Slavoj Zizek über Konsum und Charity

Bei einer Video-Aufzeichnung einer Debatte zwischen dem slowenischen Philosophen Slavoj Zizek und dem französischen Philosophen Bernard-Henri Lévy mit dem Titel “Violence & The Left in Dark Times” vom September 2008, hatte Slavoj Zizek eine interessante Ausführung über Konsum und Charity parat, die ich als so kontroversiell als auch gleichzeitig sehr den Tatsachen entsprechend empfand, dass ich es gleich bloggen musste. Er bezeichnet die moderne Form des Konsums, mit Charity oder FairTrade-Charakter als Ideologie der Depolitisierung, da Konsument_innen durch ihren Konsum ihre eigene politische Verantwortung auf Unternehmen übertragen, im Vertrauen, es würde schon etwas passieren. Ein Beitrag im Wortlaut:

… How do we consume today, when you have a commodity to buy? It’s no longer the primitive level: ‘Buy this car, because it’s the best and uses less gasoline or whatever.’ It’s also no longer the competitive logic. Isn’t it that today we are more and more adressed even more by publicity, as ‘Buy this car, because’, for example ‘it’s a Landrover, you can drive into nature, you can realize your authentic self, it’s a part of self-realization and so on, and so on. Let me go to the extreme here. This is why I find this so problematic, all this stuff with organic food and so on. Do you really believe, that if you buy the apples, the so-called organic apples, which are usually more rotten and cost half more, do you really believe, that they are more healthy? No, it’s also no competition, but it makes you feel well. You know, like, my God, I participate in something great, I’m not just a stupid consumer. I am so solidaric with it. It’s the trap I encounter here every day, when I unfortunately have to go to Starbucks Coffee. You know, like practically they make you feel like that with each cup of coffee you save some Guatemala-kid [sic!] from starvation or whatever. I mean, let’s just be aware, that’s one dimension of ’68, which again I sincerely mean that it’s not bad, that it’s not a priori bad. No, I think there are, how to put it… Ethical awareness did grow up with this. And the first, to admit it, all I’m saying is, as an old-fashioned half-marxist pessimist: ‘Let’s look, what baggage comes with it.’ You know, what do you think, I want to ask you now a question. What I find dangerous in charity, charity is ‘in’ now. It’s no lnger as it was 100 years ago, with Carneguey, some idio-syncratic guys. Today, everybody does charity, but what’s the message we get? You see that poster everywhere, some deformed black child and then ‘for the price of one Cappucino you can save his life or whatever’. The message, I think, if you read it between the lines, it’s a pretty cynical one. ‘Pay a little bit and it will make you feel better and you don’t have to worry about it and you don’t have to politicize it, and so on, and so on. I think that charity, no wonder, Bill Gates likes it today, no wonder that if you notice someething. Certain rhetorics twenty years ago, when we were young, was the rhetorics of the left, saying to us to live in relatively comfortable lifes: ‘Are we aware, that we live in ivory tower and out htere, people are starving?’ Today the mainstream is saying this all the time. It’s one way to depoliticize us. My idea is, that today’s ideology, is de ideology of depoliticization.

Hier der erste Teil der Debatte, die in voller Länge auf youtube zu sehen ist:

Tags:Charity, Depolitisierung, Konsum, Starbucks