from “The Fantastic Emergence of Narrative: Educational Fantasies in Žižek’s Atheistic Theology”

http://www.samrocha.com/post/30259601388/a-perverse-chapter-on-zizek-and-education

by Sam Rocha

Slavoj Žižek’s thought is not so much complex or disjointed, as critics like to caricature it. It is layered: embedded in deeply personal, biographical concerns he constantly connects between his internal life and external studies—and the performative and intellectual habits that come with them. My reading of Žižek takes his work as purely confessional. Nothing more, nothing less. Even his immense—and also widely criticized—productivity can only be seen, in my view, as someone who has a lot to confess.

This confessional reading of Žižek takes his Lacanian psychoanalytic lens and does to it what one would do in an action movie to someone aggressing with a pistol: force the barrel back toward the antagonist and pull the trigger. The result of this homicide is theology. In fact, it is precisely his suicidal and atheistic reading of the passion of Christ through G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy that warrants this murderous strategy. What we are left with after his theological turn, I will argue, is a reading of Žižek own assimilation of Lacan’s critique of narrative as a reflexive, inchoate, confession that displaces his Hegelian philosophical insistence with the pregnant core of his status as an atheist theologian (or materialist theologian): an educational fantasy.

This reading is not principally trying to innovate a way to handle or sythensize Žižek. It is more ambitious than that. I will use Žižek to affirm the psychoanalytic description of education, most notably championed by Deborah Britzman, as happening unconsciously, within the domain of fantasy. However, unlike the Freudian narrativist approach, the value of Žižek to education is precisely in being able to see a performance of fantasy—in his theology—that re-produces the fantastic in a Lacanian way that goes behind narrative and brings us back to the root of the psychic productions of education.

To be more direct: there are two common-sense claims of and about education that this chapter will seek to dismantle:  (1) the mistaken idea that education’s philosophical import is primarily an epistemological and/or psychological concern and (2) the narrative, linguistic, or hermeneutic—one can call it whatever what one likes—turn of the previous century that has infected education to the point that it is often considered to be purely narrative. Žižek provides, throughout his work, a serious engagement with the (political) return to ontology in continental philosophy that rejects the epistemological claim and his psychoanalytic method is a drastic contrast to the tyrannical assumptions of contemporary educational psychology. More powerfully, his appropriation of Lacan’s critique of narrativism, most notably in The Plague of Fantasies, only furthers the ontological and psychoanalytic contrast, leaving us with new ways of responding to the fundamental question,

“What is education?”

Two questions: Who is Žižek? What is education?

[…]

The Empowerment of the Right and the Dissolution of the Left

Letter from Nadya Tolokonnikova

http://eng-pussy-riot.livejournal.com/15312.html

http://www.lacan.com/thesymptom/?page_id=2380

Hi, Slavoj!

We received the news that you have been supporting us in every way – in theory and in practice. You are awesome! This has proven to be the continuation of the political liberation miracle-movement, whose birth for us now is unbelievable. I love miracles and their idiosyncracies. All of our activity is full of wonder.
The inmates are learning ‘about the violence’.

Thanks for everything!
Good luck to all.
Nadya
23 August 2012

Doctor Who?

http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/13633/doctor_who

The corporations behind WebMD’s friendly, free advice

BY TERRY J. ALLEN

After it was nailed for servicing BigPharma, WebMD, the popular medical and health information/advice site, gave itself an ethical makeover. Now, like a prostitute dressed by Talbot’s, WebMD is more subtle, if not less whorish.

The precipitating event for WebMD’s touch-up was the furor around a 2010 online questionnaire sponsored by Eli Lilly, one of WebMD’s original partners. No matter how you answered the quiz, it diagnosed depression and linked you to a river of pills.

Faced with Byzantine health insurance, or none at all, people are increasingly going online to diagnose their real and imagined ills. WebMD “reach[es] 95 percent of all adult Americans looking for health information online each year, [and] 72 percent of physicians recommend WebMD.com to their patients,” WebMD’s then-CEO Wayne Gattinella wrote to Sen. Charles Grassley after the Lilly questionnaire sparked the Iowa Republican to launch an investigation.

