Post on 13-May-2023
Danish Demarcations: Welfare State,Middle Class Nationalism and Xenophobia
By Gitte du Plessis, University of Hawai'i at Mānoa
gitte@hawaii.edu
1
ABSTRACT:
This essay looks at the population of the Danish welfare state
as an affluent middle class that demarcates itself in relation
to a foreign proletariat within a global, neoliberal division
of labor. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek‘s psychoanalytical
conceptualizations of nationalism, the analysis begins by
tracing Danish nationalism and how it results in xenophobia
and racism, as the foreign other is simultaneously blamed for
any structural threats to the continued Danish affluence and
is deemed unwelcome in the Danish welfare state. In an effort
to critically question this blaming of the other, this essay
shifts the explanatory focus onto the dialectical relationship
between the nation-state and capitalism in securing the Danish
middle-class status in a global, neoliberal world order, and
suggests that the threat to the Danish welfare lies not in
multiculturalism but in the paradox of wanting at once the
Danish borders open for surplus-extraction and closed for
foreigners. The essay ends with a discussion of new
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perspectives on cohabitation and equality beyond state
borders.
Key words: Middle Class, Welfare States, Nationalism, Slavoj
Žižek.
AUTHOR BIO
Gitte du Plessis received her Master’s degree from Copenhagen
Business School. She is now a PhD student in the Department of
Political Science, University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where she
is specializing in Political Theory and International
Relations.
Danish Demarcations: Welfare State,Middle Class Nationalism, and Xenophobia
INTRODUCTION
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The Nordic welfare states are commonly celebrated for their
desirable combination of high levels of wealth, equality, and
individual freedom. In essence, the so-called “Nordic Model”
consists of a strong welfare state combined with free-market
capitalism. To describe the success of this setup, pictures of
friendly reindeer and Vikings decorate articles in which
excited commentators use terms such as “The next supermodel,”1
“northern lights,”2 and “cuddly capitalism.”3 As yet another
marker of the success of this system, Denmark has topped the
UN “World Happiness Report” in both 2012 and 2013, with the
other Nordic welfare states all in the top ten.
This essay seeks to nuance this enthusiasm, and does so
by analyzing the Danish welfare state and the Danish nation as
a privileged player in a globalized world. More specifically,
the Danish citizenry is here viewed as a middle class that is
demarcating itself in relation to a foreign proletariat. As
such, the middle class is an anxious class who puts a lot of
ideological energy (and in many cases also a lot of material
energy such as gating, fencing and as we shall see, bordering)
into protecting the middle class lifestyle and status against
the “poor hordes” threatening it from below. The affluent
demarcate themselves based on an anxious logic that middle
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class status cannot be shared; only stolen. Thus, the middle
class would prefer to be left alone, to live the life they
have worked so hard to create and maintain for themselves
without it being threatened from the outside.
Apart from relying on surplus-extraction from other
countries, the Danish welfare state is guarantor for the
continued middle class status of the Danish citizenry in two
ways: firstly, the borders between the middle class and the
proletariat are the national borders, which means the middle
class is protected by nation state laws and security measures,
and secondly, the social policies of the Danish welfare
ensures that no Dane is dropped below a middle class
lifestyle.4 Hence, nationalistic demarcations converge with
class demarcations.
The essay begins by introducing Slavoj Žižek’s
psychoanalytical concept of a “national Thing” to explain how
nationalism is tied to particular fantasies and ways of
enjoying. How these play out in the case of Denmark is traced
by describing how Danish nationalism hinges on participation
the Danish welfare state, a shared history of a certain
“peoplehood,” and the consumption of “Danish” design. The
essay then turns to a discussion of how struggles over
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possession of the Danish national Thing results in xenophobia
and racism. Taking the Žižekian viewpoint further, the next
part of the essay discusses how nationalistic demarcations
function to cover up antagonisms that have less to do with
differences between people than with fantasies of a
capitalist, democratic society without inherent friction or
conflict. I argue that what is blamed on the other in the
Danish context are the discrepancies that arise from a
paradoxical wish of wanting to be a part of the global
neoliberal economy whilst keeping the borders closed to its
excessive elements. The essay ends with a discussion of how a
shift from focusing on blaming the other for inconsistencies
in society to focusing on the problematic aspects of a global
division of labor and how it is sustained by nation-states can
bring about new perspectives.
DANISH NATIONAL “THING(S)”
In the chapter “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!” from his book
Tarrying with the Negative, Slavoj Žižek argues that nationalism
cannot be reduced merely to an understanding of symbolic
identification. The element holding together a community is
instead a shared relationship toward a “Thing,” toward6
enjoyment structured by means of fantasies.5 To Žižek, the
social constructivist understanding that a nation is not a
biological or historical fact but something made up of social
discursive constructions misses the point, because it
overlooks “the remainder of some real, nondiscursive kernel of
enjoyment which must be present for the Nation qua discursive
entity-effect to achieve its ontological consistency.”6 This
Thing appears as only accessible to people belonging to the
community, the others are unable to grasp it, yet they
constantly disturb it. Asked to explain what “it” is, the
answer becomes an empty tautology: the Thing appears as what
gives meaning and joy to the lives of people in the community
and is simply “our way of life.” Nationalism, as it is bound
in the national Thing, lies in how a community arranges feasts
and parties, language, clothing, and artifacts, “in short, all
the details by which is made visible the unique way a
community organizes its enjoyment.”7 Existence of the Thing hinges on
members of the community believing in it, more precisely,
everyone must believe that everyone else also believes. The
Thing “turns on the fact that ‘it means something’ to people.”8
A good starting point for charting the contents of a
Danish “way of life,” or a mainstream Danish organization of
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enjoyment, is the welfare state itself. Jacob Torfing
concludes that in Denmark, the welfare state has since the
1950s been “ideologized,” in that it now functions as a
complete horizon for social orientation and political action.9
Similarly, in his work on Danish nationalism, Lasse Koefoed
positions the welfare state as “one of the Danish community’s
crown jewels.”10 In the Danish case, the welfare society isn’t
perceived as the state per se, but as “us,” a “community of
identity.”11 Here, we take care of each other; the welfare
society is perceived as our narrative, our way of structuring a
society. It is carried by an ethos of strong bonds between a
population that doesn’t abandon anyone.12 There is thus a
particular Danish enjoyment bound in solidary participation in
the community of the welfare state. Part of this enjoyment is
a view of the state as “us”, rather than a view of the state
as an entity opposed to its citizens. This enjoyment of the
welfare state is indeed dependent on everyone believing that
everyone else also believes in it, because the continuation of
the welfare state depends on everyone working hard,
contributing taxes, and only receiving benefits as needed. The
“perverted,” and as we shall see later, “un-Danish” way to
enjoy participation in the welfare state is to lazily exploit
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it, reaping as many benefits as possible while working as
little as possible.
