TheDebate – objet (a)

Antigone

Žižek, Dolar. Opera’s Second Death. 2001

This domain of the double provides the answer to the question: what is so unsettling about the possibility that a computer might “really think”? It’s not simply that the original (me) will become indistinguishable from the copy, but that my “mechanical” double will usurp my identity and become the “original” (a substantial object), while I will remain a subject.

It is thus absolutely crucial to insist on the asymmetry in the relationship of the subject to his double: they are never interchangeable – my double is not my shadow, its very existence on the contrary reduces ME to a shadow. In short, a double deprives me of my being: me and my double are not two subjects, we are I as a (barred) subject plus myself as a (non-barred) object.

For this reason, when literature deals the theme of the double, it is always from the subjective standpoint of the “original” subject persecuted by the double – the double itself is reduced to an evil entity which cannot ever be properly subjectivized.

This is what the fashionable critique of the “binary logic” gets wrong: it is only in the guise of the double that one encounters the Real – the moment indefinite multitude sets in, the moment we let ourselves go to the rhizomatic poetry of the “simulacra of simulacra endlessly mirroring themselves, with no original and no copy,” the dimension of the Real gets lost.

This Real is discernible only in the doubling, in the unique experience of a subject encountering his double, which can be defined in precise Lacanian terms, as myself PLUS that “something in me more than myself” which I forever lack, the real kernel of my being.

The point is thus not that, if we are only two, I can still maintain the “non-deconstructed” difference between the original and its simulacra/copy – in a way, this is true, but in the OBVERSE way: what is so terrifying in encountering my double is that its existence makes ME a copy and IT the “original.”

Is this lesson not best encapsulated in the famous scene from Duck Soup, in which one of the brothers (the house-breaker) tries to convince the other (Groucho, the President of Freedonia) that he is just his mirror-image, i.e. that the door frame into the next room is really a mirror: since they are both dressed in the same way (the same white nightgown with a nightcap), the intruder imitates in a mirror-like way Groucho’s gestures, with the standard Marx brothers’ radicalization of this logic ad absurdum (the two figures change sides through the mirror-frame; when the double forgets to follow closely one of Groucho’s gestures, Groucho is for a brief moment perplexed, but when, after a delay, he repeats the gesture, as if to test the fidelity of the mirror-image, and, this time, the double copies it correctly, so Groucho is again convinced of the truth of his mirror image). The game is only ruined when the THIRD Marx brother arrives, dressed in exactly the same way…

Back to the Greek tragedy: the other series, opposite to this line of self-sacrificing women, is that of the excessively destructive women who engage in a horrifying act of revenge: Hekabe, Medea, Phaedra. Although they are first portrayed with sympathy and compassion, since their predicament is terrible (Hekabe sees her entire family destroyed and herself reduced to a slave; Medea, who sacrificed all – her country – for the love of Jason, a Greek foreigner, is informed by him that, due to dynastic reasons, he will marry another young princess; Phaedra is unable to resist her all-consumming passion for Hippolytus, her stepson), the terrible act of revenge these women concoct and execute (killing their enemies or their own children, etc.) is considered pathologically excessive and thus turns them into repulsive monsters.

That is to say, in both series, we begin with the portrayal of a normal, sympathetic woman, caught in a difficult predicament and bemoaning her sad fate (Iphigenia begins with professing her love of life, etc.); however, the transformation which befalls them is thoroughly different: the women of the first series find themselves “interpellated into subjects,” i.e. abandon their love of life and freely assume their death, thus fully identifying with the paternal Law which demanded this sacrifice, while the women of the second series turn into inhuman avenging monsters undermining the very foundations of the paternal Law. In short, they both transcend the status of normal mortal suffering women, prone to human pleasures and weaknesses, and turn into something no-longer-human; however, in one case, it is the heroic free acceptance of one’s own death in the service of community, while, in the other case, it is the excessive Evil of monstrous revenge.

There are, however, two significant exceptions to this series: Antigone and Electra. Antigone clearly belongs to the first series of the women who accept their sacrifice on behalf of their fidelity to the Law; however, the nature of her act is such that it doesn’t fit the existing public Law and Order scheme, so her no-longer-human insistence does not change her into a hero to be worshipped in public memory.

On the other side, Electra is a destructive avenger, compelling her brother Orestes to kill their mother and her new husband; however, she does this on behalf of her fidelity to her betrayed father’s memory. The destructive fury is thus here in the service of the very paternal Law, while in the case of Antigone, the self-sacrificing sublime gesture is accomplished in resistance to the Law of the City.

We thus get an uncanny confusion which disturbs the clear division: a repulsive avenger for the right Cause; a sublime self-sacrificial agent for the wrong Cause. – The further interesting point is the “psychological” opposition between Antigone’s inner certainty and calm, and Electra’s obvious hysterical theater:

Electra indulges in exaggerated theatrical self-pity, and thereby confirms that this indulgence is her one luxury in life, the deepest source of her libidinal satisfaction. She displays here inner pain with neurotic affectation, offering herself as a public spectacle. After complaining all the time about Orestes’ delay in returning and avenging their father’s death, she is late in recognizing him when he does return, obviously fearing that his arrival will deprive her of the satisfaction of her grievance. Furthermore, after forcing Orestes to perform the avenging act, she breaks down and is unable to assist him.

In the case of Antigone and Medea, the “radical” act of the heroine is opposed to a feminine partner who “compromises her desire” and remains caught in the “ethics of the Good”: Antigone is contrasted to gentle Ismene, a creature of human compassion unable to follow her sister in her obstinate pursuit (as Antigone herself puts it in her answer to Ismene: “life was your choice, when mine was death”);

Medea is contrasted to Jason’s young new bride (or even herself in the role of a mother). In the case of Iphigenia, her calm dignity, her willing acceptance of the forced choice of self-sacrifice on behalf of her father’s desire, is contrasted to the furious outbursts of her sister Electra, hysterically calling for revenge, yet fully enjoying her grief as her symptom, fearing its end.

Why, in this triad of the “radical” heroines (Iphigenia, Antigone, Medea), do we tend to prefer Antigone, elevating her to the sublime status of the ultimate ethical hero(ine)? Is it because she opposes the public Law not in the gesture of a simple criminal transgression, but on behalf of ANOTHER Law?

Therein resides the gist of Judith Butler’s reading of Antigone: “the limit for which she stands, a limit for which no standing, no translatable representation is possible, is /…/ the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public sphere as its scandalous future.”(Butler 2000, p. 40)

Antigone formulates her claim on behalf of all those who, like the sans-papiers in today’s France, are without a full and definite socio-ontological status: as Butler emphasizes through a passing reference to Giorgio Agamben (Butler 2000, p. 81), in our era of self-proclaimed globalization, they – the non-identified – stand for the true universality.

Which is why one should pin down neither the position from which (on behalf of which) Antigone is speaking, neither the object of her claim: in spite of her emphasis of the unique position of the brother, this object is not as unambiguous as it may appear (is Oedipus himself also not her (half)brother?); her position is not simply feminine, because she enters the male domain of public affairs – in addressing Creon, the head of state, she speaks like him, appropriating his authority in a perverse/displaced way; and neither does she speak on behalf of kinship, as Hegel claimed, since her very family stands for the ultimate (incestuous) corruption of the proper order of kinship. Her claim thus displaces the fundamental contours of the Law, what the Law excludes and includes.

Butler develops her reading in contrast to two main opponents, not only Hegel but also Lacan. In Hegel, the conflict is conceived as internal to the socio-symbolic order, as the tragic split of the ethical substance: Creon and Antigone stand for its two components, state and family, Day and Night, the human legal order and the divine subterranean order.

Lacan, on the contrary, emphasizes how Antigone, far from standing for kinship, assumes the limit-position of the very instituting gesture of the symbolic order, of the impossible zero-level of symbolization, which is why she stands for death drive: while still alive, she is already dead with regard to the symbolic order, excluded from the socio-symbolic coordinates.

In what one is almost tempted to call a dialectical synthesis, Butler rejects both extremes (Hegel’s location of the conflict WITHIN the socio-symbolic order; Lacan’s notion of Antigone as standing for the going-to-the-limit, for reaching the OUTSIDE of this order): Antigone undermines the existing symbolic order not simply from its radical outside, but from a utopian standpoint of aiming at its radical rearticulation.

Antigone is a “living dead” not in the sense (which Butler attributes to Lacan) of entering the mysterious domain of ate, of going to the limit of the Law; she is a “living dead” in the sense of publicly assuming an uninhabitable position, a position for which there is no place in the public space – not a priori, but only with regard to the way this space is structured now, in the historically contingent and specific conditions.

