Kant

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 368:

The Kantian 'transcendental' critique is absolutely crucial to Žižek, and he draws on it throughout his work. As Žižek writes, summarizing Kant's contribution to the history of philosophy: 'On the one hand, the notion of the transcendental constitution of reality involves the loss of a direct naive empiricist approach to reality; on the other hand, it involves the prohibition of metaphysics, that is, of an all-encompassing worldview providing the noumenal structure of the universe' (p. 101). And yet at the same time Žižek entirely agrees with Hegel's argument that Kant himself misunderstood the nature of his breakthrough, that it is necessary to read Kant against or beyond himself. It is this that Hegel represents for Žižek: not an opposition to Kant or even a simple surpassing of him, but a certain drawing out of consequences that are only implicit in him. As against the distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal in Kant, we can say that the 'shift from Kant to Hegel ... [is] from the tension between immanence and transcendence to the minimal difference/gap in immanence itself ... Hegel is thus not external to Kant: the problem with Kant was that he effected the shift but was not able, for structural reasons, to formulate it explicitly' (p. 218). In this regard, Kant becomes increasingly identified for Žižek with a certain 'masculine' logic of universality and its exception (S1), while Hegel represents a 'feminine' logic of the not-all, in which there is nothing outside of phenomenal appearances but appearance is not all there is, precisely because of its ability to be marked as such ($). Žižek even goes on to compare Kant's noumenal/phenomenal split to Derrida's ethics of 'Otherness' and with Antigone's sacrifice of all things for one thing, as opposed to Hegel's truly modern ethics, in which even this cause itself must be sacrificed.

Kafka

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 367-8:

Žižek often turns to Kafka's The Trial to consider the notion of ideological interpellation: his point is that what Kafka exposes in his parable of the door of the Law is the way that ideological interpellation exists only after it has been taken up. Through a kind of distortion of perspective, what we do not realize is that the Law does not exist until after us--thus both Žižek's notion of love taken from St Paul and diabolical evil taken from Kant are ways of speaking of that 'freedom' or 'guilt' before the law, before the necessity of following the law (even in refusing or transgressing it). It is this 'distance' from the law that at once enables it--'before being caught in identification, in symbolic (mis)recognition, the subject is trapped by the Other through a paradoxical object-cause of desire, in the midst of it, embodying enjoyment ... as exemplified by the position of the man from the country in the famous apologue about the door of the Law in Kafka's The Trial' (p. 255)--and opens up a certain way of thinking what is 'outside' it in the sense of coming 'before' it--'the true conspiracy of Power resides in the very notion of conspiracy, in the notion of some mysterious Agency that "pulls the strings" and effectively runs the show' (p. 230).

Derrida

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), p. 360:

One of Žižek's long-running, though submerged, interlocutors is Derrida. It is certainly against his deconstruction that Žižek asserts his reading of Lacan and Hegel, for example: 'the Derridean deconstructive reading of Lacan reduces the corpus of Lacan's texts to a doxa on Lacan which restricts his teaching to the framework of traditional philosophy ... Lacan supplements Derrida with the Hegelian identity as to the coincidence of opposites' (pp. 190, 194). [....]

'It is easy to see why the so-called "post-secular" turn of deconstruction, which finds its ultimate expression in a certain kind of Derridean appropriation of Levinas, is totally incompatible with Lacan ... it is symptomatic that Derrida nonetheless retains the irreducible opposition between such a spectral experience of the messianic call of justice and its "ontologization", its transposition into a set of positive legal and political measures' (pp. 314, 316). [....]

Jew/Christian

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and ScottStephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 366-7:

Žižek has increasingly come to make a distinction between Judaism and Christianity in his more recent work. Although following a distinction originally made by Hegel, it is a way for Žižek to speak of two different relations to the law: the exception that founds the law (Judaism) and the 'not-all' law of love (Christianity). That is, in Judaism there is a transgression that both leads to and can only be thought within the law (the only thing not able to be spoken of within Judaism is the founding of the law). In Christianity, there is no transgression of or getting around the law (because it is par excellence the religion of internal guilt and conscience in which one is already guilty) and yet it is not-all (there always exists the possibility of forgiveness and love). [....]

