American Casino

From SOCIALISTWORKER.org

"How the mortgage crooks created a crisis"

Interview: Andrew Cockburn

August 13, 2009

BACK WHEN bankers and politicians were assuring us that the sub-prime mortgage crisis would be "contained" and the overall economy would be fine, journalists Leslie and Andrew Cockburn and their film crew got to work. They interviewed not only the victims of crooked mortgage brokers in the poorest sections of Baltimore, but financial industry insiders who explained just how Wall Street created the crisis.

The result of their work is American Casino, an award-winning documentary that's currently being screened in special showings around the U.S. Here, Andrew Cockburn, who co-produced the film with Leslie Cockburn, talks to Lee Sustar about why they made the film and the impact that they hope to have.

American Casino details how Wall Street gambled away the homes of millions of Americans

HOW did you come to make a film about the financial crisis even before the worst of the crash took place?

WE STARTED doing it in January 2008. It was clear that the crisis had started. You can take any number of dates--from when the housing market peaked in '06 when things started to go south, or when you had a sort of crash on Wall Street with the death of two Bear Stearns hedge funds in the summer of '07. We had concluded by the beginning of '08 that this was a massive economic catastrophe we were heading into, and we really thought someone should be making a film about it.

We set out to both explain what had happened and what had caused it, and also to link it to the lives of ordinary people. So we shot on both Wall Street and the city of Baltimore. We wanted to bring out what was clear--that this really had been a massive exercise in predatory lending directed against poor people, particularly African Americans and other minorities. We relate the high level, abstruse machinations of what was going on in those blue screens in the trading rooms of New York to the lives of ordinary people in Baltimore.

REVIEW: MOVIES

American Casino, written by Andrew Cockburn and Leslie Cockburn, directed by Leslie Cockburn.

Then we take it to California, which was really the epicenter of the whole sub-prime fiasco, and on into the post-apocalyptic world of Riverside, Calif., where disease-bearing mosquitoes spread across the land, thanks to the foreclosed stagnant swimming pools.

THERE HAS been a claim from the financial industry that this was an unforeseeable crisis--and that all they were trying to do is make home ownership more possible. Do you buy that?

ABSOLUTELY NOT. As I think we made clear in American Casino, it all came from the top. It was Wall Street banks who pushed this, it was Wall Street banks who had the relationships with the mortgage companies. It was Wall Street that aggressively competed for the mortgage loans sold by mortgage companies, which could then be packaged into securities--those magical instruments, the CDOs [collateralized debt obligations], CDO-squared and all those other things we've come to know and love.

They were the guilty parties and certainly not--absolutely not--the homeowners who've gotten blamed for this. People at the Wall Street Journal and so forth have been working overtime ever since the crash to say it's all the fault of ordinary people, the poor people who got into loans they couldn't afford, these misguided borrowers, single Black mothers who somehow managed to bring down the global financial system.

In American Casino, we make it clear that it's not like that. Ordinary people were lied to, were conned, were defrauded into these loans. That's what happened. The system did this. In my view--and I think we say in the film American Casino--the system couldn't do anything else. They'd run out of other productive things to invest in. So basically, the option was loan sharking, which is what they did.

OF COURSE, this is a worldwide financial crisis. How does that fit into your framework?

WE DON'T really have time to go into the international context--although my country of origin, Ireland, is right there behind Iceland in terms of economies that have been reduced to total basket cases by this lunacy. But I think it really did start here, because this is the center of the system. In particular, it was the policy of the Federal Reserve in the early part of the 21st Century that you can regard as the starting gun for this. Many other things come into play, but it was then-Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan who, in a panic after the collapse of the dot-com bust, reduced interest rates to 1 percent. That really set this thing into high gear.

THERE WAS a recent story in the New York Times about how sub-prime mortgage lenders are now involved in mortgage-modification companies that rip people off. What's your reaction to that?

TO A very large degree, the whole sub-prime mortgage program was a fraud--in terms of lying and conning people into loans they couldn't afford. And people tend to trust the professional. Just like they trust their doctor, they'll trust the mortgage professional.

A lot of the people who started these mortgage companies had a background in the savings and loan (S&L) business, so you have a chain of crookedness really going back to the S&L scandals of the 1980s. A lot of those companies were reborn as mortgage-lending companies. Now that are being reborn again as mortgage-modification companies, and in no instance can we see any sign of concern for the suffering homeowner.