This, then, is Butler’s central point against Lacan: Lacan’s very radicality (the notion that Antigone locates herself in the suicidal outside of the symbolic order), reasserts this order, the order of the established kinship relations, silently assuming that the ultimate alternative is the one between the symbolic Law of (fixed patriarchal) kinship relations and its suicidal ecstatic transgression.

What about the third option: that of rearticulating these kinship relations themselves, i.e., of reconsidering the symbolic Law as the set of contingent social arrangements open to change? And does the same not hold also for Wagner: is the obliteration of the Law of the Day in Tristan not the obverse of the inability to envision its radical rearticulation?

Is then Lacan – in his celebration of Antigone’s suicidal choice of ecstatic death – the ultimate Wagnerian, the “last Wagnerite,” if not the perfect one, as G.B.Shaw would have put it? It is here that we encounter the crucial dilemma: can that what Lacan calls ate really be historicized, as the shadowy spectral space of those to whom the contingent public discourse denies the right to full public speech, or is it the other way round, so that we can REARTICULATE the symbolic space precisely insofar as we can, in an authentic ACT, take the risk of passing through this liminal zone of ate, which only allows us to acquire the minimum of distance towards the symbolic order?

Another way to formulate this dilemma is with regard to the question of purity: according to Butler, Antigone speaks for all the subversive “pathological” claims which crave to be admitted into the public space, while for Lacan, she is precisely the PURE one in the Kantian sense, bereft of any “pathological” motivations – it is only by entering the domain of ate that we can attend the pure desire. This is why Antigone is, for Lacan, the very antipode of Hegel’s notorious notion of womankind as “the everlasting irony of the community”(Hegel, 1977,p. 288).

Butler was right to emphasize the strange passage from the (unique) individual to the universal which takes place at this point of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Butler 2000, p. 38): after celebrating the sublime beauty of Antigone, her unique “naive” identification with the ethical substance, the way her ethical stance is part of her spontaneous nature itself, not something won through the hard struggle against the egotistic and other evil propensities (as is the case with the Kantian moral subject), Hegel all of a sudden passes into GENERAL considerations about the role of “womankind” in society and history, and, with this passage, the pendulum swings into the opposite extreme: woman stands for the pathological, criminal even, perversion of the public law.

We can see how, far from bearing witness to an inconsistency in Hegel’s argumentation, this reversal obeys an inexorable logic: the very fact that a woman is formally excluded from the public affairs, allows her to embody the family ethics as opposed to the domain of public affairs, i.e., to serve as a reminder of the inherent limitation of the domain of “public affairs.” (Today, when we are fully aware of how the very frontier that separates the public from the private hinges on political rapport of forces, one can easily perceive women as the privileged agents of the repoliticization of “private” domains: not only of discerning and articulating the traces of political relations of domination in what appears to be an “apolitical” domain, but also of denouncing the very “depoliticization” of this domain, its exclusion from the political, as a political gesture par excellence.)

Is this, however, the ultimate scope of the feminine political intervention? It is here that one should consider the break which separates modernity from Antiquity: already in the late Medieval time, with Joan of Arc, a new figure of the feminine political intervention appeared which was not taken into account by Hegel: on behalf of her very universal exclusion from the domain of politics, a woman can, exceptionally, assume the role of the direct embodiment of the political AS SUCH.

Precisely as Woman, Joan stands for the political gesture at its purest, for the Community (universal Nation) as such against the particular interests of the warring factions. Her male attire, her assumption of male authority, is not to be misread as the sign of unstable sexual identity: it is crucial that she does it AS A WOMAN. Only as such, as a woman, can she stand for the Political Cause in its pure universality. In the very gesture of renouncing the determinate attributes of femininity (a virgin, no children, etc.), she stood for Woman as such. This, however, was simultaneously the reason she HAD to be betrayed and ONLY THEN canonized: such a pure position, standing directly for the national interest as such, cannot translate its universal request into a determinate social order. It is crucial not to confound this Joan’s feminine excess (a woman who, by way of renouncing feminine attributes, directly stands for the universal political mission) with the reactionary figure of “Mother-Nation” or a “Mother-Earth” figure, the patient and suffering mother who stands for the substance of her community, and who, far from renouncing feminine attributes, gives body to the worst male ideological fantasy of the noble woman.

The charge against Joan at her trial can be summed up in three points: in order to regain mercy and be readmitted into the Catholic community, she should (1) disavow the authenticity of her voice, (2) renounce her male dress, and (3) fully submit herself to the authority of the Church (as the actual terrestrial institution). These three points, of course, are interconnected: Joan did not submit to the authority of the Church, because she gave priority to the divine voices through which God addressed her directly, bypassing the Church as institution, and this exceptional status of her as the warrior directly obeying God, bypassing the customs of ordinary people, was signalled by her crossdressing.

Do we not encounter hear, yet again, the Lacanian triad of the Real-

Ž critique of Butler October 2010

Žižek Penn Humanities Forum 13 Oct. 2010
pure surface, frozen image, positive ethical utopia of eternity, this image is real and at the same time virtual. Plato has to corected, a Platonic ideal is not deeper, just an ethical act when it occurs, this is eternity, this is the Real. The Real as virtual.

I am against the notion of Otherness Universal solidarity of struggle. India I had a wonderful time. I was in a taxi with my friend and the driver asked in his language to Ž’s friend … dirty joke as entry exchange of obscenity as moment of solidarity, we are not politically correct b.s., to have authenticate relation to other you need a surplus enjoyment, and then you can go on to talk seriously. I don’t understand my culture, I don’t understand yours, ditto for you, but we have a common universality of struggle. we are eternal. this is a sublime moment.

Real as virtual
flesh, blood veins, repuslive body of decay, we take recourse in decaying body in order to avoid fascination of the Real.
real that emerges in the guise of an illusory spectacle, this is what we deny when we cut up chickens on stage, directly address the audience etc.
There is nothing transgressive talking about veins, shit underneath, aging bodies, gas, there is nothing sublime going on here.
Ethical Experience and critique of Judith Butler
This dimension of eternity is necessary to supply the big motive of pomo ethics, the precarious fragility of human being
caught in decentred representations, this precarious state of subjectivity which for Butler and Levinas accounts for zero level of all ethics.
The others face makes an unconditional demand on me. The encounter with the other which opens up the space for discourse, the Real of a violent encounter which throws me off my existence as a simple human animal.
Crux of the difference between Žižek and Butler
Desire is desire of the other.
dimension of ethical in psychoanalytic experience.
In my unconditional responsibility, I assume supremacy over the other (acts of charity, bombard us with images of starving children). Butler explains which faces are worthy of grief and which are not, the pictures dying of napalm, helped end Vietnam war. But Ž says images of sick and starving children, fragility of other staring back at you has the obverse, the moment the other doesn’t want to play this role, we all love this weak other, like Starbucks ads say we can save by buying a capuccino, but the minute they the other organize, they become terrorists. Who cares about computers when kids are starving in Africa says Bill Gates. This is an effort at depoliticization. Forget about politics and ideology, and get together, business and charity and don’t think.
Starbucks is today the example of Levinasian ethical paradigm
This vulnerable precarious other
Žižek goes into the animal that I am. Another gaze excluded by Levinas, the gaze of a wounded suffering animal.
dfas
Monstrosity of the HUMAN
What are we for animals? This is not New Age b.s. If you turn around the perspective and ask simply not what does it mean the gaze of the frightened animal, but what do you see in the animals gaze, you see your own monstrosity, this is what philosophers don’t want to talk about. What? DEATH DRIVE.
Kant: Man is an animal that needs a master, wild irrational excess of violent freedom in man, which animals don’t have, which is why animals don’t need education, it is nature “turned against itself”an excess of wild freedom.
What were the first Christians in the eyes of the Jewish establishment. What kind of monsters were they?

Locate properly our Monstrosity
So called fundamentalists are not egotists, but are ready to sacrifice their lives, same with capitalists, MEME, spreads like a computer virus, it programs its own retransmission, we humans are nonetheless are unwitting victims of a thought contagion. Daniel Dennett too. we are dealing with a parasite that occupies the individual and uses it for its own purposes. An idea can spread even if in the long term it can only bring destruction to its bearers. CAPITAL: like a meme, they use us to reproduce and multiply itself, the productive force, the capitalist process of production is development of productive forces, capitalism is NOT sustained by greed of capitalists, greed is subordinated to impersonal power of capital. What we need is MORE not less EGOTISM. In Lacanian terms, individual greed and striving of capital to expand is difference between DESIRE AND DRIVE. Krugman says most of would still follow the herd even knowing there would be a breakdown. Memetic functioning of capitalist drive.
Fetishist Disavowal
Marx’s key insight remains valid Freedom is not located in political sphere proper, are human rights respected, is there free judiciary etc. The key to freedom for Marx is apolitical network of social relations from market to family, a change in social relations which appear apolitical, a change that can’t be done through elections in narrow sense, we don’t vote about who owns what, about relations in factory. Radical changes in this domain have to be done outside legal sphere. This limitation of legal democratic approach was shown in Obama’s reaction to BP oil spill. Sue them! it is all held within a narrow legalistic frame. The true task is not COMPENSATION, but to change situation so that they won’t be in situation to cause damage
They tell you about global warming and then you go outside and see the sun and the birds chirping and you say “my god can this be true”
Humanity should get ready to live in a more plastic nomadic way. Large population migrations will be necessary, desertification, global warming, large population movements who will organize it. Trans-state global mechanism to do it.
Sometimes the impossible happens: The Act You do something which within the existing ideological universe appears impossible, but while doing it it creates its own possibility, through the act itself it becomes possible. This is what we need.
Future: continuation of the present, full actualization of the tendencies already here.

