Desire & the Symbolic (1)

From Dylan Evans' An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 127-128:

The Oedipus complex was defined by Freud as an unconscious set of loving and hostile desires which the subject experiences in relation to its parents; the subject desires one parent, and thus enters into rivalry with the other parent. In the 'positive' form of the Oedipus complex, the desired parent is the parent of the opposite sex to the subject, and the parent of the same sex is the rival. The Oedipus complex emerges in the third year of life and then declines in the fifth year, when the child renounces sexual desire for its parents and identifies with the rival. Freud argued that all psychopathological structures could be traced to a malfunction in the Oedipus complex, which was thus dubbed 'the nuclear complex of the neuroses'. Although the term does not appear in Freud's writings until 1910, traces of its origins can be found much earlier in his work, and by 1910 it was already showing signs of the central importance that it was to acquire in all psychoanalytic theory thereafter.

Lacan first addresses the Oedipus complex in his 1938 article on the family, where he argues that it is the last and most important of the three 'family complexes'. At this point his account of the Oedipus complex does not differ from Freud's, his only originality being to emphasize its historical and cultural relativity, taking his cue from the anthropological studies by Malinowski and others (Lacan, 1938: 66).

It is in the 1950's that Lacan begins to develop his own distinctive conception of the Oedipus complex. Though he always follows Freud in regarding the Oedipus complex as the central complex in the unconscious, he now begins to differ from Freud on a number of important points. The most important of these is that in Lacan's view, the subject always desires the mother, and the father is always the rival, irrespective of whether the subject is male or female. Consequently, in Lacan's account the male subject experiences the Oedipus complex in a radically asymmetrical way to the female subject.

The Oedipus complex is, for Lacan, the paradigmatic triangular structure, which contrasts with all dual relations (though see the final paragraph below). The key function in the Oedipus complex is thus that of the FATHER, the third term which transforms the dual relation between mother and child into a triadic structure. The Oedipus complex is thus nothing less than the passage from the imaginary order to the symbolic order, 'the conquest of the symbolic relation as such' (S3, 199). The fact that the passage to the symbolic passes via a complex sexual dialectic means that the subject cannot have access to the symbolic order without confronting the problem of sexual difference.

In The Seminar, Book V, Lacan analyses this passage from the imaginary to the symbolic by identifying three 'times' of the Oedipus complex, the sequence being one of logical rather than chronological priority (Lacan, 1957-8: seminar of 22 January 1958).

The first time of the Oedipus complex is characterised by the imaginary triangle of mother, child and phallus. In the previous seminar of 1956-7, Lacan calls this the preoedipal triangle. However, whether this triangle is regarded as preoedipal or as a moment in the Oedipus complex itself, the main point is the same: namely, that prior to the invention [sic] of the father there is never a purely dual relation between the mother and the child but always a third term, the phallus, an imaginary object which the mother desires beyond the child himself (S4, 240-1). Lacan hints that the presence of the imaginary phallus as a third term in the imaginary triangle indicates that the symbolic father is already functioning at this time (Lacan, 1957-8: seminar of 22 January 1958).

In the first time of the Oedipus complex, then, the child realises that both he and the mother are marked by a lack. The mother is marked by lack, since she is seen to be incomplete; otherwise, she would not desire. The subject is also marked by a lack, since he does not completely satisfy the mother's desire. The lacking element in both cases is the imaginary PHALLUS. The mother desires the phallus she lacks, and (in conformity with Hegel's theory of DESIRE) the subject seeks to become the object of her desire; he seeks to be the phallus for the mother and fill out her lack. At this point, the mother is omnipotent and her desire is the law. Although this omnipotence may be seen as threatening from the very beginning, the sense of threat is intensified when the child's own sexual drives begin to manifest themselves (for example, in infantile masturbation). This emergence of the real of the drive introduces a discordant note anxiety into the previously seductive imaginary triangle (S4, 225-6). The child is now confronted with the realisation that he cannot simply fool the mother's desire with the imaginary semblance of a phallus--he must present something in the real. Yet the child's real organ (whether boy or girl) is hopelessly inadequate. This sense of inadequacy and impotence in the face of an omnipotent maternal desire that cannot be placated gives rise to anxiety. Only the intervention of the father in the subsequent times of the Oedipus complex can provide a real solution to this anxiety.

