Zizek & Politics - A Critical Introduction
Zizek & Politics - A Critical Introduction
Zizek & Politics - A Critical Introduction
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Conclusion 219
References 234
Index 249
Expanded Contents List
Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Žižek and Politics 1
So Who is Slavoj Žižek? 2
The Dilemmas of Enjoyment as a Political Factor 7
A Critical Introduction 14
Our Method: Žižek and Political Philosophy 17
Reading Žižek: The Politics of Žižek’s Style 20
The Two Žižeks 24
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Conclusion 219
Quilting Points 219
To Anticipate 223
Repeating Lenin, an Infantile Disorder? 225
For Multi-Dimensional Political Theory 228
References 234
Index 249
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Abbreviations
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žižek and politics
A Critical Introduction
The aim of Žižek and Politics, then, is to spell out, in as plain lan-
guage as possible, all Žižek’s key theoretical notions, as they bear
on his politics. The book is an introduction, aimed at students and
interested non-specialists, as well as established readers in the rarified
realm of ‘High Theory’. In Žižek and Politics, the reader will learn
about Žižek’s own key terms or master signifiers:
• the Ego Ideal, the Symbolic Order, the big Other, and the
superego;
• the nature of transgressive enjoyment, and the role it plays in
political life;
• the critique of ‘ideological fantasies’, master signifier and ‘sublime
objects of ideology’;
• the modern or ‘Cartesian subject’, and Žižek’s critique of the
‘post-structuralist’ orthodoxy that claims to have ‘deconstructed’
it;
• Žižek’s ideas concerning the importance of social conflict in
political life and its implications for the project of emancipation
and the institutions of democracy;
• Žižek’s remarkable reading, in the middle of the 1990s, of
Romantic philosopher Gottfried Schelling’s theology or theogony,
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But Žižek and Politics, true to its subtitle, is also a critical introduc-
tion. In clarifying Žižek’s ideas we aim also to explain why there is
such bitter debate involved in the reception of his work. We locate the
division in critical reception in polarised responses to the radical shift
in Žižek’s work, from the subject of desire and a radical-democratic
politics, to the subject of the drive and a revolutionary vanguard-
ist politics. Accordingly the book proposes a new understanding
of Žižek that goes beyond previous introductions. We interpret the
conflict among the critics as the symptom of a division within Žižek’s
work itself.
We proffer this new, critical interpretation now because the criti-
cal response to Žižek has been characterised by a kind of ‘time lag’.
This is partly because of the frenetic pace of Žižek’s publishing. It
also reflects the genuine novelty of his contributions to philosophy,
political theory and the other fields in which he intervenes. Finally,
Žižek himself has reached the point where he too claims that he has
radically changed direction since 1996–7.
Since 2002 there has been an increasing stream of engagements
with Žižek’s work: critical monographs, edited collections and intro-
ductory works. In addition to a growing list of articles and book
chapters on Žižek, there is a series of valuable introductions by
Sarah Kay (2003), Tony Myers (2003), Ian Parker (2004) and Jodi
Dean (2006). Most of the introductions take Žižek’s ‘three centres
of gravity’ as the organising principle of their work, setting forth
his interpretation of Hegel, Lacan and Marx in successive chapters.
The critical books on Žižek have followed a different logic: Matthew
Sharpe (2004) and Marcus Pound (2008) have produced book-length
critical engagements with Žižek’s social theory and theological posi-
tions, respectively. Adrian Johnston’s Žižek’s Ontology (2008) is a
remarkable reconstruction of Žižek’s philosophical ideas as what
Johnston calls a ‘transcendental materialism’.
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Then there are three edited collections of essays on Žižek the hard-
hitting content of which have elicited full-length replies by Žižek.
Matthew Sharpe, Geoff Boucher, and Jason Glynos’s Traversing
the Fantasy (2005) contains both psychoanalytic and philosophi-
cal critiques of Žižek’s work by figures such as Peter Dews and Ian
Buchanan. James Bowman and Richard Stamp’s The Truth of Žižek
(2007) pulls no punches in its responses to Žižek’s theoretical work
and political positions. Erik Vogt and High Silverman’s Über Žižek
(2004) contains a probing essay by Mark de Kesel, among others.
The foundation of The International Journal of Žižek Studies in
2006 was further testimony to Žižek’s status as one of the world’s
leading intellectuals.
A distinctive feature of Žižek’s work is the way he has always
constructed his own positions in dialogue – or rather, in polemi-
cal debate – with other contemporary thinkers. By 2009 there also
exist polemical exchanges between Žižek and a series of intellectual
luminaries, Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, Terry Eagleton, Yannis
Stavrakakis, Sean Homer, Simon Critchley, Peter Dews and more.
Žižek’s prolonged engagement with figures on the French intellectual
Left such as Étienne Balibar, Jacques Rancière, Jacques-Alain Miller
and Alain Badiou is conducted across many of Žižek’s books. Žižek
has also made sallies at psychoanalytic thinkers Richard Boothby,
Jonathan Lear and Jacob Rogozinski. Then there are Žižek’s con-
tinuing engagements with key contemporary thinkers such as Jacques
Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, Jürgen
Habermas and Daniel Dennett – although these are arguably less
direct exchanges than Žižek’s brilliant, heterodox interventions from
outside into ongoing debates.
However, one feature of the ongoing academic work of ‘working
through’ what one critic has called the ‘Žižek effect’ (Resch 2005)
stands out. Much of the work before 2004 was devoted to patiently
deciphering Žižek’s work, which we will see can be tricky enough.
Yet, since that time, more and more authors – witness those collected
in The Truth of Žižek – have well and truly traversed the fantasy
that Žižek is an unimpeachable theoretical and political authority,
whom we can but hope to understand but never criticise. Since 2004,
indeed, the vast majority of writing on Žižek has become increasingly
critical. As we commented, Žižek has now been accused of nearly
every theoretical and political sin readers can imagine: everything
from supporting Joseph Stalin and Chairman Mao to not footnot-
ing properly, and producing readings of other philosophers that
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really should not pass muster in the academic world. The exceptions
include the work of Scott Parkin, Rex Butler, Adrian Johnston and
Jodi Dean, together with that of many of the authors who have con-
tributed to The International Journal of Žižek Studies. These figures
have sought to balance their criticism of some aspects of Žižek’s
politics with their appreciation of his contribution to psychoanalytic
and political theory. That is also the perspective we aim for.
The point is that the preliminaries in the work of ‘Žižek reception’
are finished. Twenty years on from The Sublime Object of Ideology,
it is now time to begin the process of bringing together the disparate
critical threads and charges that have been arraigned against Žižek
since 2004. This is the critical aim of Žižek and Politics.
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instance, very difficult to think of any writer who, more than Žižek,
presents texts that enjoin readers radically to transgress or to enjoy! –
although he is ruthless in attacking this post-structuralist imperative
in other theorists. It is equally tough to think of anyone who, more
than Žižek, has reduced politics to ethics, even though Žižek com-
plains about everyone else today that they do just this (CHU 127)
– in Žižek’s case, he goes about this by trying to derive his model of
political action from the psychoanalytic clinic. Žižek also infamously
repeats passages of himself, without acknowledging the citation, in
a way probably never before published, facilitated by the copy-and-
paste function of the modern word processor. Žižek’s texts often end
with a whimper, rather than the ‘bang’ of any conclusion, patiently
worked towards (Laclau 1989: p. vii).
Then, there are different types of Žižek texts. As Žižek’s profile
has grown, Žižek has made a name writing columns on the events of
the day in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of
Books and a variety of ‘e-zines’ on the web. In these articles, Žižek
often presents a quite moderate, left-liberal front: he is for a unified
Europe, against the ideological use of terrorism to justify US torture
or imperialism, for a two-state solution in Palestine, against any too-
cynical dismissal of the progressive significance of Obama’s election
– the list goes on.
The text of many of these articles appears, sometimes in verba-
tim chunks, in what Žižek has called in interview his series of ‘B’
texts: shorter, more popularly accessible pamphlets such as On
Belief (2001), Welcome to the Desert of the Real (2002), Iraq: The
Borrowed Kettle (2004) and On Violence (2008). Then there are
Žižek’s longer, more scholarly ‘A’ productions such as Parallax
View and In Defence of Lost Causes published in 2006 and 2008,
or The Ticklish Subject of 1999, each exceeding 300 pages. In these
texts Žižek’s more episodic, moderate commentaries on the events
of the day are interlaced with his readings of leading and historical
thinkers, and his continuing work of exposing the difficult ideas of
Hegel, Schelling and Lacan. The unusual thing is that it is above all
in these most academic texts that Žižek presents his most radical
or ‘counter-hegemonic’ political prescriptions: prescriptions that
might surprise readers who have come to the texts through Žižek’s
more public presentations. These prescriptions have become more
and more strident since 1999, culminating with In Defence of Lost
Causes in 2008.
How are we to make sense of this oeuvre? It is tempting to say
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that no one has ever written books like Žižek. As his fame has
grown, Žižek’s output has grown as rapidly, and his patient respect
for academic conventions has widely lapsed. This speaks to the dis-
missive conclusion that Žižek’s contradictions are caused because
he is writing more quickly than anyone can possibly think. Perhaps
Žižek is one of those people Freud famously described as ‘ruined by
success’. Or perhaps Žižek is a sociological phenomenon: the victim
of the postmodern, globalised lecture circuit, and the cult of person-
ality that seems like the ‘institutional unconscious’ of parts of the
humanities academy (Gilbert 2007)? Against this casual dismissal of
Žižek, however, when we look back on the history of political phi-
losophy, Žižek’s rhetorical devices are far from being new.
Žižek has himself warned that, beneath the user-friendly surface
of his texts, there is a position deployed with scant regard for all the
wealth and warmth of humanistic concerns. In Žižek’s In Defence
of Lost Causes, we are warned that ‘it is up to the reader to unravel
the clues which lie before her’ (IDLC 8). The Parallax View similarly
advertises the ‘cruel traps’ Žižek sets for the reader who is trying to
decipher what he means (PV 11). Then there is one open confession
of his toying with audiences he has little respect for – by fabricat-
ing a reading of a modernist artwork in Fright of Real Tears (FRT
5–6; WDLT 197–8). Far from shrinking from such a controversial
device, Žižek then goes on to repeat the bluff almost word for word
in an apparently serious context, discussing paintings by Malevich,
Hopper and Munch (FRT 106; Quinn 2006: 2).
So what can be at play in this version of philosophical esotericism,
the practice of concealing or partly concealing one’s true meaning?
What might the politics and motivation of such rhetorical trickery
be?
The uncanny thing is that all the features of Žižek’s texts – self-
contradiction; repetition with small variations; the presentation of his
own ideas in the guise of commentaries on other people; paratactic
shifts between topics without apparent rhyme or reason; the failure
to conclude or to sustain ‘linear’ argumentation; even the resulting
confusion among commentators – have been seen often enough in
the history of political philosophy, from Plato down to Nietzsche.
These writing techniques were used by philosophers who knew that
their political opinions stood at right angles to accepted opinion, so
they could not possibly present them in a simple, readily accessible
way. That would be to risk persecution: either public ostracism, or,
in closed societies such as the former Yugoslavia, imprisonment or
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• For the Enlightenment, the link between human nature and ideals
of political freedom is rationality. Through reason, the subject will
arrive at what is possible and desirable in a political community.
• By contrast, for Romanticism, the bridge between human nature
and social freedom is to be crossed using some irrational force –
the Imagination, unconscious fantasy, the non-rational drives and
so forth.
• Philosophical Romanticism holds that human rationality is not the
deepest or most characteristic human trait, and that – indeed –
human rationality is always underlain and undermined by forces,
affects or truths accessible only to artistic experience or religious
faith.
prompted Žižek to change tack, switching from the one horn of his
dilemma to the other. The result is the dramatic difference in the the-
oretical, ethical and political conclusions that Žižek reached between
1989 and 1995, compared with those of 1996–2009.
Of course, this is in large measure an analytical distinction
between two Žižeks, and not a substantive difference. We do not
think that Žižek has become a different person, or that elements
of the anti-democratic revolutionary vanguardist position were not
present within the earlier, radical-democratic phase (and vice versa).
But we do mean that the dominant structure of his thinking has
changed. Where, formerly, the anti-democratic, revolutionary van-
guardist elements were strictly subordinated to a radical-democratic
politics, from 1998 onwards they have become dominant. The
radical-democratic elements, meanwhile, now tend to appear only
when Žižek is defending himself from critical accusations that what
he advocates is neither desirable nor possible.
There are several registers of this change from ‘Žižek1’ to ‘Žižek2’
in Žižek’s books.
• From a deeply ironic theory of ideology that sets out to show the
depth of our underlying heteronomous commitments to symbolic-
shared norms and ideals (Chapter 1), to a deeply cynical theory
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We hope there are many questions the reader feels drawn to ask
at the end of this Introduction. They can be answered only by the
body of this book. The final question the reader might want to ask
is this: how exactly do the authors think that Žižek’s encounter with
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Part One
Žižek1
Chapter 1
Looking Ahead
Žižek’s Lacanian analysis of ideology is probably one of the most
important contributions to descriptive political theory since the
1980s. Žižek’s theory of ideology adeptly employs his ‘Lacanian
dialectics’. This is a unique synthesis of Lacanian psychoanalysis and
Hegelian dialectics, which allows Žižek to grasp the contradictions in
ideologies and understand their hold on us. These are the points we
will clarify in this chapter.