The ultimate horizon of the future, some ecological breakdown, zero-point, a virtual attractor to which our reality if left to itself tends. We have to break with this through acts, there is no future in future, there is something in avenir.

Avenir: what is to come, a break with the present

We should adopt catastrophe as virtual point. Bring logic of existing system to end, there is ecological breakdown. OK this is our destiny, but we can indefinitely postpone it, and slowly undermine it. Admit the catastrophe as a destiny, but not as natural necessity, but as symbolic destiny, this does not mean it will really arrive, it is a dialectical point, destiny is inevitable, but what we can change is the inevitability of destiny. If everything is predestined why work, why not sit and masterbate, no if there is a concept marxists should take from theology it is predestination. It is predestined, we are not free within this predestiny but we are free to change destiny itself.

Every new work of art changes the entire past. Kafka created his own predecessors.
Commodity Fetishism

162-3 face neighbor

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190. Here is Ž in Oct 2010 at Princeton in a great lecture outlining these points

This dimension is missing also in Levinas. In a properly dialectical paradox, what Levinas (with all his celebration of Otherness) fails to take into account is not some underlying Sameness of all humans but the radical, “inhuman” Otherness itself: the Otherness of a human being reduced to inhumanity, the Otherness exemplified by the terrifying figure of the Muselmann, the “living dead” in the concentration camps.

This is why, although Levinas is often perceived as the thinker who endeavored to articulate the experience of the Shoah, one thing is self-evident apropos his questioning of one’s own right to be and his emphasis on one’s unconditional asymmetrical responsibility: this is not how a survivor of the Shoah, one who effectively experienced the ethical abyss of Shoah, thinks and writes. This is how those think who feel guilty for observing the catastrophe from a minimal safe distance.

That is to say, insofar as, in his description of the ethical call, Levinas reproduces the basic coordinates of ideological interpellation (I become an ethical subject when I respond with “Here I am!” to the infinite call emanating from the vulnerable face of the other), one could say that the Muselmann is precisely the one who is no longer able to say “Here I am!” (and in front of whom I can no longer say “Here I am!”).

Recall the big gesture of identification with the exemplary victim: “We are all citizens of Sarajevo!” and such; the problem with the Muselmann is that this gesture is no longer possible. It would be obscene to proclaim pathetically, “We are all Muselmänner!”

When confronted with a Muselmann, one cannot discern in his face the trace of the abyss of the Other in his/her vulnerability, addressing us with the infinite call of our responsibility. What one gets instead is a kind of blind
wall, a lack of depth. Maybe the Muselmann is thus the zero-level neighbor, the neighbor with whom no empathetic relationship is possible.

However, at this point, we again confront the key dilemma: what if it is precisely in the guise of the “faceless” face of a Muselmann that we encounter the Other’s call at its purest and most radical? What if, facing a Muselmann, one hits upon one’s responsibility toward the Other at its most traumatic?

In short, what about bringing together Levinas’s face and the topic of the “neighbor” in its strict Freudo-Lacanian sense, as the monstrous, impenetrable Thing that is the Nebenmensch,the Thing that hystericizes and provokes me?

What if the neighbor’s face stands neither for my imaginary double/semblant nor for the purely symbolic abstract “partner in communication,” but for the Other in his or her dimension of the Real?

What if, along these lines, we restore to the Levinasian “face” all its monstrosity: face is not a harmonious Whole of the dazzling epiphany of a “human face,” face is something the glimpse of which we get when we stumble upon a grotesquely distorted face, a face in the grip of a disgusting tic or grimace, a face which, precisely, confronts us when the neighbor “loses his face”? To recall a case from popular culture, “face” is what, in Gaston Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera, the heroine gets a glimpse of when she sees for the first time the Phantom without his mask (and, as a reaction to the horror that confronts her, immediately loses her consciousness and falls to the ground).

far from standing for absolute authenticity, such a monstrous face is, rather, the ambiguity of the Real embodied, the extreme/impossible point at which opposites coincide, at which the innocence of the Other’s vulnerable nakedness overlaps with pure evil. 162

That is to say, what one should focus on here is the precise meaning of the term neighbor: is the “neighbor” in the Judeo-Freudian sense, the neighbor as the bearer of a monstrous Otherness, this properly inhuman neighbor, the same as the neighbor that we encounter in the Levinasian experience of the Other’s face?

Is there not, in the very heart of the Judeo-Freudian inhuman neighbor, a monstrous dimension which is already minimally “gentrified,” domesticated, once it is conceived in the Levinasian sense? What if the Levinasian face is yet another defense against this monstrous dimension of subjectivity?

And what if the Jewish Law is to be conceived as strictly correlative to this inhuman neighbor?

In other words, what if the ultimate function of the Law is not to enable us not to forget the neighbor, to retain our proximity to the neighbor, but, on the contrary, to keep the neighbor at a proper distance, to serve as a kind of protective wall against the monstrosity of the neighbor?

In short, the temptation to be resisted here is the ethical “gentrification” of the neighbor, the reduction of the radically ambiguous monstrosity of the Neighbor-Thing into an Other as the abyssal point from which the call of ethical responsibility emanates. 163

159 Kant undead madness

The same paradox is at work in the core of the “dialectic of Enlightenment”: although Adorno (and Horkheimer) conceive the catastrophes and barbarisms of the twentieth century as inherent to the project of enlightenment, not as a result of some remainder of preceding barbarism to be abolished by way of bringing “enlightenment as an unfinished project” to its completion, they insist on fighting this excess-consequence of enlightenment by the means of enlightenment itself.

So, again, if enlightenment brought to the end equals regression into barbarism, does this mean that the only concept of enlightenment that we possess is the one which should be constrained, rendered aware of its limitation, or is there another positive notion of enlightenment which already includes this limitation?

There are two basic answers to this inconsistency of Adorno’s critical project: Jürgen Habermas or Lacan. With Habermas, one breaks the deadlock by formulating a positive normative frame of reference.

Through Lacan, one reconceptualizes the “humanity” of the deadlock/limitation as such; in other words, one provides a definition of the “human” which, beyond and above (or, rather, beneath) the previous infinite universal, accentuates the limitation as such: being-human is a specific attitude of finitude, of passivity, of vulnerable exposure. 159

Therein resides, for Butler, the basic paradox: while we should, of course, condemn as “inhuman” all those situations in which our will is violated, thwarted, or under the pressure of an external violence, we should not simply conclude that a positive definition of humanity is the autonomy of will, because there is a kind of passive exposure to an overwhelming Otherness which is the very basis of being-human.

How, then, are we to distinguish the “bad” inhumanity, the violence which crushes our will, from the passivity constitutive of humanity?

At this point, Butler compromises her position, introducing a naive distinction which recalls Herbert Marcuse’s old distinction between “necessary” repression and “surplus” repression:

“of course we can and must invent norms which decide between different forms of being-overwhelmed, by way of drawing a line of distinction between the unavoidable and unsurpassable aspect here and the changeable conditions there”.

What Butler (as well as Adorno) fails to render thematic is the changed status of the “inhuman” in Kant’s transcendental turn.

Kant introduced a key distinction between negative and indefinite judgment: the positive judgment “the soul is mortal” can be negated in two ways, when a predicate is denied to the subject (“the soul is not mortal”) and when a nonpredicate is affirmed (“the soul is nonmortal”). The difference is exactly the same as the one, known to every reader of Stephen King, between “he is not dead” and “he is undead.”

The indefinite judgment opens up a third domain which undermines the underlying distinction: the “undead” are neither alive nor dead; they are the mon-strous “living dead.” [For a closer elaboration of this distinction, see chapter 3 Tarrying with the Negative 1993. The Lacanian objet petit a also follows the logic of indefinite judgment: one should not say that it isn’t an object, but rather that it is a nonobject, an object that from within undermines/negates objectivity.]

The same goes for inhuman.“He is not human” is not the same as “he is inhuman.” “He is not human” means simply that he is external to humanity, animal or divine, while “he is inhuman” means something thoroughly different, namely, that he is neither simply human nor simply inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as “humanity,” is inher-ent to being-human.

