Cheap Shots Against Žižek

Why American Corporate Academics (and Other Capitalist Flunkies) Accuse Žižek of Inconsistency:

"Two leitmotivs of your approach to Lacan are already discernible in what you have said. The first is that you do not conceal Lacan's inconsistencies: you seem always to be on the lookout for unexpected shifts in his position. Your Lacan is a theoretician engaged in continuous polemics against himself, his own previous statements....

True, the fundamental presupposition of my approach to Lacan is the utter incongruity of a 'synchronous' reading of his texts and seminars: the only way to comprehend Lacan is to approach his work as a work in progress, as a succession of attempts to seize the same persistent traumatic kernel. The shifts in Lacan's work become manifest the moment one concentrates on his great negative theses: 'There is no Other of the Other', 'The desire of the analyst is not a pure desire'....Upon encountering such a thesis, one must always ask the simple question: who is this idiot who is claiming that there is an Other of the Other, that the desire of the analyst is a pure desire, and so on? There is, of course, only one answer: Lacan himself a couple of years ago. The only way to approach Lacan, therefore, is to read 'Lacan contre Lacan' (the title of the 1993-4 Jacques-Alain Miller seminar)."

From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment: on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), Appendix A, p. 173

Is the Lacanian Community 'Stalinist'?

From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment: on Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994), Appendix A, pp. 171-172:

"One should acknowledge openly what many a critique of the alleged 'totalitarian', 'Stalinist' nature of Lacanian communities makes a big deal of by allusion: yes, the 'spirit', the structuring principle, which expressed itself distortedly in the Stalinist Party, found its proper form in the Lacanian community of analysts," [...]

"The choice here is unavoidable--that is to say, what occurs after passe, when the analysis is over? On the one side is the 'obscurantist' choice: passe as an intimate experience, an ecstatic moment of authenticity that can only be transmitted from person to person in an initiating act of communication. On the other is the 'Stalinist' choice: passe as an act of total externalization through which I irrevocably renounce the ineffable precious kernel in me that makes me a unique being, and leave myself unreservedly to the analytic community. This homology between the Lacanian analyst and the Stalinist Communist can be unfolded further: for example, the Lacanian analyst, like the Stalinist Communist, is in a sense 'infallible'--in contrast to ordinary people, he does not 'live in error', the error (the ideological delusion) is not an inherent constituent of his speech. So when he is empirically 'wrong', the causes are purely external: 'fatigue', 'nervous overcharge', and so on. What he needs is not theoretical enlightenment of his error but simply to 'take a rest' and restore his health...

Does not this 'infallibility' of the Lacanian analyst imply that Lacanian discourse is totally dominated, permeated, by the Master-Signifier?

Quite the contrary: paradoxical as it may sound, it implies that the analytic community is the only community capable of passing by the Master-Signifier. What is the Master-Signifier, strictly speaking? The signifier of transference. Its exemplary case occurs when, while reading a text or listening to a person, we assume that every sentence harbours some hidden profound meaning--and since we assume it in advance, we usually also find it." [...]

"Such a transferential relationship is what the community of Lacanian analysts avoid via their 'infallibility': this community is not founded upon some supposed knowledge, it is simply a community of those who know.
In short, it is the 'subjective destitution', the subject's complete self-externalization, that makes the Master superfluous: a Master is a Master only in so far as I, his subject, am not completely externalized;" [...]

"The constitutive illusion of religious discourse, for example, is that God addresses each individual by name: I know God has me precisely in his mind..."

Unothodox maybe, but Marxist nonetheless

From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 147:

"I think that there is a central idea developed by Georg Lukács and the Frankfurt School which, in spite of all my criticism of the Western Marxist tradition, is today more actual than ever. The idea is that the economy is not simply one among the social spheres. The basic insight of the Marxist critique of political economy--of commodity fetishism and so on--is that the economy has a certain proto-transcendental social status. Economy provides a generative matrix for phenomena which in the first approach has nothing to do with economy as such. For example, we can speak about reification, the commodification of culture and of politics and so on. At the level of form, the capitalist economy has a universal scope. So what interests me is the global structuring dimension of what goes on at the level of capitalist economy. It is not just one domain among others."

[...] "The problem for me is , what is working class today? I think that we should certainly abandon any fetish about the centrality of the working class. But at the same time we should abandon the opposite (postmodern) fetish: that the working class is disappearing; that it is meaningless to speak about the working class. Both are wrong."

From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 149:

"My position is almost classical Marxist in the sense that I would insist that anti-capitalist struggle is not simply one among other political struggles for greater equality, cultural recognition, anti-sexism and so on. I believe in the central structuring role of the anti-capitalist struggle."

The Fetish of the Working Class

From Žižek and Daly, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2004), pp. 145-146:

[...] "we also, of course, have a classical Trotskyism which I think represents something of a tragic position because it is always addressed to the fetish of the working class as a revolutionary party. When I speak to some of my orthodox Marxist friends, it is typical how, with their vision of all of the upheavals from Solidarity in Poland to the disintegration of communism and, more recently, the fall of Milosevic, they are always telling the same story: that those who truly brought down these corrupt degenerate communist regimes were workers--workers' strikes, workers' movements and so on. So the story goes that there was always a chance of an authentic workers' revolution, but since there wasn't a proper political party there, the workers' movement was co-opted either by nationalists, neo-capitalists, CIA agents or whatever. Sometimes there is an element of truth in this. With the early mobilizations of Solidarity, for example, the original demands were for greater socialism and not private property. But nonetheless, I think that the standard idea that in all these cases we had a missed opportunity for socialist revolution is a deep delusion. It doesn't function in this way."

