Slavoj Žižek

Start Free Trial

‘Going through the Fantasy’: Screening Slavoj Žižek

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

SOURCE: Miklitsch, Robert. “‘Going through the Fantasy’: Screening Slavoj Žižek.” South Atlantic Quarterly 97, no. 2 (spring 1998): 475-507.

[In the following essay, Miklitsch discusses Žižek's scholarship in the cultural and political context of Slovenian culture after the dissolution of the Soviet Union.]

Far from being the Other of Europe, former Yugoslavia was rather Europe itself in its Otherness, the screen onto which Europe projected its own repressed reverse.

—Slavoj Žižek, “Caught in Another's Dream in Bosnia”

The Giant of Ljubljana? The Casanova of Slovenia? The Balkan Lacan? Saint Slavoj?

Who, exactly, is Slavoj Žižek, and where does he hail from?

It is all, one might say, in the name. An anecdote: when I first came across this particular proper name—significantly, while reading Terry Eagleton's introduction to Ideology—I was struck less by Žižek's remarks on ideology, which offered a slight but crucial revision of Peter Sloterdijk's formula for “enlightened false consciousness” (“they know that, in their activity, they are following an illusion, but still, they are doing it”1), than by the sheer strangeness of the name: all those little vs and zs!

SLOVENIA AS X-YUGOSLAVIA

Žižek hails of course from the East, as in Eastern Europe, or the Balkans, as in “balkanized.” More specifically yet, he hails from Ljubljana, Slovenia, which nation-state was once part of Yugoslavia.

Slovenia, then, as X-Yugoslavia.

The x here—like the Slavic vs and zs—indicates the uncanny status of Slovenia for most Americans, where Slovenia might as well be Transylvania, and Dracula the first, insidious emissary of the Sino-Soviet Other. Part of the mysteriousness also derives from Slovenia's being—unlike, say, the United States—the product of an extremely complex geopolitical history. For instance, in 1929, King Alexander I abolished the democratic-constitutional government established in 1921, while, in October of the same year the Serbo-Croat-Slovene Kingdom, which had been proclaimed in December 1918, officially became Yugoslavia (“southern Slavs”). The Balkan Pact's formation in 1934 and, later that year, King Alexander's assassination by a Macedonian revolutionary associated with Croat terrorists centered in Hungary reflect the zeitgeist of the period. In fact, King Alexander's assassination occurred while he was on a diplomatic tour of the European capitals in order to secure alliances against an increasingly bellicose Nazi Germany (hence the Balkan Pact). It is one of those historical ironies that suggests not only the volatility of nationalism in this part of Europe between the world wars (King Alexander's assassination itself almost resulting in a war between Yugoslavia and Hungary) but, rather more to the point of Žižek's work, the near-feudal monarchical character of the nation-state of Yugoslavia (where one could still speak of the assassination of kings, as in Hamlet, rather than, as in this country, of presidents).

Although the creation of the sovereign state of Slovenia in 1991 is one terminus to that geopolitical trajectory (bracketing here the whole question of Tito2), this inaugural event for Žižek had less to do with Slovenia proper than with the fate of the Balkans in general. The critical moment here—with respect, that is, to the decomposition of “actually existing socialism” in Eastern Europe—is the death of Ceauşescu, a “fall” that situates the “little story” of Slovenia within the metanarrative of macrocommunism even as it recollects Žižek's own Hamletlike meditations on the sublime problematic of the king-thing: “Is this really him? … Is the thing really with this body? Did it really die with it?”3

This double take on the fall of Ceauşescu—the sudden, utter collapse of the Big Other (when the Sleeping Beauty spell of totalitarianism was finally broken) and the post-execution problem of the despot's “two bodies” (which, for Žižek, uncannily reproduces the aporia associated with the Jacobin logic of regicide4)—is evoked at the very beginning of Tarrying with the Negative. There, the sublimity of Ceauşescu's double death—at once imaginary and symbolic, like Madeleine/Judy's in Hitchcock's Vertigo—is refigured in the cinematic image of the “rebels waving the national flag with the red star, the Communist symbol, cut out, so that instead of the symbol standing for the organizing principle of the national life, there was nothing but a hole in its center.”5 It is between one death and another—from the assassination of King Alexander to the execution of the king-thing Ceauşescu—or between one nation-state and another—from the Serbo-Croat-Slovene Kingdom to post-Communist Slovenia—within just such a determinate, political-historical space that Žižek's work must be situated.6 Not to do so is, it seems to me, to radically ex-nominate that work.

And yet if Žižek as the voice of X-Yugoslavia offers a partial answer to the question of who he is and where he hails from (i.e., Žižek as nationalist and historical witness), the x also signals that it is ultimately impossible to reduce his work to its political and geographical conditions of possibility. As Sartre said famously of Valéry, “Valéry is a petit bourgeois intellectual, … [but] not every petit bourgeois intellectual is Valéry.”7 With this in mind, one might argue that the question is not Who, exactly, is Slavoj Žižek, and where does he hail from? but For whom, exactly, does he function as the “sublime” intellectual Other? To pose the question this way is not only to repose the issue of academic production in all its national and international force; it is also to foreground the issue of reception and consumption, or the problem of desire.

ŽIžEK IN AMERICA

If “Žižek in America” refers to the English or American, as opposed to the Slovene or even French, Žižek, this Anglo-American figure is, first of all, the Žižek of the Sublime Object of Ideology, which was published in 1989 in the Verso series Phronesis, edited by Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe.8 While the “French Žižek” is by no means absent from this volume (where he acknowledges Jacques-Alain Miller in the same space that he cites Laclau and Mouffe), the fact that his first book in English appeared in the Phronesis series nevertheless intimates that the American reception of his work is overdetermined by a certain British, post-New Left address.9 Still, the “American Žižek”—like the Slovene one—exceeds this particular textual-institutional frame as well. It is not simply that he writes in American English (which immediately distinguishes him from, say, Lacan), but that Žižek, especially in his later work, has a love affair of sorts with American popular culture, so much so that he appears to know the United States from the inside (as it seems only foreigners can do). This Žižek—the one we love to read because he reflects our own popular-cultural vision of the United States back to us (in reverse, as Lacan would say)—embodies the “whole” problem of subjectivity as envisioned by Lacan and reenvisioned by Žižek himself (e.g., desire as the desire of the Other).

That this Žižek may be a mirror image or even a mirage for American readers is an obvious possibility and one that no doubt accounts, at least in part, for his “popularity” in this country (hence my tactical evocation of the “Slovene Žižek” at the very beginning here, which is intended to forestall any simple, “imaginary” reading of his work). But if his U.S. audience is a restricted, not to say academic, one, his popularity can nevertheless be a useful means of exploring the problematic of popular culture as it intersects with that of postmodernism. Žižek himself has explicitly invoked the dialectical relation between popular culture and postmodernism, but for all the hullabaloo about the postmodernist “deconstruction” of the high-modernist division between elite and mass culture (a project that would appear to be central to Žižek10), postmodernism is something of a red herring in his work. That is to say, if Žižek is postmodernist (and it is difficult to imagine a term that better describes his corpus), his postmodernism is—to be crude—more a matter of form than of content. For instance, in the introduction to the Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek observes that the absence of any reference to Althusser in Habermas's Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a “curious accident,” adding, in a perfectly Žižekian after-thought, “Of course, we are using the term ‘curious accident’ in a Sherlock Holmesian sense.” A little later, introducing Michel Pêcheux's complicated take on Althusser's notion of interpellation, Žižek—in an abrupt, “bathetic” shift in tonality—recalls a Marx Brothers joke to illustrate the comic short circuit of ideological misrecognition: “‘You remind me of Emanuel Ravelli.’ ‘But I am Emanuel Ravelli.’ ‘Then no wonder you look like him!’”11

The way Žižek crosses hierarchically differentiated codes here—in particular, those associated with “high theory” and “mass culture,”12 in the unexpected juxtaposition of Pêcheux with the Marx Brothers—marks his discourse as distinctly postmodernist. In fact, what appeared in the early work to be a strictly ornamental feature—the occasional, illustrative allusion to Coke or Marlboros, Heinlein or Hitchcock, Alien or Invasion of the Body Snatchers—has, in the later work, taken on a programmatic, even methodological, character, as in Looking Awry's subtitle, An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. This postmodernist tack is confirmed in the book's introduction, where Žižek cites Benjamin, Mozart, and Kant in rapid-fire order (including Kant's archly subversive definition of marriage as “a contract between two adult persons of the opposite sex on the mutual use of their sexual organs”) in the course of announcing that Looking Awry proposes, apropos of the marriage of opera and philosophy, a “reading of the most sublime theoretical motifs of Jacques Lacan together with and through exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture.” Although Žižek's modus operandi here would appear to derive from the Lacan of “Kant avec Sade,” the parenthetical cap to the first paragraph of Looking Awry is “classic” Žižek: “(If, now and then, the book also mentions ‘great’ names like Shakespeare and Kafka, the reader need not be uneasy: they are read strictly as kitsch authors, on the same level as McCullough and King).”13

Lacan avec McCullough—Colleen McCullough, author of The Thorn Birds: Could there be any more striking instance of Žižek's postmodernism? And yet, as I have already observed, Žižek—or at least the “early” (Anglo-American) Žižek of the Sublime Object of Ideology—took distinct pains to demarcate his critical distance from postmodernism. Thus the introduction to that book concludes with a caveat about “falling prey” to “‘post-modernist’ traps such as the illusion that we live in a ‘post-ideological’ condition.” Moreover, his later allusion there to “the usual ‘post-modernist’ anti-Enlightenment ressentiment” suggests that the quotation marks are to be understood less in the strict, deconstructive sense than in the more usual pejorative one.14 The division or separation between popular culture and postmodernism in Žižek's work appears, then, to be a symptom of a certain ambivalence, even a contradiction, whereby the “performative Žižek,” who celebrates popular culture, is patently at odds with the other, “constative Žižek,” who critiques postmodernism.

