Žižek, Slavoj. “Passionate (Dis)Attachments, or, Judith Butler as a Reader of Freud” The Ticklish Subject. London: Verso, 1999, 247-312.
247 – 248 opposition between hysteria and perversion
🙂 Žižek argues the pervert sidesteps the unconscious in his direct acting out of his fantasies directly. Whereas the hysteric is always questioning, the pervert knows exactly what the other wants.
This opposition of perversion and hysteria is especially pertinent today, in our era of the ‘decline of Oedipus’, when the paradigmatic mode of subjectivity is no longer the subject integrated into the paternal Law through the symbolic castration, but the ‘polymorphously perverse’ subject following the superego injunction to enjoy. The question of how we are to hystericize the subject caught in the closed loop of perversion (how we are to inculcate the dimension of lack and questioning in him) becomes more urgent in view of today’s political scene: the subject of late capitalist market relations is perverse, while the ‘democratic subject’ (the mode of subjectivity implied by the modern democracy) is inherently hysterical (the abstract citizen correlative to the empty place of Power). In other words, the relationship between the bourgeois caught up in the market mechanisms and the citoyen engaged in the universal political sphere is, in its subjective economy, the relationship between perversion and hysteria. So when Rancière calls our age ‘post-political’, he is aiming precisely at this shift in political discourse (the social link) from hysteria to perversion: ‘post-politics’ is the perverse mode of administering social affairs, the mode deprived of the ‘hystericized’ universal/out-of-joint dimension (248).
🙂 I think Žižek is pulling Butler’s chain. 249 he cites coprophagy (eating shit) and breaks it down into its hysterical (if I eat shit will the other still love me? Will he leave me? What am I to the Other’s desire?) Žižek is implying that her form of theory is ‘perverse’ to the core. Calling Foucault (and Deleuze and Guttari’s Anti-Oedipus) a perverse philosopher. Why?
… the pervert bravely goes to the limit in undermining the very foundations of symbolic authority and fully endorsing the multiple productivity of pre-symbolic libidinal flux … the model of false subversive radicalization that fits the existing power constellation perfectly … the model of the false transgressive radicality (250-251).
It is not enough to say as Foucault does, that power in invoking its law engenders a flourishing of objects it itself was set up to legislate and control, they “set in motion a wild proliferation of what they endeavour to suppress and regulate: the very ‘repression’ of sexuality gives rise to new forms of sexual pleasure. But what Foucault misses according to Žižek, is the erotic, libidinal element that comes about in the subject as they are getting the whip. In other words subjection is kind of sexy for the subjected, in that, for example, the confessional activity “itself becomes sexualized” (253). Žižek cites political correct attitude of not calling stupid people ‘retarded’ but instead ‘mentally challenged.’ For Žižek the guy that self-flagellates himself in an attempt to prevent himself falling prey to sexual thoughts, is itself getting off, getting a sexual charge from the act of flagellation.
255 Žižek makes the interesting point that resisting colonial domination was inherent to colonial domination itself. “anti-colonialist national liberation movements are strict sensu generated by colonialist oppression” (255). The native moves from his passive identity in traditions and culture, to an identity spurred on by the event of colonial domination. “it is this oppression which brings about the shift from passive ethnic self-awareness grounded in mythical tradition tot he eminently modern will to assert one’s ethnic identity in the form of a national-state” (255).
Although Chechens evoke their hundred-year-old struggle against Russian domination, today’s form of this struggle is clearly the outcome of the modernizing effect of the Russian colonization of traditional Chechen society (255).
🙂 For Žižek active resistance is inherent to the forces of domination itself, by producing an excess the forces of domination thereby produce a resistance that goes beyond, an excess of resistance. So just because resistance is generated by the very power that it opposes, doesn’t mean its co-opted in advance.
… the key point is that through the effect of proliferation, of producing an excess of resistance, the very inherent antagonism of a system may well set in motion a process which leads to its own ultimate downfall (256).
