The Split Subject

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 373-4:

For Žižek, the subject is first of all a critical position from which to analyze ideology: it stands for that empty point which precedes ideology and from which ideology is articulated. In this sense, the subject is to be opposed to subjectivization, which is precisely that process of the internalizing and the making natural of ideology: 'As soon as we constitute ourselves as ideological subjects, as soon as we respond to the interpellation and assume a certain subject-position ... we are overlooking the radical dimension of social antagonism, that is to say, the traumatic kernel the symbolization of which always fails; and ... it is precisely the Lacanian notion of the subject as the "empty place of the structure" which describes the subject in its confrontation with antagonism, the subject which isn't covering up the traumatic dimension of social antagonism' (p. 251). To this extent, the subject can be thought as a certain excess of ideological interpellation, that which in a way remains 'beyond interpellation': 'that which defines the subject, let us not forget, is precisely the question' (p. 39). The experience of subjectivity is thus an experience of pure negativity, in which every aspect of identity must be lost or sacrificed: '[In] "tarrying with the negative," ... Hegel's whole point is that the subject does not survive the ordeal of negativity: he effectively loses his very essence and passes over into his Other' (p. 200). The correlative of the subject within the symbolic order can therefore be thought of as objet a, that which stands in for the Real: 'the matheme for the subject is $, an empty place in the structure, an elided signifier, while objet a is by definition an excessive object, an object that lacks its place in the structure' (p. 178). This equivalence must nevertheless be clarified: 'The parallel between the void of the transcendental subject ($) and the void of the transcendental object--the inaccessible X that causes our perceptions--is misleading here: the transcendental object is the void beyond phenomenal appearances, while the transcendental subject already appears as a void' (p. 215).

Other

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 372-3:

Žižek's ultimate position is that there is no 'Other of the Other', that is, no final guarantee of the symbolic order: 'There is no "big Other" guaranteeing the consistency of the symbolic space within which we dwell: there are just contingent, punctual and fragile points of stability' (p. 306). More precisely, a certain 'lack' in the Other at once is necessary for the symbolic order to function and offers a way of thinking an 'outside' of or 'beyond' to the symbolic order. That is, on the one hand, 'if the Other is not fractured ... the only possible relationship of the subject to the structure is that of total alienation, of a subjection without remainder; but the lack in the Other means that there is a remainder, a non-integratable residuum in the Other, objet a, and the subject is able to avoid alienation only insofar as it posits itself as the correlative of this remainder' [here follows Lacan's formula for fantasy: the split subject in relation to the objet a] (p. 31).

And, on the other [hand], 'This other, hidden Law acts the part of the "Other of the Other" in the Lacanian sense, the part of the meta-guarantee of the consistency of the big Other (the symbolic order that regulates social life)' (p. 230). This lack of the Other of the Other has immense consequences for the thinking of ethics and the political: their basis would not be some 'respect for the Other' but the attempt, for a moment, to become the Other or embody the symbolic order, with the symbolic order itself arising only as the after-effect of such 'free' actions: 'For Lacan, the ultimate horizon of ethics is not the infinite debt towards an abyssal Otherness. The act is for him strictly correlative to the suspension of the "big Other"' (p. 318). This will lead Žižek towards consideration of the Pauline notion of love: love as the giving of that which one does not have, that is, something not backed by any symbolic guarantee.

Objet a

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 372:

Objet a, one of Lacan's most famous 'mathemes' or conceptual neologisms, is first of all that element standing in for the Real within any symbolic system. It is at once what cannot be accounted for within this system and yet what produces this system as the attempt to speak of it. It is in this abstract, nonpathological sense that Žižek describes objet a as the object-cause of desire: 'The fundamental thesis of Lacan is that this impossible object is nevertheless given to us in a specific experience, that of the objet petit a, object-cause of desire, which is not "pathological," which does not reduce itself to an object of need or demand' (p. 121). And, as Žižek goes on to say, the aim of the analysis of ideology is to bring out the double status of this objet a, as both what completes the symbolic circle of authority, acting as the guarantee or Other of its Other, and what cannot be accounted for within it, what always appears as excessive within its officially stated rationale: 'The aim of the "critique of ideology," of the analysis of an ideological edifice, is to extract this symptomatic kernel which the official, public ideological text simultaneously disavows and needs for its undisturbed functioning' (p. 269). This objet a can take many forms within ideology: seemingly transgressive enjoyment, racism, paranoia, the belief in an explanation hidden behind the public one. To this extent, it functions as the 'master-signifier' of the master-signifier--and Žižek's point, following Lacan, is to reveal that there is no Other of the Other, that the Other does not possess objet a or the cause of our desire, but that in a way we do: we are ultimately our own cause. That is, if on the one hand, 'Lacan defines objet a as the fantasmatic "stuff" of the I, as that which confers on $, on the fissure in the symbolic order, on the ontological void that we call "subject," the ontological consistency of a "person"', on the other it is 'what Lacan, in his last phase at least, referred to as the "subjective destitution" which is involved in the position of the analyst, of the analyst as occupying the position of objet petit a' (p. 56).

