[...]
For Zizek there is an ideological procedure in Rand’s
work that is far more radical than she herself would have admitted. Rand, he
argues, belongs to a line of authors who are “overconformist” and who, by
nature of their very excessive identification with the ruling ideology (welfare
capitalism), achieve a successful subversion of that ideology. How does this
work? Zizek argues that Rand’s “over-orthodoxy was directed at capitalism
itself”. Rand gives us capitalism in its pure, unmediated, basic form.
According to her, “the truly heretical thing today is to embrace the basic
premise of capitalism without its communitarian, collectivist, welfare, etc.
sugar-coating”. In other words, Rand read contemporary capitalism as
“decaffeinated”, not capitalist enough, as is illustrated by the title of one
of her books, Capitalism: the unknown ideal.
Further proof that Rand in fact undermined contemporary
capitalism in the name of a fundamental, pure capitalism, is, according to
Zizek, to be located in her opposition between the “prime movers” and the
“second handers” in her work. The prime mover is independent and autonomous, he
makes no sacrifices and his satisfaction does not depend on the well-being of
others. The prime mover rejects the Hegelian construction of personhood coming
into itself only externally, through the recognition of others. Because the
prime mover is not “contaminated” by others and otherness, he is presented in
Rand as innocent and without hatred or fear. Roark does not hate Toohey, he
simply does not think or care about him. Second handers are followers – they
rely on others, are properly dependent for their happiness on others. The
second handers are the contaminators, diluting and dirtying the pure ideal.
But Zizek turns the atheistic, selfish ethic of the prime
mover, as advocated in Rand’s work, on its head, arguing that the prime mover
is capable of love for others, that it is in fact the love for others that is
properly Randian (or shall we say Roarkian?) in that it is the highest form of
selfishness – turning the other into my love object through whom I satisfy my
innermost drives. In Atlas Shrugged, the withdrawal of the prime movers
from “bureaucratised public life” has disastrous consequences, resulting in global
disintegration. The society of mass men beg the prime movers to return, which
they do, but on their own terms. Zizek reads the ideological procedure here as
being located in a simple answer to the “eternal question”: What moves the
world? Rand’s answer is: the prime movers, of course.
Zizek shows how Rand reverses our everyday evaluation of
the strike as an activity of the workers. In Atlas Shrugged, it is the
capitalists who go on strike and the society disintegrates. It is only their
selfish love for others that saves it. The secret retreat where the capitalists
go operates as close as possible to the capitalist ideal – everything occurs
strictly in accordance with the law of the market – even the word ‘help’ is
prohibited.
Zizek makes a helpful distinction between desire and
drive that can help us to better understand why the prime mover’s love for
others is simply self-love. Here he examines the relationship between Roark and
Dominique, arguing that Roark is the one who is a “being of pure drive” whereas
Dominique is ruled by “desire”. Thus, Roark needs the Other (Dominique) simply
as the (temporary) source of the satisfaction of drive. He is in fact totally
indifferent to her subjectivity – “[a]t the level of drive, [...] one can
dispose of the Other. Dominique, on the other hand is the one who is consumed
by her desire, which, in Zizek’s appropriation of Lacan, is always desire of
the Other. Whereas Roark is indifferent, Dominique is affected. And the
only way for her to be free from this desire is to sacrifice/destroy everything
she cares for. Hence Dominique’s attempts to ruin Roark – the true object of
her desire. And Roark knows this very well, that is why he resists her advances
– Dominique must achieve the shift from desire to drive if she wants to have
him.
Dominique, on the other hand, wants to destroy Roark’s
position of pure drive. The result is a self-destructive dialectic, played out
at its most intense when Dominique furiously whips Roark in what Zizek
describes as an act of self-despair on her part, “an awareness of his hold
over her, of her inability to resist him”. This is paid for by the first sex
scene between them as a brutal rape. Dominique’s tragic predicament lies in the
fact that she knows that the only way for her and Roark to be “an ordinary
couple” is for him to become worthless, in other words, to destroy the very
thing that causes her to desire him – his excessive autonomous creativity.
There is no way out of this deadlock, beautifully
expressed in Dominique’s words: “I want to be owned, not by a lover, but by an
adversary who will destroy my victory over him.” Rand illustrates a fundamental
conflict between the prime movers themselves; and the figure who causes this
conflict is Dominique, the hysterical prime mover. The only resolution to the
destructive dialectics between Roark and Dominique is for her to accept
indifference – she must give up the very core of what makes life worth living
for her, she must “accept the end of the world”.
What makes Zizek’s reading of Rand truly extraordinary is his claim that Roark and Dominique are in fact a lesbian couple. How is this claim possible? Recall that Dominique is portrayed as a feminine hysterical subject obsessed by her desire for the Other. The only way in which she can “have” the Other is for her to pass through the fantasmatic ordeal of an acceptance of indifference – the being that emerges is a “perfected” prime mover and this being is psychically feminine – Roark is a woman. As Zizek puts it: “What Rand was not aware of was that the upright, uncompromising masculine figures with a will of steel with whom she was so fascinated, are effectively figures of the feminine subject liberated from the deadlocks of hysteria.”
[...]
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