The Subject of Liberation: Žižek, Politics, Psychoanalysis 9781623563684, 9781501302312, 9781623569471

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The Subject of Liberation

The Subject of Liberation Žižek, Politics, Psychoanalysis Charles Wells

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

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www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 Paperback edition first published 2016 © Charles Wells, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Wells, Charles H., 1978The subject of liberation : Žižek, politics, psychoanalysis / Charles Wells. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-368-4 (hardback) 1. Žižek, Slavoj. 2. Political science–Philosophy–History–20th century. 3. Radicalism. 4. Postmodernism. 5. Psychoanalysis–Political aspects. 6. Lacan, Jacques, 1901–1981. I. Title. JA71.W437 2014 320.01–dc23 2014006067 ISBN: HB: PB: ePub: ePDF:

978-1-6235-6368-4 978-1-5013-1731-6 978-1-6235-6498-8 978-1-6235-6947-1

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Kate, your intelligence, patience and love are a daily inspiration.

Contents Introduction: The Subject of Liberation The Lacanian Left Why Lacan? Why Žižek? Why The Ticklish Subject? Part 1 1

2

4

3 5 7 15

How to Read the Ticklish Subject I’m not yet writing a book Look where it comes again, Horatio! Žižek’s postmodern other The Ticklish Subject: A drama

17

Leftist Philosophy and Lacan’s Theory of Character Structures That old leftist problem The deadlock of desire: Perversion vs. hysteria The philosophy of perversion The philosophy of hysteria Acting out the doubt The philosophy of obsessionality

25

Part 2 3

The Problem

1

The Subject, Ideology and Psychoanalysis

The Žižekian Universal Subject Psychoanalysis as liberation: Traversing the fantasy Why Butler? The anxious void of subjectivity: Žižek as a reader of Laplanche The fundamental fantasy: Enjoyment, masochism, consistency Žižek’s cogito: The Other doesn’t know, therefore I don’t know Ideology: The Big Other, the Symbolic Mandate and the Social Superego The big other Interpellation: The subject’s symbolic mandate

17 18 21 23

25 26 29 31 33 35 39 41 41 42 44 47 50

53 53 55

viii

Contents

Superego: The return of enjoyment The social superego The perverse turn: How to have your cake and eat it too 5

Freedom and Responsibility: The Liberatory Promise of Lacanian Psychoanalysis Defining liberation: Hamlet on the couch Gertrude doesn’t know Returning the question: The freedom to decide and responsibility for deciding Others who are supposed: Traversing the social fantasy

Part 3 6

7

8

59 61

65 65 66 69 70 75

The Problem of Postmodernity: A Life of Pleasures Traditional ideology has been traversed… And, in its place, postmodern ideology! The postmodern ego-ideal: Buy two, get one free! Liberal tolerant multiculturalism

77

The Postmodern Social Superego: Reflexive Sadomasochism Enjoy your discipline! Reflexive sadomasochism Postmodern ideology’s traditional other

89

The Unholy Conspiracy: Postmodern Ideology and (Pseudo-)Fundamentalism Fundamentalism, psychosis and the need for another framework The really (non-)existing big Other The other supposed to enjoy/believe 1: Misunderstanding postmodern ideology The other supposed to enjoy/believe 2: Misunderstanding fundamentalism The postmodern/fundamentalist pact: Stop believing and know!

Part 4 9

Contemporary Ideologies

57

Going Through the Deadlock

Antagonism in the Real Towards a definition of the post-analytic subject and the liberated society

77 79 82 84

89 90 92

97 97 99 102 104 107 111 113 113

Contents

Antagonism in the real Deciding how to decide Infinitely proliferating perspectives: Aggravation and mediation Warfare vs. recognition: A single structural divide What aggravation points towards without knowing it

ix 115 117 119 121 124

10 The Theory of the Four Fundamental Discourses The four fundamental discourses: A mapping exercise The discourses The philosophies and their discourses Correcting hysteria: Master yourself! Correcting perversion: Acknowledge the void!

127

11 The Deadlock of Lacanian Ethics and the Analytic Moment What are you taking responsibility for? Ethics and the theory of character structures Pre- and post-analytic subjects A reflexive decision for responsibility The role of the analyst

141

Part 5

153

Post-Analytic Subjects

127 129 132 134 137

141 143 146 148 150

12 The Post-Analytic Subject 1: The Analyst Lacanian ethics: Support freedom and responsibility as such The analyst Disavowal and responsibility? What are you disavowing?

155

13 The Post-Analytic Subject 2: The Lover The deadlock of desire vs. the deadlock of drive The ethics of drive: I Love You! What discourse is love?

165

14 Post-Analytic Philosophies Combined starting assumptions The beloved object: Anne Frank and John Brown vs. multiculturalism The politics of prescription and the Nazi Henchman The beloved object is the subject

175

155 157 159 161

165 167 170

175 177 179 181

x

Part 6

Contents

Liberated Societies

15 Liberated Societies 1: A Universal Right to Psychoanalysis and the Antagonistic Society A universal right to psychoanalysis Love for a social group vs. patriotism An antagonistic society The liberatory fetish: Dean and Stavrakakis as readers of Žižek

185

187 187 189 191 194

16 Liberated Societies 2: A Society of Analysts Analysis as a positive project? Bartelby politics Analyst as theorist, analyst as educator: The discourse of the analyst as a defence A society of analysts: Lacan’s Leninist moment A debate on the ends of analysis: The analyst meets the lover The radical democratic project: Žižek as a reader of Stavrakakis

199

Conclusion: Go, Bid the Soldiers Shoot! A creation myth A myth that knows… Convincing Slavoj Žižek that he doesn’t exist

215

Notes Bibliography Index

224

199 202 204 206 210

215 217 221

235 238

Introduction: The Subject of Liberation

Slavoj Žižek’s The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology begins with an echo of the opening lines of Marx’s Manifesto for the Communist Party: ‘A spectre is haunting Western academia, the spectre of the Cartesian subject.’1 And while The Ticklish Subject is specifically concerned with redeeming the spectre of Descartes’ cogito in the face of postmodern critique, I begin this book from the position that the overarching theoretical project of which Žižek is a part is in fact animated by a broader haunting, a haunting closer to the one described by Marx, a haunting which might best be described by the following phrase: A spectre is haunting radical leftist politics, the spectre of the subject of liberation. That is to say, Žižek is part of a philosophical tradition that raises the question, ‘If the radical left is fighting for liberation and against oppression, what is the liberation that the left is fighting for, and who or what is the subject that it is fighting to liberate?’ It is this question that The Subject of Liberation shares with Žižek, using his work as a guide to be followed, a problem to be solved, and a pile of raw materials out of which to build. And it is this question for which The Subject of Liberation produces an answer. Asking – and if possible answering – this question is the great task facing the radical Left today. If recent events, such as the Arab Spring, mass protests in Europe and the Occupy! movement in the United States, announce that the Left is once again finding its voice, this does not mean that the time for theory has passed. Rather, the problem is more pressing than ever. As Žižek puts it in his 2011 Masterclass for the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, in the midst of London’s anti-austerity protests, I am, I hope like most of you, glad that things are happening. I’m very glad that I am forced to correct my standard analysis which is that with the disappearance of any serious left in European countries, the only political opposition of any weight is the one between liberal multiculturalism [as] pure capitalism and right wing anti-immigrants… [However,] the more these events will unfold [in the] form of protests and so on, the more … we all will discover [that] you need thinking – theory – more than ever to know what to do. Because it’s easy to

2

The Subject of Liberation do … what you do now against cuts in spending for education, healthcare and so on, but the more things develop, the more you confront the serious issue: What now? What do we really want?2

This question highlights one of the key reasons that Žižek’s work is so important to contemporary radical leftist philosophy: his turn to psychoanalysis. While in the lecture quoted, Žižek moves on to raise the difficult practical question of what social and political system the Left wants in place of global capitalism, what a psychoanalytic perspective offers is the notion that the question, ‘What do we really want?’ is always much more difficult to answer than it first appears. As subjects of the unconscious, it is precisely when it seems most obvious to us what we want that we are at our most blind, ideological and manipulated. Psychoanalysis is thus invaluable in complicating the question of liberation because it insists that what we really want may not be the same as what we think we want. When I make a conscious rational decision, have I acted freely, or have I in fact been determined by unconscious motivations? When I am liberated from external pressures to pursue my own desires, am I truly free, or have I traded one form of oppression for another? And if psychoanalytic treatment promises to liberate me from my neurotic symptoms (or to enable me to identify with them), what relationship does this have to political liberation, if any? Žižek’s appropriation of Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory is particularly attractive here, not only because he filters Lacanian theory through a radical leftist political perspective, but also because he is interested in developing its relation to the sociopolitical level through a psychoanalytic conception of ideology. Despite Sigmund Freud’s acknowledgement from the very beginning that the human psyche with which psychoanalysis is concerned is fundamentally shaped by its social and political environment, psychoanalysis as a practice has continued to focus on the individual. And while Lacan’s subsequent insistence on the power of language and the intersubjective nature of the unconscious has certainly pushed the social and political implications of psychoanalytic theory further, it ultimately falls to Žižek and other contemporary theorists to bring psychoanalytic theory into a close conceptual relation with topics such as liberation/oppression, ideology and class antagonism. One of this book’s aims is to consolidate Žižek’s arguments concerning the social and political implications of psychoanalytic theory, and, by filling in the gaps along the way, to produce a coherent theory of the way in which the Lacanian subject relates to contemporary forms of ideology.

Introduction: The Subject of Liberation

3

The Lacanian Left Žižek is, of course, neither the first nor the only thinker to adapt Lacanian psychoanalytic theory to the ends of leftist political philosophy. In The Lacanian Left, Yannis Stavrakakis usefully describes a broad field of Lacanian leftist theory, using Žižek and Ernesto Laclau as key orienting figures, between whom Lacan insists as an object of productive antagonism and ruthless contestation. Here, Žižek is the representative of an overly radical revolutionary leftism, which Stavrakakis accuses of perversion (a choice insult among Lacanians, as confirmed by Žižek’s own attacks on Deleuze and Foucault), and Laclau stands for a radical democratic project that fails to adequately account for the vital Lacanian concept of enjoyment. However, if one brackets Stavrakakis’ particular readings and polemics, it is worth noting the way in which he characterizes the kernel at the heart of the Lacanian leftist project: Psychoanalysis as a discourse and a practice constitutes one of the privileged terrains from which it is possible to reflect on [the] constitutive tension between knowledge and experience, symbolic and real. In Jacques Lacan’s words from his seminar on The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ‘No praxis is more orientated towards that which, at the heart of experience, is the kernel of the real than psychoanalysis.’3

Without getting too far into Lacanian jargon, it is enough to note that what Stavrakakis highlights here is the focus in Lacanian theory on precisely that which evades, resists and undermines theorization itself. Every theoretical framework eventually encounters a limit that is somehow simultaneously that which lies outside of its scope and a kind of internal impossibility that haunts its very core. Every universe of meaning eventually encounters an obstacle that is somehow simultaneously an irrecoverable lack (a lost object, a missing signifier) and an unavoidable excess (an excessive attachment, a meaningless signifier that insists and repeats). Lacanian theory is privileged in its focus on this moment of encounter, which Lacan argues is the singular motive force in human experience. It is precisely our striving to retrieve our lost objects, to be rid of our excessive attachments or at least to come to grips with these impossibilities that moves us. Thus, Lacanian theory is deeply concerned with examining and enumerating the various ways in which this encounter with impossibility – or, as Stavrakakis calls it, ‘negativity’4 – occurs and does not occur, and how we as subjects do or do not relate to it.

4

The Subject of Liberation

It should be clear why this focus makes Lacanian theory attractive to contemporary radical leftist thought, plagued as it is by experiences of failure, deadlock and impossibility, and driven as it is by an attachment to something that often seems lacking, elusive and incomplete. On the one hand, the disintegration of ‘really existing’ socialisms and communisms in modern history, the decline of democratic institutions in the face of a depoliticized global economy and the seemingly perpetual and irrational return of capitalist (and worse!) relations of oppression, all encourage the Left to think about limits. What is the obstacle to liberation? Is it (only) an external obstacle that can be overcome through militancy and/or organization, or is it (also) an internal obstacle built into leftist thought itself? Are we stuck in oppression because we lack a certain knowledge, or do we have an excessive attachment to our own subordination? In this context, Lacanian theory offers a number interesting frameworks for understanding the project of liberation. For example, while the success of many oppressive political discourses in mobilizing the passion of the masses can be understood, at least in part, on the basis of various promises to overcome impossibility, to recover the lost object of political harmony by getting rid of troublesome excesses (lazy immigrants, greedy Jews, decadent liberals, dangerous terrorists, etc.), the question to be answered is what the Left can offer as an alternative. Is there some other way of relating to impossibility which could mobilize our passions as effectively? On the other hand, the fractiousness of the contemporary radical Left, its seeming inability to unite around a common image of liberation without diluting the specificity of that image to the point of total inefficacy, points in the same direction: Is the obstacle to leftist unity (only) the idiosyncratic problem of deluded radicals who just need to learn to compromise (or deluded liberal compromisers who need to radicalize), or is it (also) an obstacle inherent to political thought itself that needs to be dealt with in some other way? Stavrakakis’ definition of the Lacanian Left reflects this problematic: While he insists that ‘the designation “Lacanian Left” does not refer to any kind of pre-existing unity or essence underlying all these diverse theoretico-political projects’, quipping that ‘in true Lacanian style, one could even declare that the Lacanian left “does not exist”! ’ He simultaneously affirms that ‘paradoxically, its own division is the best proof of its emergence’.5 The point is that Lacanian theory is in a privileged position to make this paradoxical affirmation, to accomplish this particular shift in perspective. When Lacan says something doesn’t exist (as he infamously does of the sexual relationship), it’s not (only) that it isn’t there in reality, but (also) that

Introduction: The Subject of Liberation

5

it is there as that which disrupts reality, preventing it from functioning properly. The Lacanian Real is precisely that Thing whose essence is that it simultaneously has no unity, no consistent positive existence and is somehow there, in the Real, persisting and antagonizing us against all odds.

Why Lacan? Of course, if there is truth in Lacan’s theories about the encounter with the Real, then one ought to be able to find this truth elsewhere. Thinkers who are not Lacan, who don’t use psychoanalytic theory, who aren’t part of Western European theoretical traditions at all or who aren’t even ‘theorists’, ought to be grappling with the same truth, the same encounter. And (Žižek’s reading of) Lacanian theory affirms this: The Real alone is that which remains the same in all possible worlds.6 However, one can, and should, announce which of these attempts to articulate the encounter with the Real is most effective, most rigorous, most truthful. Is this a matter of personal idosyncracy? Will some articulations of the encounter with the Real be more legible to some than to others? Or is this a matter of rational calculation? Are some articulations objectively more truthful? In this very dichotomy, one should detect the antagonizing Real itself. These questions cannot be finally answered. Of course, my own social and cultural location, my particular idiosyncratic experiences and competencies, will enable me to encounter the truth of the Real in some places more effectively than in others. But simultaneously, my own resistance to this encounter, the pain and anxiety it generates in me, will encourage me to prefer some articulations that are objectively less effective, that save me from the trouble of fully facing the Real. It is thus worth interrogating the claim that Lacanian theory is in a privileged position to approach the encounter with the Real. Beyond a personal idiosyncratic preference (perhaps for obscure French writing, playful neologisms or complex mathematical schema), what grounds this claim? For my part, I ground it in the existence of psychoanalysis as a practice. When adapting psychoanalytic theory to political ends, it is often tempting to forget that psychoanalysis is also a practice, a treatment that aims to make some kind of transformation in the subjects who seek it out. In the face of the deadlocks that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory explains – the impossibility of recovering our lost objects or escaping our excessive attachments – psychoanalysis nonetheless continues to offer itself as a

6

The Subject of Liberation

practice that allows for some kind of positive progress or transformation – if not the overcoming of impossibility, then at least a different, objectively preferable, way of relating to it. In this way, psychoanalysis is privileged because it not only describes the encounter with the Real, but also acts it out, stages that encounter between its own theory and practice. Psychoanalysis is a privileged terrain insofar as it creates a space of highly productive tension between a theory that continually emphasizes negativity and impossibility, the irresolvability of the deadlocks at the core of human experience and a practice that holds out the promise of a cure, some possibility for a positive qualitative change in the deadlocked situation. In the context of this tension, the Lacanian Left’s privileging of psychoanalysis manifests in a particular wager that I read as more or less present and more or less explicit across the entire field: the wager that the Lacanian psychoanalytic cure is in some way identical to political liberation. In the face of the questions that Lacanian psychoanalytic theory helps the Left to raise (is there some unique, ‘liberated’ way of relating to the impossibility of political unity that the Left can offer or aim for?), Lacanian psychoanalytic practice offers itself as a possible answer, or at least the placeholder for one. That is to say, what if the subject who has undergone a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis (whatever that may mean) is a liberated subject, and may therefore be the constituent member of a liberated society and/or polity? What if the obstacle to liberation is that we/they have not yet undergone a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis? Žižek himself is clearly at least ambivalent about this wager, and with good reason. It’s a risky one. At the very least, one must be careful to acknowledge a host of practical concerns: Does undergoing a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis mean undergoing the kind of treatment that occurs in various psychoanalytic clinics today? What individuals or organizations have the authority to define or provide such treatment, and who has the means to access it? But beyond these practical concerns, there is, as might be anticipated, a great deal of disagreement, not only over what the definition of a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis should be, but even over whether one can or should provide such a definition at all. From a certain perspective, this is precisely the bone in the throat of the Lacanian Left, the obstacle that splits that (already fairly small, peripheral) field into such antagonistic camps. Stavrakakis’ own polemics against Žižek’s ‘perverse’ overvaluation of a miraculous revolutionary political event are fairly easily translated into a rejection of Žižek’s description of the psychoanalytic cure, which emphasizes (overemphasizes?) the necessity of passing through a terrifying state of ‘subjective destitution’, a moment in which

Introduction: The Subject of Liberation

7

the subject loses his or her consistency in some fundamental way. This is the site of productive tension that Lacanian theory and practice hold open for the radical Left: A Lacanian perspective continually emphasizes the impossibility of achieving a final political unity or liberation, the way in which every achieved utopia ultimately transforms into a nightmare. At the same time, it holds out the promise of a liberatory transformation, some way of relating to the impossibility of political unity or liberation that would be preferable to, and more liberated than, what we have now.

Why Žižek? Why The Ticklish Subject? In the face of the tension between personal preference and rational objectivity, let me borrow some language from Žižek’s own evaluation of Judith Butler. Where Žižek finds Butler’s ‘performative theory of gender formation the most representative and persuasive version of [postmodern Leftist] theories’,7 I find Žižek’s account of the ideological deadlocks faced by contemporary radical leftist political theory, and especially the way this account is articulated in The Ticklish Subject, the most representative and persuasive version of Lacanian leftist thought. On the side of personal preference, this is because I like his revolutionary polemics (and to a lesser extent his obscene humour and difficult style). Forced to choose between a Laclauian condemnation of Žižek’s radical Marxism (nicely articulated by Stavrakakis) and a Žižekian condemnation of Laclau’s radical democratic project (nicely articulated by Jodi Dean in the chapter of her Žižek’s Politics entitled ‘Democratic Fundamentalism’), I am the kind of person who will choose the latter. However, on the side of rational objectivity, the reason I experience and/or assert such a strong fidelity to Žižek, what has turned me into a card-carrying Žižekian, is that I detect in his formulations a paradoxical quality that is very useful in holding open the site of productive tension. As I will endeavour to demonstrate, Žižek’s writing does not (only) express and argue for his own opinion, but (also) stages an inner conflict or ambivalence over that very opinion. Not only is Žižek only one philosopher among many, but so too is the Ticklish Subject, only one text in a huge (and rapidly expanding) catalogue. Žižek writes books almost faster than I can read them. What could possibly justify focusing so heavily on one title from as long ago as 1999? Even if one acknowledges, as Žižek himself does in Astra Taylor’s Žižek!8 that he has a kind of central canon,

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The Subject of Liberation

consisting of only a handful of books (The Sublime Object of Ideology, Tarrying with The Negative, The Ticklish Subject, The Parallax View…), one must admit that there have been several more recent entries in this category (Living in the End Times, Less than Nothing and by all accounts even his forthcoming book on Lacan). Isn’t The Ticklish Subject rather dated? Again, I will assert that, for me, The Ticklish Subject remains the clearest, most direct staging of the ambivalence at the core of Žižek’s work that I find so useful. Specifically, to make use of the language I rehearsed above, The Ticklish Subject stages a tension between two modes of encountering (or refusing to encounter) the Real, which Žižek rehearses at three different levels: first as a tension between the radical leftist traditions of class struggle and postmodern identity politics; second as a tension between the philosophical traditions of German Enlightenment idealism and French post-structuralism/deconstruction; and third as a tension between the Lacanian character structures of hysteria and perversion. This triple-level staging of the encounter with the Real has several interesting implications for the Lacanian Left. First, in confirming the hypothesis that the Real is what remains the same in all possible worlds, this staging lays the groundwork for shifting back and forth between the three different levels: political struggle, philosophy and the psychic structure of the individual subject. That is to say, in reading the deadlocks that occur at each of these levels as structurally the same deadlock, Žižek’s work suggests that what politics, philosophy and psychoanalysis are each concerned with is ultimately the same problem, although encountered and addressed in different ways. Philosophy does not only reflect on politics and subjectivity, but can have real transformative effects on each. Psychoanalytic theory is not only ‘applied’ to politics and philosophy, but is always already dealing with their proper objects in its own terms. Real political change does not only change relations of power, but also how we think, and even the way our very subjectivities are structured. These inter-linkages are precisely the concern of the first half of The Subject of Liberation: First, it develops out of Žižek’s work a coherent and linear account of how the Lacanian subject of the unconscious relates to various forms of contemporary political ideology. Second, and simultaneously, it reveals how the ideological and psychic deadlocks experienced by the individual subject have the same structure as (because they are the same as) the deadlocks experienced by contemporary leftist theory. So how do Žižek’s ambivalent form of thinking and The Ticklish Subject’s triple-level staging relate to each other? If Žižek rehearses political, philosophical and subjective deadlocks as all versions of the same structural deadlock between

Introduction: The Subject of Liberation

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two options – hysteria and perversion – then the danger is that he will promise to do the impossible: to objectively prove that one option is preferable to the other, thereby eliminating the Real antagonism that insists between them. And, of course, he is tempted to do this, privileging good hysterical revolutionary leftism over bad perverse identity politics, and I am tempted to follow him. But the really productive moments, which I detect in Žižek’s work more than anywhere else, are the moments in which he resists this temptation. They are moments in which Žižek acknowledges that there is a tension between hysterical and perverse perspectives that is not resolvable except perhaps through a shift in perspective. That is to say, as a member of the Lacanian Left, Žižek has at his disposal not only a theory that insists on the impossibility of getting rid of the deadlock of the Real, but also the notion of a practice that promises some kind of positive change in the face of this impossibility. If it is impossible to choose between the two character structures (leftist approaches, philosophical traditions), then perhaps it is possible to do something else that one could nonetheless define as liberation. It is the pursuit of this elusive something else that I find myself engaged in, with Žižek as a simultaneously silent and wildly prolific partner, and it is a definition of this something else that The Subject of Liberation offers by the time it is done.

The problem of starting assumptions One way that I have invented to explain to the idiot who is myself the ambivalence that I detect at the core of The Ticklish Subject is through the notion of a reflexive problem that haunts the task of theorizing – what I call the problem of starting assumptions. Any act of theorizing tends to begin from one of two starting assumptions: Either one assumes that there is a correct solution for the problem at hand that can be arrived at through a certain amount of theoretical work, or one assumes that there is no correct solution to the problem, that every solution is necessarily flawed, and that all solutions are therefore essentially equal. If I begin here from the former starting assumption, then at the end of this book I will claim to have produced the correct definition of liberation and subjectivity, and will feel justified in setting out to defeat all those contemporary leftist theorists who rely on incorrect definitions. If I begin from the latter starting assumption, then at the end of this book I will claim to have produced a definition of liberation and subjectivity that represents only my own idiosyncratic preference. My act of theorizing will become part of a more or less meaningless game played by theorists for recognition, and if I’m lucky, compensation.

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The Subject of Liberation

This problem concerns not only the act of theorizing, but the political question as well. On the one hand, the assumption that there is a correct definition of liberation and subjectivity that can be arrived at through a certain amount of theoretical work tends to imply that there is also a correct liberated social and political form, and that once this is discovered every individual in the world could justifiably be compelled or induced to adopt this form. Does this not sound dangerously close to a whole plethora of ideological justifications for historical and contemporary imperialisms? On the other hand, the assumption that there is no correct definition tends to imply that there is no correct liberated social and political form, only a multitude of flawed, oppressive forms. Radical leftist political struggle is then reduced to a kind of game played for recognition, or at best an attempt to produce a beautiful tapestry of essentially oppressive societies and polities. While the former assumption can be used to justify imperialism, the latter tends to lead to a kind of political relativism or inertia in which leftist struggle as such becomes meaningless. As such, I wish to reject both of these starting assumptions. I do not wish to make the absurd and grandiose claim that I (lowly, flawed, particular individual that I am) am the first and only theorist to arrive at the correct definition of liberation and subjectivity, neither do I wish to reduce my work to a single piece of flotsam in a sea of essentially futile speculation. I want a third assumption. The Ticklish Subject is invaluable here because it stages the problem of starting assumptions in a particularly interesting way. To put it simply, The Ticklish Subject presents Enlightenment philosophy (especially German idealism) as precisely that branch of leftist political theory that starts from the first starting assumption, and postmodern thought (especially French deconstructionism) as that branch of leftist political theory that starts from the second. That is to say, for Žižek, Enlightenment thought begins from the assumption that there is a correct definition of human subjectivity, that this definition implies a correct definition of the liberated social and political form, and that once it is discovered, every individual in the world should be compelled or induced to adopt this form. On the other hand, postmodern thought begins with the assumption that there is no correct definition of human subjectivity, that this implies that there is only a multitude of idiosyncratic social and political forms and that contemporary leftist theoretical and political struggle is ultimately only a struggle for tolerance and recognition of difference.

Introduction: The Subject of Liberation

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In this context, the task that Žižek sets himself in The Ticklish Subject, the task of rescuing some part of Enlightenment thought (represented most clearly by Descartes’ cogito) from its rejection by some part of postmodern thought (represented most clearly by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault), appears as an attempt to do what I have announced that I wish to do above: to reject both starting assumptions. To be clear, The Ticklish Subject does privilege Enlightenment thought over postmodern thought. However, Žižek simultaneously acknowledges that it is only a part of Enlightenment thought that he wishes to redeem. His effort is not aimed at returning to Enlightenment thought in the way that it has traditionally been understood. Rather, both traditional Enlightenment thought and postmodern thought are temptations to be resisted in favour of some other possibility which Enlightenment thought has somehow produced without knowing it. From this perspective, Žižek is also in search of a third starting assumption, and he privileges Enlightenment thought only because for him it points the way. And while he might rankle at the suggestion, it is not difficult to argue that Žižek is at least as indebted to postmodern thought as he is to the Enlightenment for the variety of theoretical tools and strategies he employs in this search. Finally, the specific way that The Ticklish Subject stages the problem of starting assumptions reintroduces psychoanalysis into the equation and draws the seemingly disparate aims of The Subject of Liberation together to a single point: Žižek maps the antagonism between Enlightenment and postmodern thought onto Lacan’s theory of character structures, which distinguishes between hysteria and perversion. For Žižek, the Enlightenment assumption that a correct solution is out there waiting to be discovered makes it structurally homologous to the subjective position of hysteria, while the postmodern assumption that there are no correct solutions makes it structurally homologous to the subjective position of perversion. The implication is that, because the practice of Lacanian psychoanalysis offers itself as a form of treatment to subjects who have either hysteric or perverse character structures, and because it promises some change in subjective position, there is room to read the Lacanian psychoanalytic cure simultaneously as identical to political liberation and as a solution to the problem of starting assumptions. The Subject of Liberation begins from the wager that what Lacanian psychoanalytic treatment aims to produce in the analysand is precisely a liberated state based on some third starting assumption.

12

The Subject of Liberation

There is no third assumption In pursuing the ‘third assumption’ that lies between or beyond the two deadlocked structures of hysteria and perversion, The Subject of Liberation ultimately runs up against an impossibility: The only third character structure theorized by Lacan – psychosis – is just as problematic as the first two, if not more so. In the face of this deadlock, The Subject of Liberation makes the desperate move of asserting that the difference between oppression and liberation, or between pre- and post-analytic subjects, must be located not between the deadlocked structures of hysteria and perversion but internal to each of them. That is to say, The Subject of Liberation finds it ultimately necessary to produce a dual definition of liberation that includes both a definition of the post-analytic (or liberated) hysteric and the post-analytic (or liberated) pervert. Rather than arguing that the psychoanalytic cure aims to induce the subject to abandon his or her character structure and adopt another, healthy ideal, The Subject of Liberation argues that the psychoanalytic cure aims to make a transformation within the subject’s existing character structure from an unhealthy version to a healthy version. And by extension, rather than arguing that revolutionary Marxism and postmodern identity politics should be abandoned for (or combined to create) some third ‘correct’ radical leftist perspective, The Subject of Liberation argues that each tradition must be adjusted from within to become its own ‘correct’ form of Leftism. Rather than arguing that Enlightenment idealism and postmodern post-structuralism can be combined or rejected in favour of some correct uber-philosophy, The Subject of Liberation argues that these philosophical traditions are each in need of some intervention to become truer version of themselves. In developing these arguments, The Subject of Liberation challenges dominant readings of both Lacan and Žižek himself, in two key ways. First, it rejects the temptation, to which Žižek often seems to succumb, to reduce the ethic at the heart of Lacanian theory and practice to a kind of decisionist relativism. That is to say, Lacan is often read as arguing (and may in fact have intended) that the aim of psychoanalysis is only to get the subject to take subjective responsibility for his or her acts, rather than to induce him or her to perform or not perform any particular acts as such. The content of the subject’s choice – who the subject chooses to be – is rendered sacred ground on which the psychoanalyst is forbidden to trespass. It should be clear that it is this interdiction that makes defining the post-analytic state(s) so controversial. In proposing such a definition, even a

Introduction: The Subject of Liberation

13

dual-definition, The Subject of Liberation risks imposing its own (necessarily flawed, utopian) stamp on the space of the subject’s freedom, the space that Lacanian ethics is dedicated to keeping open. It should also be clear that this interdiction conflicts with the appropriation of Lacanian theory by leftist politics. If the psychoanalytic cure only asks the subject to take responsibility for choosing, might he or she not take responsibility for choosing a conservative, or even a tyrannical, oppressive political attachment? Radical decisionism is deeply antithetical to the link between liberation, psychoanalysis and radical leftism. In place of the notion that Lacanian ethics enjoins the subject only to choose and to take responsibility for choosing, The Subject of Liberation asserts that this act of choosing and accepting responsibility itself has necessary consequences for what the subject chooses. That is to say, it proposes a revised Lacanian ethics that concerns not only the subject’s internal relation to him or herself, but also his or her acts, his or her relation to his or her Other. The flip side of this is that The Subject of Liberation aims to make good on Žižek’s claim that oppression and liberation can be objectively distinguished in the external world, and it supports the wager that political liberation is inextricably linked to the aims of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Of course, it is vital, in this context, to avoid the trap of proposing a normative ethics to which subjects should be externally compelled or induced to conform. If there is a definition of oppression, it must, in some sense, lurk here. Rather, the Subject of Liberation proposes the existence of a necessary structural link between subjective responsibility and particular forms of behaviour, between an internal ethics of relating to oneself and an external ethics of relating to one’s Other. The Subject of Liberation asserts that, at a certain level, it is simply not possible to choose to behave in certain ways towards one’s Other while taking subjective responsibility for it. To be sure, this possibility is one that can be detected in Žižek’s writing, and it is in part on account of this that I have chosen Žižek as the focus of this book. Nonetheless, there remain moments in Žižek’s work that read to me, a self-professed Žižekian, too close to the decisionist temptation. The Subject of Liberation ends with some speculation about what sort of liberated society or polity is implied by the dual definition of liberation it has produced. It asks what sociopolitical forms are produced by, and/or support and produce, liberated, post-analytic subjects? While this speculation begins from the divergent points represented by the definitions of post-analytic hysteria and post-analytic perversion, it converges towards a single point: A liberated society is one that supports and reproduces as widely as possible the subjective freedom

14

The Subject of Liberation

and responsibility insisted upon by Lacanian ethics. The Subject of Liberation calls for society or polity that would guarantee a universal right to a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis (whatever this may mean). It calls for a society or polity that mobilizes its subjects not through their attachment to a fantasy of closure or peaceful co-existence, but through a radical partisan fidelity to the project of liberation. And it calls for a society or polity in which both the ends of analysis and the conditions of its possibility are openly debated rather than delimited by figures of mastery and knowledge. In taking its own stand on the aims of psychoanalysis, The Subject of Liberation hopes to contribute to a debate on the topics of human subjectivity and liberation, a debate which it conceives of as a central part, not only of the radical Left’s theory, but also of its practice.

Part One

The Problem

1

How to Read the Ticklish Subject

I’m not yet writing a book One of the most popular contemporary critiques of Žižek’s work is that it lacks a central argument. It may be fun to read, being chalk full of jokes, parables and examples from blockbuster movies. It may be scandalous and titillating, descending equally frequently into obscene humour and intentionally provocative political pronouncements. It may even offer some moments of deep insight, demonstrating a profound grasp of psychoanalytic theory and Enlightenment and postmodern philosophy. But for all this, a general suspicion hovers over Žižek’s oeuvre that he is never quite able to get to the point because there isn’t one. Behind all the sound and fury, beyond the endless series of setups and punch lines is … nothing. There are a number of responses one might make to this critique. Are the rest of us doing any better? Isn’t Žižek’s refusal (or failure) to follow the trend of pretending to have a central argument rather refreshing? Or is Žižek’s central argument perhaps simply too difficult for his critics to follow? Moreover, why do we expect this kind of coherence from Žižek in particular? No one seems to complain about Deleuze and Guattari’s 1000 Plateaus, which is so disjointed it includes a story about Deleuze turning into a lobster. But before rushing to Žižek’s aid in this way, one ought to take a moment to consider the confession he makes in Žižek! regarding his own writing process: I have a very complicated ritual about writing. It’s psychologically impossible for me to sit down, so I have to trick myself. I elaborate a very simple strategy, which, at least with me, it works. I put down ideas, but I put them down, usually, already in a relatively elaborate way: the line of thought already written, full sentences, and so on. So, up a certain point, I’m telling myself, ‘No. I’m not yet writing the book. I’m just putting down ideas.’ Then, at a certain point, I tell myself, ‘Everything is already there. Now, I just have to edit it.’ So, that’s the idea: to split it into two. I put down notes. I edit it. Writing disappears.1

18

The Subject of Liberation

On the one hand, the least one can say is that this trick works exceedingly well. As someone who is psychologically incapable of writing a book, Žižek is one of the most prolific theorists writing today. On the other hand, anyone who has actually read Žižek’s work will have to acknowledge that it tends to read as precisely this: a series of elaborate and interesting but seemingly unrelated thoughts hammered together into something only vaguely resembling a linear argument. As a self-described Žižekian, I cannot count the number of times I have felt that he was on the verge of reaching a very profound conclusion, only to turn the page and find the chapter finished, and the next picking up on some new, seemingly completely unrelated, topic. What’s more, from one book to the next, Žižek frequently repeats the same relatively elaborate thoughts, even elaborated in exactly the same way, but edited together differently with a few new thoughts thrown in here and there if one is lucky. As such, it is always tempting for those who take Žižek seriously to dismiss the central arguments that he imposes onto his books after the fact, and to try to directly write the book that he is avoiding writing. Indeed, my own succumbing to this temptation is part of the impetus behind The Subject of Liberation. One of the ways I conceived of my own project at the outset was to assemble Žižek’s thoughts into a coherent linear argument, filling in the blanks along the way. However, this is only half of the story. While the central arguments that structure Žižek’s works may, as it were, arrive too late, this does not mean that they are simply imposed on a random assemblage of parts. Rather, they are attempts to articulate the problem that Žižek was working through when he produced that particular assemblage. That is to say, Žižek’s books should not be read as attempts to provide a coherent linear argument for a particular solution to a given problem. Rather, they should be read as the traces of a series of attempts to formulate the problem as such. And in the case of The Ticklish Subject, I believe that the problem Žižek was grappling with was precisely the problem of subjectivity and liberation.

Look where it comes again, Horatio! In the introduction to The Ticklish Subject, Žižek presents himself as a Hamlet, the unlikely champion of a much maligned spectre of Cartesian subjectivity. Ranged against him, Žižek finds all of Elsinore: a ‘holy alliance’ of the entirety of Western academia, the members of which include, but are not limited to, ‘the

How to Read the Ticklish Subject

19

new age obscuranist … the postmodern deconstructionist … the Habermasian theorist of communication … the Heideggerian proponent of the thought of Being … the cognitive scientist … the Deep Ecologist … the critical (post-) Marxist … and the feminist’. In the face of this awesome conspiracy of thought, Žižek announces that his aim is to ‘reassert the Cartesian subject, whose rejection forms the silent pact of all the struggling parties of today’s academia’.2 However, while this pronouncement of fidelity to the spectre of Descartes’ cogito is enough to get The Ticklish Subject started, the time remains out of joint. Žižek seems unable to simply defeat his opponents in deadly combat. Rather, he becomes immediately entangled in a seemingly endless series of theoretical elaborations, monologues and asides. Why? Why does Žižek delay? Because he is clear from the beginning that his aim ‘is not to return to the cogito in the guise in which this notion has dominated modern thought … but to bring to light its forgotten obverse’.3 The problem that Žižek is working through in the course of The Ticklish Subject is not just that of reasserting the Cartesian subject, but of defining exactly what the Cartesian subject is that he wishes to reassert. Žižek faces the difficult task of distinguishing between two sides of the cogito: the failed and guilty side of it that must be put to rest, and the as-yet-unredeemed side of it that must be set free. Reading The Ticklish Subject as a version of the Danish play produces some interesting results, not least of which is that it indicates that Žižek is in strange company. In Spectres of Marx, Derrida begins his response to the question ‘Whither Marxism?’ by returning, like Žižek, to the opening lines of The Manifesto. And before things even get properly started, he finds himself on the battlements of a certain Danish castle with Bernardo, Horatio and Marcellus, waiting for a certain spectre to return for the first time. Derrida’s own encounter with hauntology is useful here because it introduces the language of différance and inheritance: With help from Marx, Derrida establishes ‘the difference between a spectre and a spirit. It is a diffèrance’, the difference between a thing and itself. ‘The spectre is … the carnal apparition of the spirit, its phenomenal body, its fallen and guilty body, [and] it is also the impatient and nostalgic waiting for [the spirit’s] redemption’.4 For Derrida, the task of the inheritor, the one to whom the spectre speaks, is precisely the work of differentiating between the spectre and the spirit. The call of Hamlet’s spectre, ‘Swear’,5 is a call for this work that will free the spirit from the weight of its fallen and guilty body and allow it to live again. Is it not strange that Derrida, of whose deconstructionist legacy Žižek is frequently so critical, should so accurately describe his own project?

20

The Subject of Liberation

Opposing Derrida’s inheritor in this task are the conjurers: those who deny différance, those who work to keep the spirit bound to its body, either to be rid of it once and for all (conjuring as warding off – ‘Let him stay there and move no more!’6) or to secure it as an object of mastery (conjuring as commanding – ‘Stay, illusion! If thou hast any sound, or use of voice, speak to me’7). And this secret agreement between enemies who are ‘officially involved in a deadly battle’8 is perhaps best described by Michel Foucault in his What Is Enlightenment? Foucault exhorts his readers to refuse ‘the “blackmail” of the Enlightenment’,9 which demands that one ‘either accept the Enlightenment and remain within the tradition of its rationalism … or else … criticize the Enlightenment and then try to escape from its principles of rationality’. This ‘simplistic and authoritarian alternative’,10 he argues, is underpinned by a shared ‘faithfulness to doctrinal elements’.11 Regardless of which side of the battle one chooses, regardless of whether one has chosen to accept or to criticize the Enlightenment, one has always already been blackmailed into submitting to the terms of the alternative: the Enlightenment shall mean this (this body, this tradition, this doctrine, these concepts, these elements, these thinkers and so on) and nothing more nor less! Once again, a theorist whom Žižek frequently rejects out of hand seems to produce exactly his own logic: The various branches of Western academia, officially engaged in deadly battle, are nonetheless bound in a holy conspiracy against the resuscitation of a certain Enlightenment spirit. In opposition to the faithfulness to doctrinal elements demanded by the blackmail of the Enlightenment, Foucault exhorts his reader to practise ‘the reactivation of an attitude … of a philosophical ethos’.12 This ethos, the spirit present in the Enlightenment project, must be reactivated and redeemed, while the fallen and guilty body is simultaneously put to rest. One must announce, if I may be allowed to push Foucault’s project past what some would call its breaking point, the différance between ‘the “Enlightenment” which discovered the liberties’ and the Enlightenment that ‘developed the disciplines’,13 between the Enlightenment and itself. And in The Ticklish Subject, Žižek sets himself precisely this task in relation to Descartes’ theory of subjectivity. The point is not (only) to reassert the cogito in opposition to those who criticize it, but to refuse to be blackmailed into the act of conjuration that underpins both sides of this alternative. The point is to inherit the spirit of the Enlightenment as part of the contemporary project of radically liberatory leftist politics.

How to Read the Ticklish Subject

21

Žižek’s postmodern other The second useful result of reading The Ticklish Subject as a version of Hamlet is that one may turn to Žižek’s own answer to the classic question concerning the play, ‘Why does Hamlet delay?’ which he attributes in turn to Lacan: Hamlet recognizes himself as the addressee of the imposed mandate or mission (to revenge his father’s murder); but the father’s ghost enigmatically supplements his command with the request that Hamlet should not in any way harm his mother. And what prevents Hamlet from acting … [what perpetuates the movement of the play] is precisely the confrontation with the … desire of the Other: the key scene in the whole drama is the long dialogue between Hamlet and his mother, in which he is seized with doubt as to his mother’s desire – What does she really want? What if she really enjoys her filthy, promiscuous relationship with his uncle?14

According to this interpretation, it is not Hamlet’s initial swearing of allegiance to the spectre of his father that is the most important scene (although this does manage to get the play started), neither is it the final showdown in which Hamlet at long last accomplishes the bloody deed appointed to him (although this does manage to get the play over with). The most important scene is act III, scene iv, in which Hamlet confronts the enigma of his mother’s desire, the only scene in which the spectre returns again: ‘Look’, it says to Hamlet, ‘amazement on thy mother sits: O, step between her and her fighting soul … Speak to her Hamlet’.15 Here is the conclusion towards which I am inexorably drawn: The truly difficult task is not declaring fidelity to the spectre, neither is it carrying out the mandate that the spectre imposes. The truly difficult task is the risky act of speaking to the living Other about whose desire one is in doubt. It is the attempt to rescue this Other who may not be an enemy, but simply mistaken, misled, confused or seduced. It is an attempt to step between this Other and his or her fighting soul. And this encounter must take the form of speech, of symbolic communication, because the essential task is to describe to the Other the difference between the failed and guilty body, and the spirit that must be redeemed. To Gertrude, who asks ‘How is’t with you, that you do bend your eye on vacancy? … Whereon do you look?’,16 Hamlet must describe ‘the counterfeit presentment of two brothers’, one a spirit ‘where every god did seem to set his seal’, the other, ‘like a mildew’d ear, blasting his wholesome brother’.17 My wager here is that insofar as Žižek is a Hamlet, and Enlightenment thought the spectre that haunts him, postmodern thought is the Other whom

22

The Subject of Liberation

he is attempting to rescue. More specifically, insofar as the task that Žižek has set himself in The Ticklish Subject is to inherit the spirit of the Cartesian subject, the ‘postmodern deconstructionist for whom the Cartesian subject is a discursive fiction, an effect of decentred textual mechanisms’,18 is not simply one member among others of the holy alliance that stands between him and his destiny (Ophelia, Polonius, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and so on). Rather, I believe that postmodern thought, represented for Žižek precisely by Derrida and Foucault among others, occupies the third privileged position in the drama. I believe that Postmodern thought occupies the position of Gertrude, the Other about whose desire this Hamlet is in doubt, and I believe that the fact that these postmodern theorists are so useful in describing Žižek’s own project both signals and occasions this special status. One need not look very far to discover a strong current of ambivalence in Žižek’s oeuvre in relation to precisely these thinkers. Derrida, for example, is often characterized by Žižek as a kind of waffler. His messianic waiting for a democracy to come appears as a defence against acting – and thus having to take responsibility for acting – in the present. ‘It involves us in the “postmodernist” indefinite oscillation of “how do we know this truly is the [revolutionary] Event [that enjoins us to act], not just another semblance of the Event?” ’19 Nonetheless, in his article for Critical Inquiry entitled ‘A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor pro Domo Sua,)’ Žižek calls for a resuscitation of Derridean concepts in the face of ‘a new barbarism in today’s intellectual life’, in which ‘Derrida… together with Baudrillard and others, [is] thrown into the “postmodern” melting pot that, so the story goes, opens up the way for protoFascist irrationalism’.20 Is Derrida a postmodern failure or not? Žižek seems uncertain. Gilles Deleuze, whom I have not mentioned until now, but who clearly falls into this same postmodernist camp, faces a similar treatment, but to greater extent. In The Ticklish Subject, he is described as ‘a philosopher of globalized perversion if ever there was one’, practising a ‘false subversive radicalization that fits the existing power constellation perfectly’.21 Nonetheless, Žižek devotes an entire book to Deleuze, Organs without Bodies, in which he valorises much of Deleuze’s thinking, separating it ruthlessly from errors that he is tempted to ascribe to the ‘ “bad” influence’22 of Felix Guattari. Is Deleuze a pervert who ought to be discounted, or might his inadequacies be chalked up to some external seduction? Žižek can’t seem to make up his mind. And one should not forget Foucault, who is shown out precisely the same door as Deleuze: he, also, is ‘a perverse philosopher if ever there was one’.23

How to Read the Ticklish Subject

23

Is there not already, even in this strangely unimaginative repetition of the very sentence structure of Žižek’s accusations, something that sticks out symptomatically from the body of the text? Žižek has not (yet) attempted to rescue Foucault as he has Derrida and Deleuze, but one can well imagine that this book or article is on the way, perhaps held up at the publisher’s by some unforeseen difficulty.

The Ticklish Subject: A drama If I am right, if postmodern thought is the Other about whose desire Žižek is in doubt, what does this mean for my own project? The first thing it means is that I can return to The Ticklish Subject with a particular reading at my disposal: It is not Žižek’s initial encounter with the spectre of Cartesian subjectivity (the introduction) that is the most important scene (although this does manage to get the book started), nor is it the final analysis (Part 3, Chapter 2) in which Žižek at long last passes judgement on exactly what is wrong with contemporary liberal tolerant late capitalism (although this does manage to get the book over with). The most important scene is Part 3, Chapter 1, in which Žižek confronts ‘today’s “postmodern” political thought which, against the spectre of the (transcendental) Subject, endeavour[s] to assert the liberating proliferation of the multiple forms of subjectivity – feminine, gay, ethnic…’24 It is here that I will look for Žižek to do the true work of redemption: to describe to his Other the spirit that this Other cannot yet see, and to ask his Other to choose allegiance to this spirit over the seductions of conjuration. It is here that I will expect Žižek, infamous for his reliance on jokes, parables and pop-culture illustrations, to drop his façade and admit ‘I essentially am not in madness, but mad in craft.’25 It is here that I will expect him to make good on his proclamation: ‘I am an Enlightenment person [who] believes in clear statements … What interests me are … propositions, the underlying logic, not … style … Style is a total fake, I think. Maybe it works as a strategy … first you have to seduce people with obscure statements, but I hate this kind of approach’.26 The truth of this reading is, I believe, already perceptible in the fact that while Part 3, Chapter 1 of The Ticklish Subject is ostensibly structured as a critique of Judith Butler, whose ‘performative theory of gender formation [Žižek finds] the most representative and persuasive version of [postmodern] theories’,27 Butler herself does not appear for several pages. Instead, Žižek begins this chapter with a declaration of war against what he calls the philosophy of perversion,

24

The Subject of Liberation

a theoretical position that he attributes explicitly to Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault. In these first few pages, Žižek announces his intention to argue against Deleuze and Foucault, and in favour of something that he identifies with hysteria, which I will refer to, for the remainder of this work, as the philosophy of hysteria. The reason should be clear: Butler is not, in fact, the object under discussion in Part 3, Chapter 1. Rather, she is being asked by Žižek to play the part of the Other to whom the discussion is addressed. Žižek is writing a drama, and in this climactic scene he stages a confrontation between the reluctant protagonist, played by himself, and the Other about whose desire that protagonist is in doubt, played by Judith Butler. In this scene, Žižek’s protagonist asks his Other to choose between two alternatives: the temptation of being seduced by a perverse villain, played alternately by Deleuze and Foucault, and fidelity to a forsaken ideal, played, when it appears, by the spectral image of Lacan and in small part by his contemporary, Jean Laplanche. What this reading allows for is the bracketing of one of the most immediate and contentious questions that arises here: the question of whether Deleuze and Foucault, or even Butler herself, actually subscribe to the positions that Žižek attributes to them. While Žižek has chosen his actors carefully, what is vital here is not the actors, but the roles that Žižek has asked them to play. ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’ should not be read (only) as Žižek’s attempt to engage in a real confrontation with Deleuze, Foucault and/or Butler, but (also) as a way for Žižek to stage an inner conflict, to in some way confront a part of himself. In an appendix to an earlier work, Metastases of Enjoyment, Žižek engages in what might be seen as a more transparent version of this same practice, writing an imaginary self-interview. There, in reply to a self-imposed question regarding his incessant use of pop-culture examples, he answers simply, ‘I resort to these examples above all … to achieve the greatest possible clarity not only for my readers but also for myself – the idiot for whom I endeavour to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible is ultimately myself ’.28 If one begins with the assumption that Žižek is not only playing one of the characters in the drama, but has also written the entire script, and furthermore that he is not only the author, but also the intended audience, one can put aside preliminary questions of objectivity and interpretation, of whether Žižek has properly understood the authors he refers to or not. One can focus instead on a much more poignant question: What problem has so goaded Žižek that, in the hope of resolving his inner conflict over it, he has decided to stage this particular production starring himself, Butler, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan and Laplanche?

2

Leftist Philosophy and Lacan’s Theory of Character Structures

That old leftist problem The problem around which ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’ revolves, which Žižek attributes to Butler, but which I believe is more precisely his own, and which is certainly my problem in the context of this work, is the problem of the political Left. ‘The political focus of Butler’s theoretical endeavour’, writes Žižek, ‘is the old leftist one: how is it possible not only actually to resist, but also to undermine and/or displace the existing socio-symbolic network?’1 That is to say, even if one is on the Left, even if one’s intent is to liberate subjects from oppression by displacing the existing socio-symbolic network, one may, as a result of falling into one temptation or another, fail to do so. How is one to avoid this danger? How is one to escape the trap of endeavouring to resist the existing network, only to find that one has left it in place, or, even worse, strengthened and reproduced it? While Žižek describes Butler’s focus as that old leftist problem, it should be clear that, insofar as old vs. new is a useful distinction here, Butler is in fact part of the new Left. For the old Left, the leftist problem actually took the form of what I described in my previous chapter as the project of redemption or inheritance. The old, classical Marxist Left’s problem was to address the Other (specifically the working class) in order to induce him or her to accept his or her own liberation (mobilization as a revolutionary agent). For the new Left, however, this problem has taken on a more difficult turn as the result of repeated historical experiences in which, even when the old Left succeeded, it failed. On the one hand, in order to induce the Other to accept liberation, the old Left often found itself forced to turn to oppressive practices that inadvertently undermined its aim. In this context, the new leftist problem is how to avoid taking up a position of oppressive power in the effort to induce the Other to accept liberation. On the other hand, resistant groups and individuals

26

The Subject of Liberation

have often turned out to secretly rely upon and support their oppressive Others’ continuing antagonizing presence in order to justify and legitimize their resistant position. In this context, the new leftist problem resembles very closely Žižek’s description of Butler’s project: not just mobilizing against oppressive systems, but doing so in such a way as to avoid inadvertently strengthening or reproducing those systems themselves. This distinction between the old and the new Left is key to the drama that Žižek is staging, insofar as it can be roughly mapped onto the distinction between Enlightenment and postmodern forms of thought. For the purposes of my own project, this mapping can be described in terms of the problem of starting assumptions: The old Left tended to share the Enlightenment’s assumption that, with a certain amount of theoretical work, a correct answer to any given problem could be arrived at. The key liberatory conflict could be identified: class struggle. A privileged revolutionary agent could be charged with resolving it: the working class. A universal structure of human subjectivity should be described: the rational self-transparent consciousness. And faced with the various failures of the old Left’s projects, the new Left has tended to respond by embracing the postmodern assumption that these correct answers always ultimately imply within themselves a minimally oppressive imposition that should be rejected. The over-privileging of class struggle has tended to sideline issues of gender inequality, race prejudice, heteronormativity and so on. The exclusive valourization of the working class has not only blinded leftist theorists to the existence of other revolutionary agents, but also obscured the fact that contemporary class positions are not the same as they were under early Western European industrial capitalism. Finally, the concept of universal subjectivity has historically transformed into its opposite, applying only to a very exclusive subset of humanity (male, white, heterosexual, European, Christian, etc.) and justifying that group’s position of oppressive domination over all the others.