The Effect Can ‘Outdo’ Its Cause
[Foucault] precludes the possibility that the system itself, on account of its inherent inconsistency, may give birth to a force whose excess it is no longer able to master and which thus detonates its unity, its capacity to reproduce itself. In short, Foucault does not consider the possibility of an effect escaping, outgrowing its cause, so that although it emerges as a form of resistance to power and is as such absolutely inherent to it, it can outgrow and explode it. … (the effect can ‘outdo’ its cause) (256).
And this is why Foucault lacks the appropriate notion of the subject: the subject is by definition in excess over its cause, and as such it emerges with the reversal of the repression of sexuality into the sexualisation of the repressive measures themselves (257).
From Resistance to the Act
For Lacan, radical rearticulation of the predominant symbolic Order is altogether possible – this is what his notion of point de capiton (the ‘quilting point’ or the Master-Signifier) is about: when a new point de capiton emerges, the socio-symbolic field is not only displaced, its very structuring principle changes. One is thus tempted to reverse the opposition between and Lacan and Foucault as elaborated by Butler (Lacan constrains resistance to imaginary thwarting, while Foucault, who has a more pluralistic notion of discourse as a heterogeneous field of multiple practices, allows for a more thorough symbolic subversion and rearticulation): it is Foucault who insists on the immanence of resistance to Power, while Lacan leaves open the possibility of a radical rearticulation of the entire symbolic field by means of an act proper, a passage through ‘symbolic death’. In short, it is Lacan who allows us to conceptualize the distinction between imaginary resistance (false transgression that reasserts the symbolic status quo and even serves as a positive condition of its functioning) and actual symbolic rearticulation via the intervention of the Real of an act (262).
ONLY ON THIS LEVEL – IF WE TAKE INTO ACCOUNT THE LACANIAN NOTIONS OF POINT DE CAPITON AND THE ACT AS REAL – DOES A MEANINGFUL DIALOGUE WITH BUTLER BECOME POSSIBLE.
🙂 Have to hand it to him, Žižek finds the crucial Butler quote, here it is:
What would it mean for the subject to desire something other than its continued ‘social existence’? If such an existence cannot be undone without falling into some kind of death, can existence nevertheless be risked, death courted or pursued, in order to expose and open to transformation the hold of social power on the conditions of life’s persistence? The subject is compelled to repeat the norms by which it is produced, but the repetition establishes a domain of risk, for if one fails to reinstate the norm ‘in the right way,’ one becomes subject to further sanction, one feels the prevailing conditions of existence threatened. And yet, without a repetition that risks life – in its current organization – how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?
One should criticize Butler for conflating this act in its radical dimension with the performative reconfiguration of one’s symbolic condition via its repetitive displacements: the two are not the same – that is to say, one should maintain the crucial distinction between a mere ‘performative reconfiguration’, a subversive displacement which remains within the hegemonic field and, as it were, conducts an internal guerrilla war of turning the terms of the hegemonic field against itself, and the much more radical act of a thorough reconfiguration of the entire field which redefines the very conditions of socially sustained performativity. It is thus Butler herself who ends up in a position of allowing precisely for marginal ‘reconfigurations’ of the predominant discourse – who remains constrained to a position of ‘inherent transgression’, which needs as a point of reference the Other in the guise of a predominant discourse that can only be marginally displaced or transgressed (264).
From the Lacanian standpoint, Butler is thus simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic. On the one hand she overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other through the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what they intend to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered, by the hegemonic form of the big Other – what Lacan calls ‘the big Other’ are symbolic norms and their codified transgression. The Oedipal order, this gargantuan symbolic matrix embodied in a vast set of ideological institutions, rituals and practices, is a much too deeply rooted and ‘substantial’ entity to be effectively undermined by the marginal gestures of performative displacement. On the other hand, Butler does not allow for the radical gesture of the thorough restructuring of the hegemonic symbolic order in its totality (264).
🙂 And Slavoj, what, pray tell, is that ‘radical gesture’?