Žižek's Politics: More Insightful than Nader

Nader Was Right: Liberals Are Going Nowhere With Obama

By Chris Hedges

Available online at http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090810_nader_was_right_liberals_are_going_nowhere_with_obama/

Posted on Aug 10, 2009

The American empire has not altered under Barack Obama. It kills as brutally and indiscriminately in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan as it did under George W. Bush. It steals from the U.S. treasury to enrich the corporate elite as rapaciously. It will not give us universal health care, abolish the Bush secrecy laws, end torture or “extraordinary rendition,” restore habeas corpus or halt the warrantless wiretapping and monitoring of citizens. It will not push through significant environmental reform, regulate Wall Street or end our relationship with private contractors that provide mercenary armies to fight our imperial wars and produce useless and costly weapons systems.

The sad reality is that all the well-meaning groups and individuals who challenge our permanent war economy and the doctrine of pre-emptive war, who care about sustainable energy, fight for civil liberties and want corporate malfeasance to end, were once again suckered by the Democratic Party. They were had. It is not a new story. The Democrats have been doing this to us since Bill Clinton. It is the same old merry-go-round, only with Obama branding. And if we have not learned by now that the system is broken, that as citizens we do not matter to our political elite, that we live in a corporate state where our welfare and our interests are irrelevant, we are in serious trouble. Our last hope is to step outside of the two-party system and build movements that defy the Democrats and the Republicans. If we fail to do this, we will continue to undergo a corporate coup d’etat in slow motion that will end in feudalism.

We owe Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney and the Green Party an apology. They were right. If a few million of us had had the temerity to stand behind our ideals rather than our illusions and the empty slogans peddled by the Obama campaign, we would have a platform. We forgot that social reform never comes from accommodating the power structure but from frightening it. The Liberty Party, which fought slavery, the suffragists who battled for women’s rights, the labor movement, and the civil rights movement knew that the question was not how do we get good people to rule—those attracted to power tend to be venal mediocrities—but how do we limit the damage the powerful do to us. These mass movements were the engines for social reform, the correctives to our democracy and the true protectors of the rights of citizens. We have surrendered this power. It is vital to reclaim it. Where is the foreclosure movement? Where is the robust universal health care or anti-war movement? Where is the militant movement for sustainable energy?

“Something is broken,” Nader said when I reached him at his family home in Connecticut. “We are not at the Bangladesh level in terms of passivity, but we are getting there. No one sees anything changing. There is no new political party to give people a choice. The progressive forces have no hammer. When they abandoned our campaign, they told the Democrats we have nowhere to go and will take whatever you give us. The Democrats are under no heat in the electoral arena from the left.

“There comes a point when the public imbibes the ultimatum of the plutocracy,” Nader said when asked about public apathy. “They have bought into the belief that if it protests, it will be brutalized by the police. If they have Muslim names, they will be subjected to Patriot Act treatment. This has scared the hell out of the underclass. They will be called terrorists.

“This is the third television generation,” Nader said. “They have grown up watching screens. They have not gone to rallies. Those are history now. They hear their parents and grandparents talk about marches and rallies. They have little toys and gizmos that they hold in their hands. They have no idea of any public protest or activity. It is a tapestry of passivity.

“They have been broken,” Nader said of the working class. “How many times have their employers threatened them with going abroad? How many times have they threatened the workers with outsourcing? The polls on job insecurity are record-high by those who have employment. And the liberal intelligentsia have failed them. They [the intellectuals] have bought into carping and making lecture fees as the senior fellow at the institute of so-and-so. Look at the top 50 intelligentsia—not one of them supported our campaign, not one of them has urged for street action and marches.”

Our task is to build movements that can act as a counterweight to the corporate rape of America. We must opt out of the mainstream. We must articulate and stand behind a viable and uncompromising socialism, one that is firmly and unequivocally on the side of working men and women. We must give up the self-delusion that we can influence the power elite from the inside. We must become as militant as those who are seeking our enslavement. If we remain passive as we undergo the largest transference of wealth upward in American history, our open society will die. The working class is being plunged into desperation that will soon rival the misery endured by the working class in China and India. And the Democratic Party, including Obama, is a willing accomplice.

“Obama is squandering his positive response around the world,” Nader said. “In terms of foreign and military policy, it is a distinct continuity with Bush. Iraq, Afghanistan, the militarization of foreign policy, the continued expansion of the Pentagon budget and pursuing more globalized trade agreements are the same.”

This is an assessment that neoconservatives now gleefully share. Eliot A. Cohen, writing in The Wall Street Journal, made the same pronouncement.

“Mostly, though, the underlying structure of the policy remains the same,” Cohen wrotein an Aug. 2 opinion piece titled “What’s Different About the Obama Foreign Policy.” “Nor should this surprise us: The United States has interests dictated by its physical location, its economy, its alliances, and above all, its values. Naive realists, a large tribe, fail to understand that ideals will inevitably guide American foreign policy, even if they do not always determine it. Moreover, because the Obama foreign and defense policy senior team consists of centrist experts from the Democratic Party, it is unlikely to make radically different judgments about the world, and about American interests in it, than its predecessors.”

Nader said that Obama should gradually steer the country away from imperial and corporate tyranny.

“You don’t just put out policy statements of congeniality, but statements of gradual redirection,” Nader said. “You incorporate in that statement not just demilitarization, not just ascension of smart diplomacy, but the enlargement of the U.S. as a humanitarian superpower, and cut out these Soviet-era weapons systems and start rapid response for disaster like earthquakes and tsunamis. You expand infectious disease programs, which the U.N. Developmental Commission says can be done for $50 billion a year in Third World countries on nutrition, minimal health care and minimal shelter.”

Obama has expanded the assistance to our class of Wall Street extortionists through subsidies, loan guarantees and backup declarations to banks such as Citigroup. His stimulus package does not address the crisis in our public works infrastructure; instead it doles out funds to Medicaid and unemployment compensation. There will be no huge public works program to remodel the country. The president refuses to acknowledge the obvious—we can no longer afford our empire.

“Obama could raise a call to come home, America, from the military budget abroad,” Nader suggested. “He could create a new constituency that does not exist because everything is so fragmented, scattered, haphazard and slapdash with the stimulus. He could get the local labor unions, the local Chambers of Commerce and the mayors to say the more we cut the military budget, the more you get in terms of public works.”

“They [administration leaders] don’t see the distinction between public power and corporate power,” Nader said. “This is their time in history to reassert public values represented by workers, consumers, taxpayers and communities. They are creating a jobless recovery, the worst of the worst, with the clear specter of inflation on the horizon. We are heading for deep water.”

The massive borrowing acts as an anesthetic. It prevents us from facing the new limitations we must learn to cope with domestically and abroad. It allows us to live in the illusion that we are not in a state of irrevocable crisis, that our decline is not real and that catastrophe has been averted. But running up the national debt can work only so long.

“No one can predict the future,” Nader added hopefully. “No one knows the variables. No one predicted the move on tobacco. No one predicted gay rights. No one predicted the Berkeley student rebellion. The students were supine. You never know what will light the fire. You have to keep the pressure on. I know only one thing for sure: The whole liberal-progressive constituency is going nowhere.”

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.