(Žižek Goads and Prods; Peščanik.net)
At a memorial service for Charlie Kirk in Arizona on September 21, his widow forgave the killer, but not Trump, who described Kirk as “a noble-spirited missionary on a great, great mission.” He then continued: “He didn’t hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want the best for them.”
This apparent inconsistency is a key feature of the Trumpian universe. Trump is of course not a “noble spirit”: he hates his opponents and considers them scum to be crushed. But to somehow justify his brutal hatred, he needs a figure like Kirk as a good man who wants the best for even his enemies. (It’s a bit like Christians needing a good Christ, whose death justifies the brutal persecution of anti-Christians.) Kirk therefore needs to be elevated to a figure of martyrdom of almost divine proportions. This elevation is just the flip side of the brutality of the Trumpian ethos.
Standard hypocritical logic holds that we attack a country or people to help the victims of their oppressive regime. In the 1930s, even Japan claimed to have occupied much of China in order to civilize its people. The Chinese are like naughty children who need to be disciplined for their own good. Regarding the current war in the Middle East, Bernard-Henri Levy follows this line: Israel is doing what it is doing in Gaza and the West Bank to help the Palestinians, to free them from the clutches of the Muslim fundamentalists who oppress them.
With Trump and Israel, the masks have fallen, the enemy simply needs to be destroyed, and for that you need a personality like Kirk. Trump is not original here – already at the very beginning of his "Republic" Plato perfectly depicts how Trump's populists (here Polemarchus) treat their opponents (here it is Socrates, the narrator):
"Polemarchus said - It seems, Socrates, that you are preparing to enter the city. - You guessed it - I said - Do you see - he said - how many of us there are? - How could you not? - Then, either you will defeat us all, or you will stay here! - And could it not be done - I said - something else: convince you, for example, that you must let us go? - And will you be able to do that - he replied - if no one listens to you? - Not at all - said Glaucon - Then take the matter as if we were not going to listen to you."1)
The attitude that you simply won’t listen to your opponent (if you are stronger than him) is something we see all the time in high politics today – and even in philosophy. One of the standard criticisms of Hegel is that the notion of dialectical progress implies the need to think through and bring out every consequence of a particular thought or attitude: if you are an ascetic, for example, thinking about it will lead you to the realization that asceticism is an egoistic attitude – you are completely focused on yourself, desperately trying to erase every trace of pleasure and joy. But Hegel knows this: at the very beginning of his Logic, where he analyzes the logical order of pure categories of thought without any empirical assumptions, he points out that Logic is nevertheless based on an (ultimately contingent) act of will, a willful decision to think. The ascetic can simply say: “Okay, I am indeed an egoist, but I don’t care, I refuse to think about what my asceticism entails, I just accept that this is who I am.”
This refusal to listen and/or think is not just a primordial decision; it is a continuous occurrence in our lives. Those who unconditionally support Israel simply ignore all the obvious arguments that genocide is taking place there; they dismiss them outright as anti-Semitic lies. This happens to me all the time: when I recently made the case for our environmental crisis, the response I got was a variation of the “then take it as if we’re not going to listen to you” attitude, with the short explanation that the fight against global warming is a campaign motivated by dark reasons (the destruction of the prosperous West). Along those lines, Trump, in his speech to the UN General Assembly on September 23, called climate change “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the world.”
This position is based on the precise concept of justice that Thrasymachus will articulate a few pages later in "The Republic", who says: "I maintain that what is just is nothing other than what benefits the stronger." He goes on to explain: "Every government, again, makes laws for its own benefit: democracy makes democratic laws, a tyrant issues monarchical laws, and so do other governments. What is beneficial to them they say is the right of the subjects, to which they must obey, and if anyone transgresses it, then they punish him as a man who has transgressed the laws and committed a crime. This is what I mean, my dear, when I say that all states judge equally about the concept of justice: that justice is beneficial to state power. For this state power reigns in the state, and so anyone who thinks carefully will see that what I say is just everywhere: that which benefits the stronger."
Isn’t this, again, Trumpian politics at its purest? The justice he imposes on other, weaker states is in fact the arbitrary justice of the stronger: if Brazil jails his friend Bolsonaro, Trump raises tariffs by 30%; because Starmer bows to Trump, the UK is entitled to better treatment than other European countries; if a country exports a lot to the US, Trump ignores fair competition and simply raises tariffs. Again, Trump makes sure that his actions have bad consequences for his opponents – he doesn’t even pretend that the suffering he inflicts on them will make them better. But it’s not enough to reverse the position and do things that we expect to produce good consequences for everyone. The logic here is more complex – remember Walter Benjamin’s brutal rejection of Goethe’s guiding principle, “try to have a consequence for everything in life.” In his scathing review, Benjamin says:
"This is without a doubt one of the most disgusting maxims, one that you would not expect from Goethe. It is the imperative of progress in its most dubious form. It is not the case that the consequence leads to what is fruitful in right action, much less that the consequence is its fruit. On the contrary, the bringing forth of fruit is the mark of evil actions. The actions of good men have no 'consequence' that can be attributed (or exclusively attributed) to them. The fruits of an action are, as is right and proper, its inner part. To enter into the interior of a mode of action is the way to test its fruitfulness."2)
There is an obvious counterargument to this view: what about acting to prevent global warming, or nuclear war, or the dominance of artificial intelligence? Aren’t these cases where only the consequences matter? So doesn’t Benjamin’s argument rely on the old distinction of poiesis v. praxis? “Poiesis” is activity directed at a product that will exist after the activity is performed (a work of art, a table, or whatever), while “praxis” is activity that is an end in itself (the performance of a work of art). However, it can be argued that activities directed at an external goal also have immanent value. Imagine a large collective act of constructing something that would reduce environmental damage: even if it fails, such an activity actualizes a form of social solidarity and thus exhibits an immanent positive impact. So what bears the hallmark of evil is precisely the exclusive orientation to an external goal (bad or good) that ignores the “interiority of the way of acting.”
Jean-Claude Milner once told me that for non-European countries, war is the normal state of affairs, something always lurking in the background, while periods of peace are merely occasional pauses between armed conflicts; in the Christian West, however, peace is seen as the great culmination of historical progress, the final state towards which we all aspire. Nowhere is this clearer than in Nazi Germany: it constantly evoked the ewiger Frieden, which was to come after final victory – this call for eternal peace justified (and demanded) total mobilization for one more, final war to end all wars.
Today, the same madness is spreading around the world: Trump brought peace by fully supporting Israel and bombing Iran, Netanyahu is trying to bring peace to the Middle East by expanding the war on the Palestinians and engaging in genocide (which, in a way, is quite appropriate: when you destroy your enemies, that is peace). So there is logic in the crazy fact that some countries are nominating both Trump and Netanyahu as candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. At its extreme, cancellation culture acts in a similar way: it fights for tolerance and diversity by brutally excluding all those who challenge its own definition of tolerance and diversity.
Three conclusions can be drawn from this situation. First, perhaps learning to live with the threat of war is the only way to achieve peace. Second, beware of the “noble spirits” who justify various brutalities. Third, in a truly emancipated society, people do not engage in actions with good consequences but in actions without consequences.
(Translated by Milica Jovanović)
________________
1) Translated by Albin Vilhar and Branko Pavlović, BIGZ, 2002.
2) Citat prema: Jeremy Matthew Glick, Put Some Red on It: Maoist Brooding and Communist Laughter, Cambridge University Press, 2025.
Bonus video:
