Žižek and Freedom: Utopia and the Parallax View 3031421515, 9783031421518

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Žižek and Freedom Utopia and the Parallax View

Bradley Kaye

Žižek and Freedom

Bradley Kaye

Žižek and Freedom Utopia and the Parallax View

Bradley Kaye SUNY Fredonia Socio-Justice Sciences Department Fredonia, NY, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-42150-1    ISBN 978-3-031-42151-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42151-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

Contents

1 I ntroduction  1 2 What  Is the Parallax View?  9 Interpassivity: Parallax View of Symptomal Figures   17 Parallax View of Pleasure   21 Capitalism: Order Without Social Norms   22 Drives and Desires   26 The Voice: Who Analyzes Whom?   29 3 W  hat About Life? 31 Anatomy of Man and Ape: The More Developed Form Is the Key  36 Repressive Desublimation  38 Life, the Contingent Stuck and Retroactive Detachment   39 Schelling’s God/Ages of the World   41 If God Does Not Exist, Then Nothing Is Permitted   47 God Has Been Refuted, but Not the Devil   48 Did Kantian Ethics Produce Poe’s Black Cat and the ‘Spirit of Perverseness’  51 Exiting the Garden of Eden, Regressing Back Towards it   52 The Law that Mirrors the Public Law Is the Super-Ego   54 v

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Oedipal or Christian Anxieties?   58 Terror and Mercy: “I did not come to bring peace, but a sword”  60 The Law at Home Is Evil   60 Misunderestimating the Neighbors: Infantilizing the Other   62 4 W  hat Is Ideology? 67 Antoine deStutt de Tracy (1754–1836): Originator of the Term “Ideology”  68 The Marxist Turn in Ideology   71 Ideological Superstructure  75 Althusser: Interpellation  78 Althusser: Overdetermination  81 5 Lacan,  Discourses and Social Bonds I: Graphs of Desire 83 Discourses and Social Bonds   85 Graph I  88 Graph II: “Aggressivity that becomes the beam of the balance…”  92 Graph III: Che Vuoi?  94 Graph IV: Completed Graph   96 6 Lacan,  Discourses and Social Bonds II: Aggressivity and Narcissistic Rage101 How Does Aggressivity Differ from Aggression?  104 Language 108 Paranoia of Dispossession  114 Lacan’s Theses on Aggressivity  116 7 Cynicism/Ressentiment  as the Function of Ideology125 What Is a Symptom?  128 Rehabilitating the Master-Signifier  131 Populism Is Ressentiment 135 Subject Supposed to Believe  140

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Cynicism and Slave-Morality  141 Hysteric and Pervert  144 Structure and Event  148 Political Correctness as Cynical Detachment  152 8 What  Does It Mean to Be Free?: Hermeneutics of Freedom155 Guilt-Free and Still Unfree  156 Freedom and Sadness  158 Freedom and Automatons: Robo-Rats “doing it, but they do not know”  159 Freedom as “Revolution without a Revolution”  160 Free to Articulate the Conditions of Our Unfreedom  161 Freedom: Interconnectedness and Security  162 Freedom-From Money  164 Freedom as Calvinist Predestination  167 Stay Positive, Things Only Get worse  171 Real Subsumption, a Problem Rendered Invisible  172 Documents of Capitalism/Barbarism  177 Are we Captured in the Other’s Dream?  181 9 Utopia  and the Parallax View185 Escapist Utopianism  186 Utopia and Free Will: Un-Cracking an Egg Is Impossible  192 Utopianism Relies on “Determinism”  194 Dissolve the People and Elect Another?  194 I ndex199

1 Introduction

“The final goal of the world, we said, is Spirit’s consciousness of its freedom, and hence also the actualization of that very freedom.”1 (G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History) “The people are lazy. With television you just sit, watch, and listen. The thinking is done for you.”2 (Roger Ailes)

Slavoj Žižek’s influence upon the English-speaking world began with the publication of his book The Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989. In this book, Žižek sets forth a serious engagement with the work of Lacanian psychoanalysis and Hegelian Marxism as methodologies utilized to critique capitalist ideology. The publication of this book vaulted him into a fame rarely achieved by contemporary philosophers. Today, there are so many publications on or about his work that any accurate bibliography would be outdated almost immediately. His online imprint seems to expand daily as people upload videos of his talks and interviews, which  G.W.F. Hegel. The Philosophy of History, “Freedom, Individual, and State,” pg. 22.  Roger Ailes. A Plan for Putting the GOP on the News.

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gives rise to the temptation from untrained amateurs to create half-baked ideas about what his philosophy “really” means, and it is tough, if not impossible, to extricate a “Žižekian” philosophy from the legacy of psychoanalysis, because there is a way in which readers must understand a dialectical spirit of truth, rather than the hard tables of laws ossified into stone. The temptation towards overdetermined psychoanalysis as the methodology upon which all other methods are stacked, a conflation that perhaps overdetermines significance as if there are psychic constants to be discovered by analysts, the logical fallacy of thinking Truth as a general form. Much in the same way that Euthyphro balks at Socrates as the ancestor of Daedalus whose legendary power was to create walking statues carved out of wood. Straight line thinkers such as Euthyphro (whose name translates as such) are confused by the appearance of contradictions, and their desire to create truths as apparatuses of capture, rather than the ebbs and flows of dialectical thinking. In stating that Žižek is a dialectical thinker, popular inversions of his work often mistakenly reduce his philosophy to mere postmodern subjectivism, which in fact is one of the biggest targets in the Žižekian war of position. If anything will remain from our vestiges of philosophy in the early twenty-first century, it will be the work of Slavoj, and not for the reasons that his so-called “fans” fawn over him, but because he is truly the most caustic-Gadfly thinker/activist around, and could only be so, because he navigates the philosophical and political landscape (the field is full of landmines mind you!) from outside and on the fringes of the university system. Much like the greatest para-academic, Friedrich Nietzsche, the work of the timeliest is that of the untimely in Twilight of the Idols: “Getting along with people, keeping an open house in one’s heart—that’s liberal, but nothing more than liberal. You can recognize hearts that are capable of noble hospitality by their many curtained windows and closed shutters: they keep their best rooms empty. But why?—Because they are waiting for guests that one does not “get along with”… ”3  Friedrich Nietzsche. Twilight of the Idols, Raids of an Untimely Man #25.

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In an early documentary interview given by Slavoj Žižek (Love thy Symptom as Thyself, 1996) he mentions that the first reaction to his work among academic intellectual elites was that this had to be some kind of intellectual joke. The idea was that nobody from Slovenia could ever produce something as sophisticated and lucid as his book The Sublime Object of Ideology, and that Slavoj Žižek was a fake name given by someone who was entrenched within French academia in order to fool American academics at Berkeley, Binghamton, Duke, and other left-leaning universities. When he published his book Everything You Wanted to Know About Hitchcock but Were Afraid to Ask Lacan in 1988, he was invited to the University of Berkeley to give a talk because the professors wanted to prove to their colleagues that he actually existed and that he was not a made-up conceptual personae. For all of the disbelief regarding his initial brilliance and all of the fanfare that his work has garnered today, there is a “conceptual personae” aspect of Žižek’s work that perhaps overshadows his serious dimensions as a political philosopher. Lacan exerted such influence over Žižek’s work and yet he never met a lucid Lacan. He met Lacan when Lacan was not necessarily communicating, and Lacan did not recognize him. This is probably for the best. What you get from Žižek is his own political appropriation of Lacanian analysis through Hegel. Žižek did analysis with Jacques Alain Miller, Lacan’s son in law, and Žižek referred to this as a “perverse analysis” which Žižek ultimately ended. Miller hates Žižek now, because Žižek has taken what was primarily understood to be a clinical methodology and appropriated it into a revolutionary form of analysis of ideology. As his popularity grows, so does the tendency among amateurs to make apperceptive claims that bear no resemblance to the philosophical depth of Žižek as one of the only philosophers from our time who will be read in centuries to come. What would it mean to read Žižek in a hundred years from now? What are the core tenets of the philosophy offered by this man who lived, thought, and will eventually perish? Beyond the catalog of popular cultural references in his books there is in fact a serious philosophy of freedom. One thing that immediately strikes us when we read a book by Žižek is the writing style. We are bombarded with references to films, pop culture phenomena, political trends, then plunged into dry excerpts from

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Immanuel Kant, Georg Wilhelm Hegel, and Jacques Lacan. What are we to make of this roller-coaster ride? Are we reading a book by a self-­ proclaimed madman and hysteric? Marika Rose has succinctly described Žižek’s work like a magic-eye painting from the 1990s: “colorful, appealing, chaotic, and a bit overwhelming, but to really understand what’s going on, you need to look at the whole thing and shift your gaze ever so slightly. Only then do the deep structures and systems of his thought begin to emerge.”4 The latter being a highly technical term from psychoanalysis. The “hysteric” awakens anxiety rather than suppresses it, and often deploys humor (i.e., hysterical laughter) in order to approach subjects that would otherwise seem too traumatic to approach with tragic seriousness. His books may seem like a random flurry of references to pop culture phenomena, movies, arcane novels, Žižek seems to take it for granted that his readers will be familiar with these references and with the development of his work. While there are things worth critiquing in Žižek’s work, most of the popular criticisms directed towards him are from people who have not read enough of his work to know what his responses entail. Lacan’s definition of a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is the king, but also a king who thinks he is a king; the point is that it is crucial not to take oneself as what one claims oneself to be, because that would be madness. To posit an “identity” as if this identity fully encapsulates who you are is to negate the anti-essentialist dialectical unfolding of new possibilities. Even within the subject. In approaching the work of Slavoj Žižek, the first thing to know is that his use of psychoanalysis as a philosophical methodology politicizes a methodology that is often domesticated into clinical practice. Žižek’s philosophy excites rather than cures. Spurring thought, awakening, rather than offering a psychoanalysis relegated to power as the palliative venting process of the docile, all too docile subjects entranced in the “talking cure” on the couch of the analyst.

 Marika Rose. The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, Radical Theologies and Philosophies “Slavoj Žižek”. London, pg. 480. 4

1 Introduction 

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In an interview, to return to an aforementioned point, he said that his brief therapy sessions with Jacques Alain Miller was not an analysis but a “strange, perverted session.”5 Perverted makes sense insofar as the way Žižek usually uses this term is as a form of total and absolute submission. “Therapy” turns the analysand into a docile body, and his methodology is that of ‘hysteria’ insofar as it does not make sense to domesticate anxiety over political problems that require anxiety as an authentic response (e.g., global warming, class conflict, etc.) those issues won’t be resolved through talk therapy. Hence, the limits of ‘the clinic’ e.g., Miller, and anti-psychiatry (by limiting its point of critique to only the clinic, and for valorizing things like “hearing voices network’ which makes all mental illness a form of political subjectivity, which is clearly absurd). There is no cure in the docile acceptance that returns the subject to passive consumerism. We are not moving from the analyst’s couch back to the couch where we passively watch ideological propaganda on a television screen, the point is to awaken thought by exposing the matrices of ideological enframements. One example to consider comes from one of the most commonly cited theological sources in all of Žižek’s work— G.K. Chesterton in his book The Everlasting Man where he writes: “One of my first journalistic adventures, or misadventures, concerned a comment on Grant Allen, who had written a book about the Evolution of the Idea of God. I happened to remark that it would be much more interesting if God wrote a book about the evolution of the idea of Grant Allen.”6

Žižek’s work is full of these dialectical inversions hidden in plain sight. When we think of ideology, Žižek says, we usually imagine something that distorts our view of the world, so that the critique of ideology is about removing the distorting lenses we are wearing to see the world as it really is. But in fact, he argues, the idea that there is a “real” world beneath ideological distortion is the ultimate illusion. When the veneer of what appears is torn away, another surface of appearances emerges.

 Ibid.  GK Chesterton. The Everlasting Man, pg. 23.

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Ideology is our “spontaneous relation” to our social world, our natural way of seeing; all the assumptions we make and the things we take for granted. Ideology is pleasurable and comfortable, but not necessarily for those experiencing structural and systemic violence. In his 2008 book titled Violence, Žižek carefully delineates types of violence that can be differentiated even though the categories are often overlapping. “Symbolic” violence is embodied in language and its forms, at work in the cases of incitement of relations of social domination reproduced in our habitual speech forms. There is also “systemic” violence, which are the often-­catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems.7 Rather than echo the famous line from the first great modern architect, Louis Sullivan, who declared that form follows function, freedom in Žižek’s work involves “spandrels”—a byproduct of the evolution of some other trait. In architecture, a spandrel is the leftover space in an archway, an excess in an architectural design where extra space necessitates a design. In the same way that laypeople reduce the complexity of human behavior to some vague notion of genetics and DNA, without truly understanding that, in fact, genetic scientists estimate that roughly 97 percent of human DNA does not contain gene sequences that bear any meaning. This DNA is referred to as “nonsense” or “junk” DNA.  In this way, most of outer space is empty, and we as humans attempt to fill in these gaps with meaning, and it is this gap, this “spandrel” that creates a cynical interstice in which ideological meanings fill the vacuum. If freedom is simply anti-repression (an ideology trumpeted to capitalist subjects by corporations that want to deregulate, not pay taxes, have no restrictions on itself ) then in a capitalist economy, the systemic violence of class conflict will be reproduced by removing the rules, regulations, and laws from capitalism. In a global economy this will always enact a “systemic” violence that accelerates the laws of unequal accumulation, exploitation, alienation, and violence. Therefore, in capitalism, simply removing laws creates conditions of inequality that reproduced conditions of unfreedom for the proletariat and lumpenproletariat.  Violence, pg. 1–2.

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As a master of counterintuitive observations and a speaker of truths so perverse that they must be concealed in plain sight, Žižek’s recent work exposes the grim reality that we are now living through an Apocalypse (of sorts). All the signs are there: the pestilence, the wars, the environmental catastrophes, and even the alleged return of the Whore of Babylon (in the form of the omnipresence of internet pornography), so on and so forth. Even the word Apocalypse derives from the Greek meaning “to uncover”; a truth that is too brutal to censor out. We are living through an eternal recurrence of these Apocalypse events, there is no eradicating their stain and freedom amounts to building a utopian vision within the midst of these omnipresent threats to life. Today’s capitalism “provides the background and terrain for the emergence of shifting dispersed contingent ironic— and so on, political subjectivities.”8

 Slavoj Zizek. “Class Struggle or Postmodernism?” Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, pg. 108.

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2 What Is the Parallax View?

“I hate people who play the role of wisdom.”1 (Slavoj Žižek)

Firstly, the main target is narcissistic relativism, the kind where “freedom” is described as an equality of opinions and tastes. If readers understand anything from Žižek’s theorizing it is the thesis that the enjoyment of opinions and tastes places the subject entirely within ideological matrices. If you follow the injunction to enjoy, then the capitalists have you in their clutches. Žižek’s Parallax View is not simply the appearance of the same object from a fundamentally different perspective, or a simple misunderstanding on the basis of subjective opinions, or feelings on a particular subject matter (although those factors do play a large, perhaps predominant role in shaping parallax views). Žižek’s thesis is that “an ‘epistemological’ shift in the subject’s point of view always reflects an ‘ontological’ shift in the object itself.”2 I believe that Graham Harman is correct to assert that this is most likely the core contribution to philosophy for which Slavoj will be remembered.  Ian Parker. Critical Psychology: A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek. Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pg. 355-373. 2  Parallax View, pg. 17. 1

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A synthesis of metaphysical difference into a “one-all” universality of identical-sameness is epistemologically impossible, because the occurrence of an insurmountable parallax gap makes it such. This gap is constituted by “the confrontation of two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible.”3 Such a one-all synthesis is impossible because what philosophers of epistemology might refer to as the “real world”, as something external to the subject, is always unfinished, unstable, and incomplete. We can only ever obtain a partial knowledge of reality, and therefore no objective truth exists as a fully rendered form. Truth is incomplete and partial, like in an open world video game where a character navigates a world only to discover a doorway to a building that cannot be opened because the programmers did not have the space to create something behind the doors. Some aspect of the Real must remain bracketed. “Parallax means that the bracketing itself produces its object—‘democracy’ as a form emerges only when we bracket the texture of economic relations as well as the inherent logic of the political state apparatus: they both have to be abstracted from; people who are effectively embedded in economic processes and subjected to state apparatuses have to be reduced to abstract units.”4

Our alleged “objective-knowledge of the universe” is similarly bracketed off by parallaxes. We can know quantum physics all the way down to deeper and deeper levels, subatomic particles, waves, strings, Higgs-­ Boson particles, anti-matter, and so forth, but what is revealed in the ever-deepening horizons into which the physicist pushes the limits of empirical knowledge is that there are deeper and deeper thresholds yet to be discovered. Take, for example, this excerpt from The Abyss of Freedom, one of the characteristic portrayals of the parallax view in his discussion of the “inherent stupidity of proverbs”5 which reveals one of the core tenets of his philosophical project:  Parallax View, pg. 4.  Parallax View, pg. 56. 5  The Abyss of Freedom, pg. 71. 3 4

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“Let us engage in a mental experiment by way of trying to construct proverbial wisdom out of the relationship between terrestrial life, its pleasures, and it’s Beyond. If one says, ‘Forget about the afterlife, about the Elsewhere, seize the day, enjoy life fully here and now, it’s the only life you’ve got!’ it sounds deep. If one says exactly the opposite (‘Do not get trapped in the illusory and vain pleasures of earthly life; money, power, and passions are all destined to vanish into thin air—think about eternity!’), it also sounds deep. If one combines the two sides (‘Bring eternity into your everyday life, live your life on this earth as if it is already permeated by Eternity!’), we get another profound thought. Needless to say, the same goes for its inversion: ‘Do not try in vain to bring together eternity and your terrestrial life, accept humbly that you are forever split between Heaven and Earth!’ If, finally, one simply gets perplexed by all these reversals and claims: ‘Life is an enigma, do not try to penetrate its secrets, accept the beauty of its unfathomable mystery!’ the result is no less profound than its reversal: ‘Do not allow yourself to be distracted by false mysteries that just dissimulate the fact that, ultimately, life is very simple—it is what it is, it is simply here without reason and rhyme!’ Needless to add that, by uniting mystery and simplicity, one again obtains a wisdom: ‘The ultimate, unfathomable mystery of life resides in its very simplicity, in the simple fact that there is life.’ This tautological imbecility points towards the fact that a Master is excluded from the economy of symbolic exchange—not wholly excluded, since he occupies a special, exceptional place in it. For the Master, there is no ‘tit for tat,’ since, for him, tit is in a way already its own tat.”6

The reason all of these “parallax views” of vacuous wise-sounding proverbs appear so profound is that these are typically spoken by someone who claims to hold the position of a Master. These are the standard ideology-­bearing “moral to the story” that audiences hear at the end of an allegedly profound, but ultimately vacuous, Hollywood movie. One that evokes a tearful response at its crescendo and is then swiftly forgotten in the maelstrom and monotony of day-to-day-life. Even in a throwaway, seemingly innocuous footnote, Slavoj sounds eerily similar to Friedrich Nietzsche while clarifying why the public continues to consume these vacuous commodified forms of imbecilic proverbs:  The Abyss of Freedom, pg. 71–2.

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“Cinema executives obsessed with testing new films through special previews and then frantically reshooting new endings etc. fall victim to the homologous illusion: this utter adaptability to the whims of the public as a rule ends up in failure—what the public wants is a Master capable of imposing a version on it, not a pliable servant.”7

Buried within the subconscious desires of consumers and market researchers, perhaps in them more than even they know when they reproduce it, lay a secret desire for a Master-discourse: “the analyst must not directly act as the one who knows, but rather as the one who stands in for the lack in the Other, for the big Other’s ignorance.”8 The relationship between soul and body is never direct, since “the big Other always interposes itself between the two.”9 Žižek finds ample reinforcement for this thesis from Lacan’s polemics against Aristotle in Television where Lacan says: “Even if the memories of familial suppression weren’t true, they would have to be invented, and that is certainly done. That’s what myth is, the attempt to give an epic form to what is operative through the structure.”10 To participate in democracy, even as the ideologies of nominalism fetishize the notion of an individual unto itself, the reality is that “In order to be One, one has to be multiple (to participate in multiplicity)… ”11 By echoing the sentiments of the work of Mladen Dolar, the parallax views inherent in ideology must keep these processes concealed to maintain functioning as such: “everything would fall apart, and great havoc would follow, if it turned out that there could be a contradiction in the order of forms themselves,”12—“if someone could show that kinds and forms themselves have in themselves these opposite properties, that would call for astonishment. But if someone could demonstrate that I am one thing and many, what’s astonishing about that?”13

 The Abyss of Freedom. Footnote 80, pg. 102  The Abyss of Freedom, pg. 75. 9  The Abyss of Freedom, pg. 64. 10  Jacques Lacan, Television, pg. 30. 11  Less Than Nothing, pg. 51. 12  Mladen Dolar, “In Parmenidem Parvi Commentarii,” pg. 67. 13  Ibid., pg. 129. 7 8

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In fact, Žižek’s novel interpretation of Hegel is quite illuminating in the sense that “absolute mind” is always a partial fragment. Absolute totalities of knowledge are simply never possible because knowledge is never fully complete. Therefore, the total and absolute hegemony over all knowledge is impossible. Žižek’s reading of Hegel is that Hegel was convinced that his work formed the end of all philosophy and the culmination of all knowledge, and if we know anything it is as a historical monument perhaps partially understood retroactively. The shifting manifestations of “Geist”; spirit is not a fixed entity, and hence, the shifting dimensions of “Geist” create new forms, hence, the “one-all” is always unfinished, unstable, and incomplete because it is in radical flux. The point is to contend with parallax views, and in parallax thinking the classic modernist reading of the base–superstructure analysis takes on a new meaning, which I will try to explore further in the third chapter. “To put it in terms of the good old Marxist couple infrastructure/superstructure: we should take into account the irreducible duality of, on the one hand, the ‘objective’ material socioeconomic processes taking place in reality as well as, on the other, the politico-ideological processes proper. What if the domain of politics is inherently ‘sterile,’ a theater of shadows, but nonetheless crucial in transforming reality? So, although economy is the real site and politics is a theater of shadows, the main fight is to be fought in politics and ideology.”14

This is why, in a capitalist society, postmodern critiques of ideology are always accepted as a critique of discourse, because what is most concealed in the ideologies of capitalism are the actually existing material conditions in which consciousness is produced. Our task as philosophers is to ask “What does it mean to be free?” and by asking this question we connect the dots of political causality concealed by a nominalist bias, which is the thesis that words merely describe things, people make up these descriptions individually, and that there is no more depth to reality than that which appears. In other words, a nominalist will be content to allege that the world is a theater of shadows and 14

 Parallax View, pg. 315.

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that language is merely a linguistic attachment to something that will inevitably pass away, and is created out of a solipsistic perspective. On this postmodernism is a variation of a bizarre anti-substantialist view of the world as vanishing constructs: “The standard postmodern variation: the true myth is precisely the notion that, outside the theater of shadows, there is some ‘true reality’ or a central Sun—all there is, are different theaters of shadows and their endless interplay. The properly Lacanian twist to the story would have been that for us, within the cave, the Real outside can appear only as a shadow of a shadow, as a gap between different modes or domains of shadows. It is thus not simply that substantial reality disappears in the interplay of appearances; what happens in this shift, rather, is that the very irreducibility of the appearance to its substantial support, its ‘autonomy’ with regard to it, engenders a Thing of its own, the true ‘real Thing.’”15

Alternating perspectives are often aporias of one another that the parallax views constitute such fundamentally different thought universes that there cannot be a cohesive “one-all” universal synthesis between them without negating the core characteristics of one or both sides, and that this “gap” between the view and the substantial reality constitutes a self-­ fulfilling production of its novel “true real Thing,”—a hyperstition (an idea that brings itself into reality, Lovecraft’s Cthulhu, or the ancient chthonian mythos of the underworld) enables the “actual” true-belief in the transgressive act of transgressing ethical boundaries. Hyperstition is ultimately the parallel to Hegel’s dialectics of the Aufgehoben—the dialectical term for a “negation of negation” or, the move beyond the initial negation. A negation can contradict an assertion and the “negation of negation” can either push the negation further or transmute the initial negation into a reversion back to the initial thesis, often misunderstood as a synthesis that overcomes and abolishes previous dualities or dichotomies. It is often understood through propositional logic as if it merely designates a discursive reversion of statements, a negation carries within it the residue of that which it negates.  Less Than Nothing, pg. 162.

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A concept Hegel assumes in addition to the “total sublation (Aufhebung) of the body in its symbolization: the subject emerges through—and is equivalent to—its subjection (submission) to the symbolic order, its laws and regulations: that is, for Hegel, the free and autonomous subject is the subject integrated into the symbolic order.”16 The alleged rotary motion of what appears to be a free agent in its motivation is actually a subject whose actions turn out to be decided by forces outside of itself, and without inner recognition. “Justification turns out to be more retrospective than prospective, a process in which the agent’s own stance on her action is by no means authoritative.”17 “The link between the three terms—self-consciousness, freedom, reason— now becomes evident: reason is never just an insight into ‘objective’ necessity, apropos of every fact it always involves a normative elaboration of ‘why’, and freedom is a ‘conceived/understood necessity’—the more answers a subject has to ‘why’, the more elaborated is his insight into the network of relations within which he dwells, the more he is ‘free’ in the only meaningful sense of the word.”18

Hence, a provocation requiring a radical change in perspective can only ever produce a shift along the immanent parallax view. A new world that is not yet here. It must be created. This is the meaning of “u-topos” or utopia, a world that has not yet become real, an unmappable, non-­ topographical space. Nevertheless this utopia of the parallax view is always possible, and there is never freedom without unbearable anxiety19 because we are caught in a causal nexus that is not readily apparent to us, the subject must “predestine himself ” and produce a “cipher of his destiny” where the free decision appears in the guise of its opposite as an inexorable necessity.20 Graham Harman forwards the thesis that the concept of the parallax takes a turn towards motion ontology in its later incarnations in Žižek’s  Less Than Nothing, pg. 990.  Disparities, pg. 128. 18  Disparities, pg. 130. 19  Indivisible Remainder, pg. 17. 20  Ibid., pg. 18. 16 17

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work, which seems to conceptualize parallax as the flux and flow of matter. Yet, our postmodern technological capitalism keeps desire barricaded behind “the Screen” where the refuse of consumption (the trashcan of ideology) can be barricaded behind the concealment of production and its exploitative processes. Here is just a thought from Slavoj Žižek on a process that (I fear) is irreversible, an irreversible cut brought on by technological availability of resources that make possible the desire to create a “wired brain,” where people can connect thoughts through interconnected nodules in the brain: “In the context of the late-capitalist Narcissistic mode of subjectivity, the ‘other’ as such—the real, desiring other—is experienced as a traumatic disturbance, as something that violently interrupts the closed equilibrium of my Ego. Whatever the other does, touches me, compliments me, smokes nearby, utters a reproach, looks adoringly, laughs or does not laugh at my joke, laughs but not heartily enough, it is viewed (potentially at least) as a violent encroachment upon my space.”21

Bursting these narcissistic bubbles provokes anxiety and yet, even though it feels right to retreat into an isolated cocoon, these self-enclosed narcissistic “utopias” are unnatural. They create artificial barriers that reality will rupture. Some kinds of social interactions will always require real exchanges by actual flesh and blood human interactions. For example, unless all human life is grown in a test-tube there is always going to be the social trauma of childbirth. There will always be the social trauma of conception, between flesh and blood human beings. Even though the libidinal-desire manifest in the creation of online universes is that of a Christian metaphysics (not a Gnostic one) of transcending the body to freely float in cyberspace (or, even more, in virtual reality)… not (for) the experience of being bodiless, but the experience of possessing another— etheric, virtual, weightless—body, a body which does not confine us to the inert materiality and finitude, an angelic spectral body, a body which can be artificially recreated and manipulated.22  Metastases of Enjoyment, pg. 7–8.  On Belief, pg. 54.

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Interpassivity: Parallax View of Symptomal Figures “A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.” (Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?)

Interpassivity is a concept first developed by Robert Pfaller, who theorized that in contemporary society there was a movement towards the delegation or outsourcing of enjoyment, consumption, action, and interactivity which, mediated through screens or others, produces passivity and inaction, under the imaginary presumption of doing something active. This is an appropriation from Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” which was the thesis that history fulfills its ulterior rational-designs in an indirect manner. Žižek explains: “One is tempted to conceive interpassivity as a way to avoid ideological interpellation. If I let a candle burn in the church for me instead of praying and spend time I thus gain for more pleasurable activities, is it not that I thereby acquire a minimal distance toward the (recognition in) religious interpellation? However, what if far from avoiding interpellation, such a distance effectively sustains it? Is not the ideal religious subject the one who maintains a minimal distance toward his identity as a believer… What makes me a ‘human subject’ is the very fact that I cannot be reduced to my symbolic identity, that I display a wealth of idiosyncratic features.”23

Another can do the activity for you; even enjoyment itself can be outsourced. The common example given by Žižek is the laugh track that occurs in most comedic sit-coms (now, sadly a dying form of entertainment with streaming services superseding network television), but the idea is that the television show is fully equipped with a canned laughter which then laughs at the point in the show when the actors make a funny remark. The point is not that the audience laughs along with the canned 23

 OwB, pg. 179.

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laughter, but that after a long day at work when you are tired, the canned laughter does the laughing for you. You are relieved of the need to act, and you imagine that there is a real person somewhere laughing at the joke in your place. Ideology functions in this gap, because the reality is that canned laughter is just a machine recording of laughter and there are no real people who are actually laughing. Žižek’s thesis is that this creates a “subject supposed to believe” that there is someone out there doing the work that we are not doing. In instances when we give to charities we want to believe that the money is going to a good cause and that the problem of say, hunger in Africa, is being resolved by our donation. Not by the person donating the money, but by someone else who will allegedly act on our behalf and put in the work necessary for consumerism to continue unabated. Consumers can remain docile, or even active in their own hedonistic desires. Interpassivity implies that a decentered subject has emerged, where even the innermost desires of the subject can be externalized. One such example is the fad among children in the 1990s of the Tamagotchi Pet, which is the size of a keychain ornament. A digital image of a “pet” appears on the screen, yet this is a creature that does not even remotely resemble an actual pet. The person using the keychain will not truly believe that the pet is a pet, but when it simply says “Feed me” the owner gives it a simulated pellet of food. Behind the screen there is nothing substantive that would resemble actual “life” in any corporeal form, and yet the screen captures the attention of the user. As we know through this process of psychoanalysis, often the feeling of activity does not ensure our freedom. You can behave while under the spell of an Other’s power. For example being a soldier, fighting, loving, working, and even in the example of the basketball player used by Žižek. “What about (a) basketball player himself? What if he can shine in the game only insofar as he imagines himself being exposed to some—ultimately fantasized—Other’s gaze, seeing himself being seen by that gaze, imagining the way his brilliant game is fascinating that gaze?… the point from which I see myself as likable, in the guise of my ideal ego—is the ego ideal, the point of my symbolic identification, and it is here that we encounter the structure of interpassivity: I can be active (shining on the

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basketball court) only in so far as I identify with another impassive gaze for which I am doing it, that is, only in so far as I transpose on to another the passive experience of being fascinated by what I am doing, in so far as I imagine myself appearing to this Other who registers my acts in the symbolic network.”24 “Even if a coffee without milk is materially exactly the same as a coffee without cream, its symbolic identity is not the same. We thus find ourselves in the field of symbolic alienation, of the differential game of signifiers.”25

From about the mid-1990s Žižek’s work shifted towards the removal of the “malign”-dimension of the Thing. What is excluded, whether it is coffee without cream or coffee without milk, makes a difference. What is negated has an epiphenomenal effect on what appears. In this case excluding the “cream” or the “milk” negates a different thing, which has an effect on our imaginary perception of what appears. Examples of this are: Coffee without cream Coca-Cola without sugar or caffeine Divorce without pain of losing love (therapists call this “conscious uncoupling”) Sex without physical contact of actual bodies Sex without bodies began as an early online idea similar to the meta-verse where avatars are having sex in virtual reality, but it can also serve as an understanding of the interpassivity of the pervasion of online pornography. If the barrier between the object of desire and the subject is removed, Žižek’s thesis, rightfully so, is that the object is then undervalued; it is the gap that makes the thing valuable. We are all lacking and mobilizing an active rather than a reactive sense of power means mobilizing a different set of forces. Reactively targeting actions against an allegedly oppressive big-Other, which serves as a fictional “thief of our enjoyment,” means that a subject remains within the 24 25

 Class Struggle or Postmodernism, pg. 117.  Žižek, Slavoj. Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, pg. 293.

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realm of reactive forces> Regardless of whether or not the mobilization of a liberatory project is successful, there is a transition that must occur after the fact of a successful liberatory event. Typically there is a trace of the one major “thief of enjoyment” as a fictional epiphenomenal force long after its power has been shed, that of the Primordial Father (Vader). In his radical criticism of secular atheists who remain true believers in the Christian ethos, Max Stirner wrote: “Daily experience confirms the truth that the understanding may have renounced a thing many years before the heart has ceased to beat for it.”26 What Stirner meant by this is that the news of the death of God is late to arrive. The same holds true for other forms of removing the malignancy which removes the power to convert the subject to the sublime. Spirituality without Religion began with the New Age definition of a spiritually minded person who does not attend Church. A New Age subject, such as this, serves as a continuation of Christian tropes loosened of the restrictive aspects of any disciplinary structure. In the secular “heart” of New Age spiritualism, you can find God within, God is within you more than you know, an objet petit a if there ever was one, without the hassle of dogmatic attendance in Church. A secularist can naturalize the commandments of the gospels, love thy neighbor, but never does the hard work of dogmatic spiritual exercises necessary to fully develop the soul, such as the discipline of moral asceticism and self-denial necessary to deny usage of hedonistic pleasures such as marijuana, alcohol, or premarital sex. Spiritual beliefs become amenable to whatever consumer demands one desires, rather than the religion posing a challenge of resistance towards the dominant secular culture. Through the practice of strict moral discipline, the spiritual-secular hedonist rationalizes away any challenge to the hedonist desire placed in them by ideological propaganda. What the postmodern subject, supposedly tolerant of diversity, clings to is a sense of immortality as death without death. A sense of spirituality, a belief in God, or higher power, gives the subject the opportunity to cling to the transcendent belief in immortality as an infallible metaphysical reality. Immortality is death without ending life. Death where life finds a way to persist, which is the most efficient way to make a subject pliable to the idea of martyrdom, because in martyrdom one gains  Max Stirner, The Ego and His Own, pg. 34.

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salvation and the death is a virtual death rather than an actual death. Two forms of entertainment that satisfy this metaphysics of death without death is the zombie genre. Those who are not living, but also not dead, and the zombies are an example of the difference between, “is not mortal” and “is not-mortal” wherein the first case we have a simple negation and in the second case we are presented with the situation of the zombie where the non-predicate is affirmed (not-mortal as the position of the “undead”). This is also the ideology behind the endless amounts of lives one receives in most video games. One can die, but not in a mortal sense of coming to an “end.” Players affirm the non-predicate and continue to live even after they are dead. Lastly, the postmodern parallax view gives us the worst kind of double-­ think. Akin to saying someone is “spiritual” but never goes to church. Taking the malignant force out of the thing, in this case the dullness of sitting through a boring church ceremony, there is a removal of the Thing within-us-more-than-we-know (objet petit a) that holds the possibility for conversion into the sublime. If one only “enjoys” Spirituality, you remove the boredom necessary to quiet the mind and extirpate oneself from the daily society of the spectacle that is the postmodern form of distraction. A rebellion which calls for reinstating rather than creating anew is no rebellion at all, and this is precisely what happens when societies remove the malign properties from consumption. When progress is about removing and regulating, then the force of cathected malignancy which drives the libidinal-economy of change, through a gap in what we have and our desires, concludes in a homeostasis of immediacy. The Real is the spectral power of the appearance of the object as-such, reduced to a pure object that appears merely as an entity and nothing more, reduced of its excess.

Parallax View of Pleasure One of the strange things that Sigmund Freud discovered in his work is that at the moment when an analyst begins to “succeed” in breaking into the release of the traumatic kernel which causes subconscious suffering,

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the analysand may begin to guard the traumatic kernel, which causes symptoms, as if it were a treasure. This is because the removal of the traumatic kernel will unravel the symptom and tear away so much of the fabric of the stability of the symbolic order; thus, the world will feel uncanny. Analysands will typically do whatever it takes to avoid that uncanny feeling, and this is because in a parallax view of pleasure, perhaps as a trace of the imprint of a Christian metaphysics of guilt, when one enjoys, there is typically a feeling of guilt, and this manifests in the notion of a “thief of enjoyment,” external to oneself (i.e. the interpassivity of an Other who enjoys for us, but also is responsible for stealing our enjoyment away). Typically, this is the thief cast as refugees who are produced by political unrest. Refugees from the Middle East who fled the instability of the region due to the United States as Primal Father in-vading Iraq, are thus treated as the source of problems when they enter the country. Or, as external subjects who allegedly enjoy too freely, thus irritating the racist.

Capitalism: Order Without Social Norms Capitalism today functions without social norms, and somehow maintains a semblance of order without social repression. Capitalism does not give anyone a solid base of material security in anything. It figures its subject in a social disorder that nervously cogitates from crisis to crisis without any planning, without building any stockpile of material reserves in terms of food, clothing, shelter, or anything remotely resembling the kind of communism that Marx actually wrote about in his later work in the sense of a shared stockpile of resources where people pitch in through rotating labor power (rather than a specialized “division” of labor). This is why, in capitalism, even rebellion is conducted by conformists. For Marx, especially in the first volume of Capital, the cooperation necessary to produce through factory and corporate labor creates pockets of communism within capitalism.27 Nevertheless, if these pockets of communism do not mobilize into a unifying force, they will be overtaken  Žižek. Parallax View, pg. 262.

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by power which still creeps into the crevasses like a gas or like ice solidifying into cracks.28 Even though the threat of violence constantly lingers in the air, we can laugh and be amused while watching endless amounts of entertainment in which “transgression itself is solicited, [and] we are daily bombarded by gadgets and social forms which not only enable us to live with our perversions, but even directly conjure new perversions,”29 and which allege to express the “truth” of our concealed desires. We are on the brink of extinction-level catastrophes such as global warming, which are m ­ aking large parts of the Earth uninhabitable for human life, and yet life goes on in the realm of myth, a realm of denial. Myth is thus the Real of logos: the foreign intruder, impossible to get rid of, yet simultaneously impossible to remain fully within.30 As one of Žižek’s favorite lines to cite from the French Philosopher Gilles Deleuze warns us: “Beware of the other’s dreams, because if you are caught in the other’s dreams, you are done for!” This is why, in a way, it is the tough task of a philosopher who inspires so many others, and yet, when the flowers of a thousand video lectures blossom online the temptation is to trap the philosopher in the layperson’s dreams, which would only hinder and domesticate the revolutionary hysteria and anxiety necessary to provoke an awakening. Consider one sly joke that Slavoj Žižek often tells. There is a man who believes himself to be a grain of seed. He is taken to a mental institution where the doctors do their best to convince him that he is not a seed but a human being. When they eventually succeed, he is allowed to leave the hospital. But he then returns immediately, trembling with fear. He reports that there is a chicken outside the entrance, and he is terrified that it will eat him. “Dear fellow,” says his doctor, “you know very well that you are not a seed but a man.” “Of course, I know that,” replies the patient, “but does the chicken know it?” The Master-Signifier is there in a concealment that is much more nefarious, because the punchline, akin to the

 Thesis borrowed in part from Postscript on Societies of Control by Gilles Deleuze.  On Belief, pg. 20. 30  On Belief, pg. 11. 28 29

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ideological delusions that appear normal, in this joke seems to be that the patient is so neurotic that his delusions extend even to the “Other” of the chicken. To reduce Žižek’s philosophical project to a set of concepts, rules, or dogmas is to nullify the freedom inherent in thought itself. Thinking and provoking is not the same as reflecting as if to encapsulate an object into a proper definition. Rather than slipping away, for example Jacques Lacan’s famous definition of the signifier, the signifier is that which the subject communicates with the other in relation to other signifiers. There is a signifying chain that is implied in meaningful communication, and one must be within the symbolic order, with all of its reference points, circuits of production, distribution, reproduction, in order for the most minimal reference points to make sense. In other words, one must be caught in the dream in order to reflect upon the significance of the dream. For Deleuze, books of philosophy are often, in part, particular genre-­ fictions in the detective and science fiction realms.31 However, he uses these terms in a very different way, referring not necessarily to a “detective” novel per se, but to detecting a truth through our senses, and then also employing te science fiction aspect of concepts arriving from the Erewhon—the not-yet no-place of conceptual production as the u-topos of thought. By detective novel one thinks about the philosopher piecing together clues to solve a mystery, and yet there is commonly a juridical aspect to this endeavor. Is someone or something put on trial? Who are the prosecutors in the case? Who is the defendant? The philosopher who puts forth a thesis only to later be cross-examined after the evidence in the case is stacked against the thesis. Philosophy is the perfect crime— simply asking questions or rattling on a few cages can get thinkers into serious trouble—ask Socrates. To relate philosophy to the empirical work of a detective is to cast the thinker into the role of a film noir protagonist, which the thinking subject stands in relation to the irreducible gap between “the I of apperception and the noumenal ‘thing which thinks,’ which opens up the possibility of a ‘paranoiac’ attitude to which noumenally—qua ‘thing  Gilles Deleuze. Difference and Repetition. Preface, pg. xx.

