Lacan with Hegel

From "Lacan: at What Point is He Hegelian?"

by Slavoj Žižek (translated by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens)

available online at http://www.lacan.com/zizlacan1.htm

1. The Hegelian Thing

Michel Foucault once proposed that philosophy as such could be labeled 'anti-Platonism'. All philosophers, beginning with Aristotle, have defined their projects by distancing themselves from Plato, precisely because Plato was the thinker whose enterprise marked off the field of philosophy. In the same way, one could say that what defines philosophy in the last two centuries is its dissociation from Hegel, the incarnate monster of 'panlogicism' (the total dialectical mediation of reality, the complete dissolution of reality in the self-movement of the Idea). Over against this 'monster', various attempts have affirmed that there is, supposedly, some element which escapes the mediation of the concept, a gesture that is already discernible in the three great post-Hegelian inversions [endnote1] that opposed the absolutism of the Idea in the name of the irrational abyss of the Will (Schelling), the paradox of the existence of the individual (Kierkegaard) and the productive processes of life (Marx). Even Hegel's more favorable commentators, despite identifying with him, refuse to trespass the limit that constitutes Absolute Knowledge. Thus, Jean Hyppolite insists that the post-Hegelian tradition allows for the irreducible opening of the historico-temporal process by means of an empty repetition, destroying the framework of the progress of Reason ... To put it simply, each of these relations to the Hegelian system is always that of a "I know well, but all the same." [endnote 2] One knows well that Hegel affirms the fundamentally antagonistic character of actions, the decentring of the subject, etc., but all the same ... this division is eventually overcome in the self-mediation of the absolute Idea that ends up suturing all wounds. The position of Absolute Knowledge, the final reconciliation, plays here the role of the Hegelian Thing: a monster both frightening and ridiculous, from which it is best to keep some distance, something that is at the same time impossible (Absolute Knowledge is of course unachievable, an unrealizable Ideal) and forbidden (Absolute Knowledge must be avoided, for it threatens to mortify all the richness of life through the self-movement of the concept). In other words, any attempt to define oneself within Hegel's sphere of influence requires a point of blocked identification - the Thing must always be sacrificed...

For us, this figure of Hegel as 'panlogicist', who devours and mortifies the living substance of the particular, is the Real of his critic's, 'Real' in the Lacanian sense: the construction of a point which effectively does not exist (a monster with no relation to Hegel himself), but which, nonetheless, must be presupposed in order to justify our negative reference to the other, that is to say, our effort at distantiation. Where does the horror felt by post-Hegelians before the monster of Absolute Knowledge come from? What does this fantasmatic construction conceal by means of its fascinating presence? The answer: a hole, a void. The best way to distinguish this hole is by reading Hegel with Lacan, that is to say, by reading Hegel in terms of the Lacanian problematic of the lack in the Other, the traumatic void against which the process of signification articulates itself. From this perspective, Absolute Knowledge appears to be the Hegelian name for that which Lacan outlined in his description of the passe, the final moment of the analytic process, the experience of lack in the Other. If, according to Lacan's celebrated formula, Sade offers us the truth of Kant, [endnote 3] then Lacan himself allows us to approach the elementary matrix that summarizes the entire movement of the Hegelian dialectic: Kant with Sade, Hegel with Lacan. What is implied, then, by this relationship between Hegel and Lacan?

Today, things seem clear: although no one denies that Lacan owed a certain debt to Hegel, it is argued that all Hegelian references are limited to specific theoretical borrowings, and restricted to a well-defined period of Lacan's work. Between the late 1940s and the early 1950s, Lacan tried to articulate the psychoanalytic process in terms of an intersubjective logic of the recognition of desire and/or the desire for recognition. Already at this stage, Lacan was careful to keep his distance from the closure of the Hegelian system, from an Absolute Knowledge that was allied to the unachievable ideal of a perfectly homogeneous discourse, complete and closed in upon itself. Later, the introduction of the logic of the not-all (pas-tout) and the concept of the barred Other (A) would render this initial reference to Hegel obsolete. Can one imagine any opposition more incompatible than the one between Hegelian Absolute Knowledge - the closed 'circle of circles' - and the Lacanian barred Other - absolutely empty knowledge? Is not Lacan the anti-Hegel par excellence?