Gattinella, a marketing executive at various drug companies before joining WebMD, was not coy about WebMD’s financial model. “We generate revenues primarily through the sale of advertising and sponsorship programs to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, medical device companies, and [health, diet and fitness-related] consumer products, [as well as] licensing content to insurance companies and health plans.”

It’s unlikely that WebMD’s new CEO, Cavan Redmond, appointed on May 31, will end the insalubrious industry hookups. Redmond, who has also worked at Wyeth and Sandoz, moved to WebMD from a senior executive position at Pfizer’s marketing arm. That gig, the trade website Medical Marketing and Media noted, will give him “a keen understanding of what [WebMD’s] advertisers want.”

What consumers want is sound, independent information. But they, along with experts and doctors, are bombarded with manipulative advertising and industry-funded drug and device studies that can incorporate shady or even illegal tactics to obscure bad science and conflicts of interest.

Industry-funded, ad-reliant medical websites such as WebMD reflect the same market pressures and biases. Some WebMD ads are annoying but obvious. Others, barely set off by the word “advertisement” in minuscule pale gray type, blend into edited news and features. More insidious is content wholly generated by advertisers, which, despite being labeled “sponsored,” is often set in the same font, colors and style as WebMD’s “independent” information.

WebMD’s section “Close the Gap” offers one small example of how the new “subtle” works. It examines the special burden of heart disease on blacks, Latinos and other minorities. Although part of the WebMD site, the section is actually created and sponsored by Boston Scientific, which sells almost $8 billion annually in medical devices, especially those related to cardiac surgery. You need to click on a link to reveal the disclaimer that content “is not reviewed by the WebMD Editorial department for accuracy, objectivity or balance.”

Visitors to “Close the Gap” who are concerned about heart disease can also click to find a list of a few dozen featured doctors. These physicians, the site notes, “are not paid any fees for inclusion to either WebMD or Boston Scientific.” But that policy does not exclude other rewards: Seven of the highlighted doctors are members of Boston Scientific’s 17-person steering committee. (One, Cam Patterson, racked up more than $78,000 in speaking and other fees from Pfizer in a little more than a year, according to ProPublica’s Dollars for Doctors database.) WebMD “news” videos have also featured six Boston Science steering committee members as experts on a variety of topics.

Is it a coincidence that WebMD’s chosen experts are affiliated with a major advertiser, Boston Scientific—which in turn just happens to list members of its steering committee as go-to docs?

With its history of scandals and sleazy deals, Boston Scientific has not earned the benefit of the doubt. In 2010, the U.S. government fined Boston Scientific (which acquired Guidant in 2006) $22 million for paying doctors to implant Guidant-manufactured devices, including defibrillators and pacemakers, into heart patients. While the doctors incurred no punishment for accepting these apparent bribes, Army cardiologist Maj. Jason Davis faced a stricter ethical environment. He was found guilty of accepting cash payments, extravagant meals and other gifts to use Boston Scientific devices on, among others, wounded veterans.

Davis violated a “bright line rule,” said U.S. Attorney Jenny A. Durkan. “Military doctors must owe their allegiance to the soldiers and families they treat—not to drug companies or makers of medical devices.” As part of the judgment, Boston Scientific is required  to post all payments to healthcare professionals. In 2011, the typical payout was $500 or less, but some topped $10,000. The list that year had more than 48,000 names.

Other major WebMD advertising sources include the nutrition and diet industry, along with processed-food manufacturers. Numerous WebMD news videos and stories tacitly endorse fast food by posing misleading questions such as “Fast-Food French Fries: Which Are Healthiest?” In “Fast Food Survival,” the only quoted expert, “Jodie Worrell, RD, Chick-fil-A dietitian,” praises the healthiness of her company’s chicken sandwich.