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apart into a host of nations. The East European states of the Soviet
Bloc rejected their Communist governments. Žižek’s native Slovenia
seceded relatively peacefully from Yugoslavia in 1991. Žižek stood
as a presidential candidate in the democratic elections that followed
and narrowly missed winning office. The West looked confidently to
the former Communist countries, looking to see the West’s faith in
the value of liberal capitalism vindicated in full.
In the USA, then-incumbent President George Herbert Bush caught
the moment famously. Bush described the emerging global situation
as a ‘New World Order’, characterised by the worldwide spread
of liberal democracy and free-market economics. The pre-eminent
intellectual statement of the times came from the neoconservative
Francis Fukuyama. In The End of History and the Last Man (1992),
Fukuyama argued that the fall of the Berlin Wall signalled the end of
human history. The long series of violent struggles between compet-
ing conceptions of the best political regime was over. The Western
coupling of (neo)liberal economics and parliamentary democracy
was the only legitimate form of government remaining. Socialism,
one more blood-stained god that had failed, would now join the
absolute monarchs of early modernity and their quarrelling feudal
forebears – in the dustbin of history. In liberal parliamentarism and
free markets, the deep political aspiration for mutual recognition
protected by the rule of law is fully realised.
How does Žižek stand vis-à-vis this new ‘post-ideological’ con-
sensus? His position is typically provocative and controversial. Žižek
argues that ‘in a way . . . Francis Fukuyama was right, global capital-
ism is the ‘end of history’ (RL 12). Today, politics is conceived of in
terms of the ‘post-political’ management of society and the economy,
precisely because the West thinks of itself as having entered a ‘post-
ideological’ condition. The ‘bipartisan consensus’ on free markets
and liberal societies is based on the perception of social reality as
something neutral and unproblematic. Different political parties now
compete on the basis of their style of management (or even on the
basis of the personalities of their leaders). In his debate with Ernesto
Laclau and Judith Butler in 2000, Žižek put it this way:
Today’s predominant consensus . . . [sees] the age of ideologies – of
grand ideological projects like Socialism or Liberalism – [as] over, since
we have entered the post-ideological era of rational negotiation and
decision-making, based upon the neutral insight into economic, ecologi-
cal, etc., necessities . . . This consensus assumes different guises, from the
neoconservative or Socialist refusal to accept it and consummate the loss
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in the biogenetic sciences, have taken their place. For this reason,
Žižek suggests that the postmodernists’ celebration of difference,
‘becoming’ (change), otherness and the new postmodern plurality of
lifestyles and subcultures is ‘radical’ only from the perspective of the
cultural conservatives they oppose. In the same era in which neolib-
eral economics has taken on an unprecedented political importance,
Žižek complains that the New Left has been directing progressives’
focus away from what really matters in shaping public life.
Think, by contrast, of what occurs as soon as the prospect of any
far-reaching change affecting the economy is raised. Žižek proposes
that we soon find that a ‘politically correct’ Denkenverbot (prohi-
bition against thinking) operates to suppress questioning of global
capitalism. And, despite the fashionable ‘anti-hegemonic’ rhetoric,
this happens in the postmodern academy just as much as in the
mainstream media. Žižek notes that philosophers as different as
Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida ‘would probably adopt the
same left-of-centre liberal democratic stance in practical political
decisions’. We should not be fooled by their ‘great passionate public
debates’, then, nor by the Right’s outrage against their ‘relativism’,’
‘permissiveness’, ‘adversarial culture’, and so on (CHU 127–8). In
fact, Žižek proposes, the underlying premises of the ‘postmodernist’,
academic New Left are profoundly conservative. Far from providing
any real ethical or political resistance to the neoliberal, free-market
consensus, postmodernism is merely the cultural logic of global
capitalism. As Žižek says:
the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects
that aim seriously to change the existing order, the answer is immediately:
‘benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new gulag.’ The ‘return
of ethics’ in today’s political philosophy shamefully exploits the horrors
of the gulag or holocaust as the ultimate bogey for blackmailing us into
renouncing all serious radical engagement. (CHU 127)
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G. W. F. Hegel
• Hegel’s founding notion is that ‘the truth is the whole’. Hegel holds
that no phenomenon (no thing, event or person) can truly be
grasped in isolation. In reality, Hegel argues, every phenomenon
is formed through a network of relations that constitute – that is,
give form and reason to – it. To take an everyday example, if we
see a man or woman shouting angrily in the street, merely perceiv-
ing this tells us nothing about why he or she might be shouting so.
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lament. Žižek is fond of reciting the Hegelian idea that evil lies also
in the gaze that, looking around, sees evil everywhere else.
This is a modernist, Enlightenment position – and one that is
clearly on the progressive Left, as his analysis of the fallout from
9/11 shows. It is an Enlightenment position in that Žižek’s Hegelian
reading of the darker phenomena of today’s world calls upon us to
have the courage to take a philosophically enlarged responsibility
for the world in which we live. What appears to be irrational and
wholly Other, Žižek argues, is never so wholly irrational as a too-
abstract perspective imagines. If Žižek is right, it is not that the reli-
gious fundamentalists, ethnic nationalists and reactionary sexists are
massed, like barbarians at the gates of Rome, in external opposition
to the enlightened modern West. The Western Enlightenment itself
has yet to complete its own exposure of the unreason at the heart of
modernity. For the radical-democratic Žižek (Žižek1), a Lacanian
dialectics – a combination of psychoanalysis and Hegel – can grasp,
and help us to transcend, the irrational discontents of Enlightenment
reason. Instead of denouncing the Enlightenment as a new prison, as
postmodernism does, Žižek proposes rationally to understand the
‘dark phenomena’ of the contemporary world as caused by the inter-
nal limitations of an Enlightenment that has not gone far enough.
The specific claim is that, when Enlightenment rationality becomes
the servant of capitalist domination, then it engenders irrational
anti-Enlightenment forces.
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In the Lacanian ‘algebra’, although the Ego Ideal is the result of symbolic
identification, it is designated as the Imaginary Other, I(O), which means
that it represents, for the subject, the ideal unity of the entire Symbolic
Order, the point that makes the social order into a closed totality of
meaning. Imaginary identification is subordinated to symbolic identifi-
cation: ‘imaginary identification is always identification on behalf of a
certain gaze in the Other’ (SO 106).
Ego
Ideal: Symbolic
I(O) identification
other
“me” ideal ego:
ego: e i(o)
Imaginary
misrecognition
Figure 1.1 Jean- Jacques (e) is trying to impress his deeply admired friend
Denis Diderot (i(o)) with what a great philosopher he, Rousseau, is. But
who does he think gazes lovingly on him when he does so? (Not poor old
Diderot!)
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The key thing is that the Ego Ideal, as its name suggests, involves
the dimension of what Freud terms ‘idealisation’ and Lacan the
Symbolic Order. A person’s Ego Ideal is less any real individual
person than some idea or ideal with which the person deeply identi-
fies. The Ego Ideal centres upon a ‘master signifier’, a point of sym-
bolic identification that, in itself, is just a signifier, but one that, in the
psychic economy of the subject, plays a special role: it is a signifier
without a signified. It ‘quilts the field’ of a certain context, but it itself
has no meaning. ‘Rousseau’, after all, ‘the Rousseau family’, is just a
name, just a combination of sounds. By organising the entire family
heritage, however, by lending some unity to the dispersed familial
narrative, it seems to be saturated with meaning – especially for the
subject, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. More precisely, what the family
name does, for Rousseau, is to specify his place in society as a place of
excellent achievements and the highest ideals. In other words, the Ego
Ideal holds the place of the Symbolic Order in the psychic economy
of the subject. It allocates the subject a position in society, a symbolic
mandate with social authority that is defined as deriving from a socio-
cultural totality: I(O).
The big Other, or Symbolic Order, meanwhile, the network of
linguistically mediated socio-cultural rules, is beautifully illustrated
by Žižek:
During the last election campaign in Slovenia . . . a member of the ruling
political party was approached by an elderly lady from his local constitu-
ency, asking him for help. She was convinced that the street number of
her house (not the standard 13, but 23) was bringing her bad luck – the
moment her house got this new number, due to some administrative
reorganization, misfortunes started to afflict her (burglars broke in, a
storm tore the roof off, neighbours started to annoy her), so she asked
the candidate to be so kind as to arrange with the municipal authorities
for the number to be changed. The candidate made a simple suggestion to
the lady: why didn’t she do it herself? Why didn’t she simply replace or
repaint the plate with the street number herself by, for example, adding
another number or letter (say, 23A . . .)? The old lady answered: ‘Oh, I
tried that a few weeks ago . . . but it didn’t work – my bad luck is still with
me, you can’t cheat it, it has to be done properly, with the relevant state
institution.’ The ‘it’ which cannot be duped in this way is the Lacanian big
Other, the symbolic institution. (TS 326)
In Žižek’s Lacanian terminology, the Ego Ideal involves a pas-
sionate attachment to a symbolic ‘big Other’ (with a capital O). It
is worth emphasising that the Lacanian Other refers to the entire
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only symbolic authority – the social ideals that the subject identi-
fies with – but it also holds the place, in the psychic economy, of
the big Other. The Ego Ideal, on behalf of the big Other, allocates
the subject a place in the socio-political totality, and it gives the
subject a social mandate, a definite role to play in worldly affairs.
For the subject, as the example from Slovenia shows, the big Other,
the socio-political totality, functions as if it were personified – for
instance, classic instances of the big Other are God and Fate. When
the subject symbolically identifies with the figure of Jesus and
engages in the institutional rituals of the Christian Church, this
Ego Ideal holds the place, for the subject, of God, and it assigns
the subject a place in the totality of Creation with a definite social
mandate (as a believer supposed to ‘love thy neighbour’ and obey
God’s commandments).
Žižek proposes that the fundamentally unconscious component
of this set of beliefs concerns what God finds satisfying about the
conduct of the faithful – what God ‘enjoys’. The problem is that,
in the unconscious, what the big Other enjoys might be something
that the subject would deny if this were presented to them as a
conscious proposition. For instance, it might be the case that, for a
believer, God enjoys the extermination of unbelievers. Equally, the
subject unconsciously supposes that those with different Ego Ideals,
with different social ideals, religious convictions and moral values,
serve strange big Others, alien gods. The unconscious logic runs as
follows. If God demands the extermination of the unbelievers, then
these Others, these other gods, might well demand the annihilation
of the believers in our, the true faith. The gods of the others seem to
demand an obscene enjoyment that makes these others profoundly
dangerous. This is, of course, a classic instance of what psychoanaly-
sis calls ‘projection’, the attribution to another of one’s own aggres-
sion, as a rationalisation for the anxiety that the presence of the other
evokes. Žižek’s argument, then, is that unconscious belief centres on
beliefs about the ‘enjoyment of the Other’. The word ‘Other’ here
should be taken in the double sense: it is our big Other that we hold
these unconscious beliefs about, but we always project these beliefs
onto another’s Other. When, for instance, non-Muslim Westerners
begin speculating about the dangerous and fanatical beliefs of
Muslims (that they think that suicidal terrorist attacks will earn them
a bevy of virgins in Heaven as a reward for killing unbelievers, for
instance), this tells us a lot about the unconscious beliefs held by the
non-Muslim Westerners (see Chapter 6).
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While Žižek first developed his analysis with reference to the East
European example, the scope of his idea concerning Others supposed
in ideological fantasy to be thieving Our Enjoyment is much wider, as a
critique of how ideologies work in general.
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$ ◊ (a)
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wrongs Other(s) may have dealt us, we have responsibility for how
we have symbolised or ‘come to terms’ with our fate. Our ethical
task, the ethical task of psychoanalysis and of ideology critique for
the radical democratic Žižek, is to aspire to deal with Others in a way
that is not shaped by fantasies about their theft of our enjoyment (SO
124–8). The ground of this ethics is what we will see next, Žižek’s
Lacanian reconstruction of German Idealism’s theory of the subject.
So this is what we turn to now.
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that bind subjects to political regimes. That is, Žižek extends the
Enlightenment critique of ideology by exposing the unconscious
ways that the subject can remain hostage to the unjust rule of pow-
erful others, even in the ‘enlightened’ age (SO 79–80). The subject
supposes that the Other guarantees the social order and assigns the
subject a social identity. So, even when subjects resist power, they
fear shaking this Other too totally, lest they lose the bases for their
own identity. Žižek tells us how subjects, instead of exercising free
and rational agency, more often invest their most passionate, pre-
reflective energies in propping up the same unjust social order that
the ideology protects.
Put differently, Žižek’s critique of ideology aims at overcoming
heteronomy. It shows why, once subjects have peeled away or ‘tra-
versed’ the layers of ideological fantasy, they must be brought to
understand that the Other, which subjects suppose guarantees the
order and justice of their political regimes, ‘does not exist’ (FTKN
152–6; SO 114–24; TN 231–7). This means that a political regime
is never a fully self-consistent, independent whole, into which people
are born but about which they can do nothing. In the radical demo-
cratic Žižek (1989–c.1995), the political ideal that animates Žižek’s
work is the modern notion of autonomy: rational self-determination
by self-legislating individuals, in opposition to our dependent,
heteronomous subjection to the socio-political Other.
