Žižek Studies: The Greatest Hits (So Far) 1433146177, 9781433146176

Table of contents :
Žižek Studies: The Greatest Hits (So Far)
Table of Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Editors’ Introduction
Why Žižek? And Why Online?
In the Beginning …
A Man with Qualities—Žižek the Public Intellectual
Screening Thought
The Greatest Hits—An Axe for the Frozen Sea Within Us
References
Part I: Philosophy
References
1 Žižek and the Real Hegel
Metaphysical Games
Critical Revisions and Perverse Remakes
Will the Real Hegel Please Stand Up?
Truth or Consequences
Notes
References
2 Žižek’s Kant, or The Crack in the Universal (Politicizing the Transcendental Turn)
Introduction: Žižek as Hegelian or ‘NeoKantian’? Yes, Please!
Žižek and the Subject of Kantian Apperception
Žižek on the Sublime, and the Antinomies of Pure Reason
Failure = Success: Žižek on the Transcendental Imagination
Conclusion: From the Politicization of Ontology to Žižek’s Ontology of Politics
… And a Final Remark on the (Political) Subject
Notes
References
3 Žižek’s Brand of Philosophical Excess and the Treason of the Intellectuals: Wagers of Sin, Ugly Ducklings, and Mythical Swans
Introduction—Žižek’s Brand of Excess and Le Traison des Clercs
Žižek’s Wagers of Sin … and the Puritanical Response
Fifty Shades of Gray Transference—The Violent Visions of Žižek’s Critics
The Real Excess of the Joker’s Success and the Search for Missing Rabbits
There Once Was an Ugly Ideological Duckling—A Poster Boy for the Treason of the Intellectuals
Conclusion—The Curious Case of the Academics Who Failed to Bark in the Night
References
4 The Hegelian “Night of the World”: Žižek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality
The Hegelian Ticklish Subject
Žižek’s Hegelian Criticism of Kantian Imagination
“The Night of the World”
“Tarrying with the Negative”
Imagination or Understanding?
II: Abstract Negativity and Concrete Universality
From Abstract to Concrete Universality
The ‘Night of the World’ and Revolutionary Violence
Global Capitalism: ‘End of History’ or ‘History of Violence’?
Notes
References
Part II: Politics
Reference
5 A Hermeneutic of Hope: Problematizing Žižek’s Apocalypticism
Eschatology and Alterity
Hope in the Face of Cultural Devastation
Apocalyptic Žižek
Fully Accomplished Loss
Signs from the Future
The End of Hope?
Notes
References
6 Barack Obama, the New Spirit of Capitalism and the Populist Resistance
Populism and the Political
The Bush Malaise and America’s Moral Crisis
Reclaiming American Exceptionalism
The New Spirit of Capitalism
Obama and the New Commodity Logic
The Populists Shrugged
Conclusion
Notes
References
7 Capitalism’s Cynical Leviathan: Cynicism, Totalitarianism, and Hobbes in Modern Capitalist Regulation
Totalitarianism, Cynicism, and Capitalism Management
Laclau, Hegemony, and the Impossibility of Total Inscription
Žižek, Cynicism, and Totalitarianism
Hobbes and a Cynical Totalitarianism
Hobbes, the Need for Totalitarianism and Capitalism Regulation
Saving the Individual to Save the State and Organization
Consent, Internalization and Dis-identification in Hobbes and Capitalism
Cynicism, Responsibility, and Dis-identification
Order, Dis-identification, and the Construction of the Cynical Totalitarian Subject
Conclusion: Reinforcing Totalitarianism Through Cynicism
References
8 The Joy of Inequality: The Libidinal Economy of Compassionate Consumerism
Introduction: Psychosexual/Development
The Oral Stage: Table for Two International
The Anal Stage: Toilet Twinning
The Phallic Stage: Sir Richard’s Condoms
Conclusion: The Desire of the Other
Acknowledgements
Notes
References
9 Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist
Towards a Formal Difference in Discourse Between Žižek and Lacan
The Discourse of the Capitalist: Production and Consumption
The Dynamics of Production
The Dynamics of Consumption
Consequences and Symptoms of the Decline of the Master and the Rise of the Universe of Capitalism
Waste and the Discourse of Bio-Power
The Decline of Symbolic Efficiency and the Discourse of Immaterial Labor
The Discourse of Critical Theory
Conclusion
Appendix: A Brief Summary of Lacan’s Structuralist Theory of Discourse
Notes
References
Part III: Popular Culture
10 Enjoying the Cinema
Notes
References
11 Losing What We Never Had: Žižek and Lacan Rock On with Bryan Adams
Those Were the Best Days of My Life
Standing on Your Mamma’s Porch
I Close My Eyes, and She Slips Away
Long After the Thrill of Living Is Gone
Tonight, Let’s Enjoy Life
Conclusion: Hold on to Sixteen as Long as You Can …
Notes
References
12 Interpellating Django: The Functions of the Gaze in Tarantino’s Django Unchained
Note
References
13. You Only Die Thrice: Zombies Revisited in The Walking Dead
The Zombie Sub-genre
Grotesque Zombie Sublime
Death ad nauseam
Holocaust Shades
Notes
References
14 They Were Created by Man … and They Have a Plan: Subjective and Objective Violence in Battlestar Galactica and the War on Terror
Repetition and Farce in the “War on Terror”
Subjective and Objective Violence
Subjective and Objective Violence in BSG, or, You Can’t Love a Skin-Job
Fear and Racism in the Human Fleet
The Background
First as Tragedy …
Conclusion: Should We Care About the Tyrant’s Bloody Robes?
Notes
References
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Žižek Studies The Greatest Hits (So Far) EDITED BY

David J. Gunkel & Paul A. Taylor

Žižek Studies

1 GUNKEL & TAYLOR, EDS.

ŽIŽEK STUDIES

Antonio Garcia and Rex Butler Series Editors Vol. 1

ŽIŽEK STUDIES The Greatest Hits (So Far)

The Žižek Studies series is part of the Peter Lang Humanities list. Every volume is peer reviewed and meets the highest quality standards for content and production.

Žižek Studie The Greatest Hits (So Far)

PETER LANG

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw EDITED

BY

David J. Gunkel & Paul A. Taylor

Žižek Studies The Greatest Hits (So Far)

EDITED BY

David J. Gunkel and Paul A. Taylor

PETER LANG

New York  Bern  Berlin Brussels  Vienna  Oxford  Warsaw

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gunkel, David J., editor. | Taylor, Paul A., editor. Title: Žižek studies: the greatest hits (so far) / edited by David J. Gunkel & Paul A. Taylor. Description: New York, NY: Peter Lang, 2020. Series: Žižek studies; Vol. 1 | ISSN 2475-7012 Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019019942 | ISBN 978-1-4331-4617-6 (hardback: alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4331-4718-0 (ebook pdf) ISBN 978-1-4331-4719-7 (epub) | ISBN 978-1-4331-4720-3 (mobi) Subjects: LCSH: Žižek, Slavoj. Classification: LCC B4870.Z594 G86 2019 | DDC 199/.4973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019019942 DOI 10.3726/b15734

Bibliographic information published by Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek. Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the “Deutsche Nationalbibliografie”; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de/.

© 2020 Peter Lang Publishing, Inc., New York 29 Broadway, 18th floor, New York, NY 10006 www.peterlang.com All rights reserved. Reprint or reproduction, even partially, in all forms such as microfilm, xerography, microfiche, microcard, and offset strictly prohibited.

Table of Contents

List of Figures vii Acknowledgements ix Editors’ Introduction xi Part I  Philosophy 1. Žižek and the Real Hegel David J. Gunkel

5

2. Žižek’s Kant, or The Crack in the Universal (Politicizing the Transcendental Turn) Matthew Sharpe

33

3. Žižek’s Brand of Philosophical Excess and the Treason of the Intellectuals: Wagers of Sin, Ugly Ducklings, and Mythical Swans Paul A. Taylor

57

4. The Hegelian “Night of the World”: Žižek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality Robert Sinnerbrink

77

Part II  Politics 5. A Hermeneutic of Hope: Problematizing Žižek’s Apocalypticism Ola Sigurdson 6. Barack Obama, the New Spirit of Capitalism and the Populist Resistance Olivier Jutel

105

125

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Table

of

Contents

7. Capitalism’s Cynical Leviathan: Cynicism, Totalitarianism, and Hobbes in Modern Capitalist Regulation Peter Bloom

145

8. The Joy of Inequality: The Libidinal Economy of Compassionate Consumerism Japhy Wilson

175

9. Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist Levi R. Bryant

199

Part III  Popular Culture 10. Enjoying the Cinema Todd McGowan

251

11. Losing What We Never Had: Žižek and Lacan Rock On with Bryan Adams Graham Wolfe

259

12. Interpellating Django: The Functions of the Gaze in Tarantino’s Django Unchained Abigail Fagan

279

13. You Only Die Thrice: Zombies Revisited in The Walking Dead Vlad Dima 14. They Were Created by Man … and They Have a Plan: Subjective and Objective Violence in Battlestar Galactica and the War on Terror Luke Howie

293

313

Notes on Contributors 335 Index 339

Figures

9.1

The Discourse of the Capitalist

205

9.2

The Discourse of the Master

215

9.3

The Discourse of Bio-Power

224

9.4

The Discourse of Immaterial Production

230

9.5

The Discourse of Critical Theory

235

9.6

The Formal Structure of Discourse

238

9.7

The Universe of Mastery

241

9.8

The Universe of Capitalism

241

9.9

The Third Universe of Discourse

242

9.10

The Fourth Universe of Discourse

242

9.11

The Fifth Universe of Discourse

243

9.12

The Sixth Universe of Discourse

243

Acknowledgements

This book is a testament to the commitment and dedication of a community of individuals from across the globe who—despite widely different interests, backgrounds, and professional affiliations—share an abiding interest in the work of Slavoj Žižek. For this reason, we dedicate this Greatest Hits to that community. The journal, the nascent field of what is now called, for better or worse, “Žižek Studies,” and this collection of essays is the direct result of this interest, support, and friendship. We also need to recognize and extend a “thank you” to Imanol Galfarsoro, a Basque Liverpool FC supporter, who took over the reins as General Editor of the journal, when Paul Taylor needed to take a step back from IJŽS’s dayto-day operations. The heavy-lifting of organizing, assembling, and editing the chapters was supported by three very talented graduate research assistants from Northern Illinois University (NIU): Katherine Willis, Kyle Jacobs, and Danielle Waterson. The index was assembled by Michelle Kittling-Brewer, another talented NIU graduate student. The book that you hold in your hands would not have come together and materialized as such, if it was not for their careful attention to detail and tireless efforts. Finally we need to thank Slavoj Žižek for putting up with us and the journal over the past 10+ years. He always thought we were wasting our time with this thing. Hopefully it was time well wasted.

Editors’ Introduction

Why Žižek? And Why Online? Over a decade ago the idea for the International Journal of Žižek Studies (IJŽS) initially came from Paul A. Taylor who took inspiration directly from the already existing International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS) run by the late, much missed, Gerry Coulter of Bishops University, Quebec. The idea of launching a new a journal—and a web-distributed journal—exclusively dedicated to the work and writings of Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek immediate lead to critical questions and reflection. “Why Žižek?” This question asks about content. It asks, in particular, for scholars to reflect on the role Žižek’s work plays in shaping various research programs and investigations. And it asks for a justification. Why, for example, would anyone bother dedicating a journal to one particular individual who is still very much alive and whose oeuvre remains open-ended, indeterminate, and dynamic? These questions concerning the intended content of the journal, although undeniably important, were accompanied by another question concerning form—“Why online?” Why, for instance, would one decide to publish this content on the web? Why distribute the journal through the fiber-optic cables of the Internet as opposed to being printed on paper and distributed through the usual time-honored channels (like the book in your hand—which we would justify in the same way that, despite the many advantages of digital music, we ultimately prefer vinyl)? Was an online journal merely an instrumental convenience or even a contrivance? Or could there be legitimate philosophical and political reasons for such a decision? In the following, we take up and investigate these two questions in order to account for the coming-into-being of the International Journal of Žižek Studies and to contextualize and situate this remarkable collection of essays that represent what we believe has been the best of the best or our Greatest

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Hits. The two questions are not unrelated. In fact, the question “Why Žižek?” and the question “Why online?” are implicated in one another. Or as G.W.F. Hegel has it: “what we have presented here is the absolute correlation of content and form, namely the reciprocal turning [Umschlagen] of the one into the other” (Hegel 1987, 265).

In the Beginning  …  Paul initially tried to develop the journal on his own, leveraging that DIY ethos that was the subject of his early work in hacker culture. He began by designing a website banner and basic page layout but quickly realized that he was completely out of his comfort zone and knowledge base. He turned straight away to David Gunkel an unusual breed of academic—someone steeped in Theory (more about the use of the capital T shortly) and also highly competent in all things web-based. David, as always, had too much on his plate to start running a new journal but perhaps a clue as to the reason why he allowed himself to be inveigled into the project was contained within his succinct response to Paul’s early blue and yellow themed design efforts— “It looks like the banner for a Swedish porn site.” Suitably chastened, Paul then enrolled the help of a design-literate friend, Terry Speake, who came up with both the IJŽS logo—something we called “the slot-top Z”—and colour scheme, which David then brought alive as a functioning website. From the very start of the journal, David was very clear that we should use a Creative Commons license which meant that 1) journal content would be open access and freely available to all readers across the globe and 2) the intellectual property (IP) of published material would remain in the control of the original authors with the stipulation that any and all subsequent usage acknowledged IJŽS as the original site of publication. This particular approach to open access content chimed fully with Paul’s appreciation of the innate accessibility of the IJBS and his perennial frustration with the supine acquiescence of the academic profession to a profoundly iniquitous system of journal publication and draconian control over intellectual property. In academic book publishing, the original authors receive a very small percentage of the net profits, but at least a discrete physical piece of property is produced with relatively low profit margins or, in the case of a university press, as a nonprofit operation. In contrast, the whole model of publishing conventional academic journals is premised upon an (eminently avoidable) system of labor exploitation. Academics provide the initial content, conduct the peer reviews of submissions, and carry out the editing process. Authors are then even further called

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upon to perform the task of proof reading and correcting the galley proofs. At the end of this very involved and labor-intensive process, publishers then distribute the final product under a subscription model, charging University libraries large sums for the privilege of providing patrons access to the intellectual content produced by their own faculty. And if for some reason (like diminishing funds to support serials) the library does not subscribe to the journal in which one has published research, authors and his/her students cannot access the content without a paying out of pocket for the privilege of access. A  further aspect of this irrational situation is that, in addition to employing and supporting the primary producers of content, those same universities frequently have all the necessary conditions and equipment to act as publishers themselves, if they so wished. It is as a direct reaction to this institutionalized foolishness that freely available, open access journals like IJŽS have sprung up as countervailing initiative. This model of content creation and distribution is a product of the exigencies of print technology. Although the technology has changed, the model has remains in place and largely unquestioned. In fact, the situation has not improved very much in the 10+ years since IJŽS began publication. Though IJŽS was part of what could (in retrospect) be called the academic “avant garde” in 2006, today the “online journal” is pretty much de rigour in academic publishing. Most academic journals from the big names in the business (and it is big business)—like Sage, Springer, Routledge, Elsevier, Emerald, etc.—are now online journals. As such, they employ and exploit many of the innovations pioneered by IJBS, IJŽS, and other early adopters: online review and processing of submissions, web-based distribution of content, “just in time” publication providing access to content prior to or in the process of issues being fully assembled and populated, fully searchable journal data bases and articles, etc. Today these features seem entirely natural to and a necessary aspect of any academic journal. But in 2006, when IJŽS was just starting out, it was revolutionary and untested. At that time, “serious” academic journals needed to be on paper, because (as many of our colleagues had argued at the time) “you can’t trust anything on the Internet.” There was also a widespread and rather curious criticism heard from both colleagues and publishers alike, that the electronic nature of an online journal meant that one could not read in the bathtub, as if reading academic publications was something that was routinely performed during personal grooming and bathing. For these reasons, submitting an essay to IJŽS was a bit of a risk, and early adopters often had to prove to their institutions that the online journal was a credible source of peer-reviewed publication. But even if the mainstream academic journal has slowly but surely come to realize and even exploit the

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opportunities of online publication, their integration of open access options has often undermined the best of intentions. Currently, the big names in journal publishing have some form of open access option, but they use what is commonly called “gold open access.” This means that authors can publish in the journal, retain copyright to their contribution, and have the submission made freely available to all users without the burden of subscription or other form of payment. But the costs associated with the publication are then passed on to the author or his/her institution in the form of an article processing fee (APF). And anyone who has been through this process with Sage, Springer, Routledge, etc. knows that the cost of doing so is not cheap—typically something in the range of $1100 to $1800 USD depending on the journal. This fee, it is important to point out and recall, may appear to be minimal and of marginal importance for senior faculty with externally funded research grants at a top-tier universities in Europe or the United States. But it is exceedingly burdensome for junior faculty in the early stages of their career, who do not have access to institutional funding sources; independent scholars without institutional affiliation and revenue streams; or researchers working at small teaching colleges or in parts of the world that are typically (and pejoratively) identified as “developing.” The APF is (for better or worse) firmly situated in and supported by the neo-liberal ideology that has taken hold of institutions of higher education in the early decades of the 21st century. So what the one hand giveth, the other taketh away. Commercial academic journals have caught up to innovations in digital technology and are following the lead of IJŽS (and other journals like it), moving to online submission, review, and distribution of content. But they have doubled down on monetizing their product. They still charge users for access to standard content (i.e. $29 USD for a one time use of a single article) and require that authors assign to the publisher all interests in and rights to the submitted content. But they now offer an open access option. This option is pay-to-play, where authors can retain IP rights over their material if and only if they (or their institution) provide up-front payment in the form of an APF. For this reason, the continued existence of a journal like IJŽS is important, because it provides, as it always has, practical counter-measures to commercialized forms of academic publishing.

A Man with Qualities—Žižek the Public Intellectual So much for the practical issues of online publishing and open access to published content, but why create an online/open access journal devoted to the output of one single (and most shockingly for some people), living

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thinker—Slavoj Žižek? Part of the answer to this question can perhaps be found in the motivating origins of the earlier IJBS. Jean Baudrillard was a prolific writer, but he did not fit in a neat disciplinary mould (a sociologist by training, a philosopher and cultural theorist by nature). Within academia he is routinely and egregiously dismissed as a postmodern relativist (as is Žižek), whenin fact even a fleeting reading of his oeuvre reveals an almost Old Testament style contempt for relativism and the intellectual depredations created by a highly mediated society. There was something about Baudrillard’s work (perhaps his frequently ironic, tongue-in-cheek Gallic style of writing) that mainstream academia either could not, or would not, confront with genuine intellectual openness. It is therefore not surprising that this vacuum was filled by an online journal. In Žižek’s case, a similar level of institutional sniffiness exists. A genuine engagement with his work requires some humility because he challenges the amour-propre of established academics by drawing upon a challenging range of deeply complex psychoanalytical and philosophical core sources such as Hegel, Heidegger, and Lacan and then mixes it with rude jokes, popular culture references, and what the stereotypical “serious academic” is quick to dismiss as mere entertainment—Hollywood movies, instead of more serious “art films.” Žižek uses this unlikely but highly original mashup of materials to reach beyond the disciplinary silos that act as a security blanket for pragmatically ambitious but deeply uncurious scholars. The fact that Žižek stands out so forcefully in the current intellectual climate is partly due to his own uniquely charismatic qualities, but also because of the parlous commodified and bureaucratized state of today’s university sector which provides the bleak background from which he stands out. Today, the idea of the university bears more than a passing resemblance to Siegfried Kracauer’s account of “the idea” becoming merely “an ostentatious façade” honoured more in the breach than the observance:  “The group that has gained power certainly does not abandon the idea, even though it has in fact deserted the idea and is now just floating along in reality … Its relations to the contents of should-being that once constituted it are in truth now only of a superficial sort, the idea having become pure decoration, an ostentatious façade for a partly rotten interior which represents, together with this façade, a unity that is nothing short of a mockery of spirit” (Kracauer 1995, 167). Intellectually curious academics now frequently find themselves in a situation akin to that of a devout Catholic at the time of the Borgias, struggling to find space to say the rosary in the midst of a papal orgy. It is no coincidence therefore that Žižek’s widespread popularity has arisen at the same time that virtue-signaling conformity within universities has increasingly replaced conceptual exploration. A  key insight from the

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psychoanalytical tomes from which Žižek draws his inspiration is the fact that whatever comes to be repressed will reappear elsewhere in a different form. Our personal experience with organizing and attending Žižek-related events is that there is an almost palpable hunger for the intellectual buzz he provides that is no longer present (or is at best an “ostentatious façade”) in the institutions of higher education. In the UK, for example, the very fact that privately held companies called the Academy of Ideas and the Institute of Art and Ideas have prospered by promoting open discussion of difficult and controversial topics gives some small indication of the gap in public discourse that needs to be filled because universities are failing to engage with a public (despite or perhaps because of their bureaucratic drive to promote “impact” as a research goal). As acerbically described on the Academy of Ideas (2018) website: “At a time when inclusivity and equality are the watchwords of government higher-education policy, and education seems to be valued for almost any sake except its own, we think it’s vital to take a stand for the value of the content of education instead of fixating on object and process.” Žižek thus succeeds where universities routinely fail in terms of public engagement partially because of his infectious enthusiasm for all things theoretical (even when the audience may not fully understand the esoteric content) and partly because, fully understood or not, that theory often serves to shed light upon some of the most pressing issues of our time. Žižek is not the most prepossessing of speakers, he lisps and he could be said to be sartorially challenged, yet his intellectual charisma provides audiences and readers with something they are sorely lacking. Whilst Western mainstream media failed to predict and then failed to understand phenomena like Donald Trump’s election in the US and the success of the Brexit referendum in the UK (and all too often lazily lump the two very distinct events together), the way in which Žižek blends ideological analysis with psychoanalytical insight serves to provide a much needed corrective to the media’s bromides and tired old formats. Arguably, Žižek’s biggest contribution to intellectual life comes from how he has rehabilitated so spectacularly the notion of Theory with a capital T. In an age when academics are increasingly expected to subject themselves to a battery of quantitative metrics designed to measure their “impact,” their citability, their research productivity, etc. and at a time when the humanities are often seen as the poor cousin to the hard sciences or STEM disciplines and their self-styled imitator the social sciences, Žižek is unapologetic in his insistence on the primacy of Theory. With his patented mix of high theory and low culture, Žižek is able to engage with and explain contemporary phenomenon not by, for example, dismissing facts as fake news, but by demonstrating the subterranean psychological currents and ideological eddies that provide

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the fuller context from which to understand better those facts and their significance. In an age when experts are distrusted like never before, Žižek is uniquely valuable as a guide for understanding why hitherto under-acknowledged processes of belief and their inextricable links to ideology play a fundamental role in how people come to understand the world around them. Within academia, at least one of the reasons Žižek is often viewed as persona non grata is because of his ribald humour and lewd jokes. This is not a surprising outcome given the often po-faced and precious climate that pervades contemporary academic discourse. But such knee-jerk dismissals of Žižek’s humorous method miss its substantive significance as memorably pointed out by Todd McGowan in the inaugural issue of IJŽS: “Without seriousness, theory becomes nothing but the bad conscience of the ruling ideology. It offers questions but never approaches truth. Only a serious theory can permit us to recognize the truth that we are living without being aware of it. Only in theoretical seriousness does the possibility exist for us to give up the quest for a truth based on knowledge and to embrace a truth of non-knowledge that structures our being. But first we must recognize that the path to seriousness is strewn with jokes” (McGowan 2007). Although Žižek rarely makes explicit reference to the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, his critique of institutionalized forms of seriousness and the willingness to take a risk on what is ludic—even to the point of playing the role of “philosophical fool”— follows the spirit, if not the letter, of what Nietzsche called Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft or The Gay Science.

Screening Thought The media establishment is, ironically, perhaps one of the last unexplored regions of our communications-saturated age. Despite our society now being one of extreme transparency (in the UK, for example, Channel 4 airs the program Naked Attraction in which nubile people select a date from a range of unclothed contestants) rarely does one expose the manufacturers of consent or comment upon the commentariat. Because of the way Žižek looks and sounds—add to that the radical nature of what he says—his audience and reader are provided with a corrective lens with which to view contemporary events and crucially the various structures that determine how those events are perceived and processed. His work encourages us to recognize both the distinction and relationship between the subject of the enunciation (what is said) and the enunciated subject (how we ourselves are formed by how we come to say things). In fact, this formulation characterizes his particular way of theorizing truth and its

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mediated representation: “At the level of positive knowledge,” Žižek (2008, 3) writes, “it is, of course, never possible to (be sure that we have) attain(ed) the truth—one can only endlessly approach it, because language is ultimately self-referential, there is no way to draw a definitive line of separation between sophism, sophistic exercises, and Truth itself (this is Plato’s problem). Lacan’s wager is here the Pascalean one: the wager of Truth. But how? Not by running after ‘objective’ truth, but by holding onto the truth about the position from which one speaks.” The strategic advantage to this particular approach, then, is not that it provides one with privileged and immediate access to the object in its raw or naked state but that it continually conceptualizes the place from which one claims to know anything and submits to investigation the particular position that is occupied by any epistemological claim whatsoever. The flipside of Žižek’s general rejection of and by the Ivory Tower of academe is that he has been much sought after to appear in various media outlets for exactly that same outré edginess. A  quick scan of media articles about Žižek will thus, with depressing and predictable regularity, throw up the caricatured sound bites of “the Elvis of cultural theory” and “the Marx brother.” More than any other significant thinker we are aware of, Žižek has walked this tightrope of media prominence and intellectual validity. Žižek’s disheveled ursine affability has made him a highly successful counterpoint to the media’s more typically urbane choice of talking heads ranging from the precisely-coiffured representatives from US think tanks to the more strategically unkempt Gallic hirsutism of such figures as Bernard Henri Levy. Widely admired for his highly energized discourse of otherwise off-puttingly esoteric material, his irrepressible joie de théorie is, nevertheless, vulnerable to recuperation. Jean Baudrillard uses the phrase the “mortal dose of publicity” to describe the tendency that all too often kills off the substance of radical thought. In the documentary Žižek! the eponymous theorist admits that “My big worry is not to be ignored but to be accepted.” This is the tightrope he walks in the media spotlight. His work garners great attention but with the constant risk that the full complexity of his thought will be lost in the glare of the media spectacle. As Hannah Arendt (2006, 204) memorably observed: “There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say.” Later in the film, Žižek speculates “I’m almost tempted to say that making me popular is a resistance against taking me seriously.” We would argue that, in this context, one of the most important features of Žižek’s rise to prominence as a very public intellectual is the way in which he takes the risk of not being

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taken seriously in order to shed light onto the media’s standard operating procedures—what normally, “goes without saying.” Since over-familiarity breeds consent, we tend to forget that the screens (noun form) that pervade our lives are innately predisposed to actively screen (verb form) what it is that gets to be seen. Paul experienced this distinction first hand when, in May 2011, he appeared at the Institute of Cultural Affairs with Žižek in a public talk entitled Screening Thought. The auditorium was over-subscribed, so the organizers live-streamed the event into an adjoining cinema. One practical effect of this was that the lights in the hall had to be kept off to facilitate filming but this prevented Paul and Slavoj from interacting naturally with the audience. The irony that the talk’s title and content related to precisely this sort of media screening and circumscription of how thought is communicated seemed to be lost upon the audience. In fact, they further heightened this effect by appearing to enjoy the spectacle of Žižek on screen more than his actual thoughts or the content of his statements. At times, therefore, Žižek appears to be a victim of his own mediated success. His wager is that amidst the media hoopla and entertainment a path to serious and critical thinking remains clearly visible and accessible.

The Greatest Hits—An Axe for the Frozen Sea Within Us For the sake of organization and structure, the book has been segmented into three parts or sections: Philosophy, Politics, and Popular Culture. This organizational structure is ad hoc, and it is more matter of convenience than anything else. It proceeds from and was suggested by the content, specifically the way that the critical writings about Žižek and his work have been developed in the course of a dozen years of publication effort at the journal. As we began identifying and arranging essays for this volume, different texts began to coalesce around these three concepts. At the same time, however, we are very conscious of the fact that much of Žižek’s appeal lies in the effortless way in which he vaults over such narrow definitional confines, and it would be possible to organize and sequence the contributions in a number of other ways. This is because Žižek, perhaps more than any other thinker we know, successfully marries highly complex theoretical speculation with a myriad of examples taken from popular films, TV, or just everyday objects. The result is a fascinating mélange of the past and present, the ideological and the idealistic, the sacred and the profane, the high and the low. And it is in an effort to support and foster this concatenation of ideas that we created the journal and now issue this book of Greatest Hits.

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In fact, the title of the book and its method of assembly is both inspired by and a testament to the success of Žižek’s example. In music, popular music in particular, “greatest hits” is the title that is applied to an assemblage of those musical compositions that have, over a period of time, made a particular recording artist notable and noticeable. The collection of material is often carefully curated and decisions about what goes in and what is left out is something that is decided on the basis of “popularity”—what songs topped the charts, were included in heavy rotation on the radio (proto-streaming media for those of you born after the advent of the Internet), or fan favorites. Applying the same name and procedure to an academic journal risks a kind of disciplinary blasphemy. Unlike popular music, an academic journal—especially a journal in philosophy—concerns (or at least should concern) serious thinking. Applying pop culture terms and procedures to this material seems to diminish its importance and risks playing with what is most valued. At the same time, however, this “misapplication” provides a critical insight that challenges the way that contemporary culture is divided and compartmentalized. Žižek Studies–The Greatest Hits (so far) is an effort, in both form and substance, to release this kind of critical challenge. And the parenthetical (so far) has been added in order to indicate that this is just a beginning and that there will be other “hits” outside of and beyond what has been collected here. Ultimately, we cannot think of a better description of the true value of Žižek’s work than the following excerpt from a letter by Franz Kafka (1977) to his schoolmate Oskar Pollak from 27 January 1904. Kafka, the single most powerful critic of the bureaucratic totalitarian mindset makes a powerful case for the sort of texts that Žižek, agent provocateur par excellence, revels in both analyzing and producing himself: “I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A  book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.” The authors of the different essays collected in this collection of “greatest hits” have found Žižek’s books to be an effective tool for challenging and shattering the ice of the status quo. It is our hope that this book, which contains the best and the brightest from over one decade of work with IJŽS, can provide something similar for a new generation of readers.

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References Arendt, Hannah. 2006. Between Past and Future:  Eight Exercises in Political Thought. New York: Penguin. Hegel, G. W. F. (1830) 1987. Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of The Philosophical Sciences. Translated by William Wallace. Reprint, Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Kafka, Franz. 1977. Letters to Family, Friends and Editors. New York: Schocken. Kracauer, Siegfried. 1995. The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays. Translated by Thomas Y. Lewis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McGowan, Todd. 2007. Serious Theory. International Journal of Žižek Studies 1(1): 58–67. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

Part I  Philosophy Officially speaking Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher. He has advanced degrees in the discipline and the opening lines of his Wikipedia page read: “Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian philosopher.” But Žižek’s relationship with the academic discipline that is called “philosophy” is—to repurpose a formulation that Žižek himself borrows from Jacques Rancière—“a part that is not a part” (Dean 2010, 187). Žižek is, for lack of a better description, a philosophical monster—a kind of excessiveness that comes out of philosophy but that distorts the assumed natural order of things and in so doing demonstrates (the French word monstre, from which the English noun is derived, means “to show” or “to make evident”) the inherent limitations and restrictions that customarily define its structure and operations. For this reason, Žižek, who is trained in philosophy and a card-carrying member of the club, is often excluded or marginalized by professional academic philosophers, who endeavor to protect the integrity of their discipline by excluding his efforts as something other than proper philosophical reasoning, argumentation, and comportment. Consider, for instance, how “the philosopher” is portrayed (when “he” is portrayed, and the gender exclusive pronoun is already one of the defining character traits of this portrayal) in the standard Hollywood narrative. The philosopher, or any academic for that matter, is almost always a middle-aged man, dressed in a tweed jacket with elbow patches, and, although commonly socially inept, especially with the ladies, presents himself as well-spoken and erudite. Žižek not only does not fit this stereotypical image, he undermines every element of it. He lisps when he talks and gesticulates wildly; he wears old T-shirts and rarely appears in the standard academic uniform; he makes what many find to be rude jokes or off-color comments; and he mixes and mashs-up different philosophical sources in a way that seems to be deliberately inattentive to the authority or integrity of the original texts. He simply does not fit the image one has of The Philosopher.

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But like everything Žižek says and does, this conclusion cannot be taken at face value. It should instead be leveraged for a critical re-evaluation of the accepted image of the philosopher that structures and makes this kind of judgment possible in the first place. In other words, it is not the case that Žižek perverts the proper image of The Philosopher. Rather, his deliberately abrasive appearance and iconoclastic behavior expose how the standard image of the philosopher is already a distorted and arguably inaccurate version. Western philosophy’s prototype, the man called “Socrates,” was (as far as we know from the historical accounts) a short, rotund, and notoriously ugly individual. Unlike the celebrated rhetoricians of the time, who not only spoke well but provided valuable advice on all kinds of subjects, Socrates was (in)famous for his rough personal appearance, abrasive interpersonal demeanor, and self-professed ignorance—“I only know that I  do not know.” There is something of a retrieval of this Socratic ethos in the persona of Žižek. His disheveled appearance and maladroit mode of presentation—things that from a refined philosophical perspective would be written-off and excused as mere accidents of appearance—make all the difference for his philosophical project, which challenges many accepted procedures, processes, and presumptions of the discipline—not the least of which is the privileging of being over appearances. The first section of the book assembles and presents four essays that seek to situate the philosophical “disturbance” that is Žižek within the context and currents of philosophy. The first essay in the section, is from David J. Gunkel, and it concerns Žižek’s relationship to and use of the work of the 19th century German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel. Žižek’s reading of Hegel is, as he and many of his readers explicitly recognize, distinctly unorthodox. Efforts to appraise these readings often make reference to and mobilize the idea of the “real Hegel,” a recognized standard and authorized understanding of Hegelian philosophy against which a particular interpretation may be compared and evaluated. This concept of “the real,” which is utilized in one way or another by both adherents and critics, is rooted in fundamental ontological assumptions that are at least as old as Plato. Žižek’s critical interventions in the ontology of the real expose these assumptions and contest their procedures and outcomes. In doing so, Žižek not only questions the metaphysical foundations of traditional forms of criticism but provides for an alternative approach for evaluating his own readings and interpretations. Gunkel’s essay applies Žižek’s understanding of the Real to an evaluation of his reading of Hegelian philosophy. The author asks and pursues a number of related questions: Who or what gets to determine and authorize the “real Hegel?” What metaphysical propositions justify and legitimate these decisions? And what is at stake in continuing to operate according to these standards and protocols?

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In pursuing this investigation, Gunkel’s essay stages a critical reflection that not only reevaluates typical approaches to textual evaluation but sketches the basic contours of a distinctly Žižekian theory of reading and literary criticism. The second essay, “Žižek’s Kant, or The Crack in the Universal” comes from Matthew Sharpe. Contrary to the standard narrative (a narrative that Gunkel, for his part, leaves largely unquestioned), Sharpe suggests that Žižek’s philosophical project be situated and understood in the context of Immanuel Kant, Hegel’s immediate precursor and philosophical foil. The argument that is developed in this essay cuts across the grain of Žižek Studies, demonstrating how Žižek’s work—up to and including his radical (and often controversial) political statements, which have become more and more prominent since the turn of the century—can be recontextualized as an effort to reread Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” via Lacanian psychoanalysis. If Žižek’s objective is ultimately to formulate a philosophy of politics as opposed to what is typically called a “political philosophy” (more on this in the second section of the book), then these efforts, Sharpe argues, only make sense when they are grounded in a wider post- or neo-Kantian philosophy of subjectivity. Sharpe’s development of this material moves through three stages. The first part presents Žižek’s way of engaging with Kant on the subject of apperception. The second recounts Žižek’s pivotal reading of Kant’s concept of the sublime, which Žižek connects to the problematics of the “Transcendental Dialectic” in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. The third part then examines Žižek’s conception of subjectivity in terms of the faculties and especially the faculty of imagination. In the concluding section of the essay, the force of the chapter’s subtitle—“Politicizing the Transcendental Turn”—is explicated by developing and presenting three organizing principles that define Žižek’s “neo­Kantian/Hegelian” politico-ontology. The third essay from Paul Taylor takes up and directly engages with the excessive and ribald humor that has been the signature of Žižek’s textual output, so much so that in 2014 the MIT Press published a book of philosophical humor, consisting only of jokes carefully extracted from the pages of Žižek’s other writings and presented by themselves in a volume titled, quite predictably, Žižek’s Jokes. The very existence of this “joke book” demonstrates the opportunity/challenge that Taylor takes up and addresses in his essay. Žižek’s jokes are notable, undeniably entertaining, and, quite impressively, able to stand on their own. The “joke book” is a testament to Žižek’s inimitable skill as a writer/thinker and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s insight that “A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.” But the often off-color and vulgar humor that Žižek deploys and develops in his writings are not simply entertaining examples, textual decorations, or

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philosophy by another means. They are an integral component of his philosophical thinking and project, even if (and especially because) they have an irrepressible excessive character. The jokes belong to and are situated within the texture of philosophical thinking and yet they are designed to rupture the envelope of the philosophical enclosure and interrupt its mode of operation. The jokes, therefore, are a kind of Janus faced figure that is situated on the threshold of philosophy proper, looking both into the domain of philosophy and gesturing outside and beyond its conceptual limitations. Taylor’s essay does not attempt to explain or analyze the meaning of the jokes, which would, of course, render them impotent and insignificant. Instead he seeks to document how the jokes function with Žižek’s philosophical project and the way they often articulate and make manifest that which often goes without saying. The final essay comes from Robert Sinnerbrink, who has (we would argue) done more than any other contemporary thinker to establish and explicate the importance of Žižek’s contributions for the discipline of philosophy. As indicated in its title, Sinnerbrink’s text investigates the Hegelian “night of the world” that plays such an important role in Žižek’s theorizing about the subjectivity of the subject. In the first part, Sinnerbrink examine how the themes of “pre-synthetic imagination” and “abstract negativity” are crucial to understanding Žižek’s theorization of the Hegelian subject. In the second part, he considers how this model of the subject is decisive for understanding Žižek’s interpretation of Hegel’s “concrete universality,” and how this concept figures prominently in Žižek’s analysis of the relationship between the subject and the political situation of global capitalism. Following this trajectory, Žižek’s unorthodox reading of the Hegelian “night of the world”—the radical negativity that haunts subjectivity—is then further developed in an explicitly political direction. This Hegelian theme is used to helps explain Žižek’s critique of the “Fukuyamaian” consensus, shared both by moral-religious conservatives and libertarian “postmodernists,” that global capitalism remains the “unsurpassable horizon of our times.” At the end, Sinnerbrink concludes by raising questions about Žižek’s combining of abstract and determinate negation in his “romantic” reading of the negativity of the Hegelian subject and critically examining his efforts to reclaim the revolutionary tradition of Leftist politics. By ending in this way, the final essay opens up and makes a transition to the second section of the book, which will pursue and examine Politics.

References Dean, Jodi. 2010. Blog Theory: Feedback and Capture in the Circuits of Drive. Cambridge: Polity Press.

1.  Žižek and the Real Hegel David J. Gunkel Northern Illinois University (USA)

Žižek and Hegel … the terms and conditions of this relationship are, if anything, complicated and contentious. On the one hand, Žižek—or more precisely Žižek’s writings and publications—attempt to affect “a return to Hegel” (Žižek 1989, 7). This return, it seems, responds to and takes account of Michel Foucault’s rather ominous warning:  “We have to determine the extent to which our anti-Hegelianism is possibly one of his tricks directed against us, at the end of which he stands, motionless, waiting for us” (Foucault 1972, 235). According to Foucault’s characterization, the general movement of contemporary philosophy (in post-war France in particular) may be characterized as an attempt to escape from Hegel and the influence exerted by Hegelianism. This endeavor is, however, immediately complicated by the possibility that such an escape may itself be something already comprehended and anticipated by the Hegelian system. This is precisely the kind of argument Žižek mobilizes in Organs without Bodies, where he endeavors to demonstrate that the anti-Hegelianism of Gilles Deleuze, for all its concentrated and concerted efforts, remains thoroughly comprehended and controlled by Hegelian dialectic: “Deleuze equals Hegel” (Žižek 2004, 49). It is also evident in his encounters with other well-known poststructuralist readings of Hegel, like that proffered by Jacques Derrida. “What the Derridean deconstruction brings out,” Žižek (2002b) argues, “after a great struggle and declares to be the inherent limit of dialectical mediation—the point at which the movement of Aufhebung necessarily fails—Hegel posits directly as the crucial moment of this movement” (85).1 For Žižek, this inescapable “Hegelian remainder” does not (as Foucault’s comment seems to imply) so much come back around to bite us on the ass as it always and already is clinging to or hanging off the ass of the poststructuralist or anti-Hegelian

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project, unable to be effectively eliminated to begin with. And in all of this the excremental language is not simply a clever (albeit somewhat disgusting) metaphor. For Žižek, Hegel is quite literally something that cannot be easily eliminated despite efforts, claims, and pretensions to the contrary. On the other hand, Žižek is arguably a poor and less than celebrated champion of Hegel and Hegelianism. His readings are, as he himself is well aware, admittedly unorthodox and deliberately work against “a doxa which is today as commonplace on all sides of the philosophical spectrum, from Adorno to ‘post-structuralism’ ” (Žižek 2002b, 61). As Ian Parker (2004) describes it, “Žižek’s Hegel is quite different from the versions of Hegel that usually circulate in Western philosophy” (38). And most of the orthodox “true believers,” the avid readers of the Owl of Minerva and the staunch defenders of the Hegelian legacy, would not want to be seen in his company. Žižek’s Hegel is not their Hegel, and they often resist and criticize his bastardizations and the admittedly monstrous figure that they produce (Rasmussen 2004, unpaginated). As Peter Dews (1996) succinctly characterizes it, the basic problem is that Žižek’s “Lacanian reading of Hegel does not do justice to the complexity of Hegel’s thought” (247). Noah Horwitz (2005) takes this criticism one step further, arguing that Žižek’s mash-up of Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian psychoanalysis unfortunately gets both sides wrong: “Such a ‘return to Hegel’ not only risks mis-reading Hegel as Lacan avant la lettre, but risks reading Lacan as Hegel” (24). So it appears that Žižek is also the turd in the Hegelian punch bowl—a terrible and potentially embarrassing excrescence that effectively spoils the party for everyone involved. The relationship between Žižek and Hegel is, therefore, anything but straight forward and simple. And this complexity inevitable generates a number of intertwined and seemingly irresolvable questions:





• Can it be said that Žižek simply gets it wrong? Are his Lacanian influ-

enced readings of Hegel nothing more than truncated perversions and inappropriate deviations from both the letter and spirit of the Hegelian text? • Or is it the case, to put it in Hegelian terminology, that Žižek turns out to be the truth of Hegel, that his reactualization of Hegelian dialectics via Lacanian psychoanalysis constitutes a sublation of the difference that has opened up between Hegel and the poststructuralist deconstructive anti-Hegelianism of the late 20th century? • Or is it that Žižek, to borrow Heideggerian terminology, “retrieves” something from Hegel, something covered over by the sediment of

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interpretation, translation, and history that would be, as Žižek (1989, 205) says of Kant, more Hegelian than Hegel himself? In trying to formulate responses to these questions, we often find ourselves, for better or worse, in the somewhat uncomfortable position of needing to make reference to and relying on what can only be called “the real Hegel.” This is because, beginning with at least Platonic philosophy, efforts to demonstrate either faithful adherence to something or inaccurate deviation from it inevitably requires that one posit and/or have access to what is considered to be the real, the true, and the original (Plato 1987). Take for example the evaluation provided in T. M. Knox’s review of Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory: “The Hegel of the many text-books,” Knox (1942) writes, “is portrayed as preoccupied with logical abstractions; but the real Hegel pursued these only in order to discover a metaphysical framework for the solution of the concrete problems in politics, religion, etc., which were his primary interest” (265; emphasis added). In order to characterize, critique, and eventually dismiss the inaccurate accounts of Hegelian philosophy that have been circulated in the standard text-books, Knox makes reference to and invokes “the real Hegel.” This “real Hegel” is, it is argued, not only considerably different from what appears in these text-books but provides a consistent and unquestioned standard against which it is possible to identify these various representations as inaccurate or deceptive. A similar appeal to the “real Hegel” is made by Terry Pinkard, one of Hegel’s Anglophone biographers. “You can,” Pinkard explains in an interview from 2000, “sum up Hegel quickly, get the impression you understand him, and also dismiss him just as quickly. Looking at the real Hegel is harder but more rewarding” (Postel 2000, unpaginated; emphasis added). Even Žižek is not immune to this kind of transaction, which pits inappropriate apparitions against the “real thing.” At a crucial juncture in Organs without Bodies, for example, Žižek (2004) articulates three different and competing interpretations of Hegel and then asks the obvious question:  “So, which of these three positions is the ‘real’ Hegel?” (57). It is the “real Hegel,” then, that is the problem. We appear to need access to this real thing in order to characterize, evaluate, and/or criticize Žižek’s particular reading and understanding of Hegel. Yet it is Žižek, “the philosopher of the Real” as Tony Myers (2003, 29) characterizes him, who points out how the very concept of the real (and our seemingly irrepressible desire for access to it) is itself a real philosophical problem.

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Metaphysical Games At the risk of making what is by now a well-known, perhaps even trite, Žižekian gesture, I begin with a television game show. The program, To Tell the Truth, was created by Bob Stewart, produced by the highly successful production team of Mark Goodson and Bill Todman (arguably the Rodgers and Hammerstein of the television game show industry), and ran intermittently on several U.S. television networks since its premier in the mid-1950s. To Tell the Truth was a panel show, which like its precursor, What’s My Line (1950–1967)2 featured a panel of four celebrities, mainly “television personalities” like Nipsey Russell, Betty White, Gene Rayburn, and Kitty Carlisle. The panelists, who sat side-by-side behind a long desk, were confronted with a group of three individuals, or what the program’s host and referee called a “team of challengers.” Each member of this trio claimed to be a particular individual who had some unusual background, notable life experience, or unique occupation. The celebrity panel was charged with interrogating the three challengers and deciding, based on the responses to their questions, which one of the three was actually the person s/he purported to be—who, in effect, was telling the truth. In this exchange, two of the challengers engaged in deliberate deception, answering the questions of the celebrity panel by pretending to be someone they were not, while the remaining challenger told the truth. The “moment of truth” came at the game’s conclusion, when the program’s host asked the pivotal question “Will the real so-and-so please stand up?” at which time one of the three challengers stood. In doing so, this one individual revealed him/herself as the real thing and exposed, by comparison, the other two to be false representations and imposters. Although ostensibly a simple form of entertainment designed, like most programs in American broadcast television, to deliver an audience to product advertisers, To Tell the Truth is based on and stages some of the fundamental concerns of Western metaphysics. First, the program differentiates and distinguishes between the real thing and its phenomenal appearances. According to the program’s structure, the real thing is not only hidden by the various apparitions that are presented to the panel but is situated just below, behind, or outside (the spatial metaphors can be manipulated in a number of different ways) the surface of these apparitions. Consequently, there is a real thing. It is, however, hidden or concealed by various competing and somewhat unreliable appearances. Second, in the face of these different apparitions, the panelists attempt to ascertain what is real by interrogating the appearances and looking for significant inconsistencies, incongruities, and even betrayals within phenomenal reality. The panelists, therefore, scrutinize the appearances in

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order to determine what is real and what is not. Third, the effectiveness of this particular undertaking can be evaluated by comparing each panelist’s final judgment to the real thing. This means that the panelists will, at some point in the program, have access to the real itself, as itself and not as a mere appearance. At some point, then, namely at the end of the program, the real thing can be made to stand up, to show itself as itself, so that the panelists may have direct and unmitigated access to it. Finally, once the real thing is revealed, the four panelists (and the viewing audience) will know which appearances were truthful and which were false. They will come to perceive, by a kind of retrospective comparison, who among the challengers had been telling the truth and who was lying, who among the four panelists judged correctly and who did not and, most importantly, what is real and what is merely an illusory deception and fiction. This is, as any student of philosophy will immediately recognize, the basic configuration attributed to Platonic metaphysics. For mainstream Platonism, the real is situated outside of and beyond phenomenal reality. That is, the real things are located in the realm of supersensible ideas and what is perceived by embodied and finite human beings are derivative and deficient apparitions.3 This “doctrine of the forms,” as it eventually comes to be called, is evident, in various forms, throughout the Platonic corpus. It appears, for example, in the final book of The Republic, where Socrates distinguishes between the unique idea of something and its multifarious particular appearances: “ ‘Shall we, then, start the inquiry at this point by our customary procedure? We are in the habit, I take it, of positing a single idea or form in the case of the various multiplicities to which we give the same name. Do you not understand?’ ‘I do.’ ‘In the present case, then, let us take any multiplicity you please; for example, there are many couches and tables.’ ‘Of course.’ ‘But these utensils imply, I suppose, only two ideas or forms, one of a couch and one of a table’ ” (Plato 1987, 596a-b). According to the exchange that follows, the real thing—the real couch in this particular case—is the unique idea that exists outside of and beyond what would be called experiential reality, while the various things that we do encounter in this world through the mediation of our senses are derived from and secondary to this singular and eternal idea. There is, then, one eternal idea of the couch, of which particular couches are only derived imitations and apparitions. This distinction between the eternal and unchanging form of the real and its various sensible apparitions, however, introduces an epistemological problem, namely, how and where does one gain access to the real as such. Unlike To Tell the Truth, where the revelation of the real takes place at the end of the game, Plato’s Socrates situates access at the beginning, or more

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precisely, prior to and outside of the space and time of lived experience. “For a human being,” Plato has Socrates say in the Phaedrus, “must understand a general idea formed by collecting into a unity by means of reason the many perceptions of the senses; and this is a recollection of those real things which our soul once beheld, when it journeyed with a god and, lifting its vision above the things which we now say exist, rose up to real being” (Plato 1982, 249b-c). Platonic metaphysics, therefore, seems to invert the structure of To Tell the Truth, situating the revelation of the real at the beginning and not the end of the program. In this way, Platonism is actually more in-line with What’s My Line, Goodson and Todman’s initial panel show and the immediate precursor to To Tell the Truth. In What’s My Line, four celebrity panelists interrogated one challenger in an attempt to ascertain this particular individual’s occupation or line of work. Although the true identity of the challenger was concealed from the celebrity panel, it was revealed to both the studio and television audience in advance of the start of game play. In this way, the studio audience and television viewer were given privileged access to the real, while the panel was restricted from knowing such information. This epistemological difference created a kind of dramatic tension that was undeniably entertaining. Like an omniscient being, the audience knew the truth of all things and watched the mere mortal panel try to figure out the truth from their messy involvement in and limitation to particular apparitions. Although Goodson and Todman were most likely unaware of the influence, their game show was thoroughly informed by and functioned according to the protocols of Platonism. This Platonic structure, although well over 2400 years old, is also operative in contemporary science, especially theoretical physics. For contemporary physicists, what we perceive and call “real” does not, strictly speaking, have anything to do with what actually comprises physical reality. As Brian Greene (2004) explains it, “physicists such as myself are acutely aware that the reality we observe—matter evolving on the stage of space and time—may have little to do with the reality, if any, that is out there” (ix). Greene, who is an advocate of a brand of physics called “string theory,” argues that physical reality is actually comprised of vibrating filaments of energy called “strings.” The strings, which are estimated to be “some hundred billion billion times smaller than a single atomic nucleus” (Greene 2004, 345), cannot be observed with any conceivable instrument or tested through any currently available form of experiment. Instead their existence is calculated as the hypothetical resolution of a fundamental conflict between the equations of general relativity and quantum mechanics. For string theorists, then, the real of physical reality exists beyond the realm of human perception, and what we call “reality” is

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only a derived effect and apparition. Like the Platonic forms, the real of string theory is located outside the scope of direct experience and what is given to perception is little more than an apparitional phenomenon that is, strictly speaking, illusory. “If superstring theory is proven correct,” Greene (2004) concludes, “we will be forced to accept that the reality we have known is but a delicate chiffon draped over a thick and richly textured cosmic fabric” (19). This point is emphasized by recently published critiques, which specifically target and question the theory’s provability. According to its critics, like Lee Smolen (2006) and Peter Woit (2006), string theory, although mathematically elegant and undeniably popular in the academy, lacks one of the basic requirements of science—an empirically verifiable experiment. String theory, on this account, appears to be situated just outside the threshold of what is traditionally considered to be the proper test of scientific truth. This does not mean, however, that string theorists advocate a new form of “groundless idealism,” what one might be tempted to call Platonism 2.0, and that string theory has somehow abandoned the scientific method or is involved in perpetrating another Sokal hoax.4 Quite the contrary. “Nothing would,” Greene (2003) declares, “please string theorists more than to proudly present the world with a list of detailed, experimentally testable predictions. Certainly, there is no way to establish that any theory describes our world without subjecting its predictions to experimental verification” (210). String theorist, then, do not reject experimental validation, they simply postpone its achievement. That is, the empirically verifiable data necessary to prove string theory’s predictions, although currently inaccessible to us, will at some point in the not-too-distant future be made available as such. In support of this claim, advocates often point out that new insights in physics have often preceded experimental demonstration by a good number of years. “The history of physics is,” Greene (2003) argues, “filled with ideas that when first presented seemed completely untestable but, through various unforeseen developments, were ultimately brought within the realm of experimental verifiability” (226). Whereas Platonism, like the game show What’s My Line, situates access to the real in a prior revelation that takes place outside the space and time of terrestrial experience, theoretical physics, like the game show To Tell the Truth, locates its revelation within the material of empirical reality at a point in the not-too-distant future.