On WebMD’s U.K. site (called BootsWebMD after the pharmacy chain that cosponsors it), a Kellogg’s-funded “advertorial” asserts that a “panel of world health experts … concluded that a high sugar intake is not related to the development of heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure or cancer.” And that Kellogg’s breakfast cereals, some packing more sugar than a Twinkie, “do not increase the risk of tooth decay” when eaten with milk. (Insert British dental joke here.)

The deeper problem is not the soundness of WebMD’s information. Rather, the site’s often-useful material and reasonable blandness promote trust that makes it easier to steer visitors to sponsors, and sometimes to frighten them toward unnecessary testing, procedures and drugs.

WedMD’s extensive data mining provides another problematic revenue stream. When visitors research embarrassing, or insurance- and job-threatening conditions, that information—along with data from the site’s many questionnaires and quizzes—is collected, used internally and sold. WedMD’s privacy policy warns that the site collects “personal information” when you sign up for its newsletters or use its many services, such as “Email a Friend” or the “Ovulation/Pregnancy Calendar.” WebMD also collects “non-personal information” from “external sources, even if you have not registered with or provided any personal information to WebMD.” Although the site pledges privacy for children, visitors who describe themselves as over 12 relinquish control over how their information is used.

Meanwhile, WebMD is having its own health problems. Redmond addressed “our declining revenues” in a July 31 company conference call. The new CEO blamed the company’s failure to “anticipate the unprecedented reduction in overall spending” by the biopharmaceutical industry, which has seen many of its blockbuster drugs displaced by cheaper generics.  

Redmond is looking to mobile apps, “diversifying our customer base” and “consumer products” to cure what ails the company.

“As the biopharmaceutical commercial model continues to evolve, WebMD can capitalize on these changes,” Redmond said in the company’s June 1 press release announcing his taking the helm. “WebMD is driving innovation in the rapidly changing healthcare market … for consumers, physicians and healthcare companies.”

And therein lies the problem: the fundamental conflict between a business model that is reliant on pleasing BigPharma and other advertisers, and unbiased healthcare information that serves the public.

Slavoj Žižek: The politics of Batman

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/08/slavoj-%C5%BEi%C5%BEek-politics-batman

From the repression of unruly citizens to the celebration of the “good capitalist”, The Dark Knight Rises reflects our age of anxiety.

By Slavoj Žižek [1] Published 23 August 2012

From the repression of unruly citizens to the celebration of the “good capitalist”, The Dark Knight Rises reflects our age of anxiety.

Fear city: the director Christopher Nolan's latest Batman film consciously explores modern anxieties about "economic fairness". Image: Warner Brothers Extended Artwork

The Dark Knight Rises shows that Hollywood blockbusters are precise indicators of the ideological predicaments of our societies. Here is the storyline. Eight years after the events of The Dark Knight, the previous instalment of Chris­topher Nolan’s Batman series, law and order prevail in Gotham City. Under the extraordinary powers granted by the Dent Act, Commissioner Gordon has nearly eradicated violent and organised crime. He nonetheless feels guilty about the cover-up of the crimes of Harvey Dent and plans to confess to the conspiracy at a public event – but he decides that the city is not ready to hear the truth.

No longer active as Batman, Bruce Wayne lives isolated in his manor. His company is crumbling after he invested in a clean-energy project designed to harness fusion power but then shut it down, on learning that the core could be modified to become a nuclear weapon. The beautiful Miranda Tate, a member of the Wayne Enterprises executive board, encourages Wayne to rejoin society and continue his philanthropic good works.

Here enters the first villain of the film. Bane, a terrorist leader who was a member of the League of Shadows, gets hold of a copy of the commissioner’s speech. After Bane’s financial machinations bring Wayne’s company close to bankruptcy, Wayne entrusts control of his enterprise to Miranda and also has a brief love affair with her. Learning that Bane has also got hold of his fusion core, Wayne returns as Batman and confronts Bane. Crippling Batman in close combat, Bane detains him in a prison from which escape is almost impossible. While the imprisoned Wayne recovers from his injuries and retrains himself to be Batman, Bane succeeds in turning Gotham City into an isolated city state. He first lures most of Gotham’s police force underground and traps them there; then he sets off explosions that destroy most of the bridges connecting Gotham to the mainland and announces that any attempt to leave the city will result in the detonation of Wayne’s fusion core, which has been converted into a bomb.

