Sharpe, Matthew. Slavoj Žižek: a little piece of the real. Burlington Vt: Ashgate, 2004.
Žižek as Theorist of Ideology: Two Transpositions
- Žižek argues primary site of subjective inscription for an ideology is not the consciousness of ideological subjects, but the Freudian unconscious.
- Ideology today doesn’t claim to structure the horizons of meaning of its subjects, … than how its ‘terms and conditions’ enable and structure … ‘regimes of enjoyment.’ (31)
There is no identity that is not a relational identity. Every identity is formed in differentiation from an other, or grounded through reference to an other that guarantees its own consistency, at least as a regulative ideal to be strived towards. (32)
… there is no identity that is not grounded in a reference to some guaranteeing Other (42).
🙂 We need to question the “strength of argumentation as a factor motivating individual and collective action. … — between subjects’ conscious self-evaluations, and the beliefs that inform what they actually do (40).
The key thing about Lacan, for Žižek, is that this scepticism about the modern Cartesian subject, evidenced as early as the first essay in the Ecrits, did not commit him to a total dismissal of the relevance of the category of the subject. To call into question the sovereignty of individuals’ conscious self-perceptions, according to Lacan, does not mean that one can immediately pass into a reflection that centres itself on ‘the body’, the ‘text’ or some trans-subjective ‘will’ or ‘power’. … What is passed over … is that possibility which Freud opened up: namely, that the ‘mind’ is not reducible to consciousness, and that — as such — the consciousness-body opposition might not exhaust the field proper to subjectivity (40).
- Lacan’s unconscious subject REMAINS a subject. … At any given moment, that is to say, I might be playing out my neuroses, largely unaware of the true nature of my desire, etc. Yet this does not mean that at some future time, I might not be brought to a heightened self-awareness. This is precisely the possibility that psychoanalysis qua ‘talking cure’ affords, and without which it would be simple perversity (40-41).
Žižek sees in psychoanalytic theory per se a means of uncovering how the most powerful structures of subjective motivation capable of being harnessed for social reproduction are importantly beneath subjects’ conscious control. An account of the unconscious, Žižek believes, will thus significantly sophisticate existing political theories (44).
Žižek’s position is that, from around the time of the mirror stage (six to eighteen months), human needs are irrevocably caught up in the dialectics of the subject’s exchanges with others, and its demand to be loved by them. The child thus, as it were, needs to be taught how to desire, he stresses. Its first question is not ‘what do I want’, but ‘what do the others want from me?’ or: ‘what am I for them?” (45).