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which thinks’—I am an artifact, a plaything in the hands of an unknown Maker.”32 On the other hand, there are those who claim to be philosophers who then shun all detecting of the truth and play the game of science fiction writers who fabulate new concepts to drop into circulation. Žižek, to all intents and purposes, appears to do neither. He talks endlessly about popular cultural references, while slipping in a myriad of deep ontological points that are not created as new concepts out of his own mind, but are almost always appropriated from prior thinkers, but not in the way of a classical philosopher who loves wisdom and tries to find the truth once and for all. Žižek, and I agree with this, hates “wisdom” (and thus, philo-­ sophia as the “love of wisdom”), which would amount to a reified version of truth. There is always a historical dialectic at stake in the presentation of his work. This is useful as a research tool and for diligent scholars of philosophy who are serious about studying Žižek’s theory of freedom. I try to condense difficult material and zero in on key passages in Žižek’s writing in order to distill a functional, serviceable philosophy of power and ideology and how it relates to freedom. This also means that there is no way to reify a concept such as “freedom” (because doing so would negate that which is free by trapping it in some kind of form); and also because Žižek’s work has taken so many twists and turns that it is impossible to encapsulate every single thesis he makes in the space of a single book. It would be absurd to think that I can encapsulate a thinker as wide-ranging as Žižek. A thinker and activist-philosopher, who calls himself a madman, who is not trying to be domesticated or grounded, and yet claims that he grounds his thought in “Hegel” and “Lacan.” People miss the mark as to why he does this, mistaking that there is some affinity towards the personage of a once-living corporeal being called “Hegel” or “Lacan”—rather, these are interesting historical figures because they were unique inventors of radically new methodologies. Hegel as forwarding the methodology of the dialectical process. Lacan as utilizing psychoanalysis to reveal the process of the shifting tides of desire as the ungrounded ground of truth rather than forwarding any kind of 32

 Tarrying in the Negative, pg. 39–40.

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“truth” that can be stabilized in the form of propositional logic. Even these two points of reference are not enough, as most people approach Žižek’s work through these two entryways—whereas what I want to do is to show that there is something radically undomesticated about this work. When forwarding a criticism of “ground rent,” for example, he does so as a communist who totally understands that ground rent is a delusion of capitalist ideology, rather than as some so-called “Marxist”inflected economists who study ground rent try to understand it through their own reified consciousness as an actual “thing,” rather than as the force of law imposing a “stratigraphic superimposition”33 (an ideological superstructure) atop of the commons as the a priori condition of land as a thing-in-itself.

Drives and Desires Prior to Lacan, Freud’s pioneering work on the psychoanalytical theory of sexuality discovered that sex forms a core antagonism in the subject. An intersection between the biological and the symbolic at the level of desires and drives. Desires include phantasies, wishes, imagination, dreams, all of which present the subject with the subconscious in a filtered manifestation. A dream may have latent content beyond the manifest symbolic content of the dream itself. Drives are actualized motivations towards an object (or subject) which, it may be believed, will satiate the appetitive drive through its gratification. Hunger constitutes an appetitive motive which creates a drive towards the obtainment of food. The sex-drive occurs in the same way. See, for example, Diogenes, the Greek philosopher who masturbated in the public market, and wished he could alleviate his hunger in the same way, by merely rubbing his stomach.34 A properly dialectical approach rejects the notion of a balanced stasis prior to the transgressive act. One might think of the actions of Diogenes as constituting a criminal act of deviancy, but this begs the normative question: How can we talk about crime without a preceding notion of  OwB., pg. 11.  Foucault. History of Sexuality volume 2: The Use of Pleasure, pg. 55–57.

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legal order that is violated by the criminal transgression? In response to this, one might see, in the example of Diogenes, the legal order as a kind of symbolic order imposed as a phantasmagoria apparatus of capture, imposed through fear and shame. However, we should not forget class conflict, which Žižek compels us to remember. Our shame with regard to this story about Diogenes would mean that we are fully within an apparatus of bourgeois notions of freedom (freedom in private, obedience in public). With regard to the dialectic of freedom, the alienated, bourgeois freedom itself creates the conditions and opens up the space for “actual” freedom, but the thing is that those conditions of unfreedom were produced by inequalities of power and structures of accumulation which foster those inequalities. Human sexuality is much more complex than a reduction to bios and materialism (or what Giorgio Agamben might call “bare life,” or Foucault call “Scientia Sexualis”) insofar as the blessing and curse of “logos” (our imaginative potential as thinking, reasoning, language-structuring beings) clouds our awareness via reflection, storytelling. This intersection between the symbolic and bios, desires and drives form the basis of ideological mapping onto the subject, as desires can be imprinted through the overdetermination of ideological apparatuses. Often, Žižek refers to these ideological apparatuses in Lacanian terms as “the Screen,” but it is important to know that even Freud, in his Three Essays on Sexuality, observed that the Sadist and Masochist tendencies (which are linked in Freud) in behavior are “the aggression which is mixed with the sexual impulse (not) as a remnant of the cannibalistic lust,” read here, the “Id” or a primal remnant from our prehistoric past as violent beings, but, “a participation on the part of the domination apparatus (Bemächtigungsapparatus), which served also for the gratification of the great wants of the other, ontogenetically older impulses.”35 This does not mean that a release from repression will unharness the true nature of our desire, but, rather, that reality is made up of just those such repressive forces. To untangle the repression means to untangle the very fabric of our desire and drive, and therefore, to untangle those which marks reality as such. The Real becomes impossible to sense as such once 35

 Freud. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Translation by A.A. Brill, pg. 38.

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there is no entanglement of force binding us to it; the lynchpin of these forces is ideology. This means that, “ultimately, the status of the Real is purely parallactic and, as such, non-substantial: it has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other.”36 These shifts from one to another perspective is immanent in: “All possible (symbolic) universes: the parallax Real is, rather, that which accounts for the very multiplicity of appearances of the same underlying Real—it is not the hard core which persists as the Same, but the hard bone of contention which pulverizes the sameness into the multitude of appearances.”37

But let us turn to a parallax in the Lacanian universe, one that Žižek returns to again and again in his work: the parallax between desire and drive, emblematic in the objet petit a. In Jacques Alain Miller’s interpretation, desire is connected with lack, while drive is connected with a hole. Žižek’s analysis is instructive: “The difference between desire and drive: desire is grounded in its constitutive lack, while drive circulates around a hole, a gap in the order of being. In other words, the circular movement of the drive obeys the weird logic of the curved space in which the shortest distance between the two points is not a straight line, but a curve.”38

Whereas desire pursues an (ultimately impossible) object that is merely a transient stand-in for “the Thing,” drive wants nothing more than its own continuation as drive. As Graham Harman tells us, “this is where Žižek thinks Miller misses something important: namely, the Lacanian objet petit a pertains not only to desire but to drive as well,”39 and this is because for Žižek there is an epiphenomenal aspect to the continuation of desires  Žižek. Parallax View, pg. 26.  Žižek. Parallax View, pg. 26. 38  Žižek. Parallax View, pg. 61. 39  Graham Harman. “Žižek’s Parallax, or The Inherent Stupidity of All Philosophical Positions.” Parallax: The Dialectics of Mind and World, pg. 35. 36 37

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and drives that derives pleasure from the extension of lack/hole for stretches of time long after their pragmatic fulfillment becomes possible: “in the shift from desire to drive, we pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object.”40

The Voice: Who Analyzes Whom? Lacan asks a simple question in his Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of its Power: Who analyzes today? His opening remarks give us a footing with which to better understand the forking paths of Deleuzian and Žižekian interpretations of Lacanian analysis. Lacan writes, “People say that an analysis bears the marks of the analysand as a person as if it were self-evident. But they think they are being audacious if they take an interest in the effects that the analyst as a person may have on an analysis.”41 Clearly, the question Lacan raises is answered in the way in which he frames the question by claiming that the analyst is never objective. Analysis bears the trace of the analyst; yet, what is an analyst without an analysand, and vice versa? It has been argued by Lacan (and echoed by Richard Rorty) that language is not a transcendental a priori of our society. If language is one mode of articulating the symbolic order, then it is a mechanism of “a parasitical machine which intrudes into and supplements a human being as its artificial prosthesis.”42 One of Žižek’s most commonly cited films is Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940). This is one of the only instances on which Chaplin presents his voice to the audience. This occurs during a riveting speech at the conclusion of the film where Chaplin portrays a Hitler-esque dictator, provoking a warning call against fascist propaganda. It is also no coincidence that Chaplin was subsequently blacklisted under the “Red Scare” in the post-war paranoia that stirred the United States. What we see in this presentation of the silent movie star’s voice is a deeper warning  Parallax View, pg. 62.  Jacques Lacan. Écrits, “The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power.” pg. 489. 42  On Belief, pg. 44. 40 41

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about the use of “the screen” and its voice as a fascist mechanism for ideological interpellation. Using the voice, rather than staying within the silent film, accelerated the interpellative capacity of media. Chaplin’s speech at the end of the Great Dictator is a recognition that the interpellative qualities of “the screen” are drastically intensified with the introduction of the voice. Not only is the visual field stimulated, but the ideological mapping of norms are intensified through the traversal of discourse into audible form. This creates receptive-passivity in the audience, opening windows and audible pathways onto new fields of perceptive data. The virtual is subsequently forgotten as such and instead eventually, gradually, becomes a reified process that takes an apparently “objective” sense of itself. The voice, as understood in Lacanian analysis, is inscribed between the act of speech and the field of language. It is a residual condensation of vocalized utterances and the imaginary, ideal field of language as a metaphysical conceptual form.

3 What About Life?

The internet has produced a cultural homeostasis of the panoptic gaze. People scrutinizing each other over alleged moral transgressions. We are forced into ever more reactionary forms of disciplinary power, and the backlash among the cynics who act out as a spectacle of refusal is completely within the terrain of ideological control, because the superego exerts control through injunctions to enjoy, rather than repression and fear. However, the political contingencies that determine the concept of ‘life’ often do so without falling under close scrutiny. Life is a presence that appears without question as something that must continue on. Questions like, “Is there life on other planets?” or, “Will life continue on Earth?” or, “When does life begin? Does a single cell have a right to life?” As Eugene Thacker states, “The concept of ‘life’ appears to depend on an ontology that can never be explicitly stated as such… the elusive concept of ‘life’ appears to be the horizon of the political itself.”1

 Eugene Thacker. After Life: De anima and Unhuman Politics. Radical Philosophy vol. 155.May/ June 2009. 1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kaye, Žižek and Freedom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42151-8_3

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While I agree with the concept of life as the horizon line of politics, most of the work tends to take the position that the crucial question is that of bringing representation to so-called marginalized and underrepresented groups. Whereas this is a worthy political project one must be reminded of the lines from Marx and Engels occurring in the Communist Manifesto where they warn of a capitalism that welcomes a feminist hierarchy, a re-arrangement of racial hierarchies, all while keeping the hierarchies inherent in the capitalist modes2 of production intact. Žižek’s work is far more radical and, thus, more interesting. Particularly when he makes seemingly Schopenhauerian statements like he did in a recent interview where he briskly states: life is a sexually transmitted disease that causes much suffering and ends in death. Life itself is the problem, provoked by the nihilistic simulacrum into which all lives are now thrown. There is an emphasis on the politics of ‘life’ through the lens of ‘marginalization’ and the giving and taking away of life with the solution being reducible to Said’s understanding of the marginalized making a “voyage in” from the periphery to reclaiming the center. While clearly these are useful political questions, posing problems in this way reaches an impasse, which Žižek’s work while (he claims) is in favor of immigration and open borders, correctly raises some anxieties about the politics of life from a completely different perspective. This is what I want to explore in this chapter: what does Žižek’s work make possible in thinking beyond the ideological way that the ‘politics of life’ has been framed, thus opening up discourses that have been ‘set’ by limited ‘post/de-colonial-­ biopolitical’ signifiers. In my reading of Žižek, he is right to point out that these have become the ‘master’-signifiers in the ideological matrices of how the question of life is currently framed. Recall the famous scene at the beginning of the film Žižek! where we see a frantic Slavoj Žižek explaining his metaphysical view of the universe: “What would be my, how should I call it, spontaneous attitude towards the universe? It is a very dark one. The first thesis would be a kind of total  Modes of production are plural while still remaining capitalist. Marx details this point in numerous areas of the Grundrisse. Agricultural production differs from the production of technological machinery and cultural production, while still maintaining a certain dimension of hierarchy. 2

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vanity. There is nothing. I mean it quite literally, like, ultimately there are some fragments, some vanishing things, if you look at the universe it is one big void. But then how do things emerge? Here, I feel a strange affinity with quantum physics.3 The thesis here is that the universe is a void, but a kind of positively charged void, and then particular things appear when the balance of the void is disturbed. I like this idea spontaneously very much, the fact that it’s not just nothing, things are out there, it means something went terribly wrong. That what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, a cosmic catastrophe, that things exist by mistake. I am willing to go to the end and claim that the only way to counteract this is to assume the mistake and go to the end, and we have a name for this, it’s called love. Isn’t love precisely this kind of a cosmic imbalance? I was always so disgusted with this notion of ‘I love the world’ universal love, I don’t like the world. Basically, I am somewhere between ‘I hate the world’ and ‘I am indifferent towards it,’ but the whole of reality, it’s just it, it’s stupid, it’s out there, I don’t care about it. Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not ‘I love you all.’ Love is, I pick out something, and again it’s this structure of imbalance, even if this something is a small detail, a fragile individual person, I say, ‘I love you more than anything else.’ In this quite formal sense, love is evil.”4

In many ways, you get a glimpse into Žižek’s entire oeuvre with this one small scene. The desperate humor, the existential dread, the sardonic overturning of basic assumptions about stupid ideas on love, but, more importantly, the cosmic mistake that is ‘life’ which is the crucial point. Life exists as a contingency, and only retroactively is understood as a necessity, through the concept of love, love is the quilting point upon which, retroactively, the contingency must be understood to make sense. Žižek comes daringly close to this realization in his analysis of Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death,” in Living in the End Times, where Žižek points out that Poe’s “figure is revealed as the personification of the Red

 Unfortunately, here Žižek misses a very obvious point of affinity in directing his attention to his “affinity with quantum physics” he misses the clear connection with what he is saying and the “avatar” which is the appearance of a being that masks a deeper cosmic void. 4  Žižek! (2005) 3

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Death itself which goes on to destroy all life in the castle.”5 I will present a further discussion of Žižek’s views on Poe later in the essay, but the appearance of the Red Death exemplifies this point that life starts as contingency, and can only be understood to be necessary in a retroactive sense. Žižek’s thesis, time and time again in lieu of the Lacanian signifying-­ chain in its reiterability, the telos does not emerge until after it has been reached, but what does this mean for ‘life’—in the sense that we can apply this thesis so life, it began as a contingency and is understood only in a retroactive sense as necessary; its momentum has been initiated accidentally and only retroactively does the rationalization for its existence emerge. For example, the creation narratives written after the fact of our existence to make sense of being thrown into the world without being asked, these stories serve as a sort of quilting point that the scattered chaos of existence must be ordered into a functional narrative with moral purpose. A political conceptualization of ‘life’ cannot be based on an indication of any intrinsic purpose to life. In terms of older theories on natural law from Sir Edmund Coke: “The Law of Nature is that which God at the time of creation of the nature of man infused into his heart, for his preservation and direction; and this is lex aeterna, the Moral Law, called also the Law of Nature. And by this Law, written with the finger of God in the heart of man, were the people of God a long time governed, before that Law was written by Moses, who was the first Reporter or Writer of Law in the world.”6

This is precisely the kind of thesis that is attacked repeatedly by Žižek in his atheist-Christianity, whereby Christianity is a narrative trope that has gained a universal moral hegemony. The problem becomes how, “to denounce the reminders of the religious legacy within Marxism itself.”7 Instead of “adopting such a defensive stance, allowing the enemy to define the terrain of the struggle, what one should do is to reverse the strategy by fully endorsing what one is accused of: yes, there is a direct  Living in the End Times, pg. 61.  Selected Writings of Sir Edmund Coke. 7  Fragile Absolute, pg. 1. 5 6

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lineage from Christianity to Marxism; yes, Christianity and Marxism should fight on the same side of the barricade against the onslaught of new spiritualisms—the authentic Christian legacy is much too precious to be left to the fundamentalist freaks,” and on a crucial tactical note, “there is no Christ outside Saint Paul; in exactly the same way, there is no ‘authentic Marx’ that can be approached directly, bypassing Lenin.”8 The a-priori understanding of lex aeterna as an intuition before the law was written can only be understood to carry significance a-posteriori, after the fact the law gains significance retroactively. Therefore, there is no prior essence before existence, and the existence of a meaningful understanding of the concept of life can only make sense retroactively after the Law has been instituted. As Žižek points out: “in our ‘postmodern’ world, this dialectic of the Law and its inherent transgression is given an additional twist: transgression is more and more directly enjoined by the Law itself.”9 Žižek gives numerous examples of this, and later on we will discuss this in lieu of Edgar Allen Poe. It is not that ‘existence is prior to essence’ and therefore essence is useless and can be reinvented at any moment, as claimed by the later existentialists such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. It is that the implementation of the Law is necessary for ‘life’ to be infused with meaningfulness. It is not as dualistic as the existentialists make it out to be say, for example in some readings of Kafka’s Before the Law, where we see Kafka revealing that the Law never had any intrinsic meaning and therefore the truth is revealed, the emperor has no clothes and we can be free to disobey the law. It is that ideology functions at the level of the reality that appears as real and as natural as can be, and yet to the subject is indistinguishable as the illusion that it is. That is, it is when the Law appears to be as real and natural as can be, that is when ideology sinks its teeth in and gets the subject hook, line and sinker. In this sense, the same that can be said about Law, can be said about ‘life’. It is an ideological symptom that is not an escape from a deeper concealed reality, but the ideological fantasies form the basis of support for reality itself. What political discourse says and thinks about  Fragile Absolute, pg. 2  In Defense of Lost Causes, pg. 29.

8 9

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‘life’ sets the basis for social bonds that traverse our interactions in ways that have a real effect, but may not reveal the ideological biases in any apparent way.

 natomy of Man and Ape: The More A Developed Form Is the Key Perhaps the quote that Žižek goes back to time and time again as indicative of his position on that which starts as a contingency is understood retroactively as necessity, is the line from Karl Marx in the Grundrisse: “The anatomy of man is key to the anatomy of the ape.” The full quote reads: “Bourgeois society is the most developed and the most complex historic organization of production. The categories which express its relations, the comprehension of its structure, thereby also allow insights into the structure and the relations of production of all the vanished social formations out of whose ruins and elements it built itself up, whose partly still unconquered remnants are carried along within it, whose mere nuances have developed explicit significance within it, etc. Human anatomy contains a key to the anatomy of the ape. The intimations of higher development among the subordinate animal species, however, can be understood only after the higher development is already known.”10

Implication being that the emergence of the ape does not make necessary the evolution of the human being. It is only made apparent after human beings exist that we can see the necessity of the ape and study it as a rudimentary form of human being. The path of telos becomes clear only after the contingency is resolved by its goal. One would also conclude that the Nietzschean thesis, that man is a halfway between ape and ubermensch, to the ubermensches (which have not yet come) the human is a laughing stock, just as the ape is to man. The crucial point is that if the unwritten jump from human being to ubermensch has not yet occurred, we do not  Karl Marx. Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, New York: Penguin Classics. 1993, pg. 105. 10

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know, and cannot speculate about what that jump will be until it actually happens. Then, only after the fact will the jump appear as necessary, not before the fact. In the case of Slavoj Žižek’s political ontology, this would obviously be the jump from capitalism to communism, but we do not yet know what this will be, as the past can only serve as a semblance, a useful set of errors (albeit, even saying this is making a point that is run through with ideological biases that perhaps Žižek would find revulsive). Every fascism arises as a failure of socialism, and, again to make this point, if the past is an ideological tool to see the biases clearly, whilst in the midst of history the ideological blind spots of the present remain inapparent until after the fact. Ideological biases are immanent within the unfolding of the logos and the production of ideologies in their totality cannot be understood as a complete and absolute form as if represented in one singular image. The imaginary relations that ideological superstructures produce present real conditions in imaginary forms. These forms are retroactively understood but only in partial form. What does it mean that humans are in possession of logos? Logic? Language? Speech? Reasoning? All of these seem to indicate a superior status for human beings over and above other animals. We can think and articulate thoughts using sophisticated levels of communication in ways that far surpass any animal known to humans. Why is this? Does this indicate an awareness among humans that allows us to express our needs, desires, and fantasies in ways where social bonds are sedimented by discursive practices? Social needs required the use of language in a social context for the reproduction of ‘life’ and this was an end result of human beings becoming self-aware. Humans were developing in cognition to such an extent that the ‘logos’ was developing, probably due to a surplus of caloric intake that accumulated greater and greater development towards the frontal lobes, our most precious tool and weapon as intelligent sentient beings. As this organ developed and evolved, as did the logos. Our awareness of ourselves in a self-reflective sense developed and evolved as well. Along with it was the awareness that our ‘logos’ gave us superior choices, freedoms unavailable to mere animals whose motivations are based on instincts, hunger, security, sex as merely reproductive, and things resembling the base of the human brain. Over the course of eons our human

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brains developed the frontal lobes and with it complex systems of what Žižek would certainly call ‘ideology,’ or in a way, to put it bluntly, humans create social institutions such as religions, governments, advanced technologies, and economies. Yet, there is no such equivalent to any of these in such sophistication among animals. Our ‘logos’ gives us far more range of motion in regards to our actions and imagination. We can act freely, rather than merely upon instincts. Along with that is the self-reflective knowledge that we are free and that we are mortal creatures. In the meantime we also tend to have this strange curse and blessing of knowing that we are ‘free’—we have choices available to us that a mere animal working upon motivations from the base of the brain does not, as Žižek points out, in paraphrasing Schelling: “the most horrible thing to encounter as a human being is the abyss of free will; when someone simply acts out of free will. And that’s very traumatic to accept.”11 ‘Life’ is about the awareness of this abyss of freedom. Fantasies that form the basis of the reality are where ideological certainties fill in the gaps in discursive social bonds, and bridge the unsettling explosion of this abyssal freedom. Relegating the specter of this freedom as barred from consciousness.12

Repressive Desublimation But the thesis that Žižek makes time and time again, this primordial ‘Eden’ has replaced the paternal Father of prohibition who tells the subject ‘No!’ Repression is no longer the injunction the subject must progress beyond, loosening repressive forces so that desires can be released in a cathartic expression of selfhood. The deeper way that subjects are controlled in postmodern society is through permissive interpellative forces that call the subject through an unprovoked, seemingly spontaneous call to express one’s deepest hidden desires. All around us, we see the unprovoked madness of those who are living under complete control but who  Žižek, Slavoj, and Glyn Daly. 2004. Conversations with Žižek. Cambridge: Polity.  In Žižek’s two major studies on Schelling, The Indivisible Remainder and The Abyss of Freedom highlight precisely this horrifying abyss of freedom. 11 12

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feel they are yet, totally and utterly ‘free’ in a sense of what Herbert Marcuse called “repressive desublimation,” where technology liquidates the transcendent aspects of higher culture and lowers the bar to the point of no prohibitions placed upon desires and their fulfillment, no higher ideals are to be obtained, we simply act spontaneously upon our immediate desires. As we will see later in Žižek’s analysis of the Oedipal and Christian anxieties in the Son, the reason he is interested in Christianity is the overturning of the pleasure principle and its injunction to enjoy as expressed by repressive desublimation. As Žižek says time and time again, the function of psychoanalysis in this postmodern era is to allow for the subject to not enjoy.

L ife, the Contingent Stuck and Retroactive Detachment In a minor point made by Žižek in his 2015 book Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism, there is an opportunistic way that his remarks on Buddhism and the idea that suffering originates from excessive attachment to worldly identity. “The difference between Buddhism and Lacan is crucial. It concerns not only the fact that while Buddhism strives for eternal peace, Lacan focuses on what Buddhism perceives as the Fall (the fixation on a particular feature which starts to matter more than anything and thus derails the cosmic balance). Lacan’s point is a much more precise one: only the ‘getting stuck’, the fixation on a particular feature, opens up the space for the possible withdrawal into eternal inner peace. That is to say, prior to fixation, the subject does not dwell in inner peace but remains fully caught in the flow of things, their generation and degeneration, the circle of life. What if there is no world, no disclosure of being, prior to this ‘stuckness’ and its excess of willing that opens up a space for inner peace.”13 What Žižek is saying in such clear terms is that life has no meaning disclosed to it, unless we understand that meaning retroactively. 13

 Slavoj Žižek. Absolute Recoil, pg. 118.

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‘Detachment’ as a total and absolute detachment from all of existence can only occur after a fixation to a thing. Detachment is provoked retroactively, after the fact of being stuck onto something that provokes such pain and anguish that one must yearn to detach from it. Desire can only be overcome upon the attainment of nirvana. A key point about the double-­meaning of nirvana is that nirvana literally means the extinguishing of the funeral pyre upon the cremation of a body after its death. Nirvana also takes the figurative meaning of overcoming desire. However, the literal and figurative meanings both indicate the true meaning of nirvana. One constantly detaches from desire. One’s practice is never fully complete until the body is in ashes and the subject has completely detached from its physical form. Therefore, detachment is not merely ‘detachment’ from the temptation of a subject fixating upon a fetish-­ object in a physical-material sense of lusting after a commodity, but the total and absolute recoil of the subject in a complete and total sense of detaching from the entirety of the cosmos. As Žižek claims in Sublime Object of Ideology, “capitalism runs on the leftover of the Real, eluding the symbolization, the Lacanian object petit a as the embodiment of surplus enjoyment… the limit of capitalism is the capitalist mode of production.”14 All that remains, dissolves into the air; all moral foundations melt away as inessential non-considerations in the mind of the capitalist. Capitalism is an economic formation that is always striving to push beyond the current forms of productive forces, finding new ways to maximize profits, and appropriate surplus-value regardless of the moral consequences. The reason I am bringing up these points about Buddhism here in the context of determining the ethics of Žižek’s views on evil, is that in a now-classic text by Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes, he evokes precisely this analysis of evil in lieu of a discussion of Martin Heidegger and a Zen Buddhist reading of the ethics of the late Heidegger offered by Bret Davis. Evil may have nothing to do with technology because the face-to-­ face will to violence, of willing someone into submission, of the sheer humiliation that can only occur in the face-to-face dimension of violence. There marks an evil that cannot be reconciled through the use of  Slavoj Žižek. Sublime Object of Ideology, pg. 50–1.

14

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technology. Technology can create more sophisticated weapons, but it has yet to tear away the heart of darkness that is within us all (the objet petit a, that which is in us more than we know, to put it in Joseph Conrad’s terms—“the horror, the horror,” that violence that emerges, unspeakable when no rules apply).

Schelling’s God/Ages of the World If God created the universe—what created God? In other words, why is there something instead of nothing? A question that in the later Žižek is subjected to a dialectical inversion. In Žižek’s later work, why is there nothing instead of something? An unusual source for Žižek’s hermeneutics, that only trained philosophers and social theorists (not necessarily psychoanalysts) can properly explore. Rather than the well-worn paths of Hegel to Lacan, Lacan to Hegel, he turns our attention towards the 1813 text by F.W.J. Schelling, Die Weltalter (translated as Ages of the World). As an avowed atheist, the turn towards a theistic explanation of the origin of the cosmos is puzzling, but one must remember that the puzzling part of these stories for an atheist is the ideological resonance of these mythical origin stories. Even against all evidence, why does the creation story still compel so many true-believers? Why does the discovery of dinosaur bones and the use of carbon dating provide a reliable time stamp that places the dinosaur’s existence millions of years prior to the events in the book of Genesis as understood literally, meaning that a true-believer might think that the bones were placed there by God as a test of faith? One must screen out facts in order to make the truth amenable to what is believed, again, to restore faith in the untruth one must screen out facts and rearrange them so that the facts fit with what is subjectively felt, even creating new narratives retroactively. A repeated point made by Žižek is that nobody ever converts to a religion because of the arguments. Nobody says, “Oh, I read the sacred scriptures, weighed all the arguments rationally and after reasoning it out, I converted to (fill in the blank)—religion.”

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There is a pathos of irrationalism behind why someone becomes religious, a trauma, or some sort of meta-narrative that provides a palliative effect for the subject. In many cases, it is anxiety and the religion may simply provide a stable rock, a grounding, onto which one can stand in a topsy-turvy crisis in life. In Žižek’s work, one has to remember that it is a crucial point that one searches for moral allegories in life; one winds up in some treacherous moral territory as a result of blind faith in the telos of a divinely inspired plan. If you search for a divine meaning in everything, even the most evil and violent acts, the subject winds up disgustingly rationalizing heinous acts to accommodate the true-belief in the infallibility of an all-powerful messianic power guiding the hands of history. A true-faith in moral allegories, the idea that all violence is a lesson that teaches us something, winds up with weird rationalizations, for example, did Auschwitz have to happen for us to learn a valuable lesson? Of course not. Did we have to have world history go through Nazism in order to better understand the stories of the fascists? Would this mean that we need to allow fascists in our midst today to speak freely and openly, thus allowing those views to foment into neo-fascist movements as they have in our contemporary society? Of course not, there needs to be a freedom where some semblance of codified norms remain in place, which means, we have to not only have the freedom to enjoy, but more importantly, the freedom to be allowed not to enjoy. We must ask, why is there this constant injunction to enjoy? Why are we forced into compulsory enjoyment? One of the first points that Žižek makes is often skipped right over is the idea of the “rotary motion.” This idea spans back at least as far as the atomists. Some of them believed that the formation of the cosmos resulted from the rotary motion of Nous, before which the cosmos was merely an infinite and undifferentiated mass lacking in form. Greek mythology called it chaos, which is a premonition of the “impenetrable darkness of drives”15 and was thought to be gaining momentum prior to the formation of rotary motion into form. In many ways, discourse has regressed into rotary motion.  Indivisible Remainder: Schelling and Related Matters, is the best treatment of this ‘rotary motion’. 15

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Postmodernism creates fragmented political consciousness and fragmented discourses. The presumption of a political dialectic on the level of political discourse is absurd. Simply because the ideological eco-systems of “left” and “right” political discourses have created spaces that are almost entirely partitioned out separate from one another. Conservative/ liberal (and conservative is the dominant term because, as Georges Bataille was correct to point out: it is easier to restore than to create) discourses do not even interact in any meaningful way, the Other is not allowed into the frame. Hence, we are in an era of the parallax view and the rotary motion. One of Žižek’s earliest books in which he gives us an idea of his philosophy of freedom is The Abyss of Freedom,16 where he carefully works through F.W.J. von Schelling’s work Ages of the World. Schelling’s work was highly influential. After the death of Hegel in 1831, he was invited to lecture at the University of Berlin. Some notable philosophers in attendance for Schelling’s lectures included Friedrich Engels, Søren Kierkegaard, and Mikhail Bakunin.17 The way Žižek reads his work is that Schelling provides an entryway into a possible diversion from Hegelian dialectics and moves to post-Hegelian philosophy as understood through Arthur Schopenhauer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. Žižek describes a passage from “closed” rotary motion to the “open” progress, where one of the major aporias in Schelling’s work is that he “first opposes Existence (the fully actual God) and the mere Ground of Existence (the blind striving that lacks actuality) as the Perfect and the Imperfect, and then goes on to treat the two as complementary and to conceive true completeness as the unity of the two, as if the Perfect itself needs the Imperfect in order to assert itself. This is why there is Evil in the world: on account of the perverse need of the Perfect for the Imperfect, as if the intersection of the Perfect and the Imperfect is more perfect than the Perfect itself.”18

 Abyss of Freedom, 1997.  Bjorge, Nathan. Schelling’s Nothingness—the Figuration of the Death Drive in German Idealism in Žižek’s reading of Ages of the World. International Journal of Žižek Studies. Volume 10, issue 3. 18  Abyss of Freedom, pg. 7/ 16 17

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Clearly, what provokes this move by Schelling to be so fascinating is that the “imperfect” and the “Perfect” form objet petit a in dialectical opposition to one another; that is, these are in the Other more than it appears. One cannot function without the other, and yet it is an irritant that drives freedom forward in no uncertain terms. If something is imperfect, there is an idea of perfection that motivates progress, vice versa, and this tension of posing a critique of the ‘principle of sufficient reason’19 is never fully uncovered because the causation was set in motion prior to the beginning of time and the creation of the cosmos. The question for Schelling is “The whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is: how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place?”20 By default, what is interesting for us here is that this poses a dialectical inversion of the way the question is commonly posed. “From drive to desire, or, in Lacanian terms, from the Real to the Symbolic. The beginning occurs when one ‘finds the word’ that breaks the deadlock, the vicious cycle, of empty and confused ruminations.”21 The question is whether or not this discovery of the word that will set the subject free can occur in an era where technology envelops all aspects of subjectivity in a self-enclosed metastasis of pleasure. By turning to Schelling, the work on freedom in the early part of Žižek’s career there was still a hope that the enclosure of the mind could be opened again, and that, in many ways, the opening of the mind is not necessarily the telos of freedom. Remember, opening the mind to learn about all narrative possibilities means that someone will open their mind even to the most violent fascist narratives—who wants to know why Hitler did what he did, in fact, I would like to close my mind off from that, is a common joke from Žižek. What we do not want is to posit freedom as the primordial violence as the only “essence” that eternally returns when there are no moral mechanisms of reflection, which seems to be the main problem in the opening lines of Schelling’s work, that there is a “primordial-life” with no  Leibniz believes that if we are in a universe created by an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-present, and all-good God, then we must be in the best of all possible universes, and God always has sufficient reasons for the world the way it is, and so forth. 20  Ibid., pg. 3. 21  Ibid., pg. 15. 19

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preceding time, that constitutes the oldest of essences, prior to the creation of the cosmos (the Greeks called it “chaos”), which Žižek reads as “the Real”: “Since there is nothing before or outside of this primordial life by which it might be determined, it can only develop (to the extent that it does develop) freely, purely from itself alone, out of its own drive and volition. It does not, for that matter, develop lawlessly; rather, development proceeds according to law. There is nothing capricious in this primordial life: it is a nature in the fullest sense of the term, just as man is a nature regardless of freedom, even because of it.”22 Freedom at that early phase was the “withdrawal into self, the cutting off of the links to the Umwelt (which) is followed by the construction of a symbolic universe that the subject projects onto reality as a kind of substitute-formation destined to recompense us for the loss of the immediate, presymbolic real… the ‘mad’ gesture of radical withdrawal from reality that opens up the space for its symbolic (re)constitution.”23 Up through his work in the book the Parallax View, there is an emphasis on this groundless ground echoed in this influence from Schelling: “the domain of Ideas becomes actual Spirit only through its ‘egotist’ perversion/inversion, in the guise of the absolute contraction into a real Person” And, as Žižek is careful to warn us at this early stage in his writings, “One must be careful not to miss the point here: it is not only that what we experience as ‘material reality’ is the perversion/inversion of the true ideal order; reality emerges insofar as the true ideal order gets inverted in itself, runs amok—in Schelling’s terms, the inertia of external material reality is a proof of the divine madness, of the fact that God himself was ‘out of his mind.’”24 There are two (or perhaps more) essences to the self where the “higher essence notices that the lower is assigned to it, not to be held in idleness, but rather that it might have an instrument in which it could behold itself…” “This separation, this doubling of ourselves, this secret intercourse between the two essences, one questioning and one answering, one ignorant though seeking to know and one knowledgeable without  Ibid., pg. 113.  Ibid., pg. 9. 24  Ibid., pg. 11. 22 23

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knowing its knowledge; this silent dialogue, this inner art of conversation, is the authentic secret of the philosopher from which the outer art (which for that reason is called ‘dialectic’) is only a replica and, if it has become bare form, is only empty appearance and shadow.”25 To give a parallel example, turn to a story that Žižek quotes at the start of Indivisible Remainder, “The Sole Solution,” by Eric Frank Russell, which: “describes the inner feelings of someone filled with doubt, someone who turns around in a futile circle and cannot reach a decision, who makes all kind of plans which are then immediately aborted. Finally, he makes up his mind and says: ‘Let there be light!’ In short, what we took, all through the story, for the groaning of some confused idiot turns out to be the hesitation of God immediately before the act of creation. The beginning thus occurs when one ‘finds the word’ which breaks the deadlock, the vicious cycle, of empty and confused ruminations.”26 The release of these dark forces “can occur only on condition that the rotary motion of drives which precedes the Beginning is itself not the primordial, unsurpassable fact.”27 Gravitating a rotary motion from the primordial, unsurpassable fact, these drives gain potential energy as the subject encroaches upon the Thing. That is to say, the “notion of a vortex of drives as the ultimate foundation, the ‘origin of all things’, renders inconceivable the fact of freedom: how can a Word emerge out of this vortex and dominate it, confer on it its shape, ‘discipline’ it? Consequently, this ultimate Ground (Grund) of reality, the primordial vortex of drives, this Wheel of Fate which sooner or later engulfs and destroys every determinate object, must be preceded by an unfathomable X which thereupon, in a way yet to be explained, ‘contracts’ drives.”28 A ‘rotary motion’ could be felt in the way reactionary political ideologies galvanized support from humiliated white voters29 who would have rather destroyed the planet than concede a grip on power. Žižek already  Schelling, Ages of the World, pg. 115.  Ibid., pg. 13–14. 27  Ibid. 28  Ibid. 29  To borrow a term from both Alain Badiou and Bifo Berardi. 25 26

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wrote about these ideological movements since he began publishing, and drawing on themes in Jacques Lacan’s work which predicted the emergence of subjects in the early 1970s that “capitalist globalization gives rise to the new racism focusing on the ‘theft of enjoyment’ on the figure of the Other who either threatens to snatch from us the treasure of our ‘way of life,’ and/or itself possesses and displays an excessive jouissance that eludes our grasp.”30 When he says “our” he is not identifying with those racist discourses but articulating how the new racism produces the Imaginary figure of the Other as a threat, real or perceived. Strangely, the idea that the Imaginary is only a figment of the imagination is quite contrary to how these paranoid fantasies function. The imaginary can manifest in very real events such as the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centers perpetuated by Islamic fundamentalists and thus gives a corporeal form to the perceived dread inherent in the insubstantial psychic cathexis of the Thing. An event can render the perceived dread of the Thing into an actual form as a kind of hyperstitial myth-making. A voice in a position of power can construct narratives that bring forth the Real of desire concealed in its articulative dimensions.

If God Does Not Exist, Then Nothing Is Permitted A controversial thesis forwarded by Slavoj Žižek (through Lacan, of course) and echoed by Nietzsche (although uncited as a source in Žižek’s work) is that God is a narcissist who loves only himself. If the sending of Jesus as the savior was the culmination of God’s plan to save humanity from sin, then there was no greater enjoyment for God than the excruciating crucifixion of Jesus on the Cross. The only way to truly admit this, rather than suppress this disturbing idea, is to admit that the Fall was the starting point of a chain of events that culminated in the crucifixion of Jesus.31 A bit of evil had to exist in the mind of God while 30 31

 On Belief, pg. 32.  Slavoj Žižek. Living in the End Times, pg. 93.

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setting these events in motion, because if God was all-powerful his omnipotence would have encompassed the power by which he created the Devil, a sinister side must exist in the mind of God to have the power to create sin and the Devil.