Now we reach the crucial moment of the film: Bane’s takeover is accompanied by a vast politico-ideological offensive. He publicly exposes the cover-up of Dent’s death and releases the prisoners locked up under the Dent Act. Condemning the rich and powerful, he promises to restore the power of the people, calling on citizens, “Take your city back.” Bane reveals himself, as the critic Tyler O’Neil has put it, to be “the ultimate Wall Street Occupier, calling on the 99 per cent to band together and overthrow societal elites”. What follows is the film’s idea of people power – summary show trials and executions of the rich, the streets surrendered to crime and villainy.

A couple of months later, while Gotham City continues to suffer under popular terror, Wayne escapes from prison, returns as Batman and enlists his friends to help liberate the city and disable the fusion bomb before it explodes. Batman confronts and subdues Bane but Mir­anda intervenes and stabs Batman. She reveals herself to be Talia al-Ghul, daughter of Ra’s al-Ghul, the former leader of the League of Shadows (the villains in Batman Begins). After announcing her plan to complete her father’s work in destroying Gotham City, Talia escapes.

In the ensuing mayhem, Commissioner Gordon cuts off the bomb’s remote detonation function, while a benevolent cat burglar named Selina Kyle kills Bane, freeing Batman to chase Talia. He tries to force her to take the bomb to the fusion chamber where it can be stabilised, but she floods the chamber. Talia dies, confident that the bomb cannot be stopped, when her truck is knocked off the road and crashes. Using a special helicopter, Batman hauls the bomb beyond the city limits, where it detonates over the ocean and pre­sumably kills him. Batman is now celebrated as a hero whose sacrifice saved Gotham City. Wayne is believed to have died in the riots. While his estate is being divided up, his butler, Alfred, sees Wayne and Selina together alive in a café in Florence. Blake, a young and honest policeman who knew about Batman’s identity, inherits the Batcave. The first clue to the ideological underpinnings of this ending is provided by Alfred, who, at Wayne’s apparent burial, reads the last lines from Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities: “It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.” Some reviewers took this as an indication that, in O’Neil’s words, the film “rises to the noblest level of western art . . . The film appeals to the centre of America’s tradition – the ideal of noble sacrifice for the common people . . . An ultimate Christ-figure, Batman sacrifices himself to save others.”

Seen from this perspective, the storyline is a short step back from Dickens to Christ at Calvary. But isn’t the idea of Batman’s sacrifice as a repetition of Christ’s death not compromised by the film’s last scene (Wayne with Selina in the café)? Is the religious counterpart of this ending not, instead, the well-known blasphemous idea that Christ survived his crucifixion and lived a long, peaceful life in India or, as some sources have it, Tibet? The only way to redeem this final scene would be to read it as a daydream or hallucination of Alfred’s.

A further Dickensian feature of the film is a depoliticised complaint about the gap between rich and poor. Early in the film, Selina whispers to Wayne as they are dancing at an exclusive, upper-class gala: “A storm is coming, Mr Wayne. You and your friends better batten down the hatches. Because when it hits, you’re all going to wonder how you thought you could live so large and leave so little for the rest of us.” Nolan, like any good liberal, is “worried” about the disparity and has said that this worry permeates the film: “The notion of economic fairness creeps into the film . . . I don’t feel there’s a left or right perspective in the film. What is there is just an honest assessment or honest exploration of the world we live in – things that worry us.”

