Vighi, Fabio. On Žižek’s Dialectics. New York: Continuum, 2010.
Thus, the need to restore the autonomous and legitimate diversity of “other narratives” often functions in subtle ideological terms, namely as a kind of “fantasy screen”, an unquestioned fascination with the other qua fetish-object which allows the gaze of the critic-observer to preserve the unproblematic identity of his or her own subject position. 148
… our point of view is never ideologically neutral, but instead always constituted through the foreclosure of its excessive “internally external” cause … surplus-jouissance. And it goes without saying that this historically specific surplus, today, is co-extensive with capital.
… realty emerges as an object of cognition only on condition that the material surplus of thought is disavowed and transposed into the sublime object of desire “out there”.
I can think something (for instance, a politics of emancipation) only if the constitutive non-coincidence of my thought with itself is externalized as objet a, the elusive X which sets my desire to know (my thought) in motion.
… only by yielding unreservedly to the object (objet a) can the subject find itself; only by going through to its epistemological limit, can thought realize itself. …
the actualization of any political theory that aims at subverting the status quo depends on an unexpected event which ruptures the seemingly unbreakable continuum of history (or an act which opens up the possibility of radical subjective change) and is perceived as materializing not so much the theory behind it but the very deadlock of (that) theory. From this angle, the task of political thought would seem to be not just to propose a consistent project, but especially to intervene in the symptomal point of our socio-symbolic order in the attempt to seize the Benjaminian “revolutionary chance” coincidental with history’s sudden openness.
What follows logically is that theory can only connect with praxis at the level of the Real, and not at the level of conscious rational signification.
More extensively: precisely because the only point of contact between theory and praxis is in the Real, signification needs to be at least minimally distorted and betrayed if it is to successfully actualize itself. 148