But, ironically, it is on the basis of Lacan's debt to Hegel that most critiques proceed: Lacan remains the prisoner of phallogocentrism due to a subterranean Hegelianism that confines textual dissemination within a teleological circle ... To such a critique, Lacanians could respond, rightly, by stressing the rupture of Lacanianism with Hegelianism - trying hard to save Lacan by emphasizing that he is not and never has been a Hegelian. But it is time to approach this debate in a different light, by expressing the relationship between Hegel and Lacan in an original way. From our perspective, Lacan is fundamentally Hegelian, but without knowing it. His Hegelianism is certainly not where one expects it - that is to say, in his explicit references to Hegel - but precisely in the last stage of his teaching, in his logic of the not-all, in the emphasis placed on the Real and the lack in the Other. - - And, reciprocally, a reading of Hegel in the light of Lacan provides us with a radically different image from that, commonly assumed, of the 'panlogicist' Hegel. It would make visible a Hegel of the logic of the signifier, of a self-referential process articulated as the repetitive positivization of a central void.

Such a reading would thus affect the definition of both terms. It would mark off a Hegel freed from the residues of panlogicism and/or historicism, a Hegel of the logic of the signifier. Consequently, it would become possible clearly to perceive the most subversive core of the Lacanian doctrine, that of the constitutive lack in the Other. This is why our argument is, fundamentally, "dialogical”: it is impossible to develop a positive line of thought without including the theses that are opposed to it, that is to say, in effect, those commonplaces already mentioned concerning Hegel, which would see in Hegelianism the instance par excellence of the 'imperialism of reason', a closed economy in which the self-movement of the Concept sublates all differences and every dispersion of the material process. Such commonplaces can also be found in Lacan, but they are accompanied by another conception of Hegel which one does not find in Lacan's explicit statements about Hegel - for which reason we pass by these statements, for the most part, in silence. For us, Lacan 'does not know at what point he is Hegelian', because his reading of Hegel is inscribed within the tradition of Kojève and Hyppolite. [endnote 4] It would therefore be necessary, in order to articulate the connection between the dialectic and the logic of the signifier, to bracket for the moment any explicit reference by Lacan to Hegel.

[...]

Notes:

[1] Zizek's language here is also, ironically, that of Louis Althusser, who rejects any such materialist 'inversion' of the Hegelian dialectic. See his 'On the Materialist Dialectic: On the Unevenness of Origins', in For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London and New York, Verso, 1969, pp. 161-218 [transl. note].

[2] This formula of the 'fetishist denial' was developed by Octave Mannoni in his 'I Know Well, but All the Same ...', in Perversion and the Social Relation, ed. Molly Anne Rothenberg, Dennis A. Foster and Slavoj Zizek, Durham, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 68-92.

[3] Lacan's precise formulation is as follows: 'Philosophy in the Bedroom comes eight years after the Critique of Practical Reason. Once we observe their correspondence, then we may demonstrate that one completes the other, and even suggest that (Sade's Philosophy) presents the truth of the Critique.' Jacques Lacan, 'Kant avec Sade', in Écrits, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1966, p. 244 [transl. note].

[4] Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the 'Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Raymond Queneau and Allan Bloom, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1969; Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel's 'Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman, Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1974 [transl. note].

[...]

This essay was originally published in French in Le plus sublime des hystériques - Hegel passe, Broché, Paris, 1999. It appears in Interogating the Real, London: Continuum, 2005, Rex Butler and Scott Stephens editors.

Identity and Lacan's Logic of Sexuation

From “Woman is One of the Names-of-the-Father, or How Not to Misread Lacan’s Formulas of Sexuation”

In lacanian ink 10 - 1995

by Slavoj Žižek

Available at:

http://www.lacan.com/zizwoman.htm

[....]

Here, one should recall the passage from consciousness to self-consciousness in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: what one encounters in the suprasensible Beyond is, as to its positive content, the same as our terrestrial everyday world; this same content is merely transposed to a different modality. Hegel's point, however, is that it would be false to conclude from this identity of content that there is no difference between the terrestrial reality and its Beyond: in its original dimension, Beyond is not some positive content but an empty place, a kind of screen onto which one can project any positive content whatsoever-and this empty p ace is the subject. Once we become aware of it, we pass from Substance to Subject, i.e., from consciousness to self-consciousness. (endnote 11) In this precise sense, woman is the subject par excellence. The same point could be made also in Schelling's terms, i.e., in terms of the difference between the subject qua original void, deprived of any further positive qualifications (in Lacan's mathemes:, $), and the features that this subject assumes, puts on, and which are ultimately always artificial, contingent. (endnote 12) It is precisely insofar as woman is characterized by an original masquerade, insofar as all her features are artificially put on, that she is more subject than man-since according to Schelling, what ultimately characterizes the subject is this very radical contingency and artificiality of her ever positive feature, i.e., the fact that she in herself is a pure void that cannot be identified with any of these features.