God Has Been Refuted, but Not the Devil What is meant by ‘ethics’ in Beyond Good and Evil? Typically, the move beyond good and evil is understood to be a move against ‘good’ and towards evil. When theorists, such as Bataille, take this approach it misses many crucial points that Nietzsche makes obvious. One such point is that evil relies on good as an objective against which it resists. If ethical systems take away the objective sense of good, then the drive towards evil will no longer exist. One simple problem arises. If motivation is solely driven by transgressing good, then that subject acts in a reactive form of power. Merely reacting to the good means that the act of transgression has been determined by the law of the master who produces the definition of what is ‘good,’ hence, the ressentiment of a slave morality is precisely someone who: “gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge. Whereas all noble morality grows out of a triumphant saying ‘yes’ to itself, slave morality says ‘no’ on principle to everything that is ‘outside’, ‘other’, ‘non-self ’: and this ‘no’ is its creative deed… slave morality must first have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction.”32 Removing “good” as the point of resistance creates the groundless grounds that the ubermensch (the over-Person) can create an active will to power. After the fact, slave-morality emerged as a form of ressentiment aimed towards the creative acts of the ubermensch. We should be clear by  Friedrich Nietzsche. Genealogy of Morality. Book 1, #10, pg. 20. 2010. Cambridge University Press: New York. 32

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pointing out that the slave is not an actual slave. As everyone knows who reads Nietzsche, it is a morality and moralities are an economic form of balancing credit and debt. Morality is about debt, gift-giving, giving back what is given to you, and therefore the slave morality holds ressentiment, vengeance, and as an escape from powerlessness the slave produces an entire moral belief system as a way of compensating for this debt the slave feels s/he is owed. There most certainly are unexplored avenues of convergence between Slavoj Žižek’s work and the philosophies of Friedrich Nietzsche. By his own admission, Žižek claims that his work deals mostly with a Hegelian-­ Lacanian theoretical locus; however, there are many unexplored points of convergence such as ‘necessary illusions’ are formative of ideological structures, rather than an illusion from which we can awaken through the use of factual evidence: “This is probably the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’: ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’—‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence— that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. ‘Ideological is not the false consciousness of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by false consciousness. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only in so far as its logic escapes him—the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.”33 And Nietzsche’s dubious phantasmagoria of Platonism that truth is a kind of error,34 that truth is an illusion of which we have forgotten is  Slavoj Žižek. The Sublime Object of Ideology. 1989. New York: Verso Press, pg. 16.  I am aware that Žižek constantly uses this exact phrase from Friedrich Nietzsche’s nachlass as counterpoint to the argument that he then makes, but perhaps this is for show, since the illusion is the support of reality, rather than simply external to it and into which one can be released through objective facts. 33 34

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such. To put it succinctly in the words of Nietzsche taken from his Unpublished Fragments from Spring 1885—Spring 1886, “the great danger is not pessimism (a form of hedonism) the calculating of pleasure and pain… Instead, the meaninglessness of all events! The moral interpretation has become invalid at the same time as the religious interpretation: this they do not know of course, the superficial! The more impious they are, the more instinctively they cling with their teeth to moral valuations… to what the previous morality has also fallen away with ‘God’: they mutually supported one another… God has been refuted, but not the devil.”35 Perhaps this is a reductionary form of Žižek’s work. By turning to a Hegelian-Lacanian dialectical interpretation of Christianity, Žižek is finding the Devil in Christ, but never fully atheist enough to completely eradicate the Devil itself. He is constantly looking for the remainder, the less than zero, the point beyond the negation in which the subject may tarry. Take, for example, many of the remainders in his views expressed in his reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Black Cat,”36 in that the murder in the story retells the story of a character who acts for reasons that he knows he should not, a motive without a motivation. Start with a step back to Kantian thought and Nietzsche’s Žižekian response to deontology and the non-consequentialism of Kantian ethics.

 Friedrich Nietzsche. Unpublished Fragments (Spring 1885–Spring 1886). #39(15), pg. 182. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 36  Ironically, the short story by Poe, is one of the earliest short stories in the horror genre in the United States. While Poe was also the first author in American history to make a living completely off of his fiction writings, there is something ironic about the fact that this story depicting a man viciously murdering his wife was published in the August 19, 1843 edition of the Saturday Evening Post. A periodical known for the cover art of Norman Rockwell whose portrayals of small town hijinx have become renowned Americana cliches, often stereotypical of the ‘wholesome nostalgia’ of a bygone moral era, a ‘greatness’ in America’s past. In missing the low-hanging fruit here, Žižek had a golden opportunity to make his point that we are more regulated than ever before, when one recollects ‘Americana’ it is always in the eyes of a wholesome, Puritanical past with solid morals and not in the sense of a magazine that would publish a story like The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe. If anything, the categories of horror films and Hallmark ‘Norman Rockwell-esque’ films are more segregated now than ever before! 35

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 id Kantian Ethics Produce Poe’s Black Cat D and the ‘Spirit of Perverseness’ Kantian ethics of non-consequentialism finds its telos retroactively with the writings of Edgar Allen Poe.37 In “The Black Cat” we see the “Spirit of Perverseness” where you must do something, precisely because you cannot, and should not. One does something precisely because it is prohibited, because Kantian desire refers to pathological biases and temporary motivations that are materially contingent, what Poe does in that story is produce a fictional account of an a-priori transcendental completely autonomous sense of desire. In being autonomous and transcendental, the highest version of the ‘ethical subject’ in Kant’s philosophy is unbound by external pressures to find virtue outside of itself, and by mobilizing free-volition in a transcendental act, the ethical subject is no longer bound by fear of the law. In Kant’s non-­ consequentialism, the ethical subject is totally free, and of course, unbeknownst to Kant, totally free to act upon the ‘Spirit of Perverseness.’ If an act gratifies an impulse and does so beyond the pleasure principle, effectively maintaining its transgressive connotations, then in a purely non-­consequentialist fashion it enhances the enjoyment of the act and by enhancing the passion of the subject it remains “stricto sensu ethical…”.38 Edgar Allan Poe even makes note of this in the story of desire to kill the Black Cat, “Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart—one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or stupid action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not?”39

 The parallels are clear in a way the ideological ‘gap’ in Kantian deontology and non-­ consequentialism is returned to the master by the subject whose evil was the remainder in the master’s discourse. Elsewhere Žižek draws on Lacan’s dualism between Kant and Sade. “Kant and Sade: The Ideal Couple.” Lacanian ink 13, 1998. 38  Ibid. 39  Edgar Allan Poe. The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. “The Black Cat,” pg. 321. 37

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 xiting the Garden of Eden, Regressing Back E Towards it Many cultures speak of an alleged golden age that has been lost. The biblical fable about the Garden of Eden is no different in that the sense of something that was perhaps taken for granted, something crucial to our humanity has been lost. We as humans have been taken out of our natural embodiment into a realm where the knowledge of good and evil brought us into separation from ourselves and brought an awareness of our own alienation from each other. Our minds began the process of using thought as a tool to sort out ‘this not that,’ and another example of this is very early on in the Tao te Ching, the philosopher Lao Tzu describes a similar case where he says: “The Tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao, the name that can be named is not the eternal Name. The unnamable is eternally real. Naming is the origin of all particular things. Free from desire, you can see the hidden mystery. Caught in desire, you can see only what is visibly real. Yet mystery and visible reality arise from the same source. And the mystery itself is the gateway to all understanding.”40

What occurs is the separation of ‘this not that’ through the development of language. Discourse becomes the preferred method by which to set social bonds, as a necessary tool for communication to fulfill our basic material needs we must use language to fulfill those needs. However, we also develop ways of categorizing ‘this not that’ and separating out various categories of things in order to differentiate out of the necessity for security. One of many examples would be in the early stages of this development of human language (human ‘logos’) to know this food will make you healthy, that food will poison you, and so forth. But the issue is that the beauty and tranquility of this golden age, the garden of Eden prior to the development of ‘knowledge’ and sophisticated forms of communication, the beauty of that phase of human history can only be understood as beautiful a-posteriori, after the fact of  Tao te Ching by Lao Tzu. verse #1.

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losing it forever. Hence, like with the other theses forwarded in this chapter, Žižek’s argument is quite convincing. What starts as a contingency (perhaps the development of language as a useful tool for human cognitive and social development) can only be understood retroactively as forcing humanity out of a natural phase of immediate, instinctual embodiment, into reflective and perhaps over-analytical neurosis. Adrian Johnston has perhaps tried to show the connection between Žižek’s political work on ideology and Lacan’s understanding of “primary narcissism,” and I believe it is useful to make this connection; however, the theorization of this connection has been improperly drawn. Depicting the infantile state of “primary narcissism” where the infant exists in a blissful state of oblivious perfection, “where the libidinal economy is unperturbed by deep dissatisfactions and inherent inequalities (i.e., depicting the starting condition of human existence as being that of a ‘primitive monad of enjoyment’).”41 Johnston follows up this quote by stating this thesis, “makes it almost impossible to explain why individuals would ever strive to exit from this archaic Garden of Eden.” Johnston’s approach is backwards, because if any understanding of aggressivity and narcissism proves correct it is that these are ‘infantile regressions’ where the subject (be it a historical, political, or interpersonal conflict) yearns time and time again to reconnect with this infantile state of bliss, the entire metaphysics of history is a yearning to return to this primordial memory of the Garden of Eden in the crib, the womb. More to the point, nobody ‘strives’ to get out of the Garden of Eden; we are all thrown out of the garden by the brutality of exploitation and the necessity to work. Our discovery of our own freedom, the appearance of the serpent in the garden of Eden is most phallically literal and figurative,42 because  Adrian Johnston. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity, pg. 213.  Hebrew translators have known that the passage in Genesis 3:1, ‫ עירום‬rendering the appearance of the serpent as ‘nude,’ rather than the typical King James Version that censors this into “the serpent was more subtle…” the passage should read “the serpent was more nude…” an overtly phallic imagery to the temptation offered by the serpent. See the work of Mark Gadd. “A New Look at an Old, Subtle Serpent: Naked in Genesis 3:1,” June 2007, Brigham Young University: Studia Antiqua, volume 5, number 1. Agamben scholars who do not understand this text and the biblical rendering of ‘coverage’ and Eve’s name in Greek as ‘Zoe’ are only doing a superficial reading of Agamben’s ‘bare-life,’ which not coincidentally occurs merely a few passages after the presentation of ‘chattel.’

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what appears are the choices we have between good and evil and this direct confrontation with the terror of our absolute freedom presses the subject into subjection. This is the backwards awakening of western maturity, to force our severing from our infantile regressions, our infantile memories of bliss are repressed. Hence Lacan’s thesis that the subject passes through a “retroversion effect by which the subject becomes at each stage what he was before…”.43

 he Law that Mirrors the Public Law Is T the Super-Ego Freedom is misunderstood, as with Kevin in Home Alone. I initial jouissance he feels when he realizes that “I made my family disappear” (i.e. the death of the Super-Ego)—eating twenty scoops of ice cream, jumping on the bed, watching violent movies that “Mom and Dad” say are off-limits. This is “freedom” in the postmodern era. The “liberty” that capital demands is freedom-from the state, which is always cast as a feminine parasite. The “Nanny” state, à la a nagging wife telling the boys to come home from their poker game, or mommy coddling a boy; implicit in these messages is the obvious subtext of shunning the help of women in order to prove oneself as an independent man who does not rely on anyone else. Hence, we are not really free. The freedom that most people *believe* they are experiencing the immature jouissance of childhood without heeding the call of the super-ego. Making their family, their responsibilities to an Other disappear, only to resolve into a narcissism of uninterrupted pleasure and hedonism. There is a difference between ‘freedom’ and ‘a superego that withers away,’ the postmodern condition conflates these two things. The work of Slavoj Žižek, by drawing on psychoanalysis from a Marxist perspective earlier on in his career, makes this distinction the purpose of his career. One can better understand Marx when he says, in The German Ideology, that the ego and its negation are manifestations of material conditions. Ego or non-ego are never matters of choosing moral asceticism or not,  Écrits. Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire, pg. 306.

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being humble or selfish, but are a product of lived conditions of social reproduction that produce the tactics of ego-self-representation. Whether or not a moral code of conduct allows egoism or not, when desperate material conditions put workers in life and death situations, egoism will emerge as the conatus or will to survive. This is echoed in Nietzsche’s addendum to Darwin in a brief, all-too-­ brief section of Twilight of the Idols entitled “Anti-Darwin,” where Nietzsche correctly asserts that the flaw in Darwin’s theory of evolution is that Darwin failed to fully understand “intelligence” as a skill that manifests among the physically weak who must adapt in order to survive. Brute strength in corporeal form is not the only tactic that the physically weak can use to pull at the levers of power to empower themselves. Intelligence might be read as “ego” and it might be read as the adaptation of culture into ideologies that become sympathetic to the plight of the weak, something that Nietzsche was skeptical about, but cultural critics who engage with Nietzsche and Marx seem to conflate the two in favor of a Marxist, allegedly sympathetic reading of ideology as adaptable insofar as it cultivates compassion toward a society based on needs rather than abilities. For a moment, recall Sigmund Freud’s theory of the Id, Ego, and Superego and meditate on the importance of Freud’s Tripartite Soul, as I call it, in contemporary sociological context. Think of Freud’s theory as layers. The first two layers, the Id and the Ego, are contained within the individual. Every person has an Id and Ego. My hypothesis today is that in neoliberal capitalism, the shriveling away of the state means that the superego is also shriveling away. If a superego remains, it is in the form of a cynical attitude towards it, or a longful nostalgia for what once remained of the superego. The Id consists of our buried desires, aggression, primal instinctual drives, libidinal drives. Most importantly, you cannot hear the Id in your mind. The Id manifests as the feeling of hunger, a surge of anger, the hair on the back of your neck rising up when you feel a sudden chill of fear, a flush of sexual arousal that makes your heart flutter with excitement. These are felt instinctual responses and do not constitute thoughts that manifest in the mind as words.

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The Ego is the conscious-self, imagination, daydreaming, inner thought processes, language that manifests within and outside of the mind in conversations and inner dialogue with oneself. The Ego is contained within our own body and gives us a moral conscience, if a beautiful woman walks by and suddenly a surge of excitement pours over a person, and they feel a surge of libido, and a rush of sexual hormones and pheromones, that is the Id talking to you. The Ego then translates that into conscious thoughts. Whether you go over and talk to her, or shy away, or feel embarrassed and start to think to yourself, or maybe if you’re with friends you sort of elbow a buddy and say, ‘Hey, check her out,’ consciously aware of the libidinal impulses but in a socially acceptable way. The reason you do not act like a caveman in prehistoric days and take a club and pounce on the woman instinctually is because Superego bears down on us. The Ego is the gatekeeper of the Id, the go-between mediating between the Id and the Superego, the latter being the forces bearing down on the individual that are external to the self. Forces outside of the self may include things like religious beliefs, government and the fear of consequence for breaking the laws against rape and sexual assault, pressures from family members, parents, relatives, spouses, friends, the judgement of peers who may see the incident and make you feel ashamed or embarrassed, fear of going to jail, losing freedom, so forth. More importantly, the regulation of the drives is concealed from within the subject, as the Sadistic desire towards rape (in some, not all men) can be explained by Freud’s thesis that Sadism is not a remnant of a “cannibalistic lust,” but is rather, “a participation on the part of the domination apparatus (Bemächtigungsapparatus)”44 on behalf of the Sadistic subject. Even if it is not something as violent as rape, there may be feelings of shame associated with being turned down if you simply walk up and start talking to the beautiful woman and this may be an imaginary construct in the mind (à la your ego) that is constructing that phantasy in a way to mediate between the lustful instincts of the Id and the delaying of gratification that civil society makes necessary through the teachings offered by the institutional implementation of the Superego: interpellation  Freud. Three Essays on Sexuality, pg. 38.

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through schools, churches, government policies, policing, ideological and repressive state apparatuses,45 coupled with the subject’s desire to participate in these apparatuses of domination. Even Marx and Engels, in the Communist Manifesto, make a very clear point early on that capitalism is a process of social-reproduction into which the class arrangement of wage-labor exploitation must involve the proletariat as-if willingly selecting their own submission to the system. Workers have to choose to subject themselves, or at the very least, have the true-belief that they are themselves free and willing participants in the process. Neurotic Anxiety  Anxiety which arises from an unconscious fear that the libidinal impulses of the ID will take control at an inopportune time. This type of anxiety is driven by a fear of punishment that will result from expressing the ID’s desires without proper sublimation. A neurosis is felt when there is tension between the ID and superego which regulates the expression of the desire in the form of a drive in such a way that the ego feels guilt and shame, second guessing the expression and discharge of the desire where the subject represses the drive for pleasure. Hence, worry and anxiety are normal expressions of anxiety, unsatiated desires.  Moral Anxiety  Anxiety which results from fear of violating moral or societal codes, moral anxiety appears as guilt or shame.  Freud tells us that: “neurosis is, so to say, the negative of perversion.”46  This is a direct appropriation from Louis Althusser’s “On the Reproduction of Capitalism.” where he defines the state as a repressive apparatus in the Marxist tradition. “The state is a ‘repressive machine’ that enables the dominant classes (in the nineteenth century, the bourgeois class and the ‘class’ of big landowners) to ensure their domination over the working class in order to subject it to the process of extorting surplus-value.” pg. 70. This would be fear of constraint, fear of sanction, fear of going to jail. Ideological apparatuses on the other hand serve the dominant class as the production of ideologies, with ideologies being the production of phantasies, the way that ‘wish-­ fulfillment’ is enframed to the public. The real struggle for liberation as a Marxist was the base, not the superstructure. The ways that the productive forces and the relations of production and social relations will shift as the class struggles are the last instance of these inward antagonisms finding full resolution. As for Marxists the inward consciousness is determined by material conditions that are external to the subject, consciousness is not an idea that falls from heaven out of thin air. Marxist views on the state are that the state is superstructural and secondarily determined by the modes of production which produce the relations of production. State repression simply mirrors the repression with which capital blockades resources from the working class. 46  Freud. Three Essays on Sexuality, pg. 45. 45

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In this conception of Anxiety, we can see why Freud concentrated on strengthening the Ego through psychoanalysis; however, there are epiphenomena that penetrate the subject so deeply that when the stimulus is removed in the case of Reality Anxiety, it is the worry over spiders crawling on your skin and biting you with poisonous venom. A person may have experienced a real spider bite and therefore feels a rush of fear upon seeing a spider, even if the spider is a safe distance away and there is no threat of being bitten. The epiphenomenon occurs when the memory of that spider is transmogrified into another form; the fear is still there within the subject, but it is shifted onto another object, or so deeply penetrates the subject into its memory banks that the nervousness from the spider persists without provocation. This is most common, one might think, in cases of severe trauma. Deeply impactful brushes with death, experiencing violent abuse, an attack, seeing someone close to them die, or a tragic accident that happened unexpectedly. Reality Anxiety can transform into Neurotic Anxiety if the stimulus then transfers onto a more permanent, deeper sense of memory within the subject, and that is where you run into deeper neurosis running the risk of becoming psychosis and more permanent forms of psychological illness, rather than a mere disorder, something treatable that may be a temporary condition.

Oedipal or Christian Anxieties? It is well known that Sigmund Freud forwarded the thesis that these anxieties and neuroses originate in the Oedipal desire. That innate sexual drive a child has towards the parent of the opposite gender. A son has an innate desire towards his mother and in order to fulfill that desire the son must remove obstacles in his way, which means killing the Father whose role is to set up a prohibition against the son acting upon the lust towards the Mother. In the Oedipus Trilogy, Sophocles writes that this happens unintentionally. Freud’s thesis is that these are subconscious drives and acts, and when Oedipus finds out that he has unintentionally killed his father and slept with his mother, the news is so excruciating to comprehend, he claws his eyes out.

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In Slavoj Žižek’s work, there is a clear inversion of this when we read the Christian family triangle. The son is born to a virginal mother. Jesus is allegedly devoid of all lustful desires and it is bizarrely traumatizing to believers to find out in the apocryphal gospels that Jesus was sexually active. Thereby reducing him to any other human being with desires. Since desire is alleged to be the ground of sin, hence every indication of sin is delineated by the biblical image of the Beast, the Christian family triangle is an inversion of the Oedipal family triangle. Christ is born of a virgin Mother, and sent to his death by his Heavenly Father. The opposite of Oedipus who inadvertently has sex with his mother and accidentally kills his father. More importantly, the violence enacted between Father and son is directed towards the son by the Father. If you think about it, the evidence is hidden in plain sight. Why does God use man to promulgate his own glory? Is God merely a sadistic narcissist demanding praise? A borderline personality who gives life and can also take it away? Žižek argues precisely this, which should be clear to anyone who has read the Bible or attended a Christian church, Lacan’s reversal of Dostoevsky’s famous phrase, where Lacan says, “If God does not exist, then nothing is permitted.” Žižek continues: “It is not true that, if Christ had not come to earth to deliver humanity, everyone would have been lost—quite the contrary, nobody would have been lost, that is, every human being had to fall so that Christ could come and deliver some of them…”47

Clearly, the point is that the Salvation offered by Christ retroactively makes the Fall necessary, but that God in his omnipotence and omniscience knew that a savior would have to be sacrificed in order for His plan to take shape. “Since the death of Christ is a key step in realizing the goal of creation, at no time was God (the Father) happier than when He was observing His son suffering and dying on the Cross.”48 47 48

 Žižek. Living in the End Times, pg. 93.  Ibid.

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Žižek then continues by saying the only way to avoid this perversion is to accept the Fall as the starting point, that there was no Fall from which Salvation can save humanity, and then if you do that you are obfuscating the main thesis of the entire Bible and the coming of Christ is no longer a monumental event in human history. This is a line of argumentation I take up in my work on Nietzsche and Pelagianism and the myth of Original Sin.49

 error and Mercy: “I did not come to bring T peace, but a sword” This dialectic of fear and anxiety between the Father and son is the myth that informs how political power can utilize Agape in order to instill totalitarian power. In contrast to Eros, which creates erotic love as a subtraction from social life, lusting after your partner in privacy secured through the bonds of marriage, Agape is fundamental to the creation of a community. Agape love is the patient friendship, the diligence of instilling morals into your children, the connections you have with your neighbors, the charity work you do that brings you out into the larger community. We must remember the lines from Matthew 10:34-36, where Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-­in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household.” This is clearly a side of Jesus that has been kept concealed in favor of the peacenik pacifist who lays down his life. This passage must be interpreted as a temporary teleological suspension of the ethical in order to enact a dialectical overturning of capitalist power.  Žižek asks provocative questions that lead to his typically controversial, yet hidden in plain sight, true conclusions. Which are the regimes whose power is most commonly exerted through the discourses (the social bonds of language that beckon the subjects) that utilize ‘love’—if  Bradley Kaye. Nietzsche’s Pelagianism: Dionysus versus the Crucified. The Agonist. August 2021, volume 15 no. 2, pg. 61–74.

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you look around the world, it is always regimes like the communists in North Korea. Unconditional love, the love between a parent and a child, must involve master and subject, not an involvement in selecting out particular qualities in a person (a slight shift from the opening to Žižek!), but an unconditional love in all its imperfections and weaknesses. It is terror that underlay agape, and mobilizes support through messianic perfection of the Father (the sovereign) who radiates love to the people, and the people radiate love towards the leader, and the Leader for his people, “expressed in continuous acts of grace.”50

The Law at Home Is Evil In Kant’s now-famous essay “What is Enlightenment?” he makes a remarkably terrible thesis about what has become commonplace now. What is Enlightenment? Public Freedom and Private Obedience. You are allowed the freedom to debate tax policy openly in public, but privately you still must obey the law, pay taxes and so forth. One can see this formula leading to a point where even the most heinous violence is projected through public free discourse and then subsequently rationalized as acts to obey in private. In Deontology coupled with non-­consequentialist universalism of the autonomous transcendental volition of the will, one finds oneself in some disturbing territory. One must obey, have an ethical intuition that burgeons forth from within, the ethical subject must not have an external point of motivation for the ethical act (a point that Žižek then constructs as the mediating point that a group must establish to stabilize the boundaries of ethical behavior. Žižek uses the example of the film A Few Good Men, with the ordering of the ‘Code Red’ as the way to forge positive group identity through violence exerted upon the soldiers who disobeyed the commands of the officer played by Jack Nicholson). Kantian ethics involves a person being autonomously driven by an inner sense of ethical norms that then transcend the limitations of the law. In many ways, the modern conditions left to us by the Enlightenment thinkers such as Kant produce a situation where the 50

 Living in the End Times, pg. 98–99.

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subject must always be at the limits, and must always consider how to transgress the limits. Žižek’s thesis is that we are now in a strange situation. Social transgressions are now part of the maintenance of social control. Even in the production of its ethical obverse in the Big Other in its ‘Evil’-otherness, because this ‘Evil’-otherness serves to distance the pathology of evil from what is considered normal, without threatening the basis upon which this system functions, which is that evil is integral to the system itself. Even a sentimental family man can become an evil racist, a drug dealer, an ‘irrational-Evil’-other when threatened, because a narcissistic subject can have desires flipped into becoming a violent subject. The production of narcissistic subjects is ultimately an ordinary experience of everyday life in consumer society. The violence is consumer society in another form, manifested as violent territorialized protection, a security measure to protect the home, which is codified as the most sacred entity one can possess.

“Misunderestimating” the Neighbors: Infantilizing the Other One of the most nefarious subtexts of American Exceptionalism is the way it sews the seeds of its own decline by also over-extending its power, not only through overt uses of violence abroad, but also through the decadence of infantilizing its “Other.” There is a naive projection of a guilt-free persona placed upon the rest of the world. The “neighbors” are shown love and compassion which is typically motivated by a lack of respect towards the opponent. As George Bush Jr. once said when asked about why he was successful against political opponents who were believed to be superior intellects, he remarked, “they misunderestimated me,” and that is precisely the way postmodern liberals with relativistic ethics tend to think of their political “neighbors”—they pose no threat whatsoever. How does this factor into an extension of problematic ideological tendencies which undermine freedom? Consider also that when asked by journalists what he thought about the protestors outside the

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White House lawn who wished to stop the Iraq War, George W. Bush responded, (to paraphrase) “I love it, that’s freedom, people have the right to peacefully assemble, and that is exactly what the War in Iraq is trying to give to the Iraqi people, true democracy.” This is the parallax view, flipping the negation into an affirmation while also infantilizing the other who is subject to violence in the name of being set free. One remembers Robert McNamara’s famous statement as Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, when he said that the United States had to burn Vietnam in order to rebuild it in the name of democracy. Consider this line of reasoning that one might gather from a hypothetical Nietzsche–Žižek roundtable. It is one thing to critique from a position of “disbelief ” in the sense that what you say in your critique will never actually come into fruition. In other words, it is easy to posit a critique of religious belief that takes the form of the “Death of God,” while cynically disbelieving in the notion that an eternal and immortal being will ever actually die. What does it mean to posit the death of a being that is allegedly eternal? It means that the death is a cynical death, not an actual death, that the death never actually happened. It is much more difficult and radical to think that there is a nihilism underpinning the death of God, visible to philosophers who dig deeply into these subjects, but not yet rendered actual; that when this nihilism actually sets in, there will be terrifying consequences. The same holds true for a typical anarchist critique of the state. There is a way that someone can go to protests and cry for change without really believing that what they say will be taken seriously, the protesters can walk away venting and in a homeostasis of complacent frustration, whereas, actually getting the changes you want puts the person in a rather uncanny position—what to do with the boredom that inevitably arises from no longer having any problems over which to complain? Or, the death of God posed as a problem that is a think-piece, but deep down there is a disbelief regarding the certainty in the mind of the criticizer who truly believes that people will never actually shed their belief in God. To critique the state under the premise that the state will never actually wither away. Same premise holds for the liberal critique of “American hegemony” (a term from the 1990s and early 2000s that is very rarely used anymore,

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but the premise still holds); from the position that America will hold a permanent hegemonic position. This cynical disbelief in the *end* of the Empire’s hegemony is what sustains the decadence that accelerates its precipitous decline. Same thing with global warming or any other exigencies. The denial of the “end” is what accelerates the end. The admission of the crisis is what accelerates the action necessary to negate the crisis and, therefore, turn the cynic into someone who can justify non-belief in the crisis because in the evaporation of the emergency, the proof that the emergency existed is removed, and, therefore, the cynic becomes even more assured that their cynicism is justified. If you do not believe in global warming and policies change to the point where carbon emissions are reduced and global warming is averted, the first thing a cynic will say is, “See! I told you global warming was nothing to worry about!” Same thing with the COVID quarantine and vaccine measures. If they did not work to evade the virus the cynic would cry that the measures were not effective and therefore nobody should trust the government. If the measure did work and the virus was evaded, the cynic would cling to the cynicism and say, “See! The crisis of the virus would have been averted! What is all the fuss? Why did everyone worry?” An ideology succeeds when the facts that at first appearance should serve to contradict it start to serve as arguments in its favor.51 There is a sense that “enjoyment itself, which we experience as ‘transgression’, is in its innermost status something imposed, ordered—when we enjoy… this obscene call ‘Enjoy!’, is superego.”52 Cultural downfall is pressed into action—by the decadent attitudes of those who suspend disbelief even as the demise of hegemonic power is unfolding before their eyes. The same holds true for those who disbelieve that the Other can actually overtake them, and the downplaying of cunning tendencies in the Neighbors. There is an infantilizing process that misunderestimated the possibility that the Other can mobilize itself into a force that can become a “master”signifier where you are the “subject” to the Other, the condescension that “their” power will remain virtual and never become fully realized as an actual  Sublime Object of Ideology, “Fantasy as a support of reality.”  For They Know Not What They Do, pg. 9–10.

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force enacting violence upon you, this is the condescension of liberal compassion towards the “Neighbors.” However, the problem today is not one of the “invisibility” of the neighbors as pointed out; this was the problem of the Jews during the time leading up to the Holocaust, the problem of invisibility (ad nauseum repeated via 60s academics and their progeny.53 The problem is not that this Heideggerian notion of ontology sees a field of perception and tends to exclude this or that from its perception via the “fore structural” biases that one has; now, the issue is as Slavoj correctly points out: the Neighbors are too visible in a way, the racist issue is that, for example, Muslim refugees who come to Europe bring with them the hijab (usually on the full burka), and cling to their traditional values in ways that do not assimilate into western liberal values of freedom as secular humanism, consumerism, and so forth. The neighbors are not rendered invisible, but are now too visible and irritate the norms and standard practices of Eurocentric values (which, mind you, are not necessarily wrong values). Who more resembles the “clamor of being” that Gilles Deleuze describes than the narcissist who cannot take actual constructive criticism and falls into the dialectical polemical battles that preserve their own self-enclosed metastases of pleasure. In the social media era, visibility is not the problem, it is not that the suffering is invisible, it appears everywhere you look; the problem is that breaking the bonds of pleasure to enact any kind of change brings a retaliation from those who claim that their freedoms are infringed (i.e. the freedom to choose even a fascist, racist, ecologically destructive lifestyle, and so on and so forth). What we wind up with is a homeostasis of enjoyment where the tension and violence escalates. Much in the same way that consumer choices in the realm of guns are becoming more violent, AK-47s give way to AR-15s, as just another choice along the way, or pick-up trucks become ever more weaponized/militaristic in their appearance with the high tires and the loud engines, and the same with the dialectical antithesis in the  E.g. the essay White Metaphorics by Jacques Derrida, which appears in Margins of Philosophy, or the work of my mentor William Spanos whose legacy was derived from a post-WW2 Heideggerian methodology that the main metaphysics at issue is the “invisibility” of those who fall into the marginal category of “errancy”; where this is clearly not the problem today. 53

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solicitation of ever more perverse forms of desire in all forms of entertainment. Žižek’s thesis (and I agree with him on this, I find it convincing) is that people are now controlled by the opposite of what you say, by *rejecting* obedience, by a stubborn resistance towards those who “tell them what to do”, which makes it so obvious that when some level of control is necessary for a pandemic response (e.g. “hey, dad, wash your hands,” or, “hey, please wear a mask”) the dissident tendencies of a super-ego that tells people to enjoy, create havoc in society. Its control via anti-repressive categories of power. Rebuking any progressive movement through a cynical distance is one of the most problematic symptoms of ideology, especially because it seems to the subject as if this cynical rejection is an assertion of a uniquely individual identity, when, in fact, it is the most normal, comfortable, even enjoyable aspects of ideological power, in that it appears as a mask that feels like the face it masks. During the pandemic a response of “Panic” was the sane response. If anything, the distrust and cynicism manifested among those who minimized the deaths of what is now over 4,000,000 worldwide, in order to cling to this bizarre macho belief that they are immune to death, the idea was that somehow we are supposed to never cry, be afraid, etc. and just be thick-skinned at all times, is exactly what put (and still puts) people at all kinds of risk.

4 What Is Ideology?

For Zizek, ideology is not analyzed as an abstract system of principles but as a material force which structures our actual life. An analysis that necessitates the methods of psychoanalysis to unearth the libidinal investments that regulate our daily lives. Ideology keeps us trapped in a belief that the catastrophe is “yet-to-come” when in fact, it is already past. “The rather sad conclusion we are forced to draw from all this is that a catastrophe is not something awaiting us in the future, something that can be avoided with a well-thought-out strategy. Catastrophe in (not only) its most basic ontological sense is something that always-already happened, and we, the surviving humans, are what remains at all levels, even in the most empirical sense: do the reserves of oil and coal, until now our most important resource of energy, not bear witness to the immense catastrophes that took place on our earth before the rise of humankind? Our normality is by definition post-apocalyptic.”1

1

 Zizek, Surplus Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed, pg. 5.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kaye, Žižek and Freedom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42151-8_4

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 ntoine deStutt de Tracy (1754–1836): A Originator of the Term “Ideology” The invention of the word ideology has been attributed to Antoine deStutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who first coined it during the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror. This was an especially violent period in the French Revolution when the guillotine was used for public executions and massacres that vaulted Maximilien Robespierre into a maelstrom of power, albeit only temporarily before he too was consumed. There is no way to truly delineate the precise time frame, but the Reign of Terror took place somewhere between the Autumn of 1793 and the Summer of 1794. Most would say that it definitively ended with the execution of Maximilien Robespierre, who was involved with the Montagnards (the Mountain), a revolutionary group that drew its support from the sans-­ culottes (who took their name to distinguish themselves from the culotte-­ wearing aristocracy and bourgeoisie). The Reign of Terror seemed to uncork the repressed barbarism in the sans-culottes, who emerged as the proletariat in the aftermath of the French Revolution.2 Hence, the invention of ideology, a field intended to have broad ranging effects as a new field of social science, originated in the post-­apocalyptic catastrophe of the Reign of Terror.  DeStutt de Tracy felt compelled to make some sense from these chaotic barbarous tendencies and so, while in prison under lock and key during the Reign of Terror. He devised a new science of ideas, which he termed ‘Ideology’. He envisioned ideology as a human science that would be studied and applied in the same manner as political science. This was also in an era when only the elites had access to education and literacy, and it is worth noting that one of the translators of the multi-volume set of deStutt de Tracy’s work on ideology was Thomas Jefferson, the American president who later enacted the promotion of public education as a federal policy. In an attempt to prevent another Reign of Terror, deStutt de Tracy spent the remainder of his life forwarding methodologies of objective scientific inquiry which he  Antonio Negri. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, for the best theory of revolution and the movement towards constituent power. 2

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believed might map onto the human production of ideas to create the best possible mechanisms of control. It is perhaps no coincidence that Maximilien Robespierre is one of the most consistent references in all of Žižek’s books. In fact, Robespierre fares relatively well in these works, appearing in entirely positive terms. This should not be a shock. Žižek is a thinker/activist deeply invested in the deconstruction of ideology. His work on ideology sides with Robespierre, as perhaps an historical-Christ-like figure who “brought the sword” rather than the formation of ideological tactics to shield folks from revolutionary violence. As one of the famous quotes often quoted from Robespierre goes, in responding to why he was hated by his revolutionary pacifists he said, “They want revolution without revolution.” Hence, Robespierre is held up as a revolutionary who enacted revolution, rather than a soft-power leftist who takes an approach based in interpassivity.  During this time there were many public executions. DeStutt de Tracy’s intention was that the coining of the term “ideology” was to provide a positive mechanism that governments could use to prevent the kind of mob rule that occurred after the French Revolution. During this time Antoine deStutt de Tracy was such a well-known figure that Thomas Jefferson's translation appeared under the title A Treatise on Political Economy. This version of the text undoubtedly served as an influence for many of the early American political leaders who were keen to avoid the excesses of the French republican experience. De Tracy viewed this new form of political science as a subcategory of zoology in the sense that its purpose would be to control the biological impulses of the masses, as if one were controlling an animal in a zoo to make it docile. He asserted that by controlling the four faculties that comprise conscious life, perception, memory, judgment, and volition, people could control the basis of “sensuous” life.3 In fact, in the years following the French Revolution, de Tracy worked as a counselor of Public Instruction and drafted circulars for the professors of the central schools. In these circulars, he stressed the crucial role to be played by ideology in each subject studied by the young elites in the French education system.  Emmet Kennedy, “Ideology” from deStutt de Tracy to Marx. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 40, ed. 3, Jun.–Sep. 1979, pg. 353–68. 3

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History was to be taught from Enlightenment texts, but only after a firm introduction to the principles of ideology and legislation, which would ensure students would not fall back on past moral and metaphysical superstitions. Ideology was based on objective assertions that would undermine vague religious superstitions. More than a “science of ideas” there were no ideas towards which one would uphold as if from a sanctified standpoint; however, according to deStutt de Tracy, there were certain intellectual boundaries beyond which ideological questions would not venture. These limits would circumscribe the ideological territories of what could and could not be considered valid lines of questioning, meaning that an enormous ripple effect occurred in the realm of public school teaching. As mentioned above, we know that in the United States the translator of de Tracy’s work, Thomas Jefferson, was to be an early advocate of public education. When he became president one of Jefferson’s most important policy achievements was the expansion of the public school system with the aim of producing a literate populace. De Tracy’s work emerged in the same era as the three critiques written by Immanuel Kant at the end of the eighteenth century. Given this, it should come as no surprise that Tracy’s work has been almost completely forgotten whereas Kant’s critiques have become an almost omnipresent force in most college philosophy courses. This is because de Tracy’s work attempted something that seems absurd, not just in the hindsight of Immanuel Kant, but more crucially because of Karl Marx’s scathing critique of very notion of an objectivist ideology from which a general objectivist epistemology, such as advanced by de Tracy, was developed. According to de Tracy’s view of ideology, this was a kind of knowledge containing the validity in the grammar and logic of all possible science. Yet his ideas were truncated ones, because the only way to make objective knowledge of everything possible is if it does not question itself and does not question the legitimacy of its own foundations or limits, or turn the gaze towards the roots of its own representation.4  Michel Foucault. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, pg. 240–3. A wonderful section on “Ideology” and the way that Kant was in discourse with deStutt de Tracy. Michel Foucault may have tried to pose deStutt as a philosopher of French Idealism, a powerful counterpoint to Kant, Schelling, Fichte, Novalis, Hölderlin, and Hegel and the rest of the German “Ideologists,” as Marx would term them. 4

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It is also clear that among the students of Condillac, of which de Tracy was one, an emphasis is laid upon sensuous life as the basis of knowledge. In the first volume of Tracy’s magnum opus, a five-volume work entitled Éléments d’idéologie (1817–1818), he presented his ideas as “Ideology Strictly Defined.” The fourth volume of the Eléments d’idéologie, he believed, would be the introduction to a second section of the planned nine-part work which he titled Traité de la volonté (Treatise on the Will and Its Effects).

The Marxist Turn in Ideology In many regards, Hegel’s work is still well within the deStutt de Tracy ideological methodology, in the sense that for him ideology was a way of corralling (and acting condescendingly toward) the peasants who were starting to clamor for rights via democracy. The aristocracy did not trust the workers with their newfound powers forced upon the elites through representative democracy. Think of Hegel’s famous line that after he put his pen back into the inkwell after writing the very last line of Phenomenology of Spirit, he looked up from his writing desk to gaze out the window of his study to see Napoleon Bonaparte riding atop his horse, leading his French Imperial Army. The implication being, that the aftermath of democratic struggles for freedom is a period of despotic militarism because the proles do not have the rational wherewithal to lead themselves. Not to dismiss the work of Hegel, there are others who delve deeper into these subjects, including Žižek himself, but the point is that a Marxist turn occurs in the way Marx deploys ideology so as to undermine the power of the bourgeoisie. Up to that point, even including Hegel, there are ways in which ideology only meant corralling in the unwashed masses as if to treat the majority as merely a form of human livestock (fresh, available labor, that needed to be kept as docile and useful bodies). In some ways, this Hegelian methodology infects even Slavoj Žižek’s work to some extent. This can be seen especially in humorous forms when he makes bombastic statements such as, “a majority of humanity are idiots,” and even though he is completely correct to say so, and the revulsion with this idea implies the thesis in his argument (people

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are controlled by enjoyment more often than fear), these comments from Žižek have dampened in the wake of the COVID pandemic, precisely because the idiots affect everyone. For example, just as someone infected with COVID who chose not to wear a mask (as a symbol of personal liberty) was potentially infecting others around them, the virus carried an actual effect whether anti-maskers believed it or not, the same level of “the idiots over there, effect us here”; in this case during COVID the “idiot is simply alone, outside the big Other, the moron is within it, while the imbecile is between the two,” as outlined in the opening pages of Less than Nothing; and occurs again and again in examples from Slavoj’s work such as the prospect of a war over access to the waters of the Nile: “War over access to the waters of the Nile is perhaps a model of wars to come; from the standpoint of nation-state sovereignty, Ethiopia is justified in reserving for itself as much as it wants or needs, but if it takes too much of it, this can threaten the very survival of Egypt which is reliant on the Nile. There is no abstract solution to this problem: there has to be a negotiated compromise from a global perspective.”5

The conflicts over resources, such as water rights, must occur within the context of nation-states contesting and making contracts to settle negotiations. An anarchist may have some interesting things to say about the existence of the state in a conceptual dimension, the fact that states do not exist except in their epiphenomenal enactment, but it is this enactment that creates the basis by which to address the ecological catastrophes that the world faces today. Much like the lucky horseshoe that Nils Bohr places above his doorway, when asked by his friend why he had a horseshoe above his doorway, as a man of science Bohr was not supposed to believe in superstition. To which Bohr replied, “I heard the horseshoe is lucky even if you don't believe in it.” The state is a lucky charm that one must use even if one no longer believes in it, because if the environmentalists do not believe in it, the capitalist forces will use the state to exploit resources for their own profitable ends.

