Zizek, The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan
This essay was originally published in French in Le plus sublime des hystériques – Hegel passe, Broché, Paris, 1999. It appears in Interrogating the Real, London: Continuum, 2005, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens editors.
The idea that one is able from the outset to account for error, to take it under consideration as error, and therefore to take one’s distance from it, is precisely the supreme error of the existence of metalanguage, the illusion that while taking part in illusion, one is somehow also able to observe the process from an ‘objective’ distance. By avoiding identifying oneself with error, we commit the supreme error and miss the truth, because the place of truth itself is only constituted through error. To put this another way, we could recall the Hegelian proposition which can be paraphrased as ‘the fear of error is error itself: the true evil is not the evil object but the one who perceives evil as such.
One already finds this logic of the error interior to truth in Rosa Luxemburg’s description of the dialectic of the revolutionary process. When Eduard Bernstein raised objections apropos of the revisionist fear of taking power ‘too soon’, prematurely, before the ‘objective conditions’ have reached their maturity, she responded that the first seizures of power are necessarily ‘premature’: for the proletariat, the only way of arriving at ‘maturity’, of waiting for the ‘opportune’ moment to seize power, is to form themselves, prepare themselves for this seizure; and the only way of forming themselves is, of course, these ‘premature’ attempts … If we wait for the ‘opportune moment’, we will never attain it, because this ‘opportune moment’ – that which never occurs without fulfilling the subjective conditions for the ‘maturity’ of the revolutionary subject – can only occur through a series of ‘premature’ attempts. Thus the opposition to the ‘premature’ seizure of power is exposed as an opposition to the seizure of power in general, as such: to repeat the celebrated phrase of Robespierre, the revisionists want ‘revolution without revolution’.
Once we examine things more closely, we see that Luxemburg’s fundamental wager is precisely the impossibility of a metalanguage in the revolutionary process:
the revolutionary subject does not ‘conduct’ the process from an objective distance, he is himself constituted through this process; and it is because the time of revolution occurs by means of subjectivity that no one is able to ‘achieve revolution on time’, following ‘premature’, insufficient efforts.
The attitude of Luxemburg is exactly that of the hysteric faced with the obsessional metalanguage of revisionism:
strive to act, even if prematurely, in order to arrive at the correct act through this very error. One must be duped in one’s desire, though it is ultimately impossible, in order that something real comes about.
The propositions of ‘grasping substance as subject’ and ‘there is no metalanguage’ are merely variations on the same theme. It is therefore impossible to say: ‘Although there must be premature attempts at revolution, have no illusions and remain conscious that they are doomed in advance to failure.’ The idea that we are able to act and yet retain some distance with regard to the ‘objective’ – making possible some consideration of the act’s ‘objective signification’ (namely, its destiny to fail) during the act itself – misperceives the way that the ‘subjective illusion’ of the agents is part of the ‘objective’ process itself. This is why the revolution must be repeated: the ‘meaning’ of those premature attempts is literally to be found in their failure – or rather, as one says with Hegel, ‘a political revolution is, in general, only sanctioned by popular opinion after it has been repeated’.