ABSTRACT
On the 28 November 2011, in Brussels, the capital of Europe, Slavoj Žižek was supposed to pronounce an address on the topic of “The Struggle for European Legacy.” The venue was Bozar, a sumptuous late Art Nouveau building conceived by Victor Horta, which has become one of the most important concert halls of the continent. Weeks before the talk Žižek had sold out the two thousand plus seats of the Henry Le Boeuf room – leaving unsatisfied a waiting list of hundreds of people. The occasion of this talk was the joint publication of a Dutch translation, by Boom, of Žižek's First as Tragedy, then as Farce, and of a new edition, at Presses Universitaires de France, of Žižek's very first book, written directly in French, Le plus sublime des hystériques. When Žižek started to talk, the heat was already considerable – at the very last moment, to the 2000 seats had been added 100 others, directly put on stage, behind the speaker (they were sold in 20 minutes). As often in his conferences of the time, he began with a discussion of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, a favorite of Nazi Germany before its “Ode to Joy” became the official anthem of the European Union. Beware, said Žižek: don't be fooled by the choirs of the “Ode to Joy,” because what matters the most in this symphony is not that; it is what immediately follows. And, with a gesture to the sound engineer, the audience suddenly started to hear the bombast of the third variation on the theme of the “Ode,” at the beginning of the fourth movement of the Symphony. Suddenly, at its acme (at bar 331, precisely, as Žižek recalled), a silence irrupted – followed by a long, low note, played by bassoons: “This,” commented the speaker, “is the European fart.” The room burst with laughter. Yet, despite its apparent silliness (and, even, because of it), there was a truth in this assumption: with the beginning of the marcia turca following the third variation on the “Ode,” something like the obscene counterpart to what we heard before made itself visible on the very scene that pretended to foreclose it. As “Ode to Joy” was the official hymn of the European Union, the Turkish march was what the European authorities refused to listen to, even though it was on the very repression of its “Turkish” dimension that contemporary Europe was “grounded.” This little exercise, typical of Žižek, could serve as a perfect appetizer for what the present collection is all about: trying to understand the place of law in his system of thought – a place to which he himself has apparently devoted only a few enigmatic propositions. Yet, as the reader will undoubtedly notice, there is a important novelty in Žižek's theory of law, a novelty that precisely consists in the curious game of hide and seek that law plays with its own obscene remainder.