We are us dealing with a kind of convoluted, curved space, as in the story about Achilles and the tortoise: the male representations (which articulate what woman is "for the other") endlessly approach the woman-tortoise, yet the moment the man leaps over, overtakes the woman-tortoise, he finds himself again where he already was, within the male representations about what woman is "in herself"-woman's "in itself" is always already "for the other". Woman an never be caught, one can never come up with her, one can either endlessly approach her or overtake her, for the very reason that "woman in herself" designates no substantial content but just a purely formal cut, a limit that is always missed-this purely formal cut is the subject qua $. One is thus tempted to paraphrase Hegel again: everything hinges on our conceiving woman not merely as Substance but also as Subject, i.e., on accomplishing a shift from the notion of woman as a substantial content beyond male representations to the notion of woman qua pure topological cut that forever separates the "for the other" from the "in itself".

The asymmetry of the sexual difference resides in the fact that in the case of man we are not dealing with the same cut, we do not distinguish in the same way between what he is "in himself" and what he is 'for the other' qua masquerade. True, the so-called modern man is also caught in the split between what (it seems to him that) the other (woman or social environment in general) expects from him (to be a strong macho type, etc.), and between what he effectively is in himself (weak, uncertain of himself, etc.). This split, however, is of a fundamentally different nature: the macho-image is not experienced as a delusive masquerade but as the ideal-ego one is striving to become. Behind the macho-image of a man there is no secret, just a weak ordinary person that can never live up to his ideal; whereas the trick of the feminine masquerade is to present itself as a mask that conceals the feminine secret. In other words, in opposition to man, who simply tries to live up to his image, i.e., to give the impression that he really is what he pretends to be, woman deceives by means of deception itself; she offers the mask as mask, as false pretence, in order to give rise to the search for the secret behind the mask. (endnote 13)

This problematic of femininity qua masquerade also enables us to approach in a new way Lacan's earlier attempt (from the late '50s in "The signification of the phallus") to conceptualize sexual difference as internal to the phallic economy, as the difference between "having" and "being" (man has the phallus, woman is the phallus). A reproach that immediately arises here concerns the reliance of this difference on Freud's naïve anthropologist evolutionism whose premise is that the primitive savage doesn't have an unconscious since he is (our, civilized man's) unconscious. Does the attempt to conceptualize sexual difference by means of the opposition of being and having not imply woman's subordination to man, i.e., the notion of woman as a lower, less reflected, more immediate stage, somewhat in the sense of Schelling's notion of progression as the passage from being to having? That is to say, in Schelling's philosophy, (what previously was) a Being becomes a predicate of a higher Being; (what previously was) a Subject becomes an object of a higher Subject: an animal, for example, is immediately its own Subject, it is its living body, whereas man cannot be said to be his body, he merely has a body which is thus degraded to his predicate...

As a close reading of Lacan's text instantly attests however, the opposition we are dealing with is not that of being versus having, but rather the opposition of to have/to appear: woman is not the phallus, she merely appears to be to be phallus, and this appearing (which of course is identical with femininity qua masquerade) points towards a logic of lure and deception. Phallus can perform its function only as veiled-the moment it is unveiled, it is no longer phallus; what the mask of femininity conceals is therefore not directly the phallus but rather the fact that there is nothing behind the mask. In a word, phallus is a pure semblance, a mystery which resides in the mask as such. On that account, Lacan can claim that a woman wants to be loved for what she is not, not for what she truly is: she offers herself to man not as herself, but in the guise of a mask. (endnote 14) Or, to put it in Hegelian terms: phallus does not stand for an immediate Being but for a Being which is only insofar as it is "for the other", i.e., for a pure appearing. On that account, the Freudian primitive is not immediately the unconscious, he is merely unconscious for us, for our external gaze: the spectacle of his unconscious (primitive passions, exotic rituals) is his masquerade by means of which like the woman with her masquerade, he fascinates the other's (our) desire.