Žižek's Afterward to Marcus Pound (3)

The Counterbook of Christianity (continued)

Slavoj Žižek

From Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eeerdmans Publishing Co.), pp. 153-156:

These lines cannot but evoke the famous passages from The Communist Manifesto that answer the bourgeois reproach that Communists want to abolish freedom, property, and family: it is the capitalist freedom itself that is effectively the freedom to buy and sell on the market and thus the very form of unfreedom for those who have nothing but their labor force to sell; it is the capitalist property itself that means the "abolition" of property for those who own no means of production; it is the bourgeois marriage itself that is the universalized prostitution. In all these cases the external opposition is internalized, so that one opposite becomes the form of appearance of the other (bourgeois freedom is the form of appearance of the unfreedom of the majority, etc.). However, for Marx, at least in the case of freedom, this means that Communism will not abolish freedom but, by way of abolishing the capitalist servitude, bring about actual freedom, the freedom that will no longer be the form of appearance of its opposite. It is thus not freedom itself that is the form of appearance of its opposite, but only the false freedom, the freedom distorted by relations of domination. Is it not, then, that, underlying the dialectic of the "negation of negation," a Habermasian "normative" approach imposes here immediately: How can we talk about crime if we do not have a preceding notion of legal order violated by the criminal transgression? In other words, is the notion of law as universalized/self-negated crime not auto-destructive? This, precisely, is what a properly dialectical approach rejects: what is before transgression is just a neutral state of things, neither good nor bad (neither property nor theft, neither law nor crime); the balance of this state of things is then violated, and the positive norm (law, property) arises as a secondary move, an attempt to counteract and contain the transgression. With regard to the dialectic of freedom, this means that it is the very "alienated, bourgeois" freedom that creates the conditions and opens up the space for "actual" freedom.

This Hegelian logic is at work in Wagner's universe up to Parsifal, whose final message is a profoundly Hegelian one: the wound can be healed only by the spear that smote it ("Die Wunde schliesst der Speer nur der Sie schlug"). Hegel says the same thing, although with the accent shifted in the opposite direction: the Spirit is itself the wound it tries to heal, i.e., the wound is self-inflicted. That is to say, what is "Spirit" at its most elementary? The "wound" of nature: subject is the immense--absolute--power of negativity, of introducing a gap/cut into the given-immediate substantial unity, the power of differentiating, of "abstracting," of tearing apart and treating as self-standing what in reality is part of an organic unity. This is why the notion of the "self-alienation" of Spirit (of Spirit losing itself in its otherness, in its objectivization, in its result) is more paradoxical than it may appear: it should be read together with Hegel's assertion of the thoroughly nonsubstantial character of Spirit: there is no res cogitans, no thing that (as its property) also thinks, spirit is nothing but the process of overcoming natural immediacy, of the cultivation of this immediacy, of withdrawing-into-itself or "taking off" from it, of--why not?--alienating itself from it. The paradox is thus that there is no Self that precedes the Spirit's "self-alienation": the very process of alienation creates/generates the "Self" from which Spirit is alienated and to which it then returns. (Hegel here turns around the standard notion that a failed version of x presupposes this x as their norm (measure): x is created, its space is outlined, only through repetitive failures to reach it.) Spirit self-alienation is the same as, fully coincides with, its alienation from its Other (nature), because it constitutes itself through its "return-to-itself" from its immersion into natural Otherness. In other words, Spirit's return-to-itself creates the very dimension to which it returns. (This holds for all "return to origins": when, from the nineteenth century onward, new nation-states were constituting themselves in central and eastern Europe, their discovery and return to "old ethnic roots" generated these roots.)

What this means is that the "negation of negation," the "return-to-oneself" from alienation, does not occur where it seems to: in the "negation of negation," Spirit's negativity is not relativized, subsumed under an encompassing positivity; it is, on the contrary, the "simple negation" that remains attached to the presupposed positivity it negated, the presupposed Otherness from which it alienates itself, and the "negation of negation" is nothing but the negation of the substantial character of this Otherness itself, the full acceptance of the abyss of Spirit's self-relating that retroactively posits all its presuppositions. In other words, once we are in negativity, we never quit it and regain the lost innocence of Origins; it is, on the contrary, only in "negation of negation" that the Origins are truly lost, that their very loss is lost, that they are deprived of the substantial status of that which was lost. The Spirit heals its wound not by directly healing it, but by getting rid of the very full and sane body into which the wound was cut. It is a little bit like in the (rather tasteless version of the) "first the bad news then the good news" medical joke: "The bad news is that we've discovered you have severe Alzheimer's disease. The good news is the same: you have Alzheimer's, so you will already forget the bad news when you will be back home."