And perhaps I should risk the hypothesis that this is what changes with the Kantian revolution: in the pre-Kantian universe, humans were simply humans, beings of reason, fighting the excesses of animal lusts and divine madness, but since Kant and German Idealism, the excess to be fought is absolutely immanent, the very core of subjectivity itself (which is why, with German Idealism, the metaphor for the core of subjectivity is Night, “Night of the World,” in contrast to the Enlightenment notion of the Light of Reason fighting the surrounding darkness).

So when, in the pre-Kantian universe, a hero goes mad, it means he is deprived of his humanity, in other words, the animal passions or divine madness took over, while with Kant, madness signals the unconstrained explosion of the very core of a human being. 159-160

140 Ž begins his critique of butler the act neighbor as Thing

Slavoj, Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence.” The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard. 2006. 134-190.

The limit of such a reference to the impenetrable background into which we are thrown and on account of which we cannot be taken as fully accountable and responsible for our acts is the negativity of freedom: even when the entire positive content of my psyche is ultimately impenetrable, the margin of my freedom is that I can say No! to any positive element that I encounter.

This negativity of freedom provides the zero-level from which every positive content can be questioned. Lacan’s position is thus that being exposed/overwhelmed, caught in a cobweb of preexisting conditions, is not incompatible with radical autonomy.

Of course, I cannot undo the substantial weight of the context into which I am thrown; of course, I cannot penetrate the opaque background of my being; but what I can do is, in an act of negativity, “cleanse the plate,” draw a line, exempt myself, step out of the symbolic in a “suicidal” gesture of a radical act —what Freud called “death drive” and what German Idealism called “radical negativity.”

What gets lost in this “critique of ethical violence” is precisely the most precious and revolutionary aspect of the Jewish legacy.

Let us not forget that, in the Jewish tradition, the divine Mosaic Law is experienced as something externally, violently imposed, contingent and traumatic—in short, as an impossible/real Thing that “makes the law.”

What is arguably the ultimate scene of religious-ideological interpellation — the pronouncement of the Decalogue on Mount Sinai — is the very opposite of something that emerges “organically” as the outcome of the path of self-knowing and self-realization: the pronouncement of the Decalogue is ethical violence at its purest.

The Judeo-Christian tradition is thus to be strictly opposed to the New Age Gnostic problematic of self-realization or self-fulfillment, and the cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor: far from brutally disturbing a preceding harmonious social interaction, the imposition of the Law endeavors to introduce a minimum of regulation onto a stressful “impossible” relationship.

When the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.

In contrast to the New Age attitude which ultimately reduces my Other/Neighbor to my mirror-image or to the means in the path of my self-realization (like the Jungian psychology in which other persons around me are ultimately reduced to the externalizations-projections of the different disavowed aspects of my personality), Judaism opens up a tradition in which an alien traumatic kernel forever persists in my Neighbor — the Neighbor remains an inert, impenetrable, enigmatic presence that hystericizes me. The core of this presence, of course, is the Other’s desire, an enigma not only for us, but also for the Other itself.

For this reason, the Lacanian “Che vuoi?” is not simply an inquiry into “What do you want?” but more an inquiry into “What’s bugging you? What is it in you that makes you so unbearable, not only for us but also for yourself, that you yourself obviously do not master?”

— in Serb, there is a vulgar expression which perfectly renders this meaning: when somebody is getting on one’s nerves, one asks him, “What for a prick is fucking you? [Koji kurac te jebe?]”

136-7 neighbor plea for ethical violence butler Ž

To play this game to the end, when the Wolf Man “regressed” to the traumatic scene that determined his further psychic development—witnessing the parental coitus a tergo — the solution would be to rewrite this scene, so that what the Wolf Man effectively saw was merely his parents lying on the bed, father reading a newspaper and mother a sentimental novel?

Ridiculous as this procedure may appear, let us not forget that it also has its politically correct version, that of the ethnic, sexual, and so on minorities rewriting their past in a more positive, self-asserting vein (African-Americans claiming that long be-fore European modernity, ancient African empires already had highly developed science and technology, etc.). … What disappears in this total availability of the past to its subsequent retroactive rewriting are not primarily the “hard facts,” but the Real of a traumatic encounter whose structuring role in the subject’s psychic economy forever resists its symbolic rewriting.

The ultimate irony is that this “critique of ethical violence” is some-times even linked to the Nietzschean motif of moral norms as imposed by the weak on the strong, thwarting their life-assertiveness: moral sensitivity, bad conscience, and guilt feeling are internalized resistances to the heroic assertion of Life. For Nietzsche, such “moral sensitivity” culminates in the contemporary Last Man who fears excessive intensity of life as something that may disturb his search for “happiness” without stress, and who, for this very reason, rejects “cruel” imposed moral norms as a threat to his fragile balance.

No wonder, then, that the latest version of the critique of ethical violence was proposed by Judith Butler, whose last book, although it does not mention Badiou, is de facto a kind of anti-Badiou manifesto: hers is an ethics of finitude, of making a virtue out of our very weakness, in other words, of elevating into the highest ethical value the respect for our very inability to act with full responsibility. The question one should ask concerns the limits of this operation.

Butler describes how, in every narrative account of myself, I have to submit myself to the foreign temporality of my language tradition and thus have to accept my radical decenterment. The irony of this description is that Butler, the sharp critic of Lacan, renders here (a somewhat simplified version of) what Lacan calls “symbolic castration,” the subject’s constitutive alienation in the decentered symbolic order.

Is, then, the subject totally determined by the signifying structure, or does it dispose of a margin of freedom? In order to account for this resistance to the rule of symbolic norms, Butler turns to Foucault: norms rule only insofar as they are practiced by subjects, and the subject disposes here of a minimum of freedom to arrange itself with these norms, to subvert them, to (re)inscribe them in different modes, and so on.

Lacan, on the contrary, allows for a much stronger subjective autonomy: insofar as the subject occupies the place of the lack in the Other (symbolic order), it can perform separation (the operation which is the opposite of alienation), and suspend the reign of the big Other, in other words, separate itself from it. 137

🙂 Ž doesn’t go anywhere with this last point. He says Lacan, contra Butler, allows for a strong subjective autonomy. Ok. So? This is the one and only time he speaks of separation.

zupančič sexual difference and real pt 2 of 4

Video of this presentation March 2011

Here is the paper online without works cited page

Freud in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) he insists on the original nonexistence of any germ of two sexes (or two sexualities) in preadolescent time.

The auto-erotic activity of the erotogenic zones is, however, the same in both sexes, and owing to this uniformity there is no possibility of a distinction between the two sexes such as arises after puberty … Indeed, if we were able to give a more definite connotation to the concepts of “masculine” and “feminine,” it would even be possible to maintain that libido is invariably and necessary of a masculine nature, whether it occurs in men or in women and irrespectively of whether its object is a man or a woman.

In other words, at the level of the libido there are no two sexes. And if we were able to say what exactly is “masculine” and “feminine,” we would describe it as “masculine” — but we are precisely not able to do this, as Freud further emphases in the footnote attached to the quoted passage. 7

So, when confronted with the question of sexual difference, the first answer of psychoanalysis is: From the strictly analytical point of view, there is in fact only one sex, or sexuality.

Moreover, sexuality is not something that springs from difference (between sexes); it is not propelled by any longing for our lost other half, but is originally self-propelling (and “autoerotic”). Freud writes, “The sexual drive is in the first instance independent of its object; nor is its origin likely to be due to its object’s attractions.”

Does this mean that sexual difference is only and purely a symbolic construction? Here waits the other surprise (not unrelated to the first, of course) of the psychoanalytic stance: Sexual difference doesn’t exist in the symbolic either, or, more precisely, there is no symbolic account of this difference as sexual. “In the psyche, there is nothing by which the subject may situate himself as male or female being.”

That is to say, although the production of meaning of what it is to be a “man” or a “woman” is certainly symbolic—and massive—it doesn’t amount to producing sexual difference as signifying difference. In other words, sexual difference is a different kind of difference; it doesn’t follow the differential logic.

Mladen Dolar quote: “There is a widespread criticism going around that aims at the binary oppositions as the locus of enforced sexuality, its règlementation, its imposed mould, its compulsory stricture. By the imposition of the binary code of two sexes we are subjected to the basic social constraint. But the problem is perhaps rather the opposite: the sexual difference poses the problem of the two precisely because it cannot be reduced to the binary opposition or accounted for in terms of the binary numerical two. It is not a signifying difference, such that it defines the elements of structure. It is not to be described in terms of opposing features, or as a relation of given entities preexisting the difference One could say: bodies can be counted, sexes cannot. Sex presents a limit to the count of bodies; it cuts them from inside rather than grouping them together under common headings.”