The opening of The Ticklish Subject, with which we began this
chapter, declares the philosophical basis of this Enlightenment posi-
tion. This lies in Žižek’s rehabilitation of the modern, ‘Cartesian’
subject. This notion of the subject was inaugurated by René
Descartes’s famous argument that ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogito
ergo sum) was the one idea of which he could be absolutely certain.
Descartes intended to reconstruct philosophy on this basis – doing
away with reliance on superstition, tradition, common sense and
the dogmas of the powerful. For the post-structuralists, however,
following the right-wing German philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche
and Martin Heidegger, the Cartesian subject or cogito is the most
problematic of all modern ideas. Its deeply unethical core is evident
in Descartes’s arrogant claim that his philosophical revolution
would make moderns ‘masters and possessors of nature’. For the
post-structuralists, the modern subject represents the most complete
embodiment of the Western, patriarchal dream of a fully transpar-
ent, masterful Self. The self-assertion of this modern subject accord-
ingly leads to modern humanity’s violent rejection of its own shaping
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The key thing for the moment is that Žižek, on the basis of a dis-
tinction between the subject and the Self or Ego that we will develop
further below, claims that Foucauldian-style attacks on the modern
subject are misdirected. Žižek’s subject is far from being a substan-
tial individual, Ego or Self that seeks to be the ‘master and possessor’
of everything that resists its identity. In fact, it itself resists such ‘sub-
jectivisation’. The ironic result is that many of the post-structuralist
‘critiques of the philosophy of the subject’ in fact end by actually
(mis)recognising what Žižek thinks this subject is. The irony is that
they do so under the names of what supposedly radically resists
modern philosophy: Otherness, the Other, difference, différance,
resistance, the virtual and so on. In short, Žižek’s
answer to the question asked (and answered in a negative way) by such
different philosophers as Althusser and Derrida – ‘can the gap, the
opening, the void which precedes the gesture of subjectivization, still be
called “subject”’ – is an emphatic ‘Yes!’ – . . . the subject prior to subjec-
tivization is not some idealist pseudo-Cartesian self-presence preceding
material interpellatory practices and apparatuses, but the very gap in the
structure that the imaginary (mis)recognition of the interpellatory Call
endeavours to fill. (CHU 119)
We will take the next step in our ascent towards Žižek’s reclaim-
ing of the Cartesian subject from post-structuralism by examining
what he has to say about another theoretical doyen of the 1990s,
Jacques Derrida.
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The whole effort to evade the purely theoretical form of exposing our
ideas and to adopt rhetorical devices usually preserved for literature
masks the annoying fact that at the root of what the post-structuralists
are saying there is a clearly defined theoretical position, which can be
articulated without difficulty as a pure and simple metalanguage . . . to
put it bluntly, the position from which the post-structuralist can always
make sure of the fact that ‘there is no metalanguage’ . . . is the position of
metalanguage at its purest. (SO 154–5)
The deeper basis of this Žižekian claim that deconstruction’s way
of reading ‘runs a little too smoothly’ concerns Žižek’s Lacanian
adaptation of structuralist linguistics. As with his critique of
Foucault, Žižek effectively agrees with Derrida’s post-structuralist
critique of transcendental signifieds. We saw in Chapter 1 how
Žižek also directs our attention to concepts such as God, the Nation,
the People, and so on, which allegedly stand out from the ordinary
run of other concepts. Žižek calls the things that such concepts
name ‘sublime objects of ideology’. The ‘signifiers’ that name them,
words like ‘God’ – or, to use a modern example, ‘the Party’ – are
what Žižek terms ‘master signifiers’: in his Lacanian notation, S1.
Derrida’s position is that the sublime appearance of self-presence,
certainty and splendour that an idea like God connotes for believers
conceals how this concept, ‘God’, cannot truly be self-sufficient. To
understand ‘God’, Derrida argues, we must use other signifiers and
concepts – despite the dreams of mystics to attain unmediated access
to the Godhead.
Žižek again is very close to this Derridean notion when he argues
that the master signifiers of political and theoretical ideologies
are in truth ‘empty signifiers’. Of course, from the perspective of
a true believer, God or the People are Ideas full of extraordinary
meaning, so sublime they cannot even be put into ordinary words.
In Lacanian terms, these words intimate for political subjects the
enjoyment ordinarily off limits to speaking, civilised subjects. Žižek
designates this sublime ‘stuff’, this enjoyment, with the Lacanian
notation (a), for the famous Lacanian ‘object petit a’, the object-
cause of desire.
Ideological illusion: how master signifiers appear to interpellated
subjects
S1 master signifier (e.g. ‘Australia’)
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This does not mean that the Cartesian subject as Žižek sees it is a
Transcendental Signified, as Derrideans might triumphantly rejoin.
What it means is that, where ideologies function by holding up
sublime, substantial objects ((a): the Nation, the People, etc.) before
us that demand our passive obedience, Žižek’s critique of ideology
functions by showing that our belief as subjects is the only ‘substance’
these sublime objects of ideology have. The philosophical point is
that this agency is not a stable, unchanging and self-transparent, pre-
existing substance. The political point is that, as subjects, humans
can challenge and change the master signifiers and sublime objects
political regimes hold up before them.
But to clarify all this properly, let us now look directly at Žižek’s
remarkable retrievals of the great modern philosophers, Descartes,
Kant, then Hegel.
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For Žižek following Kant, then, the following two vital distinctions are
aligned:
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change (or ‘negate’) what is given to it through the senses. This con-
ception of the subject as a negativity is why Žižek repeatedly cites in
his books the disturbing passage from the young Hegel describing
the modern subject, not as the ‘light’ of the modern Enlightenment,
but ‘this night, this empty nothing that contains everything in its
simplicity . . .’ (e.g. AF 8; ES 50; FTKN 87).
We will return to Žižek’s remarkable reading of Hegel below.
Before we do so, however, we need first to pursue how Žižek reads
Kant’s analysis of the sublime in art and nature, in The Critique
of Judgment. This analytic both (1) ties in with his account of the
subject, and (2) informs Žižek’s central political concept, of the
‘sublime’ objects of ideology that fascinate and capture subjects. It is
thus necessary to our developing story.
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our political problems upon us. For this reason, Žižek reasons,
a truly radical Act that would traverse all the coordinates of the
existing ideological regime must involve ‘identification’ with the
scapegoated internal or external ‘sinthome’ or ‘Other supposed to
cause our misfortunes’ (CHU 126–7, 149–60; PF 30–4; TN 155,
220). For instance, since the Jews were posited by Nazi ideology
as the cause of Germany’s misfortunes, any progressive politics
would have involved ‘identification’ with the Jews (CHU 126–7;
LA 140). Žižek does not specify what ‘identification’ means here,
but it seems to mean heroic symbolic and political advocacy of the
minority cause. However, in some of the more bizarre passages in
Žižek’s œuvre, Žižek openly countenances an act of radical self-
destruction – for instance, Medea’s slaying of her own children,
Sethe’s comparable Act in Toni Morrison’s Beloved or Edward
Norton’s character in Fightclub who beats himself up in front
of his boss – as (it has to be said) the unlikely means of political
empowerment in this vein. (FA 151–60).
5. Political retreat, the attitudes of ‘wait and see’, what Žižek
terms in Parallax View ‘Bartleby politics’, and the denial of any
attempt to propose a prescriptive politics. Given the oscillation
between positions, and the large problems a host of critics have
repeated concerning prescriptions 1–4, Žižek has understandably
become more politically circumspect, at least in moments of his
recent texts. The bad news is that we live in a ‘scoundrel time’
wherein possibilities for immanent progressive change cannot be
envisaged. At most we should model our political activity on the
abstract ‘I would prefer not to’ of Herman Melville’s Bartleby
(celebrated by Deleuze, Derrida and Agamben – and, we note
also, close to 1 above). In any case, theory can at most shape
subjects’ understanding of politics. The theorist cannot provide
concrete political guidance (PV 385).
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(4) The Truth underlying the (3) the (by-)product of the discourse
discourse
$ (a)
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S2 S1
The open question is whether this discourse can lead to any new,
stable regime or order, or whether it must always represent a ‘vanish-
ing mediator’ or moment of opening between two such stable orders.
We have seen how Žižek challenges all pessimistic Heideggerian and
later Frankfurt School-style accounts of modernity as enshrining the
nightmare of a totally administered, scientised brave new world,
when he defends the modern Cartesian subject. Nonetheless, Žižek
has mostly argued that the predominant ideological logics of modern
regimes have involved a mere ‘quarter turn’ in Lacan’s schema of the
four discourses, away from the pre-modern Discourse of the Master.
Both Stalinism and modern consumerism evince the structure of the
Discourse of the University, Žižek claims. The difference from what
the enlighteners aspired to is that, in these still-heteronomous socie-
ties, knowledge has the place in the four discourses not truth, but
agency. Indeed, far from questioning the bases of authority per se,
the undergirding truth in these societies remains the ‘S1’ of unques-
tionable master signifiers:
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S1 $
Challenging ‘Totalitarianism’
We have seen the ideological importance Žižek assigns to the way
everyone from liberals to conservatives and post-structuralists today
use the signifier ‘totalitarianism’. Žižek believes that his Lacanian
understanding of political regimes undermines the notion of a single
‘totalitarian’ form of government, wholly opposed to liberalism. It
does this in two ways, which we will examine in turn:
• First, Žižek distinguishes between fascism, which he argues
involves an attempt to reinstitute the Discourse of the Master in
reaction to modern liberalism, and Stalinism, which represents a
political instantiation of the Discourse of the University.
• Secondly, Žižek argues that consumerism, the predominant
ideology in later capitalism, also represents an instantiation of
the Discourse of the University, rather than the expression of a
‘freedom’ opposite to Stalinist totalitarianism.
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The problem with the Stalinist communists was that they were not ‘pure’
enough, and got caught in the perverse economy of duty: ‘I know this
is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty . . .’. Of
course, his excuse to himself (and to others) is: ‘I myself find it hard to
exert such pressure on the poor kids, but what can I do – it’s my duty!’. . .
[But] isn’t it nice to be able to inflict pain on others with the full aware-
ness that I am not responsible for it, that I merely fulfil the Other’s will?
. . . The position of the sadistic pervert provides the answer to the ques-
tion: how can a subject be guilty when he merely realises an ‘objective’,
externally imposed necessity: that is, [he can be guilty] by finding enjoy-
ment in what is imposed upon him. (FP 36)
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Consumerism, Enjoy!
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Democratic Politics
To see the homology between democracy and the Lacanian critique
of ideology, we need to recall from Chapter 1 that Žižek argues that
there is a permanent gap within the Symbolic Order of any political
regime itself. There is the public side of ideology. This calls for the
self-sacrificing identification with the regime: ‘we are all Australians,
so there are times when we have to put our differences aside . . .’.
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}
Statement Ego Ideal Inherent transgres- ‘Prohibited’ by uni-
sions. The superego: versal symbolic law
rooted in ideological – e.g. incest, murder,
fantasy etc.
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any particular ethnic community’s dream (and thus keep the space
open for them all)’ (TN 211–12).
Moral Universality
The other homology at play in Žižek’s early defence of modern
democracy is between the democratic invention and Immanuel
Kant’s moral theory. We briefly encountered this theory in Chapter
2, in the context of discussing the significance Kant attributed to our
encountering the ‘dynamic sublime’. The key thing is that Kant’s
moral theory is famous for its rigor. At its heart is a call for subjects
to do their moral duty (by following the ‘categorical imperative’ of
the moral law), no matter how much it hurts them and everything
they love. (So the parallel with Cartesian doubt is again clear: the
modern subject in Kant as well can and should doubt all inherited
conventions when faced with a moral choice. This is also why Kant,
following his Rousseau, is among the first thinkers to justify civil
disobedience to immoral laws.)
The moral law for Kant is also universal. It addresses each of us
equally, again despite race, sex, gender, class and so on, just as in
the modern democratic constitutional documents Žižek paraphrased
above. The reason it can do this, however, is somewhat paradoxi-
cal. Kant argues that, for finite, limited human beings, there is no
Sovereign Good: some particular thing or way of life that would
reunite virtue and happiness, which are so often opposed in this life.
Or at least, if there is such a thing, we cannot access it. (Žižek hence
also follows Lacan here, in seeing a parallel between the Sovereign
Good and the maternal Thing we have all lost access to as the price
of civilisation.) More than this, the very possibility of trying directly
to access such a Thing would be the worst evil of all, diabolical evil:
the principled choice of a particular Thing with the same unyielding
dutifulness that should characterise good moral action. The reason
why Kant, dramatically, thinks we cannot attain to the Sovereign
Good is the idea that humans are ‘radically evil’ (Kant’s equivalent of
original sin). This means that we have always, as particular, embod-
ied beings, somehow ‘chosen’ our own interests and needs above the
moral Law. Our radical evil nature Kant thinks is shown by how
arduous it usually is for us to have to act morally, doing unto others
as we would have done to ourselves.
