Laclau: dialectics and contingency (2)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 226-7:

Where, then, do I locate my difference with Laclau? Here, the above-mentioned oscillation between 'mere terminological misunderstanding' and 'radical incompatibility' is even stronger. Let me first deal with some points which may seem to concern mere terminological or factual misunderstandings, as is the case with Laclau's critical remark about my advocacy of the Cartesian cogito. With regard to my reference to the 'forgotten obverse, the excessive, unacknowledged kernel of the cogito, which is far from the pacifying image of the transparent self', Laclau's claim is that I deprive the cogito of its Cartesian content and Lacanize the tradition of modernity, 'like calling oneself a fully fledged Platonist while rejecting the theory of forms' (EL, p. 73). To this criticism I am first tempted to respond, in a naive factual way, that my position is by no means as 'eccentric' as it may sound: there is a long tradition within Cartesian studies of demonstrating that a gap forever separates the cogito itself from the res cogitans: that the self-transparent 'thinking substance [res cogitans]' is secondary, that it already obfuscates a certain abyss or excess that is the founding gesture of cogito--was it not Derrida himself who, in his 'Cogito and the History of Madness', highlighted this moment of excessive madness constitutive of cogito? So when Laclau refers approvingly to Kierkegaard's notion of decision ('As Kierkegaard--quoted by Derrida--said: "the moment of the decision is the moment of madness". And as I would add [which Derrida wouldn't]: this is the moment of the subject before subjectivization' [EL, p. 79], I--while, of course, fully endorsing his approval--would insist that this 'moment of madness' can be conceptualized only within the space opened up by the 'empty', 'non-substantial' Cartesian subject.

Furthermore, I claim that democracy itself--what Claude Lefort called the 'democratic invention' can also emerge only within the Cartesian space. The democratic legacy of the 'abstract' Cartesian cogito can best be discerned apropos of the pseudo-'feminist' argument for a more prominent role for women in public and political life: their role should be more prominent since, for natural or historical reasons, their predominant stance is less individualistic, competitive, domination-oriented, and more co-operative and compassionate... The Cartesian democratic lesson here is that the moment one accepts the terms of such a discussion, one already concedes defeat and also accepts the pre-democratic 'meritocratic' principle: there should be more women in public life not because of any particular positive female psychological properties, but on account of the simple democratic-egalitarian principle (what Balibar called égaliberté): women have the right to a more prominent role in public decision-making simply because they constitute half the population, not on account of any of their specific properties.

Leaving aside the question of how to read Kant (I also think there is an aspect of Kant that is totally obliterated by the standard academic image of him), let me go on to a further difference between Laclau and me which may also appear to be grounded in a simple terminological and/or factual misunderstanding, albeit already in a more ambiguous and problematic way. This difference is clearly discernible in Laclau's criticism that in my reading of Hegel I do not take into account Hegel's panlogicism, that is, the fact that Hegel's philosophy forms a closed system which radically reduces contingency, since the passage from one position to the next is always, by definition necessary:

"accepting entirely that the Absolute Spirit has no positive content of its own, and is just the succession of all dialectical transitions, of its impossibility of establishing a final overlapping between the universal and the particular--are these transitions contingent or necessary? If the latter, the characterization of the whole Hegelian project (as opposed to what he actually did) as panlogicist can hardly be avoided." (EL, p. 60)

For me, Laclau's opposition is all too crude, and misses the (already mentioned) key feature of Hegelian dialectics: the ultimate mystery of what Hegel calls 'positing the presuppositions' is the mystery of how contingency retroactively 'sublates' itself into necessity--how, through historical repetition, an initially contingent occurrence is 'transubstantiated' into an expression of a necessity: in short, the mystery of how, through 'autopoietic' self-organization, order emerges out of chaos. Here Hegel is to be read 'with Freud': in Freud also, a contingent feature (say, a traumatic sexual encounter) is elevated into a 'necessity', that is to say, into the structuring principle, into the central point of reference around which the subject's entire life revolves.

