Boucher, G. (2005) The Law as a Thing : Žižek and the Graph of Desire. In G. Boucher, J. Glynos, & M. Sharpe (Eds.), Traversing the Fantasy Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek. (pp. 23-44). Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Žižek Responds:
[…] my critics often fall into the trap of what Hegel called “reflexive determination”; what they describe as my oscillation is the projection into my work of the inadequacy of their own reading of my texts. They start with reducing my position to a simplified account of it, and when, afterwards, they are compelled to take note of how my texts do not fit this frame, they misperceive this gap as my own inconsistency or oscillation.
In the present volume, it is Boucher’s basic critical argument which, I think, can serve as an example: he first reads my opposition of public Law and its obscene superego supplement as the opposition between the conscious Law and the unconscious Real, i.e., he “essentialises” the obscene superego into a “pre-cultural Real”; then, of course, when he realises that my notion of the obscene superego doesn’t fit this substantialised “pre-cultural Real,” he transposes this inconsistency into my own theoretical edifice and arrives at the “antinomy governing Žižek’s theory”:
. . . on the one hand. the Real is only the “inherent transgression” of the Symbolic, and so we should cleave to the symbolic field by rejecting the allure of superego enjoyment. On the other hand, however, the symbolic field is nothing but a ruse, secretly supported by an obscene enjoyment that in actuality reigns supreme. … Because of the way Žižek has structured this subject, there is no way to get beyond the oscillation between the symbolic field and an obscene enjoyment, except by dispensing completely with the unconscious.
This alternative itself is false: both “hands” are here Boucher’s, i.e., what I advocate is neither the reduction of the obscene underside of the Law to its secondary “safety valve” to be rejected in the pursuit of a more adequate symbolic law, nor a substantial Real which effectively “runs the show” and devalues the public Law into an impotent theatre of shadows.
The obscene underside, of course, is the supplement of a Law, its shadowy double, its “inherent transgression”; it is not merely a secondary “safety valve,” but an active support of the public Law not a tolerated pseudo-excess, but a solicited excess. For this very reason, it functions as a Lacanian sinthome: a knot which literally holds together the Law — you dissolve the excess, and you lose the Law itself whose excess it is.
[…] what if the “oscillation” in question is not simply an epistemological default, but is part of the “thing itself,” a feature of the described socio-symbolic process?
An example from Boucher. again: ”The oscillation between the advocacy of presidential Bonapartism and a religious commune determines the compass of Žižek’s politics”.
What, however, if these are the two sides of the same coin — what if it is precisely because (what Boucher calls) the ”presidential Bonapartism” is the “truth” of democracy, that one should at least keep the space open for what Boucher calls my, advocacy of a “religious
commune” (actually, I locate religious communes into a series with revolutionary collectives like councils (“soviets”) and psychoanalYtic associations !).
There is another-politically much more crucial case of “oscillation” that my critics do not mention that fits this model, the one concerning the status of the obscene underside of the symbolic order: is this obscene underside of unwritten rules mainly the “inherent transgression” of the public Law (and, as such, its ultimate support), or does it also have a positive emancipatory function (the motif that I develop in my Lenin booklet: how an authentic contact with the ethnic, cultural — Other can only pass through an exchange of obscenities). Is, however, this really a case of my oscillation? What if this ambiguity is inscribed into the thing itself — what if the status of obscenity is ambiguous in itself?