The deadlock of desire: Perversion vs. hysteria The choice with which Žižek confronts his Other in Part 3, Chapter 1 of The Ticklish Subject is between these two options: the new leftist, postmodern assumption that there are no correct answers, and some as yet unarticulated version of the old leftist, Enlightenment assumption that there is a right answer. However, Žižek gives these options very specific names, which are borrowed

Lacan’s Theory of Character Structures

27

from Lacan’s theory of character structures. The new leftist, postmodern option, which he associates with Deleuze and Foucault, he calls the philosophy of perversion. The old leftist, Enlightenment option, which he associates with Lacan and Laplanche, he calls the philosophy of hysteria. And the first thing one must note here is that while Žižek is using these psychoanalytic terms to denote specific leftist political strategies, he has chosen them for very precise reasons. Žižek sees the new and old leftist political strategies and the postmodern and Enlightenment philosophical assumptions with which they are associated as structurally homologous with the different character structures theorized by Lacan. This homology provides a new, potentially useful terminology with which to articulate the difference between the two, but it also has another important implication: As character structures, perversion and hysteria are each (though unequally) amenable to and in need of psychoanalytic treatment. This mapping of divergent philosophies and political strategies onto character structures is the first step in grounding the wager that the aims of Lacanian psychoanalysis may be identical to those of liberatory leftist politics. In Lacanian theory, there are three (or four) character structures: neurosis, perversion and psychosis. The first character structure, neurosis, is subdivided into hysteria and obsessionality. Of the many ways of defining the character structures, the most pertinent in the current context is as alternative (failed) attempts to resolve a particular deadlock: the deadlock of desire. That is to say, for Lacan, the universal characteristic of human subjectivity is that it faces a particular traumatic, anxiety-provoking deadlock, and each of the character structures is a structurally distinct attempt to resolve this deadlock into a situation stable enough that life becomes minimally bearable. Specifically, the deadlock of desire is a situation of simultaneous mutual reliance and antagonism between two forces: the Law – a set of socially constructed prohibitions that make inter-subjective relations minimally bearable – and desire – the (often unconscious) urge to transgress these prohibitions in search of an experience of explosive, excessive, unlimited enjoyment. This deadlock has a structure that uncannily resembles Žižek’s description of (the new leftist version of) that old leftist problem: Despite being officially engaged in deadly battle, each side of the deadlock secretly relies upon the other to sustain itself. According to Lacan, desire is essentially structured by the Law: ‘The law creates desire in the first place by creating interdiction. Desire is essentially the desire to transgress, and for there to be transgression, it is first necessary that there be prohibition.’2 Without the Law, desire ceases to exist. Conversely, the only motivating force of human

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The Subject of Liberation

subjectivity is desire. The Law has no power of its own and must therefore find a way to turn desire to its own purposes. Again, if desire (which is always the desire for transgression) is extinguished, the Law ceases to function. In the context of this ‘battleground between secret desires and symbolic prohibitions’, Žižek defines the difference between perversion and hysteria in the following way: ‘Perverts heroically “do it”, [that is] realize … our secret perverse [transgressive] fantasies’. Faced with the deadlock between desire and the Law, the pervert opts for desire and against the Law. He or she attempts to break through prohibition and to realize his or her desire in an experience of explosive, excessive, unlimited enjoyment. Conversely, hysterics display ‘doubt about whether those secret perverse fantasies are “really it” … whether our inability to enjoy really hinges only on social prohibitions’.3 Faced with the deadlock of desire, the hysteric opts for the Law, but not (only) because he or she is terrified of the excessive enjoyment of perverse transgression. He or she (also) suspects that there is some other support for desire (i.e. some other obstacle to its satisfaction and extinction) beyond the Law, and thus that transgression will not deliver what it promises. With a little work here, one can use Žižek’s homology as a lens through which to read the problem of starting assumptions in the character structures themselves: On the one hand, the pervert assumes that there is no obstacle to enjoyment outside of the various socially constructed Laws that structure human interaction. That is to say, the pervert asserts that any Law, any declaration of how things ought to be (which ultimately boils down to a prohibition against the way things ought not to be) is a lure, a screen designed to cover some particular oppressive will to power. As such, the pervert enjoins transgression. Instead of being duped by those with power, we should all dare to liberate ourselves from social constraints and enjoy directly. On the other hand, the hysteric suspects that there is, in fact, an obstacle to enjoyment outside of the Law. While he or she admits that existing social prohibitions are socially constructed and may therefore justify various forms of oppression, he or she nonetheless doubts that transgression is the way to liberation. Instead, he or she suspects that it may be possible to articulate the Law correctly, to discover the actual obstacle to enjoyment and bring the Law into line with it, establishing an identity between liberation and the Law itself. And to be clear, from a Lacanian perspective, the hysteric is privileged as the one who is (almost) right. There is an obstacle to enjoyment beyond the Law: the very deadlock of desire itself, the fact that desire and the Law are part of a secret conspiracy in which each needs the other in

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order to sustain itself. What the hysteric lacks is, in some sense, only this insight: The obstacle to the realization of desire is not beyond the Law, but internal to desire itself. The obstacle to desire’s fulfilment beyond the Law is precisely its secret reliance on the Law to sustain itself.

The philosophy of perversion Žižek justifies his focus on Butler on the basis that hers is ‘the most representative and persuasive version of [postmodern] theories whose practical expression is multiculturalist identity politics’.4 This association between postmodern thought and multiculturalist identity politics is part of the specific twist that grounds the homology that Žižek sees between postmodern thought and the character structure of perversion. Having rejected the notion of a universal structure of human subjectivity on the basis that universals are always minimally oppressive, the postmodern philosophy that Žižek is arguing against finds itself turning to political strategies that champion a multiplicity of particular identities. But this is only part of the story. The postmodern philosophy that Žižek is arguing against is also linked to strategies of transgression. Rather than making demands of the existing system, or attempting to seize control of it, the postmodern philosopher of perversion rejects systematization as such, and enjoins his or her Other to liberate him- or herself in his or her own particularity. In order to be free, each identity should dare to seek out its own idiosyncratic path to enjoyment. For this reason, Žižek links postmodern perversion not only to multicultural identity politics, but also to political strategies that champion anarchism, horizontal linkages, participatory democracy and other non-hierarchical structures.5 Foucault (to whom Butler repeatedly declares her fidelity) stages this dual strategy very clearly in What Is Enlightenment? He writes: We know from experience that the claim to escape from the general system of contemporary reality so as to produce the overall programs of another society, of another way of thinking, another culture, another vision of the world, has led only to the return of the most dangerous traditions. I prefer very specific transformations … to the programs for a new man that the worst political systems have repeated throughout the twentieth century.6

For Foucault, the failure of the Enlightenment project’s liberatory potential, its ossification into oppressive disciplinary practices, is grounded precisely in its claims to reorganize society on the basis of a transcendental, universal concept

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of human subjectivity: a new man. Thus, in opposition to universal, global projects, Foucault chooses to favour specific, partial and particular changes, which he thinks of in terms of ‘transgression’.7 Why this turn to transgression? Precisely because the universal systematization aimed at by the Enlightenment, its ‘establishment of an explicit, coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework…’, was what ‘masked … the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class’.8 Regardless of its explicit intentions, Enlightenment thought’s universally liberating Law concealed an implicit will to oppressive power. Žižek’s critique of the philosophy of perversion is that it ‘fits the existing power constellation perfectly’,9 and this should be read in light of the new leftist problem that he attributes to Butler. Žižek worries that, despite its best intentions, the effect of this perverse approach is ultimately to strengthen the contemporary dominant system. Alternately appearing as liberal democracy and/or as late global capitalism, this contemporary system seems to Žižek to be not only resistant to transgressive acts performed in the name of multiple, particular identities, but even dependent upon these acts for its own maintenance and reproduction. ‘The post-political liberal establishment’, he contends, applies a vast legal-psychological-sociological network of measures, from identifying the specific problems of each group and subgroup (not only homosexuals but African-American lesbians, African-American lesbian mothers, AfricanAmerican single unemployed lesbian mothers…) to proposing a set of measures (‘affirmative action’, etc.) to rectify the wrong. What such a tolerant procedure misses, however, is the gesture of politicization proper: although the difficulties of being an African-American single unemployed lesbian mother are adequately catalogued down to their most specific features, the concerned subject none the less somehow ‘feels’ that there is something ‘wrong’ and ‘frustrating’ in this very effort to do justice to her specific predicament – what she is deprived of is the possibility of a ‘metaphorical’ elevation of her specific ‘wrong’ into the stand-in for the universal ‘wrong’.10

For Žižek, the contemporary liberal order is so adept at compromising and negotiating with groups and individuals who base their approach to the project of liberation on multiple particular identities that they are never finally able to challenge or put in doubt its essential structure. From this perspective, multicultural identity politics is precisely the domain of dominant power today. Moreover, the dominant order’s means of reproduction, the constantly selfrevolutionizing system of capital, allows it to literally turn a profit from each

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new transgressive act. ‘In the generalized perversion of late capitalism’, writes Žižek, ‘transgression itself is solicited, 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.’11 That is to say, unlike traditional forms of authority, which prohibited personal enjoyment and demanded conformity, and may therefore have been threatened by transgression, the oppressive power of late capitalism relies precisely on a call to individualistic enjoyment and is only too adept at co-opting these postmodern strategies of transgressive resistance. Transgressions enacted on behalf of a multiplicity of idiosyncratic identities are, for Žižek, the main mode of functioning of contemporary oppression itself.

The philosophy of hysteria In the face of multiculturalist late capitalism, it seems to Žižek that the only way to actually challenge the essential structure of the dominant system is precisely to refer to some transcendental, universal dimension of subjectivity: to demand a universally applicable change that cannot be simply tolerated or sold as one alternative among many. Rather than transgressing the existing order in the name of a particular identity, Žižek favours confronting that order on its own terrain, making reasonable demands with which existing forms of oppression are nonetheless fundamentally incompatible. Rather than a piecemeal approach to the specific hardships faced by particular individuals, in the face of which liberal tolerant capitalism does not seem particularly threatened, Žižek favours proposing system-wide changes that would support universal forms of equality and enfranchisement. It will thus come as no surprise that, insofar as it represents precisely this kind of strategy, Žižek argues in favour of the hysterical approach to the project of liberation. Rather than addressing the specific problems of a particular identity (such as the African-American single unemployed lesbian mothers mentioned earlier), the hysterical strategy involves precisely the move of elevating specific wrongs into stand-ins for the universal wrong. That is to say, very much in the style of the old leftist philosophy associated with Enlightenment thought, hysteria involves asserting the existence of a universal struggle and identifying the correct agent who is in a privileged position to resolve that struggle. While one version of this strategy is the old Marxist focus on class struggle and the working class, another articulation comes in the form of Rancière’s description of democracy.12 In the

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properly democratic moment, the demos, the excluded ‘part of no part’ that is not recognized as an official member of the existing system, presents itself as the people – the universal subject of the social order – and thereby elevates its own specific problems into the problem of the social order as such. This hysterical strategy seeks to undermine the oppressive structure of the existing social order by challenging the basic coordinates upon which it relies. It does not simply seek the inclusion of a particular group into the existing people, neither does it imagine a new order in which those who are presently oppressed will find themselves in a dominant position. Rather, it imagines a new order that will explicitly serve the interests of the oppressed as such, whoever they may be. It imagines a ‘correct’ liberated society/polity. What may come as a surprise here is that Žižek offers a counterargument against this hysterical approach, parallel to his critique of perversion, written from the perspective of perverse philosophy itself: ‘Do hysterics not’, Žižek asks, writing lines for Deleuze and Foucault, ‘merely provoke the Master in an ambiguous way which, in effect, amounts to an appeal addressed to the Master to assert his authority again and more strongly, while perverts actually undermine the Master’s position?’13 In demanding some universal change that cannot simply be tolerated or sold as one alternative among many, the hysterical approach may avoid the traps of perverse philosophy already described. But in addressing a demand to the dominant system, even a demand with which the existing system will find it impossible to comply, this approach (not so) secretly legitimizes the position of power and authority as such. Not only this, but the demands made by the philosophy of hysteria are vague, abstract, ambiguous. They call for a new kind of order that has yet to be articulated and therefore cannot help but appear minimally utopian. These demands ultimately serve only to antagonize the existing system into a reassertion of its power or a violent refusal. Although, in ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’, Žižek moves on from this critique of the philosophy of hysteria fairly quickly, one must not be misled into thinking that it has been effectively countered. On the contrary, this critique is a thoroughly valid one that appears repeatedly throughout Žižek’s work. Žižek is well aware that what the postmodern theorists of the philosophy of perversion are reacting to, the reason that they have rejected the Enlightenment philosophy of hysteria, is that the hysterical approach to the project of liberation founders on precisely the same rock as the perverse approach: that old leftist problem. Despite its best intentions, the effect of hysterical provocation is to strengthen the position of dominant, oppressive systems. On the one hand, ‘beneath the

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hysteric’s rebellion and challenge to paternal authority there is … hidden a call for a renewed paternal authority, for a father who would really be a “true father” and adequately embody his symbolic mandate’.14 On the other hand, the very universality of the demand made by the hysteric conceals an unresolved ambiguity. The position of demanding allows the hysteric to evade the difficult task of having to act and having to take responsibility for acting. The hysteric’s refusal to try (and potentially fail) to be the adequate figure of authority him- or herself holds open the space for a new system even more potent and oppressive than the last.

Acting out the doubt Does not this strange situation, in which Žižek frames two possible solutions to a particular problem, and aligns himself with one, while nonetheless criticizing each, lend credence to the notion that the drama of ‘Passionate (Dis) Attachments’ is staged precisely as a tool for working through his own internal conflict? It seems to me that there is room to argue here that Žižek is not (only) in doubt about the desire of his postmodern Other, but (also) in doubt about his own desire, that he is not only attempting rescue his Other, but also attempting to rescue himself. Although he favours the hysterical approach to liberation over the perverse approach, he is nonetheless plagued by well-founded doubts as to whether hysteria is really the solution (to that old leftist problem) that he has been looking for. Or, to put it another way, the key question here is not why Žižek offers a critique of Enlightenment thought from the perspective of postmodern thought, but why, if he accepts this critique as valid, he continues to cling to his preference for Enlightenment thought as less wrong. This logic of ‘both are wrong, but one is nevertheless less wrong’ should not be read as simple indecision. It is a logic which appears with some regularity in Žižek’s work. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, it asserts itself in Žižek’s discussion of descriptivism and antidescriptivism, two opposed theories of signification. ‘If ’, he writes, ‘in this dispute between descriptivism and antidescriptivism, the “truth” lies, for all that [that is despite the fact that both are essentially mistaken] on the side of antidescriptivism, it is because antidescriptivism’s error is of another kind … antidescriptivism blinds itself to its own result, to what it “has produced without knowing it” ’.15 And this further articulation, this notion that one position is less wrong because it unwittingly

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points the way towards the correct position, can be seen operating in Žižek’s description of hysteria and perversion as well. Although they are both wrong – that is although both the hysterical and perverse approaches to the project of liberation founder on the same rock: that old leftist problem – hysteria is less wrong than perversion because of ‘the fact, emphasized by Freud himself, that for psychoanalysis, hysteria and psychosis – not perversion – offer a way into the Unconscious: the Unconscious is not accessible via perversions’.16 What this logic of ‘both are wrong, but one is nevertheless less wrong’ allows for is a strange redoubling of hysterical doubt. That is to say, insofar as hysteria and perversion are equal options within a neutral container, Žižek chooses hysteria. But this choice colours the neutral container itself: Žižek’s dramatic staging is a way of displaying a fundamentally hysterical attitude towards the philosophy of hysteria itself, doubting whether the hysterical approach is really correct, and suggesting that it may have blinded itself to what it has produced without knowing it. It is as though there is some excess of doubt here which cannot be contained at the level of content. Unsatisfied with merely explaining hysterical doubt, Žižek is compelled simultaneously to perform it, to dramatize it at the level of form, to act it out. In Freudian psychoanalytic theory, acting out designates a situation in which the subject finds him- or herself compelled to repeat past events which he or she has repressed from memory. ‘When the subject does not remember the past … he is condemned to repeat it by acting it out.’17 Lacan retains this definition, but ‘emphasizes the intersubjective dimension of recollection. In other words, recollection does not merely involve recalling something to consciousness, but also communicating this something to an Other by means of speech. Hence acting out results when recollection is made impossible by the refusal of the Other to listen’.18 This topic of acting out returns me once again to the theme I raised in my previous chapter of communication with the Other, the notion that the inheritor’s essential task is to describe to the Other the spirit that this Other cannot yet see. The change of perspective through which I suggested that one should read The Ticklish Subject as a drama that Žižek is staging for himself rather than as a communication to his actual Other should here be reversed: Within the framework of Lacan’s understanding of inter-subjectivity, the subject and the Other are inextricably linked. In order for Žižek to formulate a theoretical point as clearly as possible for the idiot who is himself, he fundamentally must formulate it for the idiot who is his Other. So long as the Other remains deaf to Žižek’s message, so must he.

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The philosophy of obsessionality There is, however, another reason that may motivate Žižek’s redoubling of the doubt inherent to the philosophy of hysteria: Left to itself, the procedure of doubting threatens to transform into something like a preliminary admission of defeat. The project of liberation (and particularly the act of theorizing within that project) becomes an empty ritual whose actual function is only to expose the futility of the liberatory project as such. It is on these grounds that Žižek is so critical of Derrida’s deconstructionism. Despite being labelled by Žižek a postmodernist, Derrida is not associated with identity politics, neither does he valourize transgression. Rather, the problem with Derrida is that his messianic waiting for a democracy (or Christianity, or justice) to come seems to assume that the project of liberation is doomed from the outset. This assumption, in Žižek’s view, sabotages the liberatory project, paralyzing the subject in perpetual failure and repetition. ‘Is not the ultimate deconstructionist lesson’, asks Žižek, ‘that every enthusiastic encounter with the Real Thing … is a delusive semblance sustained by a short circuit between a contingent positive element and the preceding universal Void? In it we momentarily succumb to the illusion that the promise of impossible Fullness is actually realized – that, to paraphrase Derrida, democracy is no longer à venir but has actually arrived.’19 Here, just as Žižek has asked Deleuze and Foucault to represent the philosophy of perversion, he asks Derrida (along with Immanuel Kant) to represent what I will call the philosophy of obsessionality. In Lacan’s theory of character structures, which divides subjects into the three genera of neurosis, psychosis and perversion, hysteria and obsessionality occur as species of neurosis. However, hysteria describes not just one kind of neurosis, but the essence of neurosis as such. ‘Hysteria as a fundamental determination of a neurotic position contains two species, obsessional neurosis and itself as its own species.’20 This is why, when discussing that old leftist problem, Žižek does not feel compelled to introduce the position of obsessionality. The opposition he sets up in ‘Passionate (Dis) Attachments’ occurs at the primary level, between perversion and neurosis. But when it comes to what Žižek describes as Derrida’s ‘indefinite oscillation’,21 the secondary distinction between hysteria and obsessionality becomes extremely useful. Whereas the pervert transgresses the Law towards enjoyment, and the hysteric bombards the master with impossible demands to finally resolve the deadlock between desire and the Law, the obsessional postpones and withdraws from any encounter with enjoyment as such. Obsessionality is characterized

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by indefinite ‘postponement of the encounter with the [miraculous] object, [motivated by the] fear that we would not be able to bear such excessive enjoyment’.22 The philosophy of obsessionality is thus characterized by ‘the fear of falling into error by illegitimately taking phenomena for the Thing-in-Itself ’.23 This turn to Kantian language is key: The obsessional philosopher maintains that the desired object, the utopian Law, can never be grasped in the subject’s ‘real’ phenomenal reality, but only ever occupies a separate noumenal space. The key political example of the catastrophic error that this obsessional strategy is at pains to avoid is Nazism: Žižek himself contends that ‘Nazism … staged a pseudo-Event’.24 That is to say, in its outward appearance, Nazism dressed itself up as the revolutionary triumph of a liberatory project, while being in essence its opposite. However, while he acknowledges the danger of what I am tempted to call enthusiastic misidentification, Žižek’s critique of the philosophy of obsessionality is that its fear actually lies at a deeper level: ‘As Hegel puts it, this fear of error, of confusion between phenomena and the Thing-in-Itself, conceals its opposite, the fear of Truth – it announces a desire to elude, at any price, an encounter with the Truth.’25 The obsessional strategy of postponement and reservation eliminates both the danger of enthusiastic mistaken identification and the possibility that miracles do happen, but not, as I suggested earlier, out of fear of the former. Rather, it is precisely fear of the later, fear of a miraculous encounter with the Thing-in-Itself, that leads to ‘the incessant procrastination, the endless precautions that characterize [the obsessional philosopher’s] approach’.26 Why should the obsessional fear an encounter with the Thingin-Itself? Žižek’s formulation is that the fear of excessive enjoyment, of being unable to bear the miraculous event, ‘is nothing but a refined way of avoiding disappointment with the object – that is … it conceals a foreboding that the object itself “is not that” ’.27 One can see here both why obsessionality is a species of hysteria, and why Žižek feels compelled to act out hysterical doubt in relation to hysterical doubt itself. First, obsessionality is grounded in the same position of doubt and desire that grounds hysteria. Just like the hysteric, the obsessional doubts whether an excessive total enjoyment is actually waiting to be grasped through transgression. And, just like the hysteric, the obsessional is motivated by a desire for a final resolution to the deadlock of desire. However, whereas this desire motivates the hysteric to bombard the master with an endless series of ambiguous demands, it motivates the obsessional to refrain from making demands, to fall into an

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indefinite process of reformulating and refining his or her demand in an effort to avoid the inevitable disappointment expressed by ‘That’s not it!’ This is why, for Žižek, it is not enough to doubt. Through the double negative of doubting (at the level of form) the doubt (at the level of content), Žižek produces something like a virtual positive: It may in fact be possible to resolve the deadlock of desire. Allying himself with Badiou, Žižek asserts against the philosophers of obsessionality that ‘to use the term in its full theological weight – miracles do happen’.28

Part Two

The Subject, Ideology and Psychoanalysis

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The Žižekian Universal Subject

Psychoanalysis as liberation: Traversing the fantasy If ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’ is a drama that Žižek has written for himself in order to stage his ambivalence over the philosophy of perversion and the philosophy of hysteria, this raises a number of important questions: First, and most importantly, if the philosophy of hysteria is less wrong than the philosophy of perversion because of what it has produced without knowing it, what is this something that it has produced? I read this as the question that drives Žižek’s project as such. This is the question that he is trying to work through over the course of The Ticklish Subject and which I am trying to work through here. The short answer is that it is simultaneously the liberated subject and the liberated society or polity (the ‘correct’ Law) that produces and/or is produced by that subject. The long answer has yet to be written. But there is also an intermediary answer that is vital to tracing Žižek’s theoretical trajectory as well as my own: The something towards which the philosophy of hysteria points without knowing it is the subject of a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis. In 1937, Freud wrote Analysis Terminable and Interminable, in which he ‘discusses the question of whether it is ever possible to conclude an analysis, or whether all analyses are necessarily incomplete. Lacan’s answer to this question is that it is indeed possible to speak of concluding an analysis’,1 and I would suggest that this may be one of several vital moments in which to locate Žižek’s deep fidelity to Lacan, his self-identification as ‘a card-carrying Lacanian’.2 The idea that psychoanalysis is not interminable, that it has a particular end, may lend credence to the notion that it offers a way out of the deadlock of desire, and, by extension, a way out of that old leftist problem. Žižek’s definition of the ends of analysis follows Lacan’s later work in adopting the formula ‘Traversing the Fantasy’,3 or ‘going-through-the-fantasy’.4 The fantasy to which this formula refers to is what Lacan calls the fundamental fantasy, and the subject’s relation to the fundamental fantasy is the central focus of ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’.

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While it has a much more complicated definition than I will rehearse in the chapter, at a certain level the term ‘fundamental fantasy’ designates the deadlock of desire as such. Thus, traversing (or going through) the fantasy means stepping outside of that deadlock into some other position. Tellingly, in ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’, the Lacanian notion of fundamental fantasy makes its first appearance at the key moment of confrontation – the very instant in which Žižek’s protagonist (himself) finally accuses his postmodern Other (Judith Butler), in no uncertain terms, of falling prey to the seductions of perverse philosophy, of celebrating transgressive acts performed in the name of multiple, particular identities and of failing to see that this approach stumbles on the rock of that old leftist problem. ‘Butler is … simultaneously too optimistic and too pessimistic’, he writes. On the one hand she overestimates the subversive potential of disturbing the functioning of the big Other [the oppressive system] through the practices of performative reconfiguration/displacement: such practices ultimately support what they are intended to subvert, since the very field of such ‘transgressions’ is already taken into account, even engendered, by the hegemonic big Other … On the other hand, Butler does not allow for the radical gesture of the thorough restructuring of the hegemonic order in its totality.5

Here, Žižek accuses Butler of an overly optimistic, misplaced fidelity to the philosophy of perversion, a belief that transgressive acts are not caught in the dialectical deadlock with the oppressive system they intend to undermine or displace. And he simultaneously accuses her of an overly pessimistic failure to see that, in the concept of traversing the fantasy, late Lacanian psychoanalytic theory offers a way out of this deadlock, which, in the context of the political project of liberation, appears as the possibility of restructuring the coordinates of the oppressive system itself. Immediately following this accusation, Žižek begins a new section entitled ‘Traversing the Fantasy’. Here, he not only challenges Butler’s definition of human subjectivity, but does so by referring directly to Lacan’s formulation of the end pursued by psychoanalysis.

Why Butler? Why does Žižek find Butler’s version of postmodern identity politics the most convincing? Why is ‘Passionate (Dis-)Attachments’ addressed to her in particular? In The Psychic Life of Power, the key work to which Žižek refers in The Ticklish Subject, Butler sets herself the task of developing, with the help of

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psychoanalytic theory, an elaboration of Foucault’s thesis that subjectivity itself is produced through the functioning of power. As she puts it: We are used to thinking of power as what subordinates, sets underneath, and relegates to a lower order … But if, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, as providing the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire, then power is not simply what we oppose but also, in a strong sense, what we depend on for our existence and what we harbour and preserve in the beings that we are.6

Here, we see that Butler, like Foucault and other new leftists, is concerned precisely with the new articulation of that old leftist problem. She is concerned with how is it possible not only actually to resist, but also to undermine and/or displace the existing socio-symbolic network, and she is specifically concerned with how it is possible to do so within the context of a dialectical deadlock between the existing socio-symbolic network and the subject, a deadlock in which the two are implicated on a deep, ontological level. But what makes Butler, for Žižek, the most representative and persuasive version of postmodernist thought is that the tools that she uses to approach this problem are precisely the tools of (often Lacanian) psychoanalytic theory. ‘Even if we grant that unconscious resistance to a normalizing [oppressive] injunction guarantees the failure of that injunction fully to constitute its subject’, she asks, Does such a resistance do anything to alter or expand the dominant injunctions or interpellations of subject formation? What do we make of a resistance that can only undermine, but which appears to have no power to rearticulate the terms, the symbolic terms – to use Lacanian parlance – by which subjects are constituted, by which subjection is installed in the very formation of the subject?7

Her project is to develop the implications of the idea that, even if one posits the unconscious as an agency resistant to oppression, it is nonetheless structured by the terms of the very oppressive system that it attempts to undermine. It is for this reason that Butler plays such an important role in Žižek’s drama. She alone is able to rearticulate the argument that favours the philosophy of perversion at the level of, and in the terms of, Žižek’s own analysis. She does not simply accuse the philosophy of hysteria of stumbling on the rock of that old leftist problem. She turns this accusation against the psychoanalytic edifice as a whole. Even if hysteria points the way towards the unconscious, her argument demands, how should the unconscious, inflected as it is by the discourse of power, be any less caught up in the dialectical deadlock of mutual reinforcement? It is this rearticulation of the argument that favours the philosophy of perversion in

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the very terms of psychoanalysis that opens up the space for Žižek to articulate his own argument regarding subjectivity. From Žižek’s perspective, Deleuze and Foucault’s philosophies of perversion can only be countered by an opposite fidelity to hysteria (which is in itself flawed, caught up in the deadlock of law and desire), because ‘those who, like Michel Foucault, advocate the subversive potential of perversions are sooner or later led to the denial of the Freudian Unconscious’.8 But Butler’s willingness to affirm the Freudian Unconscious, if only to challenge its ability to provide a way out of that old leftist problem, opens up another possibility. Insofar as Foucault and Deleuze each articulate the dialectical deadlock between the Law and desire (for Foucault, between power and resistance, for Deleuze between the striated state apparatus and the smooth war machine), they nonetheless remain, from Žižek’s perspective, staunchly unwilling to accept the idea that there may be a way out of this deadlock in the notion of the unconscious. As Žižek said apropos of Foucault in a 2006-lecture at The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, maybe I read Foucault in a naïve way here, but here I think that I tend to agree with those who claim that, with Discipline and Punish and especially the first part of History of Sexuality, he as it were painted himself into a certain corner:… this total immanence where resistance is always already a part [of the order that it resists].9

Butler, on the other hand, becomes the ideal actor to play Žižek’s addressee, precisely because she is willing to accept (at least in the form of a hypothesis: ‘even if we grant…’) the existence of the Freudian Unconscious, wherein Žižek locates the possibility of a way out. For Žižek, ‘it is Foucault who insists on the immanence of resistance to Power, while Lacan leaves open the possibility of a radical rearticulation of the entire symbolic field by means of an act proper’.10 Butler represents an Other who may be able to hear Žižek’s description of the subject of the act, whom she cannot yet see.

The anxious void of subjectivity: Žižek as a reader of Laplanche Butler’s starting point in linking Foucault to psychoanalysis is what she calls ‘Passionate Attachments’,11 and it is also here that Žižek locates the link to Lacan’s

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notion of fundamental fantasy. Reading the Foucauldian interdependence between subjectivity and power into the structure of subjectivity itself, Butler proposes to examine the fact, supported by psychoanalytic theory and practice, ‘that a subject is passionately attached to his or her own subordination’.12 Žižek fully endorses this fact, simply adding that, insofar as it represents the psyche caught in the dialectical deadlock between the Law and desire, ‘the Lacanian name for the primordial “passionate attachments” on which the very consistency of the subject’s being hinges is, of course, fundamental fantasy’.13 Passionate attachment and fundamental fantasy are Butler and Lacan’s respective terms for the deadlock between desire and the Law or between oppression and liberation: the way in which the subject’s desire for liberation and transgression is supported and determined by, and is therefore reliant upon the continuing existence of, the very oppressive prohibitions that it wishes to transgress or to be liberated from. It is at this moment that Žižek inserts the key point of his argument concerning the structure of subjectivity. Whereas Butler’s thesis is, at least the way that Žižek presents it, that passionate attachment to one’s own subordination is the minimal baseline of subjectivity, Žižek contends that Lacan’s definition of subjectivity transcends the level of passionate attachment – that, although the consistency of the subject’s being depends on the fundamental fantasy, the subject nonetheless continues to exist as a kind of void even if this consistency is taken away. ‘For Lacan the fundamental fantasy (the stuff “primordial attachments” are made of) is already a filler, a formation which covers up a certain gap/void.’14 And, as Žižek never tires of announcing, this void is the subject. ‘At this “zero-level”, impossible to endure, we have only the pure void of subjectivity.’15 In order to explain what this void of subjectivity is, and how the fundamental fantasy emerges to fill it in, Žižek turns to the theory of subjective development elaborated by Jean Laplanche in his Life and Death in Psychoanalysis and Essays in Otherness. In Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, Laplanche’s investigation into the inherent deadlocks and contradictions of Freud’s thought (and especially the problematic concept of death drive, which is central to Lacan’s work) leads him to re-examine Freud’s seduction theory. Freud found that, ‘through psychoanalysis, one discovers what appear at first sight to be memories – or at least scenes, whatever truth value one accords them – in which an adult makes sexual advances towards a child’. From these observations, Freud developed the initial hypothesis that his hysterical patients had suffered childhood sexual abuse, and he engaged in a ‘tireless pursuit, beyond every “later” scene, of an earlier and more “traumatic” analogous event’.16

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However, ‘this impassioned search for “scenes”, for the scene, and ultimately for the primal scene, was fated to end in a dramatic experience of disillusionment’.17 Freud finally dismissed his initial hypothesis on the basis of ‘the impossibility of admitting that paternal perversion [for his patients’ scenes seemed universally to concern the father] is that frequent and, above all, the impossibility to decide whether a scene discovered in analysis is true or fantasied’.18 While, as Laplanche points out, this is a well-recognized moment in the development of psychoanalytic theory, insofar as it opens up the space for considering fantasy as a significant part of psychic life with its own real effects, Laplanche wishes to highlight the way in which Freud subsequently returned to his initial hypothesis. ‘Freud will reaffirm with increasing insistence the fact of seduction … for there is indeed a form of seduction which practically no human being escapes, the seduction of maternal care.’19 What the notion of the seduction of maternal care opens up for Laplanche is the possibility of locating the origin of the human (unconscious) subject in a process of interaction with the pre-existing human (unconscious) subject that cares for it in its immaturity: the parent. What is key for Laplanche is that ‘the first gestures of a mother towards her child are necessarily impregnated with sexuality’,20 not (usually) in the sense portrayed by the hysteric’s fantasy of explicit sexual seduction and abuse, but in the sense that these gestures necessarily relate to the infant’s erogenous zones, and, even more importantly, in the sense that they necessarily involve the parent’s unconscious sexual desire. Here, Laplanche quotes Freud himself: A child’s intercourse with anyone responsible for his care affords him an unending source of sexual excitation and satisfaction from his erotogenic zones. This is especially so since the person in charge of him, who, after all, is as a rule his mother, herself regards him with feelings that are derived from her own sexual life: she strokes him, kisses him, rocks him and quite clearly treats him as a substitute for a complete sexual object21.

The reason this point is so important for Laplanche is that he locates the origins of human subjectivity precisely in this encounter with the parent’s unconscious (sexual) desire. What gives this encounter its weight is not only that it represents an ‘intrusion into the universe of the child of certain meanings of the adult world’,22 but also that, as unconscious, these meanings are necessarily enigmatic and intrusive for the adult him- or herself. ‘Adult messages … those signifiers which I claim are simultaneously and indissociably enigmatic and

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sexual … are not transparent to themselves, but compromised by the adult’s relation to their own unconscious.’23 It is this encounter, the encounter in which the infant receives from the adult signifiers of whose meaning the adult him- or herself is obviously unaware (unconscious), that Laplanche believes has a quality which enables it to set in motion the development of human (unconscious) subjectivity, a quality which can be labelled very precisely: the quality of trauma. ‘For Lacan also’, contends Žižek, ‘the “birthplace” of psychoanalysis [and the birthplace of the subject with which psychoanalysis is concerned] is the child’s traumatic experience with the impenetrable “dark spot” of the Other’s [the parent’s] jouissance [unconscious sexual enjoyment] which disturbs the calm of his psychic homeostasis.’24 This experience can be defined as properly traumatic (and perhaps even as the primordial trauma in the psychoanalytic theory of subjective development) because of its essential character of inassimilability. If trauma is ‘an event in the subject’s life defined by its intensity, [and] by the subject’s incapacity to respond adequately to it’,25 then this experience of seduction by the parent is necessarily traumatic insofar as it involves the parent’s unconscious. Not only is the sexual enjoyment present in the parent’s message palpable to the child in its intensity, if the parent him- or herself is unaware of, unable to assimilate, the meaning of this message, then there is essentially no way for the child to do so, no way for him or her to respond adequately to it. Furthermore, for Lacan, the object which produces trauma is also the object of anxiety. ‘In 1926, he … argued … that anxiety was a reaction to a “traumatic situation” – an experience of helplessness in the face of an accumulation of excitation that cannot be discharged.’26 Thus, the traumatic impact of the enigma of the parent’s unconscious desire produces in the infant an unbearable feeling of anxiety, an unbearable pressure to solve the enigma, a pressure ‘designated, in [Lacan’s] “graph of desire”, by the question Che vuoi? – “What does the Other want from me? What as an object am I for the Other, for his desire?” ’27 And it is precisely as a response to this question that the fundamental fantasy emerges as a kind of make-shift answer.

The fundamental fantasy: Enjoyment, masochism, consistency According to Žižek, the fundamental fantasy that arises in response to the enigma of the parent’s desire, ‘the “attachment to subjectivization” constitutive

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of the subject, is … none other than the primordial “masochist” scene in which the subject “makes/sees himself suffering” ’.28 In other words, the scenes of explicit sexual seduction and abuse which Freud discovered even in patients who were not factually abused are structured by an unconscious, masochistic, fundamental fantasy. To the traumatic, anxious question, ‘Che vuoi? What does the Other want from me?’ the subject fantasizes an answer: ‘the Other wants me to suffer’. And although the masochistic nature of this fantasy may seem to emerge here somewhat arbitrarily, it can be explained very precisely by the ‘essentially traumatic, [excessive] nature of human sexuality [and desire]’.29 For Laplanche, Lacan and Žižek, the Freudian hypothesis of the death drive, of some agency within the human psyche which seeks to exceed the threshold of tolerable excitation (the threshold represented by the pleasure principle), is the very definition of human sexuality. Whereas its opposite, the pleasure principle, represents an instinctual apparatus which, in the pursuance of survival, aims at keeping unpleasant tension at a minimum (hunger leads to feeding which reduces hunger, pain leads to retreat and rest which reduces pain, sexual arousal leads to copulation which reduces arousal, etc.), the death drive generates enjoyment precisely through a perpetual, repetitive seeking out of excessive, essentially painful, tension. As Laplanche puts it, ‘Two levels must be scrupulously distinguished: the quantitative series or scale: (functional) pleasure – (functional) unpleasure; and the level of lust and/or enjoyment … It is at this second level, lust and/or enjoyment, that the thesis of primary masochism is situated. It might be formulated as “the lust for and/or the enjoyment of pain.” ’30 To return to the situation of the infant confronted by the enigma of his or her parent’s desire, the logic that would lead to a masochistic fantasy can be seen as a reflexive turning around of the infant’s relation to the trauma and anxiety aroused by this confrontation itself. In response to the painful experience of the question ‘Che vuoi?’ the answer arises: ‘the Other wants me to experience precisely the pain of this question’. The infant begins to enjoy (in the precise sense of lust, of human sexuality as death drive) the excessive, essentially painful, tension caused by the proximity of the parent as enigma. If the term ‘fundamental’ hints at why this fundamental fantasy might be (mis)identified as the minimal baseline of subjectivity, it has other implications as well, which must be examined here in greater detail. The primordial

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masochist scene is fundamental in one sense because it is the first fantasy, but in another, more important sense, because its function is to offer a minimum of consistency to the subject’s being. ‘The fundamental fantasy provides the subject with a minimum of being, it serves as a support for his existence – in short, its deceptive gesture is “Look, I suffer, therefore I am, I exist, I participate in the positive order of being.” ’31 And one should note straightaway that this, Žižek’s description of the function of the fundamental fantasy, has a very specific form. It is a (deceptive, incorrect) reformulation of the cogito. What makes Laplanche’s theory of the emergence of this fantasy particularly useful to an examination of its function in lending consistency to the subject’s being is that he (re-)introduces the dimension of reflexivity, which should be read as directly related to the idea of subjective reflexivity itself, to the topic of the ‘reflexive subject’. Not only does the emergence of fantasy as such imply the origin of subjective interiority (a separate, internal space in which fantasy and reflection can take place), but the form of the fantasy itself – the aspect of making-oneself suffer – also has a reflexive logic. As Žižek puts it eloquently, In fantasizing, the clear-cut opposition of activity and passivity is subverted: in ‘internalizing’ a scene of being beaten by another, I immobilize myself in a double sense (instead of being active in reality, I assume the passive stance of a fascinated observer who merely imagines/fantasizes a scene in which he participates; within the very content of this scene, I imagine myself in a passive, immobile position of suffering humiliation and pain) – however, precisely this double passivity presupposes my active engagement – that is to say, the accomplishment of a reflexive turn by means of which, in an autoerotic way, I myself, not an external agent, thwart my external activity, the spontaneous outflow of energy, and ‘dominate myself ’, replacing activity in reality by the outburst of fantasizing.32

Is it not clear that here, in this moment of reflexive self-domination, two separate strands of the argument that I have been pursuing converge? On one hand, self-domination is clearly related to the notion of being passionately attached to one’s own subordination, that which Žižek accuses Butler of defining as the minimal level of subjectivity. On the other hand, reflexivity in the sense of selftransparency, of knowing oneself, is the standard version of the Enlightenment (Cartesian) subject that Žižek wishes to put to rest in order to redeem some other possibility.

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Žižek’s cogito: The Other doesn’t know, therefore I don’t know So what is this other possibility? What formulation of the cogito would Žižek’s theory endorse? First, if on the one hand the fundamental fantasy (passionate attachment) is not the minimal baseline of human subjectivity, but a filler, a formation which covers up a certain gap/void that is (the minimal baseline of) the subject, and if on the other hand the fundamental fantasy arises as a make-shift answer to the traumatic question ‘Che vuoi? What does the Other want from me?’ then must not this (unanswered, unanswerable) question itself be the void that Žižek describes as (the minimal baseline of) the subject? A close reading of The Ticklish Subject bears this hypothesis out. ‘For Lacan…’ he writes, ‘there is a drive [a subject] beyond fantasy … The pre-phantasmatic drive [designates] the stance of exposing oneself to the “dark spot” of the Other’s enigma without filling it in with a phantasmatic answer.’33 Subjectivity is the experience of the dark spot, the unanswered question itself, which precedes any attempt to answer it. Recall that, in his theory of subjective development, Laplanche emphasizes that what is properly traumatic about the enigmatic messages received from the parent is not simply that they are inassimilable for the child, but that they are inassimilable for the parent him- or herself. The true answer to the question ‘Che vuoi? What does the Other want from me?’ is that the Other doesn’t know. To be more precise, insofar as they are expressions of the parent’s unconscious sexual desire, the enigmatic messages received by the child concern precisely the parent’s primordial traumatic encounter with his or her own parent’s unconscious desire. One should not miss the connection here to Lacan’s notion of the unconscious as inter-subjective: ‘Lacan’s dictum “the Unconscious is the discourse of the Other” is … to be taken quite literally … The primordial encounter of the Unconscious is the encounter with the Other’s inconsistency, with the fact that the parental Other is not actually the master of his acts and words, that he emits signals of whose meaning he is unaware’.34 What the Other wants, finally, is to know the answer to the question ‘Che vuoi? What is the meaning of these enigmatic messages? What does my Other (the parent’s Other) want from me (the parent)?’ Second, if the aim of psychoanalysis is to enable the analysand to traverse his or her fundamental fantasy, and the fundamental fantasy is what guarantees the subject a minimal baseline of consistency, then psychoanalytic treatment seeks to take away the subject’s consistency. ‘The ultimate aim of psychoanalytic

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treatment is for the subject to undo the ultimate “passionate attachment” that guarantees the consistency of his/her being, and thus to undergo what Lacan calls “subjective destitution” .’35 However, this destitution is clearly not a loss of subjectivity as such. The subject does not disappear. Rather, Žižek’s point is that the Lacanian subject is this destitution itself, this anxious experience of not knowing the answer to a pressing question. The subject is disappearance, which only subsequently opens up the space for fantasy to appear. In order to translate this into the terms of the cogito, it may be useful to turn here to Lacan’s Seminar XVII, in which he rehearses a series of reformulations of its logic. ‘Either I am not thinking or I am not’, he writes, ‘There where I am thinking I do not recognize myself, I am not, this is the unconscious. There where I am, it is all too clear that I am lost.’36 While this may be read as a fairly straightforward description of the necessary definition of the unconscious itself (one doesn’t recognize oneself there because one is not conscious of it), in the context of the argument that I have been pursuing, these reformulations (and the ‘I am not’ in particular) come to have a much more precise meaning. If the deceptive gesture of the fundamental fantasy (i.e., the gesture through which we become lost) is ‘Look, I suffer, therefore I am’, then psychoanalysis aims to bring the patient to accept precisely non-being (‘I am not’) in place of being (‘I am’). And to reiterate, this non-being does not mean simple non-existence, but existence as inconsistency, as a question of existence. ‘True’, writes Žižek, ‘the subject is, as it were, “blackmailed” into passively submitting to some form of “passionate attachment”, since, outside of this, he simply does not exist – however, this nonexistence is not directly the absence of existence, but a certain gap or void in the order of being which “is” the subject itself.’37 I thus feel ready at this point to offer my own reformulation of the latter half of the cogito: rather than ‘… therefore I am’, perhaps ‘therefore I am not’, or more precisely ‘… therefore I am non-being….therefore I am doubt as to what I am’. However, this leaves out the first half of the cogito, which is perhaps the more important half for the larger question that I am pursuing. It is vital to keep track of the fact that it is not only the subject’s own inconsistency with which psychoanalysis brings him or her face to face, but the traumatic, primordial encounter with his or her Other’s inconsistency as well. It is in this sense that ‘that radical change which, according to Lacan, defines the final stage of the psychoanalytic process [involves, not only] the fact that the subject no longer presupposes himself as subject … [but also an acceptance of] the nonexistence of the big Other’.38 And, of course, this non-existence is once again not the simple

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absence of existence, but an inconsistency, a gap or void in the order of being. To remain for the moment with the parental Other, the point here is not that the parent does not exist as another subject with desires that involve the child – that is, it is not that the Other doesn’t want something. It is simply that, precisely as another subject, the parent him- or herself does not know what he or she is, what he or she wants. Like the child as subject, the parent as subject is destitution itself, is disappearance, is doubt about what it is. It is this point which allows me to offer my own reformulation of the first half of the cogito – that is to offer a more precise explanation of the Lacanian reformulation which I quoted at the end of Chapter 1: ‘It (the unconscious) thinks, therefore I am.’ If, for Lacan, the unconscious is the discourse of the Other, then ‘It (the unconscious) thinks’ refers to the enigmatic messages themselves, messages that are passed from the Other to the subject without ever being understood or assimilated, messages that act as a kind of foreign body, an infection, or what Laplanche calls an ‘alien-ness’,39 messages whose final meaning is essentially enigmatic ‘all the way down’. Thus, to complete my reformulation of the cogito is, in a sense, to reflect the latter half back into the first half: rather than ‘I think, therefore I am’, I propose: ‘My Other is not, therefore I am not. My Other is non-being, therefore I am non-being. My Other is doubt as to what it is, therefore I am doubt as to what I am.’

4

Ideology: The Big Other, the Symbolic Mandate and the Social Superego

The big other What use can the political Left, concerned as it is with the problem of liberation at the social and political level, make of the psychoanalytic notion of traversing the fantasy, which thus far relates only to a particular definition of the individual subject? The first temptation to be resisted here is a naïve notion of ‘applied psychoanalysis’, the idea that psychoanalytic theory provides a set of conceptual tools that can be applied to objects for which they were not originally intended. This approach would start looking for parallels between individual liberation and social and political liberation by imagining a society or polity as an individual subject at a larger scale. Despite Freud’s own interest in this approach, one should reassert the fact that a social group is not a subject, but made up of subjects. Much more fruitful than an applied psychoanalytic approach is a return to the Lacanian notion of unconscious as inter-subjective: ‘The unconscious is the Other’s discourse.’1 Noting the ‘enigmatic’ nature of this, ‘one of Lacan’s most famous dictums’, Dylan Evans points out that it implies that ‘the unconscious is “transindividual”; [it is,] so to speak, “outside” ’.2 That is to say, the unconscious of the individual subject is not a separate, internal system or agency whose structure could be mapped onto a corresponding system in external society. Rather, the unconscious of the individual directly is, in some sense, that individual’s relation with other subjects, or with society as a whole. While it would be an oversimplification to simply equate the unconscious of the individual with the social structure of which he or she is a part, there is nonetheless clear evidence here to support the idea that, from a Lacanian perspective, the object with which political projects are concerned and the object with which psychoanalysis is concerned are deeply and essentially related.

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The key theoretical concept that links Lacanian psychoanalytic theory with social and political thought is the Other itself. The term ‘Other’ has two different meanings within Lacanian theory. First, the Other is the other individual subject in all of his or her impenetrable mystery,3 the enigmatic partner in relation with whom the subject finds him- or herself. Clearly, this is the part played by the Other in the context of the fundamental fantasy: the Other as (m)Other (one of many Lacanian word plays), the primordial other subject whose inassimilability is the traumatizing catalyst for the formation of the subject itself. This is also the part played by the Other in my interpretation of The Ticklish Subject as Žižek’s version of Hamlet. Both Hamlet and Žižek, I have argued, face their greatest challenge in confronting an Other about whose desire they are in doubt. That is to say, they find themselves in relation to another subject of whom they wish to ask the question, ‘What do you want from me?’ The second meaning of ‘Other’ in Lacanian theory is the one which stages the link between psychoanalysis and social and political thought: The Other is not (only) another individual subject, but (also) the symbolic order itself, the shared laws and norms that regulate social and linguistic interaction within a given society or polity. It is ‘the symbolic order which mediates the relationship with … other subject[s]’.4 Because the overlapping of terminology here can be confusing, I will distinguish between these two Others by referring to the enigmatic other subject as the Other and the symbolic social order as the big Other. (For Lacan these terms are interchangeable and apply to both.) This terminological overlapping is not a mistake, however, but occurs for a very specific reason: ‘It is … possible’, notes Evans, ‘to speak of the Other as a subject in a secondary sense, in the sense that a subject may occupy this position [of the big Other] and thereby “embody” the [big] Other for another subject.’5 The big Other as the ‘locus’6 of the rules that structure interaction within a society or polity is simultaneously a particular position within that society or polity, a role or position that can be occupied by a particular individual subject, by an Other. Indeed, ‘it is the mother who first occupies the position of the big Other for the child’.7 Žižek further specifies this possibility of playing the role of the big Other by introducing the term reification. ‘For example’, he says, when I talk about other people’s opinions, it is never only a matter of what we, you, or other individuals think, but also a matter of what the impersonal ‘one’ thinks. When I violate a certain rule of decency, I never simply do something that the majority of others do not do. I do what ‘one’ doesn’t do. This is the key moment for Lacan – the big Other – this necessity of a minimal reification.8

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Thus, while it is possible to think of the big Other as a role played by a particular individual at a particular moment, or as an established position of authority within the social framework, what characterizes this position is that it is always reified as a kind of imaginary subject before it is occupied. What allows an Other to occupy the role of the big Other is his or her ability to cast a judgemental gaze on the subject that determines whether he or she is doing something that ‘one’ doesn’t do. What makes the king a king is, at least in part, that whatever he does or does not do becomes, by default, what ‘one’ does or does not do.