Mortgage modification itself, I think, is kind of a distraction, because what they do in the end is still lock people into these overpriced loans. It's a way of making it possible for people to just be able to survive in a state of debt peonage. Unless you are able to reduce debt principle--which of course is being viciously resisted by the industry--I don't think mortgage modifications really do much good. In fact, there's good evidence that they don't, even when they're not being a conscious fraud.

WHY HASN'T the Obama administration done more to help victims of this crisis?

MY FAVORITE figure is the $104.7 million that was invested in Washington by the financial services industry in the first quarter of this year alone. It's kind of staggering. We think about the control of the capitalist system--how the financial industry and the banks control policy--and we tell people this. But to see it in such lurid and crude detail, particularly in this administration and the last one, is kind of staggering. The banks and Wall Street have managed to get their own way despite having really caused this incredible catastrophe, and being clearly guilty.

Remember in the beginning of the year it was revealed that AIG--who we've now bailed out, I think, to upwards of $170 billion dollars and rising--was paying themselves big bonuses. There was a lot of outrage, and Obama said this was unconscionable, and the Congress said this was outrageous. They all foamed at the mouth and jumped up and down--and then nothing happened.

More recently, there was an announcement that AIG was paying another round of bonuses. Well, there was no uproar this time, and I heard in Washington that the White House had passed the word quietly to Congress that it would be more helpful if we didn't hear too much fuss over AIG paying itself more bonuses with our money. So that's the power of Wall Street at work.

TELL US about the housing activists you worked with in the film.

THERE ARE a host of organizations. I think the squatting movement is very good--people squatting in foreclosed houses. ACORN's been doing good work. We worked with a very good housing aid agency in Baltimore called St. Ambrose which was very effective in getting loan terms reduced by dealing with lenders. There are certainly encouraging things, and across the country there hundreds of similar groups. We'll be listing them on our Web site AmericanCasinoTheMovie.com, as a guide telling people where to go.

But I still think that's not enough. In Europe--in Ireland, for instance--there's a lot more militant feeling. Some of the leading bankers can't go out in public. One was out playing golf on a fancy golf course the other day and he was advised to leave for his own safety because the employees--anyone carrying a golf club--might let the rage vent. Well we don't see anything like that here yet. I don't see any of those people who ran Citigroup or AIG into the ground getting worried. They're all feeling pretty comfortable and prosperous.

HOW DO you rate the media in covering and analyzing the crisis?

IT'S VERY uneven, but basically terrible. There's been some really good people. InAmerican Casino we feature a very smart financial reporter from Bloomberg, Mark Pittman, who really saw this coming and has been covering it throughout in a very unsparing way. Another business journalist, Gretchen Morgenson in the New York Times, hasn't been bad.

But the overall tone has been like that of CNBC, which people call Bubble Vision. On that network, Jim Kramer said that the stock market had higher to go when it was at 14,000, that it had reached the bottom at 12,000, reached the bottom at 10,000, reached the bottom at 8,000 and so on and so forth. Because their function obviously is to try and keep things rolling along.

I was just looking at the New York Times headline yesterday which said that, "oh hurray, housing prices have finally bottomed and now they're going to pick up, so we'll look back on April 2009 as when things absolutely hit bottom and when things started to get better."

But the house prices are still too high for most people to afford in most parts of the country. It's terrible that one in six, or one in five households in the country are underwater--the houses are worth less than they're paying for them. But we again have this "Bubble Vision" type of coverage, saying, "Okay, everything's over now, house prices are going to go up again, green shoots everywhere."

Is the media being as misleading generally as it has been all along? Yeah.

In American Casino, our bottom line is that they caused it, and we're having to pay big time to save it. At the end of the film we give out in detail how the $12 trillion that we, the taxpayers, the working people of America, have committed to pay to bail out Wall Street.

I'm afraid that's the future, unless there's some kind of mass action, some kind of outrage and people rise up and protest. What we're facing is the long-term impoverishment of the majority of the population in order to prop up a system where people at the top can cream off their fees and cream off their very fat incomes.

When you think about the way Wall Street has been working, every time you buy something on your credit card they get to cream off a piece because that credit card loan will have been securitized and someone up there will own the bond. Every time you pay your mortgage someone in Wall Street takes a cut of that and so on down the line. This is a system where there's a tap in the pipeline, and they hold a bucket underneath and take what's ours and make it theirs.