In Christian theology, Christ's supplement (the repeated "But I tell you...") is often designated as the "antithesis" to the thesis of the law--the irony here is that, in the proper Hegelian approach, this antithesis is synthesis itself at its purest. In other words, is what Christ does in his "fulfillment" of the law not like the law's Aufhebung in the strict Hegelian sense of the term? In its supplement, the commandment is both negated and maintained by way of being elevated/transposed into another (higher) level. This is why one should reject the commonplace reproach that cannot but arise here: Is, from the Hegelian standpoint, the "second story," this supplement that displace the "first story," not merely a negation, a split into two, which needs to be negated in its own turn in order to bring about the "synthesis" of the opposites? What happens in the passage from "antithesis" to "synthesis" is not that another story is added, bringing together the first two (or that we return to the first story, which is now rendered more "rich," provided with its background): all that happens is a purely formal shift by which we realize that the "antithesis" ALREADY IS "synthesis." Back to the example of class struggle: there is no need to provide some encompassing global narrative that would provide the frame for both opposing narratives: the second narrative (the story from the standpoint of the oppressed) ALREADY IS the story from the standpoint of social totality--why? The two stories are not symmetrical: only the second story renders the antagonism, the gap that separates the two stories, and this antagonism is the "truth" of the entire field.

Žižek's Afterward to Marcus Pound (2)

The Counterbook of Christianity (continued)

Slavoj Žižek

From Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eeerdmans Publishing Co.), pp. 149-153:

A similar clash of narratives is at the very core of Christianity. One of the few remaining truly progressive U.S. publications, the Weekly World News, reported on a recent breathtaking discovery: archaeologists discovered an additional ten commandments, as well as seven "warnings" from Jehovah to his people; they are suppressed by the Jewish and Christian establishment because they clearly give a boost to today's progressive struggle, demonstrating beyond doubt that God took a side in our political struggles. Commandment 11 is: "Thou shalt tolerate the faith of others as you would have them do unto you." (Originally, this commandment was directed at the Jews who objected to the Egyptian slaves joining them in their exodus to continue to practice their religion.) Commandment 14 ("Thou shalt not inhale burning leaves in a house of manna where it may affect the breathing of others") clearly supports the prohibition of smoking in public places; commandment 18 ("Thou shalt not erect a temple of gaming in the desert, where all will become wanton") warns of Las Vegas, although it originally referred to individuals who organized gambling in the desert close to the camp of wandering Jews; commandment 19 ("Thy body is sacred and thou shalt not permanently alter thy face or bosom. If thy nose offends thee, leave it alone") points toward the vanity of plastic surgery, while the target of commandment 16 ("Thou shalt not elect a fool to lead thee. If twice elected, thy punishment shall be death by stoning") is clearly the reelection of President Bush. Even more telling are some of the warnings: the second warning ("Seek ye not war in My Holy Lands, for they shall multiply and afflict all of civilization") presciently warns of the global dangers of the Middle East conflict, and the third warning ("Avoid dependence upon the thick black oils of the soil, for they come from the realm of Satan") is a plea for new sources of clean energy. Are we ready to hear and obey God's word?

There is a basic question to be raised here, above the ironic satisfaction provided by such jokes: Is the search for supplementary commandments not another search for the counterbook without which the principal book remains incomplete? And insofar as this book-to-be-supplemented is ultimately the Old Testament itself, is the counterbook not simply the New Testament itself? This would be the way to account for the strange coexistence of two sacred books in Christianity: the Old Testament, the book shared by all three "religions of the book," and the New Testament, the counterbook that defines Christianity and (within its perspective, of course) completes the book, so that we can effectively say that "the construction itself of the Bible is supported by the junction between the two Testaments." This ambiguous supplementation-completion is best encapsulated in the lines on the fulfillment of the law from Jesus' Sermon on the Mountain, in which he radicalizes the commandments:

You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, "Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment." But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.... You have heard that it was said, "Do not commit adultery." But I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.... You have heard that it was said, "Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth." But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles. Give to the one who asks you, and do not turn away from the one who wants to borrow from you. (Matt. 5:21-22, 27-28, 38-42 NIV)

The official Catholic way to interpret this series of supplements is the so-called double-standard view, which divides the teachings of the Sermon into general precepts and specific counsels: obedience to the general precepts is essential for salvation, but obedience to the counsels is necessary only for perfection, or, as Saint Thomas Aquinas put it (paraphrasing Didache 6.2): "For if you are able to bear the entire yoke of the Lord, you will be perfect; but if you are not able to do this, do what you are able." In short, law is for everyone, while its supplement is for the perfect only. Martin Luther rejected this Catholic approach and proposed a different two-level system, the so-called two-realms view, which divides the world into the religious and secular realms, claiming that the Sermon applies only to the spiritual: in the temporal world, obligations to family, employers, and country force believers to compromise; thus a judge should follow his secular obligations to sentence a criminal, but inwardly he should mourn for the fate of the criminal.

