By Slavoj
Žižek
Two general observations about
my numerous critics seem pertinent to me. First, the large majority of attacks
on my text follow the rules of the tweet culture with short snaps, retorts,
sarcastic or outraged remarks, and with no space for the multiple steps of a
line of argumentation. One passage (a sentence, or even a part of it) is cut
out and reacted to. For example, many critics countered my analysis of the
anti-Semitic figure of the Jew as a foreign intruder who disturbs social
harmony by accusing me of anti-Semitism and totally ignoring the fact that the
claim about “Jews as foreign intruders” is for me the very claim I reject as
the exemplary ideological operation of obfuscating social antagonisms. They
simply cut those words out of the line of argumentation and used them to attack
me… Even the “annotated” reply to my text by Virgil Texas and Felix Biederman
is just a collection of tweet snaps, and I have neither the time nor the will
to join that game and reply with my own annotations to annotations.
The stance that sustains these
tweet rejoinders is a mixture of self-righteous Political Correctness and
brutal sarcasm: the moment anything that sounds problematic is perceived, a
reply is automatically triggered—usually a PC commonplace. Although critics
like to emphasize how they reject normativity (“the imposed heterosexual norm,”
etc.), their stance itself is one of ruthless normativity, denouncing every
minimal deviation from the PC dogma as “transphobia,” or “Fascism,” or
whatever. Such a tweet culture, combining official tolerance and openness with
extreme intolerance towards actually different views, simply renders critical
thinking impossible. It is a true mirror image of the blind populist rage à la
Donald Trump, and it is simultaneously one of the reasons why the Left is so
often inefficient in confronting rightwing populism, especially in today’s
Europe. If one just mentions that this populism draws a good part of its energy
from the popular discontent of the exploited, one is immediately accused of
“class essentialism”…
This brings me to the second
observation. One of the problems at the center of my preoccupations—the link
between the struggle for sexual liberation and what was traditionally designated
a “class struggle” in all its diverse dimensions (not just the workers’
struggle but Third World crises, the plight of immigrants and refugees,
etc.)—is more or less totally ignored by my opponents. I insist on this topic
because one of the greatest tragedies of progressive struggles is, for me, the
lack of contact (antagonism even) between the two. Nancy Fraser has shown how
the predominant form of feminism in the US was basically co-opted by neoliberal
politics. And while the exploding animosity of Third World countries towards
gay struggles is widely known, the saddest thing is that they present their
rejection of homosexuality as part of their anti-imperialist struggle. So, in
the same way that the homophobia and anti-feminism of many Third World
movements should make us suspicious about the level of their anti-imperialism,
we should also at least wonder about the fact that individuals who personify
the cutting edge of global capitalism, like Tim Cook, emphatically support
LGBT+ rights. There is certainly nothing a priori bad in this fact, and there
is a long history of big corporations acting against apartheid. In the old
South Africa, foreign companies with factories based there, such as Mercedes,
began paying black workers the same as they paid white ones and thus definitely
contributed to the end of apartheid. True, one should listen to stories of how
LGBT+ individuals are oppressed, victimized, etc., but one should nonetheless
also note that they enjoy the full support of hegemonic political space and big
business. This, of course, should not in any way problematize our full support
for LGBT+, but it should make us aware of the politico-ideological background
for the affair.
The Leftist call for justice
tends to be combined with struggles for women’s and gay rights, for
multiculturalism and against racism. The strategic aim of the Clinton consensus
is clearly to dissociate all these struggles from the Leftist call for justice.
The message from this consensus to Leftists is: You can get everything, but we
just want to keep the essentials, namely the unencumbered functioning of the
global capital. President Obama’s “Yes, we can!” acquires now a new meaning:
Yes, we can concede to all your cultural demands… without endangering global
market economy, and so there is no need for radical economic measures. Or, as
Todd McGowan put it (in a private communication): “The consensus of
‘right-thinking people’ opposed to Trump is frightening. It is as if his
excess licenses the real global capitalist consensus to emerge and to
congratulate themselves on their openness.” That’s why I think it’s politically
crucial to counteract this tendency and to fight for the solidarity of all our
struggles. A truly radical gesture would have been, say, to get a Muslim lady,
with her hair veiled even, to proclaim herself part of LGBT+. (Incidentally,
for those hardline Muslims who insist that women should be covered, the
question is how transgender individuals should be dressed since they belong to
neither of the two hegemonic genders.)
