The ironic, obscene spectacle of the Paris Olympic opening ceremony was as far away as possible from the sterile, humorless political correctness that its critics have decried. It did not merely present Europe at its best; it reminded the world that only in Europe is such a ceremony even possible.
by Slavoj Žižek
Two big cultural events this summer, the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics and the release of Deadpool & Wolverine, both offer dazzling spectacles saturated by irony. But that is about all they have in common, and by analyzing their differences, we can better appreciate the profoundly ambiguous nature of irony today.
Ironic distance toward the prevailing social order often functions as a barely veiled form of conformism. As The Observer’s Wendy Ide writes of Deadpool & Wolverine, which is merely the latest installment in an apparently never-ending cycle of Marvel superhero blockbusters, the movie “can be obnoxious and simultaneously very funny … But it’s also slapdash, repetitive, and shoddy looking, with an overreliance on meme-derived gags and achingly meta comic fan in-jokes.”
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What a perfect description of how ideology functions today. Knowing that nobody takes its central message seriously any longer, it offers self-referential jokes, multiverse-hopping, and smarmy asides that break the fourth wall. This same approach – irony in the service of the status quo – is also how much of the public endures an increasingly mad and violent world.
But Thomas Jolly, the director of the Olympic opening ceremony, reminds us that a different mode of irony is also available. Although he closely followed the Olympic Charter in showcasing the host city and French culture, he was widely criticized. Putting aside the Catholics who mistook the depiction of Bacchanalian festivities as a mockery of the Last Supper, the negative reactions are best captured by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán:
“Westerners believe that nation-states no longer exist. They deny that there is a common culture and a public morality based on it. There is no morality, and if you watched the opening of the Olympic Games yesterday, you will have seen it.”
This suggests that the stakes could not be higher. For Orbán, the ceremony signaled Europe’s spiritual suicide, whereas for Jolly (and many of us, I hope), it was a rare manifestation of Europe’s true cultural legacy. The world got a taste of the country of Descartes, the founder of modern philosophy, whose radical doubt was grounded in a universal – and therefore “multicultural” – perspective. He understood that one’s own traditions are no better than the supposedly “eccentric” traditions of others:
“I had been taught, even in my College days, that there is nothing imaginable so strange or so little credible that it has not been maintained by one philosopher or other, and I further recognized in the course of my travels that all those whose sentiments are very contrary to ours are yet not necessarily barbarians or savages, but may be possessed of reason in as great or even a greater degree than ourselves.”
Only by relativizing particularity can we arrive at an authentic universalist position. In Kantian terms, clinging to our ethnic roots leads us to engage in a private use of reason, where we are constrained by contingent dogmatic presuppositions. In “What is Enlightenment?”, Kant opposes this immature, private use of reason to a more public, objective one. The former reflects and serves merely one’s own state, religion, and institutions, whereas public reason requires one to take a transnational position.
Universal reason is what we saw in the opening ceremony: a rare glimpse of modern Europe’s emancipatory core. Yes, the imagery was of France and Paris; but the self-referential jokes made clear that this was no private use of reason. Jolly masterfully achieved ironic distance from every “private” institutional frame, including that of the French state.
Conservatives are simply wrong to denounce the ceremony as a display of LGBTQ+ ideology and politically correct uniformity. Of course, there were implicit critiques of conservative nationalism; but in its content and style, it was directed even more against stiff PC moralism – or “wokeism.” Instead of worrying about diversity and inclusion in the standard PC mode (which excludes everyone who does not agree with a particular notion of inclusion), the show let in everyone. Marie Antoinette’s guillotined singing head was set against the Mona Lisa floating in the Seine and a joyful Bacchanalia of half-naked bodies. Workers repairing Notre Dame danced on the job, and the show unfolded not in a stadium, but across the entire city, which remains open to the world.
Such an ironic and obscene spectacle is as far away as possible from sterile, humorless political correctness. The ceremony did not merely present Europe at its best; it reminded the world that only in Europe is such a ceremony even possible. It was global, multicultural, and all of that, but the message was delivered from the standpoint of the French capital, the greatest city in the world. It was a message of hope, imagining a world of great diversity, with no place for war and hatred.
Contrast this with the vision offered by the right-wing Russian political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin in a recent interview with the Brazilian journalist Pepe Escobar. For Dugin, Europe is now irrelevant, a rotten garden protected by a high wall. The only choice is between the US globalist deep state and a peaceful new world order of sovereign states. It would be peaceful, he suggests, because Russia would distribute nuclear arms to all developing countries, so that the principle of mutual assured destruction applies everywhere.
As a contest between the American deep state and Donald Trump, this year’s US presidential election, according to Dugin, therefore will decide humanity’s fate. If Trump wins, de-escalation is possible; if a Democrat wins, we are headed for global war and the end of humanity.
Set against what people like Orbán and Dugin think, Jolly’s message is deeply ethical. It is whispering to conservative nationalists: Watch the ceremony carefully again, and be ashamed of what you are.
Slavoj Žižek, Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School, is International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London and the author, most recently, of Heaven in Disorder (OR Books, 2021) and Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide For The Non-Perplexed (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022).
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