Clearly, both these versions resolve the tension by introducing a split between the two domains and constraining the more severe injunctions to the second domain. As expected, in Catholicism this split is externalized into two kinds of people, the ordinary ones and the perfect (saints, monks, etc.), while Protestantism internalizes the split between how I interact with others in the secular sphere and how I inwardly relate to others. Are these, however, the only way to read this operation? A (perhaps surprising) reference to Richard Wagner might be of some help here: to his draft of the play Jesus of Nazareth, written between late 1848 and early 1849. What Wagner attributes here to Jesus is a series of alternate supplementations of the commandments:

The commandment saith: Thou shalt not commit adultery! But I say unto you: Ye shall not marry without love. A marriage without love is broken as soon as entered into, and who so hath wooed without love, already hath broken the wedding. If ye follow my commandment, how can ye ever break it, since it bids you to do what your own heart and soul desire?--But where ye marry without love, ye bind yourselves at variance with God's love, and in your wedding ye sin against God; and this sin avengeth itself by your striving next aginst the law of man, in that ye break the marriage-vow.

The shift from Jesus' actual words is crucial here: Jesus "internalizes" the prohibition, rendering it much more severe (the law says no actual adultery, while I say that if you only covet the other's wife in your mind, it is the same as if you had already committed adultery; etc.); Wagner also internalizes it, but in a different way--the inner dimension he evokes is not that of intention to do it, but that of love that should accompany the law (marriage). The true adultery is not to copulate outside of marriage, but to copulate in marriage without love: the simple adultery just violates the law from outside, while marriage without love destroys it from within, turning the letter of the law against its spirit. So, to paraphrase Brecht yet again: what is a simple adultery compared to (the adultery that is a loveless) marriage! It is not by chance that Wagner's underlying formula "marriage is adultery" recalls Proudhon's "property is theft"--in the stormy 1848 events, Wagner was not only a Feuerbachian celebrating sexual love, but also a Proudhonian revolutionary demanding the abolition of private property; so no wonder that, later on the same page, Wagner attributes to Jesus a Proudhonian supplement to "Thou shalt not steal!": "This also is a good law: Thou shalt not steal, nor covet another man's goods. Who goeth against it, sinneth: but I preserve you from that sin, inasmuch as I teach you: Love thy neighbor as thyself; which also meanest: Lay not up for thyself treasures, whereby thou stealest from thy neighbor and makest him to starve: for when thou hast thy goods safeguarded by the law of man, thou provokest thy neighbor to sin against the law." This is how the Christian "supplement" to the Book should be conceived: as a properly Hegelian "negation of negation," which resides in the decisive shift from the distortion of a notion to a distortion constitutive of this notion, i.e., to this notion as a distortion-in-itself. Recall again Proudhon's old dialectical motto "property is theft": the "negation of negation" is here the shift from theft as a distortion ("negation," violation) of property to the dimension of theft inscribed into the very notion of property (nobody has the right to fully own means of production; their nature is inherently collective, so every claim "this is mine" is illegitimate). The same goes for crime and law, for the passage from crime as the distortion ("negation") of the law to crime as sustaining law itself; i.e., to the idea of the law itself as universalized crime. One should note that, in this notion of the "negation of negation," the encompassing unity of the two opposed terms is the "lowest," "transgressive," one: it is not crime that is a moment of law's self-mediation (or theft that is a moment of property's self-mediation); the opposition of crime and law is inherent to crime, law is a subspecies crime, crime's self-relating negation (in the same way that property is theft's self-relating negation). And does ultimately the same not go for nature itself? Here, "negation of negation" is the shift from the idea that we are violating some natural balanced order to the idea that imposing on the Real such a notion of balanced order is in itself the greatest violation...which is why the premise, the first axiom even, of every radical ecology is "there is no Nature."

Žižek's Afterward to Marcus Pound (1)

From Žižek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eeerdmans Publishing Co.), pp. 145-149:

The Counterbook of Christianity

Slavoj Žižek

What can I add to the book that provides a precise critical reading of my continuous struggle to come to terms, as an atheist, with our Christian legacy? The only honest thing to do is to "dot the i," as it were, with a concise version of what I perceive as the Communist core of the Christian ethical revolution.