Interpellation: The subject’s symbolic mandate Equipped with this new concept, the big Other as the shared social substance (and its reification into the image of a subject), it becomes possible to return to the Laplanchean theory of individual subjective development that I pursued earlier, and to expand it to incorporate the level of sociopolitical inclusion. While the definition of subjectivity that I have presented thus far offers an account of the development of the human subject in infancy, it stops short of the subject’s emergence into adulthood, the subject’s taking on of a fully defined role in society. In his confrontation with Butler in ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’, Žižek is compelled to fill in this lacuna, and supplements Laplanche’s theory by turning to the Lacanian notion of the big Other, and in particular to the way in which this notion is put to use by Louis Althusser. Here, the big Other is the social agency that confers adulthood upon the subject by assigning him or her a particular social identity – what Žižek calls a ‘symbolic “mandate” ’9 – through a process of what Althusser calls interpellation. The big Other in some sense calls to, or addresses, the subject, and in recognizing him- or herself as the addressee of this call, the subject takes on a fixed identity, agrees to be the one to whom the call was addressed. However, insofar as the big Other is always reified into another subject, it is only through this act of recognition, through the subject’s agreeing to be the one who is called into being by the big Other, that the big Other comes into being in the first place. ‘Althusser’s point’, writes Žižek, ‘is that my recognition in the interpellative call of the Other is performative in the sense that, in the very gesture of recognition, it constitutes (or “posits”) this big Other.’10 To return to the classic example of the Other as the king, this point amounts to the naïve insight, referred to by Lacan, that a king is a king only insofar as his subjects treat him as such. Žižek thus conceives of the passage into adulthood as the moment in

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which the subject begins to treat the shared social big Other as a really existing, objective force – to take the ‘one’ seriously. And in treating the big Other as a really existing, objective force, the subject thereby confers existence (in the sense of efficiency, the ability to cause real effects) onto this Other. But the key point not to be missed in all this is simply that, in this moment of recognition or interpellation, the subject takes on a particular social identity through the big Other. Recall that, for Žižek, the essence of subjectivity is the question: ‘Che Vuoi? What am I as an object for the Other?’ Is it not clear that the identity conferred on the subject through his or her interpellation into the shared social substance bears a certain relationship to this question? If, in Laplanche’s theory, the subject develops a (masochistic) fundamental fantasy in response to the traumatic experience of the (m)Other’s desire, and if this fantasy acts as a filler, a make-shift answer to the question ‘What do you want from me?’ then must not the social identity conferred on the subject by the social big Other offer another kind of answer that either confirms or conflicts with the subject’s fundamental fantasy? What Lacan does here is to introduce a distinction between two terms that are identified in Butler: the fundamental fantasy that serves as the ultimate support of the subject’s being, and the symbolic identification that is already a symbolic response to the trauma of the phantasmatic ‘passionate attachment’. The symbolic identity we assume in a forced choice, when we recognize ourselves in ideological interpellation, relies on the disavowal of the phantasmatic ‘passionate attachment’ that serves as its ultimate support.11

In order to become a ‘full member of society’, the subject must relinquish (Žižek’s use of the word ‘disavowal’ here should warn us that this relinquishment is only ever partial) his or her fundamental fantasy (his or her place as the object of the Other’s desire) in favour of the symbolic mandate conferred on him or her by the big Other. As such, symbolic interpellation appears as a second line of defence against the unanswerable question that grounds subjectivity: ‘Che Vuoi?’ Recall that this question itself is properly traumatic. If the fundamental fantasy emerges as a make-shift answer that alleviates the anxiety produced by the question, but nonetheless takes an enjoyable, masochistic form, might not symbolic identification emerge to alleviate the enjoyment of this masochistic answer itself? That is to say, if my fundamental fantasy is that my Other wants me to suffer, perhaps the big Other, by offering me a symbolic mandate, protects me from precisely this suffering.

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This hypothesis is borne out by the connection in Lacanian theory between the big Other and the Law. The big Other is precisely the locus of the Law, the prohibition against enjoyment that makes up one side of the deadlock of desire. As the reification of the social rules governing what ‘one’ does and doesn’t do, the big Other is the placeholder for all those prohibitions that the subject desires to transgress. And on the other side of this prohibition lies enjoyment. What transgression of social norms promises the subject is access to the excessive, non-functional, sexualized enjoyment of the fundamental fantasy. In this way, the symbolic mandate conferred on the subject by the big Other acts as a defence against the enjoyment of the fundamental fantasy. It keeps excessive enjoyment at bay and returns the subject to a rational, functional, pleasurable stasis.

Superego: The return of enjoyment The flip side of the symbolic mandate and the Law embodied by the big Other appears in the notion of superego, which Žižek’s inherits from Lacan and which Lacan inherits in turn from Freud. Although Žižek’s notion of the superego is ultimately quite different from Freud’s, there is nonetheless support for it to be found in Freud’s writing, especially in his Civilization and Its Discontents, and I believe it is important to return to this work to make sense of Žižek’s argument. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud describes the superego as the internal agency responsible for punishing the subject with a feeling of guilt ‘if one has done something one recognizes as “evil” ’, which is to say, ‘something for which one is threatened with a loss of love’.12 That is to say, the Freudian superego is a punishing agency that develops as an internalization of standards set by the subject’s parental authority. The subject learns that if he or she commits certain prohibited acts, he or she can expect to be punished or abandoned by the (m)Other. Here, one should detect a double link to the relation I have described earlier between the big Other and the fundamental fantasy: On the one hand, the big Other confers on the subject a symbolic mandate, a set of standards for his or her behaviour that prohibit certain enjoyable acts with which his or her fundamental fantasy is preoccupied. In this context, the superego is charged with enforcing these prohibitions. Its role is something like that of the big Other itself: guaranteeing obedience to the laws and norms of social interaction. On the other hand, however, the threatened consequence of the subject’s transgression

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of those prohibitions – suffering inflicted on the subject by a parental Other – has precisely the structure of the masochistic fundamental fantasy. In a strange reflexive logic, what the superego threatens the subject with, should he or she transgress the laws of society in order to enjoy, seems to be an image of enjoyment itself. The other vital assertion that Freud makes concerning the superego in Civilization and Its Discontents is that when external, parental authority is internalized into the subject’s psyche in the form of the superego, it develops two unexpected features: First, it makes the subject feel guilty even when he or she does not transgress in act, but only fantasizes about or wishes for transgression.13 Second, and more importantly, the more the subject obeys the superego – that is, the less he or she transgresses and enjoys in act – the harsher the superego becomes, the more stringent are its demands and the more severe are its punishments. Freud explains these features in the following ways: First, unlike external parental authority, which has access only to the subject’s acts, the superego is an internal authority from which nothing can be hidden. Second, the energy that fuels the superego’s ferocity is itself the redirected energy that was driving the subject towards transgression. That is to say, when the subject refuses to allow him- or herself to satisfy his or her desire for transgression, the frustrated desire is not extinguished, but is transformed into a superegoic pressure which punishes the subject for having desired to transgress in the first place. ‘Every renunciation of the drives now becomes a dynamic source of conscience; every fresh renunciation reinforces its severity and intolerance.’14 This may help to explain the strange reflexivity I mentioned earlier: When the subject frustrates his or her desire for enjoyment, he or she engages in an increasingly severe and excessive form of enjoyable internal self-punishment. The superego’s ‘punishment’ begins to appear as simply return of the enjoyment from which the subject was hoping his or her symbolic mandate would offer him or her some protection. Žižek confirms this reading by translating Freud’s definition of the superego into the Lacanian language of the fundamental fantasy and the symbolic mandate. He writes: The guilt materialized in the pressure exerted on the subject by the superego is not as straightforward as it may seem: it is not the guilt caused by the failed emulation of the ego ideal [the symbolic mandate], but the more fundamental guilt of accepting the ego ideal (the socially determined symbolic role) as the ideal to be followed in the first place, and thus of betraying one’s more fundamental desire (the primordial ‘passionate attachment’, as Butler would have put it).15

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That is to say, according to Žižek, the superego notices the subject’s disavowal of his or her fundamental fantasy, his or her refusal to enjoy, and it is this disavowal that it punishes him or her for, rather than his or her failure to obey the big Other’s prohibitions. If only the subject had actually acted on his or her desire, the superego would not have so much energy with which to punish him or her, and he or she would not have to feel so guilty. In a strange inversion, the function of the superego is not to prevent the subject from enjoying, but precisely to remind the subject of his or her disavowal, to impose enjoyment (punishment) on him or her internally if he or she refuses to act it out externally. And indeed, further evidence for this position can be found in Lacan’s definition of the superego as ‘an imperative … The specific imperative involved is the command “Enjoy!” ’16

The social superego This account of the superego raises a number of troubling questions concerning the relationship between the superego and the social mandate: Why does the subject misrecognize the superego pressure to enjoy for a pressure to identify with the symbolic mandate in the first place? Why does Žižek assert that ‘the superego orders you to enjoy doing what you have to do?’17 Why does he contend that the subject’s symbolic mandate, conferred on him or her by the big Other, continues to rely upon the subject’s disavowed fundamental fantasy as its ultimate support? And most importantly, how does the symbolic mandate give the subject any relief from enjoyment if it simply transforms some of the enjoyment that would be produced by transgression into enjoyable superego guilt feeling? The answer to all of these questions is found in Žižek’s notion of the institutional unconscious, or what I will call the social superego. It is this concept that completes the fundamental theory of how the Lacanian subject relates to the sociopolitical level of ideology. ‘I am more and more convinced’, says Žižek, that the same gap between ego ideal in the sense of explicit normative structure [the symbolic mandate] and superego as its obscene supplement [the pressure to transgress and the guilt one experiences for not transgressing] … is clearly operative even at the institutional level. I am more and more convinced that one should introduce the term of institutional unconscious … Not collective unconscious. Not any Jungian obscurantism, but institutional unconscious

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The Subject of Liberation in the sense of social practices which are not publicly recognized – a kind of obscene secret, but nonetheless as such part of the institutional logic.18

Here, the scene described earlier, in which the subject is split between his or her enjoyment and social mandate, is complicated by being redoubled: society itself (in its institutional forms) suffers from the same split. The big Other is not only a Law that defends subjects against the excessive enjoyment of their fundamental fantasies, but it is another Law as well, a secret or obscene law that solicits enjoyment itself (the injunction to ‘Enjoy!’). When Žižek levels his accusation at Butler in ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’, he emphasizes that ‘what Lacan calls “the big Other” are symbolic norms and their codified transgressions’.19 As Žižek is fond of pointing out, the system of norms and rules that regulate social interaction is comprised of explicit rules that determine what each member of the social group is supposed to do and how he or she is supposed to do it, but also includes within itself a supplement of implicit rules that determine how one is supposed to interpret the explicit rules – when one is allowed, even solicited to do things that are officially prohibited, when one is discouraged from doing things that are officially allowed and so on. These implicit rules are what make up the social superego. While the explicit rules that make up one side of the big Other prohibit certain acts to the subject, the supplemental implicit rules tell the subject how he or she is allowed, even solicited, to transgress these explicit prohibitions and enjoy. Using a metaphor, developed from John Carpenter’s film They Live, of a pair of glasses that would reveal the implicit, unspoken rules present in the big Other, Žižek says: In traditional ideology … the direct [explicit] message is the ideological one, like: ‘Sacrifice yourself for your country.’ But then you need ideological glasses to see the [implicit] real message, which is how ideology bribes you. Like, to be a little bit obscene, for a Catholic priest, the [explicit] message would have been: ‘Dedicate your life to Jesus Christ and help people.’ When you put the glasses on, they tell you: ‘But, if you do it well, you can have a little bit of fun with some small boy.’ Or, Klu Klux Klan, no? ‘Christianity. Defend Western civilization.’ You put the glasses on: ‘But then you can rape some black girls or lynch some black guys,’ and so on.20

Is it not immediately clear here that the secret, obscene acts solicited by the social superego are precisely acts of enjoyment? They are sexualized, non-functional, excessive and even sadomasochistic. The obscene, implicit rules that make up

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the social superego mobilize the enjoyment that remains passionately attached to the subject’s fundamental fantasy, offering the subject what was previously impossible: a way to act on his or her desire while simultaneously identifying with his or her symbolic mandate, doing what he or she has to do.

The perverse turn: How to have your cake and eat it too Two topics that emerge here which are essential to finally unravelling the role of the social superego are (1) the translation of the fundamental fantasy into a transgressive act, and (2) the danger (or absence) of external punishment. First, one should note the particular twist that the big Other gives to the enjoyment of fundamental fantasy by translating it into an act. In the fundamental fantasy, the subject fantasizes a scene of primordial masochistic attachment, imagining him- or herself as a helpless object at the mercy of a sadistic omnipotent Other. However, in the obscene acts solicited by the social superego (at least those mentioned earlier), this fantasy is acted out by displacing the suffering from the subject onto an Other. The subject is acting out the fundamental fantasy, but he or she occupies the place of the omnipotent Other and forces another subject to occupy the place of the helpless object. In a strange way, the subject is ultimately acting out the Other’s fundamental fantasy rather than his or her own. Second, recall that the individual superego is originally conceived of as an internalization of external parental authority, which threatens punishments that have the structure of the fundamental fantasy (suffering inflicted on the subject by the (m)Other). The point here is that these punishments are not, in fact, fantasies. If they are carried out, these punishments are real. Clearly, this is one of the ways in which the (m)Other is simply the first Other to occupy the role of the big Other. Once the subject has reached adulthood and taken on a symbolic mandate, this role of threatening the subject with punishment, and carrying out those punishments should the subject transgress, is passed over to other representatives of the big Other’s authority: institutional authorities, hierarchical superiors and so on. While the subject may punish him- or herself internally with superego guilt feeling should he or she fail to act on his or her desire for transgression, the big Other will punish him or her externally should he or she transgress in act.

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This, then, is how the subject’s disavowed attachment to his or her fundamental fantasy supports his or her attachment to the social system, and why the subject accepts that system in the first place: The symbolic mandate is accompanied by a set of secret solicitations to enjoy transgressive acts that have two very attractive features: First, they are sadistic. They displace the suffering of the fundamental fantasy onto an Other, enabling the subject to enjoy – to experience the pleasurable excitation of excessive, non-functional sadomasochism – without having to be reduced to the helpless object of enjoyment. Second – and in a sense this amounts to the same thing – they are covered by the big Other. By soliciting these acts and implicitly promising to turn a blind eye, the big Other allows the subject to transgress official prohibitions without facing external punishment. It is the victimized Other who, in some sense, bears the punishment on the subject’s behalf. Thus, the subject is not, in the end, caught between, on the one hand trying to embody his or her symbolic mandate and suffering increasing superego guilt for refusing to transgress, and on the other hand enacting his or her transgressive fantasies and risking punishment at the hands of the big Other. The social superego provides precisely a way to do both, a way to embody one’s symbolic mandate while simultaneously acting out one’s enjoyment on an Other, thereby escaping from both the external punishment of the social group and the internal punishment of the superego. It should be noted that Freud himself describes something like this in his Civilization and Its Discontents: civilization’s role in channelling subjects’ aggressive drives against acceptable external targets. ‘It has always been possible’, he writes, ‘to bind quite large numbers of people together in love, provided that others are left out as targets for aggression.’21 And this well-known procedure of scapegoating can clearly be identified as a way of organizing enjoyment into sadistic acts. Instead of acting out his or her enjoyment against unacceptable targets and suffering punishment at the hands of external authority, or frustrating his or her desire for enjoyment and suffering superego guilt feeling, the subject can act out his or her enjoyment on acceptable targets and be rid of it, avoiding punishment. What Žižek adds to Freud’s account is the notion that the acts solicited by the social superego are by necessity surrounded by secrecy because they are transgressive of official prohibitions. While it is true that the Law represented by the big Other tends to explicitly label some subjects and groups as enemies or threats that must be fended off, defeated or even destroyed, in order to properly organize enjoyment, which is always excessive and non-functional, the big

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Other must go beyond this into the realm of obscene solicitation. While Klu Klux Klan members may explicitly perceive black people as an external threat to Christianity and Western civilization, what the example of the Catholic priest makes terrifyingly clear is that the victim of sadistic enjoyment is not, in fact, an external threat. The small boy with whom the priest is solicited to have his fun is the quintessential image of a non-threatening helpless innocent. Is it not clear that it is precisely these features that make him a perfect candidate for the transgressive enactment of the fundamental fantasy? And must one not retroactively reread the example of the Klu Klux Klan member in the same way? Although the Klu Klux Klan member may explicitly perceive black people as an external threat to Christianity and Western civilization, and although his or her symbolic mandate may be to fend them off, the only way that this symbolic mandate can effectively engage his or her passionate attachment, the only way it can effectively organize his or her enjoyment, is through an implicit acknowledgement that the black people he or she targets are not external threats, do not deserve this kind of treatment, are innocent, helpless victims of sexualized enjoyment.

5

Freedom and Responsibility: The Liberatory Promise of Lacanian Psychoanalysis

Defining liberation: Hamlet on the couch Having established the universal structure of subjectivity that Žižek’s theory supports (something like ‘My Other is doubt as to what it is, therefore I am doubt as to what I am’) and the way in which this subject relates to sociopolitical ideology (the social superego allows the subject to act out his or her enjoyment without internal or external suffering), it now becomes possible to provide a preliminary explanation of how Lacanian psychoanalysis promises to liberate the subject. I have already established that the practice of psychoanalysis aims to take away from the subject the minimal consistency conferred on him or her by his or her fundamental fantasy, and to return him or her to the anxious void of subjectivity – the question ‘Che Vuoi? What do you want from me? What am I (as an object for the Other)?’ But what remains to be seen is what this process leads to and how it resolves the deadlock of desire and/or the deadlock between (the philosophy of) hysteria and (the philosophy of) perversion. The notions of the big Other, the symbolic mandate and the social superego further complicate this terrain: If psychoanalysis aims to take away from the subject the first line of defence against the anxiety of subjectivity (the fundamental fantasy), then it must also aim to take away the second line of defence (the symbolic mandate and the social superego). It is at this level, perhaps, that the link between Lacanian psychoanalysis and liberatory leftist political projects is at its most visible: One of the aims of Lacanian psychoanalytic treatment is to take away the subject’s support in ideology, to undermine his or her easy reliance on a kind of false consciousness. And if the liberatory leftist political project is concerned not only with the liberation of the individual subject, but also with the establishment of liberated social relations

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between subjects, then the notions of the big Other and social superego allow for various reformulations of this concern: Is a liberated society structured by a figure of the big Other or can one do without it? Does a liberated society have a social superego, or, if not, what becomes of enjoyment? These are the kinds of questions that will be addressed at the end of this book, but for the moment, a formal definition of the liberation offered by Lacanian psychoanalysis to the individual must be produced. In order to address the question of why taking away the subject’s fundamental fantasy should have liberatory effects, it may be useful to begin by returning to Hamlet. I believe that if one accepts the interpretation of Hamlet that I have attributed to Žižek in Chapter 1– that is, if the most important scene is act III, scene iv, in which Hamlet confronts the enigma of his mother’s desire – then it is worth pursuing the notion that this scene represents Hamlet’s traversal of his fundamental fantasy. That is to say, from the introduction (which manages to get the play started), Hamlet is caught in a certain deadlock, represented by the spectre’s enigmatic command that he should avenge his father’s murder without in any way harming his mother. In the final scene (which manages to get the play over with), Hamlet is no longer caught in this deadlock and is thus able to accomplish the bloody task appointed to him. If Žižek is correct, if the scene in which some transformation occurs that opens the space for this final resolution is act III, scene iv, does not the fact that this scene stages Hamlet’s confrontation with the enigmatic desire of his Other (and not just any Other, but precisely his mother) lend credence to the (admittedly absurd sounding) suggestion that what Hamlet undergoes in act III, scene iv is precisely a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis? By examining the role that act III, scene iv, has in Hamlet’s transformation, it may be possible to articulate the liberatory effects promised by Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Gertrude doesn’t know Assuming one is willing to entertain the suggestion that Hamlet is the subject of a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis, the key question to be answered here is the following: In what way is Hamlet’s subjectivity transformed, and how is this transformation accomplished through his confrontation with Gertrude? A first pass reveals that part of the answer to this question lies in the very riskiness of the act of inheritance that I described in Chapter 1, in the encounter

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with the desire of the Other itself. I described this encounter, this attempt to rescue the Other from seduction, as always risky because of the dependence of its outcome on the unknowable desire of the Other. I noted that it is entirely possible that the Other will remain unconvinced, will refuse to be rescued, will not choose the spirit over the blackmail of conjuration. But the notion that I have developed in Chapter 3 – that the Other does not exist, is inconsistent, is doubt as to what it is – adds an important level of complexity here: the Other him- or herself is also in doubt as to his or her own desire. When Žižek asks, in Hamlet’s place, ‘what if she really enjoys this filthy promiscuous relationship with [my] uncle?’ the truth is that, in essence, Gertrude herself does not know the answer. As in ‘Hegel’s famous formula: “the secrets of the ancient Egyptians were also secrets for the Egyptians themselves” ’,1 Gertrude’s mysterious desire is a mystery for herself. Does this not add a great deal of weight and anxiety to the encounter? Here, Hamlet delays not (only) because he is afraid of discovering that Gertrude really enjoys her filthy promiscuous relationship with his uncle, but (also) because he is aware that she herself is undecided, which means that her desire, her choice, really does, at least in part, hinge on his ability to describe to her the spirit that she cannot yet see. Let me be clear here: If Hamlet believed in a really existing (i.e. consistent) Other, and believed that he knew what that Other desired, he would have no reason to confront her, let alone any reason to delay. If he believed in a really existing Other, but simply lacked the knowledge of what that Other desired, he might confront her for his own edification, and fear of what he would discover might cause him to delay. But it is only the knowledge that the Other does not exist, is inconsistent, undecided, that explains the absolute necessity of this confrontation, and gives proper weight to the anxiety that it induces in the unfortunate subject. Gertrude’s desire itself hangs in the balance. A second pass, however, complicates this picture even further. The situation that I have just described seems to support the suggestion I made earlier – that the inheritor’s essential task is to describe to his or her Other the spirit that this Other cannot yet see, and to ask this Other to choose allegiance to this spirit over the seductions of conjuration. But are things really as clear as this? Does this definition of inheritance not remain trapped on one side of the deadlock that Žižek is hoping to resolve, the side represented by the problem of the old Left: how to address members of the working class in a way that would mobilize them against the conditions of oppression and exploitation that they mysteriously seem

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to accept? If human subjectivity is indecision as to what it is, is doubt as to its desire, then how can one expect the Other to make a consistent choice to resolve his or her indecision one way or the other? How can Hamlet expect Gertrude to decide? Or, to put it another way, at the level of the first pass, the transformation one looks for in act III, scene iv is a transformation in Gertrude, rather than Hamlet himself. How can Hamlet’s traversal of his own fundamental fantasy rely ultimately on Gertrude’s decision? A close reading of Hamlet’s confrontation with Gertrude underscores this problem. Although one can read Gertrude’s agreeing, at the end of the scene, that she will not reveal Hamlet to Claudius (that he is only playing at being mad) as a sign of her fidelity to Hamlet’s cause, her actual response to Hamlet’s demand that she choose between the memory of his father and the reality of his uncle is precisely anxious indecision. After a series of attempts to avoid the choice as such, ‘O Hamlet, speak no more … O, speak no more to me … No more!’ she finally admits that, essentially, she cannot choose: ‘O Hamlet, thou hast cleft my heart in twain.’2 In lieu of a decision, all Gertrude has to offer Hamlet is shame: ‘Thou turn’st mine eyes into my very soul; and there I see such black and grained spots as will not leave their tinct.’3 And this shame, this feeling of guilt, has a very specific place within Žižek’s understanding of human subjectivity: The question lays open, exposes, denudes its addressee, it invades the sphere of intimacy; this is why the basic, elementary reaction to a question is shame on the bodily level, blushing and lowering our eyes, like a child to whom we ask ‘What were you doing?’ … Even if I can offer an answer which is objectively true and at the same time delivers me from guilt [e.g. ‘I was consummating my lawful marriage to Claudius!’ or ‘You’re right, I will divorce Claudius out of fidelity to Hamlet Sr.’] … the guilt is already admitted on the level of desire [e.g. ‘I was fucking my dead husband’s brother!’]; every answer is an excuse … I am confirming precisely that I did not want to do so … The question … aims at a point at which the answer is not possible, where the word is lacking, where the subject is exposed in his impotence … the stake of such a question is always to catch the other who embodies authority in his impotence.4

This confrontation, then, is the moment in which Hamlet traverses his fantasy, not in the sense of forcing his Other to make a decision, but in the sense of coming face to face with the fact that his Other is impotent, divided, inconsistent, nonexistent. She herself does not have a consistent answer to give. To the question ‘Che vuoi?’ there is no answer. There is only the question itself.

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Returning the question: The freedom to decide and responsibility for deciding In what way, then, is this realization of the Other’s inconsistency liberating? Here, one should refer to the way in which Žižek defines the psychoanalytic process itself in terms of a question: ‘At the end of the psychoanalysis’, writes Žižek, ‘the question is, so to speak, returned to the Other, the impotence of the subject displaces itself into the impossibility proper to the Other: the subject experiences the Other as blocked, failed, marked with a central impossibility.’5 Hamlet’s ‘Che vuoi?’ is returned to Gertrude. Her response of shame might well have been phrased: ‘What do you want from me, Hamlet? Any answer I give you will already be unsatisfactory!’ Hamlet’s inability to act is displaced onto Gertrude’s inability to decide, which, in some sense, frees him to answer the question for himself, to act. To put it in another way, insofar as the fundamental fantasy involves the notion of a consistent Other on the one hand, and functions as a guarantee of the subject’s consistency on the other, it is clear that the fantasmatic, really existing Other is imagined to hold the guarantee, to have the answer to the subject’s question. For Hamlet, it is Gertrude who really knows what he is as an object: whether he will be harming his mother, and therefore disobeying the spirit’s command, by allowing his uncle to live or by killing him. What her inability to decide reveals is not simply that she does not have the answer, but that there is no answer as such. The question is radically undecidable. It aims at a place ‘where the word is lacking’. And this lack of a word, this undecidability, is, for Žižek, the fundamental ground of subjective freedom as such. When Hamlet discovers that there is no answer to the question ‘Che vuoi? What am I as an object?’ he loses his (imagined, self-imposed) status as an object determined by external necessity. He has recourse neither to the logic of ‘my desire is justified, so I will kill Claudius’, nor to the logic of ‘my desire is unjustified, so I will not kill Claudius’. Instead, he becomes a subject who really is free to decide: ‘I must choose whether to kill Claudius or not.’ And, to be clear, whatever decision Hamlet makes, it will not in any way resolve the undecidability, eliminate the central impossibility, or close up the gap in the Other. Hamlet’s act is not made possible by an alleviation of the anxiety of having to decide. Rather, it is made possible precisely by the realization that this anxiety is itself co-substantial with the possibility of making a decision as such. The flip side of

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this is that the shame that Gertrude expresses at her inability to answer Hamlet’s question is the sign that she remains caught in the deadlock between desire and the Law. Whether one approaches this situation from the perspective that the Law is Gertrude’s duty to remain faithful to the ethical standards of Hamlet Sr. and her desire is her sexual lust for Claudius, or from the perspective that the Law is the corrupt, oppressive political system of Claudius’ reign and Gertrude’s desire is to make the ethical decision to reject him, her shame is the sign that she is unable to decide, but remains caught between them. In this sense, if one accepts the suggestion that what Hamlet undergoes in act III, scene iv, is precisely a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis, then the liberated state towards which Lacanian psychoanalysis aims is a state in which the subject is, first, able to make a decision on how to act that is not guaranteed by some figure of the Other, and, second, able to acknowledge, to take responsibility for, that decision. In place of being trapped in and determined by the shifting pressures of the deadlock between the Law that seeks to constrain unruly desire by prohibiting certain acts, and desire that seeks to transgress those prohibitions towards some ultimate satisfaction, the post-analytic subject is able to acknowledge, to take responsibility for, the fact that he or she is necessarily always making a kind of radical, open decision about the way in which he or she will act. As Žižek puts it, the character of a person is revealed not only in the fact that he does what he must do, but also in ‘in the location of those limits…’ I am responsible for the choice of coordinates which prevent me from doing some things and impel me to do others. This brings us to the Lacanian notion of the act: in an act, I precisely redefine the very coordinates of what I cannot and must do.6

Hamlet has undergone a successful psychoanalysis insofar as he has chosen, and has taken responsibility for choosing, the coordinates of his character, which determine his acts. He has decided to be, and takes responsibility for having decided to be, someone who must kill Claudius.

Others who are supposed: Traversing the social fantasy In order to transition from the level of the fundamental fantasy to the level of the symbolic mandate, one must move from the (m)Other to the big Other

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itself – the reified position that guarantees social prohibitions. And while the liberating promise of psychoanalysis functions here in the same way (the acknowledgement that the big Other is internally divided liberates the subject to decide and to take responsibility for having decided), the structure of the big Other introduces some interesting complications. In his Masterclass on Lacan, delivered to the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities in May/June 2006, Žižek provides the following definition of what it means for an individual to embody the big Other: I think that one of the best definitions of the big Other, of when a person embodies the big Other, would be a person which functions for us as (let’s call it) a protector of appearances. A person … for whom we must save, maintain, the appearances. [For example], when … the wife or the husband says to his/her sexual partner, ‘don’t [do] this to me … Our son may observe us’, he [the son] is the big Other. The big Other [is], again, this agency in front of whom we have to protect appearances.7

This is how the position of the big Other sustains the gap between the symbolic mandate and the social superego: As the one in front of whom appearances must be protected, the big Other is the one who must not find out ‘what is actually going on’. And as a result, an interesting relationship emerges between the function of the (m)Other and the function of the big Other: The (m)Other is imagined by the subject to have a kind of knowledge that the subject lacks – the answer to the question ‘Che Vuoi?’ – while the big Other is imagined to be ignorant of a kind of knowledge that the subject has – knowledge of the secret, obscene, enjoyable acts solicited by the social superego. In fact, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek develops a typology of four imaginary Others, which he describes as ‘subjects presumed to ...’. He describes a subject presumed to know (this is the role played by the (m)Other, but also, in Lacanian theory, by the analyst), a subject presumed to believe (this is the ignorant role played by the big Other: The big Other is someone who believes the subject can embody his or her symbolic mandate without enjoying), a subject presumed to enjoy and a subject presumed to desire.8 Without rehearsing this typological schema in detail, it is enough to note that each of these imaginary Others represents a solution to the same problem. The fundamental supposition is that the Other has the solution to (or is simply not subject to) the deadlock of desire. The Other knows or believes something that, if the subject knew it or believed it, would allow the subject either to give up

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his or her symbolic mandate and bear the enjoyment of his or her fundamental fantasy directly or to give up his or her fundamental fantasy, identify with his or her symbolic mandate directly, and do without enjoyment. This is the link between the big Other (in front of whom appearances must be kept) and the (m)Other (to whom the subject addresses the question regarding his or her existence), between the innocent child (the Other supposed to believe) and the analyst (the Other supposed to know): The big Other does not have the subject’s problem, and the (m)Other has the solution to it. The understanding of the Other (in the forms of both the social big Other and the individualized (m)Other) as the one who is supposed to have the solution to the deadlock of desire allows me to return to the notion of traversing the fantasy, and to begin to connect it to the project of political liberation. First, recall that traversing the fantasy involves acknowledging the fact that the Other is inconsistent, divided, and that he or she (like Gertrude) does not have the answer to the question concerning the subject. Here, once again, this question is the question of the deadlock of desire: ‘How can I do without enjoyment, or do without my social mandate?’ Second, recall that the big Other guarantees social cohesion by sustaining the difference, by being divided in itself, between the explicit laws of the social mandate which protect the subject from his or her enjoyment and the implicit laws of the social superego which allow him or her to enact his or her enjoyment without suffering punishment. Is it not clear that this second point (the big Other is split into explicit and implicit rules) is the content that fills out the form of the first (traversing the fantasy involves acknowledging that the Other is inconsistent)? Traversing the fantasy in the sense of breaking free from the deadlock represented by the social superego involves precisely the acknowledgement that there are obscene, enjoyable, sadomasochistic acts which are solicited by the Law itself. The deadlock of desire is not simply a deadlock between the desires of individual subjects and the laws of society, but a deadlock that runs through the laws of society as such, between the explicit rules that prohibit enjoyment and implicit the rules which solicit that very same enjoyment. That is to say, traversing the fantasy at the social level involves acknowledging that there is no (impersonal, reified) ‘one’ who has the solution to the deadlock of desire, who can do without enjoyment on the one hand, or can enjoy directly, without any distance, on the other. The only ‘one’ who must be protected from the subject’s enjoyment is the subject him- or herself.

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What this usefully implies is that the political project of liberation cannot aim simply at liberating individual subjects from the constraints of the Law in order that they may be able to enjoy in their own way. Enjoyment in its unadulterated form is unbearable. Neither can the political project of liberation aim simply at liberating individuals from the superego pressure to enjoy in order that they may live peaceful, tension-free lives, fully identified with their symbolic mandates. The enjoyment that is prohibited by the symbolic mandate will always return, either in disavowed enjoyable acts or in an explosion of superego guilt feeling. Rather, the political project of liberation must work at lifting the disavowal of enjoyment that is sustained by the big Other who is supposed (to know, believe, enjoy, desire). It must work at confronting individuals with the fact that society does not exist, not in the sense of a simple absence of existence, but in the sense of being divided, inconsistent, in doubt as to what it is. It must confront individuals with the fact that the difference between good (the symbolic mandate) and evil (enjoyment) is sustained only by a reified subject who is supposed, a fictional subject who does not exist. Society is not an answer to the question, but the anxious question itself: How are we to act? The political project of liberation must work to return the question from the Other to the subject: from the subject addressing the Other with the question ‘how can I desire/enjoy properly?’ to the Other addressing the subject with the question ‘how will you decide to act?’ And, as it is for Hamlet, the prospect of making this decision and taking this responsibility for it is properly terrifying. It involves making a decision in a situation that is properly undecidable. It involves taking responsibility for the results of this decision, no matter how terrible they may be. This is the meaning of Žižek’s assertion that, ‘if there is a Freudian ethical injunction, it is that one should have the courage of one’s own conviction: one should dare fully to assume one’s identifications’:9 On the one hand, one must have the courage to take responsibility for performing obscene, dirty acts, without relying on a pure, innocent Other who does not do so. As Žižek puts it succinctly, ‘the most difficult thing is not to violate the prohibitions in a wild orgy of enjoyment, but to do this without relying on someone else who is presupposed not to enjoy so that I can enjoy: to assume my own enjoyment directly, without mediation through another’s supposed purity’.10 On the other hand, one must have the courage to take subjective responsibility for not performing obscene dirty acts, without recourse to an external obstacle (‘I would love to, but I’m not allowed’). Here, Žižek refers to the definition

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of subjective maturity provided by Kant in his Was is Aufklarung? (to which Foucault’s What Is Enlightenment? was written as a reply): This is why the Kantian autonomy of the subject is so difficult – its implication is precisely that there is nobody out there, no external agent of ‘natural authority,’ who can do the job for me and set my limit, that I myself have to pose a limit to my natural ‘unruliness’. Although Kant famously wrote that man is an animal which needs a master, this should not deceive us … Kant’s true aim … is to point out how the very need of an external master is a deceptive lure: man needs a master in order to conceal from himself the deadlock of his own difficult freedom and self-responsibility. In this precise sense, a truly enlightened, ‘mature’ human being is a subject who no longer needs a master, who can fully assume the heavy burden of defining his own limitations.11

Part Three

Contemporary Ideologies

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The Problem of Postmodernity: A Life of Pleasures

Traditional ideology has been traversed … If what I have asserted in the previous chapter is true, if traversing the fantasy of traditional ideology involves accepting that the big Other does not exist, that there is no one who can do without enjoyment or the Law and that everyone is responsible for enjoying and limiting his or her enjoyment in his or her own way, then the next problem which arises here is that in contemporary liberal tolerant late capitalism it seems as if this traversal has already taken place. Recall that, for Žižek, ‘In the generalized perversion of late capitalism, transgression itself is [explicitly] solicited, 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.’1 The dirty, obscene enjoyment with which the subject of traditional ideology was secretly bribed to accept his or her social mandate appears to have emerged from the shadows of secrecy and into the plain light of day. The distance between the explicit rules of society which concern one’s moral duty, and their implicit superego supplement which concerns enjoyment, seems to have collapsed. More and more, subjects seem to be addressed precisely as enjoyers, as subjects whose duty it is to enjoy (especially to consume, but also to indulge in excessive sexual practices, to be non-functional, to play) to their hearts’ content. Is this it? Are we already living in a post-analytic, postrevolutionary, liberated situation? Clearly, from the perspective of the tradition of critical thinking which remains plagued by that old leftist problem, the answer is no. But the question remains: why not? At a naïve, empirical level, one may assert that the traditional social superego is still operative. In the course of protecting peace and freedom, soldiers continue to be able to enjoy raping women in foreign countries so long as the nation-state for which they are fighting does not register it. Members of racist organizations

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continue to be able to enjoy brutalizing minorities so long as this enjoyment remains concealed behind the mask of defending their own moral and racial purity. Parents continue to be able to enjoy having sex so long as the innocent eyes of their impressionable children remain blind to it. And, to be fair, Žižek does acknowledge that traditional ideology is still operative today.2 However, one must be careful not to fall into the trap of arguing that there has simply been no traversal as of yet, that the revolutionary moment is still to come. Žižek is highly critical of the notion that the liberatory promises of Enlightenment thinking and the universalizing function of capitalism have turned out to be simply illusion and empty rhetoric. Indeed, Žižek gives full weight to the notion that Enlightenment thinking on the one hand, and capitalism on the other, have, in fact, provided the means for a traversal of the fundamental fantasy structuring traditional society. In this context, Žižek approvingly quotes Badiou on Marx: The passage where Marx speaks of the desacralization of all sacred bonds in the icy waters of capitalism has an enthusiastic tone; it is Marx’s enthusiasm for the dissolving power of Capital. The fact that Capital revealed itself to be the material power capable of disencumbering us of the superego figures of the One and the sacred bonds that accompany it effectively represents its positively progressive character, and it is something that continues to unfold to the present day.3

Note that Badiou (perhaps without knowing it) even produces here the correct terminology for the argument I am pursuing: It is precisely in relation to the institutional social superego function of ideological bribery, guaranteed by the impersonal one of the big Other, that the deterritorializing nature of capital has a liberating function. And it is this same deterritorialization that is present in Enlightenment universalism. Despite its various shortcomings, Enlightenment thinking did indeed point the way (perhaps without knowing it) towards a solution to the deadlock of that old leftist problem. ‘I am the first to admit all these old Marxist [criticisms]’, Žižek says, ‘that human rights were in reality the rights of white, male … property [owners], and so on. But, nonetheless, they opened a certain path … You know … “Why not women?… Why not Blacks? Why not children?” and so on.’4 Despite being an ideological mask for the domination of a particular ruling class, the illusory promise of universal liberation had the real effect of making possible a critique of (that very same) domination. The idea of universal liberation became a yardstick against which continuing oppression could be measured. In the language of the tempting assumptions

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that I described in the Introduction chapter, Enlightenment thought may have started from the incorrect assumption that a correct, good Law, a correct social form, could be discovered with a certain amount of theoretical work. However, it did at least provide a support for the notion that the currently existing Law was ‘not (yet) it!’ For Žižek, the universal ‘subject of free choice, in the Western, tolerant, multicultural sense, can only emerge as the result of an extremely violent process of being torn out of one’s particular life-world, of being cut off from one’s roots’,5 and this violent process is precisely the deterritorialization accomplished by Enlightenment thinking and capitalism. ‘There is a … fundamental violence at work (and I think, unfortunately, it’s a positive violence) in Western society’, he says, ‘this violence of experiencing whatever your background is as something contingent, ultimately irrelevant.’6 Should one not read this as precisely the violence of being torn out of identification with one’s symbolic mandate? Enlightenment thinking is ultimately at odds with the acceptance of the traditional big Other. In questioning the Law, it exposes the secret, dirty acts of enjoyment that sustain it. Universality turns on its master, biting the hand, as it were, of any particular group that attempts to monopolize it. The secret obscene exclusion and oppression of women, non-whites, non-Europeans, the working class and so on that were facilitated by Enlightenment thought were also subject to being undermined by its own premises. Thus, for Žižek, there has been a traversal. Enlightenment thinking and capitalism have provided precisely the tools with which to traverse traditional ideology. But this does not mean that liberation has been accomplished. Rather, ideology continues to function, but not in its traditional form. In order to elucidate what the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis means in the contemporary context, this new mutation in the form of ideology must be defined.

And, in its place, postmodern ideology! Why has the traversal of the fantasy structuring traditional ideology not led to a liberated state? In what way does ideology continue to function? As a first approach, let me note that Lacan himself can be seen to address this perplexing question in his assertion that ‘we analysts know full well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer’.7 The ceasing to exist of God (which should be read here as identical with the subject’s acceptance of the

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non-existence of the traditional big Other) ought to lead to a situation in which everything is permitted, in which the dirty, enjoyable, obscene acts that were prohibited by God (which His gaze had to be protected from, but which He simultaneously solicited in an attempt to secure the subject’s obedience) are permitted (i.e. brought out of secrecy and into the light of day). However, Lacan’s assertion is that exactly the opposite is the case: Once the big Other no longer exists, nothing is permitted. Why? What does this mean? While it is tempting to return to the simplistic deadlock that Lacan sets up in his early work between desire and the Law, to assert that once prohibition is lifted, dirty, obscene acts lose their enjoyable character precisely because it was the prohibition that made them enjoyable in the first place, Žižek’s turn to Lacan is based precisely on the late Lacanian assertion that desire and the Law are not caught in a strict deadlock. If there is an outside of the deadlock of desire, which is represented by traversing the fantasy, then the question remains: why is contemporary liberal tolerant late capitalism not the liberated, postrevolutionary, post-analytic state? The solution to this problem, which reconciles Lacan’s early insights with his later, more radical pronouncements, is to introduce the idea, supported by Žižek, of a new, contemporary, reflexive form of ideology. And to be clear, this new, contemporary, reflexive form of ideology has at its root the second tempting assumption that I described in my introduction, which I associate with Žižek’s characterization of postmodern thought. That is to say, I believe that the endlessly recurrent deterritorializing effects of Enlightenment thought, of the first tempting assumption, have led individual subjects, even Western and global society as such, to make the opposite tempting assumption: that there is no way out of the deadlock of desire, that there is no correct definition of subjectivity and liberation, no good Law or correct social form, and that we are thus reduced to playing games for recognition and generating a beautiful tapestry of essentially equivalent oppressive social and political forms. That is to say, the failure of Enlightenment thought to discover the correct resolution to the deadlock of desire, its endless hysterical declaration that ‘that’s not (yet) it!’ has led to a postmodern perverse assertion that there is no correct resolution to the deadlock, that we are left in a kind of decisionist relativity. The notion of a postmodern form of ideology is supported by Žižek’s own discussion of Lacan’s pronouncement on the effects of the non-existence of God in his Reading Lacan. This discussion is accompanied by Žižek’s oft-repeated illustration of ‘the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends’. Žižek writes:

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The old-fashioned [traditional] authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: ‘I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to your Grandma’s and behave yourself there!’ In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a ‘postmodern’ non-authoritarian father: ‘You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!’ Every child who is not stupid (which is to say most children) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit Grandma, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, instructing him not only what to do, but what to want to do.8

What Žižek’s explanation implies here is that although postmodern, tolerant ideology explicitly promises a certain relativity, a freedom of the subject to make his or her own decision about how to act, it nonetheless continues to rely, in a disavowed way, on the deadlock represented by the individual and social superegos. In the constellation of traditional ideology, the (explicit) content of the authoritarian father’s demand is that the child identify with a certain symbolic mandate (the good boy who visits Grandma). However, into the very form of this demand are inscribed the (implicit) coordinates for a transgressive enjoyment (the later act of rebellion, which the father will overlook), and this secret, unspoken supplement acts as a release valve, making the child’s position in relation to his or her enjoyment minimally tolerable. With the traversal of the fantasy structuring this traditional ideological constellation, one might expect to arrive at a situation of unconstrained enjoyment in which everything is permitted, in which the child is free to identify with his enjoyment directly, out in the open. And, at the level of content, this is precisely what happens. The permissive postmodern father’s statement ‘I do not want to force you’, effectively says ‘Do what you want. Enjoy yourself ’, but into the form of the statement is inscribed an even stronger command: ‘You must enjoy going to Grandma’s!’ Isn’t this precisely the (false, misrecognized) message of the superego? ‘Enjoy doing what you have to do!’ The difference seems to be that the secret solicitation to transgression has disappeared. There is no implicit acknowledgement on the

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part of the father that the child’s enjoyment lies elsewhere, that it is passionately attached to a fundamental fantasy. The release valve has been taken away, and one can only expect the child either to obey the father’s command and fall into a terrifying spiral of superego guilt feeling (the return of thwarted transgressive enjoyment) or to take the father at his word and enjoy directly, falling into an equally terrifying spiral of unconstrained ‘playing with friends’.

The postmodern ego-ideal: Buy two, get one free! Contemporary subjects have succeeded in traversing the fantasy structuring traditional ideology only to retreat from the heavy burden of defining their own limitations into the comforting need for a new kind of master. But how does this new, postmodern form of ideology function? How is it that the explicit call to do what one wants transforms into its opposite: a command to enjoy doing what one has to do? Here, it may be useful to return to the lecture in which Žižek uses Carpenter’s film They Live and its motif of a pair of quasi-magical glasses to describe the function of ideology as a double message: In our contemporary consumerist societies … we, subjects, are no longer interpellated on behalf of some big ideological identity, but we are directly interpellated as subjects of pleasures, so that the implied ideological identity is invisible. This … is how what Lacan calls the discourse of [the] university functions. Its truth, the master’s injunction, is hidden beneath the bar. You have to put the glasses on to see it … This is our constellation … where pleasures are directly promised to you, but, of course, into the very form, the true ideological message is inscribed – like … ‘Go to the Caribbean. Have a nice vacation.’ The true message is ‘Marry, reproduce,’ and so on.9

While traditional ideology explicitly offers duty and self-sacrifice and implicitly offers enjoyment, consumerist ideology explicitly offers pleasures while implicitly offering duty and self-sacrifice. How should this seemingly symmetrical inversion be interpreted? Recall that in Chapter 3, I set up an opposition between enjoyment and the pleasure principle. In 1960, Lacan develops what soon comes to be an important concept in his work; the idea of an opposition between pleasure and jouissance [enjoyment]. Jouissance is now defined as an excessive quantity of excitation which the pleasure principle attempts to prevent. The pleasure principle is thus seen as a symbolic law, a commandment which can be phrased ‘Enjoy as little as possible.’10

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What is vital to note about consumerist ideology is that although it may present itself as an explicit solicitation to enjoy, it is not. It is in fact a solicitation to take pleasure, which is ultimately a prohibition against enjoyment. As Žižek says of advertisements: if you read closely publicity clips … they never simply tell you ‘Spend more,’ ‘Just spend,’ and so on. The message is always ‘Spend more and you will economize. You will get a surplus for free.’ That’s, I think, absolutely crucial to understand how publicity works. You are never directly interpellated, addressed as a subject of pure consumption, of just shop ‘till you drop,’ ‘Just spend to the end.’ It’s always … ‘Buy one jacket [and] it’s $100, but buy two and its $150….’ That’s always the promise: that the more you spend the more you economize … So what I claim here is that the usual designation of our society as a society of consumption … is not quite accurate. What characterizes capitalism, I claim, is precisely that consumption is the mode of appearance of its very opposite, of thrift. And the ultimate proof of it today, I claim, is our obsession [with] the figure of the junkie; drug dependence … Although, before, they also did use drugs … when they had drugs this was simply a kind of not very respectable thing to do, but it wasn’t perceived as such a threat to the social texture. I claim that precisely the junkie is effectively the only true subject of consumption. He really goes to the end, consumes himself in his unbounded consumption, without reserve, without this element of thrift.11

While the explicit message of ideology has been inverted from the traditional authoritarian father’s ‘I don’t care how you feel’, to the permissive postmodern father’s ‘I don’t want to force you’ (i.e. ‘I do care how you feel. That is even my foremost concern’), the subject is nonetheless not being solicited to go to the end in enjoyment and self-consumption. Rather, both traditional and postmodern ideologies aim precisely at prohibiting enjoyment. They simply articulate this prohibition in different ways. Specifically, in consumerist ideology, the prohibition against enjoyment is, in some sense, itself prohibited, invisible. Instead of appearing as a negative, direct prohibition against enjoyment, it appears as a set of positive recommendations and good advice about how to enjoy as economically as possible. While the traditional statement, ‘I don’t care how you feel’, could not be directly identified with, and was thus experienced as a kind of provocation, leading inexorably to the response, ‘Well, I don’t care what you want of me! I’m going to do what makes me feel good anyway’, the statement, ‘I do care how you feel’, is all too easy to identify with, precisely because the prohibition which is inscribed into its form, ‘but just don’t go to the end in self-

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consuming enjoyment’, is much more difficult to detect. ‘In other words’, asks Žižek, ‘are not injunctions to have a good time, to acquire self-realization and self-fulfilment, and so on, precisely injunctions to avoid excessive jouissance, to find a kind of homeostatic balance?’12 Here, in this image of good advice about how to economize and achieve homeostatic balance, consumerist ideology is linked not only with the pleasure principle but also with the superego. What … is the price to be paid for this suspension of the ethical dimension of the commandment, of the Master Signifier [that is, for the traversal of traditional ideology]? The psychoanalytic answer is clear: superego. Superego is on the side of knowledge; like Kafka’s law, it wants nothing from you [‘I don’t want to force you.’] – it is just there if you come to it [‘You know how much your grandmother loves you.’] This is the command operative in the warning we see everywhere today: ‘Smoking may be dangerous to your health.’ Nothing is prohibited. You are just informed of a causal link.13

‘You want to have a pleasant life’, says the superego, ‘and I agree that you are entitled to one. However, you must admit that dying of lung cancer is not a pleasant prospect. So, if you want to have a long, pleasant life, you should avoid anything that might cause lung cancer, and smoking is a leading cause. No matter how enjoyable smoking may be, I don’t recommend it.’ Precisely in the name of economizing on pleasure, the institutional superego of consumerist ideology prohibits excessive enjoyment. Once the traditional God of prohibition ceases to exist, the consumerist God of superego knowledge arises to take His place. All kinds of pleasures are allowed, even explicitly solicited, but nothing enjoyable is permitted any longer.

Liberal tolerant multiculturalism So far, I have dealt with postmodern ideology only in its incarnation as the consumerist ideology of late capitalism. But Žižek consistently asserts a strong link between late capitalism on the one hand, and liberal tolerant multiculturalism on the other. How does postmodern ideology manifest itself in relation to questions of (especially racial and cultural) identity? In order to answer this question, it is vital to begin by tracing the meaning of identity in traditional ideology.

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I have already established that, in traditional ideology, sadomasochistic acts perpetrated against racialized others fall into the category of ideological bribery: acts that are implicitly solicited by the big Other, allowing one to enjoy while performing one’s symbolic mandate. Here, I wish to suggest that the traditional big Other’s role as the one in front of whom appearances must be kept has two further implications. First, the role of the traditional big Other as the subject supposed to believe (not to know) implies the specific way in which the racialized Other is experienced as threatening to the traditional social fabric: Is it not that he or she threatens to disturb appearances, to reveal enjoyment to the big Other? Is this not precisely the fantasmatic background for the traditional racist’s fear of ‘pollution of the bloodline’: the image of the innocent, pure, virginal big Other who(se gaze) must be protected from the dirty, obscene practices of the racialized Other? Second, this offers an explanation for why traditional racism is always coupled with an eroticization and exoticization of the racialized Other, why it is acceptable, for example, for the white male subject of traditional Eurocentric, patriarchal discourse to seek romantic adventures in the Orient. In contrast to the traditional big Other who must remain ignorant, the traditional subject is the one who already knows. He is permitted to enjoy, so long as the big Other remains ignorant of it. So what happens to this traditional racism when traditional ideology is traversed and postmodern ideology emerges to take its place? To begin with, I have argued that in consumerist ideology the enjoyment that was secretly solicited by traditional ideology emerges, in a limited (pleasurable) way, from the shadows of secrecy and into the light of day. Instead of being addressed as the subject of an ideological cause, the subject is addressed as a subject of pleasures. In the context of cultural difference, this would seem to imply that enjoyable interaction with racialized others no longer has to be hidden from the innocent gaze of the big Other, but will come to be tolerated, even explicitly enjoined, as part of leading a justifiably pleasurable life. Do we not have here a fairly direct description of contemporary, multiculturalist celebrations of cultural difference? Instead of posing a threat to the social fabric, other cultures appear as a source of pleasurable self-indulgence. Žižek often refers here to ‘today’s tolerant liberal multiculturalism as an experience of … the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality’.14 The racialized Other is commodified, his or her culture transformed into a set of pleasurable experiences or lifestyle choices to be consumed at leisure (dances, cuisines, fashions, etc.).