 Zizek. Surplus Enjoyment, pg. 5.

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One cannot say strongly enough that Marx, if carefully read, always uses ideology in a pejorative, rather than a propagandist sense of the word. We must understand that Marx’s continued use of the terms “sensuous” life throughout the German Ideology, can be viewed as a rebuking of state ideologies. For example, one of the most famous excerpts from the German Ideology makes this clear: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”6

Young Marx was clearly indicating that he was distancing himself from the philosophy of Hegel. And it was not until later on in the first volume of Capital that he devotes sixteen pages to the topic of ideology in the section entitled: “The Fetishism of the Commodity and its Secret.” This is the section of Capital that contains one of the most infamous phrases that Marx pens to describe ideology: “they are doing it, but they do not know that they are doing it.”7 When taken out of context this appears to be a rather condescending statement against the working class. However, a closer reading is required to carefully understand what Marx meant by the “it” that is enacted without awareness.

 German Ideology, “The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History.”  Capital, volume 1, pg. 166–67.

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What Marx does in opening this section is to begin from an Aristotelian concept of labor by describing the four causes8 of a product in the subtext of the opening salvo of the chapter. “A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing… whether we consider it from the point of view that by its properties it satisfies human needs, or that it takes on these properties as the product of human labor. It is absolutely clear that, by his activity, man changes the forms of the materials of nature in such a way as to make them useful to him. The form of wood, for instance, is altered if a table is made out of it. Nevertheless the table continues to be wood, an ordinary, sensuous thing. But as soon as it emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness.”9

The four causes are all outlined here. The material cause is the raw material, the cherry, maple, or oak wood that is taken from nature and metabolized through the labor process. The formal design is laid out, as Marx says later, that the worst human architect is superior to the best bee because “the architect builds for the cell wall in his mind before he constructs it in wax.”10 In the change of forms from a tree trunk into a carefully crafted table, the efficient cause for this transformation is the laborer, who carefully handcrafts the lumber into a table using skilled woodworking processes. The final cause is the table, which is used to serve food, entertain guests, bring a family together for meals, any number of pragmatic uses. It is what Marx says at the end of this passage that differentiates him from prior Aristotelian philosophy. When a commodity becomes a commodity it “transcends sensuousness.” Many people have viewed this as a philosophical debt to Hegel, and undoubtedly there is no hidden influence there that one can obviously see Marx drawing on Hegel’s philosophy of absolute mind, and absolute spirit, to which Marx invents a new methodology, “Marxism” that inverts Hegelian idealism. Marx’s method approaches ideology as the  concretized conditions of the estrangement of labor power in the form of the commodity.  When asked  Aristotle, Physics, Book II chapter 3: “The Four Types of Cause.”  Capital, volume 1, pg. 163. 10  Capital, volume 1, pg. 284. 8 9

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if he was a “Marxist” during his debate with Jordan Peterson, Slavoj remarked that he is at heart a Hegelian-Lacanian, and that in some regards Karl Marx went too far with his critique. While the critique of commodity fetishism is one area in Marx’s work that Slavoj returns to in almost every book, the view of commodity fetishism is that Marx ‘invented the symptom’. For Slavoj, the commodity form collapses into the ‘secret of this form itself,’ where the commodity does not necessarily reflect a cage of material conditions, commodity fetishism should be subject to a kind of dream-analysis. Hence, raising a radical question that offers a Marx-Freud synthesis: why have latent dream thoughts (i.e. commodities) assumed such a form? Hence, the commodity form is, for Slavoj, a pathway into Althusserian critiques of the ideological superstructure. For Slavoj’s work this means an analysis of culture, popular and high culture.  

Ideological Superstructure In his La philosophie de Marx11 Étienne Balibar drew attention to the enigma of the complete disappearance of the notion of ideology from Marx’s texts after 1850. However, it is important to cite in this context the full quotation from Karl Marx’s Preface to a Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, where Marx unveils the concept of the base/ superstructural analysis as it pertains to the question of “what is living and what is dead” from the work of Marx in the works of Žižek: “In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are independent of their will, relations of production which correspond to a definite stage of development of their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real basis on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life conditions the social, political and intellectual life process in general. 11

 Étienne Balibar. La philosophie de Marx. London, Verso, 2007.

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It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage in their development the material productive forces of society come into conflict with the existing relations of production or— what is but a legal expression for the same thing—the property relations within which they have been at work hitherto. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the material conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical—in short ideological—forms in which men become conscious of the conflict and fight it out. … We do not judge a period of transformation by its consciousness; on the contrary this consciousness must itself be explained from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflicts between the social productive forces and the relations of production. In broad outlines Asiatic, ancient, feudal, and modern bourgeois modes of production can be designated as progressive epochs in the economic foundation of society.”

One of the first things readers should notice is that Marx is not describing a sense of power in which the system reproduces itself through the forceful imposition of repression or calling forth rigid demands for obedience. Consciousness occurs as a result of social forces that are independent of personal willpower, and this consciousness is explained from the contradictions of material life. Ideology is real relations of production. These now-famous lines penned by Karl Marx give us a summary of the structural thesis of consciousness. It is not through the use of overt propaganda that desire becomes entangled with capital. The structural aspects of capitalism fundamentally misrepresent, or occlude, its own structures of power. The sensuous forces and relations that condition its own cognitive activity. In the base/superstructure analysis the sensuous is the domain of both social production and reproduction. This is exactly

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what remains unapparent to the subject. If the subject has a consciousness that is produced by material conditions, the ideological superstructure is that which cannot render itself visible within the frame of its material conditions as such. If ideology rendered itself apparent, it would no longer be ideological. Consciousness systematically occludes the sensuous forces which condition its own cognitive activity. Ordinary social consciousness is ideologically enveloped and necessarily misrepresents social reality; this is why political economy is ideological through and through—because it can only mischaracterize its relations through this camera obscura (the ideological lens). This is why it inverts, distorts, and presents what is false as if it were real, without being aware that it is doing so. It is important to note that In both German Ideology and the Early Economic Manuscripts Marx already laid out a methodological framework for studying ideology. A methodological framework that would start on a different trajectory than where his analysis of ideology (a term which he never again after the German Ideology) would wind up in Capital. Marx distinguishes between what is sensuously real and that which ideology recognizes as truthful. As Marx set out his cogent critique of political economy he does so with the assertion that classical political economics up until that point has only approached economic and political questions from an ideological perspective. With deStutt de Tracy, among others, blinded by their own categories, they think they are analyzing the world in an objective sense. Marx introduces categories of analysis that they were not seriously considering, such as class, labor, exploitation, and surplus value, and these changeable categories make up the contingent and historical nature of social relations. Rather than a-historical or “objective” categories that can be discovered as if these were facts, Marx probes the categories of social relations as created out of productive activities that can change on the basis of class, property, money, and all the categories with which classical political economy usually begins rather than asking where these categories originate. This is a new ‘genesis’ in the sense that Marx offers a new starting point: the reality of labor, and the concealed exploitation of labor as a working class.

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Ideologies are understood to take the form of spontaneous false-­ consciousness subject to a systematic misrepresentation of sensuous forces and material relations that condition the cognitive activity of a subject blinded by ideology and ignorant of this blindness. For Marx, the sensual is a domain of social production and reproduction which is often not apparent to cognitive awareness of our social reality. Political economy had only been able to see the social relations and relations of production through an inverted lens of ideology, that is, through a “camera obscura.” As Marx writes: “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc.—real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.”12

Althusser: Interpellation Louis Althusser’s work was an influence on Žižek all the way back to the 1970s and 1980s when he began translations of some intellectuals who would loom as large figures through most of his publications. The role of ideology is thus to naturalize and integrate the superego. In this way, the belief that follows from behavior becomes, after the fact, the cause of that behavior: “The implicit logic of [Althusser’s] argument is:  Karl Marx. The German Ideology. “The Essence of the Materialist Conception of History, Social Being and Social Consciousness.” 12

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kneel down and you shall believe that you knelt down because of your belief—that is, your following the ritual is an expression/effect of your inner belief; in short, the ‘external’ ritual performatively generates its own ideological foundation.” 13 Thus, instead of our acts reflecting our beliefs, our beliefs are rationalizations (defense mechanisms) to make sense of our acts. Habitually praying will instill in the subject a belief in the efficacy of prayer. A very reduced summary of Althusser’s main theses are as follows: Thesis 1: Ideology represents individuals’ imaginary relation to their real conditions of existence. In other words, the power of ideology is to mobilize the imaginary dimensions of our psyche and relay the imaginary components of ourselves back to us, our Imagination is hooked into the Symbolic. Althusser explains that it is wrong to take the interpretation of ideology as literally presupposing “that what is reflected in the imaginary representations of the world found in ideology is people’s conditions of existence, hence their real world,” when, in fact, this is what people are most commonly trying to escape away from when utilizing imagination. Althusser explains that ‘people’ do not ‘represent’ their real conditions of existence in ideology (religious or some other kind), but, above all, their relation to those real conditions of existence.14 Thesis 2: Ideology has a material existence. What this means is that ‘ideas’ are not an independent, or spiritual existence that is metaphysical, but a material one. All action is i­ deology, and the material comportment of the subject follows naturally from ideas. With the key word being naturally, because ideology feels right, there is no second-guessing of the innermost certainty. Althusser continues, “The individual in question behaves in such-and-such a way, adopts such-and-such a practical line of conduct and, what is more, participates in certain regulated practices, those of the ideological apparatus on which the ideas that she has as subject, depend freely and

13 14

 Mapping Ideology, pg. 12–13.  Louis Althusser. On the Reproduction of Capitalism. London, Verso, 2014, pg. 182–3.

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in all ‘good’ conscience chosen.”15 The line that is often cited by Žižek is, “If she believes in God, she goes to church to attend mass, kneels, prays, confesses, does penance.”16 “If every contradiction is a contradiction in a complex whole structured in dominance, this complex whole cannot be envisaged without its contradictions, without their basically uneven relations. In other words, each contradiction, each essential articulation of the structure, and the general relation of the articulations in the structure in dominance, constitute so many conditions of the existence of the complex whole itself. This proposition is of the first importance.”17

Conclusions offered by Althusser’s theses on ideology: Firstly, there is no practice whatsoever except by and under an ideology. And secondly, there is no ideology except by the subject and for subjects. Finally, ideology interpellates18 individuals as subjects. What this last thesis means is that ideology interpellates as it appears natural and concretizes its power within the subject, so as to appear as the individual’s personal voice of conscience. Ideology concretizes as it feels self-evident, the subject does not notice because the subject behaves seamlessly. The voice of interpellative-power is, as Louis Althusser tells us, akin to the police calling/hailing at a subject, “Hey You!”; and the subject becomes subject upon turning around to recognize that the subject is the intended target for the beckoning police voice. If the person fails to turn around, then there is no feeling of guilty conscience, no sign of recognition of the police as authority, and therefore the person has not transitioned into the status of a subject.

 Ibid., pg. 185.  Ibid. 17  Althusser, For Marx, pg. 205. 18  The verb “interpeller” is used by Althusser in the sense of hailing or calling someone to get their attention, and also as a prelude to harassment such as disciplinary measures in school, or police checks, the term “interpeller” is often used in conversation to mean ‘to shake up,’ or to beckon, call, or speak to someone. 15 16

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Althusser: Overdetermination Althusser’s the concept of “overdetermination” which fuses Freudian dream-theory with the Marxist interpretations of ideology as an ideological superstructure. Throughout Žižek’s work, we see him responding in various ways to Althusser’s articulation of the thesis of overdetermination—the idea that the economy is determinant in the last instance. What is most pertinent are the economic factors that motivate people. Althusser’s should be fully quoted as saying: “We know very well that it is not politics but the economy that is determinant in the last instance. How, other than with the reality of the complex process with structure in dominance, could we explain theoretically the real difference between the economic and the political in the class struggle itself… the real condensation, the nodal strategic point, in which is reflected the complex whole (economic, political, and ideological)... thus goes in decisive fashion through political practice if the structure of contradiction did not make this practice possible in its concrete reality…” “and the articulation of such condensations are possible only because the structure of contradiction made the concrete reality of that production possible.”19

If a film has garnered popularity its popularity is maintained by ideological structures which reflect “condensations” of the audience upon the screen. Freud used the term overdetermination to describe, among other things, the representation of dream-thoughts in images privileged by the condensation of a number of thoughts into a single image, and/or by the transference of psychic energy from a particularly potent thought to images. Following Althusser’s lead, Žižek often utilizes popular images as examples of ideological condensations. These condensations serve as reference points, unknown to the subjects themselves, and manifest the effects of contradictions in the conditions of dominance. Condensations reveal the ways class-antagonisms reveal themselves at that moment in history (what Althusser calls a “conjuncture”—the intersection of residual psychic-trauma structured into a complex social body of capitalist class-antagonisms). 19

 For Marx, pg. 215.

5 Lacan, Discourses and Social Bonds I: Graphs of Desire

Žižek’s vital concept is “ideology.” He is viewed as a theorist of ideology and its many matrices. A Lacanian thesis posits that discourses are not simply words, but form the basis of social bonds. Ideology is the way that power saturates “life” beyond merely the institutional apparatuses of power. In this manner it clarifies Žižek’s position on the critique of ideology. It is not simply shifting around various language games to talk about this or that differently, but that the way language speaks through its subjects implicates us in concrete ways. By linking this Lacanianism with Hegelian dialectics, everything is understood as “Geist,” or the activities of spirit. Hence, ideology in the ways that Žižek writes about popular films, and then traverses effortlessly to the realm of governmental discourses, is clearly in need of clarifying as the subjective spirit reified and objectified into social institutions (i.e. laws, policies, norms, the state, religions, as concretized absolute mind). This chapter will clarify that vital concept in the work of Žižek, and in understanding the Hegelian-Lacanian framework with which Žižek approaches this topic I will try to unpack how those thinkers influence Žižek, and, of course, the unpacking of these influences will remain a theme throughout the book.

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Desire desires as a pathos, as a kind of error. Jacques Lacan takes as his point of departure the function of misrecognition that characterizes the ego. Springing from the non-corporeal aspects of the psyche is, by definition, unmappable. Reasons as topos cannot recognize desire within itself. Madness, or to use a less controversial word, anxiety and neurosis, can never recognize itself as such, because that would imply a rational-­gaze beyond the horizon of its common experience. If it is permissible to talk in such patently essentialist terms, it is crucial to emphasize that what is still useful in Lacan’s thought on the nature of the unconscious is its conceptualization as antithetical to reification. Hence the introduction of the remainder becomes crucial to understanding the mobilization of human agents in resistance, and one must try to penetrate the concealed dimensions of the subject. In other words, we must try to concentrate our efforts on understanding this action through the objet petit a. Lacan’s thesis in the Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious that “aggressivity” becomes a point of identification the subject uses to respond to the authority of the master’s signifying power, but, most importantly for my reading of Lacan, aggressivity is the constitutive quality of power, and a theoretical understanding of the ways that “rage-capital” can be appropriated by a liberatory schema, by outlining the importance of Lacan’s statement claiming that it is “aggressivity that becomes the beam of the balance...the counterpoint to counterpoint between Master and Slave…”1 It is the active and reactive force of aggressivity, rather than aggressivity with the counterpoint of passivity, that forms the dialectic of desire. A slave morality is not that of a dupe who follows the Master with blind naivete, but the Slave is implicated with the desires produced from the Master, even, and often most nefariously, as the Slave resists. Aggressivity is the method with which the slave recognizes the power of the Master.2  Écrits. Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious. pg. 307–8. 2  A number of texts have taken this approach, notably the Lord and Bondsman chapter from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Master/Slave Morality from Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, Althusser’s “Hey You!” call of interpellation in Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, and more recently but not yesterday, Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power, and Alexandra Zupancic’s The Ethics of Desire. 1

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By declaring this “objet petit a” the mirror with which the psyche finds its reflection as a form of identification the subject reveals what is barred in the Master. In response, “Che Vuoi?” (“What do you want?”) the subject does not yet have an accurate identification of itself. A mirror mirrors what the subjects yearns to resemble, not necessarily what it is. To honestly assess itself as itself, the subject must disavow the aggressivity thrust upon it as sutured to the Master’s sign and detach from the identifications produced for it, and produce signifiers from within. What does the “gap” “excess” or “failure” of the signifier mean to the nature of work that intends to clarify what Lacan meant? Does this betray Lacan’s “intention” when we attempt to make his work more transparent? In attending to this question, the point is not to reify the subject, which would annul something that cannot be reified, “the little remainder,” the objet petit a.

Discourses and Social Bonds Early on in his Subversion essay Lacan remarks that he began developing the Graphs of Desire because up until that time philosophy had been predicated upon propositional logic. Symbolic logic had been the most common method of verifying the truth and validity of a statement and statements in connection with one another. As if statements were spoken out of thin air and were to be verified with no relation to an Other. As Slavoj Žižek is correct to point out, Lacan went to great lengths to undermine the clarity sometimes attributed to the distinction between individual and collective aspects of life. For example the phrase, “in you more than you,”3 means to blur the categorical distinction between self (S) and other (O), and produces a circuit relaying from “in-itself,” being in its essential properties without qualification from other entities, to the “for-­ itself,” being considered in its relation to others, with purposive intent  Jacques Lacan. Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. pg. 268.

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towards an external realm. These networks of relation can be mapped onto the schematics of Lacan’s Graphs of Desire, which are often understood to be some of the most opaque aspects of Lacan’s work. I agree with Dominik Hoens’ assertion that the main issue can be articulated as the following concern: How do you conceptualize a difference that makes any reified universality impossible? A difference as radical as it is not based upon a common ground or is played out against the background of a unifying domain?4 By broadening the spectrum of what might be included into propositional logic so as to include a logic of desire, this problem can be viewed as the central concern of Lacan’s philosophy, from the very beginning all the way through until the last phases of his work. If statements are not drawn out of abstraction, where does the truth of a statement derive? There must be a social logic of desire between entities. As-if language circulates through us as a social-pulse, speaking through us. Language forms the basis of our relations with one another, and these social bonds are inscribed with the logic of signification. Discourses can be inscribed onto a subject in a way so as to produce a reaction. Even though discourses can inscribe onto the subject through its formation of a social bond, this power can never fully totalize. All power is power through the incompleteness of its perspective on the subject; because of this there is always some room for the subject to maneuver. It is important to remember throughout this analysis that in the creation of a discourse there are two or more entities communicating and thereby creating social bonds. However, in addition to the actual entities that communicate there are imaginary entities that co-exist, cut into, and intercede into the signifying chain. Lacan says this by claiming, “analysis reveals the truth of this relation by making ‘holes’ in the meaning of the determinants of its discourse.”5  Dominiek Hoens. The Logic of Lacan’s Not-All. Crisis and Critique, volume 6 issue 1.  Ecrits. Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire. Pg. 299.

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Power bounces back. Where there is power there may also be resistance as the signs produced by the signifying agent tend to inadequately enunciate the object it signifies as a totality; there is always a remainder (an objet petit a). One must wonder, where does this resistance arise? The brain? Does a thought emit this resistant force? If so, is a thought more than merely the gray matter, the physicalism of the physiology of an observable response? There is more going on. At least until he says, “The other as previous site of the pure subject of the signifier holds the master position, as absolute master.”6 This remainder in the subject can turn back upon the tautological way the “master” attempts to enunciate and signify its object as if it were a totality. The subversion of the subject derives from our most basic animal mind. The drive to conceal ourselves from predators. Animals can intentionally throw off their tracks by concealing or intentionally using their ‘real’ tracks and assume that a predator will be fooled into thinking the ‘real’ tracks are fake. They do this to shed off potential predators. Animals do not pretend to pretend. Some animals intentionally shed predators. Signifiers left by the subject ‘deceive’ but the deception is authentically enacted, and subjects do this with the ‘master’ who tries to signify their identity for them. “An animal does not pretend to pretend.”7 By saying this Lacan is precluding very real physical limits to the subject and he then continues to stretch these limits, the limits of the Imaginary and the Real. For an insight into our own estrangement, a Subject may intentionally spread misleading clues and authentically pretend, if that makes sense, because if we are strangers to ourselves, we are strangers in such a way that we do so intentionally and with a modicum of awareness. It is in the most authentic ways we enact our subjectivity in which we reveal the signifiers that are concealed from ourselves.

 Ecrits. Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire. Pg. 305.  Ibid. pg. 305.

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Graph I

Graph I

S

S′

$

D

The Graphs of Desire are constructed by Jacques Lacan to schematize how desire stretches the limits of the perceptible in ourselves. Lacan does so “in order to map in its arrangement the most broadly practical structure of the data of our experience”. With the purpose of showing “where desire, in relation to a subject defined in (the subject’s) articulation by the signifier, is situated.”8 A “mythical pre-symbolic intention (marked △) ‘quilts’ the signifier’s chain, the series of the signifier marked by the vector S-S’.”9 The point de capiton (the “anchoring-point”) is the point through which the subject is sewn to the signifier, and at the same time the point which interpellates the individual into a subject by addressing it with the call of a certain master-signifier (God, State, Freedom, Communism, Capitalism, etc.)10  Ibid. pg. 303.  Slavoj Žižek. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Pg. 101. 10  These are all points made by Slavoj Žižek in The Sublime Object of Ideology. I merely echo them here for clarifying the purpose of this paper. 8 9

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S/S′, the signifying-chain, makes limited interpretive possibilities available to the subject. S implies the creation of signs, the signification that signifies for someone else. The signifying-chain provokes, returns, develops, and couples-back onto discourses. Discourses, for Lacan, are defined as social-linkages. Lacan’s thesis is quite convincing. There is always a gap between what the agent imagines and what is enunciated. There is a gap between what an agent intends to enunciate and what is enunciated. An enunciated statement never fully coincides with what is fully intended. In this gap between enunciator and enunciated, there is an excess, because of the non-transparency of the social-bond; there are fantasies and ideological ways that this gap is filled in. The gap occurs because it is in the ‘anchoring point’ that “the signifier stops the otherwise endless movement (glissement) of the signification.”11 This signifying-chain in its most crude processes is marked by anticipation and retroaction. An individual becomes a subject as it mobilizes into an agent, and anticipates obtaining what it seeks, the meaning of which can only be understood retroactively, that is, after the act (and after the fact), after the master-signifier passes through its anchoring point does it retroactively find its identity (what it always already is). Also, the articulation of that which is enunciated can never fully objectify that which is articulated by the enunciator. Hence, the objet petit a is the ‘excess,’ that which is irreducible to an object in the subject. Politically, this is where the ‘multitude’ arises, in the friction between the “master-­signifier,” whose inadequate attempts to objectify its object provokes resistance among those who are irreducible to an objective form. This paradox is outlined by Lacan when he describes the first graph by describing the double-vector of the two criss-crossing arcs: “Only in this vector does one see the fish it hooks, a fish less suitable in its free movement to represent what it withholds from our grasp than the intention that tries to bury it in the mass of the pretext, namely, the reality that is

11

 Lacan. Ecrits. SSDD, pg. 303.

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imagined in the ethological schema of the return of need.”12 Desires are refracted through the ego, the ego-ideal, and the big Other. The ego is what is apparent to the subject (perhaps a voice that can be heard within the realm of conscious thought), whereas the ego-ideal is an aspect of the ego that is held in high regard, but the origins of which might be concealed from the subject, often refracted through the return of the objet petit a. The ego-ideal is the refracted return of the objet petit a, the remainder, the excess left over from what is unaccounted for in the master’s enunciation of the subject. Lacan can be seen to clarify this when he observes that, “however bizarre the fantasy of perverse desire may appear to you, never forget that the subject is always in some way present and involved in that fantasy. In the fantasy the subject always stands in some relationship to the pathos of existence—to the suffering of existing itself or that of existing as a term in a sexual configuration. For a sadistic fantasy to endure, the subject’s interest in the person who suffers humiliation must obviously be due to the possibility of the subject’s being submitted to the same humiliation himself.”13 The more the master is in command, the more the fantasy is conditioned upon ritualistic masochism. In adding to this by saying that fantasies stand in relation to the pathos of existence, Continuing on this point, “The diachronic function of this anchoring point is to be found in the sentence, even if the sentence completes its signification only with its last term, each term being anticipated in the construction of the others, and, inversely, sealing their meaning by its retroactive effect.”14 The anticipatory and retroactive aspects of the signifying-chain are one aspect of what gives the signifiers their meanings. Out of which the truth is constructed with reference to retroactive meanings, uses, previous utilizations, memories, histories, as well as significations that are utilized in

 Lacan. Ecrits. SSDD, pg. 303.  Jacques Lacan. Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet. Yale French Studies. No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading Otherwise. (1977), pg. 11–52. 14  Ibid. pg. 303. 12 13

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an anticipatory way, a future as-yet-to-come, an open-ended set of goals.15 Time and time again Žižek makes a similar point while claiming that the real understanding of Christianity is Calvinism in the sense that salvation is predestined, but in a way that is yet unwritten, you do not know what is written.16 Hence, the meaning of an act can only be understood retroactively, even though the mobilization of an act is done with an anticipatory dimension, and the meaning of which is always barred upon its initial activation. Joel Dor makes a structuralist interpretation of the Lacanian-subject: “Since it is through the signifying order that the subject arises the subject is always represented in the language that causes it.”17 Now with the ideologies of repressive-desublimation commonly used in mass-marketing for the purposes of unraveling the repressive-conscience this interpretation of the subject seems ever more persuasive. Language speaks through the subject, rather than against it. Recall the famous remark made by Jacques Lacan, “structures walked the streets in May ’68  in Paris.” However, we must remain diligent and remember that the subject you are, is also producing the ego-ideal that you anticipate becoming, because the subject follows you along all of the sentences of your articulation and along all of your memories (suppressed or apparent). Revolutionary becoming can only emerge out of that which is already available to ­retroactively memorialize. Revolutionary becoming is also a battle over the past and the creation and transfiguration of historical precursors.

 Is there a plural form of ‘telos’? Teli? Teloses? Telos’s? Lacan, in my opinion, should be understood as making a clearly Nietzschean point along the lines of the thesis offered by Nietzsche that there are multiple souls. Nietzsche makes this argument many times, most notably in Beyond Good and Evil. 16  Slavoj Žižek. Parallax View, and the Puppet and the Dwarf: the Perverse Core of Christianity. 17  Joel Dor. (2004). Introduction to the Reading of Lacan. Pg. 137. New York: Other Press. 15

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 raph II: “Aggressivity that becomes the beam G of the balance…” Graph II

s(O) Signifier

O

e

i(o)

I(O)

Voice

$

S(o) signifies the other as “complete,” the signifier is “that which represents the subject for another signifier.”18 ⊚ the symbol of the closed circle represents an imaginary enjoyment that is anticipated which might be obtained in a punctuated form. As the subject anticipates that which it seeks as its end point its teleoi are where the ⊚ is anticipated, yet unresolved. Each sentence remains punctuated19 the subject in its anticipation of the apotheosis it seeks, but can temporarily transform the subject of silence into the articulation of its voice. Therefore, the desire of the subject circles back, unfulfilled to the i(o) which might swerve desire to its barred-subject and the big I(O), which is the ego-ideal,20 or back to the signifier S(O), where the process returns to start again in anticipation to the next trajectory with the memories from prior cycles affecting the subject retroactively. Lacan is careful to note that the i(o), the remainder, the objet petit a, disrupts the attempts of the master-signifier to present signs for another,  Lacan. SSDD, pg. 316.  Signifying-chain can be both a linguistic articulation of a thought that escapes the mind into the form of a vocalization. It also has a temporal aspect to the fact that there is only so much time— ‘free play’ can never continue eternally in corporeal form. 20  Ego-ideal is a way of understanding the inverted way that the subject mirrors itself to itself, and memories which memorialize oneself to others, typically in a distorted way. 18 19

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because this is precisely the excess in the subject that is there, in the gap of these discursively formed social bonds, that which is unseen until it is provoked. “The very movement that shifts the axis of the phenomenon of mind towards the imaginary relation to the other (that is to say, to the counterpart connoted by the small ‘o’, the objet petit a), reveals its effect: namely, the aggressivity that becomes the beam of the balance on which will be centered the decomposition of the equilibrium of counterpart to counterpart in the Master–Slave relationship, a relationship that is pregnant with all the cunning tricks (ruses) by which reason sets its impersonal reign in motion.”21 When he says “pregnant with all the cunning tricks…,” the gap, the remainder, the excess that the master’s signifier cannot account for, that which cannot be fully possessed by the sign which tries to objectify that which is signifies, but cannot, that objet petit a gives birth to a multitude. The aggressivity that is the “beam and the balance” on which centers the equilibrium of power in the Master’s discourse as possessing the control over this discursive social bond is incomplete, and those social bonds can violently explode if the grip grows too tight. Even if it is an incomplete grip, this gives the subject space to maneuver. For Lacan, the voice you speak becomes necessary when there is an inadequate ‘signification’ of the object.22 The spoken voice fills in a gap in the silence, breaks the desire for comfort, docility, and how, why, when, who, or what interrupts (breaks in to rupture) the direct line of flight in anticipation of the desired ends (the teleoi) as a matter of situation. The quilting point sews together the heterogeneous fractions of the subject into a unified point of desire, an ideological field that represents this gap in the discursive social bond. A reduction down from multiple to one is viewed as a subtraction and somehow by philosophical osmosis, the mathematics of desire are viewed in negative terms. Adding, multiplying, and gaining are positively charged terms. Subtracting is a negative term. Subtraction simplifies, reduces, and ultimately unifies the subject. This reduction brings the trajectory of the signifying chain to its quilting point, the event, the loci when one or  Écrits. Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire. Pg. 307–8.  An inversion of the first line of the Tao te Ching: “the Tao that can be spoken is no longer the Tao.” Perhaps an unintended determinate negation. 21 22

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many ruptures occur that tear the linear trajectory apart, and force the subject to articulate what is lacking through ‘The Voice.’23

Graph III: Che Vuoi?

Che vuoi? Liberally translated as “What me?” It is not simply that statement, but also the question that the analyst asks the analysand, “What do you want?” More importantly, “What is bugging you?” and, as Žižek  Obviously, the political and messianic aspects of this are not lost on Lacan, or perhaps woven into the subtext of the conceptualization of the graphs of desire. As the Hebrew word for prophet goes back to “pro” meaning “for” and “phetes” meaning “to speak.” A prophet is someone who speaks-­ for, not necessarily on behalf of someone, but channels ‘The Voice’ through themselves, a voice that articulates a tension in the unresolved aspects of anticipatory desire. A prophet signifies through a voice (not literal, but perhaps even a figurative voice that presents itself as an image, a repressed-­ latent desire made manifest in a vision), the tension in this gap in phronesis, practical wisdom breaks down, new practices must be invented, the voice is provoked into speech through this gap. 23

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explains, “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?”24 At this point in the graphs of desire the subject asks, “What me?” There is an interpellative quality to this as the subject returns the gaze of the Master in an inquisitive response. In this graph the subject is still pinned to the Master’s sign, responding to the signifier as produced external to the subject. The introduction of the other, the subject “for-itself ” as a desire where the subject is less than zero, less than the “O” and subject as subjugated, or at least temporarily caught in the discourse of the “Other.”

 Slavoj Žižek. The Neighbor: Three Inquiries into Political Theology. “Neighbors and Other Monsters.” pg. 141. 24

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Graph IV: Completed Graph

When someone uses the term “discourse” it usually indicates a speech-act disembodied from a corporeal form. By including desire into the logic of discourse, a free-floating chain of signifiers, Lacan means to extend propositional logic to an interpretation of “discourse” as a social bond that effects embodiment and vice versa. In the fourth graph of desire, which Lacan indicates is the “Completed Graph,” he includes “castration and jouissance” and moves beyond “the voice,” indicating an embodied logic of desire, rather than merely the speech-act of a verbal discourse, and proposition statements articulated through talk. There is “dancity” and movement between bodies as the subject and other grapple back and forth. Emphasizing the “very delimitation of the ‘erogenous zones’ that

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the drive isolates from the metabolism of the function (the act of devouring concerns other organs than the mouth—ask one of Pavlov’s dogs)”25 Hearing the bell created a salivation response when the dogs associated the sound of the bell with the provisions of food. This example is not that interesting if you see Lacan as presenting a debate between “operant vs. classical conditioning.” What is fascinating is the extension of the oral-fixation beyond the mouth itself, because he is not necessarily talking specifically about Pavlov’s dogs, but about the extension of the libidinal economy, through polymorphous desire extended through other senses such as sound, sight, taste, and touch, which can anticipate the delicious food, and give rise to the opening of the mouth, the ears, the senses, into a becoming-awake of desire, through organic openings of the self to the Other. In-itself moves to being-for-itself, in the opening towards an Other. Hence, the senses are presages to opening into “jouissance,” which is the liberatory telos of desire, rather than a propositions leading to valid and true statements set in combination. Jouissance—enjoyment, more than orgasm, can we be free enough to allow ourselves joy before we die? Orgasm is a push to the end, a telos (or, teleoi), thinking of jouissance as orgasm and reducing ‘it’ to an orgasm can provoke neurotic eccentricity, a push to a ‘good telos’; jouissance is most definitely irreducible to orgasm in the work of Lacan. To reiterate a point made previously, the definition of “signifier” offered by Lacan, to which he says there is no other definition, “is that which represents the subject for another signifier,”26 and repeat the thesis that truth is constituted by the contingency of the chain of signifiers, each “in the absence of this signifier, all other signifiers represent nothing, since nothing is represented only for something else.”27 Jouissance is in no way a finite-end, but a momentary bliss that occurs as the subject coils free from the signifier as an apparatus of capture, much like a chrysalis out of which the butterfly emerges, struggling to break free at first, the cocoon eventually cannot trap the subject within it, it soon outgrows the signifier made for it.  Ecrits, SSDD, pg. 314.  Ecrits, SSDD, pg. 316. 27  Ibid. 25 26

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Which is why the curve of the graph turns backwards in the curve of discourse. In the later graphs this curve bends forward in anticipation toward the “treasure of signifiers,” placed as the motivating force in front of the drive, always anticipated, and that which must be castrated in order for the subject to find its enjoyment. The curve bends back toward the subject and its ‘barred other’ S(ø) through which the subject uses the other for its own pleasure (signified by “jouissance”). S is the swerve of the “in-itself ” and O, being-for-itself in relation to an Other, which here means that the O is negated with the slash, and may also indicate an infinite set, because if “Otherness” consists of all that is not the self, then as a cardinal figure indicating a set, it would have to be an infinite set. A strange situation, because “I” as a self surely do exist, and yet to form a set out of all that consists of “Otherness,” a set that includes all that is not­me, would have to be a set that continues infinitely. Yet there are limitations to this, because “I” am not included. An infinity that is not a totality. In-finitio, an unfinished set that continues forever without including everything, without drawing a sum total of all entities, because “I” (in this case symbolized by the “S”) am not included in the infinity “for-­ itself ” (in other words, the infinite space and time that exists external to the entity that the self refers to as “I”). Cartesian-era rationalist Samuel Clarke28 called an “aliquot infinity” a lesser form of infinity. There are many planes of immanence within infinity. For example, an infinite straight line that continues on forever is infinite in length. The infinite straight line can be compared with an infinitely large shape that consists of straight lines that go on forever in the four cardinal directions. This infinite criss-crossing of lines can be imagined in the mind, and it must be understood that the solitary infinite line can fit within the tracing of the infinite criss-crossed lines as a component part. Infinities work in levels. The infinite straight line would fit within the infinite criss-cross. Clarke gives similar examples and argued that “God” can be formulated as a concept similar to this. When people say “God is infinite” they do not understand that they are actually talking about “aliquot infinities”; that God has all power, all knowing, all presence, and  Samuel Clarke. Demonstration of The Being and Attributes of God.

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that these powers have layers within space and time that work similarly to the layering of infinities in the example of the straight and criss-­ crossed lines. This was a very brief sketch of Clarke’s very interesting thesis on the demonstration of the attributes of God, yet, this is perhaps a pathway forward in this long lingering aporia in the work of Lacan’s “S” and infinite-­set of Otherness. This is a theme that Alain Badiou has published on at length with, as far as I know, very little engagement with Samuel Clarke, while engaging with Spinoza who banks his entire philosophy upon aliquot infinities in saying: “a thing is called finite after its kind, when it can be limited by another thing of the same nature; for instance, a body is called finite because we always conceive another greater body. So, a thought is limited by thought, but a body is not limited by thought, nor a thought by body.”29 Spinoza continues, a substance is something “in-itself, and is conceived through itself; in other words, that of which a conception can be formed independently of any other conception”30 and “By attribute, I mean that which the intellect perceives as constituting the essence of substance.”31 Finally, “By mode, I mean modifications (affections) of substance, or that which exists in, and is conceived through, something other than itself ”32 and “By God, I mean a being absolutely infinite—that is, a substance consisting of infinite attributes, of which each expresses external and infinite essentiality.”33 Desiring can only be “pathos” yet, not entirely logical if logos attempts to capture the pathos of desire in its universal-schematics. Desire is infinite insofar as that infinity does and does not include the “S” within the “O” in the sense that there is no pure faculty of desire; desire is always linked to contingent, empirical, worldly-objects that anchor the desire into a point of fixation (the ‘treasure of desire’). Yet the excess, the remainder, that which returns to the subject as what is barred in itself, the objet petit a, IS the pure desire. The paradox is that it is entirely concealed from  Baruch Spinoza. The Ethics, axiom II.  Ibid, axiom III. 31  Ibid, axiom IV. 32  Ibid, axiom V. 33  Ibid, axiom VI. 29 30

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the signs that the Master enunciates. Lacan argues this point in a seemingly strange way when he says that a husband who is pathologically jealous from suspecting that his wife is sleeping with other men is still to be considered pathological, even if the wife is in fact cheating on him. Why this insistence upon the pathological nature of the husband’s jealousy? It is not a pathology revealed in the insistence of the husband to obsess about the cheating wife’s behavior, as Henrik Jøker Bjerre argues,34 but because the bond between ‘husband and wife’ consecrated in the bonds of marriage is itself a social bond constructed out of politically charged discourses that are ultimately imaginary in nature. The feeling of jealousy in the husband reveals a pathological insistence that the discourse, and the subsequent social bond of his possession over his wife’s sex life, is something he fully believes in, and is therefore a pathological insistence that the language games are ‘real structures’ that walk the streets of his desire. The fantasy that he has control over her has become real, precisely when the realization that those fantasies are called into jeopardy by the cheating wife. Hence, the real behavior of the ‘cheating wife’ shows that she does not behave in such a way that conforms to his imaginary idealization of what a ‘good wife’ ought to be, and, therefore, the husband is pathological because his illness manifests a deeper, concealed desire to control the ‘wife as subject,’ something that was impossible in the first place, without the use of aggressivity, narcissism, fear, and, as a last resort—violence.

