incident reflects not only a social pattern in which post-socialist society through xeno-/homophobia, makes relative the effects of the newly imposed class order brought on by the transition to capitalism, but primarily reflects the very diabolical nature of perceptions of difference in liberal capitalism, where difference is allowed to exist as such only when it is, paradoxically, not a difference at all. In a situation where the once existing Second world has vanished in a void, somewhere amid the dominant capitalist First world, the West, and the Third World, a resource of rich battlefront territories, it is exactly the concept of difference that has become subversive for the very core of the Western neoliberal global capitalist system, which ultimately sees itself as a haven for differences. Hence, this void created between the worlds is not a mere gap, not a potentiality to be solved by economic means, as we are informed by mainstream media, but a potentiality that could unmask the very nature of democracy that is conditioned and framed by liberal capitalism and its demonic free market.

The Void
Let’s take a brief look in a proper context in which the figure of an alien could be explained. When we look at the void, we are in fact watching a process, which is trying to cover the void, to monopolize it, to transcend it. Transcending this void in Eastern and southeastern Europe is known as a process of transition, that is, a transition exclusively directed towards liberal capitalism, a process that asks for political and military integration into Euro-Atlantic institutions and above all, the imposition of the free market as a default step for the transition to be finalized. However, as globalization as a process of a void transcendence on a global level that is revealed primarily as a globalization of capital – freedom of movement for capital, not for people, it easily turns it self upside down into a re-articulation of the notion of freedom within democracy itself; it is important to say that the void stages itself as a traumatic point through which the articulation of Other (not First) world countries is planned in the first place. Hence, this is the manner liberal capitalism makes us pay for its war for imposition of post-ideological contexts to both worlds (First and not First); the consequence of this process is the production of a paradigmatic figure, which simultaneously lives in both worlds, the figure of a stranger, immigrant or alien. This figure is produced because of capital spreading to new physical territories; an immigrant, after multinational corporations take over its local economical environment, has to act, and starts to break out and ignite political conflict, precisely the opposite of what liberal capitalism desires. This figure creates a context in which forms of life themselves start to create political conflict. To undertake a deeper look into this figure, we have to refer to Giorgio Agamben’s forms of life. Bare life is life in itself, a pure medium of life that resembles today’s immigrant or alien, also known in Greek as Zoe. Bare life is not an a priori racial category, although it is burdened with racist dogma. As an example, bare life is the life of an African or Asian immigrant, a Mexican worker in Arizona, all those killed in Iraq by the occupation forces, homosexuals in Poland, Frenchmen of African descent in France, Serbians or Bosnians in Croatia or both, Croatians and Roma peoples in Slovenia or Slovenians, Croats, Bosnians and Albanians in Serbia…However, it is also a white western European during the anti-globalization riot, everybody not fitting into a widely accepted form of sovereignty. Bare life is to be understood under the name of Homo Sacer, holy man, a man who can be killed but cannot be sacrificed (to-the-sovereign). On the other hand, we have life with style, also known in Greek as Bios, that is life usually from the First world of capital, I might add, life produced by the sovereignty of capital; this is not a life with humanist or political backgrounds. Bios, life with style is exactly that, life with style, a-racial and non-political category included into process of production not only in the meaning of a commodity, but as a result of the production of sovereignty of capital itself whether it rapes in Iraq, accepts parliamentary elections as ultimate democratic practice or just ignorantly lives its life creating its own commodity. The alien occurs exactly between these two forms of life – bare life and life with style or modal life. As bare life can become object of violence without sanction, it becomes a certain model of violence, which does not contribute to the sovereignty that generates the violence. Modal life (bios), on the other hand is also an object of violence, but violence that does contribute to the sovereignty from which it emerged. A banal example is, 10 dead immigrants do not mean anything, but 10 dead soldiers do. The alien, however, is on the crossroad, and he or she can choose only the modality of violence that will be brought upon it. To clarify this, let’s take a look in context. In times when idiotic “end of ideology” is heralded by mainstream media and when all of society has become a factory (Antonio Negri), only a momentum of interaction between forms of life can be seen as relevant and socially dynamic.