Critical Revisions and Perverse Remakes Immanuel Kant, who Žižek (2001a, 160; 2004, 45) considers to be the critical pivot in the history of Western thought, radicalizes the problem, wresting

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it away from naïve forms of both idealism and empiricism. Kant, following the Platonic precedent, differentiates between the object as it appears to us (finite and embodied human beings) through the mediation of our senses and the thing as it really is in-itself. “What we have meant to say,” Kant (1965) writes in the opening salvo of the Critique of Pure Reason, “is that all our intuition is nothing but the representation of appearance; that the things which we intuit are not in themselves what we intuit them as being, nor their relations so constituted in themselves as they appear to us” (A 42/B 59). This differentiation installs a fundamental and irreconcilable split whereby “the object is to be taken in a two-fold sense, namely as appearance and as thing in itself” (Kant 1965, B xxvii). Human beings are restricted to the former, while the latter remains, for us at least, forever unapproachable. “What objects may be in themselves, and apart from all this receptivity of our sensibility, remains completely unknown to us. We know nothing but our mode of perceiving them—a mode, which is peculiar to us, and not necessarily shared in by every being, though, certainly by every human being” (Kant 1965, A 42/B 59). Despite the complete and absolute inaccessibility of the thing itself, Kant still “believes” in its existence.5 “But our further contention must also be duly borne in mind, namely that though we cannot know these objects as things in themselves, we must yet be in a position at least to think them as things in themselves; otherwise we should be landed in the absurd conclusion that there can be appearances without anything that appears” (Kant 1965, B xxvi).6 Consequently, Kant redeploys the Platonic distinction between the real thing and its appearances, adding the further qualification that access to the real thing is, if we are absolutely careful in defining the proper use and limits of our reason, forever restricted and beyond us. It follows from this that if Kant’s critical philosophy had been employed in the design of To Tell the Truth, the game show would have been pretty much the same with one crucial difference.7 There would, of course, be the celebrity panel who would seek to know the truth through interrogation and the three challengers who would present this panel with various and competing appearances. At the moment of truth, however, the final gesture would be truncated. When the host asks the question “will the real so-and-so please stand up?” no one would respond; none of the challengers would stand and be recognized as the real thing. Instead, the panel and the audience would be confronted with fact that finite human beings are unable to know the thing as it truly is in itself. This does not mean, however, that there is no real thing. He/she/it would in fact exist, and Kant would be the first to insist upon it. He would, however, be just as strict in insisting that this real thing, whatever

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it really is, cannot be made to appear before us in phenomenal reality under the revealing lights of the television studio. It, whatever it is, remains forever off screen, perhaps just outside the frame of televisual phenomena, behind the curtain of the studio set, or held in the green room just down the hall. The Kantian version of the game, therefore, would probably end with a distinctly Kantian admonishment. Something like, “Remember folks, what you see here is all you get. Going further would be a violation of the proper use of our reason. Good night and see you next week.” Although perfectly consistent with the stipulations of the Critique of Pure Reason, such a program would not last very long, mainly because we would not get the final revelation and pay-off. We would, in effect, be forever denied and barred from the “the money shot.” This outcome is something that Hegel, in particular, would find unsatisfactory, but not for the obvious reason. What Hegel would object to is not the lack of resolution, that is, Kant’s seemingly stubborn insistence on the fundamental limitations of human knowledge and its absolute inability to achieve access to the thing-in-itself. Instead, Hegel criticizes Kant for pulling punches, for not taking his own innovations far enough. “It is Kant,” Žižek (2006) writes, “who goes only halfway in his destruction of metaphysics, still maintaining the reference to the Thing-in-itself as the externally inaccessible entity; Hegel is merely a radicalized Kant, who takes the step from negative access to the Absolute to the Absolute itself as negativity” (27). According to Žižek’s reading, what Hegel finds unsatisfactory is the fact that the Kantian revolution in metaphysics remains, despite and in the face of Kant’s own explicit claims, incomplete and unfulfilled. He only goes halfway, providing us with half a metaphysical revolution. For Kant, the thing-in-itself, although forever inaccessible to finite human beings, is still thought of as a positive, substantive thing. “Kant still presupposes that the Thing-in-itself exists as something positively given beyond the field of representation” (Žižek 1989, 205). Hegel finds this both incomplete and inconsistent. He therefore takes up and pushes the Kantian insight further. The Thing-in-itself expresses the object when we leave out of sight all that consciousness makes of it, all its determinate feelings and thoughts. It is easy to see what is left—utter abstraction, total emptiness, only described still as a beyond— the negative of every representation, feeling, and determination. Nor does it require much reflection to see that this caput mortuum is still only a product of thought … that it is the work of the empty I, which makes an object out of this empty self-identity of its own… . Hence one can only read with wonder the perpetual remark that we do not know the Thing-in-itself. On the contrary there is nothing we can know so easily. (Hegel 1987, 72)

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Hegel, therefore, criticizes Kant not for insisting on the necessarily limited capacity of human knowledge or the fundamental inaccessibility of the thingin-itself, but for wrongly presupposing that the thing-in-itself is some positive, substantive thing and missing the fact that this thing is itself “nothing but the inherent limitation of the intuited phenomena” (Žižek 1993, 39). “Where Kant thinks that he is still dealing only with a negative presentation of the Thing, we are already in the midst of the Thing-in-itself—for this Thingin-itself is nothing but this radical negativity. In other words—in a somewhat overused Hegelian speculative twist—the negative experience of the Thing must change into the experience of the Thing-in-itself as radical negativity” (Žižek 1989, 205–206). This Hegelian-influenced elaboration results in a much more complicated concept of the real, and Žižek finds Jacques Lacan to be the one thinker who gives it adequate articulation. On Žižek’s reading, the Lacanian real is anything but simple, and, beginning with Žižek’s earliest works, is characterized as consisting of two, seemingly incompatible aspects. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Žižek’s first book in English, the Real (which Žižek almost always distinguishes with a capital letter) is described as “simultaneously both the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency” (1989, 169). A similar explanation is provided in Tarrying with the Negative, which appeared four years later: “A certain fundamental ambiguity pertains to the notion of the Real in Lacan: The Real designates a substantial hard kernel that precedes and resists symbolization and, simultaneously, it designates the left-over, which is posited or produced by symbolization itself” (Žižek 1993, 36). Žižek’s ontology of the Real, therefore, appears, as Adrian Johnston (2008) characterizes it, to oscillate between “the (Kantian) Real-as-presupposed (présupposé) and the (Hegelian) Real-as-posed (posé)” (146).8 “Oscillation,” is an appropriate term in this context insofar as it connotes a continual shifting back and forth. For Žižek, then, it is not a matter of sequential progress, moving, for instance, from the Kantian perspective to the Hegelian. Nor is it a matter of choosing sides, deciding, for example, to back one team in opposition to the other. Nor is this all a result of sloppy or inaccurate thinking on Žižek’s part—what one might be tempted to identify as an inability to decide one way or the other. Instead it is a matter of perspective, the ability to see both sides simultaneously. “The Real,” Žižek (2003) argues, “is simultaneously the Thing to which direct access is not possible and the obstacle that prevents this direct access; the Thing that eludes our grasp and the distorting screen that makes us miss the Thing. More precisely, the Real is ultimately the very shift of perspective from the first standpoint to the second” (77). From one angle

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the Real is perceived as the Thing to which direct access is not possible—a kind of Kantian thing-in-itself. “On a second approach, however, we should merely take note of how this radical antinomy that seems to preclude our access to the Thing is already the Thing itself” (Žižek 2003, 77). For Žižek, then, the Real is parallactic. “It has no substantial density in itself, it is just a gap between two points of perspective, perceptible only in the shift from the one to the other” (Žižek 2006, 26). This alternative account of the Real, as Žižek points out on more than one occasion, bears a certain resemblance (without necessarily being the same) to a more sophisticated understanding of theoretical physics. Although Žižek (2006) pursues an interesting game of connect the dots with quantum mechanics, it is string theory that provides what is perhaps the best demonstration. As pointed out previously, string theory lacks any kind of experiment that would prove its insights and this lack has, as one might expect, fueled the efforts expended by the theory’s adherents and critics alike. The Real of string theory—the imperceptible strings of energy that supposedly vibrate in nine or more dimensions—are not directly accessible with any currently available or foreseeable process, technology, or experimental apparatus. Like Žižek’s account of the Lacanian Real, these strings are posited as the “hard kernel” that subtends and precedes the statements of theory. At the same time, however, these strings do not have any substantial density, cannot be directly observed with any conceivable instrument, and cannot be tested through any currently available form of experiment. They are, at least as things currently stand, nothing more than a lack or gap that appears within the texture of the theory itself. This does not mean, however, that anything goes—that anything and everything can be legitimately situated under the banner of “string theory.” String theorists neither tolerate this kind of epistemological relativism nor endorse, as Žižek (2003) characterizes it, the “ ‘postmodern’ notion that appearance is more valuable than stupid reality: that, ultimately, there is no final Reality, just the interplay between multiple appearances” (78). Žižek’s position on this is as strict as any physical scientist: “Everything is not just the interplay of appearance, there is a Real—this Real, however, is not the inaccessible Thing, but the gap that prevents our access to it” (78). This changes not so much the structure but the outcome of the metaphysical game. In what would be a Žižekian remake of To Tell the Truth, things would begin and proceed with little or no significant alteration. A celebrity panel would confront and interrogate three challengers, all of whom would make competing claims to be the real thing. The truth of the matter would, as in the Goodson/Todman production, be withheld. And because of this, the panel can only attempt to gain access to the real through an engagement

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with the manifold and often conflicting representations provided by the three challengers. The real difference becomes evident at the game’s end, when the real thing is asked to stand and reveal itself as such. Here, as in the Kantian version, we do not get the naïve gratification of the real making a final and revealing appearance in phenomenal reality. As with the Kantian conclusion, no one stands up. The difference—the “minimal difference,” as Žižek often calls it—comes immediately after or alongside this apparent failure or lack of resolution. The Žižekian game, unlike the Kantian version, would not conclude with a rather unsatisfactory and somewhat disappointing admonishment. In order for the game’s ending to be construed in this way, we would need, like Kant, to presuppose and place value in the positive existence of the thing itself. We would still need to “believe” in the thing-in-itself. Žižek’s version, however, would insist on “tarrying with the negative,” with the fact that this apparent lack of resolution is itself a resolution. Or to put it another way, at the end of the program, when no one stands up, there is no final and absolute revelation of the thing itself. This lack of revelation, however, is itself revealing. Through it, we come to see that the so-called real thing, which had been presupposed from the very beginning of the program and that had directed its very movement, is a kind of posed or posited fiction. “This unique procedure,” Žižek (2002b) writes in a passage that appears to address itself to the operations of the game show, “is the opposite of the standard revelation of the illusory status of (what we previously misperceived as) part of reality: what is thereby asserted is rather, in a paradoxical tautological move, the illusory status of the illusion itself—the illusion that there is some suprasensible noumenal Entity is shown precisely to be an ‘illusion’, a fleeting apparition” (xxxv). Consequently, what is revealed in the Žižekian version of the game is not a real thing standing above, behind, or outside of the play of appearances and comprehending everything. What is revealed is that this very expectation—an expectation that has been inherited from Plato and that has, since that time, held an important and controlling interest in Western intellectual history—is itself a metaphysical fantasy and fabrication.

Will the Real Hegel Please Stand Up? Žižek’s insights, although clearly influenced by Kant, Lacan, and others, are often referred to the philosophical innovations introduced by Hegel. When push comes to shove, it is Hegel who occupies the privileged position:  “Ultimately if I  am,” Žižek admits in an interview from 2004, “to choose just one thinker, it’s Hegel. He’s the one for me” (Rasmussen 2004, unpaginated). The question that remains, then, is how accurate and attentive

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are Žižek’s readings of Hegel? How faithful are his interpretations, representations, and characterizations in comparison to the thing we call and would recognize as being Hegel? Are what Žižek says and writes about Hegel and Hegelianism valid, truthful, and credible? Or do they show evidence of imprecise representations, deficient mischaracterizations, or perhaps even deliberate perversions? In order to answer these questions, we appear to need access to Hegel—not just this or that particular representation of Hegel but the real thing. In the parlance of the game show, we seem to need the real Hegel to stand up so that he can be recognized as such and we can, by comparison, evaluate Žižek’s representations to be accurate, flawed, or deceptive. In fact, we are in no position either to credit Žižek for getting it right or to criticize him for screwing it up without some form of appeal to this real thing that would anchor, substantiate, and authorize such a judgment. This all seems to be rather simple and straight forward. It is, however, anything but simple. Everything depends on how one understands and characterizes “the real.” The typical understanding and approach provides what appears to be immediate and satisfactory answers to these kinds of questions. In order to appraise Žižek’s representations of Hegel (or those of any other philosopher, for that matter), it is assumed that one would have unmitigated access to the real in itself, outside of and apart from the representations that are to be evaluated. Such access has been customarily situated in either in some fantastic past encounter or future revelation. The former, which comprises the party-line of mainstream Platonism and is exemplified in What’s My Line, is evident in those approaches to reading and literary criticism that are informed by and patronize communication theory. According to this formulation, there was a real Hegel to whom one could have had access at some point. That time, however, is now past. The real Hegel, the person and the author, is dead and gone. As a result of this, we are now limited to dealing with the manifold and multifarious appearances of Hegel that occur within phenomenal reality. This is comprised not only of the Phenomenology of Spirit but of all of the texts, notes, letters, and course transcripts that bear the authorizing signature of Hegel. Also included would be the numerous translations of this oeuvre, critical evaluations and interpretations by noted scholars like T. M. Knox or Alexandre Kojève, and, of course, the reactualization that is Žižek’s particular contribution. In the face of these different and often times competing versions/visions of Hegel, the reader is in the position of having to recollect what Hegel actually thought or really wanted to say from an engagement with what appears before him/her. And in the various debates and discussions that arise, one often finds oneself leveraging and making reference to this real Hegel, who would, it is assumed, be the final word, ultimate authority, and

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conclusive arbiter of any disagreement. As Roland Barthes (1967, unpaginated) characterized it, “the Author, when we believe in him, is always conceived as the past of his own book: the book and the author take their places of their own accord on the same line, cast as a before and an after: The Author is supposed to feed the book—that is, he pre-exists it, thinks, suffers, lives for it; he maintains with his work the same relation of antecedence a father maintains with his child.” This paternal metaphor has a long and venerable history within Western philosophy and is rooted in what is arguably the first articulation of a theory of reading and writing—Plato’s Phaedrus. According to an exchange that occurs towards this dialogue’s end, the written word is a kind of abandoned and wayward child who always needs the authority of its father to legitimize what it says (Plato 1982, 275d-e). The flipside of this arrangement is that kind of exacting realism often attributed to the “hard sciences” and exemplified in a game show like To Tell the Truth. In this case, access to the real is not something that recedes into an irrecoverable past but is projected into a future that is yet to come. Although string theory currently lacks a suitable experiment that would confirm its insights with empirically verifiable information, many physicists anticipate that such an experiment will, at some time in the not-too-distant future, be available and will yield the appropriate empirical data. At some point in the future, then, the real thing will, in the idiom of the game show, be made to stand and reveal itself as itself. Consequently the real Hegel, although not currently available, will at some future moment be made to stand up and be identified as such. This could occur, for instance, with the discovery of a text, a letter, or a lecture transcript that had not been widely available or read, like the recent interest in Hegel’s (fortuitously titled) Realphilosophie of 1805/06; a new translation of one of the canonical works that not only transforms Hegel’s 19th century German into something more readable but in doing so illuminates some previously inaccessible corner of his thought; or an insightful commentary or interpretation that brings Hegelian philosophy into contact with contemporary issues and that reveals aspects of Hegelianism that have until this time gone largely unnoticed or underappreciated. No matter how or where it takes place, this revelation of the real is not something that had occurred and is now past; it is something that is anticipated and still to come. This approach is particularly evident in that brand of philosophy that would be, as Kant (1965) had described it, “raised to the dignity of a science” (B xxxvi). In these cases, the real authority is not situated in the individual (more-often-than-not dead) philosopher who wrote this or that particular treatise but is situated elsewhere. “This shift,” as Žižek (2008) describes it, “is

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the shift from ‘I speak the truth’ to ‘the truth itself speaks (in/through me),’ to the point at which I can say, like Meister Eckhart, ‘it is true, and the truth says it itself’ ” (2). Already with Plato, responsibility for what Socrates says and does is referred elsewhere and placed in the service of another authorizing agent (Plato 1990, 23b-c). As Nietzsche (1974) characterized this rather distinctive rhetorical gesture, “It wasn’t I! Not I! But a god through me” (191). Similarly, the real authority in the physical sciences rests not in the particular expressions and opinions of this or that individual physicist, but with, for lack of a better description, Nature herself. And the real authority in philosophy is, according to Hegel’s own explanations, situated likewise. The real truth of Hegelianism, therefore, rests not in G. W. F. Hegel’s personal opinions, thoughts, or intentions. It is instead a matter of the Concept’s self-development and its own self-expression to which the philosopher Hegel contributes. This means, of course, that Hegel, the individual person and philosopher, is not necessarily the final and complete authority on Hegelianism, which is an insight that is explicitly mobilized and further developed by 20th century literary criticism in the wake of what Roland Barthes (1967) called “the death of the author.” In the Hegelian text, recognition of this particular situation is, as one would expect from a thinker (or thinking) so dedicated to self-conscious reflectivity, explicitly documented and identified as such: “The share in the total work of Spirit which falls to the individual can only be very small. Because of this, the individual must all the more forget himself, as the nature of Science implies and requires. Of course, he must make of himself and achieve what he can; but less must be demanded of him, just as he in turn can expect less of himself, and may demand less for himself” (Hegel 1977, 45). Although seemingly opposed, these two approaches share at least one fundamental assumption, namely, that the real thing (whether that consist in the thoughts of an individual philosopher or the philosophical truth of the matter) can, at some point (no matter how impossible that might seem at this current point in time), be revealed. What both agree upon, therefore, is a dedication to the real and the desire to have the real stand up and be recognized as such. Kant, of course, complicates things by demonstrating how access to this real thing-in-itself is forever restricted and inaccessible. There is, on his account, no privileged past or future revelation (or, what for Kant, at least, amounts to the same, no suitable way of knowing one way or the other) when the real thing would be given to us directly. When considered in this fashion, all we can ever have access to are the various appearances that occur in phenomenal reality and the real thing, whatever that might be, is something that remains forever, at least for us, restricted, withdrawn, and

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unknown. When the ultimate question is asked—Will the real Hegel please stand up?—we get nothing; there is no final, definitive, or authoritative revelation. “We know,” Barthes (1967, unpaginated) writes in a passage that appears to be indebted to this Kantian insight, “that a text does not consist of a line of words, releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the Author-God), but is a space of many dimensions, in which are wedded and contested various kinds of writing, no one of which is original.” This approach although seemingly more sophisticated and attentive to the facts on the ground (we can, it seems, no more go back in time to meet the real G. W. F. Hegel9 nor is there much hope that some final and definitive revelation will be made about the truth of Hegelianism in the future) has the potential to devolve into two kinds of abuses—abuses that Žižek identifies with the terms “democracy” and “totalitarianism.” “Both liberal-political democracy and ‘totalitarianism,’ ” Žižek (2002b) writes, “foreclose a politics of truth. Democracy, of course, is the reign of sophists: there are only opinions; any reference by a political agent to some ultimate truth is denounced as ‘totalitarian.’ What ‘totalitarianism’ regimes impose, however, is also a mere semblance of truth: an arbitrary Teaching whose function is simply to legitimize the pragmatic decisions of the Rulers” (176). Since we are, as Kant insists, restricted to the manifold of appearances and forever barred from accessing the thing-in-itself, there is, strictly speaking, no suitable access to a final and ultimate authority situated outside of and beyond this particular engagement with the phenomena. Consequently, any version of reality appears to be just as valid as any other. And when it comes to reading the work of a particular philosopher, like Hegel, any interpretation would, it seems, be just as good as any other. “Thus literature,” Barthes (1967, unpaginated) argues, “by refusing to assign to the text (and to the world as text) a ‘secret:’ that is, an ultimate meaning, liberates an activity which we might call counter-theological, properly revolutionary, for to refuse to arrest meaning is finally to refuse God and his hypostases, reason, science, the law.” Since there is no final and absolute authority on the matter, anyone and everyone it seems would be entitled to their opinion. And when these various opinions come into conflict with each other, the resolution would be the rather unsatisfactory platitude that is all-too-often the outcome of this kind of relativism—“we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” Conversely the same critical insights also have the potential to lead, in what appears to be the absolute opposite direction, to forms of intolerant totalitarianism. If access to the real thing is forever lacking, then authority is ultimately a transient matter and is available to whoever stakes a claim to it and is able to defend this claim against the competition.10 This approach

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is often mobilized in religion, especially fundamentalist traditions. Since God is that entity who cannot appear before us or show himself as himself, one man or a group of men (and it has been almost always a matter of men) claim to speak for and on behalf of the divine. And when one claim inevitably butts up against and comes into conflict with another, resolution is all too often a matter of violent confrontation. This politicization of truth, however, is not limited to religious conflicts. It is also a rather common practice in the academy. Because the real Hegel is withdrawn from the scene, some noted expert, like T. M. Knox (1942) for instance, proclaims that it is Herbert Marcuse who “gives us the real Hegel” (265). This claim’s legitimacy is not based on some unique and privileged access to the real but is ultimately an arbitrary and capricious decision. And when this particular claim runs up against other, just as legitimate claims, resolution is a matter of force—not necessarily physical confrontation but forceful argumentation and persuasive debate. In this way, then, “moral majority fundamentalists and tolerant multiculturalists are,” as Žižek (2001a) points out, “two sides of the same coin” (68). Žižek’s own innovations contest these outcomes. He clearly opposes the rather naïve solutions provided by those traditional approaches that presume some kind of fantastic access to the thing-in-itself. At the same time, however, he is also not entirely satisfied with the Kantian outcome and its insistence on an inaccessible yet extant thing. He therefore proposes an alternative, and this alternative avoids both the Scylla of fundamentalist adherence to a privileged thing that is presumably stripped bare of the distorting sediment of intellectual history and the Charibdis of epistemological relativism—a kind of anything goes attitude that tolerates different and competing interpretations as “all things being equal.” “This means,” Žižek (2003) writes, “neither an epistemologically ‘naïve’ reliance on ‘objective knowledge’ available when we get rid of our partial prejudices and preconception, and adopt a ‘neutral’ view, nor the (complementary) relativist view that there is no ultimate truth, only multiple subjective perspectives” (78). Žižek charts a different course. This alternative is not a kind of “middle ground,” which is explicitly rejected as a “worst case” scenario (Žižek 2003, 156). Rather it may be characterized, as Žižek often asserts, as consisting in two complementary maneuvers. In a first move, “the Real is the impossible hard core which we cannot confront directly, but only through the lenses of a multitude of symbolic fictions, virtual formations. In a second move this very hard core is purely virtual, actually nonexistent, an X that can be reconstructed only retroactively, from the multitude of symbolic formations which are ‘all there actually is’ ” (Žižek 2006, 26).

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Consequently, the real Hegel is, in the first place, that thing—the presumed hard kernel—that exists outside of and beyond the seemingly endless circulation of representations that appear in texts, interpretations, translations, and readings of Hegelian philosophy. At the same time, this apparently substantial and independent hard kernel, if we are strict in our understanding of human finitude and its proper epistemological restrictions, turns out to be entirely virtual. It does not actually exist as such; it is instead a byproduct or virtual projection of our entanglement with these different textual formations and appearances. The real Hegel, then, is a retroactively reconstructed virtuality that is fashioned from out of what was thought to be derivative and subsequent symbolic formations. Consequently, when the decisive question—“Will the real Hegel please stand up?”—is asked, what we get is not necessarily what was expected. What comes to be revealed is neither the thing-in-itself available to us in some unmitigated immediacy nor the disappointment of its inability to make an appearance. What is revealed is the lack of this kind of revelation and the way such expectations and assumptions are always and already misguided and fantastic. And it is on this point that Žižek once again comes into close proximity to Foucault: “It is not enough,” Foucault (1984) writes, “to repeat the empty affirmation that the author has disappeared. For the same reason, it is not enough to keep repeating (after Nietzsche) that God and man have died a common death. Instead, we must locate the space left empty by the author’s disappearance, follow the distribution of gaps and breaches, and watch for the openings that this disappearance uncovers” (105).

Truth or Consequences This has, at least, three related consequences. First, what Žižek describes appears to have a circular configuration:  The real Hegel is the impossible “thing” which subtends, proceeds, and exists outside what comes to appear in the various texts that bear his signature. At the same time, this “thing” is purely virtual and only able to be reconstructed retroactively from the multitude of this diverse textual material. This is not, despite initial appearances, some kind of deficient “circular reasoning.” It is, as Hegel himself points out, the proper configuration of any “speculative” mode of cognition. For Hegel, “speculative” is not, as is often the case in colloquial discourse, a pejorative term meaning groundless consideration or idle review of something that is often inconclusive and indeterminate. It is not, therefore, to be construed as a kind of pointless exercise in navel gazing. Instead, Hegel understands and utilizes the word “speculative” in its strict etymological sense, which is

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derived from the Latin noun speculum. “Speculative,” therefore, designates a form of self-reflective knowing. It is a manner of cognition that makes its own cognizing an object of its consideration. The crucial task in the face of this kind of speculative circularity is not to break out of the circle and to substantiate what Briankle Chang (1996, x) calls the “naïve empiricist picture” but to recognize the systemic necessity of the circularity and to learn to enter into it and to work through it in a way that is attentive to its structure and configuration. For Žižek, this means explicitly recognizing the way what comes to be enunciated is always and already conditioned by the situation or place of enunciation. “At the level of positive knowledge,” Žižek (2008) writes, “it is, of course, never possible to (be sure that we have) attain(ed) the truth—one can only endlessly approach it, because language is ultimately self-referential, there is no way to draw a definitive line of separation between sophism, sophistic exercises, and Truth itself (this is Plato’s problem). Lacan’s wager here is the Pascalian one: the wager of Truth. But how? Not by running after ‘objective’ truth, but by holding onto the truth about the position from which one speaks” (3). The strategic advantage of a speculative mode of knowing is not that it provides one with privileged and immediate access to the object in its raw or naked state but that it continually conceptualizes the place from which one claims to know anything and submits to investigation the position from which one makes any claim whatsoever. Second, this speculative structure, as Žižek points out, necessarily entails a transformed understanding of truth and affects the attempt to tell the truth. “There are,” as Martin Heidegger (1962) described it, “three theses which characterize the way in which the essence of truth has been traditionally taken and the way it is supposed to have been first defined: (1) that the ‘locus’ of truth is the statement (judgment); (2)  that the essence of truth lies in the ‘agreement’ of the judgment with its object; (3)  that Aristotle, the father of logic, not only has assigned truth to the judgment as its primordial locus but has set going the definition of ‘truth’ as ‘agreement’ ” (257). According to this characterization, truth is not something that resides in objects but is located in statements about objects. In other words, truth is not “out there” to be discovered in things but is essentially a relative concept. It subsists in the agreement or correspondence between a statement about something, what is commonly called a “judgment,” and the object about which the statement is made. Heidegger (1962) illustrates this characterization with a simple example: “Let us suppose that someone with his back turned to the wall makes the true statement that ‘the picture on the wall is hanging askew.’ This statement demonstrates itself when the man who makes it, turns around and perceives the picture hanging askew on the wall” (260). The truth of the statement,

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“the picture is hanging askew,” is evaluated by “turning around” and comparing the content of the statement to the state of the actual object. If the statement agrees with or corresponds to the object, then it is true; if not, it is false. According to Heidegger’s analysis (1962), this particular understanding of truth—truth as agreement or correspondence—dominates “the history of Western humanity” (184) and can therefore be found throughout the Western philosophical and scientific traditions.11 Žižek’s understanding of the real complicates this formulation. Since the real cannot ever be presented to us as such, truth cannot be evaluated by comparing a statement made about some thing to the real thing. Truth, therefore, can no longer be conceptualized and evaluated as simple, linear correspondence. The “truth,” is not the “real” state of things, that is, the “direct” view of the object without perspectival distortion, but the very Real of the antagonism that causes perspectival distortion. The site of truth is not the way “things really are in themselves,” beyond their perspectival distortions, but the very gap, passage, that separates one perspective from another, the gap that makes the two perspectives radically incommensurable… . There is a truth; everything is not relative—but this truth is the truth of the perspectival distortion as such, not the truth distorted by the partial view of a one-sided perspective. (Žižek 2003, 79; 2006, 281)

For Žižek, then, truth no longer resides in and can be evaluated by measuring the correspondence of a statement about something to the real thing itself. This kind of basic one-to-one correspondence, which is the standard operating presumption of both To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line, has been and remains a mere metaphysical game. To put it in Heideggerian language, no matter how many times one turns around, s/he does not ever get direct and unmitigated access to the real thing as it is in itself. Like the experiences of the subterranean prisoner who is described in Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” (Plato 1987, 514a-517a), the encounter with reality never achieves direct and immediate access to the thing itself but is limited to what appears to be an endless succession of different and competing representations, a kind of on-going and recursive mediation. Or as Žižek describes it, “the Real is the appearance as appearance; it not only appears within appearances, it also is nothing but its own appearance—it is simply a certain grimace of reality, a certain imperceptible, unfathomable, ultimately illusory feature that accounts for the absolute difference within identity. This Real is not the inaccessible beyond of phenomena, simply their doubling, the gap between two inconsistent phenomena, a perspective shift” (Žižek 2002b, xxvii; see also Žižek 2001a, 80). Consequently, what we encounter in phenomenal reality is not derived from some independent and pre-existing real thing but the order

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of precedence should be reversed. “The multiple perspectival inconsistencies between phenomena are not an effect of the impact of the transcendental Thing—on the contrary, the Thing is nothing but the ontologization of the inconsistency between phenomena” (Žižek 2002b, xxix-xxx). For this reason, if we could ever peek behind the scenes or turn around fast enough to catch a glimpse of the real, what we would encounter is not the real thing with its pants down. We would discover, as Žižek (2002b, liv) writes with reference to a passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit, “only what we put there.” Finally, if all this is true (to use a colloquialism that is now somewhat more complicated than initially appears), how is one to decide whether a particular reading of Hegel (or any other philosopher, for that matter) is appropriate or not? Does this suggest that anything goes and, as Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov puts it, “all things are permitted?” Does it mean, in the final analysis, that Žižek’s reading of Hegel is just as good as any other and that a decision one way or the other is ultimately capricious, tentative, and inconclusive? If what we want in response to these kinds of questions is evidence of truthful correspondence, that is, the demonstration of an accurate reproduction and exacting fidelity to the real thing, we clearly will not get it. Žižek’s texts not only question and undermine this procedure, but he also deliberately violates its assumptions and stipulations in practice. In fact, he advocates and engages in what he calls, in reference to Deleuze’s reading of the history of philosophy, “productive misreading” (Žižek 2004, ix). From the perspective of traditional ways of understanding the task of reading and the truth of interpretation, such “misreading” can only appear to be transgressive, monstrous, and deficient. It fails to achieve adequate correspondence and gets most, if not everything, wrong. From another perspective, however, the situation can be interpreted otherwise. In this case, “misreading” should not be construed as inadequate reproduction or inaccurate interpretation but constitutes an informed betrayal and calculated intervention. “One can,” as Žižek (2004) argues, “only remain faithful to an author by way of betraying him (the actual letter of his thought)” (13). This betrayal, however, is not mere infidelity with regards to some original thing. “Infidelity” is not adequate insofar as it remains the mere negative and inverse of “fidelity”—a word that has metaphysical, technical, and even conjugal connotations. Instead this “betrayal,” in a way that is similar to Donna Haraway’s (1991, 149) deployment of the concept of “blasphemy,” is generated through a kind of excessive and unrestrained faithfulness. “One can,” Žižek (2004) continues, “only truly betray an author by way of repeating him, by way of remaining faithful to the core of his thought” (13). “Productive misreading,” then, is not simply a mistake, an error, or a kind of infidelity.12 It is a deliberately blasphemous form of

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excessive faithfulness that follows an author’s text carefully and literally, even to the point, as Derrida (1978) says of Georges Bataille, “of agreeing with him against himself” (260). This does not mean, however, that anything goes and everything is permitted. Žižek is as allergic to postmodern relativisms as he is to pre-modern dogmatism.13 The question before us, then, is not whether and to what extent Žižek’s readings of Hegel are accurate reproductions of what Hegel actually thought and wrote or more or less faithful representations of the Concept of Hegelian philosophy. This kind of inquiry, although supported by over 2400 years of tradition, remains governed by deep-seated metaphysical assumptions about the real that Žižek demonstrates to be problematic, fantastic, and even illusory. The question, therefore, must be articulated and situated otherwise. The question, then, is not simply “how accurate are Žižek’s readings of Hegel?” but “on the basis of what kind of reading do we deploy and value this concept of accuracy?” and “how has this expectation already determined critical procedures and outcomes?” Žižek, therefore, turns the initial question around and asks us to reconsider the very ontological assumptions that already inform and shape our mode of investigation. He would, in effect, respond to the question, “will the real Hegel please stand up?” with another question—one which reverses the inquiry and asks about the expectations and presumptions that already underlie and determine the question itself. Consequently, instead of asking the somewhat naïve and direct question “will the real Hegel please stand up?” his inquiry would be something like “why, how, and on the basis of what authority does a particular articulation of Hegelian philosophy already present itself as and claim to be the real Hegel?”

Notes 1. Žižek’s engagement with the work of Jacques Derrida, which is given its most sustained and extended treatment in For They Know not What They Do (2002a), is complicated by the fact that Žižek says little or nothing in response to Derrida’s own writing but relies heavily on its subsequent representation in Rodolphe Gasché’s The Tain of the Mirror (1986). This transaction mirrors the problem that motivates and is addressed by this essay. Namely, when it comes to dealing with different representations of something, how are we to decide which one is an accurate portrayal of the real thing and which ones are impostors? Clearly one way to critique and to contest Žižek’s reading of Derrida would be to show how Gasché’s interpretation, although not entirely wrong, is nevertheless not entirely consistent with Derrida as such. This kind of demonstration, however, immediately falls back on and mobilizes the very issue that is to be addressed—the presumption of some pure and real original that is then distorted by subsequent representation and proxy. Instead of mobilizing this

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common and often unquestioned metaphysical assumption, the following endeavors to question its very structure, procedure, and operation. 2. For more on both To Tell the Truth and What’s My Line, see what is arguably the definitive resource for information regarding popular culture and related phenomena, Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/To_Tell_the_Truth). Although there is considerable debate concerning the validity of data contained in this online, open source encyclopedia, it is undoubtedly one of the best depositories of information on pop culture. Likewise, various clips of both game shows can be viewed at https://youtube.com. See, in particular, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_6iL4ztavMfor a 1966 version of To Tell the Truth and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wKLpo8f12TMfor Salvador Dali’s appearance as a contestant on What’s My Line. 3. The characteristic distrust of sensation that is evident in Platonism is not Plato’s innovation; it is informed by, and the product of, a general attitude that was rather pervasive throughout ancient Greece. “There was,” as Debra Hawhee (2004) points out, “among the poets and philosophers of ancient Greece a general distrust of sensation, for the eyes and ears as bodily instruments were thought to be inherently deceptive, never reaching the truth, aletheia” (173). 4. In May of 1996, Alan Sokal, a physicist at NYU, published an article in the journal Social Text. The article, “Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity” was composed as a deliberate parody of the prevailing “postmodernist jargon” that had, in Sokal’s estimations, taken root in some corners of the academy. “For some years,” Sokal wrote in a Lingua Franca article that sought to expose and explain his parody, “I’ve been troubled by an apparent decline in the standards of rigor in certain precincts of the academic humanities… . So to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment:  Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies—whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross—publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editor’s ideological preconceptions?” (Editors of Lingua Franca 2000, 49). Once exhibited as such, the Sokal Hoax, as it came to be called, ignited a firestorm of commentary and criticism that eventually landed on the front page of the New York Times. 5. In this way, Kantian philosophy anticipates a gesture that has become increasingly operative in contemporary science. Serious practitioners of both the “hard” and social sciences often find themselves asking and/or responding to what appears to be strange and somewhat surprising questions, like the one to which Bruno Latour (1999) addresses himself at the beginning of Pandora’s Hope: “Do you believe in reality?” (1). This question, which, if one believes Latour, was articulated by a social scientist, manifests both the uneasy position of the real in contemporary science and reveals the “faith-based initiatives” that some researchers have found themselves employing in order to solidify and protect scientific knowledge. Despite the fact that this question of “faith” is now often associated with the so-called “science wars,” it is actually much older and comprises one of the founding gestures of modern epistemology. In the Meditations on First Philosophy (1988), for example, Descartes’s search for a certain and secure foundation for scientific thought leads him to doubt the veracity of everything that comes to him through the mediation of the senses. In order to dispel this doubt and to secure access to the real world outside the potentially solipsistic cogito

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ergo sum, he finds it necessary to posit the existence of God, whose eternal goodness is such that He would not permit deception of any kind. In Cartesian metaphysics, therefore, it is belief in a particular Christian understanding of God that ensures both the existence of external reality and our access to it. 6. This Kantian insight, which for many years remained at the level of a philosophical argument, was experimentally confirmed in the late 1950s and reported in a paper written by Humberto Maturana, Jerry Lettvin, Warren McCulloch, and Walter Pitts. The paper, “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain,” describes an experiment where microelectrodes were implanted in the visual cortex of a frog in order to measure the strength of neural responses to different visual stimuli. “From the wired-up brain,” N. Katherine Hayles (1999) explains, “the researchers discovered that small objects in fast, erratic motion elicited maximum response, whereas large, slow-moving objects evoked little or no response. It is easy to see how such perceptual equipment is adaptive from the frog’s point of view, because it allows the frog to perceive flies while ignoring other phenomena irrelevant to its interests” (135). From this experimental data, Maturana and his co-investigators concluded that the frog’s perceptual system does not so much register reality as it is but constructs reality as it needs to be for the animal in question.“What are the consequences of this work?” the authors ask at the end of the article. “Fundamentally, it shows that the eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light upon the receptors” (Lettvin et al. 1965, 251). Like any good experimental scientist, however, Maturana and company were careful to restrict their conclusions to the particular animal upon which they operated. In fact, the article begins with an explicit caution against generalizing the findings: “This work has been done on the frog, and our interpretation applies only to the frog” (Lettvin et al. 1965, 230). Despite this reservation, the insights the experiment offered were far too compelling to remain restricted to this one amphibian. Maturana, in particular, thought the work had wider application, and he eventually employed the experiment as a spring board to revolutionize the simple empiricism that had governed observational research. In subsequent publications, most notably the essays collected in Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980), which was co-authored with Francisco Varela, Maturana argued “that perception should not be viewed as a grasping of an external reality, but rather as the specification of one” (xv) and, because of this, “no description of an absolute reality is possible” (121). As Hayles (1999) summarizes it, “Maturana concluded that perception is not fundamentally representational. He argued that to speak of an objectively existing world is misleading, for the very idea of a world implies a realm that preexists its construction by an observer. Certainly there is something ‘out there,’ which for lack of a better word we can call ‘reality.’ But it comes into existence for us, and for all living creatures, only through interactive processes determined solely by the organism’s own organization” (136). Maturana called this new epistemology autopoiesis, because what is known about the world, although perhaps triggered by something like an external event, is in fact “self-made” by the organism. According to this innovative and radical theory of knowledge, an organism, whether it be an amphibian in a laboratory or a primate observing that amphibian, never has immediate access to what is “really real”—the thing itself—but only perceives the object that is constructed through the activity of its own particular perceptual equipment.

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7. This would not be the first time that Kant has become involved (fictionally, at least) with American television game shows. His name and moral authority are also invoked in the Robert Redford film Quiz Show (1994), which dramatizes the events surrounding the quiz show scandal of the mid-1950s. At a crucial moment in the film’s narrative, the protagonist, Charles Van Dorn (Ralph Fiennes), is presented with a compelling but morally questionable opportunity by the show’s producers. They propose that Van Dorn be given the correct answers to the quiz show questions in advance of the game in an attempt to better manipulate its presentation and outcome. Van Dorn, who is visibly concerned about the ethical implications of such a proposal, does not immediately respond. When asked the reason for his hesitation, he replies: “I was just wondering what Kant would think of all this.” To which one of the hopelessly uninformed producers says, “I don’t think he’d have a problem with it, do you?” 8. Elsewhere this oscillation between “presupposed” and “posited” is marked with the term “(presup)posited” (Žižek 2002a, 209). 9. This is, of course, one of the animating fantasies behind a good deal of time travel narratives from Jay Ward’s cartoon Peabody’s Improbable History (1959), in which Sherman, a young child, and his bespectacled brainiac dog Peabody use the “wayback machine” to meet the great figures of history, to Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (DEG 1989), in which two clueless slackers travel backwards in time to meet the real Napoleon Bonaparte, Socrates, Beethoven, and other historical figures in an attempt to complete their high school history project. 10. Stephen Colbert, the comedic political pundit of Comedy Central’s Colbert Report, has recently coined two words that address this development:  “truthiness” and “wikiality.” Truthiness, which was named word of the year by the American Dialect Society in 2005 and was incorporated into the Merriam-Webster Dictionary in 2006, was introduced during the program’s inaugural episode (Comedy Central, 17 October 2005). It designates, according to Merriam-Webster, “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true” (Merriam-Webster 2006, unpaginated). Wikiality was introduced in episode 128 (31 July 2006) and is derived from the experience and features of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia. As Colbert explained, on Wikipedia “any user can change any entry, and if enough users agree with them, it becomes true.” Wikiality, then, is an agreed upon reality that, although not necessarily real and true, becomes real and true simply through user decision and agreement. These two concepts have come together in “Wikiality.com, the Truthiness Encyclopedia.” According to the site’s welcome page, Wikiality.com is similar to Wikipedia but “unlike Wikipedia, entries here are judged on their truthiness; if it feels right it’s probably truthy” (Wikiality.com 2008, unpaginated). 11. This “correspondence theory of truth” is evident in the scholastic definition of truth as adaequatio intellectus et rei, the adequation of thought to things (Heidegger 1962, 257); René Descartes’s (1991) claim that “the word ‘truth,’ in the strict sense, denotes the conformity of thought with its object” (139); and Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1965), which grants, without any critical hesitation whatsoever (a somewhat ironic gesture in a text that is all about “critique”), that truth is “the agreement of knowledge with its object” (A 58/B 82). In the text of Being and Time, Heidegger (1962) traces this concept to an assertion that has been attributed to Aristotle’s De Interpretatione: “the soul’s ‘experiences,’ its νοηµατα (‘representations’), are likenings

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of things” (257). Elsewhere, namely in the essay “Plato’s Doctrine of Truth,” he demonstrates that the concept originates with Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.” It is in this imaginative fable, Heidegger (1978) argues, that one can perceive the point at which western thought began “taking the essence of truth as the correctness of representation” (237). 12. One way to produce these kinds of “misreadings” is to engage in what Žižek calls, again borrowing from Deleuze, “philosophical buggery.” This practice comprises a kind of intellectual promiscuity, whereby one takes an author from behind and gives him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous (Deleuze 1995, 6; Žižek 2004, 46). 13. In fact, when push comes to shove, Žižek has sided with “totalitarian” and “fundamentalist” positions against the seemingly excessive and unrestrained relativisms that currently proliferate in both the academy and contemporary politics. This decision can be seen in particular in the concluding lines of his published response to Claudia Breger’s (2001) critique:  “What one sees today is a kind of ‘suspended’ belief, a belief that can thrive only as not fully (publicly) admitted, as a private obscene secret. This suspended status of our beliefs accounts for the predominant ‘antidogmatic’ stance: one should modestly accept that all our positions are relative, conditioned by contingent historical constellations, so that no one has definitive Solutions, just pragmatic temporary solutions … Compare the struggle and pain of the ‘fundamentalist’ with the serene peace of the liberal democrat who, from a safe subjective position, ironically dismisses every fully pledged engagement, every ‘dogmatic’ taking sides. Consequently, yes, I plead guilty: in this choice, I without hesitation opt for the ‘fundamentalist’ ” (Žižek 2001a, 103).

References Barthes, Roland. 1967. “The Death of the Author.” Aspen (5 and 6). Translated by Richard Howard. http://www.ubu.com/aspen/aspen5and6/threeEssays.html#barthes Breger, Claudia. 2001. “The Leader’s Two Bodies: Slavoj Žižek’s Postmodern Political Theology.” In Diacritics, 31 (1): 73–90. Chang, Briankle G. 1996. Deconstructing Communication:  Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Negotiations. New York: Columbia University Press. Derrida, Jacques. (1968) 1978. Writing and Difference. Translated by Alan Bass. Reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Descartes, René. 1988. Descartes:  Selected Philosophical Writings. Translated by John Cottingham, Dugald Murdock, and Robert Stoothoff. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Descartes, René. 1991. The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. 3. Translated by John Cottingham, Dugald Murdock, and Robert Stoothoff. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Dews, Peter. 1996. The Limits of Disenchantment:  Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy. London: Verso.

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Editors of Lingua Franca. 2000. The Sokal Hoax: The Sham the Shook the Academy. Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press. Foucault, Michel. (1971) 1972. The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language. Translated by A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, Michel. (1979) 1984. “What Is an Author?” In The Foucault Reader, edited by Paul Rabinow, translated by Josué V. Harari. Reprint, New York: Pantheon Books. Gasché, Rodolphe. 1986. The Tain of the Mirror: Derrida and the Philosophy of Reflection. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greene, Brian. 2003. The Elegant Universe:  Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. New York: Vintage Books. Greene, Brian. 2004. The Fabric of the Cosmos:  Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. New York: Vintage Books. Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:  The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge. Hawhee, Debra. 2004. Bodily Arts:  Rhetoric and Athletics in Ancient Greece. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Hayles, N. K. 1999. How We Became Post-Human: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. (1830) 1987. Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Translated by William Wallace. Reprint, Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1927) 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Reprint, New York: Harper & Row Publishers. Heidegger, Martin. 1978. Wegmarken. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Horwitz, Noah. 2005. “Contra the Slovenians:  Returning to Lacan and Away from Hegel.” In Philosophy Today, 49 (1): 24–32. Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek’s Ontology:  A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Kant, Immanuel. (1787) 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Reprint, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Knox, T. M. 1942. “Review of Herbert Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory.” In Philosophy, 17 (67): 264–7. Latour, Bruno. 1999. Pandora’s Hope: An Essay on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lettvin, J. Y., H. R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch, and W. H. Pitts. 1965. “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.” In Embodiments of Mind, edited by W.S. McCulloch. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. 1980. Autopoiesis and Cognition:  The Realization of the Living. Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing.

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Merriam-Webster. 2006. Merriam-Webster’s Words of the Year 2006. http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/06words.htm Myers, Tony. 2003. Slavoj Žižek. New York: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1887) 1974. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufman. Reprint, New York: Vintage Books. Parker, Ian. 2004. Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction. London: Pluto Press. Plato. 1982. Phaedrus. Translated by H. N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato. 1987. Republic. Translated by P. Shorey. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato. 1990. Apology. Translated by H. N. Fowler. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Postel, Danny. 2000. Understanding Hegel:  An Interview with Philosophical Biographer Terry Pinkard. http://www.postelservice.com/archives/000008.html. Rasmussen, E. D. 2004. “Liberation Hurts:  An Interview with Slavoj Žižek.” Electronic Book Review. https://electronicbookreview.com/essay/liberation-hurtsan-interview-with-slavoj-zizek/ . Smolen, Lee. 2006. The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Wikiality.com. 2008. http://www.wikiality.com/Welcome. Woit, Peter. 2006. Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law. New York: Basic Books. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001a. On Belief. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002a. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002b. Revolution at the Gates. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs without Bodies:  On Deleuze and Consequences. New  York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

2.  Žižek’s Kant, or The Crack in the Universal (Politicizing the Transcendental Turn) Matthew Sharpe Deakin University, Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy

Introduction: Žižek as Hegelian or ‘NeoKantian’? Yes, Please! Although Slavoj Žižek presents his texts as reflecting a decisively Hegelian or (since 1997) Schellingerian philosophical heritage (Žižek and von Schelling 1997), this paper argues that two distinctively Kantian preoccupations are central in everything Žižek has written. The first is the ‘transcendental turn’, and Kant’s contention that subjects’ access to the world is never direct but always mediated (in Kant’s system, through the forms of sensibility and the schematized categories of the understanding). This move in Žižek’s work is ‘cashed out’ in his Lacanian rereading of the category of ideology. How and why this Marxian term should be used to describe the collective representations and practices, Žižek contends, structure individuals’ being-in-the-world yields one register of the ‘primacy of political reason’ in Žižek’s work (see the Conclusion below). The second, ‘NeoKantian’ motif that informs Žižek’s oeuvre, decisive for Žižek’s reading of Kant, is his concern with epistemic and moral finitude. Žižek’s political ontology originates in what I will term a ‘politicization’ of the ontological field. Yet this politicization, in its turn, is carried out under the heading of this second Kantian motif of finitude. To anticipate, the argument will be that Žižek’s entire philosophy, and his reading of Kant, turn around the following two positions:

1. Žižek (with Heidegger) argues that Kant was the first thinker to broach finitude as the starting point for philosophical inquiry. The contours of this Kantian move are well known. In the first Critique,

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Matthew Sharpe Kant asserts the impossibility of humans ever immediately accessing Things-in-Themselves. Mediation through intuition, understanding and the imagination—far from being regrettable necessities, or simply deceptive—are the necessary conditions of the construction of sense. In the second Critique, Kant argues that human beings do not have access to the sovereign good or summum bonum. In Kant’s words: “If we assume any object under the name of a good as a determining principle of the will … and then deduce from it the supreme practical principle, this would always introduce heteronomy, and crush out the moral principle”. The moral law, Kant dixit, must accordingly “abstract as a determining principle from all matter”, which is exactly why it is so famously and inhumanely formal (Kant 1952, 338). 2. Nevertheless, Žižek asserts that Kant was never able to fully think through the radical nature of his broaching of the epistemic and moral finitude of our human being. In a way that might reflect Žižek’s early debt to Derrida, Žižek asserts that the logics of Kant’s concern with finitude commit him at certain points to positions that he could not finally avow. In the first Critique, Žižek argues, in Kant’s postulation of the empty subject of apperception, he introduced a post-metaphysical conception of subjectivity, yet repeatedly withdrew from this postulation by suggesting that the ‘spontaneous’ moral subject is a noumenal—and so transcendent, not just transcendental—Freedom (see Allison 1983, 286–7; Pippin 1997, 51–3).1 In the second Critique and in several of the later practical writings, Žižek argues, Kant was led towards an intimation of the ‘speculative identity’ between the perfectly Good act and Diabolical Evil (evil performed for no ‘pathological’ reason). The need to cover over this ‘speculative identity’, Žižek argues, is the real impetus behind Kant’s emphasis on the rigorous formality of the moral Law.2

It is only Hegel, for Žižek, who is able to fully think through the notion of human finitude introduced by Kant, which is why Žižek’s ‘NeoKantianism’— to be ironic—is a Lacanian Hegelianism. But an adequate reading of Žižek’s Hegel is another matter. The work of understanding Žižek’s understanding of the first and third Critiques and their inter-relation in what follows can serve as a prolegomenon to any such reading.

Žižek and the Subject of Kantian Apperception Tellingly, Žižek’s interpretation of Kant is situated in terms of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ in The Critique of Pure Reason from the start, as

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that section wherein Kant most fully argues for the unsustainability of traditional metaphysics. In Tarrying with the Negative, Žižek introduces his reading of Kant through recounting Kant’s critique of Descartes’ famous cogito sum, which features in this crucial section of The Critique of Pure Reason. As Žižek glosses Kant: According to Kant, Descartes falls prey to the ‘subremption of the hypostasized consciousness’: he wrongly concludes that, in the empty ‘I think’ which accompanies every representation of an object, we get hold of a positive phenomenal entity, res cogitans (a ‘small piece of the world’, as Husserl put it), which thinks and is transparent to itself in its capacity to think… . (Žižek 1993, 13)3

Kant’s problem with Descartes concerns how Descartes, upon reaching the performatively self-guaranteeing certainty of the cogito, immediately added to this ‘I think’, ‘therefore I am’. In this move, as Heidegger argues in Being and Time, Descartes showed his lasting indebtedness to the scholastic categories bequeathed to him by the philosophical tradition. He conceived the point of thought or doubt as a thinking thing: res cogitans (Heidegger 1962, 359–64). The cogito was to be opposed to material reality (res extensa), to be sure—this is Descartes’ much-maligned dualism. However, it was only to be opposed to the res extensa as another type of substance (or res) within the whole of reality. Thereby, as Žižek puts it, what was debarred from Descartes was the insight that ‘in itself’ the cogito is less a part of this reality than, “correlative to the whole of reality, i.e. … the point external to reality, exempted from it, which delineates reality’s horizon (in the sense of Wittgenstein’s wellknown Tractatus metaphor of the eye that can never be part of the seen reality)” (Žižek 1993, 13). To cite Kant’s first Critique itself, and its remarkably worded repudiation of Descartes’ move:  “Of this I  or he or it (the thing) which thinks, nothing further is represented than a transcendental subject of the thoughts= X … ” (Kant 1965, A346). It is above all in this formulation that Žižek claims to discern in Kant an already meaningfully ‘post-metaphysical’ and non-substantial notion of the subject.4 The Kantian subject is anything but another figuring of metaphysics’ founding drive towards a self-transparent, ‘ontotheological’ (Heidegger 1997) being, according to Žižek. Any attempt to simply write, or write off, the subject of the first Critique as a founding statement of the modern(ist) notion of world-founding subjectivity is thus misguided, as when Derrida (for example) writes in Of Grammatology that “however, (the category of the subject) is modified, however it is endowed with consciousness or unconsciousness, it will refer, by the entire thread of its history, to the substantiality of a presence unperturbed by accidents, or to the identity of the

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proper, self-same in the presence of self-relationship” (Derrida 1976, 68–9). According to Žižek, this misses what is most interesting in the first Critique. Žižek stresses how the key formulations of The Critique of Pure Reason are far indeed from presenting an agency that, secure in its own identity, could render everything else in the world transparent to its knowledge and pliable to its will. Kant places an irreducible self-ignorance at the heart of the modern subject (Žižek 1993, 15). As Kant continues at A 346: “This I or He or It … is known only through the thoughts that are its predicates, and of it, apart from them, we cannot have any concept whatsoever” (Kant 1978, A346 (my italics)). The text that underlies Kant’s critique of Descartes in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of The Critique of Pure Reason is found in the ‘Analytic of Concepts’, earlier in the first Critique. The ‘Transcendental Deduction(s)’ represent the ground-breaking chapter of The Critique of Pure Reason wherein Kant tries to establish the necessity of the synthetic activity of the subject in the constitution of a sense of a meaningfully ordered external world (Kant 1978, 120– 75). According to Kant, we constantly receive a manifold of sense data from the spatiotemporal world, through the faculty of sensible intuition. However, we do not finally experience the world as a Heraclitean flux. We experience it as an ordered ‘nature’, containing objects which exist for varying periods of time, and which exist in multiple but determinate interrelations. About these, we can make predicative judgments that legitimately lay claim to objective validity. There is thus a gap between what we intuit and what we experience, for Kant. And what this gap requires us to accept, Kant contends, is that the subject’s faculty of understanding, aided by the transcendental imagination, must always be at work. Its work brings the sensuous manifold under the sway of synthetic a priori rules (or ‘categories’), in order that ordered perceptions can arise (CPR, A51/B76).5 What is decisive for Žižek is that Kant equally ‘deduces’, especially in the second or ‘B’ version of the deduction, that this synthetic activity of consciousness over time requires a single perduring point of subjective ‘spontaneity’ in which the work of synthesis can take place. If there were no such ‘unity of apperception’, in which past intuitions are held and brought into line with fresher intuitions, Kant reasons, no ordered empirical judgments could be formed. At B132, Kant accordingly broaches what he terms a “representation ‘I think’ … which must be capable of accompanying all other representations” (Kant 1978, B132). This ‘I’, he stresses, is in no way equivalent to the ‘I’ that we can become aware of through introspection upon our behaviors, body language, and so on. This latter ‘psychological’ or ‘empirical’ self is the way in which “I, as intelligence and a thinking subject, know myself as an object

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that is thought, insofar as I am given to myself … like other phenomena, only as I appear to myself … ./ I therefore have no knowledge of myself as I am, but merely as I appear to myself” (Kant 1978, B155–156/ B167–168). The crucial philosophical distinction Žižek emphasizes in Kant’s text is thus that contained in the following Kantian quote: “Only insofar … as I can unite a manifold of given representations in one consciousness, is it possible for me to represent to myself the identity of the consciousness in (i.e. throughout) these representations” (Kant 1978, B133/154). In other (Žižekian) words, although the subject of ‘pure apperception’ is properly to be thought of as a ‘logical construction’ necessarily accompanying every representation and presupposed by them, it is incapable of ever being ‘filled out’ with intuited experiential data (Žižek 1993, 14; Pippin 1997, 33, 52). In quasi-Derridean terms, we could say that this Kantian subject of apperception is at once necessary, but impossible. As Žižek details in Tarrying with the Negative, drawing on the work of Henry Allison, the consequence of Kant’s later attempt to identify the subject as a Thing (albeit noumenal), is disastrous in terms of the conceptual architectonics of his own texts. All phenomenal things in Kant are the appearings to finite subjects of noumena / Things-In-Themselves. If we were thus to argue that the transcendental I was a noumenal Thing, we would be indirectly maintaining that the empirical self is at once an appearance of, and an appearance to, the noumenal self (Allison 1983, 286–93; Žižek 1997, 16). As Žižek comments: “This doubling, however, is a nonsensical, self-cancelling short-circuit:  if the noumenal subject appears to itself, the distance that separates appearance from noumena falls away. The agency which perceives something as an appearance cannot itself be an appearance” (Žižek 1997, 16). And, as Žižek reasons, “lack of intuited content is constitutive of the I; the inaccessibility to the I of its own ‘kernel of being’ makes it an I … ./ The I’s apperception is by definition empty of any intuitional content; it is an empty representation that carves a hole into the field of representations” (Žižek 1993, 14–16). Žižek’s emphasis on how Kant’s subject of apperception is necessarily unknowable in itself is the central pivot of his reading of Kant. Žižek contends that: “there is an aspect of Kant that is totally obliterated by the standard academic image of him” (Žižek 2000, 227). This image, as we are all taught it, and as Nietzscheans continue it, reads Kant as the philosopher of the universal. Kant is concerned to establish the universal forms and faculties constitutive for knowledge, moral agency, and aesthetic judgment.6 On Žižek’s reading, in stark contrast, Kant figures as the first consistent thinker of ‘the crack in the universal’ opened by the cogito (Žižek 1993, 45; 1997, 237). What this ‘crack’ corresponds to, he claims, is:

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Matthew Sharpe … the impossibility of locating the subject in the ‘great chain of being’, into the Whole of the universe—(as in) all those notions of the universe as a harmonious whole in which every element has its own place (today, they abound in ecological ideology). In contrast to (these theories), (the) subject … constitutively lacks its own place (in Kant), which is (also) why Lacan designates it by the matheme $, the ‘barred’ S… . (Žižek 1993, 12)7

For this reason, in his striking essay ‘Kant With (or against) Sade’, Žižek asserts—evoking an Epicurean notion8—that the Kantian subject is:  “clinamen, the out-of-joint excess, the paradoxical point at which an extreme excess itself, an element which sticks out, grounds universality” (Žižek 1999, 292).

Žižek on the Sublime, and the Antinomies of Pure Reason In Chapter 2 of Tarrying with the Negative, having presented his case that the Kantian subject of apperception is a legitimate non-metaphysical conception of subjectivity, Žižek contends that “the sublime is the site of the inscription of pure subjectivity” in Kant’s thought (Žižek 1993, 46). What does he mean? Following on from the work of Part I, I want to try to explain the reasoning, and Kantian textual evidence, underlying Žižek’s further, striking assertion. What we require is an exposition of how Žižek provocatively ties his reading of the sublime in The Critique of Judgment to a reading of the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.9 By giving such an exposition, we will also make clear how Žižek’s reading of Kant stands in relation to a sense that may have arisen in the reader’s mind as s/he read Part I. This is the concern that, far from adding anything substantially new—or potentially edifying—to contemporary theoretical dialogue, Žižek’s Lacanian reading of Kant’s subject only repeats the Hegelo-Kojevian terms of JeanPaul Sartre’s account of subjectivity as a ‘nothingness’ in L’Etre et Neant (see Borch-Jacobsen 1991; Derrida 1998). Kant broaches the topic of the sublime in the first Part of The Critique of Judgment. As Žižek notes, the analytic of the sublime has a peculiar place in Kant’s system. The third Critique deals for the most part with two types of judgments. The first are teleological judgments. In teleological judgments, subjects attribute an inner purpose to nature, which Kant otherwise stipulates as being wholly governed by telically-blind Newtonian causality.10 The second type is the aesthetic judgments concerning the beautiful. Beautiful objects are objects which have no purpose, despite—in the harmonious arrangement of their parts—bearing the marks of intelligent ‘purposiveness’. In Žižek’s precise formulation, however, the sublime in Kant is “conceived precisely as the index of the failed ‘synthesis’ of Beauty and Purpose”.

