Category: Žižek

Žižek on form formalism distinction

🙂 Rothenberg on Žižek’s insistence that the truth is a thoroughly partisan process.  Yet Žižek refuses relativism, so how can he argue truth is partisan but not relativistic.  Rothenberg cites a lengthy passage from Žižek [which I’ve broken up below for purposes of emphasis]:

Form is not the neutral frame of particular contents, but the very principle of concretion, that is, the “strange attractor” which distorts, biases, confers a specific colour on every element of the totality … [W]e should not confuse this properly dialectical notion of Form with the liberal-multiculturalist notion of Form as the neutral framework of the multitude of “narratives” — not only literature, but also politics, religion, science, are all different narratives, stories we are telling ourselves about ourselves, and the ultimate goal of ethics is to guarantee the neutral space in which this multitude of narratives can coexist peacefully — in which everyone, from ethnic to sexual minorities, will have the right and opportunity to tell their story … The properly dialectical notion of Form signals precisely the impossibility of this liberal notion of Form:

Form has nothing to do with “formalism”, with the idea of a neutral Form independent of its contingent, particular content; it stands, rather, for the traumatic kernel of the Real, for the antagonism which “colours” the entire field in question. In this precise sense, class struggle is the Form of the Social: every social phenomenon is overdetermined by it, so that it is not possible to remain neutral towards it.

(Rothenberg 161, citing guess who from Revolution at the Gates, 190, original emphasis)

Rothenberg on universality

Universality based on the excess generated by the formal negation does not depend upon finding a common ontic property, that is a property which is just one more difference within the situation.   All such properties can be used to name differences that are mobilized in the game of hegemony, empty spaces, and master-signifiers, as we have see in the discussion of Laclau’s political thought.  Only the minimal self–difference (described as the radical antagonism cutting across every element) escapes this play of signifiers, existing in an extimate relation to the situation, rather than in its encyclopedia.[I have no idea what she means ‘encyclopedia’ here, but R. does provide more insight on 168]  This self-difference or (self-)antagonism subsists (ex-sists, Lacan would say, to emphasize its extimacy) as the hidden dimension. Accordingly, Žižek goes on to argue for Badiou as the exemplar of the  philosopher of extimate causality, while admonishing Laclau … for ultimately recasting antagonism as agonism, that is, as differences among self-same elements in the social field (Rothenberg 164, referring to Žižek Iraq Broken Kettle 90).

rothenberg universal particular

Rothenberg quoting Žižek from Revolution at the Gates: “universal truth and partisanship, the gesture of taking sides, are not only not mutually exclusive, but condition each other: the universal truth of a concrete situation can be articulated only from a thoroughly partisan position; truth is, by definition, one-sided” (177).  Rothenberg then continues “[M]eanings are not at the disposal of the speaker but change with the auditor. If there were such a thing as a universal unaffected by the particular positions from which it is engaged then meanings would be stablized once and for all, and the fulfillment of political promises would be an easy task” (Rothenberg Excessive 161).

Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?

Žižek says this:

To put it simply, each of these relations to the Hegelian system is always that of a “I know well, but all the same.” One knows well that Hegel affirms the fundamentally antagonistic character of actions, the decentring of the subject, etc., but all the same … this division is eventually overcome in the self-mediation of the absolute Idea that ends up suturing all wounds. The position of Absolute Knowledge, the final reconciliation, plays here the role of the Hegelian Thing: a monster both frightening and ridiculous, from which it is best to keep some distance, something that is at the same time impossible (Absolute Knowledge is of course unachievable, an unrealizable Ideal) and forbidden (Absolute Knowledge must be avoided, for it threatens to mortify all the richness of life through the self-movement of the concept). In other words, any attempt to define oneself within Hegel’s sphere of influence requires a point of blocked identification – the Thing must always be sacrificed…

For us, this figure of Hegel as ‘panlogicist’, who devours and mortifies the living substance of the particular, is the Real of his critic’s, ‘Real’ in the Lacanian sense: the construction of a point which effectively does not exist (a monster with no relation to Hegel himself), but which, nonetheless, must be presupposed in order to justify our negative reference to the other, that is to say, our effort at distantiation. Where does the horror felt by post-Hegelians before the monster of Absolute Knowledge come from? What does this fantasmatic construction conceal by means of its fascinating presence? The answer: a hole, a void. The best way to distinguish this hole is by reading Hegel with Lacan, that is to say, by reading Hegel in terms of the Lacanian problematic of the lack in the Other, the traumatic void against which the process of signification articulates itself. From this perspective, Absolute Knowledge appears to be the Hegelian name for that which Lacan outlined in his description of the passe, the final moment of the analytic process, the experience of lack in the Other. If, according to Lacan’s celebrated formula, Sade offers us the truth of Kant, then Lacan himself allows us to approach the elementary matrix that summarizes the entire movement of the Hegelian dialectic: Kant with Sade, Hegel with Lacan. What is implied, then, by this relationship between Hegel and Lacan?

Get the rest of this fascinating article here
This might be a slightly older version, but I don’t know.

Žižek Hegel

Žižek, Slavoj. “Article on Hegel and Interview” The Speculative Turn: Continental Materialism and Realism. eds. Bryant, Levi., and Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. Melbourne: Re.press, 2011. 202-223. 406-415.

It is here that, in order to specify the meaning of materialism, one should apply Lacan’s formulas of sexuation: there is a fundamental difference between the assertion

‘everything is matter’

(which relies on its constitutive exception—in the case of Lenin who, in his Materialism and Empiriocriticism, falls into this trap, the very position of enunciation of the subject whose mind ‘reflects’ matter)

and the assertion ‘there is nothing which is not matter’

(which, with its other side, ‘not-All is matter’, opens up the space for the account of immaterial phenomena).

What this means is that a truly radical materialism is by definition non-reductionist: far from claiming that ‘everything is matter’, it confers upon the ‘immaterial’ phenomena a specific positive non-being.