It is the friction, a constant interaction – but never a collision, among these paradigmatic forms of life along the sides of the void that represents today’s social dynamics. This friction is a mere compensation for the social order which does not want to recognize that its decay is due to the lack of ethics of liberal capitalism, for in the last instance it is the very liberal capitalist ethics that prevents social issues from becoming a political factor – while organizing it as a pathetic collective of subjectivities caught in a struggle for individual positioning within the mentioned friction. The same subjectivities of course desperately protect their positions by defending the same ethics from its exposition as ideology. Their trauma is that the same could be exposed as … trauma. As Lacan used to say, trauma does not cheat, but the problem is that trauma lacks. This trauma of exposition of trauma, paraphrasing Agamben, means that holiness of life, that is today exposed against sovereign power as a human right in every basic meaning, in fact reflects exact the submission of life to the power of death, its unrecoverable exposure in the relationship of stigmatization. It is exactly the relationship of stigmatization over bare life and modal life that is aggressively imposed today by liberal capitalist sovereign monopoly over the definition of life itself as the only political process or conflict. This process is a process that consists of paradigms, or practices, if you want, of exclusion and inclusion. Meaning, life with style is not by default included into the production matrix of capital, nor is bare life by default excluded, but the positioning of both depends on acceptance of the same relationship to stigmatization by an object of exploitation itself. This means that neither bare life nor modal life, life with style, position themselves as political subjects, but as objects of stigmatization.

As an example, if we go back to the story from the beginning of the text, we see that southeast European subject (in Croatia) as an object of capitalist exploitation, or as subjectivity that wants to become the same object, reacts toward a foreign body of a transvestite. Transvestite is not a bare life, although it is not completely life with style as well. Meaning, its political potential exists between these two biosocial extremes. This figure in the transitional state of Croatia is recognized by a homophobe as a treat not because it, as transvestite, does not represent some political option, but because it indirectly does. As Croatia is a country that desperately wants to represent itself as a country with western values, it is at the same time a country whose dominant sentiment is burdened with very strong religious dogma, archaic social values and strong xenophobic sentiment, where being a Westerner, within such arrangement, turns out to be quite painful. A gesture of the attackers is therefore an illustration of resentment as an ambivalent feeling where an object of adoration is simultaneously adored and hated; in the case of West, it is adored, but simultaneously hated as well, because of the archaic sentiments preventing the embrace of the heritage of the West in its totality. To be fully clear, the perception of the West by a dominant sentiment in the transitional state is also a perception of a West that supports the homophobic, in general, discriminatory phantasm of the West. This attack occurs not only as a compensation for the trauma one experiences in a country that “freed” itself under one master – state socialism – only to find itself in the jaws of another, but something much more dangerous – capitalism (in which the figure of the attacker fails to become bios), and also as a result of the refusal to acknowledge the meaninglessness of this passage de l’act. On the one hand, the attacker’s subjectivity, as a proper illustration of the dominant social pattern in Croatia, still relies heavily on conservative religious dogma that desperately wants to perceive itself as a “nation of western culture,” but still cannot accept what is seen too much of in the West, because western decadence would presumably destroy the country’s tradition. On the other hand, the perception of the West as the First world that will impose segregation and market based discrimination is, however warmly welcomed. As Nietzsche would say, this subjectivity does not act, it reacts as an object of resentment towards its phantasm of the First world, attacking the very figure which is not from the West excluded bare life and neither the fully integrated bios, but it is the relation subsumed under the object of stigmatization, that is an alien in the West itself. It reacts precisely the way the West would, but usually does not have to, as the West has a surplus already in the form of bare life that is the pathetic position of Eastern Europe’s societies that crave to become Bios, to become fully integrated, as a matrix of exploitation by western liberal capitalism. The role of the homophobic attacker from Zagreb is therefore similar to the role of the Pakistani secret service which Americans let “interrogate” (read: torture) captured Iraqi insurgents.