And sex does not function as a stumbling block of meaning (and of the count) because it is considered morally naughty. It is considered morally naughty because it is a stumbling block of meaning.

This is why the moral and legal decriminalization of sexuality should not take the path of its naturalization (“whatever we do sexually is only natural behavior”).

We should instead start from the claim that nothing about (human) sexuality is natural, least of all sexual activity with the exclusive aim of reproduction. There is no “sexual nature” of man (and no “sexual being”). The problem with sexuality is not that it is a remainder of nature that resists any definite taming; rather, there is no nature here — it all starts with a surplus of signification.

If we now return to the question of what this implies in relation to ontology in general, and, more specifically, to the performative ontology of contemporary gender studies, we must start from the following, crucial implication: Lacan is led to establish a difference between being and the Real. The real is not a being, or a substance, but its deadlock. It is inseparable from being, yet it is not being. One could say that for psychoanalysis, there is no being independent of language (or discourse)—which is why it often seems compatible with contemporary forms of nominalism.

All being is symbolic; it is being in the Other. But with a crucial addition, which could be formulated as follows: there is only being in the symbolic — except that there is real. There “is” real, but this real is no being. Yet it is not simply the outside of being; it is not something besides being, it is — as I put it earlier — the very curving of the space of being. It only exists as the inherent contradiction of being.

Which is precisely why, for Lacan, the real is the bone in the throat of every ontology: in order to speak of “being qua being,” one has to amputate something in being that is not being.

That is to say, the real is that which the traditional ontology had to cut off in order to be able to speak of “being qua being.”

We only arrive to being qua being by subtracting something from it — and this something is precisely that which, while included in being, prevents it from being fully constituted as being.

The real, as that additional something that magnetizes and curves the (symbolic) space of being, introduces in it another dynamics, which infects the dynamics of the symbolic, makes it “not all.”

Now, a very good way of getting closer to the relationship between sexuality as such (its real) and sexual difference is via an excerpt from a lecture by Joan Copjec, in which she made the following crucial observation:

“The psychoanalytic category of sexual difference was from this date [the mid-1980s] deemed suspect and largely forsaken in favor of the neutered category of gender. Yes, neutered. I insist on this because it is specifically the sex of sexual difference that dropped out when this term was replaced by gender.

Gender theory performed one major feat: it removed the sex from sex.

For while gender theorists continued to speak of sexual practices, they ceased to question what sex or sexuality is; in brief, sex was no longer the subject of an ontological inquiry and reverted instead to being what it was in common parlance: some vague sort of distinction, but basically a secondary characteristic (when applied to the subject), a qualifier added to others, or (when applied to an act) something a bit naughty.” [Copjec The Sexual Compact]

Goto Part 3

Žižek comment on Butler 2001

Hanlon,Christopher. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj .” New Literary History, 32 (2001): 1-21. PDF rest of interview in this blog is here

Question: Judith Butler—with whom you have engaged in ongoing if cordial debate—maintains that the Lacanian topology is itself dubious for its nonhistorical, transcultural presuppositions. You yourself have written that “jouissance is nonhistorical” How do you respond to complaints such as Butler’s?

Žižek: Ah! This is what we are struggling with for dozens, maybe hundreds of pages, in this book. My answer is to say that she is nonhistorical. That is to say, she presents a certain narrative, the same as Ernesto [Laclau]. With Ernesto, it’s that we have an older type of essentialist class politics, then slowly, slowly, essentialism starts to disintegrate, and now we have this contingent struggle for hegemony where everything is open to negotiation . . . . With Judith Butler, there is the same implicit narrative: in the old times, there was sex essentialism, biologically-identified; then slowly, slowly, this started disintegrating into a sex/gender distinction, the awareness that gender is not biologically— but rather culturally—constructed; finally, we come to this performativity,contingency, and so on and so on. So the same story, from essentialist zero-point to this open contingency where we have struggles for hegemony which are undecided. My first reproach as a philosopher to this is that here, some metanarrative is missing. To ask a very stupid, naïve question: why were people one hundred and fifty years ago essentialists? Were they simply stupid? You know what I mean? There is a certain, almost teleological narrative here, in which from the “bad” zero-point of essentialism, slowly we come to the “good” realization that everything is a performative effect, that nothing is exempted from the contingent struggle for hegemony. But don’t you need a metanarrative if you want to avoid the conclusion that people were simply stupid one hundred and fifty years ago?

CH: Well, perhaps not a metanarrative in the sense of a guiding historical trajectory, but an acceptance of a loosely Foucauldian premise, that one hundred and fifty years ago there were in place certain institutional mechanisms, powerdiscourses, which coerced belief from their subjects, engendered them . . .

Žižek: Ah! But if you accept this Foucauldian metanarrative, then things get a little complicated. Because Foucault is not speaking about truth value; for him, it is simply the change from one episteme to another. Then . . . OK, I ask you another question—let’s engage in this discussion, with you as Butler. So: is there a truth-value distinction between essentialism and the performativity of gender or is it simply the passage from one episteme to another? What would you say?

CH: I won’t speak for Butler, but if I were a Foucauldian, I would say that the latter is the case, though I may prefer the later episteme in light of my own political objectives.

Žižek: Yeah, but Butler would never accept that.

CH: You don’t think so?

Žižek: You think she would? Because I think that the epistemic presupposition of her work is implicitly—even explicitly, at least in her early work—that, to put it bluntly, sex always already was a performative construction. They just didn’t know it then. But you cannot unite this with Foucauldian narrative, because Foucauldian narrative is epistemologically neutral, in which we pass from one paradigm to the other. You know, sex was confessionary then; sex is now post-confessionary, pleasurable bodies, whatever . . . . But OK: Foucault would be one possible metanarrative. Marxism would provide the other one, in the sense that “the development of capitalism itself provoked a shift in subjectivity,” whatever. But again, what I claim is that there is some unresolved tension concerning historicity and truth-value. I ask you a different question. Both in Laclau and in Butler, there is a certain theory: Butler—and I’m speaking of early Butler; later, things get much more complex, much more interesting, a more intense dialogue becomes possible . . .

CH: So we’re talking about Gender Trouble, parts of Bodies That Matter . . .

Žižek: Yeah, I’m talking about Gender Trouble with Butler, and about Hegemony and Socialist Strategy with Laclau. Why? Because let’s not forget that these two books were the only two authentic “big hits” of the time. . . . I’ll tell you why: both Gender Trouble and Hegemony and Socialist Strategy were read as a model for a certain political practice. With Gender Trouble, the idea was that performativity and drag politics could have a political impact; it was, to put it in naïve, Leninist terms, “a guideline for a certain new feminist practice.” It was programmatic. It was the same with Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. It was a justification for the abandonment of so-called essentialist class politics, after which no specific struggle takes priority, we just have to coordinate our practices, cultivate a kind of “rainbow coalition,” although Ernesto rejects the term . . . . Now, what are these theories? Are they universal theories—of gender or of social/political processes—or are they specific theories about political practice, sex practice, within a certain historical/political moment? I claim that the ambiguity is still irreducible. At the same time that it’s clear that these theories are rooted in a certain historical moment, it’s also clear that they touch upon a universal dimension. Now my ironic conclusion is that, with all this anti-Hegelianism, what both Ernesto and Judith do here is the worst kind of pseudo-Hegelian historicism. At a certain point, it’s as if the access to truth or what always already was true is possible only in a certain historical situation. So in other words, philosophically, I claim that beneath these theories of contingency, there is another narrative that is deeply teleological.

CH: But either Butler or Laclau might rebut this reproach by pointing out that even such an embedded teleology is no worse than a matrix of non-historical Lacanian presuppositions.

Žižek: But my God, this is the big misunderstanding with her! Butler systematically conflates what she calls “Real” with some nonhistorical symbolic norm. It’s interesting how, in order to qualify the Lacanian notion of sexual difference as a nonhistorical Real, she silently slips in this nonhistorical gender norm, to then claim that “we homosexuals are excluded from this,” and so on. So her whole criticism inveighs against this notion that Lacan thinks of sexual difference as part of a nonhistorical, heterosexual normativity, and that this is what should be subverted . . . .

Of course, my counterpoint is that “Real,” for Lacan, is the exact opposite.

“Real” is that on account of which every norm is undermined. When [Butler] speaks of historicity, my point is not that there is something nonhistorical which precedes us. My point is that the Lacanian Real, in a way, is historical, in the sense that each historical epoch, if you will, has its own Real. Each horizon of historicity presupposes some foreclosure of some Real.

