Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Žižek, like Lacan, is not a moralist — he refuses to connect revolution to a moral urge.
By contrast, it is a matterof being unwittingly caught in the strange, distressing awareness that in our fixation on the task in hand we go “beyond/against ourselves” — that at the crucial moment of our full commitment we have no control over our actions, since we are driven by some unconscious libidinal attachment to an object-cause which, strictly speaking, has no name or form.
For this reason the revolutionary intervention per se inevitably retains a psychotic dimension, one where despair mobilizes utopian energies in responding to what is perceived as an apocalyptic historical scenario. The urge of drive is therefore amoral, for it is “in us more than ourselves”, beyond our conscious decision to be “in overdrive”. … [for Žižek] moral knowledge is not a sufficient condition to enact change, let alone to act.
Octave Mannoni’s fortunate formula Je sais bien, mais quand même … effectively rules our lives: we are fetishists in practice, regularly displacing belief onto our concrete, material practices, for the simple reason that we do not know what we truly believe in, since we are interpellated at the level of unconscious enjoyment. Our true beliefs are unconscious, and as such they tend to materialize in the proverbial fetish. 140-141
… is it not the case that the parallax concerns not only the minimally psychotic form of the revolutionary act or the unpredictable outburst of the event, but also
the vertiginous dimension of thought itself, exemplified by the massive task of thinking a new strategic link between the socio-symbolic order and the Real which might challenge and eventually install itself as an effective alternative to the capitalist valorization of jouissance? 142
What nevertheless cannot be emphasized enough is the overlapping of his formalistic definition of the act qua confrontation with the Real and the creation of a new political vision capable of recalibrating our existence through jouissance. … to find a new formula seeking to supplement signification with enjoyment (142).