Jew

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 365-6:

The importance of the ideological figure of the 'Jew' in anti-Semitism is that it occupies the positions both of master-signifier and objet a. As Žižek writes, in speaking of the difference between the Jew as master-signifier and the Jew as objet a: 'There is, however, a pivotal difference between this symbolic authority guaranteed by the phallus as the signifier of castration and the spectral presence of the "conceptual Jew" ... The fantasmatic "conceptual Jew" is not a paternal figure of symbolic authority, a "castrated" bearer-medium of public authority ... In short, the difference between the Name-of-the-Father and the "conceptual Jew" is that between symbolic fiction and fantasmatic spectre: in Lacanian algebra, between S1, the Master-Signifier (the empty signifier of symbolic authority) and objet petit a' (p. 239). And this mention of the 'non-castrated' aspect of the Jew as objet a reminds us that the Jew in this logic of racism is a figure of enjoyment: that what we ultimately resent is the way that the Other, the Jew, seems to be able to enjoy in a way we cannot. The Jew in this sense becomes a symptom insofar as they suggest a seemingly external reason for the internal impossibility of jouissance. Speaking of this logic of the Jew as both master-signifier and objet a, Žižek says: 'The notion of fantasy offers an exemplary case of the dialectical coincidentia oppositorum: on the one hand, fantasy in its beautific side ... on the other hand, fantasy in its aspect whose elemental form is envy ... Those who are alleged to realize fully fantasy1 (the symbolic fiction) had to have recourse to fantasy2 (spectral apparitions) in order to explain their failure ... Fantasy1 and fantasy2, symbolic fiction and spectral apparition, are like the front and reverse of the same coin' (p. 244). In fact, Žižek's point is that Jews are not holders of this secret enjoyment, not merely because they do not know their own secret--to paraphrase Hegel, the secret of the Jews is a secret for the Jews themselves--but the Jewish religion is perhaps the first to break with pagan vitalist enjoyment: 'In all previous religions, we always run into a place, a domain of sacred enjoyment ... whereas Judaism evacuates from the sacred domain all traces of vitality and subordinates the living substance to the dead letter of the Father's Law' (p. 258).

Fantasy

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 364:

One of Žižek's decisive innovations is to think the role of fantasy within ideology: it is arguably in this way that he moves beyond someone like Althusser. Fantasy is both that which covers up inconsistencies within the symbolic order and that by which ideological interpellation works today in our seemingly 'post-ideological' times: it is through our apparent distance from ideology (non-ideological enjoyment, fantasy, cynicism) that ideology captures us. 'The message the power discourse bombards us with is by definition inconsistent; there is always a gap between public discourse and its fantasmatic support. Far from being a kind of secondary weakness, a sign of Power's imperfection, this splitting is constitutive for its exercise' (pp. 246 n. 9, 263). Or again: 'And, perhaps, it is here that we should look in the last resort for ideology, for the pre-ideological kernel, the formal matrix, on which are grafted various ideological formations: in the fact that there is no reality without the spectre [we might say fantasy], that the circle of reality can be closed only by means of an uncanny spectral supplement ... This Real (the part of reality that remains non-symbolized) returns in the guise of spectral apparitions ... the notions of spectre and (symbolic) fiction are codependent in their very incompatibility' (p. 241). This is why, for Žižek, the first task of any ideological critique is to attack the fantasy that keeps us bound to ideology: 'if we are to overcome the "effective" social power, we have first to break its fantasmatic hold upon us' (p. 231). And the way to do this is to prove that there is no fantasy or that the Other does not possess what we lack: 'If traversing of the fantasy overlaps with the experience of any lack, it is the lack of the Other and not that of the subject themselves' (p. 47).

Communism vs. Democracy

From "HOW TO BEGIN FROM THE BEGINNING," by SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK

New Left Review 57, May-June 2009

See the full article at

http://newleftreview.org/?page=article&view=2779

[....]

One can sincerely fight for the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confronting the antagonism between the included and the excluded. Even more, one can formulate some of these struggles in terms of the included threatened by the polluting excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only ‘private’ concerns in the Kantian sense. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favour among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell products with a progressive spin: coffee made with beans bought at ‘fair-trade’ prices, expensive hybrid vehicles, etc. In short, without the antagonism between the included and the excluded, we may find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian, fighting poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.

What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lack of a determinate place in the ‘private’ order of social hierarchy, stand directly for universality: they are what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘part of no part’ of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.

The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.

[....]