Is it Still Possible to be a Hegelian Today

For this consciousness was not in peril and fear for this element or that, nor for this or that moment of time, it was afraid for its entire being; it felt the fear of death, the sovereign master. It has been in that experience melted to its inmost soul, has trembled throughout its every fibre, and all that was fixed and steadfast has quaked within it. This complete perturbation of its entire substance, this absolute dissolution of all its stability into fluent continuity, is, however, the simple, ultimate nature of self-consciousness, absolute negativity, pure self-relating existence, which consequently is involved in this type of consciousness. Phen of Spirit

What, then, does the Servant get in exchange for renouncing all the wealth of his particular Self? Nothing—in overcoming his particular terrestrial Self, the Servant does not reach a higher level of a spiritual Self; all he has to do is to shift his position and recognize in (what appears to him as) the overwhelming power of destruction which threatens to obliterate his particular identity the absolute negativity which forms the very core of his own Self. In short,

the subject has to fully identify with the force that threatens to wipe him out: what he feared in fearing death was the negative power of his own Self.

There is thus no reversal of negativity into positive greatness — the only ‘greatness’ there is is this negativity itself. Or, with regard to suffering: Hegel’s point is not that the suffering brought about by alienating labour of renunciation is an intermediary moment to pass, so that we should just endure it and patiently wait for the reward at the end of the tunnel—there is no prize or profit to be gained at the end for our patient submission, suffering and renunciation are their own reward,

all that is to be done is to change our subjective position, to renounce our desperate clinging to our finite Self with its ‘pathological’ desires, to purify our Self to universality.

This is also how Hegel explains the overcoming of tyranny in the history of states: ‘One says that tyranny is overturned by the people because it is undignified, shameful, etc. In reality, it disappears simply because it is superfluous’.  It becomes superfluous when people no longer need the external force of the tyrant to make them renounce their particular interests, but when they become ‘universal citizens’ by directly identifying the core of their being with this universality — in short, people no longer need the external master when they are educated into doing the job of discipline and subordination themselves. …

Let us take social struggle at its most violent: war. What interests Hegel is not struggle as such, but the way the ‘truth’ of the engaged positions emerges through it, i.e., how the warring parties are ‘reconciled’ through their mutual destruction. The true (spiritual) meaning of war is not honour, victory, defence, etc., but the emergence of absolute negativity (death) as the absolute Master which reminds us of the false stability of our organized finite lives.

War serves to elevate individuals to their ‘truth’ by making them obliterate their particular self-interests and identify with the State’s universality. The true enemy is not the enemy we are fighting but our own finitude

— recall Hegel’s acerbic remark on how it is easy to preach the vanity of our finite terrestrial existence, but much more difficult to accept this lesson when it is enforced by a wild enemy soldier who breaks into our home and starts to cut members of our family with a sabre ….

In philosophical terms, Hegel’s point is here the primacy of ‘self-contradiction’ over external obstacle (or enemy).

We are not finite and self-inconsistent because our activity is always thwarted by external obstacles; we are thwarted by external obstacles because we are finite and inconsistent.

In other words, what the subject engaged in a struggle perceives as the enemy, the external obstacle he has to overcome, is the materialization of the subject’s immanent inconsistency: the fighting subject needs the figure of the enemy to sustain the illusion of his own consistency, his very identity hinges on his opposing the enemy, so that his (eventual) victory over the enemy is his own defeat, disintegration.

As Hegel likes to put it, fighting the external enemy, one (unknowingly) fights one’s own essence.

So, far from celebrating engaged fighting, Hegel’s point is rather that every struggling position, every taking-sides, has to rely on a necessary illusion (the illusion that, once the enemy is annihilated, I will achieve the full realization of my being).

This brings us to what would have been a properly Hegelian notion of ideology: the misapprehension of the condition of possibility (of what is an inherent constituent of your position) as the condition of impossibility (as an obstacle which prevents your full realization) — the ideological subject is unable to grasp how his entire identity hinges on what he perceives as the disturbing obstacle. This notion of ideology is not just an abstract mental exercise: it fits perfectly the Fascist anti-Semitism as the most elementary form of ideology, one is even tempted to say: ideology as such, kat’ exochen. The anti-Semitic figure of the Jew, this foreign intruder who disturbs and corrupts the harmony of the social order, is ultimately a fetishist objectivization, a standin, for the ‘inconsistency’ of the social order, for the immanent antagonism (‘class struggle’) which generates the dynamic of the social system’s instability (208).

We can measure here clearly the distance that separates Hegel from Nietzsche: the innocence of exuberant heroism that Nietzsche wants to resuscitate, the passion of risk, of fully engaging in a struggle, of victory or defeat, they are all gone—the ‘truth’ of the struggle only emerges in and through defeat.

This is why the standard Marxist denunciation of the falsity of the Hegelian reconciliation (already made by Schelling) misses the point. According to this critique, the Hegelian reconciliation is false, it occurs only in the Idea, while real antagonisms persist — in the ‘concrete’ experience of the ‘real life’ of individuals who cling to their particular identity, state power remains an external compulsion.

Therein resides the crux of the young Marx’s critique of Hegel’s political thought: Hegel presents the modern constitutional monarchy as a rational State in which antagonisms are reconciled, as an organic Whole in which every constituent (can) find(s) its proper place, but he thereby obfuscates the class antagonism which continues in modern societies, generating the working class as the ‘non-reason of the existing Reason’, as the part of modern society which has no proper part in it, as its ‘part of no-part’ (Rancière). …

In other words, instead of rejecting the Hegelian false reconciliation, one should reject as illusory the very notion of dialectical reconciliation, i.e., one should renounce the demand for a ‘true’ reconciliation. Hegel was fully aware that reconciliation does not alleviate real suffering and antagonisms—his formulas of reconciliation from the foreword to his Philosophy of Right is that one should ‘recognize the Rose in the Cross of the present’, or, to put it in Marx’s terms, in reconciliation, one does not change external reality to fit some Idea, one recognizes this Idea as the inner ‘truth’ of this miserable reality itself. The Marxist reproach that, instead of transforming reality, Hegel only proposes its new interpretation, thus in a way misses the point—it knocks on an open door, since, for Hegel, in order to pass from alienation to reconciliation, one does not have to change reality, but the way we perceive it and relate to it.

exclude or exploit

Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon part 2

I also want to emphasize that for communists the binary inclusion/exclusion does not indicate the primary axis of justice (although it functions quite nicely for liberal democrats who insist that the true political issue is making sure that no one is excluded from opportunities to participate in the democratic process or from the possibility of striking it rich in the capitalist market). The remedy for those without papers, for example, is to have papers—and thus membership in the state. This isn’t a bad goal, but it is a goal that extends rather than takes or changes state power. The remedy for those without property (slum dwellers, say), is a right to property, a remedy that incorporates the owner into the official market economy, in effect eliminating the threat to the market that uncounted use and exchange pose.

