Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
… what prevents the radical questioning of capitalism itself is precisely belief in the democratic form of the struggle against capitalism. … This is the hard kernel of today’s global capitalist universe, its true Master-Signifier: democracy (Žižek in Parallax View 320, quoted in Vighi Žižek’s Dialectics 114)
If we agree with this understanding of freedom as overidentification with the causal chain inclusive of its un-actualized causes, perhaps the key political questions, simple as they may sound, can be put along these lines:
what is it that brings about the dimension of drive? How can drive be connected to a specific political project that actualizes our lost causes? (109)
Intervention in the Real
Drive: the intrusion of traumatic negativity opening up the potential for change — can take place as the (unexpected, excessive, pervasively unconscious) result of our concrete political engagement with a lost cause, no matter how such engagement is pre-empted by its ideological context.
What I am suggesting here is that the disruptive dimension of the act be conceived not only as the explosion of unstoppable revolutionary urge at the level of ontic reality, but also as the vital component of that surplus of thought which typifies the psychoanalytic approach. 110
Ultimately, the strategic conscious moment of the struggle for hegemony, insofar as it constitutes itself as a form of class struggle, is by definitiion an attempt to disturb the “unknown knowledge” ensconced in the unconscious. 111