Against Liberal Leftists (1)

From The New Statesman Interview with Slavoj Zizek - full transcript

available online at http://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2009/10/today-interview-capitalism

Jonathan Derbyshire

Published 29 October 2009

[....]

I always read the liberal anti-communists, liberal leftists - they're interesting, one can learn from them. I read a wonderful essay by Orwell from 1938. There he has a wonderful analysis of the typical leftist liberal. He says they ask for a change, but they do it in a hypocritical way: they ask for a change but it's almost as if to make sure that no real change will happen.

Don't you suspect a little bit that there's something of this in today's typical radical liberal - in today's anti-immigrant campaign for instance? The standard idea is to say, like my friend Alain Badiou in France, "those who are here are from here". That is to say, no check for roots, open to all of them. Legalize everything. The problem is that they know very well that this radical opening will never happen. So it's very easy to have a radical position which costs you nothing and for the price of nothing it gives you some kind of moral superiority. It also enables them to avoid the truly difficult questions. For example, my conflict with my radical leftist friends is when they want total openness and so on. I say to them, are you aware that anti-immigrant are mostly spontaneous, lower working-class attitudes? They talk as if some big imperialist power centre decides to be against immigrants. No! If anything, capital is more liberal about immigrants. So, I think this is not a good thing - I think of all these theorists, like Giddens and Held, who are left-wing, but left within the establishment ...

NS: Would you say that thinkers of that sort, establishment leftists if you like, are insufficiently materialist?

SZ: Exactly, exactly. Apart from their very general anti-capitalist thunder -this is my biggest reproach to them. Despite the financial crisis, we do not have a serious leftist attempt to deal with what, in old Marxist terms, we called the critique of political economy. It's obvious to me that Marx has to be repeated, but repeated not as he was. Isn't it clear today that with all the problems of natural resources, intellectual property and so on, that the whole notion of exploitation, if it has any meaning at all should be radically redefined? I don't see enough work of this sort. I think it's either some kind of an abstract, moralistic politics where you focus on groups which are obviously under-privileged -other races, gays and so on- and then you can explode in all your moralistic rage. Or, another thing that I really hate as a leftist who tries to be a communist - did you notice how the standard academic left likes nothing more than an attempted revolution going on, but far away from where you are? Today it's Venezuela, which is why I like to be critical from time to time of Chavez. It's a very comfortable position: you can do all the dirty work, you struggle for your career, compromises in your country in the west, but your heart is somewhere far away but it in no way affects what you are doing. This is another thing which I think is a fake.

So, if anything was proven by this financial crisis, it is that apart from left-radical Keynesians like Paul Krugman, with whom I'm sympathetic, I don't see any serious counter-proposal by the left.

NS: So we have lost the political economy in Marx?

SZ: There are some marginal good signs - Moishe Postone is one of the few people who really asks the question, what to do with Marx's political economy today? Then there are of course some economists and so on - David Harvey, for example, But the question is not properly addressed and that's very sad. If you read the predominant cultural left, you'd have thought that Marx's Capital is some kind of treatise on commodity fetishism and other cultural phenomena. Sorry, but Marx meant it as a critical theory of society, giving a diagnosis and so on.

[....]

"Interpassive"

From "The Interpassive Subject" by Slavoj Žižek, available at
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-the-interpassive-subject.html

[....]
Interpassivity

Against this background, one is tempted to supplement the fashionable notion of "interactivity," with its shadowy and much more uncanny supplement/double, the notion of "interpassivity." That is to say, it is commonplace to emphasize how, with new electronic media, the passive consumption of a text or a work of art is over: I no longer merely stare at the screen, I increasingly interact with it, entering into a dialogic relationship with it (from choosing the programs, through participating in debates in a Virtual Community, to directly determining the outcome of the plot in so-called "interactive narratives"). Those who praise the democratic potential of new media, generally focus on precisely these features: on how cyberspace opens up the possibility for the large majority of people to break out of the role of the passive observer following the spectacle staged by others, and to participate actively not only in the spectacle, but more and more in establishing the very rules of the spectacle… Is, however, the other side of this interactivity not interpassivity? Is the necessary obverse of my interacting with the object instead of just passively following the show, not the situation in which the object itself takes from me, deprives me of, my own passive reaction of satisfaction (or mourning or laughter), so that is is the object itself which "enjoys the show" instead of me, relieving me of the superego duty to enjoy myself… Do we not witness "interpassivity" in a great number of today's publicity spots or posters which, as it were, passively enjoy the product instead of us ? (Coke cans containing the inscription "Ooh!Ooh! What taste!", emulate in advance the ideal customer's reaction.) Another strange phenomenon brings us closer to the heart of the matter: almost every VCR aficionado who compulsively records hundreds of movies (myself among them), is well aware that the immediate effect of owning a VCR, is that one effectively watches less films than in the good old days of a simple TV set without a VCR; one never has time for TV, so, instead of losing a precious evening, one simply tapes the film and stores it for a future viewing (for which, of course, there is almost never time…). So, although I do not actually watch films, the very awareness that the films I love are stored in my video library gives me a profound satisfaction and, occasionally, enables me to simply relax and indulge in the exquisite art of far'niente — as if the VCR is in a way watching them for me, in my place… VCR stands here for the "big Other," for the medium of symbolic registration.