But is capitalism best understood as a system that constitutively excludes persons or one that constitutively exploits them?

Building from Alain Badiou and Jacques Ranciere, Zizek claims that the antagonism between the included and the excluded is the fundamental antagonism rupturing capitalism today (and hence crucial to the idea of communism). Zizek recognizes that the focus on exclusion easily elides with “the liberal-tolerant-multicultural topic of ‘openness’ . . . at the expense of a properly Marxist notion of social antagonism.” Yet he argues that the inclusion of the proletariat is an inclusion of a different sort, an inclusion of the capitalism’s point of symptomal exclusion (“part of no part”) that effectively dismantles it.

A lot rides on the notion of “proletariat” here, especially insofar as contemporary capitalism relies on communication as a productive force, rather than industrial labor. On the one hand, Zizek detaches “proletarian” from the factory, treating “proletarianization” as a process that deprives humans of their “substance” and reduces them to pure subjects. On the other, he identifies exclusion as a particular kind of proletarianization, one by which some are made directly to embody “substanceless subjectivity.” They are the material remainders of the system, its unavoidable and necessary byproducts. Because the entire system relies on their exclusion (or their inclusion as remainders), because they embody the truth that capitalism produces human refuse, surplus populations with no role or function, to include them would destroy the system itself.

Capitalist productivity derives from its expropriation and exploitation of communicative processes. Cesare Casarino’s distinction between the common and the commons is helpful here.

The expropriation of language in the spectacle opens up a new experience of language and linguistic being: ‘not this or that content of language, but language itself, not this or that true proposition, but the very fact that one speaks.’ Failure to communicate provides its own satisfaction, the enjoyment of language itself.

The movement from commons to common repeats, in a way, this shift from active to passive or, the movement from desire to drive.

Blogs, Facebook, YouTube—they each and together take our ensemble of actions and return them to us as an endless communicative common.  Rather than “I make,” there is production, a production of thoughts and affects, opinions and contributions that circulate, accumulate, and distract. Words were spoken.

Agamben’s answer to the expropriation of the common is drive. The communist answer is desire, a desire already manifest in our active linking and adding and making, our creating and contributing without pay, just for ourselves and for each other

on communism

Jodi Dean, The Communist Horizon

Those who suspect that the inclusion of liberal democrats in a set with capitalists and conservatives is illegitimate probably are democrats. To determine whether they belong in the set of those who fear communism, they should ask themselves whether they think any evocation of communism should come with qualifications, apologies, condemnations of past excesses. If the answer is yes, then we have a clear indication that liberal democrats, and probably radical democrats as well, still consider communism a threat and so belong in a set with capitalists and concerns. They all are anxious about the forces the desire for communism risks unleashin

Bicycles are a “gate-way drug” to communism.

But in parliamentary democracies, for leftists to refer to their goals as a struggle for democracy is strange—it’s not like they are fighting for rights to vote and organize. Democracy is our ambient milieu, the hegemonic form of contemporary politics (which is yet another reason that the right can use communism as a name for what opposes it). For the left to use the language of democracy now is thus even stranger, a way of avoiding the fundamental antagonism between the top one percent and the rest of us by acting as if the only thing really missing was participation.

Rather than recognizing that for the left democracy is the form that the loss of communism takes, the form of communism’s displacement, radical democrats treat democracy as itself replacing communism (and on this point share the neoliberal position regarding the victory of capitalism). Political repercussions of the loss of communism as a name for left aspirations include a corresponding turn away from militant opposition and toward generalized inclusion as well as an abandonment of tight organizational forms like the party, the council, and the cell in favor of broad, thin, and momentary calls to become aware of an issue and change one’s lifestyle.

More fundamentally, the repercussion of the sublimation of communism in democratic preoccupations with process and participation is acquiescence to capitalism as the best system for the production and distribution of resources, labor, and goods.

The mistake leftists make when they turn into liberals and democrats is thinking that we are beyond the communist horizon, that democracy replaced communism rather than serving as the contemporary form of communism’s displacement.

They don’t see, can’t acknowledge, their own complicity in despotic financialism: if political struggle is always an irreducible dimension of capitalism and capitalism always interlinked with conflict, resistance, accommodation, and demands, then refusals to engage in these struggles, rejections of the terms of these struggles, will affect the form that capitalism takes.

The point I want to emphasize is that a primary factor in the changes in capitalism over the past thirty to forty years has been a change in the understanding of work, a change from an emphasis on its class, group, and collective dimension to a view of work as a personal choice, endeavor, and locus of meaning. Individual work displaced work as a common condition, freeing capital from the constraints in encountered when it had to deal with workers as a collective force.

Left appeals to democracy thus look a lot like the Lacanian notion of drive. For Lacan, drive, like desire, describes the way the subject arranges its enjoyment, jouissance.

– In the economy of desire, enjoyment is what the subject can never reach, what the subject wants but never gets—oh, that’s not it.

In the economy of drive, enjoyment comes from missing one’s goal; it’s what the subject gets, even if it doesn’t want it. It’s that little extra charge which keeps the subject keeping on. The subject’s repeated yet ever failing efforts to reach its goal become satisfying on their own.

Democracy for the left is drive: our circling around, our missing of a goal, and the satisfaction we attain through this missing. We talk, complain, and protest. We make groups on Facebook. We sign petitions and forward them to everyone in our mailbox. Activity becomes passivity, our stuckness in a circuit, which is then lamented and mourned as the absence of ideas or even the loss of the political itself and then, yet again, routed through a plea for democracy although it doesn’t take a genius to know that the real problem is neoliberal capitalism and its extreme inequality. What leftists call the loss of the political is the fog they muddle around in because they’ve lost sight of the communist horizon.

In the contemporary networks of communicative capitalism, drive is a feedback circuit that captures our best energies. Invigorating communism as a political alternative requires amplifying the collective desire that can cut through these affective networks. Fortunately, that desire is already there.