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But, of course, the injunction to take pleasure in cultural difference also conceals a secret prohibition against excessive enjoyment. Although cultural difference is tolerated, even celebrated, in liberal multiculturalist society, this tolerance nonetheless has (very clear, if usually implicit, unspoken) limits. Here, Žižek gives a nice example from Slovenia, in which (as he calls them) comfortable, big city, white liberals are engaged in protecting the cultural rights of a Roma family against the racist attitudes of the residents of a small town next to which the Roma family has set up camp: When these white liberals wanted to protect the Gypsies (‘They have the right to their way of life,’ and so on), there was [an] ironic problem here. These Romas … really had their way of life … Their way of life did not mean that they baked their own pastries and had their dance. No, it meant, for example, that small girls, when they were five [or] six, were already not only married, but sold to marriage … And the irony was how the same white liberals who supported them against these white trash, lower class [racists], exploded when the problem was, for example, how they treat their women. ‘No! Here the state must intervene!’ and so on …15

Within the context of postmodern ideology, the racialized Other is allowed, even encouraged, to retain his or her authentic ethnic traditions. But if these traditions cross a certain threshold, authoritarian repression (‘Here the state must intervene!’) returns with a vengeance. And what is this threshold? Is it not already clear that it concerns precisely enjoyment in its excessive, irrational, (self-)destructive character – precisely the domain of violence and sexuality? As Žižek insists over and over again in his work, liberal multiculturalist tolerance tolerates the Other insofar as it is not the real Other, but [only] the aseptic Other of pre-modern ecological wisdom, fascinating rites, and so on – the moment one is dealing with the real Other (say, of clitoridectomy, of women compelled to wear the veil, of torturing enemies to death…), with the way the Other regulates the specificity of its jouissance, tolerance stops.16

What is unbearable to liberal tolerant multiculturalism is that the Other is enjoying. By allowing certain cultural differences under the banner of pleasure, the multiculturalist renders the prohibition against real cultural difference (concealed ‘below the bar’) even harsher, more effective. ‘You know’, says Žižek,

The Problem of Postmodernity: A Life of Pleasures the master is the one who draws the line [between] what is the true, good other [and what is excessive in the other, what must be repressed]. This is the beauty of multiculturalism. If you treat the other in this way, you not only remain a master, but justify your position of master as the protector of the true diversity of the other … You are the one who basically says to the other, ‘No! This is your true greatness. Be that!’17

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The Postmodern Social Superego: Reflexive Sadomasochism

Enjoy your discipline! How, then, does the subject of postmodern ideology enjoy? If, as I have suggested, the traditional place of ideological bribery has been emptied out, if there are no dirty, obscene acts that are solicited from the subject by the big Other, what happens to enjoyment? One answer, which I have already mentioned, is that the subject is at risk of either falling into a terrifying spiral of superego guilt feeling or taking the big Other at its word and falling into an equally terrifying spiral of self-destructive enjoyment. But if the postmodern big Other does not offer any ideological bribery, if it condemns the subject to self-destruction, why does the subject submit to its interpellating call in the first place? What binds the postmodern subject to his or her own oppression if he or she is not provided with a way to act out his or her fundamental fantasy without suffering? As a way of approaching this question, recall that, for Freud, the superego has a regulatory, even moralizing character. ‘The super-ego’s role in relation to the ego may be compared to that of a judge or a censor. Freud sees conscience, self-observation and the formation of ideals as functions of the super-ego.’1 And this is precisely the role of superego knowledge in consumerist ideology: as a protection against (and even simultaneously as a punishment for) his or her uncontrolled striving towards prohibited, self-destructive enjoyment, every individual must be submitted to a system of moralizing regulations, both in the form of advice and preparatory activities. Was it not Foucault who formulated the most thorough analysis of these disciplinary practices, incorporating not only the notion that disciplinary power is diffused throughout society, turning each individual into his or her own oppressive, moralizing regulator, but also the insight that discipline is primarily disseminated in the form of knowledge?

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What Žižek’s use of Lacanian theory allows for here is the supplementary notion that these disciplinary practices can themselves become a way to enact enjoyment. That is to say, whereas the individual superego traditionally punished the subject for frustrating his or her own desire by imposing an internal feeling of guilt, the disciplinary procedures of contemporary consumerist society provide precisely a way to act out this feeling, to externalize it. They become a new version of the social superego. Jean Baudrillard was not the only theorist to notice the disturbing similarities between the obsessive health regimes practised in America (jogging, exercising, various forms of massage) and the pain and humiliation of direct, bodily torture.2 Suddenly, the sadomasochistic enjoyment of the fundamental fantasy, which these various preparatory activities were meant to postpone or suspend, begins to emerge as part of the preparatory activities themselves. Although the explicit aim of these practices is to ward off enjoyment (either by keeping risky, self-destructive behaviour at a minimum, or by postponing any final fulfilment), they nonetheless produce, in a secret, disavowed way, precisely the sadomasochistic enjoyment of the fundamental fantasy. But there is a problem here: How does this acting out of self-discipline differ from self-destructive suffering as such? That is to say, the traditional social superego allows the subject to enjoy without suffering by acting out his or her fundamental fantasy with him- or herself in the position of the omnipotent Other and a victimized Other in the position of the helpless object. If the postmodern social superego solicits the subject to enjoy disciplining him- or herself, how does he or she avoid suffering? When Žižek describes the postmodern gesture of politically correct self-culpabilization, as ‘a compulsive effort to uncover ever new, ever more refined forms of racial and/or sexual violence and domination…’, when he asks ‘how can one be a white, heterosexual male and still retain a clear conscience?’ does he not describe a situation in which the white heterosexual male is expected to perform precisely a terrifying spiral of superego guilt feeling?

Reflexive sadomasochism The answer to this question is no! Just as the postmodern injunction to take pleasure conceals a deeper prohibition against enjoyment, the postmodern gesture of self-culpabilization conceals a deeper self-exoneration: ‘The white-maleheterosexual position must remain empty, must sacrifice its enjoyment … Yet all this effort should not dupe us; it is ultimately a stratagem whose function is to

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conceal the fact that the PC type is not ready to renounce what really matters:… the very gesture of self-sacrifice.’3 While at the level of content the postmodern subject may enact self-criticism and guilt, his or her very gesture of doing so ensures that, at the level of form, his or her conscience remains clean. Precisely insofar as he or she announces his or her guilt externally, he or she does not have to feel guilt internally. The violence of the fundamental fantasy is once again acted out on an Other, but this time the victim is not an Other subject but a false double of the subject him- or herself, a mirror image as it were. And, of course, the politically correct white heterosexual male does not expect to face external punishment at the hands of the criminal justice system for the ever more refined forms of racial and/or sexual violence and domination that he discovers within himself. Rather, their self-discovery and public repudiation become ever more solid proof that he does not need to be punished, that he is, in fact, perfectly innocent. However, this kind of refined, reflexive masochistic ideological bribery is only part of the story. Postmodern ideology is also accompanied by a reflexive form of sadistic ideological bribery in which culpability for ever more refined forms of racial and/or sexual violence, along with the disciplinary practices that accompany this culpability, is transferred not onto the subject’s own mirror image but precisely onto an (usually racialized) Other. Do we not already begin to see this enjoyment operating in the command of the multiculturalist master, above? ‘No! This is your true greatness. Be that!’ Žižek gives a much more refined analysis of this reflexive reversal of the regulation of racist enjoyment into the racist enjoyment of regulation in both The Fragile Absolute, and in a continuing dialogue with Sara Ahmed. What I would have called reflexive racism … is how you assert your racism through [the] very stigmatization of the Other as racist … First, there is the oldfashioned direct racism: ‘We are civilized. The others are barbarians, corrupt, oriental, whatever.’ Then, there is … politically correct, reflexive racism: The others are castigated, precisely because we impute racism to them. It works at a ‘meta-level. “The other[s] … are primitive … as opposed to our postmodern, rational attitude of compromises, respect and so on.” So’, racism is attributed to the other, while we occupy the convenient position of a neutralized, benevolent observer.4

Racist enjoyment, the enactment of excessive, sexualized, sadistic practices on an innocent Other, thus continues to be solicited by the ideology of liberal

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tolerant multiculturalism, but it takes on a particular reflexive character. Instead of the racism of traditional ideology, which directly identifies a racialized Other and turns directly aggressive or sexualized acts against him or her, the reflexive racism of liberal tolerant multiculturalism identifies a racist Other and turns superegoic knowledge and disciplinary practices against him or her. The very act of judging, censoring, correcting and educating the racist Other, ostensibly so that he or she can learn to become tolerant, becomes enjoyable on an excessive, sadomasochistic level. A good illustration of this reflexive racism is Žižek’s analysis of the assimilationist demand addressed to immigrants in the United Kingdom: I think that this demand, ‘become British’ is a clear superego impossible demand. It’s an order which, not only they know you will not do it, but they secretly count on the fact that you will not do it, and that’s their racist enjoyment. ‘You see? We wanted you like us!’ The true message [is] not ‘become like us,’ it’s … ‘you know you can’t, so just be glad that you can be here and keep out of our sight’.5

What is key here is that in all these cases the explicitly wished for solution, if it arrived, would actually represent a catastrophe for liberal tolerant ideology. In relation to political correctness, Žižek argues that ‘what this attitude really fears is that the problem will disappear, i.e., that the white-male-heterosexual form of subjectivity will actually cease to exert its hegemony’.6 If this were to happen, there would be no one left to castigate, nothing left to discipline. It is vital that racist, homophobic patriarchy survive, insofar as it provides the grist for the mill of politically correct enjoyment. And the same holds true for the ‘racist’ practices of the immigrant Other. If the immigrant were really to become ‘like us’, if everyone were finally to adopt the neutral, benevolent characteristics of liberal tolerant political correctness, the social superego would cease to hold any power and the entire ideological edifice would begin to crumble.

Postmodern ideology’s traditional other Before moving on, it is important to note the ways in which the intolerant Other targeted by liberal tolerant multiculturalist disciplinary practices is identified by postmodern ideology. From Žižek’s conversation with Ahmed, it is clear that this racist Other often continues to be precisely a racialized Other. That is, the moment the Other’s culture itself appears intolerant (racist, sexist, homophobic,

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etc.), it can no longer be tolerated by liberal tolerant multiculturalism, and must be subjected to enjoyable disciplinary practices. However, racialization is not the only means that liberal tolerant multiculturalism uses to identify the racist Other. As Žižek makes clear, it also frequently relies on class. Again, in Žižek’s example concerning the Roma family in Slovenia, the liberal tolerant multiculturalist system was able to organize its sadomasochistic acts of enjoyment not only against the Roma themselves, but also against white trash, lower-class racists. I don’t think, quite, that liberal multiculturalists’ opposition to direct racism is a mere illusion whose truth is the protection of racism. It’s not simply, when they say ‘respect the other’, it’s just to isolate those brutal racists. I think that there is also a class conflict dimension in it, of which Sara Ahmed is aware, when she mentions how these people who are isolated as bad racists, so that we can assert ourselves as non-racists, are usually white working-class fundamentalists. Don’t forget the class aspect here. I think that multiculturalist liberals genuinely offer to selected members of other races a kind of a class pact. Like, ‘we’ll sell you our lower-classes,’ and so on.7

Although there is a great deal to be said here, what I wish to focus on for the moment is the characteristic that joins these figures together ideologically. Are not both the intolerant immigrant and the white, working-class fundamentalist images of a subject who is still trapped in traditional ideology? Liberal tolerant multiculturalism is ultimately concerned with the image of a backward, ignorant subject who does not yet know that otherness should be tolerated, a subject who continues to be immersed in the prejudiced, racist ideology of his or her traditional community. Recall the distinction that Žižek sets up between traditional and postmodern attitudes towards the figure of the junkie: while for traditional ideology drug use was just a kind of not very respectable thing to do, for consumerist ideology drug use becomes a serious threat to the social fabric. Is it not vital to emphasize the connection between the two? From the perspective of consumerist ideology, the ignorance of the junkie represents a continuing immersion in (wrong-headed) traditional ideology. He or she foolishly still believes that drug use is simply not a very respectable thing to do, and it is this foolishness that superego knowledge arrives to counteract. Here, again, the logic of racism (that what bothers us in the Other is that he or she appears to entertain a privileged relationship to the object) reappears in its reflexive form. What bothers the liberal tolerant subject about the racist Other is that he or she seems able to continue enjoying in a traditional way, a way no longer accessible to the liberal tolerant subject him- or herself.

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This postmodern obsession with the figure of the traditional intolerant Other is vital here because it points once again to the relationship between the two tempting assumptions that I described in the Introduction chapter, which I associate with Žižek’s characterizations of Enlightenment thought and postmodern thought. Specifically, one can see here how the latter arises as a reaction to, a rejection of, the former, an attempt not to fall into its trap. That is to say, the move to postmodern thought comes out of an acknowledgement that the Enlightenment search for a final resolution of the deadlock of desire, a correct definition of subjectivity and liberation, a good Law and a correct social form, has not been successful. Every articulation of the universal Law that is based on the external guarantee provided by a figure of the big Other is always accompanied by a social superego injunction that undermines and contradicts it, a secret solicitation to enact forms of transgression that are explicitly prohibited, but implicitly sanctioned. The postmodern solution to this deadlock of Enlightenment thought is thus to declare that there is no resolution of the deadlock of desire, no correct definition of subjectivity and liberation, no good Law or correct social form out there waiting to be discovered. It declares that every Law is equally flawed (and therefore equally correct) and that there is no means of choosing between them except by personal taste. It declares that, to borrow Foucault’s phrase, global projects for a new man will not be tolerated, because they lead inexorably to the worst political forms. Instead, postmodernism proposes something like a multiplicity of local transgressions. It proposes a world in which every subject will be entitled to express his or her personal taste in choosing a particular lifestyle, inclusive of career and commodities, but also of cultural practices and moral values. That is to say, postmodernism proposes that every individual subject should be permitted to choose whatever definition of subjectivity and liberation, whatever Law and social form he or she prefers. What this chapter has endeavoured to demonstrate is that this postmodern relativism can only be sustained through the establishment of a new, reflexive, disavowed Law, a ‘permissive’ big Other, which establishes the same kind of obscene social superego solicitations that plagued traditional ideology. In order for subjects to be able to exercise their personal taste, there must be a neutral framework that contains those choices, and in contemporary Western and global societies, this neutral framework takes the form of late global capitalism and of liberal tolerant multiculturalism. As I have endeavoured to demonstrate, the problem is that these two forms are not neutral at all (and indeed, is a

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neutral framework not precisely what Enlightenment thought tried and failed to discover? Is postmodern thought not simply a way of saying ‘This, finally, is it!’). They are just as capable of generating oppressive modes of enacting enjoyment, through the disciplinary and educatory regimes aimed at inducing intolerant, traditional subjects to accept superego knowledge. And as such, the second tempting assumption, postmodern thought, does not successfully resolve the deadlock of desire. Both Enlightenment thought and postmodern thought stumble against the same rock of that old leftist problem: In attempting to undermine and displace the existing oppressive framework, they ultimately reproduce or strengthen that very framework.

8

The Unholy Conspiracy: Postmodern Ideology and (Pseudo-)Fundamentalism

Fundamentalism, psychosis and the need for another framework While the project of liberating individuals from ideology is complicated by the transition from traditional ideology to postmodern ideology, it is further complicated by the emergence of yet another ideological form: religious fundamentalism. And while the appearance of fundamentalism here may seem arbitrary, suggesting an infinite proliferation of different ideological forms, it is not. Žižek’s contention has long been that the central antagonism that structures the contemporary political field is that between liberal tolerant multiculturalism in the guise of a post-political administration of experts, and new forms of irrational (usually racist) hatred, often in the guise of religious and ethnic fundamentalism. It is this antagonism that he argues has closed up the space of politicization proper and thereby (until recently) crippled leftist mobilization. ‘In post-politics’, he writes, the conflict of global ideological visions embodied in different parties who compete for power is replaced by the collaboration of enlightened technocrats … and liberal multiculturalists; through a process of negotiation of interests, a compromise is reached in the guise of a more or less universal consensus. The political (the space of litigation in which the excluded can protest the wrong/injustice done to them) foreclosed from the Symbolic then returns in the Real, as new forms of racism.1

As such, fundamentalism is the last piece that completes two interrelated theoretical frameworks that are essential to understanding the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the contemporary context. First, the antagonism between postmodern ideology and fundamentalism, which forecloses the space of politics proper, repeats, at the level of politics, the form of the conspiracy against

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Descartes’ cogito that Žižek asserts is operative at the level of philosophy. That is to say, in the same way that the philosophers who are officially engaged in deadly battle (‘the new age obscuranist … the postmodern deconstructionist … the Habermasian theorist of communication … the Heideggerian proponent of the thought of Being … the cognitive scientist … the Deep Ecologist … the critical (post-)Marxist … and the feminist’2) are nonetheless bound by a silent pact to reject Enlightenment philosophy, postmodern ideology and fundamentalism are bound by a silent pact to reject politics as such. ‘What defines postmodern post-politics … is the secret solidarity between its two opposed Janus faces: on the one hand the replacement of politics proper by depoliticized “humanitarian” operations … on the other, the violent emergence of depoliticized “pure Evil” in the guise of “excessive” ethnic or religious fundamentalist violence.’3 Second, Žižek’s analysis of fundamentalism links it with the third position that completes the Lacanian theory of character structures: psychosis. In mapping Lacan’s theory of character structures onto leftist philosophical traditions, I have argued that the philosophy of hysteria (manifested in Enlightenment notions of universalism) was successful in traversing the fantasy that structured traditional ideology, but that it ultimately failed to deliver what it was searching for: a correct definition of universal subjectivity, a correct Law that would resolve the deadlock of desire, a correct definition of the liberated polity or society. Because of its tendency to make impossible hysterical demands, or to fall into obsessional procrastination, the philosophy of hysteria stumbled against the rock of that old leftist problem and inadvertently strengthened or reproduced the very oppressive practices it was aiming to displace. I have further argued that the philosophy of perversion, manifested by postmodern forms of thought that champion a strategy of transgression carried out in the name of a multiplicity of identities, has arisen as a reaction to this failure of the philosophy of hysteria, but is itself suffering a similar fate: Not only is liberal tolerant multiculturalism all too adept at negotiating with proliferating particular identities, late capitalism is able to incorporate and turn a profit off of each new transgression. It is as a reaction to this second failure – the failure of the philosophy of perversion – that fundamentalism, as a representative of something like the philosophy of psychosis (more correctly a non-philosophy in the same way that Žižek speaks of post-politics) emerges as a last desperate (and ultimately failed) attempt to resolve the deadlock. This association of the character structure of psychosis with yet another failed attempt to resolve that old leftist problem is essential, because it underlines

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the difficulty of locating the Lacanian liberatory promise, or defining the ends of Lacanian psychoanalysis. If Žižek argues that the antagonism between perversion and psychosis has closed up the space for hysteria, to which he asserts his continuing fidelity, one should not forget that this fidelity is only partial, both in the sense of being incomplete and in the sense of expressing subjective partiality. Žižek fully admits the failures of Enlightenment thought. What he is trying to declare his fidelity to is what the philosophy of hysteria has produced without knowing it: the spirit that must be set free from its failed and guilty body. The point not to be missed here is that there is no character structure in Lacan’s theory that corresponds to the liberated state, to postanalytic subjectivity. If perversion and hysteria are both wrong, the only other option, psychosis, is even more wrong. Thus, in order to define the liberated state towards which Lacanian psychoanalysis aims, the theory of character structures is not enough. Some other theoretical framework must be introduced. This is the task I undertake in the following chapters. For the moment, I will trace out Žižek’s analysis of fundamentalism as homologous with psychosis and his assertion that postmodern ideology and fundamentalism are caught in a mutually reinforcing deadlock.

The really (non-)existing big Other In the final chapter of The Ticklish Subject, ‘Whither Oedipus?’, Žižek does indeed pass judgement on exactly what is wrong with contemporary society, but he does not do so in the terms of the institutional unconscious. Žižek does not develop this language until after The Ticklish Subject has been written. In ‘Whither Oedipus?’ he instead begins from the proposition that ‘today, in a sense, “the big Other no longer exists” ’.4 The use of this formulation, which I have used to represent the traversal of the fundamental fantasy (the subject must accept the non-existence of the big Other), to describe the problem with contemporary society, rather than its solution, should come as a surprise. But one should be careful to mark the question with which Žižek follows this pronouncement: ‘ “The big Other no longer exists” – but in what sense?’5 For postmodern ideology, the answer to this question is disavowal, the characteristic operation of perversion: The big Other, in the sense of a Law that prohibits enjoyment and a secret solicitation to act it out, is still there, but has been disavowed, rendered invisible behind a vast store of superego knowledge that

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enjoins the subject to take pleasure. For fundamentalism (along with a number of other contemporary ideological constellations), the answer is foreclosure, the characteristic operation of psychosis: The big Other as the guarantee of the minimally tolerable co-existence of subjects is expelled from the symbolic order and returns in the Real as a really existing Other subject. The first thing one should do to make sense of psychotic foreclosure is to recall that the non-existence with which the subject must come to terms in traversing the fantasy is not a simple absence of existence. It is not that there is no other subject out there with desires that concern the subject. It is not that there is no system of social rules that are reified into a position of authority. It is rather that the Other is inconsistent, divided. The other subject does not know what he or she desires (or rather, he or she desires to know what his or her Other desires), and the big Other is self-contradictory, including both the official system of rules that protect subjects from enjoyment on the one hand, and obscene solicitations to transgress those very rules on the other. In this context, the foreclosure of the big Other represents not just inconsistency, but an actual absence: Insofar as it prohibits enjoyment – precisely the reduction of subjects to helpless, suffering objects – the big Other ‘is strictly correlative to the notion of belief, of symbolic trust’.6 It makes social co-existence minimally bearable, allowing subjects to trust each other, by guaranteeing the universal right to not be reduced to an object of the Other’s enjoyment. And Žižek’s contention is that it is this kind of belief or trust that is under threat in contemporary society: ‘Today, the big Other’s nonexistence has attained a much more radical dimension: what is increasingly undermined is precisely the symbolic trust which persists against all sceptical data.’7 While the disavowal characteristic of postmodern ideology leads to a proliferation of politically correct disciplinary strategies that relate to other subjects as pure agents of harassment,8 foreclosure has a different result: the return of the big Other as a single, really existing omnipotent other subject. For Lacan, ‘Psychosis is defined … by the operation of foreclosure. In this operation, the name-of-the-father [or in this case the big Other] is not integrated in the symbolic universe of the psychotic (it is “foreclosed”), with the result that a hole is left in the symbolic order.’9 But the paradoxical result is that this element does not simply vanish. Rather, ‘what is abolished internally returns from without … whatever is refused in the symbolic order returns in the Real’.10 As Žižek puts it in ‘Whither Oedipus?’, ‘The paradoxical result of the mutation in the nonexistence of the big Other – of the growing collapse of symbolic efficiency

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– is thus the proliferation of different versions of a big Other that actually exists, in the Real, not merely as a symbolic fiction.’11 A good illustration of this return in the Real is the contemporary proliferation of conspiracy theories: ‘In our era when … all-encompassing narratives … no longer seem possible, the only way to achieve a kind of global mapping is through the paranoiac narrative of a “conspiracy theory” ’,12 and importantly, paranoia is one of the defining forms of psychosis (the other being schizophrenia or, as Freud wished to call it, paraphrenia). For the paranoid conspiracy theorist, ‘the distrust of the big Other (the order of symbolic fictions), the subject’s refusal to “take it seriously”, relies on the belief that there is an “Other of the Other”, that a secret, invisible and allpowerful [really existing] agent actually “pulls the strings” and runs the show’.13 Žižek provides many examples of these proliferating, really existing ‘small big Others’:14 There is ‘Bill Gates, [in whose image] the Little Brother, the average ugly guy … coincides with and contains the figure of the Evil Genius who aims for total control of our lives.’15 There is the parental Other-harasser of False Memory Syndrome, ‘a symptomatic formation that enables the subject to escape anxiety [which is brought about by the collapse of parental symbolic authority] by taking refuge in the antagonistic relationship with the parental Otherharasser’.16 And, the key example in the context of this chapter, there is the really existing God who grounds the new religious fundamentalisms, a God whose miracles are fully compatible with scientific factuality: ‘One of the ridiculous excesses of [the paradoxical-seeming] joint venture of fundamentalism and the scientific approach is taking place today in Israel’, writes Žižek ‘where a group convinced of the literal truth of the Old Testament prophecy that the Messiah will come when a calf that is totally red is born, is expending a huge amount of time and energy to produce such a calf through genetic engineering.’17 Before moving on to the pact that Žižek sees operating between postmodern ideology and fundamentalism, one should note the similarity between the definition of psychosis I have provided here and the structure of the fundamental fantasy: What is the appearance of a really existing, terrifying, omnipotent Other who ‘pulls the strings’, and in relation to whom the subject is therefore reduced to a helpless object, if not the fundamental fantasy itself? The example of False Memory Syndrome strengthens this association even further by associating the Other-harasser with the subject’s parental (m)Other. This link is the final confirmation that the function of the symbolic mandate conferred on the subject by the big Other is to act as a second line of defence against the enjoyment of his or her own fundamental fantasy (which is the first line of defence against the

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anxiety of the anxious, traumatic question ‘Che Vuoi?’). When the authority of the big Other begins to disintegrate, one finds oneself more and more returned to the unbearable scene of the fundamental fantasy in which the subject sees him- or herself suffering at the hands of an omnipotent (m)Other. When this big Other collapses, the subject is left only with the first line of defence: an unbearable, enjoyable fantasy that responds to the question ‘What am I as an object (for the Other)?’ with the answer: ‘I am a helpless object of his/her enjoyment!’

The other supposed to enjoy/believe 1: Misunderstanding postmodern ideology If one accepts this notion, that the disintegration of the authority of big Other who is supposed to … (the symbolic ground for belief, trust and minimally tolerable co-existence) may lead, not to a liberated state, but to the proliferation of small big Others in the Real (harassing, persecuting, ugly little brothers and controlling evil geniuses), then the first thing which comes immediately into focus is the contemporary pressure to reassert traditional culture(s) and forms of authority. Faced with direct immersion in the unbearable enjoyment of the fundamental fantasy, is it any wonder that contemporary subjects should grasp desperately at the remnants of traditional (authoritarian, paternalistic, racist, etc.) ideologies, and attempt to resuscitate them? For Žižek, it is at least in part this desperate effort to reassert traditional ideology that drives the new reactionary religious fundamentalism, manifest in both the Islamic fundamentalism that grounds suicide terrorism and the Christian fundamentalism that grounds the war on terror. Although both reactionary Islamist fundamentalism and reactionary Christian fundamentalism are officially involved in deadly battle, they can nevertheless be seen as manifestations of the same phenomenon insofar as they are bound by a silent pact: They both arise as reactions against, as rejections of, the permissive ideology of liberal tolerant multiculturalism. The question that needs to be addressed here is how postmodern ideology and fundamentalism relate to each other. Let me begin by noting that the question of how postmodern ideology relates to fundamentalism returns me to the point at which I left off in the previous chapter: From the perspective of liberal tolerant multiculturalism, those who require the (secretly enjoyable) application of disciplinary measures are precisely those who remain trapped in

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traditional ideology. Are not the two exemplary victims of tolerant superego reeducation, the racist new immigrant and the racist, white, working-class bigot, precisely icons of reactionary fundamentalism: the Muslim immigrant who may be a terrorist in disguise, and the American, white trash, neo-conservative Christian? Or, to be a bit more obscene, does the Western liberal’s obsession with the image of an Islamic suicide bomber who (erroneously) believes that he or she is going to receive a great reward in the afterlife, usually sexualized in the form of the oft-repeated ‘forty virgins’, not mirror his or her obsession with the image of a smoker who still doesn’t realize that cigarettes aren’t merely a sort of not very respectable thing to do, but cause cancer – a smoker who therefore requires, on his or her cigarette package, even larger, more graphic depictions of what will happen to his or her internal organs if he or she doesn’t quit? The reactionary fundamentalist is, from the perspective of liberal tolerance, clearly a subject who (erroneously) continues to believe in (i.e. to be immersed in) the (racist, sexist, etc.) ideology of his or her traditional culture, who does not yet know that otherness should be tolerated. And, to be clear, for Žižek this is, at least to a certain extent, precisely what the new reactionary fundamentalism aims at. Faced with the terrifying prospect of a headlong plunge into unconstrained enjoyment, the fundamentalist attempts to return to, to reassert the authority of, crumbling traditional ideological frameworks. Is this not the fundamental underlying theme of all so-called ‘fundamentalisms’? Do they not endeavour to contain (what they perceive as) the excessive ‘narcissistic hedonism’ of contemporary secular culture with the call to reintroduce the spirit of sacrifice?18

That is to say, fundamentalism calls for a return to the big ideological Cause that makes up the explicit call of traditional ideology, the Cause for which the subject must sacrifice his or her enjoyment, thereby gaining some much needed distance from it. Here, it should be clear that what bothers the liberal tolerant multiculturalist about the fundamentalist and what bothers the fundamentalist about the liberal tolerant multiculturalist is essentially the same thing: The Other is imagined to have access to a kind of (excessive, self-destructive) enjoyment which the subject longs for and envies on the one hand and hates and fears on the other. To the multiculturalist, the fundamentalist appears to be someone who is still immersed in horrifying traditional racist, sexist, etc. enjoyment. He or she is an Other supposed to believe. The multiculturalist supposes that the

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fundamentalist is someone who is stupid or ignorant enough to not yet know that otherness should be tolerated. As a result, the multiculturalist brings to bear on the fundamentalist a whole network of disciplinary practices. To the fundamentalist, the multiculturalist appears to be someone who is immersed in horrifying, autistic, masturbatory enjoyment. He or she is supposed to enjoy, supposed to be immoral or unrestrained enough to dive headlong into self-destructive consumption. And is it not obvious that suicide terrorism is precisely a strategy designed to shake the multiculturalist out of his or her spiral of hedonistic enjoyment? What should be clear here is that both of these perspectives are essentially mistaken about the structure of perverse, multiculturalist ideology. On the one hand, the liberal tolerant multiculturalist believes that he or she enjoys less than he or she actually does: Despite his or her efforts to manage enjoyment, that is to eliminate it or to postpone it indefinitely, enjoyment always returns. The very disciplinary practices that multiculturalists bring to bear, both on themselves and on their (supposedly) traditional Other, in order to postpone and suspend enjoyment themselves become infused with enjoyment. The process of seeking out, undermining and displacing sadomasochistic cultural practices becomes itself a sadomasochistic cultural practice, exceeding any functionality and falling into a self-destructive spiral. On the other hand, the reactionary fundamentalist believes that the multiculturalist enjoys more than he or she actually does. Postmodern ideology’s explicit call to enjoyment – the solicitation to indulge ever new perversions – is not, actually, the excessive, hedonistic commandment that it appears to be. It is actually a call to pleasure, a commandment precisely to enjoy the minimum amount possible, to regulate and economize in order to fend off excess. The figure of the junkie, a subject caught in hedonistic self-consumption, is actually liberal tolerant multiculturalism’s worst nightmare.

The other supposed to enjoy/believe 2: Misunderstanding fundamentalism And just as liberal tolerant multiculturalism and reactionary fundamentalism are essentially mistaken about the structure of perverse multiculturalist consumerism, so too are they both essentially mistaken about the structure of psychotic, fundamentalist ideology. The key question to be raised here

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is whether the reactionary fundamentalist’s attempt to reassert traditional symbolic authority succeeds: Is it possible to return to the traditional big Other once traditional ideology has been traversed? Žižek develops a number of arguments that suggest that it is not. The efficiency of traditional ideology is predicated on a kind of naïve, direct immersion in it. Once the icy waters of capitalism and Enlightenment thinking have desacralized its sacred bonds, the very meaning of the cultural signifiers that make up traditional ideology are irrevocably changed. This, I think, also clearly demonstrates the limitation of the standard liberal attitude towards … Muslim women wearing a veil: They can do it if it is their free choice and not an option imposed on them by their husbands or family. However, the moment women wear a veil as the result of their free, individual choice, the meaning of wearing a veil changes completely. It is no longer a sign of their direct, substantial belonging to their community, but an expression of their idiosyncratic individuality, or of their spiritual quest and protest against the vulgarity of today’s sexual commerce, or a political gesture of protesting Western cultural, economic, and so on, imperialism. So choice is always a meta-choice, a choice of the modality of the choice itself. One thing is to wear a veil because of one’s immediate immersion into a substantial tradition, another thing is to refuse to wear a veil, yet another thing is to wear a veil, not out of substantial belonging, but as an act of ethico-political choice.19

As a reaction to the enjoyment it sees operative in postmodern ideology, reactionary fundamentalism is already outside of the coordinates of traditional ideology. The fundamentalist endeavour to contain the narcissistic hedonism of contemporary secular culture with the call to reintroduce the spirit of sacrifice should be read as a violent rejection of the liberal tolerant celebration of idiosyncratic individuality. However, this very attitude of violent rejection implies that wearing a veil is precisely a protest against the vulgarity of today’s sexual commerce (and/or a political gesture of protesting Western cultural and economic imperialism). And (notice, once again, that old leftist problem in the wings) this reference to liberal tolerance, although it is negative, although it is a violent rejection, implies that one is in a relation with it. One has already crossed the threshold of first contact, after which it is no longer possible to wear a veil because of one’s direct immersion in a substantial tradition. Žižek emphasizes this negative reference to liberal tolerance at the heart of reactionary fundamentalism by contrasting it with ‘authentic’ (what I will risk calling ‘traditional’) fundamentalism.

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There is a feature that clearly distinguishes all authentic fundamentalists, from Tibetan Buddhists to the Amish in the US: the absence of resentment and envy, the deep indifference towards the non-believers’ way of life. Since they really believe they found their way to Truth, why should they feel threatened by nonbelievers, why should they envy them? When a Buddhist encounters a Western hedonist, he is far from condemning him; he just benevolently notes that the hedonist’s search for happiness is self-defeating. The contrast cannot be stronger to the terrorist pseudo-fundamentalists who are deeply bothered, intrigued, fascinated, by the sinful life of the non-believer.20

This very attitude of being bothered, intrigued and fascinated by the sinful life of the liberal tolerant consumerist should be read as a clear sign that reactionary fundamentalism fails in its effort to reassert the protective function of the symbolic big Other. The traditional fundamentalist is able to tolerate the existence of others, to remain indifferent to their enjoyment, because of the truth guaranteed to him or her by the big Other. The terrorist pseudo-fundamentalist, on the other hand, has lost this protective function and is more and more bothered by others’ enjoyment, in this case understood as hedonism. This distinction between traditional fundamentalism and reactionary pseudofundamentalism suggests that whereas traditional fundamentalists really believe (in the sense sustained by the big Other) that they have found their way to truth, reactionary fundamentalists face a crisis of belief. Their envy and feeling of being threatened indicates that they are no longer able to take their belief seriously. However, at several places in his work, Žižek argues that ‘in the case of so-called “fundamentalists”, this “normal” functioning of [traditional] ideology in which the ideological belief is transposed onto the [symbolic big] Other is disturbed by the violent return of immediate belief – they “really believe it” ’.21 Here, the coincidence of a failure or collapse of belief with the emergence of an excessive really believing should be read as a signal that one is dealing once again with the psychotic logic of foreclosure: ‘This brings us to the formula of fundamentalism: what is foreclosed from the symbolic (belief) returns in the Real (of a direct knowledge). A fundamentalist does not believe, he knows directly.’22 What is foreclosed in the symbolic (the big Other who is supposed), returns in the Real (as an Other of the Other who really, materially exists as an other subject, and pulls the strings from behind the scenes). And, perhaps even more importantly, what the fundamentalist knows is what God wants of him or her. One has here, once again, the formula for the fundamental fantasy: an answer to the question ‘What do you (the Other) want from me (the subject)?’ ‘The fundamentalist’s

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position is clear’, writes Žižek: ‘since fantasy is a scenario the subject builds in order to answer the enigma of the Other’s desire – since fantasy provides an answer to “What does the Other want from me?”– the immediate identification with the fantasy, as it were, closes the gap: the enigma is solved, we know the whole answer.’23

The postmodern/fundamentalist pact: Stop believing and know! It is this distinction between belief and knowledge, and the notion that the former is being replaced with the latter that stages the link between postmodern ideology and fundamentalism, demonstrating a deep solidarity behind their official opposition: Both liberal-sceptical cynicism and fundamentalism … share a basic underlying feature, the loss of the ability to believe in the proper sense of the term. For both of them, religious statements are quasi-empirical statements of direct knowledge: fundamentalists accept them as such, while sceptical cynics mock them. What is unthinkable for [both of] them is the ‘absurd’ act of decision which installs every authentic belief, a decision which cannot be grounded in the chain of ‘reasons,’ in positive knowledge.24

Certainly, there is a difference here between postmodern ideology and fundamentalism. At the level of content, the former knows that God doesn’t exist and the latter knows that He does. At the level of form, the difference is more pronounced insofar as postmodern ideology involves a perverse disavowal: The knowledge that the big Other doesn’t exist is accompanied by a disavowed continuing reliance on its existence in the form of a silent prohibition against enjoyment and an obscene solicitation to enjoy discipline. But both positions share an inability to believe in the big Other in the proper sense – that is, the decision to assert fidelity to a fiction. And, as should be clear from what we have already discussed, what this knowledge is concerned with is also the same in both cases: It is concerned with enjoyment. Both liberal tolerant consumerism and reactionary fundamentalism are essentially concerned with how to fend off the threat of an unconstrained explosion of self-destructive enjoyment. Following the traversal of the fantasy that supported the traditional big ideological Cause, politics is reduced to a desperate attempt to regulate enjoyment.

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Today, this ideological manipulation of obscene jouissance has entered a new stage: our politics is more and more directly the politics of jouissance, concerned with ways of soliciting, or controlling and regulating, jouissance. Is not the entire opposition between the liberal/tolerant West and fundamentalist Islam condensed in the opposition between, on the one hand, a woman’s right to free sexuality, including the freedom to display/expose herself and provoke/disturb men, and, on the other, desperate male attempts to eradicate this threat or, at least, keep it under control? … What the two attitudes share is … the extreme disciplinary approach, which is differently directed in each case: ‘fundamentalists’ regulate feminine self-presentation in detail to prevent sexual provocation; PC feminist liberals impose a no less severe regulation of behaviour aimed at containing different forms of harassment.25

Here, the re-emergence of the topic of discipline should signal another link between the two postmodern ideologies. For both reactionary fundamentalism and liberal tolerant multiculturalism, other subjects remain a bothersome, harassing, fascinating and fundamentally unbearable presence precisely because of enjoyment, because they threaten to enjoy and because they stimulate the subject’s own enjoyment. Fundamentalism and multiculturalism locate this harassment in different places (women or men, terrorists or hedonists), but ultimately the logic they bring to bear on their chosen objects is identical: that of moralizing, regulatory discipline. And thus, what multiculturalism misses about fundamentalism is precisely what fundamentalism misses about multiculturalism: the subject mistakenly supposes that his or her other enjoys more than he or she actually does. Although fundamentalism goes about its project in a way that is diametrically opposed to multiculturalism, their projects are nonetheless the same: to use knowledge and discipline to fend off the selfdestructive spiral of enjoyment. What emerges from this critique of the postmodern–fundamentalist pact is the possibility that belief may be a necessary component of the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis. That is to say, what the deadlock between perversion and psychosis suggests is that it is simply not possible to sustain the non-existence of the fictional big Other as such. On the one hand, this nonexistence may take the form of a perverse disavowal, meaning that the fictional big Other continues to exist, continues to structure an oppressive ideology, but that this continued existence is hidden behind the objective, factual screen of reflexivity. On the other hand, the fictional big Other may literally cease to exist, but this is necessarily coupled with the return of the big Other in the Real as

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an omnipotent Other-enjoyer who is factually present in reality, and who also continues to ground an oppressive, disciplinary ideology. If liberation is possible within this framework, then it must not be equated with getting rid of the big Other as such. However, this creates a strange double-bind insofar as on the one hand the fictional big Other is what grounds the oppressive practices of traditional ideology, and on the other hand, the subject’s liberation involves an acceptance of the non-existence of the big Other. The only clear solution to this double-bind is to return to the meaning of nonexistence within the context of the Žižekian cogito, developed in Chapter 3: ‘My Other is not, therefore I am not’ does not imply my non-existence as a subject. Rather, it refers to my non-existence as an object and asserts that non-existence as the very definition of subjectivity. The subject is there, but only in a negative way. In this context, one may conclude that the non-existence attributed to the big Other operates in the same way: Perhaps a liberated society does not dispense with the big Other outright, but instead structures itself around a big Other that accepts its non-existence as an object. In the same way that the subject is liberated by being induced to accept his or her own subjective freedom and responsibility, perhaps the big Other becomes a liberatory big Other by being induced to accept its own fictional nature. That is to say, while the subjects of traditional ideology may have known that the big Other did not factually exist, was only a fiction, the big Other itself did not know. Here, one should recall Žižek’s endlessly repeated joke about the man who knows he is not a seed of grain but is afraid that the chicken waiting outside does not. Somehow not only the man himself, but the chicken too, must be convinced. Somehow the big Other must be brought to the knowledge that it doesn’t exist.

Part Four

Going Through the Deadlock

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Antagonism in the Real

Towards a definition of the post-analytic subject and the liberated society In Chapter 5, I offered a preliminary definition of the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis based on the interrelated notions of subjective freedom and the taking of subjective responsibility. However, what remained unresolved there, and what this chapter begins to address, is the question of what freedom and responsibility mean in terms of Lacan’s theory of character structures. That is to say, insofar as perversion and hysteria (the two character structures with which Žižek is most concerned, given his mapping of these structures onto divergent strains of leftist philosophy) are ‘both wrong’, both failed attempts to resolve the deadlock of desire (or that old leftist problem), what remains to be formulated is the ‘correct’ character structure, the correct way of relating to the deadlock. And although Lacan’s assertion that it is possible to complete a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis supports the notion that there is a correct way of relating to the deadlock, it is not at all clear what this can be, especially given that the only remaining character structure in Lacan’s tripartite theory – psychosis – is no less wrong than perversion and hysteria. When a hysteric or a pervert (or an Enlightenment German idealist or postmodern French deconstructionist) takes responsibility for his or her subjective freedom, what happens to his or her character structure (or philosophy) as a result? What effect does this have on his or her fundamental fantasy or symbolic mandate? What effect does it have on the way he or she relates with other subjects? While the previous chapter emphasizes this lack of a third, ‘correct’ position, it also underlines the sociopolitical flip side of the question itself: What becomes of ideology (in terms of the big Other and the social superego) when its subjects are liberated by undergoing successful Lacanian psychoanalysis? Or, to put it another way, what sort of ideology structures a liberated society whose members are post-analytic subjects? While the end of Lacanian psychoanalysis is defined

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in part by a traversal of ideology, what the preceding chapter suggested is that this traversal cannot simply mean getting rid of ideology as such, in the sense that one cannot simply render the big Other non-existent. On the one hand, the knowledge that the big Other does not exist, which defines perverse postmodern ideology, necessarily relies on a continuing belief in the big Other at a disavowed level. On the other hand, the actual ceasing to exist of the big Other as a symbolic fiction, which structures religious pseudo-fundamentalism along with conspiracy theory and other psychotic ideological formations, is necessarily supplemented by the big Other’s return in the Real as a really existing other subject. In the face of this deadlock, I suggest that a liberated society may be structured not by the absence of a big Other but by a big Other that knows it doesn’t exist. What remains to be formulated is what this means. What is the big Other that knows it doesn’t exist and how does it function differently from the traditional, postmodern and psychotic big Others? While the question of the effects of a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis on the individual subject and the question of its effects on the sociopolitical big Other are clearly deeply interrelated, I will approach the former question first in order to set the stage for the latter. And the first essential step in this process is to supplement the theory of character structures with another theoretical framework: Lacan’s theory of the four fundamental discourses. The notion that there exists an end of psychoanalysis supports the idea that the subject of a successful analysis undergoes some kind of structural shift, an essential qualitative transformation rather than simply a quantitative re-balancing or adjustment. However, because the Lacanian theory of character structures only divides subjects between neurosis, perversion and psychosis, all of which are (in different ways) in need of psychoanalysis, this theory is not, in itself, able to distinguish between pre- and post-analytic subjects. In order to establish this distinction, a different theoretical framework must be brought to bear, and it is the theory of the four fundamental discourses that serves this purpose here. However, before introducing this framework, an intermediary term is required here, a term that enables the theory of character structures to be brought into close conceptual relation with the theory of the four fundamental discourses, and with sociopolitical ideological conflict. The central term with which this chapter is concerned is antagonism in the Real. Once this term is successfully defined, it will be possible to superimpose the theory of the four fundamental discourses onto the theory of character structures in order to deduce a definition of the post-analytic liberated subject.

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Antagonism in the real In his Lacan Masterclass lecture series, Žižek says that ‘if there’s one thing I thought my name was associated with, it’s the Lacanian Real’.1 Žižek offers many formulations for the Lacanian Real, but perhaps the most immediately pertinent is to be found in his first major work, The Sublime Object of Ideology. Here, he describes the Real as something ‘which, although it does not exist (in the sense of “really existing”, taking place in reality), has a series of properties – it has a certain structural causality, it can produce a series of effects’.2 That is to say, the Real is that which is paradoxically there and not there at the same time. It is that with which the subject can never properly come to grips, that which he or she cannot properly name, understand, confront or manipulate, but it is simultaneously that which is perpetually present, that which insists and returns, that which irritates, bothers and tickles the subject. Or, to put it another way, it is that which can be defined (it has effects, it is present) precisely by its not having any correct definition (by its non-existence, by its being present only in its absence). And to move as quickly as possible to the level of the political, the Real is, for Žižek, the domain in which one should locate political difference. In his Masterclass lectures, Žižek describes the distinction between the political Left and the political Right in precisely these terms. The difference … left/right: why is it Real? Because … any way that you try to define this difference will already be either from the left or from the right. The difference left/right is not only a difference within a given social field, where some people are on the left and some people are on the right. The catch is always that if you ask somebody from the left, not what he is, but how does he see the very difference between himself and rightist, he will give you a different global image than the rightist3

The distinction between the political Left and the political Right is a manifestation of antagonism in the Real insofar as this distinction is not a simple symmetrical opposition. Left and Right are not complementary options that fill out a neutral frame. Instead, the distinction between the Left and the Right concerns the frame as such. If you ask a leftist and a rightist to define the whole political field, to define the difference between each other, their answers will be fundamentally incompatible. Their difference goes all the way down. To complete this thought experiment, under capitalism, the antagonism between the Left and the Right traditionally concerns class interest and

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individual merit. From a leftist perspective, society is structured by a clear division between an exploiting ruling class and an exploited working class. From this perspective, a leftist is someone who takes the side of the working class and attempts to liberate it from its exploited position, whereas a rightist is someone who takes the side of the ruling class and attempts to perpetuate its position of exploitation. From a rightist perspective, however, society is structured by a continuous spectrum of relative wealth and power that rewards individual merit. From this perspective, a rightist is someone who believes that in order to produce individuals with merit, society must offer them rewards, and therefore he or she attempts to preserve this system, whereas a leftist is someone who believes that society would be just as well off, if not better, if those who do not have individual merit were rewarded as much or even more than those who do, and therefore he or she attempts to disrupt this system. Furthermore, while antagonism in the Real runs between the political Left and Right, The Ticklish Subject is clearly based on the notion that it also runs through the political Left itself: The drama that Žižek plays out between the philosophy of hysteria and the philosophy of perversion is in some sense his own attempt to perform this same kind of thought experiment, to provide two competing perspectives on an antagonism that runs through the Left itself. Whereas I suggested earlier that the antagonism between the Left and the Right concerned class interest and individual merit, the antagonism between the philosophy of hysteria and the philosophy of perversion concerns universal emancipation and local or partial struggle. From the perspective of the philosophy of hysteria, liberation means universal, revolutionary emancipation. The philosopher of hysteria sees him- or herself as someone who attempts to produce a framework within which the various antagonisms internal to exploited groups can be overcome. If this framework can be produced, the external antagonism with the exploiters can be brought to a final confrontation, which will lead to the end of exploitation. He or she sees the philosopher of perversion as someone who believes that the antagonisms internal to exploited groups (their differences, identities and cultural practices) should be celebrated and perpetuated at the expense of any unified confrontation with the exploiters as such. Conversely, from the perspective of the philosophy of perversion, liberation means the abandonment of any normalizing (and therefore necessarily exclusionary) project in favour of local struggle. The philosopher of perversion sees him- or herself as someone who attempts to detect and expose the antagonism internal to any well-defined social group and any universalizing, ‘objective’ definition, with

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the aim of producing a situation in which the dominant framework is weakened therefore less oppressive. He or she sees the philosopher of hysteria as someone who believes that this kind of openness to difference is a sign of weakness and who therefore seeks to suture it closed.

Deciding how to decide The first essential feature of antagonism in the Real is thus that it cannot be defined objectively. Any effort at a direct, objective definition necessarily falls on one side or another of the antagonism itself. It necessarily becomes subjective. And thus any claim to objectivity becomes a screen, a lure, a deception designed to convince a subject (whether an Other or oneself) to choose one side of the antagonism over another without realizing (or acknowledging) that a choice has been made at all. This is where one should locate Žižek’s assertion that any claims to be outside of ideology (in the sense of politically motivated discourse) are always moments in which ideology (in the sense of deception, false consciousness) is at its strongest. While ‘the big news of today’s post-political age of the “end of ideology” is … the radical de-politicization of the sphere of the economy’,4 ‘every neutralization of some partial content as “non-political” is a political gesture par excellence’.5 Second, there is no middle way, no possibility of mediation. If one asks a rightist to choose sides based on a leftist perspective (‘Do you really believe that corrupted tyrants should be allowed to retain their power and exploit and abuse the helpless masses as they see fit?’), or if one asks a leftist to choose sides based on a rightist perspective (‘Do you really believe that indolent manipulators should be allowed to squander the resources generated by responsible citizens as they see fit?’), one cannot hope to receive a straight answer. From the perspective of the person being asked the question, the questioner has already missed the point, and is already manipulating the terms of the argument in order to preclude the possibility of answering correctly. And this is precisely the language of hegemonic critique: The real struggle is over the formal terms of the argument as such, rather than over its content. Hegemony, in the traditional sense, is achieved by structuring the argument so that opposing perspectives are ruled out from the outset. Politically, this impossibility of mediating between perspectives that are antagonistic towards each other implies that antagonism in the Real is what

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disrupts political efficiency, the possibility of cooperation. One cannot act, that is, one cannot make a politically effective decision, based on multiple perspectives that are antagonistic towards each other. One has to choose one perspective over the others before any effective, practical decision-making becomes possible. A good illustration here is Žižek’s description of a conversation that he found himself in with Bernard-Henri Lévy. While Lévy made a ‘pathetic’ plea for liberal capitalism, Žižek made an equally ‘pathetic’ plea for communism, and, despite their diametrically opposed political positions, they were unable to find a point over which to disagree.6 They found themselves speaking past each other, each interrogating the other from a perspective within which the other’s essential position could not be properly articulated. However, while Žižek and Lévy found themselves unable to disagree at the level of their aims, if they had broached the topic of the means to achieve these aims, it is difficult to imagine that their differences would not have returned with a vengeance. This political inefficiency is also the stumbling block of multiculturalism, which Žižek underlines time and time again. Its claim to cultural relativism is continuously undercut by the need to establish a firm set of rules that provide the framework within which multiple cultures can co-exist peacefully. And this framework necessarily falls on one side or another of the antagonism. The only way liberal multiculturalism is able to achieve political efficiency is by choosing a particular perspective (which it presents as a neutral, objective framework), and reducing the various cultures it contains to mere formal signs of the acceptance of its perspective. Finally, despite the fact that one cannot define it objectively, although it proves impossible to nail down, antagonism is there, in the Real. The very fact that what the competing perspectives are competing over is the question of how to define what it is that they are competing over, and how to compete, signals the presence of an antagonism that pre-exists any of the subjective perspectives that regard it. It cannot be reduced either to a perspective illusion (someone is simply making a mistake) or to a symmetrical difference between firm identities (we simply disagree). Antagonism in the Real is the pre-existing problem that one must decide how to decide before any decision can be made. For example, if a married couple is trying to choose what colour to paint their kitchen, a disagreement over colour is not yet antagonism in the Real. Antagonism in the Real emerges when the couple begins to disagree over how the choice itself should be made. Is patriarchal authority the deciding factor? Is domestic decoration a woman’s prerogative? Will one partner relinquish his or her choice here in exchange for

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the right to make another choice somewhere else? Should there be a lottery? This structure of deciding how to decide returns again and again in Žižek’s work. He argues that although ‘every decision is contextualized … contexts themselves are in some ways produced by decisions … There is the first decision to mark or delimit the context in which a decision will be made’,7 and then there is the subsequent, second decision that decides within that context. And the implication, of course, is that a choice that does not choose how to choose is, to a certain extent, not a choice at all. One should contrast here Žižek’s attitude towards parliamentary democracy and his fidelity to Lenin’s ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’: The structure of parliamentary democracy, in which various parties compete for their constituents’ interests, serves precisely to exclude, disavow, hide or eliminate political antagonism in the Real from the outset. It determines the rules of competition beforehand and, as such, decisions made within its framework are not Real decisions. They are always already decisions for parliamentary democracy and against other ways of deciding. Although he admits that democratic elections may occasionally be the site of an authentic emancipatory event, a choice that shakes the foundations of choice itself, Žižek argues that these occasions occur only as a kind of hapax, a singular irruption that is irreducible to the structure of parliamentary democracy as such. In general, democratic elections serve only to consolidate and reproduce the existing hegemonic framework.8 Conversely, although in his Masterclass lectures, Žižek confesses that he uses the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ to antagonize his detractors, he simultaneously claims that it is a way of signalling, of keeping visible, what he calls the dictatorial aspect of politics as such. A Real political decision necessarily involves not just winning a competition within the existing framework (a democratic victory), but also winning a competition over what the very framework of competition should be (a dictatorial victory). As he puts it, at a certain level, in Real political struggle the winner has to take it all.

