The Indivisible Remainder (1)

The Aim of the Critique of Ideology

Slavoj Žižek, from The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters

(London: Verso, 1996, 2007), the following excerpts are from the 2007 edition, pp. 1-3:

p. 1: [....] "what we discover in the deepest kernel of our personality is a fundamental, constitutive, primordial lie, the proton pseudos, the phantasmatic construction by means of which we endeavor to conceal the inconsistency of the symbolic order in which we dwell."

p. 2: [....] "the 'natural state' of the human animal is to live in a lie."

p. 3: [....] "the symptom of Power: the grotesque excess by means of which, in a unique short circuit, attitudes which are officially opposed and mutually exclusive reveal their uncanny complicity, where the solemn agent of Power suddenly starts to wink at us across the table in a gesture of obscene solidarity, letting us know that the thing (i.e. his orders) is not to be taken too seriously, and thereby consolidating his power. The aim of the 'critique of ideology', the analysis of an ideological edifice, is to extract this symptomal kernel which the official, public ideological text simultaneously disavows and needs for its undisturbed functioning. One is tempted to say that each of the three main politico-ideological positions ('Right', 'Centre', 'Left') relies on such an unacknowledged yet unavoidable supplement: the 'Right' finds it difficult to conceal its fascination with the myth of a 'primordial' act of violence supposed to ground the legal order; the 'Centre' counts on innate human egotism (between the lines, liberalism as a rule addresses the individual's egotistic indifference to other people's plight); the 'Left', as has long been discerned by perspicacious conservative critics from Nietzsche onwards, manipulates with ressentiment and the promise of revenge ('Now it's our turn to...').

The conclusion to be drawn from this, however, is not that there is no escape, that every subversion of the existing power structure is false, illusory, caught in advance in the network of what it endeavors to undermine, but the exact opposite: every power structure is necessarily split, inconsistent; there is a crack in the very foundation of its edifice--and this crack can be used as a lever for the effective subversion of the power structure....In short, the foundations of Power can be shaken because the very stability of its might edifice hinges on an inconsistent, fragile balance. The other conclusion to be drawn is deeply solidary with the preceding one, although it may give rise to the false impression of contradicting it: perhaps the moment has come to leave behind the old Leftist obsession with ways and means to 'subvert' or 'undermine' the Order, and to focus on the opposite question--on what, following Ernesto Laclau, we can call the 'ordering of the Order': not how can we undermine the existing order, but how does an Order emerge out of disorder in the first place? Which inconsistencies and splittings allow the edifice of Order to maintain itself?