What Did We Miss in Syria?

Slavoj Zizek 

The downfall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria surprised even the opposition, led by Abu Mohammad al-Jolani’s Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, offering fertile ground for conspiracy theories.

What roles did Israel, Turkey, Russia, and the United States play in this sudden reversal? Did Russia abstain from intervening on Assad’s behalf simply because it cannot afford another military operation outside the Ukrainian theater, or was there some behind-the-scenes deal? Did the US again fall into the trap of supporting Islamists against Russia, ignoring the lessons from its support of the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s? What did Israel do? It is certainly benefiting from the diversion of the world’s attention from Gaza and the West Bank, and it is even seizing new territory in southern Syria for itself.

Like most commentators, I simply don’t know the answers to these questions, which is why I prefer to focus on the bigger picture. A general feature of the story, like in Afghanistan after the US withdrawal and in Iran during the 1979 revolution, is that there was no big, decisive battle. The regime simply collapsed like a house of cards. Victory went to the side that was actually willing to fight and die for its cause.

The fact that the regime was universally despised does not fully explain what happened. Why did the secular resistance to Assad disappear, leaving only Muslim fundamentalists to seize the day? One could apply the same question to Afghanistan. Why were thousands willing to risk their lives to catch a flight out of Kabul, but not to fight the Taliban? The armed forces of the old Afghan regime were better armed, but they simply were not committed to that fight.

A similar set of facts fascinated the philosopher Michel Foucault when he visited Iran (twice) in 1979. He was struck by what he saw as the revolutionaries’ indifference toward their own survival. Theirs was a “partisan and agonistic form of truth-telling,” Patrick Gamez explains. They sought a “transformation through struggle and ordeal, as opposed to the pacifying, neutralizing, and normalizing forms of modern Western power. … Crucial for understanding this point is the conception of truth at work…a conception of truth as partial, as reserved for partisans.”

As Foucault himself put it:

“… if this subject who speaks of right (or rather, rights) is speaking the truth, that truth is no longer the universal truth of the philosopher. … It is interested in the totality only to the extent that it can see it in one-sided terms, distort it and see it from its own point of view. The truth is, in other words, a truth that can be deployed only from its combat position, from the perspective of the sought-for victory and ultimately, so to speak, of the survival of the speaking subject himself.”

Can this perspective be dismissed as evidence of a premodern “primitive” society that has not yet discovered modern individualism? To anyone minimally acquainted with Western Marxism, the answer is clear. As the Hungarian philosopher Georg Lukacs argued, Marxism is “universally true” precisely because it is “partial” to a particular subjective position. What Foucault was looking for in Iran – the agonistic (“war”) form of truth-telling – was there from the beginning in Marx, who saw that participating in the class struggle is not an obstacle to acquiring “objective” knowledge of history, but rather a precondition for doing so.

The positivist conception of knowledge as an “objective” expression of reality – what Foucault characterized as “the pacifying, neutralizing, and normalizing forms of modern Western power” – is the ideology of the “end of ideology.” On one hand, we have supposedly non-ideological expert knowledge; on the other hand, we have dispersed individuals, each of whom is focused on his or her idiosyncratic “care of the Self” (Foucault’s term) – the small things that bring pleasure to one’s life. From this standpoint of liberal individualism, any universal commitment, especially if it includes risk to life and limb, is suspicious and “irrational.”

Here we encounter an interesting paradox: While traditional Marxism probably cannot provide a convincing account of the Taliban’s success, it does help clarify what Foucault was looking for in Iran (and what should fascinate us in Syria). At a time when the triumph of global capitalism had repressed the secular spirit of collective engagement in pursuit of a better life, Foucault hoped to find an example of collective engagement that did not rely on religious fundamentalism. He didn’t.

The best explanation of why religion now seems to hold a monopoly on collective commitment and self-sacrifice comes from Boris Buden, who argues that religion as a political force reflects the post-political disintegration of society – the dissolution of traditional mechanisms that guaranteed stable communal links. Fundamentalist religion is not only political; it is politics itself. For its adherents, it is no longer just a social phenomenon, but the very texture of society.

Thus, it is no longer possible to distinguish the purely spiritual aspect of religion from its politicization: in a post-political universe, religion is the channel through which antagonistic passions return. Recent developments that look like triumphs of religious fundamentalism represent not a return of religion in politics, but simply the return of the political as such.

The question, then, is what ever happened to secular radical politics (the great forgotten achievement of European modernity)? In its absence, Noam Chomsky believes we are approaching the end of organized society – the point of no return beyond which we cannot even adopt commonsense measures to “avert cataclysmic destruction of the environment.” While Chomsky focuses on our indifference toward the environment, I would extend his point to our general unwillingness to engage in political struggles generally. Making collective decisions to avert foreseeable calamities is an eminently political process.

The West’s problem is that it is wholly unwilling to fight for a big common cause. The “peaceniks” who want to end the Russia’s war in Ukraine on any terms, for example, will ultimately defend their comfortable lives, and they are ready to sacrifice Ukraine for that purpose. The Italian philosopher Franco Berardi is right. We are witnessing “the disintegration of the Western world.”