by Peter Thompson
[...]
Noam Chomsky, the professional contrarian, has accused Slavoj
Žižek, the professional heretic, of posturing in the place of theory. This is
an accusation often levelled at Žižek from within the Anglo-Saxon empirical
tradition. Even those like Chomsky who are on the proto-anarchist left of this
tradition like to maintain that their theories are empirically verifiable and
rooted in reality.
Žižek has countered with the side-swipe that nobody had been
so empirically wrong throughout his life as Chomsky. He brought up Chomsky's
supposed support for the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s and Chomsky's later
self-justification that there hadn't been empirical evidence at the time of the
crimes of the Khmer Rouge. It has all got rather heated and intemperate, but
then, debates on the left are like that. More time is spent ripping flesh out
of each other than it is trying to find a common cause against an apparently
invisible and impregnable enemy. But terms have to be defined, ground has to be
laid out.
Chomsky is also probably still smarting from his encounter
with Michel Foucault in 1971, on questions of human nature versus
socialisation. Foucault argued that human society produced ideas in individuals
which were the product of the power relationship between those individuals and
society. In Foucault's view society took precedence and individuals are unable
to uncouple themselves from the power relations at play and which soaked
through everything. In which case, it is necessary to have a speculative theory
about how the relations of power might work in psychoanalytical terms. This is
part of a long tradition of Ideologiekritik.
Žižek stands in this same continental tradition (as well as
against it, but, hey, that's his job) of asking ontological questions – that
is, questions about being as an abstraction – rather than trying to find out
through supposedly scientific methods what human nature actually is. There is
an old joke that goes "the Anglo-Saxon philosopher will accuse the
continental of being insufficiently clear, while the continental philosopher
accuses the Anglo-Saxon of being insufficiently." For Žižek there is no
finished human nature, but rather simply a process of working out how human
beings are in the world. At the core of this argument is a question of whether
the word "real" is spelled with a capital letter or not.
For the empiricists the word "real" refers to
something, well, real; something pre-existing which has to be uncovered. For
the Žižek/Lacan tradition, the word is spelled "Real" and refers to
something which isn't real, is inaccessible, and which can never be defined as
it is still, with Hegel, "im werden" (or, in becoming). This
"Big Other", as Lacan termed it, is the hole occupied by the absent
father or God, so that the Real is only present through its absence. This sort
of stuff is dismissed as charlatanry by those who want something concrete to
hold on to, whereas for the continentals the hole was always part of the whole.
Our being is conditioned by absence, by the something that is missing and by the
desire to fill that gap.
[...]
