Ban on analysis? What’s behind the scandal surrounding Slavoj Žižek

2023-10-18 12:52:44

Talking about Israel and Hamas’ terror? Nothing seems harder at the moment. The Dutch footballer Anwar El Ghazi, who is under contract with FSV Mainz 05, had to experience this. Because he shared a message on Instagram denying Israel’s right to exist, he was immediately released from playing and training. According to FSV Mainz 05, he “took a position on the conflict in the Middle East in a way that was intolerable for the club.” El Ghazi’s colleague Noussair Mazraoui, who plays for FC Bayern Munich, also has to report to his club management about pro-Palestinian Internet posts when he returns from a game with the Moroccan national team.

Football and politics have always been a broad field. However, one should abandon the idea that young football professionals do not know exactly what they are sending out into the internet world with their quick fingers. Former German national player Mesut Özil and his French colleague Karim Benzema have millions of followers behind them, especially in the Muslim world, who gratefully listen to what they think about the Middle East conflict. A differentiated attitude to Israel’s situation is not included.

Quotes from Breivik, Heydrich and Benjamin

But given this, is it appropriate to speak of a ban on analysis? This is exactly what the Slovenian philosopher did in his speech at the opening of the Frankfurt Book Fair and immediately took the committed contradiction of the Hessian anti-Semitism commissioner Uwe Becker during his speech as evidence of such a ban. In the course of his furious lecture, Žižek cited quotes from the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik and the Nazi criminal Reinhard Heydrich alongside sentences from Walter Benjamin and Moshe Dayan, as if the point was to performatively challenge the ban on analysis.

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The literary world is in turmoil, not only because Žižek used the opportunity to let formulas about the freedom of the word collide in an incompatible way. He was assisted by the American philosopher Judith Butler, who rejected a moral condemnation of Hamas in a recent essay. Moral outrage, says Butler, is limited to the present and ignores the horrors of the past 70 years that Palestinians have endured. The lack of empathy for the situation of the people in Israel, which is expressed in Butler’s text, does not exactly indicate a ban on analysis, but rather a neglect of their thinking.