Mainstream Danish and other historians portray the idea
of Danish national homogeneity and a Danish national identity
with a strong focus on (enjoying) equality and solidarity as
historically rooted. The narrative describes how, from a
multicultural kingdom expanding over vast land areas, Denmark
was reduced to the mere 17.000 square miles it is today as a
result of continuous land losses during the 17th and 19th
century. This in 1864 left the remaining Danish territory
fulfilling the ideal requirements of a nation-state (or
perhaps merely the ideal requirements for an approximation of
the perfect national simulacrum), namely a complete overlap of
state, language and territory.13 Two main national ideologies
have been posited as those that consequently came to
characterize this very small, coherent country: One was what
scholars refer to as the “internal front strategy,” in which
different classes collaborated to “bolster the defense of the
nation by providing for the welfare of the population in ways
that would unite it as a people – encouraging a unity that
would help the nation resist future geopolitical threats
should they arise.”14 Consistent with this strategy, it is
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said, moderates from the Danish left and right agreed to
implement social acts as early as 1891 that for the first time
applied state expenditures on social programs in order to
reinforce political stability and further unite the people of
the nation. These policies eventually led to the establishment
of a strong set of national institutions designed to reduce
inequality and class differences.15 The second main national
ideology was based in the peasantry and inspired by Nikolai
Frederik Severin Grundtvig (1783-1872), a Christian clergy,
writer, poet and priest who according to Danish historians
came to have a tremendous influence on Denmark and Danish
national identity.16 The Grundtvigian movement is described as
cutting across social classes in it’s impetus for the
importance of individual freedom, classical liberalism,
voluntarism, free association, popular education, and the
development of civil society and social solidarity.17
Grundtvigian “folk schools” emphasized the teaching of Danish
literature and served as a key mechanism for the spread of the
Grundtvigian cultural perspective and the development of a
Danish national identity, and “what is particular for the
Danish Grundtvigism is its underlining of the unity of land,
country, God, and people”18 Knud J.V. Jespersen writes:
10
Although in essence the Danish model which was developed duringthe twentieth century is a system of welfare and socialsecurity, it is in fact much more than that. It actuallypermeates the whole of society in all its aspects, from thesystem of taxation to the way in which the citizens conductthemselves. It would not be an exaggeration to talk of a wholephilosophy of life, tightly linked to being Danish and aparticular Danish way of doing things.19
This national Danish narrative of course dominates at the
expense of other possible narratives. Ove Korsgaard writes
that after the 1864 war, Danish historians engaged in an
“active and conscious effort in a politics of remembrance,”
instigating a new version of history in which Denmark had for
centuries been a coherent power with a rich national history.20
Left out of the Danish narrative of modesty and solidarity was
for example the Danish colonization with enormous wealth based
on slave trade and sugar plantations across the Atlantic
Ocean, which was at its height in the second half of the 18th
century. Denmark sold its colony in the West Indies to the
United States as late as 1917.21
As Immanuel Wallerstein notes, statehood almost always
precedes nationhood, and the development of a national
narrative is as much pragmatic as anything else:
Once recognized as sovereign, the states frequently findthemselves subsequently threatened by both internaldisintegration and external aggression. To the extent that'national' sentiment develops, these threats are lessened. Thegovernments in power have an interest in promoting this
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sentiment, as do all sorts of subgroups within the state. Anygroup who sees advantage in using the state's legal powers toadvance its interests against groups outside the state or inany subregion of the state has an interest in promotingnationalist sentiment as a legitimation of its claims. Statesfurthermore have an interest in administrative uniformity thatincreases the efficacy of their policies. Nationalism is theexpression, the promoter and the consequence of such state-level uniformities.22
Nonetheless, the prevailing Danish notion of a homogenous
people is heavily informed by this Grundtvigian legacy of an
emphasis on a unity of land, country, God, and people. Despite
many Danes viewing themselves as thoroughly secular,
Christianity still frames Danish enjoyment. Public holidays
and the national traditions that go with them are informed by
Christianity, and Grundtvig’s hymns make up the backbone of
not only the hymnbook of Danish churches, but also of the
Danish national treasury of songs. The Christian cross
features in the Danish flag as well as on the traditional hat
that high school students wear upon graduation, and the
countless churches scattered around the country are not only
the center of celebrations and rituals such as baptisms,
confirmations, marriages and funerals, but also a
quintessential part of the Danish landscape. It may be that
Christianity is weaved so seamlessly into the fabric of
everyday life in Denmark that to a Dane, the country is
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secular, yet being “culturally Christian” is part of the
mainstream Danish organization of enjoyment. Celebrating
Ramadan or Passover is not particularly Danish, whilst
celebrating Christmas is.
