Hegel and Lacan on Identity

From Sarah Kay's Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 26-27:

We have seen that for Žižek, the Hegelian triad involves the internalization of nothingness or difference. Consequently, Žižek's account of identity in Hegel rebuts Lacan's objection that Hegel promotes a self-identical subject of self-consciousness. Žižek is much taken with the unceasing, restless movement of Hegel's dialectic and the implications this has for identity. No sooner does something approach identity with itself than it reverses into its opposite, a process Žižek repeatedly illustrates with the paradox that tautology is actually a form of contradiction. For example, the assertion 'Law is Law' as good as concedes that the only reason to obey the law is that it is imposed on us, and thus that there is something inherently violent, arbitrary and ultimately lawless about it (e.g., For They Know Not, 34). Žižek is equally fascinated by the converse formulation, whereby a thing becomes identified with its opposite, as in the Hegelian equation 'the Spirit is a bone': in its very inertia, the skull provides us with a representation of the Spirit that once animated it (Sublime Object, 208).

The only conceivable identity, then, is one that, at the same time, includes an element of non-identity. Žižek offers nationality as an example. The English are initially defined in relation to their external borders as being separate from the Scots, the French and so on; but when we come to examine the group that we have demarcated in this way, we begin to ask who, among the English, are really properly English--is it any particular group more than others? Gradually it emerges that there is something problematic about every individual's claim to Englishness: 'The final answer is of course that nobody is fully English, that every empirical Englishman contains something "non-English"--Englishness thus becomes an "internal limit", an unattainable point which prevents empirical Englishmen from achieving full identity-with-themselves (For They Know Not,110). Another example is that of the political propogandist who claims that all other parties act out of factional interest, while his alone does not. This claim is a clear case of promoting a factional interest: what the propagandist puts on one side of a category boundary (in the other parties) in fact returns to lodge on the other (in his own) (Tarrying, 133). Identity results from 'determinate reflection', in that it deposits back on the thing to be identified, in the form of an inner contradiction, the differences by virtue of which it distinguishes itself from others (Tarrying, 130).

Žižek uses this account of identity as fissured to argue against the prevailing view of self-consciousness in Hegel. It is not the case, says Žižek, that consciousness relates to an external object as to another subject and that self-consciousness then internalizes that relation. Self-consciousness is not my capacity to internalize another subject, but my failure to internalize a resistant object. It is precisely because the object retains its difference that self-consciousness can track the movement of reflection from subject to object and back (Tarrying, 128). Hegel is thus brought into line with what Žižek had earlier said about Lacan: 'self-consciousness is the very opposite of self-transparency: I am aware of myself only insofar as outside of me a place exists where truth about me is articulated' (Tarrying, 67). Once more, by arguing against Lacan's critique of Hegel, Žižek brings the two thinkers into alignment. Hegel becomes a philosopher of the symbolic, in the Lacanian sense of one for whom 'the truth is out there' (as the X-Files motto, beloved of Žižek, has it). The truth about me lies not in some knowledge I might have about myself, but in the (failed) exchanges between myself and the world. By the same token, Lacan's meditations on identity and identification are dignified as coextensive with those of Hegel.

On The Metastases of Enjoyment

In his book The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality (London: Verso, 1994, 2005), Žižek argues that nationalistic mobilizations involve an illusion produced by the element of fantasy at work in ideology. Žižek claims that the cause of the West’s failure to end the suffering in Sarajevo during the Bosnian conflict was the enjoyment provided by the fantasy image of ‘the Balkan victim’. The Metastases of Enjoyment (abbreviated Metastases below), builds on Žižek’s previous works by tracing the workings of enjoyment as a political factor.

“Enjoyment” is Žižek’s translation of the Lacanian term jouissance. In order to understand Žižek, it is crucial to keep in mind that enjoyment is not pleasure: enjoyment is the aim of the drives and as such, it is something of which the subject is unaware. As the obscene underside of symbolic institutions, enjoyment manifests as an odd fascination accompanied by pain, disgust, or even horror.