That Žižek is a divided subject, that his discourse performs what is ostensibly the effect of postmodernism (i.e., the gradual effacement of the canonic distinction between mass and high culture), comes as no surprise, of course, given his commitment to the Lacanian conception of the subject. However, if there seems little doubt that Žižek's popularity is more a function of his postmodernist style than of his critique of postmodernism (the term itself being virtually absent from the early work),15 his position on poststructuralism is an altogether different, more material matter. Consider, for instance, his judgment on the absolute difference between Lacan and Derrida. In order to defend Lacan against Derrida, Žižek's dominant gambit from the beginning has been to argue (against the prevailing, received wisdom) that Lacanian psychoanalysis, whatever it is, is not a species of poststructuralism.16 The locus classicus of this brief against deconstruction and for psychoanalysis is the section headed “There is no metalanguage” that opens the third and final part of the Sublime Object of Ideology. Although Žižek contends here that Lacan's work should be carefully distinguished from both hermeneutics (Gadamer) and poststructuralism (Derrida), it readily becomes apparent that the real object of Žižek's critique is not so much hermeneutics or poststructuralism as deconstruction—which is to say, Derrida. Writing in the long wake of deconstruction occasioned by the fall of Paul de Man (among other things), Žižek reasserts the Lacanian “primacy of metaphor over metonymy”—le point capiton over “dissemination”—and, consequently, the whole question of “truth.” Along these properly post-poststructuralist lines, Žižek also declares, in a devastating theoretical flourish, that the “position from which the deconstructivist can always make sure of the fact that ‘there is no metalanguage,’ that no utterance can say precisely what it intended to say,” is in fact “the position of metalanguage in its purest … form.”17

Now, the tenor of this critique may remind one of Lacan's elaboration on the position of the “ostrich” critic-detective in his “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’”—a symbolic structure of which Derrida himself, to be fair, is clearly aware—but, in its stressing of the real, immanent limits of any metalanguage, Žižek's critique of indeterminacy represents a substantial departure from both Derrida and the intersubjective Lacan of the 1950s.18 Still, according to Žižek, what is really at stake in the deconstructionist proposition that “there is no metalanguage” is not (pace de Man and Derrida) its aporiatic status or structure; rather, the “point” is that the metalinguistic position characteristic of deconstruction is itself predicated on denial. Here, Žižek's Freudian emphasis effectively highlights the difference between the rhetoric of deconstruction and what might be called (after Laplanche and Pontalis) the “language of psychoanalysis.” This difference—and the invocation of the psychic mechanism of Verneinung should not obscure the fact that Žižek's defense of psychoanalysis is a philosophical one—is, in a word, subjectivity. Accordingly, when Žižek concludes his Sublime Object argument about Lacan's post-poststructuralism, he submits that “the problem with deconstruction” is not its eschewing “a strict theoretical formulation,” and thus acceding to “a flabby poeticism” à la Lévi-Strauss (although for Žižek it is obviously guilty of these venalities as well), but rather than its position is in fact “too ‘theoretical.’” In other words, to claim, as Žižek does, that deconstruction is too theoretical is to claim that it “excludes the truth-dimension” and, as such, fails to “affect the place from which we speak.” Put another way: precisely because it cannot account for affect, deconstruction is—in the final analysis—“affected.”19

POST-POSTSTRUCTURALISM

If Žižek has carried on a vigorous rearguard battle against deconstruction, most notably, in admonishing Rodolphe Gasché as well as Derrida himself for misreading Hegel,20 his avant-garde action has been fought on rather different “philosophical” terrain. This terrain is neither postmodernism nor poststructuralism but Marxism. Thus, in the Sublime Object of Ideology, he insists that the debate between Foucault and Habermas is a screen of sorts, concealing as it does another, “more far-reaching” opposition between Lacan and Althusser.21 One way to get at this issue or debate, and its formative effect on Žižek, is to establish the theoretical space of his own work, which is defined, as he himself has noted, by three centers of gravity: dialectics, psychoanalysis, and the critique of ideology—or Hegel, Lacan, and Althusser.

Apropos of Althusser (to take the last “author function” first), Žižek has commented in an interview that the dominant philosophical trends in Slovenia over the last two decades have been Heideggerianism and Frankfurt-school Marxism (as opposed to, say, the Praxis school in Croatia and Hayekian philosophy of science in Serbia). However, neither approach was finally amenable to left Slovene intellectuals like Žižek: Heideggerianism because it was associated with “right-wing populism,” Frankfurt-school Marxism because it was, ironically enough, the “official ideology” of the Slovene Communist Party. Consequently, the task for Žižek was “to be a dissident but not a Heideggerian.”22 This theoretically overdetermined political-historical conjuncture also explains the significance of Althusser for Slovene intellectuals, a significance that is dramatized for Žižek in the “big opposition” between Milan Kundera and Václav Havel. While for Kundera what was left of the private sphere and the small subversions one could perform there were the only source of resistance against the Communist regime, for Havel the basis of opposition was not “telling dirty stories” about the regime in private but doing some small thing, in public, that would disrupt the ritualistic character of everyday life (in accordance with the Althusserian thesis that state power is effectively reproduced via the public's abject submission to its rituals and practices, routines and ministrations).23 Žižek elaborates on this aspect of what might be called the publicity of ideology in Tarrying with the Negative, where he adds that, for Slovene intellectuals, “the name ‘Althusser’ triggered an enigmatic uneasiness in all camps.” Indeed, for Žižek, the political resistance to Althusser merely confirmed the fact that, although Althusserianism was “defamed as proto-Stalinist,” it actually “served as a kind of ‘spontaneous’ theoretical tool for effectively undermining the Communist totalitarian regimes.”24 In so-called actually existing socialism, then, what counted was not “inner conviction” but “external obedience,” not private belief but public practice.25 In this particular context (which is, of course, the “classic” totalitarian one), the way to be really oppositional, according to Žižek, was to “act naively” à la Havel in order to disturb and subvert the regime's appearance of “ideological consistency.”

Yet if Althusser remains one of the theoretical resources for the Slovene critique of ideology, Althusserianism has also always functioned as an object of critique for Žižek, whose lever for this counter-critique is Lacanian psychoanalysis. (Thus “Kafka, critic of Althusser”—a section heading in the Sublime Object of Ideology—might be reformulated “Lacan, critic of Althusser.”) The key to this Lacanian critique of Althusser is the notion of jouis-sense (“enjoyment-in-sense” or “enjoy-meant”), whereby the dimension elided in the Althusserian theory of interpellation is the “dimension beyond interpellation,” or what Žižek simply calls “beyond interpellation.”26 So, in the Metastases of Enjoyment, he asserts that what remains unthought in Althusser is the “uncanny subject” prior to identification and subjectivation.27

Now, given Žižek's critique of both Derrida and Althusser, this “uncanny subject” should clearly not be confused with either the Althusserian account of the imaginary dialectic of recognition and misrecognition (interpellation as identification) or the poststructuralist insistence on the irreducible polysemy of the symbolic register (interpellation as dissemination). Unlike Althusserian interpellation, which is the essence of the ideological operation (“all ideology hails … concrete individuals as concrete subjects”), Žižek's “beyond interpellation” refers to that “kernel of enjoyment” presupposed by ideology as such (“a pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy”).28 The link, then, between Ideological State Apparatuses and interpellation—between, that is, the external “Pascalian machine” (like the one that confronts K. in The Castle) and the subject's internalization of this “bureaucratic” structure as belief (K.'s subjectivation)—is fantasy. In a nutshell (and it's a hard nut to crack, as Žižek likes to say), “fantasy is on the side of reality.”29

THE REAL AS ANTAGONISM/ANTAGONISM AS THE REAL

If the drift of Žižek's critique of the Althusserian account of ideology (i.e., fantasy as the ideological support of reality) appears remote from the concerns of Althusser, not to mention Marxism, it is nevertheless, for all its Lacanianism, very much Žižek's own. In fact, I would submit that Žižek's rereading of Althusser's theory of interpellation in terms of the “logic of enjoyment,” of jouissance as “beyond interpellation,” subtly displaces the material-institutional terms of the Althusserian problematic and thereby effects a significant shift in Žižek's corpus from a certain Althusserian Marxism to a certain Hegelian Lacanianism (or Lacanian Hegelianism). This double displacement of Althusserianism and Marxism is announced at the beginning of the Sublime Object of Ideology, where, in lieu of the Althusserian and classical Marxist conception of alienation, Žižek proposes the psychoanalytic ethics of separation, as in the “famous Lacanian” maxim “not to give way on one's desire [ne pas céder sur son désir].” Like Laclau and Mouffe, Žižek not only understands separation as antagonism, but defines antagonism in opposition to the classical Marxist notion of social antagonism, which he glosses as follows: (1) “a certain fundamental antagonism” that has “an ontological priority to ‘mediate’ all other antagonisms, determining their place and their specific weight” (economic determination in the first or last instance, or economism); and (2) “historical development [that] brings about … an ‘objective possibility’ of solving this fundamental antagonism” (the revolutionary abolition of class antagonism and economic exploitation, or revolutionism).30

Now, if post-Marxism arguably represents a break with the global, revolutionary logic of classical Marxism (i.e., “that it is not possible to solve any particular question without solving them all”), psychoanalysis, for Žižek, represents an even more radical break. Where the “usual” post-Marxism affirms “the irreducible plurality of particular struggles” (such that, for instance, racism cannot be reduced to capital), Lacanian psychoanalysis interprets this plurality as so many responses to the “same impossible-real kernel.”31 Indeed, the radicality of Lacanian psychoanalysis—at least from a conventional, post-Marxist perspective—is its emphatic reaccentuation of a certain “essentialism” or antagonism: “pure” antagonism. Hence, in the context of a discussion of the super-liberality of Laclau and Mouffe's radical-democratic politics, Žižek observes (rightly, I think) that the “condition of being active politically is precisely to be unilateral: the structure of the political act as such is ‘essentialist.’”32 But, given the provocative nature of such formulations, a number of critical questions materialize: What is the relation between Laclau and Mouffe's understanding of “social antagonism” and Lacan's concept of “pure antagonism”? What is the relation between the Real and antagonism as such?