Now, Judith Butler would say “OK, I agree with this, but doesn’t this mean that we should re-historicize the Real, include it, re-negotiate it?” No, the problem is more radical . . . . Maybe the ultimate misunderstanding between us—from my perspective— is that for her, historicity is the ultimate horizon. As an old fashioned Freudian, I think that historicity is always a certain horizon which has to be sustained on the basis of some fundamental exclusion. Why is there historicity? Historicity doesn’t simply means that “things change,” and so on. That’s just stupid evolutionism; not in the biological sense, but common sense.

Historicity means that there must be some unresolved traumatic exclusion which pushes the process forward. My paradox would be that if you take away the nonhistorical kernel, you lose history itself.

And I claim that Judith Butler herself, in her last book, is silently approaching this position. Because in Gender Trouble, the idea that your psychic identity is based on some primordial loss or exclusion is anathema; it’s the Big Bad Wolf. But have you noticed that, if you read it closely, in The Psychic Life of Power she now accepts this idea of a primordial loss when she speaks of these “disavowed attachments”? The idea is now that we become subjects only through renouncing the fundamental passionate attachment, and that there’s no return, no reassumption of the fundamental attachment. It’s a very Freudian notion. If you lose the distance, the disavowal . . . it’s psychosis, foreclosure. The big problem I have with this shift is that it’s a very refined political shift of accent. What I don’t quite accept in her otherwise remarkable descriptions is how, when she speaks about the “marginalized disavowed,” she always presupposes—to put it in very naïve terms—that these are the good guys. You know: we have Power, which wants to render everything controllable, and then the problem is how to give voice to those who are marginalized, excluded . . .

CH: You see it as a kind of vulgar Bakhtinianism?

Žižek: Yeah, yeah—you know what I’m aiming at. What I’m aiming at is . . . aren’t racist, anti-Semitic pogroms also Bakhtinian carnival? That’s to say that what interests me is not so much the progressive other whom the power is controlling, but the way in which power has to disavow its own operation, has to rely on its own obscenity. The split is in the power itself. So that . . . when Butler argues very convincingly against—at least she points to the problematic aspects of—legal initiatives that would legalize gay marriages, claiming that in this way, you accept state authority, you become part of the “visible,” you lose solidarity with all those whose identity is not publicly acknowledged . . . I would say, “Wait a minute! Is there a subject in America today who defines himself as marginalized, repressed, trampled by state authority?” Yes! They are called survivalists! The extreme right! In the United States, this opposition between public state authority and local, marginalized resistances is more and more an opposition between civil society and radical rightwing groups. I’m not saying we should simply accept the state. I’m just saying that I am suspicious of the political pertinence of this opposition between the “public” system of power which wants to control, proscribe everything, and forms of resistance to subvert it. What I’m more interested in are the obscene supplements that are inherent to power itself.

subjectivization

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject p. 251
For Foucault, a perverse philosopher if ever there was one, the relationship between prohibition and diesire is circular, and one of absolute immanence: power and resistance (counter-power) presuppose and generate each other — that is, the very prohibitive measures that categorize and regulate illicit desires effectively generate them.

On Butler p.253
There is thus nothing more misguided than to argue that Foucault, in Volume 1 of his History of Sexuality, opens up the way for individuals to rearticulate-resignify-displace the power mechanisms they are caught in: the whole point .. lies in his claim that resistances to power are generated by the very matrix they seem to oppose.

In other words, the point of his notion of `biopower`is precisely to give an account of how disciplinary power mechanisms can constitute individuals directly, by penetrating individual bodies and bypassing the level of ‘subjectivization’ (that is, the whole problematic of how individuals ideologically subjectivize their predicament, how they relate to their conditions of existence).

It is therefore meaningless, in a way, to criticize him for not rendering this subjectivization thematic: his whole point is that if one is to account for social discipline and subordination, one has to bypass it!

Later, however (starting from Volume II of his History of Sexuality), he is compelled to return to this very ostracized topic of subjectivization: how individuals subjectivize their condition, how they relate to it — or, to put it in Althusserian terms, how they are not only individuals caught in disciplinary state apparatuses, but also interpellated subjects.

In short, what Foucault’s account of the discourses that discipline and regulate sexuality leaves out of consideration is the process by means of which the power mechanism itself becomes eroticized, that is, contaminated by what it endeavours to ‘repress’. It is not enough to claim that the ascetic Christian subject who, in order to fight temptation, enumerates and categorizes the various forms of temptation, actually proliferates the object he tries to combat; the point is, rather, to conceive of how the ascetic who flagellates in order to resist temptation finds sexual pleasure in this very act of inflicting wounds on himself. 254

Žižek 2001

Hanlon,Christopher. “Psychoanalysis and the Post-Political: An Interview with Slavoj .” New Literary History, 32 (2001): 1-21. PDF

Žižek: My idea is the old marxist idea that this immediate reference to experience, practice, struggle, etcetera, really relies on the most abstract and pure theory, and as an old philosopher I would say, as you said before, that we simply cannot escape theory.

I fanatically oppose this turn which has taken place in social theory, this idea that there is no longer time for great theoretical projects, that all we can do is narrativize the experience of our suffering, that all various ethnic or sexual groups can ultimately do is to narrate their painful, traumatic experience.

I think this is a catastrophe. I think that this fits perfectly the existing capitalist order, that there is nothing subversive in it. I think that this fits perfectly today’s ideology of victimization, where in order to legitimize, to gain power politically, you must present yourself, somehow, as the victim.

An anecdote of Richard Rorty’s is of some interest to me here. You know Rorty’s thesis—and you know, incidentally, I like Rorty, because he openly says what others won’t. But Rorty once pointed out—I forget where—how if you take big opponents, such as Habermas and Derrida, and ask them how they would react to a concrete social problem, whether to support this measure or that measure . . . . Are there any concrete political divisions between Habermas and Derrida, although they cannot stand each other? There are none! The same general left-ofcenter, not-too-liberal but basically democratic vision . . . practically, their positions are indistinguishable. Now, Rorty draws from this the conclusion that philosophy doesn’t matter. I am tempted to draw a more aggressive, opposite conclusion: that philosophy does matter, but that this political indifference signals the fact that although they appear opposed, they actually share a set of presuppositions at the level of their respective philosophies. Besides, not all philosophers would adopt the same position; someone like Heidegger definitely would not, and a leftwinger like [Alain] Badiou definitely would not. The big question for me today concerns this new consensus—in England it’s the “third way,” in Germany it’s the “new middle”—this idea that capitalism is here to stay, we can maybe just smooth it out a little with multiculturalism, and so on . . . . Is this a new horizon or not? What I appreciate in someone like Rorty is that at least he openly makes this point. What annoys me about some deconstructionists is that they adopt as their rhetorical post the idea that what they are doing is somehow incredibly subversive, radical, and so on. But they do not render thematic their own deep political resignation.

CH: You’ve been a long-time opponent of what you call postmodern identity politics, and especially the subversive hope some intellectuals attach to them. But with your newest book, this critique acquires a more honed feel. Now, you suggest that partisans of the identity-politics struggle have had a “depoliticizing” effect in some way. Could you hone your comments even further? Do you mean that identity politics have come to supersede what for you are more important antagonisms (such as that between capital and democracy, for instance), or do you mean something more fundamental, that politics itself has been altered for the worse?

Žižek: Definitely that it has been altered. Let me put it this way: if one were to make this reproach directly, they would explode. They would say, “My God, isn’t it the exact opposite? Isn’t it that identity politics politicized, opened up, a new domain, spheres of life that were previously not perceived as the province of politics?” But first, this form of politicization nonetheless involves a transformation of “politics” into “cultural politics,” where certain questions are simply no longer asked. Now, I’m not saying that we should simply return to some marxist fundamentalist essentialism, or whatever. I’m just saying that . . . my God, let’s at least just take note of this, that certain questions—like those concerning the nature of relationships of production, whether political democracy is really the ultimate horizon, and so on—these questions are simply no longer asked. And what I claim is that this is the necessary consequence of postmodern identity politics. You cannot claim, as they usually do, that “No, we don’t abandon those other aspects, we just add to politics proper.” No, the abandonment is always implicit. Why? Take a concrete example, like the multitude of studies on the exploitation of either African Americans or more usually illegal Mexican immigrants who work as harvesters here in the U.S. I appreciate such studies very much, but in most of them—to a point at least—silently, implicitly, economic exploitation is read as the result of intolerance, racism. In Germany, they don’t even speak of the working class; they speak of immigrants . . .

CH: “Visiting workers.”

Žižek: Right. But the point is that we now seem to believe that the economic aspect of power is an expression of intolerance. The fundamental problem then becomes “How can we tolerate the other?” Here, psychoanalysis and the post-political we are dealing with a false psychologization. The problem is not that of intrapsychic tolerance, and so I’m opposed to this way in which all problems are translated into problems of racism, intolerance, etcetera. In this sense, I claim that with so-called postmodern identity politics, the whole concept of politics has changed, because it’s not only that certain questions aren’t any longer asked. The moment you begin to talk about . . . what’s the usual triad? “Gender . . .”

