Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp eds. The Truth of Žižek London: Continuum. 2007
With Lenin, as with Lacan, the point is that the revolution ne s’autorise que d’elle-même; one should assume the revolutionary act not covered by the big Other — the fear of taking power ‘prematurely’, the search for the guarantee, is the fear of the abyss of the act. 240
🙂 Laclau and his followers claim that every fundamental social antagonism “will always be displaced to some degree since, … antagonism can never be approached directly without political mediation.”
All we have is a series of antagonisms which (can) build a chain of equivalences, metaphorically ‘contaminating’ each other, and which antagonism emerges as ‘central’ is the contingent result of a struggle for hegemony. So does this mean that one should reject the very notion of fundamental antagonism’ (as Laclau does)? 242
In order to explicate the concept of ‘fundamental antagonism’ Žižek cites Lévi-Strauss from his Structural Anthropology. The famous example of the ZERO INSTITUTION.
the very splitting into the two ‘relative’ perceptions implies a hidden reference to a constant — not the objective, ‘actual’ disposition of buildings but a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism the inhabitants of the village were unable to symbolize, to account for, to ‘internalize’ to come to terms with — an imbalance in social relations that prevented the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole. The two perceptions of the ground plan are simply two mutually exclusive endeavours to cope with this traumatic antagonism, to heal its wound via the imposition of a balanced symbolic structure.
It is here one can see in what precise sense the real intervenes through anamorphosis. We have first the ‘actual’, ‘objective’, arrangement of the houses, and then its two different symbolizations which both distort in an anamorphic way the actual arrangement. However, the ‘real‘ is here not the actual arrangement, but the traumatic core of the social antagonism which distorts the tribe members’ view of the actual social antagonism. The real is thus the disavowed X on account of which our vision of reality is anamorphically distorted. It is simultaneously the thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle which prevents this direct access; the thing which eludes our grasp and the distorting screen which makes us miss the thing. More precisely the real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first to the second standpoint: the Lacanian real is not only distorted, but the very principle of distortion of reality. 243