Although viewers know Wayne is mega-rich, they often forget where his wealth comes from: arms manufacturing plus stock-market speculation, which is why Bane’s games on the stock exchange can destroy his empire. Arms dealer and speculator – this is the secret beneath the Batman mask. How does the film deal with it? By resuscitating the archetypal Dickensian theme of a good capitalist who finances orphanages (Wayne) versus a bad, greedy capitalist (Stryver, as in Dickens). As Nolan’s brother, Jonathan, who co-wrote the screenplay, has said: “A Tale of Two Cities, to me, was the most . . . harrowing portrait of a relatable, recognisable civilisation that had completely fallen to pieces. You look at the Terror in Paris, in France in that period, and it’s hard to imagine that things could go that bad and wrong.” The scenes of the vengeful populist uprising in the film (a mob that thirsts for the blood of the rich who have neglected and exploited them) evoke Dickens’s description of the Reign of Terror, so that, although the film has nothing to do with politics, it follows Dickens’s novel in “honestly” portraying revolutionaries as possessed fanatics.

The good terrorist

An interesting thing about Bane is that the source of his revolutionary hardness is unconditional love. In one touching scene, he tells Wayne how, in an act of love amid terrible suffering, he saved the child Talia, not caring about the consequences and paying a terrible price for it (Bane was beaten to within an inch of his life while defending her).

Another critic, R M Karthick, locates The Dark Knight Rises in a long tradition stretching from Christ to Che Guevara which extols violence as a “work of love”, as Che does in his diary:

Let me say, with the risk of appearing ridiculous, that the true revolutionary is guided by strong feelings of love. It is impossible to think of an authentic revolutionary without this quality.

What we encounter here is not so much the “christification of Che” but rather a “che­isation” of Christ – the Christ whose “scandalous” words from Luke (“If anyone comes to me and does not hate his father and his mother, his wife and children, his brothers and sisters – yes, even his own life – he cannot be my disciple”) point in the same direction as these ones from Che: “You may have to be tough but do not lose your tenderness.” The statement that “the true revolutionary is guided by a strong feeling of love” should be read together with Guevara’s much more problematic description of revolutionaries as “killing machines”:

Hatred is an element of struggle; relentless hatred of the enemy that impels us over and beyond the natural limitations of man and transforms us into effective, violent, selective and cold killing machines. Our soldiers must be thus; a people without hatred cannot vanquish a brutal enemy.

Guevara here is paraphrasing Christ’s declarations on the unity of love and the sword – in both cases, the underlying paradox is that what makes love angelic, what elevates it over mere sentimentality, is its cruelty, its link with violence. And it is this link that places love beyond the natural limitations of man and thus transforms it into an unconditional drive. This is why, to turn back to The Dark Knight Rises, the only authentic love portrayed in the film is Bane’s, the terrorist’s, in clear contrast to Batman’s.

The figure of Ra’s, Talia’s father, also deserves a closer look. Ra’s has a mixture of Arab and oriental features and is an agent of virtuous terror, fighting to correct a corrupted western civilisation. He is played by Liam Neeson, an actor whose screen persona usually radiates dignified goodness and wisdom – he is Zeus in Clash of the Titans and also plays Qui-Gon Jinn in The Phantom Menace, the first episode of the Star Wars series. Qui-Gon is a Jedi knight, the mentor of Obi-Wan Kenobi as well as the one who discovers Anakin Skywalker, believing that Anakin is the chosen one who will restore the balance of the universe, and ignores Yoda’s warnings about Anakin’s unstable nature. At the end of The Phantom Menace, Qui-Gon is killed by the assassin Darth Maul.

In the Batman trilogy, Ra’s is the teacher of the young Wayne. In Batman Begins, he finds him in a prison in Bhutan. Introducing himself as Henri Ducard, he offers the boy a “path”. After Wayne is freed, he climbs to the home of the League of Shadows where Ra’s is waiting. At the end of a lengthy and painful period of training, Ra’s explains that Wayne must do what is necessary to fight evil, and that the league has trained Wayne to lead it in its mission to destroy Gotham City, which the league believes has become hopelessly corrupt.