 Henrik Jøker Bjerre, The Jealous Husband: Or why conspiracy theorists are always wrong, even when they are right. 34

6 Lacan, Discourses and Social Bonds II: Aggressivity and Narcissistic Rage

Repression of desire always turns into desire for repression; the mechanism of neurosis is formed from this enjoyment. Enjoyment is always inscribed into, a stain, an excess inscribed into oneself, and you cannot get rid of enjoyment. Capitalism valorizes aggressivity and narcissistic rage through an unleashing of systemic violence of class conflict, exploitation, competition, all the virtues that accentuate its structural violence, linking enjoyment with a sadistic production of suffering in others, concealed in the process of production, by the fetishistic-jouissance of consumption. It can be useful to study Lacan’s Graphs of Desire in an attempt to approach to Lacan’s work on narcissism, aggressivity, and affect (particularly ‘rage’) to tear back the curtain of this a-priori of desire. Lacan’s work is laden with opacities in the parallax views of subjectivity. Narcissism, aggression, and rage manifest as if intrinsic to the “Primal Father,” creating dangerous political manifestations of authoritarian male dominance through the state, and as constructions of capitalist ideologies which foster its history of “primitive accumulation” as the historical a-priori of all world histories. Aggression and narcissism are so thinly veiled that the attempts to feign a cynical distance from the ‘true kernel’ are met with the analysand grasping the symptom as if it were the “treasure” and the © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kaye, Žižek and Freedom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42151-8_6

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analysts pointing out the dangers of narcissistic destruction were “thieves of enjoyment.” The destruction appears obvious to any outside observer, hidden in plain sight. Nevertheless, the violence can only be rendered actual through the function of a cynical and ironic distanciation from the kernel of antagonism that this style of sovereignty tries to conceal as it renders visible. Lacan presented his report “Aggressivity in Psychoanalysis” to the 11th Congress of Psychoanalysts in Brussels in mid-May of 1948.1 This was almost a full decade before his famous “return to Freud” in Vienna in 1955.2 Perhaps, as Mikkel Borch-Jakobson claims, “As Plato already remarked, parricide is the inevitable form of faithfulness… sometimes you have to kill your father to preserve his heritage.”3 In psychoanalysis, this interpretation originates at least as early as Freud’s idea of the “primordial father” (Urvater), developed in Totem and Taboo, which is usually mocked, rightfully so, by foolish researchers who think there are deeper points to be made using some sort of nonsensical anti-essentialist empiricism. Yet, if we take the Urvater as an anthropological narrative with as much validity as any other myth, the idea is that at the earliest history of humanity, there were ape-like men who lived in groups dominated by all-powerful father figures who kept all of the women for their own exclusive sexual use (and abuse). Eventually, the sons gathered together and rebelled, killing the father figure; afterwards the defeated father figure would return to haunt them as a totemic figure of symbolic authority, giving rise to feelings of guilt and imposing the prohibition of incest, and other guilt-based boundaries, to reclaim power on a psychic level after being physically expelled. The parallels with contemporary state power are so overwhelmingly obvious that one must become like Oedipus. Upon seeing the dead body of Jocasta he blinds himself by poking out his eyes using her golden brooch. The power of the state,  through something alleging democracy and free choices, amounts to the return of totalitarianism through the open-society and its tendencies towards  Squarely in the later portion of his Imaginary period (1936–1953) which began with his work on The Mirror Stage presented to the International Psychoanalytical Association in Marienbad in 1936. 2  “The Oedipus Problem in Freud and Lacan.” by Mikkel Borch-Jakobson, translated by Douglas Brick. Critical Inquiry, volume 20, #2, Winter 1994, pg. 267–282. 3  ibid. 1

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mediocrity, i.e. the revenge of the Urvader gradually  waters down into mediocrity right alongside the rise of a bland mediocre Last Man mentality. Symptomatic of “democracy” in connection with neo-­liberal capitalism is the Urvader form that preserves this power via mediocre homeostasis.  As the Last Man levels out greatness into mediocrity, the master-signifiers are also levelled out, and the ressentiment of the powerless via the Last Man, mirrors back in the master-signifiers it produces. Even earlier than this return to Freud, Lacan was clearly rethinking his work in relation to Freud, and the work on aggressivity, albeit full of contextual aporias, offers a hermeneutics of reiterable aggression appropriable for open-ended permanent revolution.4 Aggressivity shifts the terrain of struggle from a mode of fear to a mode of producing anxiety where the latter lacks a definite point of referential attachment, while the former is directly linked with some manner of determinate content.5 The rest of the chapter is divided into two parts. In the first part I outline Lacan’s thesis on “aggressivity” from his report to the Congress of Psychoanalysts in 1948. The second part offers a detailed analysis of Lacan’s Graphs of Desire. The dialectic of desire, as outlined by Lacan, argues that: “The very movement that shifts the axis of the phenomenon of mind towards the imaginary relation to the other (that is to say, to the counterpart connoted by the small ‘o’, the objet petit a), reveals its effect: namely, the aggressivity that becomes the beam of the balance on which will be centered the decomposition of the equilibrium of counterpart to counterpart in the Master–Slave relationship, a relationship that is pregnant with all the cunning tricks (ruses) by which reason sets its impersonal reign in motion.”6

 “Welcome to the Cultural Revolution” by Rosalind Krauss. October, volume 77, Summer 1996. pg. 83–96, makes a similar thesis. “Its repetition of what I take to be the commonplace of the Lacanian thesis that the unconscious is structured like a language. Rather, one could argue, if Lacan has become so important to cultural theory...along with Althusser...it is that the unconscious is not structured like a language, but like an image—and that image, like the myth (but also like the mirror)—is stripped of all material support.” I agree with this, as I will try to show that the term “dispossession” of the ego as used by Lacan clearly indicates a sort of material sacrifice of the subject to try to reveal a Marxist reading of this ‘stripping of material support’ when the worker has nothing to sell but mind and body, the ego is sacrificed into an avatar, an image that is not a product of the worker’s own agency. 5  Lacan. Seminar X: Anxiety (1962–3), pg. 187–8. 6  Écrits. Subversion of the Subject and Dialectic of Desire, pg. 307–8. 4

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Attempting a careful Lacanian account of “rage-capital” to develop Slavoj Žižek’s thesis: “All successful socialist revolutions, from Cuba to Yugoslavia, followed this model, grasping the opportunity in an extreme critical situation, co-opting the national-liberation struggle or other movements fed by ‘rage-capital’. Of course, a believer in the logic of hegemony would here point out that this is the ‘normal’ logic of revolution, that the ‘critical mass’ is reached precisely and only through a series of equivalences among multiple demands, which is always dependent on a specific, unique even, set of circumstances. A revolution never occurs when all antagonisms collapse into the One, but when they synergistically combine their power.”7

 ow Does Aggressivity Differ H from Aggression? Aggressivity can best be described as the force of lashing out against threats perceived and real. Lacan’s term ‘aggressivity’ indicates a resonance beyond the punctuated events of “aggressive behavior.” As something happens and is eventually over and done with, there is lingering aggressivity in the subconscious. Ambiguously, even a seemingly loving act can carry aggressive undertones; hence, aggressivity prolongs violence even into the absence of violence where there is a pervasive premonition that the peace will irrupt into aggression yet again. The question is whether aggressivity haunts being as a non-sublatable knot of dissonance? Is politics merely the tension of competing aggressivities? As the thesis forwarded in the first portion of this two-part series of “discourses and social bonds” the metaphysics of desire wraps its knots around an irresolvable metaphysics of the self as a non-totalizing infinity. When faced with the abyss of the self mirrored back amidst the infinite-set of Otherness, the “S” can either slither back to itself, recoiling into self-negation, the nihilistic despair that is the sickness unto death. Or it can assert a will in the  Slavoj Žižek. Like a Thief in Broad Daylight: Power in the Era of Post-Human Capitalism, pg. 70.

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face of this malaise of infinite (forever-unfinished spans of space and time) for-itself, beyond but not within the “S;” that which always refers back to the self, but cannot be immanent within itself. Yes, but the terrain is continually shifting. In other words, the definition of a signifying chain is that the meanings of each signifier slides through each reiteration within the context of the chain of signifiers. The shifting terrain cannot be stripped of its material basis; this process of shifting reiterations of signifiers is based in a capitalist process of bringing the proletariat evermore into a situation of “dispossession.” On ‘aggressivity’ Lacan states the following hypothesis: “aggressivity is exercised within real constraints of course. But we know from experience that it is no less effective when given expression: a severe parent is intimidating by his or her very presence, and the image of the Punisher scarcely needs to be brandished for the child to form it. Its effects are more far-reaching than any act of brutality.”8

However, can one argue that aggressivity is symptomatic of class-conflict and therefore of capitalism, which as an economics takes the competitive destruction of any secure-base of attachment as its material groundwork. Certainly, capitalism is not the only social structure that produces the low hum of neurotic aggressivity, but it is unmistakable that the intrinsic features of its mode of production are the competitive drive to accumulate wealth, stripping away security from those on the losing side of the “general law of uneven wealth accumulation.”9 Omni-crisis and the instability of social structures only exacerbate the problems associated with the generation of new forms of sociopathic-aggressivity. In an economy where crisis is a constant fixation onto which economic motivations are driven into progress, the social ground of capitalism is differential and antagonistic, rather than integral and conciliatory. These are necessary but insufficient conditions to produce a constant background field of

 Écrits, pg. 11.  Marx outlines this thesis in chapter 25 of the first volume of Capital entitled “The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation.” 8 9

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discontent, anxiety, and fear, which encourage aggressivity to recur again and again.10 An aliquot infinity. “If aggressivity is involved in each of the ‘great phases’ of life, so too in the Lacanian model the fear of castration is repeated at all stages of development following the resolution of the Oedipus conflict. Lacan thus promises us an intriguing cumulative model of the life course: each stage of libidinal transformation will be accompanied by the specific fears or crises associated with all the previous stages.”11 Lacan bizarrely grounds the narrative of life, not in terms of the progressive developmentalism of lessons learned and growth occurring, but reiterable memories. A sort of subconscious paralysis, “a retroversion effect by which the subject becomes at each stage what he was before and announces himself—he will have been—only in the future perfect tense.”12 A problem occurs with the psychoanalysis of the political adaptation of the psychoanalytic interpretation of defense mechanisms such as ‘walling’. As a narcissistic projection of inward security placed outward onto an enemy that is a mental construct, there are environments that actually are reproduced as insecure. It is a problem of “hyperstition”, where fictional entities are made into real objects of anxiety. The problem is that the people who feel it is necessary to construct walls (both figurative and literal) are the beneficiaries of the “general law of uneven wealth accumulation,” and exacerbate the causes of the violence they are threatened by in the first place. In the tyrannical-aggression of the sovereign, the proletariat becomes captivated with the appearance of the specular-­image of their exploitation, mirrored in the narcissism of the aggressive-fury embodied by the sovereign.13 Within the last ten to twenty years there has  Hence, the metaphysical importance of Gilles Deleuze’s work in Difference and Repetition; repetition repeats, differently, the aggressivity reiterates in various forms. 11  “The Look and the Gaze: Narcissism, Aggression, and Aging.” by Kathleen Woodward. SubStance, volume 18,#1, issue 58 (1989), pg. 74–88. Woodward draws on Virginia Woolf ’s novel The Years to fill in a gap in Lacan’s work, because she is right to say, “However, his work contains no extended commentary on the stages of puberty, maturity, motherhood, menopause, or old age; and elsewhere he explicitly rejects a developmental model of the life course, offering instead an abstract trope.” pg. 74. 12  Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire, pg. 306. 13  This is called “captation” when the specular-image mesmerizes the subject to the point of keeping one captive. 10

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been increasing evidence that authoritarian parenting styles may be the clearest indicator of political polarization.14 Parents who use corporal punishment to abuse their kids also tend to feel comfortable supporting and voting for political candidates that favor political policies that they believe will stabilize social structures through the threat of prolonged aggressivity, even during times of peace. John Bowlby’s work on ‘attachment theory’ enabled sharp criticisms of some types of psychoanalysis that took a benign external world as the a-priori with which to over-diagnose symptoms of oppression as symptoms of paranoia. There may have been a tendency to view all insecure attachments and defense mechanisms as internal insecurities projected onto a benign and neutral environment, rather than seeing that, in some cases, neurosis and paranoia were the result of an insecure environment. For example, growing up in a war zone could make someone paranoid. In some cases, insecure attachments are not about satiating appetite or drives; rather, insecure attachments are evolutionary adaptations that are functionally necessary because the person has to put up defenses such as aggression and narcissism to survive! Insecure attachments that force a person into aggression and narcissism as sociopathic responses occur because in some environments there is no secure-base from which to grow out and develop compassionately as a human being. I think Lacan does see this in his work, but he has his own methodology with which to approach the subject. The political questions raised by the back and forth between Freudians and Bowlby’s research on attachment theory may have been addressed in much of the subtext of Lacan’s work on narcissism, aggressivity, and rage. Aggressivity, it is crucial to point out, refers not just to aggressive behavior, but to an underlying psychic state that also underlies many other behavioral phenomena. Even loving acts may be subject to aggressivity, the ambivalent tension between the love-object and the threat of the withdrawal of love. Capitalism is not just about explicit discussions of class. Capitalism is a structure of discourse, or, in other words, a social bond. Discourse means a social bond. Particularly in the absence of an apparent bond, 14  Marc Hetherington and Jonathan D.  Weiler. Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics. 2009. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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capitalism atomizes consciousness and melts social bonds into air. Whereas they were once solid, at least in the way social bonds become competitive, antagonistic, and aggressive, it appears that there is no meaningful social bond, and yet there always already are bonds through material conditions and social production. This was Lacan’s major intervention when he introduced his fifth discourse, to demonstrate that capitalism is a particular structure of social bond irreducible only to class antagonisms. If Marx invented the symptom, as Lacan claimed, then it was because he found subjective division or destitution as the agent of a discourse and not solely as its product. Having class consciousness is not only about becoming a class-for-­ itself capable of articulating the unconscious knowledge or ideology that maintains class antagonisms. Not at all; the late Lacan introduced another version of the unconscious: the real unconscious, which is summarized by the notion of a ‘hole’ and not a decipherable knowledge that one might interpret and therefore discuss in some systematic Marxian way. This is why Marx must always be read through the prism of Lacan, rather than Lacan being read through the prism of Marx.

Language Language as the plane-of-immanence whereby the tension of aggressivity unfolds. Language, when it turns to discourse, moves from an internal field into a “we-experience” and in this process there is a pivot into the realm of the social. This “we-experience” is easily misunderstood as an experience of equal identities, it is rather an equality of plural difference. As Hegel wrote in his Science of Logic on the doctrine of being: “Modern philosophy, it is said, reduces everything to identity. Hence its nickname, the philosophy of identity.”15 Hegel goes on to claim that the devotees to experience are the ones who reduce identity to the chief principle of knowledge, thus abstracting a general, ideal form of knowledge (i.e. “Numbering” as a thought), rather than seeing singularity. What occurs is the idealization of thought as self-externalization, “ipseity” of “my”  Hegel. Science of Logic. translated by William Wallace. 1968. London: Oxford University Press, pg. 194. 15

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experience as true-for-all experiences, and, as Hegel articulately writes: “The infinite quantitative progression is only the meaningless repetition of the one and the same contradiction.” Rather than numbering as “one” only making sense in relation to “two” as a wholly different concept, what you have are infinite sets of an identical number, a set that continues, “one, one, one, one…” on forever, in-finitio in an unfinished open-ended bad-infinity, because it fails to recognize difference.16 Rather than a metaphysics of the subject from perspectival discursivity, as if ideas were a result of merely spoken propositions upon an equal material basis, what Lacan, and subsequently Žižek, expose is that truth is a metaphysics based in a genealogy of power and that this power circulates through circuits of power. These flows of power often remain unnoticed precisely because the kernel of the Real that mobilizes the enjoyment and antagonism inherent within the Social can only appear as visible after the fact. Take, for example, how Žižek explains the Titanic and the iceberg. Since the ship was hailed as the ‘unsinkable’ ship, this was, of course, the one blind spot in the entire hubris of the project. There was no such thing as an unsinkable ship; the iceberg “was the Real that resists symbolization: the traumatic point which is missed, but nonetheless always returns.”17 It marked the end of “the age of peaceful progress of well-­ defined and stable class distinctions, and so on: that is, the long period from 1850 until the First World War…” and therefore the Titanic was imbued with the zeitgeist of its era: “it was read as a ‘symbol,’ as a condensed, metaphorical representation of the approaching catastrophe of European civilization itself.”18 That time is different than now and the future will be different than now, and, depending on the genealogical field from which one perceives the situation, there are innumerable perspectives within a given field of experience. For example, “Europe” is one of innumerable ways to conceptualize a given field of experience, one of innumerable ways of clustering groups into a common, or a history composed into a common narrative thread. One theory of ideology is that it is a multitude of “floating signifiers” that is structured into a unified field,  ibid., pg. 194–5.  Žižek. Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso, pg. 69–70. 18  ibid., pg. 70. 16 17

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through the intervention of a point de capiton, a ‘nodal point,’ that quilts them and fixes their meaning.19 In this case the Titanic served as that nodal point. Social life is an inconsistent field traversed by antagonisms, aporias, cuts, sutures, and broken signifying chains. Since language can only articulate a portion of a thought, that which is enunciated always leaves a gap. If language forms the basis of social bonds (what Lacan called “discourse”), then this speculative gap, this remainder in language, also forms a gap in our social bonds. A gap in our social bonds which plagues the imagination of its subjects and forms the basis of our fantasies provokes ideological speculation. Rather than leave this gap unknown, subjects attempt to objectify that which is left unsaid. Language tends to operate not at the level of the sense of the meaning of the words, but in the sensations they give off, perhaps even after a violent stimulus is removed. Aggressivity is not one incipient moment at the origin of a signifying chain, as Deleuze and Guattari remind us: “Not only do Descartes, Hegel, and Feuerbach not begin with the same concept, they do not have the same concept of beginning.”20 It is part of an iterable signifying practice open to variation and plasticity. Take, for example, how Lacan describes the origin of language, not in joyful, alluring and seductive desires, but as a violent ambush that seizes upon the subject: “Is it with the gifts of Danaoi or with the passwords that give them their salutary non-sense that language, with the law, begins? For these gifts are already symbols, in the sense that symbol means pact and that they are first and foremost signifiers of the pact that they constitute as signified.”21 Where there is a relationship there is language; we do not choose language, language chooses us, speaking through us. Language is necessitated by the reciprocity of relations with other beings, but this is not equal reciprocity; it is the push and pull of social antagonism. Language, when it draws the subject into social bonds, becomes an effect of power. Danaoi was Homer’s term for the ‘gift’ of the Greeks who laid siege to  ibid., pg. 87.  Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. What is Philosophy? New  York: Columbia University Press, pg. 15. 21  Jacques Lacan. Écrits. “Function and Field of Speech and Language.” New  York: Norton 1977, pg. 61. 19 20

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Troy. Danaoi is the violent and subversive way that language creeps in like a Trojan Horse. In describing the gift of language we see Lacan utilizing the tension inherent in aggressivity. Even a ‘good’ gift that can be used as a ‘good’ tool can be understood as inflicting violence upon its subjects. Language is both a good tool, a gift as well as a seizure of the subject, a laying siege, a capturing whereby language speaks through the subject as well as the subject speaking with it. The Subject is both enactment and embodiment of a subject and its reactive force. Even though language is useful, truth often circulates reflexively. As language circulates, it is utilized as currency, a currency that produces resistance and friction, like electricity flowing through circuitry to illuminate a lightbulb. By the time the subject has an awareness of itself, the subject has already been ambushed by the effects of the power of language. The plague of language in capitalism, built on the backs of exploited labor power, the sovereign must emote-fear, the sovereign must emote-­ aggressivity to drive the mills of modern man through contingent interventions that never completely stabilize, and only partially determine, the structure of its subjects. Power that flows through language is never a series of universalizing effects, nor a system of needs that are gradually fulfilled. What happens instead are acts of partial interpellation that utilize language as a mode of narcissistic identification, beckoning the subject from within. The fragility of the narcissistic ego banks upon the expectation of receiving praise, especially within the context of the fragility of the capitalist economy. When that expectation of unconditional love and affection from the Other, known as mirroring, fails to approve, confirm and reward the self: “aggression is as much bound up in man’s symbolic character as with the cruel refinement of weapons he makes.”22 The problem of narcissistic rage occurs when the expectation of an affectionate response is not mirrored back to the narcissist. Why does this libidinal investment in aggressivity occur? If there is a primordial tendency towards violence, Lacan echoes this point: “One only has to listen to children aged between two and five playing, alone or together, to know that the pulling off of the head and the ripping open of the belly are themes that occur spontaneously to their imagination, and 22

 Écrits, pg. 12.

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that this is corroborated by the experience of the doll torn to pieces.”23 It is obvious that, in saying this, Lacan is indicating that in the violence of the child there is an aggressivity projected onto the ‘mirror’ in the form of the doll. Vicarious traumatization occurs amongst therapists who hear traumatic stories all day every day and then themselves develop traumatic symptoms. This is the ‘Danaoi’; the “gift” of those who laid siege to Troy—they give the “gift” of violence. Another language transfers through aggressivity.  Language is transmitted through the historical violence of conquering armies. There is a discursive violence that accompanies a conquering army that destroys corporeal bodies. A language is destroyed. A history is destroyed. Lacan formulates several theses that tend to problematize rather than pragmatically explain aggressivity. It makes sense to articulate the building of deeper problematic tensions as capitalism is not advancing towards an increasing homogenization of social structures, but, on the contrary, towards an increasing social and institutional complexity. What is important is that in Lacan’s psychoanalytic study of language one can see that humans are not concerned with meaning in any literal sense, but with truth, which can have particular significance detached from any factual basis. Lacan forwards a thesis as to how aggressivity traverses language in a-priori use of signifiers and a-posteriori as behaviors that enact its use. Bruce Fink has shown that in Lacan there are “two different orders of the real: 1. a real before the letter, that is a presymbolic real, which, in the final analysis, is but our own hypothesis (R1), and 2. a real after the letter which is characterized by impasses and impossibilities due to the relations among elements of the symbolic order itself (R2), that is, which is generated by the symbolic.”24 Aggressivity is not an a-priori of human nature to be filled with preconstituted signifying forces, but that the structures through which the subject articulates itself are precarious, and enable gaps, cracks, crevasses, where one can see that where there is power, power is incomplete. Bruce Fink makes this clear by spelling out the bridge of associations in Freud’s  Écrits, pg. 11.  Bruce Fink, The Lacanian Subject, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1995, pg. 27.

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case study of the ‘Rat Man:’ through ‘verbal bridges,’ the man constructed a ‘rat complex,’ partly through meaningful associations. For example, rat = penis, because rats spread diseases such as syphilis, but also because the rat man had particular associations with the word that had nothing to do with its literal meaning. “Raten means installments, and leads to the equation of rats and florins; Spielratte means gambler, and the Rat Man’s father, having incurred a debt gambling, becomes drawn to the rat complex.”25 Lacan was an early influence on this latter research when he identified a structural crossroads in the psychoanalytic understanding of aggressivity. “Who has ever tried to recount a dream to someone else is in a position to measure the immense gap, the qualitative immeasurability, between the vivid memory of the dream and the dull, impoverished words which are all we can find to convey it: yet this incommensurability between the particular and the universal, between the vecu and language itself, is one in which we dwell all our lives, and it is from it that all works of literature and culture necessarily emerge.”26 It is in the “erotic relation”27 rather than the formal relation “in which the human individual fixes upon himself an image that alienates him from himself, that are to be found the energy and the form on which this organization of the passions that he will call the ego is based…this will crystallize in the subject’s internal conflictual tension, which determines the awakening of his desire for the object of the other’s desire; here the primordial coming together (concours) is precipitated into aggressive competitiveness (concurrence), from which develops the triad of others, the ego and the object.”28 How does this aggressive and eventually narcissistic fixation occur? What does it rely on? And if it is true that capitalism propagates this fragility of the aggressive-narcissistic subject then: what is to be done? Is it  ibid., pg. 22.  Frederic Jameson. “Imaginary and Symbolic in Lacan: Marxism, Psychoanalytic Criticism and the Problem of the Subject.” Yale French Studies. No. 55/56, Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise (1977), pp. 338–395. 27  In the pre-symbolic real, prior to the formation of the ego of the subject, before the real of the letter. 28  Écrits, pg. 19. 25 26

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merely a way to solidify the uncanniness in this gap between the ‘erotic relation’ and the ‘formal relation’ between the imaginary field of the constructed self and the symbolic field where there is no unique subject? The stabilization that is in itself a precarious toppling stabilization.

Paranoia of Dispossession It seems obvious that these are the ‘fear-based’ parenting styles that Lacan indicates are at the core of the paranoia behind aggressivity. Paranoia is a gap in apperception. Apperception is a sense of learning where the subject synthesizes new information into a body of ideas, thoughts, memories, perceptions, and biases that it truly believes to be true. When new information emerges, when new perceptions occur that are unfamiliar and cannot be assimilated, the subject is confronted with their own uncertainty and this provokes anxiety. A narcissist will lash out at others because the anxiety disrupts the self-enclosed u-topos of enjoyment that the narcissist has enveloped its subjectivity. Paranoid phantasies fill in this gap with the ideological form of paranoia which serves as a suturing of this gap. Suturing with a narrative in absentia of empirical factual evidence. However, in Lacan’s view, there is very real trauma that occurs and the manifestation of the “paranoia of dispossession” is a symptom of a social bond with aggressivity. The echo-chamber of intimidation, the repetition of the violence, the fear, the threats, these are enough to provoke a sense of an ‘eternal recurrence’ triggering in the traumatized subject’s psyche. More importantly is that psychoanalysis may force the analysand into a topsy-turvy uncanny feeling of not knowing who the true self is, and this is the origin of the layers of defense mechanisms that have prevented the tottering of their illusions from occurring; a good therapist can tear through those defenses. The subject is left in the absence of certainty with a sense of existential confrontation with the nothingness of being; the self is revealed to be nothing more than a projection, an avatar, an unstable illusion. A good therapist destabilizes the illusions of the narcissist to expose the deeper aggressivity:

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“Does the subject not become engaged in an ever-growing dispossession of that being of his, concerning which—by dint of sincere portraits which leave its idea no less incoherent, of rectifications that do not succeed in freeing its essence, of stays and defenses that do not prevent his statue from tottering, of narcissistic embraces that become like a puff of air in animating it—he ends up by recognizing that this being has never been anything more than his construct in the imaginary and that this construct disappoints all his certainties? For in this labor which he undertakes to reconstruct for another, he rediscovers the fundamental alienation that made him construct it like another, and which has always destined it to be taken from him by another.”29

Here the use of the imaginary30 indicates the insertion of an individual imago into the imagination, indicating not just a gap between how the subject sees itself and the mirror that the subject does not feel accurately represents itself in speculative, apparent form. Since humans are the animals who have ‘logos’ we can imagine far more than we can ever actually experience, the imago as a mental construct of ourselves in our own minds will always create a tension of frustrated labor. When patterns of self-identification are torn away, the imaginary constructs that the subject has created for itself are no longer able to stabilize reality for the subject. The dispossession that Lacan speaks of here could clearly be symptomatic of the general law of accumulation where the proletariat gives over of themselves to the property owners through their labor-power, due to the fact that workers have nothing to sell but their bodies and minds, their ontological properties are sacrificed, given over, and dispossessed. The realization that the self is nothing more than a construct in the imaginary is completely destabilizing, because the reaction among the dispossessed is to cling to the ‘I’ as if it is one’s-own-true-authentic-self, or to willfully sacrifice oneself to an Other, a God, or another figment of the imagination, another form that symbolically substitutes for the lords on earth, the bosses of the repressive apparatuses. In other words, the  Écrits. “Function and Field of Speech and Language,” pg. 42.  Lacan did not start to use the term symbolic order until the “Rome Report of 1953,” The Function and Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis. Imaginary order is the personal order where a subject may present itself as a personal imago. The symbolic order is impersonal, and the Real is an authentic unchangeable truth.

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slaves’ Iimaginary ressentiment can only withstand so much. Lacan claims that building and reproducing these illusions is frustrating work. The “frustration of (the Subject’s) labor” transforms into aggressivity when these defenses break down, and it has nothing to do with frustrated sexual desire. “The aggressivity experienced by the subject at this point has nothing to do with the animal aggressivity of frustrated desire. This assumption, which seems to satisfy most people, actually masks another that is less agreeable for each and every one of us: the aggressivity of the slave whose response to the frustration of his labor is a desire for death.”31 Freud concluded that obsessional neurotics typically connect their affects with the wrong causes—“displacement”—S/s and S/_ the real kernel of trauma is the Punisher, the objet petit a as the trauma of childhood memories of a lost hope of affection. The adult-child no longer has access to these feelings; these are barred from consciousness, and the childlike desire to maintain the naïve notion that even though an abusive Punisher is abusive, that parent still deep down ‘loves the child’ and this is buried so deep in the subconscious that the layers of transference “displace” the fears, hopes and dreams onto the wrong object. The fear toward the Punisher is masked over with affectionate connections (i.e. denial) and the fear that should be directed towards the parental-Punisher is then pushed outward in active projection.

Lacan’s Theses on Aggressivity  hesis 1: Aggressivity Manifests Itself in an Experience T That Is Subjective by Its Very Constitution Subjective experience of the aggression means that aggression will never see its aggression as aggression; the aggressive subject is always producing subjective ‘anchoring points’ that legitimate the violence in the mind of the aggressor. This is even worse in a society where the state produces the discourses of violence that allows for those ‘anchoring points’ to circulate.  ibid., pg. 42.

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All states are possessed by a territorial imperative. ‘Aggression’ is cast as a defensive-security measure. Since there is no real standard by which to measure ‘aggression’—it is not a quantifiable piece of data—and an aggressor will never admit to being aggressive. Lacan states there must be ‘transmission by recurrence.’ As we know from Žižek’s work on Gilles Deleuze’s theories of difference, “the New can only emerge through repetition.”32 If aggression is studied and subject to scientific method then there would have to be repeatable results, which means an outside objective observer must record those results and establish that those studies are done ethically and without harming human subjects. At that time there were any number of experiments that were done in that area: Stanley Milgram’s famous study on obedience and the famous Stanford Prison Experiment were two of the most famous. It does not have to take such an objectivist empirical perspective. Transmission by recurrence can also mean that the subject repeats the same words, tells the same stories over and over, avoids certain topics in conversation, and tries to avoid the ‘imago’ by various neurotic tics. These defenses may create a mechanization process within the subject.

 hesis 2: Aggressivity in Experience Is Given to Us T as Intended Aggression and as an Image of Corporal Dislocation, and It Is in Such Forms That It Shows Itself to Be Efficient The aggressive subject loses grip on reality and reacts to imaginary constructs resonating from memories, either real or perceived memories. For example, at this point Lacan has a brief description of a patient of his who came out of the closet to his mother. When this man confessed to his mother that he was gay she lashed out and mocked him, saying she always suspected he was a sissy. Lacan states that a child’s fear often begins with an actual object: fear of the ‘severe’ parent.

32

 Žižek. Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, pg. 12.

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One would have to believe by this he means the child fears corporal punishment, and angry outbursts that occur at any moment, provoking a perpetual sense of fear in the child. This paranoia that the child lives with creates real constraints. The child must live with these in obedience, or else deal with threats of violence; in severely abusive situations even if the child submits to the authority of the aggressor there is the sense that “the mere presence of the severe-parent provokes fear” and this memory is retained within the subconscious as the ‘imago,’ or the buried recurrence of paranoia that resonates deep within the subject. Lacan calls this “the schematism of the Punisher”—remember that the ‘imago’ goes back to Plato’s theory of the divided line in Plato’s Republic, where the lowest level of understanding of an object is at the level of ‘imago;’ images as objects of imagining, images that are obscured, hidden in shadows, concealed because light is literally not shining upon them and so the eye cannot see the thing clearly. Imagos are images that are perhaps circulated second-hand and allow for leeway of conjectural opinion to form a bias regarding the object in question. Quite literally, it might mean that someone cannot see the thing because there is no light upon it. Therefore, one must imagine what the thing is and what it looks like and Lacan extends this epistemology to utilize the ‘imago’ as the paranoid person whose paranoia may, in fact, be justified who has perhaps experienced a history of violence, then imagines the concealed figure to be a threat. The evoking of an imago means that even when the dust has settled on aggression, the conjecture, the gap of the unknown, the ideological space whereby the subject has yet to fully form full knowledge of the thing-in-itself, as it actually is, creates the opportunity for a paranoiac-­ menace to snake into the subject’s response to the presentation of the imago. Someone might know something about the thing, but the thing holds a precarious position as a known, yet not yet fully known image, a shadow, a conjecture can topple the certainty of what is known and the imprint of the “Punisher”33 can emerge.

 Écrits, pg. 12.

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 hesis 3: The Springs of Aggressivity Decide T the Reasons That Motivate the Technique of Analysis “It is no bad thing to reactivate such an intention in psychoanalysis.”34 To reactivate a phobia to break down the excessive defensiveness of the ego (“I must go there”) to press the subject to break down barriers within, one of the worst things an analyst (and a teacher) can do is sit back passively allowing the analysand to discover-themselves. The fact of the matter is that if the analyst allows the subject to be dictated by the analysand, no breakthroughs will occur; the patient does not know what they need, and if they did they would not need a therapist.35 In this postmodern social complexity it is clear that any ‘universal class’ is going to be the result of laborious political work rather than an automatic necessity reacting to the failure of capitalist social structures to meet the needs of workers.36 “Nevertheless, the analyst’s policy of nonintervention rings of an altruism that Lacan himself does not permit to exist. Lacan’s anti-altruism risks distorting the sense given to the idea of the ‘ethical unconscious’ by couching it not in terms of ethical behavior, but merely in terms of character or personality...In Lacan’s eyes, the analyst’s altruism conceals only his own unconscious desires, and as such every nonintervention must come to represent a strategy designed to intimidate.”37 Tobin Siebers suggests that Lacan may believe it best for therapists to sometimes trigger the springs of aggression. Analysts are particular types of agents and give a position from which discourse can be articulated. Discourse, for Lacan, indicates not just a particular way in which serious conversation occurs, but the way in which a social link can be articulated. For the analyst, the social link that is articulated is the attempted exposure of the objet petit a, the excess that is within the subject, concealed in a way  Ecrits, pg. 14.  The organizing of revolutionary consciousness allows the party to be a kind of political therapist on behalf of the working class. Not in the sense of alleviating aggression into a docile status where the working class is given a place to vent and learn to accept exploitation. 36  Ernesto Laclau. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. “Identity and Hegemony.” London: Verso Press 2000, pg. 44–89. 37  The Ethics of Criticism. “The Ethical Unconscious From Freud to Lacan” by Tobin Siebers. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988, pg. 180. 34 35

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that is precariously hidden from the subject, and when revealed it exposes the excess in the subject which is not caught in the symbolic-­order. This exposure is terrifying for the subject, typically anxiety-­inducing when revealed, and is typically resolved back into a status of latency where the subject regresses back to its barred-subject in which the hidden kernel is effectively concealed once again. There is something deeper going on here and the point made by Slavoj Žižek concurs on this point, that the emphasis in Lacan’s work is not about producing docile bodies: “Every legal order (or every order of explicit normativity) has to rely on a complex ‘reflexive’ network of informal rules which tells us how we are to relate to the explicit norms, how we are to apply them: to what extent we are to take them literally, how and when we are allowed, solicited even, to disregard them, and so on—and this is the domain of habit. To know the habits of a society is to know the meta-rules of how to apply its explicit norms: when to use them or not use them; when to violate them; when not to choose what is offered; when we are effectively obliged to do something, but have to pretend that we are doing it as a free choice...the same goes for many political situations in which a choice is given on condition that we make the right choice: we are solemnly reminded that we can say no—but we are expected to reject this offer and enthusiastically say yes.”38

Lacan’s thesis is that triggering aggression gives the analyst valuable insight into how the subject forms conjectural opinions about the buried ‘imago’. This ‘imago’ resonates within the subject as the ‘anchoring point’ by which that subject holds onto traumatic pain. To point to the double-­faced “aggressivity” that lay concealed even in the alleged “loving-act,” Lacan reveals that his patients tended to lash out: “As to presenting our own virtues and merits by way of example, the only person I have known to resort to such reactions was some establishment figure, thoroughly imbued with the idea, naive as it was austere, of his own apostolic value; I well remember the fury he unleashed.”39 What Lacan retells is the frustration of labor to create an image of a charitable subject as an ethical expectation forced upon the subject by the social pressures of the super-ego.  Slavoj Žižek. In Defense of Lost Causes. New York: Verso Press, pg. 171.  Ibid., pg. 13.

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 hesis 4: Aggressivity Is the Correlative Tendency T of a Mode of Identification That We Call Narcissistic, and Which Determines the Formal Structure of Man’s Ego and of the Register of Entities Characteristic of This World Aggressivity always mirrors its object. Mirroring is not just that you look at yourself and see your reflection back as identical to what you actually are; as Lacan knew full well, mirroring mirrors the projected desires of the subject, mirroring mirrors what the subject wishes to see—this can be either positive or negative. Lacan is pessimistic that the mirroring will actually be identical to the reality of what is actually there. The narcissist looks into the reflecting mirror and the problems occur when the subject assumes the image of what it wants to see; when the subject represses certain aspects of the personality creates an idealized image of oneself that is an unconscious phenomenon, when those idealized images one constructs are unrealized in the eyes of the other. One of the things Lacan noticed among his patients was their desire to keep the persecutory script going. It was common among Lacan’s patients that when he did respond with an aggressive response, the patient felt it to be a jarring experience. For example, these memories and expectations of aggressivity were so deeply embedded in themselves that when Lacan did not respond with anger, but with a steely-eyed unresponsiveness, to a patient named “Janet” she seemed to have her eyes go blank: “the face of an actor when a film is suddenly stopped mid-action.”40 A fixation that draws a rupture between inner-thought-world and outer (Umwelt) environment, and this rupture stretches the unfinished subject along lines of “animal-desire.”41 Even the smallest children express this tension in the ways they express playful violence as the singular fuses with the whole, the organs without bodies congeal into a unified identity: “Thus the aggressivity that is manifested in the retaliations of taps and blows cannot be regarded solely as a playful manifestation of the exercise of strengths and their employment 40 41

 Écrits, pg. 17.  ibid, pg. 17.

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in the mapping of the body…”42 and what is known as the mirror-stage, which occurs around six months, when it is the child’s first encounter with itself in the mirror, seeing a reflection gives a demonstrable dimension to the process of recognition. The child can jubilantly recognize itself in a playful discovery that then frames the way the child henceforth characterizes itself. It is not until later in Lacan’s eighth seminar that he shifts into emphasis on the Symbolic identification offered by the mirror stage as overcoding, overdetermining the prior Imaginary identifications in the visual image as identified by the child. Narcissistic-rage occurs when the eyes of the other, known as mirroring, fails to approve, confirm, and reward the subject. When the gaze of the other does not match the expectation of unconditional praise in the mind of the narcissist. A theme with narcissists prone to violence is that someone failed to greet them with gestures of approval and therefore the narcissist feels compelled to lash out in violence. The mode of identification that the narcissist holds could be unrealistic delusions of grandeur, genius, saintliness, and what seems normal in particular environments where the subject is stunned for being chastised by the revelation that aggressive behavior is cruel. When this happens there is a “Distortion of Intentions” in the mind of the normalizer of aggressivity, whose base of security has been stripped and who may associate love with its precarious withdrawal. It should be noted here that what Lacan begins to analyze could be understood today as ‘hyper-vigilance,’ which is a notable characteristic among narcissists who seek approval from outside, meaning that narcissists are excessively aware of how they appear to others. Hyper-vigilance may coincide with the narcissism described by Lacan, because this neurosis manifests in the perpetual scanning of the environment looking for possible security threats from all angles. Aggressivity, therefore, can be understood as both symptomatic of hyper-vigilance and a learned response among those who live under constant threat of persecution from the hyper-vigilant neurotic.

 Écrits, pg. 18.

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 hesis 5: Such a Notion of Aggressivity as One T of the Intentional Coordinates of the Human Ego, Especially Relative to the Category of Space, Allows Us to Conceive of Its Role in Modern Neurosis and in the ‘discontents’ of Civilization Lacan ends on a few interesting points, obviously evoking Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, but also the notion of deferred action (Nachträglichkeit) from Freud, for whom subjectivity is never completely structured, but resonates with anticipations and reconstructions of events that are often traumatic in nature. Hal Foster explains this: “we come to be who we are only in deferred action...in deferred action, as a continual process of anticipation and reconstruction.”43 Living on the razor’s edge of life in the modern era where a precarious peace hangs in the balance. A war within that spills over into the transcendent world outside the self: “war, after teaching us a great deal about the genesis of neurosis, is providing too demanding perhaps in the quest for ever more neural subjects in an aggressivity where feeling is undesirable.”44 This is the tension between aggressivity as a necessary process in populating the military-­ industrial complex with useful soldiers whose willpower is motivated by aggression towards a security threat, and the need for more trained killers who suppress the natural human emotions of empathic responses towards those one is sent to kill. Perhaps the only recourse civilization has is to appeal to the “instinct of self-preservation,”45 where the fear of death is subordinate to a “narcissistic fear of damage to one’s body.”46 The only thing that might dampen narcissistic rage is if the narcissist has to actually deal with the actual threat of damage to the body which threatens the form with which the narcissist presents itself to others. A threat that provokes a neurosis which keeps aggressivity in check, out of anxiety for a greater aggressivity and a perpetual fear of self-destruction.  Hal Foster. October. “Postmodernism in Parallax.” Volume 63, Winter 1993, pg. 3–20.  ibid., pg. 28. 45  ibid. 46  ibid. 43 44

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Thereby, a fragile peace is kept by indefinitely deferring action, even though a hyper-vigilance remains that keeps this peace merely speculative. The tension of aggressivity might be a powerful tool for mobilizing political agency, for example in toppling a sovereign whose power is misused.47 The old psychoanalytical theory of trauma decries “everyone is hurt” and needs healing. Eventually, in capitalism, material structures of support are unable to provide security from this traumatic pain; however, market forces can propagate the idea that commodity fetishism is the palliative cure.

 Slavoj Žižek’s main thesis in his two works In Defense of Lost Causes, and Living in the End Times.