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[It is] the intersection of the two sets, the set of what is ‘beautiful’ and the set of what is ‘purposeful’—(but) a negative intersection … i.e. an intersection containing elements which are neither beautiful nor purposeful. Sublime phenomena (more precisely, phenomena which arouse in the subject the sentiment of the sublime) are in no way beautiful; they are chaotic, formless, the very opposite of harmonious form, and they also serve no purpose, i.e. they are the very opposite of those features that bear witness to a hidden purposefulness in nature. (Žižek 1993, 46)

What is at stake in the sublime, Žižek accordingly stresses, is the limit of what can be experienced and represented by the finite subject as ordered nature. Kant is precise about this. The harmonious components of beautiful objects invite the imagination’s play, and a sense of ‘the furtherance of life’. By contrast, the chaotic multitude that presents itself to the subject in the sublime arrests this happy play of the imagination. The sentiment of the sublime, Kant (1952, 501) stipulates, arises “from the inadequacy of imagination in the aesthetic estimation of magnitude to attain to its estimation by reason, and (is) a simultaneously awakened pleasure, arising from this very judgment of the inadequacy of the greatest faculty of sense being in accord with ideas of reason.” In Kant’s telling, the subject confronted with a sublime representation puts her/his imagination to work to try to apprehend it, but fails. At this instant, however, something peculiar occurs. The imagination, as it were, reflexively doubles back on itself. Thereby, it attains an ‘indirect’ pleasure. This strange pleasure arise from its apprehension that the very failure of its own capacity to represent the sublime object might intimate a truth of a different order: namely, the failure of representation as such before the transcendent reality of the Ideas, which is the dimension which our Faculty of Reason directs us towards.11 What interests Žižek about Kant’s account here is that he stipulates two ways in which the imagination necessarily fails and gives rise to the apprehension of the sublime. The most well-known is undoubtedly what is involved in the ‘dynamic sublime’ (which is sometimes called ‘the sublime of power’ or of ‘might’). The dynamic sublime has been made famous in the work of romantics like Wordsworth, or the paintings of figures like Turner. It involves the subject’s confrontation with the might of nature: things like hurricanes, stormy seas, grand crags and precipices, lightning and thunder, or (to use a more recent case) jet planes flying uncannily into tall buildings. The other way the imagination fails, in the so-called mathematical sublime (sometimes called, ‘the sublime of magnitude’), is less well-known, although Kant introduces it first in The Critique of Judgment. Kant’s examples of the mathematical sublime include the “bewilderment, or sort of perplexity,

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which … seizes the visitor on first entering St. Peter’s in Rome … ” (Kant 1952, 499) Kant also invokes, in Pascalian vein, the necessarily failed attempt to picture the magnitude of the spatially infinite universe: “… the system of the Milky Way, and the immeasurable host of such systems … ” (Kant 1952, 501). As Žižek explains, what is at stake with the mathematical sublime is the inability of our ‘synthetic comprehension’ to fully encompass the quantitative magnitude of what is given to us through our sensuous apprehension (Žižek 1999, 38). Vitally, when Žižek broaches the two modes of the Kantian sublime, his stress is almost always on how their ‘conceptual matrix’ is laid out in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of The Critique of Pure Reason (Kant 1978, 297; Žižek 1993, 54). Chapter II, Book II of ‘The Transcendental Dialectic’ sets out what Kant argues are four ‘antinomies’ that ensue whenever subjects seek to apply the categories of their understanding beyond their legitimate scope, and try to make judgments concerning such ‘Ideas of Reason’ as God, Freedom, or the Universe as a Whole. Antinomies, as Kant specifies, are not contradictions. His whole point in the Critique is that we are simply not able to decide between the opposed propositions we can generate regarding these objects (e.g.: ‘the universe had a beginning in time’/‘the universe did not have a beginning in time’) (Kant 1952, 156). The reason is that, in each case, the common ground of the dispute is not something that we can meaningfully talk about in the same way as we can concerning the objects we encounter within the scope of our possible experience (Kant 1952, 153; Cf. ‘The Discipline of Pure Reason in Polemics’, 218–23; Allison 1983, 50–61). The feature of Kant’s ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ that Žižek’s reading picks up on is that—as in Kant’s analytic of the sublime—Kant once more divides the antinomies into two species. And with good reason, Kant labels these the ‘mathematical’ and the ‘dynamic’ antinomies. The dynamic antinomies involve propositions concerning the disputed existence of God and an ‘intelligible causality of freedom in nature’. Kant’s argument concerning these antinomies is that both poles of each (e.g.:  “There is no causality of freedom (i.e. free will) in nature”/“A causality according to freedom is necessary to account for at least certain phenomena” (Kant 1952, 140)) is that both can simultaneously be true. In other words, their contradiction as far as we are concerned is a merely apparent one. This strange consequent follows from the truth that the disputed objects (an intelligible non-natural causality or an absolutely necessary being) are only conceivable by us as noumena or Things-in-Themselves which would belong to a realm wholly beyond the scope of any possible experience (ibid. 152–3; 164–71). It is therefore fully legitimate to see the same event (say, someone performing a remarkable act

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of bravery) as something wholly determined by the mechanical laws of nature, and as testimony to the efficacy in nature of free human will (ibid. 166–71). As Žižek notes, it is this noumenal dimension of freedom and God that Kant thinks does the violence to the imagination in the dynamic sublime. The raging forces of nature at once pale in the face of, and negatively invoke, the truly transcendent force of the moral Law within us. This is after all, as the second Critique has told us, a force which ought and so can call upon us to put aside all of our natural selfishness, and to act for the sake of duty alone (ibid. 507–8). It is insofar as the might of nature invokes the infinitely greater force of the Moral Law, which is nevertheless given to us by our reason, that Kant thinks we can explain the strange yield of pleasure we get when we see something dynamically sublime. Unless the sublime representation invoked this much greater power within us, the experience would be simply humiliating and painful. Žižek stresses how Kant’s argument regarding what he calls the mathematical antinomies is different. In mathematical antinomies (e.g.: “the world had a beginning in time, and is also limited in regard to space”/“the world had no beginning, and no limits in space”), Kant argues that both poles are false. This is because the object in question (‘the world’) is different in kind than the disputed Things in the dynamic antinomies. Whereas God and the Soul are intelligible as noumena beyond phenomena, at least according to Kant, the ‘world’ as a whole is not something beyond the phenomenal realm. It is the totality of this realm (ibid. 160–3 (“Solution of the Cosmological Idea of the Totality of the Composition of Phenomena in the Universe”)).12 There is no phenomenon that we encounter that is not given to us through our sensible intuition. Nevertheless, the totality of all coexistent phenomena is never given to us in any one intuition. As we saw, this is what Kant stipulates as decisive when treating the mathematical sublime (ibid. 502–3). In Žižek’s words, with the first mathematical antinomy: Both the thesis and the antithesis are false, since the very thing to which the thesis attributes finitude and the antithesis infinitude does not exist. The universe as the whole of phenomenal reality is a self-contradictory entity: (each antithetical proposition) speaks of ‘reality’ i.e. it uses transcendental categories constitutive for the field of possible experience, yet simultaneously it reaches beyond possible experience, since the universe in its entirety can never be the object of our finite experience. (Žižek 1993, 35)

Having laid out the architectonic of Žižek’s systematic alignment of the mathematical sublime and antinomies, and the dynamic sublime and antinomies, we can now lay out where Žižek departs from the letter of Kant’s texts. We should always emphasize that Žižek presents this departure from

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the letters of Kant’s texts as in fact an attempt to ‘be more Kantian than Kant himself’. Žižek’s key contention on this point is as follows: What is revealed philosophically by the resolution of the mathematical antinomies, and ‘experienced’ by subjects in the trauma of the mathematical sublime, can be shown ‘within the bounds of reason alone’ to be more profound (and ultimately ‘more Kantian’) than what is postulated by Kant’s resolution of the dynamic antinomy, and what Kant takes to be intimated to us in our experience of the dynamic sublime. (Žižek 1999, 39)

From the perspective of his reading of Kant, which Žižek calls at different points both ‘materialist’ and ‘authentically idealist’:  … the dynamic antinomy itself appears as an attempt to resolve the inherent deadlock of mathematical antinomy by transposing it into the coexistence of two distinct orders, the phenomenal and the noumenal… . Materialism, in contrast, gives priority to mathematical antinomy, to the inherent inconsistency of the phenomenal domain: the ultimate outcome of mathematical antinomy is the domain of an ‘inconsistent whole’, of a multitude that lacks the ontological consistency of the noumenal… . (Žižek 1999, 39)

According to Žižek, when Kant resolved the dynamic antinomy by ‘presupposing’ the noumenal domain of Things-in-Themselves, he drew back from the most radical moment of his critical achievement, in delineating the nature and scope of human epistemic finitude. Žižek draws this ‘proto-deconstructive’ claim from out of Hegel (Žižek 1993, 15–31). Its central argument is this. Kant’s central gesture of drawing a limit around what we can know, and positing that we can never have any comprehension of the noumenal Truth of things, is apparently profoundly humble or Socratic. However, and more deeply, this is discernibly not so. Why not? If we truly had no comprehension at all of the noumena, Žižek notes, we would also not be able to measure the finitude of our understanding against their ‘greater’ or ‘truer’ reality. To invoke Wittgenstein, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one really must remain silent. Hence, we are bound as philosophers to suppose that, although Kant argues in the first Critique that the noumena are necessary presuppositions of our empirical knowledge, and although he claims in the second Critique that noumenal freedom is a necessary presupposition of our ability to follow the moral law, these noumena can only be in the Kantian system what Hegel called ‘pure positings.’ This is the force of Žižek’s recurrent recitation of Hegel’s formulation from The Phenomenology of Spirit, from near the end of the text on ‘Consciousness’:  “It is manifest that behind the so-called curtain (of phenomena) which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing

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to see unless we go behind it ourselves as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen … ” (Hegel 1977, 103; my italics). So, to return now to the consideration which opened this section, we can state now the principal difference between Žižek’s account of Kant’s subject and Sartre/Kojeve’s accounts of subjectivity as a neant. As Part I showed, it is not that Žižek denies, in his reading of Kant or elsewhere, the force of Lacan’s deflationary bon mot that ‘the subject is what is not an object.’ However, Žižek’s more radical thesis is that the lack of being that the subject ‘is’ is correlative to the lack that renders the phenomenal world minimally inconsistent and so non-totalizable by finite understanding. The subject is not simply a neant coiled in the heart of being-in-itself: it is the gap that renders this plenitude inconsistent or not-all. This can be read as the final meaning Žižek gives to Kant’s claim cited in Part I, that we can only ever know the subject through the phenomenal representations that it conditions. The subject for Žižek can never be adequately represented either in the phenomenal field, or in the terms of an enunciated sentence. Rather, the insistence of subjectivity in ontological reality can only be indirectly shown, to again invoke Wittgenstein. And it can be shown only in and through the inconsistencies or—in Kant’s terms—the antinomies that arise whenever creatures within the phenomenal universe push up against the boundaries of sense. The singularity of Žižek’s move deserves emphasis. ‘Kant’s basic premise’, Žižek (1993, 89/110) asserts, “is that the universe as the totality of beings, which includes us as its part, does not exist … ./ Kant’s solution to the mathematical antinomy is therefore very audacious. He breaks with the entire tradition of Weltanschauung, of the worldview (or world intuition).” And, for Žižek, it is this minimal inconsistency in the flesh of the world that is the point of subjectivity, broached by Kant in the ‘Transcendental Deduction’. Just as we have seen how the sublime is the failed intersection between teleology and beauty in The Critique of Judgment, so Žižek argues that the subject is the point of failed intersection between the empirical self and whatever phenomena could be given to us through our senses and the categorizing work(s) of our understanding.

Failure = Success: Žižek on the Transcendental Imagination The work of the second part puts us now in a position to lay out the most radical claim that Žižek makes concerning Kant in The Ticklish Subject and The Indivisible Remainder. This move, as I shall expand in the conclusion, is

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also absolutely vital in terms of understanding Žižek’s wider political-philosophical position. Žižek’s position comes very close to having the look of a speculation in the pre-Kantian (pejorative) sense. It is as follows. Žižek claims that the failure of the synthesis of imagination in the mathematical sublime is not only a truthful index of the non-completeness of phenomenal reality which does violence to the totalizing aspirations of our Reason (Part II). [Furthermore] If the synthesis of the imagination were to succeed without a gap, we would obtain perfect or self-sufficient auto-affection … / … (hence) far from being at the root of the antinomies of our comprehension, finite-temporal reality itself emerges because Reason, in its inherent movement, became involved in inconsistencies, and continues to exist as long as Reason does not disentangle them. (Žižek 1993, 37–38)

Žižek is drawing here on the work of Jacob Rogozinski.13 The force of the position is that we are mistaken if we think that the failure of the imagination before the sublime representations is simply exceptional in the cognitive life of the subject. Sublime representations, Žižek wants to say, are the exceptions that evince a larger rule. This is that the synthesis of comprehension necessarily fails, wherever there is perception. This synthesis fails always, Žižek argues, in exactly the same, ‘quantitative’ way that Kant isolated in his discussion of the mathematical sublime. There is always, according to Žižek, a minimal gap between the quantity of sensations the subject receives, and what it can comprehend. More precisely, there is always a surplus of the former (sensation) over the latter (comprehension). And this holds whether we are faced with the starry skies above, a mighty hurricane here below, or something altogether more banal again. Here Žižek’s reading of Kant most closely (and explicitly) approaches that of Heidegger in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1997) As Chapter 1 of The Ticklish Subject expounds, Žižek lays emphasis, like Heidegger, on the transcendental or ‘productive’ role of the imagination. This is the role that Kant assigns to the imagination not only in reproducing and combining previous representations, but in generating representations in the first place. For Kant, as Heidegger emphasizes, a work of imagination is constitutive to the work of the synthesis of the manifold of intuitions which makes our ordered experiences possible. Beyond Heidegger, though, Žižek argues that the ‘productive’ role of the imagination is not exhausted in its work of schematizing the categories, and bringing their formal rules down to the earth of temporality and our sensations (Heidegger 1962). Žižek claims that it plays a further role. This work is to ceaselessly ‘cover over’ the minimal gap that Žižek asserts exists between what we sensuously apprehend and what we can intelligibly comprehend.

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Interestingly, Žižek’s argumentation supporting this claim once more evokes Jacques Derrida’s work, which he elsewhere excels in deriding. Everything turns on Žižek’s locating (or ‘deconstructing’) what is indeed a telling exception in the conceptual architectonics of Kant’s system. Usually, Žižek notes, Kant rigorously separated regulative principles—principles which regulate future cognitive or moral activity—from anything to do with the constitution of our everyday sense of the world. Kant’s argument in the ‘Transcendental Dialectic’ of The Critique of Pure Reason is that the only legitimate use a critical mind can have for these regulative principles is practical. As he writes of the Idea of the Universe-as-a-whole at this point of The Critique of Pure Reason: Still less is it a constitutive principle of reason authorizing us to extend our conception of the sensuous world beyond all possible experience. It is only a principle for the enlargement and extension of experience as far as is possible for human faculties… . It is hence a principle of reason which, as a rule, dictates how we ought to proceed in our empirical (investigations), but is unable to anticipate or indicate, prior to the empirical investigation, what is given in the thing itself. (Kant 1978, 358)

Nevertheless, Žižek notes rightly that in two decisive points in The Critique of Pure Reason Kant upsets this strict opposition. Kant in these places argues for a constitutive role for regulative positings in the subject’s constitution of sense. Where are these places? For purposes of economy, we will restrict ourselves to the ‘exceptional (Kantian) use of the constitutive / regulative pair’ which Žižek identifies in the ‘Analytic of Principles’ in The Critique of Pure Reason.14 In section III of this ‘Analytic’, entitled ‘The Systematic Representation of all Synthetic Principles of the Pure Understanding’, Kant broaches what are avowedly ‘ … merely regulative principles … distinguished from the mathematical, which are constitutive’. These are the so-called ‘Analogies of Experience’: the principles that all substance is permanent; that all change takes place according to the laws of cause and effect; and that all coexistent things exist ‘in a state of complete reciprocality of action’ (Kant 1952, 74, 76, 84). In each case, the use of the universal quantifier (everywhere vital for Kant) is the decisive thing. Kant is concerned here with the topic of the ‘Analytic’ more generally: namely, how it is that the purely universal, formal categories can work upon the always-particular contents given to the senses. Furthermore, he wants to establish how we can accordingly establish the ‘real existence’ of the objects that the categories enable us to make judgments about. Kant argues that, for us to get a real sense of the existence of objects, we need to have always already made a regulative wager about what is given to us. The

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content of this regulative wager is contained in what Kant calls the ‘general principle’ of the analogies. Žižek’s stress is to note how this principle, in order to attain to Universality, necessarily invokes something beyond the scope of any possible single experience: namely “… the necessary unity of apprehension in relation to all our empirical consciousness (perception) at every time … ” (Kant 1952, 73 (my italics)) Why is this vital? As Žižek notes, the ‘Analogies of Experience’ are not themselves categories of understanding. We could say imprecisely that they supplement the categories. More to the point, they function to guarantee that the categories will apply ‘at every time’, no matter what may come to the senses of the subject in any possible future time. To quote The Critique of Pure Reason again: In philosophy, analogy is not the equality of two quantitative terms (as in mathematics), but of two qualitative relations. In this case, from three given terms, I  can give a priori and cognize the relation to a fourth member, but not this fourth term itself… . An analogy of experience is therefore only a rule according to which unity of experience must arise out of perceptions in respect of objects (phenomena) not as a constitutive, but merely as a regulative principle… . (Kant 1952, 73; my italics)

This point in Kant’s first Critique, Žižek ventures, is enacting a radical ‘extraneation’ of ‘our most “natural” sense of reality’. As a finite, embodied subject, we are always confined to a spatiotemporally limited segment of the universe. The horizon of the material universe always extends indefinitely in space and time beyond what is immediately apprehended by us at any one time. Yet, Žižek argues, in the analogies, Kant is forced to argue that our ability to comprehend any given local point(s) in space and time is only possible because of the transcendental deployment of a regulative analogy that ‘the universe is a consistent whole, about which sense will always emerge’. In other words, although Kant stipulated in his resolution of the mathematical antinomy that our Idea of the universe as a whole is an illusory one, in the Analogies, we learn that this illusion is a transcendental one. It is a constitutive illusion constructed and maintained by the work of the ‘productive imagination’: The crucial point … is that this illusion of the Universe is not something we can realistically renounce, but is necessary, unavoidable, if our experience is to maintain its consistency: if I do not represent to myself things in the world as entities that exist in themselves; if I do not conceive what I perceive as a partial aspect of some reality-in-itself … then my perceptual field disintegrates into an inconsistent mess… . / In short, it is an inherent part of our ‘common sense’

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that we humans are part of the universe which exists in itself as a finite or infinite whole… . (Žižek 1993, 84–5)

In characteristic fashion, Žižek seeks to ‘render palpable’ his reading of what Kant’s doctrine of the analogies commits us to, through reference to ‘a somewhat similar cinematic experience.’ “Today, one often supplements a shot of ‘real reality’ with a computer-generated image (a ‘live’ picture of planes flying, of a waterfall) which not only fits harmoniously into the framework of screen reality but is actually responsible for the shot’s ‘impression of reality’: if one were to subtract this ‘artful’, computer-generated element, the remainder would suddenly change into a puzzle with some crucial pictures still missing” (Žižek 2007, 111). In the spirit of the famous quip that sometimes the truth is stranger than fiction (and Lacan’s remark that truth is structured like a fiction), Žižek’s claim is that this cinematic phenomenon again gives external or technological form to a more basic truth of subjectivity. A further proximity with some of Derrida’s thought, and that of Stiegler more recently, could be entertained. On Žižek’s reading, Kant’s regulative analogies in The Critique of Pure Reason play precisely such a ‘transcendentally artful’ role in all of our experience as do these often clumsy, computer-generated images in contemporary films. Indeed, as transcendental, without them, we could not experience true phenomena at all.

Conclusion: From the Politicization of Ontology to Žižek’s Ontology of Politics The essay’s expository work is now complete. To repeat the premises:



1. Žižek argues that the subject of apperception in The Critique of Pure Reason is not a being that could ever be objectified, but only a necessary condition for any objectification. (Part I) 2. Žižek stresses on how the two modes of the sublime ‘map’ on to the two types of antinomies of pure reason in The Critique of Pure Reason. Žižek argues for the epistemic priority of what is intimated to the subject in the ‘experience’ of the mathematical sublime: namely, that the universe as a unified finite whole we could ever predicate about consistently ‘does not exist’. Žižek’s position is that the lack-of-being that ‘is’ the subject is equivalent to the inconsistency of phenomenal reality. (Part II) 3. Žižek argues that this equivalence—which Žižek often describes by saying, in Hegelian terms, that the subject ‘is’ the crack in the (social)

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Matthew Sharpe substance—is demonstrable, at least indirectly. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, in the ‘Analytic of Principles’ (and also in the ‘A deduction’) can be shown to have conceded that the synthetic work of the imagination extends to filling in an irreducible gap between what we sensuously apprehend and what we finally comprehend. This work of supplementation is carried out by the transcendental imagination. The imagination unifies the subject’s sense of reality, or rather guarantees that such a unity will always be comprehended. It does this work by referring all our apprehensions concerning material phenomena to the regulative ‘transcendental illusion’ that the universe exists as a fully unified totalizable whole. (Part III)

What unifies these premises is Žižek’s commitment to trying to think through fully the implications of Kant’s starting point: epistemic finitude. Žižek argues that Kant, in the critical project of trying to delineate the legitimate use of our faculties, opened this problematic. But he ‘opened’ it in the two senses of having both inaugurated it, and left it incompletely thought through. According to Žižek, it was only Hegel (and later Lacan) who fully thought through the a priori that arise when a limited creature tries to comprehend its own limitation, and what these aporiai point us towards. To conclude, building on our exposition of Žižek’s reading of Kant, I want to pose what I will call three principles of Žižek’s political ontology. All of these follow from Žižek’s avowed intention, whose parameters we have seen, that his Hegelian and Lacanian theory be ‘more Kantian than Kant’.   First Principle: Limitation precedes transcendence (Žižek 1993, 15). The first of these Žižekian principles is stated directly in Chapter  1 of Tarrying with the Negative:  ‘limitation precedes transcendence.’ What this means, in a slogan, is that “there where we might be tempted to follow the Kant of the dynamic deployment of Reason, and explain the more Unheimlich aspects of our experience as marking the interventions in the phenomenal world of an Other, noumenal dimension, we should instead only see in these exceptional moments the indices of the inconsistency of our own phenomenal world” (Žižek 1993, 15). What is at stake in limit experiences of the sublime is nothing beyond the scope of possible experience. Rather, what these experience index is that the field of possible experience (which Žižek usually talks of under the aegis of the Lacanian ‘big Other’) is itself inconsistent (or ‘not-all’). It needs our subjective, imaginative or (in psychoanalytic terms, fantasmatic) ‘supplementation’ if it is to appear fully consistent and ‘in itself’ to subjects (see Principle 3).

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  Principle 2: The inconsistency of phenomenal reality precedes and ‘generates’— as a fantasmatic misrecognition—any sense we may have of its incompleteness before a more True, Noumenal or Other level of reality. The second ontological principle follows from Principle 1. In the terms of Kant’s system, the Ideas of Reason Kant thinks the sublime objects in phenomenal reality intimate are the active positings of our productive imagination. They are posited by this faculty to save the (semblance of the consistency of) phenomenal experience. They do this “through (elevating) the noumenal (realm) which is their constitutive exception” (Žižek 1999, 39). The truth of such Ideas of Reason, Žižek effectively maintains, is accordingly to be found less in the ‘Dialectic’ of The Critique of Pure Reason than in the earlier section on the ‘Analogies’. Here, as we saw in Part III, Kant argues that the dynamic principles of the understanding—which ‘oversee’ the interconnectedness in space and time of objects of subjects’ possible experience—are regulative, even though they operate at the very heart of the subject’s most basic, sense-constituting activities.   Principle 3 (the move from ontology to politics, via ideology): Given Principle 1, Sublime Objects (of Ideology) are the Ways that Subjects misrecognize their own Irreducible (Political) Responsibility. We commented in introducing this essay that Žižek’s largest aim is to contribute to political philosophy, and the modern project of enlightenment. Reading Žižek’s interpretation of Kant, however, shows us with regard to this wider or more basic orientation, that Žižek’s contribution to the political philosophy is grounded in his understanding of a much more basic, indeed transcendental, ‘politicization’ of the production of Truth—and thereby of the object-field of philosophy itself. How can we exactly locate the sense this ‘politicization’? From 1989 onwards, ‘ideology’ is the key term Žižek insists on using to describe the transcendental frameworks within which subjects constitute their understandings of the world. In the lineage of Marx, Žižek wants to insist that the ways that people ordinarily understand their political worlds and relations is saliently false or deceptive. To base his theory of ideology as he does in a Kantian account of how subjects make sense of the world, then, seems on the face of it deeply problematic. Why? Because Kant, as standardly read, takes the scope of the categories that he uncovers to be—by definition—‘synthetic a priori’, which means: universal. Far from being possibly false or illusory, they set out the framework within which things can appear truly or falsely to subjects in the first place.

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In this paper, we have laid the grounds for understanding how Žižek nevertheless can and does consistently read ‘Kant with Marx’ on this issue. Žižek accepts Kant’s transcendental turn. Yet he holds that Kant broached, but could not finally accept, that the subject’s work of making sense of the world is finite: which means, minimally partial, ‘subjective’. Žižek’s analytic of the sublime shows how the phenomenal world is never given to us all at once (Principle 2), so that the sense we usually do have of it as a unified whole can only be the result of our own partial or biased supplementation of what is given by way of the productive imagination. If the term ‘ideology’ assumes such a wide scope in Žižek’s work, we can then say, it is because all experience, according to his revamping of Kant, involves a ‘falseness’, in his exact sense. Žižek then keeps, in Kantian form, a kind of ‘primacy of practical reason’. Only, it points him in a distinctly political direction, far removed from Kant’s salutary intentions to make room for faith. For Žižek, we each always have an input into ‘how the world is’, or at least how it is taken by us to be. Kant’s transcendental analyses show us how the world can never be wholly, or wholly consistently, given to us. Yet we each have the sense that yet it is unified. This can only mean that we, as subjects, have regulatively unified what we experience according to one or other positing of our transcendental imagination. This contention in fact points us towards how the title of his first book in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology needs to be read. In the terms of Kant, Žižek’s claim is that ideological representations politically ‘colonize’ this activity of the transcendental imagination in subjects. They provide it with ready-made sublime images (e.g.:  the interminable shots of sports champions winning in national colors, or, differently, of the second plane hitting the WTC) and elevated, but profoundly empty, ‘master signifiers’ (like ‘the people’, ‘Australian-ness’, ‘war on terror’). Through these (in psychoanalytic terms) fantasmatic positings, political subjects can be both captivated, and in this way brought to misrecognize, their own responsibility in maintaining commitment to hegemonic ways of understanding the world. As subjects of ideology, Žižek argues, we ‘love our political community’s sublime objects as ourselves’. This means: we love them as the alienated projections of the kind of world-constituting potential we each harbor within us, as the finite subjects Kant disclosed us as being. Yet just as Kant (mis)read the experience of the dynamic sublime as pointing towards the provenance of the Ideas of Reason within ourselves, what ideologies do is get us to read our experience of sublime objects as pointing towards the provenance of the key ideological signifiers within us.

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… And a Final Remark on the (Political) Subject So what then does our third principle point us towards, in the political field? According to Žižek, to be a subject is to have an inalienable, indeed transcendental, responsibility for how one stands in the world, and what world it is that one stands within. Such an inalienable responsibility, Žižek thinks, is identifiable in the first Critique, despite Kant’s attempts to identify the subject of apperception with a noumenal Self or Thing. Because of this transcendental responsibility or ‘abyss of freedom’ in subjects, Žižek then reasons, we must also accept that subjects’ accession to see the (socio-political) world according to the interpretive categories furnished them by the dominant discourses in their socio-political world must always have involved a primordial activity. This is where he sharply differs from Levinas or the later Derrida, who elevate a sublime passivity before the Other as at the heart of subjectivity and responsibility. To see the world according to an ideology always involves an active acceptance and ‘supplementation’ of the minimally-inconsistent conceptual coordinates furnished us by the dominant worldviews of our socio-political communities. This primordial activity is, Žižek agrees, usually only ‘a blind but indispensable function of the soul’, as Kant described the imagination in the first Critique (Kant 1978, 112). But in Žižek it also becomes the deepest ground for (the possibility of) any transformative political act. If subjects can be brought by critical philosophy to avow this originary responsibility—and if they can accordingly be drawn to re-examine their fascination with the sublime objects and narratives that ideological systems provide for them to passively accept—perhaps we can also be brought to act to institute new, and better, socio-political regimes. That is the basis of Žižek’s political challenge to us.

Notes 1. To quote and compare Robert Pippin’s “Kant and the Spontaneity of Mind,” in Idealism as Modernism, at page 51: “For one thing, there is ample evidence that Kant often thought one way to resolve the ambiguities was just to state flat out that the transcendental subject was the noumenal self. Perhaps his most famous statement is the Reflexion: ‘The soul in transcendental apperception is substantia noumenon, hence it has no permanence in time, since belongs only to objects in space’. The same identification between the ‘self proper as it exists in itself,’ with the ‘transcendental subject’ occurs in the Critique at B520/A492.” 2. “[I]‌n each of his three Critiques,” Žižek (1997, 227) suggests: “[a]fter indicating the contours of this concept (which would fully register our constitutive finitude), Kant quickly withdraws and offers another, supplementary concept in exchange, a concept which already ‘pacifies’ the unbearable dimension of the first one:  The

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Matthew Sharpe Sublime [is offered] (instead of the Monstrous) [in the Critique of Judgment]; radical evil [is offered] (instead of ‘diabolical evil’) [in the texts on practical reason].” The problem within Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason (Kant 1996) concerns Kant’s seeming need to postulate the possibility of an act of evil which is not pathologically motivated, which is a privilege he wants to reserve for action for the sake of moral duty.As Žižek acutely diagnoses the issue: i) Kant usually holds that it is solely our autonomous capacity to legislate for ourselves in line with the moral law, that is capable of ‘lifting’ us out of the causal-phenomenal nexus. Practical reason, Kant remarkably says in the second Critique, requires “… a respect for something entirely different from life, in comparison to which life and its enjoyment have absolutely no worth. [A man] lives only because it is his duty, not because he has the least taste for living. / Such is the nature of the genuine drive of pure practical reason” (Kant 1965, 328; my italics).Yet ii) Kant wants to hold that, underlying our empirical tendency to prioritize our pathological selves over moral duty is an initial, founding or transcendental choice:  this is what he terms ‘radical evil’. The problem is that a choice or tendency which is transcendental can’t be ‘pathologically’ motivated, in Kant’s system. When Kant speaks of our desires as ‘pathological’, what he is asserting is that our motivations to act, except when we act morally, are conditioned by representations of ‘normal’ or ‘empirical’ things in the world (this pretty girl, that cup of coffee), which drive us to act in their pursuit. However, to take the most famous Kantian candidate of what is transcendental, the categories of the first Critique are themselves absolutely not empirical ‘representations’. They are the purely formal frame given whose schematization by the imagination, such representations can emerge in the first place.Hence, Žižek deduces, if: i) the good is Kant’s model for what allows us to transcend the ‘pathological’, and: ii) radical evil as transcendental cannot be pathologically conditioned, therefore: iii) the transcendental adoption of ‘radical evil’ qua maxim subordinating universal law to one’s particular ends, can itself only have been a purely formal, free and non-pathological act. As such, this opting for evil will have been indistinguishable from a purely good moral act. The originary opting for evil that Kant posits as underlying all subsequent pathologically motivated acts of evil can only have been an act of evil for the sake of evil, untainted by any pathological gain, and yet also strictly amoral.Having reached this conclusion himself, however, Kant explicitly withdraws from it. Here is the relevant passage pointed to by Žižek’s reading: The ground of [human] evil can … not be placed … in a corruption of the morally legislative reason, as if reason could extirpate within itself the dignity of the law itself, for this is absolutely impossible. To think of oneself as a freely acting being, yet as exempted from the one law commensurate to such a being (the moral law), would amount to the thought of a cause operating without any law at all … , and this is a contradiction. Sensuous nature therefore contains too little to provide a ground of moral evil in the human being, for, to the extent that it eliminates the incentives originating in freedom, it makes of the human a purely animal being; [however] a reason exonerated from the moral law, an evil reason as it were (an absolutely evil will), would on the contrary contain too much [to provide a ground for human evil], because resistance to the law would itself be thereby elevated to an incentive … 

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[Hence] the subject would be made a diabolical being.—Neither of these two is however applicable to the human being. [Kant 1996, 82 (my italics)] 3. What is perhaps most interesting here about Husserl, however, is that he arguably traces out the same ‘withdrawal’ in the space of a few sections in his Ideas. Having specified that the subject is transcendental for there to be a world rather than itself being a piece of the world, he goes on almost immediately to try to specify the being of this subject. In doing so, though, he names it an absolute sphere of being which could feasibly exist without the world of ‘transcendent’ phenomena (see Husserl 1976, 33–50). 4. It would be interesting to compare Žižek’s reading of the unity of apperception in Kant with Robert Brandom’s, in Making It Explicit, centrally. For both writers at least, the notion of responsibility and in this way freedom is decisively close to the core of this Kantian concept. How this would play out in terms of Brandom’s emphasis on the Kantian subject as always a rule-bound subject, is another question (see below, and Brandom 1998, 9–11). 5. I am directing the reader to Kant’s famous slogan: ‘Thoughts without content are empty; intuitions without concepts are blind.’ 6. One more extreme case of such a ‘standard’ reading, for example, is Zygmunt Bauman’s treatment of Kant in Modernity and Ambivalence, where he picks up on Kant’s frequent judicial metaphorics and tropes to paint the latter as the archetypical exemplar of the hubristic ancient or modern dream of the ‘philosopher as legislator.’ 7. Although I  cannot examine this here, Žižek argues that, on grounds of this ‘Copernican revolution,’ ‘… each of Kant’s three critiques “stumbles” against universalization’: “In ‘pure reason’, antinomies emerge when, in the use of categories, we reach beyond our finite experience and endeavor to apply them to the totality of the universe… . In ‘practical reason’, the ‘crack’ is introduced by the possibility of ‘radical evil’… . In the ‘capacity of judging’ the split occurs twice. First, we have the opposition of aesthetics and teleology that, together, do not form a harmonious whole. (and second) the Sublime is to be conceived precisely as the index of the failed synthesis of Beauty and Purpose … ” (Žižek 1993, 45–6). Unfortunately, it is not within the scope of this paper to examine these in anything like the depth they deserve. More immediately, however, you can now see how the sense of the human-being as ‘nature sick unto death,’ which Žižek takes from ‘the young Hegel’ (Žižek 1991, 37) needs also to be read as positing that human-subjectivity is beyond not only that ‘first nature’ of ‘things in themselves’ which man, as ‘a speaking being’ is irreducibly debarred from, according to Lacanian psychoanalysis. More than this, the ‘subject’ also represents a ‘variable’ that properly has no place in that ‘second nature’ particular to human-being qua ‘parletre’ (Žižek 1993, 14): namely, “… nature’s circular movement … insofar as this circular movement is already symbolized/historicized, inscribed, caught in the symbolic web … ” (Žižek 1989, 135) or—in Kantian terms—insofar as its percepts have been schematized and ordered by the categories of our Understanding. 8. Epicurus largely adopted the atomism of the pre-Socratics Empedocles and Democritus. However, with the idea of the clinamen, he introduced the possibility that the atoms may randomly swerve from their ordered paths. It is this that Žižek is evoking, as a way of describing the Kantian subject.

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9. In a move mediated by his reading of Lacan’s infamous formulae of sexuation, to make things even simpler (sic.). 10. Such a purpose cannot be empirically verified, Kant stipulates—here as elsewhere, he follows other modern thinkers in rejecting the constitutive efficacy of final causes. Nevertheless, he holds that the presupposition that nature follows such inner purposes can legitimately serve as the regulative principle for empirical investigations. 11. This author has expounded on this in Matthew Sharpe, ‘A (Kantian) Critique of the Post-Structuralist Position on Ethics: On the Dumb Sublimity of Law’, Minerva Volume VII, 2003. There is nothing significantly controversial in this part of Žižek’s reading of the sublime in Kant. It is how this analytic is signified in Žižek’s wider project that is novel (in particular, I refer to the notion of ‘sublime objects of ideology’. 12. Twentieth and twenty first century readers of Kant have good reason here to be put in mind of Wittgenstein’s distinction in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus between statements that are nonsense and statements, like the Tractatus itself, which are senseless, laying claim to describe neither what is within the limits of natural science, nor what is wholly beyond, but this limit itself. 13. In particular, Jacob Rogozinski, Kanten (Paris: Editions Kime, 1996). 14. The first is Kant’s enigmatic postulation of the ‘transcendental object’ in the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. In this deduction, Kant stipulates that it is not enough to recognize the work of the categories and their schematization by the imagination, if we want to explain how it is that the subject generates meaning from the multitude of sense impressions it receives. In order that the purely formal categories can synthesize this manifold of intuitions, Kant stipulates that they must also be referred to “the transcendental object, that is, the completely indeterminate thought of something in general” (Kant 1965, A109). What is crucial about this transcendental object, then, is that it is purely a product of the productive imagination of the subject. As Žižek comments, it is thus the very opposite of what Kant thinks concerning the Things-inThemselves, insofar as “… it is devoid of any ‘objective’ content … i.e. all sensations by means of which the subject is affected by (the) Ding (Thing-in-Itself)” (Žižek 1993, 151). The transcendental object, Kant is clear, thus adds no new content to the object to which the categories are applied. Its eminently anti-Humean and regulative function is simply to guarantee that, no matter what intuitions may be given to the subject, these categories will apply, or—in slightly different terms—that our judgments will refer to things, no matter what. To use an example, before the referring of the categories to the transcendental object, we might be able to say something like: ‘this seems to be a table, because it appears to have qualities x, y, z.’ After this reference has been made, we will be able to say: ‘this object has qualities x, y, z, because it is a table … ’ In Žižek’s (1993, 152) gloss on a comparative example: “At work here are regulative principles, since (the) dynamical synthesis (that refers the categories to the transcendental object) is not limited to phenomenal features, but refers them to their underlying-unknowable substratum (‘tableness’), to the transcendental object.”

References Allison, Henry E. 1983. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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Borch-Jacobsen, Michel. 1991. Lacan: The Absolute Master. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Brandom, Robert. 1998. Making It Explicit. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1976. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Spivak. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1998. Resistances to Psychoanalysis. Translated by Peggy Kamuf et  al. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. (1927) 1962. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Reprint, New York: Harpers & Row Publishers. Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Fifth edition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1976. Ideas. Translated by Boyce Gibson. London: Allen and Unwin. Kant, Immanuel. 1952. Kant. London: Britannica. Kant, Immanuel. (1787) 1965. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith. Reprint, New York: St. Martin’s Press. Kant, Immanuel. 1996. “Religion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason.” In Religion and Rational Theology. Edited by Allen W. Wood. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Pippen, Robert B. 1997. Idealism as Modernism:  Hegelian Variations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogozinski, Jacob. 1996. Kanten. Paris: Editions Kime. Sharpe, Matthew. 2003. “A (Kantian) Critique of the Post-Structuralist Position on Ethics: On the Dumb Sublimity of Law.” In Minerva—An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 7: 23–43. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj and F. W. J. von Schelling. 1997. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World. An Essay by Slavoj Žižek with the Text of Schelling’s Die Weltalter (second draft, 1813). In English translation by Judith Norman. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. “Holding the Place.” In Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:  Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso: London. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters. London: Verso.

3.  Žižek’s Brand of Philosophical Excess and the Treason of the Intellectuals: Wagers of Sin, Ugly Ducklings, and Mythical Swans Paul A. Taylor University of Leeds

Introduction—Žižek’s Brand of Excess and Le Traison des Clercs No one who has tried to work in cultural studies from a perspective which is even conscious of the global hegemony of neo-liberalism and its social consequences can fail to be dismayed by the atmosphere of complete disengagement which seems to infuse so much “cultural studies” and related areas of thought… . (Gilbert in Bowman and Stamp 2007, 77) I heard recently Oliver Cromwell’s address to the rump parliament in 1653 (online, I’m not a Time Lord) where he bawls out the whole of the House of Commons as “whores, virtueless horses and money-grabbing dicklickers.” I  added the last one but, honestly, that is the vibe. I  was getting close to admiring old Oliver for his “calls it as he sees it, balls-out” rhetoric till I read about him on Wikipedia and learned that beyond this brilliant 8 Mile-style takedown of corrupt politicians he was a right arsehole; starving and murdering the Irish and generally (and surprisingly for a Roundhead) being a total square. The fact remains that if you were to recite his speech in parliament today you’d be hard pushed to find someone who could be legitimately offended. (Brand 2013)

Through his inimitable use of philosophical excess in the form of frequently offensive examples and dirty jokes, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek has risen to either academic celebrity status or notoriety depending upon one’s personal taste. The briefest survey of his work reveals serious philosophical points conveyed through jocular descriptions of sphincters, ­

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interracial threesomes, and the Hegelian nature of shit. This paper uses the specific case of Žižek and his use of filthy humor to explore wider questions about the viability of excess as a compensatory strategy for today’s version of le traison des clercs—the intellectual pusillanimity and lack of engagement with the social and cultural consequences of neo-liberal ideology, a problem recognized above by even one of Žižek’s fiercest critics. This lack of engagement has produced an intellectual climate in which even the most basic critical concepts have become decaffeinated. Ironically, this is not because critical theory’s insights have proved inaccurate, but rather the opposite. “Pragmatic” accommodations by academics with capitalist realpolitik have plumbed such quotidian depths that familiarity has bred not contempt but consent. For example, instead of constituting a cautionary concept, Adorno and Horkheimer’s deliberate oxymoron—“the culture industry”—is now simply either blithely accepted or uncritically embraced by such new capitalism-acquiescent fields of study as “creative and cultural industries”, and in the UK university sector, scholars scrabble indecorously to prove the real world “impact” of their work to funding councils. This paper argues that within such an acquiescent environment, comedic excess can serve a valuable corrective and countervailing role. As the advertising slogan for Heineken beer put it, it can still refresh the parts that other forms of political analysis no longer reach. The second quotation above comes from a guest editorial by the comedian Russell Brand for the British political magazine, The New Statesman. Whilst calling for a revolution in the way we think about our current political situation, Brand does so in a manner that shares Žižek’s strategic use of ribald humor’s excess as an ideological tool with which to critique the contemporary mediascape. Shortly before the publication of his article, Brand appeared on a BBC flagship news program Newsnight questioned by the doyen of aggressive British TV political interviewing, Jeremy Paxman. By the end of the interview, due to a combination of Brand’s strength of feeling, the radical nature of his views and the paradoxically earnest nature of his defense of the right to be facetious, despite being widely referred to in the press as a “Rottweiler,” Paxman appears to be visibly chastened and the video of the encounter went viral (Paxman 2013). It is important to emphasize that, to a significant extent; neither politically aware comedians nor humorous philosophers tell us anything that we didn’t already know. More than this, the very perception of their excess is fueled by surplus repression—the strain of the emotional investments we make in maintaining open secrets is displaced on to those who dare to criticize. Žižek and Brand have predictably become bête noirs for sections of the press because, like the small boy in Hans Christian Anderson’s tale,

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“The Emperor’s New Clothes,” they have pointed out a truth that we would all prefer to ignore. In the words of Marcuse, “The unrealistic sound of these propositions is indicative, not of their utopian character, but of the strength of the forces which prevent their realization” (Marcuse 1964). In solidarity with the ethos manifested in Diogenes’ philosophical use of public defecation and the belief system of Bulgakov who, “… always loved clowning and agreed with E. T. A. Hoffmann that irony and buffoonery are expressions of ‘the deepest contemplation of life in all its conditionality’ ” (Pevear in Bulgakov 2007 [1966–7], xviii), it is suggested that today, maintaining a sense of excessive humor’s political importance is more important than ever. Thus, in recent years, faced with a dearth of convincing ideology critique amongst the traditional cognoscenti, a number of comedians have engaged more directly in substantive political debate than the usual forms of political satire. In 2004, The Daily Show satirist Jon Stewart appeared on the political discussion program Crossfire (Stewart 2004) and lambasted the conservative journalism of its presenters so effectively that the incident is thought by many to have hastened the subsequent demise of the program for an eight-year period (perhaps something of a Pyrrhic victory given that the show has recently reappeared with Newt Gingrich now at the helm). Again, in 2010, Stewart demonstrated the political use of excess by calling Fox News “the lupus of the news” proceeding to sing “Go Fuck Yourself” backed by a Gospel choir. In the UK, meanwhile, Frankie Boyle, a notoriously offensive Glaswegian comic, published Work! Consume! Die! (2012), a scathingly crude and damning indictment of capitalist society in which he quotes Žižek more than once, and the character comedian Steve Coogan has played a leading role in the press regulation campaign Hacked Off including a strident newspaper debate with another comedian David Mitchell (see Coogan 2013). Frequent recourse to obscene topics for political intent represents a secondary form of obscenity. The primary, but routinely overlooked, form of obscenity is the framework of under-acknowledged values and processes that maintain the gross iniquities of the status quo, “This obscene underground of habits is what is really difficult to change” (Žižek 2007b). Despite (because of?) the difficulty of changing these habits, Žižek, like Freud before him, finds affinity with Virgil’s expression: ‘Flectere si nequeo, Acheronto movebo (If I cannot bend the higher powers, I will move the infernal regions)’ (cited in Freud 2001, xi). Brand also feels a politically-motivated need to provoke, arguing that “… apathy is in fact a transmission problem, when we are given the correct information in an engaging fashion, we will stir” (Brand 2013). After first describing Žižek’s use of excess (the highly engaging quality of which is ambivalently recognized in the media’s mantra-like introduction of him as

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“the Elvis of Cultural Theory”) to undermine the obscene underground of habits, Žižek’s reception within the media and academia is examined. The uncritical response to the inherent ideology contained within TV programs like Ugly Betty, Louie, and The Swan, is then used to show how, frequently under the guise of superficially good intentions, the ideological state apparatuses (ISA) of both the media and academia propagate under-acknowledged obscene ideologies of their own. Since the concept of excess is innately relational, the obvious question arises “excessive to whom?” Seeking to go beyond Žižek’s obvious épater le bourgeoisie tendencies, it is suggested that both Žižek and politically engaged comedians tend to be deemed too excessive and provoke negative responses less because of what they say and more because they represent a threatening return of the repressed. The smooth functioning of both media and university systems requires the routinized exclusion of the sorts of uncomfortable subjects they address with atypical vigor and earthy directness. It is recognized, however, that humor-infused critique faces a double threat of its own—the more po-faced critics deliberately fail to appreciate the deeply serious role comedy plays in the service of ideology critique whilst in terms of its more enthusiastic audiences, its critical, oppositional, element risks being drowned out in the unalloyed enjoyment of the performance: “There are many great authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say” (Arendt 1993 [1954], 207–8). In an age dominated by “casino capitalism,” Žižek stakes his project on a deliberate gamble with Arendt’s open question.

Žižek’s Wagers of Sin … and the Puritanical Response The wager behind Berlusconi’s vulgarities is that the people will identify with him as embodying the mythic image of the average Italian… . Yet we shouldn’t be fooled:  behind the clownish mask there is a state power that functions with ruthless efficiency. Perhaps by laughing at Berlusconi we are already playing his game. (Žižek 2009)

In the context of academia, Žižek appears excessive and unrealistic because his passionate and (self-confessed) dogmatically Lacanian adherence to an ideologically-reflexive theoretical perspective stands out markedly from the usual degree of academic disengagement that C.  Wright Mills so insightfully termed “the curious passion for the mannerism of the non-committed” (Mills 2000 [1959], 7–8). “Wagers of sin” describes Žižek’s contrasting gamble, his pseudo-masochistic willingness to subject himself to the inevitable

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depredations of media formats and academic humorlessness that meet his passionate curiosity conveyed through dirty jokes. The phrase illuminates the underlying strategy by drawing upon the notion of “Pascal’s Wager” that Žižek frequently references in his work. Pascal’s Wager portrays the performative element of belief, the bet that the cumulative effect of somatized habit (in the case of Pascal’s church-goer, the kneeling down and the voicing of incantatory prayers) means that even a non-believer will eventually come to believe notwithstanding their conscious preferences. Likewise, laugh with, or even at, Žižek for long enough and, just as Silvio Berlusconi plays the clown to such an extent that it is all too easy to forget that he retains real power, so we may also only belatedly realize that behind the “engaging fashion” of Žižek’s joke-laden performances lurks material that, à la Brand, is full of “correct information” and which still has the power to stir. I have previously (Taylor 2010) explored both the style and purpose of Žižek’s wagers of sin through the notion of “the dog’s bollocks”—a British phrase used to express the idea that something or someone is excellent. The precise etymology of the phrase is unclear, but it is thought that it stems from the manner in which dogs’ testicles stand out. This is true not only in the sense of a basic physical extrusion, but also due to the manner in which, through constant self-licking, the presence of the dog’s bollocks is shamelessly highlighted in self-conscious human company. A related joke which portrays something of the strategy behind Žižek’s excess goes as follows—into the midst of a very polite dinner party the hostess’s old, flatulent dog stumbles into the dining room and begins to lick its scrotum. In an attempt to diffuse the sudden atmosphere of embarrassment, a male guest quips “I wish I could do that”, to which the hostess tartly replies, “if you give him a biscuit you can.” In this scenario, the hostess shares with Žižek a desire to undermine the social conventions that create a sense of excess through the strength of their constraining influence (in this case, the dog’s perfectly natural behavior only seems excessive in comparison to the achingly polite behavior of the dinner party scenario). Both Žižek and the hostess up the ante, they force those otherwise resistant to do so, to consider the uncomfortable underlying realities that people would prefer to ignore. As much as he enjoys being gratuitously provocative, it is important to appreciate the degree to which Žižek’s power to stir up a reaction derives its ultimate strength from a resistance which tends to manifest itself in two particular forms akin to a patient’s experience of the psychoanalytical process: 1) Positive and negative transference—whether it comes from adulatory fans in packed-out auditoria hanging on Žižek’s every word but missing the substance of his critique (see Taylor in Flisfeder [ed.] {in press}), or scathing repudiation by

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The combined effect of these two elements means that Žižek becomes the subject of, at times, quite passionate criticism—he is resented for raising issues in analysis that we would rather keep repressed and he offers us no easy solutions. Chomsky’s dismissal of Žižek as the embodiment of theory’s misdirected energy encapsulates the negative transference created by Žižek’s philosophical use of excess. When I said I’m not interested in Theory, what I meant is, I’m not interested in posturing—using fancy terms like polysyllables and pretending you have a theory when you have no theory whatsoever. So there’s no theory in any of this stuff, not in the sense of theory that anyone is familiar with in the sciences or any other serious field. Try to find in all of the work you mentioned some principles from which you can deduce conclusions, empirically testable propositions where it all goes beyond the level of something you can explain in five minutes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fancy words are decoded. I can’t. So I’m not interested in that kind of posturing. Žižek is an extreme example of it. I don’t see anything to what he’s saying. (Chomsky 2012)

The basis for rejecting, out of hand, any substantive content to his work when it involves close readings of such major figures of Western thought as Hegel, Marx, and Lacan, to name but three, is clearly for Chomsky a result of Theory’s failure to constitute a scientific mode of enquiry or something similarly “serious.” To go from this empirically fundamentalist position to not seeing anything in his work (beyond what could be explained in five minutes to a twelve-year-old), however, obviously requires a level of emotionally invested antipathy that is not adequately explained by an all-excluding love of scientific punctiliousness alone. It is similarly present in the response of other scholars for whom “… this work does not even approach the standards of academic rigor that would normally be expected of an undergraduate essay” (Gilbert in Bowman and Stamp 2007, 63). This ideologically-loaded excess of feeling can be illustrated by a series of additional examples of negative transference taken from Žižek’s most voluble critics within both academia

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and the media in which the criticism clearly goes beyond either catty academic in-fighting or genuine intellectual disagreement.

Fifty Shades of Gray Transference—The Violent Visions of Žižek’s Critics Achieving a deceptive substance by endlessly reiterating an essentially empty vision, Žižek’s work—nicely illustrating the principles of paraconsistent logic— amounts in the end to less than nothing. (John Gray 2012)

In John Gray’s New  York Times condemnatory review of Žižek’s “essentially empty vision” entitled “The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek”, Gray cites Žižek’s description in of how, in Stalinist Russia, paranoid denunciation became institutionalized so that:  “The art of identifying a kulak was thus no longer a matter of objective social analysis; it became a kind of complex ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ of identifying an individual’s ‘true political attitudes’ hidden beneath his or her deceptive public proclamations” (Žižek cited in Gray 2012). Gray then proceeds to argue, “Describing mass murder in this way as an exercise in hermeneutics is repugnant and grotesque; it is also characteristic of Žižek’s work” (ibid). Contra Gray, what is characteristic is this statement’s excessive misinterpretation of Žižek’s point. It clearly would be repugnant and grotesque to reduce a discussion of mass murder to an exercise in hermeneutics, but Žižek does not do this. He does indeed describe how, in Stalinist times, mass murder was carried out according to the dictates of a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” however, the important distinction to be made here is between Žižek’s explanation of the cultural and psychological processes that enable mass murder and a repugnant and grotesque attempt to justify mass murder itself. Ironically, the fact that a professional philosopher is willing to deliberately conflate a justification and an explanation serves to illustrate how the institutionalization of paranoid denunciation works in a contemporary, non-Stalinist context. A similar example is provided by Richard Wolin who, exhibiting his trademark active refusal to understand the initial premises of critical theory, describes how, in relation to the events of 9–11, Žižek said:  “America got what it fantasized about”—which Žižek insinuates, echoing Baudrillard, is merely another way of saying that America got what it had coming… . Amid the fog of postmodern relativism disseminated by Baudrillard, Žižek, and others, something essential is missing (Wolin 2004, 307). Again, using the accuser’s own terms, the something essential that is missing in this instance is any grounding for Wolin’s charge that Žižek is sneering at America. It is a

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psychological fact that people have fantasies. It is also a psychological fact that to have a fantasy enter one’s reality, in an act of violence, for example, can be doubly traumatic—there is the trauma of the violence and to add to this there is the trauma of reliving one’s fantasy in conditions not of your own choosing. Žižek uses the movie The Piano Teacher as a sustained artistic expression of this point. For Wolin to proceed to argue that commenting upon the role of fantasy in trauma is the same as saying that someone is “getting what they had coming” itself insinuates something—a truly excessive and unhealthy desire to misrepresent. Perhaps the most excessive misrepresentations of Žižek have focused upon the theme of violence, as Gray claims: “The celebration of violence is one of the most prominent strands in Žižek’s work” (Gray 2012). Žižek’s interpretation of violence is emblematic of misrepresentations of his work because it goes straight to the heart of the role excess plays in his ideology critique. Violence shares with ideology the paradoxical quality of being most effective when it is least obviously present. The true ideological danger resides in the notion that one is in a nonideological situation, whilst similarly, an absence of explicit violence can hide the unacknowledged violence that underpins any given social situation. To encourage people to reflect upon the underlying violent grounds of their erstwhile normality requires a compensatory form of symbolic violence with which to prod them—Žižek’s method of “looking awry” and adopting a “parallax view”. This desire to look afresh at what, pace Barthes, otherwise “goes without saying”, frequently involves from the perspective of critics like Wolin, Gray, and Chomsky, recourse to an unacceptable degree of playfully non-scientific, unserious over-reading. The stark difference in perspective can be seen in how “Eco describes as an ‘excess of wonder’ … the inclination to treat as significant what might simply be fortuitous [whilst] Culler argues that this excess is ‘a quality to be cultivated rather than shunned’ ” (Davis 2010, xi). Contra Chomsky’s exclusive privileging of “serious” scientific discourse, “the force of these readings depends upon their dual ability to shock and to persuade. The philosophical interpreters court outrageousness whilst also seeking to create a context which will lend plausibility to their claims” (ibid, xii). The successful courting of outrage is demonstrated in the carefully cultivated sense of outrage that arose from Žižek’s statement that historical despots like Hitler, Stalin, and Pol Pot were (only in a very specific sense that Žižek explains in detail but which the critics ignored) “not violent enough”. Of particular note in this regard, was Adam Kirsch’s New Republic article “The Deadly Jester” (2008) the unequivocal general tenor of which is summed up in statements like:  “Žižek’s allegedly progressive thought leads directly

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into a pit of moral and intellectual squalor” (Kirsch 2008). With typical mischievousness, Žižek, co-opted Kirsch’s title of for his subsequent book cover publicity blurb. The deliberate misunderstanding and/or misrepresentation of Žižek’s analysis of violence is emblematic because it demonstrates, more clearly than any other theme, precisely what is at stake with Žižek’s wagers of sin. Outrageousness needs to be courted because, left undisturbed, the mediascape’s standard operating procedures act to process away recognition of the normalized forms of violence required by capitalism’s day-to-day functioning. Periodically, events such as Hurricane Katrina and Abu Ghraib may puncture its veneer by revealing society’s infernal regions, at least temporarily, but, directly contra Žižek’s reading, moments of deep political significance are soon reinterpreted either as being merely fortuitous, or reduced through such depoliticizing ideological filters as the superficially neutral non-political politics of personality and celebrity. The subtitle of the book Violence (Žižek 2008)—Six Sideways Reflections— reflects the search for a method of producing an ideologically-sensitive calibration of society’s various forms of violence capable of going beyond the surface level of overfamiliarity that breeds consent. In this work, Žižek uses three terms subjective, symbolic, and objective to demonstrate how “What might simply be fortuitous” is in fact the deeply ideological response trotted out when the excessive implications of one-off events threaten to disturb the political status quo. The notion of symbolic violence is inherent to language itself. The most basic act of communication necessarily involves a reduction and simplification of the initial reality that is being re-presented. It acts as the contested bridge between the other two notions. Subjective violence refers to that violence which has a directly attributable source whilst objective violence relates to systemic violence that is no less horrible in its effects, but which is less readily shocking due to the ease with which it can be accommodated into conventional social structures—a distinction summed up by the significantly named (from this paper’s perspective) movie character The Joker: “Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan.’ Even if the plan is horrifying! If, tomorrow, I tell the press that, like, a gang banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all ‘part of the plan’. But when I say that one little old mayor will die, well then everyone loses their minds!” (Nolan 2008). The “Deadly Jester” label conveys an important sense of the ambivalence that results from the “indivisible remainder” of seriousness that stubbornly persists after the media leavens and co-opts serious ideas with entertainment values. Because of our knowledge of his subsequent death Heath Ledger’s performance of The Joker in The Dark Knight has poignancy, but more than this, a deeper, more disturbing political effect is

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created by the viewers’ sense that behind The Joker’s excessive statements lie genuine, uncomfortable truths. The truth of the Joker’s analysis can be seen in our default approach to the historical record. We tend to compensate for our inability to conceptualize excess in the form of the largely incalculable number of deaths that occurred as a direct result of Russia’s Tsars and France’s Ancien Régime by means of a correspondingly excessive fixation upon the more easily identifiable and eventful deaths of individuals. Thus, the systematized death of Russian and French peasants through overwork and malnutrition remain in the historical subconscious whilst the guillotining of aristocrats and the execution of the Tsar’s family are dwelt upon time after time. This tendency to subsume systemic excess with an excessive focus upon individuals/individual instances is a key part of the contemporary mediascape’s ideological make-up, no more so than in Hollywood and, within Hollywood, no more so than in the metonymic image from Schindler’s List in which, in an otherwise monochrome film, a small girl is shown wearing a bright red coat—the objet petit a, an uncanny stain of Spielberg’s ideology that Terry Gilliam interprets in terms of taking sides: There was a wonderful quote in a book that Freddy Raphael wrote about the making of Eyes Wide Shut, it’s called Eyes Wide Open, and he’s talking to Kubrick about Schindler’s List and the Holocaust, and he says: “The thing is, Schindler’s List is about success, the Holocaust was about failure.” And that’s Kubrick, and that’s just spot on. Schindler’s List had “save those few people” happy ending. “A man can do what a man can do”, and stop death for a few people. But that’s not what Holocaust is about, it’s about complete failure of civilization, to allow 6 million people to die. And I know which side I’d rather be on. I’d like to have a nice house like Spielberg, but I know which side I’d rather be on. (Gilliam 2011)

The violence of the critical response to Žižek’s analysis of violence may partly be a result of the inchoate resentment caused by his direct engagement with the infernal regions of historical excess normally left repressed and unstirred— the sort of displeasure aimed at the whistle-blower who undermines the group solidarity that is deemed more important than the truth. An additional degree of resentment is caused by a combination of Žižek’s willingness to philosophize on the media’s terrain with lots of questions but precious few solutions.