As Foucault makes clear, the limiting of the people as a common force turns them from active agents of power into a passive population. Here they are active only as individuals, little entrepreneurs or enterprises. What appears as the freedom of the market, then, is a certain foreclosure of the collective power of the people in and as a common. The power that matters, to affect the basic conditions in which they live, is displaced onto an economy that they are told they cannot govern because they cannot know. What do the people get instead? Representative democracy—the form of their passivity.

From politics of the extimate to axiomatic politics

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

[Žižek] searches for exceptional social agents that would replace the proletariat in transforming capitalism. Slums, in Žižek’s recent work, seem to be the privileged site for such social agents. Marginalized and dispossessed of “all but their chains,” “excluded from citizenship,” slum dwellers, for Žižek, hold the position of the extimate, the “part of no part,” the torque that could unravel the capitalist system (2007, 56-58). We wonder, however, whether this political vision is not rendering Žižek susceptible to the same critique that he has previously extended to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.

We are referring here to Žižek’s critique of Hardt and Negri’s politics of immanence and its reliance on a messianic awakening in which the dormant potential of the multitude realizes itself (2007). Is the politics of the extimate, at least in the manner occasionally articulated by Žižek, not premised on a similar understanding of political agency that is simply asserted, rather than constructed—although this time, the political agent refers to some exceptional social group (i.e., slum dwellers) rather than the multitude? 101

Initially, Žižek’s notion of the extimate appears to differ from the Hardt and Negri’s use of immanence. By rendering capitalism and its potential opposition as perfectly overlapping,

a politics of immanence eliminates the theoretical space needed to actually construct a position of real difference from which economic transformation can proceed.

For Žižek, the concept of the extimate refers precisely to such a political position that incarnates real difference. At a closer look, however, both Hardt and Negri and Žižek are unable to situate difference. If all difference collapses into a (capitalist) sameness in Hardt and Negri, difference is introduced in a manner that remains arbitrary and
unwarranted in Žižek. This common shortcoming does not come as a surprise
to us. Žižek shares with Hardt and Negri a similar ontology of the economy,
permeated by the logic of self-driven and self-regulating capitalist accumulation.

Limiting the constitution of the economy to the masculine logic of the capitalist-all, Žižek is hard pressed to carve up a position within capitalism that is heterogeneous to it.

The latter, then, is arbitrarily assigned to a selected set of marginalized positions, such as slum collectives, with an alleged disposition to revolt. Slums could certainly be a potential site for social transformation, or they might not be. What we wish to question, however, is the political cogency of trying to locate the “real” social agents of change.

After all, Marxian history is replete with stories of resentment when class-in-itself fails to transpire into class-for-itself (that is, when certain dominated and marginalized groups, anticipated to resist and mobilize due their marginalized position, fail to do so).

Axiomatic politics enables us to extricate ourselves from limiting the potential of transformation to a privileged set of social groups, economic sectors or geographical scales. It displaces the agent of class transformation from a social group to an abstract principle that could insert itself into every occasion in which decisions over the use of surplus are being instituted, rendering each concrete class organization an inconsistent and failed attempt.

Yet, it is also important not to confuse the communist gesture of refusal of an exception with the hysterical questioning of the Master. If the communist axiom fails to constitute an all, this is not because it has doubts about the authenticity, the legitimacy, the validity of that which occupies the position of the exception. By leaving the exception in place, such an understanding would remain blind to the radical commitment of the axiom. Rather, it is because the axiom, to repeat Joan Copjec’s perceptive claim, is only “half-said” (2002, 171, 175). That is, the potential of the axiom is only actualized as it encounters and engages with the function of exception in various concrete contexts, as its universalizing aspiration propels it to move beyond the cooperative workplaceto the local economy, beyond the local economy to the nation-state, and beyond the nation-state to a community of states, and so on. 101-102

Masculine economies of surplus labor

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

In this vein, it is only appropriate to consider the different organizations of surplus as various institutional attempts to furnish us with a knowledge of how to come to terms with the impossibility of the class relation. Under feudalism, for instance, the feudal manor constitutes a set, an all gathered together under the feudal lord qua the exception to the set. While all feudal agencies (from the knights that protected the manor from the attacks of the other lords and the vassals that managed the lord’s demesne to the church that provided the rules of conduct under the feudal order), receive a cut from the surplus for the services and functions that they render, it is only the lord who occupies an exceptional status that designates him as the sole recipient of the (products of the) surplus labor performed by the serfs. This highly stylized description of the feudal system can be formalized through

the masculine logic of exception, where the exception to the set (the feudal lord) that appropriates the surplus labor, delineates the boundaries of the affective and political economy of the feudal order. 93

Provided that theexceptional status of the lord is upheld, the social agencies that fall under the feudal form can engage in endless struggles with each other. Moreover, the
endless variations that the feudal form has passed throughout the long transition from feudalism to capitalism (Dobb 1946; Hilton 1976; Ashton and Philpin 1985) as well as its continuing (albeit highly fragile and unstable) presence in the contemporary household (Fraad, Resnick, and Wolff 1994; Gibson-Graham 2006; Safri 2006) attest to the fact that it is both fairly resilient yet at the same time highly unstable.

[W]e discern the masculine logic of exception that Marx identified in the feudal system (the universal set of the feudal manor constituted around the lord as its constitutive exception) in the other “canonical” modes of production, including slavery and capitalism. For instance, under the modern capitalist enterprise (i.e., the joint-stock company whose existence can be traced back all the way to the inception of Dutch East India Company in 1602), all the factors of production, “all individuals really active in production from the manager down to the lowest day labourer” as Marx puts it (1991, 568, emphasis added), must give something to get something (a portion of the living labor): the workers have to perform labor, the managers have to manage, the accountants have to keep the accounts, the financiers have to loan capital and so on. In this sense, under the joint stock company, “the capitalist” qua entrepreneur dissolves into its functional components and, thereby, evaporates.

Nevertheless, this universal set of all subsumed under the capitalist enterprise is still constituted by an exceptional entity, or better yet a function, that enjoys “other people’s surplus” without giving anything in return: the Board of Directors.

