Determinism and the Cause

From Žižek's The Metastases of Enjoyment:  On Women and Causality (London:  Verso, p. 30):

The relationship between the cause and the law--the law of causality, of symbolic determination--is therefore an antagonistic one:  'Cause is to be distinguished from that which is determinate in a chain, in other words the law ... there is cause only in something that doesn't work.'  The cause qua the Real intervenes where symbolic determination stumbles, misfires--that is, where a signifier falls out.  For that reason, the Cause qua the Real can never effectuate its causal power in a direct way, as such, but must operate intermediately, under the guise of disturbances within the symbolic order.  Suffice it to recall slips of the tongue when the automaton of the signifying chain is, for a brief moment, disrupted by the intervention of some traumatic memory.  However, the fact that the Real operates and is accessible only through the Symbolic does not authorize us to conceive of it as a factor immanent to the Symbolic:  the Real is precisely that which resists and eludes the grasp of the Symbolic and, consequently, that which is detectable within the Symbolic only under the guise of its disturbances. 

Free Will or Determinism? (1)

The "parallax gap" is the Real, which shows itself in fundamental oppositions or antagonisms. For example:

1. Kant's determinate phenomena (appearances, things for us) versus unknowable noumena (things in themselves, e.g. the freedom of the will).

2. The philosophical question about determinism versus free will. For Kant both of these alternatives are true. Žižek points out that the Real is indicated in the opposition between the two types of Kantian antinomy, dynamic versus mathematical.

3. linear time (a causal sequence) versus the hermeneutic circle (interpretation based on memory and tradition);

4. a situation in which the cause determines the effect versus a situation in which the effect retroactively determines its own cause.

The "short circuit," or twist in the Moebius strip (i.e., the qualitative change that apparently emerges out of quantitative developments in complexity) is when linear time "folds back on itself." Assume that a physically determined organism develops memory to the point of accepting symbolic castration, forming abstract concepts, etc. Nonetheless, a speaking animal is not simply determined by reflexes, instincts, etc. For example, a speaking animal retroactively determines which memories "will have been" traumatic for it. Après-coup is one of the ways Lacan described this mode of temporality. But like everything in Lacan, this concept is presented in a way that seems obscure. By contrast, if you research "the hermeneutic circle," you will find many clearer accounts (than Lacan’s) which nonetheless indicate something of what Lacan meant by après-coup or "psychoanalytic time" (i.e., the interpretation of memories and the retroactive formation of what will have been past trauma).

Keep in mind that occasionally Žižek might--in his amusing, provocactive way--just express it all in a form something like this: "Determinism or Free Will? Yes, please!"

Some Other Group Threatens Our Enjoyment!

From Sarah Kay’s Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), p. 138:

Žižek's theme of the 'theft of enjoyment' reworks Hegel's dialectic of lord and bondsman (Phenomenology, subsections178-196), exploring its implications for the contemporary political scene, especially racism and nationalism. A thoroughgoing instance of such analysis is the final chapter of Tarrying with the Negative.

This examines how political identifications involve 'a shared relationship toward a Thing, toward Enjoyment incarnated' (Tarrying, p. 201). What we call a 'way of life' is the way a 'community' bases itself on the organization of enjoyment. National feeling arises from a common reference to enjoyment (such as festivals), and national tensions from fear that some other group threatens this enjoyment, or has a perverse relationship to it. Animosity towards other racial groups often concentrates on what they eat, or the smell of their food, or the way they themselves smell. The disgust which such things arouse is itself a form of enjoyment, the surplus enjoyment that arises from the conviction that these groups indulge in excessive enjoyments of a kind which we ourselves have renounced (Tarrying, p. 206). Totalitarian regimes make use of racial minorities as a kind of 'shock-absorber': if all the disgust of enjoyment can be projected onto, and borne by, another group, this helps to preserve the balance of the pleasure principle for the rest. Capitalist regimes are likewise eager to off-load their inherent imbalance and excess on to a racial Other, since this enables them to fantasize themselves as 'communities' rather than as impersonal 'societies' (Tarrying, pp. 209-211). White liberal intellectuals are no more comfortable than racists with other people's enjoyment. They may be 'tolerant' of black community politics, but not of white rednecks (Tarrying, pp. 213-214). Thus they merely reshuffle the cards, but keep the same deck. What is needed is not to embrace some alternative fantasy of enjoyment, but to gain a purchase on the structure which gives rise to fantasies of enjoyment in the first place.