In Metastases, Žižek argues that Western intervention was inadequate because of our unconscious desire to maintain the ideologically-charged image of the helpless victim, reduced to the level of animal suffering:

[...] “the West provided just enough humanitarian aid for the city to survive, exerted just enough pressure on the Serbs to prevent them from occupying the city; yet this pressure was not strong enough to break the siege and allow the city to breathe freely—as if the unavowed desire was to preserve Sarajevo in a kind of atemporal freeze, between the two deaths, in the guise of a living dead, a victim eternalized in its suffering.” (Metastases, p. 213)

In sum, Right-wing power (and the masculine logic that underlies it) is held in place by an obscene, fantasmatic underside. Beneath the public law, the superego functions as the injunction to enjoy, to adopt the mantle of the mythical, primordial father of unbridled jouissance. It is this obscene “nightly law”—as the injunction to transgress—that sustains the triumph of liberal, global capitalism. Nationalistic mobilizations, and all political identifications, involve a relationship toward a fantasmatic Thing, which represents the incarnation of enjoyment. Racial tensions result from imagining that some other group threatens our enjoyment, or has a privileged relationship to enjoyment.

In Metastases, Žižek shows that the illusion of community in global, multicultural capitalism is sustained by racist fantasy. In spite of our alleged “freedom”, we cynical, postmodern subjects—finding ourselves overwhelmed by the injunction to transgress and the burden of choosing every aspect of our very existence—compensate for the decline in symbolic efficacy by voluntarily subjecting ourselves to ever new forms of constraint: in short, we demand that the other act on our behalf. Instead of recognizing that Capital itself is the ultimate power of deterritorialization, we blame the loss of symbolic efficacy on some ethnic other.

This is why the resigned and cynical, “depoliticized” subject of late capitalism views anyone with political principles as a dangerous fanatic. Moreover, the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy has led to the development of a new ideological formation, namely, the universalization of the fantasy image of the helpless victim. Žižek writes:

“So the much-advertised liberal-democratic ‘right to difference’ and anti-Eurocentrism appear in their true light: the Third World other is recognized as a victim—that is to say, in so far as he is a victim. The true object of anxiety is the other no longer prepared to play the role of victim—such an other is promptly denounced as a ‘terrorist’, a ‘fundamentalist’, and so on. The Somalis, for example, undergo a true Kleinian splitting into a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ object—on the one hand the good object: passive victims, suffering starving children and women; on the other the bad object: fanatical warlords who care more for their power or their ideological goals than for the welfare of their own people. The good other dwells in the anonymous passive universality of a victim—the moment we encounter an actual/active other, there is always something with which to reproach him: being patriarchal, fanatical, intolerant....” (Metastases, p. 215)

In such ways, Žižek’s supports his provocative claim from the Introduction to Metastases—the claim that unconscious enjoyment was the cause of the West’s quavering indecision during the Bosnian war. It is the enjoyment provided by ideological formations—such as the fantasy image of the victim—that explains the failure of Western intervention in the Bosnian conflict.

Free Will or Determinism? (4)

From Žižek's The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), p. 20:

The emergence of Freedom means that Spirit has posited itself as such in opposition to its impenetrable-inert Ground, that it has acquired a distance towards its Ground and can now 'make free with it', and that the 'chain of being' is broken--that is to say, Spirit is no longer determined by the network of causality. Freedom is thus stricto sensu the moment of eternity--it stands for the suspension of the temporal chain of (sufficient) reasons-causes, for the leap from the enchainment [Verkettung] of finite, determinate entities into the abyss of their primordial origin, of the 'source of things'.

In the experience of freedom, in the vortex we perceive for a brief moment when we confront a groundless act of freedom, we 'rejoin the Absolute'--that is, we re-establish contact--our identity even--with the primordial origin outside temporal reality, with the abyss of eternity prior to the fall into the world of creatures. Man is directly linked to the Absolute in so far as he occupies a unique place among created things: what re-emerges in him (and in him only) is a 'possibility-potentiality of being [Seinskonnen]' which does not immediately collapse into actuality. Other actually existing entities do not relate to possibility as such; in them, a possibility is simply realized; man only relates to possibility as such--for him, a possibility is in a sense 'more' than actuality, as if the actualization-realization of a possibility somehow already 'betrays' or 'devalues' it. This opposition, of course, coincides with the opposition between necessity and freedom: an unfree entity simply is, it coincides with its positive actuality, whereas (as Schelling asserts, announcing thereby the existentialist problematic) a free being can never be reduced to what it is, to its actual, positive presence--its 'project', the undecidable opening of what it might do or become, its 'want-to-be', is the kernel of its very existence.