As long as the reproduction of the exceptional status of the Board of Directors as the sole appropriator of surplus, as the entity that gets “something for nothing,” is not jeopardized, the affective and political economy of capitalism can accommodate an infinite range of distributions of surplus, a wide array of consumption practices, and a variety of modes of exchange. According to our reading, therefore, (portions of) surplus value becomes the object cause of desire (as the currency that enables these subjects to participate in the commodity economy) for the subjects of this capitalist-all only within the delimited frame constituted by the exception to the exchange-function universalized by the market system: from the worker who demands a union premium (efficiency wage) to the executive manager who tries to secure funds for new investment in R&D, they all struggle with each other to justify (to the symbolic Big Other) why they should get a larger cut from the surplus appropriated by the Board of Directors.

The drive-effect

Early on in the paper, we welcomed the recent psychoanalytical literature on “the administration of enjoyment under late capitalism” and its analysis of the logic of desire in consumption. And then, in concretizing our “There is no class relation” thesis, we argued that surplus labor/value is the object cause of desire for the subjects of  capitalist-all (or any other exploitative form structured around a constitutive exception). In both cases, we were able to identify concrete desiring subjects.  Nevertheless, if we are speaking of the case of a joint stock company and if there is no actual capitalist but only a series of functionaries subsumed under the capitalist-all, then how are we going to impute a desire or a drive to the capitalist corporation?

In his The Parallax View, Žižek recognizes this problem and distinguishes the drive of capitalism from desire within capitalism. In contrast to desire, which is located on the side of the interpellated subjects of consumption who jump from one commodity to another in search of satisfaction, drive “…inheres to capitalism at a more fundamental, systematic, level: drive is that which propels the whole capitalist machinery, it is the impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction (emphasis added). 95

We enter the mode of drive the moment the circulation of money as capital becomes “an end in itself, for the expansion of value takes place only within this constantly renewed movement. The circulation of capital has therefore no limits.” […] (2006, 61)

As noted earlier, Žižek borrows this economic determinist narrative from a particular tradition within Marxism that has long defined “expansion through contradiction” as the “law of motion” of capital, and saw in it the telos of capitalism’s end (Norton 2001).
Žižek’s innovation is to turn this narrative upside down and associate drive with capitalism’s resilience rather than its destruction. Even though a pantheon of Marxist political economists, including Paul Sweezy, David Gordon, and David Harvey, posit that “accumulation for accumulation’s sake” is “the rule that governs the behaviour of all capitalists” (Harvey 1982, 29), the argument that the endless circular movement of the circuit of capital is propelled by an accumulation drive is not necessarily one that Marx himself would subscribe to.

Indeed, if we were to expand our concept of capitalism to include Marx’s explorations in Volumes 2 and 3, and his analysis of the numerous claims on surplus value, then it becomes very difficult to reduce the movement of capital into a self-regulating “expanded self-reproduction.”15 We have already noted that, within the masculine universe of the capitalist corporation, in the shape of endless struggles over the surplus, we find “an infinite movement of the desire within a finite, delimited frame” (Zupančič 2000, 289). An endless number of social agencies located within and outside of the actual corporation (but, to the extent they do not question the status of the constitutive exception, within the “capitalist-all”) strive to receive a cut of the surplus and to this end, they need to struggle with one another and, on occasion, justify their “necessity” for the continued existence of the capitalist form of extraction and distribution of surplus value.

This capitalist-all (with its constitutive exception embodied in the Board of Directors) frames the field within which a whole range of “competitive battles” takes place (Ruccio and Amariglio 2003, 239-244). The agencies of these competitive battles could be different recipients of surplus distributions within a corporation, different corporations (within and across industries), different forms of capital (industrial, financial, and merchant), and even nation-states and trans- and inter-national institutions (Resnick 2006). In this sense, the capitalist-all is a topological whole and its consistency is sustained by the taboo status of the exception: as long as (the institutional form that embodies) the exception is sustained and remains unquestioned, the particular location of a particular claimant/recipient of surplus value is only incidental.

We have already argued that, what sets in motion the circuit of capital is a host of social technologies of reproduction. Therefore, from our perspective, the question is not so much what propels the circuit of capital and the process of the self-expansion of value, but rather what throws it out of balance.

In fact, the aggregate outcome of the internal dynamic fueled by the logic of desire at the level of the subjects of capitalist-all is the mad dance of capitalism caught in a circular movement, sometimes resulting in expanded reproduction, sometimes in simple reproduction, and sometimes in non-reproduction. What are economic recessions and depressions, if not the unexpected aggregate outcomes of the uncoordinated activities as well as the competitive battles among the subjects of the capitalist-all? 97

Therefore, the cause of this directionless circular movement is not a drive to accumulate or “an impersonal compulsion to engage in […] expanded selfreproduction” (Žižek 2006, 61). Rather,

the blind movement of the circuit of capital is the overdetermined outcome of, on the one hand, the social technologies of reproduction that uphold/maintain the exception, and on the other hand, the competitive battles and intractable contradictions that crisscross the capitalist-all.

And if there is a drive, it is either at the level of the particular subjects of the capitalist-all, or, if it is at the aggregate level, then it is only as a drive-effect—not really as a drive, but rather a semblance of drive, giving an impression of inevitability and necessity in what seems like a “repetition compulsion.” 97

The question of difference

On the one hand, we have touched upon and highlighted economic difference as it is inflected within capitalism, in the figure of the different claims on the distributions of surplus value. On the other hand, we have demonstrated the different forms of configuring the relation to surplus labor within the delimited economies of capitalism, feudalism, and slavery. Nonetheless, in order to explicate what we mean by the ethico-political in the realm of the economy, we need to produce a particular notion of difference that embodies not only a break from the libidinal economy of capitalism but from all delimited structures of class. To be able to think this difference, we turn to psychoanalysis.

the possibility of formulating a meaningful economic difference that would unsettle the capitalist field of differences. We proffer that, when grafted onto the Marxian field of economic difference,

sexual difference (qua Lacan’s formalization of Kant’s dynamical and mathematical antinomies) helps to articulate difference as such. It allows distinguishing between the kind of difference within the delimited frame of the masculine logic of exception—including the differences among the various class structures that fall under the masculine logic of exception—and the difference between this masculine logic and the feminine logic of non-all.

The masculine logic defines a whole, an all, by positing a constitutive exception. Within the bounds of this set, all kinds of differences are permitted—with the proviso that the constitutive exception remains untouched.