Not surprisingly, Danish enjoyment is also related to
desiring and consuming certain items. For example, Thomas
Dickson’s book about Danish design displays Danish
exceptionalism represented in objects, where Danish design is
linked to a Danish “way of life”. The “internal front
strategy” is mentioned here as encapsulating the national
narrative of a population who after losing large areas of land
focused on working with what they had. With very few raw
materials (in fact, the author states, only wood, stone and
amber were available), “Danes soon learned to be creative and
make much of very little.”23
Perhaps this lack of natural resources more than anything elseis what has made the Danes a design-oriented society? Danishcommon sense certainly resulted in clean lines of design usingnatural materials.24
Also the landscape of the small area of Denmark is linked to
Danish design, both the landscape and design objects have
nothing sharp about them, “no cliffs, no gorges, no high
mountains, only rich and fertile soil,”25 and Danish furniture
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thus “reminds us of something familiar, something we find
pleasant.”26 Again, left out here is for example the many
buildings and churches ornamented with materials such as
marble and gold that were built with wealth gained from
colonization. Nonetheless, the ethos that informs Danish
architecture, clothing, interior design, and furniture is
characterized by a focus on modesty, simplicity, aesthetics
and functionality. A gallery selling Danish design furniture
describes on its website how “a circle of craftsmen,
architects and designers erased the distinction between works
of art and functional equipment for everyday life.” This
resulted, the gallery continues, in “truly modern furniture
that relied on beautiful materials, rather than applied
decoration, and finely-crafted details for its aesthetic
value.”27 The pride in historical roots of social inclusion and
welfare are also brought forth here in descriptions of the
architecture of public housing for low-income families built
in the mid-1800s, designed with a focus on health, outside
recreational spaces and communal facilities, that are still
today popular homes.28 Danish exceptionalism is also detectable
in the following quote, where the functionalism, reasonable
pragmatism, sense of aesthetics and an attitude contrary to
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that of a settler nation are celebrated:
When a motorway is going to be built, it might as well be donebeautifully by routing the road as gently as possible throughthe landscape. In the US as well as other countries with apioneer mentality, there is a tradition of using a ruler toplan roads and then let loose the bulldozers. You’ll often seea road that cuts right through a hill instead of going aroundit. In Denmark there is a tradition of letting major roads windbetween hills and go around bogs and hollows. Thus you don’thave to move as much earth, plus you get roads that are morevaried to drive on, which also makes it less likely that thedriver will fall asleep at the wheel on the long stretches.”29
Danish enjoyment is thus linked to putting this sense of
simplicity, minimalism, aesthetics and functionalism to use in
everyday life. How one dresses, what bicycle or car one
drives, and how one decorates one’s home is a showcase of
one’s Danish way of enjoying. Ironically, this modestly
designed furniture and clothing is incredibly expensive. A
Danish way of consuming linked to a Danish way of life is thus
a performative act that requires a privileged financial
status.
While the aspects of the Danish national Thing outlined
above are not an exhaustive description of everything that
encapsulates Danishness, and while there are of course many
variations and exceptions within Denmark itself, I argue that
the aspects listed above play a role in how the Danes
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demarcate themselves in relation to a foreign other. This
demarcation is what the essay now turns to.
XENOPHOBIA AND NEW RACISM
According to Žižek, tensions of racism and xenophobia turn on
the possession of the national Thing. When the Danish
community thus demarcates itself, it does so in relation to a
foreign other that threatens the Danish national Thing:
We always impute to the “other” an excessive enjoyment: hewants to steal our enjoyment (by ruining our way of life)and/or he has access to some secret, perverse enjoyment. Inshort, what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiarway he organizes his enjoyment, precisely the surplus, the“excess” that pertains to this way” the smell of “their” food,“their” noisy songs and dances, “their” strange manners,“their” attitude to work.”30
As an example of tension around the Danish national Thing we
can consider how a foreign other threatens Danish production,
export and consumption of pork. In relation to an increasing
Muslim population, Denmark has been through two so-called wars
on “frikadeller” (traditional meat balls made partly from
pork) because public institutions such as day care centers and
hospitals chose to stop serving pork and/or to only serve
halal-butchered meat in order to ensure that all
children/patients - including those who were Muslim - were
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able to eat the same food. These initiatives were met with
exploding public outcry in national media outlets, culminating
in 2013 with the Prime Minister officially defending a Danish
right to eat pork.31 Meanwhile Danish Crown, Europe’s largest
producer of pork, is closing butcheries in Denmark and
outsourcing the work to Eastern Europe, thus contributing to
Eastern Europeans (another foreign other threatening the
Danish national Thing) stealing Danish jobs. As Žižek
polemically asserts;
To the racist, the “other” is either a workaholic stealing ourjobs or an idler living on our labor, and it is quite amusingto notice the haste with which one passes from reproaching theother with a refusal to work to reproaching him for the theftof work.32
As mentioned above, the Danish national Thing is also at work
in the idea of a homogenous Danish identity tightly linked to
participation in the welfare state. This aspect is at the
forefront of contemporary immigration politics, especially as
they are voiced to the right of the political spectrum.33 Here,
the watchword is integration: Only someone who can participate
properly in the welfare society is welcome in Denmark. As the
Danish Conservative Party states on their website:
In Denmark we have some fundamental values we will not give up.Values such as democracy, freedom of speech, dialogue ratherthan violence, minority protection – but respect for majoritydecisions – and equality between genders. Real integration can
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only happen based on these completely invariable principles.Therefore, democratic integration is as important as economic.
An effective and targeted integration of new fellow citizens isnecessary. Therefore we must make demands about languageskills, education and employment, and we must reward those whomake a concerted effort. We as a society cannot afford, andview it as a waste of resources, that people walk aroundpassively on transfer income.