So for Kant, the place held up in traditional religions and classical
philosophy of a sovereign good (whether the life of contemplation of
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} } }
Statement Hegemonic content Excluded particular Social Harmony, The
of the universal, contents, ‘unwrit- National Thing: ‘Our
public law ten law’: Others/ society does Exist’
enemies supposed (embodied in the Leader
to enjoy or Party)
ETHICS THE MORAL LAW
Enunciation
Diabolical evil = eleva-
Statement Public law as Radical evil in the
tion of the (particular)
representation of form of a principled
Supreme Good into the
the truly universal or consistent choice
place of the universal
appeal of the cat- in favour of one’s
Moral Law itself
egorical imperative: ‘pathological’ ‘self-
‘do you duty, no conceit’ or particu-
matter what!’ lar interests
SUBJECTIVITY SYMBOLIC LAW REAL
Enunciation ‘Permitted’
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for other signifiers’, we saw the debt Žižek owes in his understand-
ing of how political ideologies work to Laclau and Mouffe’s great
work, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. Žižek for a long period
endorses this theory that politics involves the struggle between rela-
tively universal ‘master signifiers’: signifiers such as ‘Democracy’ or
‘Socialism’, which compete to represent the accepted common good,
by ‘requilting’ all the other political signifiers. However, drawing on
his Lacanian-psychoanalytic account of subjectivity and the uncon-
scious, Žižek always refused to accept that political competition
between master signifiers happens on a level playing field. The reason
is social antagonism.
The theory of social antagonism is one of the most interesting
aspects of Laclau’s and Mouffe’s position. It is based on a combi-
nation of the Lacanian category of the Real with the Derridean,
deconstructive concept of différance. The social antagonism in play
here involves the fact that, for engaged political agents, the other
camp is not just the ‘other team’, a group of sterling chaps and lovely
ladies whose ideas, unfortunately, are somewhat misguided. (Indeed,
when, as is often the case in parliamentary party politics, the other
side is just the ‘other team’, this often testifies to the concealment of
social antagonism, to its displacement outside the field of mainstream
politics.) No – in social antagonism, the other camp is an abomina-
ble stain on the political life of the nation, a blot on society, and it
is so because it prevents the totality of national life from becoming
socially harmonious under our master signifier. The politics of social
antagonism are passionate and engaged. Žižek’s understanding of
subjectivity of course adds to Laclau and Mouffe that politics is such
a passionate business because it very often rests upon unconscious
fantasies about the opponent or antagonist, and their illegitimate
‘theft of enjoyment’. It is they who spoil or have stolen the enjoy-
ment of our way of life, and things would be better for us if they were
ostracised from society altogether.
Laclau’s and Mouffe’s political stance is usually called that of
‘radical-democratic’ politics. It is radical because it proposes to learn
to live with antagonism, to embrace the dimensions of democratic
and popular oppositions. In Lacanian terms, as Yannis Stavrakakis
(1999) has argued, this would mean refusing the ideological fantasy
of social harmony and the drive to annihilate the other that arises
from it. This perspective of democracy as an agon involves a spirited
defence of social movements’ challenging of the reigning ideology
and political struggle in various arenas crucial to democratic politics
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their struggle. This would involve the defiant affirmation that sexual
liberation – the free right of people to choose their mode of sexual
life – is an intrinsic part of the left-wing agenda – leading up to the
installation of a deepened and expanded universal in the empty place
of power.
But there is also a fantasy on the Left to be traversed: that, by
legally criminalising movements like the Moral Majority, we could
achieve socially harmonious sexual freedom, safe from moralising
bigotry. The radical-democratic Left has to learn to live with the
anxiety that the Right will always be with us, hostile to any deep-
ened and expanded conception of the universality of sexual freedom,
aiming to replace it with its more restricted notions in the name
of Virtue. Žižek1’s position is not utopian. Political antagonism
is a universal part of political life, so the most we can do is try to
institutionalise it in forms of radicalised democracy.
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It has to be said that the moments where Žižek takes up the cause
of radical democracy are matched from the very start by growing
hesitations of this kind. In particular, Žižek wonders: what if radical
democracy is just a radicalised liberalism, which leaves the economic
exploitation intrinsic to modern capitalism in place? One reason for
Žižek’s ambivalence surely has to be because, in all of his voluminous
oeuvre to date, Žižek has never produced a sustained analysis of
even a single liberal political philosophy. Indeed, Žižek’s thinking on
parliamentary democracy remains strictly within the coordinates of
the Marxist doctrines of the former second world. This is expressed
most graphically in Žižek’s unthinking repetition of the condensation
‘liberal democracy’ when he means representative government with
a relatively liberal economy. ‘Formal’, ‘bourgeois’ or ‘liberal’ democ-
racy is, of course, opposed to ‘real democracy’ or the ‘dictatorship
of the proletariat’, something that for Žižek initially meant: totali-
tarianism. But, as his suspicions that radical democracy involved a
renaturalisation of capitalism increased, his position on totalitarian-
ism reversed. By 2001, Laclau was able to note that in Žižek’s recent
‘R-R-Revolutionary’ turn, he advocates not only the overthrow of
capitalism in the name of ‘class struggle’ (see Chapter 5), but also the
abolition of liberal democratic regimes and their replacement with
‘proletarian dictatorship’ (CHU 289). As we will see in Part II, this is
exactly what Žižek has come vehemently to advocate.
In his excellent book The Real World of Democracy, the socialist
philosopher C. B. Macpherson elaborated on an argument originally
made by the great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. If we look at the
actual history of ‘liberal democracy’, what we see is the Right fighting
tooth and nail to prevent each and every expansion and deepening
of political universality, from the popular franchise, through female
suffrage, civil liberties and social rights, down to the extension of
the vote to indigenous people. At the same time, the vast majority
of working people passionately support parliamentary democracy
and organise their everyday struggles, from trade unionism through
to civic activism, through democratic institutions and civil society.
The democratic process is the only form of democratic training the
immense majority knows. Certainly, supplements can be imagined
that would improve the depth of civic participation in democratic
politics, ranging from workers’ councils on the soviet model through
to the trade associations of guild socialism. Those who wish to throw
away parliamentary democracy, however, seek to dispense with
something that many of the oppressed and exploited have fought
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and died for. Such people may say they are on the Left. But they may
not say that they are part of the self-emancipation of the majority of
people (Macpherson 1972, 1973, 1977).
‘Žižek’s political thought’, Laclau (2000b: 204) writes, ‘suffers
from a certain combined and uneven development’, where a sophis-
ticated theoretical apparatus is juxtaposed to political immaturity.
‘And this is because Žižek’s thought is not organized around a
truly political reflection, but is rather a psychoanalytic discourse
which takes its series of examples from the politico-ideological field’
(Laclau 2000a: 289). Perhaps that is why it is through the category
of ethics that Žižek organises his turn from radical democracy to
messianic Marxism. For They Know Not What They Do, arguably
his most radical-democratic book, nonetheless closes on an ominous
note: ‘The ethics which we have in mind here, apropos of this duty,
is the ethics of Cause qua Thing, the ethics of the Real’ (FTKN 271).
After The Metasases of Enjoyment (1994), in any case, Žižek shut
himself up in his study with the Romantic philosophy of Schelling,
and uncharacteristically wrote almost nothing for two years. When
he emerged, with The Indivisible Remainder (1996) and The Abyss
of Freedom (1997) in his hands, he was a changed man.
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Žižek’s early work shows how our implied commitments to the unity
of the social order – our unconscious belief in the ‘existence of the
Other’ – lead us to internalise forms of socio-symbolic authority that
prevent us from determining progressive new symbolic identifica-
tions and lock us into exclusionary politics, through the unconscious
mechanism of the ‘theft of enjoyment’. By grasping that ‘the Other
does not exist’, that is, by ‘traversing the social fantasy’, the subject
can propose forms of symbolic authority that refuse the superego’s
command to exclude certain marginalised others.
As we saw in Chapter 3, at this stage, for Žižek, democratic poli-
tics and moral autonomy have the same psychological structure. This
depends on rejecting the allure of a forbidden ‘supreme crime’ (and
the despised others supposed to enjoy this ultimate transgression)
by realising that this fantasy actually only props up an unjust social
order as necessary and inevitable. Although the death drive – the
‘kernel of the real’, disclosed in social antagonism – is a permanent
feature of the human condition, such that social conflict will always
exist, the crucial thing for human freedom and a politics of liberation
is to get beyond the fantasy that annihilation of our political adver-
saries will finally make the social order harmonious and whole. This
is the political equivalent to the Freudian ‘talking cure’: by under-
standing the unconscious roots of our desires, we progressively ‘drain
the Zuider Zee’ of the death drive, and arrive at a mode of social
cooperation that depends less and less on aggression and repression.
We have to find a modus vivendi with the death drive that drains it
off into the ongoing expansion of moral universality, through the
extension and deepening of democracy. Of course, we cannot hope
just to get rid of it – but at the same time, we must avoid rushing into
the void of its seductive aggression.
Writing in The Plague of Fantasies about the death drive in rela-
tion to the psychoanalytic theory of morality and politics, Žižek
asks: ‘Is not Lacan’s entire theoretical edifice torn between . . . two
options: between the ethics of desire/Law, of maintaining the gap,
and the lethal/suicidal immersion in the Thing?’ (PF 239).
Whatever the case for Lacan, this is certainly the dilemma central
to Žižek’s politics. But if the radical-democratic Žižek is all about
‘maintaining the gap’ and expanding democracy through refusing
the revolutionary Romanticism of the death’s drive’s promise of
a clean slate and a new order, then the revolutionary-vanguardist
Žižek is all about the lethal plunge into the Real. For the recent
Žižek, acknowledgement that ‘the Other does not exist’ does not
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world. This sort of a decision ‘taken in the Real’ will become the
model for Žižek’s Political Act.
• Secondly, the Symbolic Order is not something that this subject,
God, finds external to himself: it is projected out of God himself.
In psychoanalytic terms, primary repression of the ‘rotary motion
of the drives’ happens not through the entry of the infant into
the Symbolic Order under the sign of the paternal ‘no!’ to incest,
but, instead, through a radical decision taken by the subject to
project a Symbolic Order as the solution to its libidinal deadlock.
In Žižek’s Hegelian language, the symbolic Other is God himself
externalised, in the form of the Other (AF 42).
• Thirdly, in this way, this primordial Act involves ‘the principle
of identity’. God is not, in this moment of decision and Act, a
‘split’ subject. It is true that, after the Act is accomplished, He has
a ‘contracted Substance’ – namely the World – that is Other to
Himself. But the God ‘posits Itself as grounded in and simultane-
ously different from its [own] contracted Substance’, the Wor(l)d,
in His creative Act (AF 33). By implication, what Žižek is claim-
ing is that, in the authentic political Act, the political subject is no
longer a divided subject. It is an ‘acephalous saint’, a subject of
the drives – a full subject ‘in the Real’.
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that all the different fields Žižek examines must in the crucial respects
all be ‘the same’. The objects in these structures might appear to be
very different – individual psychology in the case of psychoanalysis,
collective organisation in the case of politics, cultural mythologies
in the case of popular culture, and so on – but somehow the underly-
ing structure must be the same structure in all cases. In other words,
Žižek must be arguing that one logic, or what we are about to call
a single ‘subject–object’, is at play in all these fields, unfolding or
expressing itself in them. The idea that the true object of Žižek’s
analysis is such a single ‘subject–object’ – the ‘big Other’ as the
projection/expression of an undivided subject ‘in the Real’ – is what
philosophically licenses Žižek’s characteristic sideways rhetorical
jumping between fields. All fields are ultimately the same field, the
expression/projection of the one world-constituting subject.
So, when Žižek turns to Schelling in 1996–7, we think that Žižek
finds a metaphysical and theological confirmation of his own sup-
position concerning the world as subject–object. In Schelling, he
sees himself, or a theological account for what he has been doing all
along. We have just seen how, explicitly, Žižek is fascinated by how
Schelling argues that the Other (the world, the word, the Symbolic
Order) is God himself, or his ‘contractionary’ drive, externalised. It
is He, God, a subject, before it is Other, an object. This God is not
divided first of all because he enters into a Symbolic Order, or Other,
not of his own creation. On the contrary, the division of the subject
is a solution to the problem of the ‘rotary motion of the drives’ and
the ‘vortex of madness’ involved in God’s own, internal, absolute
solipsism.
So we should not be surprised that in The Indivisible Remainder
and The Abyss of Freedom Žižek, in typical clip, interweaves his story
about how God engendered the world with psychoanalytic categories
there to explain the subjectivity of individuals. That vanishing media-
tion, the rotary motion of the divine drives, gives Žižek occasion to
raise the controversial topic – which becomes increasingly central in
Žižek2, as we shall see – of the death drive. We then discover that
the description of God as a ‘subject’ licenses Žižek to apply lessons
from the Schellingerian Creation narrative to the psycho-biography
of individual children. He simply cuts straight from the theogony to
a section on Melanie Klein’s child psychology, and Lacan’s account
of symbolic castration, as if the two objects were the same (AF 20–1,
43–4). Faced with this characteristic textual pastiche, we could say
Žižek is ‘psychoanalysing God’, already a fairly difficult endeavour.
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1. The first, decisive for Chapter 4, is that Žižek collapses the dis-
tinction between the Ego Ideal and the Symbolic Order. We exam-
ined the Ego Ideal in the context of examining Žižek’s theory of
ideology in Chapter 1. For the subject, the Ego Ideal is the locus
of symbolic identification. It is the master signifier that ‘sews’ the
subject into the social totality. In Lacan’s early seminars, the Ego
Ideal is referred to as the ‘Name of the Father’, the idea being that
symbolic identification with parental ideals is reflected in the sub-
ject’s patronymic, or surname. Just as there is a huge number of
surnames in the Symbolic Order, so too the Symbolic Order holds
many social ideals. But Žižek’s notion that the subject and the
Other are somehow ‘the same’ leads inevitably to him talking as
if the Ego Ideal and the Symbolic Order were somehow identical
– as if there were room for only a single, social ideal or highest
good in any society, and cultural pluralisation were somehow
equivalent to the undermining of social cohesion.
