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From my [[communist ]] youth, I still [[remember ]] the [[formula]], endlessly repeated in [[official ]] proclamations to mark the "[[unity ]] of all progressive forces": "[[workers]], peasants and honest intellectuals" - as if intellectuals are, by their very [[nature]], suspicious, all too free-[[floating]], [[lacking ]] a solid [[social ]] and professional [[identity]], so that they can only be accepted at the price of a special qualification.

This distrust is alive and well today, in our post-[[ideological ]] societies. The lines are clearly drawn. On the "honest" side, there are the no-nonsense experts, sociologists, economists, psychologists, trying to cope with the [[real]]-[[life ]] problems engendered by our "risk [[society]]", aware that old ideological solutions are useless. Beyond, there are the "prattling classes", academics and journalists with no solid professional education, usually [[working ]] in humanities with some vague [[French ]] [[postmodern ]] leanings, specialists in everything, prone to [[verbal ]] radicalism, in [[love ]] with paradoxical formulations that flatly contradict the obvious. When faced with fundamental [[liberal]]-democratic tenets, they display a breathtaking talent to unearth hidden traps of domination. When faced with an attack on these tenets, they display a no less breathtaking ability to discover emancipatory potential in it.

This cliche is not without [[truth ]] - [[recall ]] the numerous fiascos of the 20th-century radical intellectuals, perhaps best encapsulated by the French poet [[Paul ]] Eluard's [[refusal ]] to demonstrate support for the victims of Stalinist show trials: "I spend enough [[time ]] defending the innocent who proclaim their innocence, to have any time [[left ]] to [[defend ]] the [[guilty ]] who proclaim their [[guilt]]." But [[hysterical ]] over-reaction against"free-floating" [[intellectual ]] renders such a critique suspicious: distrust of intellectuals is ultimately distrust of [[philosophy ]] itself.

In March 2003, Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a little bit of amateur philosophising: "There are known knowns. These are things we [[know ]] that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know." What he forgot to add was the crucial fourth term: the "unknown knowns", things we don't know that we know - which is precisely the [[Freudian ]] [[unconscious]]. If Rumsfeld [[thought ]] that the main dangers in the confrontation with [[Iraq ]] were the "unknown unknowns", the [[threats ]] from [[Saddam ]] we did not even suspect, the [[Abu Ghraib ]] scandal shows where the main dangers actually are in the "unknown knowns", the disavowed beliefs, suppositions and [[obscene ]] practices we pretend not to know [[about]], even though they [[form ]] the background of our [[public ]] values. To unearth these "unknown knowns" is the task of an intellectual.

On [[September 11 ]] 2001, the Twin Towers were hit. Twelve years earlier, on November 9 1989, the Berlin Wall fell. November 9 announced the "happy 90s", the Francis [[Fukuyama ]] [[dream ]] of the "end of [[history]]", the [[belief ]] that liberal [[democracy ]] had, in [[principle]], won, that the [[search ]] is over, that the advent of a [[global]], liberal [[world ]] [[community ]] lurks just around the corner, that the obstacles to this Hollywood happy ending are merely [[contingent ]] - local pockets of [[resistance ]] where leaders did not yet grasp that their time was over. By contrast, 9/11 is the [[symbol ]] of the end of the Clintonite happy 90s, of an era in which new walls are emerging everywhere, in the West Bank, around the [[European Union]], on the US-[[Mexico ]] border. The prospect of a new global crisis is looming: [[economic ]] breakdowns, military and [[other ]] catastrophes, states of emergency.

In their [[recent ]] The War Over Iraq, William Kristol and Lawrence F Kaplan wrote: "The mission begins in Baghdad, but it does not end there... We stand at the cusp of a new historical era... This is a decisive [[moment]]... It is so clearly about more than Iraq. It is about more even than the [[future ]] of the [[Middle East ]] and the war on [[terror]]. It is about what sort of [[role ]] the US intends to play in the 21st century." One cannot but agree: it is effectively the future of the [[international community ]] that is at stake now - the new rules that will regulate it, what the new world [[order ]] will be.