The Spectre of Ideology

From Žižek's Introduction to Mapping Ideology (London: Verso, 1994), p. 1:

I Critique of Ideology, today?

By way of a simple reflection on how the horizon of historical imagination is subject to change, we find ourselves in medias res, compelled to accept the unrelenting pertinence of the notion of ideology. Up to a decade ago, the system production-nature (man's productive-exploitative relationship with nature and its resources) was perceived as a constant, whereas everybody was busy imagining different forms of the social organization of production and commerce (Fascism or Communism as alternatives to liberal capitalism); today, as Fredric Jameson perspicaciously remarked, nobody seriously considers possible alternatives to capitalism any longer, whereas popular imagination is persecuted by the visions of the forthcoming 'breakdown of nature', of the stoppage of all life on earth--it seems easier to imagine the 'end of the world' than a far more modest change in the mode of production, as if liberal capitalism is the 'real' that will somehow survive even under conditions of a global catastrophe.... One can thus categorically assert the existence of ideology qua generative matrix that regulates the relationship between the visible and the non-visible, between imaginable and non-imaginable, as well as the changes in this relationship.

Lacan on Desire

From Dylan Evans' An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 37:

Need is a purely biological instinct, an appetite which emerges according to the requirements of the organism and which abates completely (even if only temporarily) when satisfied. The human subject, being born in a state of helplessness, is unable to satisfy its own needs, and hence depends on the Other to help it satisfy them. In order to get the Other's help, the infant must express its needs vocally; need must be articulated in demand. The primitive demands of the infant may only be inarticulate screams, but they serve to bring the Other to minister to the infant's needs. However, the presence of the Other soon acquires an importance in itself, an importance that goes beyond the satisfaction of need, since this presence symbolizes the Other's love. Hence demand soon takes on a double function, serving both as an articulation of need and as a demand for love. However, whereas the Other can provide the objects which the subject requires to satisfy his needs, the Other cannot provide that unconditional love which the subject craves. Hence even after the needs which were articulated in demand have been satisfied, the other aspect of demand, the craving for love, remains unsatisfied, and this leftover is desire. 'Desire is neither the appetite for satisfaction, nor the demand for love, but the difference that results from the subtraction of the first from the second' (Ecrits, 287).

Desire is thus the surplus produced by the articulation of need in demand; 'Desire begins to take shape in the margin in which demand becomes separated from need' (Ecrits, 311). Unlike a need, which can be satisfied and which then ceases to motivate the subject until another need arises, desire can never be satisfied; it is constant in its pressure, and eternal. The realisation of desire does not consist in its being 'fulfilled', but in the reproduction of desire as such.

An Effect which Retroactively Posits its own Cause

From the glossary in Sarah Kay’s Žižek:  A Critical Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press), p. 159.

APRES-COUP:  The psychoanalytical view of time is that it does not progress in a linear way but in a kind of backward loop, so that the crucial tense is the future perfect:  what ‘will have been’.  For example, a childhood experience will reveal itself to have been traumatic if it is reactivated as such--for example, in a neurotic symptom--by some subsequent turn of events.  The concept of après-coup does not mean that the past does not determine the present--it does, but in a way that is itself overdetermined by the present.  Thus significance is always grasped retrospectively.  An elementary effect of après-coup is that it is not until the end of a sentence that the meaning of its beginning can be ascertained.  A more complex instance is that the SUBJECT, which is nothing but the failure of S1 to represent it to S2, is nevertheless perceived as what will have been filled out by S2 (see SIGNIFYING CHAIN).  For this reason, the subject is said to be an effect which retroactively posits its own cause.  There is nothing teleological about après-coup; the point is that what may seem inevitable is a purely contingent state of affairs.  The process of après-coup shapes Lacan’s reading of Freud and Žižek’s readings of both Lacan and Hegel:  each reader reveals from his or her own, contingent viewpoint ‘what’s in the text which could not be written there’ (‘Lacan in Slovenia’, 26).

