[spectre] (fwd) Cur rent - an interview

[Andreas Broeckmann]

Date: Thu, 10 Jun 2004 08:53:19 -0700 (PDT)
From: Cur rent <current_bg at yahoo.com>
Subject: an interview


hi,
is it possible to forward this message to the list? I tried to send 
it several times, but in vain... maybe the address of mine is too 
spammer-like to be allowed to post to the list...


  - This interview is published by KulturKampf, alternative magazine 
from Nis (Serbia). The members of its redaction are anonymous -



Over the past few years, we witnessed several politically topical 
events in public life, events important for the majority of citizens 
- situations distinguished by the fact that hooligans tended to take 
over the prerogatives of state authorities. The most interesting 
situations happened in Belgrade on October 5th 2000, June 22nd 2001 - 
during the failed attempt of organizing Gay Parade in Belgrade and on 
the night of March 17th/18th 2004 in Belgrade, Nis and Novi Sad 
during street protests against the violence in Kosovo. In each of 
them the police behaved in the same way ñ they did not really try to 
stop the riots or deliberately retreated before the hooligans. If we 
agree that anonymity is one of the most powerful weapons of vandals, 
the question is what kind of ìanonymousî political thought ensures 
passive attitude of the state and its citizens and a peculiar 
neutrality of the majority of political factors in the time of such 
violence?





I think that the hidden roots of hooliganism or as you said 
ìanonymous political thoughtî backing it up, lie in the ideology of 
legalism. Take, for example, the simplest form of legalistic 
ideology, the basic form of its operationalization in the everyday 
politics, in fact the situation when a politician says ìI am a 
legalistî. What does a politician actually say when he announces ìI 
am a legalistî? This emphatic statement is meant to show that the 
person in question believes in Law, because, taken at a literal 
level, it would be either nonsensical or trivial, since no man living 
in a state can be anything other than a legalist. What kind of Law 
does a legalist have in mind? Obviously, he is referring to some 
other law, different from the ordinary one which keeps us ñ the 
unbelievers ñ in the state. What is in fact Law for a legalist, if it 
is not the law that applies to every law-abiding citizen: the 
obligation to obey the law? It follows that a legalist does not 
believe in Law but in the ideal of law, in a law that is above the 
law, law that is beyond reach. Namely, the statement ìI am a 
legalistî indicates acceptance of the terror of the Ideal Law, some 
rigid and obscene Law that demands belief. What a legalist really 
wants is to integrate into law, not to obey it. In other words, the 
declaration ìI am a legalistî splits the Law into the kind of Law 
that is obeyed and the other kind that is believed in. Moreover, by 
the very fact of believing in Law a legalist exempts himself from the 
rule of law that is obeyed, wishing, at the same time, to integrate 
completely into it.



Since we know that contemporary states know no examples of political 
parties that naively identify with the role of Law, i.e. 
disinterested neutrality that stabilizes and normalizes political 
relations, we must ask ourselves the question as to what are 
political aims of someone who wants to identify naively with the role 
of Law. This leads us to making a very simple diagnosis. A political 
legalist is someone who presumes to be above the law and justifies 
that claim by saying that he believes in law. Therefore, a political 
party presuming to hegemonize the neutrality of law, its  equal 
distance from everyone, does nothing but create just the opposite 
effect of what is meant to be achieved by the statement ìI am a 
legalistî. Its actual meaning, in this case, is ìI am usurping the 
law, that is to say, I can infringe the law because I believe in itî. 
Namely, ìI am using the law as an instrument in political battlesî. 
In the subjective economy of a legalist, this belief produces the 
following conviction: I am an instrument of law. A party that claims 
to be legalistic is positioned beyond the law, precisely because of 
its aspirations to speak in the name of law.



Itís interesting to note how legalists behave in political life. For 
instance, letís consider the activity of legalists after the last 
elections that brought them to power. They use the logic of the law 
in which they believe and execute its obscene order: DO EVERYTHING 
THAT YOU FORBID OTHERS TO DO. Legalists presume to lustrate their 
political opponents without the Lustration Act, while, at the same 
time, they refuse to pass that Act. To make things even more absurd, 
they appointed Justice Minister the man who should have been among 
the first to be lustrated because by adhering to law he was breaking 
the law, which is the sublime of legalism. Thatís what happens when 
legalism becomes the ideology of those who rule. The current Justice 
Minister enforced the thought crime law at the time of the total 
disintegration of socialism, in the era of the breakdown of the 
legitimate framework of legality of socialist laws. That was the time 
when that law was almost no longer enforced and every respected judge 
refused to sentence people for thought crimes. On the other hand, 
didnít the hooligans, similarly to legalists, use the ideal law as an 
excuse for beating up homosexuals in the streets? To be fair, by 
ideal law they mean the law of God, natural law and believe that they 
are integrated in it. In fact they believe themselves to be 
instruments of it, while by beating up others and committing violent 
acts they violate human laws.



On another level, the level of libidinal economy, legalists are 
perverts because they, like perverts, consider law to be an ideal 
into which they want to integrate completely; therefore we can safely 
say that perversion is currently in power in Serbia. Since the last 
perverts in the history of Serbian politics were the Stalinists who 
believed that they were instruments of the application of the 
historic law of class struggle, todayís legalism is an unconscious 
successor of this tradition in Serbian politics. More precisely, it 
is a personal trauma of the inventor of legalism ñ anticommunist 
whose father enforced the law in the Stalinist era.