Ra’s is thus not a simple embodiment of evil. He stands for the combination of virtue and terror, for egalitarian discipline fighting a corrupted empire, and thus belongs to a line that stretches in recent fiction from Paul Atreides in Frank Herbert’s Dune to Leonidas in Frank Miller’s graphic novel 300. It is crucial that Wayne was a disciple of Ra’s: Wayne was made into Batman by his mentor.

At this point, two common-sense objections suggest themselves. The first is that there were monstrous mass killings and violence in real-life revolutions, from the rise of Stalin to the rule of the Khmer Rouge, so the film is clearly not just engaging in reactionary imagination. The second objection is that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement in reality was not violent – its goal was definitely not a new Reign of Terror. In so far as Bane’s revolt is supposed to extrapolate the immanent tendency of OWS, the film absurdly misrepresents its aims and strategies. The ongoing anti-capitalist protests are the opposite of Bane: he stands for the mirror image of state terror, for a murderous fundamentalism that takes over and rules by fear, not for the overcoming of state power through popular self-organisation. What both objections share, however, is the rejection of the figure of Bane.

The reply to these two objections has several parts. First, one should make the scope of violence clear. The best answer to the claim that the violent mob reaction to oppression is worse than the original oppression was the one provided by Mark Twain in his novel A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court:

There were two “Reigns of Terror” if we would remember it and consider it; the one wrought in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood . . . Our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak, whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heartbreak? . . . A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror, that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror, which none of us have been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.

Then, one should demystify the problem of violence, rejecting simplistic claims that 20th- century communism used too much extreme murderous violence. We should be careful not to fall into this trap again. As a fact, this is terrifyingly true. Yet such a direct focus on violence obfuscates the underlying question: what was wrong with the communist project as such? What internal weakness of that project was it that pushed communists towards unrestrained violence? It is not enough to say that communists neglected the “problem of violence”; it was a deeper, sociopolitical failure that pushed them to violence. It is thus not only Nolan’s film that is unable to imagine authentic people’s power. The “real” radical-emancipatory movements couldn’t do it, either; they remained caught in the co-ordinates of the old society, in which actual “people power” was often such a violent horror.

Finally, it is all too simplistic to claim that there is no violent potential in OWS and similar movements – there is a violence at work in every authentic emancipatory process. The problem withThe Dark Knight Rises is that it has wrongly translated this violence into murderous terror. Let us take a brief detour here through José Saramago’s novel Seeing, which tells the story of strange events in the unnamed capital city of an unidentified democratic country. When election day dawns with torrential rain, the voter turnout is disturbingly low. But the weather turns by mid-afternoon and the population heads en masse to the polling stations. The government’s relief is short-lived, however: the count shows that more than 70 per cent of the ballots cast in the capital have been left blank. Baffled, the government gives the people a chance to make amends a week later at another election.

The results are worse. Now 83 per cent of the ballots are blank. The two major political parties – the ruling party of the right and its chief adversary, the party of the middle – are in a panic, while the marginalised party of the left produces an analysis claiming that the blank ballots are a vote for its progressive agenda. Unsure how to respond to a benign protest but certain that an anti-democratic conspiracy is afoot, the government quickly labels the movement “terrorism, pure and unadulterated” and declares a state of emergency.

Citizens are seized at random and disappear into secret interrogation sites; the police and seat of government are withdrawn from the capital; all entrances to the city are sealed, as are the exits. The city continues to function almost normally throughout, the people parrying each of the government’s thrusts in unison and with a Gandhian level of non-violent resistance. This, the voters’ abstention, is a case of authentically radical “divine violence” that prompts panic reactions from those in power.

Back to Nolan. The trilogy of Batman films follows an internal logic. In Batman Begins, the hero remains within the constraints of a liberal order: the system can be defended with morally acceptable methods. The Dark Knight is, in effect, a new version of two John Ford western classics, Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show how, to civilise the Wild West, one has to “print the legend” and ignore the truth. They show, in short, how our civilisation has to be grounded in a lie – one has to break the rules in order to defend the system.