The tendency for “ghettoization” in certain residential areasmust be counteracted and fought. It is subversive to thecohesion of the Danish society when entire residential areasdevelop different fundamental norms than the Danish ones, andthere arises a concentration of social and cultural problemsthat have a negative influence on the rest of the society.34
Lines of demarcation are drawn here. Proper participation in
the welfare state is paramount, because the society cannot
afford and views it as a waste if anyone mooches on the
welfare system. It is also posited here that being different,
or having different norms and values than the Danish ones, is
seen as a threat to the rest of the community. This is again
congruent with a view of a foreign other threatening a
particular Danish way of enjoying. As Žižek says of the
national Thing, “The basic paradox is that our Thing is
conceived as something inaccessible to the other and at the
same time threatened by him.”35 Hence what is possibly at play
here is much more than merely working, paying taxes, speaking
Danish, and believing in democracy, Danish law, and gender
equality. When these values are being explicated in a Danish
18
context, they become interwoven with the Danish Thing that is
also informed by mainstream orientations towards history,
religion, culture, and objects. To integrate into Denmark, it
is thus not enough to know how to behave as a Dane, one must
know how to enjoy like a Dane. As an editorial in the national
Danish newspaper Belingske Tidende outlines, one has to want to be
a Dane, and one has to feel like a Dane:
“Dane” is something you become and are because you want to be,and because you in words and actions show that you feel like apart of Denmark. If you live in a ghetto and are one of thosewhose fault it is that the police and firemen can’t do theirjobs because of excessive harassment, or if you for exampleinsist on being a member of Hizb ut-Tahrir or otherorganizations that openly despise all western and therebyDanish values, then you are perhaps technically a Dane becauseyou are a Danish citizen. But you are not in the strict senseDanish.36
This raises the question of whether the very production of
Danish national identity is premised on the exclusion of those
who are unfit for inclusion, and whether a simultaneous
exhortation to ”integrate” while partially denying the
possibility of such integration becomes a way in itself of
performing ”Danishness”. As Žižek puts it:
The demand “Become like us!” is a superego demand, a demandwhich counts on the other’s inability to really become like us,so that we can then gleefully “deplore” their failure. Thetruly unbearable fact for a multiculturalist liberal is anOther who effectively becomes like us, while retaining itsspecific features.37
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Furthermore, the view that a foreign other is unable to grasp
the Danish “way of life” suggests an ethos in which the Danish
“way of life” is seen as superior to other ways of life.
Successfully integrating the other into the Danish society,
teaching him or her how “we” do the welfare state, becomes
part of a civilizing mission. As Etienne Balibar aptly puts
it:
No theoretical discourse on the dignity of all cultures willreally compensate for the fact that, for a ‘Black’ in Britainor a ‘Beur’ in France, the assimilation demanded of them beforethey can become 'integrated' into the society in which theyalready live (and which will always be suspected of beingsuperficial, imperfect or simulated) is presented as progress,as an emancipation, a conceding of rights.38
Perhaps not surprisingly then, the xenophobia is unevenly
distributed in relation to where the other entering Denmark is
from. Recently, Denmark’s currently largest political party,
Venstre, launched a new set of immigration policies they would
like to implement. In a feature article by the Party’s
spokesman on nationality, it is made clear that “The state has
to make a distinction between people”:
We are already distinguishing between different countries. Itis easier to come to Denmark for an Italian than for an Indian.And it is harder for a Somali than a Swede. Now we areexpanding the list of countries. The countries have been chosenbased on objective and factual criteria. And those are –naturally – neither religion nor skin color.
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If one is from a country with a high standard of living –broadly speaking – there is a higher chance that one willsettle and thrive in Denmark without problems, and there is asmaller risk that one is coming for the wrong reasons.
All things considered, there is a bigger risk of problems witha Somali than with a Swede, regardless if this is an atheist, aMuslim or a Christian. It will hit unfairly in a lot of singlecases, but it can hardly be any different. The world is in manyways unfair, and Denmark’s immigration politics can’t solve theworld’s injustices and poverty problems.39
The idea is to accept immigrants based on how the country they
are from is rated on the UN Human Development Index. More
specifically, the level of otherness is ranked from benign to
threatening based on a logic that people from first world
countries will easily be able to integrate into the Danish
society, whereas people from third world countries will not.
As it is stated, the demarcations don’t center on questions of
religion or race, but they do however center on notions of
civilizational adeptness. Etienne Balibar relates such a need
to “differentiate and rank individuals or groups in terms of
their greater or lesser aptitude for – or resistance to –
assimilation” to an ethos where proper participation in the
welfare state is a “civilizing mission” in which “they” must
learn to partake in a civilized manner in “our” superior way
of structuring society.40
21
Even though the political party denounces any talk of
possible racism in these policy-suggestions, the racism is
still there. As Balibar points out, contemporary racism,
especially as it pertains to western European nations, is no
longer based on biological heredity, but is ideologically
bound in a view of complete incompatibility between different
cultures:
What we see here is that biological or genetic naturalism isnot the only means of naturalizing human behavior and socialaffinities. At the cost of abandoning the hierarchical model(though the abandonment is more apparent than real, as we shallsee), culture can also function like a nature, and it can in particularfunction as a way of locking individuals and groups a prioriinto a genealogy, into a determination that is immutable andintangible in origin.41
While it is acknowledged that behaviors and aptitudes cannot
be explained in terms of blood or genes, these are now instead
explained by belonging to a certain culture. As such it is “a
racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the
superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others
but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the
incompatibility of life-styles and traditions.”42 In this way,
the arguments of the liberal multiculturalist, who is oriented
towards acknowledging the diversity and equality of cultures,
end up feeding this cultural racism with its arguments.
Suddenly, the idea of “mixing cultures” is bad because it will22
homogenize in a destructive way. This doctrine can be utilized
also to explain (or even legitimize) racism, because if these
differences are inherent in us, they will invariably clash,
which will inevitably result in conflict and aggressiveness.43
An argument of securing cultural diversity then becomes an
argument for maintaining tolerance thresholds and cultural
distances, and the result is that it is best to segregate
collectives, the prime mode of this segregation of course
being different nations.44 About the current “arabophobia,”
Balibar writes:
It carries with it an image of Islam as a ‘conception of theworld’ which is incompatible with Europeanness and anenterprise of universal ideological domination.45
Žižek also touches upon this new racism, which in his view is
“reflected” in that it puts itself forth as the opposite of
racism.46 Again, “apartheid is thus legitimized as the ultimate
form of anti-racism, as an endeavor to prevent racial tensions
and conflicts.”47
“We don’t want anything foreign, we just want what rightfullybelongs to us!” – a reliable sign of racism, since it claims todraw a clear line of distinction where none exists.48
It is thus an illusion – and a racist one – to assume that a
country has a natural, and politically correct, right to close
its borders to certain, unwanted people, who simply don’t “fit
23
in.” Next, we will look closer at how racism, nationalism and
fantasies intersect.
