Slavoj Žižek

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Review of The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the Mis(use) of a Notion

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SOURCE: Bullimore, Matthew. Review of The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?: Five Interventions in the Mis(use) of a Notion, by Slavoj Žižek. Literature and Theology 16, no. 3 (August 2002): 342-45.

[In the following review, Bullimore compliments Žižek's skill with constructing coherent political arguments in The Ticklish Subject and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, commenting that “Žižek's work provides valuable insight into the mechanisms of our contemporary universe.”]

The Ticklish Subject and Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? are two of Slavoj Žižek's most recent interventions into political theory. He has recently published two works (The Fragile Absolute, or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? Verso: London, 2000 and On Belief, Routledge: London, 2001), dovetailing with the volumes under consideration, which focus more specifically on theological themes. All four books, however, show Žižek's present interest in using the logic of Christianity to exemplify what he sees as authentic revolutionary commitment.

Žižek's work comes out of the Slovene/Ljubljiana Lacanian school. The school is non-clinical but uses Lacanian psychoanalysis as the privileged lens in its philosophical hermeneutic. Lacanian theory is deployed in order to describe, understand, and analyse contemporary political and ideological theories and practices. Another hallmark of the school is its use of (popular) forms of cultural expression (film, literature, the joke) to explicate Lacanian theory. Žižek's multiform work, like that of the school in general, thus continues to resist specific appellations, although it consciously resists that of being ‘postmodern’. Žižek ardently critiques postmodern thought, preferring for himself the seemingly perverse self-description: ‘Pauline materialist’.

These books are published in Žižek's series ‘Wo Es War’—dedicated to combining Lacanian and Marxist insights to question, and interrupt the ever more acquisitive circuit of capital. The Ticklish Subject acts as Žižek's philosophical manifesto. The introduction declares that ‘a spectre is haunting Western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian subject’. This is an attempt by the ‘partisans’ of Cartesian subjectivity to meet head-on the ‘nursery tale’ (1-2) of ‘The Cartesian Subject’ decried by nearly all contemporary academic discourses. Žižek's obdurate insistence on reinstating the Cartesian subject lies in realising that at its heart is a traumatic empty core: the abyss of freedom. This subject is the subject of a Lacanian interpreted German Idealism, and not the transparent thinking self that has become the postmodern scapegoat for all our philosophical woes. This (yes, idiosyncratic) Cartesian subject is the condition for an authentic abyssal ‘act’ that might supplant a postmodern emphasis on constant, shifting rearticulations of discursively formed subjectivities that remain contingent upon the hidden backdrop of global capitalism.

Focussing on contemporary political theory, The Ticklish Subject is dialectical in style. Each of the three parts begins with a chapter explicating a major critique of Cartesian subjectivity, with a second chapter dealing with the problems inherent in that position. Part I deals with the subject in German Idealism. Heidegger is criticised for his misreading of Kant, and is then supplemented in the next chapter by Hegel and the reflexive, hysterical (ticklish) subject of his work. Part II confronts four major political theorists who, Žižek controversially argues, work out of an Althusserian heritage: Balibar, Rancière, Laclau and Badiou. Each deals with the contemporary Third Way, ‘post-political’ liberal-democratic stance through theories of political subjectivation. Alain Badiou, as a reader of St Paul, is championed by Žižek for his description of ‘Truth-Events’ that break with the contemporary order of ‘Being’. The second chapter seeks to supplement their work with a Lacanian emphasis on both the mediating ‘totalitarian’ master and also the act of the ‘empty’ subject. It is here that Žižek appeals to the logic of Christianity. Žižek sees Christ's injunctions (to hate mother and father, for example) as the mad act that breaks all former substantial ties. After Badiou, he then explores the Pauline formation of the community of the Holy Ghost, faithful to the Truth-Event of Christ's death and resurrection, as a paradigm for the political community. Finally, Part III takes issue with the postmodern celebration of the proliferation of subjectivities. Žižek engages with the work of Judith Butler and her theory of performativity as the ‘most representative and persuasive’ (3) proponent of such a stance. The final chapter, which is perhaps the most interesting in terms of Žižek's political thought, asks ‘Whither Oedipus?’ in these contemporary accounts of subjectivation. If the Oedipal mode of subject formation is in decline then Žižek is led to ask what the dangers of a loss of symbolic authority today might be. Žižek worries that this decline of authority leads to new modes of subjection and dependency. Žižek's response is self-consciously that of the (Marxist) ‘materialist’. If the ‘depoliticized economy is the “fundamental fantasy” of postmodern politics’ (355) then a repoliticisation of the economy is the way to ‘traverse this fantasy’. This is not to the detriment of issues raised by postmodern forms of political subjectivity, but ‘precisely in order to create the conditions for the more effective realisation of feminist, ecological, and so on, demands’ (356). Žižek's belief, persuasively presented, is that to challenge the apparently unanimous consensus on the unassailable status of capitalism will precipitate a ‘mad’ totalitarian moment.

