Remarks on Lacan and on Žižek’s The Parallax View

Lacan changed the course of psychoanalysis by supplementing Freud’s emphasis on the biological aspect of human existence with inquiries into the symbolic and linguistic character of human interrelations. Lacan showed that because any human subject is split from within by the acquisition of language, the human subject is barred from itself by entry into the symbolic order. As a result, human desire is not simply a function of biology, but is de-centred insofar as it involves imaginative projection—the dimension of fantasy—and the attempt to become whatever it is that the other desires most. As an interpreter of Lacanian psychoanalysis, however, Žižek also engages with theology and political discourses, in order to revive the subversive core of both Christianity and Marxism. He is a leftist and, in addition to Lacan, was strongly influenced by Hegel, Marx, and Freud. The overall strategy of Žižek’s work is to bring together German Idealist philosophy and the most fundamental insights of psychoanalysis.

In The Parallax View, Žižek reads philosophical, scientific, and political theories in light of fundamental Hegelian and Lacanian insights. To put it succinctly, he deploys dialectical thinking and psychoanalytic categories to analyze contemporary culture and to reinvigorate a Marxist critique of capitalist globalism. Žižek discloses the functioning of an irreducible negativity, and shows how the recognition of this gap (for example, between the enunciated content and the act of enunciation) may enable us, on the one hand, to reflectively distance ourselves from the ideological manipulations of late capitalism while, on the other, avoiding the deadlock of a globalized suspicion.