The feminine logic of non-all, on the other hand, refuses to posit an exception at the expense of failing to constitute a coherent whole.

Contra capitalism, or any other exploitative form of appropriation of surplus (e.g., slavery, feudalism), the logic of non-all refuses to assign exclusive appropriative rights to any particular set of social agents.

This also includes those who were exploited under the ancien régime, namely the workers. Communism is generally understood to be the reparation of collective justice or the completeness of social being, which would be achieved once what is stolen from the workers is given back to them. Rejecting the substitution of one exception (i.e., board of directors) by another (i.e., the worker), the logic of non-all disrupts this fantasy. It is important to note that the exception that constitutes the capitalist-all is a function, even though it is embodied in the institution of the Board of Directors in our contemporary social formations. That is, various economic ideologies can sustain the function assumed by the Board of Directors. The ideology of economic growth, for instance, as the unchanging answer of classical political economy, neoclassical economics, and late neoclassical economics to their constitutive and shared problematic of how to reconcile rational choice and social harmony, seems to be a prominent example. In a passage, uncharacteristic in its declaration of the inevitability of capitalism as a “fetish,” Žižek skillfully argues for the need to counter this discourse:

“Whenever a political project takes a radical turn, up pops the inevitable blackmail: ‘Of course these goals are desirable in themselves; if we do all this, however, international capital will boycott us, the growth rate will fall, and so on.’ […] Many fetishes will have to be broken here: who cares if growth stalls, or even becomes negative? Have we not had enough of the high growth rate whose effects on the social organism were felt mostly in the guise of new forms of poverty and dispossession? What about a negative growth that would translate into a qualitatively better, not higher, standard of living for the wider popular strata? That would be a political act today…” (2004, 74) 99

Žižek aptly exposes the efficiency with which the superegoic imperative of growth holds back the contemporary subjects as its captives. The discourse of “negative growth” is a sobering gesture to undo the grip of the growth fantasy. However, our emphasis is on interrupting the logic of exception in all of its manifestations,  irrespective of the particular economic discourses that sustain it. After all, this logic can be perpetuated not only in the ideology of growth, but also in the economic fantasies of “local development,” “alleviation of poverty,” “enhancing human capital,” “creation of jobs,” “economic efficiency,” “freedom of choice,” and so on. That is why we approach economic difference instigated and materialized by the “non-all” as a moment, a perspective, a principle, which refuses the exception as such, and not just the particular social group that occupies the position of the exception, or the particular social discourse that articulates this function. We call this difference the communist moment.

Utopianism or dystopianism? No, thanks!

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

If we were to distinguish surplus labor from surplus value and reconstruct the proper homology as one between surplus labor and surplus jouissance, then an entirely different picture emerges.

In this alternative construction of the homology, not just capitalism but all forms of production, appropriation, and distribution are disrupted by the paradoxical topology of surplus jouissance.

By universalizing the psychoanalytical insight, in this manner, to all class formations, we intend to steer away from the dual dangers of utopianism as well as dystopianism. On the one hand, we reject utopianism by acknowledging the impossibility of a social link purged from surplus jouissance and the impossibility of the class relation, echoing the Lacanian insight pertaining to the impossibility of the sexual relation. On the other hand, we would be rejecting dystopianism by not restricting the homology to capitalism and retaining the Marxian insight pertaining to the possibility of another way of relating to surplus. Moreover, through our reconstruction of the homology, we will be able to produce a more robust and distinctively Marxian explanation as to why surplus labor/value, and not an inexorable accumulation drive, is indeed the absent “cause” that sets the circuit of capital in motion. 91

“There is no class relation”

We also believe that the numerous refutations and reinstatements of the labor theory of value, by reducing it to a theory of price determination, obscure Marx’s radical insight pertaining to the impossibility of the class relation (92).

For Marxian economics, neither the respective quanta of necessary- and surplus-labor nor the potential destinations of the appropriated surplus-labor could be determined a priori.  Indeed, there is no stable and universally accepted logic for conducting and institutionalizing the process of the performance, appropriation, and distribution of surplus-labor. To the extent that

there is no true, correct, or just way of dividing the total labor-time performed by direct laborers into its necessary and surplus components and distributing the surplus labor to their destinations, all social organizations of surplus labor will be structured around a foundational, constitutive lack.

This is the sense in which we construct the homology between surplus labor and surplus jouissance. Since there exists no pre-constituted/pre-given guideline or knowledge as to how to organize the surplus labor, there exists a surplus of knowledge. Indeed, historically concrete forms of the social organization of class (that designate who is the lord and who is the serf, who is the master and who is the slave, who is the capitalist and who is the worker) are already so many different, and ultimately failed, attempts to overcome this constitutive impossibility of the class relation and make up for the absence of a ready-made knowledge of what to do with the living labor. Yet each formation, each form of organizing surplus labor is inevitably thrown out of balance,
insofar as all social links are smeared with surplus jouissance. At the end of the day, to the extent that we are speaking of surplus labor, whether it is directly materialized in products/services or in currency with which one can buy products/services, the dialectics of desire as well as the obdurate logic of partial drives will be present.

All social links, therefore, including class formations, are structured around a constitutive lack that simultaneously invites and frustrates the communities.

We consider this foundational, constitutive lack as the absent cause, the foundational antagonism, the constitutive impossibility, around which sociality is constructed.

As Žižek once put it, the antagonism between the “bosses” and “workers” is “already a ‘reactive’ or ‘defence’ formation, an attempt to ‘cope with’ (to come to terms with, to pacify…) the trauma of class antagonism” 92

The homology, therefore, is not so much between the surplus labor and surplus jouissance as it is between the way a particular organization of surplus labor is a response formation to a foundational impossibility and the way the desire of the subject is sustained by a fantasy formation that wraps itself around the constitutive lack embodied in the objet petit a. 93

Diverging from Žižek, we do not restrict the conceptual content of surplus labor
to the paradoxical logic of capitalism, although we concur that there is a capitalist way of organizing the surplus labor, just as there could be a feudal or a communist way of organizing it. This seems more in tune with the original spirit of Marx. While he discussed surplus value as the form of surplus labor under capitalism, Marx neither derived the concept of surplus labor from, nor reduced it to, capitalism. Rather, the concept emerged as a consequence of Marx’s repeated attempts to make sense of the changing forms of economic organizations that existed side by side in the long process of the so-called transition from feudalism to capitalism. To argue otherwise and assert that
Marx constructed surplus labor exclusively through his focus on capitalism would be to neglect how Marx persistently studied, theorized and compared the different economic forms, such as feudalism, primitive communism, simple commodity production, capitalism, and so on, before he arrived at the concept of surplus labor.