Charismatic Speech, Love, Knowledge

From Bruce Fink's Lacan to the Letter (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 68:

"Lacan sees his own oral teaching as an important part of training. To his mind, his seminars contribute to the training of analysts far more than his writings ever could (even though they too strive to achieve certain training effects). Since Plato's time, it has been clear that oral transmission engenders love and that love and knowledge are not unrelated. Lacan's seminars provide a transferential context, engendering love in the students, love that puts them to work. The student at Lacan's seminar is inspired to work, much as the analysand is in analysis. There is more to it than that, of course: Lacan was, from many accounts, a fine and charismatic speaker who made a great impression on his audience. He also seemed to crave and genuinely thrive on the transference love he inspired in his students. He worked for that love, just as they worked for him."

Enjoyment, the Will of the People, Envy

From P.D. James' The Children of Men (Random House, 1993), pp. 104-105

Luke said gently: "Protection, comfort, pleasure. There has to be something more."

"It's what people care about, what they want. What more should the Council be offering?"

"Compassion, justice, love."

"No state has ever concerned itself with love, and no state ever can."

Julian said: "But it can concern itself with justice."

Rolf was impatient: "Justice, compassion, love. They're all words. What we're talking about is power. The Warden is a dictator masquerading as a democratic leader. He ought to be made to be responsible to the will of the people."

Theo said: "Ah, the will of the people. That's a fine sounding phrase. At present, the will of the people seems to be for protection, comfort, pleasure." He thought: I know what offends you--the fact that Xan enjoys such power, not the way he exercises it.

Justice, Equality, Envy, Evil, Revolution

If John Brown and Lenin were egotists, then I can accept those remarks of Žižek's from his book Violence that you cited in a recent post. But when I look around me here in the USA (Unreflective States of Arrogance), I do not see benign egotists who are too concerned with their own good to cause harm to anyone. What I see are self-worshiping idiots with large cars and small libraries.

In the Unreflective States of Arrogance I see thousands of submissive but pompous, hypocritical academics who have sold their souls for TIAA-CREF, homes in exclusive neighborhoods, perfect hairstyles, tasteful clothes, and pearly-white, crocodile smiles. They have privileged access to information and what do they use it for? Vainglorious self-promotion, posturing, and reckless competition over trifles.

But I also see—here in the USA—thousands of good-intentioned, working-class people who still believe in democracy. These are the people who must be converted to the cause before communism can win. Many of our invisible and forgotten workers also serve in the National Guard or the Reserves. I am a veteran; but I did not enlist in order to invade other countries and to steal the natural resources. I did not enlist in order to preserve the system of privileges as it now stands. I believe a dream is worth dying for, and the nation I love (the nation I thought I would be serving when I enlisted) is not the nation we really are, but the nation we might be someday. Unless we are hypocrites who want revolution without revolution, the left must re-appropriate from the right notions like duty, honor, and self-sacrifice. I have a dream of what the USA could be, like our nonviolent martyr, Martin Luther King jr., who said that "if a man hasn't discovered something that he will die for, he isn't fit to live."

Let the cowardly and vain American academics pre-judge me to be naive; I do not care. I challenge any one of these pseudo-leftist intellectuals to explain to me how the left will really accomplish anything without involving the unemployed and the working poor. The problem now is that most North American workers still admire people like Bill Gates instead of people like John Brown, Lenin, and Che. My Žižek is the one who educates the proletariat.

If "self-love" involves risking one's reputation (or even better, one's very existence) for the sake of the millions of slum dwellers and all of the other abject, disenfranchised human beings—including the future generations whose inheritance we are currently wasting—then is this really egotism?

If Che was an "egotist" then okay, I can accept Žižek's remarks that you cited. But if Che was acting out of "envy," then give me such envy or give me death. I agree with Plato that the love of luxuries and privileges corrupts the soul (call it "self-reflexive negativity" or "death drive" if you prefer). The only reason I care about money is to save enough of it to someday leave this evil empire. All around me in the Unreflective States of Arrogance I see swaggering, domineering narcissists who have no concern for future generations or for the ecology. I see politicians who are puppets dancing on strings pulled by corporations. And of course I prefer chocolate to vanilla, but when are we finally going to socialize these corporations? It looks to me like we will wait do it until it is too late for us: after the ecology is destroyed and we are a province of China's empire.

Okay, theory matters. But so does the revolution. And even if he sometimes seems to contradict himself or waver, I believe that for Žižek theory is not the only thing that matters. In spite of what he sometimes provocatively blurts out, people matter to him also; this is precisely why he wants communism to win: he has said as much in other texts and in interviews.

Give me the Žižek who (like Badiou) loves Western movies, admires courage, and puts a guillotine on the dust jacket of In Defense of Lost Causes. I have no use at all for a cute and lovable, overgrown teddy bear. Dirty jokes bore me; and I cannot find inspiration in a narcissistic, pure theoretician. Some of us simply cannot bury our heads in ontology and metapsychology. You have your Žižek and I have mine. Maybe he's no Lenin, but if my Žižek won't keep speaking out for the dispossessed, then I'll look into Badiou or elsewhere.