The answer to the first question is, as it were, the Same, inasmuch as the “splitting” that traverses social antagonism (or, for Hegel, social Substance) is the same as the splitting that constitutes the subject (for Lacan, the so-called sujet barré). As Žižek himself argues with respect to the classic opposition between the individual and society, the subject of social antagonism “is precisely not ‘in-dividual.’”33 In other words, the subject as defined by Lacan—that “internal” limit which both subverts and sustains subjectivity—is the same as the social as defined by Laclau and Mouffe. This “paradoxical limit” is encapsulated in their notorious maxim that “society doesn't exist,” which (like Lacan's formulation “la Femme n'existe pas”34) stresses the paradoxical “nature” of society as at once possible and impossible, or (im)possible. Simply put, societies exist (e.g., “American society”), but no society is identical to itself—to, that is, its founding presuppositions; in fact, to imagine otherwise, to seriously entertain the possibility of a nonantagonistic socius, constitutes—for Žižek as for Claude Lefort—the totalitarian temptation.35 If social antagonism is therefore the same as pure antagonism (which is not to say that they are identical), the answer to the second question above is, again, the Same, since antagonism and the Real refer to the same “thing” (das Ding). Thus, commenting on the practico-epistemological “wager” that motivates Adorno's work, Žižek maintains that it is not aimed at “‘resolving’ or ‘abolishing’ … contradiction by way of some conceptual clarification”; instead, Adorno's work is aimed at “conceiving this contradiction as an immediate index of the ‘contradiction’—that is, the antagonism—that pertains to social reality itself.36

Given this definition of the Real as antagonism and (social) antagonism as the Real, it is nevertheless important, it seems to me, to situate Lacan's notion of the antagonistic Real within the microhistorical context of his work. And here one might say that, with respect to the letter of that work, the Real of the 1950s is not the same as the Real of the 1960s and 1970s. The Real as a “brute, pre-symbolic reality which always returns to its place” dominates, it is true, the early seminars, as in Lacan's observation (articulated in his own peculiar idiolect) that the Real, “whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always in its place; it carries it glued to its heel, ignorant of what might exile it from it.”37 In the post-1950s seminars, however, the Lacanian Real is understood as a “hard core” that resists symbolization (perhaps its most familiar definition); moreover, in contradistinction to the Lacan of the “Purloined Letter,” whether the Real has in fact had a place—if it has “actually occurred” in so-called reality—no longer matters, since, like trauma, it can only be accounted for after the fact, après coup.

This said, it would no doubt be closer to the spirit of the seminars to read Lacan's various definitions of the Real as different “aspects” of the same problematic, as “both the hard, impenetrable kernel” that resists symbolic integration “and a pure chimerical entity” that has “no ontological” substance. Put another way (and there are many ways to put it, as anybody who has read Lacan knows), the Real simultaneously possesses “corporeal contingency” (the Real as “presupposed” by the Symbolic) and “logical consistency” (the Real as “posed” by the Symbolic).38 However, lest one think—as it is virtually impossible not to do—that this last, double definition of the Real recollects “some kind of Kantian ‘Thing in itself [das Ding-an-sich],’” Žižek is quick to assure us that it “is not a transcendent positive entity, persisting somewhere beyond the symbolic order like a hard kernel inaccessible to it”; rather, the Real “is nothing at all, just a void, an emptiness in a symbolic structure marking some central impossibility.39 This reading of the Lacanian Real as, precisely, “no thing” (as opposed to, say, a “positive” limit) usefully points up the radical negativity at the heart of Žižek's project, whereby the Real is in the last instance or final analysis, as in Hegel, a “pure ‘Thing-of-Thought [Gedankending].’”40

IDEOLOGY CRITIQUE: GOING THROUGH THE FANTASY

Such Hegelian trappings would appear to be the height of idealism (at least from a classical Marxist perspective), but the Lacanian-Hegelian concept of the antagonistic Real has, according to Žižek, a definite purchase on the problem of ideology. So, to formulate a number of the critical terms in circulation here, one might say that (social) fantasy is to the Real as ideology is to (social) antagonism.

The most convenient example of this relation, given my earlier construction of the historical-geopolitical preconditions of Žižek's work, is the dissolution of “real socialism,” about which Žižek observes, “This disintegration is of course immediately perceived as a ‘loss’—loss of the quasi-idyllic stability that characterizes the social fabric of post-Stalinist ‘real socialism’”; however, “the idyll was false from the very beginning, society was always-already ridden with fierce antagonisms.”41 Here, in addition to showing how ideology or social fantasy papers over the hole of the Real, Žižek also initiates a critical program. That is to say, if ideology colors in the void of the Real, the critique of ideology necessarily takes the form of a reflexive demonstration of the “logic of fantasy” as, for example, the “loss of loss” (vide Vertigo).

This critical-ideological emphasis on lack and negation—on the “analytical” disclosure of the pure, “primordial lie,” in other words—hints that if Žižek's program cannot be labeled a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (if only because he has so little use for hermeneutics proper and, more importantly perhaps, because of a certain comic, even Chaplinesque, strain in his work),42 it is a politics of demystification for all that. And yet, for Žižek as for Lacan, demystification is not all. Thus, contra Althusser, the critique of ideology is not for Žižek simply a metanarrative of misrecognition (and its interpretation) but a “logic of enjoyment” (and the active traversal or coming to terms with this jouissance). Indeed, this “double session” represents a psychoanalytic reconfiguration of the above-mentioned Lacan-Althusser debate. Whereas the first stage of the critique of ideology is what Žižek calls, after Althusser, the “symptomal reading” or, in the psychoanalytic register, the “interpretation of symptoms,” the second stage is the articulation or, more properly, rearticulation of the deep structure of enjoyment, of the way ideology is predicated on a “pre-ideological enjoyment structured in fantasy.” This second stage is what Žižek describes, after Lacan, as “going through the fantasy [traversée du fantasme].”43

The difference between these two moments or stages—between, that is, interpreting the symptom and going through the fantasy—is crucial. While the symptomatic reading aims to de-totalize the natural, “commonsense” experience of a particular ideological figure (as the Jew, one of Žižek's most privileged tropes, condenses a number of contradictory but socially meaningful mythemes such as “filthy” affluence44), “going through the fantasy” exposes the limits of both classic Ideologiekritik and psychoanalytic interpretation. Moreover, for Žižek, these limits are not so much those of the Althusserian theory of ideology, for instance, interpellation as imaginary/symbolic (mis)recognition, as those of deconstruction in particular and of poststructuralism in general. In other words, it is not enough simply to interpret a symptom or to deconstruct an ideological configuration; as in the Brechtian theory of alienation (Entfremdung), the so-called E- or A-effect, one must attain some “real” distance from the fantasy by experiencing not only how “ideology” organizes one's sense of enjoyment but, equally or more importantly, how it forms the support for one's sense of external reality.45

Although Žižek's description of “going through the fantasy” as the performative moment of ideology critique appears definitive, the problem with this procedure—at least within the psychoanalytic scenario—is that it cannot adequately account for the persistence of a symptom beyond both analysis and fantasy. The solution to this particular problem, for Žižek as for Lacan, lies in the third and final stage of psychoanalysis, which Žižek christens (dialectically recollecting the first stage of the process) “identification with the symptom,” or, rather more allusively, the sinthome. This neologism, constellating various associations (e.g., “Saint Thomas,” “synthetic-artificial man,” “synthesis between symptom and fantasy”), refers to a letter or signifier suffused with idiotic enjoyment, albeit a letter-signifier that constitutes “our only substance, the only positive support of our being.”46

Žižek summarizes the entire triadic movement in a chapter of Looking Awry entitled “The Ideological Sinthome”:

First, we had to get rid of the symptoms as compromise formations, then, we had to “traverse” the fantasy as the frame determining the coordinates of our enjoyment: the “desire of the analyst” was thus conceived as a desire purified of enjoyment. … In the last stage, however, the whole perspective is reversed: we have to identify precisely with the particular form of our enjoyment.47

Here, Lacan's “invention” of the sinthome returns us not only to the Real (in this case, the Real of the symptom) but to the drive and, ultimately, as Žižek notes, to the death drive itself.48 What is at stake in this shift in Žižek's reading of Lacan from the double program of interpretation of the symptom—going through the fantasy to that of going through the fantasy—identification with the symptom? Rather more to the Marxist point, what is the critical-ideological use-value of the notion of the sinthome as well as the “ethical” imperative to identify with the “particular form of our enjoyment”?