Master-Signifier

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 371:

One of Žižek's key terms and the centrepiece of his renewed analysis of ideology is the notion of the master-signifier. Žižek provides perhaps two accounts of how the master-signifier works in making appear natural or conventional what is in fact a forced and artificial construction of reality: 'The elementary operation of the point de capiton should be sought in this "miraculous" turn, in this quid pro quo by means of which what was previously the very source of disarray becomes proof and testimony of a triumph' (p. 116); and 'the Master-Signifier [is] no longer a simple abbreviation that designates a series of markers but the name of the hidden ground of this series of markers that act as so many expressions-effects of this ground' (p. 186). That is, the master-signifier is not a simple empirical quality that makes sense of previously existing circumstances, but rather a kind of radical hypothesis that proposes an always unrepresentable signifier through which these very circumstances become visible for the first time. 'Therein resides the paradoxical achievement of symbolization: the vain quest for the "true meaning" (the ultimate signified) is supplanted by a unique signifying gesture' (p. 277). But if this is the unique strength and power of a master-signifier--that it is not simply an empirical designation, that it already takes into account our own distance from it, its inability to be definitively stated--it is also this that opens up a certain way out of it, for we are always able to point to a deeper explanation of it, what it itself stands in for and what allows it to be stated. It is something like this that is to be seen in Hegel's notion of concrete universality and in Žižek's thinking of the empty space of enunciation. As Žižek writes of the way that the master-signifier is its own limit: Lacan, in contrast to Derrida, 'directly offers a concept of this element [of the supplement], namely the concept of the Master-Signifier, S1 in relation to S2 ... In Lacan, S1 stands for the supplement ... and, simultaneously, for the totalizing Master-Signifier ... the Centre which Derrida endeavors to "deconstruct" is ultimately the very supplement which threatens to disrupt its totalizing power' (p. 194).

Masculine/Feminine

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 370-371:

The Lacanian 'formulae of sexuation' make up a crucial part of Žižek's thinking: one way of characterizing the overall trajectory of his work is as a movement from a masculine logic of the universal and its exception towards a feminine logic of a 'not-all' without exception. However, Žižek does not simply oppose the masculine and the feminine, but rather argues that the masculine is a certain effect of the feminine: 'Man is a reflexive determination of woman's impossibility of achieving an identity with herself (which is why woman is a symptom of man)' (p. 253). That is, everything in Žižek can ultimately be understood in terms of these two formulae. As Žižek asks: 'What if sexual difference is ultimately a kind of zero-institution of the social split of humankind, the naturalized, minimal zero-difference, a split that, prior to signalling any determinate social difference, signals this difference as such? The struggle for hegemony would then, once again, be the struggle for how this zero-difference is overdetermined by other particular social differences.' (p. 311) [....]

Love

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and ScottStephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 370:

Love in the sense Žižek understands it was first developed by Lacan in his Seminar XX. It is thus from the beginning associated with a certain 'feminine' logic of the not-all and implies a way of thinking beyond the master-signifier and its universality guaranteed by exception: 'Lacan's extensive discussion of love in Seminar XX is thus to be read in the Paulinian sense, as opposed to the dialectic of the Law and its transgression. This latter dialectic is clearly "masculine" or phallic ... Love, on the other hand, is "feminine": it involves the paradoxes of the not-All' (p. 309). Žižek associates love with St Paul, and it is a way for him to think the difference between Judaism, whose libidinal economy is still fundamentally that of the law and its transgression, and Christianity, which through forgiveness and the possibility of being born again seeks to overcome this dialectic: 'It is here that one should insist on how Lacan accomplishes the passage from Law to Love, in short, from Judaism to Christianity' (p. 318). In other words, this love might be seen to testify--as we also find with drive and enunciation--to a moment that precedes and makes possible the symbolic order and its social mediation, the way in which things are never directly what they are but only stand in for something else: 'Love bears witness to the abyss of a self-relating gesture by means of which, due to the lack of an independent guarantee of the social pact, the ruler himself has to guarantee the Truth of his word' (p. 245 n. 5).

Claude Levi-Strauss

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 369:

The key example Žižek takes from Levi-Strauss is his famous analysis in Structural Anthropology concerning two different groups from the same tribe, each conceiving of their village in a different way. Žižek's point is that the 'truth' of the village is to be found neither in some reconciliation of the two competing versions nor in some neutral, 'objective' overhead view, but in this very split itself: 'Returning to Levi-Strauss's example of the two drawings of the village, let us note that it is here that we can see in what precise sense the Real intervenes through anamorphosis' (p. 312). This will be related by Žižek to that fundamental 'split' of sexual difference, where again the 'truth' is not to be found in some reconciliation or putting together of a whole, but in the antagonism itself. As he asks: 'How ... are we to understand the "ahistorical" status of sexual difference? Perhaps an analogy to Claude Levi-Strauss's notion of the "zero-institution" might be of some help here' (p. 309). Žižek will use Adorno's analysis of the social in exactly the same sense as that of Levi-Strauss here.