In this precise sense, we consider surplus labor to be the “concrete universal” of the Marxian tradition. While surplus labor as a concept emerges out of Marx’s analysis of its various concrete manifestations, it always fails to be given a final shape by any one of these forms. 93

surplus labour surplus value surplus jouissance

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

In our attempt to develop a psychoanalytically informed class difference, however, we encounter another resistance, namely, a particular psychoanalytical approach to Marxian discourse, in which the scope of some key Marxian concepts is limited to the form they take within the specific discourse of capitalism. We find the virtual absence of surplus labor in the psychoanalytical literature symptomatic in this respect.

Rather, surplus labor appears in only one conceivable form, the capitalist form of surplus value. Such a reduction of Marxian concepts to their particular form within the discourse of capitalism eliminates the possibility of conceiving different relations to surplus labor (and hence to class) as integral to conceptualizing economic difference from capitalism.

Lacan’s seminars XVI and XVII, delivered in the aftermath of May 1968, include many favorable references to Marx’s discourse and the significance of the concept of surplus value. It is in seminar XVI that Lacan, in order to underscore the intimate relationship between surplus jouissance and surplus value, emphasizes the term “homology,” thereby evoking the idea of a fundamental similarity in the structure and function of these two concepts, a sameness that needs to be strictly distinguished from a cursory resemblance
between two discrete entities 87

Our interpretation of the encounter between Marx and Lacan begins from conceiving the homology as one between two nodal points (surplus labor and surplus jouissance) that set a new “discourse” in motion that revolves around them. Žižek, on the other hand, understands the homology as one between surplus jouissance as the object cause of desire and the surplus value as the “cause” which sets in motion the circuit of capital. His analysis differs from ours primarily in its oversight of the Marxian distinction between surplus labor and the particular form it takes under capitalism, surplus value. This, in turn, as we shall demonstrate, leads to a representation of capitalism as the only game in town. We believe that with the absence of the epistemological dimension of the homology that insists on retaining the independent existence and the distinct objects of each theoretical discourse, the attempts at articulating psychoanalysis with Marxism fail to do justice to either discourse. 87

What then, for Žižek, is the precise nature of the homology between the two concepts and what was it that Marx failed to recognize? What additional insight does the psychoanalytical concept of surplus jouissance bring into the Marxian concept of surplus value?

For Žižek, surplus jouissance is essentially “a residue, a remnant, a leftover of every signifying operation” (1989, 180) that gets “embodied” in the Lacanian objet petit a.

The Lacanian objet petit a “is just an objectification of a void, of a discontinuity opened in reality by the emergence of the signifier” (95).

Zupančič adds that surplus jouissance is a pure waste, an excess, a senseless and entropy-inducing refuse of signification that results from “the inadequacy of the signifier to itself, its inability to function ‘purely,’ without producing a useless surplus” (2006, 159).

However, surplus jouissance is not a simple, ordinary waste or excess that could be disposed of without consequence. Quite the contrary, in its status as the limit of signification, surplus jouissance (or objet petit a) is where the cause, the kernel of enjoyment is. The objet petit a is the “‘surplus’ in the object which stays the same in all possible worlds” (Žižek 1989, 95): because it lacks consistency, because it is “just an objectification of [the] void” of signification, it simultaneously frustrates and incites our desire to pin its meaning down to a concrete attribute.

Nevertheless, the subtraction of this excess, this surplus, this “something in it more than itself” will not deliver a balanced desire:

[Surplus jouissance] is not a surplus which simply attaches itself to some ‘normal’, fundamental enjoyment, because enjoyment as such emerges only in this surplus, because it is constitutively an ‘excess.’ If we subtract the surplus we lose enjoyment itself, just as capitalism, which can survive only by incessantly revolutionizing its own material conditions, ceases to exist if it ‘stays the same’, if it achieves an internal balance. This, then, is the homology between surplus value — the ‘cause’ which sets in motion the capitalist process of production — and surplus-enjoyment, the object-cause of desire. (Žižek SOO 1989, 52-53)

Žižek … argue[s] that because capitalism is marked by a constitutive imbalance, it is impossible to reform it or eliminate its foundational discord between the forces and relations of production.

Just as one cannot obtain domesticated, balanced desire without surplus jouissance, one cannot maintain a regulated capitalism without an incessant push towards capital accumulation that continually revolutionizes its conditions of production and reproduction. 89

against Žižek’s essentialism

Ceren Özselҫuk and Yahya M. Madra. “Economy, Surplus, Politics: Some Questions on Slavoj Žižek’s Political Economy Critique of Capitalism.” 78-107

An impasse in Žižek’s work on capitalism emerges with his inability to imagine the ethico-political principles of a non-capitalist and non-exploitative relation to class. [Žižek]continually points out the limitation of contemporary critiques of liberal democracy, insofar as they fail to acknowledge the primacy of class struggle in their framework. However, Zizek is in complicity with his own accusations, given that he is neither clear as to what the object of class struggle is, nor indicative of what a new way of organizing our enjoyment to the economy might be.

Rather we entertain the following hypothesis: the difficulty to think economic difference is conditioned, at least in part, by the particular ways in which Žižek and the psychoanalytical literature on capitalism that his work has inspired tend to operationalize Marx’s concepts of circuit of capital and surplus value. This tendency is most easily discernable at those moments when this psychoanalytical critique articulates the concept of enjoyment within an “accumulationist” narrative, which presupposes the contradictory unfolding of the expanded reproduction of capital as a built-in and automatic process.

This narrative ultimately erases any possibility of conceiving of contingency within, or difference from the process of capitalist reproduction.

Further still, this rendering of capitalist reproduction as self-constituted and self-driven also obliterates Žižek’s original attempt to embed the constitutive impossibility of capitalism within the discordant economy of enjoyment, since it disconnects the “structural” from the vital support of the “subjective.”