Free Will or Determinism? (3)

On p. 14 of The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), Žižek discusses "the fact of freedom." Here is a quotation from p. 16:

"The whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is : how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place? Here Schelling inverts the standard perspective : the problem is not how, in an universe regulated by inexorable natural laws, freedom is possible--that is, where, in the determinist universe, there is a place for freedom which would not be a mere illusion based on our ignorance of the true causes--but, rather, how the world as a rational totality of causal interconnections made its appearance in the first place." [....] "For Schelling, then, the primordial, radically contingent fact, a fact which can in no way be accounted for, is freedom itself, a freedom bound by nothing, a freedom which, in a sense, is Nothing; and the problem is, rather, how this Nothing of the abyss of primordial freedom becomes entangled in the causal chains of reason."

The Real is a kind of "parallax gap", which shows itself in fundamental oppositions or antagonisms. For example: (1) Kant's phenomena (appearances, things for us) versus noumena (things in themselves, e.g. the freedom of the will); (2) the philosophical question about determinism versus freedom; (3) linear time (a causal sequence) versus the hermeneutic circle, i.e., 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 finally emerges out of quantitative developments in complexity) is when linear time "folds back on itself". A physically determined organism develops memory to the point of forming abstract concepts, or ideas (no longer just reflexes, instincts, etc). Après-coup is the way Lacan described this "psychoanalytic time" (i.e., interpretation of memories, past trauma).

It is only in these terms that we can understand Lacan's enigmatic remark that "a madman is the only free man". A psychotic is the subject that refuses the whole world that is thoroughly caught in reason. A psychotic refuses the forced choice of the Name of the Father. This means that the psychotic continues to dwell in the impossible opposite of symbolic identification; instead of accepting a place in the intersubjective space of the symbolic "big Other", the psychotic chooses instead to remain in what Schelling describes as the original abyss of Nothing, that is, the abyss of primordial freedom.

Free Will or Determinism? (2)

On p. 14 of The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), Žižek discusses "the fact of freedom." Here is a quotation from p. 16:

"The whole world is thoroughly caught in reason, but the question is : how did it get caught in the network of reason in the first place? Here Schelling inverts the standard perspective : the problem is not how, in an universe regulated by inexorable natural laws, freedom is possible--that is, where, in the determinist universe, there is a place for freedom which would not be a mere illusion based on our ignorance of the true causes--but, rather, how the world as a rational totality of causal interconnections made its appearance in the first place." [....] "For Schelling, then, the primordial, radically contingent fact, a fact which can in no way be accounted for, is freedom itself, a freedom bound by nothing, a freedom which, in a sense, is Nothing; and the problem is, rather, how this Nothing of the abyss of primordial freedom becomes entangled in the causal chains of reason."

The Real is a kind of "parallax gap", which shows itself in fundamental oppositions or antagonisms. For example: (1) Kant's phenomena (appearances, things for us) versus noumena (things in themselves, e.g. the freedom of the will); (2) the philosophical question about determinism versus freedom; (3) linear time (a causal sequence) versus the hermeneutic circle, i.e., 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 finally emerges out of quantitative developments in complexity) is when linear time "folds back on itself". A physically determined organism develops memory to the point of forming abstract concepts, or ideas (no longer just reflexes, instincts, etc). Après-coup is the way Lacan described this "psychoanalytic time" (i.e., interpretation of memories, past trauma).

Repressive Desublimation

From The Metastases of Enjoyment (London: Verso, 1994), p. 16:

The logic of this 'failed encounter' bears witness to the Frankfurt School's conception of psychoanalysis as a 'negative' theory: a theory of self-alientated, divided individuals, which implies as its inherent practical goal the achievement of a 'disalientated' condition in which individuals are undivided, no longer dominated by the alientated psychic substance (the 'unconscious')--a condition thereby rendering psychoanalysis itself superfluous. However, Freud continued to conceive of his own theory as 'positive', describing the unalterable condition of civilization. Because of this limitation--that is to say, because he comprehended 'repressive sublimation' (traumatic repression qua the underside of sublimation) as an anthropological constant--Freud could not foresee the unexpected, paradoxical condition actualized in our centiry: that of 'repressive desublimation', characteristic of 'post-liberal' societies in which 'the triumphant archaic urges, the victory of the Id over the Ego, live in harmony with the triumph of the society over the individual'.

