Boyle, Kirk. “The Four Fundamental Concepts of Slavoj Žižek’s Psychoanalytic Marxism.” International Journal of Žižek Studies Vol 2.1 (2008) 1-21.
Whither drive in Žižek’s conception of the Marxian parallax?
What role might drive play in a properly political “intervention”? The missing connection between drive’s inherence to capitalism and the “ultimate parallax of the political economy” in Žižek’s work proves frustrating, but we may broach two tentative conclusions.
The location of drive and desire with regards to capitalism seems to fall on either side of the political economy parallax, i.e. from the perspective of the economic Real, drive describes the self-propelling movement of the metaphysical dance of Capital. Desire, on the other hand, describes the same process of endless circulation but from the perspective of the libidinal economy of surplus-enjoyment and the symbolic order of consumer society.8
Both sides of this parallax are economically and politically necessary: financial speculation ceases to exist if there is no hysterical consumer society; no understanding of the personal lure of commodities is possible without reference to the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction.
The distinction between drive and desire also provides a gauge for evaluating the effectiveness of interventions to break the spell of global capitalism.
Žižek raises the possibility of resistance on the level of desire when he claims that critiques of capitalism from stable ethical positions appear to be the exception in the “carnivalized” world of late capitalism (Žižek 2007: 235). By harkening back to an ethics of moderation, for example, we might curtail the normal functioning of capitalism to self-revolutionize through the incorporation of ever new forms of surplus-enjoyment.
If we opt out of enjoyment (through elective poverty, for example), do we not throw a wrench in the gears of capital’s incessant circulation? Although resistance on the level of desire sounds feasible, it also smacks of a nostalgia for times that are irrecoverable on a large scale. Capitalism also has an uncanny ability to create new markets out of even the most heroic of bohemian efforts. The scope of a stable ethics to combat capital would be parochial at best, and Žižek’s interest lies with something more radically transformative.
The kind of resistance Žižek envisions would be as large in scale as Capital itself because it seeks to intervene on the level of drive.
Žižek frames the question of the possibility of resisting the capitalist drive as follows: “how are we to formulate the resistance to the economic logic of reproduction-through-excess?…how, then, are we to revolutionize an order whose very principle is constant self-revolutionizing? This, perhaps, is the question today” (Žižek 2006b: 321, Žižek 2007: 235).
With a question big enough to be the question today comes no easy answers, only more questions. Does such a thing as a Leftist drive exist? What would a form of resistance on the level of drive look like? Where exactly would this form of resistance intervene?
Can drive fight drive?
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Lacan, Jacques (1998b) Seminar XX: Encore. Trans. Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
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Žižek, Slavoj (1989) The Sublime Object of Ideology. New York: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj (1993) Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham: Duke.
Žižek, Slavoj (1994) The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality. London: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj (2000) The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. New York: Verso.
Žižek, Slavoj (2002) “The Interpassive Subject.” The Symptom, 3. Available at: http://www.lacan.com/interpassf.htm. Accessed Jan 29th 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj (2005a) “Concesso non Dato.” Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Responses to Slavoj Žižek. Eds. Geoff Bucher, Jason Glynos, and Matthew Sharpe. Burlington: Ashgate.
Žižek, Slavoj (2005b) “Objet a as Inherent Limit to Capitalism: On Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.” Available at: http://www.lacan.com/zizmultitude.htm. Accessed Jan 28th 2008.
Žižek, Slavoj (2006a) How to Read Lacan. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Žižek, Slavoj (2006b) The Parallax View. Cambridge: MIT.Žižek, Slavoj (2007) “With Defenders Like These.” The Truth of Žižek. Eds. Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp. London: Continuum.
Žižek, Slavoj and Glyn Daly (2004) Conversations With Žižek. Cambridge: Polity.