Is the Western liberal academic's obsession with the suffering in Bosnia not the outstanding recent example of interpassive suffering? One can authentically suffer through reports on rapes and mass killings in Bosnia, while calmly pursuing one's academic career… Another standard example of interpassivity is provided by the role of the "madman" within a pathologically distorted intersubjective link (say, a family whose repressed traumas explode in the mental breakdown of one of its members): when a group produces a madman, do they not shift upon him the necessity to passively endure the suffering which belongs to all of them? Furthermore, is the ultimate example of interpassivity not the "absolute example" (Hegel) itself, that of Christ who took upon himself the (deserved) suffering of humanity? Christ redeemed us all not by acting for us, but by assuming the burden of the ultimate passive experience. (The difference between activity and passivity, of course, is often blurred: weeping as an act of public mourning is not simply passive, it is passivity transformed into an active ritualized symbolic practice.) In the political domain, one of the recent outstanding examples of "interpassivity," is the multiculturalist Leftist intellectual's "apprehension" about how even the Muslims, the great victims of the Yugoslav war, are now renouncing the multi-ethnic pluralist vision of Bosnia and conceding to the fact that, if Serbs and Croats want their clearly defined ethnic units, they too want an ethnic space of their own. This Leftist's "regret" is multiculturalist racism at its worst: as if Bosnians were not literally pushed into creating their own ethnic enclave by the way that the "liberal" West has threated them in the last five years. However, what interests us here is how the "multi-ethnic Bosnia" is only the latest in the series of mythical figures of the Other through which Western Leftist intellectuals have acted out their ideological fantasies: this intellectual is "multi-ethnic" through Bosnians, breaks out of the Cartesian paradigm by admiring Native American wisdom, etc., the same way as in past decades, when they were revolutionaries by admiring Cuba, or "democratic socialists" by endorsing the myth of Yugoslav "self-management" socialist as "something special," a genuine democratic breakthrough… In all of these cases, they have continued to lead their undisturbed upper-middle-class academic existence, while doing their progressive duty through the Other. — This paradox of interpassivity, of believing or enjoying through the other, also opens up a new approach to aggressivity: what sets aggressivity in motion in a subject, is when the other subject, through which the first subject believed or enjoyed, does something which disturbs the functioning of this transference. See, for example, the attitude of some Western Leftist academics towards the disintegration of Yugoslavia: since the fact that the people of ex-Yugoslavia rejected ("betrayed") Socialism disturbed the belief of these academics, i.e. prevented them from persisting in their belief in "authentic" self-management Socialism through the Other which realizes it, everyone who does not share their Yugo-nostalgic attitude was dismissed as a proto-Fascist nationalist.
[....]

"All Men Are Created Equal"

Symbolic Castration & Radical Autonomy

From Slavoj Žižek's The Sublime Object of Ideology (First published in London by Verso in 1989; page numbers here refer to the edition published by Verso in 1999), p. 122:

[On Lacan's "graph of desire"]

[....] The problem of the second (upper) level is what happens when this very field of the signifier's order, of the big Other, is perforated, penetrated by a pre-symbolic (real) stream of enjoyment--what happens when the pre-symbolic 'substance', the body as materialized, incarnated enjoyment, becomes enmeshed in the signifier's network.

Its general result is clear: by being filtered through the sieve of the signifier, the body is submitted to castration, enjoyment is evacuated from it, the body survives as dismembered, mortified. In other words, the order of the signifier (the big Other) and that of enjoyment (the Thing as its embodiment) are radically heterogeneous, inconsistent; any accordance between them is structurally impossible. This is why we find on the left-hand side of the upper level of the graph--at the first point of intersection between enjoyment and signifier, S(Ø)--the signifier of the lack in the Other, of the inconsistency of the Other: as soon as the field of the signifier is penetrated by enjoyment it becomes inconsistent, porous, perforated--the enjoyment is what cannot be symbolized, its presence in the field of the signifier can be detected only through the holes and inconsistencies of this field, so the only possible signifier of enjoyment is the signifier of the lack in the Other, the signifier of its inconsistency.

Today, it is a commonplace that the Lacanian subject is divided, crossed-out, identical to a lack in a signifying chain. However, the most radical dimension of Lacanian theory lies not in recognizing this fact but in realizing that the big Other, the symbolic order itself, is also barrè, crossed-out, by a fundamental impossibility, structured around an impossible/traumatic kernel, around a central lack. Without this lack in the Other, the Other would be a closed structure and the only possibility open to the subject would be his radical alienation in the Other. So it is precisely this lack in the Other which enables the subject to achieve a kind of 'de-alienation' called by Lacan separation: not in the sense that the subject experiences that now he is separated for ever from the object by the barrier of language, but that the object is separated from the Other itself, that the Other itself 'hasn't got it', hasn't got the final answer--that is to say, is in itself blocked, desiring; that there is also a desire of the Other. This lack in the Other gives the subject--so to speak--a breathing space, it enables him to avoid the total alienation in the signifier not by filling out his lack but by allowing him to identify himself, his own lack, with the lack in the Other.