Like Brecht's alienation-effect, which relies on what might be called a certain modernist distance, “identification with the symptom,” according to Žižek, is “more radical”—because less “defensive”—than “going through the fantasy” (since desire is understood, as in the late Lacan, as a defense against the traumatic symptom that is jouissance). In other words, where “going through the fantasy” achieves its effect of distanciation by situating “the phenomenon in its historical totality,” “identification with the symptom” makes us “experience the utter nullity of its immediate reality,” the “stupid, material presence that escapes ‘historical mediation.’” The imperative nature of this aspect of the critique of ideology is reflected in the following collective terms: “What we must do … is to isolate the sinthome from the context by virtue of which it exerts its power of fascination in order to expose the sinthome's utter stupidity.”49

If Žižek's explanation of “identification with the symptom” hints that it is not without a collective, critical-ideological element, his remarks later in the same chapter of Looking Awry on the difference between “acting out” and “passage to act [passage à l'acte]” also suggest that his importation of certain late Lacanian concepts into the critique of ideology is not without its problematic aspects. For instance, what is one to make of the assertion that, unlike “acting out,” a “‘passage to act’ entails … an exit from the symbolic network, a dissolution of the social bond”?50 This particular formulation (and admittedly, it is only one formulation) italicizes what may well be the irreducible difference between Marxism and psychoanalysis. For whatever Marxism is (political economy, “philosophy of praxis,” etc.), it cannot be said to be about the “dissolution of the social bond.” Indeed, however utopian Marx's understanding of communism as the solution to the riddle of history (“the dissolution of all classes”), it is in fact predicated on exactly the opposite state of affairs—on, that is, social association. What, after all, can it mean to claim that the most progressive stage of psychoanalysis—and, one imagines, of ideology critique as well—is identification with the “real of jouissance,” a state of “being” that Žižek refers to as “subjective destitution”?51

HEGEL AFTER MARX AND LACAN

Although the critical stress in Žižek's work on (over-)identification52 rather than alienation (or, even more to the political-economic point, exploitation) is only one theoretical instance of his turn from Marxism and “return to Lacan,” his Lacanian understanding of history also exhibits the very real distance between his project and Marxism. In fact, if post-Marxism represents, as I believe it does, both an affirmation and a negation of classical Marxism, discarding what is not essential (i.e., Hegelian dialectics) while retaining what is most distinctive and valuable (e.g., the analytical valorization of history and economy, if not “historical materialism” per se), then it may be useful to determine the political-theoretical implications of Žižek's problematic relation to Marx(ism). (Not so incidentally, I take it as a given that, in the relativistic wake of poststructuralism, it is imperative to make these sorts of determinations.)

A preliminary critique of Marx and of historical materialism, in particular, is broached near the end of the first chapter of the Sublime Object of Ideology (“How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?”). Consider the “common” Marxist-feminist critique of psychoanalysis, according to which the Oedipus complex is a “‘false’ eternalization” that misconstrues “a historically conditioned form of patriarchal family” (i.e., the classic bourgeois nuclear family) as a trait “of the universal human condition.” The problem with this particular effort at historicization is that it completely ignores “the ‘hard kernel’ which announces itself through the ‘patriarchal family’—the Real of the Law, the rock of castration.”53 In fact, the irony of this position for Žižek is that, not unlike its ideological complement (and ostensible object of critique), “‘false’ eternalization,” “over-rapid historicization” blinds us “to the real kernel which returns as the same through diverse … symbolizations.”54

As in his post-Althusserian formulation of ideology as “beyond interpellation,” Žižek's understanding of the “unhistorical” as the Real of jouissance is intended to supplement what he sees as the gross poverty of the Marxist conception of history. However, Žižek's view of the “unhistorical” underscores not only the Lacanian thrust of his theory of history but the ontological repetition on which his work is, as it were, “based”: “What the nostalgic image conceals is not the historical mediation but on the contrary the unhistorical traumatic kernel which returns as the Same through all historical epochs.”55 If this statement suggests that Žižek's concept of repetition is unhistorical in the pejorative sense, the real irony of his insistent, even monotonous, invocation of “the unhistorical” is that it ultimately leaves his own avowedly post-poststructuralist work open to the same critique he levels against deconstruction in the Sublime Object of Ideology. Indeed, it might not be too much to say that Žižek's post-poststructuralism, not to mention his “postmodernist” style, “exists only to embellish some basic theoretical proposition,” such as the Real as the return of the (same) “unhistorical” traumatic kernel. One effect of this persistent ontologization of history is that, despite Žižek's theoretic and stylistic ingenuity (and he is nothing if not ingenious), the accent in his work on the unhistoricality of the Real—whether as trauma or the Same, jouissance or antagonism—eventuates in just the sort of “bad infinity” that he imputes to deconstruction: “an endless … variation which does not produce anything new.”56

Now, if it is in fact the case that Žižek's work revolves around a fundamental Lacanian-Hegelian proposition (call it “the Real as antagonism”), and this proposition bears on his critique of Marxist historicism,57 what, one wonders, is the relationship between Hegel and Marx in his work? Although there are any number of moments when Žižek reads this much-disputed relationship, the critical instance arguably occurs in Tarrying with the Negative, where he claims that the “standard Marxist” (Derridean?) critique of Hegelian dialectics as “a closed economy”—a system whose “every loss is in advance recompensed, ‘sublated’ into a moment of self-mediation”58—should be attributed not to Hegel but to Marx. A paradigmatic example of this pre-Hegelianism is Marx's formulation in the Grundrisse of the proletarian as “substanceless subjectivity.”59 At stake here is the problem of alienation or, more precisely, de- or disalienation, since in classical Marxism the proletariat collectively embodies the reconciliation—structurally blocked in capitalism and only “speculated” about by Hegel—of “subject” and “substance” (or, in the classical Marxist idiom, “labor force” and “mode of production”). But according to Žižek, this revolutionary formulation, which for Marx represented “a ‘materialist’ version of the Hegelian reconciliation of subject and substance,”60 must be subjected to a critical rereversal.

Žižek's theoretical gambit here is not, it seems to me, particularly scandalous. (Althusser's surmise about the “eternality” of ideology struck, as it were, the first blow against the classical concept of communism as the social figure for absolute de-alienation.61) However, Žižek's “apocalyptic tone” is scandalous, as when, invoking Marx's materialist critique of Hegel, he proposes that “the time has come to raise the inverse possibility of a Hegelian critique of Marx.” In sum, it is now necessary, “after more than a century of polemics on the Marxist ‘materialist reversal of Hegel,’” to entertain what for dyed-in-the-wool Marxists is unthinkable—that it is none other than Marx himself who should be stood on his head, that it is Marxism which, under the guise of a combative antiphilosophy, “retroactively constructs the figure of Hegel” as “the philosopher who elevates self-mediating Notion into the Ground and Substance of the universe.”62 That Žižek's target here is Marx rather than Derrida is striking, to say the least, since the conventional reading of Hegel as the philosopher-king of sublation is an aftereffect—at least in the United States—of the influence of deconstruction, which no doubt explains Žižek's chronic antipathy to Derrida.63 Still, inasmuch as he has also taken Derrida himself to task for his monolithic reading of Hegel, what, precisely, is at stake in Žižek's claim that “‘Hegel as absolute idealist’ is a displacement of Marx's own disavowed ontology”? As Žižek sees it, Marx's ambiguous relationship to Hegel is not merely a “symptom” of that retroactive displacement but an index of the “inherent impossibility of the Marxian project” as such.64 And yet, if it is clear that one of the things at stake in Žižek's return to Hegel is the validity of Marxism as a historical project, what is not clear, what remains unsaid, is the status of Žižek's “desire for Hegel.”

I raise here the hydra-headed question of desire because Žižek himself argues, à la Lacan, that what is missing from Marx (and, presumably, from the Marxian project itself) is a sense of subjectivity as “inscribed into the very core of Substance in the guise of an irreducible lack which forever prevents it from achieving full self-identity.”65 If one consequence of this anti-identitarian argument is that the absolute de-alienation associated with communism is a priori impossible, the problem with this critique of Marxism is not so much that it conflates communism with Marxism (arguably very different formations) or that it is predicated on a selective reading of Marx (the sort of critical treatment to which Lacan is rarely submitted by Žižek) as that the Lacan-inspired metalepsis “Hegel after Marx” threatens to reinstall a universal law: the law of desire as the law of castration.66 Indeed, if, as Butler argues,67 whatever threatens the invariant “threat” of castration in Žižek's work—Marxism, feminism, or Marxist feminism—is categorically foreclosed, one result of this theoretical foreclosure (and I am thinking here of Žižek's critique of deconstruction) is a certain afteraffect, or “permanent,” prepolitical pathos.

However, the question of politics aside, the most surprising thing about Žižek's Hegelian critique of Marxism—given Althusser's influence on his work—is that it is curiously pre-Althusserian. Bluntly, Žižek's anti-Marxist defense of the “substantial” subject is arguably a species of humanism and, as such, ideological through and through (since the naturalization of human subjectivity is, pace Žižek, the ideological operation par excellence).68 From this critical perspective, it is not hard to see, as Žižek himself is fond of saying, that his conception of the “substance as subject” (and consequent critique of Marx's understanding of proletarian subjectivity) is intended to reinscribe the “ontological” dimension of the historical subject.69 At the same time, if it is true (as Žižek also claims) that the “ontological” subject radically destabilizes the sort of “historical” subject that Marxism presupposes, the “historical-materialist” nevertheless remains after the subject-as-substance (i.e., the subject subjected to the law of castration) has been subtracted. In other words, if the relation between these two modes of subjectivity—the “ontological” and the “historical-materialist”—is not only irreducible but asymmetrical, the “historical-materialist” subject always already exceeds the “ontological” one—at least for Marxism.