Infinitely proliferating perspectives: Aggravation and mediation The first thing that becomes clear here is that there are likely to be an infinite number of possible perspectives on antagonism in the Real. If the Left is internally divided between the philosophy of hysteria and the philosophy of perversion,

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then I was already cheating in my thought experiment when I described leftism as focussed on class struggle. I was already privileging the philosophy of hysteria over the philosophy of perversion as ‘objectively leftist’. Are there not likely to be even finer articulations of antagonism in the Real that run through the philosophy of hysteria and the philosophy of perversion, respectively? It is almost too obvious to mention that the various philosophers Žižek identifies as perverse will each develop minimally incompatible political perspectives. In ‘Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics’, Žižek marks this impossibility of finally nailing down political antagonism by introducing the term diagonal division: ‘the division that mobilizes [precisely in the sense of calling upon the subject to engage in a political project] is not the division between two well-defined social groups (“Us” and “Them”), but the division which runs “diagonally” to the social division in the Order of Being’.9 No matter how one attempts to divide social groups that are antagonistic towards one another, the actual line of antagonism, the real division, (also) runs through each group respectively, rather than (only) between them. Every division into two camps can be followed by a further subdivision into two camps until one reaches a point at which every camp either is occupied by a single individual or is empty. And in this context, what is Freud’s discovery of the unconscious but the assertion that, even at this point, subdivision remains possible? Antagonism in the Real recedes, horizonlike, into the psyche of the individual subject, who is further subdivided among agencies that are antagonistic towards each other (ego, superego, id, etc.). The second thing that begins to emerge here is what differentiates each of the infinitely proliferating perspectives on antagonism in the Real. Political perspectives differ precisely in how they relate to, and specifically whether they aim to aggravate or mediate, each of the infinitely proliferating antagonisms that run both between and through every well-defined social group. For example, while the leftist (and to be clear, at this level I am still cheating, still using the ‘traditional’ philosopher of hysteria to represent the Left as such) seeks to aggravate the antagonism that runs through society itself, splitting it into two well-defined social groups (the exploiting Other and the exploited Other), the rightist seeks to mediate this antagonism into a continuous spectrum (of relative wealth and power). Whereas the leftist seeks to mediate the antagonism internal to the exploited Other, uniting it into a common front against the external enemy, the rightist seeks to aggravate the antagonism internal to any subgroup, pointing to the conflict between individual merit and the lack thereof. Moving to the antagonism internal to the Left itself, the philosophy

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of perversion seeks to mediate the broad ‘Us’ vs. ‘Them’ antagonisms that divide society as such through moments of recognition and the celebration of difference, whereas the philosophy of hysteria seeks to aggravate this kind of antagonism into class warfare. At a second level, the philosophy of hysteria seeks to mediate the antagonism internal to the exploited Other by building class solidarity (even, if one goes to the end with, for example, Sorel, building solidarity among the ruling class), while the philosophy of perversion seeks to aggravate this antagonism by exposing and recognizing differences internal to both the oppressed and the oppressors. What one ends up here with is something like an image of an infinite number of toggle switches, each of which decides between mediation and aggravation in the context of a given antagonism. But what should not go unnoticed is that each of these individual mediations and aggravations is itself the image of a resolution of the particular antagonism that it concerns. On the one hand, one resolves an antagonism by mediating it, by establishing agreement or, at the very least, a framework within which antagonism can be reduced to a simple symmetrical difference. This is Žižek’s understanding of parliamentary democracy: By establishing the rules of competition beforehand, parliamentary democracy represses antagonism in the Real, offering a choice between two (or more) options that each ultimately support the existing system. On the other hand, one resolves an antagonism by aggravating it into a final showdown. After this explosive confrontation, only one side will remain and the antagonism will therefore have been resolved by default. From the perspective of traditional Marxism, once the proletarian revolution has taken place, a classless society will necessarily emerge, because all political perspectives that support class division will have been eliminated once and for all. Each political perspective, as a particular collection of mediations and aggravations, is thus a particular vision of how antagonism in the Real can ultimately be resolved, gotten rid of, once and for all. Somewhat ironically, what makes political perspectives antagonistic towards one another is precisely the difference between their specific fantasies of how to do away with the antagonism that divides them.

Warfare vs. recognition: A single structural divide It is here that the notion of antagonism in the Real as such becomes particularly useful. What this notion corresponds to is the move of focusing, not on the

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endlessly proliferating particular antagonisms running between and through every well-defined group and individual, but on the original, overarching antagonism that each of the endlessly proliferating perspectives attempts to resolve. That is to say, the notion of antagonism in the Real corresponds to the assertion that there is only one antagonism, only one diagonal division that goes all the way down, running through every well-defined social group and individual, respectively. To use the analogy already discussed, the diagonal antagonism is that (impossible, but ever-present) thing in the Real that ensures that there will always be at least one more toggle switch at the end of the series, one more particular antagonism that any given group (or individual) will find itself in disagreement over how to resolve. This hypothesis must be rigorously differentiated from the notion there is only one division that divides the world into two camps. This latter notion is the precise inverse of the hypothesis of diagonal antagonism. Recall that the antagonism that the leftist and rightist perspectives regard is the unnameable something which pre-exists their respective attempts to resolve it. It is only after the antagonism has been resolved in one way or another, after one has chosen to be a leftist or a rightist, that the world appears split into two well-defined (e.g. exploited/exploiting) social groups. Žižek’s critique of Stalin may provide a good illustration here: According to Žižek, Stalin recognized that the various levels of political antagonism were not horizontally independent, that they circled around the same central impossibility. However, Stalin made the mistake (or performed the trick) of retroactively reading every moment of this diagonal antagonism back into a purely vertical distinction. Briefly put, you are either for the bourgeoisie or for social democracy. If you are for social democracy, then you are either a Christian Socialist or a Marxist. If you are a Marxist, then you are either a Menshevik softy or a Bolshevik. But for Stalin, these latter distinctions inexorably collapse back into the former ones, which is to say that if you are a Menshevik softy, then you are ‘objectively’ just for the bourgeoisie.10 And the hypothesis of diagonal antagonism makes clear why this mistake (or trick) leads to an endless spiral of (self-)destruction: If the antagonism runs all the way down, it runs not just through every well-defined social group, but through every individual as well. Antagonism is precisely what splits the Lacanian split subject. Thus, no one will escape the Stalinist show trials, because everyone is always already split between some ‘objectively more leftist’ part and some ‘objectively more rightist part’, and the Stalinist retroactive reading of this split will reduce everyone to bourgeois apologists pure and simple.

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It is tempting in this context to read the deadlock that Žižek sets up between the philosophy of hysteria and the philosophy of perversion as another example of this kind of mistaken, oversimplified symmetrical opposition, as Žižek’s particular attempt to resolve antagonism in the Real into a stable political perspective. Once the antagonism has been defined as the difference between the philosophy of hysteria and the philosophy of perversion, all that remains for the individual is to choose sides. And, of course, one choice, the philosophy of hysteria, is clearly privileged over the other. However, Žižek’s logic of ‘both are wrong…’ precludes this overly simplistic reading. While it is clearly impossible to choose the philosophy of perversion from within Žižek’s perspective, it is nevertheless also impossible to choose the philosophy of hysteria. Like the thought experiment I performed earlier, the logic of ‘both are wrong’ renders antagonism in the Real by providing a dual definition, the opposing sides of which are incompatible. If Žižek can be accused of anything here, it is not the privileging of hysteria over perversion, but the essentializing of these two camps as such, a homologous move to my privileging traditional Marxism over other leftist perspectives in my opposition between Left and Right. In order to produce his dual definition, Žižek rules out an infinite number of other possible perspectives from the outset. However, the key point here is that Lacan’s typological theory of character structures is an abstraction, not (only) in the negative sense of lumping together an infinite variety of possible subjective positions into three (or four) meagre categories, but (also) in the positive sense of enumerating three (or four) mutually exclusive, structurally distinct positions that cover the entire field of possible subjective positions. That is to say, while there may be an infinitely proliferating series of particular philosophies, each of which relates differently to an endlessly proliferating series of antagonisms, there is only one antagonism in the Real as such, and there are only three (or four) basic ways of relating to it. Every subjective structure, every philosophical starting assumption, must be essentially reducible to one of the structures Lacan describes, because there is no outside of the logical knot that these structures describe. And while this may be a difficult pill to swallow, it is worth noting that this difficulty arises precisely from within the perspective of the philosophy of perversion: The philosophy of perversion is based precisely on the assertion that universalizing frameworks (such as Lacan’s theory of character structures) are necessarily oppressive insofar as they always exclude an infinitely proliferating series of possible perspectives, structures or identities. Only a deluded philosopher of hysteria, an old Marxist

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or Enlightenment idealist, would be foolish enough to start from the assumption that a correct definition of all possible subjective positions could be arrived at through a certain amount of theoretical work!

What aggravation points towards without knowing it If one is willing to accept, even as a hypothesis, that hysteria and perversion do describe two of the only three (or four) possible subjective relations to antagonism in the Real, then the next question that arises is: what differentiates them? The essential difference between hysterical and perverse attitudes towards antagonism in the Real concerns precisely their privileging of aggravation or mediation as its ultimate resolution. Although I have been describing various political perspectives as each involving a different series of aggravations and mediations, an attentive reader will have noted that the meaning of aggravation is not consistent across these variations. While the philosopher of hysteria seeks to aggravate the antagonism between the exploiting Other and the exploited Other into a final showdown in which one of the sides will be eliminated, the philosopher of perversion seeks to aggravate the antagonism internal to the oppressed and oppressive Others, respectively, in order to allow for the recognition of difference. Aggravation means something very different in each of these cases. While one kind of aggravation aims at eliminating the enemy, the other aims at peaceful co-existence. And the point here should be plain: The first of these, the hysterical aggravation into a final showdown, is aggravation as such, while the perverse recognition of difference is not aggravation at all, but precisely mediation. Recall that the only way to achieve peaceful co-existence, the only way to transform antagonism in the Real into a stable difference, is to universalize a particular political perspective, to make the decision of how to decide at another, higher, level. The different perspectives internal to both oppressed and oppressive groups can only be brought into peaceful co-existence if there is some overarching framework or perspective that they all share and that necessarily rules out other perspectives. It is this need for an overarching framework that Žižek believes the philosophy of perversion is always at pains to disavow. He accuses the philosophy of perversion of imagining (wrongly) that there can be a peaceful co-existence of differences without the need for a particular resolution of antagonism in the Real. This is the essential link between the leftist

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philosophy of perversion and postmodern ideology: Just as multiculturalism asserts the celebration of cultural differences while disavowing that it actually prohibits particular cultural forms of (necessarily sadomasochistic, sexualized) enjoyment, and just as consumerism enjoins subjects to enjoy while disavowing that it actually prohibits self-destructive over-consumption, the philosophy of perversion asserts that universal frameworks are always necessarily oppressive while disavowing that just such a framework is required in order to achieve the peaceful co-existence of multiple identities that it strives for. And it is not inconsequential here that Žižek’s critique of the philosophy of perversion is actually a kind of confirmation of the philosophy of perversion’s own critique: Yes, you are right, universal frameworks are always minimally oppressive, including the one that you are secretly relying upon! The point not to be missed is that the notion of aggravation as such contains within itself an affirmation of antagonism in the Real. Because it exists in the Real, antagonism cannot be finally mediated. Antagonism always returns. While the aim of politics is always to create a series of mediations, to unite a welldefined social group (which may contain, acknowledge, even celebrate, a wide variety of identities and differences) towards a single purpose, no matter how successful one is in this project, no matter how universal the cause, antagonism in the Real guarantees that there will always be at least one more issue, one more toggle switch, over which there will be disagreement, one more question that will shatter political unity. And it is at precisely this point, when antagonism in the Real returns with a vengeance, that aggravation appears as the only solution. At this point, the Other cannot be co-existed with peacefully, cannot be included as one identity among many. He or she can only be eliminated. One of the reasons that Žižek sees the philosophy of hysteria as less wrong than the philosophy of perversion is thus that it takes this essentially aggravating characteristic of antagonism in the Real into account. Simply, it starts from the acknowledgement that, somewhere along the way, aggravation has to appear, and will appear inexorably. Having made this acknowledgement, it then concerns itself with the question of where to locate this aggravation ‘correctly’, who is really the enemy. This project is, of course, doomed to failure. No matter who one eliminates, antagonism will return. No matter what clearly defined social group is left after the final showdown, it will necessarily continue to be internally divided. The philosophy of perversion, however, argues against the inexorable appearance of aggravation, and this amounts to a disavowal of antagonism in the Real as such.

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While the philosophy of hysteria takes a (wrong) particular perspective in which the world is divided into two camps that it hopes to bring to a final showdown, the philosophy of perversion makes the (wrong) claim that it can do without a (wrong) particular perspective as such, without the idea of a final showdown. The philosophy of perversion asserts (wrongly) that antagonism in the Real itself is extraneous, a kind of perspective illusion or manipulation that can itself be finally eliminated in favour of absolute peaceful co-existence.

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The Theory of the Four Fundamental Discourses

The four fundamental discourses: A mapping exercise Having defined antagonism in the Real, it is now possible to introduce Lacan’s theory of the four fundamental discourses in a way that can be brought to bear on the Lacanian theory of character structures. While in the last chapter I defined hysteria and perversion as relating differently to antagonism in the Real as such, the four fundamental discourses represent the different ways in which the subject can relate to another subject – his or her Other – in the context of antagonism in the Real. By using the notion of antagonism in the Real to superimpose these two theories one onto the other, a more refined definition of the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis begins to emerge, a definition that deals directly with the character structure(s) of the post-analytic subject. This, in turn, will lay the groundwork for the final chapters of the book, which speculate on the possibility of defining a liberated society. Žižek uses the theory of the four fundamental discourses in a number of different (arguably inconsistent) ways at different moments in his work. The key use for the purposes of my own project is to be found in The Ticklish Subject, at the end of the chapter entitled ‘The Politics of Truth: Badiou as a Reader of St. Paul’. Here, Žižek maps the philosophy of hysteria and the philosophy of perversion directly onto the theory of the four fundamental discourses.1 Briefly, Žižek uses the discourse of the master to represent the traditional relation of oppression and exploitation towards which leftism as a whole is externally antagonistic. He uses the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the university to represent the philosophy of hysteria and the philosophy of perversion respectively. Also, he uses the discourse of the analyst to represent the possibility of a third leftist perspective towards which he wishes to aim, a perspective that ‘sublates’ (in Žižek’s idiosyncratic use of the Hegelian term) the antagonism internal to the

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Left, a perspective that he hopes might define the post-analytic, liberated state, and provide the ground for subjective freedom and responsibility. In this sense, it is tempting to read the theory of the four fundamental discourses as a possible substitute for the theory of character structures, allowing one to escape from the logical knot of neurosis–perversion–psychosis by transplanting two of these structures (neurosis and perversion) into a new framework that allows for a third (fourth?) ‘correct’, liberated position. This kind of direct mapping exercise is fairly easy to critique for its simplicity. First and foremost, it must be stressed that for Lacan the four fundamental discourses are modes of address, structures of communication, forms of the social link, which must be strictly differentiated from the character structures of the subjects who make use of them (although they are linked in subtle ways). That is to say, a hysteric, obsessional or perverse (perhaps even a psychotic) subject might make use of any of the four discourses (master, hysteric, university or analyst) at any moment to address his or her Other. As such, associating the philosophies of hysteria and perversion, whose names are derived from the theory of character structures, with particular discourses is fairly limiting. Depending on what sort of Other he or she is addressing, and in what context, a hysteric or pervert might make use of any of the four discourses. And second, adding even this level of complexity does not take into account another haunting presence: psychosis. In ‘The Politics of Truth’, Žižek refers to psychosis as something like a fifth non-discourse, and by the time he reaches the final chapter of The Ticklish Subject, he begins using it as part of his diagnosis of the contemporary postpolitical condition. However, while this critique should certainly be taken into account, it should be used to complicate the mapping exercise that Žižek undertakes rather than to dismiss it. The very fact that Lacan finds himself forced to insist on a rigid distinction between the character structure of hysteria and the discourse of the hysteric serves to emphasize the fact that the two are, if not identical, nonetheless linked at a fundamental level. Like the (m)Other and the big Other, the repetition of (nearly) the same terminology to designate two structurally distinct concepts is not accidental. The ultimate consequence is that the theory of the four fundamental discourses cannot be mapped directly onto the theory of character structures, but the two do share a definite, if more complicated, relationship. As such, the theory of the four fundamental discourses cannot substitute for the theory of character structures, but it can be used as a theoretical lens through which to further articulate it. At the level of character structures, one

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remains in the deadlock of neurosis–perversion–psychosis. However, when one introduces the four fundamental discourses – the possible ways of relating to one’s Other in the context of antagonism in the Real – one can distinguish between neurotics, perverts and psychopaths who tend to utilize (a) given discourse(s), rather than others. It is this distinction that I will use to develop a definition of the post-analytic subject.

The discourses The discourse of the master is perhaps best understood as an imperative, a command. The subject (or more correctly the agent) tells his or her Other to do something. In the context of antagonism in the Real, the master is the one who resolves antagonism into a stable, symmetrical difference by defining it. That is, he or she is the one who has the authority to make the choice of how to choose. He or she decides which single perspective all the Others should take, and this decision allows for political efficiency. Once the antagonism has been resolved by the master, the Others are able to act (to democratically elect a leader instead of arguing over how the leader should be chosen, for example.) In ‘The Politics of Truth’, Žižek adopts Badiou’s term ‘Event’. ‘The Master is the one who names the event.’2 However, one can translate this formula more or less directly into the language of antagonism in the Real: The Event is the moment in which antagonism appears, and the master’s act of naming presents itself as an act of imposing a particular definition on the antagonism, which resolves it into a stable symmetrical difference. The key feature to note about the discourse of the master is that its efficacy, the Other’s obedience to the command, relies on a symbolic authority that can only be described tautologically. The master says, in effect, ‘Do such and such (because I say so)!’ This tautological quality implies that antagonism in the Real, the point of Event at which the master had to make a decision, is simultaneously covered over and marked by the master’s gesture. Although the decision (about how to decide) has been made, the fact that it was a decision continues to insist, because the master has no justification for his or her decision other than his or her authority as such. As Žižek and Lacan constantly remind their readers, the master’s gesture (the master signifier) is always essentially empty. ‘The MasterSignifier is the signifier of potentiality, of potential threat, of a threat which, in order to function as such, has to remain potential … This emptiness of the

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threat is clearly discernible in everyday phrases like “Just wait! You’ll see what will happen to you!” ’3 This emptiness is the obverse of the fact that the master is always only the master because the others treat him or her as such. The discourse of the hysteric is perhaps best understood as a question. The subject asks his or her Other to explain, to give reasons for, to justify something. In the context of antagonism in the Real, the hysteric is one who insists on the fact that, beneath the master’s effort to create a stable, symmetrical difference, there nonetheless remains an unresolved, irresolvable antagonism. That is to say, the hysteric questions, threatens and undermines the master’s authority to decide how to decide. He or she points out that the only reason other perspectives have been ruled out is because of a tautological gesture. He or she reveals that the master is the master, not for any good reason, but only because the others treat him or her as such. In Badiou’s language of Event, ‘The Hysteric … questions and challenges the Master’s naming of the Event … That is to say, the Hysteric reacts to each symbolization of the Event with a “ce n’est pas ça”, that’s not it’.4 The key feature to note about this discourse is that on the one hand it implies a refusal of every effort to name the antagonism. The hysteric is never satisfied with any definition, any decision. On the other hand it implies a secret wish for a real, adequate, potent master who would be able to define the antagonism properly, to decide how to decide in a way that would not have to rely on an empty gesture that ultimately reveals the master’s impotence. ‘Beneath the hysteric’s rebellion and challenge to paternal authority there is … a hidden call for a renewed paternal authority, for a father who would really be a “true father” and adequately embody his symbolic mandate.’5 The oft referred to ‘hysterical demand’ is thus an impossible demand. As a demand for someone to be a good enough master to define antagonism in the Real once and for all, it is doomed to remain perpetually unsatisfied. The discourse of the university is perhaps best understood as a statement. The subject (whom I will call, with my tongue in my cheek, the professor) transmits to his or her Other an objective fact. In the context of antagonism in the Real, the professor is one who disavows or denies the existence of the antagonism as such. That is, he or she shifts the field from a competition between incompatible perspectives on an ultimately elusive antagonism to a search for and sharing of universal, objective facts about reality. He or she argues that the infinitely proliferating multitude of competing perspectives is the result either of insufficient thought, knowledge or investigation, or of a concerted effort to conceal the objective facts in favour of empty rhetoric and ideological

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manipulation. ‘The perverse agent of University discourse disavows that there was the event of an act in the first place – with his chain of knowledge, he wants to reduce the consequences of the act to just another thing that can be explained away as part of the normal run of things.’6 The key feature to note about this discourse is that on the one hand it implies a repudiation of the master. He or she is not, as the hysteric claims, an incompetent, but rather a charlatan, a liar, perpetuating belief in an imaginary problem (antagonism in the Real) in order to secure his or her own position of mastery. And from this perspective, the hysteric is a dupe who falls for the master’s trick. On the other hand, the discourse of the university involves a secret will to mastery. The professor’s factual information always contains a secret command. It is always, in the last instance, precisely information about why the Other should do something. The professor effectively says, ‘(Do such and such, because) this is a chain of causal facts: A, B, C, etc.’ Here, one should recall the postmodern superegoic knowledge concerning why one shouldn’t smoke. It doesn’t demand anything. You are just informed of a series of causal links. The discourse of the analyst is perhaps best understood as a (particular kind of) silence. The subject invites his or her Other to speak, to fill in a void with his or her own thoughts. In the context of antagonism in the Real, the analyst is one who coaxes his or her Other into confronting the antagonism and attempting to define it. As Žižek puts it, the discourse of the analyst, while maintaining the gap between the Event and its symbolization [that is, while affirming that the antagonism has not been properly named], avoids the hysterical trap and, instead of being caught in the vicious cycle of permanent failure [instead of demanding an adequate master], affirms this gap as positive and productive: it asserts the Real of the Event [the undecideability of antagonism in the Real] as the ‘generator’, the generating core to be encircled repeatedly by the subject’s symbolic productivity.7

The analyst is a subject who induces his or her Other to reject the decision (of how to decide) that has been imposed on him or her by the master (or by the professor) and to instead have the courage of his or her own convictions, to make use of his or her own capacity to decide and to take responsibility for that decision. The key feature to note about this discourse is the strange temporality of the decision to which it refers. On the one hand, the Other’s decision (of how to decide) is always past. He or she always experiences his or her decision as a

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realization concerning what he or she has always already been (e.g. ‘As it turns out, I have always been a leftist.’). But on the other hand, it always faces the Other in the present. The Other’s decision appears past because it retroactively reconfigures the perspective from which he or she perceives what he or she has always already been (e.g. ‘I have just realized that I have always been a leftist because, unbeknownst to myself, I must have just decided to become a leftist,’). Žižek uses the example of Bertrand Russell, who, in a famous passage from his letter to Lady Ottoline Morrell … recalls the circumstances of his declaration of love to her … ‘I did not know I loved you till I heard myself telling you so – for one instant I thought “Good God, what have I said?” and then I knew it was the truth’ … It is wrong to read this passage … as if, deep in himself, Russell ‘already knew that he loved her:’ this effect of alwaysalready is strictly retroactive: its temporality is that of future antérieur – that is to say, Russell was not in love with her all the time without knowing it; rather, he will have been in love with her.8

The philosophies and their discourses Why does Žižek map the philosophy of hysteria onto the discourse of the hysteric and the philosophy of perversion onto the discourse of the university? The first thing one should note here is that Žižek makes a clear connection between the philosophy of perversion and the practice of deconstruction, about which he has particular reservations, or at least fundamental questions. What these reservations concern is the position of the deconstructionist. Although deconstruction takes as its explicit aim precisely that of detecting and exposing the antagonism internal to any well-defined social group or universalizing ‘objective’ description, Žižek’s contention is that there is always at least one position that it refuses to deconstruct: the position of the deconstructionist himor herself. The position from which the deconstructivist can always make sure of the fact that ‘there is no metalanguage’; that no utterance can say precisely what it intended to say; that the process of enunciation always subverts the utterance; is the position of metalanguage in its purest, most radical form. How can one not recognize, in the passionate zeal with which the post-structuralist insists that every text, his own included, is caught in a fundamental ambiguity … the signs of an obstinate denial … a barely hidden acknowledgement of the fact that one is

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speaking from a safe position, a position not menaced by the decentred textual process.9

To put it another way, if (as the deconstructionist position insists) one must refuse to take any statement at face value, must one not also refuse to take the statement ‘one must refuse to take any statement at face value’ at face value? And does this logic not lead one into a strange, paradoxical situation in which, in order not to take any statement at face value, one must risk taking at least one statement at face value? As such, Žižek suspects the philosophy of perversion of precisely the trick at work in the discourse of the university: In the guise of its opposite (i.e. of undermining the rule of the master who, being a charlatan or a liar, has concealed his or her own will to power beneath the illusory necessity of resolving some impossible conflict), the philosophy of perversion secretly privileges its own position as precisely the position of mastery, the correct position, the position that all the Others should adopt. That is to say, Žižek accuses the deconstructionist position of relying on the circumspect assumption that as long as one is practising deconstruction, one is guaranteed to do no wrong, that there is no act of deconstruction that will lead to more oppression, more exclusion, more suffering. This is also one side of the link between the philosophy of perversion and postmodern ideology: The gesture of self-culpabilization in which the politically correct subject endeavours to detect in him- or herself ever more refined forms of oppression actually conceals a deeper self-exoneration. It proves his or her essential innocence. In contrast to this self-certainty, the philosophy of hysteria can be associated with the discourse of the hysteric on the basis of a corresponding feature of self-doubt. The hysteric (the subject with the character structure of a hysteric) is one who asks (who makes use of the discourse of the hysteric to ask) the master, ‘Why am I what you are saying that I am? What am I (as an object, for you)?’ If Žižek explicitly associates the philosophy of perversion with the postmodern practice of deconstruction, he implicitly associates the philosophy of hysteria with Enlightenment structuralism, and one should locate here the feature of radical self-doubt that characterizes hysteria in the desperate search for firm universal founding principles that characterize Enlightenment thought. The project of establishing a set of a priori principles on which all rational thought must be based can be read as precisely an attempt to resolve the radical doubt inherent in the position of the hysteric, a desperate attempt to answer the anxious question, ‘What am I?’ And the fact that this search presupposes an answer outside of itself, a transcendental truth that ‘really exists out there’, can

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be read as parallel to the hysteric’s posing of a question to an external master. The fact that this search is always ultimately failed (if the implicit reference here is to Kant, one should think of Kant’s failure to properly resolve the problem of transcendental imagination, which Žižek discusses in the first chapter of The Ticklish Subject) corresponds to the hysteric’s ultimate dissatisfaction with every answer, every master, every act of naming. One can see here why the philosophy of perversion (the discourse of the university) arises as a response to (the failures of) the philosophy of hysteria (the discourse of the hysteric): The failure of every master to satisfy the hysteric’s demands suggests the notion that mastery itself may be pernicious, dispensable, and this notion corresponds to a disavowal of antagonism in the Real. But one can also see why traditional ideology (the discourse of the master), Enlightenment critique (the discourse of the hysteric) and postmodern ideology (the discourse of the university) follow each other in a strictly logical order: Traditional ideology is based on the ‘I told you so!’ of the master’s discourse. The traditional father, for example, says to the child: ‘You have to go to Grandma’s and behave there properly!’ In response to this command, the discourse of the hysteric emerges as a critical questioning: ‘Why? Who made you the boss? What are your qualifications?’ And, in order to satisfy the hysteric’s demands, the master must stop making tautological gestures and instead give answers, which can only take the form of factual knowledge: the superego knowledge of postmodern ideology. While the tautological gesture of mastery remains – and ultimately must remain insofar as antagonism in the Real can never be properly resolved – it is disavowed behind a screen of reasons that respond to the hysteric’s questions. The postmodern father, for example, presents the child with causal facts ‘You know how much your Grandma loves you’, which position him as the master, but which conceal this mastery behind his qualifications as an expert – in this case someone who knows how to get the most pleasure out of one’s relationship with one’s Grandma.

Correcting hysteria: Master yourself! What role does the discourse of the analyst play in this context? As I mentioned earlier, it is tempting to begin from the assumption that the discourse of the analyst directly is the correct way to relate to antagonism in the Real, and that there must therefore be a correct form of leftist philosophy that corresponds

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to it. Indeed, Žižek seems to support this hypothesis: ‘The analyst’s discourse’, he writes, ‘stands for the emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity that reconciles the split into university and hysteria.’10 However, while I will to a certain extent play out this temptation later, using the term ‘philosophy of the analyst’ as a place-holder for the post-analytic, liberated perspective, things are clearly not so simple. On the one hand, as I have emphasized repeatedly, there is no correct character structure waiting to be associated with the discourse of the analyst, suggesting that there is no philosophy of the analyst waiting to be discovered. On the other hand, psychoanalysis is a clinical practice that aims to produce a subjective change in an Other, the analysand. If the discourse of the analyst is the form of address used by the analyst in psychoanalytic practice, then it is not necessarily in itself the correct way to relate to antagonism in the Real. Rather, it is a technique that induces the Other (the analysand) to adopt the correct way of relating to antagonism in the Real. Thus, while I will in part pursue the tempting question ‘How does the philosophy of the analyst differ from the philosophies of perversion and hysteria?’ the correct question lurking in the background is actually, ‘How does the discourse of the analyst induce the philosophies of perversion and hysteria to correct themselves?’ How does the philosophy of the analyst relate to the philosophy of hysteria? As already mentioned, the analyst, like the hysteric, insists on the continual presence of antagonism in the Real, but, unlike the hysteric who is stuck in perpetual failure, the analyst insists on the productive nature of the act of defining as such, the repetitive encircling and marking of the antagonism. What is this failure in the context of the philosophy of hysteria? If, for the discourse of the hysteric, it is the failure to find a consistent definition for the antagonism, to find a truly adequate master, then for the philosophy of hysteria it is the failure of the Enlightenment project to construct a truly adequate universal theory of ontology, ethics and subjectivity. It is the failure of traditional Marxism to discover a correct struggle (class struggle) and/or a correct revolutionary actor who could win this struggle once and for all. What, then, is the productivity asserted by the analyst in the place of this failure? The analyst confronts his or her Other with the very choice of how to choose. The ultimate failure of every act of naming to adequately define Real antagonism is the obverse of the fact that every act of naming is a decision in a radical sense. The very existence of antagonism in the Real, outside of (between, even within) every subject, necessarily means that there is no adequate answer to the hysteric’s question. The only way to establish political efficiency is to make

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a decision, a choice, a leap of faith, which inadequately bridges the gap. The analyst is thus one who acknowledges the hysteric’s criticism of the master (‘Yes, the master’s gesture is ultimately nothing more than a tautological decision’), but who simultaneously confronts the hysteric with the conclusion that he or she must therefore ‘make up the difference’, must decide for him- or herself how to decide (‘…but this only means that you will have to make your own decision, to fail in your own way’). Like the discourse of the hysteric and the discourse of the master, the discourse of the analyst thus accepts the existence of the antagonism as such. However, it does not (like the discourse of the master) assert a particular perspective on the antagonism as that which all the Others should adopt, neither does it (like the discourse of the hysteric) search for an (impossible) adequate master or objectively true perspective outside of itself. It merely insists on the necessity that every subject make his or her own choice, be his or her own master. This is precisely how Žižek reads The formal-tautological-empty character of the [Kantian] categorical imperative: Hegel’s criticism is that Kant’s categorical imperative, because of its formal character, cannot generate any determinate content – it can justify everything and/or nothing as an ethical act. It is easy to demonstrate not only that Kant is well aware of the formal character of the imperative, but also that this formal character is the central part of his argument: Kant does not strive to show how we can derive our determinate moral duties directly from the categorical imperative; his point, rather, is that the formal emptiness of the categorical imperative confronts us with the abyss [void] of our freedom – this emptiness means that the free subject is fully responsible not only for doing his duty, but also for establishing what this duty is.11

In a way, the discourse of the analyst thus accepts the Enlightenment notion that there is a universal structure of human subjectivity and of reality as such, and accepts the traditional Marxist notion that there is one key struggle and a privileged actor who is charged with resolving it, but it does so only in a negative way. That is to say, for this philosophy there is one key struggle, but this one key struggle is precisely the irresolvable struggle over what the one key struggle is. There is one privileged actor who is charged with resolving this struggle, but this one privileged actor is the universal subject itself, residing within every individual. And, finally, there is a universal structure of subjectivity and reality as such, but this universal structure is precisely that of being open, without any guarantee, requiring a decision.

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Correcting perversion: Acknowledge the void! How, then, does the discourse of the analyst relate to the philosophy of perversion? Here, something very interesting and unexpected happens. Although Žižek does relate the discourse of the analyst to the discourse of the university in the way that I have described – the analyst validates the existence of the antagonism while the professor disavows it – he also relates it to something else, which he refers to as the ‘perverse social link’. Without going into the mathemes and diagrams that Lacan develops in order to explain the four fundamental discourses, it is enough to note here that the perverse social link about which Žižek speaks has the structure, not of the discourse of the university, but of the discourse of the analyst itself. ‘The fact that the upper level of Lacan’s formula of the discourse of the Analyst is the same as his formula of perversion (a-$) opens up a possibility of reading the entire formula of the discourse of the Analyst as also the formula of the perverse social link.’12 That is to say, the philosopher of perversion is much more likely than the philosopher of hysteria to make use of (something like) the discourse of the analyst. And is this really so surprising? Is not psychoanalysis precisely a kind of deconstruction, designed to take away the subject’s imaginary security and consistency? One cannot overstate the importance of this strange asymmetry in Žižek’s mapping exercise. Although, as I have noted, he maps the character structure of hysteria onto the discourse of the hysteric and the character structure of perversion onto the discourse of the university, he also maps the character structure of perversion onto what he refers to as the perverse social link, which has the form of the discourse of the analyst. What can this double mapping mean? What emerges here is that it is impossible to locate the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis either through the lens of the theory of character structures or through the lens of the theory of the four fundamental discourses. One requires both, because of the logic of short circuit. The discourse of the analyst is a genus with two subspecies: the perverse social link (the discourse of the analyst in the service of perversion) and itself as its own subspecies (the discourse of the analyst in the service of – and here I must turn to my placeholder – the philosophy of the analyst). This difference, internal to the discourse of the analyst, can only be detected through reference to the Lacanian theory of character structures, through the introduction of the notion of perversion. The discourse of the analyst somehow becomes something that it is not – the perverse social link – when it is put to use by the pervert.

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What, then, is the perverse social link? How does it resemble the discourse of the analyst, and how should the two be distinguished? Earlier in the chapter I described the analyst as one who induces his or her Other to reject the decision (of how to decide) that is imposed on him or her by the master (or the professor) in favour of the Other’s own capacity to decide. The pervert also undermines the Other’s comfortable reliance on the figure of an external master. However, instead of confronting him or her with the abyssal, anxiety-provoking, undecidable decision, the pervert confronts him or her with his or her own enjoyment. Here is the distinction that Žižek himself draws between the discourse of the analyst and the perverse social link: The difference between the social link of perversion and that of analysis is grounded in the radical ambiguity of objet petit a in Lacan, which stands simultaneously for the imaginary fantasmatic lure/screen and for that which this lure is obfuscating, for the void behind the lure. Consequently, when we pass from perversion to the analytic social link, the agent (analyst) reduces himself to the Void which provokes the subject into confronting the truth of his desire.13

The reference here to a void and to a fantasy that obfuscates that void signals that the arguments I developed in Chapter 3 return here with greater explanatory power: For Žižek, the subject is structured by an original void or lack that is best expressed as a question, ‘What am I (as an object) for you, the Other?’ In response to the anxious, traumatic pressure of this unanswered question, the subject fantasizes an answer that provides (sadomasochistic) enjoyment, but which remains essentially unbearable. The social Law then arrives to fend off the excessive enjoyment of this fantasy by providing the subject with a new identity, his or her symbolic mandate. In this context, the analyst’s role is to undermine the subject’s reliance on an externally imposed symbolic mandate in order to confront him or her with the fact that, at the core of his or her being, he or she remains a void, an unanswered question that demands an answer, requires some kind of decision. The pervert, on the other hand, undermines the subject’s reliance on an externally imposed symbolic mandate in order to convince him or her that, at the core of his or her being, he or she is nothing more or less than the fundamental fantasy that he or she has constructed in order to obfuscate the primordial void. In this sense, the pervert’s injunction to transgression enjoins the subject to enjoy. Occupying the place of the superego, the pervert makes his or her Other feel guilty for giving up on his or her fundamental fantasy and for

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accepting in its place the social Law that prohibits it. The pervert gives voice to the superego injunction: ‘Enjoy!’ Before moving on to the next chapter, in which the difficulty of sustaining the idea of a single philosophy of the analyst is revealed, one should pause for a moment to affirm that the proximity of the discourse of the perverse social link to the discourse of the analyst helps to explain Žižek’s ambivalence over his Other, what he calls the philosophy of perversion. Although Žižek’s position involves deep doubts, or at least fundamental questions, about the practice of deconstruction, and accuses the philosophers of perversion of refusing to include their own position as deconstructionists among the positions that must be deconstructed, he nonetheless cannot afford to throw out the baby (the discourse of the analyst as a genus) with the bath water (the perverse social link as a species of the discourse of the analyst). Although Žižek privileges the philosophy of hysteria as less wrong than the philosophy of perversion because of its acknowledgement of the existence of antagonism in the Real, nonetheless, at the level of its attitude towards the Other, the philosophy of perversion is actually closer to the supposed philosophy of the analyst. Is it not worth suggesting here that The Ticklish Subject could be rewritten from the opposite perspective; that the philosophy of perversion is actually less wrong than the philosophy of hysteria because of what it has produced without knowing it: a deconstructive, analytic practice?

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The Deadlock of Lacanian Ethics and the Analytic Moment

What are you taking responsibility for? It is at this point in the pursuit of the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis that the question of ethics emerges as such. By enumerating the possible ways in which the subject can relate to his or her Other, the theory of the four fundamental discourses leads inexorably to this topic, shifting the inflection of the anxious question that structures subjectivity from ‘What am I (for the Other as an object)?’ to ‘How ought I to address, to behave towards, my Other?’ And if the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis is based on a recognition that both antagonism in the Real and subjective freedom are essentially undecidable, then it follows that it is also based on a recognition that the ethical question is undecidable. As Žižek remarks, the truth of Kant’s categorical imperative is to be located precisely in the fact that it cannot be used to deduce any substantial content. The subject’s duty is precisely to choose, and to take responsibility for choosing, his or her duty. What the subject wants, what the subject does not want, what the Other wants, what the Other does not want, what the big Other allows, what it does not allow, none of these things bears any necessary relation to how the subject ought to behave towards his or her Other. The ethical question is terrifyingly open, and can only be answered by a decision on the part of the subject. But is this the end of the story? Is it true that, from a (Žižekian) Lacanian perspective, the only criterion for determining ethical behaviour is whether the subject has freely chosen his or her behaviour and taken responsibility for having chosen it? In order to render as starkly as possible the kind of difficult terrain that this position leads to, allow me to adopt as my example history’s most controversial Kantian: Adolf Eichmann. Of course, as Žižek himself insists, Eichmann’s self-identification as a Kantian was based on a fundamental misreading, was even exactly the opposite of the truth.

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The full acceptance of [the Kantian] paradox compels us to reject any reference to duty as an excuse: ‘I know this is heavy and can be painful, but what can I do, this is my duty…’ Kant’s ethics is often taken as justifying just such an attitude – no wonder Adolf Eichmann himself referred to Kant when trying to justify his role in planning and executing the Holocaust: he was just doing his duty and obeying the Fuhrer’s orders. However, the aim of Kant’s emphasis on the subject’s full moral autonomy and responsibility was precisely to prevent such a manoeuvre of putting the blame of some figure of the big Other.1

From the perspective of Žižek’s reading of Kant, one should hold Eichmann ethically responsible precisely for his choice to be someone whose duty is to obey the Fuhrer’s orders. But what if the opposite had come to pass? What if, rather than turning out to be the hunched servant of power described by Hannah Arendt in Eichmann in Jerusalem, Eichmann had adopted the position of radical Evil, climbing to the stand at the Nuremberg trials, and announcing proudly, ‘Yes, I did these things. I take responsibility. I have chosen to be the kind of person that plans and executes the Holocaust. Do what you will to me.’ Would we not then be compelled, using Žižek’s logic, to endorse Eichmann as an ethical figure? There are certainly moments in Žižek’s work that would seem to support this terrifying possibility. Take, for example, his analysis of Don Giovanni, whom he compares to Anakin Skywalker, the central figure of Star Wars saga. After a lifetime of evil acts, each of these characters is offered salvation if only he will repent in his final moments. Each of them refuses, sticking stubbornly to his decision, accepting the damnation that awaits him as a reward. What appears at the level of content to be the choice of Evil is, at the formal level, an act of asserting one’s ethical consistency. That is to say: they are both aware that, from the standpoint of pragmatic egoist calculation, renouncing Evil is preferable; they are both at the end of their lives, aware that there is no profit in persisting in their choice of Evil – nonetheless, in an act of defiance that cannot but appear uncannily ethical, they courageously remain faithful to their choice out of principle, not on account of the promise of any material or spiritual profit.2

Žižek’s terminology here underscores the problem faced by Lacanian ethics: If the ethical distinction is inscribed only at the level of form, each of these figures – Don Giovanni, Anakin Skywalker, and the radically evil counterpart of Adolf Eichmann – retains their ethical consistency by asserting their freedom and responsibility. However, this threatens to relativize the level of content, so that

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there is no longer any justification for condemning the choices for which they have taken responsibility as unethical. In the case of Don Giovanni and Anakin Skywalker, it is tempting to confirm this reading, to redeem them as ethical figures. And Žižek essentially does so by defining evil as that which contravenes the dominant, arbitrary, socially constructed laws of a given society or polity (the existing big Other).3 In this sense, evil is essentially the aim of radical leftist politics: That old leftist problem of how to not only resist but actually undermine and disrupt the existing relations of oppression is by definition the problem of how to be successfully evil. In the case of Eichmann, however, things are not so easy. One may certainly argue that the real Eichmann was precisely not evil in this sense, but simply complied with dominant social pressures. However, it would be an obscenity to suggest that, had Eichmann operated in a different social context (contemporary liberal tolerant multiculturalism, for example), and had he taken subjective responsibility for his acts (adopted the radically evil position), this would have made him a heroic leftist revolutionary. Žižek’s own insistence that whereas the October revolution was a failed emancipatory event, the Nazi catastrophe was an anti-emancipatory event going all too well signals that a line must be drawn here. The ethical distinction between liberation and oppression must be inscribed both at the level of form (the subject’s relation to his or her own subjective freedom) and at the level of content (the subject’s relation to his or her Other). The question is how to move from one level to the other. If Lacanian ethics requires the subject to take responsibility, what does it require the subject to take responsibility for?

Ethics and the theory of character structures This question has two key implications for the theory of character structures: First, Žižek’s Kantian ethics involves the recognition of ‘a primordial, atemporal, transcendental act by means of which we choose our “eternal character”, the elementary contours of our ethical identity’.4 In what he frequently describes as retroactive determinism, subjective freedom is the ability to decide what forces will determine our behaviour, to decide how one will make decisions. In the context of Lacanian theory, what can this eternal character be but one’s character structure? The responsibility that Lacanian psychoanalysis aims to confer on the subject is not only responsibility for his or her acts, but also

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responsibility for having chosen the character structure that made his or her acts an unavoidable duty. The liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis, at the level of form (the subject’s relation to him- or herself), is based on a moment in which the subject accepts responsibility for having chosen his or her character structure. But this leads to a problem at the level of content: On the one hand, Lacan insists that psychoanalytic practice must not aim to change the subject’s character structure (from perverse to hysterical, for example), and on the other hand, there is no ‘correct’ character structure waiting to be discovered. However, each of the existing character structures is, by definition, a way of avoiding taking responsibility. How can the subject take responsibility within one of the established character structures, and what does this imply for that structure itself? In order to elucidate this deadlock further, let me review how hysteria and perversion each avoid ethical responsibility: The hysteric’s assumption that there is a correct answer out there waiting to be discovered, that there is a correct Law or big Other that will resolve antagonism in the Real (provided the enemy can be correctly identified and eliminated), involves a refusal of the duty to choose and take responsibility for choosing. The desperate search for an adequate master who could guarantee that the hysteric’s acts are not unethical is precisely an effort to escape the terrible burden of decision and responsibility. Ethical responsibility is grounded on the notion that there is no guarantee, no big Other that would be sufficient to the task of alleviating the subject of responsibility. However, the pervert’s starting assumption that there is no correct answer out there waiting to be discovered also relieves him or her of responsibility insofar as it grounds a rejection of the ethical category as such. From the pervert’s perspective, the ethical question itself as an unnecessary, spurious, ideological manipulation, because he or she understands ‘ought’ as the tool of choice with which dominant groups and individuals establish their primacy over others (‘They ought to be like Us’). In place of ethical norms, the pervert asserts the right of every identity to pursue its own idiosyncratic enjoyment. However, this assertion disavows the fact that in the very act of dispensing with the ethical question, the pervert has secretly answered it: ‘One ought not to ought!’ And the enjoyment which he or she enjoins his or her Other to pursue is not, in fact, idiosyncratic, but always already structured by the big Other itself. Transgressive desire is simply the inverse of the Law that it desires to transgress. If, then, it is unethical to rely on an external, normative ideal for a measure of one’s acts, but it is also unethical to simply do what one wants (transgressing the

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normative rule of the big Other), then the only way to choose ethically seems to be a kind of absolute decisionism. Deprived of any access to the Law, to desire, or to objective knowledge, the only ground for decision-making left to the subject seems to be absolute randomness, totally arbitrary decision. And this is the flip side of what I asserted earlier: The temptation when dealing with Lacanian ethics is to relativize the level of content, to render all choices essentially equal. However, this option is also ruled out in advance. If there is a subjective position that really does live in a completely free way, outside of the Law and its fantasmatic superego supplement, it is psychosis. As Žižek puts it, the ‘forced choice’, in which one is compelled to accept an externally imposed decision which delimits one’s practical decision-making, ‘is precisely what the psychotic position lacks: the psychotic subject acts as if he has a truly free choice “all the way along” ’.5 The only subject for whom the choice of his or her duty really is free, for whom the level of content is truly relative, is the psychotic subject. And this should come as no surprise. The only alternative to the hysterical search for a ‘correct’ big Other, and the perverse disavowal of the big Other (the knowledge that it does not exist), is the psychotic foreclosure of the big Other (the knowledge that it does exist as a really existing other subject) and its attendant return in the Real. The only way to truly escape ethical normativity is to be reduced to the puppet of an omnipotent small big Other in the Real. Perhaps not surprisingly, my thesis is that the deadlock can only be resolved through the Hegelian logic of short circuit, in which form and content are interrelated. From the point of view of a neutral form filled out by particular content, all choices are equal, one can take ethical responsibility for choosing any of the character structures. However, the formal choice itself affects the content, creating a distinction internal to each of the character structures between pre- and post-analytic structures. That is to say, the definition of the ‘correct’ character structure is a dual (if not multiple) definition: There are both pre-analytic and post-analytic forms of hysteria, and pre-analytic and postanalytic forms of perversion. (There may even be pre- and post-analytic forms of psychosis, but because this book focuses on Žižek’s mapping of hysteria and perversion onto different branches of leftist theory, I will leave this possibility to one side.) Insofar as one makes the choice for responsibility at the level of form, the choice of ‘correct’ ethical content is already implicit. The post-analytic form of any of the character structures is the ethical choice as such. In the remainder of this chapter, I will develop an explanation of the Lacanian psychoanalytic process that supports this notion of a structural difference between pre- and

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post-analytic character structures. In the following chapter, I will develop the implications of this division for perversion and hysteria, respectively, using the theory of the four fundamental discourses. This will lay the groundwork for beginning to imagine the liberated post-analytic society implied by Žižek’s Lacanian politics.

Pre- and post-analytic subjects How does the Lacanian psychoanalytic moment function? How does it induce the subject to accept subjective freedom and responsibility and what does this imply for his or her character structure? The best way to approach this question is to return to that portion of my original description of the discourse of the analyst that has not yet entered play: the notion of strange temporality. To review, the choice with which the analyst confronts his or her Other is always, in some sense, past. He or she always experiences his or her decision as a realization concerning what he or she has always already been, precisely because this decision retroactively reconfigures the perspective from which he or she perceives his or her past. (‘I may have always thought that I was X, but I was wrong. I have actually always been Y.’) What is key here is that the decision never actually arrives in the present. The subject never consciously experiences making a decision. That is to say, the decision is, by definition, unconscious. Consciously, the subject only registers the decision after the fact as a realization. In this way, the decision is made, but, because it is made at the level of the fundamental void that pre-exists fantasy, it is made behind the subject’s back, in a scene to which he or she has no access. What this distinction between the subject’s conscious experience and some unconscious other scene points to is that while on the one hand the other scene in which the choice is made may be associated with psychotic withdrawal, with the dissolution or suspension (destitution) of the conscious subject, on the other hand the very notion that this realization takes place, that there is a conscious subject there to (mis-)recognize the decision retroactively, implies that the aim of psychoanalysis is not to leave the subject in the undecided (non-)state of psychotic withdrawal. While the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis does insist on the necessity of a choice which is made in a criteria-less, decisionist state, it does not valourize the moment of choosing in and of itself. Rather, if the aim of Lacanian psychoanalysis is to bring the subject to the point where he or

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she has to make a decision on how to decide, it is precisely in order to produce a subject who has decided. One should note here Žižek’s insistence that psychoanalysis is not an insight which can be shared only in precious, initiatic moments, not a process of introspection at the end of which one returns to the sober light of day.6 Although the destitution of the subject, followed by its reconstitution, appears as precisely this kind of initiatic moment, a terrifying momentary event from which the subject returns to normal reality, I do not believe Žižek is arguing that the aim of psychoanalysis should be permanent destitution. And, although the unconscious decision of how to fill in the subjective void clearly is one that has far-reaching implications for the subject’s life, I do not believe that Žižek is simply arguing here against a position that would reduce psychoanalysis to a therapeutic practice, a practice that aims at making minor reforms to a subject who nevertheless remains essentially the same. Rather, I believe he is aiming at the notion that there is, in fact, a ground for distinguishing between character structures as more or less ethical, but that this distinction is internal to each of the character structures themselves: There are pre-analytic hysterics and post-analytic hysterics, and pre-analytic perverts and post-analytic perverts. Moreover, this pre-/post- distinction is qualitative and structural. One may retain one’s character structure in the sense of remaining in the same category, but the functioning of this structure is fundamentally transformed by the unconscious decision for responsibility. And it should be clear that this notion is deeply implicated in Žižek’s political investment in Lacanian theory. One of Žižek’s fundamental premises is that psychoanalysis is essentially revolutionary, that the ends of analysis should be thought of as at least homologous with, if not identical to, the ends of leftist political philosophy. And for this investment to be meaningful, political change must not be change for its own sake. The decision of what Law should structure society after a successful revolution must not be an arbitrary one. If the discourse of the analyst confronts the hysteric with the terrifying truth that there is no correct answer waiting to be found ‘out there’, it is not in order to produce a state of total relativity within which the subject is absolutely free to pick whatever answer he or she wishes. Rather, in alleviating him or her of the burden of searching for an adequate master, the psychoanalytic process shifts onto the subject the even greater burden of having to be his or her own master, of having to choose correctly for him- or herself. But, again, what can this correct choice be?