The Ego's relative autonomy was based on its role as the mediator between the Id (the non-sublimated life-substance of the drives) and the Superego (the agency of social 'repression', the representative of the demands of society). 'Repressive desublimation' succeeds in getting rid of this autonomous, mediating agency of 'synthesis' which is the Ego: through such 'desublimation' the Ego loses its relative autonomy and regresses towards the unconscious. However, this 'regressive', compulsive, blind, 'automatic' behaviour, which bears all the signs of the Id, far from liberating us from the pressures of the existing social order, adheres perfectly to the demands of the Superego, and is therefore already enlisted in the service of the social order. As a consequence, the forces of social 'repression' exert a direct control over drives.

The bourgeois liberal subject represses his unconscious urges by means of internalized prohibitions and, as a result, his self-control enables him to get hold of his libidinal 'spontaneity'. In post-liberal societies, however, the agency of social repression no longer acts in the guise of an internalized Law or Prohibition that requires renunciation and self-control; instead, it assumes the form of a hypnotic agency that imposes the attitude of 'yielding to temptation'--that is to say, its injunction amounts to a command: 'Enjoy yourself!'. Such an idiotic enjoyment is dictated by the social environment which includes the Anglo-Saxon psychoanalyst whose main goal is to render the patient capable of 'normal', 'healthy' pleasures. Society requires us to fall asleep, into a hypnotic trance, usually under the guise of just the opposite command: 'The Nazi battle cry of "Germany awake" hides its very opposite.'

Masculine Universality versus Feminine Universality

From Sarah Kay's Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Polity Press, 2003), pp. 38-41:

Žižek first treats the topic of universality at length in For They Know Not, and continues unabated in recent writings, with particularly extended discussions in The Ticklish Subject (chapter 3) and Contingency, Hegemony, Universality ('Da Capo Senza Fine'). Universality is central to Žižek's thinking about sexual difference, history and politics, and I shall be returning to it in chapters 4 and 6.

On the psychoanalytic side, Žižek's first account of universality runs like this (based on For They Know Not, especially 21-7). The universal order is the symbolic order, or big Other, which provides the conceptual grid with which we construe the world. However, our conceptual mapping is impaired by the fact that the planes of signifier and signified are out of kilter with one another. The reason why this comes about is that one of the signifiers has no corresponding signified; it does not introduce a content into the linguistic system, but merely insinuates difference. The perpetually moving place to which it points is that of the 'lack' in the symbolic order, the primordial lack of 'castration'. This signifier is represented as S1 because, having no signified, it is singular, whereas all the other signifiers are double, hence S2. S1 is also singular in the sense that it is unique among the signifiers; hence it can also be referred to as the 'unary feature' (Lacan's trait unaire; see Glossary, SIGNIFYING CHAIN).

The unary feature acts as the prop of individual identification at the symbolic level. How I position myself as an individual depends on how I attach myself to this signifier of pure difference. However, as the empty space in the set, S1 also both determines and effectively takes on the value of all the other signifiers (S2). The result is that, as well as being a pure (qualitative) singular, it assumes the role of the (quantitative) particular. That is, instead of being utterly unique, it appears as just one of a set, and hence as correlated with the universal. Thus inflated with the meaning of the other signifiers, it gives the impression of totalizing the whole field of signification. This is why it is also called the master signifier, or 'quilting point' (Lacan's point de capiton), the signifier that 'quilts' the field of meaning. For example, the claim that we are a 'free society' acts as a political quilting point that is, in itself, meaningless--a flag to wave at cultures we wish to disparage, and that has nothing to do with the extent to which we actually are or are not free (for instance, one way we regulalry show we are a 'free society' is by locking up people who threaten our 'freedom'). But in everyday thinking, the empty term 'free society' becomes 'filled out' with all the aspects of our society which we treasure (family life, nice cars, TV, etc.).

Via a process of double reflection, then, S1 appears first as negating the rest of the set, S2--that is, as unique relative to its fullness--and next, via a negation of this negation, when the rest of the set is reflected into it, as typifying the universal in the form of the particular. For instance, when I identify myself relative to the unary feature, I don't normally think of myself as absolutely unique, as a point of difference. Instead, I embrace some ideologically totalizing view of myself: say, as a successful academic and mother of three. In this way, I make the transition from the singular to the particular which in turn evokes the universals 'academic success' and 'motherhood'.