2. The second, decisive for Chapter 5, is that Žižek cannot conduct
a critical analysis of economic processes. Yet he himself argues
that this is decisive for an understanding of contemporary capital-
ism. The consequence is that his Marxism is mostly rhetorical, a
provocation to the hated ‘PC multiculturalists’ but not grounded
in any adequate social theory (Laclau 2000: 289–90). Elsewhere,
for instance in In Defence of Lost Causes, Žižek simply tells us
that the relations between economics and politics are logically the
same as those between the latent and manifest content of dreams
in Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. There could hardly be a
more direct statement of Žižek’s thinking of political societies as
‘subject–objects’ than this (IDLC 285–93).
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the gods were for pre-modern subjects. We note how closely Žižek’s
position here ironically approaches the worst fetishisations of the
market that emerged in the neoliberal management literature of the
soaring 1990s and early years of this century.
So the point is that, far from resolving the problem, there could
hardly be a clearer statement of Žižek’s failure to provide the politi-
cal economy for which he has called than his own repetition of the
‘Capital is the Real today’ theme. It is less a statement of theoreti-
cal understanding or insight than a confession of the inability of
his theoretical categories to gain analytic purchase on economic
concerns.
But more can and should be said about this telling mystification.
Consider the way Žižek explains the distinction between ‘reality’ and
‘the Real’ in making his case. To cite again: ‘ “reality” is the social
reality of the actual people involved in interaction, and in the produc-
tive process; while the Real is the inexorable “abstract” spectral logic
of Capital that determines what goes on in social reality.’ Notice how
Žižek’s distinction between experiential social reality and something
else, which operates anonymously ‘behind the backs’ of agents and
that cannot directly be an object of possible experience, corresponds
to the central socio-theoretical distinction in Jürgen Habermas’s
Theory of Communicative Action (Habermas 1984, 1987a).
For Habermas, the lifeworld (Žižek’s ‘social reality’) is something
inhabited by subjects and experienced as a meaningful world. By
contrast, the system (Žižek’s ‘Capital as Real’) is a network of proc-
esses that function independently of the intentions of the agents who
operate these processes. The actions of agents in the economy and the
administration are integrated, meshed, through anonymous ‘steer-
ing media’ such as money and power, and not through the intended
meaningfulness of subjects’ actions. Thus, for instance, subjects go
to work in a workplace – an experiential arena full of meaningful
(for example, just and unjust) relationships. But the actions per-
formed in this workplace, which require subjective motivation and
social ideals to perform, are integrated into the economic system
through the movement of prices, in ways that have nothing to do
with the employees’ motivations and ideals. The systematic regulari-
ties of the economy and administration can be detected only from
the perspective of an observer – participants cannot experience this
directly. Yet the workings of the system have very concrete effects in
the lifeworlds of subjects, including the devastating consequences of
economic dislocation and political turmoil.
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Part Two
Žižek2
Chapter 4
Introduction
Žižek regards the supposed consumer paradise at the ‘end of history’
more as a bleak dystopia. With Marxists such as Fredric Jameson,
Žižek describes postmodern culture as the cultural logic of global
capitalism. But Žižek adds that this culture is characterised by ‘gen-
eralised perversion’ (e.g. OB 20). The cultural liberation of ‘new
individualists’, which is supposed to go with economic globalisation,
is really a new domination of the individual by capitalism.
Žižek’s description, to be examined now, of the contemporary
situation as ‘generalised perversion’ needs to be read in conjunction
with his basic assessment of the period in terms of the ‘end of history’.
The ‘triumph of capitalism’ means a society ruled by what Marx called
‘commodity fetishism’, wherein the dominance of capitalism seems
natural and inevitable. Although Marx based his idea of commodity
fetishism on anthropology, Žižek adds to it a psychological aspect,
not just in individuals’ perverse fetishisation of consumer items, but,
more fundamentally, in individuals’ disavowal of the way that capi-
talism now rules their lives. Individuals today, in the industrialised
world, celebrate a cultural liberation that for Žižek has a darker
underside – where their celebration of cultural struggles for recogni-
tion, new identity possibilities and market-driven cultural differences
conceals the radical depoliticisation of the capitalist economy.
For Žižek, this depoliticisation prevents us from confronting
global injustice head on. As he shows in works like Iraq: The
Borrowed Kettle (2004), with its recognition of human-rights vio-
lations committed by imperialism, and in books like On Violence
(2008), with its critique of the structural violence of global capital-
ism, world capitalism involves manifold suffering. Mindlessly to
celebrate consumerism, or even to engage in cultural politics in the
privileged centres of the industrialised world without making any
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surprise. The attempt to dispense with the Ego Ideal, or master signi-
fier, failed to consider the possibility that aggression was in fact the
result, not of the Ego Ideal, but of the superego, and that, actually,
the master signifier pacifies the superego by regulating it through a
symbolic contract. Žižek maintains that dethroning the Ego Ideal
meant liberation of the superego and that postmodernism begins
when this process is complete (IDLC 30; PV 303–4; TS 313). By the
time of our late capitalist consumerism, what has emerged is a society
without any reigning social ideals, where subjects are delivered over
to the brutal injunctions of an unrestrained superego.
Far from expressing a new freedom, then, the constant pressure
to consume today represents a punishing injunction. It is as if an
inverted moral conscience operated in all of us, forcing us to do our
‘duty’ of consumption. This breaks up social bonds and isolates the
individual. As Žižek says, ‘from all sides, Right and Left, complaints
abound today about how, in our postmodern societies composed of
hedonistic solipsists, social bonds are progressively disintegrating;
we are increasingly reduced to social atoms’ (IDLC 34). What is
missing, then, is the figure who embodies the social bond, the master
(IDLC 35) – and what is wanted, Žižek’s analysis seems to suggest, is
an alternative to the Enlightenment: instead of the superego without
the master, the master without the superego.
In this chapter we are going to discuss Žižek’s diagnosis of the
‘spirit of the times’ as the ‘reign of the superego’ and ‘generalised
perversion’. We need to know not only whether this is a credible
description of contemporary social reality, but also what the fault
lines in the situation are that make an escape possible, and whether
Žižek has overlooked anything of importance that qualifies his par-
ticular vision.
Reflexive Modernity
To understand why Žižek thinks that the new era is a wasteland for
political resistance, we need to look at how he sets up his analysis
of the latest stage of capitalism via a critique of celebrations of the
new epoch as ‘reflexive modernity’. According to sociologists Ulrich
Beck and Anthony Giddens, we are in the midst of the unfolding of
a major new epoch in Western history, a ‘second Enlightenment’
bringing ‘reflexive modernity’, whose cultural implications will be
as dislocating as was the advent of modernity in the Renaissance.
For them, modernity was characterised by the use of radical doubt
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Pathological Narcissism
The roots of Žižek’s concerns about the decline in paternal author-
ity run deep – all the way back to his early, enthusiastic embrace of
the neoconservative, psychoanalytically influenced social theory of
Christopher Lasch, in Žižek’s Looking Awry (1991). According to
Lasch, the ‘permissive society’ of late capitalism has turned decisively
aside from the work ethic to adopt consumerist hedonism. Catalysed
by the youth rebellions of the 1960s, the new anti-authoritarian atti-
tude of the late capitalist individual has become the norm in a society
that can no longer tolerate delayed gratification, and that actually
requires the desire for instant satisfaction as the driving mechanism of
consumer culture. These individuals – themselves deeply ambivalent
in their attitudes to authority – although they lack the internalised
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But after Looking Awry, the term ‘maternal superego’, with its
connotations of strident anti-feminism and cultural conservatism,
disappears from Žižek’s theoretical lexicon. In its place, a whole series
of substitute expressions make their appearance: the decline of pater-
nal authority, the decline of symbolic authority, the ferocious God,
superego enjoyment and, most exotically of all, ‘the phallophany of
the anal father’ (ES 124–46). What remains the same is the diagnosis
that there is a fundamental disturbance in subjects’ relation to the
father and that this potently distorts the Symbolic Order per se.
Initially, the name for this disturbance is ‘pathological narcissism’,
as relayed through Lasch’s appropriation of the clinical category. In
the psychological work of Otto Kernberg, pathological narcissism is
a diagnostic category located in the borderline conditions that sur-
round fully blown psychosis. Because of a deficient internalisation of
the Ego Ideal, the pathological narcissist displays low anxiety toler-
ance, a narcissistic inability to love others and high levels of promis-
cuity combined with rage.
Lasch (and Žižek) incorporate this category into a historical nar-
rative about the passage from the autonomous individual of liberal
capitalism, through the ‘organisational man’ of monopoly capitalism,
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Ambivalent Diagnosis
Now we have a fairly good idea of what Žižek is driving at with the
idea of the ‘decline of paternal authority’. But what are the politics
of this position?
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Notice, though, that the culprit here is not so much global capi-
talism as the culture of modernity itself. According to Žižek, with
the decline of the Ego Ideal, the superego’s policing of transgres-
sions through guilt turns into the elevation of transgression into the
norm – a consequence of the way that, for Lacan, the superego is
the malevolent gaze of the Ego Ideal ‘in the Real’, as an agency that
makes the subject guilty through its simultaneous instigation and
punishment of transgressions. Lacking the symbolic identification
that would define a limit beyond which transgressions are punished,
the superego simply enjoins transgression.
There is a certain resonance between Žižek’s claim and a com-
monplace of neoconservative social commentary, the depiction of
late capitalism as the ‘fun society,’ where the provocations of the
artistic avant-garde become the logic of advertising-driven consump-
tion. Consumerism’s constant demand for novelty, combined with
capitalism’s recuperation of every form of cultural rebellion as a
commodified stylistic innovation, mean that the norm of transgres-
sion is driven by an uncanny repetition compulsion that has a ‘dae-
monic’ quality to it. But, according to Žižek, the superego injunction
to enjoy (and the consequent guilt in failing to comply with this
demand for pleasure) is an effective prohibition against enjoyment
– once everything is permitted, nothing is desired. The subject expe-
riences an abstract guilt and tremendous anxiety, without the bonus
of pleasure associated with a real transgression, because there are no
longer any clearly symbolised limits. In Father’s absence, in other
words, instead of fun, we get a sort of gothic inversion of the con-
sumer funhouse: ‘the lack of symbolic prohibition is supplemented
by the re-emergence of ferocious superego figures . . . [and] so-called
postmodern subjectivity thus involves a kind of direct “superegoisa-
tion” of the imaginary Ideal, caused by the lack of a proper symbolic
Prohibition’ (TS 353).
Žižek argues that this ‘direct “superegoisation” of the imaginary
Ideal’ cashes out at two levels: that of the big Other (the Symbolic
Order) and the little other (the other person). The Symbolic Order,
he proposes, disintegrates into an archipelago of ‘small big Others’,
islands of regulation in a sea of transgression, generating a multiplicity
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So readers can also see that Žižek’s connection between the disap-
pearance of a cohesive ideal and the triumph of capitalism has some
concerning implications. For one thing, the insistence on a single Ego
Ideal as the bond of social cohesion for all citizens in a society implies
that multicultural society and political pluralism are a problem. For
another thing, it means that the radical-democratic political strategy
of supporting multiple struggles for cultural recognition and different
sorts of political demands (ecological, feminist, and so on), actually
makes things worse.
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Chapter 5
A Paradoxical View
We saw in the Introduction how political philosophy addresses the
questions of what is desirable (the best form(s) of regime) and what
is possible. We also saw that the politics of different philosophers
rests on competing visions of the human condition. Yet if people can
remake the world, they never do so under conditions wholly of their
own choosing. Theorists’ prescriptions concerning what is possible –
with a view to the highest possible good political subjects can pursue
– will be determined by their descriptive estimation of the present
world. As Žižek’s thought has developed, he has turned from the
advocacy of an extension and deepening of democracy to an entire
change of political regime. So what does Žižek end by proposing as
possible or desirable, given his estimation of the present ‘scoundrel
time’? How can we interpret Žižek’s politics, and how does his
political philosophy measure up?
In this chapter, focusing on Žižek’s two recent long books, The
Parallax View and In Defence of Lost Causes, we are going to show
how Žižek, since 1997, has increasingly come to embrace a position
calling for a total revolution against global capitalism. This is not
a simple position to interpet, because Žižek frames it as a reaction
against what he calls the ‘liberal blackmail’ that, as soon as people
criticise the existing status quo, they become ‘terrorists’ or ‘totalitar-
ians’ or ‘fascists’. Is Žižek’s position a provocation designed to open
up debate again by refusing this blackmail, or is it what he now
believes is necessary and desirable?
Part of the difficulty may be that Žižek himself does not really
escape the logic of this blackmail, although his merit is to call it
what it is. Žižek’s rebellion against the hidden violence of today’s
liberal democracies (OV 9–29), together with his recent philosophi-
cal Romanticism, seem to drive him fatefully towards a reactionary,
merely adversarial stance. In In Defence of Lost Causes, Žižek defi-
antly announces that the work is something like every liberal’s worst
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The logic of Žižek’s argument, which claims that all these forms of
politics represent so many ‘neutralisations and depoliticisations’ of
politics, means that we should not be surprised that the last, ‘take-all’
category Žižek introduces in The Ticklish Subject is ‘post-politics’.