The Real Excess of the Joker’s Success and the Search for Missing Rabbits I’m a bit of a tree-hugging, Hindu-tattooed, veggie meditator myself but first and foremost I  want to have a fucking laugh. When Ali G, who had

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joined protesters attempting to prevent a forest being felled to make way for a road, shouted across the barricade, “You may take our trees, but you’ll never take our freedom,” I  identified more with Baron Cohen’s amoral trickster than the stern activist who aggressively admonished him:  “This is serious, you cunt.” A bit too fucking serious, actually. As John Cleese said, there is a tendency to confuse seriousness with solemnity. Serious causes can and must be approached with good humor, otherwise they’re boring and can’t compete with the Premier League and Grand Theft Auto. Social movements needn’t lack razzmatazz. (Brand 2013)  Reality is structured by belief, by a faith in fantasy that we know to be fantasy yet we believe nonetheless. This is a stunning diagnostic insight, yet my question is and always has been: what does one do with this insight?… . I  remember asking Žižek years ago about the implications of his work for political action and he answered, characteristically, “I have a hat, but I do not have a rabbit.” My question is: where is the rabbit? We need at least one rabbit, maybe more if we want them to breed. (Critchley in Bowman and Stamp 2007, xv & xvi)

Brand and Critchley’s above statements encapsulate the two main competing elements of Žižek’s perceived excess that leads to a corresponding excess of criticism: 1) By academic standards, Žižek is disproportionately successful. Despite his superficially unprepossessing appearance and tic-ridden mannerisms, his obvious earnestness, masterful ability to produce disorientating but convincing analyses of popular culture, and refusal to confuse seriousness with solemnity, all combine to produce the razzmatazz championed by Brand. 2) His huge output of theoretical interpretation is not accompanied by matching political solutions.

The first objection relates to the perennially vexed relationship critics have in relation to capitalism when they voice their critique of the system from within that same system, or, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it “Talented performers belong to the industry long before it displays them” (Adorno & Horkheimer 2005 [1944]), and with regard to the possibilities opened up by capitalism, “… the same principle that has opened up these opportunities also ties them to big business” (Adorno cited in Hansen 1981–2, 186). In Žižek’s case, the one solution he has provided is to the transmission problem Brand identified earlier, however, the practical success of his “engaging fashion” is also used as evidence of his failure. In Gray’s eyes for example: “In a stupendous feat of intellectual overproduction Žižek has created a fantasmatic critique of the present order, a critique that claims to repudiate practically everything that currently exists and in some sense actually does, but that at the same time reproduces the compulsive, purposeless dynamism that he

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perceives in the operations of capitalism” (Gray 2012). Arguably the “Real” problem critics have with Žižek’s “Idiotic Enjoyment” (see Davis 2010) is an unwillingness or inability to appreciate the significance of the difference between the Lacanian concept of the symptom and the sinthome and the importance of the relationship between the two. Symptoms, like those a physician uses to identify the cause of an illness, are signs of an underlying code to be solved. The sinthome relates to how jouissance is processed. Jouissance is routinely translated into English as “enjoyment” but this fails to express fully its excessive character. Jouissance is a form of enjoyment that goes beyond the pleasure principle with frequently self-destructive outcomes, to paraphrase a common saying—lots of pain and no gain. So annoying to his critics, Žižek’s idiotic enjoyment matches content and form. He explores the profound ideological implications of the excess contained within jouissance through an approach that is itself suffused with jouissance. For Žižek, “it is the ‘stain’ or ‘uncanny excess’ of the text which is the true object of his reading. Rather than eliminating this excess, he aims to encounter it as the trace of what he calls ‘the traumatic presence of the Real’ ” (Davis 2010, 123). Encountering that trace of the Real, however, also involves the jouissance of attempting to enunciate that which, by definition, resists enunciation. This explains why “his writing is repetitious, it takes surprising twists and turns, goes back on itself and revises what has been said previously. Žižek’s style enacts a hesitant edging towards a theoretical position which is never quite finalized, in the attempt to enunciate the Real of desire, when in the Lacanian account, both the Real and desire are beyond the reach of enunciation” (Davis 2010, 112). The accusation that Žižek is a problematic part of the same system he critiques tends to be closely associated with the supplementary charge that he fails to provide any answers. This can be seen in the following representative selection of criticisms: Laclau explains that he knew what Lenin and Trotsky meant when they issued calls for revolutionary seizures of state power, but Žižek? Does “he have a secret plan of which he is careful not to inform anyone?” Laclau asks …  (La Berge in Bowman and Stamp 2007, 21). Žižek is one of very few voices in recent times to have posed a particular and particularly urgent set of questions for the post-Marxist theoretical Left, even if the answers that he proffers are very far from being useful to anyone. (Gilbert ibid, 63)

While he rejects Marx’s conception of communism, Žižek devotes none of the over one thousand pages of Less Than Nothing to specifying the economic system or institutions of government that would feature in a communist society of the kind he favors (Gray 2012). A yearning for solutions is a perennially

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voiced desire routinely directed at anyone who argues for a need of revolution (and predictably enough occurs in Paxman’s interview with Brand). It requires, however, a particular notion of philosophy and its purpose not shared by Žižek for whom, pace Heidegger, questioning, not answering, is the piety of thought and therefore, “Faced with the demands of the protestors, intellectuals are definitely not in the position of the subjects supposed to know: they cannot operationalize these demands, or translate them into proposals for precise and realistic measures” (Žižek 2012, 1007). In his case, the subject-supposed—to-know is a subject that doesn’t mind admitting that he has no rabbits to pull from his hat. The criticism that Žižek lacks solutions that he never intended to produce in the first place is made because of a refusal to accept the reason for his constant circling around the gap between the sinthome and symptom. Žižek’s point is that, in a very real political sense, it is not solutions that we lack. For example, global resources do exist to solve starvation in the developing world but the real problem rests in finding a way to defeat the ideological processes and barriers that make sure that those eminently feasible solutions never come about. The problem that really needs solving is how to tackle the open contradictions of today’s pervasively cynical form of ideology—je sais bien mais quande même (Manoni 1969).

There Once Was an Ugly Ideological Duckling—A Poster Boy for the Treason of the Intellectuals It is as if in late capitalism “words do not count”, no longer oblige:  they increasingly seem to lose their performative power; whatever one says is drowned in the general indifference; the emperor is naked and the media trumpet forth this fact, yet nobody seems really to mind—that is, people continue to act as if the emperor is not naked… . (Žižek 1994, 18)

Whilst words may have lost some of their performative power it remains an important ideological element of belief. To convey the sense of this, Žižek describes Pascal’s advice to non-believers struggling to make the leap of faith. “ ‘Kneel down, pray, act as if you believe, and belief will come by itself.’ Or, as Alcoholics Anonymous put it today more succinctly: ‘Fake it until you make it’ ” (Žižek 2007a). This leads to something of a paradox— we are frequently tempted to look down on “primitive” peoples because we hold a much more sophisticated and critical distance to myth. In reality, ancient cultures recognized the cultural adhesion gained from myths whilst simultaneously retaining the right, indeed the practical need, not to believe in those myths literally. Paul Veyne explores this paradox with

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reference to Dan Sperber’s account of the belief system of the Ethiopian Dorzé tribe in order to answer the central question, “How is it possible to half-believe, or believe in contradictory things?” (Veyne 1988, xi). For the Dorzé “the leopard is a Christian animal who respects the fasts of the Coptic church, the observance of which, in Ethiopia, is the principal test of religion. Nonetheless, a Dorzé is no less careful to protect his livestock on Wednesdays and Fridays, the fast days, than on other days of the week. He holds it true that leopards fast and that they eat every day. Leopards are dangerous every day; this he knows by experience. They are Christian; tradition proves it” (Veyne 1988, xi). “Primitive people” have therefore what might be called an “organically cynical attitude”, the Dorzé know on a day-to-day level that a leopard doesn’t change its spots to suit their religious beliefs (and so they take all necessary precautions), but for the purposes of group solidarity they are prepared to pretend to believe that it will. In late capitalism, by contrast, various cynical forms of belief exist. One is the type of belief contained in those institutions and processes that we pretend to pretend to believe in. For example, parents say they only keep the Father Christmas myth going “for the children”, when in fact it is their naïve need to believe in a child’s naïve belief that drives the whole ritual. The end result is that, notwithstanding our protestations to the contrary, we may hold certain beliefs despite ourselves. More interesting still for a discussion of the ideological role of excess, however, is the type of cynicism that derives from knowing something to be true, but proceeding to ignore it in a state of bad faith. The US TV show Ugly Betty exemplifies this new cynical form of belief. Ugly Betty is premised upon the eponymous heroine’s travails in the fashion industry and her good-hearted battle against its inherently superficial values. The show illustrates the notion of lying in the guise of truth. In terms of content, the show purports to be against superficiality but this is belied by the direct contradiction at its heart. Underneath her manufactured dowdy appearance, the real life actress playing Betty (America Ferrara) is highly attractive, whilst this is obvious to viewers; we nevertheless continue to watch as if we didn’t know. It is because of the pervasive nature of this cynicism within popular culture that Žižek says: We must avoid the simple metaphors of demasking, of throwing away the veils which are supposed to hide the naked reality. We can see why Lacan, in his Seminar on The Ethic of Psychoanalysis, distances himself from the liberating gesture of saying finally that “the emperor has no clothes”. The point is, as Lacan puts it, that the emperor is naked only beneath his clothes, so if there is an unmasking gesture of psychoanalysis, it is closer to Alphonse Allais’s well-known joke, quoted by Lacan: somebody points at a woman and utters a horrified cry,

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“Look at her, what a shame, under her clothes, she is totally naked” [Lacan, 1986, p. 231]. (Žižek 1989, 28–30)

Ugly Betty needs to be taken more, not less, literally than its ironic title would suggest. Its superficially fake ugliness purportedly designed to undermine superficiality is, in practice, an example of a genuinely ugly ideology—“Look at her, what a shame, under her clothes, she is totally gorgeous.” Lacan emphasizes the need to be able to recognize and then denaturalize what we know to be true so that we can fully appreciate how it is true, the profound significance of the form in which the truth appears to us. To paraphrase the title of a James Bond film—the truth is not enough. It is perfectly possible for a lie to be told in the guise of the truth and vice versa. Žižek’s provocatively excessive examples are an attempt to crack today’s cynical ideological carapace. Its thickness is demonstrated by the status-quo-supporting role played by those satirists and intellectuals one might reasonably expect to be predisposed to combating political indifference and apathy. Louis C.  K.  is an American stand-up comic whose reputation is built upon his acerbically cynical rants about contemporary mores which form an integral part of the hybrid format of his stand-up/sitcom show Louie. Even allowing for cultural differences in the ability to tolerate schmaltz (in the figurative rather than literal avian form), the 2011 hour-long special appropriately entitled “Duckling” encapsulates the underlying ideological ugliness of the comedian’s superficially critical outlook. The plot is that his young daughter plants a duckling in his luggage just before he flies out to Afghanistan on a USO tour. According to a TV “critic” from the Huffington Post: In even the uniquely unvarnished, autobiographical world of Louie, an hour-long episode that tenderly draws together Middle East war zones and ducklings is a particular accomplishment… . A remarkable hour of television in its breadth, it was surely the most ambitious Louie. Most telling, perhaps, is that its normally self-critical creator actually allows for some modicum of satisfaction… . Near the end of “Duckling,” a tense moment between soldiers (mostly played by former military) and Afghan farmers (played by Afghani immigrants), is alleviated when Louie falls chasing his duckling. The daunting journey—both for the character of Louie on the show and for Louis C.K. making it—ends with the irresistible, cross-cultural comedy of the pratfall, a comic’s peace sign. (Coyle 2011)

It is in such an episode of extreme mawkishness that we can see the true manifestation of the “deadly jester”, a comic, who, rather than using comedy as an act of critical expression like Brand and Žižek, takes a pratfall to make a peace sign with the death-dealing military industrial ideology of the non-complex. The geo-political realities of mass civilian deaths in Afghanistan and post-invasion Iraq are displaced by saccharin depictions of peace-creating ducklings.

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C. K. Louie thus perfectly fits Žižek’s claim that “cynicism … recognizes, it takes into account, the particular interest behind the ideological universality, the distance between the ideological mask and the reality, but it still finds reasons to retain the mask. This cynicism is not a direct position of immorality, it is more like morality itself put in the service of immorality” (Žižek 1989, 29). This tendency is also evident amongst intellectuals who have chosen to take the ruling ideology’s mask very literally at “face” value. A stark example of the contrast between ideology critique and those intellectuals who actively work to betray it is contained within Mark Poster’s essay about the US cosmetic surgery make-over show The Swan—“Swan’s Way: Care of the Self in the Hyperreal” (Poster 2007). To help set out his position, Poster disapprovingly cites Mark Andrejevic’s contrasting ideological analysis of reality TV. He points out that in Andrejevic’s eyes, “Like the Internet, reality TV promises democracy through interactivity, but ends only by strengthening the grip of neoliberal capitalism on the population” (Poster 2007, 159). Poster then proceeds to take issue with Andrejevic’s claim that instead of being a democratizing influence, in actuality it only encourages “submission to comprehensive forms of monitoring as a form of empowerment and self-expression” (ibid, 159). The kicker in Poster’s denunciation comes from the same realm of excessive reaction that we have previously seen in relation to Žižek’s work. Thus, for Poster (2007, 159): “Although Andrejevic credits himself as a ‘critic,’ the rhetorical effect of his denunciation of reality TV is not an impetus to struggle, but paralysis: nothing can be done that the reigning powers cannot co-opt. Academic cultural studies at the hands of such scholars betray a tendency to refuse any hint of a negative dialectic in popular culture.” The suggestion that scholars like Andrejevic betray a tendency of refusal is inadvertently ironic. Even if it is accepted for the sake of argument that a betrayal is present, it pales into insignificance compared with how the type of “negative dialectic” that Poster finds in shows like The Swan and Extreme Makeover risks bringing the formerly critical concept into disrepute: The shows validate and legitimize an ethic of self-transformation in an age of mediated culture, one certainly different from that of the Hellenistic era discussed by Foucault, but one perhaps more consonant with a time when information machines are in a new relation with humans. From this perspective, the surgeries on reality TV might be seen as moves toward new forms of care of self that, while not liberational or resistant in themselves, explore possibilities of subjectivation in the current formation of mediated culture. (Poster 2007, 172)

A better example of supine accommodation to an oppressive status quo is difficult to either imagine or parody. For Poster, it appears that no form of

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capitulation to capitalist values is too excessive and this allows him to conclude that: “If taking oneself seriously and caring for oneself in the 21st century requires … surgery to change the body, even with its dangers, then so be it” (ibid, 175). The ideological mask of apathy, indifference, and voluntary servitude is not just to be retained, it is to be surgically enhanced and then celebrated once the anesthetic has worn off. The contemporary cynical treason of some academics means that far from being the intellectual shock troops of a revolutionary vanguard, they act as the rear-guard non-shockable troops for whom “I know very well, but even so” becomes “I know very well, but I will do my best to make sure others don’t”. Pretending to act as if the emperor is not naked is no longer enough, now his courtiers design new imaginary clothes for him.

Conclusion—The Curious Case of the Academics Who Failed to Bark in the Night Žižek’s … “public position” foregrounds what may otherwise remain below many radars:  namely, the complex imbrication of intellectual production in academic and commercial institutions, forces and imperatives. Intentionally or inadvertently, Žižek’s very success—or his plight—demands an intellectual interrogation. It promises to teach us a great deal about our own “position” or location, and as such, about the limits and possibilities of the imbrication and reticulation of academic intellectual life with society, culture and politics. (Bowman and Stamp [eds.] 2007, 7)

Despite being taken from an otherwise highly critical, at times ad hominem, collection of essays somewhat archly entitled The Truth of Žižek, Bowman and Stamp’s above summary of the wider implications of Žižek’s individual success constitutes a succinct and insightful development of Arendt’s earlier formulation of the perennial conundrum faced by thinkers who attempt to engage with popular culture. The “possibilities” they mention imply the perennial question of “what is to be done?” The one possibility not allowed, however, is Žižek’s insistence on the primary philosophical responsibility to, above all else, question rather than provide answers where there may be none. Adorno memorably made this point: “When the doors are barricaded, it is doubly important that thought not be interrupted. It is rather the task of thought to analyze the reasons behind this situation and to draw the consequences from these reasons” (Adorno 2001 [1978], 200). Figures like Žižek and Brand seem so excessive because they speak enthusiastically (framed as near-mania by the media) about challenging ideas that do not normally fit within neither the media’s almost exclusively image and sound-bite centered purview, nor contemporary theorists’ misguidedly

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utilitarian conceptualization of what theory should be. To contain and domesticate any deeper implications that may arise for consideration from such excess, Žižek, the philosopher, is presented as someone merely entertaining and, as an entertainer; Brand’s right to speak at all is questioned. The media and academia’s rejection of conceptual excess represents a practical example of today’s pervasive need to subjectivize. The struggle is on to turn figures like Žižek and Brand into a sublime object of ideology even as they speak of how such objects pervade and permeate our culture. Brand cautions that, “The right seeks converts and the left seeks traitors” (Brand 2013). This is indeed a trap worth avoiding but fear of it is not reason enough to avoid pointing out the sins of commission and omission of treasonous intellectuals when they do occur. Žižek and Brand are obvious, self-consciously privileged parts of the system they denounce but they are caught in a stubborn Catch-22 in so far as they would not be listened to if they were not. Žižek’s humorous wager rests on the hope that an uncanny, hard-to-remove, stain remains behind after his performances. This is the reflexive power of the critical (in both senses of the word) excess that challenges the constraining power of “mere” facts—the glib indifference distilled in the phrase je sais bien mais quand même. The excessive ad hominem reaction to figures like Žižek and Brand ultimately has little to do with any interpretive or analytical excesses on their part. Rather, it stems from the strength of the complicitous ties that bind together those who resent the exposure of their open secret. The Slovenian and Essex jokers continue to take brickbats on our behalf, not because they are the theory-heroes that we deserve, but because they are the batmen in the belfry that we need. In the preface to The Philosophy of Right, Hegel famously observed that: “Only when the dusk starts to fall does the owl of Minerva spread its wings and fly.” For the cultural conservatives encountered in this paper who masquerade as polysemically-sophisticated intellectuals, it is the middle of the night, the guard dogs are silent, and the owl is still in the barn.

References Adorno, Theodor. (1978) 2001. The Culture Industry:  Selected Essays on Mass Culture. Reprint, London: Routledge. Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer. (1944) 2005. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm. Arendt, Hannah. (1954) 1993. Between Past and Future:  Eight Exercises in Political Thought. Reprint, London: Penguin.

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Bowman, Paul, and Richard Stamp. 2007. “Editor’s Introduction: Is This Not Precisely … the Truth of Žižek?” In The Truth of Žižek, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, 1–8. London: Continuum. Brand, Russell. 2013. “Russell Brand on Revolution: ‘We No Longer Have the Luxury of Tradition’: But Before We Change the World, We Need to Change the Way We Think.” New Statesman. October 24. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2013/10/ russell-brand-on-revolution Bulgakov, Mikhail. (1996–7) 2007. The Master and Margarita. Reprint, London: Penguin. Chomsky, Noam. 2012. ‘Virtual Town Hall’ Interview with Noam Chomsky. December 2012. http://chomsky.globl.org/ Coogan, Steve. 2013. “David Mitchell:  Press Freedom is Not Being Threatened.” The Observer. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/27/levesonpress-regulation-steve-coogan-david-mitchell Coyle, Jake. 2011. “ ‘Louie’:  Hour-Long USO Episode Is His Most Ambitious Yet.” Huffington Post. August 27. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/08/27/louiehour-long-uso-episode_n_938907.html Davis, Colin. 2010. Critical Excess: Overreading in Derrida, Deleuze, Levinas, Žižek and Cavell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Freud, Sigmund. (1900) 2001. The Interpretation of Dreams (I). Edited by J. Strachey. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works, Vol.  IV. Reprint, London: Vintage. Gilbert, Jeremy. 2007. “All the Right Questions, All the Wrong Answers.” In The Truth of Žižek, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, 61–81. London: Continuum. Gilliam, Terry. 2011. “Interview with TCM.” Open Culture. November. http://www. openculture.com/2011/11/terry_gilliam_on_filmmakers.html Gray, John. 2012. “The Violent Visions of Slavoj Žižek.” The New York Times. July 12. https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2012/07/12/violent-visions-slavoj-zizek/ Hansen, Miriam B. 1981. “Introduction to Adorno, ‘Transparencies on Film’ (1966).” In New German Critique, 24/25: 186–98. Kirsch, Adam. 2008. “The Deadly Jester.” New Republic. http://www.newrepublic.com/ article/books/the-deadly-jester La Berge, Leigh C. 2007. “The Writing Cure:  Slavoj Žižek, Analysand of Modernity.” In The Truth of Žižek, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, 9–26. London: Continuum. Manoni, Octave. 1969. “Je Sais Bien, Mais Quand-Même …” In Clefs pour L’imaginaire ou L’autre Scène, 9–33. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One Dimensional Man. https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/ marcuse/one-dimensional-man.htm Mills, C. Wright. (1959) 2000. The Sociological Imagination. Reprint, Oxford:  Oxford University Press. Nolan, Christopher. 2008. The Dark Knight. Warner Bros.

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Paxman, Jeremy. 2013. Newsnight interview with Russell Brand. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=3YR4CseY9pk Poster, Mark. 2007. “Swan’s Way: Care of Self in the Hyperreal.” In Configurations, 15 (2): 151–75. Stewart, Jon. 2004. Jon Stewart on Crossfire. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v= aFQFB5YpDZE Taylor, Paul A. 2010. Žižek and the Media. Cambridge: Polity Press. Taylor, Paul A. 2014. “Žižek’s Reception:  Fifty Shades of Gray Ideology.” In Žižek and Media Studies:  A Reader, edited by Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Veyne, Paul. 1988. Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? Chicago:  University of Chicago Press. Wolin, Richard. 2004. The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1994. Mapping Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007a. How To Read Lacan. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007b. Tolerance as an Ideological Category. https://www.lacan.com/ zizek-inquiry.html Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. Berlusconi in Tehran. http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n14/slavoj-Žižek/ berlusconi-in-tehran Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. Less Than Zero:  Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.

4.  The Hegelian “Night of the World”: Žižek on Subjectivity, Negativity, and Universality Robert Sinnerbrink Macquarie University (Australia)

The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. … One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful. (Hegel, Jenaer Realphilosophie, 1805–6)

This extraordinary passage, written by Hegel in his Jena, pre-Phenomenology days, appears in many of Žižek’s published works, usually in connection with the theme of the radical negativity of the (Hegelian-Lacanian) subject (see Žižek 1992, 50–52; 1994, 145; 1997, 8–10; 1999, 29–30; 2006, 44). One could even say it is one of the Ur-texts for Žižek’s project of rereading Lacanian psychoanalysis through post-Kantian, and in particular Hegelian, idealism. While the importance of Hegel’s Logic and Hegelian dialectic has been noted for Žižek’s rereading of Lacan (see Butler, Laclau, and Žižek 2000; Kay 2003; Sharpe 2004; Butler 2005), the importance of the Hegelian conception of the radical negativity of the subject for Žižek’s project has received far less attention. In what follows I address this lack by exploring the Hegelian figure of the ‘night of the world’ that plays such an important role in Žižek’s theorization of the (Hegelian) subject. In the first part, I examine how the themes of the “pre-synthetic imagination” and “abstract negativity” are crucial to understanding Žižek’s theorization of the Hegelian subject (in The Ticklish Subject [1999]). In the second part, I consider how this Hegelian model of the subject is decisive for understanding Žižek’s conception of Hegelian “concrete universality,” and how the latter concept figures

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prominently in Žižek’s analysis of the relationship between the abstract negativity of the subject and the political question of confronting global capitalism.1 In conclusion I  raise some questions about Žižek’s combining of abstract and determinate negation in his ‘romantic’ reading of the negativity of the Hegelian subject. I then critically examine the implications Žižek draws from this analysis in In Defense of Lost Causes (2008), which presents a sustained argument to reclaim the revolutionary tradition of Leftist politics.

The Hegelian Ticklish Subject Hegel is a ubiquitous presence in Žižek’s formidable (and ever growing) oeuvre. Indeed, Hegelian dialectics comprises one apex of the triadic structure (or intertwining knots) that continues to define Žižek’s prodigious theoretical project, the other two being Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (the apex), and the contemporary criticism of ideology (Žižek 1991, 2). One of Žižek’s most significant analyses of Hegel can be found in Part I of The Ticklish Subject (1999), entitled “The Night of the World,” which presents a Hegelian model of the subject, psychoanalytically reconfigured, emphasizing the radical negativity of subjectivity. Žižek’s first chapter in The Ticklish Subject explores the “deadlock of the transcendental imagination” that prompts Heidegger to recoil from the abyss of subjectivity (after his famous Kehre or ‘turn’), While the second chapter turns to the “Hegelian Ticklish Subject,” developing a powerful rereading of Hegel’s concept of “concrete universality” that continues to play a crucial role in Žižek’s more recent works, The Parallax View (2006) and In Defense of Lost Causes (2008). This extraordinary analysis of the transcendental imagination, critique of Heidegger, and rereading of Hegelian ‘night of the world,’ together contribute to Žižek’s reassertion of the radicality of the “Cartesian subject”—that thoroughly repudiated theoretical specter which nonetheless continues to “haunt Western academia” (1999, 1–5). This unorthodox reading of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’—the radical negativity that haunts subjectivity—is developed further in an explicitly political direction, which helps explain Žižek’s recent critique of the ‘Fukuyamaian’ consensus, shared both by moral-religious conservatives and libertarian ‘postmodernists’, that global capitalism remains the ‘unsurpassable horizon of our times’.

Žižek’s Hegelian Criticism of Kantian Imagination Heidegger’s ground-breaking but controversial interpretation of Kant (1997) turned on the question of the possibility of metaphysics, which, in

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turn, pointed to the problem of how to think human finitude. For Heidegger, Kant ‘shrinks back’ from the ontological implications of his path-breaking move (in the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason) in taking the productive imagination as playing the primary role in the constitution of the subject. Indeed, Kant’s ‘recoiling’ from this radical dimension of subjectivity, Heidegger claimed, was a recoiling from our constitutive finitude as temporalizing-projecting beings. Kant’s anxiety over the imagination can also be criticized, however, from a Hegelian-Lacanian point of view, which is what Žižek does in The Ticklish Subject (1999). Žižek turns there to Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s ‘formalist’ theory of subjectivity, underlining Kant’s failure to acknowledge the dimension of radical negativity that is constitutive of the experience of subjectivity. It is this radical negativity, Žižek will argue, that Heidegger too ultimately ‘shrinks back’ from in his later meditative thinking on the history of Being. Žižek’s point of departure is to show that the fundamental ambiguity in Kant’s account of imagination lies in its relationship with the discursive understanding. In Kant’s considered account of cognition, we begin with the diversity of pure intuition; this diversity is synthesized by the pure imagination, and the resulting pure synthesis is then unified by means of concepts supplied by the understanding. The question thus arises: Is “pure synthesis” the work of the imagination, with understanding intervening only after the imagination has done its work? Or is “pure synthesis” the work of the understanding, such that the imagination is merely a lower level application of the synthetic power of the understanding at a precognitive level? (Žižek 1999, 29) This is precisely the ambiguity that Heidegger emphasizes in his critique of Kant’s ‘recoiling’ from the transcendental imagination. For Žižek, the critical point in Heidegger’s reading is that “one should determine the synthesis of imagination as the fundamental dimension at the root of the discursive understanding, which should thus be analyzed independently of the categories of the Understanding” (1999, 29). Kant recoils from this step, later taken by Heidegger, demoting the imagination to a mediator between the sensuous manifold of intuition and the synthetic activity of the Understanding (Žižek 1999, 29). Heidegger’s proposal to move beyond Kant, I  suggest, can be understood as a romantic reading emphasizing the primacy of imagination over understanding, which can be contrasted with the idealist reading insisting on the primacy of understanding over imagination. Kant, along with the mature Hegel, opted for the ‘idealist’ alternative, while Schelling and the romantics, including Heidegger (and the early Hegel), chose the ‘romantic’ path to a transcendental freedom of imagination that grounds, but also circumvents,

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the discursive understanding. What one discovers along this ‘romantic’ path— as Schelling, Hölderlin, Nietzsche, and Heidegger were each to find—is that metaphysical thinking, grounded in the transition from understanding to reason, gives way to a post-metaphysical language in which philosophy intersects with poetry, literature, and art. And this is also partially the case, I would suggest, with Žižek’s (romantic neo-Hegelian) reading of Kant, even down to Žižek’s evocation of the films of David Lynch as disclosing the unconscious, pre-synthetic, ‘disintegrative’ power of the ‘pre-synthetic’ imagination (Žižek 1999, 51–9). Interestingly, Žižek also presents himself here as a romantic reader of Kant. In the spirit of the young Hegel, and in keeping with Schelling’s emphasis on the radical self-contraction at the heart of subjectivity, Žižek turns to the radical dimension of negativity that Kant eschews in his account of transcendental imagination (1997, 8–12).2 Indeed, Kant’s version of the imagination ignores the crucial dimension of negativity emphasized by Hegel—“namely, imagination qua the ‘activity of dissolution’, which treats as a separate entity what has effective existence only as a part of some organic Whole” (Žižek 1999, 29). For Hegel, according to Žižek, this negative power of dissolution, of dissolving the whole into distinct independent parts, comprises both the power of imagination and of the understanding.

“The Night of the World” Žižek cites two fascinating passages from Hegel, one obscure, the other wellknown, to show Hegel’s original insight into the disintegrative power of negativity. The first is from Hegel’s 1805–6 Jenaer Realphilosophie manuscripts, the enigmatic “night of the world” passage: The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful. (Hegel 1974, 204; quoted in Verene 1985, 7–8)

Žižek obsessively returns to this extraordinary passage in many of his works.3 Before turning to Žižek’s reading of this passage it is worth making a few interpretative remarks. Hegel vividly describes here the pre-subjective experience of the ‘impersonal’ or ‘unconscious’ production of representations and images, both violent and destructive, which will form the basis for

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the emergence of self-conscious subjectivity. This pre-discursive, pre-rational, ‘unconscious’ interiority is a part of (alienated) nature in the proto-subject. It expresses the “pure” or impersonal self, whose dark unconscious domain of phantasmagorical partial objects—“a bloody head,” a “ghastly white apparition”—is precisely what marks the ‘violent’, traumatic transition from natural being to social and cultural subject. This netherworld of unconscious fantasy, subjective dissolution—the “night of the world,” of intersubjective meaning—is an irreducible dimension of the finitude of subjectivity. It is the abyss of negativity glimpsed in the uncanny gaze of the Other—in the night of the eye, the abyss of subjectivity, “a night that becomes awful,” as Hegel says. The proto-psychoanalytic resonances of this passage are striking, anticipating themes such as the Freudian death drive and the Lacanian traumatic encounter with the Real that precipitates the imaginary capture and symbolic ‘quilting’ of the subject. Indeed, Žižek reads this passage, at least in The Ticklish Subject, as an exemplary description of the negative, disruptive, decomposing power of imagination, “as the power that disperses continuous reality into a confused multitude of ‘partial objects’, spectral apparitions of what in reality is effective only as a part of a larger organism” (1999, 30). Contra Kant, the imagination in its productive or constructive aspect is at the same time also negative or destructive. For the imagination is “the power to dismember what immediate perception puts together”; the uncanny power to imagine a partial, phantasmagorical object abstracted from its proper whole: a head without a body, a ghost without flesh, colors without shape, a body without organs and organs without a body (Žižek 1999, 30). Hegel’s ‘night of the world’—the negative aspect of the synthetic power of subjectivity— is thus “transcendental imagination at its most elementary and violent”: the empty or abstract freedom of imagination as the power of dissolution rather than synthesis; the power of dissolving all objective relations grounded in things in themselves (Žižek 1999, 30). The night of the dissipative imagination is the radical negativity of arbitrary freedom; the power, to cite Hegel once again, “to tear up the images and to reconnect them without any constraint” (Žižek 1999, 30). Žižek returns to this passage many times in different contexts, each time linking the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ with a different philosophical theme. In Enjoy Your Symptom!, The Hegelian ‘night of the world’ is connected with the psychoanalytical and German idealist theses concerning the constituted or ‘posited’ nature of social reality—its constitution through the performative efficacy of ‘symbolic fictions’ or the universe of the symbolic order of the Word emerging only against the background of this experience of the abyss of negativity (Žižek 2008, 50). The text of Hegel’s Jena manuscript goes on

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to make just this point, arguing that this radical inwardness of the pure self “must also enter into existence” through language as “name-giving power” (Hegel 1974; quoted in Verene 1985, 8). In The Metastases of Enjoyment, Žižek compares this Hegelian ‘night of the world’, the experience of the self qua pure ‘abstract negativity’ with Otto Weininger’s misogynistic images of the pre-representational feminine, which is really an aversion to the void of subjectivity itself (1994, 145).4 Here, as in The Abyss of Freedom, Žižek underlines Hegel’s break with the Enlightenment tradition, his metaphoric reversal of the image of the transparent subject as the “light of Reason” as opposed to the dark inertness or opacity of matter, nature, or tradition; contra the Enlightenment cliché, Hegel takes the very kernel of the subject’s being, “the gesture which opens up the space for the Light of Logos,” to be abstract negativity qua the ‘night of the world’ (1994, 145), the “point of utter madness in which phantasmatic apparitions of ‘partial objects’ wander around” (1997, 8). Žižek goes on to link the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ with Schelling’s conception of the subject as “pure night of the Self”, “infinite lack of Being”; the “violent gesture of contraction” that also forms the basis of Hegel’s account of madness as the cutting of all links with external reality, which Hegel then construes as the subject’s regression to the level of the “animal soul” still unreflectively immersed in its immediate natural environment (Žižek and von Schelling 1997, 8; 1999, 34–5). Where Žižek differs from Hegel, however, is in arguing that this withdrawal from the world, the subject’s contraction and severing of all links with the Umwelt, is rather the founding gesture of ‘humanization’, indeed the emergence of subjectivity itself (1997, 8). The passage through madness is thus an ontological necessity; there is no subjectivity without this experience of radical negativity, this cutting of links with the Umwelt, which is then followed by the construction of a symbolic universe of meaning (1997, 9). The question, psychoanalytically, is not so much how the fall into madness is possible, but rather how the subject is able to attain “normalcy” by climbing out of madness—for Hegel, this radical withdrawal from the world—in order to reconstitute social reality through symbolic mediation. This Hegelian-Schellingian moment of radical negativity and symbolic reconstruction will remain a consistent feature not only of Žižek’s account of subjectivity but also, as we shall see, of his analysis of the historico-political experience of revolutionary violence.

“Tarrying with the Negative” The other Hegelian text Žižek cites to show the power of negativity is the famous “tarrying with the negative” passage in the Preface to the Phenomenology

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of Spirit (1977, 19). In the latter, Hegel famously describes the “activity of dissolution” that is the “power and work of the Understanding [Verstand], the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power” (Hegel 1977, 18). The tremendous power of the negative—which Hegel here attributes to the understanding rather than imagination—is the power to detach an accidental, contingent particular belonging within a contextual whole such that it can attain an independent existence of its own; this is precisely “the energy of thought, of the pure I” (1977, 19) (which we have already encountered in Hegel’s earlier text on the “night of the world”). This life of thought, the activity of dissolution defining the pure I, is at the same time marked by death, finitude, radical loss, which can nonetheless be sublated in thought by the finite subject (which therefore also has the Hegelian ‘logical’ structure of infinitude). Indeed, rather than a metaphysical tract on the ‘totalizing’ Subject of absolute idealism, Hegel’s famous passage can be read as an account of the radical finitude of the Subject; the constitutive negativity that both makes possible and delimits autonomous subjectivity. To quote Hegel: Death, if that is what we want to call this non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast to what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself untouched by devastation, but rather the life that endures it and maintains itself in it. It wins its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself. It is this power, not as something positive, which closes its eyes to the negative, as when we say of something that it is nothing or is false, and then, having done with it, turn away and pass on to something else; on the contrary, Spirit is this power only by looking the negative in the face, and tarrying with it. This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being. This power is identical with what we earlier called the Subject … (Hegel 1977, 19). What is striking in this celebrated passage is the way that experiences of finitude—of death, negativity, absence, loss—are all presented as constitutive of the power of the self-conscious Subject as Geist. The positive aspect of imagination—for example in the aesthetic experience of beauty, the subjective harmony and free play between imagination and understanding— cannot deal with this radically negative dimension of subjectivity (unless we are talking of the disruptive experience of the sublime, as Žižek goes on to discuss (1999, 41–50)). Subjectivity as Geist is precisely the embracing of finitude in order to affirm the infinite within the finite (the transforming-transcending power of imagination and understanding defining the

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finite subject), as well as affirming the finite within the infinite (the self-consciousness of the individual subject recognized within relations of historical and social intersubjectivity). Subjectivity is thus constituted through a negative self-relation: a relation to itself that is necessarily a relation to the Other; a mediated self-relation in which the self finds itself precisely in and through its relation to the Other. At the same time, this self-relation through the Other is made possible only because of a violent rending of the immediate self-feeling and immersion of this seemingly isolated proto-subject within its natural environment. The subject is not only negative self-relation, a relation to the Other, it is also a self-relating negativity: that which wins its truth (its self-identity in otherness) only through the experience of radical negativity or the freedom to negate itself, to say ‘no!’ to everything, even itself; or as Hegel puts it, through the experience of finding itself in and through “utter dismemberment”. Once again, for Hegel this negativity is constitutive, ontological rather than ontic, as Heidegger would say. Self-conscious Spirit is this power of self-relating negativity, which is to say free subjectivity, only through “tarrying with the negative”. Indeed, this fundamental moment of negativity, we should note, is a decisive feature of every key experience in the phenomenological journey of consciousness and self-consciousness (the most famous example being the life-and-death struggle and experience of mastery and servitude, not to mention the alienated ‘freedom’ of self-consciousness in stoicism, skepticism, and the unhappy consciousness, or the radical affirmation of freedom in the French revolution and subsequent negative moment of Terror as the ‘violence’ of abstract universality). This power of radical negativity, this “abyss of freedom,” is precisely what for Hegel defines and determines “the Subject”. Unlike some ‘non-metaphysical’ readers of Hegel, Žižek does not shy away from this element of radical negativity.5 Indeed, it is precisely the crux of his critique of the Heideggerian reading of Kantian imagination. Žižek notes the surprising fact that Hegel does not praise speculative Reason but rather the Understanding [Verstand] as the “mightiest power in the world,” the infinite power of ‘dismembering,’ of taking apart and treating as separate what naturally belongs together (1999, 31). For Žižek, Hegel here identifies the ‘negative power’ of the Understanding with “the basic negative gesture of—let us risk the term—‘pre-synthetic imagination’, its destructive power of undermining every organic unity” (1999, 31). Although the two passages of Hegel seem to speak of opposing phenomena—namely the pre-rational/ pre-discursive confusion of the purely subjective Interior, and the abstract discursive activity of the rational understanding—they in fact must be taken

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together, Žižek argues, as constituting both the pre-synthetic and discursive power of negativity defining the freedom of subjectivity as such.

Imagination or Understanding? I remark here that Žižek here passes over the obvious point that Hegel too shifts from giving primacy to the pure imagination (in the 1805–6 Jena manuscripts) to asserting the pure understanding as the exemplary power of the “activity of dissolution” (in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit). In response to this point, it is worth noting that Žižek gives this shift a ‘Schellingian’ interpretation that effectively makes the pre-synthetic imagination and the discursive understanding two ‘potences’ of the same power of negativity defining the subject: “here ‘Understanding’ is another name for what we have called ‘pre-synthetic understanding’ ” (Žižek 1999, 96). Be that as it may, one could nonetheless argue that Hegel confronts here the same difficulty as Kant: how to account for the ambiguous relationship between the pure imagination and discursive understanding? Is the ‘pre-synthetic’ imagination the source of the radical negativity that makes possible self-conscious subjectivity, or does this reside rather in the mightiest of powers, the discursive understanding or pure I? On Žižek’s ‘Schellingian’ reading, Hegel’s resolution of this ambiguity lies in taking both Hegel’s references to dissolutive power of imagination and understanding as two interrelated aspects of the process of radical negativity. Heidegger, Žižek notes, was right to point to Kant’s retreat from the productive imagination, but this retreat concerned Kant’s refusal “to bring to light Imagination in its negative/disruptive aspect, as the force of tearing the continuous fabric of intuitions apart” (1999, 32). Kant overlooks the fact that the primordial form of imagination is not synthetic and unifying but disruptive and disintegrative: “imagination enables us to tear the texture of reality apart, to treat as effectively existing something that is merely a component of a living Whole” (Žižek 1999, 32). Žižek’s response to my question whether the imagination or the understanding is more fundamental for radical negativity is to hand the palm to the dismembering power of ‘pre-synthetic’ imagination. Žižek thus observes that “because of the subject’s irreducible finitude,” the disintegrative imagination takes precedence over the understanding. Indeed, “the very endeavor of ‘synthesis’ is always minimally ‘violent’ and disruptive” (1999, 33), since every synthetic unity is based upon a primordial act of ‘repression’ that inevitably leaves some (Schellingian) “indivisible remainder” (or, if one will, Derridean ‘supplement’). This primordial ‘repression’ is the price of entry into the

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symbolic, intersubjective universe of rational understanding: the violent transition from Hegel’s “night of the world” to the intersubjective “spiritual daylight of the present”. Žižek thus arrives at a very distinctive interpretation of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’ as the ‘pre-synthetic’ multitude, highly reminiscent of the Lacanian Real. As Žižek remarks, this “pre-synthetic Real, its pure, notyet-fashioned multitude not yet synthesized by a minimum of transcendental imagination, is, stricto sensu, impossible: a level that must be retroactively presupposed, but can never actually be encountered.” (1999, 33). Contra Judith Butler, who unjustly criticized Žižek for lapsing into a crude pre-Kantian ‘transcendental realism’ concerning the status of the Lacanian Real (1993, 187–222), Žižek here draws the Hegelian lesson that this retroactively presupposed multitude—pure difference, “difference in itself,” or pre-individual singularities, to speak with Deleuze—is the product of the transcendental imagination. At the same time, the presupposition of a pre-synthetic multitude is nothing but pure imagination itself, “imagination at its most violent, as the activity of disrupting the continuity of the inertia of the pre-symbolic ‘natural’ Real” (Žižek 1999, 33). This pre-synthetic multitude, the ‘night of the world,’ is the “unruliness” of the subject’s abyssal freedom, the disruptive power of negativity that is the very definition of the finite Subject. This is the radical moment of finitude that, according to Žižek, the later Heidegger shrinks back from, retreating from this dimension of disruptive negativity and attempting instead to restore the ontological sundering of human Dasein from its originary ground in the unconcealment of Being. From this perspective, it is Heidegger, not Hegel, who retreats from the trauma of finitude, which is to say from the radical abyss of freedom.

II: Abstract Negativity and Concrete Universality Žižek’s reflections on the Hegelian subject, however, do not only have psychoanalytic and cultural significance; they also have social and political implications. In The Ticklish Subject as well as elsewhere, Žižek’s analysis of the Hegelian “night of the world” is explicitly linked with the question of abstract negativity and its relationship with concrete universality. In an argument charged with political resonances, Žižek shows how the radical negativity of subjectivity—the capacity to negate all our finite, particular determinations— enables the dialectical passage from abstract to concrete universality. In practical terms, this means there is a dimension of violence, conflict, or antagonism that cannot be eliminated in historical and socio-political experience. Far from rehearsing the cliché of Hegel’s reconciliationist stance towards the

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state, Žižek claims that the radical negativity of the subject—the ‘night of the world’—means that there can be no concrete universality without the historico-political passage through madness, violence, even revolutionary terror (as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the post-revolutionary Jacobin Terror, an abstract negativity that ushered in the modern bourgeois state (Hegel 1977, 355–63)). This Hegelian argument concerning abstract negativity and concrete universality provides an essential backdrop, frequently misunderstood, to Žižek’s critique of various contemporary forms of ‘post-political’ ethical resistance to the state (most recently, Simon Critchley’s ethically grounded neo-anarchism (see Žižek 2006, 332–4; 2008, 339–50; Critchley 2007)). Žižek returns again and again to the Hegelian distinction between abstract and concrete universality. What does it mean? Against the prevailing stereotype of Hegel’s subordinating of particularity to universality, Žižek points out that universality in its concrete dimension is realized through individualization; that is, the concrete universal is embodied in the individual. As Žižek observes, Hegel was the first thinker to argue that the “properly modern notion of individualization” occurs through secondary identification (1999, 90). The individual is initially immersed in its immediate milieu, the particular life-form into which he or she is born (family, local community). It is only once one’s primary identifications with one’s ‘organic’ community are broken that one becomes an “individual,” namely by asserting one’s autonomy through identification with a secondary community that is also universal and ‘artificial’; that is, mediated and sustained through the free activity of independent subjects (profession, nation, independent peer-group versus traditional apprenticeship, organic community, prescribed social role, and so on) (Žižek 1999, 90). The abstract opposition between primary and secondary identifications (where primary identifications are rejected in favor of secondary identifications) is suspended once the primary identifications are reintegrated and experienced as the “modes of appearance” of my secondary identifications (Žižek 1999, 90). Žižek then further complicates this account of concrete universality, ‘crossbreeding’ it with Hegel’s distinction between neutral “positive” Universality and differentiated “actual” Universality (1999, 90). The former refers to the “impassive/neutral medium of the coexistence of its particular content”; the latter to the actual existence of Universality, “which is individuality, the assertion of the subject as unique and irreducible to the particular concrete totality into which he is inserted” (Žižek 1999, 91). The Universal as neutral ‘container’ that is indifferent towards the particulars it subsumes is contrasted with the Universal as “the power of negativity that undermines the fixity of every particular constellation” (Žižek 1999, 91). The latter is

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the Universality of the individuated subject as power of the negative; the power to oppose and negate all particular determinate content. Indeed, the passage from abstract to concrete universality, Žižek argues, proceeds thanks to the power of abstract negativity; phenomenologically speaking, this power of the negative “comes into existence in the guise of the individual’s absolute egotist self-contraction” (Žižek 1999, 91)—via what the Phenomenology will later describe, with reference to the discursive understanding, as the subject’s power to “tarry with the negative.” The striking conclusion Žižek draws from this analysis is that the only way to make the passage from abstract to contract universality is via “the full assertion” of this power of radical negativity, the negation of all particular content (1999, 92). At one level this would seem to be an instance of the famous Hegelian Aufhebung; we must lose immediate reality in the self-contraction of the “night of the world” in order to regain it as social reality, symbolically mediated by the subject; or we must renounce the immediate organic whole, submitting ourselves to the activity of the understanding, in order to regain it at a higher, mediated level as the “totality of Reason” (Žižek 1999, 92). Here the standard objection to the Hegelian Aufhebung looms, much rehearsed by poststructuralist readers of Hegel (see Žižek 1991, 31–8); namely that Hegel allows the moment of radical negativity, recognizes “the horror of the psychotic self-contraction,” the radical dismemberment in which Spirit finds itself, but only in order to dialectically recuperate this negativity in the name of the “reconstituted organic whole” (Žižek 1999, 92–3).

From Abstract to Concrete Universality Žižek’s radical reading of Hegel challenges this orthodoxy:  the passage through negativity, from abstract to concrete universality, is not about avoiding the moment of radical negativity in favor of the rational totality. Rather, it claims that this passage is unavoidable; the passage to the high passes through the low, the direct choice of the higher is precisely the way to miss it (Žižek 1999, 93). Citing another favorite speculative passage from the Phenomenology, Žižek refers to the peculiar conjunction of opposites that Hegel observes in the case of the penis, a conjunction which Nature “naively expresses when it combines the organ of its highest fulfilment, the organ of generation, with the organ of urination” (Hegel 1977, 210). It is not a matter of choosing insemination rather than urination (as though these comprise an abstract opposition, as representational consciousness would have it). Rather, we have to pass through the ‘wrong choice’ (biological excretion, urination) in order to attain the ‘right choice’ (biological conception, insemination, the

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reproduction of life):  the speculative meaning—the Hegelian infinite judgment that articulates the co-existence of excretion/elimination and conception/reproduction, indeed the shift from biological conception to rational comprehension—emerges only as an after-effect of the first, ‘wrong’ reading, which is contained within, indeed constitutive of, the speculative meaning (Žižek 1999, 93).6 Žižek’s point here is to show that the movement from abstract to concrete universality requires this passage through radical negativity, that is to say the ‘wrong’ choice of the abstract negativity of conflict and violence is the only way to arrive historically at the ‘right’ choice of a stable, rational, democratic state. At the level of social and political life, the attempt to bypass the negative and directly choose “the ‘concrete universality’ of a particular ethical life-world” results in the even greater violence of a “regression to premodern organic society”; a denial of the “infinite right of subjectivity” that, for Hegel, is the principle of modernity itself (Žižek 1999, 93). The modern subject-citizen cannot accept being immersed within a particular determinate social role prescribed within an organic social Whole; rather, as in Hegel’s famous analysis of the French revolution, it is only by passing through the “horror of revolutionary Terror” that the constraints of the premodern organic ‘concrete universality’ are destroyed and the “infinite right of subjectivity in its abstract negativity” can thus be asserted (Žižek 1999, 93). Again, Žižek questions the standard reading of Hegel’s famous analysis in the Phenomenology of abstract freedom and Terror, according to which the revolutionary project, with its “direct assertion of abstract Universal reason,” perishes in “self-destructive fury” because it fails to organize its revolutionary energy into a stable and differentiated social order (1999, 93). Hegel’s point, rather, as Žižek argues, is to show how the revolutionary Terror, despite being an historical deadlock, is nonetheless necessary in order to affect the historical passage towards the modern rational state (1999, 93). The historical situation that opposes “a premodern organic body and the revolutionary Terror which unleashes the destructive force of abstract negativity” always involves an Hegelian forced choice:  “one has to choose Terror” (the ‘wrong’ choice) against pre-modern organic community, in order to create the terrain for the ‘right’ choice; namely to create the conditions “for the new post-revolutionary reconciliation between the demands of social Order and the abstract freedom of the individual” (Žižek 1999, 94). Žižek thus fully endorses the Hegelian claim that the freedom of subjectivity emerges out a certain experience of radical negativity. This also applies to the contrast between ethical life and morality: the immersion of the subject in his/her concrete social life-world versus his/her “abstract individualist/

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universal moral opposition to this concrete inherited universe” (Žižek 1999, 94). The moral individual, acting on behalf of a larger universality, acts so as to challenge and undermine the inherited determinate ethical mores of his/her community (Socrates versus the Greek polis; Christ versus the Jewish people) (Žižek 1999, 94). As Hegel argues, however, the stubborn attachment of the moral subject to his/her convictions, despite the demands of the ethical totality, also dialectically transitions into its opposite, that is, into Evil—yet another instance of the passage through negativity marking the movement from abstract to concrete universality. As Žižek points out, Hegel is well aware that this abstract universality gains existence through violence, the destructive fury towards all particular content, which is again the only way the concrete Universal can be realized through the emergence of the freedom of individual subjectivity (1999, 94). Once again, Žižek challenges the doxa concerning the young Hegel’s aesthetic vision of harmonious Greek Sittlichkeit:  Hegel ‘becomes Hegel’ once this vision of a stable organic totality (as developed in the 1802–3 System of Sittlichkeit) is abandoned. Such a model, Žižek remarks, is in fact closer to the ‘aestheticization of politics’ characteristic of political romanticism, with its anti-modernist emphasis on organic community and anti-universalistic traditionalism (1999, 94). Indeed, it is only after Hegel too makes the ‘wrong’ choice (idealized Greek Sittlichkeit) that the mature Hegel can make the ‘right’ one: namely, acknowledging that the only path to concrete universality (and the modern state) is via the subject’s choice of abstract negativity (the skandalon of Christ’s emergence versus the nostalgic hope for a renewed version of Greek Sittlichkeit) (Žižek 1999, 94–5). The mature Hegel’s concept of reconciliation, on Žižek’s reading, is thus deeply ambiguous: it is not only the reconciliation of a split (between individual subjectivity and social totality) but reconciliation with this split as “the necessary price of individual freedom” (1999, 95). The stereotype of the young radical Hegel who later became the conservative ‘state philosopher’ justifying the existing social order should thus be turned on its head: it is the revolutionary project of the younger Hegel that prefigured the establishment of a new organic Order that abolishes modern individuality, while the mature Hegel’s insistence on the right of subjectivity—including the unavoidable passage through abstract negativity—provides the only way historically to ensure the achievement of concrete universality (Žižek 1999, 95). The lesson to be drawn here is twofold: that liberal democratic modernity cannot disavow its revolutionary, indeed violent, historico-political origins; and that political romanticism can recur even in the guise of an anti-universalist insistence on particularity, difference, and ‘community’.

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To return to my earlier discussion, this is why Hegel praises the Understanding [Verstand] (rather than reason) in the “tarrying with the negative” passage from the Phenomenology quoted above. It is the understanding’s power to “disrupt any organic link,” to treat as separated what originally exists within a concrete context, that guarantees the subject’s freedom as Spirit. Indeed, this negative power of the understanding is a more developed version of what the younger, romantic Hegel called the ‘night of the world,’ the power of the pre-synthetic imagination; “the power that precedes the synthesis of imagination whose highest expression is logos” (for Heidegger, that which gathers together) (Žižek 1999, 96). The image of Hegel the arch-conservative, arguing for a return to a premodern organic social totality in which each individual has his/her prescribed place, is thus radically false. Rather, for Hegel, the very existence of subjectivity “involves the ‘false’, ‘abstract’ choice of Evil, of Crime”—that excessive moment of abstract negativity that throws the whole social order momentarily ‘out of joint’ (Žižek 1999, 96). The destruction of organic community, the subject’s ‘irrational’ insistence on some ‘abstract’ feature of the whole that disrupts its harmonious unity, is the very movement by which the subject is historically actualized—or to put it in Hegelese, the manner in which substance also becomes subject. As Žižek argues, the unity that emerges from this passage through negativity is thus no longer a substantial organic unity; rather it is a “substantially different Unity,” a Unity grounded in negativity, one in which this movement of negativity assumes a positive existence (1999, 96)—precisely in the modern political state, the formalized ‘embodiment’ of negativity that nonetheless retains the trace of this violent power to expose the life of its citizens. Hegel thus anticipates the Foucaultian-Agambenian theme of biopolitics, the ‘negative’ power of the state to both expose and administer the biological life of its citizens.

The ‘Night of the World’ and Revolutionary Violence Žižek’s unorthodox reading of the Hegelian theme of concrete universality— the necessity of a passage through abstract negativity in order to attain the individualization of the subject as free and universal—is taken up again in The Parallax View (2006). It also informs his recent analysis (2008, 337–80) of the “crisis in determinate negation” afflicting liberal democratic politics and contemporary political philosophy (Critchley and Badiou). In The Parallax View, Hegel’s ‘night of the world’ passage reappears again, this time in connection with the question of revolutionary violence. Žižek cites here Rebecca Comay’s fascinating discussion of the link between the Hegelian analysis of the self-destructive fury of the revolutionary Terror, and the “obsessive fantasies

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of survival entertained by the popular imaginary of the guillotine” (2006, 43). Such spectral decapitation fantasies were vividly manifested, Comay observes, in the “proliferation of blushing heads, talking heads, suffering heads, heads that dreamed, screamed, returned the gaze, the disembodied body parts, detached writing hands, the ghosts and ghouls and zombies that would fill the pages of gothic novels throughout Europe” (Comay 2004, 386). As Žižek asks, with these nightmarish fantasies of spectral decapitation haunting the post-revolutionary world, are we not back again within Hegel’s notorious ‘night of the world’? The frenzy of revolutionary upheaval destroys the fabric of ordinary historical and social reality, returning us to the elementary ‘zero-level’ of subjectivity; the “spectral obscene proto-reality of partial objects floating around against the background of the ontological Void” (2006, 44). Revolutionary violence disrupts social reality through the exercise of abstract negativity, temporarily returning the subject to the elemental level of proto-subjectivity, the dismembering violence of the ‘night of the world’. Here one cannot help but make the comparison between Hegel’s brutal observation concerning the guillotine—the post-revolutionary reduction of death to a mechanical cut, “a meaningless chopping off of a cabbage head” (Hegel 1977, 360; Žižek 2006, 43)—and the archaic revival of ‘sacrificial’ beheadings practiced by Islamist terrorists. Such beheadings occur through knife-wielding executioner rather than the impersonal operation of the guillotine; and while performed in secret they are video recorded in order to be disseminated via Jihadist propaganda websites for a globally dispersed audience. In the latter case, however, this abstract negativity or political violence is not in the service of “Absolute Freedom,” as was the case, from Hegel’s perspective, with the post-French revolutionary Terror.7 Rather, Islamist terrorism is more akin to a violent abstract negation of the modern ‘right of individual subjectivity’: a simultaneously ‘pre- and post-modern’, technologically primitive (knives, box cutters) and sophisticated (internet and communicational media), attempt to negate the ‘morally decadent’ liberal democratic capitalist order that makes this right of subjectivity possible. The point of Hegel’s analysis, it must be said, is to show that this revolutionary Terror is fundamentally self-undermining; that it cannot reconcile the drive towards (abstractly conceived) Absolute Freedom with the historically achieved norms of freedom and subjectivity that define the institutions of modernity. Žižek’s claim is that such violence is nonetheless historically unavoidable as the way in which the transition from abstract to concrete universality is effected. Here I return to my earlier question concerning the relationship between imagination and understanding: the contrast between the

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‘romantic’ reading of Hegel that gives priority to the ‘pre-synthetic’ imagination of the ‘night of the world’ (abstract negation) versus the ‘idealist’ reading that emphasizes the “power of the negative” articulated through the discursive understanding (determinate negation). Žižek combines the two forms of negativity (abstract and determinate) in a Schellingian manner, arguing that they are two aspects of the same power of negativity. This move, however, exposes him to the criticism that his account of revolutionary Terror flirts with a political romanticism that valorizes the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggle over the determinate negation that results in the rational social and political institutions of the modern state. For Hegel, the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben in the rational organization of the self-reforming social and political institutions of modernity. We only revert to the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence when these norms and institutions have utterly broken down, lost all legitimacy and normative authority, that is, when the (violent) historical transition to a new configuration of Spirit is already well underway. Must we say, however, with Žižek that abstract negation is the only way that concrete universality—the freedom of subjectivity—can be historically realized?