CH: “Gender/Race/Class”?

Žižek: Yes. The moment you start to talk this way, this “class” becomes just one aspect within an overall picture which already mystifies the true social antagonisms. Here I disagree with Ernesto Laclau’s more optimistic picture of the postmodern age, where there are multiple antagonisms coexisting, etcetera . . .

CH: . . . But aren’t you then subordinating what is “merely cultural” to a set of “authentically” political problems?

Žižek: No, no. I’m well aware, for example, that the whole problematic of political economy also had its own symbolic dimension. . . . I’m not playing “merely cultural” problems against “real” problems. What I’m saying is that with this new proliferation of political subjects, certain questions are no longer asked. Is the state our ultimate horizon? Is capitalism our ultimate horizon? I just take note that certain concerns have disappeared.

CH: Let’s talk about another aspect of this critique you lay out. Part of your polemic against this “post-political” sphere concerns the great premium you place on the “Lacanian act,” the gesture that resituates everything, creates its own condition of possibility, and so on. Could you specify this further by way of pointing to an example of such an act? In culture or politics, is there some instance of an authentic Lacanian act that we can turn toward?

Žižek: […] You’ve got me here, in that sense. But I’m not mystifying the notion of act into some big event . . . . What I’m saying is that the way the political space is structured today more and more prevents the emergence of the act. But I’m not thinking of some metaphysical event— once I was even accused of conceiving of some protofascist, out-of nowhere intervention. For me, an act is simply something that changes the very horizon in which it takes place, and I claim that the present situation closes the space for such acts. We could even draw the pessimist conclusion—and though he doesn’t say so publicly, I know privately that Alain Badiou tends to this conclusion—that maybe politics, for some foreseeable time, is no longer a domain where acts are possible. That is, there were times during which acts did happen—the French Revolution, the October Revolution, maybe the ’68 uprisings. I can only say what will have been an act: something which would break this liberal consensus, though of course not in a fascist way. But otherwise, there are examples from culture, from individuals’ experiences; there are acts all around in this sense. The problem for me is that in politics, again, the space for an act is closing viciously.

CH: Let’s move on to another topic. I have to ask you about your reaction to what may be Derrida’s last word on his whole conflict with Lacan, published in Resistances to Psychoanalysis. Without retracting any of his original theses concerning Lacan’s seminar on “The Purloined Letter,” Derrida now insists that“ I loved him and admired him a lot,” and also that “Not only was I not criticizing Lacan, but I was not even writing a sort of overseeing or objectifying metadiscourse on Lacan,” that it was all part of a mutual dialogue . . . . What is your response to this?

Žižek: I would just like to make two points. First, I still think, as I first developed in Enjoy Your Symptom!, that “resistance” is the appropriate term here. In deconstructionist circles, you can almost feel it, this strong embarrassment about Lacan. So they can buy Lacan only, as it were, conditionally, only insofar as they can say he didn’t go far enough. I claim that the truth is the exact opposite; the only way they can appropriate Lacan is to submit him to a radical misreading. You know, all the time we hear about the “phallic signifier,” and so on, and so on, but the figure of Lacan they construct is precisely what Lacan was trying to undermine. For example, one of the standard criticisms of some deconstructionists here in the States is that Lacan elevates the “Big Other” into some kind of non-historical, a priori symbolic order … My only, perhaps naïve answer to this is that the big Lacanian thesis from the mid-fifties is that “The Big Other doesn’t exist.” He repeats this again and again, and the point of this is precisely that there is no symbolic order that would serve as a kind of prototranscendental guarantor. My second point would be a very materialist, Althusserian one. Without reducing the theoretical aspects of this conflict, let’s not forget that academia is itself an “Ideological State Apparatus,” and that all these orientations are not simply theoretical orientations, but what’s in question is thousands of posts, departmental politics, and so on. Lacanians are excluded from this. That is to say, we are not a field. You know, Derrida has his own empire, Habermasians have their own empire—dozens of departments, all connected—but with Lacanians, it’s not like this. It’s maybe a person here, a person there, usually marginal positions. So I think we should never underestimate this aspect. I think it would be much nicer, in a way, if Derrida said the opposite: not that “I really hated him,” but “there is a tension; we are irreducible to each other.” This statement you point out is the kiss of death. What’s the message in this apparently nice statement from Derrida? The message is that “the difference is really not so strong, so that our field, deconstruction, can swallow all of this; it’s really an internal discussion.” I think it is not. I’m not even saying who’s right; I’m just claiming—and I think this is more important than ever to emphasize—the tension between Derrida and Lacan and their followers is not an interfamilial struggle. It’s a struggle between two radically different global perceptions. Even when they appear to use approximately the same terms, refer to the same orders, they do it in a totally different way, and this is why all attempts to mediate between them ultimately fall short. Once, I was at a conference at Cardozo Law School where Drucilla Cornell maintained that the Lacanian Real was a good “first attempt” at penetrating beyond this ahistorical Symbolic order, but that it also retains this dimension of otherness that is still defined through the Symbolic order, and that the Derridean notion of writing incorporates this otherness into the Symbolic order itself more effectively, much more radically, so that the “real Real” lies with Derrida’s écriture, Lacan’s “Real” is still under the dimension of the metaphysical-logocentric order, and so on. This is typical of what I’m talking about. We should simply accept that there is no common language here, that Lacan is no closer to Derrida than to Hegel, than to Heidegger, than to whomever you want.

[…] Žižek: Yeah, yeah—you know what I’m aiming at. What I’m aiming at is . . . aren’t racist, anti-Semitic pogroms also Bakhtinian carnival? That’s to say that what interests me is not so much the progressive other whom the power is controlling, but the way in which power has to disavow its own operation, has to rely on its own obscenity. The split is in the power itself. So that . . . when Butler argues very convincingly against—at least she points to the problematic aspects of—legal initiatives that would legalize gay marriages, claiming that in this way, you accept state authority, you become part of the “visible,” you lose solidarity with all those whose identity is not publicly acknowledged . . . I would say, “Wait a minute! Is there a subject in America today who defines himself as marginalized, repressed, trampled by state authority?” Yes! They are called survivalists! The extreme right! In the United States, this opposition between public state authority and local, marginalized resistances is more and more an opposition between civil society and radical rightwing groups. I’m not saying we should simply accept the state. I’m just saying that I am suspicious of the political pertinence of this opposition between the “public” system of power which wants to control, proscribe everything, and forms of resistance to subvert it. What I’m more interested in are the obscene supplements that are inherent to power itself.

CH: Has this relatively pro-State position played a role in your decision to support the ruling party in Slovenia?

Žižek: No, no . . . that was a more specific phenomenon, a very naïve one. What happened was that, ten years ago, the danger in Slovenia was the same as in all the post-Communist countries. Would there emerge one big, hegemonic, nationalist movement that would then colonize practically the entire political space, or not? That was the choice. And by making some compromises, we succeeded. In Slovenia, the scene is totally different than in other post-Communist countries, in the sense that we don’t have—as in Poland, as in Hungary—the big opposition is not between radical, right-wing, nationalist movements and ex-Communists. The strongest political party in Slovenia is neither nationalistic, nor ex-Communist . . . it was worth it. I’m far from idealizing Slovenia, but the whole scene is nonetheless much more pluralistic, much more open. It wasn’t a Big Decision; it was just a very modest, particular gesture with a specific aim: how to prevent Slovenia from falling into the Serb or Croat trap, with one big nationalist movement that controls the space? How also to avoid the oppositions I mention that define the political space of Hungary and Poland?

CH: Could we talk about Kosovo? In The Metastases of Enjoyment, when the Bosnian conflict was still raging, you insisted that the West’s inability to act was rooted in its fixation with the “Balkan victim”—-that is, with its secret desire to maintain the Balkan subject as victim. More recently, when the NATO bombings were under way, you claimed that the act came much too late. Now, the West seems to have descended into a period of waiting for a “democratic transformation” of Serbia . . .

Žižek: . . . which will not happen, I think. Let me end up with a nice provocation: the problem for me is this abstract pacifism of the West, which renders publicly its own inability to act. What do I mean by this? For the West, practically everything that happens in the Balkans is bad. When the Serbs began their dirty work in Kosovo, that was of course bad.
When the Albanians tried to strike back, it was also bad. The possibility of Western intervention was also bad, and so on and so on. This abstract moralism bothers me, in which you deplore everything on account of . . . what? I claim that we are dealing here with the worst kind of Nietzschean ressentiment. And again, we encounter here the logic of victimization at its worst, exemplified by a New York Times piece by Steven Erlanger. He presented the crisis in terms of a “truly human perspective” on the war, and picked up an ordinary [Kosovar] Albanian woman who said, “I don’t care who wins or who loses; I just want the nightmare to end; I just want peace; I want to feel good again. . . .” This, I claim, is the West’s ideal subject—not a conscious political fighter, but this anonymous victim, reduced to this almost animal craving . . . as if the ultimate political project is to “feel good again.”