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But the real question, given Žižek’s criticisms of arche-, para-, meta-
and ultra-politics, is what is his alternative, and why does it open the
dimension of ‘politics proper’, or ‘the Political,’ when the others do
not?
As we shall see, many critics have argued that Žižek, rather than
providing an alternative, merely combines the main features of meta-
and ultra-politics (e.g. Parker 2004: 85–104). He thereby generates
a form of Schmittian, decisionistic ultra-politics that adopts a super-
ficial meta-political coloration as ‘messianic Marxism’ in order to
position its hostility to global capitalism and liberal democracy as on
the Left.
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Indeed, we have been living – between 1989 and 2008 – through two
decades in which capitalism has had an unprecedented dominance
around the globe. Economics now has an unprecedented centrality
in public discourse. It is the key component of the post-political con-
sensus, with which even moderate progressive ideas are quickly wal-
loped over the metaphorical head – ‘as good as that sounds, it will
lead to increased spending, hence higher taxes, more bureaucracy,
crowding out of capital markets, disincentives for investment . . .’.
It is these observations that underlie Žižek’s untenable attempt to
identify Capital today with the Lacanian Real (FA 15; OV 13).
Yet contemporary ‘radical’ theory in this very period – everyone
from the democrat Laclau to the ultra-Leftist Alain Badiou – has
been overwhelmingly silent in this period concerning economics, and
its key role in shaping people’s lived experiences. This is a remark-
able observation, confirming that something like Žižek’s notion of a
disavowal of economics must be true:
as long as the fundamental depoliticisation of the economic sphere is
accepted, all the talk about . . . public discussion leading to responsible
collective decisions . . . will remain limited to the ‘cultural’ issues of reli-
gious, sexual, ethnic . . . differences, without actually encroaching upon
the level at which long-term decisions that affect us all are made. (TS
353)
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Bartleby, who simply says ‘I would prefer not to’ when confronted
with authority’s call to act; to Yannis Stavrakakis’s alleged recent cel-
ebration of (citing Žižek’s dismissive gloss): ‘Paleolithic communities
practicing a Zen road to affluence’ (IDLC 330).
Žižek’s one exception to the theoretical rule of the disavowal of
the economy, for instance, lies in Hardt and Negri, authors of the
important works Empire (2000) and Multitude (2005). He notes
that these books, unlike those of Žižek’s other academic interlocu-
tors, have the merit of actually engaging with the emerging global
anti-capitalist movement (PV 261). Yet, among Žižek’s many telling
criticisms of Hardt and Negri, perhaps the clincher is that their work
ends in an all-too-common, weak messianism. Messianism is the
hope for a coming messiah who or which will redeem the present
fallen world, without our own actions, but as if by divine grace.
Historian Gerschom Scholem (1971) noted how messianism in the
Jewish tradition always emerged at the moments of the gravest politi-
cal crises and defeat (for instance, the expulsion of the Jewish com-
munity from Spain by the Inquisition), wherein no political solutions
to present woes could be envisaged. Just so, Hardt and Negri end
Empire by invoking the hope for new revolutionaries, and an abso-
lute expressive democracy, which would somehow bring to politics
the apolitical Christian spirit of St Francis of Assisi. As Žižek writes,
in words that could, as we will see, very well read as a devastatingly
ironic self-critique:
That is to say, what we do and should expect is a description of the
notional structure of this qualitative jump, from the multitudes resisting
the One of sovereign power to the multitudes directly ruling themselves.
Leaving the notional structure of this passage in a darkness elucidated
only by vague analogies and examples from resistance movements cannot
but arouse the suspicion that this self-transparent direct rule of everyone
over everyone, this democracy tout court, will coincide with its opposite.
(PV 262).
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entire new subject–objects. Providing the model for this set of ideas,
the first Žižekian political subject was Schelling’s divided God, who
gave birth to the entire Symbolic Order before the beginning of time
(IDLC 153; OB 144–8).
But can the political theorist reasonably hope or expect that sub-
jects will simply give up on all their inherited ways, myths and beliefs,
all in one world-creating moment? And can they be legitimately asked
or expected to, on the basis of a set of ideals whose legitimacy they
will only retrospectively see, after they have acceded to the Great
Leap Forward? And if they do not – for Žižek laments that today sub-
jects are politically disengaged in unprecedented ways – what means
can the theorist and his allies use to move them to do so?
Žižek, as ever, does not shrink from drawing the only possible con-
clusion: the politics of the Act is a politics of voluntaristic, groundless
or ‘divine’ violence (IDLC 162). Biting the pessimistic bullet, Žižek2
indeed maintains that all political power (and even all speech itself) is
tainted with ‘obscene violence’ (IDLC 378; OV 58–72; PV 307) This is
an extrapolation of his claim that there is no Law and Symbolic Order
without the superego, which we saw in Chapter 4. It is a repackag-
ing of the (neo)conservative, later Freudian, position on civilisation’s
ineradicable discontents, whose bleakness invites us to wonder how
any power could be legitimated as better than any other.
So it is understandable that Žižek has attracted the critical charge
that he is a Schmittian ‘ultra-politician’: someone who militarises
politics. Tellingly, his only response is to argue that, while the ‘Right’
externalises political conflict into war, the ‘Left’ accepts that conflict
rives societies from within: this is class struggle. So Žižek does not
give any ground, as we will see, on the equation of politics with
potentially violent conflict between competing ‘concrete universals’.
It is as if he believes not in draining the Zuider Zee of irrational
drives, but in learning to swim in it better than the antagonist can.
Žižek’s move is to go from describing politics as based on travers-
ing the fantasy to resting his model for revolutionary agency on the
later Lacan’s difficult notion that the end of the cure involves iden-
tifying with the sinthome. Notably, like Freud’s later notion of the
intractable death drive, this sinthome responds to the later Lacan’s
pessimism about the power of the talking cure. As per Žižek’s cri-
tique of Stavrakakis above, it names an unmediatisable, unchanging
‘knot’ of Jouissance. It lies at the subject’s most singular, idiosyn-
cratic heart: an exceptional or ‘extimate’ mode of enjoyment that it
can neither traverse nor publicly avow. When Žižek2 applies this to
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new global order, as some potential ‘evental site’ wherein a new revo-
lutionary energy might be found. The problem is that the only thing
the suffering millions in the favellas have in common with Marx’s
proletariat is that they have virtually nothing to lose within the exist-
ing regime. The key difference from the nineteenth-century proletar-
iat is that the economic system precisely does not need these people’s
labour or support in order to reproduce itself – as Žižek typically
confesses, as if this were not absolutely crucial (IDLC 420, 425; PV
269). Unlike the working class, they do not have any economic good
or capacity – like collective labour – without which the existing order
could not function, and which they could potently withdraw from the
existing status quo. They are rather more like what Giorgio Agamben
has called bleakly the Homo Sacer: human beings without rights,
whose killing can have no sacrificial value to the system (IDLC 425;
PV 269,). Nor, thinking politically, is there any reason to think that
their abject impoverishment alone (rather than the education of
working and operating the industrial means of production on which
the system depends) can engender anything like a more technically
and ethicopolitically enlightened form of political solidarity, to
which the Left might appeal as a model for a new society.
In characteristic fashion, Žižek is too sophisticated not to note
the weakness of romanticising the revolutionary potential of slum-
dwellers, in his criticisms of Hardt and Negri (IDLC 359, 365; PV
264). The type of political movement that is actually flourishing
in these semi-autonomous zones is Pentecostal Christianity, and
other forms of religious fundamentalism (IDLC 424–5). In criticis-
ing Laclau’s populist turn, Žižek makes the observation that cities’
displaced lumpenproletarians, far from being the agents of progres-
sive change, have most often in history been mobilised as the shock
troopers of tyrannical regimes, like that of Louis Bonaparte (IDLC
280–1, 285–6). In this vein, Žižek recognises that the Third World
lumpenproletariat lacks the most elementary political organisation,
let alone constituting an imminent revolutionary movement ‘at the
gates’ (IDLC 426). We can only infer that the sole way Žižek believes
they could be so organised is from the outside, or from above, by
a revolutionary vanguard (IDLC 427). It is little wonder in any
case that the only ‘revolutionary’ potential Žižek sees in them is the
‘divine’ explosion of anomic violence he witnessed in Rio de Janeiro
when the men and women of the favellas suddenly issued down into
the city, ‘blindly’ smashing things like biblical locusts (IDLC 163), or
Hugo Chaves’s ‘militarising’ of the favellas (IDLC 427).
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or regime, but also all the existing cultural practices, ways of life and
ideological fantasies? The answer is that terror will be required, and a
highly disciplined cadre of elites willing to do whatever it takes. This
is why, after 1999, Žižek does not shrink from arguing that Stalinism
– particularly the Stalinism of 1928 to 1936, the period of the purges
and the cult of personality – is the unavoidable truth of Leninism:
what Leninism can and should embrace, if it wants to enact a new
groundless mode or order. Horrible as it was, Žižek argues, Stalin’s
ultra-Left period involved the change of everything, down to the
most minute practices in people’s ways of living, courtship rituals,
ways of working, making love, preparing food, and so on (IDLC
174–5; PV 287–8). This is what Žižek describes in In Defence of Lost
Causes as the ‘Stalinist carnival’: a world in which indeed the Other,
let alone a ‘New Class’, was never stabilised, since in the afternoon a
condemned man could be freed as arbitrarily as he had been impris-
oned or marked for extermination in the morning (IDLC 246–53).
The enemy of the type of ultra-Leftist total upheaval Žižek dreams
of – and in whose light even Mao’s Cultural Revolution, as we are
surprised to learn, was not radical enough – is ‘habit’ (IDLC 171–4;
OV 167–8). (‘Habit’ in fact corresponds in On Violence and In
Defence of Lost Causes to the place formerly held by ideological
fantasies and the material, inherent transgressions that sustain a
regime.) To oppose habits, the party elite, meanwhile, need a remark-
able list of ‘virtues’ that include the ‘discipline of patience’ (IDLC
391–2) required ‘brutally [to] impose a new order’ (IDLC 419),
the ‘Badiouian’ courage (IDLC 152) ruthlessly to force through
the total cultural upheaval despite people’s lethargy and ‘all-too-
human’ attachments, and the type of ‘trembling’ Heideggerian or
Machiavellian ‘terror’ at the absence of any rational ground for the
‘new beginning’ (IDLC 431). The ‘bitter truth to be fully endorsed’,
Žižek argues, is that to be fully human we must become inhuman,
and ‘assert the inhuman’ (IDLC 160, 164–75). This is what it is to
be an authentic subject of the drives: acephalous or mindless, like the
dog Lassie in her pursuit of her duty (AF 81), the terminator in the
classic sci-fi films, or Howard Roark, the hero of the Nietzschean-
neoliberal author Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead (AF 82–3). Stridently,
Žižek cites Badiou’s endorsement of Saint-Just’s strict political
Manicheism: ‘For, as Saint-Just asked: “What do those who want
neither virtue nor terror want?” His answer is well known: they want
corruption – another name for the subject’s defeat’ (IDLC 160).
Žižek closes In Defence of Lost Causes, then, by listing the four
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We wonder, then, whether the Leader could express the political will
of the revolutionary vanguard in any other way than by messianically
imposing it upon the lumpenproletariat, who would in turn impose
it on society. The provocative rhetoric of ‘reactivated’ informers, the
voluntaristic willingness to exercise ‘brutal terror’ in ‘asserting the
inhuman’ supposedly inauthentically covered over by postmodern
liberalism, and so forth, do not exactly set these concerns to rest.
Žižek concludes In Defence of Lost Causes by openly advocat-
ing that we completely ditch liberal democracy. It turns out that we
should embrace the term ‘dictatorship’ – of course, a dictatorship of
the proletariat, which would no doubt be claimed as a ‘participa-
tory democracy’ even more democratic than the ‘dictatorship of the
bourgeoisie’ that is representative government. But, when all this is
combined with the apparent contradiction that Žižek first refuses the
inclusive term ‘the people’ for the divisive term ‘the proletariat’, but
ends up advocating ‘trust in the people’, we might well wonder how
carefully thought out all this really is (IDLC 162, 414–15).
Žižek’s analysis of contemporary ‘post-politics’ is acute and his
criticisms of radical academia’s alternatives are incisive. But Žižek
himself sometimes seems uncertain as to what the alternative actu-
ally is. The logic of the position he has been developing since his turn
to the Romantic philosophy of Schelling in the late 1990s, however,
increasingly drives Žižek in the direction of a revolutionary van-
guardism that smacks of left-wing authoritarianism. Although it is
often difficult to disentangle the provocations from the positions, it
seems that Žižek’s frustration with the lack of political resistance to
contemporary capitalism is leading him to adopt extreme positions
that can easily (as they did with Sorel) prepare a political jump from
Left to Right, across the bridge made by reactive hostility to liberal
parliamentarianism and representative democracy.
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These two reasons for the theological turn overlap, because, if religion is
a resource for political criticism, and also provides a framework for social
order, then this means an analysis of religion can do two things. Religion
can be the blueprint for the Ego Ideal that Žižek believes society needs
(Chapter 4). It can also be the model for the ideological conversion Žižek
thinks is required for the political Act that is necessary to get this new
order (Chapter 5).
rape and kill’. The other side of this new focus on the Neighbour is
Žižek’s wager that, because ‘God is unconscious’, religion outlines
profound strategies for dealing with the frighteningly irrational
kernel of aggression in the human being.