Unfortunately, I think that's the foreseeable future. The system has been under fantastic strain in the last year as people realized what had been happening and got outraged. So [politicians] have worked very hard to bring things back on even keel. Obama was quoted as saying something I thought was very telling earlier this year when he had a bunch of the nation's leading bankers in a meeting at the White House. He said, "My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks." We might ask, "Why don't you get out of the way?"

Of course, that didn't happen. But hopefully, American Casino, will remind people what it was that got them angry--or will get them angry again.

For more information about American Casino and screenings in your area, visitAmericanCasinoTheMovie.com.

Theory versus the Political Act?

From Žižek and Heidegger - IJŽS Vol 1.4 (2007)

"Why Heidegger Made the Right Step in 1933"

[....]

This, also, compels us to qualify and limit the homology between

Foucault’s Iranian engagement and Heidegger’s Nazi engagement:

Foucault was right in engaging himself, he correctly detected the

emancipatory potential in the events; all insinuations of liberal

critics that his engagement is yet another chapter in the sad

saga of Western radical intellectuals projecting their fantasies

into an exotic foreign upheaval which allows them to satisfy

simultaneously their emancipatory desires and their secret

“masochistic” longing for harsh discipline and oppression,

totally misses the point. So where was his mistake? One

can claim that he did the right thing for the wrong reason:

the way he theorized and justified his engagement is

misleading. The frame within which Foucault operates in

his analysis of the Iranian situation is the opposition

between the revolutionary Event, the sublime enthusiasm

of the united people where all internal differences are

momentarily suspended, and the pragmatic domain of

the politics of interests, strategic power calculations, etc.

– the opposition which, as we have already seen, directly

evokes Kant’s distinction between the noumenal (or, more

precisely, the sublime which evokes the noumenal

dimension) and the phenomenal. Our thesis is here a very

precise one: this general frame is too “abstract” to account

for different modalities of collective enthusiasm – between,

say, the Nazi enthusiasm of the people united in its rejection

of (whose effects were undoubtedly real), the enthusiasm of

the people united against the stagnating Communist regime,

or the properly revolutionary enthusiasm. The difference is

simply that the first two are not Events, merely pseudo-Events,

because they were lacking the moment of properly utopian

opening. This difference is strictly immanent to enthusiastic

unity: only in the last case, the common denominator of this

unity was the “part of no-part,” the “downtrodden,” those

included in society with no proper place within it and, as such,

functioning as the “universal singularity,” directly embodying

the universal dimension.

This is why, also, the opposition between noumenal

enthusiasm and particular strategic interests does not

cover the entire field – if it were so, then we would remain

stuck forever in the opposition between emancipatory

outbursts and the sobering “day after” when life returns to

its pragmatic normal run. From this constrained perspective,

every attempt to avoid and/or postpone this sobering return

to the normal run of things amounts to terror, to the reversal

of enthusiasm into monstrosity. What if, however, this is

what is truly at stake in a true emancipatory process: in

Jacques Ranciere’s terms, how to unite the political and the

police, how to transpose the political emancipatory outburst

into the concrete regulation of policing. What can be more

sublime than the creation of a new “liberated territory,”

of a positive order of being which escapes the grasp of

the existing order?

This is why Badiou is right in denying to the enthusiastic

events of the collapse of the Communist regimes the

status of an Event.

[....]

Truth Tokens and the American Way

(Song published by Telltale Games)

N-O-M-A-F-I-A, oh baby.

Welcome, welcome, generous friends,

Days and weeks and tokens to spend.

We're just regular business men,

Just you and me and Ted E. Bear.

Ted E. Bear's is oodles of fun,

Slots and sandwiches and poker and guns.

And look, no mobsters -- nary a one,

Just you and me and Ted E. Bear.

Not mafia, no! No mafia mugs.

We're mafia-free!

No mafia here. What mafia? Please!

No shady leaves on the family tree.

J. Edgar Hoover always insists,

Organized crime just doesn't exist.

Q.E.D. they're not in our midst,

Says Edgar, me, and Ted E. Bear.

No goons, no droppers, no grifters, no thugs.

No gyps, no clippers, no chippies, no lugs.

No button-men packing gats loaded with slugs.

Just you and me and Ted E. Bear.

Not mafia, no! No mafia mugs.

We're mafia-free!

No mafia here. What mafia? Please!

We're doing business legitimately.

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.