The New Eristocracy

Rammstein, "Mutter"

A programmatic statement towards the end of 300 defines the Greeks’ agenda as “against the reign of mystique and tyranny, towards the bright future,” further specified as the rule of freedom and reason – which sounds like an elementary Enlightenment program, even with a Communist twist! Recall that at the start of the film, Leonidas rejects the message of the corrupt “oracles,” according to whom the gods forbid the military expedition to stop the Persians.

But what about the seeming absurdity of the idea of dignity, freedom and reason, sustained by extreme military discipline (including of the practice of discarding the weak children)? This “absurdity” is simply the price of freedom. Freedom is not something given, but is regained through a hard struggle in which one should be ready to risk everything. The ruthless military discipline of the Spartans is not simply the external opposite of Athenian “liberal democracy,” but is its inherent condition and lays the foundation for it: the free subject of reason can only emerge through a ruthless self-discipline.

True freedom is not freedom of choice made from a safe distance, like choosing between Coke or Pepsi. Rather, true freedom overlaps with necessity: one makes a truly free choice when one’s choice puts at stake one’s very existence – one does it because one simply “cannot do it otherwise.” When one’s country is under a foreign occupation and one is called by a resistance leader to join the fight against the occupiers, the reason given is not “you are free to choose,” but, “Can’t you see that this is the only thing you can do if you want to retain your dignity?”

It is no wonder that all early-modern egalitarian radicals, from Rousseau to the Jacobins, admired the Spartan and imagined the French Republic as a new Sparta: there is an emancipatory core in the Spartan spirit of military discipline which survives even when we subtract all the historical paraphernalia of Spartan class rule, ruthless exploitation of and terror over their slaves, and so on. It is also no wonder that Trotsky called Soviet Union in the difficult years of “war Communism” “proletarian Sparta.”

- Slavoj Zizek, "Against Aristocratic Pride: Shakespeare and Radical Politics"

Ralph Fiennes effectively achieved the impossible, thereby perhaps confirming T.S. Eliot’s famous claim that Coriolanus is superior to Hamlet: he broke out of this closed circle of interpretive options (which invariably introduce critical distance towards the figure of Coriolanus) and instead fully asserted Coriolanus – not as a fanatical anti-democrat, but as a figure of the radical Left.

- Slavoj Zizek, "Against Aristocratic Pride: Shakespeare and Radical Politics"