Laclau: dialectics and contingency (1)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 223-5:

I have a suspicion that the philosophical aspect of this political disagreement between Butler and Laclau on the one side and me on the other finds its expression in our different stances towards the notion of 'essentialism'. Butler and Laclau rely fully on the opposition essentialism/contingency; they both conceive of 'progress' (if this term is still defensible) as the gradual passage from 'essentialism' to the more and more radical assertion of contingency. I, however, find the notion of 'essentialism' problematic, in so far as it tends to condense three different levels of resistance to total fluidity: the imaginary 'essence' (the firm shape, Gestalt, which persists through the incessant flux of change); the One of the Master-Signifier (the empty signifier that serves as the container for the shifting significations: we are all for 'democracy', although the content of this term changes as a result of hegemonic struggles), and the debilitating Sameness of the Real (the trauma that resists its symbolization and, as such, triggers the very repetitive process of symbolization). Is not Butler's criticism of Lacan the exemplary case of how the term 'essentialism' implies the progressive reduction of the latter to the former level: first, the Sameness of the Real is reduced to a 'fixed' symbolic determination (Butler's point that sexual difference as real equals a firm set of heterosexual normative symbolic determinations); then, the symbolic itself is reduced to the imaginary (her thesis that the Lacanian 'symbolic' is ultimately nothing but the coagulated, 'reified', imaginary flux).

The problem with 'essentialism' is thus that this critical designation shares the fatal weakness of the standard procedure of philosophical rejection. The first step in this procedure is the negative gesture of totalizing the field to be rejected, designating it as a single and distinctive field, against which one then asserts the positive alternative--the question to be asked is the one about the hidden limitation of this critical totalization of the Whole that one endeavors to undermine. What is problematic in Kantian ethics is not its formalism as such but, rather, the fact that, prior to Kant's assertion of the autonomous formal moral Law, he has to reject every other foundation of ethics as 'pathological', relating to some contingent, ultimately empirical notion of the Good--what is problematic is this reduction of all previous ethics to the utilitarian notion of the Good as pathological, serving our pleasure... (against this, Sade, as the truth of Kant, asserts precisely the paradoxical possibility of a pathological-contingent attitude which works against one's well-being, finding satisfaction in this self-blockage--is not the point of the Freudian death drive that one can suspend the rule of utilitarian egotism on 'pathological' grounds?).

In much the same way, is not Derrida's 'metaphysics of presence' silently dominated/hegemonized by Husserl's subjectivity as the pure auto-affection/self-presence of the conscious subject, so that when Derrida talks about 'metaphysics of presence', he is always essentially referring to the Husserlian subject present-to-itself? The problem with sweeping philosophical oppositions (all the others against me and possibly my predecessors) therefore lies in the problematic totalization of all other options under one and the same global label--the multitude thus totalized is always secretly 'hegemonized' by one of its particular species; in the same way, the Derridean notion of the 'metaphysics of presence' is secretly hegemonized by Husserl, so that Derrida in effect reads Plato and all the others through Husserl. And it is my contention that the same goes for the critical notion of 'essentialism'. Let us take the case of capitalism itself: against the proponents of the critique of global capitalism, of the 'logic of Capital', Laclau argues that capitalism is an inconsistent composite of heterogeneous features which were combined as the result of a contingent historical constellation, not a homogeneous Totality obeying a common underlying Logic.

My answer to this is the reference to the Hegelian logic of the retroactive reversal of contingency into necessity: of course capitalism emerged from a contingent combination of historical conditions; of course it gave birth to a series of phenomena (political democracy, concern for human rights, etc.) which can be 'resignified', rehegemonized into a non-capitalist context. However, capitalism retroactively 'posited its own presuppositions', and reinscribed its contingent/external circumstances into an all-encompassing logic that can be generated from an elementary conceptual matrix (the 'contradiction' involved in the act of commodity exchange, etc.). In a proper dialectical analysis, the 'necessity' of a totality does not preclude its contingent origins and the heterogeneous nature of its constituents--these are, precisely, its presuppositions which are then posited, retroactively totalized, by the emergence of dialectical totality. Furthermore, I am tempted to claim that Laclau's critique would have been much more appropriate with regard to the very notion of 'radical democracy', to which Laclau and Mouffe regularly refer in the singular: does this notion not actually cover a series of heterogeneous phenomena for which it is problematic to claim that they belong to the same genus: from the feminist, ecological, etc. struggle in developed countries to the Third World resistance to the neoliberal New World Order?