Žižek’s idea is that capitalism itself, through the decline of
symbolic authority that it engenders, also regenerates the biblical
problem of the Neighbour in a particularly vivid way – the term
‘the Neighbour’, in other words, increasingly becomes the cipher for
all the postmodern cultural discontents he diagnoses in pieces like
‘Whither Oedipus?’ The difficulty with this later-Žižekian concep-
tualisation of the world is the idea that society is at base a ‘war of
each against all’ conducted by bestial, mutually hostile individuals.
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Žižek constantly insists that the other person is one’s neighbour, but
that the Neighbour is a threatening figure who poses the question of
anti-social aggression as the radical evil of the human condition (e.g.
IDLC 16). The problem is that such a deeply cynical view has, in the
history of political philosophy, rarely led to any conclusions except
the need for authoritarian government legitimised in theological
terms. For the neoconservatives, for instance, the recommendation
is ‘a blend of economic liberalism with a minimally ‘authoritarian’
spirit of community’ (IDLC 2) – that is, the free market, the strong
state and a return to religion.
We also saw in Chapter 4 how Žižek is committed to an account
of political life according to which social order depends upon a
unified framework of belief – that is, a form of the social bond in
which all individuals are committed to a single Cause. When this
is combined with an approach to the problem of social order that
arises from the supposition that the basis of human sociality is the
encounter between dangerous bearers of the death drive, the result
is a solution that eerily resembles the neoconservative one. Unlike
the neoconservatives, Žižek is hostile to market economics, but, like
them, he thinks that a single unifying framework of beliefs modelled
on religious faith solves the fundamental problem of human anti-
sociality. Žižek makes a heroic attempt to differentiate his solution
from that of orthodox religion, despite an evident attraction. He does
this through his notion that a ‘radical Christianity’ would involve the
emptying-out of particularistic religious belief into a pure formal uni-
versality. This would mean, ultimately, a sort of Christianity without
God as Father, or a Christianity conceived as the only religion for
which God as Transcendent Father is dead, having died in Christ on
the cross.
Let us now examine how this is so.
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• ‘God’ is the universal, the master signifier that quilts the field of
meanings for the believer and makes them experience the world
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There are two main interpretations of how Christ’s death deals with sin:
sacrificial and participatory. . . . The first approach is legalistic: there is
a guilt to be paid for, and, by paying our debt for us, Christ redeemed
us (and, of course, thereby forever indebted us); from the participation-
ist perspective, on the contrary, people are freed from sin not by Christ’s
death as such, but by sharing in Christ’s death, by dying to sin, to the way
of the flesh. (PD 102; cf. FA 157–8)
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for the ‘Christian’ political decision Žižek asks his readers to take.
Indeed, Žižek flirts romantically at every moment with the position
that asking for such reasons is a sign of existential failure to commit
or decide: the inability to achieve the type of religious–political devo-
tion he wants is readers to embrace. What is certain is that what
Žižek wants from Kierkegaard is a legitimating emphasis on standing
by one’s decision, no matter what the consequences. ‘Liberal leftists
reject the Social Democratic “compromise”,’ Žižek prophesies:
they want a true revolution, yet they shirk the actual price to be paid for
it and thus prefer to adopt the attitude of a Beautiful Soul and to keep
their hands clean. In contrast to this false radical Leftists’ position (who
wants true democracy for the people, but without the secret police to fight
counter-revolution, without their academic privileges being threatened),
a Leninist, like a Conservative, is authentic in the sense of fully assum-
ing the consequences of his choice, i.e., of being fully aware of what it
actually means to take power and to exert it. (OB 4)
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have met often in this book) who supplies Žižek with his ‘Pauline’
formula for revolution today: far from a pastoral forbearance and
turning the other cheek, Christian love is ‘the emergency political
suspension of the law in the name of an ethical teleology’ (PD 112).
Certainly, we now have travelled the strangely short distance from
Žižek’s emphasis on Pauline love to the type of authoritarian van-
guardism we saw him endorse in Chapter 5.
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In other words, the Other may keep the formal shell of its way of life,
but only with the decaffeinated substance of exotic rituals, clothing
and interesting cuisine. How then does Žižek propose to break out
of this contemporary malaise of false projections and fetishisations of
the Other? Žižek since 2000 has sought to return us to what he now
evidently regards as the elementary matrix of human sociality:
When Freud and Lacan insist on the problematic nature of the basic
Judeo-Christian injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’, they are thus not just
making the standard critico-ideological point about how every notion of
universality is coloured by our particular values and thus implies secret
exclusions. They are making a much stronger point about the incompat-
ibility of the Neighbour with the very dimension of universality. What
resists universality is the properly inhuman dimension of the Neighbour.
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This brings us back to the key question: does every universal ethics have
to rely on such a gesture of fetishistic disavowal? The answer is: every
ethics that remains ‘humanist’ (in the sense of avoiding the inhuman core
of being-human), that disavows the abyssal dimension of the Neighbour.
‘Man’, ‘human person’, is a mask that conceals the pure subjectivity of
the Neighbour. (IDLC 16)
So we have to note that Žižek here is suggesting that the encounter
with the Neighbour is not merely something that comes with today’s
decline of symbolic authority (although this is true). It is something
fundamental to human existence, and recalcitrant to all symbolic
‘universality’. The ‘pure subjectivity of the Neighbour’ is the encoun-
ter with the Other as bearer of the Real qua ‘kernel of human exist-
ence’: ‘at its most fundamental, the proximity of the Neighbour,
with all the Judaeo-Christian–Freudian weight of this term, [is] the
proximity of the thing which, no matter how far away it is physically,
is always by definition too close”’ (OV 45).
The present decline of symbolic authority in this light has the
merit of confronting us with this usually repressed Truth most
openly, and provoking us to make a decision. What is needed, Žižek
boldly asserts in In Defence of Lost Causes, is an ethics of ‘practical
anti-humanism’, rather than the postmodernists’ theoretical attacks
on modern humanistic politics and ideas, coupled with their increas-
ingly fraught, repetitive invocations of messianic Otherness (IDLC
164–6).
But what on earth can a ‘practical anti-humanism’ amount to,
especially since Žižek is quite open in saying that it alone would con-
front the abyssal or diabolical evil at the death drive’s heart of subjec-
tivity? The reply of the revolutionary-vanguardist Žižek is: theology.
For, like Lacanian psychoanalysis as he reads it, theological discourse
is nothing if not ‘anti-humanist’. From the theological perspective,
humanity is not the standard of value but subordinate to God.
The biblical solution to the problem of the Neighbour is the
external imposition of a religiously grounded legal code: the Ten
Commandments of Mosaic Law, in Exodus. This Law is internalised
as the voice of conscience, or Ego Ideal, of the orthodox subject. But
for him, this Law represents God’s revealed Will for human beings,
mediated by His prophets. The Ten Commandments, for instance,
were experienced by the ancient Hebrews as a traumatic external
injunction originating from their transcendent Ego Ideal, YHWH.
Interestingly, following Lacan in a way that brings him close to this
orthodox stance, Žižek has long seen the imposition of Mosaic Law
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drive central to Žižek’s recent work – Freud also raises the political
theorist Thomas Hobbes. In particular, Freud notes the proximity
of psychoanalysis to the Hobbesian notion of homo homini lupus
(man is wolf to man), when it posits an irremovable seed of aggres-
sion in human nature that makes any too progressive, too ‘idealis-
tic’ approaches to politics so many species of whistling in the wind
(Freud 1985: 302).
We can say, therefore, that Žižek’s Neighbour is just a recent
version of the type of argument Hobbes made when he contended
that humans in the prepolitical ‘state of nature’ were prone to mutual
violence, which is itself a secular echo of grimmer Augustinian and
Lutheran views about the unredeemable Evil of the cities of men.
Žižek2’s twist on this argument consists of his in fact far bleaker
Freudo-Lacanian pendant to the Hobbesian way of framing the
problem of social order – that is, of how to bring peace to violent,
self-interested human beings. If Žižek’s view of the Neighbour is
right, individuals confront one another not just as proud and self-
interested but rational calculators, as in Hobbes. The Žižekian
Truth is that we are each to the Other irrational projectors, imagi-
nary rivals who are also bearers of the death drive, drawn to obscene
Jouissance. In the later Žižek’s view, that is, the fragile rationality
of individuals is undermined by this mechanism of projection (for
which the Other confronts the ego as the bearer of perverse satisfac-
tions) and our instinct for self-preservation itself is undermined by
the death drive – for Žižek rightly notes that psychoanalysis teaches
that, once the question of perverse satisfactions has been raised,
subjects can and very often will go beyond the pleasure principle in
their drive to annihilate the ‘Other supposed to enjoy’. In terms of
political realism, if the human being is a Žižekian Neighbour to the
other, then human societies are permanently threatened by the pos-
sible outbreak of fighting in a libidinally supercharged war of each
against all.
We cannot help but remark that what has vanished in this Freudo-
Hobbesian framing of the question of social order is what was
present in the early Žižek’s Hegelian work – namely, the notion of
the Symbolic Order as both the peaceful medium of human socia-
bility, and the minimal condition for subjects to take on any kind
of political identity at all (Chapter 1). As we pass from the early
Hegelian works, beyond Schelling, into the later theological works,
that is, we pass between two completely distinct conceptions of the
political subject:
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Or, rationally, they take the law into their own hands. The only way
to prevent a constant relapse into the state of nature, then, is to make
certain that ‘individuals keep their covenants’. And Hobbes, with
consummate materialistic cynicism, proposes that religion is just the
ticket. Where people do not sufficiently understand how the rule of
law benefits their self-interest, or fear the State, the dread of God
and infinite punishment for transgressions should be deployed by
Leviathan to keep them in line.
An onus falls on defenders of Žižek’s recent turn to political the-
ology to show that this type of cynical solution does not beckon at
the gates of his recent thought, especially in the light of the sharp
authoritarian turn we documented in Chapter 5. If liberalism is to be
overcome, new Žižekian subjects committed unconditionally to the
Cause will be required. These subjects must accept the need teleologi-
cally to suspend the ethical in the revolutionary moment, and then
purge outsiders and counter-revolutionaries after the revolutionary
Act has succeeded. Yet Žižek has no concrete vision of a better world
that might inspire the New Men, nor does he present any compelling
vision of human flourishing, beyond the rather grim, Romanticist
appeal to us authentically to accept the death drive at our hearts.
Subjects’ rational, debated commitment to the New Cause cannot
be asked by him – at the threat of our regressing back into the idle
chatter of liberal postmodernism. Certainly also, we know that Žižek
refuses to oppose Christian love to ‘divine violence’, with the distinct
implication that the liberated community of believers may be freed
to suspend the ordinary rules of human sociability. On the other
hand, the only solution to the encounter between Neighbours Žižek
proposes is their both accepting the same, neo-Christian master signi-
fier – a conversion, in other words, to a new faith based on a ‘love’
without determinate ethical or political content, more a ‘belonging to
belonging’ or ‘stubborn attachment’ to a Cause, rather than an enno-
bling political vision. In this way, incidentally, it is tempting to say in
the language of recent political debate that there is a ‘communitarian’
core to Žižek’s dialectical psychoanalysis, most potently displayed in
his hostility to liberal multiculturalism and his advocacy of religious
communities as the paradigm for a new form of political solidarity.
Building on what we argued in Chapter 4, we think that Žižek’s
preference for Christianity and his hostility to multiculturalism
suggest his inescapable belief that only a monocultural order can
survive. This is consistent with the notion that every society is bound
by a ruling ideology, and that every ideological field must turn upon
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Conclusion
Quilting Points
The reader will by now see in full the extent to which Žižek and
Politics is the critical introduction its subtitle promised. We have
introduced the reader to the three undoubted contributions Žižek has
made to today’s political theory:
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To Anticipate
It is worth saying that we are under absolutely no illusions as to how
Žižek, in his revolutionary vanguardist mode (and many readers
who identify strongly with him), will respond to our claims. Žižek’s
response to critics so far has only seen him further radicalising his
arguments and provocations, rather than reconsidering his theoreti-
cal premises or their political applications. Two rhetorical strategies
predominate in Žižek’s texts, ostensibly devoted to responding to
critics:
1. Žižek asks, with outrage, ‘Where did I say what X [insert name
of critic] has alleged? Did I not also say [at another point in his
work] exactly the opposite of what X asserts? And does not critic
Y, to prove my point, say exactly the opposite of what X asserts?’
Often Žižek expresses frustration that he has been even asked to
respond to the ‘standard boring reproaches’ that people astonish-
ingly insist on making against his work (CND; WDLT). What
Žižek rarely does, however, is account for the things that he did
say, as documented by critic X, or respond to the substantive
claims raised against these passages;
2. Žižek uses what are called technically ad hominem arguments.
This type of response has the form of saying: ‘X is of course an
orthodox (for example) Marxist, so of course she would say . . .’
or ‘Y is a conservative Lacanian/deconstructionist, so of course
he would assert that . . .’.The force of ad hominems is to deflect
attention from assessing the substance of the charges (which may
of course be true, even if they happen to be made from a partisan
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We have given our textual and argumentative reasons for the posi-
tions we take in Part Two of Žižek and Politics. We take it that the
process of intellectual debate is about rational arguments as well as
political commitments, and we have supplied the textual sources and
logical claims to support our positions. So we can again only invite
the reader to assess things by their own lights. Nevertheless, let us
close by trying to rebut some of these anticipated charges by making
our deepest theoretical arguments clear again to close the book.