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A reflexive decision for responsibility While from the Lacanian psychoanalytic perspective the choice between character structures (hysteria and perversion) may be relative, the choice of whether or not to take responsibility for choosing is not. One choice – the choice for responsibility – is clearly privileged over the other. The subject did make a decision. What remains is simply for him or her to decide whether to acknowledge it as such, to sign off on the Law that he or she has legislated or to disavow it, to refuse to recognize his or her own will at work. And here psychoanalysis plays its most terrible trick on the subject, removing the last hiding place to which he or she has access: If the subject is not willing to take responsibility for his or her unconscious decision, if he or she insists that he or she chose no such thing, then the analyst offers him or her the opportunity to choose again, to choose differently. It is here that the first level of the choice with which the analyst confronts the analysand (the choice of equivalent particular contents within a neutral frame, of what character structure to adopt) comes into play. While the aim of psychoanalysis is to induce the subject to take responsibility for his or her decision, it achieves this aim by approaching its end, which is the (fleeting, unconscious, precious, initiatic) moment at which the decision itself is made. ‘You may choose to endorse the decision you have already made’, says the analyst to the analysand, ‘or you may decide on something else and endorse that decision, but either way, you will not escape responsibility.’ But there is a further confusion to be resolved here which concerns the status of this choice for or against taking responsibility. Is this choice conscious or unconscious? That is, is the subject asked to sign off in his or her conscious experience on the Law legislated by his or her unconscious (‘I acknowledge that it, my unconscious, has decided’,) or does the Law itself have to include a reference to the choice. (‘It, my unconscious, acknowledges that it has decided?’) If the logic of short circuit is to be followed to its end, it is this latter case that must be affirmed. It is not simply the subject’s conscious attitude towards his or her unconscious character structure that matters, but the attitude that the unconscious character structure itself takes towards the void that preceded it. Throughout Žižek’s work, there are many formulations that affirm this point, from the endlessly repeated joke about the man who knows he is not a seed of grain but is afraid that the chicken waiting outside does not, to the assertion that it is commodities themselves that behave as if they had special powers regardless of subjects’ knowledge to the contrary. In the context of the psychoanalytic clinic

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however, his formulation is as follows: ‘The true stake of the analytic treatment’, he writes, ‘is not … to convince the patient of the unconscious truth of his symptoms; the Unconscious itself must be induced to accept this truth.’7 Rather than staying at the level of changing one’s conscious (symbolic) relations to one’s unconscious (Real), it is vital to affirm that the unconscious (Real) can, indeed must, itself be intervened in. Thus, even if the subject chooses to stick with, to take responsibility for, the fantasy with which he or she began, this fantasy itself has to change at least minimally to take account of the choice as such. Even if the subject chooses exactly the same character structure, this structure must somehow retroactively take account of the subject’s responsibility for this choice. As such, the end of psychoanalysis, the (fleeting, precious, initiatic) moment at which the decision itself is made, is not simply a limit up against which the analyst presses the analysand in order to achieve its aim, the taking of responsibility. In order for this aim to be achieved, the end must, in fact, be traversed. The subject must undergo a minimal subjective destitution, a minimal unconscious re-choosing, which fundamentally changes the content of the choice itself, even if the same choice is made a second time. This re-choosing mirrors Deleuze’s notion of repetition and difference, a notion that Žižek endorses while simultaneously condemning Deleuze (or at least Guattari) as a philosopher of perversion. ‘Deleuzian “pure difference” at its purest…’ writes Žižek, ‘is a purely virtual difference of an entity which repeats itself as totally identical with regard to its actual properties, [but this] repetition … gives rise to a third, purely virtual element.’8 That is to say, the choice of exactly the same character structure a second time creates the third spectral element of responsibility, which haunts the second choice. And this notion of difference emerging through repetition arrives here just in time to indicate a solution to a problem that emerges from the above: How is the subject to choose correctly if he or she is destitute, essentially non-existent, when the choice is made? With the Deleuzian notion of repetition, one may suggest that the choice as such, when made a second time, cannot help but take itself into account. That is to say, the first choice, in which the subject emerged as such into social reality, was always a forced choice because nothing preceded it. The subject had to choose social inclusion in order to recognize him- or herself as a subject in the first place. But when made a second time, after the subject has subtracted him- or herself from social inclusion, even if it is exactly the same choice for inclusion again, the second choice has a radically different meaning than the first.

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The role of the analyst And this leads directly to the topic of the role played by the analyst. Why does the subject need the Other to address him or her with the discourse of the analyst? Why does the theory of psychoanalysis insist over and over again that self-analysis is not possible? Precisely because it is only the analytic discourse that opens up the space in which the subject is confronted – in practice, at the level of his or her unconscious decision-making, not just at the level of conscious abstraction – with the radical undecidability of the ethical question. That is to say, when a subject takes the step of traversing his or her fantasy (when he or she experiences the subjective destitution produced by undoing his or her interpellation through the big Other and his or her passionate attachment to fantasized scene of objectification), it is the presence of an Other making use of the discourse of the analyst (the Other’s silence, his or her unwillingness to provide any external support, alibi or guarantee for the decision as such) that has the effect of introducing the fact of decision-making into the unconscious decision itself. That is to say, the subject’s original choice for social inclusion, his or her original acceptance of the Law that structures the society in which he or she finds herself, was a forced choice not only in the sense that he or she had to choose it in order to come into existence as a subject in the first place, but also in the sense that it was delivered by the discourse of the master or the discourse of the university. Either it was a decision made by someone else (the master) or it was not a decision at all, but simply a fact of (the professor’s) knowledge. The second choice, however, the choice that follows the subject’s traversing of his or her fundamental fantasy, is a free choice both in the sense that the subject first chose to subtract him- or herself from social inclusion in order to make the choice and in the sense that the analyst’s refusal to supply a choice or a fact of knowledge for the subject to endorse forces him or her to acknowledge, at the unconscious level of the choice itself, that the only ground for the choice that he or she made was his or her subjective freedom. Is there a correct choice? Yes, it is the choice that affirms and reproduces the space of freedom, the choice to recognize oneself as having chosen, as being responsible. ‘The space of freedom is … my ability retroactively to choose/ determine what causes [Law/fantasy] will determine me’, writes Žižek, ‘ “Ethics”, at its most elementary, stands for the courage to accept this responsibility.’9 However, structurally, one cannot make this correct choice oneself. One requires

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it to be minimally imposed on one by an Other making use of the discourse of the analyst. But this imposition is not, cannot be, direct. If the Other simply commanded one to choose freedom and responsibility directly, the form of the command would undermine its content. Even if one agreed to endorse this commandment at a conscious level, at an unconscious level one could not help but register the fact that one did not choose for oneself but only obeyed (i.e. chose non-freedom). Rather, the Other can impose the correct choice only by providing the subject with a space in which he or she is absolutely free to choose. In this way, the Other creates a situation in which it is impossible to choose non-freedom, to make a choice which conceals the moment of choosing behind obedience to a command. It does, unfortunately, remain possible for the subject to refuse to choose at all, to remain with the forced choice that he or she originally made. And, as a brief aside, this possibility is one way to locate the two meanings of the word resistance. In its more colloquial, political sense, resistance refers to the subject’s refusal of the symbolic mandate imposed on him or her by a figure of the master (or professor) through the mechanism of a forced choice. But, as the new version of that old leftist problem asserts, to only resist the Law is to risk secretly sustaining it by complying with its obscene unspoken solicitations to transgression. In its psychoanalytic sense, resistance refers to the subject’s refusal to enter the space of destitution opened up by the discourse of the analyst. Here, the subject resists the moment at which he or she would be forced to accept ethical responsibility. Thus, while officially different, even opposed, both versions of resistance remain trapped within the deadlock between the symbolic mandate and the social superego, desire and the Law.

Part Five

Post-Analytic Subjects

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The Post-Analytic Subject 1: The Analyst

Lacanian ethics: Support freedom and responsibility as such I argued in the previous chapter that the liberatory promise of Lacanian psychoanalysis is based on the transformation of the analysand’s character structure from pre-analytic hysteria or perversion to post-analytic hysteria or perversion. In this chapter, I address the question of whether this transformation has any necessary effect on the way in which the analysand, the subject of a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis, relates to his or her Other. Is the subject’s acceptance of ethical responsibility for having chosen his or her character structure reflected in some kind of ethical behaviour, in the adoption of some particular discourse with which he or she addresses his or her Other, or are subjects free to treat their Others in any way, provided they are willing to accept ethical responsibility for it? This is a repetition of the question: Is it possible to take ethical responsibility for an act that is nonetheless unethical? Would Adolph Eichmann have been an ethical figure, provided he had taken subjective responsibility for his acts? And, as should be clear, this is an extremely difficult question insofar as, on the one hand, I wish to support Žižek’s assertion that the Nazi catastrophe can be structurally differentiated from the October Revolution in terms of a Lacanian ethics of liberation, while on the other hand, the positing of any universal criteria for ethical behaviour sounds suspiciously like a closing up of the space of freedom, a refusal to take responsibility. One way in which to open the space for an ethical standard that nonetheless insists on the subject’s responsibility is to turn to the distinction between intention and consequence. One of the key reasons that the ethical decision is terrifying is precisely because it will have consequences that the subject is only ever partially able to predict. For Žižek, who confirms Hegel’s critique of the position of the beautiful soul,1 good intentions do not redeem bad consequences.

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Although he affirms that ‘since I act in a situation which is ultimately opaque, and thus cannot control the consequences of my acts, all I can do is act with sincere intentions’,2 Žižek is nonetheless at pains to point out that what these intentions concern is their very consequences, so that when these intentions go wrong, and produce unintended consequences, it is not the opaque external situation that is to be blamed, but the subject’s own failure to understand this situation properly. As Žižek puts it in Tarrying with the Negative, ‘external circumstances are not an impediment to realizing inner potentials, but on the contrary the very arena in which the true nature of these inner potentials is to be tested’.3 What this implies is that one is ethically responsible both for one’s intentions and for the consequences of those intentions. In this sense, the imaginary self-responsible Eichmann might be partially redeemed, not as a figure of radical evil, but as someone who really wanted authentic liberation, and who is now willing to pay the price for the terrifyingly unethical consequences of his unbelievably flawed attempt to realize those intentions. However, this turn to the distinction between intention and consequence should not eclipse the challenge that my position implies for the decisionism of many of Žižek’s formulations of Lacanian (or Kantian) ethics. If the acceptance of ethical responsibility necessarily implies even a particular intention with regard to Other subjects, if it is not possible to take ethical responsibility for intending to behave unethically, then the Kantian categorical imperative does indeed imply a minimally determinate content. One can determine one’s ethical duty. The difficulty lies only in deciding how to go about attempting to realize this duty, and in accepting one’s responsibility for one’s failures in this regard. What is this duty? How can ethical behaviour be formulated in the context of (Žižek’s reading of) Lacanian theory? My position is once again that the subjective freedom and responsibility on which Lacan insists at the level of form (the level of the subject’s relation to his or her own character structure) is reflected into the level of content (the level of the subject’s relation to his or her Other). Once one has recognized the ethical necessity of subjective freedom and responsibility, one’s ethical standard in relation to other subjects cannot be anything other than those subjects’ own subjective freedom and responsibility. One’s ethical duty is to support the Other’s own ability to choose, and to take responsibility for having chosen, his or her own character structure. To be clear, the realization of this duty remains opaque. What supports this freedom? What does not? How can we be sure? There will also inevitably arise situations in which one must decide whether to risk taking away the subjective freedom of one or

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many subjects in an attempt to preserve others’, or even his/her/their own. In the pursuit of this intention, many unethical consequences will arise whose impact will not in any way be mitigated by the ethical intention behind them. But my position is that the ethical standard for judging intentions is clear: One must support a universal right to the subjective freedom and radical responsibility described by Lacanian theory.

The analyst In the remainder of this chapter, I will begin to develop what this ethical standard means for the character structures themselves, asking: If taking ethical responsibility implies (the intention of) treating the Other ethically, of supporting his or her subjective freedom, how do the post-analytic hysteric and the post-analytic pervert approach this task, respectively? Recall that in Chapter 10, I argued that Žižek’s mapping of the character structures onto the four fundamental discourses was fruitful, insofar as these discourses represent the ways in which each of the character structures tends to manifest its rejection of subjective responsibility (the pervert through the discourse of the university and the perverse social link, and the hysteric through the discourse of the hysteric). Here I will develop the opposite: What discourses will each of these character structures use to address its Other once it has accepted subjective responsibility? This will involve returning to the effects produced in each of these character structures by the discourse of the analyst. How does the discourse of the analyst encourage the hysteric and the pervert (or German Enlightenment idealism and postmodern French deconstructionism) to correct their use of the discourses (or their philosophies) respectively? Given the proximity that I have described between the perverse social link and the discourse of the analyst, is it not tempting to begin here with the assertion that, for a perverse subject, taking subjective responsibility must involve making the jump from one to the other? That is to say, would the post-analytic pervert not clearly be one who retains his or her relation to the Other, but drops the disavowal of antagonism in the Real that underpins this practice? Would he or she not be one who seeks to expose and undermine the Other’s reliance on an externally imposed Law, but without resorting to the injunction to enjoy, without directly valourizing what the subject already wants? Simply, would the post-analytic pervert not be precisely the psychoanalyst him- or herself?

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While Lacan clearly valourizes the discourse of the analyst (and the thus the position of the analyst itself) as ethical, I nonetheless believe that it should not be associated with post-analytic perversion. In fact, I wish to substitute the opposite argument: It is not the post-analytic pervert who is the psychoanalyst, but the post-analytic hysteric. That is to say, the result of taking responsibility for having chosen his or her character structure leads the hysteric, not the pervert, to adopt the discourse of the analyst. Why should this be so? Because in taking responsibility for having chosen his or her fantasy, the hysteric nonetheless retains the essential structure of that fantasy: an acceptance of the antagonism in the Real and the necessity of the act of defining it. While this structure remains the same, it is the hysteric’s subjective relation to that structure that changes: Instead of experiencing the perpetual failure of any figure of the master to successfully resolve the antagonism once and for all as a loss to be recuperated, the post-analytic hysteric comes to see the impossibility of resolving the antagonism as productive in itself, as the very condition of possibility for subjective freedom. Thus, while the hysteric’s fundamental relation to antagonism in the Real remains the same, in incorporating the notion of subjective responsibility, he or she changes in the way he or she addresses his or her Other. Instead of using the discourse of the hysteric to bombard the Other with impossible demands to be a sufficient master (or professor), the post-analytic hysteric uses the discourse of the analyst to create a space within which the Other can become a master for him- or herself alone, and can ‘make up the difference’ with a sign of subjective responsibility. Furthermore, recall that what the hysteric desires is a resolution of antagonism that would be universally valid. Again, a change in subjective position here transforms the failed desire for universality into a productive condition of its possibility. In my previous formulations, I argued that the discourse of the analyst implies a philosophy that would accept the Enlightenment notion that there is a universal structure of human subjectivity, as well as the traditional Marxist notion that there is one key struggle and a privileged actor who is charged with resolving it, but that it would accept these notions only in a negative way. That is to say, for this post-analytic philosophy there would be one key struggle, but it would be precisely the irresolvable struggle over what the key struggle is. There would be one privileged actor who is charged with resolving this struggle, but that actor would be the universal subject itself, residing within every individual. And, finally, there would be a universal structure of subjectivity and reality as such, but it would be precisely

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that they are open, without any guarantee, requiring a decision. My argument here is that the proper name for this philosophy is the philosophy of postanalytic hysteria. The essential structure of hysteria, the desire for a universal name for antagonism in the Real, remains. What has changed is the subjective relation that this fantasy takes towards itself. The failure of universality to accomplish itself becomes the universal as such.

Disavowal and responsibility? This assertion that the position of the analyst should be associated with post-analytic hysteria on the grounds that it must retain its essential structure – the recognition of antagonism in the Real and the necessity of naming it – underscores a serious difficulty on the other side of the equation: What can post-analytic perversion mean if perversion’s essential structure is disavowal? Does this disavowal not essentially concern antagonism in the Real, and is the psychoanalytic moment not concerned precisely with a recognition of the existence of that antagonism? How could one take subjective responsibility for an act of disavowal that seems to concern the basis for subjective responsibility itself? Is choosing to be perverse not the same as choosing non-freedom, as choosing not to take responsibility for having chosen? Here, it is tempting to see the logic of the awful trick that psychoanalysis plays on the subject returning with a vengeance. The analyst offers the analysand a space of absolute freedom of choice, but offers it with the secret knowledge that this freedom in itself imposes a particular kind of decision. In this space, the subject cannot make a decision that does not include within itself a reference to his or her free decision as such. He or she cannot avoid taking responsibility for whatever choice he or she makes. And in this sense, it is a forced choice. The subject is free to choose his or her character structure, but because this choice is presented in a totally free way, he or she cannot choose to have been forced to choose a particular character structure. Is it not tempting to read, as an iteration of this same strategy of forced choice, the character structure of perversion as a kind of lure, an illusory non-free option that the subject structurally cannot choose? What if Lacan insists that the analyst should not attempt to change the pervert’s character structure because secretly he knows that the only way to change the pervert’s character structure is for the pervert to change it him- or herself without outside interference? What if Žižek’s inclusion of the philosophy

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of perversion’s critique of the philosophy of hysteria is precisely this kind of lure, this kind of necessary but illusory supplement? What if he has included it because that is the only way to get his reader to choose the philosophy of hysteria for him- or herself, without outside interference? Clearly, my use of the term ‘temptation’ here once again foreshadows my rejection of this possibility, as does my repeated insistence that the critique of the philosophy of hysteria from the perspective of the philosophy of perversion is a thoroughly valid critique. Both hysteria and perversion in their preanalytic forms represent a rejection of responsibility, and, to take Lacan at his word, one must assert that each of them also has a post-analytic form that represents a taking of responsibility. To be sure, Žižek’s privileging of hysteria over perversion as ‘less wrong’ has a firm foundation in psychoanalytic theory. Recall that, for Freud, ‘the Unconscious is not accessible via perversions’.4 And this makes some sense in the context of my assertion that the psychoanalytic position should be equated with post-analytic hysteria. Insofar as the discourse of the analyst is a discourse employed by the post-analytic hysteric, it seems reasonable to expect that it addresses pre-analytic hysterics more easily than it does pre-analytic perverts. And while ‘it is extremely rare for a perverse subject to demand analysis’,5 this does not mean that they are not subject to it. The postanalytic pervert must be accounted for. The difficulty is in theorizing his or her position: What can disavowal mean if it is not a disavowal of subjective ethical responsibility? Again, it is important to note that, on a philosophical level, taking this question seriously challenges strong trends in Žižek’s own work. When Žižek asserts, with good reason, that philosophers of perversion who, ‘like Michel Foucault, advocate the subversive potential of perversions are sooner or later led to the denial of the Freudian Unconscious’,6 it is always tempting to assert that, from a Žižekian perspective, this denial should be rejected, while the importance of postmodern forms of inquiry (such as deconstruction or, in Foucault’s case, genealogy) should nonetheless be preserved. While the effectiveness of postmodern identity politics that valourize subversive multiplicity should be challenged, the postmodern critique of the exclusions built into Enlightenment universalism should nonetheless be taken seriously. And this is precisely what I have done in the preceding chapters. What one discovers here is that the postanalytic philosophy towards which this process of inheriting leads, what is left after one lays to rest the failed and guilty body of postmodern leftist philosophy in order to redeem its liberatory spirit, is precisely the philosophy of post-

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analytic hysteria. If there is a philosophy of post-analytic perversion, it must somehow redeem precisely that part of perversion which Žižek is most at pains to critique, the dirty bathwater that he attempts to throw away in order to save his clean Enlightenment baby: disavowal itself.

What are you disavowing? Here, several lines of Žižek’s argumentation converge to produce a solution. First, Žižek argues at several points that perversion is a socially constructive attitude. Indeed, this point often accompanies his criticism of the philosophy of perversion. Against the philosophers of perversion, Foucault and Deleuze, who believe that their practices are socially subversive, Žižek argues that in fact they are not. As I have noted again and again, he asserts that these practices fit the existing power constellation perfectly. However, there are also moments when Žižek valourizes the socially productive nature of disavowal as fundamentally necessary to sociality as such. ‘In our most intimate relationship with our neighbours we behave as if we do not know that they also smell bad, secrete excrement, and so on – a minimum of idealization, of fetishizing disavowal, is the basis of our coexistence.’7 In order to treat one’s neighbour as a fellow human being, in order to relate to him or her as an other subject, one must disavow a whole series of facts about him or her that one knows to be true: he or she shits and pisses, sweats and stinks. He or she is possessed by terrifying urges. He or she is perfectly capable at any moment of acts of murder, torture, rape and so on. And, if one accepts the notion that desire is the inverse of the Law, then he or she is even guaranteed to be fantasizing about doing just these things at any given moment. It is only by disavowing this knowledge, by wilfully ignoring it, that one is able to bear the Other’s presence at all, let alone offer him or her kindness and respect. Here, the argument that I pursued in Chapter 8 concerning belief returns with greater explanatory power: In order for sociality to exist as such, one must disavow knowledge of materiality, of reality, of cause and effect relations that structure the world of fact. In place of this knowledge, one must assert a series of fundamentally fictional beliefs about the Other, a series of symbolic fictions that have no basis in reality. And, in the contemporary conflict between postmodern scientific reason and fundamentalist religion, it is precisely this kind of belief that disappears. For the one side, everything that does not belong to the field of

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materiality, reality and cause and effect relations, must be eliminated as spurious illusion. For the other side, however, belief in God, in miracles, does not take the form of an assertion of fundamentally fictional beliefs, but the form precisely of knowledge of materiality, reality and cause and effect relations. God and miracles are facts. They simply exceed the knowledge offered by scientific reason. Insofar as both sides of this conflict are unable to disavow the other subject’s unbearable presence in favour of belief in a symbolic fiction, it is no wonder that they both experience that Other as a traumatic, harassing, fascinating presence. Belief proper disavows both of these forms of knowledge and asserts something that acknowledges itself as fundamentally unrealistic, counterintuitive, counterfactual. And here it is worth introducing two of Žižek’s key examples. First, there is Anne Frank ‘who, in her diaries, expresses belief in the ultimate goodness of mankind in spite of the horrors perpetrated against Jews in World War II: what makes such an assertion of belief … sublime is the very gap between it and the overwhelming factual evidence against it, that is, the active will to disavow the actual state of things’.8 Second, there is John Brown, who Žižek describes as the only consequent white fighter for black civil rights in the United States. ‘The early stages of the struggle against slavery in the USA … culminated in armed conflict between the gradualism of compassionate liberals and the unique figure of John Brown.’9 Here, one should acknowledge the truth in Žižek’s argument that the inequality perpetrated on black people in America is a real inequality. By refusing them education, political enfranchisement, rights to property and so on, the dominant white culture really did make black people less than equal. John Brown disavowed the realistic knowledge of his liberal contemporaries that the black people of America were not yet mature enough to participate as equals in the democratic political system, and in place of this knowledge practised what Žižek calls ‘the politics of prescription’.10 He asserted (prescribed) the fictional principle that all people, including the black people of the United States, were equal, and set about treating them as such, including arming them, allowing them to organize into a military body and the like. Is it not interesting that disavowal – the structural characteristic of perversion – finds itself on both sides of belief/knowledge divide? On the one hand, the disavowal that characterizes postmodern ideology is disavowal of antagonism in the Real in favour of material causality. By claiming that ethical norms are always minimally oppressive and valourizing the pursuit of idiosyncratic enjoyment, pre-analytic perversion disavows the traumatic heart

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of subjectivity: the anxious question ‘Che Vuoi?’, which pre-exists any particular identity or enjoyable fantasy. By reducing politics to the negotiation of interests by technocratic experts, pre-analytic perversion disavows both antagonism in the Real and the secret act of mastery by which that antagonism has already been resolved into a stable symmetrical difference, utilizing the discourse of the university to bombard its Other with superego knowledge about how to lead a pleasurable life. On the other hand, the belief characteristic of Anne Frank and John Brown disavows material causality in favour of a symbolic fiction. By disavowing the obvious conclusion from the evidence of the Holocaust that (at least many) human beings are essentially evil and irredeemable, Anne Frank opens up the space to assert a sublime optimism about the goodness of the human race. By disavowing the inferiority inflicted upon the black population of the United States, John Brown opens up the possibility of directly asserting their equality. Is it not worth exploring the possibility that this transformation in the object of disavowal represents the transition from pre-analytic to postanalytic perversion, that in retaining the essential structure of perversion while nonetheless transforming its ethical implications, Anne Frank and John Brown may represent the position of the post-analytic pervert? What remains to be seen is how this disavowal relates to subjective responsibility, and what discourse is implied by the assertion of a symbolic fiction.

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The Post-Analytic Subject 2: The Lover

The deadlock of desire vs. the deadlock of drive A second answer to the question of how the post-analytic pervert can retain the essential structure of disavowal while accepting subjective responsibility may be found in Žižek’s notion of an ethics of drive. For Žižek, as for Lacan, desire and drive are counter-posed as the two possible relations that subjects can take towards enjoyment, or jouissance. ‘Desire desperately strives to achieve jouissance, its ultimate object which forever eludes it; while drive, on the contrary, involves the opposite inability – not the impossibility of attaining jouissance, but the impossibility of getting rid of it.’1 What’s more, in ‘Passionate (Dis)Attachments’ Žižek asserts that there is a direct connection between the opposition desire/drive and the opposition hysteria/perversion: ‘If desire “as such” is hysterical, drive “as such” is perverse.’2 What I wish to argue, then, is, first, that the taking of responsibility for the hysteric, the move from pre-analytic hysteria to post-analytic hysteria, involves a change in the subject’s relation to desire. Instead of searching desperately for an ultimately satisfying resolution to antagonism in the Real, he or she acknowledges that the very irresolution of antagonism in the Real is ground for productive subjective decision-making and ethics. But, second, I wish to argue that the taking of responsibility for the pervert, the move from pre-analytic perversion to post-analytic perversion, must involve a parallel change in the subject’s relation to drive. Let me begin here with the way in which I have been describing the desire inherent in the philosophy of hysteria: the desire for a universal framework of understanding that would be externally guaranteed, that would be true for everyone and that would therefore be able to resolve antagonism in the Real once and for all. At a certain level, I believe that it is precisely this lost object of enjoyment that the philosophy of perversion is always trying (unsuccessfully) to be rid of. Recall that the strategy of disavowal that I have described as inherent in the philosophy of perversion is precisely the strategy of disavowing

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antagonism as such, and thus disavowing the need for a universal framework that would resolve it. From the perspective of the philosophy of perversion, it is precisely the notion of a universal framework of understanding that grounds the most oppressive and exclusionary practices of power. Thus, the pre-analytic philosopher of perversion occupies him- or herself with deconstructing, with undermining and displacing, every particular attempt to produce a universally valid framework of understanding. Or, to use another language I have introduced, while the philosophy of hysteria is concerned with correctly locating the line of aggravation, with determining once and for all who should/ can be mediated with as part of a just, liberated society and who should/can be eliminated as the fundamental enemy of justice and liberation, the philosophy of perversion sees aggravation itself as the very definition of injustice and oppression, and thus attempts a kind of universal mediation, or an elimination of aggravation as such. The reintroduction of the language of enjoyment here points to the fact that the problem faced by the philosophy of pre-analytic perversion is the impossibility inherent in drive as such, the impossibility of getting rid of enjoyment. While the critique of the philosophy of hysteria made from the perspective of the philosophy of perversion is valid, the philosophy of perversion nonetheless tends to get caught in its own trap. That is to say, although the philosophy of perversion is correct in its accusation that the notion of a universally valid framework is oppressive and exclusionary, that it generates enjoyment, enjoyment nonetheless sticks to everything. The very procedures officially designed to get rid of enjoyment inevitably become infused with it. And the two ways to illustrate this problem are once again to be identified with the discourse of the university and the perverse social link. On the side of the discourse of the university, there is liberal tolerant multiculturalism which attempts to produce total mediation. Unfortunately, its politically correct disciplinary procedures themselves become infused with sadomasochistic enjoyment. On the side of the perverse social link, there is the figure of the deconstructionist who secretly privileges his or her own position as safe, immune from deconstruction, and is thereby able to derive a perverse enjoyment from the discomfort of others who are subjected to his or her ministrations. The conclusion that Žižek draws from this argument, however, is not that the philosophy of perversion and the logic of drive are hopelessly flawed, but on the contrary that they can provide a way out of the deadlock of desire on condition that one makes a subjective shift. Recall that the solution for hysteria is to change

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one’s subjective stance, so that the impossibility of desire is transformed from an insurmountable obstacle to the very condition for subjective freedom. Here, the same logic should be asserted: The solution for perversion, the shift from the philosophy of pre-analytic perversion to the philosophy of post-analytic perversion, involves changing one’s subjective stance so that the impossibility of getting rid of enjoyment, the impossibility of getting rid of the imbalance and exclusion that sticks to universal frameworks, transforms from an insurmountable obstacle into the very condition for liberation. Just as the postanalytic hysteric accepts the impossibility of achieving enjoyment, of resolving antagonism in the Real once and for all, the post-analytic pervert accepts the impossibility of getting rid of enjoyment, of getting rid of the various particular perspectives that fail to resolve antagonism in the Real.

The ethics of drive: I Love You! Instead of attempting to undermine the particular frameworks of Others that mistakenly present themselves as universal, and thereby inadvertently asserting his or her own privileged position of universality, the post-analytic pervert makes the move of directly asserting particularity as such. As Žižek puts it at the beginning of the documentary Žižek!, if ‘what we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe…’ that is to say, if the universe is structured by an antagonism that cannot be resolved by any universal framework of understanding, then the only way to counteract it is to assume the mistake and go to the end. And we have a name for this. It’s called love … Love for me is an extremely violent act. Love is not ‘I love you all.’ Love means I pick out something and [this act of picking repeats the] 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.’3

The post-analytic pervert takes the impossibility inherent in drive as his or her starting point and comes to a radical conclusion: One cannot be rid of enjoyment, of non-functional excess. As such, what one should endeavour to get rid of is not enjoyment as such, but precisely universality. And the only way to get rid of universality is to directly assert enjoyment, particularity and imbalance. In order to escape from the doomed pursuit of universality, one

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must choose one particular thing, one person, one fragile detail and enjoy it in an excessive, repetitive, non-functional, sexualized way (to the exclusion of all else). Žižek develops the difference between a love based on the logic of desire and a love based on the logic of drive in two different places: first, in The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, and, second, in the lecture ‘Respect for Otherness? No Thanks!’ What is made clear in The Neighbour is the way in which a declaration of excessive love for one particular object provides a way out of the deadlock of universality. ‘I love you all’ [the declaration of a universal love, a love based on the logic of desire] acquires the level of actual existence only if ‘there is at least one whom I hate’ – a thesis abundantly confirmed by the fact that universal love for humanity always led to the brutal hatred of the (actually existing) exception, of the enemies of humanity. This hatred of the exception is thus the ‘truth’ of universal love, in contrast to true love [love based on the logic of drive] which can only emerge against the background – not of universal hatred, but – of universal indifference: I am indifferent toward All, the totality of the universe, and as such, I actually love you.4

In the logic of desire, the good, love, has the character of a neutral universal framework which will allow for the peaceful co-existence of all, a framework within which enjoyment will not be allowed. As such, enjoyment is the remainder that is necessarily externalized onto an exception, someone who does not deserve universal love but instead various enjoyable practices of oppression, exclusion, discipline and punishment. In the logic of drive, however, the good, love, has precisely the character of exception and enjoyment. Here, it is love itself that is excessive, non-functional, violent and painful. And, as such, it is the remainder of indifference and neutrality that is externalized onto all the others, totality as such. What is made clear in ‘Respect for Otherness…’ is how the notion of universal love relates to the more colloquial notion of love as an expression of desire: the notion that the loved object is a more-or-less satisfactory stand-in for the impossible, primordially lost object of ultimate satisfaction. Drive has not the structure of, ‘The original object is lost. I try to recuperate it.’ No, drive is the very gesture of cut, of loss as such. In other words, it’s not that … because you cannot get the absolute Thing, you got stuck onto a particular object. Drive is this very cut where, instead of being immersed into totality,

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I cling to a particular object and I say, ‘this means to me more than everything else’. I introduce a cut, an imbalance. For example, let’s say … you are in love with a certain person. If this remains within the structure of desire, then you can play these cheap games … (Permit me to slip back into male chauvinist perspective). ‘Every empirical woman is just an ersatz for an impossible maternal object,’ all this boring stuff and so on. But, if your love is true radical love at the level of drive, then the woman that you love is the thing itself in a way. It’s not an ersatz. This pseudo psychoanalytic shit, like ‘You really love your mother,’ isn’t it … Drive is this move: ‘I love you!’5

What should be clear here is that love based on the logic of desire is always love grounded in, motivated by, the loved object’s correspondence to the characteristics of the lost object. It is in this way that the object of love structured by desire is an ersatz, a more-or-less unsatisfactory replacement for the truly satisfying lost Thing. And in the same way that the more or less unsatisfactory universal framework for resolving antagonism in the Real necessarily generates a remainder of excessive hatred, the same is true for this more romantic version of love insofar as it remains based on the logic of desire: One cannot help but explode with rage and despair when the loved object fails to live up to the expectations of desire, displays its lack of correspondence with the characteristics of the (impossible) lost object. The move of drive is thus, once again, to drop all reference to the lost object as such, and to assert in its place a radical fidelity to the very unsatisfying really existing object. ‘I don’t care whether you resemble the object of my desire!’, says the post-analytic pervert, ‘I don’t care about your characteristics! I love you directly, no matter what you are like!’ Thus, what is key to the ethics of drive is that the declaration of love must occur outside of any criteria of justification, and it is here that I believe one should return to the topics of disavowal and fiction. First, in the relationship of love structured by the ethics of drive, one disavows the realistic, factual, cause and effect criteria that would determine one’s desire for the object. Antagonism in the Real guarantees that no matter how perfect the correspondence between one’s desire and the object that fills it out, the object will always have one more characteristic that breaks the symmetry, spoils the correspondence, leaves one’s desire unsatisfied. The solution of the post-analytic pervert to this impasse is to make the move of disavowing desire as such, refusing the very desire for correspondence. Second, in place of the disavowed desire, the post-analytic pervert asserts a purely fictional direct love of the object itself. And to be very clear, the fiction here concerns, at a certain level, the existence of the object

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as such. At the level of factual, material reality, every human being is only a collection of characteristics (that are necessarily inadequate to the space of desire, incapable of being ultimately satisfying). The existence of the object of love structured by drive, an object that it takes without any of its characteristics, is therefore essentially fictional. At another level, and this connection will become clearer later on, the non-existent something to which the post-analytic pervert declares his or her love is the nothingness that is subjectivity as such. It is the void of subjectivity, the radically free capacity to (re-)choose what causes (fundamental fantasy) will determine the subject’s actions. What the postanalytic pervert declares his or her love for is precisely the object’s capacity to take subjective responsibility.

What discourse is love? If my assertion here is correct, if the ethics of drive represents the stance of the post-analytic pervert, it remains to be seen how it is to be differentiated from preanalytic perversion at the level of the discourses. Recall that the difficult question I am in the midst of attempting to answer is the question of how the taking of subjective responsibility at an unconscious level affects the way in which subjects relate to their Others. I have made the case that the post-analytic pervert should not be identified as the analyst, but rather as the lover, but what discourse does this position make use of? First, the pervert clearly must give up the perverse social link. In the post-analytic state, this discursive structure becomes the province of the hysteric, whose acceptance of the existence of antagonism in the Real and the necessity of the act of naming transforms the perverse social link into the discourse of the analyst. Disavowal, the essential structure of perverse fantasy, condemns the pervert, in his or her use of this discourse, to expose and undermine every universal structure, even the negative universalism that I have described as underpinning the position of the post-analytic hysteric. For the philosopher of perversion, it is only too easy to deconstruct even this reflexive universal structure. And it is precisely this excessive deconstruction that Žižek (and Ernesto Laclau) accuses Judith Butler of performing in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues of the Left: attempting to historicize, to deconstruct, antagonism in the Real as such. In response to what he reads as Butler’s attempt to deconstruct the ahistorical bar of the Real – that is, antagonism as such – as part of contingent historicity, Žižek writes:

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The opposition between an ahistorical bar of the Real and thoroughly contingent historicity is … a false one: it is the very ‘ahistorical’ bar as the internal limit of the process of symbolization that sustains the place of historicity. That, in my view, is the fundamental misunderstanding: in Laclau’s terms, Butler systematically (mis)reads antagonism (which is impossible-real) as (symbolic) difference/ opposition.6

That is to say, Butler takes the process of deconstruction, which challenges the Other to renounce his or her particular perspective on antagonism in the Real, and applies it to the notion of antagonism in the Real as such, implying that the existence of antagonism in the Real is one of many (an infinite number) of historical misperceptions produced by (necessarily flawed) particular perspectives. Or, as Žižek puts it in the language of psychoanalysis, the perverse position ultimately leads one to disavow (or at least to deconstruct, to relativize) the existence of the Freudian unconscious. And the problem is that, if one accepts the link I have made here between psychoanalysis and deconstruction, it is precisely the Freudian unconscious that grounds the subject’s ability to be deconstructed, to re-choose his or her fundamental fantasy. If one deconstructs this foundation, one loses the very ground for the practice of psychoanalytic deconstruction as such. Second, however, the pervert must also give up the discourse of the university. The philosopher of perversion must give up the post-political, politically correct identity politics of inclusion that relies in a disavowed secret way on a universal, and therefore necessarily exclusionary, vision of society. That is to say, the ethics of drive does resemble the emphasis on particularity and partial projects that characterizes postmodern identity politics. The problem is that identity politics typically does not go far enough in its celebration of particularity. It continues to rely on the notion that all particularities, all differences, are equally important, are equal in relation to some neutral framework. And this equality already sneaks in through a back door a version of universality that produces exclusion. It is this equality that the philosopher of perversion must dispense with. He or she should not valourize partial or political projects as such, but precisely a particular project. Yes, the act of love involves asserting fidelity to a particular object, but for this assertion of fidelity to conform to the structure of the ethics of drive, it must be at the expense of fidelity to all other objects, no matter how particular and partial those other objects might also be. Here one should return to my earlier critique of the practice of deconstruction concerning its failure to deconstruct its own position, the paradoxical necessity of taking some statements

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at face value if one is to refuse to take any statements at face value. The discourse of the analyst enjoins the pervert to take responsibility for choosing which one statement to take at face value, for choosing which one particular, partial project to assert his or her fidelity to over all the others. It is this fidelity to a particular object that grounds the post-analytic pervert’s activity, not the negative gesture of undermining and deconstructing the universalizing, levelling projects of the philosophy of pre-analytic hysteria. But what discourse should the ethics of drive be mapped onto? Clearly, it is not the discourse of the hysteric, given that this discourse is always dominated by the logic of desire. The only remaining option seems to be the discourse of the master. Can this conclusion be correct? Here it may be useful to recall that one of the formulations that I have used again and again for what it means that the discourse of the analyst encourages its Other to take responsibility is that it encourages the Other to be his or her own master. The post-analytic pervert is the one who makes precisely this move (whereas the post-analytic hysteric in some sense avoids it by taking on the role of the analyst him- or herself). He or she makes a choice, declares his or her fidelity, but does not make any claim to have resolved the antagonism as such, to have found an adequate answer that all the Others should adopt. He or she does not confront his or her Other with a series of material, factual characteristics of the loved object in order to demonstrate its adequacy (the discourse of the university), neither does he or she threaten or cajole the others into loving it (the discourse of the master). Rather, he or she acknowledges that there are no good reasons for loving the object, but loves it anyway, or more precisely directly because of this inadequacy. I propose that, in parallel with my assertion that the discourse of the analyst is a genus with two subspecies (the perverse social link and itself as its own subspecies), the discourse of the master is also a genus with two subspecies: the discourse of the master as its own subspecies and the declaration of love. And the difference between the declaration of love and the discourse of the master is to be located in the same place as the difference between the discourse of the analyst and the perverse social link: their respective attitudes towards antagonism in the Real. While the discourse of the master is concerned with resolving antagonism in the Real once and for all, the ethics of drive is concerned with asserting it directly. The declaration of love dispenses with the logic of resolution and adequacy from the outset. Recall that the master makes a tautological gesture that is designed to conceal his or her own inadequacy, but

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fails. He or she says, effectively, ‘Do such and such (because I say so)! And stop asking questions!’ to which the hysteric responds, ‘Why should I? (Give me a better reason)!’ The post-analytic pervert makes a similarly tautological gesture, but one that is designed to reveal his or her responsibility, and he or she therefore succeeds. He or she says, effectively, ‘I am going to do such and such for no other reason than that I have decided to love this object! You can ask whatever you like! I have no good answer!’, which effectively transforms the hysterical question from an undermining threat into a positive condition. Whereas the master uses his or her power in an attempt to conceal his or her impotence, the post-analytic pervert uses his or her impotence as the very basis of his or her power. Here, one might assert that the post-analytic pervert is the one who fully realizes Kant’s notion that it is man’s finitude that provides the conditions of possibility for ethics as such.

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Post-Analytic Philosophies

Combined starting assumptions At this point, I would like to return to the deadlock that I set up in the Introduction chapter between the two tempting assumptions from which it is possible to approach the task of defining the problem of subjectivity and political liberation: on the one hand the assumption that there is a correct definition of subjectivity and liberation that can be arrived at through a certain amount of theoretical work, and on the other hand the assumption that there is no correct definition, that all definitions are necessarily flawed and therefore equal. As I have argued throughout this book, I believe that the characterizations that Žižek develops in The Ticklish Subject of Enlightenment thought (as the philosophy of hysteria) and postmodern thought (as the philosophy of perversion) can be read as the branches of leftist political theory that make these first and second tempting assumptions, respectively. Here I wish to tackle the question of what assumption is made by the subject of a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis. What is the ‘correct’ starting assumption implied by the Lacanian ethics I have outlined? What I wish to suggest is that the same Hegelian logic of short circuit with which I produced definitions of post-analytic hysteria and post-analytic perversion can be used here to define the ‘correct’ starting assumption of a post-analytic form of philosophy. That is to say, in the same way that neurosis, perversion and psychosis (each ‘incorrect’, requiring psychoanalysis) form a logical knot that covers the entire field, excluding other possibilities, the two starting assumptions I set up in my introduction seem to be caught in an irresolvable deadlock. As long as one remains at the level of the neutral form (of starting assumptions) filled out by particular content (the two possible options), there is no other correct assumption waiting to be discovered. However, when one introduces the logic of short circuit, suggesting that content and form may be mutually implicated, that a genus may reappear as one of its own subspecies,

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a solution begins to emerge. That is to say, the moment one shifts focus from the assumptions themselves to the neutral frame that contains them, asking ‘is one of these assumptions correct, or are they equally incorrect?’, interesting consequences begin to emerge. There are suddenly two levels in operation: the formal level at which one either searches for a correct assumption or accepts that all assumptions are equally flawed, and the level of content at which one decides between the assumption that there is a correct answer out there waiting to be discovered, or one assumes that there is no correct answer. The content is reflected into the form itself. What this strange redoubling opens up is the possibility that one may choose one starting assumption at the formal level, and either the same starting assumption at the level of content (itself as its own subspecies) or its opposite. And to jump directly to my conclusion, it is precisely the possibility of choosing different assumptions at the level of form and at the level of content that I believe grounds the possibility of a ‘correct’ starting assumption. Indeed, it grounds two correct starting assumptions, one corresponding to the character structure of post-analytic hysteria and the other corresponding to the character structure of post-analytic perversion. The former I have already defined. Recall my suggestion that the philosophy of post-analytic hysteria would accept the Enlightenment notion that there is a universal structure of human subjectivity, as well as the traditional Marxist notion that there is one key struggle and a privileged actor who is charged with resolving it, but that it would accept these notions only in a negative way. That is to say, the one key struggle would be precisely the irresolvable struggle over what the key struggle is. The one privileged actor would be the universal subject itself, residing within every individual. And the universal structure of subjectivity and reality as such would be that they are open, without any guarantee, requiring a decision. Is it not clear that this corresponds to the notion that, at a formal level, there is a correct starting assumption, but at the level of content, this correct answer is empty? The assumption that there is no correct answer waiting to be discovered is, in itself, the correct assumption. To be clear, this definition of the philosophy of post-analytic hysteria is very close to the definition of pre-analytic perversion. Is this not precisely the accusation that Žižek levels at the philosophers of perversion: that they claim to abandon the project of developing a universalizing framework, discovering a correct answer, all the while secretly privileging the place of neutral deconstruction from which they speak? The difference here is that

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the philosopher of post-analytic hysteria does away with this secrecy, does not disavow the need for an (empty, negative) universalizing framework. This proximity between the post-analytic hysteric and the pre-analytic pervert is a reflection of my assertion that the post-analytic hysteric is the subject who mobilizes the discourse of the analyst, which is nearly identical to the perverse social link mobilized by the pre-analytic pervert. While the philosopher of postanalytic hysteria will agree that every universalizing framework is minimally oppressive, he or she will assert that this is the condition of possibility for the subject’s responsibility to choose a framework that overcomes oppression (and his or her failure to do so). One should detect here a link to Žižek’s self-confessed Eurocentrism, his assertion that, although Enlightenment universality was historically used to justify colonialism and oppression, it nonetheless carried within it a liberatory potential: the notion that everyone, including Europeans themselves, should tear themselves free from immersion in their culture, and take ethical subjective responsibility.

The beloved object: Anne Frank and John Brown vs. multiculturalism The philosophy of post-analytic perversion proves much more difficult to formulate in terms of the two starting assumptions that I have described, insofar as it resuscitates the problematic deadlock of Lacanian ethics. As I have suggested, I wish to assert that the philosophy of post-analytic perversion is structured by a combined assumption that has the second tempting assumption as its form and the first tempting assumption as its content. At a certain level, this formulation is fairly straightforward: Insofar as the post-analytic pervert is the lover, he or she declares his or her fidelity to (raises to the level of a universal good, treats as the correct answer) some contingent, flawed, partial object (which is not the correct answer or universal good in any factual way, because at the factual level there isn’t one). And again, in contrast to pre-analytic hysteria, this elevation of contingency is not in any way concealed or covered over. The post-analytic pervert makes explicit, all the way along, that the object of his or her love is not truly universal. Unlike the discourse of the master mobilized by the pre-analytic hysteric, the declaration of love mobilized by the post-analytic pervert does not demand that all other subjects adopt his or her beloved object as the factually correct answer. It asserts mastery only for the post-analytic pervert him- or herself.

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However, a difficult question emerges here when one asks how this particular object is chosen. Clearly, it is not on the basis of any factual sufficiency – the post-analytic pervert does not declare his or her love to an object on the grounds of its resemblance to the perfect, correct object. This would be to follow the logic of desire. But if this is the case, the only other possible mode of choosing seems to be absolute decisionism. And once again decisionism is ruled out in the framework of Lacanian ethics as tied to the haunting spectre of psychosis. What one confronts here is the flip side of the problematic question: What is one to take subjective responsibility for? In the same way that all criteria for choosing one’s character structure (including absolute decisionism) seem to be ruled out in advance, so too do all criteria for choosing an object of love. To what object is one to declare one’s fidelity? In seeking for an ethical standard by which to judge the object of the postanalytic pervert’s love, perhaps the best approach is to return to the examples that I referred to earlier in my description of the ethics of drive: John Brown and Anne Frank. What is particularly useful about these two examples is the way in which they challenge and subvert the demands of liberal tolerant multiculturalism. That is to say, insofar as liberal tolerant multiculturalism is a pre-analytic perverse ideological framework, its (greater or lesser) inability to assimilate Anne Frank and John Brown as ethical figures may indicate how their respective beloved objects conform to the ethics of drive, the ethics of postanalytic perversion. What should immediately strike the eye in this context is the strange asymmetry between the two examples. On the one hand, it is all too easy for liberal tolerant multiculturalism to identify Anne Frank as certainly an ethical figure, insofar as she is a defenceless, innocent girl asserting her love for humanity as such. On the other hand, John Brown is much more difficult to endorse because of his turn to violent political struggle. Yet, if one focuses on the objects to which these two figures assert their love, these terms are (more or less) reversed. On the one hand, Anne Frank’s beloved object threatens to include liberal tolerant multiculturalism’s favourite figure of ultimate evil: the Nazi henchman himself. On the other hand, John Brown’s beloved object, the black people of the United States, is clearly a much more likely candidate for multiculturalist political fidelity. What I believe one should detect here is both the figure of the big Other and the structure of fundamental fantasy. On the one hand, Anne Frank and the black people of the United States are acceptable ethical figures for liberal multiculturalist ideology precisely because they fit into the fundamental fantasy

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as images of the innocent, helpless victim, reduced to an object of enjoyment by an omnipotent Other. They become stand-ins for the subject him- or herself in the primordial masochistic scene, and therefore justify the need for the intervention of the pacifying Law. And while the Law asserted by liberal tolerant multiculturalism aims to protect these figures, it does not aim to allow them to choose and take responsibility for their own mode of enjoyment. Rather, it aims to keep them in a state of pure non-enjoyment. This Law aims (officially) at a situation of peaceful co-existence within which there will no longer be any enjoyment. On the other hand (and this amounts to the same thing) Anne Frank and the black people of the United States are also acceptable ethical figures for liberal multiculturalist ideology because they fit the image of the subject supposed to believe, the big Other who should be protected from knowing about the enjoyable (excessive, sexualized, non-functional and even sadomasochistic) acts that sustain the symbolic Law itself. Here, they represent the ideal of peaceful co-existence, which can be sustained only insofar as enjoyment, which is inescapable, is enacted without their knowledge.

The politics of prescription and the Nazi Henchman If the declaration of love is to escape from the logic of pre-analytic perverse ideology, it must escape from this deadlock between the enjoyable fundamental fantasy and the postmodern big Other. Insofar as it is the subjective responsibility for freely choosing one’s own mode of enjoyment that postmodern ideology is at pains to disavow, the beloved objects chosen by Anne Frank and John Brown must be, in some sense, turned on their heads: It is precisely those features that make these objects difficult for liberal tolerant multiculturalism to assimilate that make them ethical objects from the perspective of post-analytic perversion. On the one hand, John Brown is difficult for liberal tolerant ideology to endorse because he breaks with the logic of ethics as peaceful co-existence. What John Brown’s willingness to arm the black people of the United States demonstrates is a willingness to make them responsible for choosing their own mode of enjoyment. That is to say, the risk that they too will choose to be oppressive, exclusionary or excessively violent is the very condition of possibility of their ethical freedom and responsibility. Any attempt to rescue the black people of the United States from their oppressors’ enjoyment while simultaneously enforcing their own non-enjoyment continues to deny them the ethical ‘heavy burden’

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of responsibility. By actually transferring the means of enjoyment (in this case literally weapons) to the black people of the United States, John Brown places the heavy burden of responsibility for enjoyment onto their shoulders, making them responsible, to make use once again of Kantian language, for becoming their own masters. Conversely, Anne Frank is an acceptable ethical figure for liberal tolerant ideology precisely insofar as her beloved object is not a Nazi henchman as such, but the human race in general. That is to say, liberal tolerant ideology identifies ethics with precisely the kind of universal love that Žižek explicitly rules out in his definition of the ethics of drive. Liberal tolerant ethics is the universal love that has as its obverse an intense hatred of some excessive remainder (Nazi henchmen for example), against whom various enjoyable disciplinary practices must be mobilized. The ethics of drive, in order to generate universal indifference as its obverse, makes the move of asserting excessive love for some particular object. Thus, Žižek’s reading of Anne Frank’s status as an ethical figure is sustained only by reading her declaration of love as applying to precisely to a particular object, and what better object than the Nazi henchman himself? This strange possibility should be read as symmetrical to John Brown’s declaration of love for the black people of the United States: Insofar as Anne Frank loves the Nazi henchman, it is precisely on account of his potential to take subjective responsibility for his freedom – precisely what he, like Eichmann, fails to do so long as he continues to rely on the Fuhrer’s orders to determine his duty. Is this form of love not, in the end, the most dramatic possible condemnation of the Nazi henchman? It is here that one should locate Žižek’s assertion that what is properly horrifying about the Nazis is not that they were monsters, but that they were human, all too human: Auschwitz is the ultimate argument against the romanticized notion of ‘diabolical Evil,’ of the evil hero who elevates Evil into an a priori principle [that is, someone who chooses Evil as their Law and who takes responsibility for this choice]. As Hannah Arendt was right to emphasize, 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.1

Each individual Nazi henchman was neither an irresponsible, blind machine, incapable of ethical behaviour, nor a figure of Byronesque Evil who took radical responsibility for his or her unethical choice. Rather, every Nazi had within

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him- or herself the potential to tear him- or herself free from the particular mode of irresponsibility that was offered to him or her by the nation-state. And it was the failure of Nazi henchmen to take this responsibility that led to the catastrophe of Auschwitz. Read in this way, Anne Frank’s love continues to mark the moment of failure which was not unavoidable, which was precisely the responsibility of the Nazi henchmen themselves.

