By Viktor Warg We usually do not speak about peace or peacefulness as the mere absence of war and violence, we think of it as something more than an absence. It would not suffice to attach people to some cords in incubators, through which they would be fed the necessities to survive and then speak about a peaceful life of the blobs. Acknowledging their biological needs, observing, securing, administering and maybe even extending their lives would not be enough. We usually describe such a pure biopolitical approach, in which the mere integrity of the living creature is all that matters, as a dystopia. We want something extra from peace, something reflecting our pleasures and positive convictions, not a mere absence. Don’t we? According to Robert Pfaller’s and Slavoj Zizek’s theory of interpassivity, we might not! Religious imagery should not be thought of as a means of actively confronting our problems and fulfilling our dreams, but on the contrary as a solution for escaping what it would mean to confront them in reality; interacting with a medialized representation of a conviction to become passive in relation to the very dream. One of the prime examples, grounding interpassivity comes from Zizek who found the mo-
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dern day example of the old Greek choir (The chorus in Classical Greek drama was a group of actors who described and commented upon the main action of a play with song, dance, and recitation) in the so-called canned laughter. Canned laughter refers to the recorded laughs incorporated in tv-shows such as the American show Seinfeld or the Swedish Svensson, Svensson, that laughs in your place. Zizek made the uncanny observation that people were actually laughing less when the symbolic laugh is added, representing or delegating their enjoyment through the means of a representation. Enjoy! - An imperative and a burden it seems. Another example are Buddhist monks writing their prayers on notes, attaching the notes to a praying wheel to spin them around, letting the wheel pray for them in their place, while they themselves can engage in whatever “dirty and obscene fantasies” they prefer; as Zizek’s psychoanalytical jargon would have it. A third behavior that Pfaller often refers to consists in people setting up video cameras in front of their TV’s, recording a “beloved” show while they can escape their enjoyment through a symbolic representation of them watching (the camera), and do something else. According to Pfaller this problematic relation to one’s so-called pleasures speaks of a thievish joy in the way interpassive people represent