CH: In other words, a subject who has no stake in whether Kosovo gains independence or not . . .

Žižek: No stake, just this abstract suffering . . . and this is the fundamental logic, that the [Kosovar] Albanians were good so long as they were suffering. Remember the images during the war, of the Albanians coming across the mountains, fleeing Kosovo? The moment they started to strike back—and of course there are Albanian excesses; I’m not idealizing them in this sense—they become the “Muslim danger,” and so on. So it’s clear that the humanitarian interventions of the West are formulated in terms of this atmosphere of the protectorate—the underlying idea is that these people are somehow not mature enough to run their lives. The West should come and organize things for them, and of course the West is surprised if the local population doesn’t find such an arrangement acceptable. Let me tell you a story that condenses what I truly believe here. About a year and a half ago, there was an Austrian TV debate, apropos of Kosovo, between three different parties: a Green pacifist, a Serb nationalist, and an Albanian nationalist. Now, the Serb and the Albanian talked—of course within the horizon of their political projects—in pretty rational terms: you know, the Serb making the claim that Kosovo was, for many centuries, the seat of the Serbian nation, blah, blah, blah; the Albanian was also pretty rational, pointing out that since they constitute the majority, they should be allowed self-determination, etcetera. . . . Then the stupid Green pacifist said, “OK, OK, but it doesn’t matter what you think politically—just promise me that when you leave here, you will not shoot at each other, that you will tolerate each other, that you will love each other.” And then for a brief moment—that was the magic moment—I noticed how, although they were officially enemies, the Albanian and the Serb exchanged glances, as if to ask, “What’s this idiot saying? Doesn’t he get it?”

My idea is that the only hope in Kosovo is for the two of them to come together and say something like the following: “Let’s shoot the stupid pacifist!”

I think that this kind of abstract pacifism, which reformulates the problem in the terms of tolerance . . . My God, it’s not tolerance which is the problem! This is what I hate so much apropos of Western interventionism: that the problem is always rephrased in terms of tolerance/intolerance. The moment you translate it into this abstract proposition which—again, my old story—depoliticizes the situation, it’s over. Another aspect I want to emphasize apropos of Serbia: here, my friend/enemy, a Serb journalist called Alexander Tijanic, wrote a wonderful essay examining the appeal of Milosevic; for the Serb people. It was practically—I wondered if I could have paid him to make my point better. He said that the West which perceives Milosevic; as a kind of tyrant doesn’t see the perverse, liberating aspect of Milosevic;. What Milosevic; did was to open up what even Tijanic calls a “permanent carnival”: nothing functions in Serbia! Everyone can steal! Everyone can cheat! You can go on TV and spit on Western leaders! You can kill! You can smuggle! Again, we are back at Bakhtin. All Serbia is an eternal carnival now. This is the crucial thing people do not get here; it’s not simply some kind of “dark terror,” but a kind of false, explosive liberation.

CH: Do you see a viable political entity in Serbia that might alter this?

Žižek: I can give you a precise answer in the guise of a triple analysis. I am afraid the answer is no. There are three options for Serbia: one possibility is that Milosevic;’s regime will survive, but the country will be isolated, ignored, floating in its own shit, a pariah. That’s one option. Another option that we dream about is that, through mass demonstrations or whatever, there will be “a new beginning,” a new opening in the sense of a Western-style democratic upheaval. But I think, unfortunately, that what will probably happen if Milosevic; falls will be what I am tempted to call the “Russia-fication” of Serbia. That is to say, if Milosevic; falls, a new regime will take over, which will consist of basically the same nationalists who are now in power, but which will present itself to the West—like Yeltsin in Russia—as open, and so on. Within Serbia, they will play the same corrupt games that Yeltsin is now playing, so that the same mobsters, maybe even another faction of the mafia, will take over, but they will then blackmail the West, saying that “If you don’t give us economic help, all of these nationalists will take over . . . .”

CH: The “democratic resistance” in Serbia, in fact, is also deeply nationalistic, right?

Žižek: Of course! What you don’t get often through the Western media is this hypocritical . . . for instance, when there was a clash between the police and anti-Milosevic; demonstrators, you know what the demonstrators were shouting? “Why are you beating us? Go to Kosovo and beat the Albanians!” So much for the “Serb Democratic Opposition”! Their accusation against Milosevic; is not that he is un-democratic, though it’s also that: it’s “You lost Bosnia! You lost Kosovo!” So I fear the advent of a regime that would present itself to the West as open and democratic, but will play this covert game. When pressed by the West to go further with democratic reforms, they will claim that they are under pressure from radical right-wing groups. So I don’t think there will be any great transformation. Now that the Serbs have lost Kosovo, I don’t think there will be another great conflict, but neither do I think there will be any true solution. It will just drag on—it’s very sad.

butler Hegel Žižek ek-static

Judith Butler speaking at Columbia Law School, saying some interesting, no make that really interesting stuff on the notion of “consent.”

Commenting on Žižek in this 2000 text, Butler accuses him of presenting us with an overly formalistic brand of Hegelianism. She draws upon the way in which Žižek’s occupation with the Kant-Hegel combo is telling and productive in some respects, but that ultimately Žižek’s analyses, while brilliant, are often ahistorical, presented in an overly structuralist-formalist fashion that makes thinking a political aritculation somewhat difficult. Here is a quote from the Verso book Contingency, Universality, Hegemony (2000).

Hegel implicitly likens the Kantian to one who seeks to know how to swim before actually swimming, and he counters this model of a self-possessed cognition with one that gives itself over to the activity itself, a form of knowing that is given over to the world it seeks to know. Although Hegel is often dubbed philosopher of ‘mastery’, we can see here … that the ek-static disposition of the self towards its world undoes cognitive mastery. Hegel’s own persistent references to ‘losing oneself’ and ‘giving oneself over’ only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a pre-given world. The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not known without the prior action of those categories. And just as Hegel insists on revising several times his very definition of ‘universality’, so he makes plain that the categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by the encounter with the world that they facilitate. We do not remain the same, and neither do our cognitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world. Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone by the act of knowledge (20).

commenting on Zizek:

One difference that is doubtless apparent is that my approach to Hegel draws upon a certain set of literary and rhetorical presumptions about how meaning is generated in his text. I therefore oppose the effort to construe Hegel in formal terms or, indeed, to render him compatible with a Kantian formalism, which is something Žižek has done on occasion. Any effort to reduce Hegel’s own text to a formal schematism will become subject to the very same critique that Hegel has offered of all such formalisms, and subject to the same founderings (25).

social fictions symbolic

Campbell, Kirsten. Jacques Lacan and Feminist Epistemology. Florence, KY, USA: Routledge, 2004. p 119.

Social fictions are culturally dominant representations of how to be a subject and how to exist as a subject in relation to other subjects.

… Lacan links what he describes as the dominant discourse of our age – the Discourse of the Master – to the rise of capitalism and the modern ego (S17: 207), indicating that discourses are historically and culturally specific. Accordingly, social fictions can be understood as historically and culturally specific forms of the Symbolic order, which articulate particular historical and cultural discourses.

Judith Butler offers a useful reading of the Symbolic order as ‘a register of regulatory ideality’, which includes not only sexualized but racialized interpellations (1993b: 18). For Butler, the Symbolic produces ‘regulatory norms’ which demarcate and delimit forms of family, identity and love (1997b: 66). It represents ‘reigning epistemes of cultural intelligibility’ (1997b: 24), suggesting that it is a set of cultural rules which constitute social norms.

However, in this formulation, the Symbolic remains a closed and monolithic structure that produces a single normative subject. Such a conception of the Symbolic does not explain the many discourses of identity, or their historical specificity – which are precisely the grounds of Butler’s critique of the Lacanian notion of the Symbolic.

‘Social fictions’ help us to understand the ‘register of regulatory ideality’ as a discursive register of social fictions, as discourses of identity that produce it through the identification with master signifiers of sexualized and racialized subjectivity. The Symbolic order also produces racialized and sexualized relations between subjects, operating as a register of regulatory relations. While the Symbolic order structures discourses in terms of the production of sexualized and racialized subjects and intersubjective relations, the ‘content’ of those identities and social relations will be historically and culturally articulated as social fictions. Social fictions are therefore specific to a historical moment of that social order. In this way, social fictions are contingent in the sense that they represent particular cultural and historical forms of the discursive production of identity. If social fictions are contingent and mobile, then they are open to political contestation and change.