The beloved object is the subject The question remains here, however: How does this attitude of treating the loved object as a subject amount to an ethical standard for measuring the object of love? If the post-analytic pervert defies one’s spontaneous desire for a guarantee that the object of his or her love is really, materially, an ethical object, does he or she not effectively refuse any ethical standard? How does this definition of postanalytic perversion differ from simple decisionism? The first step to answering this question is to recall that what the post-analytic pervert asserts in place of disavowed material, factual knowledge is something that has the structure of a fiction. That is to say, the object to which the post-analytic pervert asserts his or her fidelity is essentially a fictional object. It is an object of belief. To use the Derridean language I introduced in my first chapter, the post-analytic pervert disavows the failed and guilty body of the real, material object with which he or she is confronted, and in its place asserts his or her fidelity to the redemptive spirit that waits within this object as a kind of pure potentiality. As such, if one is to challenge, for example, Anne Frank’s choice of a Nazi henchman as her object of love, it must not be on the basis of the Nazi henchman’s material, factual, unethical behaviour. Anne Frank’s love is directly based on a disavowal of that factuality and refers instead to a potentiality that may well remain, at present, unfulfilled. In order to provide an ethical standard for measuring the object of love, one must thus refer not to the factual material object itself, but to the fictional object that is asserted in its place. It is this fictional object that can be measured against an ethical standard that corresponds to the ethics of drive. That is to say, the key question is not ‘What is the failed and guilty body within which you assert waits the redemptive spirit?’ but rather, ‘What is the redemptive spirit that you assert waits within that body?’ The key difference, the ethical standard as such, is to be located in the potentiality the lover asserts exists within his or her loved object.

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What is this potentiality? What is the ethical object loved by the post-analytic pervert? It is, in essence, the Lacanian subject as such. It is the subject who is capable of deciding in a radically free way and of taking responsibility for his or her decision. It is worth returning here for a moment to Žižek’s use, when he is describing Anne Frank and John Brown, of the term ‘equality’. What makes Anne Frank and John Brown ethical figures for Žižek is their assertion that their respective objects of love are worthy of an equality that is denied to them. But the key question is ‘what is this equality?’ The term ‘equality’ is an ambivalent one, precisely because it can be used to describe both liberal tolerant multiculturalism, with its structure of fundamental fantasy and reliance on a figure of the big Other, and what I have called the ethics of drive, which breaks with these structures and figures. And I believe this ambivalence should be linked straight away to Žižek’s ambivalence over the universal emancipation promised by Enlightenment thinking. It is all too easy to define the universal emancipation promised by Enlightenment thinking as precisely the kind of peaceful co-existence and tolerant equality that is produced by a neutral framework. And in the context of this kind of neutral framework, what characterizes the objects to which Anne Frank and John Brown assert their fidelity, the Nazi henchman and the black people of the United States, is that these are cases in which universality threatens to break down. These are cases in which any tolerant liberal would say (even did say, historically, in the case of the black people of the United States), ‘these are not the people I had in mind when I suggested universal emancipation. They are not yet ready for it. They themselves do not (yet) respect the notion of universal emancipation’. That is to say, these are precisely the ‘enemies of humanity’ that are produced by the universal love of humanity. Because the black people of the United States have really been rendered less than equal by their enslavement, because the Nazis have transgressed all bounds of human decency in pursuit of their ideological dream, these become cases in which a neutral, universal framework that allows for peaceful co-existence determines that it should intervene and limit equality, limit universalism. It is also in this context that one should return to Žižek’s admission that universal rights have historically turned out to be an imaginary lure, a screen that covers the actual assertion of the rights of European, white, male property owners. It is precisely by excluding certain troublesome exceptions that the universalism of human rights is able to constitute itself. It is only be referring to some extreme enemy that universal love can be sustained. However, it is in

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the face of this falsity of universalism that Žižek nonetheless asserts that the illusion of universal rights has its own efficiency, has an emancipatory potential. However, one should be very careful here. The way that he describes this potential is as an Archimedean point from which to bombard the existing power structure with demands for actual, rather than imaginary, equality.2 What one must do immediately at this point is to reject this formula of bombarding the existing power structure with demands for inclusion. This is precisely the formula of the discourse of the hysteric. This is the discourse used by the philosophy of pre-analytic hysteria, which secretly gives voice to a demand for a new, adequate master. If the illusion of universal rights has some emancipatory potential, it must not be at the level of demanding inclusion within the existing neutral framework. It must provide the coordinates for breaking out of that framework. Here, one should return to what Žižek calls the politics of prescription. Instead of demanding inclusion within the existing universal framework, which, even if successful, will only shift the excessive hatred and exclusion produced by this system onto some other subject or social group, the ethics of drive directly enacts equality as a supposition, a prescriptive starting point from which to act. The ethics of drive is able to accomplish its acts precisely because it disavows, suspends, any reference to the existing power structure, or to the desire for an adequate master who would be able to resolve antagonism in the Real into peaceful co-existence once and for all. It is by disavowing the desire for peaceful co-existence that the ethics of drive is able to assert equality and universalism precisely in the places where the logic of equality and universalism demands that equality and universalism be suspended. Contrary to the politics of liberal gradualism, which is willing to sacrifice the immediate enfranchisement of excluded subjects in order to ensure the stability of the neutral framework itself, the ethics of drive, in its mode as the politics of prescription, is willing to sacrifice the neutral framework itself in favour of immediate enfranchisement, in favour of immediately treating subjects as free and responsible.

Part Six

Liberated Societies

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Liberated Societies 1: A Universal Right to Psychoanalysis and the Antagonistic Society

A universal right to psychoanalysis In these final chapters, I wish to address the question of what sort of liberated society the liberatory Lacanian politics I have developed implies. That is to say, what sort of social relation will the subjects of a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis establish between themselves, and/or what sort of society supports its members’ subjective freedom and taking of subjective responsibility? One possible formulation I have provided for the liberated society is that it is structured by a big Other who knows it doesn’t exist. What remains to be seen is what this means and how it would function. Once again, it is important to begin from the fact that I have developed two images of the post-analytic state: post-analytic hysteria and post-analytic perversion. While it will be important to develop the social and political implications of each of these structures, it is in these implications that the structures themselves begin to converge. That is to say, it should become clearer and clearer that the liberated societies towards which post-analytic hysteria and post-analytic perversion point are identical. Here, however, I will begin by looking at what sort of political or social relation is implied by post-analytic perversion, starting with the notion of prescriptive politics, and then moving to the possibility of declaring one’s love for a social body. If the prescriptive politics that Žižek endorses immediately enfranchises the Other, what does this enfranchisement mean if it is not included into the existing sociopolitical framework? That is to say, from a liberatory Lacanian perspective, the existing framework is always already structured by an ideological figure of the big Other that doesn’t know that it doesn’t exist, regardless of whether this is the big Other of traditional ideology, the disavowed big Other of postmodern ideology or the really existing little big Other of religious pseudo-

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fundamentalism. In each of these cases, inclusion into the existing order implies subjective non-responsibility. Enfranchisement means not having to take subjective responsibility for the choice of one’s character structure, and for one’s mode of enjoyment. If the object to which the post-analytic pervert declares his or her love is defined as the Lacanian subject, and if this declaration of love indicates a fidelity to the Other’s capacity to take responsibility for his or her subjective freedom, then the equality enacted by prescriptive politics cannot mean simply including the Other in the existing order. Here, I will risk the interpretation that what prescriptive politics essentially implies is an equality grounded in a universal right to a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis (however this is defined). Consider once again the cases of John Brown and Anne Frank: What the liberal gradualist approach to the inclusion of black people into American society implies is a desire to mediate, a demand that they accept the particular resolution of antagonism in the Real represented by the existing power structure (liberal tolerant multiculturalist late capitalism). What the dehumanization of Nazi henchmen implies is a desire to aggravate, to be rid of their antagonizing presence once and for all, to eliminate them from a social group that will subsequently share a particular resolution of antagonism in the Real (liberal tolerant multiculturalist late capitalism). Insofar as they can be read as postanalytic perverts, what Anne Frank and John Brown are fighting for is the right of individuals to be freed from these pressures that are determined by the logic of desire, the desire for a closed, coherent society that has resolved antagonism in the Real once and for all. What Anne Frank and John Brown are fighting for is the right of every individual to confront antagonism in the Real without any outside pressures or guarantees, the right of every individual to be his or her own master, to make the terrifying decision about what Law and fantasy will structure his or her own activity, and to take subjective responsibility for this decision, to make the decision in a way that cannot help but include within itself a reference to the absurd, crazy nature of the decision itself. And once again, the wager of this struggle is that if the subject takes responsibility for his or her freedom, he or she cannot help but take the freedom of the Other as his or her ethical criterion. From this perspective, John Brown is thus not fighting for the right of black people to self-determination in the colloquial sense, for their right to a separate political body that would then be one among many in the neutral global framework of nation-states. This sense of universal rights is itself structured by the logic of desire. On the one hand, the fantasy of a return to a traditional,

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authentic African culture, would imply a return to the discourse of the master. On the other hand, the fantasy of establishing a new, separate but equal black nation would imply a turn to the discourse of the university. In both cases, a particular perspective on how to resolve antagonism in the Real would have to be imposed on all the members of the new, self-determined society, in the service of the desire for peaceful co-existence. This kind of self-determination implies only the right of every culture to its own practices of exclusion and exploitation. What John Brown is fighting for is rather the right of all individuals to escape from this logic of desire, to be part of a social group that is not structured by the demand to adopt a particular resolution of antagonism in the Real. Here, I think it is worth following Žižek in his reference, in his ‘Notes Towards a Communist Culture’ lecture series, to the final pages of Franz Fanon’s Back Skin, White Masks. ‘I am a man’, writes Fanon, and I have to rework the world’s past from the very beginning … Every time a man has brought victory to the dignity of the spirit, every time a man has said no to an attempt to enslave his fellow man, I have felt a sense of solidarity with his act. In no way does my basic vocation have to be drawn from the past of peoples of colour. In no way do I have to dedicate myself to reviving a black civilization unjustly ignored … I do not want to be the victim of the ruse of a black world. My life must not be devoted to making an assessment of black values. There is no white world; there is no white ethic – any more than there is a white intelligence. There are from one end of the world to the other men who are searching.1

That is to say, insofar as a liberatory Lacanian politics is a fight for selfdetermination, it is not the fight for the self-determination of a particular political body. Rather, it is the fight for the self-determination (and responsibility) of the individual subject, and the corresponding political body that would support this self-determination. A liberatory Lacanian politics fights for a sociopolitical structure that endeavours to guarantee to everyone a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis.

Love for a social group vs. patriotism What about social groups? Is it possible for the ethics of drive to take a social group as the object of its declaration of love? One of the traditional Marxist critiques of psychoanalysis has been that it starts from a bourgeois over-privileging of the individual and tends to devalue social and political

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transformation. If the model I have developed of the relationship between the Lacanian subject and the various forms of ideology that structure social and political groups addresses this critique to a certain extent, the rendering of the ethical object of love as an individual subject tends to reinforce it. My previous denunciations of naïve applied psychoanalysis seem to preclude the possibility of reading a social group as a possible ethical object of love for the post-analytic pervert. Groups are not subjects. They are made up of subjects. However, while the difference between a subject and social group must be strictly maintained, it is worth considering that the philosophy of post-analytic perversion may take a social group as its object of love, and that this possibility can be best elucidated by contrasting it with a more colloquial image of the love of a social group: patriotic nationalism. Is it not clear that patriotic nationalism’s primary concern, the question of what counts as part of the social group and what does not, with setting up borders and frontiers between inside and outside, with detecting those foreign elements on the inside that should be expelled to the outside and with fending off the threatening possibility that outside elements may attempt to penetrate into the inside, has a very specific meaning in terms of antagonism in the Real? Patriotic nationalism is an image of love for a particular social group that is dependent on the members of that social group sharing a particular perspective on how to resolve antagonism in the Real. For the patriotic nationalist, the nation as such is defined by its unified acceptance of a particular gesture of mastery. He or she mediates between – that is, imposes a particular perspective on – all the members of the nation, and aggravates – that is, expels or exterminates – all of those who refuse to accept it. If the antagonism that traverses every well-defined social group returns to visibility within the nation-state, that is, if there appear some individuals whose particular perspective on how to resolve antagonism in the Real differs from that which the patriotic nationalist believes structures the social group, then those individuals simply do not (deserve to) belong to the social group as such. They are foreign agents that must be expelled or exterminated. And to be clear, this structure describes not only a traditional patriotic nationalism, but also postmodern liberal tolerant patriotic nationalism. Although liberal tolerant multiculturalism claims to include all identities and cultures, the moment these identities and cultures encroach on the gesture of knowledge that sustains their peaceful co-existence, they become threatening intruders who must be expelled or eliminated (extremists, fundamentalists, racists, sexists, homophobes, etc.).

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But what is key here is that this logic of patriotic nationalism follows the logic of desire, which is precisely the logic that is disavowed by the post-analytic pervert. A patriotic nationalist’s love for his or her nation is determined by the presence of a particular characteristic: unified resolution of antagonism in the Real. It should be clear that, for the patriotic nationalist, those individual subjects whose particular perspectives differ from that which he or she believes structures the social group lose, in his or her eyes, their worthiness of love. But perhaps more importantly, his or her activity of expelling or exterminating these individuals is an expression of his or her desire for a nation that remains a closed, non-antagonistic body. That is to say, what he or she is fending off is the fearful prospect that the nation itself will no longer be worthy of love. What one should not miss here is the return of the more specific logic of hysterical desire, which is precisely desire for an adequate master, a master who would be able to resolve antagonism in the Real once and for all. While the (rightist) patriotic nationalist and the (leftist) pre-analytic philosopher of hysteria may seem like natural enemies, the desire which determines their activity is, I would argue, identical. The pre-analytic philosopher of hysteria bombards the existing power structure with (impossible) demands for actual equality, for the inclusion of excluded and oppressed groups, with the aim of producing a master who would finally be adequate to his or her role. What is this but the mediating side of patriotic nationalism, the attempt to produce an absolutely united social group, a universal acceptance of a particular perspective on antagonism in the Real? And if the expulsions and exterminations carried out by the patriotic nationalist are the aggravating side of this operation, this does not prevent him or her from making use of the hysterical technique of bombarding the existing power structure with (impossible) demands for their fulfilment. Are the increasingly harsh, even hysterically reactive, anti-terrorist legislations that have passed in officially liberal tolerant Western societies in recent years not precisely attempts on the part of the existing power structure to respond to this sort of (perceived) demand?

An antagonistic society All of the elements of patriotic nationalism that concern themselves with defining what counts as part of the social group and what does not must be dropped, suspended, disavowed. All of the efforts aimed at distinguishing what

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is good and therefore worthy of inclusion into the social group, and what is bad and therefore subject to exclusion from it, are part of the logic of desire. They represent precisely the pursuit of a perfectly satisfying, incestuous, maternal, lost object. In their place, the ethics of drive, associated as it is with what Žižek calls the politics of prescription, directly asserts the love of the people constituting the social group as a starting premise. If the post-analytic pervert loves the people that constitute a social group, it is not because they share or lack any common characteristic, but directly, because of an absurd, groundless decision, because they are there as such. And what I wish to argue here is that, if one accepts the definition of antagonism in the Real that I have provided, the postanalytic pervert’s disavowal of the patriotic nationalist’s (and philosopher of preanalytic hysteria’s) desire for a resolution of antagonism in the Real necessarily becomes a direct, positive assertion of and support for the antagonism that traverses his or her object of love. That is to say, insofar as antagonism in the Real always traverses every well-defined social group, always returns to disrupt and undermine any given unity, every declaration of love and/or fidelity is necessarily always a declaration of love and/or fidelity to a split, antagonistic object. What distinguishes patriotic nationalism from post-analytic perversion is that the love and/or fidelity that characterizes the former is conditional on the fulfilment of an impossible demand (‘I love you only insofar as you are impossibly unified, united’), whereas the latter drops this condition (‘I love you as you are, with all of your divisions and flaws’). And what should be reasserted here is the fictional nature of the object to which the post-analytic pervert declares his or her fidelity. Precisely because this object is split by antagonism in the Real, it is necessarily fictional. It only exists as a fictional unity imposed on a thoroughly divided, fragmented assemblage by the post-analytic pervert him- or herself. What this suggests is that the patriotic nationalist has a certain valid point. It is not simply that the social group to which he or she asserts his or her fidelity will no longer be worthy of his or her love if the antagonism that runs through it re-emerges, it is rather (or also) that it will cease to exist as such. The pre-analytic subject retains a factual knowledge that the post-analytic pervert disavows: the knowledge that a split body is not a body as such. And I have already given this particular fact a particular name. It is called political inefficiency. Insofar as the social group to which the post-analytic pervert declares his or her fidelity is split by an unresolved antagonism in the Real, it is not a body that is capable of practical decision-making. Because the initial decision of how to decide has not been properly resolved, the subsequent

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decisions of how to act cannot be made as such. While the individuals who make up the social group may have particular perspectives that allow them to make practical decisions, the differences between these perspectives will mean that the practical activities of the social group as a whole will be disjointed, if not at dramatic cross-purposes. But to the post-analytic pervert, once again, this does not matter. His or her love for the social group does not depend on its unity, on its political efficiency. While the social group itself may be disjointed, at crosspurposes with itself, or even paralyzed, the post-analytic pervert him- or herself is not. He or she is able to act for the good of the social group while bracketing off, disavowing, the contradictory Laws and desires that struggle within it. The question is how the post-analytic pervert determines the good of his or her beloved social group. How does his or her love remain a partisan, engaged love and not the generalized love of liberal tolerant multiculturalism? Does the acceptance of the antagonistic nature of the social group not resemble very closely the notion that it is possible for multiple competing cultures (perspectives on antagonism in the Real) to occupy the same neutral, multiculturalist space? How does the post-analytic pervert love his or her antagonistic social group without imposing a particular resolution to antagonism in the Real at some higher level? It is vital to emphasize here that the post-analytic pervert’s love for a social group is not an indifferent, neutralizing love for everything (all the individuals and perspectives) that the group contains. Just as Anne Frank’s love for the Nazi henchman should not be read as an assertion that the Nazi henchman is entitled to his or her Nazism, the post-analytic pervert’s love for a social group should not be read as a love for both the liberatory and oppressive tendencies in that group. Rather the post-analytic pervert loves the social body on account of its inherent liberatory potential: the fact that it could be a society that supports its members’ subjective freedom and responsibility. One must constantly affirm that particular trends within a given social body, certain attitudes towards antagonism in the Real, are more or less prone to attempting to resolve antagonism in the Real once and for all, and it is the perspectives that are less prone to this, that do not attempt to resolve antagonism in the Real, which the post-analytic pervert’s activity supports. Rather than a relativist, the post-analytic pervert is a radical partisan, seeking out and supporting moments that support members of the social group’s universal right and duty to confront antagonism in the Real. If the post-analytic pervert declares his or her love for a social group, it is not on the basis that the group supports the peaceful co-existence of its members. Rather, it is on the basis that the social

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group might be a liberated social group that supports each and every individual’s right and duty to reject the resolutions of antagonism in the Real that have been imposed on him or her and be his or her own master. In this sense, the postanalytic pervert who loves a social group directly loves the antagonism that traverses that group itself.

The liberatory fetish: Dean and Stavrakakis as readers of Žižek As I mentioned in the Introduction chapter, Yannis Stavrakakis’ The Lacanian Left contains a strong critique of Žižek’s position, part of which involves accusing Žižek of being perverse. Not only does he describe Žižek’s revolutionary polemics as relying on a fetish-like image of miraculous revolutionary transformation,2 but he also invokes examples of various moments in which Žižek seems to contradict himself, and reads them as instances of perverse disavowal (‘I am well aware … but nevertheless’).3 Clearly, my effort in The Subject of Liberation has been to offer a reading opposed to Stavrakakis’. For me, the moments in which Žižek champions miraculous transformation are moments in which he attempts (and by necessity fails, at least to a certain degree) to describe the promise of a positive cure held out by psychoanalytic practice in the face of the impossibility and deadlocks described by psychoanalytic theory. For me, the moments in which Žižek seems to contradict himself are moments that stage an ambivalence or productive tension within his thinking that in turn demand (and may or may not produce) some kind of shift in perspective. Nevertheless, there is a strange truth in Stavrakakis’ accusation: Although Žižek consistently identifies himself with pre-analytic hysteria as ‘less wrong’ than pre-analytic perversion, the revolutionary politics he valourizes often seems to be much closer to my definition of post-analytic perversion than to post-analytic hysteria. What my dual definition of the post-analytic subject allows for in this context is a re-casting of perversion as not (only) an accusation (Žižek is himself a preanalytic pervert), but (also) a necessary component of liberation itself (Žižek is describing post-analytic perversion). Jodi Dean, in her Žižek’s Politics, stages this ‘perverse’ part of Žižek’s politics in a very useful way. As her own example of the politics of prescription, Dean turns to the image of Rosa Parks. Dean uses Parks’ gesture of defiance, her prescriptive act of allowing herself to retain a seat at the front of the bus in the

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face of legalized segregation, as an example of politicization, the definition for which she quotes from Žižek: ‘politics proper, he explains, is “the moment in which a particular demand is not simply part of the negotiation of interests but aims at something more, and starts to function as the metaphoric condensation of the global restructuring of the entire space” ’. In the case of Parks, ‘at issue was not simply her particular seat on the bus or even the racist practices of Montgomery, Alabama. Rather, the laws of segregation, and the racism of U.S. law most broadly, of U.S. willingness to enforce a system of apartheid was at stake’.4 What this example is so useful in demonstrating is that the attachment to a particular issue is always minimally perverse. At the level of common sense, the seat that Rosa Parks occupies on a bus for a couple of hours on one day is not particularly important. It is only by disavowing this common sense that the bus seat can be raised to the level of, dare I say it, a kind of fetish object imbued with magical powers, that stands in for the lost object of political liberation. Dean contrasts this moment of politicization with a scenario in which Parks’ act is depoliticized: ‘Rosa Parks would have discussed her feelings about being discriminated against; the bus driver would have dealt with his racism, explaining that he had been brought up that way; and perhaps there would have been a settlement enabling Parks to ride at a discounted fare on weekends and holidays.’5 My only complaint is that Dean doesn’t go far enough here. What is at stake in Parks’ gesture is not just her, or even the black people of the United States’, desire to challenge only U.S. apartheid policies, or even racism more broadly. What is at stake is the People’s (i.e. everyone’s) desire to live in a liberated society, without oppression, exclusion and exploitation. What would have happened if Parks’ act were depoliticized is that it would have been reduced to a particular demand for the black people of the United States to be more fully included into the existing global system of oppression, exclusion and exploitation – a demand that they should be allowed to pay to ride at the front of semiprivately run busses, vote for pro-corporate-power presidents and exploit others for profit, just like white Americans do. In saying this, I do not mean in any way to discredit the achievement of the American civil rights movement, only to point out that the struggle over politicization continues. The antagonism has not been (cannot be) finally resolved. Would Stavrakakis object to this ‘perverse’ image of transformative politics? Likely not. Indeed, this establishing of a ‘quilting point’, the symbolic elevation of a particular signifier (Rosa Parks’ bus seat) into something that galvanizes a whole host of anti-oppressive struggles, and which oppressive forces necessarily

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attempt to commandeer and redefine, is the very topic of hegemony which he inherits from Laclau. Stavrakakis’ critique does not concern the politicization of the act or event itself, but the question of what act or event is being politicized and what new order it will establish. Specifically, Stavrakakis attacks Žižek’s ‘perverse’ fidelity to the story of Antigone, arguing that Antigone is not attractive to Žižek on the basis of an objective calculation of her liberatory potential, but rather on the basis of her own excessive, perverse attachment. That is to say, Stavrakakis worries that Žižek sticks to Antigone because, unlike Rosa Parks who has calculated that it is worth the risk of going to jail over a bus seat, Antigone has gone beyond this kind of strategic calculation and is determined to be put to death over her brother’s burial. And while this argument may hold some water, I simply wish to note here that one must remember to keep in mind the obverse: One cannot, ultimately, calculate away the perverse nature of belief proper. There can never be a final guarantee of a successful act. After one has analysed the situation as thoroughly as possible, a ridiculous leap of faith will still be required. While Antigone’s gesture should perhaps be rejected as a failed suicidal acting out, one must nonetheless be careful to acknowledge – to not disavow – the disavowal that lurks at the core of the authentic act itself. Before moving on, I should note that there is an implicit danger here of relegating post-analytic perversion to the status of a kind of vanishing mediator. Thus far, the politics of prescription has always appeared as an act or event that is on the way to liberation. It never seems to coincide with the liberated state itself. And this follows from the definitions that I am developing. Later I will argue that it is the task of the post-analytic hysteric to construct a theory that explains, as clearly and effectively as possible, the deadlocks of the Real and the elusive promise of their overcoming. In some sense then, it is the post-analytic hysteric to whom falls the impossible task of creating an actual system of ‘liberated’ policies, laws and procedures, a big Other that knows it doesn’t exist. It is the post-analytic hysteric who must create a post-analytic order that takes into account its own arbitrary, constructed, flawed and internally deadlocked nature – its own need for perpetual deconstruction and radical transformation. But this is not the whole story. Not only breaking with existing oppressive, exclusive and exploitative systems, but also the very act of instituting new ‘liberatory’ policies requires an act of belief, a leap of faith characteristic of post-analytic perversion. If the deadlocks and impossibilities described by Lacanian theory are given their due, then every institutionalization of liberation will be imperfect. If the transformation that leads to a new political order is carried out according to

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Lacanian ethics, then the new order will by necessity be more ethical than that which it has replaced, and at a qualitative, not just a quantitative, level, but there will still be oppression lurking at some higher level, which will require yet another transformation, another shift. It is in the face of this knowledge, along with the knowledge that the transformation may not – is even very likely not to – be carried out in a way that is completely consistent with Lacanian ethics, that a perverse disavowal, a leap of faith, is required in order to make the transformation as such. Every new order, every new institutionalization, is a risk, an experiment, which involves elevating some ridiculous contingent object (a set of rules arbitrarily constructed by a flawed individual in a particular context at a particular moment in time) to a magical, fetishized stand-in for the lost object of political liberation. Without the moment of disavowal, the space cannot be cleared for something new.

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Analysis as a positive project? Bartelby politics If the previous chapter begins to explain the political implications of the post-analytic perverse subject, what about post-analytic hysteria? So far I have described the post-analytic hysteric, whom I have associated with the psychoanalyst, as having only a negative role. He or she uses the discourse of the analyst to open up the space of freedom within which his or her Other is able to (re-)choose, and to take responsibility for having chosen, his or her character structure. Through something like the practice of deconstruction, the post-analytic hysteric seeks to undermine and displace the coordinates of the subject’s current fantasy, his or her immersion in his or her traditional, cultural life world. By refusing to confirm and reproduce the coordinates of this life world, by asking questions and allowing the Other to ask questions that are officially prohibited (recall the master’s response to the hysteric: ‘Because I say so! Stop asking questions!’), the analyst brings the subject into the space of radical freedom within which there is no external guarantee on which to rely in answering the ethical question, ‘How ought I to relate to my Other?’ The question that I wish to raise in this context is whether the post-analytic hysteric is trapped, as it were, within the walls of the psychoanalytic clinic, or whether he or she is capable of participating in some more creative political project. Žižek’s effort to answer this question is, I believe, what leads him first of all to the strange notion of Bartelby politics, which he develops in The Parallax View. Bartelby politics, so named because of its association with the attitude of Herman Melville’s character, Bartelby the Scrivener, is a political stance of withdrawal in which the subject responds to every call for action or, more precisely, for decision-making, with something like Bartelby’s catchphrase, ‘I would prefer not to.’ We all know the pop-psychological notion of ‘passive-aggressive behaviour,’ usually applied to a housewife who, instead of actively opposing her husband,

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passively sabotages him … perhaps we should assert this attitude of passive aggression as a proper radical political gesture, in contrast to aggressive passivity, the standard ‘interpassive’ mode of our participation in socio-ideological life in which we are active all the time in order to make sure that nothing will happen, that nothing will really change. In such a constellation, the first truly critical (‘aggressive,’ violent) step is to withdraw into passivity, to refuse to participate – Bartelby’s ‘I would prefer not to’ is the necessary first step which, as it were, clears the ground, opens up the place, for true activity, for an act that will actually change the coordinates of the constellation.1

What I believe one should detect in Žižek’s notion of Bartelby politics is an echo of the psychoanalyst’s act of withdrawal. In response to the analysand’s hysterical demand that he or she provide some guarantee, that he or she provide a name for antagonism in the Real, the analyst responds with something like Bartelby’s ‘I would prefer not to’. And the aim of this act of withdrawal is precisely to open up the space for an act, the space in which the analysand can re-choose the coordinates of his or her fantasmatic constellation and take responsibility for that choice. At a political level, it is tempting to imagine the possibility of a Bartelby political leader, a leader who would act as a psychoanalyst in relation to his or her subjects. Here, ‘I would prefer not to’ emerges as the leader’s response to his or her subjects’ demand that he or she produce political efficiency by naming the antagonism, by deciding what should be done (or, perhaps more precisely, deciding how the decision of what should be done should be made). Like a psychoanalyst, he or she would return the question to his or her subjects, undermining their reliance on a figure of the big Other (the master him- or herself) to relieve them of the burden of their subjective responsibility. But is it only the leader who is capable of playing the role of Bartelby? Consider Žižek’s examples of Bartelby political gestures: Not only the obvious ‘There are great chances for a new career here! Join us!’ – ‘I would prefer not to’; but also ‘Discover the depths of your true self, find inner peace!’ – ‘I would prefer not to’; or ‘Are you aware that the environment is endangered? Do something for ecology!’ – ‘I would prefer not to’; or ‘What about all the racial and sexual injustices we witness all around us? Isn’t it time to do more?’ – ‘I would prefer not to’.2

There are two ways of interpreting these examples, which are clearly not the gestures of a political leader in the traditional sense. First, in a political space structured not by traditional ideology, but by democracy, the people is the big

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Other as such. Political acts are always done in the name of the people. Here, it is the people themselves who, when confronted with the question of what should be done, with the demand that they sign off on the decisions of their experts and leaders, are able to make Bartelby’s reply. I believe one arrives here at a version of the leftist fantasy of a mass refusal to vote, to participate in the system that confirms and reproduces parliamentary democracy as such, the fantasy of an absolute rejection of the electoral process that would undermine the contemporary political constellation to the point that it would collapse and the ground would be cleared for something new to emerge. But, second, it is possible to read Žižek’s examples as pointing towards a Bartelby gesture made by the subjects of power themselves. If, as Žižek contends, the big Other exists only insofar as those who are subject to it treat it as existing, then it is precisely a gesture on the part of those subjects themselves that can undermine and/or displace its coordinates. That is to say, although an individual other subject may occupy the position of the big Other, the big Other as such is only an other subject in a reified, supposed, imaginary way. The knowledge, belief, enjoyment or desire that the subject supposes the big Other to have is only the subject’s own knowledge, belief, enjoyment or desire that he or she is unable to take subjective responsibility for. This is why the process of inducing the big Other into accepting its own nonexistence can happen within the confines of the psychoanalytic clinic. It is the individual subject’s big Other – his or her unconscious rejection of responsibility – that must be undermined and displaced. In this context, the people’s act of Bartelby politics is not the withdrawal of the analyst, but the withdrawal of the analysand him- or herself that occurs in response to the analyst’s deconstructive practice. ‘I would prefer not to’, becomes ‘I would prefer not to believe in the big Other.’ At this level, Bartelby politics represents the subject’s withdrawal from the externally imposed system of the Law and its superego supplement into the psychotic space of subjective destitution, the space within which it is possible for the subject to rechoose his or her own fundamental fantasy. But all these versions of Bartelby politics remain at the level of preliminary negative gestures of withdrawal. Is there no positive project with which the postanalytic hysteric can be occupied? Is he or she limited to negative gestures of withdrawal, of reducing him- or herself to silence? I believe that to a certain extent this is the case. If the pervert has to relinquish his or her practice of deconstruction in favour of the construction of a fictional object to which he or she asserts his or her fidelity, then the hysteric must relinquish his or her

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quest to construct an adequate, closed, coherent system in favour of a practice of deconstruction. However, I believe there are nonetheless signs that this should not be the end of the argument. As I hinted earlier, I believe Žižek is struggling with a much more complicated answer to these questions in his discussion of Bartelby politics. What Žižek is searching for at the end of The Parallax View is a way of asserting that Bartelby’s attitude is not merely the first, preparatory, stage for the second, more ‘constructive,’ work of forming a new alternative order; it is the very source and background of this order, its permanent foundation. The difference between Bartelby’s gesture of withdrawal and the foundation of a new order is … that of parallax: the very frantic and engaged activity of constructing a new order is sustained by an underlying ‘I would prefer not to’ which forever reverberates in it … The difficulty of imagining the New is the difficulty of imagining Bartelby in power.3

Here, as I believe should be obvious, when Žižek speaks of imagining Bartelby in power, he has in mind something quite different from the image of the Bartelby leader that I produced earlier. There, I remained at the level of preparatory gesture, a kind of self-effacing, dadaist leader who simply refuses to lead, refuses to make the gesture of mastery. What Žižek has in mind here is something much more difficult: the possibility of a positive political gesture that nonetheless remains negative in relation to mastery, the possibility of a new order that is based on and sustained by something like the gesture of withdrawal that characterizes post-analytic hysteria.

Analyst as theorist, analyst as educator: The discourse of the analyst as a defence How can the post-analytic hysteric engage in a positive political project? How can Bartelby’s gesture resonate in the order which follows his withdrawal? One affirmative answer may concern the project of theorizing itself. A theoretical project that seeks to induce its readers into withdrawing themselves from their immersion in their particular cultural life worlds, that seeks to open up a space of radical freedom in which they will have to confront their own subjective responsibility for choosing the fundamental fantasy that structures their activity, that does not impose on them a particular fantasy through the discourse of the master or the university, can, I believe count itself as a version

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of the psychoanalytic act. And this definition can, I believe, be extended beyond theoretical writing to incorporate other domains, perhaps one of the most obvious being education. An educational project, instead of offering its students a particular way of resolving antagonism in the Real, instead of imparting supposedly neutral, objective knowledge (through the discourse of the university) or traditional cultural values (through the discourse of the master), can potentially offer its students the open, radically free space of subjective responsibility (through the discourse of the analyst). In my experience, this kind of analytic education is most clearly expressed in certain projects within the humanities, social and political sciences, and philosophy, all of which associate themselves with critical thinking. Instead of focusing on the transfer of knowledge or judgements from professor to student, these projects tend to think of themselves in terms of transferring the skill of critical thinking, the ability to question and choose whether or not to accept any given knowledge or judgement. That is to say, these are projects whose logic inevitably leads to a critique of their own means and methods, a questioning of the very university system that provides this education, of the very authority of the professor (or master) as such. And, in the end, these projects rely not only on the professor’s ability to transfer a particular knowledge, judgement or skill, but on his or her inability to do so, his or her refusal of the student’s demand to resolve antagonism in the Real once and for all. These projects rely on a particular kind of silence that opens the space for the students to confront their own responsibility for choosing how to answer the question: ‘How ought I to behave towards the Other?’ But this notion of analytic education points towards what I believe is an extremely important issue: If one extends the discourse of the analyst beyond the psychoanalytic clinic in this way, if the post-analytic hysteric turns his or her deconstructive lens on the world at large, where do analysis and deconstruction end? Recall Žižek’s critique of the practice of deconstruction on the grounds of its link with the philosophy of pre-analytic perversion. The philosophy of pre-analytic perversion makes the mistake of accepting as an immediate truth the notion that there is no act of deconstruction that does not lead to more injustice, to more exclusion. Here, one should ask if there is no act of analysis that leads to more injustice, to more exclusion. One should take seriously the clearly foreseeable frustration of a student who finds him- or herself confronted with a professor who uses only the discourse of the analyst. ‘I didn’t come here for psychoanalysis!’ he or she will say, ‘I didn’t come here for you to alternately

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undermine my own assumptions and say nothing! Tell me something I don’t know!’ While it is easy to detect in this imaginary outburst a resistance on the part of the student to his or her subjective freedom, to the necessity that he or she fill out for him- or herself the space opened up by the analyst, can one not also see in it a justified reaction to a defensive gesture on the part of the professor? Perhaps, confronted with the terrifying silence of the student, with the necessity of filling in the space of the classroom, the analytic professor is merely attempting to turn the tables. Here, the discourse of the analyst threatens to become a desperate strategy to kill time, to fend off the dangerous possibility that the professor may actually have to say something, the possibility that he or she may have to fill in the gap of antagonism in the Real with something of his or her own and take responsibility for it. At a certain point, the professor must leave off analysing his or her students and take a stand, express a belief, take subjective responsibility for his or her own position. In this way, he or she ought to be able to break off from the silence and the questioning that make up the discourse of the analyst, but without falling into the transmission of neutral objective knowledge and/or the imposition of particular values that make up the discourse of the university and the discourse of the master, respectively. It ought to be possible for the professor to, as it were, lead by example; not only to analyse and deconstruct his or her students’ immersion in their respective life world(s) but also to show them what it is like to take subjective responsibility for having chosen a particular perspective. He or she ought to be able to present a particular perspective, without demanding that the Others adopt it, either by providing neutral objective reasons why it is correct or by imposing it through force or traditional authority. He or she ought to be able to reveal to his or her students not only the point at which it is necessary to make a subjective decision but also the point at which he or she really has already made a particular decision and what that decision is.

A society of analysts: Lacan’s Leninist moment Another way of approaching this problem is to turn once again to Lacan’s attempts to organize a society of analysts in the 50s, what Žižek calls ‘the properly Leninist moment of Lacan’.4 Žižek identifies Lacan’s problem with the question of whether it is possible for a social group to exist without being caught in a deadlock between the Law and its fantasmatic support. That is to say, is it

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possible for a social group to exist that is structured by a big Other that knows it doesn’t exist? Is it possible for a social group to exist that acknowledges the fact that it is split by antagonism in the Real? Is it possible for a social group to exist without demanding of itself what I have called political efficiency? I have already addressed a version of this question in reference to the post-analytic pervert: The social group loved by the post-analytic pervert is precisely the fictional social group structured (for the post-analytic pervert him- or herself) by a big Other that knows it doesn’t exist. What remains is to address this question in reference to the post-analytic hysteric, the subject whom I have identified with the figure of the analyst. And this is why the image of Lacan’s society of analysts is so useful: It is precisely the image of a society of post-analytic hysterics. Here, the problem of psychoanalytic deconstruction as a defence against one’s own responsibility returns. If the post-analytic hysteric is limited to analysis and deconstruction, then the individuals who make up the society of analysts will spend their time and energy endlessly analysing each other, accusing each other of being immersed in a particular life world, and attempting to undermine and subvert that immersion. And if every member of a society of analysts spends all of his or her time and energy withdrawing and analysing all the Others, what will be left to analyse? Is the image of a society of analysts that emerges here not the image of a group of individuals who remain together in absolute silence? And, most importantly, if every individual remains in perfect silence and refuses to speak, does this not become yet another way of concealing antagonism in the Real? To be clear, the danger that I am pointing to here is precisely the danger that Žižek detects in the philosophy of pre-analytic perversion. It is the problem of the pre-analytic pervert’s use of the perverse social link and the discourse of the university. It is the problem of the deconstructionist’s tendency to exclude his or her own position from the series of positions that must be deconstructed. It is the problem that if one refuses to take any statement at face value, one must also refuse to take the statement, ‘One must refuse to take any statement at face value’ at face value, which puts one in the paradoxical position of having to take some statement(s) at face value. Here, if every particular position must be analysed, then the position ‘every particular position must be analyzed’ must itself be analysed. And my contention is that this position can itself function as a defence against antagonism in the Real, a defence against having to choose a particular position and having to take responsibility for having chosen. Like the deconstructionist, the analyst who will never stop analysing, even outside of the

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clinic amongst his or her colleagues, conceals his or her own will to power, his or her own position of mastery, behind an attitude of neutrality and objectivity. To any demand made by the Other that he or she produce his or her own position, this perverse analyst responds only by returning the question, by asking the Other ‘what do you think my position is?’ But what kind of position must the post-analytic hysteric take? What question is it that he or she must answer? It is here that I believe one should return to what I have argued characterizes the structure of the post-analytic hysteric: the acceptance of the premises that underlie pre-analytic hysteria, but in their negative form. I have argued that the post-analytic philosopher of hysteria, the analyst, accepts that there is one key struggle, but also asserts that this is precisely the irresolvable struggle over what the key struggle is. He or she accepts that there is one privileged actor who is charged with resolving this struggle, but asserts that this is the universal subject itself, residing (at least as a potentiality) within every individual. And, finally, he or she accepts that there is a universal structure of subjectivity and reality as such, but asserts that this universal structure is openness itself, the lack of any guarantee, the requirement of a decision. These formulas are my attempt to answer the question that I believe the post-analytic hysteric is called upon to answer. It is the question of what theoretical framework, what subjective attitude or position, is required in order to sustain psychoanalysis itself. These formulas are my attempt to articulate, in the form of a positive description, the conditions of possibility of the negative practice that opens up the space of radical freedom as such. But this is not all. Because I have identified the figure of the analyst with the post-analytic hysteric him- or herself, the question ‘What kind of subject position is required to practice psychoanalysis?’ is identical with the question ‘What kind of subject position does the practice of psychoanalysis produce? What is the post-analytic hysteric?’ Or, in its more standard format: What are the ends of psychoanalysis?

A debate on the ends of analysis: The analyst meets the lover Should an analytic society not be a place where analysts come together in order to discuss the theories that support, that provide the conditions of possibility for, the practice of psychoanalysis as such? Should it not be a place where the question of the ends of psychoanalysis, the question of what psychoanalysis itself

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is, is debated? My own limited experience with actual analytic societies suggests that this is often not the case. On the one hand, analytic societies are often structured around a particular figure of the master (and my suspicion is that this may have been what was behind what Žižek calls Lacan’s ‘dismal failure’5) who determines for all the Others what particular perspective, what definition of the ends of psychoanalysis, must be adopted in order to qualify for inclusion within the social group. This structure transforms the society of analysts into yet another version of the patriotic nation-state, structured by desire, albeit on a smaller scale. On the other hand, analytic societies are often structured around a neutral, objective framework that professes to accommodate and include all possible perspectives at the ends of the analysis, allowing its members to pick and choose from among them as though different definitions of the ends of the analysis were different lifestyle choices. And this structure inevitably retains a single, higherlevel resolution of antagonism in the Real that effectively neutralizes the various perspectives that are contained within it. Instead of being what they essentially are, that is mutually exclusive practices with serious political implications, particular perspectives on the definition of psychoanalysis become formal signs of the acceptance of the society’s own logic, for example the use of representative democratic structures for its organization, or the basic aim of representing its members’ shared private interests within the existing economic system. Instead of these two structures, I believe that a society of analysts, if it is to have the emancipatory potential that Žižek is looking for, must have a directly antagonistic structure. That is to say, in place of the directly imposed resolution of antagonism in the Real asserted by the master or the neutral objective resolution of antagonism in the Real asserted by the professor (or pre-analytic pervert), the community of analysts should be structured by unresolved antagonism as such. It should be a social group (or more correctly the absence of a social group) whose members confront each other with their opposing positions on what the ends of analysis are, without attempting either to neutralize those differences, or to antagonize them into a final showdown. Is it not clear that what emerges here is precisely the image of an antagonistic society that I produced in response to the question of the political implications of the philosophy of post-analytic perversion? What is revealed here, at long last, is the deep relation of mutual implication that joins the philosophy of post-analytic hysteria and the philosophy of post-analytic perversion. The community of analysts, the community made up of post-analytic hysterics, is precisely the fictional community to which the postanalytic pervert asserts his or her fidelity and love. It is a community that does

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not exist as such, insofar as the antagonism that runs through it is not concealed or resolved by the discourse of the master or the university. And as such, it is a community without political efficiency. It does not operate as a coordinated body. If it acts, it acts in a disjointed way, if not at dramatic cross-purposes with itself. However, this does not mean that its members are unable to act. Here, the philosophy of post-analytic hysteria and the philosophy of postanalytic perversion, the ethics of desire and the ethics of drive, become two sides of the same coin. First, whereas the post-analytic pervert fights on behalf of a group or individual that is excluded from that equality which I have described as a universal right to the deterritorializing effects of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the post-analytic hysteric provides this right, attempts to deconstruct and undermine the acceptance of particular perspectives on how to resolve antagonism in the Real and induce subjective responsibility. Second, whereas the post-analytic pervert’s ethical stance, the ethics of drive, is founded on his or her selfconsciously crazy, impossible assertion of fidelity or love to a particular object outside of any criteria concerning that object’s characteristics, the post-analytic hysteric’s ethical stance is founded on taking a particular position on the ends of analysis, on the theoretical or subjective position that acts as the condition of possibility for the act of analysis as such. That is to say, the post-analytic hysteric attempts to define what grounds the possibility of fidelity or love. Here, it is vital to reintroduce and resuscitate the notion of desire as what is essential to the fantasy that structures post-analytic hysteria. The post-analytic hysteric’s pursuit of an adequate theory to ground psychoanalysis should be fearlessly identified with the logic of desire. He or she searches endlessly for a correct, even perfect, articulation of the subjective, conceptual bedrock from which analysis can be performed, the ground for universal subjective freedom. This search for a correct articulation of the theoretical ground for analysis must immediately be differentiated, however, from the search of the pre-analytic hysteric for an adequate master who would be able to resolve antagonism in the Real once and for all, or for a neutral objective framework that would allow for the peaceful co-existence of all subjects. What the post-analytic hysteric searches for is a theoretical articulation of the possibility for a subjective shift that transforms the impossibility of any final resolution of antagonism in the Real, the impossibility of peaceful co-existence, from an insurmountable obstacle into the very condition of possibility for subjectivity as such. The postanalytic hysteric searches for a theoretical articulation of the possibility of a social group for which the antagonism in the Real that traverses it is not an

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insurmountable obstacle to its existence, but the very form of the social bond that constitutes it. And while one way to explain this search is through a reference to negativity (my assertion that the post-analytic hysteric accepts the assertions of pre-analytic hysteria but only in a negative way), another way to do so is through a reference to the logic of short circuit. What the post-analytic hysteric is searching for is a theoretical articulation that is adequate, not in the sense of finally resolving the problem that it confronts, but in the sense of taking the irresolvability of the problem it confronts into account in the very solution that it proposes. The sought-after theory is one theory among many that concern the definition of human subjectivity and liberation. However, it is essentially different from the others insofar as it relates differently to the neutral container that embraces them all as equal, the category of theories concerning subjectivity and liberation. The sought-after theory is one that takes into account the un-theorizeability of subjectivity and liberation as such – the gap, obstacle or bone in the throat (antagonism in the Real, subjective freedom as such) that prevents any theory of subjectivity and liberation from truly covering the whole field. Let me be very clear about what this means. It means that there is a basis for accusing particular theories of subjectivity and liberation, particular positions on what are the ends of psychoanalysis, of being incorrect. That is, theories that are based on the discourse of the master or the university, theories that attempt to provide a means for resolving antagonism in the Real, either by imposing a particular perspective or by proposing a neutral objective framework within which all particular perspectives are equally correct, are incorrect. The correct theory is one that does not attempt to resolve antagonism in the Real, but attempts to perform a shift in subjective position, which reveals the presence of antagonism in the Real as the condition of possibility for subjectivity and liberation as such. When confronted with these incorrect particular theories, it is, at least to a certain extent, the responsibility of the post-analytic hysteric to employ the discourse of the analyst, to attempt to undermine and displace the Other’s acceptance of the discourse of the master or the university, his or her refusal of responsibility. However, there are clearly various more or less successful attempts to articulate the correct theory, and when confronted with these, it is the post-analytic hysteric’s responsibility to offer constructive critique, to assert his or her own position about what the most efficient articulations of the logic of short circuit are. It is here that the logic of rescuing with which I began this work returns. The project of rescuing the Other involves the work of attempting

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to locate in him or her what appears to one as a (perhaps accidental) sliding back into the discourse of the master or the university, celebrating what appears to one as efficient articulations of the logic of short circuit and attempting to replace or repair the Other’s failures with alternatives that are more successful. One must speak to the Other, and attempt to step between him or her and his or her fighting soul. One must contribute to the shared work of articulating the logic of short circuit, the ethics of desire and the ethics of drive.

The radical democratic project: Žižek as a reader of Stavrakakis In the conclusion of The Lacanian Left’s chapter on Žižek, Stavrakakis produces a succinct definition of a radical democratic principle, consistent with ‘radical democratic ethics, as developed by thinkers like Claude Lefort, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, and others’, that has some remarkable similarities to my own definition of the task appointed to the post-analytic hysteric: For Stavrakakis, radical democracy is defined by ‘the (socio-political) production of a signifier of the lack in the Other’.6 What can this mean? Recall that the lack in the Other is what the subject must come to grips with in undergoing a successful Lacanian psychoanalysis. There is no Other out there who is not faced with the deadlock of desire, or who could guarantee that the subject’s choices are correct. There is no big Other that can successfully organize the subject’s enjoyment without establishing secretly institutionalized modes of transgression. It is the acknowledgement of this fact that returns the question to the subject and allows him or her to act in a radically free and responsible way. Acknowledging the lack in Other is thus the threshold of successful Lacanian psychoanalysis, and ‘the production of a signifier of the lack in the Other’ represents precisely this moment of acknowledgement. Accepting Lacan’s assertion that the unconscious is structured like a language, to say that the subject’s unconscious can be induced to accept subjective responsibility means that it can be made to incorporate subjective responsibility into its vocabulary, to mark it with a signifier. Finally, the bracketed insertion of ‘sociopolitical’ here connects this individual moment of transformation to the inter-subjective order of the Law, social superego and big Other. The question of radical democracy is precisely the question that I have attributed to the post-analytic hysteric: how to institutionalize radical freedom and subjective responsibility, how to construct a post-revolutionary society

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that is qualitatively preferable to that which preceded it in its ability to support Lacanian ethics. So what’s the problem? If Stavrakakis’ radical democracy is perfectly compatible with my reading of Žižek’s revolutionary project, why is he so critical of Žižek? Where is the antagonism to be located? One place it emerges is in Stavrakakis’ assertion that Žižek ‘disregards the problem of the form institutional arrangements can and should take following the [miraculous, revolutionary, liberatory] act, including the possibility of experimenting with new post-fantasmatic types of ordering’.7 Is this not an interesting critique in light of Žižek’s focus on Lacan’s Leninism, his notion of Bartleby politics and his frequent debates with Costas Douzinas and others, in which he argues that they are the ones who refuse to think about the day after? Has Stavrakakis misread Žižek? Has Žižek changed his tune in response to critique? Or is Žižek perhaps projecting his own shortcomings onto others? What I see in Stavrakakis’ argument is an echo of my own concern about a particular reading of Žižek (to which Žižek himself may fall prey), a reading that interprets Lacanian ethics as racially decisionist/relativist. This parallel is confirmed by Stavrakakis’ turn to Peter Hallward’s invocation of Nazism as the false event that must be guarded against: ‘There can be no clear way of distinguishing, before it is too late, a genuine event (which relates to the void of the situation) from a false event (one that, like September 11th or the triumph of National Socialism, reinforces the basic distinctions governing the situation).’8 If Lacanian ethics concerns only my radically free choice, then am I not ethically free to choose the most unethical forms of oppression? What guarantee is there that the day after will not be an anti-emancipatory nightmare? In the final instance, this reading leads Stavrakakis to reject Žižek’s revolutionary polemics outright: My starting point is not the impossibility of radical ‘unconditional’ [miraculous, revolutionary, liberatory] acts, an impossibility leaving the road open only to strategic adjustments. On the contrary, I consider such ‘unconditional’ acts entirely possible and I have no reason to doubt their momentary ‘success’. What I doubt is their ability to effect a radical re-foundation of the social in a progressive direction.9

What Stavrakakis does not see in Žižek (perhaps because it is not articulated clearly, or even not there at all) is the moment of short circuit that I described in Chapter 11, which posits a relation of structural necessity between the content of an ethical choice and the ethics of choosing as such. The reading I offered

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of Lacanian ethics in Chapter 12 asserts that if one chooses in a radically free way and takes subjective responsibility for that choice, then it is simply not possible to choose anything other than a universal right to radical freedom and subjective responsibility. The implication here is that if a revolutionary political transformation occurs in a way consistent with Lacanian ethics, it cannot help but reproduce Lacanian ethics in the institutional arrangements that it erects on the day after. Of course, there are an infinite number of things that can go wrong here, and an unethical ‘false event’ will do everything in its power to pass itself off as its ethical counterpart after the fact. But this does nothing to challenge my belief in a relation of structural necessity between the content of the choice and the act of choosing itself. In this context, Hallward’s assertion is simply not true. It is not impossible to distinguish between liberatory and oppressive revolutionary transformations until it is too late. It is only very difficult. It has taken me something like 200 pages simply to describe the difference between oppression and liberation in abstract terms. How difficult must this difference be to detect in the ‘real’ world, let alone in times of political turmoil, and for those who have not had the opportunity to spend much time thinking about it? Finally, Stavrakakis’ rejection of the unconditional act must be challenged. Admittedly, without the notion of short circuit that I am championing, the act of radical decision can only appear as psychotic, the third ‘even worse’ option beyond the deadlock between hysteria and perversion (and this explains Hallward’s invocation of fundamentalist terror). But this is only because from this perspective the psychoanalytic cure has disappeared. The moment of subjective destitution when the analysand re-chooses his or her character structure is by necessity absolute. It is a moment of psychotic withdrawal. It is only the notion that the radically free choice made in the space of withdrawal, supported by the (non-)intervention of the discourse of the analyst, necessarily includes subjective responsibility into the content of choice itself that supports Lacan’s insistence that there is an end to psychoanalysis. What should be clear here is that in my taxonomy of leftist thought, Stavrakakis risks falling into the position of the philosopher of obsessionality. Out of an official fear of avoiding the false event, which conceals a deeper fear of inevitable disappointment with the true event itself, the philosopher of obsessionality engages in an endless series of procrastinations that fend off eventness as such. Nonetheless, this is only a temptation in Stavrakakis’ work (parallel to the decisionist temptation in Žižek), which I believe he himself struggles against. Take, for example, his pathetic (in the good sense) plea for radical democracy’s

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revolutionary potential: In the face of Žižek’s critique that the radical democratic tradition tends to shy away from revolutionary transformation, he asks ‘Why should one deny the transformative potential of radical democracy?’10 And one should fearlessly endorse this question. If radical democracy means what Stavrakakis and Laclau say it means – ‘instead of the impossibility [of resolving antagonism in the Real] leading to a series of substitutions which try to supercede it, it leads to a symbolization of impossibility as such as a positive value … the institutionalization of its own openness and … the injunction to identify with its ultimate impossibility’11 – then it is interchangeable with Žižek’s ‘community of believers’, or my own term, ‘post-analytic hysteria’. In this context, Žižek’s polemics against ‘democracy’ may represent only a minor strategic consideration over the difficulty of persuading people to challenge their existing understandings of what democracy means. But the point not to be missed is that the space for this redefinition of democracy, the space for a more effective institutionalization of lack, can only be cleared through the very kind of absolute act that Stavrakakis rejects. In order to reach a radically democratic social order, it will be necessary to go through the terrifying revolutionary moment in which our current, insufficiently democratic order is shaken to its very foundations. It is not possible for the subject to make the unconscious choice for radical freedom and subjective responsibility without undergoing the moment of subjective destitution in which he or she suspends his or her conscious, symbolic identifications, and enters the space of revolutionary, psychotic withdrawal. The ends of psychoanalysis may not be (only) about a precious initiatic moment, but neither are they (only) about an ongoing therapeutic process. One simply cannot arrive at a symbolization of the lack in the Other through a slow process of careful conscious adjustment.