But are there not exceptions
to this tweet culture? Sam Warren
Miell‘s reaction to my text[1] presents itself as such, challenging me
to confront him who criticizes me from the Lacanian standpoint and reproaches
me with misreading Lacan or at least with not keeping in touch with the new
developments in Lacanian theory that are much more open to the LGBT+ topic and
can enable us to grasp it in a new way. So what do we get there, apart from the
standard, rather tasteless, puns on my account? Here enters the big surprise:
quite a lot of his text sounds familiar, as it recapitulates the analyses by
Joan Copjec and others, with which I fully agree. I’ve written literally
hundreds of pages on how to read Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, so to preach to
me how sexual difference is the point at which logos/reason breaks down sounds
weird… Quite a lot, but not all. Referring mostly to the work of Tim Dean (whom
I highly appreciate, by the way), he outlines a new approach to Lacan, which,
so he claims, indicates that “Lacanian studies have decisively moved
beyond Žižek and his generation. How appropriate that, in the field of
psychoanalysis, we have killed the Father.”
Does it? Here enters the
second surprise: the approach he advocates is based on—let’s call it, to
simplify things to the utmost—the “from phallus to objet a” thesis. The idea is
that the late Lacan, with his shift of accent from the Symbolic to the Real,
also left behind the central role of the phallic signifier and of sexual
difference, instead of which he asserted the central role of objet petit a (or
surplus-enjoyment) as more primordial, as grounding the subject’s relation to
enjoyment, and this object is, as Lacan wrote, “a-sexual.” From this premise,
Dean deploys his impersonalist theory of desire, according to which we have sex
not with others but with the Other. From this standpoint, of course, the
phallus (the phallic signifier) has to appear as a kind of retrograde legacy:
“Lacan’s most profound ideological and affective convictions sometimes run
counter to his most brilliant critical and analytical insights.” The phallic
signifier is part of these “convictions” and should be reduced to a
“provisional concept because so many of its functions are taken over by other
concepts, in particular that of objet a, which has no a priori relation to
gender and, indeed, may be represented by objects gendered masculine, feminine,
or neuter” (quotes from Dean’s Beyond Sexuality). (Incidentally, this is always
a comfortable position: when you propose a reading that obviously has to ignore
some of the interpreted author’s key theses, the easiest way to deal with it is
to impute the inconsistency to the interpreted author him/herself.)
With regard to sexual
difference itself, Dean evokes Freud’s “astonishing claim” that “the
unconscious has no knowledge of sexual difference /…/ Lacan maintains that
there is no signifier for sexual difference in the unconscious. Hence the
phallus cannot be a signifier of sexual difference /…/If there is no signifier
for sexual difference in the unconscious, then as far as the unconscious is
concerned heterosexuality does not exist…. Sexual difference does not organize
or determine sexual desire.” Miell sums up Dean’s position:
“Our tendency to read sexual
difference and sexuality in terms of each other, and to read sexual difference
in terms of men and women, corresponds to a pre-Freudian, psychologistic
understanding of sexuality. Worse, it endorses an identification of sexuality
with the ego, with normative, idealizing results. /…/ The fact that the
unconscious contains no signifier of sexual difference means that it is
essentially bigendered/bisexual (as Freud himself already suggested), which is
why Shanna T. Carlson has concluded that one way a transgendered person might
be viewed in terms of psychoanalysis is as personifying ‘the human subject as
such, the unconsciously bisexual subject for whom sexual difference is only
ever an incomplete, unsatisfactory solution to the failure of the sexual
relation.’”