Given this asymmetry between history and ontology—what Žižek himself calls the “true critical ‘materialist’ supplement”70—what does it mean to privilege ontology (or, more generally, philosophy) over history? If a Hegelian re-reversal of Marxism is not a species of idealism, what is it? First, whether or not one agrees with Althusser's location of Marx's break with Hegel or, rather more seriously, with the whole notion of an “epistemological break.” Althusser, unlike Žižek, maintains the “classic” distinction between Marx and Hegel, namely, that Hegel(ianism), in whatever form, is an analytical and historical regression.71

Žižek, of course, thoroughly problematizes this genealogy (i.e., Hegel before Marx). Thus, in Tarrying with the Negative, he reverses even as he answers Pierre Macherey's titular question Hegel ou Spinoza? so that one might say as with Marx, so with Althusser. Or, to rewrite Žižek himself, “[Hegel's] philosophy must be read as a critique of [Althusser]—as if [Hegel] read [Althusser] and was able in advance to answer the latter's critique of [‘Hegelianism’].”72 Suffice it to say that if one must choose between Hegel and Althusser (on the analogy of Hegel ou Spinoza?), and this is simultaneously a choice between philosophy and antiphilosophy, then Žižek clearly chooses Hegel and philosophy.73 From a Marxist perspective, though (and this is the theoretical “rub”), to return to Hegel—beyond both Marx and Althusser—is to “engage” in an act of philosophical nostalgia, since, as Žižek himself notes, “Marx insists on the inherent limitation of a purely dialectical [i.e., philosophical] presentation.”74 The “inherent limitations” of a strictly Hegelian and/or philosophical approach can be seen in Žižek's inordinately “thin” sense of historicity; hence, whether the specific object of historical analysis is the Gulag or the Holocaust, Hiroshima or Chernobyl, the answer for Žižek is always, somehow, the Same. In this sense at least, Žižek's project, despite its spirited critique of postmodern historicism and its “dialectical” twin, the “logic of nostalgia,” is thoroughly historicist—in “spirit.”75

Still, assuming—for the sake of argument—that Žižek's basic critique of Marx is correct, that Marx's notion of collective subjectivity and therefore of de-alienation are, sensu stricto, an effect of a “perspective-illusion which hinges precisely on the ‘closed economy’ of the dialectical reversal,” why does Žižek “need” to return to Hegel (rather than, say, Baudrillard) in order to effect this critique?76 In other words, while it is perfectly understandable why Žižek would want to return to Hegel in order to interrogate the received philosophical wisdom about his alleged monism, why is Žižek intent on saving Hegel at the expense of Marx? The answer to this particular question (at least with respect to the “early” Žižek of the Sublime Object of Ideology) is that his “reading of Hegel and the Hegelian heritage”—via, of course, the necessary detour of a reading of Lacan—suggests “a new approach to [the problem of] ideology.”77 The historical thrust of this recommendation would appear to be that today (after, presumably, the debacle that was communism) Hegel can teach us something about the critique of ideology that Marx(ism) couldn't or, rather more to the point, can't. And what Hegel can teach us is Subject, where “Subject” is, as it were, a synonym for “Lacan.”

Given this psychoanalytic tack, Žižek's brand of Lacanianism is emphatically opposed, it is clear, to that post-Hegelian practice which understands itself as antiphilosophy, or “not-anymore-philosophy”—to, that is, Marxism. This prise de position is reflected in the oppositional character of Žižek's conclusion to the introduction to Tarrying with the Negative, where Marxism is summarily dismissed in favor of “Lacanian philosophy”: “One is … tempted to risk the hypothesis that what Lacan's ‘antiphilosophy’ opposes is this very philosophy qua antiphilosophy.”78 Indeed, this “antiphilosophical”-qua-Lacanian Hegelian position is the perspective from which one must read the rhetorico-ecological “demand” that concludes the book as a whole: “Perhaps … our very physical survival hinges on our ability to consummate the act of assuming fully the ‘nonexistence of the Other,’ of tarrying with the negative.79 If this apocalyptic peroration—the concluding emphasis of which echoes Hegel's preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit—is plainly hyperbolic, it is also, I think it safe to say, downright gnomic. What does, or can, it mean to “consummate the act of fully assuming the ‘nonexistence of the Other,’” let alone to consummate the act of “tarrying with the negative”?

BEYOND SPINOZISM

The first thing to understand when trying to decipher the programmatic conclusion to Tarrying with the Negative is that the “anxiety of ecology”80 is tied up, for Žižek, with the “collapse of the big Other” (where the ecological and political referents for this catastrophic event are Chernobyl and the end of communism, respectively). In other words, there is a certain historical, if not strictly logical, relation between the demise of communism and the rise of the ecology movement. Thus, with respect to the “green” issue, Žižek argues that the Lacanian lesson to be applied to the anxiety of ecology (to the unaccountable fear that a natural catastrophe is on the immediate horizon) is that “we must learn to accept the real of the ecological crisis in its senseless actuality, without charging it with some message or meaning.”81 As for communism, the substitution of “green” for “red” politics is staged in the last chapter of Tarrying with the Negative, “Enjoy Your Nation as Yourself!” The question here is as simple as it is profound: In the wake of the dissolution of “actually existing socialism” in the Eastern bloc, what is the solution?

If Žižek's long answer to this question is a certain Lacanian ethics, his short, exemplary answer is, as I have already noted, ecology.82 What is striking about this eco-ethical solution, which cannot of course be divorced from the related issue of ethnonationalism, is that it involves an overt, albeit intricate, critique of Spinozism.83 The key figure is once again Hegel, where Hegel is understood (as in Althusser and Macherey) as the diametrical opposite of Spinoza.84 However, the additional Žižekian twist here is that Spinozism is the “ideology of late capitalism.” Indeed, in Žižek's account of late capitalism, Spinozism arguably displaces what Fredric Jameson reserves for the culture of postmodernism (i.e., postmodernism as the “cultural logic of late capitalism”). Accordingly, the answer to the ideology of Spinozism for Žižek is not Marxism (as it is for Jameson) but that oxymoronic practice “Lacanian philosophy.” Moreover, with the collapse of “actually existing socialism,” psychoanalysis itself has acquired a new political urgency, charged as it is—“more than ever,” according to Žižek—with the task of defining the “space of possible resistance” to the production and reproduction of capital. Simply put, the political task of psychoanalysis today is to elucidate those decidedly anti-Deleuzian forms of subjectivity that contest late (Spinozist) capitalism.85

While the so-called ethics of the Real—Lacan's “critique of pure desire” as the “foundation” of Kant's three critiques—can be said to drive Žižek's political philosophy, it must also be said that, his negative invocation of Spinoza notwithstanding, the real object of his critique is not Spinoza per se but a certain reading of him: Deleuze's “affective” interpretation of Spinoza as the premier philosopher of “speeds and slownesses, of frozen catatonias and accelerated movements, unformed elements [and] nonsubjectified affects.”86 What is at stake in this particular reading of Spinoza is the capital-deterritorialized “nature” of postmodern subjectivity, which for Žižek is distinctly Deleuzian in character: “Far from being an autonomous bearer of this process [of ‘affective identification’], the subject is rather a place, a passive ground for the network of partial lateral links.” The postmodern subject described here—plural, affective, dispersed—may sound subversive, but, according to Žižek, this form of subjectivity is not only not subversive, it is in fact the subject of late capitalism, prone as it is to those “particular, inconsistent modes of enjoyment” that are the hallmark of post-Fordist, consumer-driven capital. For Žižek, the critical question is therefore: Is there a “way out of this vicious circle of late-capitalist Spinozism”?87

In order to mount a really effective critique of contemporary ideological phenomena it is necessary, according to Žižek, to “go through the fantasy” of postmodern capitalism. But perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the aim of Žižek's “return to philosophy” is to root out what might be called the double fantasy of the contemporary (left) “universal intellectual.” This fantasy is premised on two, equally untenable propositions: (1) that the decentered, libidinal subject of postmodernism is the liberatory subject of capitalism (affirmative position); and (2) that the “cure” for this pathological symptom is Marxism (negative position). The problem with this argument for Žižek is that neither Marxism nor Spinozism can be said to represent a genuinely radical critique of late capitalism, since Marxism is merely the negative and “universal” Other of the “new Spinozism,” while the latter discourse is reflexively—and, therefore, uncritically—predicated not on negation (as in Marxism) but on affirmation, not on lack or loss (as in psychoanalysis) but on affect and desire. In other words, Marxism and Spinozism are simply two sides of the same coin: the coin of late capitalism.

Still, if neither Marxism nor Spinozism is the answer to late capitalism, liberalism is no solution either. As Žižek sees it, the “fundamental” political opposition today (at least in Eastern Europe) is not the apparent, “external” one between different regimes of social-political regulation—between nationalism and liberalism, for example, or even socialism and liberalism—but a strictly “internal,” economic one. That is to say, the real opposition should be located within capitalism itself, between those who will be permitted “inside”—integrated into the New (liberal-democratic) World Order—and those who will be condemned to the “outside” or periphery.88 In this context, it is worth noting that if, or precisely because, ethnonationalist fundamentalism is the Other or hidden presupposition of Western-style capitalism (as the epigraph to this essay suggests), the emerging nation-states of what was once Yugoslavia will be especially subject to the draconian diktats of this global political-economic logic—in a phrase: play or pay.