The ruling [[ideology ]] appropriated the September 11 [[tragedy ]] and used it to impose its basic [[message]]: it is time to stop playing around, you have to take sides - for or against. This, precisely, is the temptation to be resisted: in such moments of [[apparent ]] clarity of [[choice]], mystification is [[total]]. Today, more than ever, intellectuals [[need ]] to step back. Are we aware that we are in the midst of a "soft [[revolution]]", in the course of which the unwritten rules determining the most elementary international [[logic ]] are changing?

The [[danger ]] the west is courting in its "war on [[terror" ]] was clearly perceived by GK [[Chesterton ]] who - in the very last pages of his Orthodoxy, the ultimate [[Catholic ]] propaganda piece - exposed the deadlock of the pseudo-revolutionary critics of [[religion]]: they start by denouncing religion as the force of oppression that threatens [[human ]] [[freedom]]; but in fighting religion, they are compelled to forsake freedom itself, thus sacrificing precisely what they wanted to defend: the [[atheist ]] radical [[universe]], deprived of [[religious ]] reference, is the grey universe of egalitarian terror. Today the same holds for advocates of religion themselves: how many fanatical defenders of religion started by ferociously attacking secular [[culture ]] and ended up forsaking religion itself, losing any meaningful religious [[experience]]?

And is it not that, in a strictly homologous way, the liberal warriors against terror are so eager to fight anti-democratic [[fundamentalism ]] that they will end by flinging away freedom and democracy? They have such a [[passion ]] for proving that non-[[Christian ]] fundamentalism is the main [[threat ]] to freedom that they are ready to [[limit ]] our own freedom here and now, in our allegedly Christian societies. If the "terrorists" are ready to wreck this world for love of the other, our warriors on terror are ready to wreck their own democratic world out of [[hatred ]] for the Muslim other. Thus the American commentators Jonathan Alter and Alan Derschowitz love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise [[torture ]] - the ultimate degradation of human dignity - to defend it.

Does the same not hold for the postmodern disdain for great ideological causes and the [[notion ]] that, in our post-ideological era, instead of trying to [[change ]] the world, we should reinvent ourselves by engaging in new forms of ([[sexual]], spiritual, aesthetic) [[subjective ]] practices? Confronted with arguments like this, one cannot but recall the old lesson of critical [[theory]]: when we try to preserve the authentic intimate sphere of privacy against the onslaught of "[[alienated]]" public [[exchange]], it is privacy itself that gets lost. [[Withdrawal ]] into privacy means today adopting [[formulas ]] of private authenticity propagated by the contemporary [[cultural ]] industry - from taking lessons in spiritual [[enlightenment ]] a to engaging in [[body ]] building. The ultimate truth of withdrawal into privacy is public [[confessions ]] of intimate secrets on TV shows. Against this kind of privacy, the only way to break out of the constraints of "alienated" public life is to invent a new collectivity.

Recall the old story about a worker suspected of stealing. Every evening, when he was leaving the factory, the wheelbarrow he was rolling in front of him was carefully inspected, but it was always empty - till, finally, the guards got the point: what the worker was stealing were the wheel-barrows themselves. This is the trick that those who [[claim ]] today "But the world is none the less better off without Saddam!" try to pull on us: they forget to include in the account the effects of the very military [[intervention ]] against Saddam. Yes, the world is better without Saddam - but it is not better with the military occupation of Iraq, with the rise of Islamist fundamentalism provoked by this very occupation. The guy who first got this point about the wheelbarrow was an arch-intellectual.

* [[The Empty Wheelbarrow]]. ''The Guardian''. February 19, 2005. <>. Also listed on ''[[Lacan]].com''. <http://www.lacan.com/zizekempty.htm>.