Man wants to be loved for what he truly is; which is why the archetypal male scenario of the trial of woman's love is that of the prince from a fairy tale who first approaches his beloved under the guise of a poor servant, in order to insure that the woman will fall in love with him for himself, not for his princely title. This, however, is precisely what a woman doesn't want-and is this not yet another confirmation of the fact that woman is more subject than man? A man stupidly believes that, beyond his symbolic title, there is deep in himself some substantial content, some hidden treasure which makes him worthy of love, whereas a woman knows that there is nothing beneath the mask-her strategy is precisely to preserve this 'nothing' of her freedom, out of reach of man's possessive love...

A recent English publicity spot for a beer renders perfectly what Lacan aims at with his notion that "... there is no sexual relation". Its first part stages the well-known fairy tale anecdote: a girl walks along a stream, sees a frog, takes it gently into her lap, kisses it, and of course, the ugly frog miraculously turns into a beautiful young man. However, the story isn't over yet: the young man casts a covetous glance at the girl, draws her towards himself, kisses her, and she turns into a bottle of beer the man triumphantly holds in his hand... For the woman, the point is that her love and affection (signalled by the kiss) turn a frog into a beautiful man, a full phallic presence (in Lacan's mathemes, Phi); for the man, it is to reduce the woman to a partial object, the cause of his desire (in Lacan's mathemes, the objet petit a). On account of this asymmetry the relationship is impossible: we have either a woman with the frog or a man with the bottle of beer; what we can never obtain is the natural couple of the beautiful woman and man... To conclude, two clichés are to be avoided apropos of the hysterical nature of feminine subjectivity:

-on the one hand, the dismissive treatment of the (feminine) hysterical subject as a confused babbler unable to confront reality, and therefore taking refuge in impotent theatrical gestures (an example from the domain of political discourse: from Lenin onwards, Bolsheviks regularly stigmatized their liberal political opponents as hysterics who "do not know what they effectively want");

-on the other hand, the false elevation of hysteria to a protest, through woman's body language, against male domination: by means of hysterical symptoms, the (feminine) subject signals her refusal to act as the empty screen or medium for the male monologue.

Hysteria has to be comprehended in the complexity of its strategy as a radically ambiguous protest against Master's interpolation which simultaneously bears witness to the fact that the hysterical subject needs a Master, that she cannot do without a Master, so that there is no simple and direct way out. For that reason, one should also avoid the historicist pitfall of rejecting the notion of hysteria as belonging to a bygone era, i.e., the notion that today borderline disturbances, not hysteria, are the predominant form of "discontent" in our civilization: borderline is the contemporary form of hysteria, i.e., of the subject's refusal to accept the predominant mode of interpolation whose agent is no longer the traditional Master but the expert-knowledge of the discourse of Science. In short, the shift from the classic form of hysteria to borderline disturbances is strictly correlative with the shift from the traditional Master to the form of Power legitimized by Knowledge.

A more than sufficient reason for maintaining the notion of hysteria is that the status of the subject as such is ultimately hysterical. That is to say, when Lacan asserts that the most succinct definition of the subject is 'that which is not an object', the apparent banality of this claim should not deceive us: the subject-in the precise psychoanalytic sense of the subject of desire-only exists insofar as the question remains open of how much of an object she is for the Other, i.e., I am a subject insofar as the radical perplexity persists as to the Other's desire, as to what the Other sees (and finds worthy of desire) in me. In other words, when Lacan claims that there is no desire without an object-cause, this does not amount to the banality according to which every desire is attached to its objective correlative: the 'lost object' which sets in motion my desire is ultimately the subject herself, and the lack in question concerns her uncertainty as to her status for the Other's desire. In this precise sense, desire is always desire of the Other: the subject's desire is the desire to ascertain her status as the object of the Other's desire.

Notes

1 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan XX: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge, 1972-73 (Encore), New York: W.W. Norton, 1998.

2 In the domain of politics, populist rhetoric offers a case of the exception which grounds universality: whenever the opinion prevails that politics as such is corrupted etc., one can be sure that there is always one politician to promulgate this universal distrust and thereby offer himself as the one to be trusted, the neutral/apolitical representative of the people's true interests...