As expected, the line of
thought concludes with a stab at me. Since sexual difference does not organize
or determine sexual desire, “Žižek’s conflation of gender identities and
sexualities is particularly surprising.” Really? I think this entire line of
thought should be rejected as a pretty obvious misreading of Lacan. Not only do
I not conflate gender and sex, I clearly distinguish the biological reality of
males and females (though it remains a question if even here we are dealing
with pure biology), gender identities (normative symbolic constructions of
masculine, feminine, and other identities) and sexual difference (although
Lacan never uses this term; he talks about masculine and feminine sides of his
“formulas of sexuation”).
And this bring us to the
crucial point. If we designate as “sexual difference” what Lacan renders with
his formulas of sexuation, then, for Lacan, not only sexuality but human
subjectivity as such is thoroughly “sexed” precisely in the sense of the trauma
of sexual difference. The parallax gap between masculine and feminine
positions, the two inconsistent ways to cope with—or, rather, to assume—the
trauma of the impossibility of sexual relationship, is unconditional; there is
no third way. Of course, our position is not determined by biology (a
biological man can assume a feminine position) but the choice is unconditional:
there is no “bisexuality” here; the gap is parallactic; one position excludes
the other, which is why one precisely should not invoke “the human subject as
such, the unconsciously bisexual subject for whom sexual difference is only
ever an incomplete, unsatisfactory solution to the failure of the sexual
relation.” Yes, every solution to the failure of sexual relationship is
unsatisfactory and in this sense incomplete, but this does not mean that sexual
difference is a secondary imposed frame which cannot even completely capture
the wealth of the unconsciously bisexual subject. There is nothing outside this
failure, for subject and language are themselves the outcomes of this
primordial failure. As Lacan put it, the Real is an impasse of formalization,
and this is to be taken literally: not that the Real is an external substantial
domain that resists formalization (or symbolization, although they are not the
same, of course), but that the Real is totally immanent to the Symbolic and is
nothing but its immanent failure.
One should note that the only
“function” operative in these formulas of sexuation is the phallic function. As
Lacan emphasizes, what is “primordially repressed,” what is constitutively
absent even from the unconscious, is (not the signifier of sexual difference but)
the “binary signifier,” the signifier that would serve as the feminine
counterpart to the phallic function in the way premodern sexualized cosmology
talks about masculine and feminine “principles,” such as Yin and Yang. (To
avoid any misunderstanding, this primordial repression of the binary signifier
not only does not put women in a subordinate position; if anything, it elevates
them into exemplary cases of subjectivity, since subjectivity is for Lacan
defined by the missing signifier—this is how one should read Lacan’s mark for
the subject, $, barred S, signifier.) Because the binary signifier is
primordially repressed, there is no sexual relationship; sexual antagonism
cannot be symbolized in a pair of opposed symbolic/differential features.