In Batman Begins, the hero is simply the classic urban vigilante who punishes the criminals when the police can’t. The problem is that the police, the official law-enforcement agency, respond ambivalently to Batman’s help. They see him as a threat to their monopoly on power and therefore as evidence of their inefficiency. However, his transgression here is purely formal: it lies in acting on behalf of the law without being legitimised to do so. In his acts, he never violates the law. The Dark Knight changes these co-ordinates. Batman’s true rival is not his ostensible opponent, the Joker, but Harvey Dent, the “white knight”, the aggressive new district attorney, a kind of official vigilante whose fanatical battle against crime leads to the killing of innocent people and ultimately destroys him. It is as if Dent were the legal order’s reply to the threat posed by Batman: against Batman’s vigilantism, the system generates its own illegal excess in a vigilante much more violent than Batman.

There is poetic justice, therefore, when Wayne plans to reveal his identity as Batman and Dent jumps in and names himself as Batman – he is more Batman than Batman, actualising the temptation to break the law that Wayne was able to resist. When, at the end of the film, Batman assumes responsibility for the crimes committed by Dent to save the reputation of the popular hero who embodies hope for ordinary people, his act is a gesture of symbolic exchange: first Dent takes upon himself the identity of Batman, then Wayne – the real Batman – takes Dent’s crimes upon himself.

The Dark Knight Rises pushes things even further. Is Bane not Dent taken to an extreme? Dent draws the conclusion that the system is unjust, so that, to fight injustice effectively, one has to turn directly against the system and destroy it. Dent loses his remaining inhibitions and is ready to use all manner of methods to achieve this goal. The rise of such a figure changes things entirely. For all the characters, Batman included, morality is relativised and becomes a matter of convenience, something determined by circumstances. It’s open class warfare – everything is permitted in defence of the system when we are dealing not just with mad gangsters, but with a popular uprising.

Should the film be rejected by those engaged in emancipatory struggles? Things aren’t quite so simple. We should approach the film in the way one has to interpret a Chinese political poem. Absences and surprising presences count. Recall the old French story about a wife who complains that her husband’s best friend is making illicit sexual advances towards her. It takes some time until the surprised friend gets the point: in this twisted way, she is inviting him to seduce her. It is like the Freudian unconscious that knows no negation; what matters is not a negative judgement of something but that this something is mentioned at all. In The Dark Knight Rises, people power is here, staged as an event, in a significant development from the usual Batman opponents (criminal mega-capitalists, gangsters and terrorists).

Strange attraction

The prospect of the Occupy Wall Street movement taking power and establishing a people’s democracy on the island of Manhattan is so patently absurd, so utterly unrealistic, that one cannot avoid asking the following question – why does a Hollywood blockbuster dream about it? Why does it evoke this spectre? Why does it even fantasise about OWS exploding into a violent takeover? The obvious answer – that it does so to taint OWS with the accusation that it harbours a terrorist or totalitarian potential – is not enough to account for the strange attraction exerted by the prospect of “people power”. No wonder the proper functioning of this power remains blank, absent; no details are given about how the people power functions or what the mobilised people are doing. Bane tells the people they can do what they want – he is not imposing his own order on them. This is why external critique of the film (claiming that its depiction of OWS is a ridi­culous caricature) is not enough. The critique has to be immanent; it has to locate inside the film a multitude of signs that point towards the authentic event. (Recall, for instance, that Bane is not just a bloodthirsty terrorist but a person of deep love, with a spirit of sacrifice.)

In short, pure ideology isn’t possible. Bane’s authenticity has to leave traces in the film’s texture. This is why The Dark Knight Rises deserves close reading. The event – the “People’s Republic of Gotham City”, a dictatorship of the proletariat in Manhattan – is immanent to the film. It is its absent centre.

Slavoj Žižek’s latest book is “Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism” (Verso, £50)