[....]

Desire & the Symbolic (4)

From Slavoj Žižek's How to Read Lacan (First published in the UK by Granta Publications; page numbers here refer to the edition published in New York by W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), pp. 34-36:

Because of this gap, the subject cannot ever fully and immediately identify with his symbolic mask or title; the subject's questioning of his symbolic title is what hysteria is all about: 'Why am I what you are saying what I am? Or, to quote Shakespeare's Juliet: 'Why am I that name?' There is a truth in the wordplay between 'hysteria' and 'historia': the subject's symbolic identity is always historically determined, dependent upon a specific ideological context. We are dealing here with what Louis Althusser called 'ideological interpellation': the symbolic identity conferred on us is the result of the way the ruling ideology 'interpellates' us--as citizens, democrats, Christians. Hysteria emerges when a subject starts to question or to feel discomfort in his or her symbolic identity: 'You say I am your beloved--what is there in me that makes me that? What do you see in me that causes you to desire me in that way? Richard II is Shakespeare's ultimate play about hystericization (in contrast to Hamlet, the ultimate play about obsession). Its topic is the progressive questioning by the king of his own kingship--What is it that makes me a king? What remains of me if the symbolic title 'king' is taken away?

I have no name, no title

No, not that name was given me at the font,

But 'tis usurp'd: alack the heavy day,

That I have worn so many winters out,

And know not now what name to call myself!

O that I were a mockery king of snow,

Standing before the sun of Bolingbroke,

To melt myself away in water-drops!

In the Slovene translation, the second line is translated as: 'Why am I what I am?' Although this clearly involves too much poetic license, it does convey the gist of the predicament: deprived of its symbolic titles, Richard's identity melts like a snowman's in the sun.

The problem for the hysteric is how to distinguish what he or she is (his true desire) from what others see and desire in him or her. This brings us to another of Lacan's formulas, that 'Man's desire is the other's desire.' For Lacan, the fundamental impasse of human desire is that it is the other's desire in both subjective and objective genitive: desire for the other, desire to be desired by the other, and, especially, desire for what the other desires.

Desire & the Symbolic (3)

From Slavoj Žižek's How to Read Lacan (First published in the UK by Granta Publications; page numbers here refer to the edition published in New York by W.W. Norton & Co., 2006), p. 34:

This gap between my direct psychological identity and my symbolic identity (the symbolic mask or title I wear, defining what I am for and in the big Other) is what Lacan (for complex reasons that we can here ignore) calls 'symbolic castration', with the phallus as its signifier. Why is phallus for Lacan a signifier and not simply the organ of insemination? In the traditional rituals of investiture, the objects that symbolize power also put the subject who acquires them into the position of exercising power--if a king holds the sceptre in his hands, and wears the crown, his words will be taken as royal. Such insignia are external, not part of my nature: I don them; I wear them to exercise power. As such, they 'castrate' me, by introducing a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (I am never complete at the level of my function). This is what the infamous 'symbolic castration' means: the castration that occurs by the very fact of me being caught in the symbolic order, assuming a mask or title. Castration is the gap between what I immediately am and the symbolic title that confers on me a certain status and authority. In this precise sense, far from being the opposite of power, it is synonymous with power; it is what gives power to me. So one has to think of the phallus not as the organ that immediately expresses the vital force of my being, but as a kind of insignia, a mask that I put on in the same way that a king or judge puts on his insignia--phallus is a kind of organ without a body which I put on, which gets attached to my body, but never becomes an organic part, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive prosthesis.

Desire & the Symbolic (2)

From Dylan Evans' An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 128-129:

The second 'time' of the Oedipus complex is characterised by the intervention of the imaginary father. The father imposes the law on the mother's desire by denying her access to the phallic object and forbidding the subject access to the mother. Lacan often refers to this intervention as the 'castration' of the mother, even though he states that, properly speaking, the operation is not one of castration but of privation. This intervention is mediated by the discourse of the mother; in other words, what is important is not that the real father step in and impose the law, but that this law be respected by the mother herself in both her words and her actions. The subject now sees the father as a rival for the mother's desire.

The third 'time' of the Oedipus complex is marked by the intervention of the real father. By showing that he has the phallus, and neither exchanges it nor gives it (S3, 319), the real father castrates the child, in the sense of making it impossible for the child to persist in trying to be the phallus for the mother; it is no use competing with the real father, because he always wins (S4, 208-9, 227). The subject is freed from the impossibility and anxiety-provoking task of having to be the phallus by realizing that the father has it. This allows the subject to identify with the father. In this secondary (symbolic) identification the subject transcends the aggressivity inherent in primary (imaginary) identification. Lacan follows Freud in arguing that the superego is formed out of this Oedipal identification with the father (S4, 415).

Since the symbolic is the realm of the LAW, and since the Oedipus complex is the conquest of the symbolic order, it has a normative and normalising function: 'the Oedipus complex is essential for the human being to be able to accede to a humanized structure of the real' (S3, 198). This normative function is to be understood in reference to both clinical structures and the question of sexuality.