The other example of being the locus of fundamental contradictions (from which transitional societies suffer from) may be found in some reactions by Croat citizens to Steven Spielberg’s film “Schindler’s List.” When it was aired on Croatian national TV for the first time a couple of years ago, a number of citizens started to call the TV station complaining about the subtitles, which were in Serbian and not in the Croatian language. Although there are only minor differences between the two languages, it is bizarre that someone wants to see a movie about racial and ethnic extermination while simultaneously complaining about a couple of different words coming from the language of another ethnic group… It is the very present sentiment, which accepts a cultural product just because it comes from the First world, and at the same time, aggressively reacts to what is a denkverbot (thinking forbidden) for the First world. Therefore, this attacker’s gesture is mutatis mutandis, the very role of post-socialist eastern European society, but also the role of the First world itself, in the process of rationalization of a new master – signifier, the ethics of liberal capitalism. As Marina Gržinić noted, the role of this subject is dual, it is an ontological totality in the absolute narrowing of subjectivity and a break up of the subject with reality. Here we come across the analogy, also presented by Gržinić, in which, like in a Hollywood movie, a protagonist after an action scene that made a mess on the working table, instead of precisely cleaning the table, erases and destroys everything in an act popularly known as “cleansing the terrain.” (Ibid.) East European bare life, craving to become bios, to become the object of capitalist exploitation therefore positions itself towards the very void that separates the two worlds and towards the very life, which represents this same void, the life of an alien. In this manner, these not fully included subjectivities of Eastern Europeans relate to the non-proclaimed liberal capitalist ideology where, precisely because the same is not proclaimed as such, it reacts, “cleans the terrain” against those who are perceived by the same ideology as a non-productive part of the first world matrix, as in this case of a transvestite. Bare life in transition to bios, “erases the terrain” for its master so the master does not have to do it. In this process southeast European bare life positions itself voluntary as Europe’s surplus after which it targets not only its presumed cause of being bare life, but also attacks the presumed lack of the First world it craves. Speaking of a void, we now see that the relationship of the dominant First world ethics towards an alien – which is pathetically mimicked by south-east European satellite states – is in fact a First world relationship towards the void where it does not overcomes the emptiness of a void, but makes it more bearable. The position of East European subjectivity towards the alien, as a figure of the void, does indeed resemble a role created by Tom Waits (acting as Renfield) in Coppola’s movie Dracula from 1992. Tom Waits as Renfield, the hapless slave of Dracula, who miserably sits in a dungeon, where he eats insects and bugs, eats life and everything in order to please his master who promised to make him immortal, a vampire. Interestingly enough, it should be pointed out that today’s southeastern European nations refer to socialism as “the dungeon of nations,” the prison of nations. East European subjectivity “eats” the dignity of a life (as an insect) and represents the void as consequence of globalization of capital, so that its new master, capitalism – the vampire – accepts it as an equal, but in nothing else than in devouring the life of those that does not fit into the liberal capitalist definition of life. This is an example of the East European perception of a stranger where the stranger is produced because of an inability to accept new class antagonism and market based segregation. The sadistic relationship towards “aliens” (others) functions as a perverted dislocation of trauma from class to the register of cultural differences. Here is the point where the East European transition unmasks itself only as a transition toward the cannibalistic capital machine, and not to any romanticized version of democracy.

Democracy as Ideology
Democracy that is brought up in such a context by the same liberal capitalism is not its mask, but a diabolical shadow, a killer clown, that ultimately makes relative the effects of capital by precisely imposing the relationship of stigmatization as the relationship in which human rights violations, in order to protect democracy, becomes a norm. It does not mater if we are talking about communists, transvestites, gays or as it always turns out, Jews. (As Croatian’s first president Franjo Tudjman in the process of establishing democracy in Croatia once “proudly” stated, he is happy his wife is not a Serb or a Jew…) As Alain Badiou claims, democracy is a norm encrypted into the relationship of subjects towards the liberal state. In the context of Croatia, democracy is a norm encrypted into the freedom of a subject allowed to act against a presumed enemy of an object of its discriminatory phantasm The object of this phantasm is, of course, freedom, but no other freedom that the one of sadistically acting against those who does not share the same phantasm. In the same way, bare life becomes life with style when it attacks the object that separates the bare from bios. However, the predicament of democracy as system of equality and individual responsibility implies the inclusion of an alien into it, partially, though what has to be left out is the recognition of included difference as a difference. Even if the neo-liberal regime officially insists that the “other” should stay different, it segregates it immediately if it sees it as authentically different, and encourages the difference only if it is already part of the segregated difference. This is excellently presented through the ideological bulletin board: the movie industry. As Marina Gržinić noted regarding Ridley’s Scott movie Alien, the human – beast relationship is allowed only when Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is uncovered as half-human, a hybrid, not a human being. Are we not witness to this kind of ideological background in today’s democracies, which are only framed by the utilitarian context and objectified functioning of the law? French government recently proposed that immigrant families with visa applications for entering France undergo DNA testing to prove that the application is genuine. Although the tests will not be compulsory, it is highly likely that immigrants who reject the DNA testing will be rejected as well.1