That is why we find it imperative to begin our analysis by reclaiming “organizations of surplus labor,” rather than the “accumulation of capital,” as the particular entry point of Marxian discourse before we interlace Marxian political economy with Lacanian psychoanalysis in order to conceptualize both the impossibility of, and difference in, class relations.

We then take issue with Žižek’s interpretation of Lacan’s thesis pertaining to the homology between surplus value and surplus jouissance. We reformulate the terms of this homology as that between surplus labor and surplus jouissance. In doing so, we opt for a different relation between psychoanalysis and Marxism in which we rethink economic difference, more precisely difference from capitalism, in light of psychoanalytical discourse without losing sight of one of the unique contributions of Marxian theory: the study of the historically changing relations of surplus labor. To this end, we shift the focus in psychoanalytical theory from consumption/exchange to the moments of production, appropriation, and distribution and conceive the different ways in which communities organize their relation to surplus in terms of sexual difference.

Drawing from Alain Badiou’s axiomatic politics, we formulate a feminine politics of the “non-all” that dynamites not only capitalism, but all other forms of relating to surplus labor, including forms of communism, which are organized around the masculine logic of exception.

As long as the subjects of capitalism continue to believe that an ultimate enjoyment is possible, capitalism will continue to feed off of the very disappointment that the act of consumption produces and shopping will go on ceaselessly.

This is why Stavrakakis (2003) argues that the problem with capitalism is not so much that it produces false needs, desires, and alienated subjectivities but rather that it has become a successful “administration” of enjoyment. This distinction is crucial: while the former position endorses the humanist idea that there are “true” needs, the latter shifts the focus from whether or not our needs are manufactured (they always are—to a certain extent) to the way in which capitalism thrives on the very structure of enjoyment as such (regardless of the content of enjoyment). In other words, the success of capitalism resides not so much in what it dictates that we enjoy, but the way in which it has begun to exploit how we enjoy.

The circuit of capital completes its round again, and again, without any disruption, and begins each time anew, because it has been successfully articulated with the libidinal economy of enjoyment, the structure of how we enjoy. 81-82

Moreover, the logic of desire provides a meaningful frame not only to understand how the administration of enjoyment has become constitutive of capitalism through enabling the sale of commodities (hence, securing the realization of capitalist surplus value), but also to inventively formulate a different relation to enjoyment within the field of consumption. This latter possibility hinges on articulating a relation to enjoyment that does not chase after the promise of fullness. If the notion of ultimate enjoyment is structured by the masculine logic, whereby our libidinal investment in an exceptional state of enjoyment fuels the continual displacement of our desire from one object to another in search of that impossible limit experience, then

a different relation to enjoyment, one that might very well disrupt the circuit of capital, is the decidedly ethical act of saying “no” to the superegoic injunction to “Enjoy!”—an injunction that imprisons the subjects in a regime of difference within a frame delimited by capitalism.

It is by refusing the bribe of impossible enjoyment that the subjects of this libidinal economy of desire are able to break from the endless consumption of commodities, whose flow is shored up by the ready-made signifiers (qua regime of difference/value) that are cleverly propagated by the advertisement discourse. Even though this possibility, which depends on a particular ethical reading of Lacan’s formula of sexuation, is rarely, if ever, explored, it is within the realm of the conceivable for these psychoanalytical critics. 82

However, as far as the moments of the economy other than consumption are considered, contingency remains inconceivable within the psychoanalysis of capital literature, and so does the possibility of politicizing those moments. We conjecture this is because the sophisticated critique of “the administration of enjoyment under late capitalism” attributes a certain necessity to the rest of the circuit of capital to function without any friction. In response to this presupposition, we are compelled to ask: what is the precise mechanism that propels the capitalist corporations to produce the commodities that are to be purchased by the consumers?

In representing the perpetuation of the expansion of value as automatic, we discern a tendency to understand capitalism in terms of the “accumulation drive.” This is an essentializing theoretical maneuver,

which effectively removes contingency from the reproduction of capitalism by positing capitalism qua drive as “the index of a dimension in human existence that persists for ever, beyond our physical death, and of which we can never rid ourselves…” (Žižek 1999, 293). To the extent that the production and reproduction of capital is seen as a “structural” (as opposed to “subjective”) process governed by an “impersonal compulsion to engage in the endless circular movement of expanded self-reproduction” (Žižek 2006, 61, emphasis added), it becomes difficult to conceptualize contingency in the constitution of the circuit of capital and, from there, to introduce class difference into the other moments of the circuit of capital. 82-83

To the extent that the process of expansion of value is taken to function automatically, the moment of consumption (i.e., realization of surplus value) ends up being the only subjective moment within the circuit of capital where the ethical can have a say and the difference from capitalism can emerge as a possibility. In the rest of the paper, we question and refuse the exceptional status that the psychoanalysis of capital literature tacitly assigns to the moment of consumption, with a view towards proliferating the subjective moments that are potentially open to an “evental site” where difference from capitalism can emerge. 83

It is to this third moment of realization of surplus value (i.e., consumption) that the psychoanalytical intervention tends to limit itself. Such a limitation, in turn, makes it impossible to see the other moments within the circuit, such as production, appropriation, exchange, and distribution, as potential sites of subjectivation. In recovering these moments, it becomes relevant again to reconsider some distinctively Marxian concerns: Who appropriates the surplus value? How are the means of production secured? What are the particular social and technical relations of producing surplus value? What happens to the realized surplus value? What are the concrete struggles over its distribution? As these questions are being posed, the circuit of capital and its continued maintenance will start to appear more and more uncertain and susceptible to disruption by a host of social antagonisms and competitive battles. 84

In this sense, a more nuanced Marxian treatment of the circuit of capital will not only reveal the contingency of the social reproduction of the process of expansion of value, but also expand the scope of applicability of psychoanalysis beyond the hustle and bustle of the shopping mall and into the “hidden abode of production.” 85

To put it differently, rendering the constitution of the expansion of value (the circuit of capital) contingent opens a space within the moment of production for conceptualizing a psychoanalytically informed economic difference that pertains to class. The concept of class here refers to the organization of different affective relations to the surplus labor, in which the relation to surplus value, the capitalist form of surplus labor, becomes one relation among many.