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1. The idea that the political Act happens in a normative and descrip-
tive void, as a radical break with the existing Symbolic Order or
big Other. Žižek’s Lenin, the Lenin of April–October 1917, is
presented as the purest historical example of an evental subject
who has had the courage to Act without the sanction of the big
Other of any pre-existing ‘situation’ or normative frame.
2. The idea that politics is the art of the impossible – an art based on
the death drive, in the style of the surrealist slogans of the Parisian
students in May 1968 – and that everyone who says that politics
is the art of the possible is guilty of ‘compromise’ with the system.
From this position follows the desire to short-cut political strug-
gles and go directly to the political Act, hand-in-hand not with
the masses who are at the heart of the dynamics of capitalism, but
with the most marginalised groups on its fringes.
Žižek can get away with this type of caricature today because nobody
reads Marx and Lenin any more, so a generation of students has no
idea that they are the butt of a sort of (im)practical joke.
Until April 1917, Lenin had held that the backwards capitalism
in Tsarist Russia meant that only a democratic revolution (that is,
bourgeois society with a parliamentary government) was possible.
The Marxists should hasten this process, the Russian version of
the French Revolution, forward, in order then to prepare the forces
for a socialist revolution. But Lenin’s theoretical study of imperial-
ism, catalysed by the First World War, convinced him that Russian
capitalism was part of a world capitalist system whose parts could
not be analysed in isolation from one another. Lenin’s April Theses
argue that it followed from the world character of imperialism and
the political opportunity presented by the hostility of the masses to
the war that socialist revolution in Russia was possible, provided that
it was followed by socialist revolutions in Germany and France. So,
rather than calling for a socialist uprising in a moral and historical
void, Lenin’s April Theses announced that, all along, Lenin had radi-
cally misread the historical situation (Žižek’s Symbolic Order, or big
Other).
But this radical alteration in Lenin’s understanding of the his-
torical process did not mean that he also scrapped twenty years of
intense hostility towards those who wanted to substitute terrorist
actions and the marginalised fringes for the self-organisation and
self-emancipation of the masses. Published in 1920, only three years
after His Revolutionary Act, Lenin’s Left Wing Communism: An
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political success (Lenin 1921: VIII. 2–3). In the light of this testimony,
the reader has to wonder whether Žižek, again closer to Sorel than to
the Bolshevik leader he praises, is using Lenin for his own purposes, in
order to try to create a new Sorelian revolutionary mythology, a story
of betrayed origins that – despite our very different political situation
(see Kellogg 2008: 15–17) – could animate a new vanguard?
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conclusion
that Žižek can and does adduce in his work: the analysis of cultural
products, books, poems, films, and so on, and since 1996 increas-
ingly (although already in the final chapter of The Sublime Object of
Ideology) theological considerations.
To emphasise, we do not dispute the power, even the genius, of
many of Žižek’s analyses, particular at the levels of theology, and
the exegeses of philosophical and cultural artefacts. We do, however,
think that one method alone is not adequate to address the particu-
larities of all these different realms as readily as Žižek supposes. This
is our basic or deepest explanation for what we take Žižek’s theoreti-
cal and political shortcomings to be, those that the existing critical
literature on his work have identified and turned around.
Our particular claim is twofold:
1. First: Žižek’s theoretical object, what he rediscovers in every field
to which he turns his eye, is ‘the big Other’, which shapes the
coordinates of subjects’ identifications and understandings of the
world. This category in Žižek’s work at different points can and
does describe:
• the natural, causally determined world;
• the ideology of any political system;
• the psychoanalyst in the clinic;
• the parent(s), especially the father, and any other authority
figure;
• the (Kantian) moral Law;
• the material political institutions of any political regime;
• the written laws of any society;
• the unwritten conventions of any society;
• the Symbolic Law prohibiting incest and parricide at the bases
of all human sociability or any society whatsoever;
• the particular syntactical and other rules of any natural
language;
• the differential ordering of any language system, as such a
system or structure.
In Žižek’s defence, it has to be said that Lacan before him did use
‘the Other’ in different contexts as a condensation of many of
these different object domains.
2. Second: in Žižek’s work, the tendency to posit the big Other as
what needs to be analysed, albeit in order to show how it ‘does
not exist’, leads to two telling theoretical conflations:
229
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230
conclusion
1
See also Slavoj Zizek, ‘Iraq’s False Promises’, www.lacan.com/zizek-
iraq2.htm (accessed May 2009).
231
žižek and politics
criticism would apply, for instance, to theorists who feel that the
method Jacques Derrida developed for criticising philosophical texts
can meaningfully supplant the methodologies of political science,
philosophy, economics, sociology and so forth, when it comes to
thinking about ‘the political’. Or, differently, thinkers who opt for
Deleuze (or Deleuze’s and Guattari’s) Nietzschean Spinozism as a
new metaphysics to explain ethics, politics, aesthetics, ontology and
so forth, seem to us candidates for the same type of criticism, as a
reductive passing over the empirical and analytic distinctness of the
different object fields in complex societies.
In truth, we feel that Theory, and the continuing line of ‘master
thinkers’ who regularly appear particularly in the English-speaking
world, is the last gasp of what used to be called First Philosophy.
The philosopher ascends out of the city, Plato tells us, from whence
she can espie the Higher Truth, which she must then bring back
down to political earth. From outside the city, we can well imagine
that she can see much more widely than her benighted political con-
temporaries. But from these philosophical heights, we can equally
suspect that the ‘master thinker’ is also always in danger of passing
over the salient differences and features of political life – differences
only too evident to people ‘on the ground’. Political life, after all, is
always a more complex affair than a bunch of ideologically duped
fools staring at and enacting a wall (or ‘politically correct screen’) of
ideologically produced illusions, from Plato’s timeless cave allegory
to Žižek’s theory of ideology.
We know that Theory largely understands itself as avowedly
‘post-metaphysical’. It aims to erect its new claims on the gravestone
of First Philosophy as the West has known it. But it also tells us that
people very often do not know what they do. And so it seems to us
that too many of its proponents and their followers are mourners
who remain in the graveyard, propping up the gravestone of Western
philosophy under the sign of some totalising account of absolutely
everything – enjoyment, différance, biopower . . . Perhaps the time
has come, we would argue, less for one more would-be global, all-
purpose existential and political Theory than for a multi-dimensional
and interdisciplinary critical theory that would challenge the chaotic
specialisation neoliberalism speeds up in academe, which mirrors and
accelerates the splintering of the Left over the last four decades. This
would mean that we would have to shun the hope that one method,
one perspective, or one master thinker could single-handedly deci-
pher all the complexity of socio-political life, the concerns of really
232
conclusion
233
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Index
act, the, 83–4, 118, 127–9, 170, 181–2, capitalism, 5–6, 26, 32–6, 39–40, 43,
188–93 57, 81, 88, 94, 100, 109–10, 114,
Adorno, Theodor, 42, 89 129–35, 139–44, 145–6, 148, 152,
Agamben, Giorgio, 85, 95, 178, 187, 154, 157–9, 160, 162, 164–5, 170,
207, 214 173, 177–8, 180, 183, 189–90,
al-Qaeda, 36–7, 40 193–4, 196–8, 207, 210, 218, 222,
Althusser, Louis, 44–7, 129, 148, 186, 225–6, 230, 233
231 cause see sublime object
anti-humanism, 212 Chesterton, G. K., 201, 203–4
anti-Semitism, 20 Christ, 52, 197, 202–6, 208
anxiety, 8, 52, 99, 102, 109, 143–7, commodity fetishism, 131–6, 140–1,
154, 216 149, 151, 158–62, 177–8
Arendt, Hannah, 88, 96 communism, 6, 31, 43, 55, 88, 113,
Aristotle, 86, 91 142, 188, 194, 226–7
atonal worlds, 162 concrete universal, 147–8, 176, 185
authenticity, 26, 116, 182, 184, 188, consumption, 65, 93–4, 98–100, 139,
190 141, 150–1, 154, 162, 220
autonomy, 26, 63, 87, 114–16, 123, contingency, 81
221 contradiction, 31, 35, 38–40, 75, 156,
193, 199, 225, 233
Badiou, Alain, 4, 16, 82, 84, 173–4, Critchley, Simon, 16, 174, 180
177, 180, 191, 210–11, 214, 222 cultural revolution, 180, 190–1
Balibar, Étienne, 4, 5, 16, 173, 174
Bartelby, 85, 178 Dean, Jodi, 7, 15, 17
Beck, Ulrich, 34, 37, 141–2 death drive, 8–9, 13, 18, 19–20, 26–7,
belief, 31, 35, 44, 46–51, 53–9, 62, 67, 51, 82–4, 115–16, 120–2, 124–7,
72, 73–5, 93, 113–14, 135, 146, 150, 153, 175, 185, 195–7, 212, 214–17,
155–7, 176, 182, 184–5, 197, 200, 222, 226
208–9, 217–19 decisionism, 84
Bell, Daniel, 147 Deleuze, Gilles, 1, 4, 16, 61, 85, 99,
Benjamin, Walter, 188, 194, 209 100, 232
big Other, 49, 51, 54, 67, 106, 136–7, Derrida, Jacques, 1, 4, 16, 34, 61, 65,
158, 201, 228, 229 68–9, 70–4, 85, 224, 232
biopolitics, 131 Descartes, René, 60–4, 65, 68, 69–70,
Bolshevik, 181, 225, 228 72–5, 79, 82, 93, 103, 105, 161,
Bourdieu, Pierre, 129 219, 222
Bush, George W., 6, 32, 35, 37 desire, as ‘discourse of the Other’, 44,
Butler, Judith, 4, 5, 16, 32, 131, 174 50
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index
Lacan, Jacques, 1, 2, 4, 7, 15, 21–2, Nietzsche, Friedrich, 23, 61, 63, 66,
41, 44, 46–52, 58, 61–2, 65, 72, 200, 218
76–7, 83–4, 89–93, 103, 109, 115,
120, 123, 126, 130–2, 153–4, 160–3, Parker, Alan, 4, 7, 15, 24, 83,
181–5, 195, 204, 206, 211–13, 170
219–22, 229 paternal authority see symbolic
Laclau, Ernesto, 5, 7, 16, 21, 22, 32, authority
73, 101, 106–8, 110–11, 130–2, 167, Plato, 23, 66, 70, 86, 232
172–5, 177, 187 political correctness, 20–1, 33, 61, 130,
Lasch, Christopher, 144–7 198
Lefort, Claude, 101–2, 103, 106 populism, 200
Lenin, Vladimir, 2, 89, 129, 174, 181, postmodern, 140–1
186, 191, 195, 208, 225–8 Pound, Marcus, 15
Levinas, Emmanuel, 61, 211 proletariat, 130, 187, 193, 227
Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 4, 18–19
liberal democracy, 1, 6, 32, 34, 35–6, radical democracy, 5, 6, 21, 110, 111,
100, 102–3, 110, 144, 149, 151, 162, 158, 174, 175
165–6, 170, 174, 188, 193, 194–5, Rancière, Jacques, 45, 6, 21, 110–11,
198, 200, 201 158, 174–5
liberalism, political, 5, 6, 21, 26, 43, real, the, 13, 51, 107, 121
86–9, 94, 109, 110, 163, 167, 182, revolution, socialist, 6–7, 14–15,
197, 217–18 18–20, 24–5, 42, 110, 114, 128–30,
Lukács, György, 27, 130, 131, 161 152, 158, 164, 165, 170, 179–81,
lumpenproletariat, 186–7, 193 189–92, 209–10, 226–7
Robespierre, Maximillian, 127,
Machiavelli, Niccolò, 61, 86, 91, 190
191 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 47–9, 62, 105,
Mao Tse-Tung, 16, 40, 127, 180, 183, 140
190–2
Marcuse, Herbert, 42, 172, 189 Sade, Marquis de, 74
Marx, Karl, 7, 15, 39, 42–3, 45, 60, 61, Schelling, F. W. J., 22, 24, 27, 111,
80–1, 92, 113, 129, 131, 139, 160–1, 112–27, 162, 185, 193, 215, 222–3,
172, 187, 225–6 228
master signifier, 8–12, 47, 49, 56, 71–4, Schmitt, Carl, 127–8, 166, 168, 170,
79, 82, 84, 90, 93–4, 101, 106–7, 182, 203, 209, 218
108, 121, 127, 130, 140–1, 147–8, September 11th (2001), 31, 35, 36,
164, 201–2, 217, 219; see also Ego 168
Ideal sexual difference, 21, 182
Miller, Jacques-Alain, 2, 4, 16, 24 Shoah see Holocaust
moral law, 53, 78, 105–6, 122, 126–7, sinthome, 12–4, 26, 84–5, 122, 175,
147, 208, 229 185–6, 225
Mouffe, Chantal, 73, 101, 106–8, 167, slum dwellers see lumpenproletariat
172, 174 Sorel, Georges, 188–90, 193, 218, 228,
multiculturalism, 33, 61, 167, 174, 217 231
Myers, Tony, 2, 15 Spinoza, Baruch, 100
Stalin, Joseph, 96–8, 126, 190–2
neighbour, 26, 49, 52, 83, 149, 195–7, Stalinism, 42, 61, 88, 93–9, 168, 190,
201, 204, 210–18, 222, 230 220
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