Global Capitalism: ‘End of History’ or ‘History of Violence’? The question for us today, then, is to ask what happens when this rational totality (Western neoliberal democracy) becomes disturbed by the contradictory dynamics of global capitalism. There are at least two distinct Hegelian responses:  one is to point to the role of the self-reforming institutions of modernity, those of capitalist liberal democracy, to effectively pacify, manage, or control these contradictory dynamics without entirely eliminating them. This line of thought—given popular expression in Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man (1992)—tends to the conclusion that liberal democratic capitalist modernity is here to stay; we have effectively reached the ‘end of history’ in which radical revolutionary political transformations are no longer likely or even possible. This ‘Fukuyamaian’ line then cleaves into at least two opposing positions: the moral or religious conservative position arguing for a return to traditional values to offset the deracinating effects of neoliberalism, a desperate attempt to refound the disturbed Sittlichkeit of multicultural liberal democracies; and the libertarian-postmodernist position that displaces political radicalism to the contested sphere of culture, arguing for a cultural politics of difference, utopian multiculturalism, radical affirmation of the Other, and so on, as ways of affirming ethical forms of freedom and plural modes of subjectivity made possible by capitalist liberal democracy.

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The point, for Žižek, is that both moral-religious conservative and libertarian-postmodernist positions share the ‘Fukuyamaian’ thesis: that capitalist liberal democracy is here to stay, hence needs to be either resisted or reformed. “The dominant ethos today,” as Žižek remarks, “is ‘Fukuyamaian’:  liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society, all one can do is render it more just, tolerant, and so forth” (2008, 421). On the other hand, there is the romantic, revolutionary position, which argues for a retrieval of the abstract negativity of the revolutionary tradition in order to perform a destructive negation that would disrupt the capitalist economico-political system. This is the line of thought—Hegelian but also Marxist-Leninist in inspiration—that Žižek argues for in his most recent tome, In Defense of Lost Causes (2008). For Žižek, we must first of all question and theoretically reject the ‘Fukuyamaian’ liberal democratic consensus: capitalist liberal democracy is not necessarily the ‘universal and homogeneous’ form of the state, as Kojève put it, in which the atomized post-historical animals of the species homo sapiens will privately enjoy their narcissistic consumer pleasures (Kojève 1969, 157–62). Rather, the contradictory dynamics of contemporary global capitalism—we need only mention global credit, fuel, oil, and Third World food crises, and the stark reality of ecological and environmental limits to growth—suggest that it is possible that Western societies may be entering a period of instability, uncertainty, even decline. Žižek cites four key antagonisms that are relevant here: the ecological crisis (global warming, ‘peak oil’); the challenge to concepts of private property posed by new forms of ‘intellectual property’; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments (biogenetics); and new forms of apartheid, particularly the proliferation of slums, separated communities, non-state governed zones of disorder (2008, 421–7). In light of these intersecting antagonisms confronting global capitalism, the historical question of whether it is possible to redeem the failed revolutionary attempts of the past (Benjamin) may not yet be entirely closed. Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist wager is directed primarily against contemporary liberal democratic but also ‘postmodernist’ politics that depoliticize the economy—‘naturalizing’ it as the unquestioned background of society, culture, and politics—and thereby displace political conflict to the sphere of culture and subjectivity. One could argue that the displacement of political radicalism to the cultural sphere—our contemporary ‘aestheticization of politics’—is an ideological disavowal of the real source of the antagonisms afflicting modern liberal democracies. It represents a politically debilitating attempt to transpose the abstract negativity of revolutionary struggles to the

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‘sublimated’ sphere of culture (as in the familiar ‘culture wars’ that pit social and religious conservatives against secular liberals and libertarian ‘postmodernists’ in symbolic struggles over moral and cultural questions of subjectivity, identity, and values). The problem with this pseudo-Hegelian sublimation of politics into culture, however, is that it leaves untouched what Marx correctly identified as the ‘base’ of these morally driven forms of socio-cultural struggle: the economic dynamics of global capitalism. This is why Žižek’s has recently argued—notably in In Defense of Lost Causes—for a refusal of the liberal democratic ‘moral blackmail’ that condemns in advance any form of radical politics as ‘totalitarian’ or ‘terroristic,’ and why he now advocates an active reclaiming of the historical and political revolutionary heritage of the Left. Žižek’s radical Hegelian-Marxist proposal would entail acknowledging the power of negativity defining modern subjectivity, a recognition of the suppressed ‘night of the world’ or abstract negativity that continues to haunt the precarious ‘imaginary community’ of liberal democracy. The question, however, is whether this can be done without relapsing into the nightmarish violence of the Hegelian ‘night of the world’. Are there more determinate forms of negation—of social and political struggle against the normative orders of capitalism—that might disturb the liberal democratic ‘moral consensus’ that has so strikingly paralyzed the Left? Does reclaiming the history of revolutionary activism also imply the risk of embracing forms of violence that have marred 20th-century political history? Or can the revolutionary spirit—the specter of Marx, if one will—be reanimated without repeating this history of violence? Žižek’s Hegelianism and his MarxistLeninism pull in different directions precisely on this issue. The Hegelian answer would be that the abstract negativity of revolutionary violence must be aufgehoben through the formation of rational social and political institutions capable of reconciling the deracinating effects of capitalism with the principle of individual subjectivity. The Marxist-Leninist response, on the other hand, would argue that such liberal-capitalist institutions themselves be subjected to revolutionary violence—a ‘negation of the negation’—that would create the historical conditions for future (communist) emancipation. We should note, though, that the Hegelian response is retrospective and descriptive; a conceptual comprehension of the underlying logic of the dynamics of modernity that would reconcile us to the vicissitudes of modern freedom. The Marxist-Leninist response, by contrast, is prospective and prescriptive; a demand to translate theory into practice, overcoming this alienating opposition by means of revolutionary action. Žižek appears to argue for a synthesis of these distinct, seemingly incompatible, responses, which raises the following difficulty: how is the Hegelian account of the negativity involved in the

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transition from abstract to concrete universality to be reconciled with the Marxist-Leninist demand for revolutionary action that would negate all such merely ‘ideological’ comprehension? One response would be to suggest that Žižek is simply pointing to the unavoidability of the moment of negativity in any theorization—and political practice—of the historical realization of free subjectivity. He reminds us that the Left forgets this Hegelian lesson at its peril. For in that case it either assents to the ‘Fukuyamaist’ consensus that there is ‘nothing to be done’ since we’ve already arrived at the (liberal-capitalist democratic) ‘end of history’; or else it naively asserts the need for a renewed romantic-revolutionary response that demands a violent (abstract) negation of the status quo. The Hegelian response, by contrast, would be to argue for the possibility of a retrieval of the revolutionary tradition that has also become historically reflective and socio-politically determinate:  not simply an abstract ‘violent’ negation of modern liberal-democratic institutions but rather a determinate negation of the normative consensus—the implicit background of economic neo-liberalism—that sustains them; a productive negation that would both preserve their emancipatory potentials while also negating their alienating socio-cultural effects. Such a task, of course, is easier said than done. Žižek’s bold engagement with the relationship between the negativity of the (Hegelian) subject and the antagonisms defining global capitalism thus throws down the philosophico-political gauntlet. All the more so if one believes that social and political movements today should reclaim that seemingly most ‘lost’ of causes—the Leftist revolutionary tradition committed to the concrete universality of freedom.

Notes 1. This Hegelian background is crucial, I  suggest, for grasping Žižek’s critical response to Simon Critchley’s claims for a (Levinasian) ethical anarchism of resistance in response to global capitalism (Critchley 2007; Žižek 2006, 332–4, 2008, 339–50). 2. Žižek returns precisely to Hegel’s “night of the world” passage in his analysis of Schelling’s Die Weltalter, comparing the Hegelian radical negativity and conception of madness as withdrawal from the world with the Schellingian “self-contraction” that “negates every being outside itself” (Žižek 1997, 8). 3. As Žižek remarks, he has referred to these two Hegelian passages “repeatedly in almost all my books” (1999, 67 n. 33). 4. Otto Weininger, like Heidegger, recoils from the abyss of subjectivity: Weininger via recourse to his misogynistic “henids” or phantasmatic “confused feminine representations” (1994, 145), and Heidegger via his “turn” from the Daseinsanalytik of Being and Time towards the gentle releasement towards Being (1999, 22–28).

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5. In this respect, Žižek’s Hegelianism echoes the radical reading of Hegel—inflected by Marx and Heidegger—made famous by Alexandre Kojève in his 1933–1939 Lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1969). 6. As A. V. Miller observes, Hegel makes a similar speculative point (in his Philosophy of Nature) concerning the mouth, which combines kissing and speech on the one hand, with eating, drinking, and spitting on the other (Hegel 1977, 210–1 n. 1). 7. This is why Žižek criticizes Simon Critchley’s claim (2007, 5–6) that all forms of revolutionary vanguardism—including Leninism, Maoism, Situationism, and Al-Qaedastyle Islamism—are to be equally rejected as forms of active nihilism. By blurring the difference between the distinct political logics of “radical egalitarian violence” (what Badiou calls the “eternal Idea” of revolutionary justice) and “anti-modernist ‘fundamentalist’ violence” (defining radical Islamism), Critchley lapses into “the purest ideological formalism”, echoing the identification, both by liberals and conservatives, of so-called “Left” and “Right” forms of totalitarianism (Žižek 2008, 348).

References Butler, Judith, Ernesto Lacau, and Slavoj Žižek. 2000. Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. London: Verso. Butler, Rex W. 2005. Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory. New York: Continuum. Comay, Rebecca. 2004. “Dead Right: Hegel and the Terror.” In South Atlantic Quarterly, 103 (2–3): 375–95. Critchley, Simon. 2007. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Responsibility, Politics of Resistance. London: Verso. Fukuyama, Francis. 1992. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press. Hegel, G. W. F. 1974. “Jenaer Realphilosophie.” In Frühe politische Systeme. Frankfurt: Ullstein. Hegel, G. W. F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heidegger, Martin. 1997. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Translated by Richard Taft. Fifth edition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kay, Sarah. 2003. Žižek: A Critical Introduction. London: Polity Press. Kojève, Alexandre. 1969. Lectures on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by James H. Nichols. New York: Basic Books. Sharpe, Matthew. 2004. Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real. Aldershot: Ashgate. Verene, D. P. 1985. Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1991. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1994. The Metastases of Enjoyment:  Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso.

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Žižek, Slavoj and F. W. J. von Schelling. 1997. The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World. An Essay by Slavoj Žižek with the Text of Schelling’s Die Weltalter (second draft, 1813), in English translation by Judith Norman. Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. (1992) 2001. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and out. Revised Edition. Reprint, New York/London: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

Part II  Politics At the time of writing, in the US and UK, we are living in exceptionally febrile political times in which both countries’ legislative assemblies are gridlocked. In the former there is a government shutdown over the building of a Babellike border wall and in the latter the Mother of parliaments is tying itself in knots finding ever more imaginative ways to fail to enact the result of a referendum Parliament itself voted for overwhelmingly. One particularly interesting aspect of these situations is the failure of practical minded journalists or data-driven social scientists to either predict or explain the underlying motivations and cultural eddies of fast-changing events. Trapped in a conceptual echo chamber of their own making, the media commentariat and co-opted academics alike, appear perpetually fated to react to latest developments with previously tried and distrusted perspectives rather than being able to reflect critically upon the events’ true root causes and potential consequences. More than 50 years since Roland Barthes coined the phrase “what goes without saying” to encapsulate the notion of myth (a kind of ideological closed-mindedness) Žižek’s work continues to contribute to a tradition of critical theory that, like the slave whispering into the Emperor’s ear at his Triumph, serves to remind the powerful of their hubris. More than this, however, Žižek’s inquiry into our society’s ideological foundations does not spare the blushes of theorists themselves, thus, a common feature of the essays in this second section is the theme of complicity, e.g. to what extent does conventional intellectual inquiry ultimately act to maintain and reproduce the status quo rather than questioning and undermining it? Žižek’s work encourages us to examine the foundational assumptions of much of what passes for political discourse in today’s media. Fake news may be a phrase brought to prominence by the world’s most powerful narcissist, but its dubious provenance does not detract from the validity of its pithy encapsulation of the moral bankruptcy at the heart of the military industrial non-complex—a media system that routinely acts as a dishonest broker to massage and assuage justified public discontent. It is in this context that Hilary Clinton

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inadvertently broke the apparatchik’s code of dishonor by, for once, honestly describing the “deplorables” she was unable/unwilling to understand. In the UK, meanwhile, a self-entitled (disproportionately London-based) clique within the Deep Establishment finds itself in paroxysms of indignation over (rightly or wrongly) the public’s desire to leave a putatively democratic organization one is apparently not allowed to leave. Pace Bertolt Brecht, parliamentarians battle to dissolve the people and elect another one. The simultaneously lazy and outraged conflation by mainstream commentators of Trump and Brexit is itself indicative of an underlying ideological gridlock—democracy can only be valid and comprehensible when it provides predetermined results. In contrast, we would suggest that the only real commonality between Trump and Brexit lies within their role as (discrete) manifestations of previously ignored or strategically downplayed social antagonisms that swirl about, unresolved, in the infernal regions of public and private psyches. In the following chapters we see particularly good examples of how Žižek’s work is uniquely placed to shed light upon the real deplorables in our society, e.g. those who engage in political and bureaucratic legerdemain rather than address those antagonisms directly and head on. Ola Sigurdson’s contribution examines the role played in Žižek’s thought by the apocalyptic tradition and the notion of hope. This is extremely pertinent to recent times, when both sides of the political spectrum have regularly used apocalyptic warnings, whether to scare their populations with the threat of immigrant swarms, or to use the threat of economic Armageddon if the electorate fails to follow expert advice. Sigurdson questions the extent to which genuine emancipatory hope can co-exist with and survive beyond total discontinuity with current social conditions and the decisionist nihilism by which all radical change is ultimately co-opted and defanged. Sigurdson develops the conceptual distinction to be made between decisionism and defeatism:  “Decisionism in the sense of the eventual decision itself provides the criteria for what counts as a legitimate emancipation rather than any preconceived criteria.” The essay traces the troubled relationship between apocalyptic thought and “a substantial horizon through which a more developed hermeneutics of discernment is possible.” Sigurdson, therefore, critiques Žižek by arguing that “his weak sense of hope makes emancipation almost unimaginable here and now, and more like a leap into the dark rather than a condition to be desired even when one can only partially imagine what it might be like.” Extremely apposite in Britain’s current political climate, it remains to be seen whether, in Sigurdson’s terms, an electorate will be allowed to have the temerity to test the hopefulness of a leap into the dark.

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Olivier Jutel’s chapter continues to develop this notion of political hope by tracing the ideological role played by Barack Obama. Drenched in the symbolic goodwill bestowed upon the first African-American president, Obama proved to be the reassuringly diverse face of a neo-liberal regime for which he ultimately served as an urbane lobbyist rather than a radical reformer. As suggested above in relation to the unexpected rise of Trump and the Brexit vote, neo-liberal discourse thrives in the absence of open clashes between fundamental values. Academics may sneer at the redneck mindset that dismisses the media’s output as fake news, but within that populist dismissal lies under-acknowledged truths about the media establishment’s industrialized exclusion of the life experiences and concerns of the deplorable Other whether they hail from the rustbelt or the swamp. Rather than dismissing populism, Jutel shows how, ultimately deluded or not, it contains a redemptive purpose through the way in which we are forced to re-recognize that, contra Democrat big hitters like Obama, Hilary Clinton, and others, populism “clearly identifies the constitutive role of economy in the political.” Jutel forcefully describes how “Obama’s discourse performs all the ideological contortions necessary to both secure the culmination of neo-liberalism and restore American hegemony of global capitalism” that “engenders the imagination of socialist autonomy and offers new commodities that elicit a post-capitalist fantasy.” For all its myriad faults, what populism doubtlessly does achieve is a powerful reminder that, contra another Clinton, “It’s the politics, stupid.” Peter Bloom’s chapter is aptly introduced by an epigraph from Nietzsche: “Obstinately, he clings to something he has come to see through; but he calls it faithfulness.” This statement neatly summarizes Bloom’s focus upon the ideological phenomenon of those who see through institutionalized hypocrisy, but nevertheless fail to take a meaningful stance against it. Worse than mere moral cowardice, Bloom explores how the sophistication of the cynical Leviathan is such that its smooth running even requires an appropriate amount of internal critique, where the subjectivity of “I disagree, but I still obey” is increasingly central to this seemingly contradictory phenomenon. The pervasive ubiquity of capitalist structures is such that the societal result is a form of “cynical totalitarianism.” The degree to which Bloom’s analysis is true is confirmed from a brief reflection on the current state of higher education in the UK. The commodification of university education occurred much later in the UK than the US. But being late to the party has not dampened the enthusiastic complicity with which British academics (and perhaps most egregiously, US academics working in the UK who have Stateside experience of genuine academic autonomy) have embraced the alchemical transformation of students into fee-paying customers. If even those tasked with thinking

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for a living are vulnerable to the Leviathan’s totalitarian control perhaps the intelligentsia’s contempt for the deplorable populists needs to be significantly re-evaluated in order to find new grounds for hope. Thus, Bloom concludes his chapter with the following: “the liberating effect of cynical rebellion is the foundation for an acting compliance.” Japhy Wilson’s chapter puts flesh on the bones of an idea alluded to in Paul Taylor’s book Žižek and the Media in which Taylor cites his own experience of gluttonously consuming a KFC bargain bucket that had, on its lid, an announcement that a portion of the profits made from the purchase would be devoted to tackling world hunger. Wilson’s highly entertaining and erudite take on this theme of culturally normalized hypocrisy provides a sterling illustration of what can be termed Žižek’s Heineken effect, whereby he reaches the parts that other theorists simply cannot reach. Like an expert proctologist, Wilson skillfully gets to the bottom of a core ideological issue that mainstream social science inquiry is ill-equipped to deal with. Using as one of his key examples of the inherent hypocrisy of “ethical consumption” the most basic of all bodily functions—shitting—Wilson demonstrates that factual discourse alone is insufficient to understand how the cynical Leviathan truly functions. Wilson deconstructs a number of examples from ethical consumerism to show how the essence of capitalist cynicism can best be understood using the psychoanalytical notion of jouissance. The genius of capitalism’s cynicism is such that we in the West are never shitting on the developing world more than when think we are helping it. Wilson calls for a shattering of the West’s self-indulgent fantasy-space in order to attain a rare instance of genuine self-knowledge. If this were to occur, he argues, “suddenly the compassionate consumer [would] see himself through the eyes of the Other, and glimpses the same expression that Freud detected on the face of the Rat Man when confronted with the Real of his jouissance. It is an expression of ‘horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware.’ ” The concluding chapter in this section provides a neat summary of the two key themes developed in previous chapters:  cynicism and hope. Levi R. Bryant examines the complex issues that arise when considering the relationship between Žižek’s work and that of his primary theoretical influence, Lacan. Bryant argues that the difference between the two figures occurs not at the level of content, but rather at the level of form. The basic explanation of this complex issue is found to reside in the ultimately different ways the two men engage with the universe of discourse. Lacan’s work centers upon a discourse of mastery, and Bryant provides a sophisticated delineation of the many nuances of Lacan’s schematically rich categories. Žižek, by contrast, is shown to be keener to use his theoretical project much more directly in

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the service of questioning capitalism as the universal horizon of our current situation. Bryant provides detailed insights into how Žižek’s use of Lacan helps him to promote questioning as a political end in itself, and it is an end that encourages people to think for themselves rather than seek readymade answers from their theoretical guru. “Questioning is the piety of thought” according to Heidegger, and in Žižek’s hands, Bryant shows how it can encourage us to reframe the nature of the very questions we ask and therefore our understanding of what is actually possible. Interestingly given his reputation for self-plagiarism and repetition of themes, Bryant concludes that “the discourse of the critical theorist endlessly repeats without limit. Paraphrasing Beckett, the discourse of critical theory is characterized by the impossibility of going on, the necessity of going on, and the will to go on.” At a time when Western democracies are struggling to contain the widespread disgruntlement of their electorates, the chapters in this section provide a timely reminder of the political significance of Žižek’s political thinking. Rather than providing alternative facts, Žižek helps us to understand facts in their true political context, a context that today consists of a heady mix of failing traditional party politics, systemic societal hypocrisy, populist upsurges, and a pathologically confused commentariat. Few have put it better than Antonio Gramsci (1971, 276): “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

Reference Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. Translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence & Wishart.

5.  A Hermeneutic of Hope: Problematizing Žižek’s Apocalypticism Ola Sigurdson Department of Literature of History of Ideas and Religion, University of Gothemburg, Sweden

In this chapter, I wish to problematize Slavoj Žižek’s use of the apocalyptic tradition in his political philosophy, especially focusing on the consequences it has for his understanding of hope.1 Especially, I find his strong emphasis on the disjunction between the state before and after the radical event implies a radical discontinuity between the present state and the state of emancipation, so that the possibility falls away of any kind of criteria for a useful distinction between authentic and inauthentic events. Such a lack of a more developed hermeneutics of discernment opens up for a potential ‘decisionism’ in Žižek’s work despite itself; decisionism in the sense of the eventual decision itself provides the criteria for what counts as a legitimate emancipation rather than any preconceived criteria. This means, in turn, that the heavy emphasis on discontinuity between the state before the event and after, results in a philosophical version of ‘supersessionism’—that is, for example, the theological understanding that the Jewish people was superseded or replaced by the Christian church—that belie any continuity between the memory of what once was and the hope for what is to come. If there is only little or no continuity whatsoever between the state before and the state after the event between memory and hope, does this not mean the end of hope as we know it? My critique against Žižek, then, is that his weak sense of hope makes emancipation almost unimaginable here and now, and more like a leap into the dark rather than a condition to be desired even when one can only partially imagine what it might be like. I shall proceed this inquiry of hope by means of a theological

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critique; however, my purpose is to call attention to a latent weakness in Žižek’s political conception. I begin by clarifying some of the key concepts of my argument, especially ‘apocalypticism’, ‘eschatology’ and ‘hope’ and with introducing the apocalyptic tradition in Christianity, its hermeneutic challenges, as well as the relation between the more general concept eschatology and its relation to alterity. I then proceed with a summary of philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear’s understanding of ‘radical hope’. It is at this conjuncture that I return to Žižek, where I  explore the ways he relates to the ‘apocalyptic’ heritage. Here I discuss the act of hoping and the object of hope—on loss as well as a possible future—and will discuss Žižek’s dialectical understanding of hope in relation to Lear’s conception and, specifically, what Žižek’s understanding of hope might imply in terms of possibilities to discern the emancipatory quality of an event. In my concluding section I summarize my argument in relation to the potential decisionism and supersessionism in Žižek’s work and why this might imply the end of hope as we know it.

Eschatology and Alterity As a kind of general background to my argument, I shall begin with a very short exposition of theological understandings of apocalypse and eschatology and their relation to alterity. Such an exposition could aptly begin where the Christian Bible ends: In the Book of Revelation in the New Testament, also known as The Apocalypse from the first (Greek) word of the text. Here, the reader gets a graphic description of the world to come. After the seven seals are broken and the seven trumpets have sounded, after the fights with the dragon and the beasts are over, after the seven angels with the seven plagues of God’s wrath have flown, after the thousand years of the millennial kingdom is over and Satan has been released, there is a vision of a New Jerusalem. According to ­chapter 21, this is a quite extraordinary city, given that it is built of jasper, gold as pure as glass, pearls, and every kind of precious stone. Not only is the building material amazing, it is a city that promises everlasting peace and where the nations will come to heal. Through it a river of the water of life will flow. This provides a vision of a city that will inform the imagery of Christian eschatology for centuries. The Bible starts in Genesis with a formless and empty earth which then continues into a garden, but ends as a city; an image of both human and divine community. The image of the city in Revelation puts one before an immediate hermeneutic obstacle. A  city of gold where the foundations of city walls are made of jasper, sapphire, agate, emerald, onyx, ruby, chrysalides, beryl, topaz,

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turquoise, jacinth and amethyst seems wildly impractical. Even allowing for a hermeneutic gap of almost two thousand years where one cannot be sure what the original readers thought of all these precious stones, there must have been readers of Revelation even then wondering what to do with such an imagery that hardly could be taken literally. (Or, rather, can it? Given the obscene affluence of some of the world’s super-rich today, is it actually thinkable that such a city could be appealing to someone?) Perhaps, and this is a conjecture, such imagery is chosen because it deliberately wants to draw attention to the impossibility of taking it at face value, thus forcing the reader to imagine a city beyond our present conditions. If this is correct—and it certainly is for some historical exegetes—then the purpose of the strange imagery is to evoke the image of a city discontinuous with our present, more contemporary cities. This is perhaps an obvious point to make, but it nevertheless illustrates the dilemma which any discussion of the future, whether it be political or theological, faces: is the future merely a prolongation of the present or will it be different? The image of the city in Revelation (a book that throughout history has inspired many emancipatory movements) is obviously on the side of imagining a different future. But, how different is this different future? In my illustration of the New Jerusalem in Revelation, there is both continuity and discontinuity: we recognize the image of the city even when it is a different city from all present cities. I shall not deal here with the extraordinary rich, problematic and extremely varied history of interpretation of the imagery detailed in the Book of Revelation, the only apocalyptic book in the New Testament, a text which has always been recognized by the Christian tradition as being very difficult to interpret. To note two prominent historical interpretations, Augustine (354–430) interpreted the millennial kingdom in ­chapter 20, verses 1–6 as an ahistorical allegory for the time between the first and the second coming of Christ, whereas Joachim of Fiore (1135–202) thought of it as an actual, historical period, a peaceable kingdom in history rather than after history (Svenungsson 2014, 65, 76 f.). These differing interpretations of the millennial period are representative of how these authors interpret Revelation in general, particularly given these authors’ different yet equally prominent Wirkungsgeschichten or effective histories. Neither of these authors consider the image of the peaceful city as a literal image of the world to come. However, the function of propagating this particularly abstruse imagery is to alert the reader that the New Jerusalem is quite unlike the old one as well as any city known to us. The emphasis, perhaps, is on the discontinuity between the new and the old rather than continuity. The image of the New Jerusalem not only raises the general question of the continuity and discontinuity between

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this world and the world to come for Christian theology, but also, specifically in Joachim’s case, the continuity and discontinuity between different eras in history. Eschatology is the locus in Christian theology that deals with this question, not only with regard to things to come in a futuristic or historical sense, but in its entirety: if God is transcendent, which incidentally does not only mean that God is far away but alter, how alter is this alter? What is the end of the world, in the sense both of its final chapter and its semogenic context? Theology in an eschatological mode deals with questions concerning the relation between continuity and discontinuity, whether regarding the alterity of God, the form of the coming peaceable kingdom, or the resurrection of the dead. If the coming world of peace is too like our own, one may suspect that it will not be as peaceable as one would hope. But if it is completely different, then what is the point of hoping for it, as it will be completely unrecognizable to us? Eschatology needs to strike a balance between continuity and discontinuity, so as to avoid the extremes of trite permanence and irrelevant alterity. The image of the city in the Book of Revelation attempts to recognize this. As the British theologian Gerald Loughlin puts it: “We can only imagine paradise on the basis of our knowledge of earthly gardens” (Loughlin 2004, 281). Likewise, one cannot imagine divine cities other than through earthly cities. Eschatology, then, deals with the question of alterity, or how to strike a balance between continuity and discontinuity. To someone outside of the scope of Christian theology or belief, such eschatology as the one presented thus far might appear perplexing. The questions that Christian eschatology deals with could be more generalized, however. The question of hope, for example, is neither limited to the Christian tradition nor to any religious tradition, yet, at the same time appears prominently in secular philosophy, emancipatory politics as well as some factions of psychoanalysis. In the Christian tradition, hope is counted among the theological virtues along with love and faith. But regardless of the genealogy of the concept, that act of hoping is clearly recognizable far outside of this tradition. Nevertheless, in its political as well as psychoanalytical forms, hope shares with eschatology the question of continuity and discontinuity and their relation to each other.

Hope in the Face of Cultural Devastation One of the best recent philosophical accounts of hope is given by philosopher and psychoanalyst, Jonathan Lear in his text, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (2006). Here, Lear retells the story of a chief of the Crow nation, Plenty Coups, who had to handle the very likely collapse of the

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traditional way of life in his Indian tribe. I shall, however, focus on a more structural account of his understanding of hope with the intention of using this as a tool for critical comparison to Žižek’s account of hope. Central to Lear’s argument is how the Crow nation in its traditional form ruined at the end of the 19th century, and more precisely, ruined beyond the possibility of repair. This devastation did not only mean an external destruction of the Crow way of life, but it also signified an internal ruin. All the coordinates through which a Crow Indian made sense of his life disappeared. To be an optimist in such a situation would just be a form of wishful thinking, and in in this case, dreaming that the Crow nation somehow would be miraculously restored is not sufficient. Optimism does not recognize how vast the cultural devastation actually was for this Indian tribe. In my terms, optimism equals an untroubled continuity, a wish for more of the same. Apocalyptic imagery as the one we find in Revelation is hardly the expression of optimism, as it, relatively speaking, puts more emphasis on alterity than continuity. Hope, on the other hand, is more radical in that it recognizes the cultural trauma, but, nevertheless, hopes that there might be a way of continuing the Crow life under different circumstances and in a different way. Lear writes: “This hope is radical in that it is aiming for a subjectivity that is at once Crow and does not yet exist” (2006, 104). In other words, there is continuity as this new life that is hoped for is still recognizable as a Crow in some way. But there is also discontinuity in that this new Crow life does not yet exist and it is difficult to visualize what it might be. Hoping, then, is not knowing or projecting a known past into an unknown future, but rather to trust that newness is possible in the face of likely despair. The past remains as memory, not as fetish. Whence this trust? To Plenty Coups, in Lear’s account, a divine omen appeared in a dream. Not a divine omen that told him that everything will be well, that the devastation his nation had suffered was not real or that he would be bestowed with supernatural powers to set everything right. In that sense at least, the dream was not a form of wishful thinking. The dream was instrumental in providing some kind of legitimacy to the hope that there was a way forward at all, not in the sense of giving information of how this would come about, but in a deeper sense of actually giving trust. Lear relates agnostically to this dream, and generalizes its importance in suggesting that the legitimacy of hope is dependent upon some kind of goodness that ‘transcends our finite powers to grasp it’ (2006, 121). Here, Lear is intentionally vague, as he wishes to avoid committing himself to any particular metaphysics. However, he makes it clear that such a view is founded on human beings as erotic creatures, always striving towards something that transcends us.

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Such transcendence need not be of theological nature, however, nor need it be a ‘thing.’ We could regard it as a kind of immanent transcending process as long as there is something ‘other’ than human resources involved. According to Lear, such a transcendence or transcending is compatible also with several non-religious world-views. In a term often employed by Žižek, one could perhaps think of Plenty Coup’s dream as a ‘vanishing mediator’: a structurally necessary object that will fall away when its work is done. It is easy to spot why Lear thinks that such goodness is necessary: the alternative is despair and cynicism that has given up on hope, concluding that the yearning of human beings is ultimately pointless. Hope too, then, tries to strike a balance between continuity and discontinuity, as in the example of Christian eschatology. To formulate this with the help of Lear’s account in Radical Hope: to wish for the mere continuation of the Crow nation after its cultural devastation would not be hope but just optimism or wishful thinking that does not take the impact of the destruction seriously. Discontinuity, on the other hand, would be to despair of any meaningful continuation of the Crow nation whatsoever. Hope is trusting that a way forward is possible that is both somehow continuous with earlier Crow life in that it is still recognizably Crow but still discontinuous as it will have to be ‘in a form that is not yet intelligible’ (2006, 95). Beyond the Crow nation as well as Christian eschatology, the same structure, presumably, also informs our present personal and political hoping. The political vision of another society, which is a more just society, needs to be discontinuous with our present society. If it is not, it is just a projection of more of the same. However, at the same time it is, in some sense, recognizably continuous with what we know now of how a just society would be if the concept of justice is not to be thoroughly ambiguous. Note, as an example, Karl Marx’s well-known description of the communist society in the The German Ideology: In communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic. (Marx and Engels 1964)

Marx has been criticized for putting forward some very particular ideals of his own cultural context as an ideal for the coming society. Regardless as to whether this point of critique is legitimate or not, the question remains as to how he could have envisioned otherwise, particularly, if he wanted to convey an image of a coming society that would have been intelligible to his time? Maybe he errs on the side of continuity by not stressing enough

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of discontinuity, but nevertheless, even Marx should be allowed to imagine paradise on the basis of his knowledge of earthly gardens. If we did not recognize somehow, however preliminary, what this coming society would look like, would we even find it worth striving for? Can we yearn for what is utterly unknown to us, continuous with our present in just the negative sense of not being like that? After now having set the scene regarding apocalypse, eschatology and hope, this is the question I wish to pose regarding Žižek’s political philosophy.

Apocalyptic Žižek Increasingly, Slavoj Žižek has associated his political philosophy with the apocalyptic tradition. Especially in Living in the End Times (2010), Žižek begins with alluding to the ‘four riders of the apocalypse’ from the Book of Revelation, suggesting that these in our present time consist of the ecological crisis, the biogenetic revolution, systemic imbalances and social divisions. All these developments lead to the premise of the book: “the global capitalist system is approaching an apocalyptic zero-point” (Žižek 2010, x). Apocalypticism, to Žižek, denotes a cultural revolution, the kind of cultural devastation described in Lear’s book, where it becomes impossible to go on as before. There is a need, then, for a radical re-orientation with regard to economy and social policy but also, with regard to the human subject itself. Apocalypse means that subjectivity itself needs to be revolutionized rather than reformed; the term radical, as often pointed out, is etymologically derived from the Latin term radix which means ‘root,’ and the call for radical change in Žižek has primarily to do with the need for uprooting the subject from the current symbolic system if true change is to be achieved. That this is so becomes clear if one looks at the three current versions of apocalypticism that Žižek suggests characterize our times:  “Christian fundamentalist, New Age, and techno-digital-post-human” (Žižek 2010, 336). In First as Tragedy, then as Farce, Žižek actually cites four versions, which includes ‘secular ecologism’ (2009, 94). However, the three versions differ according to their respective ontologies, and even if the Christian fundamentalist version “is considered the most ridiculous,” this is still the version that Žižek sees as “closest to a radical ‘millenarian’ emancipatory logic” (Žižek 2010, 337). Why is this? I claim that the account Žižek gives of each one of them is rather a broad outline than a nuanced exposition, and it is clear that his interest lies more with presenting his own alternative than giving an understanding of rival traditions. Nevertheless, the main complaint that Žižek holds against both New Age and ‘techno-digital-post-human’ apocalypticism is that they

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are not radical enough. These versions of apocalypticism do not question the fundamental coordinates of the liberal-autonomous subject; all through the radical, historical changes announced by them this subject remains intact. On the foundation of a basically unbroken subject, they propose modest, pragmatic change, reformism rather than revolution. For Žižek, they do not acknowledge the basic traumatic cut, the inescapable alienation of the subject or the fundamental discontinuity of a present with a future. Žižek’s critique of New Age and ‘techno-digital-post-human’ apocalypticism—which hardly deserve the epithet apocalypticism at all, in his account— are similar to his often repeated distinction between New Age spirituality or Western Buddhism and Christianity, where dialectical materialism falls on the side of Christianity. According to Žižek, Christian love, agape, actually means the ‘uncoupling’ of the subject, a ‘symbolic death,’ where “one has to ‘die for the law’ (Saint Paul) that regulates our tradition, our ‘social substance’ ” (Žižek 2000, 127). The appearance of Christ is traumatic, in that it forces a choice that belies any naïve attempt to experience an untroubled identification with one’s original community. Thus, “to become a true dialectical materialist, one should go through the Christian experience” (Žižek 2003, 6). Further, one needs to be ‘born again,’ which means that one goes through such an experience of ‘unplugging’ or ‘uprooting’ from one’s cultural, ethnic or social context. Only at this conjuncture is one able to form, together with other ‘born again’ subjects, and create a truly alternative collective not founded on the reigning symbolic system. This could also be described in a more psychoanalytic terminology as ‘traversing the fantasy’ and also as a ‘subjective destitution’ or moment of madness. But the message is essentially the same: anything less radical than this will not result in thorough change, as it will not take the gravity of the cultural devastation or the subjective alienation serious enough. According to Žižek, the subject is doubly alienated: not only from the current political situation but also in relation to the coming future; we are as ourselves a problem to and for our own future. A radical re-orientation of human subjectivity is needed to respond to the challenges posed by the contemporary ‘four riders of the apocalypse’. Such a radical re-orientation is undoubtedly hard work and thus does not evolve spontaneously. This is also the reason why it is easier to imagine the end of the world, as in the ever so popular apocalyptic film genre of Hollywood, than to imagine a change of economic system from capitalism to something else.2 This is why Žižek appeals to the ‘authentic Christian apocalyptic tradition,’ since its agapeic love can express itself in a new political order:  “The form of appearance of this love is so-called apocalyptic millenarianism, or the Idea of Communism: the urge to realize an egalitarian social order of solidarity” (Žižek 2010, 117).

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But even if the radical reorientation is challenging, it still is not necessarily grounded in work, but rather, in grace (in the theological sense), which is an ungrounded apocalyptic event that throws overboard the current cultural coordinates. However, Žižek himself does not subscribe to a Christian version of apocalypticism. As he has made abundantly clear, he considers himself an atheist at the same time that he believes that his version of dialectical materialism is the true inheritor of the Christian legacy. In other words, there is a dialectical relation towards the Christian tradition from Žižek.3 One reason for his rejection of at least some versions of a theistic variant of the Christian tradition is to avoid identifying God with the big Other. This reason could be exemplified by an illuminating discussion in another of his apocalyptic-themed books, Trouble in Paradise. Here Žižek wishes to distinguish between eschatology and apocalypticism. Eschatology here stands for the big Other, an “agent of total accountability that can take into account the consequences of our own acts” (Žižek 2014, 129). The concern that Žižek expresses is for an eschatology that claims to know where history is going. This is a kind of historical determinism and not only a problem, according to Žižek, inherent in Christian eschatology, but also with a Marxism that has inherited this notion of historical determinism from Christianity. But as Žižek claims, history is contingent, which means that one cannot predict, neither the consequences of our acts, nor the outcome of history. This means that we have to take full responsibility for our activities. In other words, “the thing to do is to separate apocalyptic experience from eschatology: we are now approaching a certain zero-point—ecologically, economically, socially—things will change, and the change will be most radical if we do nothing, but there is no eschatological turn ahead pointing towards the act of global Salvation” (ibid.). The apocalyptic experience is thus something different from eschatology, which means that Žižek’s legitimate critique of (such) eschatology does not force him to abandon apocalypticism for a “happy, liberal-progressive, ‘postmetaphysical’ ” view of modest, risky but cautious pragmatic interventions” (Žižek 2014, 129). The essence of Žižek’s critique of eschatology—in both Christianity, versions of Marxism, and also in New Age and ‘techno-digital-post-human’ apocalypticism—is that it suffers from too much continuity and does not acknowledge the traumatic cut necessary for true emancipation. However, Žižek’s distinction between eschatology and apocalypticism is a somewhat awkward distinction from a theological perspective. This is because of the way that the concept of eschatology is often used today, as the genus of which apocalypticism is a species (McGinn 1998: xvi). When I use this concept, I do so as a more generic term that encompasses very different

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ideas of how the eschaton or ‘the end’ is figured, including non-futuristic versions. Nevertheless, another distinction between eschatology and apocalypticism is often used as one that leads us back to the differing interpretations of the millennial kingdom in Revelation 20:1–6. Augustine could be described as a non-apocalyptic eschatological theologian in that any speculation of how and when the world was coming to an end was far from his mind even if he saw all of history in the light of the end, whereas Joachim of Fiore was more convinced of ‘living in the end times’ or in other words, undertook an interpretation where biblical visions actually referred to historical happenings in his own time. This is more typical for an apocalyptic perspective. The Greek term apokalypsis actually means ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure,’ and a generic characteristic of the apocalyptic tradition is the claim of a deeper insight into the happenings of history. Unlike Žižek’s distinction, historically speaking it is actually apocalypticism rather than eschatology that is prone to historical determinism. This is not Žižek’s point in alluding to the apocalyptic imagery, and he certainly makes this clear. His intention is to highlight the imminence of the end. As Bernard McGinn, one of the foremost scholars on apocalyptic thought, puts it:  there is a vast difference “between viewing the events of one’s own time in the light of the End of history and seeing them as the last events themselves” (McGinn 1998, 4). Žižek clearly is in favor of the latter alternative. In fact, it is generally suggested that the kind of intra-historical apocalypticism that the Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore introduced in the 12th century has been instrumental in giving rise to religious as well as secular emancipatory and revolutionary thought throughout history (Taubes 2009; Svenungsson 2014)—an effective historical context which we also find Žižek’s apocalypticism. What clearly distinguishes a philosopher such as Žižek from at least some of his precursors among the apocalyptic thinkers is his emphasis on the active responsibility of humanity for history; apocalyptic thought can, as history has shown, also give rise to a passive stance in the face of the imminent end. What also distinguishes Žižek from someone like Joachim of Fiore is Žižek’s disregard for any transcendent dimension of eschatology outside the bounds of history. But even if there are traditional accounts of eschatology that look like those Žižek is critical of, this does not imply that his critique is equally valid for all of them. In fact, much historical and present eschatology had or have a keen understanding of the discontinuity that any possible future will implicate. As I outline above, a key question to consider is rather how to balance discontinuity with continuity. And I pose this question to Žižek. In a way, Žižek recognizes such a question: “The key question is: what happens the day after? How will this emancipatory explosion be translated

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into a new social order?” (Žižek 2014, 102). One of the functions of a true emancipatory event, according to Žižek, is to change the coordinates of the old social order. It is not enough to get rid of the tyrant; one must also get rid of the society that gave birth to the tyrant (Žižek 2014, 104). Anything less would most likely result in a return to the starting point—the old tyrant would just be replaced by a new tyrant if a more fundamental change does not take place. This is the reason why so many revolutions fail: no political agent seizes the moment to turn the happening into a true emancipatory event and thus there is no big Other that guarantees success and longevity of a new social order. After the initial moment when the tyrant is toppled, there is a need of a repetition of the revolution where the illusions of the first enthusiasm are shattered; then begins the hard and conflict-ridden work of finding out where to draw the line between true emancipation and illusory emancipation according to the old order. What begins as an initial enthusiastic moment that might well be within the confines or the reforms of the system, can eventually take on a wider, more revolutionary significance, such as, Martin Luther King’s call for abolishment of racial segregation that evolved into a more radical call for equality and emancipation. However, the opposite also takes place, where after the initial revolutionary moment life returns to normal. What matters, in other words, is what happens the day after. Whereas Žižek earlier could be interpreted as suggesting that because alienation belongs to la condition humaine so that no non-alienated political system is possible, our only way out is a permanent revolution, today he explicitly distances himself from such a position. It is in ‘the domain of citizen’s passivity’ that real change needs to take place; as Žižek puts it: “it is (relatively) easy to have a big ecstatic spectacle of sublime unity, but how will ordinary people feel the difference in their daily lives?” (Žižek 2014, 127). Enthusiastic emancipatory moments can even have a conservative effect in the long run, if they are taken to show that no real change is actually possible. It is now time to turn to the question how Žižek understands the disjuncture between continuity and discontinuity in relation to the future.

Fully Accomplished Loss As we have seen already in the above section on apocalypticism, Žižek’s work emphasizes heavily a discontinuity between the present state and the coming future. Let me here refer back to Lear’s account of radical hope to compare it with Žižek’s understanding of hope, or rather his understanding of the loss necessary for true emancipation. I shall here focus upon the act of hoping and then, in the next section, turn to the object of hope.

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In terms of the Crow Indians’ possible return to a life that is somehow recognizably Crow, under radically different circumstances, Žižek would probably deny both the possibility and the desirability (from an emancipatory perspective) of such a return. Compare a line of reasoning that could be found in Trouble in Paradise: in discussing the colonization of India by the British Empire, Žižek denies that the liberation of colonies ought to mean a return to the conditions prior to colonization. Rather, it is quite the opposite, as the colonization creates the conditions of true liberation. It is possible to talk of colonization as an ‘unconscious tool of history’ and not as an expression of a teleology of history, but rather, as a recognition of the fortuitous circumstances that gave rise to emancipation for India. It provided the tools that made it possible not only to liberate India from the colonizers, but also to liberate Indian citizens from their own tradition, thus a ‘double liberation’ occurs (Žižek 2014, 164). Therefore, “The true victory over colonization is not the return to any ‘authentic’ pre-colonial existence, even less any ‘synthesis’ between modern civilization and pre-modern origins—but, paradoxically, the fully accomplished loss of these pre-modern origins” (Žižek 2014, 169). Colonization appears as an ‘unconscious tool of history’ as a two-fold stage: First, as the liberation of India from its pre-colonial existence through the British Empire and then as the impulse to liberation from the colonizers themselves. “The very disintegration of traditional forms opens up the space of liberation” (Žižek 2014, 171). It is as if the colonizers appear as the ‘vanishing mediator’ or the external impulse of an emancipation that would never have taken place except for this ‘disturbance’. As Žižek puts it, “we cannot accede to our freedom directly—in order to gain this access we have to be pushed from the outside, since our ‘natural state’ is one of inert hedonism” (Žižek 2014, 188). In relation to the Crow nation, it seems that Žižek’s advice would be to give up on any recognizable Crow way of life. Not in an undialectical way, to be sure. The ‘cultural devastation’ can be interpreted as the ‘unconscious tool of history’ that, firstly liberated the Crow from the constraints of their own history. To accomplish the necessary reiteration of liberation and not just sink in despair, the Crow needed Plenty Coups and his prophetic dream as a ‘vanishing mediator’, showing them their way to an even more authentic liberation. Plenty Coups appears to embody Žižek’s concept of a ‘Master,’ since it is only through such that a people can accede to freedom. The ‘Master’ is someone that both crystallizes and reveals the true nature of people’s desire: “true leaders do not do what people want or plan; they tell the people what they want, and it is only through them that

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they realize what they want” (Žižek 2014, 190). But when the ‘Master,’ in this case Plenty Coups, have made people realize what they want, he has accomplished his mission and should wither away (I cannot think Žižek means it in any other way). Plenty Coups’ function, in other words, is to achieve the second stage of liberation. The Crow can trust Plenty Coups, and Plenty Coups trusts the omen he received in a dream. But when both Plenty Coups and the omen has fulfilled their mission, these small pieces of continuity between the conditions before and after the cultural devastation can be let go of. This would, supposedly, mean the ‘disintegration,’ not the ‘reintegration,’ of a traditional form of Crow life. Thus, the only fulfilment of hope seems to be to let go of hope. Let me sum up what this means in terms of continuity and discontinuity. A straightforward continuity is of course out of the question, both in the account we find in Lear and in Žižek. Just continuity would mean a nostalgic and ultimately impossible return to the conditions before the cultural devastation, and to dream of it would not be to recognize how radical this trauma is. Žižek’s emphasis is indeed on discontinuity, as in the quote above where he speaks of a ‘fully accomplished loss’ of the pre-modern or pre-colonial conditions. The full accomplishment of such a loss is not helped by a direct discontinuity, however, as this would mean either biological death or a despair supposedly ending in melancholy that never lets go of its past.4 Such a full accomplishment must be dialectical in acknowledging the need for hope and trust and consequently some kind of continuity—but only as an intermediate stage. This intermediate stage would help the Crow to make their way into the future and not melancholically get stuck in the past. Rather, it is an intermediate stage not necessary from the point of view of the future, only from the point of view of the past. Žižek’s understanding of hope is, in other words, quite different from Lear’s, as Lear thinks that hope aims for a subjectivity “that is at once Crow and does not yet exist.” Žižek on the other hand, asks himself, quoting George Orwell from The Road to Wigan Pier: “Is ‘to alter myself so completely that at the end I should hardly be recognizable as the same person’ not an event of radical self-transformation comparable to rebirth?” (Žižek 2014, 174). This is another understanding of subjectivity than the one exemplified in Lear’s account, which also corresponds to a different concept of hope, as we have seen. It is also, at least compared to most traditional versions of apocalypticism, a version that puts all of the emphasis on discontinuity rather than trying to balance continuity and discontinuity in some way. If Žižek faults eschatology in not acknowledging discontinuity enough, his apocalypticism is more discontinuous than most.

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Signs from the Future What does this mean in terms of what is being hoped for? Is it possible to say something about the object of hope now, even before the emancipatory event? Naturally, to expect a thorough description of a coming society would be to deny the newness of it as well as the extent of our alienation. But vice versa, not to be able to say something about what to expect or to hope for would be to think that we are in a state of such complete alienation that a new society would be senseless to us. If the New Jerusalem we are hoping for does not resemble the Old Jerusalem, what are we hoping for at all as then these two cities, the new and the old, have nothing in common and the New Jerusalem would be another city for a completely different subjectivity, perhaps of no concern to us? We would then not have any idea of what emancipation, equality, justice and so on, would actually mean in such a context and if these concepts would necessarily have anything in common with the here and now—before the unfolding of the event—think of as emancipation, equality, justice and so on, however our rudimentary ideas of them would be in the present state. As Terry Eagleton puts it when he reflects upon alienation as a way to be able to experience oppression as oppression, it is required that some part of us can imagine what it would be like to exist in a state free from oppression; “nobody is ever wholly mystified” (Eagleton 2007, xxiii). This means that we should be able to express some idea of what a non-oppressive society might look like. Such an inkling of the object of our hope is also needed to be able to discern between good or bad, or better or worse. Throughout his ouvre, Žižek is reticent to offer any concrete imagery of the hoped for society, the ‘egalitarian social order of solidarity’ as he puts it in Living in the End Times (Žižek 2010, 117). We would certainly not expect him to offer an apocalyptic vision as the one in Revelation, but what could be asked for is if there are any social movements already that somehow display those virtues that should characterize a future and more just society? Or, to take a step back even further, ask whether this is even impossible? Would any form of prefiguration of this more just society compromise the newness of it, in forcing it to conform to our present, alienated subjectivity? Žižek has, at least in his later writings, actually offered some ideas of what such a prefiguration of a coming just society would look like. In The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, he has a chapter on “Signs from the Future” (Žižek 2012, 127–35). Here he suggests that there is a need to strike a balance between continuity and discontinuity: “openness alone ends in a decisionist nihilism that impels us to leap into the void, while taking the signs of the future for granted risks succumbing to the temptation of determinist planning” (129). This balance is, however, not a

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‘middle way’ or a philosophy of history, but the prefiguration of a coming society that is only visible to the engaged subjective perspective—a kind of Pascalian wager according to Žižek. There is a good reason for Žižek to speak of ‘signs from the future’ rather than, for instance, ‘positive trajectories of the present’ as it is not a matter of a continuation of the present but rather something that is ‘to come’ (134). These signs cannot be understood as part of our present conditions but only as a part of the future to come. So what are those signs from the future? In The Year of Dreaming Dangerously Žižek offers a rather abstract definition: “limited, distorted (sometimes even perverted) fragments of a utopian future that lies dormant in the present as its hidden potential” (128). Supposedly, then, what is presented in the bulk of the book—namely, the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street in 2011—could be seen as such signs, despite their ambivalence. Such signs are not signs of what is to come in any determinist sense, but rather, they signal that here and now another future is actually possible. Even if the full potential of these 2011 events were not realized there and then—Žižek’s later view of them in Trouble in Paradise seems quite bleak—they nevertheless they signaled the possibility of newness. Both the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street figure with Žižek as enthusiastic moments, but not necessarily as the second stage of liberation (where the first enthusiasm is shattered). This means that they could be (and are) taken for examples that radical change is impossible according to a conservative logic. One of the few examples I  have found of an event that is not an enthusiastic moment—and that also could be seen as such a ‘sign from the future’—comes from Living in the End Times, where Žižek discuss the mutual resistance and common struggle towards the demolition of the village Bilin on the West Bank between Jewish lesbians and conservative Palestinian women (Žižek 2010, 138). This is a telling example as it both grounds Žižek’s hope for emancipation in the here and now, as well as clothes the bare bones of the struggle for universality with some contextual flesh. Nevertheless, very little is said about the life-world of the Jewish lesbians and Palestinian women, including their own hopes for the future, hopes that probably are more substantial or at least more rooted in their present conditions than “a shared struggle on behalf of a universality which cuts diagonally across both communities” (ibid.). One may suspect, if we follow the logic of Žižek, that someone participating in this struggle would be surprised to learn that the successful dialectical outcome of this struggle would be a ‘fully accomplished loss’ of their Judaism or Palestinian or lesbian identity. Would that not just mean that the struggle was lost, and their respective identities sacrificed to some higher necessity? Perhaps, but one could supposedly reply that the ‘fully accomplished loss’ is the second stage of the liberation, which

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is not intelligible as such from the point of view of the first stage. When the Jewish lesbians and the Palestinian women engage in their struggle, they will eventually learn that the way forward is to give up their particular identities for the communist collective. But how for sure, do we know that this will be the result, except for some kind of insight that we can have here and now into the dialectics of history, an insight that will provide us with a hermeneutic principle with which we can discern what the future will or should look like? Might this mean that Žižek is apocalyptic, not only in the sense according to which the end is imminent but also according to the sense of a ‘revelation’ or ‘disclosure’ that gives a deeper insight into the happenings of history? If not, then how is his version of apocalypticism different from decisionism in his own sense quoted above: a ‘leap into the void’? In other words, how does Žižek negotiate between continuity and discontinuity?

The End of Hope? I continually return to the question of the relationship between continuity and discontinuity as a way of interrogating various claims of Žižek’s. I would like to conclude by posing the questions as to whether Žižek’s emphasis on discontinuity entails that his philosophy does not have certain decisionist and supersessionist tendencies, and if so, whether this means the end of hope as we know it. Žižek repeatedly returns to the question of demarcation between three different responses to the current crisis:  non-change, as in the LiberalCapitalist-New Age response, pseudo-change, as in Fascism, and real change, as in the emancipatory event (Žižek 2014, 145). Some kind of a hermeneutics of discernment is consequently involved, as it is necessary to discriminate between true and false events. Such judgment is only possible from an engaged perspective, however, and is not shaped by the circumstances around the enthusiastic moment as such. This is actually what the apocalyptic tradition usually says: not just anybody can read the signs of the imminence of the end. As we have seen, however, Žižek emphatically denies himself or anyone else some deeper insight into the course of history, even, presumably, from a perspective that is committed to the Communist cause. What he also denies himself is those memories and traditions from where the apocalyptic tradition made sense of their hopes and fears. As the Swedish theologian Jayne Svenungsson puts it in a critique of the decisionist tendencies in Žižek’s political philosophy: in Judaic apocalyptic thought “the messianic Event is never severed from the Law—the sign of the Covenant—which, more substantially, means that it is uncompromisingly tied to the past—to memories, promises

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and commitments” (Svenungsson 2010, 12). Such ‘memories, promises and commitments’ seems to be denied in Žižek’s version of apocalypticism, thus depriving him of the fundamental instrument of discernment available to traditional apocalypticism. Whatever we might think of such apocalypticism, the Jewish or Christian tradition seldom or never claimed—at least until modern times—an unmediated insight into the future directly given by God. Such insight only came in a mediated form, through the careful exposition of the relevant texts that were in principle available to all. Even, then, if apocalypticism in history has been prone to lead away from reflections on such things as bodies, institutions and interpretative practices, it seldom let go of these completely, but retained a relation to memory through biblical text. My point here is not that we need to return to ‘authentic apocalypticism’ whatever that is, only that such ‘memories, promises and commitments’ provide the traditional apocalyptic thought with a substantial horizon through which a more developed hermeneutics of discernment is possible. The concrete, material conditions of the possibility of an emancipatory event are remarkably absent in Žižek’s claims, most likely since he thinks they would, in principle, jeopardize the newness of the coming society. But is the relation of continuity and discontinuity between the old and the new not much more complex than a choice of either/or, even in its dialectical version? What characterizes Žižek’s apocalypticism more than anything else is his very sharp disjunction between the past and the future, between the engaged perspective and other, perhaps equally engaged perspectives. This is also what gives his philosophy a certain decisionist tone. Through his understanding of dialectics, and in relation to hope, the emphasis falls heavy on the side of discontinuity to the extent that one might ask what distinguishes Žižek’s own perspective from the “decisionist nihilism that impels us to leap into the void.” Is there any criterion for discerning what is a genuine emancipatory event and what is not, that transcends the emancipatory event itself and the actual political situation? In other words, the only fulfilment of hope seems to be to let go of such hope that could be recognizably mine or ours. On the rhetorical side, his philosophy is often put forward in terms of ‘Pascalian wagers,’ ‘zeropoints’ and, of course, ‘fully accomplished losses’ that conjure up images of discontinuity. Subjectivity undergoes a ‘rebirth,’ another image of discontinuity. Further, his understanding of particular identities, such as the Indian in relation to the British Empire, is that they will be dialectically overcome, falling away on behalf of a more abstract universality. ‘Supersessionism’ in theology is the (infamous) idea that the Christian church has superseded and consequently replaced the Jewish people as the chosen people of God. To the extent that Žižek is a theologian, he seems to be a supersessionist theologian,

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and to the extent that he is not a theologian, he still seems to be decidedly supersessionist. For Žižek it seems that there is no earthly city through which he can make sense of, if not heavenly so at least the coming future city. The future city is not a New Jerusalem, but an entirely different city that has little to do with the Old Jerusalem. It is not a Jerusalem at all, it is just New. The reason I hesitate is that I wonder if it is possible to dissociate Žižek’s dialectics from his hyperbolic language. I can perhaps understand the rhetorical need for such an extreme language, given the need to avoid the possibility of submerging his philosophy of emancipation into a more processual or organic understanding of social change and thus depriving it of its critical edge. But on the other hand, history is littered of examples where a particular age has deluded itself of its own radical newness; from the hindsight of little more than half a century Swedish modernity appears as a reworking of earlier Swedish cultural, religious and social traditions rather than being at the ‘zeropoint’ which some of its proponents repeatedly claimed in quite apocalyptic language (Sigurdson 2014). A  radical rhetoric of discontinuity—combined with a certain national hubris—prevented this particular societal event from seeing how complex and entangled the relation between the memories of the past and hopes for the future actually were. No doubt Swedish modernization could be dismissed as another failed revolution, but so can, as far as I can see, any revolution in Žižek’s perspective. Undoubtedly, a more dialectical understanding of societal change is enlightening, but the supersessionism that has plagued dialectics at least since Hegel (or even longer) seems to come in the way of understanding how true emancipatory change has and can come about. In the worst case, a position such as Žižek’s could exchange radical hope for a kind of retrogressive radical gesturing eminently compatible with a resigned politics of piecemeal engineering (yes, I am thinking of Sweden again). This would actually mean the end of hope, the hope for a future that is distinctly new, but still in some way, our future. What I would like to have from Žižek is a more explicit, and perhaps also more complex, hermeneutics of discernment; a hermeneutics of hope that—of course—takes discontinuity with as much seriousness as one could expect, but still able to explain in what sense a coming future is actually worth hoping for, still recognizably the object of our hope. At least to me, the road between decisionism and defaitism is too short.