However, the fact that there
is no sexual relationship in no way implies that “there is no sexual difference
in the unconscious,” that the unconscious is beyond or beneath sexual
difference, a fluid domain of partial drives that defy sexuation. One can even
say that the unconscious is thoroughly and only about sexual difference in the
sense of an antagonism that is impossible to symbolize and that haunts the
symbolic order. The impossibility of sexual relationship does not mean that
sexual relationship is simply absent from the unconscious. It means that the
very impossibility of sexual relationship is the traumatic point of failure
which structures the entire symbolic space, or, as Lacan put it in his Seminar
XX, “we take language as that which functions as a supplement for the absence
of the only part of the real that cannot manage to be formed in being, namely,
the sexual relationship.” That’s why objet a as a-sexual is not prior to the
deadlock of sexual relationship but is already mediated by it, an object which fills
in the lack/void sustained by this deadlock/impossibility. There is objet a
because there is no sexual relationship. To put it in yet another way: yes, as
Miell repeats, sexual difference is the point of failure of logos, of the
Symbolic, but this failure absolutely does not mean that there is a domain of
sexuality prior to (or outside of) sexual difference and its deadlock. Sexual
difference/antagonism is not just the point at which logos/reason fails; it is
nothing but the effect of this failure. For this reason, if I may quote myself,
partial drives, through which the subject relates to objet a,
“are not simply happy
self-enclosed circular movements which generate enjoyment; their circular
movement is a repeated failure, a repeated attempt to encircle some central
void. What this means is that drive is not a primordial fact, that it has to be
deduced from a previous constellation: what logically precedes drive is the
ontological failure—the thwarted movement towards a goal, i.e., some form of
radical ontological negativity/failure—, and the basic operation of drive is to
find enjoyment in the very failure to reach full enjoyment. We should thus
distinguish between drives with their partial satisfactions (oral, anal,
scopic), and the disruptive negativity this circular movement of drives tries
to cope with.”[2]
And, again, Lacan’s name for
this negativity is the impossibility of sexual relationship, the impossibility
formalized in his formulas of sexuation. For this reason, I also don’t think
that the idea to conceive transgender identity as a “sinthom” in Lacan’s sense
is of great use: it is either too general or too narrow. On the one hand, the
sinthom is for (late) Lacan the most elementary “formula” of enjoyment, and, as
such, provides the minimum of consistency to every human being. On the other
hand, apropos Joyce-the-sinthom, Lacan reads Joyce’s work—his literary texts—as
a sinthom, a synthetic formation, which allowed him to avoid psychosis, i.e.,
which served as a formation that supplemented for the missing
Name-of-the-Father. But I don’t see transgender individuals as potential
psychotics who avoided psychosis by creating a sinthom… I think that the
ethical greatness of transgender subjects resides precisely in the fact that
they reject “depersonalization” and remain subjects, assuming the deadlock of
subjectivity even more radically than other more “normalized” subjects. If all
this sounds abstract and crazy, well, that’s how Lacan is usually perceived.
So, to conclude, I will shamelessly quote a long passage from my Absolute
Recoil where I formulate the critical edge of my reading:
“One should reject the
predominant view according to which hegemonic ideology in all its aspects
(social, legal, economic, ethical, religious) privileges ‘natural’ sexuality
(the standard reproductive copulation) and tries to repress or suppress the
polymorphously-perverse sexuality of partial drives which is considered asocial
and dangerous, and is tolerated only as a subordinate preparatory moment of the
‘normal’ sexual (fondling and kissing as a foreplay, etc.). The best argument
against this predominant view is the history of its greatest advocate, of
Christianity:
‘Christ, even when resurrected
from the dead, is valued for his body, and his body is the means by which
communion in his presence is incorporation – oral drive – with which Christ’s
wife, the Church as it is called, contents itself very well, having nothing to
expect from copulation. In everything that followed from the effects of
Christianity, particularly in art – and it’s in this respect that I coincide
with the ‘baroquism’ with which I accept to be clothed – everything is exhibition
of the body evoking jouissance – and you can lend credence to the testimony of
someone who has just come back from an orgy of churches in Italy – but without
copulation.’[3]
Lacan is very clear here: one
should reject the endlessly repeated ‘critical’ thesis that the Catholic sexual
morality imposes ‘normative heterosexuality’ on the subversive and
destabilizing ‘polymorphous sexuality’ of humans. In contrast to the idea that
partial drives are masturbatory, asocial, etc., while genital sexuality grounds
social link (family as elementary social form), one should insist that there is