3 The transsexual subject, by way of installing Woman at the place of the Name-of-the-Father, disavows castration. If one adopts the usual feminist-deconstructionist commonplace, according to which the notion of castration implies that woman, not man, is castrated, one would expect that when Woman occupies the place of symbolic authority this place will be branded by castration; if however, we take into account that both Woman and the primordial father are uncastratable, the mystery immediately disappears.

4 Slavoj Zizek, Metastases of Enjoyment: Six Essays on Woman and Causality, New York: Verso, 1994.

5 Since, in patriarchal societies, male predominance is inscribed into the symbolic order itself, does the assertion that women are integrated into it without exception-in a sense more fully than men-not run counter to their subordinate position within this order? Is it not more logical to ascribe the subordinate position to those who are not fully integrated into the symbolic order? What one must challenge here is the underlying premise according to which Power belongs to those who are more fully within the symbolic order. The exercise of Power, on the contrary, always involves a residue of the non-symbolized real (in the guise of the unfathomable je ne sais quoi which is supposed to account for the Master's charisma, for example). It is not accidental that both our examples of the constitutive exception, of the element non-integrated into the symbolic order (primordial father, Lady in courtly love), involve the figure of an extremely cruel Master not bound by any Law.

6 This paradox points towards the delusion which is the proper object of psychoanalysis-the delusion more refined than a simple mistaking of a false appearance for the thing itself. When, for example, I daydream about sexual prowess and conquests, I am, of course, all the time aware of the illusory character of my fantasizing-I know very well that, in reality, I'll never effectively do it, that I am 'not really like that'. The delusion resides elsewhere: this daydreaming is a screen which provides a misleading image of myself, not only of my capacities but also of my true desires-if, in reality, I were to find myself in a position to realize my daydreaming, I would surely retreat from it in panic. At an even more complex level (in the case of indulging in sadistic fantasies, for example), the very soothing awareness of how I merely daydream, of how "I am not really like that", can well conceal the extent to which my desire is determined by these fantasies...

7 Insofar as the symbolic constitutes itself by way of positing some element as the traumatic non-symbolizable Thing, as its constitutive exception, then the symbolic gesture par excellence is the drawing of a line of separation between symbolic and real; the real on the contrary, is not external to the symbolic as some kind of substance resisting symbolization-the real is the symbolic itself qua "not-all", i.e., insofar as it lacks the constitutive exception.

8 It would be productive to elaborate the link between the totalitarian leader and the art of the comic absurd, in which figures of the capricious Master, à la Jarry's roi Ubu, abound: i.e., to read Lewis Carroll with Samuel Goldwyn, Marx Brothers with Stalin, etc.

9 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982. Such a feminine substantialism (this word is probably more appropriate than the usual essentialism) often serves as the hidden presupposition of feminist argumentation. Suffice it to recall the standard claim that a woman who actively participates in patriarchal repression (by way of following the male ideals of feminine beauty, focusing her life on raising the children, etc.) is eo ipso a victim of male manipulation and plays a role imposed on her. This logic is homologous to the old orthodox Marxist claim: the working class is, as to its objective social position, progressive. So that when workers engage in the anti-Semitic, right-wing populism, they are being manipulated by the ruling class and its ideology: in both cases, one has to assert that there is no substantial guarantee of the progressive nature of women or of the working class-the situation is irreducibly antagonistic and open, the terrain of an undecidable ideological and political struggle.

10 This ambiguity pertains already to the commonplace notion of femininity, which, in line with Gilligan, associates women with intimacy, identification, spontaneity, as opposed to male distance, reflectivity, calculation; but at the same time, also with masquerade, affected feigning, as opposed to male authentic inwardness-woman is simultaneously more spontaneous and more artificial than man.

11 G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: OUP, 1977.

12 F.W.J. von Schelling, On the History of Modern Philosophy, Cambridge: CUP, 1994.

13 We can see now how the notion of femininity qua masquerade is strictly co-dependent with the position of woman as "not-all": supposed to conceal something beneath itself, the mask is not all; so, since there is nothing-no hidden truth beneath the mask-there is also no positive, substantial element exempted from the masquerade, which is not a mask. The name for this void which is in itself nothing, but nonetheless makes the domain of masks not-all, of course, is the subject qua void (_).

14 "It is for what she is not that she expects to be desired as well as loved". Jacques Lacan, ...crits: A Selection, New York: W.W. Norton, 2002.

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).