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7 Cynicism/Ressentiment as the Function of Ideology

As far as I know, there are no serious works, beyond a few journal articles, that unpack the influences of Nietzsche upon Žižek. Most of these works often conceal missed opportunities that are often downright avoided in Žižek’s book-length published works. In a common thread that runs throughout most of Žižek’s work there is a way that he casts cynicism and irony as always implying a gap, a beyond in which the ironic, cynical subject “knows” and feigns foolishness. In the realm of cynical postmodern entertainment the phantasy based foolishness is always posited as an ‘end of history’ whereby the cynical subject now ‘knows’ the error of incorrect ideology, and the cynical irony reinforces a reactionary metaphysics through this gap which alleges to conceal a kernel of truth that knows better. Hence, as Žižek is correct to point out, the most heinous abuses of postmodern methods of vulgarity now occur on the right wing of politics, because the vulgarity is readily appropriated into the cynical-irony of the knowing subject who “knows better;” because this direct experience of a postmodern vulgarity is always presumed to have a metaphysical “gap” that reinforces the reactionary political ideology, the ‘kernel of truth’ (an illusion that seems real) that we now know better that nothing will ever actually change. Žižek does not speak highly of Nietzsche (and various Nietzscheans such as Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida), and this

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makes his work much more difficult, because the cynicism Žižek relies on is not too dissimilar to the ways Nietzsche understands ressentiment and this gap in the metaphysics appearance versus ‘true reality’ that is deeper, Nietzsche painstakingly argues throughout his many books that this is precisely what is most problematic about ridding Christian metaphysics from western culture (especially starting early on in Untimely Meditations, and all the way through to his last books such as Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christian, this is a common thread for Nietzsche throughout) among the ‘slave’-morality that mocks, humiliates, and drags down the authentic master-morality, and we can see how a subject emerges through cynical disbelief, while actually reproducing the structures of power it discursively claims to resist, transcend, or perhaps destroy. The transvaluation of values takes from within the structures of power that the Ubermensch attempts to transvaluate, and therefore it is a temporal stasis, changes seem to occur, but these changes are occurring at the level of content rather than form. The point is to disrupt form, and rather than repeat the same tropes over and over again, create new stories. What Žižek often refers to as “cynicism” in his work bears a striking resemblance to Nietzsche’s “ressentiment”; or, the slave-morality that forms a negative relation to power as its vengeful other, this vengeful attitude festers, but never actually forms into a revolutionary ontology. Ressentiment—is the vengeful morality of the weak and powerless who imagine revenge enacted on the strong and powerful through metaphysical forces like Gods, Angels, etc. because the meek are not in power, they enact revenge in their imagination and find comfort through the narratives offered by religion. “Far from simply dismissing religion as a finite way to represent conceptual truth, Hegel clearly saw the role of surplus-enjoyment in religious collective rituals, the satisfaction they bring.”1 What if, “those who read Hegel’s notion of freedom through the lenses of the gradual progress towards free mutual recognition miss radical negativity as the core of the dialectical process?”2

 Žižek. Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed, pg. 11.  Ibid.

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In recent years, as Žižek seems to embrace a sort of thesis of cynical agency is categorized in Sloterdijk’s thesis “they know what they are doing, nevertheless, they continue doing it.” Knowing something is true, in an era of techno-postmodernism, subjects all truths to the mediation of postmodern notions of equality. Truths are awash in the basin of ideological certainty. It is not that the public are lacking facts; it is that the public is bombarded with brainwashing via pseudo-facts and partial objects that frame reality in such a way that is appealing to consumers. If scholars present the public with correct facts, these facts can be disregarded by those who do not find it enjoyable. Presenting unenjoyable facts, like the inconvenient truths that carbon consumption is creating massive extinction-level crises to human life, poses the intellectual as a thief of enjoyment, trying to steal away the treasure of jouissance. The opposite holds true in trying to correctly attribute pseudo-­ philosophical-­sounding quotations to their rightful owners. One of the few small pleasures in life derives from misattributing quotes and misstating a famous quote to stumble upon a statement that works even better. Throughout history there are numerous examples of misattributed quotations. For example, it recently came to our attention that there was a misunderstanding of the famous quote from the Chinese Premier, Zhou Enlai. When he was asked in 1972, “What was the impact of the French Revolution?,” he had replied, “It is too early to say.” As it turns out, he was simply being asked about the Paris uprisings that had occurred in May of 1968 when students and workers banded together in solidarity to shut down the entire city of Paris for an entire month. What is most important is that by understanding Lacanian analysis, from reading Nietzsche and Žižek we cannot let the facts get in the way of a good story. This mistaken interpretation was much more successful than the actual interpretation would have ever been, which suggests that there is a kernel of subconscious truth in the mistake. Why else would it have circulated so widely? Slavoj Žižek has written entire books where he analyzes these slips of the tongue. These included the famous line from Donald Rumsfeld in which he talked of “known knowns and known unknowns,” but the missing link in this proposition is where ideology seeps in. Žižek

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correctly noticed that this is elided by Rumsfeld’s analysis, that of the “known unknowns.” What we believe we know, but we actually do not know (i.e. as an atheist, it is easier for Nietzsche to claim that God is dead, rather than simply say, “You Christians claim to know something that you actually do not know, there is no God at all.”) Or, somehow that Dan Quayle’s misspelling of the word potato as “potatoe,” in effect, contains a kernel of truth. It simply feels correct even though it is the “wrong” spelling, and when we claim that there is a right and wrong spelling of a word we are fundamentally within the “good and evil” matrices that grip us in ideology, because we presume a reified definition of language rather than seeing language as it is—an exchangeable currency that only makes sense on the basis of social production. As well as a construct rooted in power, as Nietzsche eloquently put it, a “mobile army of metaphors, metonyms…” Peter Sloterdijk’s thesis on cynicism is the contrary position of that held by Marx. “They know they are doing it, and yet they continue doing it,” is the cynical thesis. As soon as we renounce fictions, we also lose reality.

What Is a Symptom? When analysts are dealing with a universal structuring principle, it is assumed that, in principle, it is possible to apply the principle to all of its potential elements, so that the principle’s empirical non-realization is merely a matter of contingent circumstances and outlying conditions. A symptom is, however, an element which must remain an exception, as the point of suspension of the universal principle. In other words, if the universal principle were to apply to the symptom, the universal structure of the system itself would disintegrate.3 This externalizing of what is most internal and necessary to the functioning of the structures of capitalist inequality is what is at stake in analysis of the symptom. “If the Real were to be directly external to the Symbolic, then Society definitely would exist: for something to exist, it  The Plague of Fantasies, pg. 161.

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has to be defined by its external limit, and the Real would have served as this externality guaranteeing the inherent consistency of Society.”4 “What happens in the passage from the position of strict class struggle to Fascist anti-Semitism is not just a simple replacement of one figure of the enemy [the bourgeoisie, the ruling class] with another [the Jews], but the shift from the logic of antagonism which makes Society impossible to the logic of external Enemy which guarantees Society’s consistency.”5 A growing class of ‘rabble [Pöbel]’ in modern society is not a mismanagement of inadequate government policies, or economic bad luck. The inherent social structure of civil society necessarily gives rise to a class which is excluded from its benefits. This exclusion renders itself invisible within the persecutory subject, yet is projected onto a “symptomal-­figure” who is persecuted under that which is denied within the persecuting subject. The invention of a symbolic identification with a persecutory, albeit in some cases imaginary, Other who is out to steal the treasure of enjoyment is the ultimate enactment of an ideological symptom. In other words, “What is a Nazi without a Jew?”6 The idea that if the Jews did not exist, the Nazis would have invented them; the persecuting violence of aggressivity necessitates its identity on its creation of a target. The one thing that “Hitler fatefully forgot to add is that he, the anti-Semite, his identity, is also in the Jew. (and the same holds for a certain kind of anti-­ racism. The dependence of the Politically Correct anti-racism on what it (pretends to) fight… its parasitizing upon its opponent, is clear: the PC anti-racism is sustained by the surplus-enjoyment which emerges when the PC-subject triumphantly reveals the hidden racist bias on an apparently neutral statement or gesture.”7 To emphasize this point, and to bring the comfortable terrain of ideology surrounding the Holocaust into relief, in his brilliant book On Belief, Žižek plays the role of Gadfly and writes something that is sure to shock the reader: “Auschwitz is the ultimate argument AGAINST the romanticized notion of ‘diabolical Evil,’ of the evil hero who elevates Evil  Class Struggle or Postmodernism? pg. 121.  Ibid. 6  Disparities, pg. 183. 7  Ibid. 4 5

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into an a priori principle.”8 By arguing this point, does Žižek fall into his own trap of removing the “malignant” part of fascism? To be clear, no, because the “diabolical Evil” masterplan of one rogue psychotic individual is the least malignant portion of the rise of fascism. However, the maintenance of the “malignant” aspects of fascism are given in the thesis offered by Hannah Arendt’s thesis on the “banality of evil,” in her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem, “the unbearable horror of Auschwitz resides in the fact that its perpetrators were NOT Byronesque figures who asserted, like Milton’s Satan, ‘Let Evil be my Good!’”—the true cause for alarm resides in the unbridgeable GAP between the horror of what went on and the “human, all too human” character of its perpetrators.9 On the one hand, there are acts of violence perpetrated by drone strikes, say in the war in Afghanistan, where the mechanisms of destruction can be controlled remotely. In our case, trapped by the machinations of postmodernism and techno-capitalism, the thesis that evil is a result of individual pathology no longer holds much truth. Rather, the mechanisms of evil can perform violence in ways that are fully automated, even if by people who claim they are ethically and morally good human beings on an individual level. One of the cultural symptoms of postmodernism is the production of an egregiously apolitical way that ideological spaces connect different perspectives into what Ernesto Laclau called a “chain of equivalences”— where the star of a reality television show may have equal subjective influence over shaping public opinions regarding vaccine mandates as the head of the Center for Disease Control, because the production of culture places an emphasis on sponsorships, advertisements, and ratings to ensure an audience for those ads. Media spectacles tend to garner higher ratings than boring policy debates. Therefore, in a crisis that occurs which requires dull policy mandates to quell the exigency, say, a public debate regarding the impact of fossil fuels and carbon emissions on the environment, the public will relate to these topics through the framework of spectacle because political discourses have been subsumed into the public

 On Belief, pg. 38.  Ibid.

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imagination as a form of entertainment like any other form of entertainment. A particularly anti-substantial move that Žižek makes in his work from Living in the End Times onward, and echoed in his work on surplus-­ enjoyment, is that “Surplus-enjoyment implies the paradox of a thing which is always (and nothing but) an excess with regard to itself: in its ‘normal’ state, it is nothing.”10 This creates a terrifying situation where if indeed surplus-enjoyment is building out from nothing but its own excess, then the enjoyment of ressentiment experienced as the slave-­ morality at the core of reactionary responses to rapidly changing quasi-­ paradigmatic postmodernist culture—then, in reality, there is no core, the subject can only be constituted as a protean subject with a centrifugal core and the only anchor with which to grip oneself to reality is the lynchpin of enjoyment as such. Even and especially cynical enjoyment as a detached practice of enjoyment as a passive political observer watching the Titanic as it sinks.

Rehabilitating the Master-Signifier Cynicism can slip in through the everyday, with the plural contingency of postmodern political struggles and identity politics already entirely absorbed into the logic of the free drift of hegemonic displacements. Žižek has described his work as a rehabilitation of the Master-Signifier. Bringing back the Father who says “You are going to your grandmother’s house because I said so” renders an inflexible manifestation of power that is easier to resist because it’s apparent. Whereas, the postmodern signifier which is concealed in the plague of fantasies lulls the subject into truly believing that there is some kind of free choice to be made. In the science world there is a tendency towards compatibilism whereby: “We experience ourselves as free when we are able to act the way our organism determines us to act.”11

10 11

 Žižek. Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed, pg. 6.  Žižek. “Populism, Democracy, Freedom, and Iran.” Literal 18: Latin American Voices.

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In dealing with the Name-of-the-Father, “we have a split between knowledge and belief (“I know very well that my father is actually an imperfect, confused, impotent creature, yet I nonetheless believe in his symbolic authority”).”12 Strangely, as the cynical attitude towards the Father gains influence, perversely, the power of the Father enhanced in a paradoxical inversion: “when this figure (father, king…) no longer successfully performs his function, when he no longer fully exerts his power, this lack is necessarily (mis) perceived as an excess, the ruler is reproached for having ‘too much authority,’ as if we were dealing with a ‘brutal excess of Power.’ This paradox is typical of a pre-revolutionary situation: the more a regime… is uncertain of itself, of its legitimacy—the more it hesitates and makes concessions to its opposition—the more it is attacked by the opposition as a tyranny. The opposition, of course, acts here as a hysteric, since its reproach concerning the regime’s excessive exercise of power conceals its exact opposite—its true reproach is that the regime is not strong enough, that it does not live up to its mandate of power.”13

When what appears as a free choice is actually pressing into action a rather subtle interrogation into the essence of the self. The subject is forced to answer the hysterical question: “Why am I what you say I am?” Every choice over consumer preferences creates an identity, now mappable through data-gathering about consumer preferences, keystrokes on your computer can tell data-gathering mechanisms minutiae of personal preferences, lifespan, sexual tendencies, and so forth. Beneath this alleged free choice there is a deeper radical probing going on: the market needs to know what kind of person you are! But, also more importantly, questions probing into power are only possible when power is waning. We should see the epiphenomenal trace of the Father that lingers in the attachment to the chain of signifiers manifest in these desires for oppression, stealing the treasure of oppressive-enjoyment. In the preface to The Plague of Fantasies he explains how a similar pattern occurred in the Communist Party of America in the 1960s: “We  Less Than Nothing, pg. 680.  Less Than Nothing, pg. 681.

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directly see the Master-Signifier beneath the chain of knowledge—we learn to see the dictatorship in democracy. This could remind us of a not so well-known fact that, in the 1960’s, the leadership of the Communist Party of America, in order to account for its failure to mobilize the workers, seriously entertained the idea that the US population was being controlled by the secret use of drugs distributed through the air and the water supply. But we do not need aliens, secret drugs or gasses—the form of ideology does the work without them.”14 It is not that the subjects trust the ideological state apparatuses with full confidence. Rather, there is cynicism towards “state apparatuses” and media apparatuses which is factored into the ideologies that reproduce positive views of capitalism. Predominant in consumer capitalist societies subjects are interpellated directly as subjects of pleasures, which pits those pleasures offered by capitalist enjoyment (i.e. the fetish of the commodity) against the dreary authoritarianism of the state. Even though distrust and has completely eroded, because these apparatuses, while reporting the facts of the matter, are not “accurately” reporting the kind of “Master-Signifier” that these conservatives would like to repetitiously hear (e.g. God is in control, calm down, COVID is a passing thing, so is Global Warming, nothing to worry about here, stay content praying, consuming, docile, etc.). The narcissism of the cult of the self that capitalism produces makes it almost impossible to make even the most modest changes in personal behavior, even if those changes will result in the survival of life on this planet because those customary personal habits have developed in alignment with the production of needs that can only be gratified by consuming commodities which are fetishized. In drawing this connection the example used by Slavoj Žižek is of a father who divorces his wife and still returns to her house to visit the kids as if nothing ever happened. The symbolism of the relationship has shifted and therefore the husband can take it easy and really enjoy it without the burden of acknowledging the chain of knowledge inherent in the bonds of family relations.15 In this, “it is easy to discern the liberating potential of being relieved of enjoyment: in this way one is relieved of the 14 15

 The Plague of Fantasies, preface, pg. xii.  Ibid., pg. 148.

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monstrous duty to enjoy.”16 And again, the externalization of a subject supposed to believe is rendered apparent in the form of commodity fetishism in two types of the Other doing or enduring it for me: 1. Our belief is laid upon the other, this gesture of criticism occurs as an assertion of identity, “no it is you who believe through the Other” (in the theological whimsies of commodity fetishism, in Santa Claus, etc.) it is never acknowledged that “I” am doing this, but that others are doing it without knowing it. 2. In the case of the video-recorder viewing and enjoying a film for me (canned laughter, Tibetan prayer wheel, etc.) it is the other way around, you think you enjoyed the show, but the Other did it for you. The gesture of criticism here is that, no, it was not you who laughed, it was the Other (the TV set) who did it. Slavoj Žižek’s copious detailing of cynical ideological processes may have two major predecessors. First, Hegelian notions of tarrying in the negative which was the subject of an entire book from Žižek and tends to be the major focus of most of the secondary writing about his philosophy. The other, less-studied predecessor is the Nietzschean examination of slave morality. Besides Zahi Zalloua’s work, there is very little written about this subject and yet, “authentic ressentiment”17 is the inverted position of the subject supposed to believe. The disconnect is between “belief and jouissance”—I am not enjoying, but it is good enough to believe that someone out there is actually enjoying the real thing. The cynical distance of the slave morality who holds enjoyment at a cynical distance and produces fantasies that bolster an imaginary notion of oneself as powerful enough to choose powerlessness (under the guise of a virtue called “humility”); the subject supposed to believe fantasizes that some Other exists as an authentic believer in order to rationalize the cynical distance one feels in order to overcome his “gap” and continue to behave as if one fully believed.  Ibid.  Zahi Zalloua. “Betting on Ressentiment: Žižek and Nietzsche.” Symplokē volume 20, Winter-­ Spring 2012. 16 17

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In a common thread that runs throughout most of Žižek’s work there is a way that he casts cynicism and irony as always implying a gap, a beyond in which the ironic, cynical subject “knows” and feigns foolishness, or simply chooses not to know.

Populism Is Ressentiment Such is the case in his analysis of populist political movements that garner working-class and lumpenproletariat forces for reactionary purposes. As we know from reading Ernesto Laclau’s work On Populist Reason,18 populism is not just arousing the popular pathos of the masses, it is arousing the popular pathos of the masses in reaction to a perceived common enemy (e.g. immigrants, bankers, foreign powers, etc.) to stir up nationalist sentiments. One of the few times that we see Žižek’s admiration for Friedrich Nietzsche is when he makes use of Nietzsche’s thesis of ressentiment as a critique of populism: “The minimum tenet of populism is that there must be a minimal amount of order, and some external intruder (it can be imperialism, communism). The cause comes from the outside destroying the organic order. In other words, I claim that populism is always sustained by a kind of frustrated despair. I do not know what is going on, but it must stop. Populism believes in the insuring conviction that there must be somebody responsible for all the mess which is why an agent behind the scenes is needed. In this refusal to know resides the proper fetishist that names no populism. Although, at the purely formal level, fetishism involves a gesture of transference upon the subject of the fetish, it functions as an exact inversion of the standard formula of transference with the subject it is supposed to know. What fetish gives body to is precisely my refusal to subjectively assume what I know. So you see my point? I don’t think people are stupid, or with a minimal amount of will, but they voluntarily choose stupidity. Behind populism there’s always a minimum of I don’t want to know. Even if it’s not

18

 Ernesto Laclau. On Populist Reason. Verso, 2018.

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acknowledged, it is implicit. In Nietzschean terms, populism is a reactive strategy.”19

The refusal to know presents us with the deadlock of what we believe is our society of choice.20 In the realm of cynical postmodern entertainment, phantasy-based foolishness is always posited as an ‘end of history’ whereby the cynical subject now ‘knows’ the error of incorrect ideology, and the cynical irony reinforces a reactionary metaphysics through this gap which alleges to conceal a kernel of truth that will be revealed later (aka a “revelation” at a future time). Hence, as Žižek is correct to point out, the most heinous abuses of postmodern methods of vulgarity now occur on the right wing of politics, because the vulgarity is akin to an affectual standing-reserve to be appropriated into the cynical-irony of the knowing subject who “knows better;” a subject we are supposed to believe because this direct experience of a postmodern vulgarity is always presumed to have a metaphysical “gap” that reinforces a reactionary political ideology. The ‘kernel of truth’ (an illusion that seems real) that we now know better that nothing will ever actually change is the most alluring illusion. Žižek does not speak highly of Nietzsche (and various Nietzscheans such as Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida), and this makes his work much more difficult, because the cynicism Žižek relies on is not too dissimilar to the ways Nietzsche understands ressentiment. This gap in the metaphysics of appearance versus ‘true reality’ that is deeper; Nietzsche painstakingly argues throughout his many books that this is precisely what is most problematic about ridding Christian metaphysics from western culture. Especially starting early on in Untimely Meditations, and all the way through to his last books such as Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ, this is a common thread in Nietzsche’s thought. Ideologies cannot acquiesce into a homeostasis of atomized thinking, which Žižek rightly associates with nominalism. Nominalism is the philosophical doctrine that universals or general ideas are mere names without any corresponding reality, and that only particular objects  Slavoj Žižek “Populism, Freedom, Democracy and Iran” in Literal 18: Latin American Voices.  Ibid.

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exist; properties, numbers, and sets are thought of as merely features of the way of considering the things that exist. The nominalist view is that values are constructed solely on an individual level, a point that Nietzsche seems to make in On Truth and Lying in an Extra Moral Sense, a peace-pact of language is necessary to hold the a-priori of nominalism together into a feasible society, even though the peace-pact holds the world into a precarious peace. Among the ‘slave’-morality that mocks, humiliates, drags down the authentic master-morality, and we can see how a subject emerges through cynical disbelief while actually reproducing the structures of power it discursively claims to resist, transcend, or perhaps destroy. A dialectical synthesis created out of a negation of a negation, sublated into a new positivity. The transvaluation of values takes from within the structures of power that the Ubermensch attempts to transvaluate, and therefore it is a temporal stasis, changes seem to occur, but these changes are occurring at the level of content rather than form. The point is to disrupt form, and rather than repeat the same tropes over and over again, create new stories. What Žižek often refers to as “cynicism” in his work bears a striking resemblance to Nietzsche’s “ressentiment;” or, the slave-morality that forms a negative relation to power as its vengeful other, this vengeful attitude festers, but never actually forms into a revolutionary ontology. The idea that human beings can live only through illusion as a support, rather than an escape from reality, is a thesis that Nietzsche held from very early on. As he wrote, “Knowledge as such is impossible within the flux of becoming. In that case, how then is knowledge possible? As an error about oneself, as will to power, as will to deception.”21 I think there is an affinity between this thesis from Nietzsche and the one often forwarded by Žižek, such as this common refrain found in his book The Plague of Fantasies:

21

 Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power #617

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“Fantasy is on the side of reality… it sustains the subject’s ‘sense of reality’; when the phantasmic frame disintegrates, the subject undergoes a ‘loss of reality’ and starts to perceive reality as an ‘irreal’ nightmarish universe with no firm ontological foundation; this nightmarish universe is not ‘pure fantasy’ but, on the contrary, that which remains of reality after reality is deprived of its support in fantasy.”22

In a way, Nietzsche echoes this sentiment while critiquing the ideology of the Bismark era when he writes: “All living things require an atmosphere around them, a mysterious misty vapor… every nation, too, indeed every human being that wants to become mature requires a similar enveloping illusion, a similar protective and veiling cloud.”23 Nietzsche is clear that what qualifies as “life” is “in need of the services of history,” and yet, “an excess of history is harmful to the living man,” because history can only pertain to the living (not the posthumous man that he mentions elsewhere, the memorialized mummified recollection as myth-making tool after the revered are deceased24); for those who are alive now, history can only be useful for those who strive, those who preserve and revere, and those who suffer and seek deliverance.25 It is not simply that ideology seeps into the cracks of what subjects believe they know, it is that the motivation to change conditions on the basis of history is not always the most compelling force when those who are alive always wish to stay alive. The path of history “leads through human brains! Through the brains of timorous and short lived animals which emerge again and again to the same needs and distresses and fend of destruction only with effort and then only for a short time.”26 There is only so much that a human can accomplish in one lifespan, and, in this regard, Nietzsche echoes the four ashramas in classical Hinduism. The stages in life as a backdrop for later work on the eternal return and recurrence. The four ashramas are: Brahmacharya (student),  Plague of Fantasies, pg. 84, Verso; 1997; 2008.   Friedrich Nietzsche, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” Untimely Meditations, pg. 97. 24  Beyond Good and Evil, 25  Untimely Meditations, “On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life,” pg. 67. 26  Ibid., pg. 68. 22 23

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Grihastha (householder), Vanaprastha (forest walker/forest dweller, retirement), and Sannyasa (renunciation). Life cycles recur as each life clears the slate of history, with history to creep in as children enter the world at the level of Brahmacharya (student) and move forward from there. Ideology gets its grasp upon subjects through a cynical distance which a space through which ideology fills in the gaps in subjects’ knowledge. Take, for example, Žižek’s analysis of why a show (and film) like MASH was so popular, because “for all their mockery of authority, practical jokes and sexual escapades, the members of the MASH crew perform their job exemplary, and thus present absolutely no threat to the smooth running of the military machine. In other words, the cliché which regards MASH as an anti-militarist film, depicting the horrors of the meaningless military slaughter which can be endured only through a healthy measure of cynicism, practical jokes, laughing at pompous official rituals, and so on, misses the point—this very distance is ideology.”27 Through a process of inductive reasoning implying a kind of concealed universe. A presumption that something more is going on that we do not know, a deeper moral allegory is presumed which conceals the true story beyond the surfaces. Hence, a “criticism of ideology,” as Žižek explains, “consists in unmaking traditional allegory as an ‘optical illusion’ concealing the mechanism of modern allegory…” In this case, the quilting point can shift focus depending upon who is cast as the political scapegoat during that particular crisis. Since the veil is perpetually concealed, the plot can be fictionalized in whatever way the deputies of the dominant discourses desire, and the presumption is that in an era where ideology is over-determined by the forces of the super-structure, false consciousness is produced in such a way that consciousness is no longer produced from material conditions in the economic base. Cynicism keeps the subject powerless, but it also produces a particularly masochistic jouissance. In a sense, all life is in need of the services of history, history is a nightmare weighing on the brains of the living, and thusly to escape that nightmare, hegemonic forces that benefit from the inertia of historical materialist momentum must approach history 27

 Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, pg. 26.

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through the screen of cynical distance and the traumatic kernel of a hegemonic sense of ressentiment, of lost power and the imaginary forces that are allegedly oppressing. It is very easy to dismiss Nietzsche as an adolescent thinker, but his work on decadence perfectly describes the stage of decline that American “democracy” is going through right now. Just go read his “Anti-Darwin” critiques in Twilight of the Idols and see this critique of decadence as a viable description of contemporary western cultural and political decline. The intellect only develops when it has an obstacle to overcome. Once the obstacle is removed, the organism has no need for intelligence. Hence, when a nation becomes hegemonic (as Germany was after the Franco-­ Prussian War), there is a complacency that sets in, but with the bravado of feeling like the power one enjoys will last forever. In a way, the big Other must linger as an obstacle to compel the subject into action, and in this way the exporting of enjoyment to the subject supposed to believe where “somebody else does it for me”28 referred to by Žižek as the ‘primordial substitution’ where one can pay the price for the sins of the Other is precisely how ressentiment functions as the cynical basis of slave-morality.

Subject Supposed to Believe In his book, the Plague of Fantasies, we see Žižek unveil his theory of the subject supposed to believe rather than Lacan’s subject supposed to know. In this theory the perfect example of this is the laugh track on a television sitcom. The laugh track does not alert the audience when to laugh. The brilliance of the laugh track is that it laughs for the audience so that the audience does not actually laugh. It functions because the subject is supposed to believe that someone out there is laughing. Ethics is just like this because in our digital era when we see human interest stories on the news, sign a petition online, or put a few extra pennies of leftover change into the jar at the coffee shop we get an optimistic feeling that these actions go  Ibid., pg. 140–44. “The Primordial Substitution.”

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towards something good. This plays into our desire to feel ourselves as part of something greater than our own selfish desires. These actions, while ultimately futile, quell our anxiety about feeling powerless over all of the awful things we cannot escape seeing daily in the world. Differently from Noam Chomsky, Žižek argued that it is not lack of knowledge that bars our action; the people know and they still do not act, and if they are ignorant it is because they do not want to know. We are subjects supposed to believe that someone else is taking care of the problem so that we can rest assured. Žižek’s description is purely an ideological function of representative democracy rather than the way one might understand politics in, say, a society based on democracy as direct action. In representative democracy, citizens are told that democracy is about someone else legislating on our behalf; as long as we obey we are allowed to speak and express whatever discursive idle talk we desire without any full resolution.

Cynicism and Slave-Morality The most commonly cited analysis of the slaves’ revolt in morality is offered by Nietzsche in Genealogy of Morality, book 1, section 10: “The beginning of the slaves’ revolt in morality occurs when ressentiment itself turns creative and gives birth to values: the ressentiment of those beings who, denied the proper response of action, compensate for it only with imaginary revenge… a feature of ressentiment: in order to come about, slave morality first has to have an opposing, external world, it needs, physiologically speaking, external stimuli in order to act at all,—its action is basically a reaction.”29

Ressentiment is not merely a reaction to something annoying the subject cast under the spell of slave morality; it is a percolating, festering rage that simmers and is passed on through generations over the course of centuries. The nefariousness of the slave morality is that, according to Nietzsche, 29

 Genealogy of Morality, book 1, section 10.

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Christianity gives a textual repetition to the slaves’ revolt. Therefore, even though the slate is wiped clean with each successive generation (à la what one might see as the Brahmacharya “student” stage), what does one learn while a blank slate? The morals of Christianity which are inscribed into almost every aspect of western civilization. For Nietzsche, even the ethicist who is considered the greatest modern philosopher produced at the outset of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, offered nothing more than a secularization of the tenets of the Gospels. Nietzsche calls Kant “a sneaky Christian to the end” in his critique of this yawning gap that creates an interstice where ideology congeals. It is because there is a sense of a big Other (i.e. God) with some sort of intelligent plan, that the Christians’ slave revolt maps that intelligence and the gap onto material events, especially contingency. Nietzsche describes this scientific overtaking of life as a form of self-­mummification.30 A form of retreating into comfortable rational explanations where, for example, the exegesis of a science like physics has been forgotten.31 Žižek also turns this corner by looking at science as a kind of rudimentary methodical search for order that ultimately fails. When he writes of a kind of masochistic-dionysiac position of art in juxtaposition of the always orderly apollonian search for order and method among the sciences. “Is not the most succinct definition of modern art that it is art ‘beyond the pleasure principle’? We are supposed to enjoy traditional art, it is expected to generate aesthetic pleasure, in contrast to modern art, which causes displeasure—modern art, by definition hurts… in contrast, beauty, harmonious balance, seems more and more the domain of the sciences: Einstein’s theory of relativity, that paradigm of modern science, was praised for its simple elegance—no wonder the title of Brian Greene’s bestselling introduction to string theory is The Elegant Universe.”32 The expectation being that science will somehow discover the harmony in the chaos (in phenomena, events, and appearances), whereas the arts unlock the mystery wrapped in the riddle, the real thing which cannot be signified. Subjects under the spell of the slaves’ revolt will always fall into the  Twilight of the Idols. “Reason” in Philosophy, section 1.  Beyond Good and Evil, “On the Prejudices of Philosophers,” section 14. 32  Parallax View, pg. 147. 30 31

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depth of ‘the real thing’ which is not actually there, the true-belief that there is an intelligence beyond the surfaces of phenomena that is actually pulling the strings such as a God transferred onto “government” or some earthly political intelligence, which is the big lie because there is no deeper intelligence, no grand intelligence beyond the surfaces. Hence, “God is Dead.” In this critique of “depths” offered by Nietzsche who explains his four theses that there is no such thing as “reason” in philosophy, the desire to discover “depth” means that one is grasping at the nothing trying to posit an intelligent design behind appearances: “First proposition. The grounds on which ‘this’ world has been called apparent are instead grounds for its reality—another kind of reality is absolutely indemonstrable. Second proposition. The distinguishing marks which have been given to the ‘true being’ of things are the distinguishing marks of nonbeing, of nothingness—the ‘true world’ has been constructed by contradicting the actual world: this ‘true world’ is in fact an apparent world, insofar as it is just a moral-optical illusion. Third proposition. It makes no sense whatsoever to tell fictional stories about ‘another’ world than this one, as long as the instinct to slander, trivialize, and look down upon life is not powerful within us; in that case, we revenge ourselves on life with the phantasmagoria of ‘another,’ ‘better’ life. Fourth proposition. Dividing the world into a ‘true’ and an ‘apparent’ world, whether in the style of Christianity or in the style of Kant (a sneaky Christian to the end), is merely a move inspired by décadence—a symptom of declining life…”.33

33

 Twilight of the Idols, “Reason” in Philosophy, #6.

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Hysteric and Pervert In much of Lacan’s work the status of the subject is characterized as an hysteric. Precisely one who ceaselessly questions the ontological status of personal existence qua enjoyment, that is, the refusal to fully identify with the object that society calls the subject as it “is”, the hysteric eternally wonders: ‘Am I really that?’ It is crucial to note that this beckoning can be external or internal to the subject. Either side, the front or backside, can be authentic or not, and therefore subject to absurd comic release. It is not the release, a liquidation of humorous energy in order to safely reify the subject back onto the terra firma of solid ontological ground which forms the radical critique of ideology offered through humor. It is the expunging of reified consciousness so as to dislocate the subject from its self-certainty as such which offers the greatest promise of awakening from the slumbers of ideology through the use of humor. Comedy can bring the hysteric into an awareness of suffering as social-­ symptom not as in pursuit of a cure of the symptom, but in the sense that discontent will never completely disappear. The role of the comic is to make laughter productive. One of the greatest contributions to the application of psychoanalytic criticism to popular culture, and particularly the deployment of humor as a tactical method of critique, is Slavoj Žižek’s work. His thesis is that the real teachers can be observed through cultural-productions of ideology. Popular culture gives radicals the “political” tools to observe and critique the ways that enjoyment is framed, the superego is created for the proletariat through the frames of enjoyment producing “identity” without the consent of those who identify. In Žižek’s work, the figure of the hysteric often appears in binary relation to the figure of the pervert. It is crucial to remember that in theorizing freedom the emphasis is placed upon resistance, rather than total submission. Hence, the figure of the hysteric takes priority rather than the pervert. We should trust the authenticity of the hysteric rather than the pathos of the pervert because the hysteric pays the price of acting in the absence of guilt by expressing anxiety. As Lacan put it, anxiety is the

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only emotion that does not deceive: all other emotions, from sorrow to love, are based on deceit.34 Throughout his work there may be slight variations on the way these theories are deployed and which historical, or theatrical, figures Žižek uses as examples. While Lacan also utilizes these concepts throughout much of his work, Žižek points out that in Lacan’s (then-)unpublished Seminar on Anxiety from 1962 to 63, we see that in the lesson given on December 5th 1962, entitled “Beyond Castration Anxiety,” Lacan emphasizes the hysteric’s anxiety stems from the fundamental lack that the hysteric perceives in the Other, which makes the other inconsistent/ barred.35 While the hysteric perceives a lack in the Other, its impotence is an inconsistency towards which the hysteric is unready to sacrifice the part of him/herself that would complete the Other, fill in its lack and this refusal sustains: “the hysteric’s eternal complaint that the Other will somehow manipulate and exploit him/her, use him/her, deprive him/her of his most precious possession… the hysteric (neurotic) does not hold back from castration… he fully accepts castration; (s)he merely does not want to ‘functionalize’ it, to put it in the service of the Other, i.e. what (s)he holds back from is ‘making his/her castration into what the Other is lacking.”36

A hysteric resists becoming a pure submissive to the slave-morality, and therefore susceptible to ressentiment. The figure of the hysteric realizes that “there is nothing to sacrifice”37 because the self is unable to fill in the lack in the Other. What Lacan actually says is: “What the neurotic shrinks back from is not castration, but from turning his castration into what the Other lacks. He shrinks back from turning his castration into something positive, namely, the guarantee of the function of the Other, this other that steals away in the indeterminate echo of significations, this other in which the subject no longer sees himself except as  The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, pg. 57.  On Belief, pg. 73. 36  On Belief, pg. 73–74. 37  On Belief, pg. 74. 34 35

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fate, but fate that has no end, fate that gets lost in the ocean of histories. Now, what are these histories, if not an immense fiction? What might ensure a relationship between the subject and this universe of significations, if not the fact that somewhere there is jouissance?”38

There is a distortion in the hysteric’s approach to the Other, where typical clinical psychoanalysis would offer a talking “cure” to alleviate this gap and turn the hysteric into a docile body, because “Anxiety,” as Lacan teaches us about the hysteric, can possibly become “linked to anything that might appear…” and this distortion links to an Imagined projection of neurosis within, onto “a point located in the Other that lies beyond the image from which we are fashioned.”39 Lacan cannot restate Marx’s thesis on ideology that “they are doing it without knowing they are doing it,” when he explains that for the pervert: “things are in their right place. The a is right where the subject can’t see it and the capital S is in its place. This is why one can say that the perverse subject, whilst remaining oblivious to the way this functions, offers himself loyally to the Other’s jouissance.”40

Whereas the hysteric says “I would prefer not to,” as in the case of Bartleby, the Scrivener, who resisted the terrible attraction of sacrifice, because attraction is, as outlined in earlier chapters, the call of the normative ethics of the SuperEgo, enforced through violence and repression. The hysteric no longer hears the call, much like W.B. Yeats’ falcon who flies in a widening gyre and can no longer hear the beckoning call of the falconer, when hysteria is the norm, which it very well may be, “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” as Yeats wrote in his famous poem The Second Coming. On the other hand, the pervert offers him/herself loyally to the Other’s jouissance. The falsity of sacrifice resides in the leap of faith, not a guarantee of success because as we know the gratification of jouissance is  Jacques Lacan, Anxiety Seminar X, “Beyond Castration Anxiety,” December 5, 1962 lecture, pg. 46. 39  Ibid., pg. 47. 40  Ibid., pg. 49. 38

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impossible, and forces the symbolic death of all enjoyment, the obsession of the pervert is the fixation on the idea that what resides in him/herself IS what the Other needs, that “I” effectively possess the singular precious ingredient that is coveted by the Other, and the true belief that this ingredient will fill in the lack of the Other. Hence, the pervert on the Cross readily turns into the “moral majority” of perverted fundamentalists, rather than the authentic fundamentalist (for example, the Amish). The authentic fundamentalist could care less about their secular neighbors because they (the Amish) are centered on their own world, not bothered by what goes on “out there” among “them,” while the perverse moral majority is constantly expressing a passionate interest in their neighbors. Perverts claim to “love” their neighbors, but, in fact, it is an ambiguous attitude of horror and envy with regard to the “unspeakable pleasures in which sinners engage” whereas the authentic fundamentalists “DO NOT ENVY their neighbors (and) their different jouissance.”41 It is key to remember that “for Lacan, the ultimate aim of psychoanalysis is not to enable the subject to assume the necessary sacrifice (to ‘accept symbolic castration,’ to renounce immature narcissistic attachments…) but to resist the terrible attraction of sacrifice—an attraction that is the superego beckoning the subject. The call to the perversion of sacrifice and submission is the call of the ‘generalized perversion of late capitalism, (where) transgression itself is solicited.’”42 If we go to the limit in this direction, “it would even be possible to maintain that this is the ultimate message of Christ’s sacrifice: you can indulge in your desires, and enjoy; I took the price for it upon myself!”43 Political liberation cannot solicit more and more perverse desires as transgression is solicited as a mechanism of perverse submission to an Other. For example, the ‘freedom’ of ever more perverse desires, weaponizing all aspects of life, “machismo” as Stoic-emotional cynicism as an affront to the insecurity of the bulky musculature of patriotism—the most patriotic signifiers solicited to transgress, and to sacrifice their lives  On Belief, pg. 68.  On Belief, pg. 20. 43  The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, pg. 49. 41 42

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as such examples, as the true-believers that they possess the missing piece that the Other is lacking. Communist movements in the past, say the twentieth-century movements that utilized repression and violence as tactical maneuvers to suppress hysteria, were using tactics that were precisely the opposite of what liberatory politics “ought” to be. Freedom-from supplanted for perversion and total submission. This is why psychoanalysis must take part in the next waves of communist difference, rather than merely mirroring capitalist egoism which demands its own gratification by the submission of the Other to its wishes. The hysteric tears off in autonomy, the bondsman no longer acknowledging/ recognizing the interpellating call of the Lord.44 That which is in the subject more than even (s)he knows.

Structure and Event “The relationship between the Structure and its Event is indeterminable. One the one hand, the Event is the impossible Real of a structure, of its synchronous symbolic order, the engendering of violent gesture which brings about the legal Order that renders this very gesture retroactively ‘illegal,’ relegating it to the spectral repressed status of something that can never be fully acknowledged-symbolized-confessed.”45 The synchronous structural Order is a kind of defense-formation against its grounding the Event, which can only be discerned retroactively in the guise of a mythical spectral narrative. Jacques Lacan’s famous statement during the Paris May ’68 student and worker solidarity movement that “structures walk in the streets of Paris.” We might as well say, in January of 2021, “structures walked directly into the Capitol building.” This was a revolution without revolution. The structures that stormed the capital were perverse structures. As Lacan said to the protests of May ’68 in Paris, they want a master-­signifier,  Phenomenology of Spirit. Lordship and Bondage, pg. 111. For the best treatment of this, see Judith Butler’s Psychic Life of Power, and Subjects of Desire. 45  Fragile Absolute, pg. 92. 44

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and that is what they are going to get! The same can be said of the perverted fundamentalists among the “moral majority” who exemplify this perverse desire to return to the Primal-Father. What Žižek refers to time and time again as an Imaginary construct that supports the real itself. The fact of the matter is that the state exists; even if it’s an imaginary construct/projection, it takes an actual form. There is something in the human psyche that wants the state to exist as it is, and, just as in Žižek’s analysis of the Iranian novel Palace of Dreams, there is a way that the state is the accumulation of all of the perverse fantasies of the populace that it alleges to represent. The palace of dreams, called the Tabir Sarrail, takes place in an unnamed Balkan empire loosely based on the Ottoman Empire where bureaucrats work tirelessly in the palace, collecting the dreams of the empire’s subjects. The hope is to figure out the “Master-Dream” that everyone is searching for, and the censors in real life at the time, banned the book two weeks after it was published; by that time, however, the book had already sold out of its first print run. Yet the dialog between two characters in the novel serve the Cartesian point that Žižek makes: “In my opinion,” Kurt said, “it is the only organization in the state where the darker side of the subject’s consciousness enters into direct contact with the state itself.” He looked around at everyone present, as if to assess the effect of his words. “The masses don’t rule of course,” he continued, “but they do possess a mechanism through which they influence the state’s affairs, including its crimes. And that mechanism is the Tabir Sarrail.” “Do you mean to say,” asked the cousin, “that the masses are to a certain extent responsible for everything that happens, and so should to a certain extent feel guilty about it?” “Yes,” said Kurt. Then, more firmly, “In a way, yes.”46

When we read Žižek on this point, we should not think that there is some hidden intelligent being behind the scenes pulling the strings. As if 46

 Ismail Kadare, The Palace of Dreams, New York: Arcade Publishing, 1988, pg. 63.