FANTASIES AND FASCIST DREAMS
In Žižek’s view of nationalism, our enjoyment is characterized
by us never possessing it. In this psychoanalytic framework,
both the subject and social reality are constituted by a
fundamental lack – neither can ever be complete. This means
that the subject is always trying to cover these gaps by
different identification acts. The role of fantasy is to tell
us how (and what) to desire,49 and fantasy fills in ideological
gaps by offering the subject to envision a way out of the
dissatisfaction with social reality, and “In this way, fantasy
bestows reality with a fictional coherence and consistency
that appears to fulfill the lack that constitutes social
reality.”50 The fantasy operates such that the impossibility of
wholeness is transformed into being perceived as only a
prohibition or difficulty, thus leaving the subject with an
illusion that the impossibility (primordially lost) can be
transgressed.51 Keeping the desire unfulfilled, the fantasy
gives us an explanation for why our full enjoyment is missing;
24
we could enjoy, if only... Žižek’s main example of an
ideological fantasy is the role of the Jew in the Nazi regime:
What appears as the hindrance to society's full identity withitself is actually its positive condition: by transposing ontothe Jew the role of the foreign body which introduces in thesocial organism disintegration and antagonism, the fantasy-image of society qua consistent, harmonious whole is renderedpossible.52
According to Žižek, what is hated is however our own inner
antagonism, the overlap of lack and excess in the little
incomplete tastes of enjoyment we get. Hating the other’s
enjoyment is hating our own excessive, unobtainable enjoyment.
For example;
Do we not find enjoyment precisely in fantasizing about theOther’s enjoyment, in this ambivalent attitude toward it? Do wenot obtain satisfaction by means of the very supposition thatthe Other enjoys in a way inaccessible to us?53
In Denmark, especially the Muslim and Eastern European ways of
enjoying are marked as threatening: Their food, their loud
conversations in different languages than Danish, their
smells, their celebrations, the way they dress and decorate
their homes, their manners, their tendency to steal and commit
violent crimes; and most of all the way they lazily exploit
the welfare state in order to live a comfortable life.54 Is
what is at stake here then, in fact the Danes hating their own
enjoyment, their own comfortable reliance on the welfare
25
state? Is it this enjoyment that is threatened when it
crystalizes in the habits of the other? In the following
excerpt of a column in Berlingske Tidende, the author portrays a
very ambivalent attitude to his own (Danish) enjoyment:
My own frustration causes me to feel like the veil-women[Muslim women who wear the veil]. I only dwell in Denmarkbecause of my high income and the good health care system inline with many immigrants who are only here because of earlyretirement and sickness leave benefits. As soon as it ispossible, I run away on a long weekend or a longer vacationabroad, where the weather is better and the prices are lower.My country is turning into a defensive, masochistic amoeba thataccepts that everyone exploits it. The only answer seems to bexenophobia, which is as alien to me as Morten Østergaard’s[politician from a center-left wing party who is known for themost tolerant politics towards immigrants] naive andtotalitarian accept of veils, children’s checks [governmentsubsidy to families with children] to Rumanians and eliminationof the Danish language.55
The message here seems to be that others have ruined this
author’s belief in the Danish narrative, and have thus
destroyed the Danish national Thing, leaving his country “a
defensive, masochistic amoeba that accepts that everyone
exploits it.” The current situation leaves him unable to enjoy
being Danish, and instead forces him to enjoy Denmark in the
same, perverse way the immigrants do. In this sense, it is the
immigrants’ fault that he hates his own enjoyment. In terms of
a possible solution, the author feels trapped between a stance
of xenophobia, a stance he has arguably already taken, and
26
opening the borders completely and allowing the Danish way to
be destroyed, something that however seems to already have
happened.
Žižek reminds us that this logic of “theft of enjoyment” is
not motivated by an immediate social reality of different
ethnic communities living together, but comes about from “the
inner antagonism inherent in these communities”56:
It is too easy to dispose of this problematic by pointing outthat what we have here is simply the transposition, theideological displacement, of the effective socioeconomicantagonisms of today’s capitalism. The problem is that, whilethis is undoubtedly true, it is precisely through such adisplacement that desire is constituted. What we gain bytransposing the perception of inherent social antagonisms intothe fascination with the Other (Jew, Japanese …) is thefantasy-organization of desire.57
In the case of nationalistic xenophobia, the desire is of a
coherent Danish state free of antagonisms. This desire is a
priori something that cannot be fulfilled. Žižek calls it “the
fascist dream,” when a community fantasizes about being a
capitalist society without any excess or structural
imbalance.58 This dream is perhaps what is encapsulated in the
Nordic Model: Free market capitalism in a homogenous, equal
society of happy people that all enjoy a middle class status.
The Danish fantasy then posits that the only thing prohibiting
the Nordic Model from functioning without friction, are the
27
hordes of foreign immigrants who mooch on the system and
thereby wreck it. This dreaming of course leads to racism,
because according to the dream, an alien intruder introduced
the excess and structural imbalance from the outside, so by
excluding this alien intruder, society could return to its
frictionless status quo. When a Danish political party asserts
that;
We neither want to open nor close, we want both. Open for thosewho can and will. Close for those who will not.59
It gives us a clue that the source of the antagonism lies in
exactly a paradoxical setup of the Nordic Welfare state, where
Denmark wants to be open to free markets and closed to the
other. Hence, what is threatening the Danish national Thing is
the paradox that Denmark desires to partake as an incredibly
wealthy core country in the global neoliberal world order,
whilst at the same time wants to only be for Danes. The rest
of the essay will unpack and critique this paradox further.
DANISH BOURGEOISIE AND A FOREIGN PROLETARIAT
The Danish welfare state, the affluence it creates and
sustains amongst its privileged population, and the xenophobia
and racism that this setup seemingly elicits, questions the
28
notions of a regulated, benign capitalism. The image of a
nation state with “cuddly” capitalism becomes even more
questionable when taking into account how nation-states
provide political foundations for unequal exchange across
borders that results in a worldwide structural/axial division
of labor. In this arrangement, “core states” appropriate
surplus value from “periphery states,” as privileged states
utilize their positions of power to assure that money and
goods flow more “freely” across borders than labor and people.
