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 Although following a distinction originally made by Hegel, it is a way for Žižek to speak of two different relations to the law: the exception that founds the law (Judaism) and the 'not-all' law of love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.

[....]

Absolute Knowledge

From Slavoj Žižek: Interrogating the Real, edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (London: Continuum, 2005, 2006), pp. 357:

In Žižek's reading of Hegel, Absolute Knowledge is not to be understood as any principle of completion or totality: '"Absolute Knowledge" is undeniably not a position of "omniscience", in which, ultimately, the subject "knows everything"' (p. 48). In fact, paradoxically, Absolute Knowledge is the realization of the impossibility of any such neutral position outside of its position of enunciation; and, beyond that, the absence of any similar guarantee in the Other: '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' (p. 27). It is ultimately this refusal to take into account the subjective position of enunciation that distinguishes Knowledge from Truth: 'Politically correct proponents of cultural studies often pay for their arrogance and lack of a serious approach by confusing truth (the engaged subjective position) and knowledge, that is, by disavowing the gap that separates them, by directly subordinating knowledge to truth' (p. 92).

Žižek on Hegel

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

Hegel forms a constant reference for Žižek, from his earliest writings to his most recent (if anything, he is becoming even more Hegelian as his work progresses). Žižek's chief insight is that hegel completes the Kantian revolution in philosophy in that he proposes a 'transcendental' explanation for reality but without some cause that simply stands outside of it. For Hegel, reality does not need some exception standing outside of it. Rather, it is already its own exception, its own re-mark: 'A Hegelian corollary to Kant ... is that limitation is to be conceived as prior to what lies "beyond" it, so that it is ultimately Kant himself whose notion of the Thing-in-itself remains too "reified" ... What [Hegel] claims by stating that the Suprasensible is "appearance qua appearance" is precisely that the Thing-in-itself is the limitation of the phenomena as such' (p. 156). Žižek calls this precisely the modernity of Hegel, but we would call it his postmodernity. And indeed in Žižek's surprising comparison of Deleuze with Hegel, it is just this aspect that is emphasized in both: that this 'cause' is not outside of what it explains, that, to paraphrase Deleuze, it belongs to 'pure events-effects devoid of any substantial support' (p. 171). And it is in this sense that we might say that, as against Kant's 'negation' of what is, in Hegel we have a 'negation of negation', the 'negation' even of that negation or exception that remains outside of the positive order. 'This is why the Hegelian "loss of the loss" is definitively not the return to a full identity, lacking nothing: the "loss of the loss" is the moment in which loss ceases the loss of "something" and becomes the opening of the empty place that the object ("something") can occupy (p. 46). And this 'tarrying with the negative' has great consequences for ethics and the political, and marks what truly is at stake in that revolutionary act Žižek can be seen to be arguing for: 'The "negation of negation" is not a kind existential sleight of hand by means of which the subject feigns to put everything at stake, but effectively sacrifices only the inessential. Rather,it stands for the horrifying experience which occurs when, after sacrificing everything considered "inessential," I suddenly perceive that the very essential dimension, for the sake of which I sacrificed the inessential, is already lost' (p. 200).