Consequently, the only way out of the “vicious circle” of late Spinozist capitalism—the reactive inverse of which economic universalism is ethnonationalism—“is not to fight the ‘irrational’ nationalist particularism but to invent forms of political practice.”89 Moreover, it is in just this combative, democratic-inventive sense that our “physical survival” as a species can be said to depend on the “coming ecological crisis,” since only such a planetary crisis will allow us to completely come to terms with the “non-existence of the big Other.” Put another way, the “real” value of ecology and its apocalyptic death drive is that, in forcing us to seriously entertain the “idea” of the nonexistence of the planet, it simultaneously compels us to consummate the act of “going through the fantasy” on nationalism as well as of Nature itself. In fact, with that last grand ideologeme in mind, one might say that on the other side of the fantasy of (super-)natural apocalypse or catastrophe is the terrible intuition that Nature, like God, doesn't exist. Or, to cite Spinoza himself, not God or Nature (Deus sive Natura), but neither God nor Nature. Of course, if even capital is a “chimeric apparition,”90 and Marxism merely a fantasy, what is left for the Left to do?

THE “NEW” NEW LEFT (MARXISM WITHOUT MARXISM/“CAPITALISM WITHOUT CAPITALISM”)

As the foregoing speculations about the ecology movement intimate (and such speculations are the stuff of Žižek's project), there is a significant theoretical difference between his project—founded as it is on the Hegelian notion of Gedankending—and Marxism. For if capital is a monster (Ungeheuer) and, strictly speaking, “no thing,” it is also always something for Marx, and that something is surplus-value.91 But if Žižek does not credit Marxism with any liberatory force (and, it sometimes seems, with only a residual explanatory one), his repeated affirmation of “new social movements” such as ecology indicates that he has by no means abandoned the Left in general. However, Žižek's considered recommendation is that while the politics of “the New” and its various forms of refusal (e.g., ecological “hysteria”) signify a “dimension beyond capital” as well as a necessary utopian sense of futurity, they must also actively engage the recent, catastrophic past. Accordingly, the current task for the Left—a rather formidable one, given the abrupt collapse of communism—is to imagine a viable future without completely forsaking the past, “to keep alive the memory of all lost causes, of all shattered … dreams and hopes attached to leftist projects.” This, for Žižek, is the “real” ethics of the drive, the “compulsion” to “mark,” insistently, the “site” of the trauma, the “Cause qua thing”—with the crucial proviso that this “lost Cause” or “Thing” (and one cannot, perhaps, emphasize this point enough) is not “actually existing socialism” or even communism but that traumatic impossibility which communism sought, tragically, to suture.92

Žižek's politics for the present juncture are predicated, then, on a dialectical refusal of both the current incarnation of contemporary capitalism (i.e., late Spinozism) and that nostalgia for the past-as-simulacrum which is postmodernism (e.g., the “back to the future” Reagan 1980s). In fact, for Žižek, the ethics of the drive—“far from confining the Left within a nostalgic infatuation with the past” (e.g., with the historical failure of revolutionary socialism)—is the only option left for getting some real “distance on the present,” whether understood as the New (post-Communist) World Order or the inhuman, fascist face of ethnonationalism associated with Bosnia.93

Still, if Žižek's exhortation of “an ethics of the Real”—especially in its utopian, repetitive-compulsive aspect (Freud's Zwang)—obviously speaks to some real tactical concerns currently facing the post-Marxist Left, the limits of this very “same” recommendation are equally obvious in the conclusion to “Beyond Discourse-Analysis,” where he presents the “practical” end point of his politics of the (death) drive: “The fact that the signifying field is always structured around a certain fundamental deadlock … doesn't entail any kind of resignation—or, if there is a resignation, it is a paradox of the enthusiastic resignation.94 I suppose one can understand this properly Kantian imperative as a version of Gramsci's memorable precept “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will,” but the sort of historical tension between theory and practice embodied in Gramsci's work is, it seems to me, all but lost in Žižek's “sublime” formulation. The “willful,” “intellectual” character of Žižek's petition for “enthusiastic resignation” is even more manifest in the Sublime Object of Ideology, where, addressing the crucial question of the efficacy of “at first sight purely speculative [read: Kantian-Hegelian] ruminations” for a psychoanalytic theory of ideology, he introduces a moment synonymous with that of “enthusiastic resignation,” which he labels, after Freud, die Versagung, or “subjective destitution.”95

From a psycho-Marxist perspective, the theoretical interest of this moment—of, that is to say, the “sacrifice of the sacrifice”—is substantial, since die Versagung is allegedly beyond both castration and alienation. Indeed, with the prototypically Marxist concept of alienation in mind, Žižek has argued that the sort of utopianism associated with the ethics of the Real “is possible only on the basis of a certain fundamental ‘alienation.’”96 Drawing out the necessary political implications of this ethics of separation in Tarrying with the Negative, he even adds, “What Eastern Europe needs most now is more alienation.97

Žižek's application here of the logic of separation to the former Yugoslavia makes real political sense, especially given the relative scarcity of civil-social institutions vis-à-vis the State in Eastern Europe; but it seems to me that alienation cannot be understood simply (and however profoundly) as separation, but must ultimately be thought together with the concept and the reality of exploitation. Perhaps (post-)Marxism needs to come to terms, as Žižek's work so ably attests, with the question of “castration” and even “separation.” Certainly, if it is ever going to speak persuasively to the problems of capitalism and ethnonationalism, among other things, it needs to be able to better articulate the way subjectivity is inscribed into the very heart of the discourse of political economy. However, while it may well be true that separation is the ethical-political answer to the problem of castration, die Versagung is not, and cannot be, the answer to the problem of exploitation. And, to the question of exploitation in its most “base,” even banal sense, Žižek has—in the final analysis—no real answer.

“DIALECTICAL PUNCTUATION”

While preparing an abridged version of this essay for a conference, I composed the following provisional conclusion: “If the critique of ideology ends, for Žižek, with the death drive, it may well be that his Lacanianism—at least for those of us still committed to the project of Marxism—represents a dreadful, if fascinating, dead end.” The point of my “dialectical punctuation” was to propose that, for all its force and interest, Žižek's project is decisively bereft of the sort of theoretical use-values that contemporary Marxism needs most today.98 In the time between writing the conclusion and delivering the paper, though, it struck me that American academic Marxism seems to be dominated more and more by a kind of political neo-pragmatism, the simplistic version of which attitude is “Žižek isn't Marxist enough!”99 Forget that Žižek—unlike most, if not all, of his American critics—has actually lived most of his life under a Communist regime and thus may have something important, even urgent, to say to those of us who have never really experienced life in a putatively Socialist country. Forget that Žižek's critique may have something to teach us about the practical and theoretical limits of Marxism.

Given the fall of communism and the so-called triumph of transnational capitalism—not to mention the local but by no means insignificant issue of the impact of these events on American academic Marxism (a student recently asked me at the beginning of a course on Marxism and psychoanalysis, “How can one justify teaching Marxism today?”)—given, that is, this unprecedented conjuncture, Žižek's work, to tarry with the negative, cannot not be found wanting. While his political philosophy sometimes appears to be a very real defense against desire and historicity, the historicity of desire (and a defense, therefore, against political despair),100 he can hardly be expected to produce a completely satisfying set of answers to the extraordinarily complex issues that confront the post-Marxist Left at this particular moment.

In any event, it was with these sorts of unorthodox thoughts in mind (to return to my anecdote) that I began to rethink the polemical conclusion to my conference paper, so much so that when I finally read it I immediately put it “under erasure.” My ex tempore argument was that, precisely because of the current conjuncture, it is imperative for post-Marxists and left intellectuals in general not to foreclose on theoretical work whose political efficacy is not immediately apparent. In order to illustrate this point and underscore the performative contradiction of my conclusion, I also mentioned a slip of the pen that I had “suppressed” in the final version of my paper. Instead of writing “Žižek's Lacanianism represents a dreadful, if fascinating, dead end,” I had written “Žižek's Lacanianism represents a deeply troubling, if fascinating, dead end.”

The meaning of this slip (“deeply troubling” when I had no doubt meant to say something like “deeply troubled”) is, I take it, that Žižek's work is deeply troubling for Marxists, not least because, as a left East European intellectual, he does not reflect back the “naive,” fascinated gaze of his not-so-sublime other: the gaze, that is, of the North American Marxist. In this sense (a profound one, it seems to me), Žižek refuses to give us what “we” want, refuses to satisfy “our” desire. Therein, one might say, lies our dread and our fascination, our dreadful fascination.

Notes

  1. Quoted in Terry Eagleton, Ideology: An Introduction (London, 1991), 40.

  2. In The Destruction of Yugoslavia: Tracing the Break-Up, 1980-92 (London, 1993), Branka Magas writes that “Tito's death in 1980 marked a point of no return for Yugoslavia” (xii); see also “Tito's Deluge” (79-83).

  3. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London and New York, 1991 [1990]), 256; and, on the death of Ceauşescu, see Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out (New York, 1992), 40-41.

  4. See Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 253-54 and 256-60.

  5. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, 1993), 1.