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the political power has some grand masterplan that is hidden from the general public. As Schelling once said, to paraphrase, one cannot imply an intelligence simply because it appears to be from within the context of nature; nature may, in fact be a form that came into being without intelligence. In a way, Descartes slips into the bizarre realm of the Tabir Sarrail, insofar as the mind can generate its own productive imaginary constructs, insofar as it does not recoil back into the security of a Big-Other/God character whose presence is felt, even if the presence is unreal. This is the strange contradiction of human existence; that even though consciousness is produced by material conditions, each mind is bound with its own individual consciousness that is separate from all other minds. Yet this individual mind is part of a collective dream-work compiled of all the individual minds imagining and dreaming in imbrication with other minds. There never will be the one-singular “Master-Dream” once and for all;, that is absurd to even think about as something to discover. Just as with the cosmologists who truly believe they can devise a theory of everything with the right equations in theoretical quantum physics, there is no “actual” mapping of the quilting point. These physicists are literally searching for “God” in the math of nature; even though many of them claim to be atheists, they are nothing more than Spinozist-pantheists, as are the Big-Data gatherers who seek the “Master-Dream” with which to market perfectly to every single human being on earth. As if this master-­ dream will turn out to be something deeper than we are walking talking apes who think about sex all day. There is little more depth to most people, but the game is played in such a way that one must conceal the dull aspects of the truth with the fascinating mysteries of mystical thinking, the fact that there is no ‘real kernel’ to be exposed. It is odd that early on in his writing, Žižek staked his claim as an adamant Cartesian and one has to think that, even at that time while he was claiming to be a card-carrying Lacanian, the opening lines of Ticklish Subject as pro-Cartesian can clearly be read as Žižek staking his own ground as a fundamentally unique philosopher of “the Subject.” If you see the lines that open Lacan’s famous text “The Mirror Stage as formative of the I…” at the close of the first paragraph Lacan states that the

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formation of the “I” in psychoanalysis, “leads us to oppose any philosophy directly issuing from the Cogito.”47 One should recollect the question quite bluntly put to Žižek by Jordan Peterson in their much-touted debate. It is, I think, a fair challenge to make of Žižek: ‘Why was it that at a certain point in your philosophical life you decided that the promotion of Marxism rather than Žižekism was appropriate?’ In Descartes’ writings, the sixth meditation makes it clear that the dualism between the mind and the body occurs at the level of where thoughts arise. Ideas arise out of pure understanding. The mind interprets some external phenomena in a purely mental capacity where the thing is contemplated without any intrusion from the appetitive, or bodily, stimuli that interrupt the process of the mind thinking about its object. Imagination, or Imago, derives from bodily stimuli which input information from the stimuli, through the senses into a thought, or image, that arises in the brain. Descartes has in mind a modicum of physicalism in this characterization of imagination. The smell emanating from a tasty meal may flow into the nostrils from the air which gives off the pleasant aroma, stimulating a feeling of hunger—and anticipation about eating the delicious meal. This is imagination in the way that the aroma stimulates the senses; the thing is not yet experienced and although the thing has made contact with the senses and passes through the body in the form of its aroma, the thing can only produce an image in the mind. “Is there not a God, or whatever I may call him, who puts into me the thoughts I am now having?”48 It is hard to ignore the ideological undertones in this fundamental Cartesian question. Is the mode of production simply reiterating the ideas amenable to producing the ethos of capitalism? Even Marx and Engels make this point in the Communist Manifesto, stating that the mode of production is a mode of social reproduction in their first footnote defining the terms of their critique. Yet, if history is indeed weighing like a nightmare upon the living, then Žižek’s use of the Hegelian  Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection, The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience, Norton: New York, 1977, pg. 1. 48  Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, translated by John Cottingham, Cambridge University Press: New York, 1988, pg. 80. 47

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concept of the “aufhebung” (sublation) gets to the ways in which this nightmare is rationalized on a meta-social level. Žižek, who often deploys the “aufhebung” in various spots throughout his work, defines it in Less Than Nothing by referring to it: “as a movement through which every contingent particularity is aufgehoben (sublated) in its universal notion.”49 Whether or not there is a “negation of negation” is another story altogether; those who take the work of Adorno seriously tend to take it at face value that there always is a negation of negation. The ‘negation of negation’ occurs not in this sort of antithetical movement of negation in any discursive sense, but in the overturning of the object into its opposite. An uncovering of a difference from within itself; an “absolute recoil” as the term originated in Hegel and was often utilized by Žižek. An absolute recoil implies the speculative coincidence of opposites in the movement by which a thing emerges out of its own loss, the secret alliance between the dignity of the Law (as felt from a noumenal ‘Big Other’/super-ego), and its obscene transgression.50

Political Correctness as Cynical Detachment Ticklish Subject, widely considered to be one of Slavoj Žižek’s most important early period works, even by his own assessment. There he had so many pertinent theorizations on oppression that still remain quite timely. In particular, the understanding that breaking the frame makes for necessary ideological deconstruction. Žižek’s assessment that cynicism is an indifferent detachment is a key component of Slavoj Žižek’s conceptualization of his critique of ideology throughout most of his books. That liberation is the first step in ridding the self of the imaginary sinthome; the next step is to transform the content of one’s own position, meaning one has to change from slave-morality to master-morality, and there are citations from Slavoj Žižek that allude to what a turn to the Greeks might mean for Žižek. The point of this chapter is to hypothesize  Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing, pg. 471.  Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil, pg. 1–2.

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a Žižek in the spirit of the later Foucault’s turn to the Greeks in imagining a Hermeneutics of the Subject, and the volumes of the History of Sexuality. What would a Žižekian turn to the Greeks look like? How might this influence the ways philosophers might revisit an interpretation of the world? A return to thinking, rather than rushing to change things too quickly, because, as we have seen, in the twentieth century the rush to create anti-capitalist changes ended in another replication of master/ slave relations in the form of state power. What we see now is a ressentiment among those who claim to know the true-evils of state power while trumpeting a triumphalism of capitalism as the only true form of freedom; if that is the only definition of freedom, then the future is doomed. Perhaps it is best to return to the past and as a favorite movie from the Hollywood culture industry of the 1980s that waxes nostalgic for members of my generation—we go back to the future by revisiting the past (à la Benjamin’s appropriate orthodoxy for progress as in the case of the early Žižek). Submission as the predominant religious way of life. Reproduction has no intelligence behind it, there is no plan, and it is not about fulfilling needs. It is about continuing the circuit of reproduction with surplus-value; if a product fulfills a “need” but does not continue the circuit of production and reproduction with the added surplus-value extracted, then, in capitalism, the product does not gain access to the market. Yet the only way that an economy can survive is if it also has enough to reproduce non-workers in some capacity. Children, elderly retired or infirm, handicapped, those who are chronically sick and need medical care, those who are mentally unable to work, the circuits of reproduction must also find a way to keep non-productive folks reproducing their basic needs, or else the system crumbles.51

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 Rosa Luxemburg. Accumulation of Capital. New York, Verso, 2003, pg. 49–50.

8 What Does It Mean to Be Free?: Hermeneutics of Freedom

Žižek has held the position, again and again, that we are not spontaneously free, and this is one of the reasons why he has claimed his philosophy is a rehabilitation of the “master signifier” discourse, to provoke an awakening. In some regards he is akin to Socrates, who self-applied his nickname as the “Gadfly of Athens,” stinging and biting the slumbering horse (which represented the Athenian city-state), and stirring it into a gallop. Obviously, this would become a main focal point of my book, incorporating more recent publications from Žižek into his earlier understanding of “freedom” and the unique way that he thinks about “utopia” within the parameters of a radical project, which I see as a bit like the Socratic “Gadfly;” stirring up an awakening among the apathetic political situation of postmodernism, but not necessarily positing a finished conclusion. Rather, he is motivated by asking the provocative questions that reveal latent contradictions concealed within ideological thinking. In the documentary film Žižek! he is interviewed and asked: what is the core of his thought? And, while he remarks that most philosophers try to think about an object, his work is something totally different. Rather than start from the framework of an objective question “Are we free or not?,” and then debating ‘Yes,’ or ‘No,’ which amounts to a vicious circle

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with no answers. He claims his work is based on a “hermeneutic question: it is not, are we free or not, but what does it mean to be free?” On freedom, Žižek sometimes forwards a seemingly paradoxical view that Calvinism carries within it the true core of Christian metaphysics. If predestination is the true interpretation of Christianity, this means that we do not know if we are predestined to go to heaven or not. What does this mean for “freedom” and how can we disentangle this from so many appropriations of Christianity in Žižek’s work? It means that if there is a “destiny,” a redeeming moral to the story to all of the suffering in the world, the meaning of that destiny is concealed from us, and therefore our destiny should not fall on us like a burden. We are currently burdened with uncertainty about our fate. Žižek also provides a carefully positioned critique of Leibniz’s ‘sufficient reason’ which ultimately leads to apathy. However, the provocation of freedom occurs through contingencies that are only rendered visible when the contradictions and antagonisms invisible from a vantage point within the structure are so immense that a new utopia is the only possibility to sustain life, the Real of an antagonism. “In social life, for example, what the multitude of ideological symbolizations-narrativizations fails to render is not society’s self-identity, but its antagonisms, the constitutive splitting of the body politic.”1

Guilt-Free and Still Unfree Freedom is a strange concept, because freedom cannot be reducible to form. Any reduction to form is an apparatus of capture and a reification of power; therefore, it is a subject position that is unfree. The more that someone tries to capture the notion of freedom, the more one is met with resistance. Let me turn to a comparison between Žižek and Nietzsche. For Nietzsche, the predominant way that morality seeps into our conscience is through the herd mentality. Our desire, born from our evolutionary past, is to stick with others and to find security from finding signals in what others are doing, so that you do not get left behind. This marks a  Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters, pg. 100–1

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desire to find security from a deep feeling of insecurity, and this herd instinct, among those who enable a slave-morality in themselves, can undermine our individuality through ingraining a deeply held fear of doing wrong in the eyes of the herd. Since traditions have been deeply imprinted upon the herd, even to the point of becoming subconscious desires, the individual who transgresses the rules laid out by traditional values, may feel an internal “sting of conscience.”2 Most of Nietzsche’s readers are aware of his thesis on the sting of conscience, which he carefully describes as the herd’s remorse, as a solicitation for the reader to call forth an ubermensch mentality to transvalue values by relieving oneself of the guilt and shame by transcending the herd’s remorse. Felt internally as the ‘sting of conscience.’ What lay-­ readers and scholars often miss is the very next portion of this aphorism, which will tie in nicely with Žižek’s thesis. Right after describing the ‘sting of conscience’ Nietzsche immediately writes: “The sting of conscience was not at all what it is now. Today one feels responsible only for one’s will and actions, and one finds one’s pride in oneself. All our teachers of law start from this sense of self and pleasure in the individual as if this had always been the fount of law.”3

Rather than alleviate the ‘sting of conscience,’ which will leave the Last Man with only a nihilistic a-moral sense of decadent pleasure-seeking as the purpose to life, the way that modern and postmodern power creeps into the slave is through the pleasure-principle as the objet petit a (in us more than we know). One can still remain under the spell of power, while remaining guilt-­ free. In Stanley Milgram’s famous experiments on obedience, one of the less talked-about insights discovered was that people were not intrinsically motivated to commit acts of violence. A majority of the participants in the study tended to protest electro-shocking the subjects. The initial response when asked to shock the subjects was to refuse. What was fascinating about this study was the way that obedience was gained by  Nietzsche. The Joyful Science. Aphorism #117.  Ibid.

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alleviating the guilt of the tester. If the authority figure took the responsibility for the violence enacted by the tester, this alleviated the guilt of the tester, and cleansed their moral conscience regarding the shame which might have been felt. If an authority figure can alleviate the guilt associated with committing an act of violence, then the subject felt freed up to enact violence beyond what they would normally do—for example, roughly two-thirds of the testers in the Milgram experiment were willing to administer potentially lethal electric shocks when encouraged to do so by what they perceived to be a legitimate authority figure. When the testers protested and wanted to stop, if the alleged authority figure alleviated their guilt and claimed to take responsibility for their actions by saying, “I will take the blame for your actions, I take full responsibility for the results of this experiment, we must proceed, the experiment must continue.” This alleviation of guilt made it most likely that the person would proceed with what they perceived as a lethal use of electric shocks. It is not “obey, you must do this or else!” via fear and a threat of force; the alleviation of guilt from a sovereign figure communicates the messages to subjects that the use of violence is encouraged and perhaps even applauded, that there will not be consequences for those who behave with impunity towards perceived enemies of the state. The alleviation of guilt is a much more effective tactic to exacerbate violence, than blind obedience through strict commands and orders. This is what Stanley Milgram eventually referred to as the “agentic state,” where a subject acts out the orders of a perceived authority figure acting as their agent. Especially if the authority does not make an explicit statement demanding obedience, the authority can exert power over the agent by alleviating the feeling of guilt and alleviating the perception that consequences will be incurred upon the authority and not the agent.

Freedom and Sadness We are not free spontaneously. As Lacan teaches us, “there are people who have all their heart desires and are still sad. Sadness is a passion of quite another color.”4 If Lacan and Freud teach us about the way in which the  Jacques Lacan, The Psychoses 1955–56 Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book III, pg. 6.

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super-ego commands its subjects as a positive injunction to enjoy, not a prohibition or restriction on desires. Ideology is what appears to the subject as desire itself; ideology is what forms the subject in its innermost fantasies and desires, in it more than it knows. If we cannot see this, and enjoy it unreflectively, then we have already fallen under the spell of ideology. Ideology is what “they are doing without knowing they are doing it” precisely because whatever “it” is, it just feels right. We can be awash in jouissance, pleasure, enjoyment, and what some refer to as akin to “happiness” and use this as a method of escapism from our deeper feelings of sadness. Typically, a deeper sense of trauma. As psychoanalysis makes clear, the cut of the trauma recurs in unusual ways. It recurs in memory on a subconscious level its cause concealed from the consciousness of the subject and it recurs in epiphenomenal aspects, where the epiphenomenal events in the brain are the cause of mental events and these events have no causality in physical reality beyond the brain. In some sense the recurrence of a trauma can find its trigger in events totally unrelated to the initial pain, or triggers occur without any stimuli at all, hence these can be viewed as misplaced affects. Freedom is never displacement of sadness; it is a confrontation with it and yet the process of being free can only occur through a process of securing freedom.

F reedom and Automatons: Robo-Rats “doing it, but they do not know” In Žižek’s recent work, his views on brain-events breaks with this internalist epiphenomenalism instead favoring an externalist view of the mind. He says that the shortcomings of Elon Musk’s Neuro Link Project is that it takes internalism for granted as the basis of all mental events. Years before the proposed Neuro Link Project, Žižek asks an important question. This was in the light of the scientific experiment in which the first cyberman, Matt Nagle, controlled a cursor on a computer screen through the BrainGate neurological input system. He had knowledge that his brain was moving the cursor, and freely chose to partake in the experiments because he was paralyzed from a stab wound from which he would later die.

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Scientists have had the ability to control “robo-rats” by remote control since the early 2000s. The question Žižek asks is at the center of the entire controversy over digital control over human consciousness. Does the robo-rat, whose consciousness is controlled through smooth-space on a much deeper level than Matt’s Nagle was, experience the remote controlling of its consciousness as an external force acting upon it? Or, is the robo-rat experiencing the remote controlled movements as if they are its own? If it is the latter, then we are sunk, ideologically speaking. This is how ideology creeps in, unbeknownst to the subject as if it is its own beliefs, movements, and the subject truly believes that these are grounded in its own desires (rather than, being in itself more than even it knows as the objet petit a). This is how ideology creeps in, as if it is part of your identity, a part of you even more than you know. A subject falls prey to the forces of ideology like the robo-rat that does not know its movements are commanded by remote control. This is akin to the soldier in Alien who carries the alien within his breast (near and dear to his heart, not coincidentally); and only realizes there is an alien within him, only realizes his alienation in the sense that the ends of labor power are expropriated elsewhere, when the alien bursts out of his chest. Smooth space capitalism is just like this, insofar as every bourgeois figure in our times would dream of having control to the point where frictionless capitalism can be achieved.

Freedom as “Revolution without a Revolution” “Did you want a revolution without a revolution?”—Robespierre

As the famous formula from Robespierre clearly states, there is a way that the desire for a radical change in the world is truncated by the prospect of actually changing the material conditions of oppression. Immediate enjoyment provokes no challenge for the instincts to resist, against which the instinctual drives are forced to exert more force to push through the object in its path. What Nietzsche referred to as “anti-nature” or, what

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some might identify as the repression of instincts, can foster creativity. Because those instincts either wither away, or are diverted and require creative measures to blossom forth like flowers that have to push through the pavement. If the plant has an obstacle against which to push, as it conquers resistance, it grows stronger. The same with instincts that Christianity has posited as virtues. Nietzsche refers to this as the spiritualization of sensuality, and this is commonly called another name—Love. For Žižek, as we have shown, this means picking out one singular individual above everyone else, which, in this regard, Christianity channels the force of sensual desire into an inherently evil act. The violent act of setting the beloved “one” above everything and everyone else.

F ree to Articulate the Conditions of Our Unfreedom There is a now famous joke that occurs in Welcome to the Desert of the Real: “In the now defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: ‘Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it’s true; if it’s written in red ink, it’s false.’ After a month, his friends get the first letter: ‘Everything is wonderful here. The shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing you can’t get is red ink.’”

The point that this joke makes is that we believe our presence is identical to our freedom, until it is brought to our attention that we lack the tools necessary to articulate our unfreedom. One starts to agree that one is free, until one sees that there is a lack of “red ink”.

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Freedom: Interconnectedness and Security Interconnectedness and security are the social a-priori that make freedom possible. Freedom without security and interconnectedness is no such freedom. The point is that the new theory of freedom has to move from “monadic” theories of the self in isolation to philosophies that imply interconnectedness and security as the necessary social a-priori which makes freedom possible. The tools for this kind of analysis, this kind of reimagining of the concept of freedom are squarely within the texts and oeuvre of publications offered by Slavoj Žižek, and so, strangely, this is not necessarily a reimagining. Rather, this is a differential repetition of what was already there, concealed in plain sight, but now rendered palpable for those still aware enough to ponder the questions that political philosophy has to offer. One thing to realize is that “Philosophy is emphatically not about the ‘beliefs’ of different individual persons.”5 In stating what philosophy is, through clarification with Deleuze and Derrida, one might echo Žižek’s statement that, “philosophy today can be practiced only in the mode of meta philosophy, as a reading of (other) philosophers.”6 Not just a comparative report on whether or not different opinions are correct or incorrect, the organic interweaving of positions is what Hegel referred to as the “self-movement of the Notion,”7 and one of the many reasons why Hegel is so important to understanding modern philosophy, particularly in the continental practice, is that his system did not necessarily correct the mistakes of those who went before him, but rather passed from “Kant’s openness and indeterminacy to the notion’s complete actualization/ determination,”8 and in echoing the “parallax view” of a shift from one perspective immanent within the same absolute to another perspective, also subsumed within the same absolute: “what if ‘absolute knowing’ is not the absurd position of knowing everything, but the insight into how  Slavoj Žižek. Organs Without Bodies, pg. 50  Ibid., pg. 47. 7  Ibid., pg. 50. 8  Ibid., pg. 58. 5 6

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the path towards Truth is already Truth itself.” To put it succinctly, “how the Absolute is precisely—to put it in Deleuzian terms—the virtuality of the eternal process of its own actualization?”9 Žižek claims that this is: “the very heart of the problem of freedom: the only way to save freedom is through this short circuit between epistemology and ontology—the moment we reduce our process of knowledge to a process external to the thing itself, to an endless approximation to the thing, freedom is lost, because “reality” is conceived of as a completed positive order of Being, as a full and exhaustive ontological domain.”10 Yet, this is the antinomy that occurs in the last portion of the first section of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason where “On the one hand, the subject is free in the noumenal sense—its freedom attests to the fact that it does not belong to the realm of the phenomenal enchainment of causes and effects, that it is capable of absolute spontaneity. On the other hand, spontaneity is transcendental, not transcendent: it is the way the subject appears to itself—as we learn in the final paragraphs of Part I of the Critique of Practical Reason,11 it may well be that, in ourselves at the noumenal level, we are just marionettes in the hands of the all-powerful God. The only solution is here the Hegel-­Deleuzian one: to transpose the incompleteness and openness (the surplus of the virtual over the actual, of the problem over its solutions) into the thing itself.”12

This is why, perhaps tongue in cheek, nevertheless with all seriousness in the sense that Bertolt Brecht also once wrote that there is no dialectics without humor, Žižek can claim that “if there ever was a philosopher of unconditional immanence, it is Hegel.”13 This is because the elementary procedural dimension to truth is not out-there beyond ourselves, but is, as exemplified by Hegel’s motto in the Phenomenology of Spirit, in the sense that the distinction between For-us and In-itself is itself “for us;” in the sense that what appears true is what appears to us as a thing, in itself,  Ibid., pg. 58.  Ibid., pg. 58. 11  Žižek’s reference is to the last portion of the first section of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, “Of the Wise Adaptation of Man’s Cognitive Faculties to His Practical Destination.” 12  Ibid., pg. 58. 13  Ibid., pg. 53. 9

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in a certain way. Our fantasies are structured into the nature of what appears and misinformation does not mean that we are denied access to the Thing-in-itself, rather, the “antinomic or contradictory character of our experience of a Thing is what brings us into direct contact with it.”14 The subject is in a very real sense—tickled by the object, and through the subject as an non-reified, unfinished, sublime object of ideology, which is structured through the fantasy of commodity fetishism and as the unfinished, ever-present, perennially incomplete quest to gain/pursue money/ mommy. Which is the “barred-subject;” that which is there but cannot be rendered apparent as an actual corporeal object of our desire, but structures subjectivity through the act of being barred. It is no coincidence that the symbol for the barred subject in Lacan’s work is the exact same as the symbol for money, the dollar-sign $.

Freedom-From Money Whenever people fully within the throes of capitalist ideology talk about freedom it is through the construct of money as carrying intrinsic value. Money is understood to be the pathway to freedom, rather than a tool for servitude, and people believe this because money is believed to bring the Imaginary of enjoyment. For most people under the spell of the “cash-­ nexus” in capitalism, the idea of freedom starts and stops with “Freedom-to” obtain money. Freedom to get money means someone must act within the framework of money and the metaphysics of value. If humans are only free to obtain money and spend money, then freedom is curtailed because human action is circumscribed by market forces and therefore human action is unfree. Money can be a fetish. In terms of a fetish, this means that there is a difference and a potential for overlap with the symptom. For example, a question to consider is: why is there a rebranding process occurring in postmodern late capitalism where the “malignant” aspect of a thing is removed from the Thing? Why must there be an extirpation of the painful, destructive, aspect of the thing which provokes suffering? It is the  Ibid., pg. 53.

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attempted removal of the Thanotic (or the “death”) drive. Money functions as a way to accelerate this process of removing the malignant aspect from life. Take this example of “conscious uncoupling” as the term now used for getting a divorce. Its use signifies a sort of clinical objectivity about the departure of the beloved, and, in many cases, the response later on is that the partners in the broken marriage are so objective about the divorce that their response is to say “I was never truly in love, in fact, I do not know what love is, I have never truly experienced love.” This alleged “objectivity” narrativized the monumental history of the partnership, and the memory of the record of the marriage itself, as cold, clinical, distant, and “objective” to barricade the subject from pathos, from the fact that there was love and it faded away. It hurts more to think that there was love lost rather than to say that there was never any love whatsoever. This is the same reason why people use money. Money ($—as a barred signifier) serves as a barricade, a shield against bonds and attachments that might be necessary if the person were to do the task for free, as a friend, or as someone in love. This is why people pay for therapists and for prostitutes. The money serves as an “objective” barrier whereby the alleged professional who enacts the service is then removed without the pain of attachment. As the saying goes, the John does not pay the prostitute for the sex, the John pays the prostitute to leave by morning. The same principle goes for the therapist who takes the place of a friend. Therapists are paid so that when the session is over, the talking stops and so-called “real life” can continue, whereas for the friends who perhaps meet up at a coffee shop and who talk with each other for free, the conversation can build closer attachments. This is because it is not barricaded by money, and the conversation is not bounded by the time of a clinical session (an hour and it is over). Friends in a coffee shop can chat for as long as they have free time; the time is free, and therefore it is not barricaded by the “objective”-mediation of Money ($), which bars the actual connection, an actual connection which hurts much worse when a betrayal occurs; the same holds true for the prostitute as opposed to a beloved. If a prostitute sleeps with other Johns it is expected, no pain occurs, it is her job; if a beloved, who is allegedly seeing you for free, breaks the bond of a loving intimate relationship

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and betrays that social bond by being intimate with someone else, there is pain there. That’s unfortunately what Money bars from the subject, and that is one of the many reasons why there are more narcissists building self-enclosed circuits of “utopia” unto themselves today, for fear of disrupting the self-enclosed harmony by allowing an actual-Other in, which inevitably disrupts the narcissistic enclosure one has built for oneself. The problem is that if human life on this planet is going to persist, there must be massive intrusions into the daily syllogism of consumer/ distribution/production patterns15 of capitalism. It seems impossible to say that these flows will ever shut down, and yet, during the COVID-19 pandemic, prior to the invention of a vaccine, the bourgeoisie, the proletariat, and the lumpenproletariat were exposed to death (perhaps not equally, because those without healthcare were not at even odds to get a ventilator, whereas the rich could be put on one of the scarce ventilators for the right price). Voila! World markets were shut down?! Only to open back up again, with the pro-conservative right-wing media espousing anti-vaccination and anti-masking propaganda when the vaccines were invented. This anti-vaccination and anti-masking propaganda served as an exposure of the symptom, because even though the elites on the right wing were all securing themselves against the virus by taking the vaccines, they were perfectly fine with leaving their workers exposed to sickness in the name of “freedom.” Clearly, that kind of “freedom” requires re-­ evaluation via critique. In a method popularized ad nauseum by Jacques Derrida we can perhaps find one of the more revealing anecdotes in the footnotes of a work rather than the text itself. One of the more humorous (and therefore honest in the sense of Paulius’s line—if you make the plebs laugh, they will obey their lashings) statements from Žižek occurs in a footnote: “Is not the obvious thing for an analyst the root Envy in the infamous penis envy? Rather than succumbing to this temptation, one should emphasize that envy is ultimately the envy of the Other’s jouissance. My affluent business-­oriented colleagues always marvel at how much work I put into theory and, comparatively, how little I earn; although their marvel is usually expressed in aggressive scorn (“How stupid you are to deal with the Karl Marx, Introduction to the Grundrisse.

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ory!”). What obviously lurks behind this is envy: the idea that, since I am not doing it for money (or power), and since they do not get the reason, I am doing it, there must be some strange jouissance, some satisfaction in theory accessible only to me, out of reach of them…”16

This is a call to what Žižek refers to as the Leninist freedom of choice, which differentiates between the ideological choice of “Life or Money!,” which is under the delusion of money, towards the communist revolutionary choice “Life or Critique!”17 Which begs the question with regard to freedom Lenin is best known: “Freedom, yes, but for WHOM? To do WHAT?”18 “…what I would long for is to prove how revolutionary practice is also, that there is a certain revolutionary moment that is structured like the analytic discourse. That the Leninist leader is not a master but the one who presents the split subject with a deadlock, this is the Leninist point of knowledge. That you have knowledge at the place of truth, and you produce, but produce precisely in the sense that you get rid of it in the sense that you disclose the master signifier. And on the other hand, I am well aware that we can play these games but then you ask yourself, so what is the big deal if you somehow squeeze a certain Leninist practice into the analytic discourse. And you know Badiou told me that even he oscillates here. Badiou is tempted by this. At the same time Badiou has this long tendency to assert, for him the typically French totalitarian discourse of the master, but also to say why should the discourse of the master be bad?”19

Freedom as Calvinist Predestination If we tear away the escarpment of ideology, revealing the symptom that holds the world together, it seems odd to figure Calvinism as *the* master discourse of Christianity. This is because even though the Calvinists  On Belief, pg. 157.  Ibid., pg. 113–126. 18  Ibid., pg. 113. 19  Ian Parker. Critical Psychology: A Conversation with Slavoj Žižek. Annual Review of Critical Psychology, 7, pg. 355–373. 16 17

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believed in predestination there was no way of knowing whether or not one had been selected to go to Heaven. Therefore, this gap in knowledge means that there is no sign or clue from the heavens that would indicate whether or not Grace had been predestined by God. Doctrinally, salvation becomes untethered from causality derived from works and one has to conclude that if your salvation (or damnation) is already written up above, you can do whatever you want here on earth because it will not change the results. If, on the other hand, you are burdened with free will (in the neoliberal sense of ‘moral choices determine your credit score’ and other Weberian Protestant ethic in capitalist ideas) changes the outcome, then you need to make “good” choices, because you can choose your way into damnation, and, since you can choose, you always shoulder the burden of your own salvation. In Calvinism, predestination puts the burden squarely on God, who destined you before you were born, which means you are free to live as if the outcome is guaranteed or not regardless of what actions you take, God would have already known in advance and therefore the power is not up to you. No matter what choices you appear to make, it is already a part of God’s greater plan. We must understand the absolute terror that the existentialist provokes who believes we are thrown into the world as free, if there is no backdrop of immortality; interestingly enough in the sense of the eternal, as a future project, the only motivation would be the pathos of history as a confusedly fermenting element. Kierkegaard explains this when he says: “If a consciousness of the eternal were not implanted in man; if the basis of all that exists were but a confusedly fermenting element which, convulsed by obscure passions, produced all, both the great and the insignificant; if under everything there lay a bottomless void never to be filled—what else were life but despair?” Kierkegaard’s thesis is that man *must* invent a sense of ‘the Eternal’ implanted in the subject by the subject, rather than ad initio (at initiation), as a future project to aspire towards, in order to stay grounded in ethical actions. Nevertheless, this is precisely the opposite of what actually seems to enable interpassivity. Organized religions, in fact, reduce ethical agency in the here and now by imprinting a sense of “the Eternal” on their believers. If someone dies but their life does not truly end, this

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belief structure seems to produce subjects compliant with self-sacrifice. Because it takes the malignant aspects out of death (immortality is death without the ‘end’ of life). Therefore, if you do not truly die, then your sacrifice is not a fatal blow, and it is easier to accept. The despair that Kierkegaard speaks of, is a despair that if the leap of faith ends the consciousness of the Knight of Faith, then the sacrifice will not be rewarded with eternal bliss, and will not be rewarded with the retrospective gaze that the living subject takes for granted as giving life meaning while alive. As detailed in the first chapter, the meaning of life is only understood retroactively; if there is nothing after our life, then there is no retroactive meaning to anticipate on the other side of this life and, therefore, our freedom to create our own precursors ends, as does our creative freedom. There must be a virtual idea of the Eternal to sustain our attention in pursuit of future projects. However, there is no guarantee that this Eternal realm can appear as an actual corporeal realm. Noumenalism of the Eternal must remain as a senseless reality beyond the horizon of meaning. Kant endeavors to explain what would happen if we were to gain access to the noumenal domain, to the noumenal as an appearance: “Instead of the conflict which now the moral disposition has to wage with inclinations and in which, after some defeats, moral strength of mind may be gradually won, God and eternity in their awful majesty would stand unceasingly before our eyes… Thus, most actions conforming to the law would be done from fear, few would be done from hope, none from duty. The moral worth of actions, on which alone the worth of the person and even of the world depends in the eyes of supreme wisdom, would not exist at all. The conduct of man, so long as his nature remained as it is now, would be changed into mere mechanism, where, as in a puppet show, everything would gesticulate well but no life would be found in the figures.”20

In a brilliantly odd way Žižek reads the predestination offered by Calvinism as the penultimate thesis on freedom. “Predestination does  Immanuel Kant. Critique of Practical Reason. “Of the Wise Adaptation of Man’s Cognitive Faculties to his Practical Vocation.”

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not mean that since everything is determined in advance we are not really free; rather, it involves an even more radical freedom than the ordinary one, the freedom to retroactively determine (that is, change) one’s Destiny itself.”21 This means extricating oneself from desires that have been created for us in order to make us pliable to consumerism, and resistant to constructing our consciousness from a position of capitalist apperception where all knowledge resolves into a synthesis with “truths” that figure into prior knowledge. For example, when Immanuel Kant makes a rather oblique statement such as this one, which are common throughout his three critiques: “Accordingly, to cogitate the world, which fills all spaces, as a whole, the successive synthesis of the parts of an infinite world must be looked upon as completed, that is to say, an infinite time must be regarded as having elapsed in the enumeration of all coexisting things, which is impossible.”22

It seems obvious that if we exist and can experience the passage of time as temporal, then we are not yet at the end of time, and, therefore, the world cannot be looked upon as completed. Therefore, the meta-narratives of a grand destiny as already determined in the mind of God can only make sense if and only if the mind of God perceives after the end of the world, and thusly, after the temporal experience of time. In other words, the theory of everything (“absolute Mind”) can only find itself in full knowledge after the destruction of temporality, after time stops, after the end of the world when the mind of God reveals itself via revelation, the revealing of the Thing concealed behind the curtain of our partial knowledge. Hence, these ideologies of concealment are always destructive ideologies that must force the revelation beyond that which is concealed (which turns out to be the nothingness of being, that which provokes the anxiety of desire in the mind of those in denial about the absurd nature of existence); or the destruction of all. Cosmic veiling must force the end of time, or else it has no meaningful purpose to fulfill as its destiny.  Living in the End Times, pg. 401.  Critique of Pure Reason, pg. 181

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Stay Positive, Things Only Get worse As the pace of life seems accelerating, less and less seems to change. Even as greater and greater change becomes necessary to our survival as a species, the changes that occur seem more and more superficial. If Žižek’s thesis is that the cynical gap so common in the production of postmodern affects is the ideology that allows the continuation of late capitalism—what is the alternative? There must be something else because there are perhaps only two alternatives to this cynical gap. On the one hand, the return to a more humanist, “new sincerity” as literary critics associate with the work of David Foster Wallace. A cynical gap is a fear of being fully human, of investing oneself fully in existence for fear of failure, suffering, being hurt. Yet, even in Foster’s work, in Infinite Jest, the move to a new sincerity is a failure because it links the subject with a greater libidinal investment into matrices of capitalism. Big data will mine your patterns of consumption and produce content, send it back, and circulate it insofar as new cultural forms of entertainment will be imbricated with a greater awareness of how the audience experiences empathy and compassion, to apprehend a market share of attention one must apprehend the audience, the best way to do this is to provoke a tear, a laugh, and the society of spectacle (from politics to movies) all want to master the art of gaining market share (attentive viewers). If you invest yourself fully into the matrix, you simply fall further into the matrix. David Foster Wallace perhaps realized this aporia, this dead end. In his book, the title Infinite Jest, while a reference to the famous passage from Shakespeare; and the existential aspects of nihilism that are disavowed in our entertainment, the narrative centers around addictions, and consumers amusing themselves to distract from deeper nihilistic strands of meaning that are haunting the West. The other option, besides maintaining this cynical gap or falling for the seductions of the matrix and digging further channels of libidinal investment, thereby imbricating oneself to modes of desiring production, is to create a new “communist” matrix.

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How is that even possible without alerting everyone else and making a world where everyone else is willing to unplug themselves from the matrix and join your “communist” matrix? The question is not “Why do the machines enslave the people into the matrix?”; but the more provocative question: “Why do the people need to be enslaved by the matrix?”

 eal Subsumption, a Problem R Rendered Invisible We should remember the horrors of January 6th. Not the storming of the American Capitol Building by neo-fascist supporters, but the other January 6th, in 1492, when the Catholic kings occupied Granada, handed over by Boabdil, who was the last sultan to tread upon European soil. At this terminal moment of the Middle Ages, just as the Christians occupied Malaga and cut off the heads of Andalusian Muslims in 1487, these conquests that paved the way for Spanish (and Christian) funding of Columbus’ voyage to hopefully discover sea passage to the Indies, were counter-hegemonic moves in reaction to centuries of Islamic hegemony in the Mediterranean. These were not innocent Islamic empires either, as we might be led to believe by the liberal quest for an innocent victim (see: literally anything the brilliant Slavoj Žižek has written about the figure of the “Neighbor”). We should also remember that these were acts of counter-hegemonic violence. Besides the commonly cited (and also true) understanding of the voyage from Marx and Engels’ interpretation in the Communist Manifesto, that Columbus’ journey was funded by capital from the Spanish monarchy as an investment to seek more capital, we must remember that in the centuries prior to this the Umayyad Conquest of Spain, and the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem, had taken hold of the Mediterranean for several hundred years. On the losing side of this defeat at Granada was not an innocent set of Islamic dupes. Take, for example, the lesser-known understanding of where the word “Slave” originates. Most people, if you asked them, would probably say something about Columbus and the Atlantic Slave Trade,

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but they would be wrong. Slaves are a term derived from the period prior to Columbus, when the Muslim conquest of Europe forced the “Slavs” into unpaid labor power, just as, to jump forward centuries, the emergence of genocide as state-sanctioned extermination of a group on the basis of ethnic, religious, or racial identity was first occurring during the Armenian “genocide” (the term did not exist yet) when the Ottomans exterminated millions of Christians from 1915 to 1917, some historians claim it may have spanned from the late 1890s. Interestingly enough, to return the emergence of the term “slavery.”. Marx alludes to the Slavs as one of the only money-free societies, interestingly enough connecting the dots with the Peruvian “minka” system, and perhaps making these cultures easy pickings for slave labor because neither the Slavs nor the Peruvian “minka” systems utilized money within the boundaries of their own culture. They preferred instead an exchange system on the basis of goodwill, doing basic chores for one another without asking for monetary remuneration and trusting on good faith that the chores will be repaid in your service to others at the appropriate time is needed: “developed but nevertheless historically less mature forms of society, in which the highest forms of economy, e.g. cooperation, a developed division of labor, etc., are found, even though there is no kind of money, e.g. Peru. Among the Slav communities also, money and the exchange which determines it play little or no role within the individual communities, but only on their boundaries, in traffic with others; it is simply wrong to place exchange at the center of communal society as the original, constituent element.”23

We are in a precarious time when our interconnected modes of communication put each of us in contact with the forces that gave rise to fascism, nationalism, racism, sexism, and the general “law” of capitalist accumulation. For example, while this endless historical navel gazing about the Atlantic Slave Trade seems to occur ad nauseum, nobody talks about the fact that there are more slaves in the world today than there were during 23

 Grundrisse, pg. 103.

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the peak of the Atlantic Slave Trade. Some 10–15 million slaves were traded between the 15th and 19th centuries, whereas in 2015 the United Nations International Labor Organization undertook study that reported the existence of roughly 40 million slaves around the world at that date. These were mostly trafficked as sex slaves, sweatshop labor, or, surprisingly, for organ transplants. Social science researchers are also discovering staggering statistics such as that some sociologists estimate that 40 million children are working or living on the streets of Latin America without any parental oversight. In addition, there are some 30 to 50 million orphaned street children living in Africa.24 The Italian Marxist Antonio Negri once gave an interview, strolling along a suburban street in Venezia-Mestre; the journalist’s camera caught him passing a line of workers picketing in front of a textile factory which was due to close. He pointed at the workers and dismissively remarked: “Look at them! They don’t know they are already dead!” For Negri, those workers stood for all that is wrong with the traditional trade-unionist view of socialism focused on corporate job-security, a socialism rendered mercilessly obsolete by ‘postmodern’ capitalism with its hegemony over intellectual labor. We should embrace the dynamics of intellectual labor in its non-hierarchic and non-centralized social interaction, within which contain the seeds of a communism. We cannot see this because of the problem of real subsumption, the problem that Marx called the “cash-­ nexus” of capitalism, where all aspects of life become subsumed under matrices of the market, and there is no longer a visible outside to which one can point and rely upon as a visible effect of resistance. This is a situation in which postmodern theorists utter totalizing statements such as that made by Judith Butler at the 2014 PEN World Voices Festival: “Way before we enter into contracts that confirm that our relations are a result of our choice, we are already in the hands of the other— a thrilling and terrifying way to begin. We are from the start both done and undone by the other. If we refuse this, we refuse passion and life and

 O.S.  Adeyemi and Oyewule Oluwaseun. Cultural Factors Promoting Streetism Among Urban Children in Ibadan Metropolis, Nigeria. Research on Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 2, no. 9, 2012. 24

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loss; the lived form of that refusal is destruction; the lived form of its affirmation is non-violence.” It sets up a rather easy “Wittgensteinian” retort. For someone to start from the premise that we are always already within power, made and unmade by power, the statement would have to render power apparent. If she, we, are all within power, then we would lack the perspective to know we are within power (especially if it’s already working on us since birth), but her statement seems to be made from a position of awareness; hence her statement is made from a vantage point that renders both sides of the boundary to power visible (i.e. the question of whether the universe exists inside a computer simulation or not is pointless because in order to know whether we are in a computer simulation we have to step beyond the simulation, and if we were to do that then the question becomes: how do we know we are not entering into yet another simulation?) The starting point presupposes the conclusion—we are always within the grips of power, and one cannot help but be relieved of any political agency and recoil into a nihilistic malaise, happy with the idea that nothing truly matters. Whether this is true or not is a different story, but there are some major biases in how these statements are always from a parallax view that reinforces what cannot be known. The point is that this idea of matrices stacked upon matrices is itself a symptom of a postmodern fetishizing of screens and lifestyles (while the world as a material object rots to its core). We should be deeply concerned, even pessimistic, about the revolutionary challenges posed by the emergence of a plurality of new subjects as the latest turn in capitalist ideology. The accommodation of “identity politics” folded into its schematic because it barricades consumers from the slavery that is occurring. As we know from the Communist Manifesto, there can be an anti-racist and anti-sexist capitalism, an anti-racism anti-­ sexism at the discursive level capitalism that removes the words slavery from history books will also reproduce conditions of inequality that reproduce immense cruelty. Living in America, the capitalist center has fully embraced a “bourgeoisie” built upon minorities. “Today’s ‘minorities’ and ‘marginals’ is the predominant majority position: even alt-­ rightists who complain about the terror of liberal political correctness present themselves as protectors of endangered minorities.