Notes 1. I would like to thank my colleague Hjalmar Falk for his very insightful and constructive critique of an earlier version of this chapter, the anonymous reviewer for forcing me to express myself (hopefully) a bit more clearly, and Cindy Zeiher for many good points on the final version.

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2. This saying, often alluded to by Žižek, seems to have its origin in Jameson (2003, 76):  “Someone once said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism.” Who this “someone” is remains unclear however. 3. I have dealt with this question in detail in Sigurdson (2012) and there is no need to repeat this discussion here. 4. It would be worthwhile, I think, to explore how Žižek uses ‘mourning’ and ‘melancholy’ in relation to hope, but this undertaking has to wait for another occasion.

References Eagleton, Terry. 2007. Ideology: An Introduction. New and Updated Edition. London/ New York: Verso. Jameson, Fredric. 2003. “Future City.” In New Left Review, 21: 65–79. Lear, John. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA/London: Harvard University Press. Loughlin, Gerard. 2004. Alien Sex: The Body and Desire in Cinema and Theology. Malden, MA/Oxford: Blackwell. Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1964. The German Ideology. Moscow: Progress Publishers. McGinn, Bernard. 1998. Visions of the End:  Apocalyptic Traditions in the Middle Ages. New York: Columbia University Press. Sigurdson, Ola. 2012. Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Sigurdson, Ola. 2014. “Hygiene as Metaphor:  On Metaphorization, Racial Hygiene, and the Swedish Ideals of Modernity.” In Culture, Health, and Religion at the Millennium: Sweden Unparadised, edited by Marie Demker, Yvonne Leffler, and Ola Sigurdson, 19–50. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Svenungsson Jayne. 2010. “Wrestling with Angels: Or How to Avoid Decisionist Messianic Romances.” In International Journal of Žižek Studies, 4: 4. Svenungsson, Jayne. 2014. Den Gudomliga Historien:  Profetism, Messianism & Andens Utveckling. Göteborg: Glänta. Taubes, Jacob. 2009. Occidental Eschatology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Fragile Absolute – Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London/New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2003. The Puppet and the Dwarf:  The Perverse Core of Christianity. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London/New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Time. London/New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2012. The Year of Dreaming Dangerously. London/New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. Trouble in Paradise: From the End of History to the End of Capitalism. London/New York: Verso.

6.  Barack Obama, the New Spirit of Capitalism and the Populist Resistance Olivier Jutel University of Otago

The remarkable ascendancy of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States of America, in the shadows of the financial crisis, was in no small part due to the effective discursive response to the ideological crisis of American neo-liberalism. With the disgracing of the once venerable Allan Greenspan and the irreconcilable gap between a strident neo-liberalism and the lived experience of working Americans, Obama’s victory marked a moment of openness in the battle for America’s political trajectory. The Obama campaign presented itself as a moral correction to the worst excesses of capitalism and adventurism under George W. Bush. This success was crucially dependent on formulating aspirational discourses about the redemptive qualities of American power and global leadership as well as the emancipatory and transformative power of a morally restored capitalism. It is in this critical ideological maneuver that Obama can be seen as the Third Way neo-liberal par excellence. In dealing with the harsh realities of neo-liberal financialization facing most Americans, the specific structures of political economy are displaced through an articulation of desired social and ecological outcomes. What was properly transformative about Obama was the ability of his campaign to embody the commodity logic of the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello 2007). The new spirit of capitalism can be defined as the attempt to incorporate an anti-capitalist supplement to neo-liberalism. The “theological niceties” (Marx 1887, 46)  of the commodity have been extended to incorporate what Lutz has described as the “socialist ideal of autonomy” (2009, 423). The Third Way’s rejection of market fundamentalism as the structuring principle of the social, in favor of instrumentalizing

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markets for social democratic outcomes, has allowed neo-liberalism to recast itself as a redemptive and emancipatory project. Responding to the desire for “authenticity,” Obama’s identity politics, his work as a community organizer and the organizational form of his campaign, were all used to capture and project the aspirational potential of a left politics. The expression of a progressive transformation of American civil society, embracing the internationalist causes of human rights and climate change, managed to supersede a left or anti-capitalist discourse of the financial crisis. This universalist and moral, as opposed to political, discourse of the economy belies the Third Way buttressing of financial class power and the ideological perfection of the commodity that is attained through evoking the socialist imaginary. The commodity fetishism of the new spirit thus not only engenders preand post-capitalist fantasies but a civil society movement logic of political transformation. The return of the political and antagonism in the space opened by the neo-liberal crisis has come in the form of the right wing populist resistance to Obama. It is in the delineation of a virtuous, besieged people against a radical outsider or other that populism speaks to the political, the ontological necessity of antagonism, the fetishistic character of populism and the interspersion of economy among the sites of the political. I will return to these key theoretical categories shortly. Obama has been designated the radical “other” of populist ire not just in racial terms but in a battle internal to capital over the spirit or ideological content of capitalism. In response to the Third Way’s discourse of a moral intervention to capitalist excess the Tea Party take the bait of what Žižek calls “liberal communism” (2006b) imagining Obama as a real communist. In reaction to this threat of the outsider, that in fact embodies neo-liberal universality, the populists retreat into a fetishized notion of the people, capitalism, and the American revolution. The key metaphor for the people of the revolution is Thomas Jefferson’s yeoman1 laboring within a classical liberal, productivist and frontier2 notion of private property. The Tea Party’s fetish of a capitalism that is a self-sustaining and moral system, allows it to displace any internal contradiction on to the outsider, who in this case is made alien simply by identifying capitalism’s moral failing. In this way the Tea Party typify populism as a political discourse in which antagonism is constitutive of political identity while placing economy, not as one site among others, but centrally within the realm of the political. What is properly fetishistic, de-politicizing and reactionary about populist identity is the ultimate vision of political closure in which the ontological is forever reconciled with an ontic form, in this case the fetish of frontier private property.

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Populism and the Political Having provided a quick sketch of the crucial political frontier of the post financial crisis epoch it is necessary to precisely theorize the political and populism. For Mouffe the political and antagonism are constitutive of social relations, more specifically antagonism is ontologically necessary for the construction of political identity. It then follows that antagonism may “emerge in different types of social relations” (Mouffe 2000, 101)  and the political approaches its “most extreme point” in the “friend/enemy” (Schmitt 1996) demarcation. Laclau couples the notion of the political to populism specifically as the affective consequences of naming a people and a dichotomous division of the social space represents “political reason tout court” (2005, 225). Thus the signifier “people” serves as the affective bond for chains of equivalence through the various sites of the social in a hegemonic project. This notion of the people is entirely negative in the sense that it shares only the antagonistic political frontier. For Laclau this is representative of the radical indeterminacy and heterogeneity of the social as there are “no a priori privileged points of rupture or contestation” (ibid, 150) from which a people or the political may emerge. Heterogeneity here accounts for the contingency and metastability of any hegemonic chain of equivalences as it returns as the antagonistic Real which shatters the static binarism of the frontier. While it is essential to conceive of the political as this explosive, indeterminable heterogeneous force of the social we may still talk of a certain ontic residue born of a hegemonic “crystallization of power relations” (Mouffe 2000, 49). Whether a notion of the people has been constitutionally enshrined or ideologically supplements an institutional order, certain frontiers are more stubborn or rematerialize more readily. It is here that Jefferson’s yeoman and the man of property retains an ideological currency as the measure of a virtuous people. As Foucault identifies in the Birth of Biopolitics (2008, 217) classical liberalism did not moderate existing state power, as in Europe, but was at the revolutionary core of America. Thus the revolutionary foundational notion of the American people couples “bourgeois autonomy” (Lutz 2009, 421)  with a certain republican virtue “undergirded by sufficient property” (Rodgers 1992, 19). For the left-liberal who is bewildered by the rightward shift of populism from the late 20th century one need look no further than the centrality of this notion of the people. From Andrew Jackson, the Populist Party to the Tea Party, “the people” has always served as a fetishized notion of capitalism in which a productive middle stands between a banking aristocracy and the teeming urban masses.3 It is in this way that we can understand

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the ideological indeterminacy of Main Street/Wall Street dichotomies or the notion that government and/or bankers have created an ersatz capitalism. The nature of the fetish allows us to grasp the deadlocks of populism as a “negative phenomenon” (Žižek 2008, 268) that ultimately represents the mystification of the political. The populist reaction to the symptom of capitalist crisis has been to radically reinvest in the fetish, in this case a people who are virtuous, whole and reconciled. In the symptom/fetish logic of populism the parasitic outsider is reified into a “positive ontological category” (ibid, 278) whose existence is necessary for preserving the sanctity of the fetish. If we return to Jefferson’s yeoman, this virtuous embodiment of the man of property was counterpoised to the “mobs” of the city who are described as a “cankerous sore” eating at the heart of the republic (217). While this rural/urban dichotomy still animates a suburban conservatism, this notion of a virtuous and encircled people may be reanimated in innumerable variations while protecting the invested subject from the trauma that the people do not exist. What the logic of the fetish entails here for the political is that there may be a certain blockage to the fluidity of hegemony as described by Laclau in the sense that the dissolution and recalibration of frontiers may be circumvented by a static binarism. In this case we are faced with the problem of how to account for the political as a heterogeneous force playing itself out. What Arditi identifies in Laclau is a dependence on “critical junctures,” organic crises and “de-institutionalization” (2010, 494) as the necessary pre-conditions for the radical people of populism to emerge. But as Arditi adroitly observes:  “then the political would be subservient to those junctures, and therefore, its status would be derivative rather than constitutive” (ibid, 494). It thus becomes imperative to consider what may transform the political frontier and effectively de-institutionalizes the prevailing hegemonic project. In the battle between Obama’s Third Way discourse of liberal universality and a populism that revels in the simplicity of its fetishized notion of capitalism, the economic becomes crucial as a means to properly conceive of the political. Economy is not understood here as the essential content of all struggles, nor as one site among others, rather as one site in a field that is cut through with political economy. This is analogous to labor as the “special commodity” (Marx 1887, 66) that while experiencing itself as a particular serves as the basis for the universal exchange of commodities. Economy structures the populist/Third Way frontier in absentia as that which must be disavowed. The populists gesture towards the political in the ritualizing of antagonism necessary to sustain their fetish of a people realized in private property, while the Third Way completely disavows antagonism and reduces economy to a

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site merely requiring technocratic oversight. One cannot help but notice here how the diminution of economy corresponds precisely to the domestication of heterogeneity in Third Way discourse. As Žižek has put it: “global capitalism, with its dynamics of ‘deterritorialization’ … has created the conditions for the demise of ‘essentialist’ politics and the proliferation of new multiple political subjectivities” (2000, 319). It is the direct confrontation with what is immovable in this frontier, what James Madison called the most “durable source of factions,” namely the “unequal distribution of property” (2008, 42), that might allow for the construction of a hegemonic project that could form substantive links through the different sites of the social and as such supersede the deadlock of the Third Way and its populist opposition.

The Bush Malaise and America’s Moral Crisis Before advancing I wish to clarify the method of selection for the texts here examined. In delineating Obama’s Third Way/New Spirit discourse I have concentrated on the 2008 campaign, his own writings, his arrival on the national stage in 2004 and the early stages of his presidency. This selection is justified on the basis that Obama’s aspirational discourse of hope has subsequently been muted by the populist resistance and the strain put on his contradictory alliance of civil society and Wall Street. The timeline for populist texts is broader as it can be consistently tracked and identified from its crystallization in 2008 to the present political context. The principle discursive response, formulated by the Obama campaign, to the neo-liberal crisis was that of a general condition of American complacency and moral degradation synonymous with the Bush malaise. While Obama evoked powerful images of American decline this discourse was limited strictly to politics on a “moral register” (Mouffe 2005, 75)  in which problems are not about political choices and antagonisms but questions of morality. Obama’s frontier or notion of a people was strictly moral as opposed to political in the sense that an all-inclusive universal morality would restore American exceptionalism. This has to be contrasted to the Tea Party’s ethico-political demarcation of not just a specific antagonistic frontier and people but concrete practices and contexts of struggle and protest against government. To the extent that Obama did draw a frontier between the people and an outside, the toxic figure of Bush was most expedient to crucially spare the substance of neo-liberalism. Upon Obama’s election this frontier dissolved with the administration’s mantra of “looking forward not backward” (Krugman 2009b) and fatefully taking ownership of the US economy with the words, “give it to me” (Kuhnhenn 2009).

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In campaigning Obama spoke in touching detail of the plight of American workers in the face home foreclosures, de-industrialization, shameless corporations and a complacent political elite. In one of his many vignettes he spoke of “a man in Indiana” who “has to pack up the equipment he’s worked on for twenty years and watch it shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news” (2008d). In positioning himself alongside the victims of neo-liberalization Obama articulates a vision of American reconciliation without cutting the financial and managerial classes adrift, imploring the need to restore prosperity “not just to the CEO but the secretary and the janitor; not just the factory owner but the men and women who work the factory floor” (2008e). Obama rejects the populist dichotomy of Main Street and Wall Street stating “if this financial crisis taught us anything, it’s that we cannot have a thriving Wall Street while Main Street suffers—in this country, we rise or fall as one nation; as one people” (Obama 2008f). Wall Street firms as leading backers of his campaign (Centre for Responsive Politics 2008) escape sustained criticism, rather the crisis is discursively constructed as born of a moral waywardness. This evidenced in the “failure of responsibility—from Wall Street to Washington” to understand “that behind every dollar traded or leveraged, there is a family looking to buy a house, pay for an education, open a business, or save for retirement” (Obama 2010). In essence the American dream has been put at risk by suspect moral behavior which threatens the very substance of American exceptionalism.

Reclaiming American Exceptionalism What is necessary to disavow the structural antagonism of neo-liberalism between the secretary and the CEO is a potent discourse of universality which is crucially tied to the new spirit of capitalism (Boltanski & Chiapello 2005). This will be developed further in the coming section; suffice to say for now this pertains to inscribing in capitalism and the commodity new emancipatory potential. In framing the financial crisis as born of the complacency, arrogance and the moral decline of America under Bush, Obama claims privileged access to the values of American exceptionalism. Obama’s personal story and rise to prominence are held as evidence of the revolutionary universality of America as not merely a nation state but the embodiment of liberal democratic ideals. In 2004 Obama was propelled into the national spotlight, at the Democratic Convention, where he spoke of his father’s humble origins “herding goats” in Kenya, and states that “I stand here knowing that my story is part of the larger American story … and that in no other country on earth is my story

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even possible” (Obama 2004). The articulation of the “authentic” and personal account of the global reach of American values allows Obama to stand in as the transcendent figure of American exceptionalism as “the global affirms nation rather than contradicting it” (Toal 2009, 382). For Obama, the ability to transcend domestic and international divisions rests in America’s unique leadership potential in embodying universal principles—our ideals:  democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope” (Obama 2008f). In addressing post 9/11 American foreign military engagement he echoes Lincoln stating that “The America I know is the last best hope for that child looking up at a helicopter… . We can be what that child needs us to be: the relentless opponent of terror and tyranny, and the light of hope to the world” (2007a). What is poignant here is through his own improbable story as a global citizen we are led to feel as though that child could be him and he is therefore equipped to renew American power in global affairs even after the disasters of neo-conservatism (2007b). This confident re-articulation of American exceptionalism is crucial to maintain America’s global economic leadership ensuring the dollar’s status as reserve currency, the role of Wall Street in recycling petro-dollars and US hegemony in supranational financial institutions. It is the confluence of both restoring America’s global leadership from the strident imperialism of Bush and disavowing antagonism through a discourse of universality that Obama embodies the logic of Empire3 (Hardt & Negri 2000) and Third Way neo-liberalism. I use Hardt and Negri’s notion of Empire interchangeably with the Third Way in that they are both accompanied by discourses of the liberal-democratic end of history, cosmopolitanism, “global civil society” and a “new transnational democracy” (2000, 7). NGOs, human rights and civil society groups are integrated into this new order playing the crucial ideological role of acting as the “moral” agents (ibid, 37)  of global capitalism. Obama has positioned himself as a leader drawn from the ranks of those moral agents, as a community organizer, who is able to re-instill in global capitalism redemptive and emancipatory potential, while securing the ultimate interests of finance capital. Obama has sought to characterize his project as building “bottom-up prosperity” (2008b) while also being capable of restoring a global sense of purpose in “come(ing) together to save this planet” (2008c) and in addressing global humanitarian concerns.4 What is crucial in this ideological re-calibration or moral restoration of neo-liberal capitalism is the precise manner in which a cosmopolitan politics of heterogeneity is coupled to the subtraction of economy from the political. Working with Harvey’s (2005) definition of neo-liberalism as the restoration of financial class power, as opposed to a principled theoretical practice, the Third Way represents the “culmination” (Harvey 2009) of the neo-liberal

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project. While the financial crisis has forced state interventions that have been dubbed neo-Keynesian, including Obama’s modest stimulus,5 the power of central bankers has been dramatically expanded. Little has been done to effect a substantive class compromise or to re-finance the state through progressive taxation, effectively ushering in the second round of the crisis in the sovereign debt panic. While it may be a tired point to make that Obama’s economic team of Geithner, Summers, Rubin, Volcker and Goolsbee have hardly recanted their ideology, it is indicative of a consolidated Third Way neo-liberalism. Obama thus has to be seen as the embodiment of Empire’s neo-liberal universalism in sustaining the vital interests of finance capital through a discourse which disavows antagonism in the economic and places aspirational potential within global capitalism. The revulsion against precisely the ideological tenets of Empire and actually existing neo-liberalism is what allows us to observe in the Tea Party the return of the political, in relation to the site of economy, even if this is in inverted and fetishized terms.

The New Spirit of Capitalism Obama’s moral discourse of the economy can be understood as ideologically necessary not merely in its disavowal of antagonism but in its correspondence to the new spirit of capitalism. Boltanski and Chiapello’s (2005) remarkable sociological study of the field of management and the reorganization of work in the face of the struggles by new social movements, is understood here as the delineation of a critical historical rupture which marks a distinct ideological turn in capitalism. Beginning with the struggles of ’68, they identify two salient critiques of capitalism; the ‘artistic critique’ of students and new social movements, and the “social critique” of trade unions. What was crucial for capital in finding new “moral supports” and “mechanisms for justice” (27) was the harnessing of new energies through the partial embrace of the artistic critique. In response to centralized industrial planning of the Ford/Taylorist economy, the artistic critique denounced “alienation”, “in-authenticity,” “hierarchical power”, “the absence of creativity” and the “poverty of everyday life” (170). In contrast the social critique associated with unions, social democrats or communist parties could not transcend the model of state paternalism, increasingly attacked as authoritarian. Thus the New Spirit or ideological configuration of neo-liberalism has allowed capital to reinvent itself as a moral and social project, creating a “libertarian way of making profit … transcending capitalism, thereby transcending anti-capitalism as well” (201). What is essential for our purposes is an understanding of this rupture and ideological recalibration as inscribed and materialized in the new commodity

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fetishism. For Boltanski and Chiapello the ideological force of the new spirit lies in the promise of the common good that coincides “with people’s moral experience of daily life” (14) and secures a rational consent to an “economic humanism” (Chiapello & Berland 2003, 143). What this reading of the new spirit as a humanist project frustrated or co-opted fails to grasp is that this “displacement is original and constitutive” (Žižek 1999). The demands of ’68 themselves are not reducible to an essential content, humanist or otherwise, but are as Laclau would put it “catachrestical” (72), embodying the indeterminacy of heterogeneity as the Real. Any demand or signification of notions such as justice or equality are incomplete and are only accorded meaning in relation to a political frontier. Thus the demands of ’68 may be thought of as either anti-capitalist or embodying the new spirit depending on the particular articulation of economy. What is offered in the new commodity and what makes it properly fetishistic is the realization of these demands for authenticity, self-fulfillment and the common good in the commodity itself. Boltanski and Chiapello have identified in the new commodity the ability to invoke a sense of authenticity and higher purpose through imbuing “hidden meanings and qualities” (446), a certain uncoded openness in its determinations and suggestion of pre-market relations. Žižek’s well known examples of organic food and Starbucks are illustrative of the new consumer who is implored to buy a product as the “authentic fulfillment of my true Self” (2009, 53). The new commodity at this point while placing “the most specific qualities of human beings … directly in the pursuit of profit” (Boltanski & Chiapello, 465), elicits the subject’s desire for “socialist autonomy” (Lutz, 422). Lutz writes that as capital expands the range of consumption it develops the “aesthetic sensibilities” of the subject approaching the “many sided relationship to the world” (423) of socialist autonomy. In channeling the aesthetic concerns of the artistic critique the socialist imaginary is inscribed in the fetishistic promise of the new commodity. This ideological maneuver is squarely opposed to the in-authentic bourgeois notion of autonomy of “show[ing] others who you are by consuming” (Resnick & Wolf 2010, 176) and the crass commodity fetishism that presents capital as “the very fount of human freedom” (Lutz 2009, 421). Thus the efficacy of the new commodity fetishism lies in the appearance of transcending of capital. It is worth emphasizing here that the commodity does not merely reify displaced humanist aspirations but at the height of fetishism practices a demystification of the commodity. As Žižek writes the “secret” of commodity fetishism is not the “hidden kernel” the form belies but the persistence of the form itself (1989, 4). Thus the rational bourgeois subject knows very well

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that “the commodity-money is nothing but a reified form of the appearance of social relations” (1999) but nevertheless treats the commodity as its own special entity of “sublime materiality” (1989, 12). The fetishistic disavowal of the new spirit lies in a certain critique of commodity relations that knows very well of the inauthenticity, environmental degradation and deprivation born of commodification, but nevertheless imagines the new commodity as building global solidarities and a better world. Thus the new commodity fetishism not only elicits the socialist imaginary but feigns a self-reflexive critique of commodification. The co-option of critique and its culmination in the new commodity form is not thought of here as an unproblematic development within capital. However, any genuine reclamation of the demands of ’68 will have to deal with the stubborn persistence of the fetishized commodity form and construct an antagonistic frontier that traverses the site of economy.

Obama and the New Commodity Logic The campaign of Barack Obama showed a keen sensitivity to the new commodity logic in presenting his candidacy in the terms of redemptive authenticity and self-fulfillment. Brand Obama has been described by business magazine Fast Company as open to “the way consumers communicate with one another” while recognizing “their desire for ‘authentic’ products” (McGirt 2008). Obama is described as an “Open Brand” that is “personal,” “engaging” and networked so that consumers “get constant feedback from the campaign and each other” (ibid). Literary critique David Pease (2009) has similarly identified in Obama an openness that functions as a depository of aspirations and desires: Barack Obama is a man of dreams, a figure who solicits fantasy work. He knows how to transpose waking dream work into a recognizable representation of a goal … he condensed all of those dream objects into a person whereby he did not have to do anything except address the audience as you. ‘You.’ However you project me, I will be that projection, that fantasy projection, for you.

It is no wonder then that the Obama campaign and its floating signifier candidate claimed two top prizes at the world’s largest advertising awards (Sweney 2009). The authenticity and redemptive power of the Obama brand stems from his remarkable personal story, his experience as a community organizer and the articulation of a grass-roots movement logic, particularly in the online realm. The phenomenal online apparatus developed around his campaign, which facilitated an unprecedented amount of small donations and enlisted the services of thousands, was described as the creation of a new

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grass-roots community, online and beyond. In facilitating the active participation and creative engagement of supporters through MyBarackObama. com6 and other social networking sites, the campaign positioned itself as part of the “free and open-source software movement” with Obama, “the first real ‘wiki-candidate,’ ” serving as a “conduit for decentralized collaboration” (Cohen 2008). In merging the innovative organizational form of his campaign with his personal story, Obama is able to explain his candidacy as the fulfillment of a generation. The campaign’s slogan ‘Yes We Can’ perfectly embodied the logic of self-fulfillment as Obama represents the best of ourselves. Throughout the campaign’s victories Obama constantly reiterates an inspiring movement logic that marks it as a transcendent and authentic political moment. At the Democratic National Committee (DNC) he reinforces a sense personal agency, “this election has never been about me. It’s about you” (2008d), while on election night we are told that “this is your victory” (2008e). Perhaps the most evocative statement of Obama’s politics of personal redemption is the Native American Hopi maxim, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for” (2008a). Here we receive the message that emancipation is ours to be had, through our own ambitions that are reflected in the vehicle of his candidacy. In embodying the commodity logic of the new spirit, Obama invokes all of the aspirational qualities of America, offers a privatized, civil society and voluntarist mode of political action and mobilization that is palpable and instills in the consumer/individual the message that “we (You) are the change we seek” (2008a).

The Populists Shrugged The extent to which Obama’s candidacy can be read as the embodiment of the new spirit of capitalism is discernible by the populist backlash which explicitly rejects the ideological contortions necessary to sustain neo-liberalism. It is here that we encounter the limits of the new spirit’s emancipatory gesturing and the problem of the political. The populists are principally opposed to Obama’s moral discourse of the crisis of capitalism and all-inclusive notion of reconciliation, preferring instead a fiercely antagonistic political discourse. Despite the ultimate mystification of the political in the Tea Party’s fetishistic attachment to a frontier notion of property, they speak to “the ontological need to express social division” (Laclau 2005, 88). This has to be contrasted to the abstract universalism and morality of the Third Way, which engages in the expansion of rights without antagonism. The populists delineate a specific people who are engaged in antagonistic struggle with economy central to its ontology. While the Tea Party discourse is political in opposing the

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post-politics of the Third Way it is populist in the strict sense of the fetishist inversion of the site of economy. The populist backlash opposes actually existing neo-liberalism only in the sense that it threatens their fetish of a people reconciled in a frontier notion of private property. It is in this way that we can understand the Obama/populist frontier as a battle for the ideological content of capitalism as the Tea Party reject the ideological perfection of the commodity which imperils the sanctity of their fetish. The Tea Party are those who are invested in “Freedom, Equality, Property and Bentham” (Marx 1887, 121) as a fully reconciled moral and political system. The Third Way/ new spirit’s disavowal of the vulgar bourgeois notion of autonomy which is embodied in the commodity fetishism of “unlimited consumption and material enrichment” (Lutz 2009, 421), is precisely what provokes the fetishist to denounce the Third Way as outsider and socialist. While the populist othering of Obama as socialist clearly encapsulates a certain cultural anxiety in conservative America, it has to be seen within the symptomatic logic of reifying the parasitic agent that threatens the fetish. Thus the fetishist inversion of the Tea Party designates the political crisis at the heart of capitalism as the perceived socialist conspiracy of neo-liberal Empire. The crystallization of the populist opposition to Obama as a convergence of social conservatism and bourgeois autonomy emerged out of the Wall St bail-out and the nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice presidential candidate. Palin’s appeal lay in her frontierswoman image, later explicitly rendered in the reality TV show ‘Sarah Palin’s Alaska’ where the traditional patriarchal family, the second amendment and the promise of the frontier (particularly oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge) are celebrated as quintessential Americanism. Palin was thus instrumental in the cultural othering of Obama and expanding this culture war to embody the defense of free market capitalism and the republic. The particular productivist ideal of the yeoman and property even allowed Palin to appropriate a working class discourse,7 understood here strictly as a privileged cultural content, in the fight against Obama’s socialism. The red state/blue state dichotomy which Obama famously aspired to transcend at the 2004 DNC, was turned into a question of who is “pro-America” or from the “Real America”8 (Stein 2008). Further slander of Obama ranged from a lack of patriotism, being a terrorist sympathizer and John McCain’s rhetorical question that laid the groundwork for the birther movement; “who is the real Barack Obama?” (Cooper 2008). That this campaign of delegitimization represented an unprecedented extreme in modern American politics was evidenced in the various crowd outbursts of “terrorist”, “liar” (Cooper 2008), “treason” (Weiner 2008) and “kill him” (Millbank 2008). While on election night McCain preformed the

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ritual concession speech aimed at cooling passions, his audience loudly booed the mention of President Obama (Gardner 2008). It was clear from this point that civility would not be restored in American politics9 with the construction of a populist political frontier of an embattled people defending free market capitalism and the republic. What marked the expansion of the traditional culture war tactics of the Republican Party towards something approaching the political in inverse terms (that is, antagonism at the site of the economic) is the manner in which Obama’s identity and civil society politics as a moral agent of Empire are held as proof positive of a socialist plot. Obama’s work as a community organizer and the anti-poverty group ACORN soon came to symbolize the fundamental corruption of the republic and capitalism. Following the Karl Rove political playbook of trumping up charges of voter fraud McCain in the last presidential debate brazenly attempted to link Obama to ACORN and claimed the group was “on the verge of … destroying the fabric of democracy” (Obama & McCain 2008). For the populists the conspiracy to throw the election to Obama was part of an overall plan to use the state to destroy American capitalism. In delineating this conspiracy, the populists return to the new left community organizers Saul Alinsky, Richard Cloward and Francis Fox Piven who spoke of organizing the poor to make demands of the state. The “original sin” (O’Hara 2010) of the so-called “Cloward-Piven” strategy is identified as the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which was created to provide poor and minority communities with better access to home loans and was underwritten by the Federal Reserve, itself an invention of this same liberal progressivism (Beck 2010). From this, nefarious civil society groups such as ACORN, funded by George Soros, were able to force state sponsored mortgage lenders Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to lend to poor minorities, or people who should not buy homes. While much of this has been fomented at the margins of American political discourse, the McCain-Palin campaign did much of the early legwork. The early presence of such theories in the presidential campaign demonstrates that the Tea Party populism is not simply a passing fit but rather a sustained political logic.10 The emergence of the Tea Party in the aftermath of the Republican’s electoral failure marks not only the ontological necessity of antagonism but in its populist fetishist inversion demarcates the significance of economy. Their fetishized notion of economy serves as their principle of hegemonic linkage in which the various battles of the culture war coalesce. In preserving the ideal of the yeoman, bourgeois autonomy and the self-sustaining moral order of capital the populists construct a parasitic agent precisely in the terms of the new spirit of capitalism thus marking economy as foundational to their

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ontology. While it is plainly ludicrous to assume that George Soros,11 who perhaps best embodies Empire as simultaneously a project of finance capital, liberal cosmopolitanism and a politics of heterogeneity, is financing the overthrow of capitalism, the populist dichotomy of the political is able to account for a contradiction that Obama cannot. While Third Way moralism offers an analysis that the proper balance between the market and state was askew, the populists identify rot in the heart of the system. The left-liberal state/market binary is incapable of grasping the ways in which the state was neo-liberalized, effectively creating the legal forms which allowed for the proliferation of derivatives markets and all manner of financial innovation, while Fannie and Freddie were transformed into market movers. What the populists do is take the emancipatory and transcendent claims of the new spirit seriously thereby constructing a parasitic agent in order to preserve the dignity of their fetish. It is this reified notion of socialist government takeover that has allowed the populists to sustain and antagonistic frontier and holistic narrative that encompasses the stimulus, the GM bail-out and healthcare reform, while Obama is left to reconcile the contradictions of his civil society/Wall Street alliance.

Conclusion The populist challenge to Obama represents the key antagonism of American politics in the post financial crisis epoch and crucially underscores the tensions of the Third Way conception of the political and the limits of its redemptive discourse. The Tea Party vociferously reject the new consensus of the Third Way and flourishes in the space opened up by the contradictions of Obama. Obama’s discourse performs all the ideological contortions necessary to both secure the culmination of neo-liberalism and restore American hegemony of global capitalism. This is principally achieved through a moral discourse emblematic of the new spirit of capitalism in which capitalism itself engenders the imagination of socialist autonomy and offers new commodities that elicit a post-capitalist fantasy. In instilling the necessary redemptive potential in the American political process Obama preformed countless acts of self-effacement in characterizing his campaign as an authentic moment based in a grass-roots civil society movement. This maneuver allowed Obama to stand as the ultimate redeemer of the system in both eclipsing the left critiques of capitalism and in securing the vital interests of finance capital. The “people” of the Tea Party have emerged specifically to protect their fetish of capitalism as a self-sustaining moral, political and economic system. For them capital needs no moral supplementation and any imperfection is attributable to the

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parasitic outsider such as government or those moral agents of Empire that might question the virtue of capital. While this fetishized notion of capital surpasses delusion, it clearly identifies the constitutive role of economy in the political. What this new intractable post-crisis entanglement highlights is that the Third Way de-politicization of the economy is politically untenable. The Third Way reaction to populism has been to treat it as “traditionalist” and “fundamentalist” remnants opposed to the march of history (Mouffe 2005). However, what is thought of as a temporary condition has come to dominate American political discourse and created political deadlock, even before the Republican’s retook congress in 2010. The ethico-political commitment of the populists should speak to the left and serious liberals of certain political truths and tactical calculations that that have been expunged from the history and consciousness of the left although are beginning to be recovered by the Occupy movement. Despite the innumerable inconsistencies and contradictions of the populist right they speak of an idealized community which is militantly engaged in public, antagonistic struggle with subjects described in productivist if not workerist terms. In contrast, the model of politics embodied by Obama is a privatized civil society movement largely in the virtual public sphere, with communitarianism reduced to modes of conscientious consumption, all within a reconciled nation from Wall St to the heartland. The New Deal, which remains the touchstone ideal for left-liberals, would clearly not have been won without the recognition by workers for the necessity of sectoral struggle against and the owners of capital. What is evident is that the simple antagonistic logic, which offers an explanation of the constitutive role of the state in neo-liberalism, will not be undone by Obama’s moralization. Furthermore, as the new Third Way consensus fails to even moderately impinge upon the power of the financial class, creating a banking oligarchy that former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson calls “too big to save” (2011), the next financial crisis threatens to bring radical change from the populist right with untold consequences for the liberal-democratic consensus.

Notes 1. Jefferson wrote that: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of god, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which might otherwise might escape from the face of the earth” (1975, 217). 2. The frontier has always accorded private property a particular elevated status within the American imagination. Hegel noted that “the safety valve of the frontier accounted for the absence of class conflicts” (in Pocock 1975, 549), as America, already a project

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born of the flight from city squalor, had its own internal escape in the westward push. Lockean property has been accorded a properly divine status. Consider Thomas Jefferson’s exaltation: “America is the world’s garden; there is an all but infinite reservoir of free land, and expansion to fill it is all but the infinite expansion of virtue” (ibid, 539). 3. I contend here that the New Deal while containing populist elements, as most movements do, should be thought of as instrumentalizing populist discourse. In dramatically re-shaping the site of economy with the labor/capital compromise, populist rhetoric was crucial in disavowing the radical transformation that was taking place. Even the Communist Party USA in its united front policy adopted the slogan that “Communism is 20th Century Americanism” (Kazin 1995, 152), the favored post-ideological ism of populists. It is in perpetuating this ideal of the middle, in the case of the New Deal labor as a bulwark against communism, that we can understand the various reactionary forms this populist politics of the middle may take. 4. Obama has been blasted by the populist right for seeking a humbler leadership role for the US in global coalitions. One of the most egregious offences of his 2009 “global apology tour” was the relativizing of American exceptionalism: “I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism” (Kirchik 2009). 5. On the night of his election Obama addressed those “huddled around radios in the forgotten corners of our world—our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared” (2008f). During his inauguration speech he spoke of the intent to “work alongside” poor nations “to make your farms flourish and let clean waters flow; to nourish starved bodies and feed hungry minds. And to nations like ours that enjoy relative plenty, we say we can no longer afford indifference to the suffering outside our borders; nor can we consume the world’s resources without regard to effect” (2009). 6. Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman (2009a) was an outspoken critic of the scale of the stimulus and the fact that 40% of the stimulus was in the form of tax cuts, which, while having a dubious effect on spending, fits the neo-liberal rubric of low taxation. 7. Since the end of the campaign the site has been renamed “Organizing for America”, while the header reads; “Because it’s About YOU”. 8. The traditional populist language of productivism is evidenced in her description of Real Americans as “those who are running our factories and teaching our kids and growing our food and are fighting our wars for us” (Stein 2008). 9. One of the most striking breaches of political conduct came during Obama’s state of the union address in 2009 were Republicans were waving papers in defiance of his health care plan and representative Joe Wilson heckled him with the outburst “You lie!”. 10. Sarah Palin has since endorsed the Cloward-Piven reading of Obama (Kim 2010) while the vilification of Obama as socialist has become a staple of Republican politics. 11. Glenn Beck’s hysterical attacks of George Soros as the puppet master of an anti-capitalist conspiracy, through Soros’ funding of Third Way cosmopolitan and human rights groups, proves Žižek’s (2006a, 556) claim that the basic model of populism is Nazism with the Jew figuring as the outsider that threatens a good people. Beck’s attacks may not be aimed at Soros’ because he is Jewish but mirror precisely the structure of anti-Semitism that the cosmopolitan liberal is alien and corrupt.

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Pease, Donald E. 2009. “Obama’s ‘Transnational’ Presidency.” Radio Open Source. October 13. http://radioopensource.org/donald-pease-obamas-transnational-presidency/ Pocock, J. G.A. 1975. The Machiavellian Moment. Princeton, NJ:  Princeton University Press. Resnick, Stephen and Richard Wolf. 2010. “The Economic Crisis:  A Marxian Interpretation.” In Rethinking Marxism, 22 (2): 170–86. Rodgers, Daniel. 1992. “Republicanism:  The Career of a Concept.” In The Journal of American History, 79 (1): 1–38. Schmitt, Carl. 1996. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stein, Sam. 2008. “Palin Explains What Parts of Country not ‘Pro-America’.” Huffington Post. October 17. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/17/palin-clarifieswhat-part_n_135641.html. Sweney, Mark. 2009. “Obama Campaign Claims Two Top Prizes at Cannes Lion ad Awards.” The Guardian. June 29. http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/ jun/29/barack-obama-cannes-lions. Toal, Gerard. 2009. “ ‘In No Other Country on Earth’:  The Presidential Campaign of Barack Obama.” In Geopolitical Discourses, 14 (2): 376–401. Weiner, R. 2008. “Obama Hatred at McCain-Palin Rallies:  ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Kill Him’.” Huffington Post. October 6. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/10/06/ mccaindoesnothing-as-cr_n_132366.html. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. “The Interpassive Subject.” Traverses. https://www.lacan.com/ zizek-pompidou.htm Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. “Holding the Place.” In Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Žižek Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:  Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso: London. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006a. “Against the Populist Temptation.” In Critical Inquiry, 32 (3): 551–74. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006b. “Nobody has to be Vile.” London Review of Books. http://www.lrb. co.uk/v28/n07/slavoj-Žižek/nobody-has-to-be-vile. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London/New York: Verso.

7.  Capitalism’s Cynical Leviathan: Cynicism, Totalitarianism, and Hobbes in Modern Capitalist Regulation Peter Bloom University of Essex, UK

Obstinately, he clings to something he has come to see through; but he calls it faithfulness—Friedrich Nietzsche Lacan’s theory is perhaps the most radical contemporary version of the Enlightenment.—Slavoj Žižek

How capitalist organizations ensure the obedience of its members has long been a matter of discussion. Behind the idealism of “market freedom” lie more troubling realities of daily subordination and ideologies of conformity. Increasingly scholars have studied the effect of subjugating subjectivities present in capitalist production. Two specific features of modern capitalism have been the utilization of totalitarian discourses, in this case defined within the boundaries of capitalist institutions, and the prevalence of cynicism for this purpose. The former highlights the attempts by these institutions to control every aspect of the workers’ experience and understandings for the benefit of the company. Ideologically this involves the internalization of capitalist values resulting in practices of “self-regulation” (Knights and Wilmont 1989). By contrast recent research has focused on how employee cynicism, away from organizational values, paradoxically strengthens an individual’s commitment to these economic institutions (Fleming and Spicer 2003). A subjectivity of “I disagree but I still obey” is central to this seemingly contradictory phenomenon. Currently, analysis of totalitarianism and cynicism exist if not antagonistically at the very least in an uneasy tension. However, a more in-depth

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theoretical and historical examination reveals the complementary character of these perspectives within liberal theories of sovereignty. In particular Hobbesian discussions on this topic reflect an early and perhaps defining precedent for modern capitalist regulatory ideologies that rely on a so-called cynical totalitarianism. In the contemporary context, Slavoj Žižek has theoretically borne witness to the role of both totalitarianism and cynicism for ideological interpellation more generally. The idea of complete subjective inscription speaks to notions of fantasy and the Law. By contrast the perspective of “I disagree but I still obey” resonates with the author’s lengthy analysis of cynicism for ensuring the subject’s ideological obedience. Yet while Žižek takes great strides to situate these concepts within a workable theory of how certain dominant discourses affectively “grip” the subject, it remains ambiguous as to how these categories map out specifically onto each other. At stake therefore is to theoretically elucidate how a psychological mode of cynicism may work to legitimize and ultimately reproduce forms of totalitarian control. In order to do so it is imperative to return, as Žižek himself so often desires, to the Enlightenment. However, whereas Žižek finds his original interlocutor to be Kant, couched in his mandates to “reason about whatever you want and as much as you want— but Obey!”, the first and perhaps most forceful thinker to combine cynicism and totalitarianism was Hobbes (Žižek 1989, 80). A more in-depth reading of contemporary capitalist regulation reveals this reliance on the cynical subject for the reproduction of totalitarianism as initially put forth by Hobbes. This work thus interrogates how Hobbes’ combination of totalitarianism and cynicism into a workable theory of sovereignty resonates with contemporary discourses of capitalist control. After reviewing the recent literature concerning how these subjectivities exist as modern techniques for capitalist management I  will seek to marry these concepts, drawing on a post-structuralist analysis of hegemony and fantasy, through a more thorough examination of Hobbes. First I  will trace out the similarities of the Hobbesian and capitalist “social contract” as each asks individuals to rationally surrender their natural liberty for the promise of security and survival. I will then show the totalitarian basis of these arrangements as the Leviathan and the organization respectively decides what is necessary for this contract with relatively little limit to their authority. Following this initial, and perhaps more obvious, investigation I will illuminate how Hobbes’s totalitarianism, akin to present day capitalism, implicitly contains within it the positive allowance for individual cynicism toward existing sovereign regimes. Specifically Hobbes separates thoughts from action—arguing that individuals may at all times think as they wish provided that they are obedient in their actions. This point directly refers

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to the responsibility one has to comply with a leader if it means the possibility of religious damnation. In Hobbes an individual has the obligation to conform to the Leviathans’ desires in action but not in thoughts—precipitating a subject simultaneously bound to a totalitarian system while potentially cynical to its rule. Modern economic organizations operate from a similar ideological framework whereby workers may internally subjectively oppose organizational prerogatives as long as they outwardly conform to company policy. Moreover, like in Hobbes this displaces feelings of personal responsibility to these overarching institutions legitimizing individual inscription into these institutions despite personal ethical disagreement. Consequently, both Hobbesian liberalism and present day capitalism account for and often rely upon a “fetishist disavowal” from its members in order to sustain and reinforce totalitarian relationships of power.

Totalitarianism, Cynicism, and Capitalism Management Over the past several decades totalitarianism has become a prominent means for explaining capitalist regulation. Central to this analysis has been how current economic institutions employ ideological mechanisms demanding complete employee submission in all areas of their working life. In particular capitalist organizations “manufacture consent” through the construction of subjectivities able to encompass all aspects of an individual’s working experience to their needs (Burawoy 1979; Clegg and Dunkerley 1980; Knights and Wilmont 1989). Specifically, business theorists have noted the importance of creating overarching management cultures that conflate individual desires with those of the company in order to promote efficiency and production (Deal and Kennedy 1982; Peters and Waterman 1982; Waterman 1988). Hugh Wilmont has by contrast revealed the negative character of these ideological regimes, directly relating such ideologies to the fictional dystopia of Orwell’s 1984 (Wilmont 1993). This all-encompassing regulatory framework has led to processes of value internalization by workers within these organizations. Thus the traditional coercive nature of totalitarianism becomes translated into types of intentional and induced “self-regulation” by employees in conformity with given institutional prerogatives. This involves specifically the creation of worker subjectivities aimed at increasing productivity and decreasing desires for resistance (Casey 1995). Moreover, coinciding with this move has been the atomization of employees designed to replace past identifications of workplace solidarity with an overarching positive individual relationship to

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the company. Discourses of an “enterprising self” reflect this shifting managerial strategy in which individuals are positively interpellated as capitalist subjects, accepting of hierarchical power structures and increased demands for productivity (du Gay 1996; Fleming and Spicer 2003). In this way the totalitarian character of modern capitalist organizations is exhibited dually in the greater latitude given to these institutions regarding their employees and the renewed desires for workers to completely and totally identify with their company. Recently scholars have expanded this model in order to emphasize how individuals look to their place of employment for psychological and social fulfilment more generally. Here workers desire from capitalist institutions a sense of wholeness, as the expanded scope of these organizations opens the space for a more expansive vision of what these institutions could potentially offer its members. Sosteric’s (1996) case study of the restaurant industry speaks to this phenomenon reflecting the positive regulatory aspects of this totalitarian mode of control. Workers in his research turned to the company for emotional wholeness and to provide meaning to their largely atomized existence. Importantly these employees saw themselves in individual terms not as a collective—each attaining their personal dreams and aspirations through the company. Thus critical scholarship concerning the totalitarian character of modern capitalism has transformed from a purely negative conception of total individual inscription, akin to modernist fears of unlimited sovereignty, to a more positive account of this interpellation with organizations increasingly serving as conduits for individual desires. Not surprisingly however the totalitarian tendencies of modern capitalism have led to increased spaces of resistance and heightened experiences of worker dis-identification. The increased reach of contemporary economic organizations has also expanded the opportunities for resistance. Sturdy (1998) writes of the inevitable tensions that arise in implementing all-encompassing institutional discourses. In demanding total complicity, companies are exposed to a wider range of questioning previously unseen. Thus, paradoxically, the greater the scope of an institution’s ideology the more it avails itself to contradiction and challenge. In concrete terms Knights and McCabe (2000) have chronicled employee resistance against totalitarian workplace imperatives through disobedience and subversion. Examining the practices of bank employees the authors investigate how totalistic attempts at ideological interpellation produces unachievable demands breeding employee non-complicity and institutional disillusionment. Moreover, this totalitarian model causes greater cynicism among workers. The increased resistance of employees reflects a more pervasive ideological

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distancing by these individuals from organizational protocols and values. Knights and McCabes’ work reveals the disenchantment created by unattainable institutional demands, fueling gradually an overall subjective detachment from these overarching institutional subjectivities. Sosteric’s insight into the situating of work sites as a place for interpersonal fulfilment exacerbates this problem of cynicism. The inevitable failure of capitalist institutions to psychologically complete individuals, despite its claims to the contrary produces employee dissatisfaction and disappointment. The imperative for workers to identify totally with their place of work precipitates anger and ultimately dis-identification when these expectations fail to materialize. In particular structural barriers to inclusion in decision-making catalyze increased sentiments of cynicism (Wanous, Reichers, and Austin 2000). The lack of genuine democratic participation over company direction and resource redistribution augments worker discontent and personal dis-identification within these organizations. Yet such cynicism empirically has not served as a flashpoint for more transformatory changes. Both Knights and McCabe as well as Wanous, Reichers, and Austin note the ultimately non-revolutionary character of this cynicism. Fleming and Spicer (2003) have accordingly sought to theoretically explain this disjuncture between internal dissatisfaction and continued external compliance with organizational desires. Their essay “Working at a Cynical Distance” illuminates the relationship between cynicism and capitalist conformity. Drawing on the work of Lacan and Žižek, they reveal how cynical attitudes reinforce organizational obedience through displacing resistance away from actual practical change and towards a complacency of internal disagreement. Here, cynicism acts as a salve for individuals who realize the futility of their working experience yet refuse or are unable to actualize this dissent. Consequently, the very presence of subjective distancing works as a barrier to more effective campaigns of resistance. How are we then to understand this seeming contradiction between the daily presence of individual subjective dis-identification and a continued compliance to capitalist organizational prerogatives? This cynical totalitarianism speaks theoretically to two competing elements integral to contemporary capitalist regulation—namely hegemony and the fetishist disavowal. Far from being separate both play into and enhance the overall strength of the other. Interrogating the dominant theorists of each perspective, Laclau and Žižek respectively, speaks to their ultimate compatibility. Laclau’s notion of hegemony highlights how an organizational ideology can suture itself as an all-encompassing subjectivity due to the fact that discourses ontologically seek to dominate totally a given social space.

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However, implicit in the Laclauian account is the eternal availability of contestation to this hegemonic discourse as no one subjectivity can completely monopolize a subject’s understanding. It is at this juncture between complete interpellation and hegemony that cynicism reveals its importance for individual inscription, an idea expressed most clearly in the work of Žižek. The inherently incomplete nature of this hegemony provides the very terrain for a cynical obedience—as one can recognize the inadequacies of a hegemonic discourse without thinking beyond its ideological horizons. At stake thus is not internal coherence of a hegemonic discourse but the forms of enjoyment it provides to its inscribed subject. To this end an individual is able to participate within a hegemonic field of meaning without internally accepting its overarching truth value. Put differently, a dominant social understanding is sustained exactly through the allowance of internal subjective disagreement premised on the perceived inability to change prevailing systems of power.

Laclau, Hegemony, and the Impossibility of Total Inscription Laclauian notions of hegemony correspond strongly with contemporary configurations of capitalist totalitarianism. In his work with Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1986), he describes how central to politics and subjectification is the contingent battle for dominance between competing suturing discourses. Here the line dividing discursive and non-discursive disappears, as all actions and understandings are constituted within prevailing hegemonic fields of meaning. Whether one is playing football, building a house (Laclau and Mouffe 1990) or completing a sales call, each of these practices is precipitated by and given relevance through an existing dominant discourse. Significantly, this discursive war of positions is emptied of any essential character, as a hegemonic constellation is never a priori pre-determined. Politics and the formation of the social more generally thus revolve around the struggle between discourses to achieve supremacy. Hegemony therefore for Laclau is the effort to cohere and unify the multiplicity of available subjectivities and social understandings into a singular discourse over determining a subjects’ perspective. In their words it is “a space in which bursts forth a whole conception of the social based upon an intelligibility which reduces its distinct moments to the interiority of a closed paradigm” (Laclau and Mouffe 1986, 93). This analysis of hegemony illuminates current efforts by capitalist organizations to completely define its employees to their own advantage. The plurality of subject positions within an institution and various desires driving its members is overcome through the appearance of over-determining

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organizational discourses. These proscribed subjectivities situate employees into a similar mindset designed to enhance a company’s prerogatives. Thus regardless of department, occupation, or overall place within the organizational hierarchy capitalist institutions employ hegemonic discourses to reinforce company values and ensure employee conformity. However, at the heart of this attempted interpellation, whether it be in companies or in more obvious political struggles, lies a paradox. The very attempt to completely inscribe individuals ideologically is what opens the space for the contestation of these hegemonies. Laclau and Mouffe refer to this as the “impossibility of society” in so much as any attempt to completely define society will ultimately be insufficient to describe a social space composed of a multiplicity and often times dissimilar subjectivities (Laclau and Mouffe 1986, 114). In doing so a hegemonic discourse, seeking the total ideological inscription of the subject, reveals its ultimate deficiency for this purpose. This eternal incompleteness thus allows differing discourses to emerge challenging such dominant articulations. To say therefore that “this company is this” or “this is Britain,” reveals paradoxically exactly what is not being represented in such a definition. Consequently, in striving for a complete and homogenous discursive identity what emerges is the very heterogeneity of the object being described. Born out of this contradictory, though necessary process of identification, are renewed opportunities for counter-hegemonic questioning and resistance. For Laclau and Mouffe, a discourse cannot simply exist outside of hegemony. Instead all meanings are formed through, or in resistance to, an existing dominant ideology. For this reason they refer to antagonisms as “the limit of objectivity” in that challenges to a hegemonic discourse exposes the non-objective quality of these prevailing subjectivities while opening the space for new social truths to become dominant (Laclau and Mouffe 1986, 122). Primarily theorists have employed this framework in order to explain social change. Specifically, Laclau has described how hegemonies become dislocated and are thus made available for replacement. Here “dislocations are events that cannot be symbolized by an existent discursive order, and thus function to disrupt that order” (Howarth 2000a, 111). Using the case of Apartheid South Africa, Howarth (2000b) and Norval (1996) have shown how this entrenched racialist discourse was made subject to contestation due to events like the Soweto crisis in the early 1970s, paving the way for the hegemonic ascendancy of a multi-ethnic liberal democratic discourse to reign supreme by the late 1980s. However, while this model works well in illustrating the continual instability of hegemonies it nonetheless is problematic in portraying how such

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dominant articulations remain viable despite large-scale ideological dis-identification. One does not have to look far in the post-cold war era for evidence of the simultaneous presence of disillusionment and conformity. Mass disenchantment of electoral choice in established Western democracies, and progressively smaller voting turnout, speaks to the subjective distancing individuals exhibit to reigning ideological configurations. Yet this has not in turn catalyzed broad based movements for social transformation or substantive questioning to the ideals of liberal democratic nationalism within these contexts. Similarly, as the empirical work of Wanous, Reichers, and Austin along with Knights and McCabe show greater workplace cynicism is not a recipe for transformatory workplace resistance. This theoretically validates Fleming and Spicer’s insight into the non-revolutionary nature of this cynicism more generally.