Let me begin with a simple mental experiment with two of Hitchcock's late masterpieces. What if Vertigo were to end after Madeleine's suicide, with the devastated Scottie listening to Mozart in the sanatorium? What if Psycho were to end seconds prior to the shower murder, with Marion staring into the falling water, purifying herself? In both cases we would get a consistent short film. Vertigo would be a drama of the destruction caused by the violently obsessive male desire: it is the very excessive-possessive nature of male desire that makes it destructive of its object--(male) love is murder, as Otto Weininger knew long ago. Psycho would be a moral tale about the catastrophe prevented in the last minute: Marion commits a minor crime, escaping with the stolen money to rejoin her lover; on the way she meets Norman, who is like a figure of moral warning, rendering visible to Marion what awaits her at the end of the line if she follows the path taken; this terrifying vision sobers her up, so she withdraws to her room, plans her return, and then takes a shower, as if to cleanse her of her moral dirt. In both cases, it is thus as if what we are first lured into taking as the full story is all of a sudden displaced, reframed, relocated into, or supplemented by another story, something along the lines of the idea envisaged by Borges in the opening story of his Fictions, which culminates in the claim: "Un libro que no encierra su contra-libro es considerado incomplete" [A book which does not contain its counterbook is considered incomplete]. In his 2005-2006 seminar, Jacques-Alain Miller elaborated on this idea, referring to Ricardo Piglia. Piglia quoted as an example of Borges's claim one of Mikhail Chekhov's tales whose nucleus is: "A man goes to the casino at Monte Carlo, wins a million, returns to his place and commits suicide."

If this is the nucleus of a story, one must, in order to tell it, divide the twisted story in two: on the one hand, the story of the game; on the other, that of the suicide. Thus Piglia's first thesis: that a story always has a double characteristic and always tells two stories at the same time, which provides the opportunity to distinguish the story that is on the first plane from the number 2 story that is encoded in the interstices of story number 1. We should note that story number 2 appears only when the story is concluded, and it has the effect of surprise. What joins these two stories is that the elements, the events, are inscribed in two narrative registers that are at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories. The inversions that seem superfluous in the development of story number 1 become, on the contrary, essential in the plot of story number 2.

There is a modern form of the story that transforms this structure by omitting the surprise finale without closing the structure of the story, which leaves the trace of a narrative, and the tension of the two stories is never resolved. This is what one considers as being properly modern: the subtraction of the final anchoring point that allows the two stories to continue in an unresolved tension.

This is the case, says Piglia, with Hemingway, who pushed the ellipse to its highest point in such a way that the secret story remains hermetic. One perceives simply that there is another story that needs to be told but remains absent. There is a hole. If one modified Chekhov's note in Hemingway's style, it would not narrate the suicide, but rather the text would be assembled in such a way that one might think that the reader already knew it. Kafka constitutes another of these variants. He narrates very simply, in his novels, the most secret story, a secret story that appears on the first plane, told as if coming from itself, and he encodes the story that should be visible but becomes, on the contrary, enigmatic and hidden.

Back to Hitchcock's Vertigo and Psycho. Is this not precisely the structure of the narrative twist/cut in both films? In both cases story number 2 (the shift to Judy and to Norman) appears only when the story seems concluded, and it certainly has the effect of surprise; in both cases the two narrative registers are at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories. The inversions that seem superfluous in the development of story number 1 (like the totally contingent intrusion of the murdering monster in Psycho) become essential in the plot of story number 2.

One can thus well imagine, along these lines, Psycho remade by Hemingway or Kafka. Exemplary of Hemingway's procedure is "The Killers," his best-known short story that, on a mere ten pages, reports in a terse style the arrival of two killers to a small provincial city; they occupy there a diner, awaiting a mysterious "Swede" whom they have to kill. Swede's young friend escapes from the diner and informs him that two killers are on the way to murder him, yet Swede is so desperate and resigned that he sends the boy off and calmly awaits them. The "second story," the explanation of this enigma (what happened to Swede that he is ready to calmly await his death), is never told. (The classic film noir based on this story tries to fill in this void: in the series of flashbacks, the "second story," the betrayal of a femme fatale, is told in detail.) In Hemingway's version, Norman's story will remain hermetic: the spectator will simply perceive that there is another (Norman's) story that needs to be told but remains absent--there is a hole. In Kafka's version Norman's story would appear in the first plane, told as if coming from itself: Norman's weird universe would have been narrated directly, in the first person, as something most normal, while Marion's story would have been encoded/enframed by Norman's horizon, told as enigmatic and hidden. Just imagine the conversation between Marion and Norman in his private room, prior to the shower murder: the way we have it now, our point of identification is Marion, and Norman appears as a weird and threatening presence. What if this scene were reshot with Norman as our point of identification, so that Marion's "ordinary" questions would appear as what they often effectively are, a cruel and insensitive intrusion into Norman's world?