  6. For some sense of the context of Žižek's work, see Peter Osborne's interviews with him and Renata Salecl, “Lacan in Slovenia” and “Postscript,” in A Critical Sense: Interviews with Intellectuals, ed. Peter Osborne (New York, 1996), 21-35 and 36-44.

  7. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York, 1968 [1960]), 56.

  8. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York, 1989). Laclau's preface (xi) includes a partial bibliography of Žižek's works in French and in Slovene. Laclau and Mouffe's statement about the theoretical program of the Phronesis series (“We believe that an anti-essentialist theoretical stand is the sine qua non of a new vision for the Left conceived in terms of a radical and plural democracy”) can also be found in the front matter of this volume.

  9. Part of this address or context is, as Laclau notes, so-called screen theory and, in particular, the notion of “suture” (on suture and the gaze, see also Osborne, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 27). As Laclau observes, the “younger” generation of Lacanians “attempted to formalize Lacanian theory, pointing out the distinctions between the different stages of his teaching, and placing an accent on the theoretical importance of the last stage, in which a central role is granted to the notion of the Real as that which resists symbolization” (Sublime Object of Ideology, ix-x). The influence of this particular reading of Lacan on Žižek is obvious in the latter's own reaccentuation of the Lacanian Real.

  10. Of course, one could also argue that the distinction between popular culture and “high theory” remains intact in Žižek's work, since “low” or mass culture is used simply to illustrate “high” theory (e.g., Lacanian psychoanalysis). See Slavoj Žižek, “Taking Sides: A Self-Interview,” in The Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality (London and New York, 1994), 167-217, where he says that he is “convinced of [his] proper grasp of some Lacanian concept only when [he] can translate it successfully into the inherent imbecility of popular culture” (175). In this context, I might reiterate that what he calls Lacan's “most sublime theoretical motifs” are thought “together with and through exemplary cases of contemporary mass culture”; Slavoj Žižek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture (Cambridge, MA, 1991), vii; my emphases. In other words, mass- or popular-cultural objects retain a certain specificity in Žižek's work.

  11. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 1, 3.

  12. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 113.

  13. Žižek, Looking Awry, vii.

  14. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 7, 79.

  15. Žižek's engagement with postmodernism does not really commence until Looking Awry (see esp. 141-53). See also Enjoy Your Symptom, 80-83 and 122-24, as well as (and most importantly) Žižek's reading of the difference between Lacan and Foucault with respect to the question of Kant and the Enlightenment (179-84). For Žižek's own restricted definition of himself as a postmodernist, see Osborne, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 34.

  16. In Looking Awry (142-43), Žižek asserts—against all odds, as it were—that “it is only with Lacan that the ‘postmodernist’ break occurs. … In this sense we could even say that deconstructionists are basically still ‘structuralists’ and that the only ‘poststructuralist’ is Lacan.” Cf. what Žižek says about the “unexpected connections” between Lacan and Derrida in The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London and New York, 1996), 189-236, esp. 193-96.

  17. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 154, 154-55.

  18. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’” (1955-56), trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading, ed. John P. Muller and William Richardson (Baltimore, 1988), 28-54. With respect to Derrida, I am thinking of not only the historico-philosophic metalepsis “Socrates after Plato,” but also the “homosexual” structure (a tergo): “Socrates is in front of Plato, no, Plato is behind him”; see Jacques Derrida, The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, ed. and trans. Alan Bass (Chicago, 1987 [1980]), 9.

  19. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 155.

  20. See Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 72-80. On Gasché's alleged misreading of Hegel, see also Indivisible Remainder, 92-186, esp. 180 n. 45. For a more balanced appraisal of the dispute between Žižek and Gasché, see Peter Dews, “Tremor of Reflection: Slavoj Žižek's Lacanian Dialectics,” in The Limits of Disenchantment (London, 1995), 256-57 n. 37.

  21. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 1. Judith Butler argues that the Žižekian Real “stands theoretically as a counter both to Foucauldian linguisticism … and Habermasian rationalism,” in Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York, 1993), 192. Butler's real point, though, is that Foucault (like feminism and poststructuralism) represents a radical “challenge” to Žižek's construction of the Real as the law or “threat” of castration. Needless to say, Butler is also arguing pointedly, if implicitly, about “homosexuality” here.

  22. Quoted in Osborne, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 22; see also 22-25 (on the history of theory in Yugoslavia).

  23. See Žižek, “Superego by Default,” in Metastases of Enjoyment, 54-85, esp. 62-65.

  24. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 229.

  25. On the Pascalian aspect of Althusser's theory of Ideological State Apparatuses, see Žižek, “Superego by Default,” 59.

  26. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 44, 124.

  27. Žižek, “Superego by Default,” 60-61.

  28. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy, trans. Ben Brewster (New York, 1971 [1969]), 127-86; quotation from 173; Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 125; my emphasis.

  29. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 44.

  30. Ibid., 3. On Žižek and Laclau and Mouffe, see Butler, Bodies That Matter, 191-94 and 209-11; Rey Chow, “Ethics after Idealism,” diacritics 23 (1993): 3-22, esp. 14-15; Elizabeth J. Bellamy, “Discourses of Impossibility: Can Psychoanalysis Be Political?,” diacritics 23 (1993): 24-38, esp. 30-35; Anthony Elliott, “Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Modern Societies,” in Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition: Self and Society from Freud to Kristeva (Oxford, 1992), 162-200, esp. 177-99; and Robert Miklitsch, “The Rhetoric of Post-Marxism: Discourse and Institutionality in Laclau and Mouffe, Resnick and Wolff,” Social Text, No. 45 (Winter 1995): 167-96.

  31. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 4.

  32. Quoted in Osborne, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 34.

  33. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 30.

  34. For a feminist critique of Žižek's recapitulation of Lacan's “la Femme n'existe pas” (which critique I presuppose throughout), see Butler's Bodies That Matter. For his response to Butler's critique, see Žižek, “Taking Sides,” 202-3; and Osborne, “Postscript,” 40-43.

  35. For Žižek's recourse to Lefort, see For They Know Not What They Do, 253-70. See also Robert Miklitsch, “News from Nowhere: Reading Raymond Williams's Readers,” in Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams, ed. Christopher Prendergast (Minneapolis, 1995), 71-90.

  36. Žižek, “The Deadlock of ‘Repressive Desublimation,’” in Metastases of Enjoyment, 2-28; quotation from 13.

  37. Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” 40. For Žižek's take on Poe's “Purloined Letter,” see “Superego by Default,” 74.

  38. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 169. On the two aspects of the Lacanian Real, see also “Does the Subject Have a Cause?,” in Metastases of Enjoyment, 29-53, esp. 51 n. 11.

  39. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 173; my emphasis.

  40. Ibid., 172. See also Žižek's comments on his disagreement with Laclau (in Osborne, “Postscript,” 42-43): “The element that limits [the] boundless parade of symbolic reinscriptions is the level of phantasy enjoyment. These are not just symbolic differentials, they exist as historical traumas, registered by the real” (my emphasis). Moreover, says Žižek elsewhere (Indivisible Remainder, 97), “for Lacan the ‘Real’ is not, in the Kantian mode, a purely negative category, a designation of a limit without any specification of what lies beyond—the Real qua drive is, on the contrary, the agens, the ‘driving force,’ of desiring.”

  41. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 168.

  42. On the “primordial lie,” see Žižek's introduction to Indivisible Remainder, 1; and for his reading of City Lights, among other things, see Enjoy Your Symptom, 1-9. See also Lacan's by no means incidental remarks on the “comic” in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York, 1978 [1973]), 4-5.

  43. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 74.

  44. Ibid., 201-7.

  45. See Žižek, “Superego by Default,” 80-82; and Osborne, “Postscript,” 38.

  46. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 75.

  47. Žižek, Looking Awry, 138.

  48. In an interview by Peter Canning, Žižek says of the moment of “identification with the symptom,” which he situates between Lacan's Ethics of Psychoanalysis (1959-60) and “Kant avec Sade” (1962): “In this other logic, [the question] is no longer one of pure desire, where every identification with jouissance means betraying desire. Now, it is the opposite: the only authentic thing to do is to identify with your symptom. … In other words, the only true desire is the death drive”; Peter Canning, “The Sublime Theorist of Slovenia,” Artforum 31 (1993): 84-89; quotation from 88.

  49. Žižek, Looking Awry, 129.

  50. Ibid., 139; my emphasis.

  51. Ibid., 139-40.

  52. On “identification with the symptom” as overidentification, see, for example, Osborne, “Postscript,” 39. Butler, of course, views disidentification as “itself the point of departure for a more democratizing affirmation of internal difference” (Bodies That Matter, 219).

  53. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 49, 50. For a counter-Žižekian critique of the Marxist-feminist critique of psychoanalysis, see Butler, Bodies That Matter, 200-203. See also, more generally, Robert Miklitsch, “Troping Prostitution: Two or Three Things about (Post-)Marxism/Feminism,” Genders 12 (1991): 120-39.

  54. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 50. Žižek also contends that “what all epochs have in common is not some universal positive feature, some transcendental content; what they all share, rather, is the same deadlock, the same antinomy” (Indivisible Remainder, 217).

  55. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 81; my emphasis.

  56. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 155.

  57. For Žižek's critique of Marxist and Lukácscian historicism in particular, see “Taking Sides,” 200.

  58. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 25.

  59. For Žižek's formulation of “the point at which the Hegelian identity of subject and substance begins to break up,” see Enjoy Your Symptom, 180 n. 24.