Žižek, Cynicism, and Totalitarianism Recent psychoanalytic perspectives help to gain purchase on this paradoxical phenomenon of cynicism as a reinforcement of hegemonic ideologies. Post-structuralist readings of Jacques Lacan, especially concerning fantasy, reflect the ways a dominant discourse may act to interpellate a subject despite its unfulfilling qualities. Here an inherently lacking subject’s drive for psychoanalytic wholeness becomes manifested into a particular articulated desire (Glynos and Stavrakarkis 2004, 206–7). Accordingly, an individual finds solace in pursuing such a fantasy even when confronted with the futility of this phantasmatic longing. For Lacan individuals thus gain enjoyment, or jouissance, from overarching fantasies that are inherently unattainable (Evans 1998; Fink 1995, 1997; Miller 2000). This psychoanalytic reading of fantasy importantly is linked to collective social discourses of hegemony. Slavoj Žižek in particular has shown the ways that dominant understandings are reinforced and indeed sustained through the personalized enjoyment individuals gain from this shared world-view (Žižek 1989). Here jouissance plays a necessary supporting role for hegemonic articulations—as it explains how such colonizing discourses remain so appealing to those being inscribed within its meanings. In the words of Žižek: What psychoanalysis can do to help the critique of ideology is precisely to clarify the status of this paradoxical jouissance as the payment the exploited, the served received for serving the master. This jouissance of course, always emerges within a certain phantasmic field; the crucial precondition for breaking the chains of servitude is thus to ‘transverse the fantasy’ which structures our jouissance in a way which keeps us attached to the Master—makes us accept the framework of

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the social relationship of domination”. (Žižek 1997, 48; also taken from Glynos and Stavrakakis 2004)

The increasingly atomized and individualistic character of post-industrial capitalism further highlights the importance of fantasy for present practices of capitalist regulation. Phantasmatic inscription as put forward by Lacan is intrinsically individualistic by nature, in contrast to the Law, which acts homogenously to regulate individual, or create the collective limits, for individual desire. In this sense the Law is the set of mandates, understandings, taboos that help to circumscribe personalized desire—a desire which is simultaneously born out of the Law yet nonetheless whose primary purpose is to transgress its boundaries. As such the Law is that which structures individual social relationships, giving it order and meaning as part of a larger collective just as language structures individual unconscious and ones understanding of symbolic reality: “This law, then, is revealed clearly enough as identical with an order of language. For without kinship nominations, no power is capable of instituting the order of preferences and taboos that bind and weave the yarn of lineage through succeeding generations” (Lacan 1977, 66). Žižek describes this distinction, even while correctly appealing to the inter-subjective nature of fantasy, in the following way:  “To speak of the ‘social fantasy’ seems nevertheless to imply a fundamental theoretical error insofar as a fantasy is basically non-universable. The social fantasy is particular, ‘pathological’ in the Kantian sense, personal … the unique way each of us tries to come to terms with the Thing, the impossible jouissance… . The field of Law, of rights and duties, on the contrary, is not only universalizable but universal in its very nature” (Žižek 2014, 101). In this way within the larger restrictions of the Law a diverse number of fantasies and desires can exist. Think in this instance of a nation-state, while all citizens must uniformly obey its legal mandates, people nonetheless seek fulfilment through its auspices in a variety of ways. Thus while nationalism may have a broad based appeal each subject uniquely experiences and designs this ideology according to their own wishes. Within modern capitalism employees craft institutional fantasies as specific to their distinct desires. Consequently, companies exist not simply as behemoths promoting a homogenous vision of reality but as ambiguous sites able to potentially fulfil a heterogonous number of subjectively constructed aspirations. The Law plays into this as these desires, despite differences, are constantly translated through the continued existence of the company and its established regulatory demands. Thinking again of the nation-citizens may have divergent conceptions of what it means to be ideally British, a welfare or a Thatcherite free-market for instance, yet nonetheless all rely on the survival of the nation for these fantasies to become potential realities, thus subscribing

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to the necessity of national security. Of primary significance here is how these organizations or imagined communities conflate their own existence with the inherent need for order more generally. This tension between the personalized nature of fantasies and the aggregate mandates of the Law opens the way for understanding the phenomena of cynical conformity. Though the futility of fantasy may breed the cynic, it is the continued force of the Law that ensures the continued obedience of subjects. Žižek refers to this contradiction as the “fetishist disavowal.” Here, an individual recognizes the absurdity or failures of a particular person or order yet nonetheless remains an active participant to its demands. Put differently, it is the perspective of the compliant cynic, one who justifies his or her conformity by internally declaring “I know this is wrong yet I still act for what else is there?” (Žižek 1989, 2004). It would be too easy to say however that this disavowal is merely a new form of jouissance (though that is certainly an element), whereby an individual gains enjoyment from their understood inability to be fulfilled. Instead such a mindset is premised on a deep ideological commitment to the sanctity and necessity of a given symbolic order. Žižek masterfully employs the very institutions of the law to reveal the over-determining significance of the Law for inscribing even disillusioned individuals within a prevailing hegemonic field of meaning. Speaking through the mouth of the doubting defendant in the presence of an incompetent judge he declares: “I know very well that things are the way I see them /that this person is a corrupt weakling, but I nonetheless treat him respectfully, since he wears the insignia of a judge, so that when he speaks, it is the Law itself which speaks through him” (Žižek 2005). It is this simultaneous presence of distancing and belief that explains the actions of the cynical conformist. Even at her most disenchanted she remains committed to the necessity of the Law, the need for a given system to exist for others to fulfil their fantasies. The instance of legality previously mentioned encapsulates this disjuncture. To dismiss the judge would have been to disregard the very sanctity of lawfulness—destroying even the possibility for justice. Yet what is essential in this case is not that the disillusioned subject seeks fulfilment within the Law, or any law for that matter. Instead such an individual cannot think beyond the boundaries of these systems. Indeed it is the fundamental dichotomization of reality between chaos and order—here the dignity of the punitive law comes to represent the requirement of a Law in toto. Thus it is no longer a matter of choosing orders but accepting the need for order as such even in disagreement with the current state of affairs. Through this framework of the fetishist disavowal it is made clear how an individual could remain committed to a hegemonic discourse even while

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subjectively dis-identifying with it. Hegemonies deal with their incomplete character through phrasing themselves not merely in the particularity of their own ideology but in the very requirement of hegemony as such. Thus even if one rejects the nation, to think outside its ideological boundaries would be to reject the necessity of community. Similarly, for an employee to dismiss the mandates of a capitalist organization wholesale is akin to imagining a world of pure competition without any regulation or assurances of economic security. In this way though one may disagree with a system nonetheless they maintain their obedience to its demands exactly because to not do so would be to deny the importance of the Law, or any order, more generally for structuring human affairs. Individuals are therefore shaped to be at once above the Law yet continually committed to its overarching importance. This paradoxical situating of the subject as simultaneously above the Law yet subservient to its demands thus reflects the affective role of cynicism for ideologically reproducing hegemonic configurations of power. To this end, through the performance of the fetishist disavowal, an individual is able to gain the enjoyment of transgressing the Law without the consequences of confronting the “real,” or always incomplete nature, of order as such. The Law provides the subject therefore a means of transcending the confines of the Law while respecting its necessity in structuring society through the specified fantasies in which it manifests itself within. This speaks to the always transgressive role of fantasy to the Law. While the Law represents the taboos, the very irrational essence of the social, fantasies gain their force through their promise of transgressing such entrenched a priori limits. However, via cynicism, the individual is presented the opportunity of going beyond the restrictive confines of the Law, as a subjective ideological force, while remaining compliant to overarching ideological prerogatives. When one says “I know this is wrong but I follow,” what they are really articulating is the safe pleasure gained through the fetishist disavowal, the comfortable distance they retain to an over-determining set of ideological relations commanding their actions. Consequently, this hegemonic strategy acts to disempower individuals from demanding or even expecting positive social transformation. Hegemonies situate individual resistance so that they can dis-identify with prevailing values yet see no way in which to reimagine their present circumstances. By presenting hegemonies as the decision between order and anarchy, survival and non-survival, individuals are able to equally disregard the content of dominant ideologies while being “free” from having to change them. This “relief” from responsibility enables subjects to simultaneously feel validated in their disillusionment of obviously constricting ruling systems while still comfortably acting as if they believe. Fleming and Spicer describe this phenomenon

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in the following way:  “… when the dis-identification process is enacted it can establish an alluring ‘breathing space’ where people feel untrammeled by the subjective demands of the organization, but which ironically permits them to behave as an efficient and meticulous member of the team nevertheless” (Fleming and Spicer 2003, 167). Here hegemonies are strengthened exactly because they do not demand belief. Individuals are exempted from ethically identifying with dominant ideologies, or a sense of responsibility toward them based on their disagreement with its principles coupled with the accepted necessity of these configurations of power. An employee may make fun of his/her boss, laugh at the organizations constantly repeated clichéd ideals, and pull pranks at the office yet still be a model employee in so much as these institutions present themselves as despite all else the very means of these individuals’ continued existence. If they quit one job their next job would undoubtedly operate from the same underlying set of values and practices. To dramatically question such a system would be to challenge the entire structures of society, the very basis for present security, order, and survival. Cynicism on the other hand permits this disillusioned subject the moral high ground of internal dissent without the added obligation of revolutionary or reforming action. Importantly, cynicism is the rational consent to the irrationality of an eternally incomplete symbolic order. Law, in the Lacanian sense, is never rational in its own right. Instead it is the irrational, the non-explainable, a priori limits for the allowance of order more generally. Žižek states in this regard “it follows, from this continuously senseless character of the Law, that we must obey it not because it is just, good or even beneficial, but simply because it is the law” (Žižek 1989, 37). For this reason ideological compliance based on conscious belief is always secondary, and of a weaker character, than the external submission to its over-determining mandates. In Žižek’s (1989, 37) own words: “the only real obedience, then, is an ‘external’ one: obedience out of conviction is not real obedience because it is already ‘mediated’ through our subjectivity—that is, we are not really obeying the authority but simply following our own judgment, which tells us that the authority deserves to be obeyed in so far as it is good, wise, beneficent … ”. The cynic therefore is expressing, even in the attitude of utter disdain, a more thorough and complete acceptance of a totalitarian system of control. In this respect the cynic obeys not out of belief, or a rational acceptance of its mandates, but out of duty and fidelity to the need for order as such. Paradoxically therefore, the perspective of the disbelieving fetishist is always pragmatic—founded in the rational acceptance of the irrational. Žižek notes accordingly that “fetishist are not dreamers lost in their private worlds, they

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are thoroughly realists able to accept the things the way they actually are … ” (Žižek 2001a, 14; also found in Johnston 2007, 73). In this respect, it is the very act of laughing at power, even while following its every decree that fantasies remain at their most effective for completely suturing the subject within its ideology. Indeed, to Žižek “the ruling ideology is not meant to be taken seriously or literally. Perhaps the greatest danger for totalitarianism is people who take its ideology literally … ” (Žižek 1989, 28). The rationalization of an ideology as a fantasy, in terms of its correctness and overall appeal to pre-conceived normative values, opens it exactly to the questioning of its legitimacy. In so much as any phantasmatic order will necessarily be incomplete, on the basis of belief it will always be found insufficient. No order can ever be completely just, internally coherent, or fulfilling. Instead, the compliance of the cynic is based on a much stronger bond—the acceptance of its imperfection yet rational consent to its mandates despite this realization. Indeed it is when such ideological fidelity is premised on the acceptance of the universal Law as opposed to the particularity of the fantasy that its reproduction is most assured. Consequently, it becomes apparent why the cynical totalitarian, one who does not even recognize or admit they are in a totalitarian system, is so much more stable than those subjects engaged in an explicitly totalitarian project. In his own work Žižek differentiates between the “totalitarianism of fantasy” and the “totalitarian fantasy” (Žižek 2014, 100). The former denotes the all-encompassing character of fantasies for constituting an individual’s worldview and structuring their actions. The latter, by contrast, signifies a specific phantasmatic form founded on desires to unite individuals homogenously in the pursuit of wholeness. In this sense, the “totalitarian fantasy” acts to completely conflate the Law with fantasy, to deny them a “minimal distance” by which fantasies, formed out of the Law, can nevertheless seek its transgression (Žižek 2002a, 91). Put differently, it is the establishment not of order per se but of a particular order. Žižek therefore defines the “totalitarian fantasy” as the state of affairs by which the “Law has lost its formal neutrality” (Žižek 1989, 77). Thus a traditional totalitarian politics relies not on the cynic but the hysteric or the psychotic—one who by nature defies interpellation yet nonetheless demands from a phantasmatic order a legitimization for their continued inscription. By contrast the cynical subject of totalitarianism views the Law not in any particularized form but as the very mechanism trough which stability is guaranteed. As such she is not concerned with whether or not it is right but in the continuation of its existence even in the face of its deficiencies. The Law is in this context not an object for belief but a clear means to an end—one whose

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compliance is demanded not due to its own rationality but in the a priori way it obliges individuals to comply with its irrational mandates while permitting for the acknowledgement of its own imperfections. Indeed what is more fearful to the sovereign, the subject who is convinced that she is forever righteous and therefore demands that their rule never betray them or let them down, or the subject who is outwardly disdainful but obeys out of a recognition that however deficient at least order is being preserved? It is for this very reason that totalitarianism is at its strongest when it is at its most silent, existing as a “totalitarianism of fantasy,” relying on the unbelieving cynical subject as opposed to when it announces itself forthrightly and opens itself to the questioning of its convictions. Thus it is now becomes possible to understand how through hegemony and the fetishist disavowal dominant ideologies are able to affectively “grip” individuals even in the face of mass cynicism to its values. By linking the particularities of one hegemonic articulation, in all its imperfections, as representative of the Law overall—individuals are presented the option of complacency, recognizing the present absurdity of existing ruling discourses yet conforming to its demands out of fear of disorder and the perceived inability to positively confront such totalistic systems of control. This mode of discursive regulation however is by no means ahistorical. Instead it has its historical roots in the Enlightenment.

Hobbes and a Cynical Totalitarianism Thus far this paper has investigated how ideologies interpellate individuals through the dual presence of totalitarianism and cynicism. On the one hand hegemonic discourses attempt to completely subjectivize individuals within their field of meaning. This is apparent in how political, social, and economic identities increasingly phrase themselves as all-encompassing entities able to completely fulfil a subject’s needs and desires. On the other hand these dominant understandings deal with their inability to achieve this wholesale subjectification through the positive allowance of cynicism. Specifically, through presenting hegemonies in terms of the false decision between order and dis-order, ideological challenges are situated as the questioning of the necessity of the Law more generally. In this way an individual can comfortably dis-identify with a prevailing regime while remaining committed to its overall importance and conforming to its demands. As such the very totalitarian character of these discursive techniques of control paradoxically relies on the availability of a complacent cynicism to its rule.

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The work of the first liberal thinker Thomas Hobbes speaks to this contemporary form of capitalist regulation. Hobbes proposed a theory of sovereignty that similarly combined the need for totalitarianism with the positive allowance for individual cynicism. Significantly, Hobbes separated a subject’s right to freedom of thought from their obligation for sovereign conformity in action. A more in depth examination of his theory thus does much to shed light on the current capitalist promotion of cynical totalitarianism.

Hobbes, the Need for Totalitarianism and Capitalism Regulation Hobbes is historically associated with totalitarianism and unlimited sovereignty. Writing in the aftermath of the English civil war, his theory argues for the need of a Leviathan able to ensure the collective peace between naturally antagonistic individuals. Consequently, he subscribes sovereign obligation to the overarching requirement of survival both individually and collectively. This appeal to totalitarianism as essential to the construction of social order more generally, indeed an individual’s very existence, resonates with ideologies of late capitalism. Capitalism similarly frames organizational obedience as premised on the need to transcend the fearful prospect of individual competition and as a conduit for continued material survival. Hobbes begins his argument with a detailed ontological analysis of the human subject. He describes individuals as naturally desiring goods as well as power (Hobbes 1966, 70–1). The natural liberty of humans pre-supposes paradoxically an intolerable situation of infinite conflict and ultimately unjustified domination. As each individual is free to do and pursue what he or she wishes in a world of limited resources, over time this liberty becomes translated into an anarchic submission of the weak to the powerful (Hobbes 1966, 90–1). To prevent this outcome Hobbes argues for the creation of a collective covenant between subjects for mutually assured peace. This social contract rationally asks individuals to surrender their natural liberty for the higher achievement of survival and stability (Hobbes 1966, 120). However, as individuals are by nature competitive and driven by shortsighted “passions,” this “social contract” must be maintained through a Leviathan able to prohibit individual non-compliance threatening social harmony. On the one hand the leviathan’s role is purely punitive in character (Hobbes 1966, 214). When a subject violates the social covenant the leviathan is charged with punishing him or her in the name of collective security. On the other hand Hobbes’s sovereign must act preventatively to avert potential risks to this social peace (Hobbes 1966, 124). This flexible remit ranges from deciding matters of

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acceptable speech in the public sphere to the determination of labor laws (Hobbes 1966, 171,125, 371). Importantly, Hobbes does not specify the form that this Leviathan must take. While favoring monarchy he accepts that democracy or aristocracy may be equally successful (Hobbes 1966, 135). Instead his principal concern is collective security and the avoidance of conflict. At the heart of this system thus is the presence of fear obligating subjects to follow sovereign mandates despite their natural passions desiring shortterm gain at the expense of their fellow citizen. Hobbes argues therefore that: The final cause, end or design of men (who naturally love Liberty and Dominion over others) in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves (in which we see them live in commonwealths) is the foresight of their own preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say of getting them out of that miserable condition of War, which is necessarily consequent (as hath been shown) to the natural passions of men, when there is no visible power to keep them in awe, and tie them by fear of punishment to the performance of their covenants. (Hobbes 1966, 117)

Totalitarianism is essential for this purpose as it is only in the permitting of an almost unlimited sovereign authority that individuals will be constrained to follow the social contract. The continual prospects of “war of all against all” demands a strong leviathan capable of ensuring order in the face of any and all emerging threats and possible subversions. Further this “order” must be maintained through the continued existence of the commonwealth— therefore conflating the success of the state with the overall survival of its individual members, a survival that can only be ensured moreover through a totalitarian leader. Notice further that for Hobbes totalitarianism does not necessarily imply wholesale control only that the limits of sovereignty is at the discretion of the sovereign. Individuals for their part are required to conform to this totalitarian system of rule to avoid a bleaker future of eternal discord. Hobbes therefore constructs a vision of legitimate rule where individuals submit to domination for their very survival. Thus in the world of Hobbes to be free is to be dominated, to be dominated is to be free. Modern capitalism functions out of an analogous framework to that of Hobbes, especially in terms of its desire for organizational obedience. While modern capitalist discourses valorize individual initiative and enterprise, it, like Hobbes, asks the majority of individuals to surrender their natural liberty for the controlled environment of the workplace. In a strikingly similar process the innate freedom of the capitalist subject is voluntarily forfeited for the security of a constricting market institution. Moreover, this surrendering of liberty stems from the same rationale. Here the “free” individual, at liberty to do, go and live as he or she pleases leaves the competitive sphere of market

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competition and instead agrees to a more subservient position in a larger organization. They do so to ensure their own material survival as well as the comfort of regularized pay and benefits. Thus they forgo the short-term rationality of complete freedom for the “peace” of institutional conformity and consented servitude. Put more concretely, individuals will choose not to own their own business, despite the independence it provides, in order to guarantee their continued material survival through the auspices of a larger company. Moreover, as with Hobbes capitalist organizations desire formally a totalitarian system in which an employer decides what level of regulation is necessary in relationship to his or her employees. It is up ultimately to management to choose how deeply it desires to control its staff. Thus while one company may enforce a strict dress code while others may not, in the final instance the degree of conscription is decided solely by those in power. In this way an organization is given free rein to control all aspects of an individual’s working life that they see fit. Institutions justify this totalitarianism through appeals to the overriding imperative of organizational survival. If a company fails, then so too does the security of its employees. Thus the continued existence of the inscribing organization is translated and integrally connected to the existence of its subjects. This totalitarian allowance in capitalism based on the need to preserve an organization for the very survival of its members echoes Hobbesian legitimization along the same line as a Leviathan is provided an almost infinite scope to determine what is necessary to sustain the commonwealth. Hobbes therefore offers an early means for justifying totalitarian regimes, one currently in use within dominating capitalist organizations.

Saving the Individual to Save the State and Organization Perhaps just as significant as their similar logics for totalitarianism are their almost parallel limitations both Hobbes and capitalism places on this largely unlimited sovereignty. Each sets restrictions around the sanctity of the subject’s life. If for Hobbes the purpose of the Leviathan is to prevent eternal conflict, preserving individual survival, allowing the sovereign to unlawfully and arbitrarily execute those they rule would be ultimately self-defeating. Yet while ostensibly about the needs of the subject of greater importance for Hobbes is the resiliency of the state. Without citizens there would be no commonwealth. Further by privileging the state as the only means for ensuring individual and collective survival subjects can be expected to have a heightened desire to protect it against unrest. On the other side of the spectrum, a Leviathan cannot be so repressive to ferment rebellion. Of

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overriding importance thus was maintaining the state and its overall functioning. Totalitarianism was simply a means for this end. Akin to Hobbes in contemporary capitalism employers cannot harm, and needless to say kill, its workforce. Both managers and workers are constrained by the needs of sustaining the company. The entire point of capitalist regulation is consequentialist, centering on making the organization more profitable and economically viable. As in the Hobbesian perspective, without workers there is not company. Recognition of workplace diversity as well as more general trends concerning a greater sensitivity to employee’s emotional needs all revolve around the mandates of organizational survival. In moreover linking institutional fortunes to those of its members in the most fundamental way possible, their very material subsistence, organizations are able to demand conformity for a “larger good.” Equally in Hobbes and capitalism subjects accept totalitarian practices due to the supposed need to maintain constricting systems, the state and market organizations respectively, and by proxy their own lives. What is apparent therefore in Hobbes and capitalism at their most basic level is a similar legitimization for totalitarian inscription. In both individuals begin in freedom and end up in submission. In both subjects rationally choose to be dominated due to promises of security and survival. Further, each justifies this totalitarianism in terms of the needs for overarching stability. Thus Hobbes and capitalism construct rationales for invasive and nearly all encompassing modes of control through appeals their necessity in ensuring individual survival. Yet each also shares desires for individuals to not merely rationally embrace this reasoning but to internalize its values and freely consent to its rule. As such both would face the same problems stemming from this wish to wholesale shape subjectivity and thus open the space for the positive employment of cynicism.

Consent, Internalization and Dis-identification in Hobbes and Capitalism Central to the Hobbesian project is individual consent. This need for consent is derived from the competing and contradictory elements contained within Hobbes’ theory—namely freedom and domination. At first glance, his argument is rife with tension over exactly how one can negotiate appeals to natural liberty and totalitarianism. Indeed why would a free individual voluntarily agree to become a subordinate subject? Hobbes’ first inclination is to provide a rational explanation for this transference of power. The anarchy of freedom is transplanted by the stability of submission. As inherently rational creatures,

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humans are able realize this truth and act accordingly. Therefore unlike natural orders of domination a Leviathan acquires his authority through the consensus of those he or she governs. In his own words: The way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of Forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their own industrie, and by the fruites of the Earth, thye may nouristh themselves and live contentedly, is to confere all their power and streinght upon Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Will, by plurality of voices, unto one Will: which is as much as to say, to appoint one man, or Assembley of men, to bear their Person; and everyone to owne, and acknowledge himselfe to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their Person, shall Act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concerned the Common Peace and Safety, and therein to submit their wills, everyone to his Will, and their Judgments, to his Judgment. This is more than Consent, or Concord, it is a really unity of them all, in one and the same Person, made covenant of every man to every man… . (Hobbes 1966, 120)

What remains troubling in this formulation however is how Hobbes can rectify his dualistic vision of human motivation premised equally on reason and passion. If his system of totalitarian inscription is so self-evident why has it not already been achieved and why has such authoritarian relationships of sovereignty continually been undermined? Hobbes’ implicit solution is to emphasize his appeal to rationality—to guide human action so that they understand the benefit and need for totalitarian regulation. In the face of mounting unrest against monarchy and the appearance of civil war with the possibility for even greater discord in the future Hobbes sought to transform officially sanctioned hierarchical associations of rule into a freely given individual submission to authority. Importantly, conservatives of his time rejected his theory as heresy on the grounds that he situates conformity not in any essentialized view of “divine right” but as made through considerations of utility. The king is by no means pre-ordained nor any type of Leviathan figure for that matter. Instead it is gained and maintained only through the realization of its beneficial character and the acceptance of its legitimacy by all members of the community equally. Thus at the heart of Hobbes is a desire for individuals to internalize the value of domination—phrasing it in terms of their own good as well as for the community at large. The formal enshrinement of totalitarianism would itself be insufficient if individuals felt or saw no reason to abide by such a system. One of Hobbes key innovations is to argue not merely for authoritarianism per se but for the identification of subjects to this authoritarian subordination. To do so he frames this domination in terms of consent. An individual chooses subordination out of his or her own free will, rationally and with full

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assent to the righteousness of this decision. In doing so a subject is asked to identify completely with the commonwealth, to assume that he or she is this political community in full. Any attempt thus to subvert the social contract would be for Hobbes an insult not to the leviathan but to one’s own self. Yet while Hobbes primarily relies on reason for this determination he also recognizes the usefulness of ideology for this purpose. In addition to making the case for the rational handing over of liberty for the security of being ruled he further compels people in positions of authority, such as teachers and fathers, to instruct those under them about the need for sovereign obedience (Hobbes 1966, 234–6, 373–4). Further he asks that those learning these values accept them not blindly but “sincerely from the heart” (236). Hobbes thus provides a theory that at its foundations offers an objective and subjective strategy for achieving authoritarianism. As such it expresses its totalitarianism both externally in the formal rights of the sovereign to decide what is necessary to maintain peace and internally in its complete ideological inscription of the subject into its system of values. Put differently, Hobbes wants a form of governance able to regulate a subject’s actions while subjectively determining her over-arching perspective as well. More to the point, it creates a theoretical framework for normatively legitimizing structural problems of stratification and subordination. Hobbes theory seeks to justify authoritarian rule and uneven relationships of power via discourses of freedom, consent, and security. Further, his argument desires to implement a totalitarian system of sovereignty through completely transforming an individual’s perspective in line with this end. It draws on the rational as well as the constructive possibility of ideological arguments to convince subjects of the moral correctness of their subjugation. In this way Hobbes advocates a totalitarian means for achieving totalitarian ends. Like Hobbes capitalism similarly draws on ideas of consent to justify its own discursive practices of control. Capitalist organizations normatively phrase their wholesale regulation over their workforce using the same ideas of freedom and choice. Accordingly, these institutions present contemporary situations of totalitarianism in emphasizing the supposed free choice of individuals in accepting such conscripting conditions. Despite evidence questioning the voluntary nature of these exchanges (Preston 1984) analogous to Hobbes capitalism defends its totalitarianism through highlighting paradoxically its foundations in “freedom.” Consequently, it is largely able to legitimize its invasive and potentially all-encompassing modes of control via its recourse to the supposed liberty underpinning these decisions. More simply, since individuals choose out of their accord to enter into these organizations any complaint concerning its remit is said to be null and void. In employing this

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discourse capitalism desires thus to validate its reliance on systems of totalitarian oversight by subscribing them to the deliberate preference of the subjugated individuals themselves. Further, it longs for these subjects to internalize such values as their own—justifying for themselves that this submission is rational and necessary. In addition capitalism acts to inscribe individuals into totalitarian organizations through constructing subjectivities of unity and fraternity. Parallel to Hobbesian notions of a civil religion institutional rhetoric of being as a family and “as one with the company” emotionally connects employees to these subordinating organizations. It moreover reflects upon the dualistic character of totalitarianism in both capitalism and Hobbes. As with Hobbes capitalism seeks not only to establish a totalitarian system of institutional rule but also to completely shape an individual’s subjectivities. Its traditional political opposition to explicitly totalitarian forms of governance—namely that of Communism—demands that it couches its own authoritarianism through notions of freedom and shared community. Implied thus in capitalist regulation is the need for proper ideological discourses able to convince subjects of the justness of organizational totalitarianism thus avoiding questions of moral legitimacy. Yet the difficulty in such totalitarianism is exactly its totalized character. It is impossible to ever fully inscribe an individual within a given subjectivity. These ideological perspectives will always be incomplete and become available to challenge. Regardless of whether one is referring to a political community or workplace—these social spaces will forever be crisscrossed by competing understandings and individualized desires. To deal with this reality concerning totalitarianism’s innate futility both Hobbes and capitalism have positively transformed such possible dislocations into a manageable cynicism. In separating the freedom one has in word and action they have constructed acceptable spaces of dissent that ultimately reinforce and strengthen existing hegemonic configurations. Separating Words and Thoughts: Hobbes, Capitalism, and an Acceptable Cynicism The totalitarian desires contained within the early liberal writings of Hobbes and in modern capitalist organizations is inherently undermined by the impossibility of ever totally inscribing a subject within a single ideology. In short the problem of totalitarian is the futility of totalitarianism. The innately incomplete character of inscribing discourses naturally catalyzes hegemonic questioning. Efforts at homogeneity thus create paradoxically a greater awareness of heterogeneity. To say you are to be “this and only this” leads exactly to subjects saying, “no I am not.” To confront these issues Hobbes and modern capitalism have relied upon cynicism to minimize the prospects for later movements of change. By opening

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up the permanent space for dis-identification these theories ultimately create a framework whereby individuals may be comfortably compliant. This involves dually the idea that one is performing a necessary unchanging role that they nonetheless disagree with and secondly the subsequent ethical distancing one has to these conscripting systems. In other words, subjects are permitted internal dissension due to the perceived immutable nature of these communities or organizations and their underlying ideologies. Early in his work Hobbes distinguishes between words and actions in terms of importance. It is only in and through the act that the word or verbal longing can be actualized and judged. More importantly Hobbes mistrusts words. Actions are solid and real whereas words are fantasies or simple idealistic desires. This perspective is clear in his discussions regarding the need for a leviathan in ensuring the social contract. Words alone cannot guarantee the collective peace. The possibility of tangible force is essential in this regard. He states, “covenants without the sword, are but words, and are of no strength to secure a man at all” (Hobbes 1966, 120). Thus Hobbes reveals his overriding concern with performance as opposed to abstraction—the end result instead of idle longings and untrustworthy verbal covenants. His emphasis therefore is on the construction of stability not its simple articulation. This action oriented totalitarian perspective however becomes directly challenged when having to deal with competing levels of authority. In Hobbes’ time the state was always subsidiary to the religious, at least theoretically. Proposing a total politics as well as the essentiality of above all else an active sovereign obligation contradicted the overriding authority of the divine. It raised significant questions for individuals regarding to whom they owed their allegiance—God or the leviathan. Specifically problematic is to what extent religion should primarily be a force for social stability or a personal means for salvation. If the sovereign is the highest leader, the new guarantee for human survival, can they compel subject to accept eternal damnation for the sake of secular peace? If the leviathan demands that all citizens follow Catholicism or Scientology, whether by mistake or otherwise, while Calvinism is the one true religion how is an individual to respond? To disobey the leader would be to fail themselves and their fellow humans in fermenting instability and possible war. To go against God further would lead to a more long-term problem of hell. Hobbes deals with this contradiction through implicitly promoting practices of cynical conformity. First as perhaps expected, Hobbes offers a rational solution. God in giving humans reason to realize the necessity of the Leviathan expects individual to follow the sovereign’s will (Hobbes 1966, 199). Yet this answer does little to address concerns over God’s final

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judgment. It is here that Hobbes introduces the positive possibility of cynicism. Drawing on his earlier distinction between words and actions he posits that one’s thoughts are not really reflected in one’s actions. Only actions belong to sovereignty. By contrast what one internally believes is always free due to its inherent inconsequential nature. Hobbes argues in this sense that a Sovereign … cannot oblige men to believe; though as a Civil Sovereign he may make Laws suitable to his doctrine, which my oblige men to certain actions, and sometimes to such as they would not otherwise do, and which he ought not to command, and yet when they are commanded, they are Laws; and the external actions done in obedience to them, without the inward approbation, are the actions of the Sovereign, and not of the Subject, which is in that case but as an instrument, without any motion of his own at all, because God hath commanded to obey them all. (Hobbes 1966, 389)

Thus if one believes in the correct God they are not made religiously responsible for the decisions of the leviathan. The divine will not punish them for obeying the sovereign as long as they were internally faithful to the true ways of God as “God accepteth not the Will for the Deed, but only in the Faithful” (Hobbes 1966, 413). For this reason in Hobbes view “Faith and Obedience are both Necessary to Salvation” (Hobbes 1966, 413). This separation of word and action also materializes similarly regarding sin and acceptable dissent. According to Hobbes to think of misconduct is not in and of itself a sin. To dream of murdering doesn’t make one a murderer or any wrongdoing for that matter. He states: To be delighted in the Imagination only, of being possessed of another man’s goods, servants, or wife, without any intention to take them by force, or fraud, is no breach of the Law, that sayeth thou shall not covet, nor is the pleasure a man may have in imagining, or dreaming of the death of him… . For to be pleased in the faction of that, which would please a man if it were recall, is a Passion so adherent to the Nature both of man, and every other living creature, as to make it a Sinn, were to make Sinn out of being a Man. (Hobbes 1966, 201) Hobbes further transposes this religious perspective onto his politics. To think disobedience is as harmless and non-punishable as to dream of murder. It is only the action of subversion that is of any concern. Even the sin of positive intention is cannot be prosecuted within the commonwealth as: “Crime is a sin, but not every sin is a Crime. To intend to steal, or kill, is a sin, though it never appears in Word, or Fact: for God that seeth the thoughts of man can lay it to his charge; but till it appear something done, or said, by which the intention bay be argued by a human judge, it hath not the name of a crime”

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(Hobbes 1966, 201). Hobbes thus positively distinguishes between thought and action in order to ensure conformity. In privileging the external over the internal he hopes to relegate dissent purely within the realm of thought and therefore inaction. Yet this dichotomy should not be understood as the making mutually exclusive thought and action. Instead Hobbes presents a conception of the subject that ably combines these two elements for inducing a subject’s overall obedience. In pre-supposing thought as a space of unalienable freedom he sets the boundaries for acceptable antagonisms. While an individual may never be completely interpellated in a sovereign ideology they nonetheless can be taught what the limits of such disillusionment are. In this sense the Althusserian notion of externality concerning ideology depends often exactly on an “internal” dis-identification. To demand external compliance requires the perceived presence of internal liberty. Capitalist organizations base their own regulatory practices around this separation of thought and action, expressed in their positive allowance for cynicism. Company’s even while desiring complete control over their employee’s subjectivity ask no more than for its workers to follow its rules and actively dissent. The positive employment of cynicism by these institutions as suggested by Fleming and Spicer becomes clearer when viewed through its Hobbesian forerunner. The situating of thoughts as the ultimate site of freedom leaves action almost entirely under the command of the sovereign. Subjects become satisfied exactly in being dissatisfied—in so much as they view their liberty in terms of internality and not external effect. The internal or secretly shared complaint becomes the modus operandi for considerations of resistance more generally. Capitalism like Hobbes thus has symbolically set aside the sphere of thought as the proper place for dissent while demanding full and total conformity in action. In acting out the subjective freedom of the cynic the individual is therefore often embracing the confining politics of sovereign obedience.

Cynicism, Responsibility, and Dis-identification A key component of Hobbesian cynicism is its displacement of social responsibility by individuals through processes of dis-identification. If one subjectively distances themselves from leadership and its decisions this subsequently causes a rejection of responsibility for these actors’ actions. Hobbes’s problem of religion reflects this phenomenon. By not making the subject divinely accountable for the Leviathan’s choice of public religion he frees them from all sense of community responsibility in terms of its decisions and direction.

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Instead their only ethical obligation resides in conformity to sovereign prerogatives for its continued survival. The effect of this ethical erosion is the lessening of desires for more transformatory change. Why should an individual try to challenge the religious convictions set out by the Leviathan if internally they are free to believe as they wish? Their only secular responsibility is obedience. They can think, feel, and believe what they want and receive no punishment from the Leviathan or in turn God for the sovereign’s potential wrongdoing. Thus the subjects’ liberty of thought is the existential freedom of the non-decision. “I was just following orders” becomes a justification for the internally but actively unethical consenting subject. Consequently, the freedom of subjectivity is two-fold: the liberty of internal thought and the freedom of complete irresponsibility for one’s surrounding and society. Cynicism plays heavily into this jettisoning of ethical responsibility. The cynic is not merely disillusioned with their superiors but with themselves as well. In particular cynicism is premised on the subject’s supposed inability for enacting change. It thus takes away obligations for seeking reform or revolution to these systems. If it is futile then why bother? Moreover, this dis-identification gradually separates individuals morally from their actions. Through situating thought as the locus of freedom and dissent feelings of responsibility over one’s conduct becomes reduced and in many cases completely disappear. By partaking in cynicism, one is to a large degree comfortably rejecting their own responsibility for their action and those within their community. Capitalism similarly employs cynicism to distance individuals from feelings of ethical responsibility to their environment. In allowing for, and at points promoting, this dis-identification they make it easier for individuals to deal with their perhaps unethical unease over their company’s practices and overall ideology. The theme of “what can I do I just work here” permits employees to simultaneously recognize the immorality of their organization while comfortably rejecting or feeling any obligation to change them. The structural barriers preventing workers from enacting such a transformation serves to further isolate individuals from feelings of ethical accountability. If an employee is barred from real democratic decision making concerning institutional direction, then what plausible justification does he or she have for questioning its larger prerogatives? Considering that legally most employees are not liable for the overall conduct of their workplace further exacerbates this problem. How can one hold a lowly Enron sales representative at blame for the corrupt actions of Ken Lay? The dis-identification resulting from the lack of genuine democracy in capitalist organizations thus directly bears upon the daily cynicism of its members. Moreover, it speaks to how a personally

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ethical individual can comfortably stop themselves from challenging market institutions even when subjectively realizing their unethical character.

Order, Dis-identification, and the Construction of the Cynical Totalitarian Subject The preceding examination of Hobbes and capitalism permits a broader reading of the interrelationship between totalitarianism and cynicism for ideological interpellation. Hegemonic discourses deal with their innately incomplete nature by presenting their specific dominant understandings as related to the maintenance of social order more generally while allowing an internal but ultimately ineffectual space for internal dissent to these revealing fields of meaning. In short dominant ideologies use their totalistic nature to render subjects less capable of large-scale questioning through fear of anarchy and in the final analysis non-survival. This strategy is complemented through promoting perspectives of individual cynicism, which accommodate subjective dis-identification, but nonetheless demands external compliance. Through interrogating how these seemingly contradictory phenomena of totalitarianism and cynicism work together it becomes to clear more generally how necessarily incomplete ideologies maintain their overall hegemonic status. Importantly, both Hobbes and capitalism equate conformity to totalitarian systems with individual survival. Hobbes posits the keeping of the social contract via obedience to the sovereign as a pre-requisite for ensuring a subject’s very continued worldly existence. Without such compliance society would revert back to eternal warfare and make tenuous an individual’s survival. He thus justified the surrendering of natural freedom for the security of the leviathan and conformity. Similarly capitalist organizations legitimize the complete submission to their regulation as necessary for individuals to maintain their material reproduction. Without these institutions people would be unable to draw a salary, buy a house, or even purchase food. As with Hobbes’ social covenant individuals agree to both acquiescence their liberty and put aside differences with co-workers for the security of obedience. By situating ideological compliance with subsistence Hobbes and capitalism effectively conflate such conformity to the achievement of order in toto. Totalitarianism exists in this instance not merely through regimes of complete control or even wholesale ideological inscription but as the only means for ensuring survival. Its totalistic character in this sense is exactly in its presenting of itself as the sole course for guaranteeing one’s life. Obviously one is free to reject Hobbes’ social contract or a capitalist job but in doing so he or she is exposed to a world of complete competition and a precarious

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self-sufficiency. Consequently, it becomes difficult for individuals to imagine their existence outside of this ideological horizon and easier to simply submit to its conscripting mandates. These systems thus base their success on equating their specific dominant articulations with the existence of the Law completely. They present themselves not simply as one amongst competing social orders but as the presence of social order wholesale. No wonder Žižek, even while arguing for a renewed class struggle, declares, “today one cannot even imagine a viable alternative to global capitalism” (Žižek 2000, 321). Indeed for individuals to rebel against these systems would be to support anarchy and potentially precipitate their own ruin. This linking of totalitarianism with survival further presents obedience to the Law with the subsequent fulfilment of individual fantasy. Considering that the hegemonic orders proposed by Hobbes and modern capitalist organizations implies fundamentally an individual’s sustained material existence they also herald themselves as the necessary condition for achieving their subsequent social aspirations. For Hobbes, underlying all individual success was the foundations provided by the assured peace of the social contract. His Leviathan offered not only the bare minimum of guaranteed survival but the ability to securely gaining individual desires in an orderly and safe environment: The office of the Sovereign (be it Monarch or an Assembly) consisteth in the end, for which he was trusted with the Sovereign Power, namely the procuration of the safety of the people; to which his obliged by the Law of Nature and to render an account thereof to God, the Author of the Law, and to none but him. But by Safety here is not meant a bare Preservation, but also all other Contentments of live, which every man by lawful Industry, without danger, or hurt to the Common-wealth, shall acquire to himself. (Hobbes 1966, 231)

Capitalism operates out of the same framework. It presents itself as the most viable means for continued existence and in doing so as the principle means for attaining what one wants out of society. This basis for phantasmatic fullness works dually for those pursuing wholeness inside or outside their place of work. In terms of the former, capitalist organizations serve as sites for realizing all one’s interpersonal goals. As to the later it provides the means for accomplishing one’s extra-curricular objectives such as family and friends. However, the overarching nature of these ideologies, especially when representative of the Law, leads to the questioning of these regimes as to their ability for providing as much as they claim. If these discourses are the locus for achieving wholeness how does one deal with their inevitable failure in this regard? It is here that cynicism plays such a productive role for interpellation. By making available internal dissent to individual subjects these prevailing

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ideologies are able to sustain their dominance while limitedly permitting dis-identification to their rule. This feeds into the conflation of specific hegemonic articulations and the maintenance of social order more generally. In situating a given governing configuration as representative of the Law overall they sanction an acceptable cynicism to their prerogatives while reinforcing their position as the only possible means for ensuring continued individual survival. In this way subjects can legitimately express sentiments of futility while acting compliantly. It is akin to saying “I don’t like my present situation, but what else is there? What can I do but accept it and hope for the best.” Cynicism thus acts as a salve for feelings of disappointment to a system that is seemingly permanent and necessary.

Conclusion: Reinforcing Totalitarianism Through Cynicism In this paper I have tried to show the symbiotic relationship between discursive systems of totalitarianism and cynicism. Whether speaking of a social Leviathan a la Hobbes or localized capitalist regulation each relies upon the symbiotic combination of total governance with the positive allowance for individual dis-identification. The inherent failures of totalitarian discourses to fully interpellate a subject requires a subjective freedom of thought expressed via an ineffectual cynicism, a point borne witness to in the theoretical work of Žižek. Individuals are thus, either implicitly or explicitly, encouraged to manifest their discontent through a non-active liberty in thought or an “ideology of cynicism” (Žižek 1989). By providing the space to think resistance these systems are able to legitimately demand and make easier obedience in action. Thus the liberating effect of cynical rebellion is the foundation for an acting compliance.

References Burawoy, Michael. 1979. Manufacturing Consent:  Changes in Labour Process Under Monopoly Capitalism. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Casey, Catherine. 1995. Work, Self, and Society: After Industrialism. London: Sage. Clegg, Stewart and David Dunkerley. 1980. Organization, Class, and Control. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Deal, Terrence and Allan Kennedy. 1982. Corporate Cultures:  Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley. Du Gay, Paul. 1996. Consumption and Identity at Work. London: Sage. Evans, Dylan. 1998. “From Kantian Ethics to Mystical Experience:  An Exploration of Jouissance.” In Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Edited by Dany Nobus. London: Princeton University Press.

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Fink, Bruce. 1995. The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fink, Bruce. 1997. A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis:  Theory and Technique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Fleming, Peter and André Spicer. 2003. “Working at a Cynical Distance: Implications for Power, Subjectivity, and Resistance.” In Organization, 10 (1): 157–79. Glynos, Jason and Yannis Stavrakakis. 2004. “Encounters of the Real Kind: Sussing out the Limits of Laclau’s Embrace of Lacan.” In Laclau: A Critical Reader. Edited by Simon Critchley (Editor), Oliver Marchart. New York: Routledge. Hobbes, Thomas. 1966. Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck. Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press. Howarth, David. 2000a. Discourse. Buckingham: Open University Press. Howarth, David. 2000b. “The Difficult Emergence of a Democratic Imaginary:  Black Consciousness and Non-Racial Democracy in South Africa.” In Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies, and Social Change. Edited by David Howarth, Aletta J. Norval and Yannis Stavrakakis. Manchester and New  York:  Manchester University Press. Johnston, Adrian. 2007. “The Cynics Fetish: Slavoj Žižek and the Dynamics of Belief.” In International Journal of Žižek Studies, 1 (1): 1–18. Knights, David and Darren McCabe. 2000. “Ain’t Misbehavin? Opportunities for Resistance Under New Forms of ‘Quality’ Management.” In Sociology, 4 (3): 421–36. Knights, David and Henery Wilmont. 1989. “Power and Subjectivity at Work:  From Degradation to Subjugation in Social Relations.” In Sociology, 23: 534–8. Lacan, Jacques. 1977. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan. London: Tavistock Publications. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1986. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. London: Verso. Laclau, Ernesto and Chantal Mouffe. 1990. “Post-Marxist Without Apologies.” In Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of our Times. London: Verso. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2000. “Paradigms of Jouissance.” In Lacanian Ink, 17: 10–47. Norval, Aletta J. 1996. Deconstructing Apartheid Discourse. London: Verso. Peters, T.J. and Waterman, R.H. 1982. In Search of Excellence: Lessons from America’s BestRun Companies. Harper & Row, New York. Preston, Larry M. 1984. “Freedom, Markets, and Voluntary Exchange.” In The American Political Science Review, 78 (4): 959–70. Sosteric, Michael. 1996. Subjectivity and the Labour Process:  A Case Study in the Restaurant Industry. Work, Employment and Society 10 (2), 297–318. Sturdy, Andrew. 1998. “Customer Care in a Consumer Society: Smiling and Sometimes Meaning it?” In Organization, 5 (1): 27–53. Wanous, John, Arnon Reichers and James Austin. 2000. “Cynicism About Organizational Change.” In Group and Organization Management Movement, 25 (2): 132–53. Waterman, Robert H. 1988. The Renewal Factor. New York: Bantam Books.

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Wilmont, Hugh. 1993. “Strength is Ignorance, Slavery is Freedom: Managing Cultures in Modern Organizations.” In Journal of Management Studies, 30 (4): 515–52. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. “Holding the Place.” In Ernesto Laclau, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek Contingency, Hegemony, Universality:  Contemporary Dialogues on the Left. Verso: London. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. “The Ongoing ‘Soft’ Revolution.” In Critical Inquiry, 30 (2): 292–323. Žižek, Slavoj. 2005. “With or Without Passion.” http://www.lacan.com/zizpassion.htm. Žižek, Slavoj. 2014. The Universal Exception. New York: Bloomsbury.

8.  The Joy of Inequality: The Libidinal Economy of Compassionate Consumerism Japhy Wilson Politics, University of Manchester

Introduction: Psychosexual/Development The signifier … evacuates enjoyment from the body, but this evacuation is never fully accomplished; scattered around the desert of the symbolic Other, there are always some leftovers, oases of enjoyment, so-called ‘erogenous zones’, fragments still penetrated with enjoyment—and it is precisely these remnants to which Freudian drive is tied: it circulates, it pulses around them. (Slavoj Žižek 1989, 123)

Table for Two International is a social enterprise with a simple idea for doing business while making the world a better place:  for every meal bought at its participating restaurants, one school meal is provided to a poor child in sub-Saharan Africa. Toilet Twinning is a charity with a similar premise, which offers participants the opportunity to ‘twin’ their toilet with a latrine in a poor region of Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa. Sir Richard’s Condoms is a condom company that likewise donates one condom to a ‘developing’ country for each condom purchased. This paper explores these three cases of ‘compassionate consumerism,’ and asks what they can tell us about the ideological content of this increasingly pervasive form of development financing, in which the consumer participates in ‘development’ through the purchase of a specific product. From the perspective of the orthodox Marxist critique of ideology as false consciousness, all three of these campaigns can be accused of obscuring the profound inequalities of the global economy beneath a false representation of equality:  in each case there is a one-for-one relation

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between the product enjoyed and the product donated—a meal, a toilet, a condom. Much of the broader literature on compassionate consumerism critiques it in these terms, accusing it of a disingenuous morality that ‘celebrates a culture of global capitalism while sympathizing with its victims’ (Nikel and Eikenberry 2009, 979), and that constitutes a ‘therapeutic discourse of the West, a feel-good factor hiding us from how our privilege is produced’ (Sharp et al 2010, 1140).1 In this paper, I argue that this critique does not go far enough. Compassionate consumerism does not merely conceal relations of global inequality beneath a veneer of ethical concern, or justify them on the basis of the charitable giving of the privileged. Instead, it invites ‘us’ (the affluent populations of Western consumer societies) to enjoy the relations of inequality that it simultaneously stages and disavows. I develop this argument through an engagement with Slavoj Žižek’s critique of ideology, which draws on the work of Jacques Lacan in challenging the orthodox understanding of ideology as false consciousness. At its deepest level, Žižek argues, ideology functions not as an illusory appearance concealing an external reality, but as a web of social fantasies that structures ‘reality’ itself in relation to jouissance (Žižek 1989, 28, 124–5). Jouissance is commonly translated as ‘enjoyment.’ But it is a much more complex and ambiguous phenomenon than the ‘simple pleasures’ denoted by our everyday usage of that term. Lacan’s understanding of jouissance departs from Sigmund Freud’s theory of psychosexual development, according to which the libido, or sexual drive, comes to be concentrated in specific erogenous zones during early childhood: In the oral phase, it is focused on the mouth in relation to the mother’s breast; in the anal phase it is attached to the pleasure derived from the retention and expulsion of faeces; and in the phallic phase it is shifted to the genitals (Stratton 1996).2 Lacan replaces this biological naturalism with an emphasis on the symbolic and imaginary structuration of enjoyment. For Lacan, the libido is associated with the traumatic Real of jouissance. The child is born into a world unstructured by language, and replete with the unmediated jouissance of the bodily drives. Through its entry into the symbolic order of language, the child abandons its direct relation to jouissance, escaping its overwhelming intensity, but also losing access to its enjoyment. Yet jouissance continues to impinge upon the symbolic universe of the subject, with an alien material persistence that is both disturbing and compelling (Braunstein 2003; Declerq 2004). It is only by appealing to specific fantasies, operating in the Imaginary register, that the subject is able to pacify the traumatic dimension of jouissance, and to experience it as enjoyment. In Žižek’s words, ‘fantasy animates and structures enjoyment, while simultaneously serving as a protective shield

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against its excess’ (Žižek 1997, xxiv). This understanding of fantasy differs from the common-sense usage of the term in two important respects: Fantasies are not dream-like illusions through which we escape from reality, but are central to our organization of the Imaginary and Symbolic co-ordinates of ‘reality’ through which we keep the Real at bay (Žižek 1989, 45); and fantasies are not merely ‘private affairs,’ but circulate in the external symbolic order of language and culture (Fink 1995, 12–13; Homer 2005, 85, 126). This social dimension of fantasy is central to its ideological operation. According to Žižek, all social orders are underpinned by the mobilization and regulation of jouissance through the production and circulation of specific social fantasies. However, whereas other societies have attempted to restrict enjoyment through scarcity and moral sanction, Western consumer capitalism entails ‘a passage from a society of prohibition to a society of commanded enjoyment’ (Stavrakakis 2007, 246, emphasis in original).3 Compassionate consumerism is an integral element of this social order, and its critique must therefore inquire into the ways in which it organizes the consumer’s relationship to jouissance. From this perspective, the existing critical literature on compassionate consumerism is limited by its understanding of ideology. Though not necessarily Marxist, this literature reproduces the orthodox Marxist understanding of ideology as false consciousness: cause-related marketing and other forms of compassionate consumerism are criticized for projecting a semblance of equality and humanitarian concern onto a reality of inequality and impoverishment, which conceals the individualistic character of consumption while legitimating the exploitative activities of multinational capital (see for example Hawkins 2013, 756; Farrell 2012, 11). This critique is accurate up to a point, but as Žižek explains, ‘The relationship between fantasy and the horror of the Real it conceals is much more ambiguous than it may seem: fantasy conceals the horror, yet at the same time it [invites us to enjoy] what it purports to conceal, its “repressed” point of reference’ (Žižek 1997, 6). In what follows, I draw on Žižek’s critique of ideology in arguing that compassionate consumerism invites us to participate in a disavowed enjoyment of inequality as its own ‘repressed point of reference.’ My argument challenges the understanding of ideology as false consciousness, by revealing the ways in which jouissance is mobilized and regulated within this ideological formation. This critique goes beyond Žižek’s own influential work on ethical consumption, which he sees in terms of the inclusion of the act of penance in the sin of consumerism itself (see for example Žižek 2008b, 5, 19). Ironically, Žižek’s critique reproduces the limitations of the broader critical literature on this topic, to the extent that it remains in the register of the ethical/symbolic, and fails to engage with the Real of jouissance. This is symptomatic of Žižek’s

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failure to fully develop the potential of his own theory in his work on global capitalism, in contrast to his more sophisticated work on cinema and popular culture (Sharpe 2004, 198; see also Wilson 2014a, 2014b). In advancing beyond Žižek’s own work on this topic, this paper contributes to an emergent literature that seeks to realize the potential of a Žižekian critique of political economy in the field of development policy and practice (see for example Kingsbury 2005; Kapoor 2005, 2013; De Vries 2007; Dean 2008; Böhm and Batta 2010; Fletcher 2013; Wilson 2014c, 2014d). The paper is organized around Freud’s three infantile stages of psychosexual development, which I  relate to the three cases of compassionate consumerism introduced above. The first section addresses Table for Two International, as the oral stage. The second explores Toilet Twinning, as the anal stage. And the third examines Sir Richard’s Condoms, as the phallic stage. As already discussed, my understanding of enjoyment is based on (Žižek’s reading of) Lacan, rather than Freud. My appeal to Freud’s periodization is therefore purely schematic, and the ‘stages’ should be understood as performative instead of temporal: in each case I show how the enjoyment of the libidinal drive is procured through the staging of a specific fantasy, and how this enjoyment is central to the ideological function and appeal of the product. Each of these fantasies is framed in ethical terms, as an act of generosity for someone less fortunate, in which both consumer and beneficiary receive an equivalent good. But this ethical dimension is underwritten by an invitation to enjoy the inequality that is simultaneously staged and disavowed. This invitation is never made explicit: ‘In order to be operative, fantasy has to remain “implicit,” it has to maintain a distance towards the explicit symbolic texture sustained by it, and to function as its inherent transgression’ (Žižek 1997, 24). Yet it can be read ‘between the lines’ of each of these campaigns. By demonstrating that compassionate consumerism mobilizes a disavowed enjoyment of inequality, I aim to expose the obscenity that underpins its ‘ethical’ discourse, and to advance our understanding of the relationship between ideology and enjoyment. Ideology does not manipulate our ‘natural’ pleasures. Instead, it structures our fantasies in order to procure enjoyment from the alien materiality of the bodily drives.

The Oral Stage: Table for Two International Table for Two International is a social enterprise that aims to address the problems of obesity in the ‘developed’ world and malnutrition in the ‘developing’ world by tackling both simultaneously. It serves low calorie meals in its participating restaurants, and sends the calories it has ‘saved’ to countries in

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Southeast Asia or sub-Saharan Africa in the form of a cash donation, which is used to provide free school meals for impoverished children. It was launched in 2008, and has been a great success. By 2014 it had served over 50 million meals globally, and had attracted over 630 partnering institutions, including Bank of America, Barclays Capital, Caterpillar, Coca Cola, Goldman Sachs, Panasonic, and Toyota. Table for Two meals are now served in American corporate cafeterias, Norwegian hospitals, Japanese karaoke bars, and at the World Economic Forum in Davos and the annual meetings of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund.4 From the perspective of orthodox ideology critique, Table for Two can be accused of depoliticizing global inequality by reducing it to an imaginary relationship between the obese and the underweight—a representation that is not only simplistic, but also inaccurate, given that malnutrition and obesity are both problems associated with poverty. Instead of engaging with the causes of poverty and malnutrition, Table for Two offers the easy ethical gesture of ‘healthy options that feel AND taste good!’5 And it explicitly promotes itself as a cheap and convenient mechanism for corporations to improve their brand image: ‘With no start-up cost or business disruption, a company or consumer product can partner with TFT to quickly and effectively convey its social responsibility.’6 It also has a disciplinary dimension, which ‘helps companies promote healthy eating and … wellness initiatives’7 in their corporate cafeterias while providing ‘African’ parents with the incentive of a free school meal to encourage them to show ‘a greater appreciation for the education of their children.’8 Table for Two thus provides a quick-fix ethical gesture in the service of multinational capital, which absolves Western consumers of the guilt associated with their privilege. Its ideological dimension, however, is located not only in its explicit appeal to the alleviation of suffering, but also in its implicit invitation to enjoy the relations of inequality that it both stages and disavows. At the level of immediate appearances, Table for Two represents itself in terms of equality. The concept is of a ‘Customer’ and a ‘Recipient’ sharing their meal at the same table, as expressed in the company slogan: ‘At Table for Two, you never eat alone.’9 Yet closer attention to its promotional literature reveals a consistent focus on the difference between the two meals in terms of quality and price. The Customer is repeatedly told that while their meal costs US $6.25, only US $0.25 of this price will be spent on the meal of the Recipient. This difference is graphically represented in various images in the promotional literature, in which two cartoon figures face each other across a table. In these images, the Customer’s meal is consistently much larger than that of the Recipient.10 Attention is also placed on the difference

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between the content of the two meals. Prospective customers are presented with mouth-watering images of the healthy and delicious menu options to be enjoyed in participating restaurants on ‘this side of the table,’ including ‘braised chicken couscous,’ and ‘tofu salad with plum sauce.’11 Meanwhile, images of ‘the other side of the table,’ depict charred cauldrons being stirred over open fires, and long queues of poor black children clutching their plastic bowls in eager expectation of their humble meal (see for example Table for Two 2013a, 2013c, 2014). In contrast to the exciting menu options on our side of the table, we are told that in Uganda ‘the food being served is called ‘posho,’ made by boiling maize (or corn) flour in water. It is most commonly cooked to a dough-like consistency and eaten with vegetables. Here, it is served as porridge.’12 Table for Two thus presents its Customers with an ethical discourse of equality and generosity, while simultaneously inviting them to enjoy the inequality between their meal and that of the Recipients. Crucially, it is precisely this staging of inequality that makes the Customer’s meal enjoyable. Our common-sense understanding of enjoyment would lead us to believe that Table for Two operates by offering us the natural pleasure of a good meal along with the opportunity to help someone in need. But there is nothing inherently enjoyable about the act of eating—of shoving objects into our mouths and grinding them into a congealed mass before forcing them down our throats. According to Lacanian theory, it is only by framing the oral drive with a specific fantasy that even our ‘favorite food’ can be enjoyed, as Žižek explains: Fantasy mediates between the formal symbolic structure and the positivity of the objects we encounter in reality—that is to say, it provides a ‘schema’ according to which certain positive objects in reality can function as objects of desire… . To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that when I desire a strawberry cake and cannot get it in reality, I fantasize about eating it; the problem is, rather: how do I know that I desire a strawberry cake in the first place? This is what fantasy tells me. (Žižek 1997, 7; emphasis in original)

In the case of Table for Two, the fantasy that tells the Customer that he desires his tofu salad with plum sauce is the imagined inequality between this meal and the boiled maize porridge that will be served to the Recipient. Table for Two encourages its participating restaurants to include ‘signage’ on its walls and tables, in which this inequality is staged in a variety of ways. Its website provides print-offs and instructions for a variety of ‘table tents,’ which are to be placed on the tables at which people eat their meals. One of these tents stages the gap between the two meals in direct visual terms. On one side of the tent, a healthy white woman smiles radiantly into the camera, while tucking

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into an exotic gourmet salad. On the other, a ragged brown child crams beans into his mouth with his bare hands.13 Another table tent presents a graphic representation of the Table for Two concept.14 The slogan at the top of the tent is a statement of equality and global harmony: ‘Order for One. Feed Two. And Help the World Eat Better.’ But the cartoon imagery beneath the slogan comprises a complex representation of the inequality between the two meals. The Customer sits upright before a large plate of food, gazing across the table at the Recipient, whose head is bowed submissively above a plate containing a much smaller portion. A pie-chart beneath the table graphically represents the Recipient’s miniscule 25 cent slice of the ‘pie,’ in contrast to the massive 6-dollar chunk that the Customer will consume. And while the Recipient ‘receives a healthy school lunch,’ the Customer ‘enjoys a healthy meal’ (emphasis added). Enjoyment is therefore located entirely on the side of the Customer, and it is only through this staging of an excessive enjoyment at the expense of the ‘less fortunate’ Recipient that the Customer is able to really enjoy his meal.15 The company’s 2012 annual report includes a particularly explicit staging of this fantasy, in which we are shown a mock-up photograph of the meals on each side of the same table. On ‘our’ side is a delightfully presented plate of braised chicken couscous, complete with an adventurous medley of tropical fruit and vegetables. On the other side is a loathsome bowl of beans and posho, lumped together in an excremental mass, with a fork stuck crudely into it (Table for Two International 2012, 28).16 It is as if the relationship between the Real and the Imaginary has broken down, and the fantasy of our meal has floated free of its vile materiality, which lies abandoned in the bowl of the unfortunate African child. The juxtaposition recalls Žižek’s reading of the scene from Terry Gilliam’s Brazil, in which the protagonist sits down to a meal in an exclusive restaurant, only to find that ‘the food on [his] plate is split into its symbolic frame (a color photo of the course above the plate) and the formless slime of jouissance that we actually eat’ (Žižek 1997, 63). But whereas in Brazil this rupture indicates a moment of symbolic breakdown in the ruling ideology (a terrorist bomb rips through the restaurant shortly afterwards), in Table for Two this gap is the very foundation on which the ideological structure is sustained. The same gap is staged in a different way in the case of Toilet Twinning, in which a different form of enjoyment contributes to the same ideological formation.