This is how, from a proper Hegelo-Lacanian perspective, one should subvert the standard self-enclosed linear narrative: not by means of a postmodern dispersal into a multitude of local narratives, but by means of its redoubling in a hidden counternarrative. (This is why the classic detective whodunit is so similar to the psychoanalytic process: in it, also, the two narrative registers--the visible story of the discovery of crime and its investigation by the detective, and the hidden story of what really happened--are "at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories.") And is one of the ways to conceptualize class struggle not also such a split between the two narratives that are "at the same time distinct, simultaneous, and antagonistic, and the construction itself of the story is supported by the junction between the two stories"? If one starts to tell the story from the standpoint of the ruling class, one sooner or later reaches a gap, a point at which something arises that doesn't make sense within the horizon of the story, something experienced as a meaningless brutality, something akin to the unexpected intrusion of the murdering figure in the shower scene from Psycho. In 1922 the Soviet government organized the forced expulsion of leading anti-Communist intellectuals, from philosophers and theologians to economists and historians. They left Russia for Germany on a boat known as the "Philosophy Steamer." Prior to his expulsion, Nikolai Lossky, one of those forced into exile, enjoyed with his family the comfortable life of the haute bourgeoisie, supported by servants and nannies. He "simply couldn't understand who would want to destroy his way of life. What had the Losskys and their kind done? His boys and their friends, as they inherited the best of what Russia had to offer, helped fill the world with talk of literature and music and art, and they led gentle lives. What was wrong with that?"

To account for such a foreign element, one has to pass to "story number 2," the story from the standpoint of the exploited. For Marxism, class struggle is not the all-encompassing narrative of our history, it is an irreducible clash of narratives--and does not the same go for today's Israel? Many peace-loving Israelis confess to their perplexity: they just want peace and a shared life with the Palestinians: they are ready to make concessions, but why do Palestinians hate them so much, why the brutal suicide bombings that kill innocent wives and children? The thing to do here is of course to supplement this story with its counterstory, the story of what it means to be a Palestinian in the occupied territories, subjected to hundreds of regulations of the bureaucratic microphysics of power--say, a Palestinian farmer is allowed to dig a hole in the earth no deeper than three feet to find a source of water, while a Jewish farmer is allowed to dig as deep as he wants.

On President Obama

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 107-110:

One should note here that the French Revolution generated enthusiasm not only in Europe, but also in faraway places such as Haiti. The enthusiasm felt there was not just that of the Kantian spectator, but took an engaged, practical form at a key moment in another world-historical event: the first revolt of black slaves fighting for full participation in the emancipatory project of the French Revolution.

Obama's electoral victory in the US belongs, at a certain level, to the same line. One can and should entertain cynical doubts about the consequences of Obama's victory: from a pragmatic-realistic perspective, it is quite possible that Obama will turn out to be a "Bush with a human face," making no more than a few minor face-lifting improvements. He will pursue the same basic politics in a more attractive mode ans thus possibly even strengthen the US hegemony, damaged as it has been by the catastrophe of the Bush years. There is nonetheless something deeply wrong with such a reaction--a key dimension is missing. It is in light of the Kantian conception of enthusiasm that Obama's victory should be viewed not simply as another shift in the eternal parliamentary struggle for a majority, with all its pragmatic calculations and manipulations. It is a sign of something more. This is why a good American friend of mine, a hardened Leftist with no illusions, cried for hours when the news came through of Obama's victory. Whatever our doubts, fears and compromises, for that instant of enthusiasm, each of us was free and participating in the universal freedom of humanity.

The reason that Obama's victory generated such enthusiasm was not only the fact that, against all the odds, it really happened, but that the possibility of such a thing happening was demonstrated. The same goes for all great historical ruptures--recall the fall of the Berlin Wall. Although we all knew about the rotten inefficiency of the communist regimes, we somehow did not "really believe" that they would disintegrate--like Henry Kissinger, we were all too much victims of a cynical pragmatism. This attitude is best encapsulated by the French expression je sais bien, mais quand meme--I know very well that it can happen, but all the same (I cannot really accept that it will happen). This is why, although Obama's victory was clearly predictable, at least for the last two weeks before the election, his actual victory was still experienced as a surprise--in some sense, the unthinkable had happened, something which we really did not believe could happen. (Note that there is also a tragic version of the unthinkable really taking place: the Holocaust, the Gulag . . . how can one accept that something like that could happen?