Against Judith Butler (3)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 222-3:

It is crucial to get the precise idea of what Butler is claiming here: her notion is that since ideological universality (the space of interpellation), in order to reproduce itself and retain its hold, has to rely on its repeated assumption by the subject, this repetition is not only the passive assuming of some mandate, but opens up the space of re-formation, resignification, displacement--it is possible to resignify/displace the 'symbolic substance' which predetermines my identity, but not totally to overhaul it, since a total would involve the psychotic loss of my symbolic identity. This resignification can work even in the extreme case of injurious interpellations: they determine me, I cannot get rid of them, they are the condition of my symbolic being/identity; rejecting them tout court would bring about psychosis; but what I can do is resignify/displace them, mockingly assume them: 'the possibilities of resignification will rework and unsettle the passionate attachment to subjection without which subject-formation--and re-formation--cannot succeed.

My aim is not to deny that such a practice of resignification can be very effective in the ideological struggle for hegemony--does not the success of The X Files provide an excellent illustration of this? What happens in this series is precisely that the standard formula of alien threat and invasion is 'resignified', reset in a different context. Not only does the content of this threat offer a quasi-encyclopedic 'multiculturalist' combination of all possible myths and folklores (from Eastern European vampires and werewolves to Navajo spectral monsters); what is even more crucial is the setting of these apparitions: derelict suburbs, half-abandoned country houses or lonely forests, most of them in a North of the USA (no doubt conditioned by the fact that, for economic reasons, most of the exteriors are shot in Canada)--the privileged sites of the threat are the outcasts of our society, from Native Americans and illegal Latino immigrants to the homeless and junkies in our cities. Furthermore, the government itself is systematically presented as an ominous network, penetrated by secret organizations which deny their existence, ambiguously collaborating with the aliens....

There is, however, a limit to this process of resignification, and the Lacanian name for this limit, of course, is precisely the Real. How does this Real operate in language? In 'Pretending', J.L. Austin evokes a neat example of how pretending to be vulgar can itself become vulgar: when I am with people who have rigid standards of behaviour, I pretend to be vulgar and, as part of a social joke, start to use obscene language or refer to obscene content. My pretending to be vulgar will in fact be vulgar--this collapse of the distinction between pretending and being is the unmistakable signal that my speech has touched some Real. That is to say: apropos of what kind of speech acts does the distance between pretending and being (or, rather, actually doing it) collapse? Apropos of speech acts which aim at the other in the Real of his or her being: hate speech, aggressive humiliation, and so on. In such cases, no amount of disguising it with the semblance of a joke or irony caan prevent it from having a hurtful effect--we touch the Real when the efficiency of such symbolic markers of distance is suspended.

And my point is that in so far as we conceive of the politico-ideological resignification in the terms of the struggle for hegemony, today's Real which sets a limit to resignification is Capital: the smooth functioning of Capital is that which remains the same, that which 'always returns to its place', in the unconstrained struggle for hegemony. Is this not demonstrated by the fact thaat Butler, as well as Laclau, in their criticism of the old 'essentialist' Marxism, none the less silently accept a set of premisses: they never question the fundamentals of the capitalist market economy and the liberal-democratic political regime; they never envisage the possibility of a completely different economico-political regime. In this way, they fully participate in the abandonment of these questions by the 'postmodern' Left: all the changes they propose are changes within this economico-political regime.

Against Judith Butler (2)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 221:

Along these lines,Lacan triumphantly rewrites the Freudian 'stages' (oral, anal, phallic...) not as biologically determined stages in libidinal evolution, but as different modes of the dialectical subjectivization of the child's position within the network of his or her family: what matters in, say, the anal stage is not the function of defecation as such, but the subjective stance it involves (complying with the Other's demand to do it in an orderly way, asserting one's defiance and/or self-control...). What is crucial here is that it is this Lacan of radical and unlimited resignification who is at the same time the Lacan of the paternal Law (Name-of-the-Father) as the unquestionable horizon of the subject's integration into the symbolic order. Consequently, the shift from this early 'Lacan of unlimited resignification' to the later 'Lacan of the Real' is not the shift from the unconstrained play of resignification towards the assertion of some ahistorical limit of the process of symbolization: it is the very focus on the notion of the Real as impossible that reveals the ultimate contingency, fragility, (and thus changeability) of every symbolic constellation that pretends to serve as the a priori horizon of the process of symbolization.