nothing necessarily a-social in partial drives: they function as the glue of
society, the very stuff of communion, in contrast to the heterosexual couple
which is – as Freud emphasizes in Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego
– effectively asocial, isolating itself from its community, and is therefore
distrusted by church and army, Freud’s two models of social link – or, to quote
the concise comment of these lines by Alenka Zupančič:
‘So there is something
profoundly disruptive at stake in copulation. For the kind of (social) bond it
proposes, Christianity doesn’t need the latter, which functions as the
superfluous element, something on top of what would be (ideally) needed, and
hence as disturbing. Indeed, ‘natural’ copulation is utterly banned from the
religious imaginary, whereas the latter doesn’t recede from, for example, images
of canonized saints eating the excrements of another person. If looked at from
this perspective, Christianity is indeed all about ‘jouissance of the body,’
about the body (of God) as constituting another person’s jouissance. Partial
drives and the satisfaction they procure are rather abundantly present, and in
this sense one would be justified in claiming that in its libidinal aspect the
Christian religion massively relies on what belongs to the register of
‘infantile sexuality’: satisfaction and bonding by way of partial objects, with
the exclusion of sexual coupling. The pure enjoyment, ‘enjoyment for the sake
of enjoyment’ is not exactly what is banned here; what is banned, or repressed,
is its link with sexuality, particularly in the form of ‘copulation’.’[4]
Christianity thus acknowledges
the polymorphous-perverse satisfactions of drives, but it desexualizes them, it
desexualizes the pleasures they provide. Pleasures as such are not problematic:
Christian literature abounds with the descriptions of ecstatic heavenly
pleasures provided by meditations, prayers and rituals, but it cuts them off
thoroughly from sexuality. The irony here is that Christianity does exactly the
same as the greatest analyst and critic of the Christian mode of
subjectivization, Michel Foucault, who also endeavors to assert pleasures
outside the domain of sexuality.”[5]
Again, as far as I can see,
transgender subjects in no way follow this path of subtracting their space of
enjoyment from intersubjectivity and asserting the search for enjoyment in
direct dealings with objects. Their anxieties seem to concern precisely their
position in social space. And, on the contrary, today’s consumerist capitalism
does this subtraction quite well: instead of sex with persons, we have more and
more sex with what Lacan calls lathouses, technologically created partial objects,
all the “things that did not exist” prior to the scientific intervention into
the Real, from mobile phones to remote-controlled toys, from air conditioners
to artificial hearts:
“The world is increasingly
populated by lathouses. Since you seem to find that amusing, I am going to show
you how it is written. Notice that I could have called it lathousies. That
would have gone better with ousia, it is open to all sorts of ambiguity. /…/
And for the tiny little a-objects that you are going to encounter when you
leave, on the pavement at every street corner, behind every shop window, in the
superabundance of these objects designed to cause your desire in so far as it
is now science that governs it, think of them as lathouses.”[6]
As such, a lathouse is to be
opposed to a symptom in the precise Freudian sense of the term: lathouse is
knowledge embodied in a new “unnatural” object. Now we can see why, apropos lathouses,
we have to include capitalism. After all, we are dealing with a whole chain of
surpluses: scientific technology with its surplus-knowledge (a knowledge beyond
mere connaissance of already existing reality, a knowledge which gets embodied
in new objects); the capitalist surplus-value (the commodification of this
surplus-knowledge in the overflow of gadgets); and, last but not least, the
surplus-enjoyment (gadgets as forms of objet a) which accounts for the
libidinal economy of the hold lathouses have over us. No wonder that, in
Lacan’s formulas of sexuation, such a direct link between the subject and
partial objects is located on the masculine side: although it bypasses the
phallic signifier, it is no way outside sexual difference.
[2]
Op.cit., p. 206.
[3]
Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge (Seminar
XX), New York: Norton 1999, p. 113.
[4]
Alenka Zupančič, “Die Sexualitaet innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft”
(unpublished manuscript).
[5]
Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil, London: Verso Books 2014, pp. 200-201.
[6]
Jacques Lacan, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, New York: Norton 2007, p. 62.
The Author
The Slovenian Marxist
philosopher and cultural critic is one of the most distinguished thinkers of
our time. Žižek achieved international recognition as a social theorist after
the 1989 publication of his first book in English, "The Sublime Object of
Ideology“. He is a regular contributor to newspapers like “The Guardian”, “Die
Zeit” or "The New York Times“. He has been labelled by some the
"Elvis of cultural theory“ and is the subject of numerous documentaries
and books.
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