On Žižek's Tarrying with the Negative

One of Žižek’s theoretically most substantial books is Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993). In Tarrying with the Negative (abbreviated TWTN below), Žižek shows how Lacan’s psychoanalytic theory opposes cognitive and ethical relativism and reaffirms a conception of universal truth.

Žižek demonstrates, on the one hand, how Lacanian analysis reveals the produced and artificial character of the master signifier. This “signifier with no signified” (word with no definition), serves as a quilting point that provides the illusion of consistency in a discourse or social link. But on the other hand—against the misconception that Lacanian theory is just another form of postmodern relativism—Žižek shows how Lacan’s approach reinvigorates the concept of universality. For Lacan the universal truth of any situation is revealed through contingency.

TWTN shows how those who identify with an ideology tend to be unaware of its inconsistency. For example, postmodern relativism—the ideology of late capitalism—is self-referentially inconsistent insofar as it implicitly offers a synoptic view of the Whole even while it explicitly denies the possibility of any synoptic view of the Whole. It is absurd to claim that it is universally true that all meaning is the result of non-universal, performative practices. Similarly, adherents of any ideology are generally not cognizant of the hidden, obscene underside—the repressed truth—of the social reality. Thus the universal truth of an event or situation is not revealed in the “big Other”, the intersubjective, socio-symbolic network; on the contrary, the universal truth of an entire situation is accessible only to those who occupy the position of the abject, excluded other. Any ideology disenfranchises some particular group, and when this exclusion is symptomatic of a wider problem, it encapsulates what is wrong with the entire society. Consequently, the truth of the entire social field is disclosed only at its margins, through the experiences of those who are excluded and made abject by the hegemonic ideology. In sum, universal truth is revealed through a contingent and historically relative locus in the constellation of social positions.

After the ontological preparation, Žižek turns to the critique of ideology and the Real of social antagonism. In the last chapter of TWTN, he argues that nationalistic mobilizations involve an illusion produced by the element of fantasy at work in ideology. Fantasy patches up the inconsistency of the intersubjective, symbolic network, the big Other. However, the master signifier around which any ideology revolves cannot provide true unity, because it is a word with no definition—a name for nothing—that is positivized through the unreflective actions of believers so as to keep repressed any awareness of class antagonism within the regime.

In the concluding passages of TWTN, Žižek asks whether liberal democracy—and its implicit compromise with capitalism—is the only option for the left today. He reveals the vacuity of the liberal-democratic notion of the universal as a neutral medium for the expression of self-interest or group identity. He argues that this sterile notion of universality serves the interests of multinational, corporate capitalism. But how can leftists oppose nationalism without sliding into the vacuous, liberal-democratic notion of universality as a neutral framework for compromise? Žižek answers by reviving the Hegelian notion of concrete universality: a form of universality that is realized only through the partisan—and properly political—act of taking sides. Žižek argues that at this juncture in history, what is called for is the identification with the disenfranchised “excremental remainder” of society.

Because the universal truth of an entire society is revealed only through the position of that society’s excluded, abject other, it is by occupying the position of this disenfranchised other that we will traverse the fantasies of nationalism and racism, and achieve the solidarity of a common struggle. By means of a politics of identification with the abject other, we open up the possibility for the ethical-political act as symbolic suicide. In this way, a revolutionary collective may change the entire coordinates of a situation and reactualize emancipatory possibilities that had been repressed by the hegemonic ideology. In the book’s final chapter, Žižek argues for an openly partisan and committed, unorthodox version of Marxism. The concluding sentences reiterate Žižek’s claim that because of the coming ecological crisis, the fate of humanity hinges on the acceptance of transcendental materialism and its concomitant Marxist political stance. In short, communism is the only viable political alternative.