In this essay, Žižek quotes Benjamin, and wonders with him: ”what if culture itself is nothing but a halt, a break, a respite, in the pursuit of barbarity?” He gives an example of how culture can be not just synonymous but identical with barbarity in Less Than Nothing, where he mentions an utterance attributed to various Nazi leaders: “When I hear the word ‘culture’ I reach for my pistol.” Here “the intended meaning was probably that he was ready to defend high German culture… against Jews and other barbarians; the true meaning, however is that he is himself a barbarian who explodes with violence when confronted with true works of culture.” (at the end of The “Magical Force” of Reversal section of Part III, Chapter 8).
In La Scienza nuouva, Vico has already intuited this position: after the “human” stage of history, comes “barbarie ritornata”, which he defines as “barbarie della riflessione” (barbarity of reflection). His evidence comes from the Middle Ages: an example of new barbarity that set in after the most enlightened teachings of Christianity were revealed. How far away are we from this intuition coming true? For one thing seems to be certain: the same symbolic framework that gives rise and supports culture in a society is also the framework of that society’s possible or existing barbarity. Take the USSR. How proud its citizens were of its ballet, arts, literature. Yet, this was the muster of a totalitarian society, suppressing its citizens with violence only matched by that of Nazi Germany (which, incidently, did not concentrate on its own citizens, not that I am defending the monstorsity of Nazism, just stressing that the monstrocity of communism belongs on a different level). So Benjamin was right: any monument to culture is simultaniously a monument to barbarity.