This is also how one should answer all those who point to the compromises Obama had to make to become electable. The danger Obama courted in his campaign is that he was already applying to himself what the later historical censorship applied to Martin Luther King, namely, cleansing his program of contentious topics in order to assure his eligibility. There is a famous dialogue in Monty Python's religious spoof The Life of Brian set in Palestine at the time of Christ: the leader of a Jewish revolutionary resistance organization passionately argues that the Romans have brought only misery to the Jews; when his followers remark that they have nonetheless introduced education, built roads, constructed irrigation, and so on, he triumphantly concludes: "All right, but apart from the sanitation, education, medicine, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh-water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" Do the latest proclamations by Obama not follow the same line? "I stand for a radical break with Bush's politics! OK, I pleaded for full support for Israel, for continuing the war on terror in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for refusing prosecutions against those who ordered torture, and so on, but I still stand for a radical break with Bush's politics!" Obama's inauguration speech concluded this process of "political self-cleansing"--which is why it was such a disappointment even for many left-liberals in the US. It was a well-crafted but weirdly anemic speech whose message to "all other peoples and governments who are watching today" was "we are ready to lead once more"; "we will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense."

During the election campaign, it was often noted that when Obama talked about the "audacity of hope," about a change we can believe in, he relied on a rhetoric which lacked any specific content: to hope for what? To change what? Now things are a little clearer: Obama proposes a tactical change destined to reassert the fundamental goals of US politics: the defense of the American way of life and a leading role internationally for the US. The US empire will be now more humane, and respectful of others; it will lead through dialogue, rather than through the brutal imposition of its will. If the Bush administration was the empire with a brutal face, now we shall have the empire with a human face--but it will be the same empire. In Obama's June 2009 speech in Cairo, in which he tried to reach out to the Muslim world, he formulated the debate in terms of the depoliticized dialogue of religions (not even of civilizations)--this was Obama at his politically-correct worst.

Nevertheless, such a pessimistic view falls short. The global situation is not only a harsh reality; it is also defined by its ideological contours, by what is visible and invisible within it, sayable and unsayable. Recall Ehud Barak's response to Gideon Levy for Ha'aretz, more than a decade ago, when he was asked what he would have done had he been born a Palestinian: "I would have joined a terrorist organization." This statement had nothing whatsoever to do with endorsing terrorism--but it had everything to do with opening a space for a dialogue with the Palestinians. Remember Gorbachev launching the slogans of glasnost and perestroika--no matter how he "really meant" them, he unleashed an avalanche which changed the world. Or, to take a negative example: today, even those who oppose torture accept it as a topic of public debate--a major regression in our common discourse. Words are never "only words": they matter because they define the contours of what we can do.

In this respect then, Obama has already demonstrated an extraordinary ability to change the limits of what one can say publicly. His greatest achievement up to now is that, in his refined non-provocative way, he has introduced into public speech topics which had hitherto been de facto unsayable: the continuing importance of race in politics, the positive role of atheists in public life, the necessity to talk with "enemies" like Iran or Hamas, and so on. This is just what US politics needs today more than anything, if it is to break out of its gridlock: new words which will change the way we think and act.

Many of Obama's acts as president also already point in this direction (his educational and healthcare plans, his overtures to Cuba and other "rogue" states, for example). However, as already noted, the real tragedy of Obama is that he has every chance of turning out to be the ultimate savior of capitalism and, as such, one of the great conservative American presidents. There are progressive things that only a conservative with the right hard-line patriotic credentials can do: only de Gaulle was able to grant independence to Algeria; only Nixon was able to establish relations with China--in both cases, had a progressive president done these things, he would have been instantly accused of betraying national interests, selling out to the communists or to terrorists, and so on. Obama's predicament seems to be exactly the opposite one: his "progressive" credentials are enabling him to enforce the "structural readjustments" necessary to stabilize the system.

[....]

Socialism or Communism? (3)

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 97-99:

Fidelity to the communist Idea thus means that, to repeat Arthur Rimbaud, il faut etre absolument moderne--we should remain resolutely modern and reject the all too glib generalization whereby the critique of capitalism morphs into the critique of "instrumental reason" or "modern technological civilization." This is why we should insist on the qualitative difference between the fourth antagonism--the gap that separates the Excluded from the Included--and the other three: it is only this reference to the Excluded that justifies the use of the term communism. There is nothing more "private" than a state community which perceives the Excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance.

In the series of four antagonisms then, that between the Included and the Excluded is the crucial one. Without it, all others lose their subversive edge--ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight to preserve the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, or oppose the copyrighting of genes, without ever confronting the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded. Furthermore, one can even formulate certain aspects of these struggles in the terms of the Included being threatened by the polluting Excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only "private" concerns in the Kantian sense of the term. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favor among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell their products with a progressive spin. One buys coffee made with beans bought at above fair-market value, one drives a hybrid vehicle, one buys from companies that ensure good benefits for their staff and customers (according to the corporations own standards), and so on. In short, without the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded, we may well find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian battling against poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.