A Hegelian terminology has already crept into this exposition, and clearly Žižek's development of Lacan owes much to Hegel. Hegel too is interested in this triadic construction of the concept as comprising three 'moments', singular, particular and universal, which are dialectically related to one another. Thus, for instance, the particular can pass into the universal and back, says Žižek, like the passage round a Moebius band, where what we thought were two distinct sides are in fact one continuous one (For They Know Not, 46). The capacity for each 'moment' to pass into another also means, paradoxically, that the universal can be located in the particular. In this way, the universal is 'always-already part of itself, comprised within its own elements' (ibid.); this capacity to appear among its own particulars is illustrated by Lacan's often repeated quip, 'I have three brothers, Paul, Ernest and myself'.

Another way in which the universal is located in one of the particulars is via the exception. Žižek endorses as authentically Hegelian the claim that 'the exception proves the rule', since it is precisely from our awareness of an exception to it that the existence of a rule can be inferred. A more concrete instance of the correlation between the exception and the universal is furnished by Marx's account of the commodity (For They Know Not, 124). All commodities are defined as being goods which can be exchanged for money, except for money itself. What universalizes the notion 'commodity' is the fact that there exists one commodity, money, which is the exception to the set.

Returning now to Lacan, this account of the universal as correlative with its exception corresponds exactly with how he defines masculinity in the 'formulae of sexuation' in Seminar XX. The 'exception which proves the rule' of masculinity is the mythical father in Freud's Totem and Taboo, the father who enjoyed uncontested sexual possession of all the women in the tribe before being murdered by his sons. Through guilt for their act, the sons became subject to the law of inhibition and repression ('castration') that characterizes all men as a result of the very fact that there was one--their father--who claimed exemption from it. As Žižek puts it,

"Lacan's basic premiss is that the leap from the general set of 'all men' into the universal 'man' is possible only through an exception: the universal (in its difference to the empirical generality) is constituted through the exception; we do not pass from the general set to the universality of One-Notion by way of adding something to the set but, on the contrary, by way of subtracting something from it, namely the 'unary feature' [trait unaire] which totalizes the general set, which makes out of it a universality." (For They Know Not, 123)

The correspondence between Hegel and Lacan looks complete. However, a new twist (or dialectical reversal) is about to be effected.

It comes in the form of the feminine formula of sexuation, which proposes a different relationship to the universal from the masculine one: one in which the signifying order plays a greatly diminished role. Women, like men, are subject to inhibition and repression, says Lacan--indeed, they are so without exception--but they are so incompletely and inconsistently. The result of this, according to Lacan, is that 'woman' is not fully actualized as a universal. I shall be returning to this problematic claim in chapter 4; what is relevant to the present discussion is the way Žižek presents this 'not-quite-universal' of the feminine. This is the 'non all' which we encountered when reviewing the so-called immanentism of the Hegelian dialectic. It means that the symbolic fiction of the universal, instead of being tugged into shape by S1, is, on the contrary, exposed as deficient and leaky. The agent of this exposure is an absolutely contingent object, here identified as the objet a. This is what blocks or holds open the place of lack in the symbolic order that is commandeered, on the side of the symbolic, by S1. The complex arguments concerning S1 were not a red herring--the master signifier is indeed a clue to the way the universals of ideology and identity, not to mention masculinity, are constructed--but they need to be subordinated to this new view of universality.

So now the objet a and not S1 is proposed as what impedes (and provokes) the universal. Objet a is the fantasy object that plugs the gap of the primary repression and provides the subject's original defence against 'castration'. It is, as it were, the traumatic underside of S1. The 'lack' which it gives the illusion of filling out is, Žižek is arguing, the emptiness on which the universal founders: the conceptual world cannot 'say it all'; there is always something which escapes. Also, because of its connection with trauma, the space of objet a discloses the dimension of violence in the universal. In effect, the universal is not so much a concept as a struggle for conceptualization:

"Lacan's 'primordial repression'...is precisely what creates universality as an empty place; and the 'trace of the disavowed in the formal structure that emerges' [Žižek is here referring to Butler's criticisms] is what Lacan calls objet petit a, the remainder of the jouissance within the symbolic order. This very necessity of the primordial repression shows clearly why one should distinguish between the exclusion of the Real that opens up the empty place of the universal and the subsequent hegemonic struggles of different particular contents to occupy this place. (Contingency, 257)