As Immanuel Wallerstein suggests, the fundamental role of the
nation-state in a global capitalist economy is to augment the
advantage of some against others in the market, by reducing
the “freedom” of the market.60 Those who are in favor of this
setup of course tend to be those who benefit from this uneven
sociographic distribution of bourgeoisie and proletariat in
different states. Here, the nation, or the “peoplehood”
becomes a claim for a position of advantage in the capitalist
world-economy:61
Ethnicization, or peoplehood, resolves one of the basiccontradictions of historical capitalism – its simultaneousthrust for theoretical equality and practical inequality – andit does so by utilizing the mentalities of the world’s workingstrata.62
29
When the Danish refrain “we want equality, but only for us!,”
goes along with a wish to open the borders to wealth and close
them to foreigners, we see how this combination of theoretical
equality and practical inequality is naturalized by way of the
imaginary of a people. The political Party of Venstre then
reminds us that “The world is in many ways unfair, and
Denmark’s immigration-politics can’t solve the world’s
injustices and poverty problems,” once again naturalizing the
affluence of Danes as something that is inherent to their
nationality and not something that depends on a global
division of labor. What we see here is also an example of a
core state that demarcates itself against an unwelcome foreign
proletariat that is viewed as a threat to the affluent middle
class lifestyles inside the Danish borders.
If one views Denmark as a closed bubble, it may seem as
though capitalism has been tamed and reined, and that what is
gained is only its benefits. However if one takes a global
perspective and acknowledges that the Danish welfare state and
the affluence it sustains for its population is entirely
dependent on cheap labor and resources in other parts of the
world, the struggles at the Danish borders are in fact class
struggles between a Danish bourgeoisie and a foreign
30
proletariat.63 Žižek uses the term “the new bourgeoisie” about
privileged salaried workers, a description that fits the vast
majority of Danes today:
This new bourgeoisie still appropriates surplus value, but inthe (mystified) form of what has been called ‘surplus wage’:they are paid rather more than the proletarian ‘minimum wage’(an often mythic point of reference whose only real example intoday’s global economy is the wage of a sweatshop worker inChina or Indonesia), and it is this distinction from commonproletarians which determines their status. The bourgeoisie inthe classic sense thus tends to disappear: capitalists reappearas a subset of salaried workers, as managers [as well as allsorts of experts, administrators, public servants, doctors,lawyers, journalists, intellectuals and artists] who arequalified to earn more by virtue of their competence (which iswhy pseudo-scientific ‘evaluation’ is crucial: it legitimisesdisparities).64
This Danish bourgeoisie I argue is comparable to affluent
middle classes in places such as India, South Korea, and so
on, and as such, the definitions of bourgeoisie and middle
class collapse in today’s neoliberal global capitalism. The
distinction is between an affluent population who is able to
thrive on the economic setup of neoliberal globalization, and
a struggling population whose surplus value is appropriated to
enable continued affluence for those who are better off. The
axial division of labor is thus not always in congruence with
state borders; some nation states, such as India and South
Korea, have both core and periphery populations within.
31
The affluent Danish bourgeoisie/middle class quite aptly
fits Marx and Engels’ description of Socialist bourgeois:
The Socialistic bourgeois want all the advantages of modernsocial conditions without the struggles and dangers necessarilyresulting therefrom. They desire the existing state of society,minus its revolutionary and disintegrating elements. They wishfor a bourgeoisie without a proletariat. The bourgeoisienaturally conceives the world in which it is supreme to be thebest; and bourgeois Socialism develops this comfortableconception into various more or less complete systems. Inrequiring the proletariat to carry out such a system, […] itbut requires in reality, that the proletariat should remainwithin the bounds of existing society, but should cast away allits hateful ideas concerning the bourgeoisie.65
Here, the socialist wish for a “bourgeoisie without a
proletariat” is critiqued for merely silencing the proletariat
within the community. However in the Nordic Model, the wish
for a bourgeoisie without a proletariat has been fulfilled by
pushing the proletariat, and hence any radical critiques and
revolutionary elements, out of sight. Marx and Engels viewed
Socialism as utopic because it wouldn’t get rid of class
antagonisms. The ‘third way’ Nordic welfare states could claim
to have fulfilled this without the step of abandoning
capitalism, but class antagonisms are not absent in the Nordic
Model, they have merely been outsourced.
That class antagonisms would be removed from within an
entire nation was not something Marx and Engels foresaw. As we
know, their solution rested firmly on strong, independent
32
states. What they described as a “universal range” of the
revolution they sought was only all so-called civilized
countries; “that is to say, at least in England, America,
France and Germany.”66 In the framework of Marx and Engels, the
“uncivilized” countries simply do not count. For Marx and
Engels, a large state was seen as the solution for ending
capitalist exploitation. However in the case of a Danish
middle class exploiting a foreign proletariat, the state is
the enabler of this exploitation as it enters into a
dialectical relationship with neoliberal capitalism.
What we see in the Danish struggles of immigration, then,
is how the world onto which the Danish welfare state has
outsourced the excessive, destructive elements of capitalism
comes knocking on the Danish front door, as the lives of the
proletariat in periphery countries have become intolerable due
to excessive inequality, oil-related conflicts, environmental
devastation and so on. The Danes are thus confronted with
their own excess by their borders. Rather than critical self-
investigation, the result of this confrontation becomes racism
and xenophobia, as the national fantasy of a coherent welfare
state of shared solidarity that is irreplaceable, precious and
33
threatened becomes the framework in which the confrontation is
understood.
One of the major problems of the Danish system is that it
looks so pretty. The revolutionary elements have been removed,
suffering has been outsourced to China, Bangladesh, India,
Mexico - out of sight to the Danes who consume at a rate that
it would require four and a half extra earths to sustain.67 A
belief that a coherent, frictionless, liberal-democratic
society will surface if we get rid of racist nationalism
misses the point that a modern, capitalist, liberal democracy
is inevitably constructed with a split between those who will
be inside, and those who will be outside, as the structural
setup of liberal democracy means that it can never be
universalized. This inevitable split is of course not
analogous to the new racist claim of an inevitable split
between different cultures. Rather, this inevitable split
enables a shift of critique from blaming an intruding other
that society fails to be coherent, to looking critically at
the dialectic relationship between state and capitalism.