There is another key difference between the first three antagonisms and the fourth: the first three effectively concern questions of the (economic, anthropological, even physical) survival of humanity, but the fourth is ultimately a question of justice. If humanity does not resolve its ecological predicament, we may all vanish; but one can well imagine a society which somehow resolves the first three antagonisms through authoritarian measures which not only maintain but in fact strengthen existing social hierarchies, divisions and exclusions. In Lacanese, we are dealing here with the gap that separates the series of ordinary signifiers (S2) from the Master-Signifier (S1), that is, with a struggle for hegemony: which pole in the antagonism between the Included and the Excluded will "hegemonize" the other three? One can no longer rely on the old Marxist logic of "historical necessity" which claims that the first three problems will only be solved if one wins the key "class" struggle between the Excluded and the Included--the logic of "only the overcoming of class distinctions can really resolve our ecological predicament." There is a common feature shared by all four antagonisms: the process of proletarianization, of the reduction of human agents to pure subjects deprived of their substance; this proletarianization, however, works in different ways. In the first three cases, it deprives agents of their substantial content; in the fourth case, it is the formal fact of excluding certain figures from socio-political space. We should underline this structure of 3+1, namely the reflection of the external tension between subject and substance ("man" deprived of its substance) within the human collective. There are subjects who, within the human collective, directly embody the proletarian position of substanceless subjectivity. Which is why the Communist wager is that the only way to solve the "external" problem (the re-appropriation of alienated substance) is to radically transform the inner-subjective (social) relations.

Socialism or Communism? (2)

Slavoj Žižek, First as Tragedy, then as Farce (London: Verso, 2009), pp. 95-97:

As Michael Hardt has put it, if capitalism stands for private property and socialism for state property, communism stands for the overcoming of property as such in the commons. Socialism is what Marx called "vulgar communism," in which we get only what Hegel would have called the abstract negation of property, that is, the negation of property within the field of property--it is "universalized private property." Hence the title of the Newsweek cover story of February 16, 2009: "We are all socialists now," and its subtitle, "In many ways our economy already resembles a European one," is fully justified, if properly understood: even in the US, the bastion of economic liberalism, capitalism is having to re-invent socialism in order to save itself. The irony of the fact that this process of coming to "resemble Europe" is further characterized by the prediction that "we [in the US] will become even more French" cannot but strike the reader. After all, Sarkozy was elected as French president on a platform of finally finishing off the tradition of European welfare-state socialism and rejoining the Anglo-Saxon liberal model--and yet the very model he proposed to imitate is now returning to just what he wanted to move away from: the allegedly discredited path of large-scale state intervention in the economy. The much-maligned European "social model," decried as inefficient and out of date under the conditions of postmodern capitalism, has tasted its revenge. But there is no reason for joy here: socialism is no longer to be conceived as the infamous "lower phase" of communism, it is its true competitor, the greatest threat to it. (Perhaps the time has come to remember that throughout the twentieth century social democracy was an instrument mobilized to counteract the communist threat to capitalism.) Thus the completion of Negri's title should be: Goodbye Mr. Socialism ... and Welcome, Comrade Communism!

What the communist fidelity to the proletarian position involves is thus an unambiguous rejection of any ideology implying a return to any kind of prelapsarian substantial unity. On November 28, 2008, Evo Morales, the president of Bolivia, issued a public letter on the subject "Climate Change: Save the Planet from Capitalism." Here are its opening statements:

"Sisters and brothers: Today our Mother Earth is ill....Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750, which gave birth to the capitalist system. In tow and a half centuries, the so-called "developed" countries have consumed a large part of the fossil fuels created over five million centuries....Competition and the thirst for profit without limits of the capitalist system are destroying the planet. Under Capitalism we are not human beings but consumers. Under Capitalism Mother Earth does not exist, instead there are raw materials. Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world." (Evo Morales, "Climate Change: save the planet from capitalism," available online [....])

The politics pursued by the Morales government in Bolivia is on the very cutting edge of contemporary progressive struggle. Nonetheless, the lines just quoted demonstrate with painful clarity its ideological limitations (for which one always pays a practical price). Morales relies in a simplistic way on the narrative of the Fall which took place at a precise historical moment: "Everything began with the industrial revolution in 1750..."--and, predictably, this Fall consists in losing our roots in mother earth: "Under Capitalism mother earth does not exist." (To this, one is tempted to add that, if there is one good thing about capitalism, it is that, precisely, mother earth now no longer exists.) "Capitalism is the source of the asymmetries and imbalances in the world"--meaning that our goal should be to restore a "natural" balance and symmetry. What is thereby attacked and rejected is the very process that gave rise to modern subjectivity and that obliterates the traditional sexualized cosmology of mother earth (and father heaven), along with the idea that our roots lie in the substantial "maternal" order of nature.