  60. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 26.

  61. The problem of history in Althusser is “directly related” to his uncritical appropriation of the Freudian unconscious as the analogue of ideology (i.e., “ideology in general”). As Althusser puts it (“Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” 161), the thesis that “ideology has no history can and must … be directly related to Freud's proposition that the unconscious is eternal.” For his explicit position on historicism, see Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading “Capital,” trans. Ben Brewster (London and New York, 1970 [1968]), 199-244.

  62. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 26.

  63. For the articulation of Marxism and deconstruction in the United States, which was largely a function of Derrida's prior reception (Of Grammatology having appeared in 1976), see Michael Ryan, Marxism and Deconstruction (Baltimore, 1982); and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York and London, 1987).

  64. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 26.

  65. Ibid.

  66. On the communism/Marxism distinction, see Robert Miklitsch, “From Adorno to The Clash,” in From Hegel to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of “Commodity Fetishism” (Albany, 1998), 9-36. For one instance of Žižek's critical attention to Lacan, see “Taking Sides,” where Žižek claims that the “only way to approach Lacan … is to read ‘Lacan contre Lacan’” (173). On the “rock of castration,” Butler observes: “The figure of substance … appears misplaced … unless we take it as a figure for incontrovertibility, specifically, the unquestionable status of the law, where that law is understood as the law of castration” (Bodies That Matter, 201).

  67. See Butler, Bodies That Matter, 207. As forceful as Butler's reading is (and I have obviously found it of particular interest), its force also appears almost directly proportional to its reduction of the Žižekian text—that is, to its rhetoric. To rewrite Butler on Žižek on Lacan: “[Žižek's] own textuality is not considered in the often brilliant appropriations to be found in [Butler's] work” (197). The irony of Butler's reading, then, is that for all its deconstructive zest it privileges the “declarative mode” itself, as if Žižek's text were without performative effects. Bluntly, part of the interest of Žižek's work on, say, the Real as that which exceeds the Imaginary/Symbolic is the way it specifically embodies this “rhetorical” remainder. Accordingly, Butler's reading of the Žižekian text would be more persuasive if her critique recognized the “real” rhetoricity at work there. Another, interrogative way to put this would be to ask and endeavor to answer the following question: Why do “we”—including Butler—(want to) read Žižek?

  68. If Žižek's “humanism” puts him at odds with Althusser's antihumanism, his understanding of the Real of jouissance as the “kernel” of ideology also aligns his work with the Althusserian notion of “permanent ideology,” as Butler suggests (ibid., 278 n. 5). See also Louis Althusser, For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1977 [1965]), 219-47.

  69. Although what Teresa Brennan calls “the concept of a transhistorical psychical fantasy as such” (or what I here call “the ontological”) “gives the psychical some autonomy in history,” allowing “for a tension between psychical factors and sociohistorical ones,” to term any fantasy “transhistorical”—no matter how “ubiquitous” it may appear to be—is “to impute” to it an immutable status “when we simply do not know if it is immutable, and exempt from historical scrutiny”; History after Lacan (London and New York, 1993), 22.

  70. Žižek, Indivisible Remainder, 13-91; quotation from 46.

  71. See, for example, Althusser, For Marx, 32-34; and Althusser and Balibar, Reading “Capital,” 30-31.

  72. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 140.

  73. In his “Errors of Classical Economics,” Althusser declares that “Spinoza's philosophy introduced an unprecedented theoretical revolution in the history of philosophy, probably the greatest philosophical revolution of all time, insofar as we can regard Spinoza as Marx's only direct ancestor” (Althusser and Balibar, Reading “Capital,” 91-118; quotation from 102; my emphasis). More to the point, in his 1975 soutenance for his doctorat d'état from the University of Picardy, he noted that he had “turned the weapon of Spinoza against Hegel”; Louis Althusser, Philosophy and the Spontaneous Philosophy of the Scientists and Other Essays, ed. Gregory Elliott, trans. Ben Brewster et al. (London and New York, 1990), xviii. As for Lacan's relation to Spinoza/Kant, see Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, where Lacan suggests that “Kant avec Sade” and, more generally, the turn in his work to the concept of die Versagung (“desire in its pure state”) is a direct refusal of Spinoza's position: “This position is not tenable for us” (275-76).

  74. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 211.

  75. See Žižek, Looking Awry, 111-16. On his problematic relation to historicism, see also Robert Miklitsch, “‘Out of the Past’: Psycho-Historicism” (forthcoming).

  76. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 26. On the “restricted” use-value of Baudrillard for (post-)Marxism, see Robert Miklitsch, “The Commodity-Body-Sign: Toward a General Economy of ‘Commodity Fetishism,’” Cultural Critique, No. 33 (Spring 1996): 5-40.

  77. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 7 (“the only way to ‘save Hegel’ is through Lacan”).

  78. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 3-4.

  79. Ibid., 237.

  80. See Robert Miklitsch, “Total Recall: Production, Revolution, Simulation, Alienation-Effect,” Camera Obscura 32 (1995 [1993-94]): 5-39.

  81. Žižek, Looking Awry, 35.

  82. For Žižek's more recent remarks on ecology, see Indivisible Remainder, 128, 131.

  83. I am using “ethnonationalism” in Walker Connor's sense of a nation as “a group of people who believe they are ancestrally related”; see his Ethnonationalism (Princeton, 1994).

    Spinoza has, of course, been a resource for the radical environmental movement; see, for example, Robert Hurley's preface to Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco, 1988 [1981]), 11. In “Seeing Green,” Stanley Aronowitz observes that for the Greens (and, in some sense, for Žižek as well), ecology is an “alternative ‘system’ to Marxism and liberalism, the dominant frameworks for working-class and middle-class politics in Western societies,” in Dead Artists, Live Theories (New York, 1994), 286-95; quotation from 287. For an original reconceptualization of Marxism and ecology, see Brennan, History after Lacan, 166-96.

  84. See, in particular, Christopher Norris, “Spinoza versus Hegel: The Althusserian Moment,” in Spinoza and the Origins of Modern Critical Theory (Oxford, 1991), 21-53.

  85. See Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 216-19.

  86. Deleuze, Spinoza, 129.

  87. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 218, 219.

  88. Osborne (“Postscript,” 37) quotes Žižek as saying that although “Marxism is still valid in its belief in a fundamental antagonism pertaining to today's liberal democracy,” the antagonism “has assumed a new form”: “It is no longer capitalists versus proletariats, but those who are inside the system versus those who aren't.”

  89. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 220.

  90. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom, 123.

  91. On the “monstrous nature of the commodity,” see Thomas Keenan, “The Point Is to (Ex) Change It,” in Fetishism as Cultural Discourse, ed. Emily Apter and William Pietz (Ithaca, 1993), 152-85, esp. 152-61. See also Brennan's gloss of Capital: “The transformation of labour-power into labour is none the less, and oddly, a transformation from something immaterial to something material” (History after Lacan, 203). Accordingly, to think surplus-value is to think this “something.”

  92. Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do, 271, 272.

  93. Ibid., 273. For an especially illuminating example of Žižek's understanding of the Bosnian war, see “Taking Sides,” 210-17.

  94. Slavoj Žižek, “Beyond Discourse-Analysis” (1987), appendix to Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London, 1990), 249-60; quotation from 259. See also “In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large,” in Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), ed. Slavoj Žižek (London, 1992), 211-72, esp. 252-55, as well as 262-63, where he mobilizes the moment of die Versagung in his reading of The Silence of the Lambs: “‘Eat your being-there!’” For Žižek's reading of the Kantian distinction between “fanaticism” (Schwärmerei) and “enthusiasm” proper, see Sublime Object of Ideology, 204.

  95. Žižek, Sublime Object of Ideology, 230. Elsewhere (Enjoy Your Symptom, 176), Žižek observes that “what Freud called Todestrieb [death drive] … ultimately equals die Versagung”; see also Indivisible Remainder, 92-95 and 115-22.

  96. Žižek, Looking Awry, 142. Elsewhere, Žižek comments, “When you want to actualize your non-alienated project and you are confronted with some limit, disalienation does not consist in annihilating the limit, but in seeing how this limit is the positive condition of your very activity” (Osborne, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 25).

  97. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 211. See also his observations on the Slovene punk band Laibach, whose fundamental cry was “We want more alienation” (Osborne, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 24).

  98. “Dialectical punctuation” is an allusion to Lacan's theory and practice of the short session (séance scandée); see Jacques Lacan, “The Function and Field of Speech and Language” (1953), in Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York and London, 1977 [1966]), 30-113, esp. 95.

  99. Cf. Žižek's comments on his relations with the Slovenia Green Party, “which threw [him] out for not being enough of a Marxist” (Osborne, “Lacan in Slovenia,” 29).

  100. With respect to the question of the transhistorical, Victor Wolfenstein has argued—convincingly, I believe—that transhistorical “theories of human nature” such as Žižek's “function as defenses against the unremitting historicity of human existence,” in Psychoanalytic-Marxism: Groundwork (New York, 1993), 164. Moreover, philosophies of transhistoricization—again, such as Žižek's—constitute not only a “resistance to or defense against the analysis of desire,” but, most importantly (given the geopolitical conditions of possibility of Žižek's work), a “defense against political despair” (ibid.). This last defense is most obvious, it seems to me, in Žižek's recourse to the concept of die Versagung.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Toward a Notion of Critical Self-Creation: Slavoj Žižek and the ‘Vortex of Madness.’

Next

Enjoy Your Žižek