No wonder Lacan's shift of focus towards the Real is strictly correlative to the devaluation of the paternal function (and of the central place of the Oedipus complex itself)--to the introduction of the notion that paternal authority is ultimately an imposture, one among the possible 'sinthoms' which allow us temporarily to stabilize and co-ordinate the inconsistent/nonexistent 'big Other'. So Lacan's point in unearthing the 'ahistorical' limit of historicization/resignification is thus not that we have to accept this limit in a resigned way, but that every historical figuration of this limit is itself contingent and, as such, susceptible to a radical overhaul. So my basic answer to Butler--no doubt paradoxical for those who have been fully involved in recent debates--is that, with all the talk about Lacan's clinging to an ahistorical bar, and so on, it is Butler herself who, on a more radical level, is not historicist enough: it is Butler who limits the subject's intervention to multiple resignifications/displacements of the basic 'passionate attachment', which therefore persists as the very limit/condition of subjectivity. Consequently, I am tempted to supplement Butler's series in her rhetorical question quoted above: "How would the new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias, reversals, and performative displacements or resignifications...?

Against Judith Butler (1)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 219-220:

In what, then, does our difference consist? Let me approach this key point via another key criticism from Butler: her point that I describe only the paradoxical mechanisms of ideology, the way an ideological edifice reproduces itself (the reversal that characterizes the effect of point de capiton, the 'inherent transgression', etc.), without elaborating how one can 'disturb' (resignify, displace, turn against themselves) these mechanisms; I show:

"how power compels us to consent to that which constrains us, and how our very sense of freedom or resistance can be the dissimulated instrument of dominance. But what remains less clear to me is how one moves beyond such a dialectical reversal or impasse to something new. How would the new be produced from an analysis of the social field that remains restricted to inversions, aporias and reversals that work regardless of time and place?" (Judith Butler, p. 29)

In The Psychic Life of Power, Butler makes the same point apropos of Lacan himself:

"The [Lacanian] imaginary [resistance] thwarts the efficacy of the symbolic law but cannot turn back upon the law, demanding or effecting its reformulation. In this sense, psychic resistance thwarts the law in its effects, but cannot redirect the law or its effects. Resistance is thus located in a domain that is virtually powerless to alter the law that it opposes. Hence, psychic resistance presumes the continuation of the law in its anterior, symbolic form and, in that sense, contributes to its status quo. In such a view, resistance appears doomed to perpetual defeat. In contrast, Foucault formulates resistance as an effect of the very power that it is said to oppose....For Foucault, the symbolic produces the possibility of its own subversion, and these subversions are unanticipated effects of symbolic interpellations." (Butler, The Psychic Life of Power, pp. 98-9)

My response to this is triple. First, on the level of exegesis, Foucault is much more ambivalent on this point: his thesis on the immanence of resistance to power can also be read as asserting that every resistance is caught in advance in the game of power that it opposes. Second, my notion of 'inherent transgression', far from playing another variation on this theme (resistance reproduces that to which it resists), makes the power edifice even more vulnerable: in so far as power relies on its 'inherent transgression', then--sometimes, at least--overidentifying with the explicit power discourse--ignoring this inherent obscene underside and simply taking the power discourse at its (public) word, acting as if it really means what it explicitly says (and promises)--can be the most effective way of disturbing its smooth functioning. Third, and most important: far from constraining the subject to a resistance doomed to perpetual defeat, Lacan allows for a much more radical subjective intervention than Butler: what the Lacanian notion of 'act' aims at is not a mere displacement/resignification of the symbolic coordinates that confer on the subject his or her identity, but the radical transformation of the very universal structuring 'principle' of the existing symbolic order. Or--to put it in more psychoanalytic terms--the Lacanian act, in its dimension of 'traversing the fundamental fantasy' aims radically to disturb the very 'passionate attachment' that forms, for Butler, the ultimately ineluctable background of the process of resignification. So, far from being more 'radical' in the sense of thorough historicization, Butler is in fact very close to the Lacan of the early 1950's, who found his ultimate expression in the rapport de Rome on 'The Function and the Field of Speech and Language in Psychoanalysis' (1953)--to the Lacan of the permanent process of retroactive historicization or resymbolization of social reality; to the Lacan who emphasized again and again how there is no directly accessible 'raw' reality, how what we perceive as 'reality' is overdetermined by the symbolic texture within which it appears.

