Universal Love vs. True Love

The universal proposition “I love you all” acquires the level of actual existence only if “There is at least one whom I hate” – a thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity has always led to brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is the “truth” of universal love, in contrast to true love which can only emerge against the background not of universal hatred, but of universal indifference: I am indifferent towards All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love you, the unique individual who stands out against this indifferent background. Love and hatred are thus not symmetrical: love emerges out of universal indifference, while hatred emerges out of universal love. In short, we are dealing here again with the formulae of sexuation: “I do not love you all” is the only foundation of “There is nobody that I do not love,” while “I love you all” necessarily relies on “I really hate some of you.”

– Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

On Israel's Legitimacy

On April 29, 1956, a group of Palestinians from Gaza crossed the border to plunder the harvest in the Nahal Oz kibbutz's fields; Roi, a young Jewish member of the kibbutz who patrolled the fields galloped towards them on his horse brandishing a stick to chase them away; he was seized by the Palestinians and carried back to the Gaza Strip. When the UN returned his body to the Israelis, his eyes had been gouged out. Moshe Dayan, the then Israeli Chief of Staff, delivered the eulogy at his funeral the following day:

Let us not cast blame on the murderers today. What claim do we have against their mortal hatred of us? They have lived in the refugee camp of Gaza for the past eight years, while right before their eyes we have transformed the land and the villages where they and their ancestors once lived into our own inheritance.

It is not among the Arabs of Gaza but in our own midst that we must seek Roi's blood. How have we shut our eyes and refused to look squarely at our fate and see the destiny of our generation in all its brutality? Have we forgotten that this group of young people living in Nahal Oz bears the burden of Gaza's gates on its shoulders?

Apart from the parallel between Roi and the blinded Samson (which plays a key role in the later mythology of the Israeli Defense Force), what cannot but strike one is the apparent non sequitur, the gap, between the first and the second paragraph: in the first paragraph, Dayan openly admits that the Palestinians have every right to hate the Israeli Jews, since they had taken their land; his conclusion, however, is not the obvious admission of guilt, but rather the need for a full acceptance of "the destiny of our generation in all its brutality," or, in other words, the assumption of the burden - not of guilt, but of the war in which might is right, in which the stronger force wins. The war was not about principles or justice, it was an exercise in "mythic violence" - an insight totally obliterated by recent Israeli self-legitimization.

– Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times

"No Ethnic Cleansing Without Poetry"

In an interview with Riz Khan of Al Jazeera, philosopher and author of Living in the End Times Slavoj Žižek makes an interesting point about the role art and poetry play in providing people with an ethnic national myth which, in turn, gives people the perverse strength to kill other people.