Judging by the paralysis of the police and other state authorities, 
hooligans are somewhat entitled to behave like chosen representatives 
of the people, authorized to carry out some anonymous but legitimate 
political will. What kind of voters can a politician claiming to be a 
legalist count on, or who wants to be interpellated into the ideology 
of legalism?



Hooligans are the hidden truth of the ideology of legalism, best 
hidden from legalism itself. A legalist distances himself from 
hooligans and sees himself as being on the opposite side. However, 
between a legalist and a hooligan there exists a relationship of 
immediate conversion ñ a legalist is the ideal hooligan and a 
hooligan is the ideal legalist.



Namely, you are quite familiar with Brechtís joke ìwhat is the 
robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a new bank?í Naive 
childís playî. The same applies to law, ìwhat is the violence that 
breaks the law compared to the violence that establishes the rule of 
law? - Childís playî. The dark roots of law that the legalist doesnít 
want to know anything about lie in violence; law is founded on 
violence, which is a necessary element in setting the framework of 
law. But that element is later suppressed by the law itself; law 
makes it invisible so that Law can seemingly self-reproduce in its 
idealized, ritualized form. The statement ìI am a legalistî in its 
emphatic form means I believe in law, in its both forms: in the 
violence which is necessary to set the framework of law and its 
idealized and ritualized form that covers up the violence inherent to 
law. Since legalist ideology lays hold of the ìgood side of lawî 
only, that is to say, itís idealized and ritualized side, a legalist 
is not aware of the fact that by doing so he shows that he believes 
in violence too, the violence which ensures the application of law. 
It is a hooligan who takes it on himself to use violence; he 
identifies with it and believes that violence will result in a law.



As Hegel puts it: ìA criminal is not a criminal because he committed 
a crime but because he did not universalize itî. So the policy 
embodied in the statement ìI am a legalistî is an attempt to use law 
to cover up crime, the crime that is impossible to universalize ñ 
genocide. If we analyze the intention of a legalist to the utmost and 
get to the core idea, we see that he violates laws by enforcing laws; 
he wants to use law to commit a crime, which is the sublime of 
hooliganism. To lay hold of the good, ritualized side of law is a 
crime.



The result of that was the inability of the police to confront the 
hooligans that gathered around the Bajrakli mosque and the mosque in 
Nis ñ the ideology of legalism ran into itself and stepped back at 
the very moment when it should have enforced the law and used 
violence to restore law and order. Staying true to its legalistic 
principles, it withdrew in the ideal of ritualized law, allowing the 
hooligans to use violence. By burning down mosques, the hooligans 
sent a message letting everybody know that they expected the 
legalists to stick to the ideology that legalizes crime instead of 
enforcing the Law (not even the most harmless form of law ñ 
maintenance of law and order) that would prevent the symbolic 
equivalent of genocide.



Interior Minister provided the best possible proof of the assumption 
that violation of law is an integral part of law itself because he is 
completely integrated in law: in his youth he was a hooligan and as a 
mature individual he became the man in charge of law enforcement in 
the entire state. He has come full circle ñ self-constitution of law 
is complete: first he violated the law and now he enforces it. No 
wonder the current minister of the interior described the offence he 
committed in his youth as childís play, using the exact same words 
that Brecht had used to describe the relationship between a bank 
robbery and the founding of a bank. The only difference being that 
the legalist is a cynical Brechtian, because the only person who 
cannot afford to say a thing like that is the person in charge of law 
enforcement.



Does this mean that the society we live in is hooliganized? Are 
hooligan groups just the more active part of the anonymous silent 
majority indifferent to the incidents committed by vandals, as well 
as war crimes? Did political and economic processes give rise to the 
hooliganization of the society and if so which processes lead to this?



The entire society was hooliganized in the era that is behind us, at 
the time when hooliganism was the ruling ideology ñ throughout the 
period of Milosevicís rise to power in 1987 until the signing of the 
Dayton agreement. Unlike the nineties when hooliganism was the ruling 
ideology, it has now become the ideology of those who rule and 
appears in its legalistic form. There is an interesting paradox that 
apparently no one examined. Thatís the paradox concerning the 
difference between leftñwing and right-wing hooliganism. Namely, at 
the time when hooliganism was the ruling ideology, the ideology in 
power was leftist, but today when hooliganism became the ideology of 
those who rule, ruling ideology is rightist. This is an inversion 
that is hard to understand without introducing Lacanís view of the 
difference between the left and the right. Lacan says that a 
left-winger is a fool and right-winger a knave. Left-wingers are 
fools because they are eternally in possession of truth, but are 
unwilling to suffer the consequences of that truth, while 
right-wingers are knaves because they cynically distance themselves 
from the state of affairs, and it is precisely this cynical distance 
that reproduces the existing state of affairs. However, a situation 
may arise where left-wingers and right-wingers change places and form 
groups of leftists and rightists, namely, they form political 
parties. Then united left-wingers in power become knaves and united 
right-wingers in power become fools. Nowadays, this is the only way 
to understand the cynical blindness of the ideology of those who rule 
ñ united knaves in the party in power are fools.