Today's Predominant Consensus (circa 2000)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 323-4:

How, then, are we to answer today's predominant consensus according to which the age of ideologies--of grand ideological projects like Socialism or Liberalism--is over, since we have entered the post-ideological era of rational negotiation and decision-making, based upon the neutral insight into economic, ecological, etc. necessities? This consensus can assume different guises, from the neoconservative or Socialist refusal to accept it and consummate the loss of grand ideological projects by means of a proper 'work of mourning' (different attempts to resuscitate global ideological projects) up to the neoliberal opinion according to which the passage from the age of ideologies to the post-ideological era is part of the sad but none the less inexorable process of the maturation of humanity--just as a young man has to learn to accept the loss of grand enthusiastic adolescent plans and enter the everyday adult life of realistic compromises, the collective subject has to learn to accept a withering-away of global utopian ideological projects and the entry into the post-utopian realist era....

The first thing to note about this neoliberal cliche is that the neutral reference to the necessities of the market economy, usually invoked in order to categorize grand ideological projects as unrealistic utopias, is itself to be inserted into the series of great modern utopian projects. That is to say--as Fredric Jameson has pointed out--what characterizes utopia is not a belief in the essential goodness of human nature, or some similar naive notion, but, rather, belief in some global mechanism which, applied to the whole of society, will automatically bring about the balanced state of progress and happiness one is longing for--and, in this precise sense, is not the market precisely the name for such a mechanism, which, properly applied, will bring about the optimal state of society? So, again, the first answer of the Left to those--Leftists themselves--who bemoan the loss of the utopian impetus in our societies should be that this impetus is alive and well--not only in the Rightist 'fundamentalist' populism which advocates a return to grass-roots democracy, but above all among the advocates of the market economy themselves. The second answer should be a clear line of distinction between utopia and ideology: ideology is not only a utopian project of social transformation with no realistic chance of actualization; no less ideological is the anti-utopian stance of those who 'realistically' devalue every global project of social transformation as 'utopian', that is, as unrealistic dreaming and/or harbouring 'totalitarian' potential--today's predominant form of ideological 'closure' takes the precise form of mental block which prevents us from imagining a fundamental social change, in the interests of an allegedly 'realistic' and 'mature' attitude.

Against Liberal Leftists (2)

Slavoj Žižek, from Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left, by Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek (London: Verso, 2000), pp. 127-8:

The problem of today's philosophico-political scene is ultimately best expressed by Lenin's old question 'What is to be done?'--how do we reassert, on the political terrain, the proper dimension of the act? The main form of the resistance against the act today is a kind of unwritten Denkverbot (prohibition to think) similar to the infamous Berufsverbot (prohibition to be employed by any state institution) from the late 1960's in Germany--the moment one shows a minimal sign of engaging in political projects that aim seriously to change the existing order, the answer is immediately: 'Benevolent as it is, this will necessarily end in a new Gulag!' The 'return to ethics' in today's political philosophy shamefully exploits the horrors of Gulag or Holocaust as the ultimate bogey for blackmailing us into renouncing all serious radical engagement. In this way, conformist liberal scoundrels can find hypocritical satisfaction in their defence of the existing order: they know there is corruption, exploitation, and so on, but every attempt to change things is denounced as ethically dangerous and unacceptable, recalling the ghosts of Gulag or Holocaust....

And this resistance against the act seems to be shared across a wide spectrum of (officially) opposed philosophical positions. Four philosophers as different as Derrida, Habermas, Rorty and Dennett would probably adopt the same left-of-centre liberal democratic stance in practical political decisions; as for the political conclusions to be drawn from their thought, the difference between their positions is negligible. On the other hand, already our immediate intuition tells us that a philosopher like Heidegger on the one hand, or Badiou on the other, would definitely adopt a different stance. Rorty, who made this perspicacious observation, concludes from it that philosophical differences do not involve, generate or rely on political differences--politically, they do not really matter. What, however, if philosophical differences do matter politically, and if, as a consequence, this political congruence between philosophers tells us something about their pertinent philosophical stance? What if, in spite of the great passionate public debates between deconstructionists, pragmatists, Habermasians and cognitivists, they none the less share a series of philosophical premisses--what if there is an unacknowledged proximity between them? And what if the task today is precisely to break with this terrain of shared premisses?