Žižek and the Logics of the Political

From "The Materialism of Spirit - Žižek and the Logics of the Political"

by Glyn Daly, University of Northampton, UK.

in IJŽS Vol 1.4

see original article at http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/79/139

[....]

The Spirit of the Political (and the Political in the Spirit)

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (2000) can be seen as a kind of philosophical equivalent of Yalta in which each of the protagonists - Butler, Laclau and Žižek – debate the destinies and materialist prospects for the political. Butler and Laclau are directly opposed. Butler embraces a radical contextualism against which every attempt to establish transcendental categories and argument is seen to founder. One cannot, for example, speak of hegemony (as a universal logic) without paying attention to the place of enunciation; without putting ‘one’s body on the line’ (Butler in Butler et al, 2000: 178). There is consequently no universality as such, only a politics of competing universalities; one in which the very sense of the universal is ‘wrought from the work of translation’ (Butler in Butler et al, 2000: 179). For Laclau, by contrast, contextuality is something that already implies its Other: the universal conditions of possibility that enable contexts to emerge in the first place. In a kind of inversion of Kant, what we have is a ‘noumenalism’ of empty universals: antagonism, dislocation, empty signifier that can be added to the Derridean order of dark metaphysics (trace, differánce, undecidability etc.).

Žižek certainly agrees with Laclau as regards the persistence of a negative form of transcendentality. Against Butler’s criticism that Lacanians insist on a transcendental sexual difference ‘even when sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within ideal gender dimorphism’, Žižek subverts this by substituting the ‘even when’ with ‘because’: i.e. ‘sexual difference has a transcendental status because sexed bodies emerge that do not fit squarely within gender dimorphism’ (Žižek in Butler et al, 2000: 309). On the other hand, Žižek also agrees with Butler and her argument that the structuring of the social space and intersubjective recognition is retroactively constitutive of its very sense(s) of the universal.

This does not mean that we can infer Žižek’s position as comprising any kind of ‘third way’. On the contrary, I think that what Žižek is critiquing in both Butler and Laclau is an underdeveloped perspectivism. In the case of Butler this refers to her implicit Foucauldianism where emphasis is placed on the emancipatory potential of marginal groups to challenge/subvert the power bloc. For Žižek what this misses is the way in which a power bloc is already split in terms of an ‘official’ identity and an obscene underside that already takes into account its own transgressions – they are both part of the perspectival totality.

With Laclau the problem arises from the opposite (transcendental) end of matters. That is to say, the generalisation of the hegemonic form of politics does not provide a perspectival account of the historical conditions of that generalisation – Laclau’s own historicism appears to fall back on an implicit, even teleological, developmentalism. More than this, Žižek argues that Laclau’s argument commits him to a self-hampering view of politics:

I am tempted to argue that the main ‘Kantian’

dimension of Laclau lies in his acceptance of

the unbridgeable gap between the enthusiasm

for the impossible Goal of a political

engagement and its more realizable content…

My claim is that if we accept such a gap as the

ultimate horizon of political engagement, does

it not leave us with a choice apropos of such an

engagement: either we must blind ourselves to

the necessary ultimate failure of our endeavour

– regress to naivety, and let ourselves be caught

up in the enthusiasm – or we must adopt a stance

of cynical distance, participating in the game

while being fully aware that the result will be

disappointing?

(Žižek in Butler et al, 2000: 316-317).

[....]