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Or take those critics of patriarchy who attack it as if it were still a hegemonic position, ignoring what Marx and Engels wrote more than 150 years ago in the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations…” and the obvious lines of demarcation in production vs. social production (caring for ‘actual producers’) creates a sexist division of labor when production evacuates to the Global South— men are slowly turning into perpetual adolescents, with no clear passage into maturity, whereas women are more and more precariously mature, expected to control their destiny, plan their careers. Men are falling into a perpetual ludic adolescence, as outlaws, while women appear hard, mature, serious, legal and punitive.25 Even in the midst of the COVID-19 economic closure in the summer of 2020 the United States Labor Department estimated that in the months of June and July approximately 50 million workers filed for unemployment (unemployment in the United States means that the person is out of work and seeking work, therefore the former employer has a fund that the government draws from to pay the worker until they find another job, most people believe these funds are taken from taxes, but this is a mistaken understanding); while these tens of millions of people were seeking work and could not find it, the top 1% wealthiest people in the United States made upwards of $10 billion. At the exact same time when millions of people are on the brink of starving to death in the “wealthiest” country on earth, the structures of wealth accumulation were (and are) still set up to circulate wealth into the hands of the 1% who own everything—that is capitalism at its most brutal. It is a broken system. The fact that people are unaware of these facts tells us that there are elisions of their own material conditions. Those who traverse the material conditions live like fish in water who do not notice the water in which they swim because they have never experienced life on dry land. The eye conceals itself; the one thing an eye cannot see is itself. Is euro-centrism to blame for the rampant problem of femicide in Central and South America, dealt with by the Ni Una Menos (“Not One Less”) movement  Like a Thief in Broad Daylight, pgs. 53 & 111.

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where in Argentina, Brazil, and Peru it is estimated that a woman is killed every 32 hours? Or it is true that NAFTA displaced workers in Mexico, and created destitute conditions where workers turned to working with drug cartels or “illegal” migration patterns into the United States? However, the fact remains that 88 Mexican politicians were executed between September 2020 and June 2021, and there have been roughly between 100 and 200 assassinations every year for the last several years in Mexico because the drug cartels are running the show. So, people can identify “euro-centrism” is the cause of this, when in fact, it is the displacement that occurs as a result of capitalist accumulation that disrupts the political system.

Documents of Capitalism/Barbarism We should remember the lines from Walter Benjamin, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism. And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another. A historical materialist therefore dissociates himself from it as far as possible. He regards it as his task to brush history against the grain.”26 A capitalism that rearranges the identities of those in the corporate boardroom as a desperate measure to maintain corporate hegemony is basically rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic and we need to be fully aware that the Titanic has hit the iceberg. Humans are potentially the first animal species to go extinct while endlessly talking, debating, and discussing our own extinction—or censoring out the topic of discussion—but there is a dangerous game to be played if libidinal investments produce social contracts with capitalist barbarism. There should be no question that the world market is here; as folks mistakenly discuss world politics through the lens of identity politics and other distractions of the society of spectacle, competing capitalist blocs are emerging. Most scholars know about the World Bank, the IMF, the so-called Bretton Woods organizations. Among leftists in the United 26

 Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History.

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States, these are discussed ad nauseam, but virtually none of the academics in the West seem to be concerned about (due to lack of knowledge) the rise of competing forms of global capitalism outside of Western hegemony. I mean, of course, the so-called BRICS banking system. This system consists of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, renamed the New Development Bank in 2014, and largely funded by Goldman Sachs as a way to give equity assistance to financial instruments and fund development projects supported by the bank. It all sounds good in corporate-­speak, but this is the kind of thing that leads to reproducing systems of what used to be called simply “class conflict” but is now rebranded as structural inequality, as if there is an imaginary capitalism where fairness and equality exist. We hear this kind of codified docile language all the time when corporate capitalists marketing firms get their hands on the language. These networks of capital are producing an interconnected ontology (whether subjects chose it or not). Capital obtains wealth, workers obtain use-value in exchange for labor power, with money as the vanishing mediator between the two; money circulates into accelerated mechanisms of wealth accumulation for capital, whereas workers do not possess their labor power and watch the fruits of their labor disintegrate in consumption as wages evaporate in the maintenance of reproducing basic needs. What we need is a manifesto to transform this horrifyingly exploitative and alienating form of property relation. I am not sure if anyone has said it better than Karl Marx did in the Grundrisse (a much less studied text than Capital): “Just as the division of labor creates agglomeration, combination, cooperation, the antithesis of private interests, class interests, competition, concentration of capital, monopoly, stock companies—so many antithetical forms of the unity which itself brings the antithesis to the fore—so does private exchange create world trade, private independence creates complete dependence on the so-called world market, and the fragmented acts of exchange create a banking and credit system whose books, at least keep a record of the balance between debit and credit in private exchange. Although the private interests within each nation divide it into as many nations as it has ‘full-grown individuals’, and although the interests of exporters and of

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importers are antithetical here, etc, etc., national trade does obtain the semblance of existence in the form of the rate of exchange. Nobody will take this as a ground for believing that a reform of the money market can abolish the foundations of internal or external private trade. But within bourgeois society, the society that rests on exchange value, there arise relations of circulation as well as of production which are so many mines to explode it. (A mass of antithetical forms of social unity, whose antithetical character can never be abolished through quiet metamorphosis. On the other hand, if we did not find concealed in society as it is the material conditions of production and the corresponding relations of exchange prerequisite for a classless society, then all attempts to explode it would be quixotic.)”27

In the notebooks later entitled The German Ideology, Marx gives one of his clearest definitions of “communism” as a movement that recognizes the commons as an a-priori. “Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the now existing premise.”28 This, in a way, this description of communism is the greatest description of u-topos rendered actual as a non-totalizing totality. Hence, a communist manifesto is not an external idea, an idealism from outside of material conditions forced upon workers and working class, but an imminent dissidence that emerges from within the matrices of capital. Can there be a multicultural pluralistic method to uncover a universalist ground to ontology? It seems that this is the major impasse of leftist political theory over the last forty to fifty years. Every time a political theorist discovers what amounts to a universal principle of the “being of beings” one is immediately labeled a euro-centric, or Masculinist, or limiting the question to being merely a homogenous totality. One begins to discern from this impasse that totalities are akin to state power that place limitations on the plurality of differences and thereby territorialize the 27 28

 Grundrisse, pg. 158.  German Ideology, pg. 57.

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being of beings. Can theorists think in other terms? We can think of the thing in itself, but only as an abstraction because our approach is always muddled. As human beings we have emotions and impulses, and our attention tends to be distracted. Prolonged research over lengthy periods of time is a luxury of a few scholars and yet we turn to these scholars who have devoted their lives to these questions to better understand the long view of history. There are some aspects of biopolitics that are new to contemporary capitalism, but there are latent kernels in western and non-­ western history that have become manifest as time passes and tropes solidify into the meta-narrative mythos of what passes as Universal History. The class composition of the working class(es) had so dramatically changed that the concept no longer makes sense, and instead, even in his earliest incarnations of revolutionary writings on the topic of communism, there is a sense that this was a changing world and that “this transformation of history into world history is by no means a mere abstract act on the part of ‘self-consciousness’, the world spirit, or of any other metaphysical specter, but a quite material, empirically verifiable act, an act the proof of which every individual furnishes as he comes and goes, eats, drinks, and clothes (themselves).”29 Interestingly enough, Etienne Balibar points out that Marx drops the word “proletariat” from his analysis in his later writings. The word almost never appears in the first volume of Capital, and it is a major methodological mistake to think that Marx (and readers of Marx) should ascribe a revolutionary subject *only* to the proletariat. If anything, the term was antiquated by the time of Capital’s publication as it was a remnant from the French Revolution. While Marx may have overstated the tension on the backside of capital, there has yet to be a full explosion of these relations of production and circulation, the fact remains that these relations are enabled through forceful and violent measures. Another competing version of the universal development of productive forces is necessary to create a universal oikos, or world-as-household, which on the one side produces in all nations simultaneously the  German Ideology, pg. 59.

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phenomenon of the “propertyless” mass (universal competition), making each nation dependent on the revolutions of the others, and finally puts world-historical, empirically universal individuals in place of local ones. Without this, (1) communism could only exist as a local phenomenon; (2) the forces of intercourse themselves could not have developed as universal, hence unendurable powers: they would have remained home-bred “conditions” surrounded by superstition; and (3) each extension of intercourse would abolish local communism. Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world of social metabolism bound up with them.*.

Are we Captured in the Other’s Dream? We often hear Slavoj quote a line from Gilles Deleuze: Be careful of being caught in someone else’s dream! We should be keenly aware, as Slavoj’s work points out with a seemingly limitless list of references to popular culture and political anecdotes, beware that we are caught in the ideological superstructures of capitalist-Big-Other. In a rather interesting 2012 article entitled “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie,” Slavoj Žižek explains how Bill Gates became one of the wealthiest men in the world: “How did Bill Gates become the richest man in America? His wealth has nothing to do with Microsoft producing good software at lower prices than its competitors, or ‘exploiting’ its workers more successfully (Microsoft pays its intellectual workers a relatively high salary). Millions of people still buy Microsoft software because Microsoft has imposed itself as an almost universal standard, practically monopolizing the field, as one embodiment of what Marx called the ‘general intellect’, by which he meant collective knowledge in all its forms, from science to practical knowhow. Gates effectively privatized part of the general intellect and became rich by appropriating the rent that followed.”30  Slavoj Žižek. “The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie.” London, London Review of Books, January 26, 2012. 30

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Slavoj Žižek also writes about the price of oil functioning in this way as well; the price of oil has nothing to do with supply and demand, it has to do with who utilizes violence to obtain the private ownership, an Imaginary construct, hooked onto the Symbolic/virtual a-priori, the fictional-­belief that ownership actually exists external to brute force. The actual a-priori before ground rent is the a-priori of the commons. Land is a commons and the resources underneath that land is a commons. Setting “ground rent” payments on that land is an Imaginary construct that just feels right. “The same is true of natural resources, the exploitation of which is one of the world’s main sources of rent. There is a permanent struggle over who gets this rent: citizens of the Third World or Western corporations. It’s ironic that in explaining the difference between labor (which in its use produces surplus value) and other commodities (which consume all their value in their use), Marx gives oil as an example of an ‘ordinary’ commodity. Any attempt now to link the rise and fall in the price of oil to the rise or fall in production costs or the price of exploited labor would be meaningless: production costs are negligible as a proportion of the price we pay for oil, a price which is really the rent the resource’s owners can command thanks to its limited supply.”31 Carl Schmitt, the lawyer to Adolf Hitler and legal philosopher for the Nazi Party, tells us that “Nomos comes from nemein— Greek word that means both ‘to divide’ and ‘to pasture.’ Thus, nomos is the immediate form in which the political and social order of a people becomes spatially visible—the initial measure and division of pasture-land, i.e., the land-­ appropriation as well as the concrete order contained in it and following from it.”32 This is the fascist way, not the communist way. The communist way enacts the commons as an already existing a-priori. The fascist way steals property and appropriates land. This is obviously not revolutionary universalism. In many ways, there are merely shades of difference between neoliberalism and fascism. Neoliberalism needs utopian escapism. Utopia is the logic of any meta-­ narrative that attempts to give history a productive telos. However, this  Ibid.  Nomos of the Earth, pg. 70.

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production will expand until it reaches its material limit. Liberalism cannot exceed the limit of its resources, and the hyperreal will last only as long as the money flows. Fascism presents itself as the “good alternative” to decadence and decline, which it associates with a decline in virtues, rather than a decadence brought on by the very capitalist mode of production that fascism fosters. A mode of production which perpetually revolutionizes itself, because capital requires ever new instruments of production to ward off falling rate of profit, the introduction of ever-new technologies revolutionizes the social relations of production, thus revolutionizing the material conditions in which consciousness is produced. Fascist power has its totalization as its telos, fascist power wants to present itself as totalized, even while it conceals itself as such in the ‘backside’ as a choice among a myriad of other choices. The idea being: The people chose it, it reflects the truth of desire, and therefore as one choice among a number of choices, the people could have preferred other options; hence, fascism sneaks in innocuously as if among other choices, and as a reaction to ‘choice itself ’ in a way, because the decadence caused by bourgeois hegemony, and opening up an economy to the world market, presents consumers with a dizzying myriad of choices (in the form of commodities in the grocery store, and cultural choices like exposure to outside religions, artistic expressions, forms of communication, films, music). Hence, a return to ‘traditional values’ provides a trope that preys upon a desire to return to the days before decadence and decline which fascism says accompanies ‘openness’ and secularism, and that is what the world awaits on the precipice, slouching towards fascism in the wake of a failed communist movement. Capitalist apologetics never cease to celebrate technological innovation. Even as the capitalist mode of production revolutionizes itself, a communist break never seems to mobilize a transformation at the level of the economic base and superstructure. Changes in content within the superstructure, yes, changes in the formal relations at the level of the economic base, not quite. This reproduces a circular quality to capitalist time in the sense of non-linear periodic cycles. The periodic boom-and-­ bust cycles occur as if we are all living within the modern myth of an eternal recurrence of the same. This tendency to see within the frame of ideology is prone to affirming that a woefully misguided belief that capitalism constitutes the only good end of history.

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Which conflates the idealism of an essential continuity of time and space as a transcendental a-priori,33 with the historical materialist consideration of the possibility that any phenomenology of space and time might have empirical, material conditions of possibility—or, closer to the point, perhaps material determinations. Time is not the synthesis of an eternity, or a temporary gap between limitless expanses of time. Being is a copula in-between nothingness. We must feel the impending dread that our time is finite, the end is rapidly approaching, and our being returns to nothingness. A nihilistic thought, but this differs from the notion that life springs eternal from capital as it returns its wealth to itself through structures of accumulation it created for its own benefit (i.e. the property relations of the economic base, upon which rest the superstructures of the state, the legal system, the culture industry). Thus conceiving itself to be eternal, capitalism has no need to historicize its base as temporal because its ideological apparatuses reproduce a nefarious sort of solipsistic apperception. As if capital is God’s mirror-­ phase (eternally returning itself to itself, “Hey, it’s me, god!”) like an ouroboros. All knowledge synthesizes with the capitalist ground upon which ideological superstructures rest—hence, an ethos of “enjoyment” becomes predominant as an extension of the hegemonic “clever language of certain social circles who had the privilege of enjoyment.”34 To undertake a reflection on the materialist conception of a competing universality is to explore the possibility that time and space are, in fact, generated in the experience of materiality, and this has a particular urgency in a time when the capitalist modes of production saturate so much of the world. Social institutions, political forms, and so much of what counts as “thought” in the present conjuncture is over-determined by what Marx called “real subsumption;” a world enclosed by ideological superstructures grounded in a capitalist base to the point where it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to convey an anti-capitalist message to a world where so many are traversing the matrix and find it enjoyable.

 Obviously, this is a wrong way that Kantian metaphysics overcodes readings of Marx, with Hegel as a middle passage. 34  German Ideology, pg. 441. 33

9 Utopia and the Parallax View

Žižek’s Parallax View is probably one of his most misunderstood “major works.” In it he posits that there are fundamentally different metaphysical worldviews that exist, and that revolutionary politics should not strive towards a synthesis of metaphysical difference into a “one-all” universality. Rather, the point is to contend with parallax views, shifting perspectives from alternating perspectives that are often aporias of one another. For example, the Anglo-Saxon nominalist view of the self is indicated by the metaphysics of western religions where (perhaps starting with the tree of life “Guf ” in the Kabbalah Eden Myths), and Žižek’s lengthy discussion of God’s hesitation prior to the creation of the cosmos in The Indivisible Remainder, and individual souls who live once and pass on to eternal salvation. This is at fundamental variance with the Vedic beliefs of natural interconnectedness that we have all fallen out of through our pursuit of the gratification of the ego. These two views are so fundamentally different that there cannot be a cohesive “one-all” universal synthesis between them, without negating the core characteristics of one or both sides. Hence, a provocation requiring a radical change in perspective produces a parallax view that propels the subject into another worldview, and a

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new world that is not yet here, must be created—this is “u-topos” or, utopia, a world that has not yet become real. Nevertheless, this utopia of the parallax view is always possible, and there is never freedom without unbearable anxiety1 because we are caught in a causal nexus that is not readily apparent to us. The subject must “predestine himself ” and produce a “cipher of his destiny” where the “free decision appears in the guise of its opposite, as an inexorable necessity.”2

Escapist Utopianism Theodor Adorno informs us that dreams of utopia are universal: All humans deep down, whether they admit it or not, know that it could be possible for things to be different. Not only could they live without hunger and probably without anxiety, but they could also live as free human beings. However, in the modern era, the utopian imagination that once nurtured these dreams contains the mental images created for its biosocial apparatus that has “hardened itself against people.” People become sworn to this world as it is, and they have blocked consciousness of other possibilities. Within the limitations of this kind of blocked consciousness, utopian images come to be viewed as naive or foolish. People universally say today what was once reserved only for Philistines in more harsh times, “Oh that’s just utopian”—in religion, Buddhism included, the Pure Land has stood for an image of a better afterlife and is rarely thought through as the actual construction of an actual topos (or, bashō) here on Earth. Either way “pure land” and utopia have constituted a metaphor of consolation. As the Buddha once observed, “the world is upside down.” Adorno and Ernst Bloch turn this assessment of utopia on its head. Far from indicating a robust engagement with the real world, they say, the anti-­ utopian focus on the present reflects the fact that our capacity to imagine the future has deteriorated so much that the best future we can think of “consists largely only in a repetition of the continually same ‘today’.”  Indivisible Remainder, pg. 17.  Indivisible Remainder, pg. 18.

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Images of utopia, if taken seriously as real possibilities, allowed for the imaginative possibilities of negation of the real as something that is necessary for the transformation of the world as it is. Intentions that cater to a sense of realism in the people often lead to actions that produce the most suffering in the world; hence, the first step along the way out is detachment. Detaching from the way things are is to form an awareness that things can change. From there, it is only a matter of time before a modicum of imaginative labor power is liberated to create the world differently. There are many reasons to distrust utopianism in the twenty-first century. In the words of Eric Voegelin, previous attempts to “immanentize the eschaton”, or the idea of bringing heavens to earth, have in recent years, always ended in totalitarian nightmares. A healthy skepticism of utopian rhetoric is probably a good thing. However, this is not the same as utopianism. A political coup that utilizes a term like “National Socialism” to stir up the working class against their own interests, and then manipulates rhetorical sympathy for socialism to force workers into death camps deploys a perverse sense of utopianism onto the world. Perhaps to intentionally subvert the term utopianism. As Primo Levi put it: “it is possible, even easy, to picture a Socialism without prison camps. A Nazism without concentration camps is, instead, unimaginable.”3 We have to deal with this “epiphenomenon” of secondary traces manifested as the reification of past “truths.” Taking a cue from Nietzsche, what is subsequent appears within a past and future that never ends, and yet recurs, and the paradox that when we speak of today’s consciousness, yesterday’s consciousness has clearly disappeared. That which is mere memory, and is divorced from time, also has a resonance upon consciousness occurring now. Particularly this echo of the name of Communism. As any kind of resistance towards capitalist subsumption. One of Žižek’s most important works, even by his own determinations, the Parallax View, admonishes a particular type of utopian thinking of the Beautiful Souls, a term borrowed from William James and Georg Wilhelm Hegel: “There is nothing ethically more disgusting than  Primo Levi, If This Is a Man/The Truce, London: Abacus 1987, pg. 395.

3

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revolutionary Beautiful Souls who refuse to recognize, in the Cross of the postrevolutionary present, the truth of their own flowering dreams about freedom.”4 Beautiful Souls are persons who naively bias themselves against seeing anything that may disrupt their self-enclosed utopian bubble; the motto of the Beautiful Soul is “ignorance is bliss.” In this case, the revolutionary Beautiful Souls attempt to barricade themselves against disruption by censoring out any of the realities of the immense violence that occurred in the name of utopian ideas. Those interested in constructing a better world need to remain diligent by thinking like Nietzsche and taking an amor fati position on the current situation. Amor fati means “love of fate” and in this context it means honestly embracing the good and the bad within historical conditions that circumscribe the present and moving from there. We are living in a present that is a dystopian nightmare where most people hold cynical views about the remote prospects of any sort of progress because a previous utopian project of communism failed. Whether we should rethink the ideas of utopia and communism is up for some level of debate; however, one thing is clear—there needs to be a way to mesh the utopian and communist projects with an understanding that perhaps there is a correlative need to rethink our understanding of freedom in tandem with these parallel concepts. Another common reaction is to reproach those who regard philosophy as a potentially revolutionary practice as hopelessly idealistic and needlessly utopian. Often conservative critics denounce the miserable and terrifying results of revolutionary upheaval as if this is the whole story. Žižek’s reference to an interview given by Gilles Deleuze reveals the conservative elision of the dimension of becoming: “It is fashionable these days to condemn the horrors of revolution. It’s nothing new; English Romanticism is permeated by reflections on Cromwell very similar to present-day reflections on Stalin. They say revolutions turn out badly. But they’re constantly confusing two different things, the way revolutions turn out historically and people’s revolutionary  Parallax View, pg. 5.

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b­ ecoming. These relate to two different sets of people. Men’s only hope lies in a revolutionary becoming: the only way of casting off their shame or responding to what is intolerable.”5

Žižek’s work gives articulation to the idea that we are now dealing with a situation where the absence of Law universalizes transgression. Why? There is only one possible explanation: enjoyment itself, which we experience as “transgression,” and yet, in its innermost status “transgression” has become something imposed, ordered. When we enjoy, we never do it spontaneously; we always follow a certain injunction.6 These injunctions are concealed from the subject, yet often hidden in plain sight to others around them, and the crucial point is that the Imaginary is never fully beyond reduction to the realm of the Symbolic Order—there is no “pure imagination” out of which springs genuine ingenuity. “The Imaginary and the Symbolic are therefore not simply opposed as two external entities or levels: within the Imaginary itself, there is always a point of double reflection at which the Imaginary is, so to speak, hooked on the Symbolic.”7 What makes Žižek’s work far more interesting is that as a dialectical thinker, he never stops. His work is never fully reified and has taken some interesting and unexpected twists and turns. On this point of how the Imaginary is hooked on the Symbolic he continues, in this brilliant way of swerving the thesis. Where one would expect someone to respond by asking: If the Imaginary is hooked on the Symbolic, then how can your critique of ideology stand external to the Imaginary as hooked on the Symbolic? His response seems to be that we must clear discern the function of the Ego-Ideal, as “symbolic identification—from its imaginary counterpart: symbolic identification is identification with the ideal (‘virtual’) point from which the subject looks upon himself when his own actual life appears to him as a vain and repulsive spectacle.”8

 Cited in Žižek. Organs Without Bodies, pg. 12.  For They Know Not What They Do, pg. 9. 7  Ibid., pg. 10. 8  For They Know Not What They Do, pg. 11. 5 6

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Nor is it beneficial to anyone to advocate for some vague neo-­liberalism of “individual-choice” as the standard baseline definition of freedom which spans back to the emergence of social contract theory, and representative forms of government based on individual voting rights, and consumer choice as the paramount value in marketplace capitalism. A term is often used to cluster these values together under the rubric of liberalism. Not in the sense of a politician labeled liberal, but as basic tenets of the market system of capitalism; in this way, both major political parties in America are liberal insofar as nobody truly criticizes the basic philosophies that maintain these core values, even to the extent that these values are becoming increasingly destructive to the continuation of life on earth. Žižek has made a cogent point, time and time again, in his work. These aporias in liberalism pose a grave threat to human progress. For example, if you look back on the biggest criticisms of the French Revolution launched by the British philosopher Edmund Burke, you will see all kinds of historical relativist and subjectivist bias in his absurd criticisms. The revolution was wrong in his eyes because it forced a universal sense of rights upon the world where people always disagree, where individual differences were not respected, and where a diversity of opinions must remain open in order to respect the maximum amount of space for individual liberties and choices. Burke is the ultimate cultural relativist who forwards the postmodern thesis that cultures all think differently and therefore nobody should force any universal sense of human rights upon anyone else. One notable incarnation of this occurred when George Bush Jr., confronted with questions about protestors outside of the White House during his administration’s invasion of Iraq. When asked if the protests made him question the invasion because they showed the people of America were losing their enthusiasm for the war, he responded by saying: “Of course, but that’s exactly why we must remain resolved! We are fighting in Iraq to give the people there the same rights that those protestors outside are enjoying now. The right to protest.” Of course, every totalitarian dictator knows that the best way to become a totalitarian is not through a universal statement of general human rights, but through benevolent

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dictatorship in which all kinds of pleasures and spectacles are offered to the people while the dictator maintains authoritarian control. One can imagine that such a benevolent dictatorship would thrive in the midst of a technologically advanced modern world where computers, cellphones, television, films, and popular music all serve as mediums for a society of control by continuous enjoyment and the sedation of consumers through a totality of meaningless choices. If there are choices to be made in the sense of preserving a “monadist” fantasy of individualism, then individuals will always condemn the many through the inevitability of “monads’‘ who make destructive choices. Some “monads’‘ will choose not to get vaccinated. Some will choose to drive gas-guzzling SUVs. Some will choose to destroy the rainforest to build cattle ranches and supply beef for Brazilian “all-you-can-eat” steakhouses. This is an absurdly irrational system based on greed, and little else. This neoliberalist “monadism” gives no thought to the effect of the monad’s actions on the other monads. Nor is there a thought about the world around the monads. The effect of the “choice” to create products in a factory that pumps carbon monoxide into the atmosphere is not a “choice” that happens on behalf of a mind in a vat. There are people around the factory who are also affected. Their breathing air is polluted, their water is infected, and if there are carcinogens thrown into the air, people will develop cancers. One psychotic monad can throw the entire global economy into a tailspin. There has to be another way. All of the time and energy that people waste because of this “monadic” chaos could be better used stockpiling resources and distributing products on the basis of needs rather than “abilities” (as Marx termed it); clearer still is the notion of the nationless circulation of products. Michel Foucault realized this trick when he wrote that the purpose of enlightenment, at the time of Immanuel Kant, was not to say “don’t think, just follow orders;” rather, it was, “Obey, and you will be able to reason as much as you like.” At that time freedom amounted to the right to think as one pleases so long as one also obeyed as one must. Immanuel Kant, according to Foucault, “proposes to Frederick II, in scarcely veiled terms, a sort of contract—what might be called the contract of rational despotism with free reason: the public and free use of autonomous reason

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will be the best guarantee of obedience, on condition, however, that the political principle that must be obeyed itself be in conformity with universal reason.”9 Even though their material conditions have been stripped away by the policies of free-market capitalism, their Imaginary reality is hooked on the Symbolic to the point where their “Ego-Ideal;” the virtual image of themselves is that they are the penultimate agent of patriotism. They project the most patriotic symbols of loyalty as a way of staying true to the “Ego-Ideal” of themselves even though their conditions appear to be disintegrating; the image of themselves appears as a “vain and repulsive spectacle.”10 Žižek’s work is informative insofar as the way one might perceive a cynical distance from structures of disciplinary power, may in fact invest oneself firmly within those structures of power.

 topia and Free Will: Un-Cracking an Egg U Is Impossible What about the very real possibility that free will and ethics are completely incompatible and yet both seem to be true? The perils of this alleged crisis of democracy is that when democracy is coupled with consumerism, consumer demands exert control over all aspects of society, even knowledge production. What feels correct, becomes what is the norm, and what is the norm resolves into satisfying homeostasis of the mind. Nobody is “controlling” per se; herding and shepherding seem more apt descriptions. As a matter of the plethora of opinions that are available, there seems to be an overproduction of news clutter that marks the postmodern condition. This means that anyone can find knowledge amenable to their a-priori biases. Hence, learning halts.

 Michel Foucault. The Foucault Reader. “What is Enlightenment?” New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pg. 36–37 10  Slavoj Žižek. For They Know Not What They Do, pg. 11. 9

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For example, let us reflect for a minute and run through some basic logic. If we are free, it means that human beings are free to do anything. This even means we are free not to always choose the best and most virtuous “good” behavior, correct? I think this is the problem of evil that the existentialists ran up against when they discovered that we are, as Sartre put it, “condemned to freedom,” in the sense that we are free to choose the wicked, sadistic, and wholly evil action, which someone like Sartre and his colleague Camus understood all too well while living through the German occupation of France during the Second World War. Strangely, Sartre made a paradoxical statement that he never felt as free as when the Nazis occupied France. The resistance gave him an ethical purpose and therefore captivated his agency; it forced him to take action. Therefore, ethics (or the belief that there are good things one can do with one’s life) becomes a seemingly impossible goal to establish. If each of us possesses the sadistic freedom, the freedom to choose wrong, then would not this mean that there will always be some portion of the people who will choose not to do good things? The problem of Raskolnikov-ethics in Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. We are condemned to freely act, even to the point of doing something violent such as committing a murder, as Raskolnikov does in the novel, yet this might mean that in the aftermath the act may weigh on our conscience and change the quality of our character into something wicked. Much like a broken egg, once the egg is cracked, it cannot be uncracked. Once an act is chosen, something like murder, when a life is taken away, it is an act that cannot be undone. It leaves a scar. In other words, let me set this up as a proposition, a logical statement in terms of “if then therefore…”. If free will exists. Then—we are all free to choose our behaviors. Also, it must be the case that doing good things that are ethical is a choice between doing a good thing and doing a bad thing. And we take the first set of statements to be true. Then, we are all free to choose to do good or bad, and some portion of people will choose to do bad things. Therefore—free will is incompatible with always doing good things, because if you always do good things, you negate your free will, which relies on having the option and then actually willing bad behavior.

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Utopianism Relies on “Determinism” To forward a theory of a utopian society, you would also have to believe in some form of determinist version of human behavior, because accepting the belief that human behavior is freely chosen means you would have to also accept the belief that some segment of the people will choose to do unethical (and, therefore, imperfectly good) things, such as murder, or any number of other “morally bad” things like dealing drugs to children, or violently abusing someone else. I think every person deep down with a soul and a conscience would know that those actions are morally bad; however, people do these things daily in our world. Is it the determining factors in a society that conditions people to do these things? Or is there an element of free choice where the responsibility should be placed on each person for making their own decisions? Let us think about this logically. If human behavior is determined by material conditions, then free will is tethered to those deterministic conditions and therefore the behavior that is unethical and imperfectly good is viewed as being a result of consciousness formed out of unethical and imperfect material conditions; hence, if those material conditions change, so does the consciousness. If those conditions can be improved, then therefore ethical consciousness will also change. The only problem with this is that even by the determinist standards of ethics, as the material conditions improve, so does the unethical behavior as conditioned within the structures of the unethical system that determined it in the first place.

Dissolve the People and Elect Another? The Subjective Destitution chapter at the end of Surplus-Enjoyment: A Guide for the Non-Perplexed, is some of Slavoj’s best work in recent years. Conservatives are clueless. As Vladimir Lenin wrote during the October Revolution, decades take place in the span of weeks. In the last few years, the opposite has seemed to occur. As the pace of life has accelerated, less and less seems to change, and yet years and years seem to spin by in the

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snap of a finger. 2020 was a year that occurred as if it were contained in a week. The issue was not that the state was controlling everyone during the pandemic, but the fact that the virus “invaded and disturbed the political body, throwing it into a panic and rendering its impotence visible.” I sincerely believe that the antiquated political methodologies out of which resistance is formed are the greatest threat to human extinction (hence, the dinosaur era conceptions of power and resistance led to an “insurrection” that resembled the Storming of the Bastille on January 6th, 2021, when 2020 had made it absurdly obvious that the pandemic could have been averted had there been modest investments in healthcare and workers’ security years before the events unfolded). The question becomes, as Deleuze and Guattari state in echoing Spinoza’s lament, “Why do the people fight for their slavery as if it were their salvation?” and to draw from Bertolt Brecht, in his response to the 1953 East German uprising, a poem thought too controversial to publish at the time and which remained unpublished until 1959 in which Brecht remarks that the people had lost confidence in the government: Would it not in that case be simpler for the government To dissolve the people And elect another?11 If every aspect of subjectivity is under the guise of ideology, then the attitudes of “the people” are also ideological; therefore, a new “conceptual personae” of the people must emerge. This is what is necessary, and this is the function of philosophy in the postmodern world, as a relief and critique of the torrent of ideological discourses (from state, media, and religion) which interpellate subjects. Obviously, this does not mean to imply a violence enacted upon the people in the form of a Stalinist Gulag. Rather, this book hopes to advocate for the highly unlikely possibility of another quarantine-level “think locally, act globally!”-style response to what I would like to refer to as the omni-exigency of our own species-wide extinction (be it through atomic 11

 Bertolt Brecht. Die Lösung (The Solution).

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weapons, global warming, or another viral outbreak, all of which are factual symptoms of class hierarchy). In the motto of May ’68 in Paris, let us be realists and demand the impossible! Insofar as the discourses of freedom can and must be reinvented, these existential threats to all life shall also be avoided. In no small way, what Žižek’s work offers is a culture-jamming exercise in book form. Too often ideological critique occurs in the dusty corners of academia where small-impact journals publish ideas that often collect dust, and revolutionary philosophy, which takes time and effort to understand, is either ignored or, if it is ingested by students or academics, is too often approached like a skip on a record that the needle passes over with minor interruption.12 It seems as if the moments when a revolutionary consciousness might emerge are totally unpredictable because we may be subjects to contingent forces in our imagination, even though the forces are sedimented by stratigraphic superimpositions and crystallizations of historical formations imprinted upon our consciousness. This is not to say that there is no hope. To share one such example from Žižek’s book Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences: “During the shooting of David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago in a Madrid suburb in 1964, a crowd of Spanish statists had to sing the ‘Internationale’ in a scene involving a mass demonstration. The movie team was astonished to discover that they all knew the song and were singing it with such a passion that the Francoist police intervened, thinking that they were dealing with a real political manifestation. Even more, when, late in the evening (the scene was to take place in darkness), people living in the nearby houses heard the echoes of the song, they opened up bottles and started to dance in the street, wrongly presuming that Franco had died, and the Socialists had taken power. This book is dedicated to those magic moments of illusory freedom (which, in a way, were precisely not simply illusory) and to the hopes thwarted by the return to ‘normal’ reality.”13  Richard Gilman-Opalsky. Specters of Revolt: On the Intellect of Insurrection and the Philosophy from Below. “Unjamming the Insurrectionary Imagination.” New  York, Repeater Books, 2016, pg. 117. 13  Slavoj Žižek. Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences. New York, Routledge, 2004, pg. xii. 12

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The hope of this book is not to reproduce some sort of belief in revolutionary subjectivity deriving from the people, but to enhance our understanding of how ideology has fixed its roots in latent biases which are then erupted through political discourses that render those desires manifest (i.e. aggression, love, fear, anxiety, etc.); and that those problems are only broached through the kind of political psychoanalysis offered by Žižek’s critique of ideology. By doing this we can critique the ideological frames that shape the consciousness of the people and thus posit a modus operandi of freedom. One of the main aspects of this critique is the realization that there is nothing that can ever escape the grasp of necessity, which is the only way that we can form an awareness of our own freedom. As in the Althusserian theory of ideology where the statement, “I am in ideology” is the realization that our “human” memories are not our own in the sense that we all borrow elements of our identity from myths in the treasury of the big Other.14

14

 Tarrying in the Negative, pg. 41.

Index1

A

E

Althusser, Louis, 57n45, 78–81, 84n2, 103n4

Enjoyment/jouissance, 9, 17, 19, 20, 22, 40, 42, 47, 51, 53, 54, 64, 65, 72, 92, 96–98, 101, 102, 109, 114, 127, 129, 131, 133, 134, 139, 140, 144, 146, 147, 159, 160, 164, 166, 167, 184, 189, 191

C

Cynicism, 64, 66, 125–153 D

Desire, 2, 12, 16, 18–21, 23, 25–29, 37–40, 44, 47, 51, 52, 55–59, 62, 66, 76, 83–101, 103, 104, 110, 113, 116, 119, 121, 132, 139, 141, 143, 147, 149, 156–161, 164, 170, 183, 197 Dialectic, 14, 25, 27, 35, 43, 46, 60, 83, 84, 103, 163

F

Freedom, 1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 15, 18, 24, 25, 27, 37, 38, 38n12, 42–46, 53, 54, 56, 61–63, 65, 71, 88, 126, 144, 147, 153, 155–184, 186, 188, 190, 191, 193, 196, 197 Freud, Sigmund, 21, 26, 27, 55–58, 57n46, 81, 102, 103, 112, 116, 123, 158

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 B. Kaye, Žižek and Freedom, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42151-8

199

200 Index G

God, 5, 20, 34, 41–50, 59, 63, 80, 88, 98, 99, 115, 126, 128, 133, 142, 143, 150, 151, 163, 168–170, 184, 185 Grace, 61, 168

73–78, 105n9, 108, 128, 146, 151, 172–174, 176, 178, 180–182, 184, 191 Materialism, 27 N

H

Hegel, G.W.F., 1, 3, 4, 13–15, 17, 25, 41, 43, 70n4, 71, 73, 74, 84n2, 108–110, 126, 152, 162, 163, 184n33, 187 Heidegger, Martain, 40

Nietzsche, Friedrich, 2, 11, 43, 47–50, 49n34, 50n35, 55, 60, 60n49, 63, 84n2, 91n15, 125–128, 135–138, 140–143, 156, 157, 160, 161, 187, 188 O

I

Ideology/ideological state apparatuses, 1, 3, 12, 35, 67–81, 83, 84n2, 101, 108, 125–153, 159, 189

Objet petit a, 20, 21, 28, 41, 44, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 92, 93, 99, 103, 119, 157, 160 P

Lacan, Jacques, 3, 4, 12, 24–26, 29, 39, 41, 47, 51n37, 53, 54, 59, 83–124, 140, 144–148, 150, 158, 164

Parallax view, 9–30, 43, 45, 63, 91n16, 101, 162, 175, 185–197 Postmodern, 2, 13, 14, 16, 20, 21, 35, 38, 39, 54, 62, 119, 125, 127, 131, 136, 157, 164, 171, 174, 175, 190, 192, 195 Psychoanalysis, 1, 2, 4, 18, 25, 39, 54, 58, 67, 79, 102, 106, 107, 114, 119, 146–148, 151, 159, 197

M

R

K

Kant, Immanuel, 4, 51, 51n37, 61, 70, 70n4, 142, 143, 162, 163, 163n11, 169, 170, 191 L

Marx, Karl, 22, 32, 32n2, 35, 36, 43, 54, 55, 57, 70, 70n4, 71,

Robespierre, Maximilien, 68, 69, 160

 Index  S

U

Schelling, F.W.J., 38, 38n12, 41–47, 70n4, 150 Sinthome, 152 State, 10, 31, 32, 53–55, 57, 57n45, 63, 72, 73, 83, 88, 101, 102, 105, 107, 116, 117, 131, 133, 149, 150, 153, 158, 160, 179, 184, 195 Symptom, 22, 35, 49, 66, 101, 107, 108, 112, 114, 128–131, 143, 144, 164, 166, 167, 175, 196

Utopia, 15, 16, 155, 166, 182, 185–197

201

V

Violence, 6, 23, 40–42, 44, 59, 61–63, 65, 69, 100–102, 104, 106, 111, 112, 114, 116, 118, 121, 122, 130, 146, 148, 157, 158, 172, 182, 188, 195