EQUALITY WITHOUT BORDERS
In her book Frames of War, Judith Butler theorizes on how some34
lives become recognizable as lives while others are not by
asking “when is life grievable?” To Butler, ungrievable lives
are those that cannot be lost or destroyed because they
inhabit a lost and destroyed zone, and so are from the very
outset lost and destroyed.68 In relation to these lives that
don’t count, Butler discusses;
… a form of righteous coldness cultivated over time throughlocal and collective practices of nation-building, supported byprevalent social norms as they are articulated by both publicpolicy, dominant media, and the strategies of war.69
This, she writes, also plays out in immigration politics,
where certain lives are perceived as lives while others, even
though living, are not viewed as such:
Forms of racism instituted and active at the level ofperception tend to produce iconic versions of populations whoare eminently grievable, and others whose loss is no loss, andwho remain ungrievable.70
Here, “unfit” populations are not only unfit because their
cultures are viewed as incompatible, they are unfit in the
sense that they don’t really count as people. As the current
Danish government states in their “foundation,” the demands to
become a Danish citizen “must be high, because Danish
citizenship is something special.” In other words, some
populations are not special (modern, democratic, tolerant,
Christian) enough to be worth a life with as much affluence as
35
a Danish life. In relation to Islamophobia and a view of
Europe as modernized with rational, advanced secular
principles, and Islamic countries as somehow medieval, Butler
writes:
If the Islamic populations destroyed in recent and current warsare considered less than human, or “outside” the culturalconditions for the emergence of the human, then they belongeither to a time of cultural infancy or to a time that isoutside time as we know it. In both cases, they are regarded asnot yet having arrived at the idea of the rational human. Itfollows from such a viewpoint that the destruction of suchpopulations, their infrastructures, their housing, and theirreligious and community institutions, constitutes thedestruction of what threatens the human, but not the humanitself.71
The Danish sense of entitlement and the civilizing mission
inherent in the politics of integration thus brings the
cultural racism into an ideological realm where other, foreign
lives simply aren’t worth a Danish life. The foreign
proletariat are the “rabble”, a mob of humans with no lives,
useful insofar as they mine the metals for our mobile phones,
but useless as Danish citizens.
To encourage a move towards a new, radical form of
egalitarianism, Butler introduces the term ’precariousness’ as
a shared social human condition, and asks the left to move
beyond multicultural conceptions of different (minority)
36
identities within the framework of a nation-state, to a focus
on state violence against precarious populations:
Precarity cuts across identity categories as well asmulticultural maps, thus forming the basis for an alliancefocused on opposition to state violence and its capacity toproduce, exploit and distribute precarity for the purposes ofprofit and territorial defense. Such an alliance would notrequire agreement on all questions of desire or belief or self-identification. It would be a movement sheltering certain kindsof ongoing antagonisms among its participants, valuing suchpersistent and animating differences as the sign and substanceof a radical democratic politics.72
If we apply this idea to the Danish case, it suggests a shift
from a situation of “us and our welfare state against the
other” to “us and the other against the (welfare) state.” It
also suggests a shift from a view of global poverty and
violence being “their problem” to something that is also “our
problem”. When in the Danish case the (welfare) state is
perceived as “us” and “ours,” this proposition of a universal
struggle against state violence in general would require a
complete ideological re-rendering of the Danish national
narrative.
The solution proposed here by Butler isn’t far removed from
Žižek, who posits the solution of “traversing the fantasy”: We
must realize that our desires, or enjoyment, and our “way of
life” is contingent upon our fantasies.73 We must realize that
the other does not possess any secret Thing just as we do37
not.74 So even though nationalism hinges on a real,
nondiscursive kernel of enjoyment, we must realize that this
enjoyment is bound in fantasies, and it is these fantasies
that should be “traversed” as it were. This poses the
challenge of balancing between a destructive claim to
homogenize everyone and a new racist claim that mixing
different people will lead to conflicts:
If all sides do not share or respect the same civility, thenmulticulturalism turns into a form of legally regulated mutualignorance or hatred. The conflict over multiculturalism alreadyis a conflict about Leitkultur: not a conflict between cultures,but a conflict between different visions of how differentcultures can and should co-exist, about the rules and practicesthese cultures would have to share. One should thus avoidgetting caught in the liberal game of determining how muchtolerance we should show the Other […] At this level, ofcourse, we can never be tolerant enough, or else we are alwaysalready too tolerant […] The only way to break out of thisdeadlock is to propose and fight for a positive universalproject shared by all participants.75
Žižek suggests that the struggle against global neoliberal
inequality structures, against fundamentalism, against anti-
Semitism as well as aggressive Zionism, the struggles of
WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, Occupy, and Pussy Riot, are all a
part of the same, universal struggle.76 Butler pointed to the
state as a central focus of this struggle, and Žižek adds to
this that also capitalism is a fundamental force to resist:
[…] there is no way out as long as the universal dimension ofour social formation remains defined in terms of Capital. The
38
way to break out of this vicious circle is not to fight the“irrational” nationalist particularism but to invent forms ofpolitical practice that contain a dimension of universalitybeyond Capital.77
Taken together, this means that both the violence of states
and the violence of global capitalism must be resisted and
unraveled. This requires an unveiling of the fantasies that
function to keep this violence naturalized and/or out of sight
as spatial distances and national security measures are
curbing any potentials of change. A view of racism and
immigration struggles as contemporary class struggles in a
global neoliberal division of labor can perhaps help to bring
what is out of sight back into sight, by pointing to the
interdependence we all share despite national imaginaries and
state borders. We must ask what is more utopic: the idea of a
Danish welfare state without xenophobic nationalism, or a
society without capitalism?
Word count, text body including endnotes: 9014.