What can we learn from this practice besides that it is highly hypocritical? By indirectly forcing an alien (the figure that exposes the void) to undergo DNA tests, the regime firstly creates a biologically determined segregation and secondly, it reminds the native alien of his Third world roots, by letting it know that it supports its “integration” in this relationship of stigmatization, but with the presupposition that the alien accepts fully this relation as well. This is not about the “clash of civilization,” the “Clash” functions only as a device for rationalizing the effects of globalization. This DNA example is very much in line with Etienne Balibar’s notion of meta-racism, where meta-racism is acceptance of the “other,” but with the presupposition, she or he stays far enough not to endanger the commodity of a bios (of a white man, if you want). When we mention France, the problem with French suburb riots is therefore a problem of an alien par excellence, because fundamentally, the clash was not generated by religious dogma, but the result of market based segregation of a certain population that failed to become included into capitalist relationship of stigmatization. The fact that this population is excluded from French society made them a political factor, and this is what the regime finds disturbing. Liberal capitalist ideology therefore transcends the form of old racist categorization with the recognition of bare life as difference only when it tries to become bios, if not, then it treats it as an alien toward which it will act in a totalitarian manner. As Alain Badiou would say, “I will accept your difference only if you become me.” Bare life therefore CAN become different, but an alien cannot.

Paraphrasing Agamben, (today’s) political space of sovereignty constitutes itself through a double exception, a surplus of the profane in religion and a surplus of religion in the profane. This claim does not primarily refer to institutionalized religion as such, but to a predicament of neo-liberal culture where God is the commodity. In addition, Agamben adds that Homo Sacer is an object of intense violence that transcends the sphere of law and the sphere of sacrifice. As such, as an object of intense violence, Homo Sacer still does not reveal itself as an alien, as a stranger, it only does so when it refuses to accept the relationship of stigmatization, whatever religion it belongs to. If we look at the latest number of dead in Iraq, it is not an exaggeration to say that the whole nation could be named as Homo Sacer, though they are not aliens. They are not sacrificed to democracy in whose name they were killed, but on the contrary, those who killed them have been sacrificed to democracy in order that bare life being killed accepts this same democracy. In this context, we can state, that the emancipation of African Americans started the moment they were co-opted for the American civil war…To summarize, bare life that can be killed but cannot be sacrificed is not precisely an alien. Bare life is not by default excluded from society in the form of racial/sexual/economic or cultural segregation and neither is bios by default, included. Even worse, bare life is gradually being included while bios remains included in the capitalist matrix, with both subjected to stigmatization and subjected to becoming an alien, if they start to make their agenda political, i.e. if they claim political power, which is not within the ruling discourse of the liberal capitalist ideology. Hence, the alien in transition to bios OR to bare life – desiring to become bios, ceases to be an alien. The alien who wants to be included loses its political agenda and gets its inclusion, but only as a-political commodity, what bios already takes as its primal feature. Emancipation unfortunately turns out to be in such a case nothing else but a demand for inclusion into the same ideology. Therefore, the process of emancipation in the context of culture, that is the liberal capitalist ideology, makes this process visible.