Thus, in Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?, Žižek seeks to identify (mis)uses of the trope ‘totalitarian’ within present intra-academic wranglings and so allow for a ‘positive’ reappropriation of the term. Specifically, Žižek complains that the limits of postmodern ethics and politics are marked by the misuse of ‘totalitarianism’ as the accusation to end all debates. He argues that the term has been marshalled by the present liberal-democratic hegemony to criticise Leftists who manifest, it claims, the obverse side of fascist discourse. This goes hand in hand with an absolutising of the evil of the holocaust—a move that ensures the status quo and finally refuses any real radical ethico-political engagement. And so, Žižek scathingly writes: ‘conformist, liberal scoundrels can find hypocritical satisfaction in their defence of the existing order: they know there is corruption, exploitation … but every attempt to change things is denounced as ethically dangerous … resuscitating the ghost of “totalitarianism”’ (4).

The five chapters follow five (mis)uses of ‘totalitarianism’ in contemporary theory. Chapter 1 deals with totalitarianism as modernism going awry, either as the inevitable outcome of the Enlightenment project, or as the manifestation of its failure to realise its true potential. Here Žižek deploys a theological meditation on the totalitarian moment of Christ's life and death to explain how it is possible to break out of the constraints of a postmodern world that is the actual outcome/failure of the Enlightenment. Chapter 2 is an attempt to think the holocaust differently, in opposition to the contemporary consensus that to apply concrete political analysis to the holocaust is already to have trivialised it. The argument is here sustained through attention to aesthetics and the nature of the tragic/comic. Thirdly, Žižek attacks the neo-liberal juxtaposition of ethnic fundamentalisms and Leftist emancipatory politics, a move that equates emancipatory politics with inevitable ‘total control’. Lenin is invoked as allowing precisely for the way out of a capitalist existence as ‘bondsmen’ to greed. Rather, and again after Badiou, we are to be the momentarily rootless, those who refuse substantial ties in order to move forward. The fourth chapter is an argument against the ‘mantra of contingency/displacement/finitude’ (6) in postmodern politics. This stance, Žižek argues, so fears metaphysical closure that no concrete political effects are tolerated for fear of totalitarianism. Žižek provides a treatment of the ‘post-secular’ ethics of the Other in Derrida and Levinas. Here we learn that we are to be mourners and not melancholics—again, because the latter still cling to lost roots whilst the former are able to cut loose and begin again. Provocatively, the Christian is seen as a paradigmatic mourner that allows the mediator (Christ) to vanish. Žižek has described (52) how this letting go of the lost object allows one to move from the circuit of desire to the authenticity of an economy of love. Finally, he examines the claim made by scientific cognitivists that cultural studies forms a totalitarian Party that refuses rational debate. In the conclusion, Žižek describes the remaining spectres of totalitarianism in the political field today, including a treatment of cyberspace.

Žižek's work seems so striking, perhaps, because of its novelty and sheer audacity. Against the growing orthodoxy of deconstructionist doxa, Žižek strategically uses words from his own Leftist, ‘Pauline’ revolutionary vocabulary (master, totalitarianism, evil, truth, love) to move beyond the strictures of capital. The use of theological themes is tantalising. This ‘theology’, with its self-consciously Hegelian flavour and its Girardian influence, is not traditionally orthodox. Yet, given that Žižek's theory of the political act is currently narrated through an extended meditation upon Christian desire/love, his work promises to make us rethink the intimate link between Christian desire, christology and community. It will be instructive to see how Žižek develops his theological thought in relation to theological reactions to his work. However, I think that Žižek's suggestiveness is still at present found in his wonderfully irreverent mixture of ‘high’ theory and ‘low’ culture to provide a startling critique of ideology. Perhaps most striking here is Žižek's description of the way that fantasy suffuses our very everyday existence and keeps desire flowing. Love is found in a communal formation that has broken with its fantasy, and again Žižek here envisages a post-capitalist society. The use of ‘the subject’, as opposed to ‘subject position’, with its emphasis on act/decision and even ‘conversion’ (DSST [Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?], 152), may be especially welcome to some theological ears.

I would ask how far Žižek can sustain the argument that he is not postmodern. From a theological perspective, it seems that he is not always able to mark his difference from the ‘true’ postmodernists as starkly as he wishes. I suspect that Žižek might argue that he is writing himself ‘another’ modernity, which could be an interesting point of comparison with certain contemporary theological voices. With reference to his stance against ‘post-secularism’, for example, I would question how far the return of the theological in his work, albeit fairly doctrinal, is not similarly symptomatic of a wider turn also manifested in the writers of alterity (Levinas/Derrida). Žižek is a self-confessed ‘atheist’, and I am not certain that immersing yourself in the (Lacanianised) logic of a theological position takes you beyond ‘post-secularism’, Pauline materialist or not. Nevertheless, Žižek's work provides valuable insight into the mechanisms of our contemporary universe, and is certainly never uninteresting (even if his voluminous output creates overlaps and repetitions).

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