Conclusion: Go, Bid the Soldiers Shoot!

A creation myth By way of conclusion, I would like to comment on two interrelated topics: first, the role of mythology in this work, and, second, the role that the figure of Žižek has played in its creation. By mythology, I am referring most explicitly to the narrative of the development of the human subject that I developed out of Žižek and Laplanche’s work in Chapter 3. This narrative, which grounds all of my proposals regarding the ethics and political aims of Lacanian psychoanalysis, is essentially a creation myth. As a story about the creation of the subject, about what kernel intervenes from without into the life of the human organism and begins the process of subjectivization, it can only appear as a kind of half-failed retroactive reconstruction, because it is necessarily constructed from within the perspective of an already-existing subject. The question of the genesis of the human subject – ‘Where does/did the subject come from? What was/is the subject before it was/is a subject?’ – remains unanswered, and the narrative that I have constructed has the status of a filler, a placeholder for the missing answer. There is a strong tradition of mythology within psychoanalytic theory, most obviously represented by Freud’s famous trilogy: the Oedipus myth, the myth of primal horde from Totem and Taboo and the myth of Moses and the monotheistic deity from Moses and Monotheism. But at an even more basic level, one of Freud’s essential discoveries – infantile sexuality – is deeply and essentially concerned with the question of the genesis of the subject, and with the myths that answer it. As Žižek puts it in his 2012 talk ‘The Event’, Absolutely crucial for Freud is that children’s sexuality is not some Deleuzian polymorphously perverse paradise of … masturbatory pre-genital gestures … Rather, it its deeply cognitive. It’s connected with all this mysterious questioning: ‘Where do children come from? How?’ which is why it’s also deeply embedded in fantasies. Because, as we know, fantasies are precisely answers to all this. That’s the Freudian myth: a small child sees some strange things: as Laplanche would have put it, the enigma of the Other’s desire. He feels something obscene in adults. What do they want from me? Obviously, they are not aware

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of what they want from me. This is for Laplanche … the original experience of subjectivity: Not ‘What do I want?’ but ‘What do the others see in me?’1

What should be obvious from the link that Žižek himself sets up here to the Laplanchean moment of confronting the enigma of the Other’s desire is that we are right back at the moment of void of subjectivity and the fundamental fantasy that emerges to fill it in. The implication here is that the questions, ‘Where do children come from? How does subjectivity emerge out of that which precedes it?’ and ‘What do the Others want from me?’ are the same. As such, the answer that I have in part borrowed from Laplanche – the notion that subjectivity emerges as the result of a traumatic encounter with the desire of the Other – is simply another version of the fundamental fantasy. It is a placeholder, a filler that covers up the unanswerable question itself. And one should detect the flimsy, insufficient nature of this fantasy in the way that it only displaces the question itself: If subjectivity emerges out of an encounter with an already-existing subject, then how did it emerge to begin with? How did the original Ur-subject come into being if it had no already-existing other subject to encounter? Žižek uses the Hegelian term ‘bad infinity’ to describe this kind of endlessly receding logical spiral,2 and one should locate it in a number of other places throughout this book, including in the notion of antagonism in the Real. The notion that every well-defined social group is always already traversed by antagonism produces an endless spiral of dieresis, of further and further subdivision. With psychoanalysis, even the individual can be further subdivided between the various agencies and subagencies that compete within the psyche. Žižek’s colleague, Alenka Zupančič, offers one solution to this problem, which is to shift one’s focus from the (non-)factuality of the fantasy – the question of whether Laplanche has accurately described the emergence of subjectivity in the human animal – to its function – the question of whether Laplanche has accurately described the subject’s predicament after it has already emerged. Speaking of Lacan’s turn from narratives to mathematical formulas in his later work, Zupančič writes Myth and tragedy, as Lacan understands them, are not to be looked at in terms of narratives (continuous ‘historical’ unfolding and events) as opposed to discrete formulae, for Lacan treats myth and tragedy themselves as instantiations of formal structures. When he refers, for example, in his commentary on Hamlet, to the famous graph of desire, the tragedy is not just an illustration of the graph but, rather, the graph itself – that is to say, its proper articulation. One might say that Lacan’s ‘detour’ through tragedy is – contrary to our expectations – his first

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attempt at ‘formalizing’ analytic experience, not an attempt to ‘poeticize’ this experience.3

From this perspective, Žižek’s insistence on the ontological primacy of the void of subjectivity over the fantasy that only subsequently fills it in should not be read as an argument about the actual process through which subjectivity emerges, but as an argument about the way that subjectivity finds itself in medias res. Žižek’s argument should be read as asserting that human subjects behave as if the anxious void of subjectivity came into being through a traumatic encounter with the desire of the Other, and was only subsequently answered by the fundamental fantasy. How does this shift in perspective resolve the strange problem that my account of the emergence of subjectivity is itself a version of the fundamental fantasy that obscures the traumatic kernel of subjectivity proper? Precisely by reintroducing the topic of the function of a fictional narrative, or fantasy, as opposed to its factual accuracy. This should immediately call to mind Žižek’s arguments concerning belief in a symbolic fiction, the notion of a big Other that knows it doesn’t exist, and even the usefulness to ongoing leftist projects of the (historically unrealized) Enlightenment notion of universality. Even if any given fantasy explaining the emergence of human subjectivity is necessarily more or less factually inaccurate, it will still necessarily have more or less liberatory or oppressive/ideological effects. It can more or less effectively carry within it a recognition of subjective freedom and responsibility. Or, to put it another way, if one of the tasks of the post-analytic hysteric is to theorize the ground which supports subjective freedom and responsibility (both at the individual and social levels), the theory that he or she produces will necessarily always be inaccurate, fictional, non-factual. However, it may in itself be more or less successful in supporting and promoting the freedom and responsibility that it endeavours to describe. It is in this context that I have chosen to endorse Laplanche’s account of the emergence of the human subject. It simply seems to me the most useful.

A myth that knows… However, there is another way to approach the problem of mythology, which emerges in Žižek’s forays into quantum physics and complexity theory. Describing his ontological view of the universe in the opening lives of Žižek!, he says

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I feel a kind of spontaneous affinity with quantum physics, where the idea 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 … The fact that it’s not just nothing, [the fact that] things are out there, means that something went terribly wrong. What we call creation is a kind of cosmic imbalance, cosmic catastrophe. Things exist by mistake.4

More recently, Žižek has taken up this topic again at the end of his magnum opus on Hegel, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. Here, Žižek develops ‘The Ontology of Quantum Physics’, with help from Adrian Johnston’s Žižek’s Ontology. Johnston is a useful figure here insofar as his explanation of Žižek’s ontology makes specific reference to the question of mythology: ‘There’s no need’, he argues boldly, ‘to resort to myths of creation ex nihilo; even though Žižek’s language frequently suggests otherwise, it’s not that there is literally some original void out of which everything emerges.’5 Without getting too far into Žižek’s particular take on quantum physics, it is enough to note that Less than Nothing puts a finer point on this. Insofar as there is some original void out of which everything emerges, that void is always already divided, or split from within into two different voids: the positively charged void he mentioned earlier (this is the ‘den’ or ‘less than nothing’ itself) and the actually empty neutral void which can only exist after something has been removed from the positively charged void (and it is this something that, after being removed, becomes the subject). What should be clear even at this preliminary, superficial level, is that in Žižek’s ontology the division or split that I have been referring to as antagonism in the Real (‘contradiction, antagonism, symbolic castration, parallax, diffraction, complimentarity … up to difference’)6 really goes all the way down. It is not even only a human affair (insofar as one might fantasize about the universe without humans), but splits the universe to its core. Žižek thus enjoins us not (only) to reject mythology as such, but (also) to reject myths that locate a neutral, stable, non-antagonistic state outside of the present (either in the future or in the past, but usually both): what he calls the ideology of the Fall. Frederic Jameson has pointed out that the original topic of a narrative, the narrative ‘as such,’ is the narrative of a Fall, of how things went wrong, of how the old harmony was destroyed (in the case of Hamlet, how the evil uncle overthrew the good father-king). This narrative is the elementary form of ideology, and as such the key step in the critique of ideology should be to invert it – which brings us back to Hegel: the story he is telling in his account of a dialectical process is

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not the story of how an organic unity alienates itself from itself, but the story of how this organic unity never existed in the first place, of how its status is by definition a retroactive fantasy – the Fall itself generates the mirage of what it was a Fall from.

As a result, ‘The Ontology of Quantum Physics’ is filled with images of antagonism pre-existing the point at which it is imagined to have emerged. Before the arrival of humanity, the self-enclosure of the organism splits the universe between inside and outside, which in turn creates the spectral ‘something’ that we call life, ‘and, as Hegel put it, thought is only a further development of this Foritself ’.7 The history of the universe extends back to a big bang before which there was nothing, and yet even this big bang is unbalanced by matter in the universe, which seems to pre-exist it.8 My own temptation in this context is to try to invert the ideology of the Fall by transposing the bad infinity of the past into a good infinity of the future. That is to say, in place of the endless striving to locate the exact moment when human subjectivity emerged from harmonious nature, I am tempted to follow Žižek’s notion of subjectivity as a kind of boot-strapping or emergent property,9 and to argue that human subjectivity is a kind of qualitative shift brought about by the ongoing quantitative unbalancing of the universe itself. Any specific moment one chooses to focus on in this process of unbalancing (the differentiation between elementary forms of matter, the emergence of the self-enclosed organism, the appearance of language) may represent a more or less radical explosion of antagonism in the universe, but each of these moments is also part of an ongoing trend of self-antagonizing, and each moment is thus to a certain extent arbitrarily chosen. What this perspective produces is the possibility of championing the process of self-antagonizing itself, taking as a goal not the elimination of antagonism, but its development to the point where another emergent qualitative shift (however minor or major) occurs. This is how I tend to read what follows the seemingly off-the-cuff quantum ontology in Žižek!: Žižek’s valourization of love as a violent act which confirms or ‘goes to the end’ with the mistake that founds the universe as such. This act of going to the end reads to me as identical with what I have described as the post-analytic perverse declaration of love. And the key point not to be missed here is that what defines this declaration of love is that it does not aim at a utopian nirvana where antagonism will disappear. Rather, ‘going to the end’ is precisely an endless process. Self-antagonizing, the emergence of liberation as such, appears as a kind of endlessly accelerating vector. This does not mean it does not have a

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direction (there is a difference between oppression and liberation), nor does it mean that it can be reduced to a simple quantitative transformation (there are qualitative leaps along the way). But there is nonetheless no utopian moment at which further transformation will no longer be required. Each qualitative transformation clears the ground for yet another one. However, this going to the end with the mistake is a double-edged sword. If it does manage to avoid the trap of imagining a utopian future in which the Fall will be redeemed in the sense of being erased, it nonetheless threatens to reaffirm the ontology of the Fall as such, albeit with the roles reversed: ‘There was a Fall from an old harmony, and I am the embodiment of the Fall itself!’ This is precisely the logic of pre-analytic perversion: The pervert positions himor herself as the agent of the big Other’s enjoyment, the ultimate transgressor. What he or she misses is that transgression is not in itself liberatory. It is always already structured by the Law. The flip side of this problem is that quantum ontology threatens once again to produce a kind of relativity. Without referring to the relationship between Law and transgression, order and chaos, one cannot generate the minimally directional coordinates of leftist political engagement. When Žižek challenges Meillassouz’s ‘naive ontology of levels: physical reality, life, mind’, with the question, ‘What if we discover this hierarchy is false? That, for instance, dolphins think better than we do?’,10 this must nonetheless be supplemented with its obverse: Even if it proves to be wrong, we must work to establish a criterion from which to judge thought. Even if every attempt at liberation fails in relation to a utopian resolution, this does not mean radical leftist political transformation is in vain. And Žižek is doing just this at the end of Less than Nothing. While he tends to privilege the ‘true’ void of the ‘less than nothing’ over the ‘false void’ of stable harmony, the one cannot exist without the other. The parallax tension between them is the primary fact. And this is why, if I may be permitted my own pathetic plea, the act of theorizing as such is so important. If ‘the true implication of quantum physics is [that it compels us] to conceive how our knowing of reality is included into reality itself ’,11 then is not one of the ways to do so to challenge the strict division between theory and practice by asserting that theorizing is already a practice as such? When I am exposed to or develop a new idea, is the universe itself, of which I am a part, not at least minimally changed? Why should the act of theorizing and more importantly the transmission of theory and the collective act of theorizing not be thought of as a terrain for liberatory transformation? Perhaps the next moment of emergent unbalancing is a transformation in thought itself.

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Convincing Slavoj Žižek that he doesn’t exist Finally, I wish to reflect briefly on the role that the image of Slavoj Žižek has played in the creation of The Subject of Liberation itself. In his Masterclass lectures, Žižek produces a wonderful passage in which he gives several illustrations of what he calls the logic of the symptom. In one of these, he refers to a text by Heinrich von Kleist called On the Gradual Formation of Thoughts in the Process of Speech. The thesis is how you can say something original only if you let yourself be surprised by your own words. When you know what you say, it will be worthless. And [Kleist] gives [a] wonderful analysis, intimate and rhetorical, from [the] French revolution: that famous … reply of Mirabeau … to the king. Kleist reconstruct[s] the whole line, claiming, line by line, how this guy got caught into a certain deadlock. First, the guy wanted to reply to the king’s envoy in a standard rhetorical way. Then, he made a slip, and his rhetoric got screwed up … So, Kleist’s idea is that, after a mess like that, you can see how this guy … had quickly to invent something to get out of this mess, and that’s how one of the most famous phrases of French revolution came up. So, again, the idea is that of this temporality where originality is not ‘I know what I want to say and I try to express it,’ but, ‘I let myself be surprised by my very process of enunciation.’ So, again, the idea is that creative ideas emerge when you start in a properly Hegelian way, [a] dialectical way, through failure. You want to say something, things go wrong, [and] then, to save your skin as it were, you quickly shift the field, or you … re-interpret failure at that point it emerges.12

What I wish to point out is that this is exactly the process that I, as it were, fell into in the writing of this text. I began the process by pursuing a linear argument that sifted, separated and stitched together a multitude of Žižek’s arguments concerning subjectivity, ideology and the antagonism internal to leftist thought. I was, in a sense, writing the book that I’d always hoped Žižek would write. But this project got screwed up. I found myself in a certain mess. That is to say, I found myself having promised something that I was in no position to deliver on: a clear description of the ends of Lacanian psychoanalysis, a definition of the post-analytic subject. The only way that I found to save my skin was to quickly shift the field, to drop the deadlock of desire and begin again with the notion of antagonism in the Real. While this moment of failure has been more or less successfully repressed, producing a text in which it appears that I know what I want to say all the way along, it remains visible to me in the gap between the end of Chapter 8 and the beginning of Chapter 9. But the point is that if

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there is anything new or creative in this work, it emerged only as a result of this desperate manoeuvre to save my own skin. As such, it is only retroactively that I recognize my own contribution, my own argument, as distinct from Žižek’s, from Lacan’s, from Laplanche’s. My own position has emerged only out of my failure to successfully articulate the positions of others. The other concept that this experience of writing suggests is Lacan’s notion of the psychoanalyst as the subject supposed to know. For Lacan, the analysand comes to the analyst with a question concerning his or her own desire, concerning the meaning of his or her symptom, supposing that the analyst has the knowledge that would answer it. This supposition sustains a process through which the analyst refuses to answer the analysand’s question directly, but leads him or her to articulate the knowledge which he or she supposes the analyst to have. At the end of the treatment, the analysand realizes that the knowledge of which he or she has been in pursuit, the knowledge that he or she assumed the analyst to have, has in fact been produced by his or her very activity. What began as the pursuit of something outside of the subject him- or herself becomes the process through which he or she creates something out of nothing. In this sense, the writing of this text has in some sense had the structure of a psychoanalysis, and Žižek, who certainly does not remain silent, but who nonetheless never failed to not answer my questions, has been like an analyst. Although when I set out to write this text, I set myself the task of assembling out of the fragments that constitute Žižek’s work the clear linear argument that I always felt he failed to provide, here, at the end of the process, I must acknowledge that Žižek did not in fact have the knowledge I was seeking. It did not even exist in him, or anywhere outside of myself. In the course of finding myself in a certain deadlock and trying to save my skin by quickly shifting the field, I have created this knowledge ex nihilo. In the process of trying to elaborate what Žižek believes, I have inadvertently constructed what it is that I believe. Although all the way along I have stressed that the theoretical edifice I have been building is constructed out of the building blocks that I have found in Žižek’s work, I must now admit that the linkages I have established and the consequences I have drawn do not have any necessary relation to Žižek. I must take responsibility for my own position, admitting that I can fully expect everyone, even Žižek himself, to at least find my position lacking, unsuccessfully articulated, if not downright wrong. And it should be equally clear that I conceive of myself at this point, if I may be allowed this closing moment of megalomania, as what I have called a post-

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analytic hysteric. This book has been my attempt to articulate in my own way the logic of short circuit, to articulate the negative universal presuppositions that I believe ground the possibility of the practice of psychoanalysis, or the theoretical practice of deconstruction, which is to say that this text has been my attempt to articulate what I believe are the ends of psychoanalysis. And, in brief, the most essential definition of what I take to be the ends of psychoanalysis is the possibility precisely of taking a position on what are the ends of psychoanalysis. This position places me in opposition to those who believe that the fact that there is no adequate definition of the ends of psychoanalysis implies that one should not attempt to provide one. It places me in opposition to those who believe that psychoanalysis is an interminable process with no end as such. It places me in opposition to those who believe that the ends of psychoanalysis are to provide peaceful co-existence or the resolution of antagonism in the Real. It places me in opposition to those who would argue that there is no possibility for a universal definition of the ends of analysis, but only partial, specific definitions specific to individual analysands. And this position on the ends of psychoanalysis has its necessary political implications. I believe that a truly emancipatory social group is not based around a figure of the master, or a set of rules and regulations, that promises to resolve political antagonism in the Real and establish peaceful co-existence amongst its members. Rather, I believe that the individuals who make up this social group should work to guarantee to each other the universal right to what I have defined as Lacanian psychoanalysis. That is to say, the members of an emancipatory society should guarantee, through various theoretical, educational and deconstructive practices, liberation from traditional cultural life-worlds, from the neutral objective framework of liberal tolerant multiculturalist late capitalism and from religious pseudo-fundamentalism. In place of these options, the members of an emancipatory society should strive to offer each other a space of absolute freedom in which they are individually compelled to confront their own radical subjective freedom for choosing their fundamental fantasies. And the members of an emancipatory society should strive to bring their respective fantasies into antagonistic conflict, in which there is a struggle between particular perspectives, not with the aim of imposing a single unified perspective on the group as such, or with the aim of excluding oppositional perspectives, but with the aim of producing a perspective that articulates the most successfully, the most efficiently, the very conditions of possibility for this emancipatory society as such.

Notes Introduction 1 2

3 4 5 6 7 8

Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (New York: Verso, 1999), 1. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Masterclass: The Idea of Communism and Its Actuality’, lecture series, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 23 March 2011, .mp3 audio file, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2011/03/slavoj-Žižek-Masterclass-theidea-of-communism-and-its-actuality/. Yannis Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (New York: SUNY, 2007), 8. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 10. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 4. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (New York: Verso, 1989), 169. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 3. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Metaphysical Suicide’, Žižek!, directed by Astra Taylor (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2005), DVD.

Chapter 1 1 2 3 4

5

6 7

Slavoj Žižek, ‘Metaphysical Suicide’, Žižek!, directed by Astra Taylor (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2005), DVD. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 1–2. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 2. Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), 136. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, The Edition of the Shakespeare Head Press (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994), 1.5.199. Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 9. Hamlet, in William Shakespeare, 1.1.141–142.

Notes

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 2. Michel Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Pantheon, 1984), 42. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, 43. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, 42. Foucault, ‘What Is Enlightenment?’, 42. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (New York: Vintage, 1995), 211. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (New York: Verso, 1989), 120. Hamlet, 3.4.127. Hamlet, 3.4.129–137. Hamlet, 3.4.62–73. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 1. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 138. Slavoj Žižek, ‘A Plea for a Return to Différance (with a Minor Pro Domo Sua)’, Critical Inquiry, 32, no. 2 (Winter 2006): 228. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 250–251. Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 21. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 251. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 3. Hamlet, 3.4.204–205. Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Puppet and the Dwarf ’, Žižek!, directed by Astra Taylor (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2005), DVD. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 3. Slavoj Žižek, Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (New York: Verso, 1994), 175.

Chapter 2 1 2 3 4 5

225

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 260. Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1996), 99. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 247–248. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 3. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Critical Theory Summer School 2012 – Friday Debate I’, debate, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 15 June

226

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

Notes

2012, .mp3 audio file, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/archive/ audio/2012_06_15/2012_06_15_Critical_Theory_Summer_ School_2012_I_Debate.mp3. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 46. Foucault, What is Enlightenment?, 45. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 222. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 250–251. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics’, in The Challenge of Carl Schmitt, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Verso, 1999), 34. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 20. Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose. (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 247. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 334. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 95. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 247. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 2. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 2–3. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 134. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 135. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 192. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 190. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 135. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 190. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 191. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 192. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 135.

Chapter 3 1 2 3 4 5

Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 53. Žižek, ‘Metaphysical Suicide’, Žižek! Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 265. (my emphasis) Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 124. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 264.

Notes

6 7 8 9

10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

22 23 24 25

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

227

Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 2. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 88–89. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 247. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction’, lecture series, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 21 June 2006, .wav audio file, http://rabelais.socialtools.net/09.Žižek.lacan.london.21-June-2006.wav. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 264. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 6. Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, 6. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 265. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 265. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 51. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 31. Laplanche and Pontalis, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Laplanche and Pontalis, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 32. Laplanche and Pontalis, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 33. Laplanche and Pontalis, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 33. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–66), 7: 223. Laplanche and Pontalis, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 44. Jean Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, trans. John Fletcher (New York: Routledge, 1999), 79–80. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 288. Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 465. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 10. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 288. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 265. Laplanche and Pontalis, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 105. Laplanche and Pontalis, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, 105. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 281. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 283. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 288.

228

34 35 36 37 38 39

Notes

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 284. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 266. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991), 188. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 288. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 230. Laplanche, Essays on Otherness, 79–80.

Chapter 4 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

21

Jacques Lacan, Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 10. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 218. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 133. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 133. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 133. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 133. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 133. Žižek, ‘Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction’. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 267. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 260. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 266. Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. David McLintock (New York: Penguin, 2002), 61. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 62. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 65. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 268. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 201. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 268. Žižek, ‘Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction’. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 268. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, The Case of Cinema’, lecture series, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 18 February 2008. ogg audio file, http://rabelais.socialtools.net/01.Žižek.cinemaIdeology. London18Feb2008.ogg. Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 50.

Notes

229

Chapter 5 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 234. Hamlet, 3.4.97–172. Hamlet, 3.4.98–100. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 179–180. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 181. Žižek, The Parallax View, 49. Žižek, ‘Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction’. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 185–186. Žižek, The Parallax View, 354. Žižek, The Parallax View, 91. Žižek, The Parallax View, 90.

Chapter 6 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11

12 13 14

Žižek, On Belief, 20. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, the Case of Cinema’. Žižek, The Parallax View, 318. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, the Case of Cinema’. Žižek, The Parallax View, 332. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, the Case of Cinema’. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis (New York: Norton, 1988), 128. Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: Norton, 2006), 92–93. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, the Case of Cinema’. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 148. Slavoj Žižek, ‘A Lacanian Plea for Fundamentalism’, lecture, Slought Foundation, September, 2000, .mp3 audio file, http://slought.org/media/ media-mp3/1236-2004-09-11-1-Žižek.mp3. Žižek, The Parallax View, 332. Žižek, Organs Without Bodies, 41. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Passion in the Era of Decaffeinated Belief ’, The Symptom: The Online Journal for Lacan.com 5 (Lacan.com: Winter 2004), http:// www.lacan.com/passionf.htm.

230

15 16 17

Notes

Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, the Case of Cinema’. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 219. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, the Case of Cinema’.

Chapter 7 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, 435. Jean Baudrillard, America (New York: Verso, 1988), 38. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993) 213–214. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, The Case of Cinema’. Žižek, ‘Masterclass’. Žižek, ‘Masterclass’. Žižek, ‘Masterclass’.

Chapter 8 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

Žižek, ‘Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics’, 30. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 1–2. Žižek, ‘Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics’, 31. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 322. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 322. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 323. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 323. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 143–144. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 155. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 66. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 334. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 362. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 362. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 334. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 348. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 363.

Notes

17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

231

Žižek, How to Read Lacan, 124. Žižek, The Parallax View, 381. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Embedded in Ideology, the Case of Cinema’. Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason: A Blood-Dimmed Tide Is Loosed’ (Lacan.com, March 2006), http://www.lacan.com/ zizantinomies.htm. Žižek, The Parallax View, 354. Žižek, The Parallax View, 348. Žižek, The Parallax View, 356. Žižek, The Parallax View, 348. Žižek, The Parallax View, 309–310.

Chapter 9 1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10

Žižek, ‘Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction’. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 163. Žižek, ‘Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction’. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 353. Žižek, The Parallax View, 338. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture’, lecture series, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 15 June 2009, .mp3 audio file, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/archive/ audio/2009_06_Žižek/2009_06_15_SlajovŽižek_Utopia.mp3. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 19. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture’. Žižek, ‘Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics’, 36. Žižek, ‘Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction’.

Chapter 10 1 2 3 4 5

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 165. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 164. Žižek, The Parallax View, 373. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 164–165. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 334.

232

6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Notes

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 165. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 165. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 54. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 154–155. Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 298. Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (New York: Verso, 2008), xxiv. Žižek, The Parallax View, 303. Žižek, The Parallax View, 304.

Chapter 11 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 128. Žižek, The Parallax View, 102. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 97. Žižek, The Parallax View, 243. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 19. Žižek, The Parallax View, 381. Žižek, The Parallax View, 351. Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (New York: Verso, 2008), 321–322. Žižek, The Parallax View, 203.

Chapter 12 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 215. Žižek, The Parallax View, 48. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, 142. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 247. Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 140. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 247. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 323. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 323. Žižek, The Parallax View, 323. Žižek, The Parallax View, 323.

Notes

233

Chapter 13 1 2 3 4 5

6

Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 291–293. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 290. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Slavoj Žižek’, Žižek!, directed by Astra Taylor (New York: Zeitgeist Films, 2005), DVD. Žižek et al., The Neighbour, 183. Slavoj Žižek, ‘Respect for Otherness? No Thanks!’, lecture, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 20 May 2005, .wav audio file, http://rabelais. socialtools.net/Respect_for_otherness_no_thanks.wav. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (New York: Verso, 2000), 214.

Chapter 14 1 2

Žižek, On Belief, 102. Žižek, ‘Masterclass: Notes Towards a Definition of Communist Culture’.

Chapter 15 1 2 3 4 5

Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 201–204. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 134. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 132. Jodi Dean, Žižek’s Politics, 122–123. Dean, Žižek’s Politics, 123.

Chapter 16 1 2 3

Žižek, The Parallax View, 342. Žižek, The Parallax View, 382. Žižek, The Parallax View.

234

4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

Notes

Žižek, The Parallax View, 306. Žižek, The Parallax View. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 140. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 111. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 125. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 134. Stavrakakis, The Lacanian Left, 141. Butler, Laclau and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 100.

Conclusion 1

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Slavoj Žižek, ‘The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology’, lecture, Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, 9 May 2013, .mp3 audio file, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/archive/audio/2013_05_09/2013_05_09_ Slavoj%20Žižek_the%20Event_talk.mp3. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 133. Alenka Zupančič, Ethics of the Real (New York: Verso, 2000), 171. Žižek, ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Slavoj Žižek’, Žižek! Adrian Johnston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 194. Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (New York: Verso, 2012), 950. Žižek, Less than Nothing, 909. Žižek, Less than Nothing, 926. Žižek, The Parallax View, 205. Žižek, Less than Nothing, 939. Žižek, Less than Nothing, 932. Žižek, ‘Masterclass on Jacques Lacan: A Lateral Introduction’.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. America. New York: Verso, 1988. Butler, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Dean, Jodi. Žižek’s Politics. New York: Routledge, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New International. Translated by Peggy Kamuf. New York: Routledge, 1994. Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 1996. Fanon, Franz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. New York: Grove Press, 2008. Foucault, Michel. “What Is Enlightenment?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, Translated by Catherine Porter. 32–50. New York: Pantheon, 1984. ———. Discipline and Punish. New York: Vintage, 1995. Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, edited by James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press, 1953–66. ———. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by David, McLintock. New York: Penguin, 2002.Johnston, Adrian. Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008. Lacan, Jacques. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan. Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton, 1988. ———. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Russell Grigg. New York: W.W. Norton, 1991. ———. Écrits. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Laplanche, Jean. Essays on Otherness. Translated by John Fletcher. New York: Routledge, 1999. ——— and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. Life and Death in Psychoanalysis. Translated by Jeffrey Mehlman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970. ——— and Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand. The Language of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith. New York: W. W. Norton, 1973. Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Translated by Julie Rose. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Shakespeare, William. ‘Hamlet’. In William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, The Edition of the Shakespeare Head Press, edited by Arthur Henry Bullen. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1994. Stavrakakis, Yannis. The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007.

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———. Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. New York: Verso, 2012. ———. ‘The Event: Politics, Art, Ontology’. Lecture for the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities. 9 May 2013. .mp3 audio file, http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/archive/ audio/2013_05_09/2013_05_09_Slavoj%20Žižek_the%20Event_talk.mp3. ———, Santner, Eric L and Reinhard, Kenneth. The Neighbour: Three Inquiries in Political Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Zupančič, Alenka. Ethics of the Real. New York: Verso, 2000.

Index Note: Locators with letter ‘n’ refer to notes.

absolute decisionism 145, 178 aggravation 124–6 meaning of 124 mediation and 119–21 objectively leftist 120 proliferating antagonisms 120 notion of 125 Alabama, racist practices 195 American civil rights movement 195 Analysis Terminable and Interminable 41 analyst’s role 150–1 analytic education 203 antagonism acceptance of the 158 affirmation of 125 aggravating characteristic of 125 consistent definition 135 continual presence of 135 defence against 205 definition 123 diagonal hypothesis 122 disavowal of 125, 134, 157, 162 essential feature of 117 existence of 130, 135–7, 139, 170–1 higher-level resolution of 207 hysteric desires 158 hysteric’s relation to 158 language of 129 means for resolving 209 mediation 117 notion of 121–2, 127, 171, 216, 221 objective definition 117 political 119–20, 122, 223 proliferating series of 123 real 9, 135 recognition of 159 resolution of 124, 188–9, 192, 194, 207–8, 223 satisfying resolution to 165

subjective freedom and 141 subjective perspectives 118 subjective relations to 124 unified resolution of 191 universal name for 159 way of concealing 205 antagonistic society 191–4 anti-austerity protests 1–2 antidescriptivism 33 applied psychoanalysis, naïve denunciations 190 Arab Spring 1 authentic African culture 189 Bartelby politics 199–202 negative gestures of withdrawal 201 preparatory gesture 202 psychoanalyst’s act of withdrawal 200 Bartelby the Scrivener 199 Baudrillard, Jean 22, 90, 230n. 2 beloved object 181–3 ethical standard for measuring 181 Nazi henchman as object of love big ideological Cause 103, 107 big Other 53–5 authority of the 102 definition 71 explicit and implicit rules 72 fundamental fantasy 54 guilt feeling 89 Lacanian notion of the 55 meaning of ‘Other’ in Lacanian theory 54 (non-)existing 99–102 fictional 108 fundamental fantasy 99 traditional 80 notions of 65–6 position of 54, 71, 201

Index psychotic foreclosure of 145 of religious pseudo-fundamentalism 187–8 role of 54, 85 symbolic mandate 71 understanding of 72 Brown, John 162–3, 177–80, 182, 188–9 Butler, Judith 7, 23–6, 29, 30, 42–5, 49, 55, 56, 58, 60, 170–1, 227nn. 6, 7, 11–12, 234n. 11 capitalism Enlightenment and 79, 105 European 26 global 2, 30, 94 liberal tolerant 23, 31, 77, 80 multiculturalist 31, 188, 223 oppressive power of 31 pathetic plea for 118 universalizing function of 78 Cartesian subject 1, 18–19, 22 catastrophic error 36 character structures, theory of 27, 99, 114, 123, 128, 137, 143–6 Christian fundamentalism 102 Christianity, external threat 63 Civilization and Its Discontents 57–8, 62 codified transgressions 60 cogito 1, 11, 19–20, 49–52, 98, 109 communisms 4 conspiracy theory 101, 114 consumerist ideology 82–5, 89, 93 incarnation as the 84 superego of 84 deadlock of desire 26–8, 36–7, 41–2, 57, 65, 71–2, 80, 94–5, 98, 113, 165–6, 210, 221 Dean, Jodi 7, 194–7, 233nn. 4–5 death drive concept of 45 hypothesis of 48 decisionism 13, 156, 178, 181 decisionist relativism 12 decisionist temptation 13 deconstructionist legacy 19 Derrida, Jacques 19, 20, 22, 23, 35, 224nn. 4, 6 descriptivism 33

239

desire for enjoyment 58 desire for transgression 28, 58, 61 desire vs. drive 165–7 deadlock of desire 166 ethics of drive 165 impossibility of desire 167 philosophy of hysteria 165 direct mapping 128 disavowal 159–63 of antagonism 125, 134, 157, 162 of antagonism in the Real 162 belief 162 of enjoyment 73 knowledge of materiality 161 negotiation of interests 163 scientific reason 162 structural characteristic of perversion 162 subjective ethical 160 subjective responsibility 159 discourse is love 170–3 discourse of the analyst 127, 131, 134–9, 146–7, 150–1, 157–8, 160, 170, 172, 177, 199, 202–4, 209, 212 Enlightenment notion 136 perverse social link 137 subspecies 137, 172 disillusionment 46 double mapping 137 Eichmann, Adolf 141–2 enfranchisement 188 enigmatic desire of his Other 66 Enlightenment 10–12, 17, 20, 23, 26–7, 29–33, 74, 78–9, 94–5, 98, 105, 113, 124, 133–4, 158, 160–1, 175–7, 217 blackmail of the 20 characterizations of 94 critique of 33 deadlock of 94 deterritorializing effects of 80 failure of 29, 80, 99, 135 German idealist 113 idealist 124 notions of universalism 98 philosophical assumptions 27 philosophy 10, 32, 98 postmodern forms of thought, distinction 26

240 standard version of the 49 thinking and capitalism 79 thought 11, 30–1, 33, 79, 95, 133, 175 universalism deterritorialization 78–9 universal systematization 30 Žižek’s 10 erogenous zones 46 ethics 143–6 acceptance of 155–6 eternal character 143 ethical duty 156 ethical injunction 73 ethical responsibility 144–5, 151, 155–7, 160 hysteria and perversion 144 universal criteria for 155 ethics of drive 165, 167, 169–72, 178, 180–3, 189, 192, 208, 210 key 169 logic of desire and drive 168 move of drive 169 post-analytic pervert 167 ultimate satisfaction 168 eurosis-perversion-psychosis 128 Evans, Dylan 53, 54, 225n. 2, 226nn. 17–18, 226n. 1, 227n. 25, 228nn. 2–7, 16, 229n. 10, 230nn. 9–10, 232n. 5 exploitation 67, 116, 195 exclusion and 189 oppression and 67 traditional relation of 127 False Memory Syndrome 101 Fanon, Franz 189, 233n. 1 Foucault, Michel 3, 11, 20, 22–4, 27, 29–30, 32, 35, 43, 44, 74, 89, 94, 160, 161, 225nn. 9–13, 226nn. 6–8 four fundamental discourses theory 127 antagonism in the Real 129 correcting hysteria 134–6 correcting perversion 137–9 direct mapping 128 discourses 129–32 discourse of the analyst 131 discourse of the hysteric 130 discourse of the university 130

Index key feature 129–32 tautological quality 129 forms of the social link 128 modes of address 128 philosophies 132–4 problem of transcendental imagination 134 self-certainty 133 self-doubt 133 self-exoneration 133 structures of communication 128 ultimate consequence 128 Fragile Absolute, The 91 Frank, Anne 162–3, 177–2, 188, 193 French deconstructionism 8, 10 postmodern 113, 157 Freud, Sigmund 2, 34, 41, 45, 46, 48, 53, 57, 58, 62, 73, 89, 101, 120, 160, 215, 228nn. 12–14, 21 Freudian unconscious, denial of the 44, 160 fundamental fantasy big Other and 57, 178 disavowal of 59, 62 enigma of the parent’s desire 47 function of 49 gesture of 51 language of 58 as make-shift answer 47, 56 masochistic 56, 58 notion of a consistent Other 69 passionate attachment and 45, 50 passionate (dis)attachment 41–2 sadomasochistic enjoyment of 90 sexualized enjoyment of 57 structure of 178, 180 symbolic mandate 70, 72 transgressive enactment 61, 63 traversal of 66, 68, 78, 99 unbearable enjoyment 102 violence of the 91 fundamentalism 97–9, 101, 103 analysis of 98 ethnic fundamentalism 97 Islamist 102 misunderstanding 104–7 capitalism and enlightenment 105 multiculturalist consumerism 104

Index reactionary fundamentalism 105, 106 reactionary pseudofundamentalism 106 postmodern ideology and 98–9 religious fundamentalism 97 venture with scientific approach 101 fundamentalists 93, 105–8, 190 gender formation, performative theory of 7, 23 German Enlightenment idealism 8, 157 German idealism 10 Giovanni, Don 142–3 gradualist approach 188 Hamlet 18, 21–2, 54, 65–70, 73, 216, 218 hegemony 92, 196 Henri Levi 118 human sexuality, definition of 48 hysteria, essential structure of 159 identity politics of inclusion 171 ideological bribery, category of 85 idiosyncratic identities, multiplicity of 31 imaginary self-interview 24 imperialism 10 individual subjective development, theory of 55 interpellation 55–7 interpellation, moment of recognition or interpellation 56 Islamic suicide bomber 103 Islamist fundamentalism 102 Johnston, Adrian 218, 234n. 5 Klu Klux Klan 60, 63 Lacan, Jacques 2, 3, 5–7, 11–14, 21, 24–7, 41–8, 50–60, 79–80, 82, 89, 98–100, 113–15, 123, 127–9, 137–8, 144, 156, 158–60, 165, 204–12, 216, 222, 228n. 36, 228n. 1, 229n. 7 Lacanian ethics 155–7 decisionism of 156 Lacanian Left 3–5 fractiousness of 4 idiosyncratic problem 4

241

neologisms 5 practical concerns 6 theory 3 Lacanian Real 5, 115 Lacanian theory anxiety-provoking deadlock 27 appropriation by leftist 13 character structures 11, 27, 35, 98, 113, 123 concerns 3 connection with big Other and Law 57 deadlock 27 deadlocks and impossibilities 196 decisionist relativism 12 encounter with Real 5 hysteria 27 meaning of Other in 54 neurosis 27, 114 obsessionality 27 perversion 27, 114 political investment in 147 psychosis 27, 98, 114 radical leftist perspective 2, 4 radical responsibility 157 subjective freedom 157 understanding of liberation 4 Lacan Masterclass 115 Laclau, Ernesto 234n. 11 language of enjoyment 166 Laplanche, Jean 24, 27, 44–50, 52, 55, 56, 215–17, 222, 227nn. 16–20, 22–3, 25, 29–30, 228n. 39, 230n. 1 leftist fantasy 201 leftist theory 10, 175 Leninist moment 204–6 Levi, Bernard Henri 118 liberal tolerance, perspective of 103 liberal tolerant ethics 180 liberal tolerant multiculturalism 84–7, 93, 97–8, 102, 104, 108, 166, 178–9, 182, 190 authoritarian repression 86 beauty of 87 contemporary 143 cultural differences 86 generalized love of 193 global capitalism and 94 Roma family 93

242 liberal tolerant multiculturalist 92–3, 103–4, 188, 223 liberatory fetish 194–7 miraculous revolutionary transformation 194 objective calculation of 196 revolutionary politics 194 liberatory politics 187, 189 linear argument 18, 221–2 local transgressions, multiplicity of 94 Manifesto for the Communist Party 1 mapping exercise 127–8, 137 Marxism 7, 12, 19, 121, 123, 135 Marxist critiques of psychoanalysis 189 masochism 47–9 maternal care, seduction of 46 megalomania, moment of 222 Metastases of Enjoyment 24 Montgomery, racist practices 195 multiple identities, peaceful co-existence 125 narcissistic hedonism 103, 105 Nazi henchman 179–81 dehumanization of 188 dramatic condemnation 180 entitled to Nazism 193 failure of 181 liberal tolerant ideology 180 as object of love 181 Nazism 36, 211 negative universalism 170 Neighbour, The 168 neurosis essence of 35 genera of 35 neutral objective resolution of antagonism 207 transmission of 204 obscene solicitation, realm of 63 obsessionality 27, 35, 212 obsessional neurosis 35 obsessional procrastination 98 Occupy! movement 1 October Revolution 143, 155 official prohibitions, transgressive of 62 old leftist 25–6, 27

Index Old Testament 101 Ontology of Quantum Physics 218–19 oppression 67, 127 Organs without Bodies 22 Parallax View, The 8, 199, 202 parliamentary democracy 119, 121, 201 structure of 119 Zižek’s understanding of 121 passionate attachment 44–5, 51, 56, 58, 63, 150 form of 51 fundamental fantasy and 45 Passionate (Dis)Attachments 24–5, 32–3, 35, 41–2, 55, 60, 165 patriotic nationalism 190–2 elements of 191 logic of 191 mediating side of 191 peaceful co-existence, ideal of 179 permanent destitution 147 perverse transgression, enjoyment of 28 perverse turn 61–3 perversion vs. hysteria 26–9 definition 28 philosophy of hysteria 24, 27, 31–2, 34–5, 41, 43, 98–9, 116, 119–21, 123, 125–7, 132–5, 139, 160, 165–6, 175 counterargument 32 critique of 32, 160, 166 desire 165 with Enlightenment structuralism 133 failure of 98 hysterical attitude 34 line of aggravation 166 passionate (dis)attachments 32 rejection of Enlightenment 32 philosophy of obsessionality 35–7 characterization of 36 critique of 36 postponement strategy 36 philosophy of perversion 23, 27, 29–32, 35, 41–3, 98, 116, 119–21, 123–7, 132–4, 137, 139, 165–6, 175 ambivalence over 41 criticism of 161 critique of 30, 125 multicultural identity politics 29–30 perspective of the 116, 123, 160, 166

Index persuasive version of [postmodern] theories 29 postmodern ideology and 125, 133 postmodern philosophy 29 post-political liberal establishment 30 structure of 29 transgression strategy 29 Žižek’s critique of the 30, 123, 125 political antagonism 119–20, 122, 223 political efficiency 118, 129, 135, 193, 200, 205, 208 political inefficiency 118, 192 politicization, moment of 195 politics of prescription 179–81 Pontalis, Jean-Bertrand 227nn. 16–20, 25, 29–30, 230n. 1 pop-culture 23–4 post-analytic form of philosophy 175 post-analytic hysteria 147, 157–60, 167, 170, 172, 176–7, 196, 199, 201–3, 205–10, 217, 222–3 character structure of 176 definitions of 13, 113–14, 129, 175, 194, 221 postmodern deconstructionist 19, 22, 98 postmodern ego-ideal 82–4 postmodern/fundamentalist pact 107–9 critique of 108 fundamentalism and multiculturalism 108 liberal tolerant consumerism 107 reactionary fundamentalism 108 postmodern identity politics 8, 12, 42, 171 effectiveness of 160 postmodern ideology 79–81, 84–6, 89, 92, 97–102, 105, 107, 114, 134, 162, 179, 187 characterization of postmodern 80 disavowal characteristic of 100 fundamentalism and 97–102, 107 misunderstanding 102–4 liberal tolerant multiculturalism 102 reactionary religious fundamentalism 102 sadomasochistic cultural practice 104 persuasive version of 43 representative version of 43 traditional Other 92–5 traversal of the fantasy 81

243

postmodernist indefinite oscillation 22 postmodern obsession 94 postmodern thought 10–11, 21–3, 29, 33, 80, 94–5, 175 postmodern, tolerant ideology 81 pre-analytic hysteria 172, 183 pre-analytic perversion 166–7, 203, 205 pre- and post-analytic subjects 146–7 primordial attachments 45 proletarian revolution 121 psychic homeostasis 47 Psychic Life of Power, The 42 psychoanalysis aim of 12–13, 27, 50, 146–8 applied 53 birthplace of 47 definition 6, 207, 223 deterritorializing effects of 208 ethics and political aims of 215 liberatory promise of 79, 97, 108, 113, 127, 137, 141, 144, 146, 155 permanent destitution 147 universal right to 188–9 psychoanalytic cure 6, 11–13, 212 psychoanalytic deconstruction 171, 205 psychoanalytic edifice, accusation against 43 psychoanalytic notion of traversing the fantasy 53 psychoanalytic practice 6 psychoanalytic process, Žižek’s definition 69 psychoanalytic theory 2, 5–6, 34, 42–3, 45–6, 53–4, 160, 194 application of 8 grasp of 17 political implications of 2 social implications of 2 tools of 43 tradition of mythology within 215 psychosis 12, 34–5, 97–9, 101, 108, 113–14, 128–9, 145, 175, 178 characteristic operation of 100 definition 100 sense of psychotic foreclosure 100 psychotic ideological formations 114 racialized Other 85–6, 92 racism 91–3, 97, 195 radical democracy 210–13 critique 213

244

Index

radical freedom 199, 202, 206, 210, 213 universal right to 212 radical leftist philosophy 2, 7, 14 politics 143 radical pronouncements 80 Rancière, Jacques 31, 226n. 12 rationality principles 20 reactionary fundamentalism 103–8 Reading Lacan 80 reflexive decision for responsibility 148–9 reflexive racism 91–2 reflexive sadomasochism 90–2 ideological bribery 91 racist enjoyment 91–2 self-criticism and guilt 91 self-culpabilization 90 reflexive self-domination 49 reflexive subject 49 Reinhard, Kenneth 230n. 8 religious pseudo-fundamentalism 114, 223 retroactive reconstruction 215 revolutionary emancipation 116 revolutionary polemics 7, 194, 211 revolutionary political transformation 212 Roma family 86, 93 sadistic enjoyment, victim of 63 sadomasochistic enjoyment 138 Santner, Eric L. 230n. 8 schizophrenia 101 seductions of conjuration 23, 67 seduction theory 45 segregation laws 195 self-antagonizing 219 self-culpabilization 90, 133 self-destructive enjoyment 89, 107 sexual seduction 46, 48 Shakespeare, William 224n. 5 short circuit, logic of 137, 145, 148, 175, 209–10, 223 Skywalker, Anakin 142–3 social fantasy, traversing the 41, 70–4 social group vs. patriotism 189–91 social inclusion 149–50 socialisms 4 social Law 138–9 social prohibitions 28, 71

social superego 59–61 danger of external punishment 61 implicit laws of 72 role of 61 symbolic mandate 59 translation of the fundamental fantasy 61 sociopolitical ideology 65, 114 sociopolitical inclusion 55 sociopolitical level of ideology 59–60 socio-symbolic network 25, 43 Stavrakakis, Yannis 3, 4, 6, 7, 194–7, 210–13, 224nn. 3–5, 233nn. 2–3, 234nn. 6–10 structural deadlock 8 subjective destitution 51, 149–50, 212–13 psychotic space of 201 state of 6 subjective development, theory of 45, 50 subjective freedom notions of 113 radical 223 subjective maturity, definition 74 subjective positions, infinite variety of 123 subjective responsibility 12–13, 73, 113, 143, 155, 157–9, 163, 165, 170, 177–80, 187–8, 200–4, 208, 210, 212–13 disavowal act 159, 163, 165 enfranchisement 188 ethical 177 link with behaviour 13 radical freedom and 210, 212–13 rejection of 157 subjective freedom and 113, 187 subjectivity anxious void of 44–7, 65, 217 baseline of 50 definition of 10, 42, 45, 55, 80, 94, 109, 175, 209 emergence of 216–17 multiple forms of 23 notion of 219 ontological primacy of 217 structure of 45 traumatic kernel of 217 understanding of 68

Index universal dimension of 31 universal structure of 65, 136, 158, 176, 206 Sublime Object of Ideology, The 8, 33, 71, 115 superego 57–9 of consumerist ideology 84 definition of 58–9 functions of 89 guilt feeling 59, 61–2, 73, 82, 89–90 ideological bribery 78 as internal agency 57 parental authority 61 punishment 58 symbolic interpellation 56 symbolic mandate, language of 58–9 symbolic prohibitions 28 tautological gesture 130, 134, 172–3 theoretical endeavour 25 They Live 60, 82 third privileged position 22 threshold of tolerable excitation 48 Ticklish Subject 1, 7–14, 17–23, 26, 34, 41–2, 50, 54, 99, 116, 127–8, 134, 139, 175 tolerant multiculturalism 84, 92–3, 178 traditional ideology 77–9 constellation of 81 efficiency of 105 fantasy 77 moral and racial purity 78 obscene enjoyment 77 oppressive practices of 109 racism of 92 traditional Other 92–5 traditional racism 85 transcendental imagination 134 transgression features 62

245

institutionalized modes of 210 postmodern strategies of 31 transgressive enjoyment 81–2 traumatic situation 47 tripartite theory 113 typological schema 71 unconscious 34, 44, 50, 149, 160 definition of 51 as inter-subjective 53 primordial encounter of 50 sexual enjoyment 47 unethical consequences 156–7 universalism, falsity of 183 universal liberation, illusory promise of 78 universal rights, illusion of 183 universal subjectivity, definition of 98 valourization of love 219 warfare vs. recognition 121–4 Western academia 1, 18, 20 Western civilization, external threat 63 What is Enlightenment? 20 white-male-heterosexual subjectivity 92 Žižek, Slavoj 1, 211–13, 224nn. 1–2, 6–8, 224nn. 1–3, 225nn. 8, 14, 18–24, 26–8, 25nn. 1, 3–5, 226nn. 9–11, 13–16, 19–28, 226nn. 2–5, 227nn. 8–10, 13–15, 24, 27–8, 31–3, 228nn. 34–5, 37–8, 228nn. 8–11, 15, 17–20, 229nn. 1, 4–11, 229nn. 1–6, 8–9, 11–14, 230nn. 15–17, 230nn. 3–7, 230nn. 1–8, 11–16, 231nn. 1–10, 231nn. 17–25, 232nn. 1–13, 233nn. 1–5, 234nn. 1–8 Zupančič, Alenka 216, 234n. 3