Emancipation is Discrimination
Liberal capitalism as a totalitarian system starts to unmask itself when it starts to represent bare life as a value, as a commodity, and confirms its inclusion; an alien is a life form, which cannot be presented as commodity. It does so in the field that is its current most potent territory of capitalist colonization or field of culture.We could say that the “alien” is a life form unpresentable as a value or a commodity. If we take a look at what happened to the perception of major emancipation movements, we see that instead of political agendas, only life as form of life, as a cultural object, not as a political subject, has been emancipated. We do not witness a re-articulation of Martin Luther King’s politics as a tool for emancipation, but, as is the case in the Kevin Hill TV show, a figure of an African-American who is a successful lawyer, has a gay friend, hosts cool parties in his fancy apartment and fights for corporate justice. That is a banal example how bare life by itself accepts being turned into bios, under the parole of a successful emancipation, not to mention the decay of the hip-hop culture that from a politically motivated agenda in the late 1980s has turned itself into a preposterous celebration of the consumer life style. The First world’s demand from all those who want to be included in it is to abort every political agenda that was not born within the ruling capitalist neo-liberal discourse. Instant emancipation as another name for inclusion of bare life, and prosecuted aliens, does not however include authentic cultural difference(s) that could result in politically articulated demands, but includes only such differences that serve to present democracy as a tolerant social system. Therefore, an alien as a bare life that has not been included, must be recoded, converted into a differential that should serve as a position through which, not only the sovereignty of a state will reaffirm itself, but through which the sovereignty of capital will reconfirm itself as an incessantly hungry matrix in search of new boundaries to be conquered. An example of such a process is the British toy company that produces toys of bacteria of Ebola, HIV and similar microbes (that of course represent the perception of Africans, Arabs, Orientals, Jews and others in Europe) and serves as a perfect illustration that capitalist totalitarianism must first redesign the other to make it acceptable and not threatening. It literarily produces a foreign body as a toy, an object of pleasure, an object of enjoyment that is in stark contradiction to those already included.

In the void space in-between worlds, the political conflict has been abolished in the name of culture, in the name of a territory in which sterile practices of pursuing life styles and their exposition to others as an ideology, becoming socialized at such a level that it became its only politics. In the context of pop culture, we could just look at popular TV shows like Sex and the City. This series that “exploits the nature of relations” in spaces between parties, sex and buying Manolo Blahnik’s shoes, rapes the notion of individuality by praising individual action as a nihilist reaction to un-formal demand. In other words, it monopolizes the definition of individuality, integrates it into the norm and then celebrates the norm as norm destruction. Doing so, the character of Carrie Bradshaw is far more dangerous then Bush, Angela Merkel, Sarkozy and Blair together. What does it have to do with the notion of a stranger? Well, it is an illustration or representation of a demand liberal capitalism wants out of bare life; to be coded into the matrix as subjectivity and then to delegate the definition of that subjectivity to the objective matrix of the hyper- capitalist immaterial factory, a factory for the production of nothing. As Hegel claimed, general will subsumes individual will, that is subordinated to general law and general creation, but this individual consciousness is also directly aware of itself as general consciousness; it is aware that its object is a law it imposed, and a creation it created, while by moving into action, and by creating objects it does not create anything that is individual, but only laws and state regulations. Therefore, bare life, while still excluded from the capitalist production matrix, is a zero phase of life with style; bare life could become bios, could be included only by rejecting its political agenda. If it does not want to, or does not recognize the choice – which-is-not-a-choice at all, then it becomes an alien, foreign body that by exposing the nature of the void between two worlds exposes the very ethics of both worlds. It is the friction among these two (bios or bare life) under which bare life should become bios that allows capitalism to impose the monopoly over definition of life. Therefore, emancipation, as we can see has become a discriminatory practice when it operates through total submission of bare life to bios; where subjectivity will be nothing else but a reflection of perversion of the system to which it has invested its subjectivity. An alien is an alien because it refuses to do so. Gayatri Spivak’s notorious claim that the exclusion of the “other” from Europe is very important for production of the European epistemic regimes is based on the subaltern that can not speak, should be upgraded with the claim that other can speak, but all it can say is “yes.” This is the spiritus movens of the First world itself as well as the core of democracy itself. What should be done? Bare life should not become bios, but instead it should become an alien, a creature of conflict, by organizing its own political agenda, not letting the liberal capitalist establishment act in its place.

References:
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford University Press, Stanford 1998.

Marina Gržinić, Re-politicizing art, theory, representation and new media technology, (Schriften der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien, Vol. 6). Schlebrügge.Editor, Vienna 2008.

G.W.F. Hegel, Phanomenologie des Geistes, Leipzig, Jubilaumsausgabe. Hrsg. V. G. Lasson, 2. Durchgesehene Auflage, Leipzig 1921.

1 http://www.guardian.co.uk/france/story/0,,2169068,00.html

Šefik Šeki Tatlić is a theoretician from Sarajevo. He is enrolled in PhD programme at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Zagreb.

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