39
1 ”Special report: The Nordic countries,” The Economist, February 2, 2013. 2 Ibid.3 Sara Miller Llana and Fabrizio Tassinari, “Nordic cuddly capitalism: Utopia, no. But a global model for equity,” The Christian Science Monitor, May 11, 2014. 4 Depending on the perspective, there can also be a middle class and a proletariat within Denmark itself. However when comparing the affluence of this Danish proletariat to lives in third-world countries, it is firmly middle class. 5 Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, (London: Verso, 1993), pp. 201-237. 6 Ibid., 202.7 Ibid., 201.8 Ibid., 202.9 Jacob Torfing, Velfærdsstatens Ideologisering. Research Papers from the Department of Social Sciences, Roskilde University, 1999, http://rudar.ruc.dk/handle/1800/1229.10 Lasse Koefoed, “Glokale nationalismer: Globalisering, hverdagsliv og fortællinger om dansk identitet (PhD diss., Roskilde University, 2006), p. 140.11 Ibid., 141.12 Ibid.13 See Knud K.V. Jespersen, A history of Denmark, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Ove Korsgaard, The struggle for the people; Five Hundred Years of Danish History in Short, (Copenhagen: Danish School of Education Press, 2008); Uffe Østergaard, “Peasants and Danes: The Danish National Identity and Political Culture”, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 34(1) (1992) 3-27. 14 John L. Campbell and John A. Hall, National Identity and the Varieties ofCapitalism: The Danish Experience, (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006), p. 23. 15 Campbell and Hall, National Identity, 23. 16 Korsgaard, The struggle for the people, 59. 17 Campbell and Hall, National Identity.18 Østergaard, Peasants and Danes, 18.19 Jespersen, A History of Denmark, 82.20 Korsgaard, The struggle for the people, 56.21 Aarhus University, Danish history, accessed September 26th, 2014 http://danmarkshistorien.dk/leksikon-og-kilder/vis/materiale/de-vestindiske-oeer-dansk-vestindien/22 Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class (London: Verso, 1991), p. 81.23 Thomas Dickson, Dansk Design, (Sydney: Murdoch Books, 2008), p. 30.
24 Ibid., 31.25 Ibid., 24.26 Ibid., 27.27 Dansk Møbelkunst, Accessed September 26th 2014, www.dmk.dk.28 Dickson, Dansk Design.29 Dickson, Dansk Design, 27.30 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 203.31 Anne Mette Svane, “Thorning er Statsminister for frikadeller og flæskesteg,” Politiken, August 13th 2013. 32 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 203.33 The examples of immigration discourse I give here are from parties that are seen as being on the right of the political spectrum. Nevertheless, these views currently represent more than half of the population, and it can be discussed how different these views of immigration are from the onesharbored by parties on the political left. As the current, leftist government states in their “foundation of government”: “The government wishes a Denmark, where everyone regardless of background feel welcome and are active participants in our community. A Denmark, where everyone speaks the Danish language. A Denmark, where everyone gets an education they can use. A Denmark, where both men and women are participating in the labor market. And a Denmark, where people with different social and ethnic backgrounds live side by side. […] The government wants to send the clear signal that foreigners who have lived in Denmark for several years and where the integration is successful, can become Danish citizens. The demands must be high, because Danish citizenship is something special. […] The government wants to pursue a consistent policy towards the little minority that is challenging our democracy, law and order, and that doesn’twant to contribute to the Danish society. The effort against forced marriage, extremism, parallel laws and antidemocratic organizations must beseverely intensified […] Translation by the author.34 Konservativt Folkeparti, Accessed September 26th, 2014, http://www.konservative.dk/politik/integrationspolitik/demokratisk-integration. Translation by the author. 35 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 203. 36 Berlingske Tidende, Det at være dansker. Berlingske mener, Editorial, Berlingske Tidende March 25th, 2014. http://www.b.dk/berlingske-mener/det-at-vaere-dansker. Translation by the author. 37 Slavoj Žižek, "Multiculturalism, the Reality of an Illusion" Lacan.com, 2009. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/articles/multiculturalism-the-reality-of-an-illusion/38 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 25.39 Jan E. Jørgensen, “Venstre vil både åbne og lukke landet,” Berlingske Tidende, August 16, 2014. Translation by the author.
40 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 24.41 Ibid., 22.42 Ibid.43 See Judith Butler, “Sexual Politics, Torture, and Secular Time” in JudithButler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2010), pp. 101-135. 44 Ibid., 22-23.45 Ibid., 24.46 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 226. 47 Ibid.48 Ibid., 204. 49 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, (London: Verso, 1997), p. 7.50 Adam Cottrel, “Fantasy,” in Rex Butler ed., The Žižek Dictionary, (Durham: Acumen, 2014), p. 90.51 Jason Glynos, “Transgressive Enjoyment as a Freedom Fetter,” Political Studies, 56 (2008): 679-704.52 Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 90.53 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative,, 206. 54 To point to the arbitrariness of such national and/or foreign enjoyment, it is of course just as easy for others to hate for example the Danish perversion of pork, the excessive Danish consumerism and the way Danes define their worth in terms of clothing and interior decoration.55 Poulsen, 2014. My translation. 56 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 205.57 Ibid., 206.58 Ibid.59 Jørgensen, “Venstre vil både åbne og lukke landet”60 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 122.61 Ibid., 82.62 Balibar and Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 84.63 For a great insight into the excessive Scandinavian consumerism and the axial distribution of labor, see the Swedish documentary Santa’s Workshop: InsideChina’s Slave Labour Toy Factories by Lotta Ekelund and Kristina Bjurling.64 Slavoj Žižek, The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie: The New Proletariat, London Review of Books, 26 January (2012). 65 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto: A Road Map to History's Most Important Political Document (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005), p. 81. 66 Ibid., 142.67 WWF, Living Planet Report 2014: Species and spaces, people and places, Accessed September 30th, 2014, http://wwf.panda.org/about_our_earth/all_publications/living_planet_report/
68 Judith Butler, Frames of War (London: Verso, 2010), xix.69 Ibid., xxiv.70 Ibid., 24.71 Ibid., 125.72 Ibid., 32. 73 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 213.74 Ibid., 221.75 Slavoj Žižek, Living in the End Times, (London: Verso, 2010), p. 415.76 Slavoj Žižek, “Rotherham child sex abuse: it is our duty to ask difficultquestions,” The Guardian, September 1, 2014. 77 Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 220.