The Anal Stage: Toilet Twinning Toilet Twinning is a UK-based charity that offers people in Europe and North America the opportunity to ‘twin’ their toilet with a latrine in Southeast Asia

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or sub-Saharan Africa. A donation of £60 to the charity purchases a latrine in one of several countries in these regions, for a family that did not have one previously. In return, the donor receives a certificate, featuring a photograph of the latrine in question, and the name and GPS coordinates of its location. By providing latrines to people who lack them, Toilet Twinning aims to reduce diseases related to hygiene and sanitation, leading to increased productivity and school attendance, and thus ‘helping to flush away poverty.’17 This slogan represents poverty, not as an integral component of global capitalism, but as an excremental remainder that can be easily disposed of while leaving the system healthy and intact. Like Table for Two, Toilet Twinning thus reduces the causes of poverty to a single material factor, abstracting from the power relations of the global economy that reproduce and intensify existing patterns of inequality and marginalization. Like Table for Two, Toilet Twinning also adopts a paternalistic attitude towards its beneficiaries, implying that the inhabitants of the Third World require toilet training if they are to join the ranks of civilization. We are told, for example, of a family in Bangladesh: ‘Before a pit latrine was installed … the family had many episodes of vomiting and diarrhoea. Since then, the family has been much healthier, as they’ve learned how to use the toilet.’18 A  further ‘success story’ from Ethiopia is worth quoting at length: ‘Before we had a toilet, we were not interested in working in the fields, because the smell was pungent and the field was full of excrement’, says Amanuel from Ethiopia… . Toilet Twinning funded Ethiopia’s Kale Haywet Church to show the couple how to build a latrine… . They also gave them training and advice on keeping their bodies, house, and compound healthy and hygienic, stressing the importance of using soap and clean water. ‘After the toilet was built, our environment became clean and we wanted to work’ says Amanuel, adding ‘Now, we are in the field and get fresh air. We are much healthier. My compound is clean. It makes me want to be productive.’ (Toilet Twinning 2013a)

We should pause for a moment to consider what we are being asked to believe here. According to this account, Amanuel and his family were forced to abandon their fields because they had shat all over them. Incapable of formulating a practical response to this situation, they languished in helpless indolence until a missionary church transformed them into healthy and productive workers. The transparent absurdity of this neo-colonial vignette suggests that the ideological content of Toilet Twinning is located at the level of libidinal investment rather than rational argumentation. From a Freudian perspective, the anecdote would seem to evoke a horrified fascination with the excessive anal enjoyment of the African savage, against which an ‘anally retentive’ fantasy of the cleanliness and order of the West can be defined.19

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Strangely enough, Toilet Twinning combines this sublimated enjoyment of the retention of the stool with an appeal to the ‘anally expulsive’ enjoyment to be found in its release: a favorite activity at Toilet Twinning fundraising events is the disposal of cash donations into an unplumbed toilet (see for example Toilet Twinning 2012). This act recalls Freud’s assertion of the symbolic relationship between money and excrement,20 while the light-hearted allusion to ‘throwing money down the toilet’ betrays a disavowed knowledge that this complacent gesture will have little impact on the poverty that it is supposed to be addressing. These apparent symptoms of a repressed anal eroticism suggest that the libidinal economy of Toilet Twinning might run deeper than mere feel-good gestures, and might offer a disavowed enjoyment that exceeds its scatological jokes and puns. As Žižek (2006, 16–17) has noted, toilets are as imbued with ideology as any other dimension of everyday life. Žižek illustrates this by comparing the designs of British, French, and German toilets, and noting the parallels between the philosophical traditions of each country and the ways in which their toilets encourage us to confront our excrement. In the case of Toilet Twinning, the significant relationship is not between different styles of Western toilet, but between Western toilets in general and the Third World latrines with which they are twinned. The explicit discourse of Toilet Twinning is one of equality—of the one-for-one relationship between ‘our’ toilet and theirs. But as in the case of Table for Two, this discourse is underwritten by an implicit staging of the differences between them. This is evident in a poster advertising the charity. The poster features a collage of photographs of poor African families standing in front of ramshackle latrines, accompanied by the phrase ‘Take Your Pick’.21 The phrase is clearly designed to be read in two ways:  ‘Which family would you like to help?’, but also ‘Which toilet would you like to use?’ The implication would seem to be that you would not like to use any of them, and that something must therefore be done to help the families who are forced to do so. But the images are not of the toilets that the families are to be ‘saved’ from. Instead, they depict the toilets that these families have been given by Toilet Twinning, as an indication of the kind of latrine that the prospective donor can choose to give to others. In other words, the toilet that ‘we’ are giving ‘them’ is framed not only as a toilet that will improve their condition, but also as a toilet that we would not want to use ourselves. In the bottom corner of the poster is the Toilet Twinning logo: a cartoon of a white male figure reading a newspaper on a Western toilet. Within an explicit message of salvation and equality, the poster therefore stages the inequality between ‘our’ toilet and the one that ‘they’ will receive.

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Toilet Twinning thus functions ideologically by framing the anal drive with a disavowed fantasy of inequality, which promises to make the donor’s bowel movement enjoyable. This is evident in the various products associated with the charity. As already mentioned, every person who twins their toilet receives a certificate with a picture of their twinned latrine. Crucially, this certificate comes with the explicit instruction to display it in the donor’s bathroom.22 The donor’s use of their toilet is thus framed by a visual representation of the difference in quality and sophistication between it and the latrine of their imagined Third World counterpart. Donors can also purchase branded toilet paper, with photographs of a selection of twinned latrines printed on each individual sheet, allowing them to extend their enjoyment of inequality to one of the most intimate rituals of personal hygiene. A set of stickers is also offered.23 Again, these stickers unambiguously stage the difference between the donor’s toilet and the twinned latrine. Each sticker includes the phrase ‘Welcome to the Toilet Deluxe,’ and is designed to be applied to a feature of the Western toilet that is missing from (the Western imaginary of) a Third World latrine: ‘Door with lock!’; ‘Working flush!’; ‘A seat!’ and so on. One sticker relies on the mere invocation of ‘the dark continent’ to convey the inequality between the donor’s toilet and its twinned latrine: ‘My other bog’s in Africa!’ The list of businesses that partner with Toilet Twinning includes several manufacturers of up-market toilets and bathroom fittings, such as Thomas Crapper. On its website, Toilet Twinning celebrates this partnership with a further staging of the imagined gap between Western opulence and African squalor, noting that ‘The legendary sanitary-ware company Thomas Crapper has joined [the] global Toilet Twinning movement, linking three of its traditional high-quality loos with three latrines deep in the African bush.’24 Another business partner is Toilet Yoga, an American company that produces books, apps, and other paraphernalia, based on a series of yoga exercises that have been adapted for performance while on the toilet, as a means of facilitating the speedy and pleasurable evacuation of one’s bowels. Toilet Yoga donates ten percent of its profits to Toilet Twinning. In doing so it claims to offer purchasers of its products ‘the opportunity to connect with others around the world as you share in the joy of relief and satisfaction.’25 This ‘tongue-in-cheek’ gesture of harmony and egalitarianism is rendered even more disingenuous when we consider that Toilet Yoga is designed to be performed on a Western-style lavatory, and would be impossible for the ‘African’ squatting gratefully over a hole in the ground in their humble new latrine. Here again, the discourse of equality and the enjoyment of inequality are

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intertwined. In the words of Toilet Yoga, you ‘Walk out feeling great’ (quoted in Rognlin 2012). Toilet Twinning thus provides a complex fantasy space within which its participants can organize their anal jouissance to deliver enjoyment, through the staging of the inequality between their sophisticated toilet experience and the imagined horrors of the Third World latrine. This fantasy space can be evoked by imagining the ideal subject of Toilet Twinning, who has bought all its related products and has dutifully followed its instructions: Splayed upon his Western toilet in a contorted yoga pose; surrounded by stickers reminding him of how ‘deluxe’ his toilet is in relation to the grim latrine of his imagined African counterpart; staring at an image of that very latrine on the certificate lovingly framed and hung upon his toilet door; and with images of a hundred more latrines ready to hand on the toilet paper beside him … at last, the committed Toilet Twinner can really enjoy his shit.

The Phallic Stage: Sir Richard’s Condoms Sir Richard’s Condoms is a California-based social enterprise that specializes in ‘ethical’ condoms. Its luxury condoms are made of 100  percent natural latex rubber, and are vegan and PETA-approved. Furthermore, for every condom that it sells, Sir Richard’s Condoms donates one to a ‘developing country.’ The company aims to address the shortage of condoms in such countries, in order to combat unwanted pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases.26 Its ‘one-for-one’ structure is identical to Table for Two and Toilet Twinning. Like Toilet Twinning, it adopts a playful and irreverent approach to its subject matter, in which the conditions of poverty and disease that it purports to address are reduced to opportunities for endless double entendre. The company markets its condoms with slogans such as ‘A pleasure pack with a purpose’; ‘Give back while getting it on’; and ‘Doing good never felt better.’27 This angle has proved popular with men’s lifestyle websites. Man of Many, for example, points out that ‘Sir Richard’s has made getting laid into a charitable event,’28 while Ethical Johnny explains that ‘Sir Richard’s also donate one condom to charity for every one they sell. That’s pretty hot in anyone’s book.’29 Like Table for Two and Toilet Twinning, Sir Richard’s Condoms can be accused of depoliticizing development by promising an easy solution to highly complex socioeconomic problems, based on the selective provision of a single material input. As with these other cases, it can also be criticized for replacing social struggle with an ethical gesture, underpinned by the sensual enjoyment of a specific bodily act. But as I have argued in these other cases,

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the common-sense understanding of the relationship between enjoyment and fantasy has to be reversed in order to grasp the way in which ideology is operating here. We have seen that the enjoyment of eating and defecating is not ‘natural,’ but must be framed by specific fantasies to procure pleasure from the alien materiality of their related drives. In the same way, Lacanian theory insists that there is nothing inherently enjoyable about sex. The jouissance of an orgasm is not simply enjoyable ‘in itself,’ but is an overwhelming physical event, which would be traumatic if it remained unmediated by fantasy: Imagine a hypothetical human infant, isolated from all human society. In the unlikely event of its surviving, the manifestation of the erotic drive in its genitalia can be answered by masturbation. But it would be masturbation without any link to arousing imaginings:  a purely physical response devoid of fantasy—perhaps not even a very pleasurable act. (Bailly 2009, 140)

The intensely relational dimension of sex adds a further traumatic element to the raw jouissance of the erotic drive. According to Lacan, ‘There is no sexual relationship’ (quoted in Žižek 1997, 7). We can only engage with each other sexually to the extent that we succeed in mapping our fantasies onto one another, in order to conceal the abyss of the Other’s desire: ‘Any contact with a real flesh-and-blood other, any sexual pleasure that we find in touching another human being, is not something evident but something inherently traumatic, and can be sustained only insofar as this other enters the subject’s fantasy frame’ (Žižek 2006, 51). For these reasons, we should understand Sir Richard’s Condoms, not as using sexual enjoyment to sell a charity product, but as using a charity product to provide the fantasy frame within which sexual enjoyment becomes possible. Sir Richard’s Condoms are marketed primarily to white heterosexual men. The marketing strategy promises to incite and sustain the purchaser’s desire in the moment of the sexual act, and to arouse desire and provide satisfaction in his prospective female partners. In the words of one men’s lifestyle website, ‘When you’re getting it on, you’re probably not thinking of much outside of “This is awesome”… . Now while you’re enjoying yourself … you can be thinking of all the good you are doing as well.’30 This blasé promise of phallic enjoyment betrays the necessarily phantasmatic dimension of the sexual act. If sex is self-evidently ‘awesome,’ why would the ethical condom consumer need to think about ‘all the good he is doing as well’? The erotic necessity of the fantasy frame is also evident in a poster campaign for the company: ‘For every condom you purchase, one is donated to a developing country, which makes even bad sex, good sex.’31 The joke addresses sexual anxiety with the reassuring message that the ethical act of the condom’s purchase will

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be sufficient to provide enjoyment, even if the act is not enjoyable ‘in itself.’ Another advertisement features a classic image of Marlon Brando in a tuxedo, with the caption ‘I’m going to use condoms she can’t refuse.’32 This seemingly confident assertion of masculinity invites the male consumer to avoid the traumatic confrontation with the desire of the Other, by promising that the ethical condoms will morally oblige his prospective partner to sleep with him without having to arouse her desire. This message is reinforced by the company’s advice to its customers to display their product in the bedroom: ‘A 12 pack of Sir Richard’s condoms would look great on anyone’s nightstand. The design of the box attracts people’s eye immediately. So why not have safe sex while donating to a developing country?’33 Here again, the ethical dimension of the condom serves as a prop to mask the absence of a sexual relationship. At the level of its discursive articulation, Sir Richard’s is based on the principle of harmony and equality: we are told that it is a ‘buy-one give-one initiative’ and that its founders ‘live by the simple motto, “the power of business can help bring pleasure and health to the global community” ’.34 But as in the cases of Table for Two and Toilet Twinning, this message is underwritten by the mobilization of a disavowed enjoyment of relations of inequality. Like Table for Two, Sir Richard’s Condoms emphasizes the difference between the product consumed and the product donated. The consumer can select from a variety of condoms, each of which promises a distinct form of enjoyment, ‘including Ultra Thin, Classic Ribbed, Pleasure Dots, and Extra Large’.35 Needless to say, the recipient of the free condom in the ‘developing country’ is not offered an equivalent choice. Sites are selected on the basis of high rates of unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases, and beneficiaries receive a basic condom with simple instructions ‘in the area’s language, so the intended population can easily understand’.36 Like Table for Two and Toilet Twinning, Sir Richard’s Condoms therefore includes a disciplinary dimension: ‘our’ condoms are designed to enhance our enjoyment, while ‘their’ condoms are designed to control their behavior. Sir Richard’s evokes colonial images of excessive sexual activity in the ‘developing countries’ in which it operates, such as Haiti, which it claims ‘has seen a spike in pregnancies following the 2009 earthquake … of 2391 women in 120 camps, almost 12 percent reported being pregnant’ (quoted in Estrella 2012). Such representations depict their subjects ‘in stereotypically racialized sexual terms, of being out of control of their sexuality and thus contributing to public health crises’ (Richey and Ponte 2011, 96). They also recall the ‘simultaneous desire and frustration’ of the colonial administrator, who imagines that ‘the colonized enjoy access to some hidden kernel of enjoyment’ that must be

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brought under his control if he is to sustain his fantasy of domination (Lane 2002, 194). This ‘simultaneous desire and frustration’ is further aroused by Sir Richard’s collaboration with Product (RED), in which we are told that ‘The worlds of fashion and condoms have finally collided.’37 Product (RED) partners with many of the world’s most iconic consumer brands, which donate a percentage of the profits from their (RED) products to the Global Fund to provide medical treatment for sufferers of HIV/AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. In its promotional campaigns, Product (RED) represents Africa as the site of an excessive sexual enjoyment. In the words of its co-founder Bono, ‘Africa is sexy, and people need to know that’ (quoted in Richey and Ponte 2011, 184). Within the imaginary of Western consumer capitalism, the ‘sexiness’ of Africa lies in the enduring colonial trope of ‘the dark continent’ as ‘erotically powerful … visceral and compelling … untamed, unknowable and evil’ (Jarosz 1992, 107). As such, ‘Africa’ holds the symbolic position of the Lacanian Thing:  ‘the material leftover, the materialization of the terrible, impossible jouissance … a kind of coagulated remnant of liquid jouissance … and as such an object that simultaneously attracts and repels us’ (Žižek 1989, 71, 180). This threatening and alluring presence is further eroticized by its association with AIDS, given that ‘much of the mythology surrounding African AIDS has been based on stereotypical neo-colonial depictions of the sexual savage’ (Richey and Ponte 2008, 72). The twin invocation of ‘Africa’ and ‘AIDS’ thus evokes an excessive and horrifying jouissance, which Product (RED) domesticates in the framing its own products as objects of desire.38 Sir Richard’s (RED) condoms inform the consumer that ‘5% of net proceeds are donated to help eliminate AIDS in Africa.’39 This donation infuses the brand with a surplus enjoyment derived from its symbolic association with Africa and AIDS, while contributing to its staging of the difference between ‘our’ healthy and desirable enjoyment and the unbearable jouissance of the abject Third World Other. Sir Richard’s Condoms thus offer the compassionate consumers of Western societies a complex ‘fantasy screen which enables [them] to sustain the Real of the sexual act’ (Žižek 1997, 234).

Conclusion: The Desire of the Other What precedes fantasy is not reality but a hole in reality … what defines a ‘world’ is primarily not its positive features, but the way its structure relates to its own inherent point of impossibility. (Žižek 2008a, xiv–xv )

This paper has argued that compassionate consumerism operates ideologically through the production of specific fantasies that mobilize and regulate

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the Real of the bodily drives. The appeal of its charitable gestures lies not only in compliance with the ethical injunction to help those less fortunate than ourselves, but also in a disavowed enjoyment of relations of inequality between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ In the cases of Table for Two, Toilet Twinning, and Sir Richard’s Condoms, I  have shown how the libidinal economy of compassionate consumerism procures enjoyment through the production of fantasies that stage these relations of inequality ‘between the lines’ of an imaginary ethic of egalitarian harmony. In all three cases, this libidinal economy underpins a post-political consensus between businesses, charities, and lifestyle choices that legitimates existing relations of global inequality, and that reduces highly complex problems of poverty and marginalization to simple issues to be resolved by the purchase of a single input. As such, it contributes to an immense ideological system that functions to guarantee the expanded reproduction of capital through an uneven geographical dialectic of ever-increasing consumption and never-ending impoverishment. In the words of Product (RED): ‘Shop today and eliminate AIDS in Africa. Shop now.’40 This invocation of Africa is a common element of the cases considered here. Despite the fact that all three operate in countries outside sub-Saharan Africa, their promotional material consistently appeals to a colonial fantasy of ‘Africa’ as the site of an obscene and excessive enjoyment—as the perverted underside of the clean and desirable pleasures of Western consumer capitalism. As Žižek has argued, such fantasies of an alien enjoyment are crucial to sustaining the shared enjoyment that binds a community together (Žižek 1993, 201–5). The horrified fascination with the Other’s jouissance is embodied in the evocation of African AIDS for Sir Richard’s (Red) condoms; in the description of African foods in Table for Two International; and in Toilet Twinning’s persistent representation of the uncontrolled defecation of Africans in places including ‘fields, streams, rivers, railway lines, canal banks, roadsides, plastic bags, [and] squalid, disease-breeding buckets.’41 These depictions of an alien ‘African’ enjoyment are accompanied in all three cases by a disciplinary logic that reproduces the paternalistic attitude of the colonial administrator:  the natives must be toilet trained and instructed in matters of good hygiene and safe sexual intercourse, and if they cannot grasp the value of education then they must be bribed with free school meals. As Achille Mbembe has argued, the underlying premise of such assumptions is that ‘We can, through a process of domestication and training, bring the African to where he or she can enjoy a fully human life. In this perspective, Africa is essentially, for us, an object of experimentation’ (Mbembe 2001, 2). Ironically, the infantilization of the ‘African’ in each of these cases is done in the name of development interventions that are childish in their

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simplicity. The suggestion that global poverty can be meaningfully addressed through the provision of free school meals, the construction of latrines, or the distribution of condoms, based on the individual purchasing decisions of privileged Western consumers, cannot be taken seriously by anyone who pauses to think about it. At one level, of course, not thinking about it is precisely the point: critical thought is replaced with an urgent ethical gesture (Žižek 1997, 24). But the ideology at work here cannot be reduced to the obscuring of actual social relations beneath a veil of charitable giving. The cases I have considered share a ‘light-hearted’ and ‘ironic’ attitude, and those participating in them would probably acknowledge that they are not really going to change anything through their actions. As Žižek has argued in another context, ‘All this, of course, is meant in an ironic way; it is “not to be taken literally”—however it is precisely through such self-distance that postmodern “cynical” ideology functions’ (Žižek 199b, 81, emphasis in original). According to Žižek, the consumers of ‘advanced’ capitalist societies are no longer trapped in false consciousness, but are fully aware of the lies and absurdities that they are participating in. Crucially, however, they are still in ideology. The ideological moment has simply shifted from the level of belief to the level of practice (Žižek 1989, 28–35). It is not necessary for the compassionate consumer to consciously believe that they are really transforming the world through their trivial actions. It is enough for these actions to be performed. Through its colonization of the mundane rituals of everyday life—eating, shitting, fucking—compassionate consumerism functions ideologically as an embodied dimension of lived experience without anyone having to actually believe in it.42 But despite adopting a ‘knowing’ and ‘ironic’ attitude, the ethical consumer remains unaware of his disavowed enjoyment of relations of inequality. ‘Inequality’ is the repressed signifier of compassionate consumerism. It is never once uttered by any of the social enterprises discussed in this paper. Yet they all circle ceaselessly around it, tracing its outline, and implicitly staging the gap between Western opulence and generosity and Third World poverty and helplessness, as the fantasy that sustains the Western consumer’s enjoyment of their products.43 As I have shown in all three cases, compassionate consumerism does not operate by harnessing our ‘natural’ pleasures in the service of the greater good. Instead, it stages specific fantasies of inequality that procure enjoyment through their framing of the alien materiality of the bodily drives. This disavowed enjoyment of inequality is dependent upon the imagined gaze of a Third World beneficiary. ‘At Table for Two, you never eat alone,’ but are invited to think of yourself eating in the company of the African child you are feeding. Similarly, with Toilet Twinning, you never shit

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alone:  the certificate of the twinned latrine in your bathroom reminds you that you are ‘sharing the joy of relief and satisfaction.’ Crucially, however, this intersubjectivity must remain at the level of fantasy for it to be operative, because the desire of the Other is precisely the ‘point of impossibility’ that compassionate consumerism is structured to exclude. There is no African child at the other side of the Table for Two. And the Toilet Twinning certificates all depict empty latrines. The ethical consumer is alone in their jouissance. The imagined proximity of the helpless and grateful beneficiary is only a prop to sustain their enjoyment of inequality, and to exclude the abyssal gaze of the Third World Other in the fullness of their Real presence. This gaze expresses a desire that cannot be satisfied by a meal, a condom, or a latrine. It is a desire for equality that threatens the privilege on which compassionate consumerism is premised, and that must be excluded before it can be articulated as a political demand. At its deepest level, Žižek argues, ‘fantasy is the screen by means of which the subject avoids the radical opening of the enigma of the Other’s desire’ (Žižek 1997, 41). The psychoanalytic critique of ideology must therefore aim to ‘generate the tension necessary to separate the subject from its fantasized relation to the Other’s desire’ (Fink 1995, xiii). In the case of compassionate consumerism, all that is required to shatter this fantasy-space is to actualize the disavowed position of the Other within it: A Davos delegate enjoys his braised chicken couscous, smiling charitably across the table at an African child eating a bowl of cornmeal porridge. A yoga expert enjoys her deluxe Western toilet, grinning generously at a peasant woman squatting over a hole in the ground. A hipster couple enjoy their luxury vegan condom, leering philanthropically at an AIDS sufferer and his partner using their last free prophylactic. Suddenly the compassionate consumer sees himself through the eyes of the Other, and glimpses the same expression that Freud detected on the face of the Rat Man when confronted with the Real of his jouissance. It is an expression of ‘horror at pleasure of his own of which he himself was unaware’.44

Acknowledgements Thanks to Ilan Kapoor, Mike Goodman, Maureen Sioh, Erik Swyngedouw, and Ioanna Tantanasi for very useful comments on an early draft. Any errors are of course my own. A  version of this paper was presented at a conference on ‘Sustainability and the Celebrity-Business-Development Nexus’ (Copenhagen, May 2014). I  acknowledge the financial support of the Hallsworth Fellowship in making this research possible.

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Notes 1. Other examples of this literature include Lewis 2010; Richey and Ponte 2008, 2011; Shamir 2008; Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007; Youde 2009. 2. The infant then enters a period of ‘latency’, after which the young adult organizes the final, ‘genital’ phase of his or her psychosexual development. According to Freud, childhood experiences can cause adults to remain fixated on earlier stages of development, the enjoyment of which is repressed, leading to pleasure being taken in apparently unrelated activities, such as the meticulous organization of the ‘anal retentive.’ 3. The advertising industry deliberately intervenes in the unconscious in the mobilization of enjoyment. Indeed, it was Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays, who revolutionized the industry by shifting its focus from an appeal to rational utility maximization towards the mobilization of unconscious libidinal urges, in line with his uncle’s theories (Stavrakakis 2007, 231). 4. Information compiled from various sources on the Table for Two website: http:// www.tablefor2.org/home (accessed 26/04/2014). 5. Table for Two, ‘Brochure’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=40 (accessed 03/05/2014). 6. Table for Two, ‘Impact’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/impact (accessed 16/04/2014). 7. Table for Two, ‘Brochure’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=40 (accessed 03/05/2014) 8. Table for Two, ‘Impact’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/impact (accessed 16/04/2014). As is often the case in such campaigns, ‘Africa’ is repeatedly appealed to as an instantly recognizable symbol of poverty and abjection. In its 2012 Annual Report, for example, the Executive Director of Table for Two describes a visit to Ethiopia: ‘I remember looking across a barren landscape with not a single tree… . There were times in the past when children would sit in class, staring out into space from hunger. These same children greeted me in the courtyard with an Ethiopian dance’ (Masa Kogure, in Table for Two International 2012, 2). 9. Table for Two, ‘Brochure’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=40 (accessed 03/05/2014). 10. See for example Table for Two, ‘Brochure’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/ documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=40 (accessed 03/05/2014) 11. Table for Two, ‘Brochure’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=40 (accessed 03/05/2014); Table for Two, ‘Implementation Guideline (restaurants)’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/ documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=26 (accessed 03/05/2014) 12. ‘New Footage from Ruhiira, Uganda!’ available at http://tablefor2usa.wordpress. com/2011/06/30/new-footage-from-ruhiira-uganda/ (accessed 03/05/2014). Other meals depicted ‘on their side of the table’ include ‘a daily porridge (called Sosoma) and at least two eggs a week’ for children in Rwanda (Table for Two 2013b), and ‘bukulti’ in Ethiopia, ‘consisting of germinated beans and chickpea with fortified vegetable oil and iodized salt. A portion of fruit is added two days a week’ (Table for Two 2014). 13. Table for Two, ‘Table Tent 3’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=31 (accessed 03/05/2014).

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14. Table for Two, ‘Table Tent 1’, available at http://www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=38 (accessed 03/05/2014). 15. Similarly, in its 2012 Annual Report, Table for Two provides us with a fantasy frame in which to enjoy our meal on the basis of the inequality between our affluence and their insecurity: ‘For the brief moment that you sit down to your healthy meal, you pause and think about how you are helping a child who worries where his or her next meal will come from. This pause allows us to appreciate what we have … ’ (Table for Two International 2012, 18). 16. This description refers to the way in which the bowl of beans and posho is represented by Table for Two, and is not a judgment on the food itself, which is widely enjoyed by people across East Africa, where it is structured by very different fantasies. 17. http://www.toilettwinning.org/ (accessed 03/05/2014). 18. Toilet Twinning, ‘Bangladesh’, available at http://www.toilettwinning.org/ about-ourbogs/bangladesh (accessed 03/05/2014). 19. This colonial infantilization of ‘Third World’ adults is further demonstrated by a report on training programs offered by Toilet Twinning, which describes a ‘defecation walk’ at a school in England. Children are led through scenes in which fake excrement has been left next to food, toys, and water sources, in order to encourage them ‘to consider the hazards of open defecation’. Similar training is offered to Third World adults: ‘When Toilet Twinning gets alongside people in communities overseas where there is no proper sanitation, it invites them to question traditionally held beliefs and customs. There is no need for plastic poo for the defecation walks because there is plenty of the real thing. And flies a-go-go’ (Toilet Twinning 2013b). 20. In a paper written in 1905 entitled ‘Character and Anal Eroticism’, Freud notes several ‘connections between the complexes of interest in money and defecation’, including ‘common usage in speech, which calls a person who keeps too careful a hold on his money “dirty” or “filthy” ’, and the fact that ‘even according to ancient Babylonian doctrine gold is “the faeces of hell” ’ (quoted in Herbert 2002). 21. Toilet Twinning, ‘Toilet Twinning A4 Poster’, available at http://www.toilettwinning.org/resources/ (accessed 03/05/2014). 22. This instruction is repeated throughout the promotional literature for Toilet Twinning. Its full page advertisement in National Geographic features a photograph of a latrine in ‘Ethiopia, Africa’, and instructs the reader to ‘Twin your toilet and you’ll receive a certificate to display in your loo’ (Toilet Twinning 2014). 23. Toilet Twinning, ‘Stickers’, available at http://www.toilettwinning.org/resources/ (accessed 03/05/2014). 24. Toilet Twinning, ‘Thomas Crapper’, available at http://www.toilettwinning.org/ funstuff/loominaries/corporations/thomas-crapper/ (accessed 02/04/2014). 25. Toilet Yoga, reproduced in Holy Kaw!, ‘Meditation on Evacuation: Toilet Yoga’, available at http://holykaw.alltop.com/meditation-on-evacuation-toilet-yoga (accessed 03/05/2014). 26. This ‘ethical’ gesture is central to the company’s business strategy. In the words of its CEO, ‘We’re going to give up a little bit of profitability to do this and because of that it opens up a larger market, we believe, for us’ (Jim Moscou, CEO of Sir Richard’s Condoms, quoted in Strauss 2013). 27. Sir Richard’s Condoms, ‘(RED) Condoms’ available at http://www.sirrichards. com/red (accessed 03/04/2014).

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28. Man of Many, ‘Sir Richard’s Condoms’, available at http://manofmany.com/lifestyle/sirrichards-condoms/ (accessed 05/04/2014). 29. Ethical Johnny, ‘Sir Richards condoms—hot or not?’, available at http://manofmany. com/lifestyle/sir-richards-condoms/ (accessed 05/04/2014). 30. Cool Material, ‘Sir Richard’s Condom Company’, available at http://coolmaterial. com/gear/sir-richards-condom-company/ (accessed 05/04/2014). 31. This poster can be viewed at http://carphotos.cardomain.com/story_images/1/ 2214/4841/5534920002_large.jpg (accessed 03/05/2014). 32. This image can be viewed at http://www.behance.net/gallery/Sir-RichardsCondom-Ads/12236529 (accessed 03/05/2014). 33. Quoted in Style Forensics, ‘Sir Richard’s Condom Company’, http://styleforensics. com/2014/01/08/sir-richards-condom-company/ (accessed 03/05/2014). 34. About.com Contraception, ‘Sir Richard’s Company’, http://contraception.about. com/od/malecondom/p/Sir-Richards-Company.htm (accessed 03/05/2014). 35. Sir Richard’s Condoms, ‘(RED) Condoms’, http://www.sirrichards.com/red (accessed 03/04/2014). 36. About.com Contraception, ‘Sir Richard’s Company’, available at http://contraception.about.com/od/malecondom/p/Sir-Richards-Company.htm (accessed 03/05/2014). 37. Style Forensics, ‘Sir Richard’s Condom Company’, http://styleforensics. com/2014/01/08/sir-richards-condom-company/ (accessed 05/04/2014). 38. The example of Gap (RED) is interesting in this regard. The range includes a series of red T-shirts printed with single words, many of which frame the wearer as the object of desire in the eyes of another: ‘Desi(RED)’, ‘Treasu(RED)’, ‘Admi(RED)’, ‘Ador(RED)’, and so on. Product (RED) thus frames its products as what Lacan called objet petit a: ‘the object of fantasy … that something in me more than myself on account of which I perceive myself as worthy of the Other’s desire’ (Žižek 1997, 9). 39. An image of the packet can be seen at http://www.sirrichards.com/media/catalog/ product/cache/1/image/650x/040ec09b1e35df1394 33887a97daa66f/1/2/12back-red.jpg (accessed 03/05/2014). 40. This is from a Gap (RED) advertisement, which can be viewed at http://www.shoppersresource.com/consumer/images/gap_red.jpg (accessed 03/05/2014). In the advertisement, the phrase ‘shop now’ is underlined—hence the use of italics here. 41. Toilet Twinning, ‘PowerPoint Presentation’, available at http://www.toilettwinning. org/resources/ (accessed 03/05/2014). 42. It is through the daily performance of such acts that the compassionate consumer constructs his or her imagined identity as such, ‘as a crystallization or sedimentation of ideal images, tantamount to a fixed, reified object’ (Fink 1995, 36). This composite image of a low-calorie meal eating, Toilet Yoga performing, vegan condom using, affluent-but-caring Western consumer is instantly recognizable as a subspecies of the so-called creative class of bourgeois bohemian hipsters, which I am tempted to classify as the ‘new age neoliberal’. 43. Žižek argues that ‘Whenever we have a symbolic structure it is structured around a certain void, it implies the foreclosure of a certain master-signifier’ (Žižek 1989, 73). Fink similarly describes the Real as ‘a center of gravity around which the symbolic order is condemned to circle without ever being able to hit it’. The chain of signifiers ‘is condemned to ceaselessly write something else or say something which keeps

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avoiding this point, as though this point were the truth of everything the chain produces as it beats around the bush. One could go as far as to say that what, of necessity, remains outside the chain causes what is inside’ (Fink 1995, 27–8). 44. Sigmund Freud, quoted in Fink 1995, 60, emphasis in original.

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Kingsbury, Paul. 2005. “Jamaican Tourism and the Politics of Enjoyment.” In Geoforum, 36: 113–32. Lane, Jeremy F. 2002. “The Stain, the Impotent Gaze, and the Theft of Jouissance: Towards A  Žižekian Reading of Robbe-Grillet’s La Jalousie.” In French Studies, 56 (2): 193–206. Lewis, Tania. 2010. “Branding, Celebritization and the Lifestyle Expert.” In Cultural Studies, 24 (4): 580–98. Mbembe, Achille. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Nikel, Patricia and Angela Eikenberry. 2009. “A Critique of the Discourse of Marketized Philanthropy.” In American Behavioural Scientist, 52 (7): 974–89. Richey, Lisa and Stefano Ponte. 2008. “Better (Red) than Dead? Celebrities, Consumption and International Aid.” In Third World Quarterly, 29 (4): 711–29. Richey, Lisa and Stefano Ponte. 2011. Brand Aid:  Shopping Well to Save the World. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Rognlin, Briana. 2012. “Toilet Yoga Looks like a Joke; Is Seriously Pretty Cool.” Blisstree. http://www.blisstree.com/2012/02/16/fitness/yoga/toilet-yoga-appdigestion-350/ Shamir, Ron. 2008. “The Age of Responsibilization: On Market-Embedded Morality.” In Economy and Society, 37 (1): 1–19. Sharp, Jo, Patricia Campbell, and Emma Laurie. 2010. “The Violence of Aid? Giving, Power, and Active Subjects in One World Conservatism.” In Third World Quarterly, 31 (7): 1125–43. Sharpe, Matthew. 2004. Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real. Aldershot: Ashgate. Stavrakakis, Yannis. 2007. The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics. New York: State University of New York Press. Stratton, Jon. 1996. The Desirable Body: Cultural Fetishism and the Erotics of Consumption. Manchester: University of Manchester Press. Strauss, Karsten. 2013. “Not Your Average Condom Company.” Forbes.https://www. forbes.com/sites/karstenstrauss/2013/07/24/not-your-average-condom-company/ #7c4489b5495f Table for Two International. 2012. Annual Report 2012. http://www.tablefor2.org/ documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=33 Table for Two International. 2013a. “Global Newsletter Vol. 14, February 2013.” http:// www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=13 Table for Two International. 2013b. “Global Newsletter Vol. 20, August 2013.” http:// www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=34 Table for Two International. 2013c. “Global Newsletter Vol. 22, October 2013.” http:// www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=41 Table for Two International. 2014. “Global Newsletter Vol. 25, Jan-Feb 2014.” http:// www.tablefor2.org/documentdownload.axd?documentresourceid=44 Thompson, Craig J. and Gokcen Coskuner-Balli. 2007. “Enchanting Ethical Consumerism: The Case of Community Supported Agriculture.” In Journal of Consumer Culture, 7 (3): 275–303.

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Toilet Twinning. 2012. “Curry, Cawl and Mummies.” On the Blog. http://toilettwinning. blogspot.co.uk/2012/10/curry-cawl-andmummies.html Toilet Twinning. 2013a. “Aid DOES Make a Difference’ On the Blog. http://toilettwinning.blogspot.co.uk/2013/11/aid-does-makedifference.html Toilet Twinning. 2013b. “Doing the Defecation Walk.” On the Blog. http://toilettwinning.blogspot.co.uk/2013/09/doing-defecationwalk.html Toilet Twinning. 2014. “Camera-Khazi.” On the Blog. http://toilettwinning.blogspot. co.uk/2014/01/camera-khazi.html Wilson, Japhy. 2014a. “The Shock of the Real: The Neoliberal Neurosis in the Life and Times of Jeffrey Sachs.” In Antipode, 46 (1): 301–21. Wilson, Japhy. 2014b. “The Jouissance of Philanthrocapitalism.” In The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticisation, Spectres of Radical Politics, edited by Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw, 109–25. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Wilson, Japhy. 2014c. Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid. London and New York: Verso. Wilson, Japhy. 2014d. “Fantasy Machine:  Philanthrocapitalism as an Ideological Formation.” In Third World Quarterly, 35 (7): 1144–61. Youde, Jeremy. 2009. “Ethical Consumerism or Reified Neoliberalism? Product (RED) and Private Funding for Public Goods.” In New Political Science, 31 (2): 201–20. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1993. Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. How to Read Lacan. New York: W.H. Norton and Company. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008a. The Plague of Fantasies (second edition) London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008b. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books.

9.  Žižek’s New Universe of Discourse: Politics and the Discourse of the Capitalist Levi R. Bryant Collin College, Texas, USA

Truth punches a hole in knowledge—Jacques Lacan

Towards a Formal Difference in Discourse Between Žižek and Lacan If the originality of Žižek’s contribution to psychoanalytic theory is to be distinguished from the thought of Jacques Lacan, this should be done at the level of form rather than content. Although Žižek makes significant contributions to psychoanalytic thought at the level of content through the deployment of new concepts such as interpassivity, the conjunction of Lacan with the analysis of popular culture, political theory, Marx, German Idealism, and Enlightenment rationality, the singularity of Žižek’s thought with respect to Lacanian theory can be most visibly discerned at the level of the formal structure of discourse with which his theoretical and political praxis strives to engage and respond. In Žižek’s own self-understanding of his project, his thought occupies the position of the discourse of the analyst, striving to affect a separation of the master-signifier and objet a, so as to contribute to an opening of revolutionary emancipatory possibilities for both thought and engaged political praxis in response to capitalism as the universal horizon of our historical present (Žižek 2006b).1 As he remarks in the documentary Žižek!, Žižek does not see his role as one of providing the formula or answer to the question of what is to be done in response to capitalism, but rather of throwing this question back at those that ask it, those that expect an answer, reframing

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the nature of the questions and modes of political engagement that inhabit our current political field of possibilities.2 The issue, then, is not one of choosing among the various possibilities currently available in the symbolic, but rather of introducing entirely new possibilities into this field. As Žižek puts it in his brief introduction to Mao, “… in a radical revolution, people not only ‘realize their old (emancipatory, etc.) dreams’; rather they have to reinvent their very modes of dreaming” (Žižek 2007, 24). Here revolution cannot simply be situated at the level of the material, of shifts in conditions of production, but must also be situated at the level of the cultural or symbolic. Without these shifts in the symbolic, we remain tied to particular conditions of production and power, simply reproducing them in another form. At the level of form, we replace one master with another master, leaving the structure as we found it. Consequently, Žižek remarks that, There are, roughly speaking, two philosophical approaches to an antagonistic constellation of either/or: either one opts for one pole against the other (Good against Evil, freedom against oppression, morality against hedonism, etc.), or one adopts a “deeper” attitude of emphasizing the complicity of the opposites, and of advocating a proper measure or their unity. Although Hegel’s dialectic seems a version of the second approach (the “synthesis” of opposites), he opts for an unheard-of third version: the way to resolve the deadlock is to engage oneself neither in fighting for the “good” side against the “bad” one, nor in trying to bring them together in a balanced “synthesis”, but in opting for the bad side of the initial either/or. Of course, this “choice of the worst” fails, but in this failure it undermines the entire field of alternatives and thus enables us to overcome its terms. (Žižek 2007, 12)

The point here is that the either/or alternative offered by these alternatives is an ideological trap characterized by what Lacan called a “forced veil of alienation”: “Your money or your life!” Our immediate instinct is to choose the Good, freedom, and morality. Who, after all, would side with Evil, oppression, and hedonism? However, what this false alternative masks is that oppression and Evil lie on the side of the good choice, the obvious choice. In short, the choice itself functions to reinforce the reigning ideology and the way in which that ideology functions as a lure for our desire, leading us to will, as Deleuze and Guattari put it, our own oppression and slavery. In choosing the “bad choice,” the aim is not to choose hedonism, evil, and, oppression— the choice of hedonism, for example, turns out to be impossible due to the death drive and our subordination to the Law or the signifier—but rather to affect “… the inherent decentering of the interpreted text, which brings to light its ‘unthought,’ its disavowed presuppositions and consequences”

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(Žižek 2006b, ix). Here the text would be the symbolic field we inhabit in contemporary capitalism. The disavowed presuppositions and consequences would be the manner in which the “good choice” itself functions to reinforce this system of power and oppression. The activity of decentering these disavowed presuppositions would open the space of new possibilities where an act might be possible. As Žižek remarks, “… in an act, I precisely redefine the very coordinates of what I cannot and must do” (Ibid, 49). So long as these coordinates are defined for me, my action, my praxis, simply reinforces the coordinates of the reigning ideology. In the forced choice we are given the illusion of a free choice and of making a free choice, without genuinely having a choice at all. The choice was already decided from the outset. But why is this detour through short circuiting the alternatives of a false choice, of a choice that is already ideological in its essence, a necessary detour for any political praxis? This question can be answered by recourse to Lacan. As Lacan (2007, 31) remarks in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, “the idea that knowledge can make a whole is, if I may say so, immanent to the political as such… . The imaginary idea of the whole that is given by the body, as drawing on the good form of satisfaction, on what, ultimately, forms a sphere, has always been used in politics by the party of political preaching.” We can readily discern this idea of the political in Plato’s Republic, where the polis is conceived as an organic totality akin to the organic body, where all members have their properly assigned functional place, producing a harmonious organic social structure where the elements composing this social structure are also best able to find personal satisfaction. The dream here is one where personal and collective satisfaction are co-terminus with one another without any loss or sacrifice. Under this organic model, Plato is able to plot four “pathological” forms of social organization—timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny—where social disorder results from disequilibrium produced by the intervention of an excessive and unchecked desire issuing from one element of the social system and thereby disrupting the collective. Insofar as the ideological conception of the political is premised on the idea of a harmonious whole, it is necessarily grounded on a bifurcated structure of fantasy. In order to understand just why the imaginary idea of a harmonious organic totality is grounded on a bifurcated structure of fantasy, it is necessary to situate how antagonism is understood within this conception of the political. In the context of the imaginary conception of the political, antagonism is understood as an accidental feature of the social, rather than constitutive structure of social relations. On the one hand, harmonious organic totality without antagonism is understood to be a possibility for social structures. On

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the other hand, any antagonism unsettling the social formation is understood to be something that, in principle, could be removed and as something that besets the system from the outside. For example, the desires that unsettle the social realm in the case of timocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and tyranny are not intrinsic or structural features of the social as such, but are pathological disruptions produced by unbalanced desires that could be removed thereby producing a harmonious social world.3 By contrast, one of Žižek’s fundamental claims is that antagonism is not an accidental feature of the social, but rather a structural feature of the social as such. Žižek articulates the reason for this very nicely in The Parallax View when he observes that, … a system of pure differentiality (a system totally defined by the differential structure of its elements, with no antagonism and/or impossibility traversing it) would lead to a pure equivalence of all its elements—they are all equivalent with regard to the void of the Outside; and, at the other extreme, a system of radical antagonism with no structure at all, just the pure opposition of Us and Them, would coincide with a naturalized difference between Us and Them as the positively existing opposed species… . What we need to do is to take a step further from this external opposition (or mutual reliance) into direct internalized overlapping, which means:  not only does on pole, when abstracted from the other and thus brought to the extreme, coincide with its opposite, but there is no “primordial” duality of poles in the first place, only the inherent gap of the One. Equivalence is primordially not the opposite of difference; equivalence emerges only because no system of differences can ever complete itself, it “is” a structural effect of incompleteness. The tension between immanence and transcendence is thus secondary with regard to the gap within immanence itself: “transcendence” is a kind of perspective illusion, the way we (mis)perceive the gap/discord that inheres to immanence itself. In the same way, the tension between the Same and the Other is secondary with regard to the noncoincidence of the Same with itself. (Žižek 2006b, 38)

The key point to draw from this passage is that 1) every system is necessarily structurally incomplete, and 2) that any One differs not simply from others, but differs first and foremost from itself. On the one hand, if the One, for example a mark or signifier, must necessarily differ from itself, if it can never attain coincidence or equivalence with itself, then this is because the mark can only function as a mark insofar as it differs from its place of inscription. Numbers, for example, could not count things were they not simultaneously identical to themselves and different from themselves. For, if they did not contain difference within themselves, how would it be possible for them to stand for something else? Similarly, signifiers could not signify, but would themselves become dumb, mute, sonorous objects as in the case of psychosis if they did not simultaneously differ from themselves. The net result of this

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is that any identity or One necessarily contains a gap or discord within it that prevents it from attaining identity with itself. If, by contrast, no system of differences can attain completeness, then this is by virtue of that property of the signifier such that the signifier can never signify itself (Lacan 1966:  Seminar of 16 Nov.). In order to signify, every signifier must necessarily refer to another signifier. As such, the signifiers that belong to the set of signifiers have the property of being sets that do not belong to themselves, thereby fulfilling the requirements of Russell’s paradox pertaining to the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Were the signifier to signify itself, then it would violate this principle prohibiting self-membership. Were this set not to contain itself, it would again cease to be the set of all such sets. The consequence is that there can be no complete set of signifiers. The consequence of these two features of the signifier is that antagonism is a structural feature of any social organization. Antagonism is not an accidental feature that disturbs social organization from the outside, but is instead intrinsic to the organization itself. The organic totality is always already Other to itself, and identity always already differs from itself. If, then, the idea of the political premised on the idea of an imaginary organic whole or totality is necessarily grounded on fantasy, then this is because fantasy comes to cover over this traumatic antagonism, this structural impossibility of unification and self-identity, at the heart of social structures as a constitutive feature of these structures by transforming a constitutive wound into an accidental wound. Put otherwise, fantasy transforms a lack into a loss. A  lack is an ineradicable absence that can never be surmounted, while loss implies the possibility that we both once had something and that we can regain that thing. Fantasy functions as a supplement, surmounting this gap or deadlock at the heart of identity and the One; first, by providing a schema of harmonious totality that we either once had in the case of nostalgic political discourses about the decline and fall of civilization, or by proposing a utopian future; second, by proposing a cause for the disturbances preventing harmonious totality:  the Jews, terrorists, single welfare mothers, blacks, gangs, Hollywood, etc. (for a more detailed treatment of this logic, see Bryant forthcoming). As such, the subject in the grips of this structure of fantasy ends up tilting at windmills, failing to get at the “real” of antagonism. If, then, a detour through the coordinates of the symbolic is necessary, if it is necessary to “decenter” these disavowed presuppositions and consequences, then this is because we must be brought before the constitutive structure of antagonism premised on the “not-all” of the social. It is only then that non-self-defeating political engagement becomes possible. Žižek, along with thinkers like Badiou, Laclau, and

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Ranciere can be seen as proposing a politics grounded in the not-all, the non-existence of the One, the Real, as opposed to one based on the idea of imaginary wholeness. But what does any of this have to do with the form of the discourse or set of social relations with which Žižek engages? While there is a kernel of truth in Žižek’s self-characterization of his theoretico-politico praxis in terms of the discourse of the analyst revealing the castration at work beneath the discourse of the master and university, the letter of his text suggests something quite different. Indeed, the letter of his text even suggests a critique of the relevance of Lacan’s four discourses to our contemporary historical moment. Expressing this point in “Hegelese,” it could be said that Žižek in-himself is quite different than Žižek as he is for-himself. As Lacan remarks, “… it is not at all self-evident that all knowledge, by virtue of being known, is known as knowledge” (Lacan 2007, 30). In this context, Žižek “for-himself” would be the commentary he gives on his own project, how he understands that project, and how he articulates what it is that he is doing. Put differently, this would be Žižek as he is conscious of himself and his work. By contrast, the letter of Žižek’s text, what that text is in-itself, would be the knowledge at work in this text that is known without being known as knowledge. What comes into relief in reading Žižek in this way is that his thought profoundly deepens and expands the work of Lacan. More specifically, Žižek’s thought, as I  will try to show later, does not inhabit the discourse of the analyst at all—nor any of the other three discourses explored by Lacan (see Verhaeghe 1999, 95–118)—but rather, is a very precise cartography of an entirely new universe of discourse,4 that strives to uncover the structures governing the new discourses that populate this new universe of discourse, their constitutive deadlocks, and how it might be possible to politically engage this universe of social relations. On the one hand, Žižek can be understood as tracing the consequences of the collapse of the universe of mastery explored by Lacan in his four discourses.5 On the other hand, Žižek can thus be understood as engaging the form of social relations that have emerged in the shadow of this universe of discourse: the discourse of the capitalist, the discourse of biopower, the discourse of immaterial labor, and the discourse or form of social relation to which Žižek’s own text belongs, the discourse of critical theory.

The Discourse of the Capitalist: Production and Consumption In his address to the University of Milan in Italy (Lacan 1972, 6), Lacan introduced a fifth discourse in addition to the four discourses first put forth in Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. The fifth discourse introduced

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by Lacan is there referred to as the “discourse of the capitalist,” and is found by inverting the position of truth and the agent in the discourse of the master (Figure 9.1). The argument of this paper is that Žižek’s political and philosophical project is characterized by an engagement with the universe of discourse following from the discourse of the capitalist, rather than the discourse of mastery explored by Lacan. Since Žižek himself nowhere, to my knowledge, mentions the discourse of the capitalist in these precise structural terms, this thesis is to be established through the structure of Žižek’s own texts and interpretations of social, cultural, and political formations. I leave it to readers to determine whether this organization of Žižek’s politico-theoretico praxis does not better lay bare the structure behind his thought as well as the social symptoms with which he is trying to engage and to which he is trying to respond, then the discourse of the master, the discourse of the hysteric, the discourse of the hysteric, and the discourse of the analyst. Lacan tells us precious little about just how the discourse of the capitalist is to be understood. Significantly we are told that the discourse of the capitalist has come to replace the discourse of the master (Ibid, 10–11). This echoes a claim Lacan had already made in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, where he hints that the discourse of the master has largely disappeared (Lacan 2007, 24). As such, discourses should not be understood as eternal Platonic forms characterizing all social relations, but rather as historical entities that cometo-be and pass-away in time. Thus, for example, not only does the discourse of the master disappear, but the discourse of the analyst only comes into existence at the beginning of the 20th century. This raises the question of the relationship between the four discourses populating any universe of discourse. For example, if the discourse of the master is now in a state of decline and disappearance, does this entail that the other discourses populating this universe—the discourse of the hysteric, university, and analyst—are also endangered? As we shall see, there is reason to believe that this is precisely what we are witnessing today.

Impossibility S2

→

$ →

→

S1

a

//

6

Impotence

Figure 9.1.  The Discourse of the Capitalist.

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In addition to being told that the discourse of the capitalist has come to replace the discourse of the master, we are also told that it is the most ingenious discourse or social relation ever devised (Lacan 1972). However, despite all of its ingeniousness, Lacan (1972, 11) remarks that “it is no less headed for a blowout. This is because it is untenable. It is untenable … in a thing that I could explain to you … because capitalist discourse is here, you see … [indicates the formula on the board] … a little inversion simply between the S1 and $ … which is the subject … it suffices to the extent that it runs as if on a roulette wheel, but it runs too fast, it consumes, it consumes so well that it consumes itself.” In claiming that the discourse of the capitalist is headed for a blowout due to its own internal contradictions, Lacan appears to be endorsing the standard Marxist account where contradictions between production and distribution lead toward the implosion of capitalist modes of production. However, in speaking of consumption as lying at the heart of capitalism, Lacan also seems to be speaking of consumer culture as central to how capitalism functions. My suggestion is that Lacan’s formula for capitalism should be read as simultaneously representing the structure of capitalist consumption and production. By virtue of the form of impossibility and impotence that this particular structure of discourse or the social relation generates, it will be seen that a number of social symptoms emerge characteristic of our historical moment, the horizon of political engagement in our time, and characteristic of Žižek’s analysis of capitalism as it functions in late modernity.

The Dynamics of Production First the structure of production in the discourse of the capitalist:  Unlike the discourse of the master where objet a in the position of production is produced by the servant (S2) for the master’s consumption or enjoyment, the discourse of the capitalist does not aim at producing an object for the subject ($) to enjoy or consume, but rather aims at endless accumulation, production of surplus-value, and capital that can then be re-invested in the next cycle of production so that the system can expand even more. To put this difference in rather literal terms, in the discourse of the master the Monarch (S1) commands the servant (S2) to produce either the object he desires or the knowledge he wants as in the case of the slave in Plato’s Meno, which the Monarch then consumes. By contrast, in the discourse of the capitalist, the worker ($) sets knowledge, technology, and know-how (S2) to work which is then appropriated by the owner of the means of production (either the owner of the company or the shareholders in the form of S1) which is procured not

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for the sake of the owner’s consumption, but rather for the sake of reinvestment to produce yet more capital that is then reinvested in the next cycle to produce yet more capital. Unlike the discourse of the master, then, the discourse of the capitalist is premised on constant expansion. Thus, as Deleuze and Guattari argue in Anti-Oedipus, the capitalist machine differs from the savage machine and the despotic machine in that the latter carefully guard against accumulation, expansion, and anything that deviates from the codes governing these territories, whereas capitalism feeds itself through constant expansion, constantly decodes or pulls apart existing social codes, and integrates anything that deviates from existing social codes into the system of capitalism to produce new markets. In the savage machine everything goes to the community as a whole, while in the despotic machine everything goes to the despot. By contrast, in the capitalist machine everything is reinvested in the machine itself so that it might continue to expand. If the divided subject ($) now appears in the position of the agent, then this is because the agents of production under capitalism are now workers who are themselves commodities on the market. In short, the agent of production in the discourse of the capitalist does not own his own labor, but sells his labor to someone else, the owners of the means of production (S1), in return for a wage. While the worker is free to sell his labor to any capitalist he might like, in all but the most exceptional circumstances the worker does not have the freedom to not sell his labor at all simply by virtue of the necessity of being able to survive and live. If, then, this subject is a divided subject, then this is because 1) the worker produces more value than he is given for his labor (the famous “surplus-value”), and 2) because the value of the worker’s labor as a commodity is not determined by the worker himself, but rather by competition among other workers also selling their labor as a commodity as well as by the degree of technological development characterizing production. Thus as Marx had already observed in his unpublished Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, labor increasingly comes to be experienced as something outside of life as it is something that belongs to someone else, and life is experienced as beginning when the work day ends. The upper level of the social relation in the discourse of the capitalist is characterized by impossibility in two ways. First, as Marx observed, capitalism must perpetually revolutionize the means of production by virtue of competition between different sites of production. Consequently, the relationship between workers ($) and know-how, technology, and science never exists in a steady-state, but is always characterized by instability such that last year’s modes of production need to be updated this year so that production might remain competitive with other businesses. As such, part of the capital

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produced must always be reinvested in training, the development of new knowledge, and the development of new technologies. This is part of what makes the discourse of the capitalist, in Lacan’s words, the cleverest discourse ever devised as it is forced to perpetually recreate itself. However, the net result of this competition is that the market can never entirely be mastered so as to establish perfect production. Part of this dynamic, of course, entails that if the production of surplus-value is to be maximized, wages for labor must increasingly decline to maximize the production of surplus-value and ensure competitiveness, such that the gap between those that own the means of production and workers becomes increasingly large. Here is one of the ways in which the discourse of the capitalist is “headed for a blowout,” for production also requires distribution, and distribution requires subjects capable of affording commodities. Yet where wages increasingly decline, it becomes more and more difficult for workers to afford commodities, thereby leading to a decline in the production of surplus-value. So far this problem has been managed by “uneven geographical development,” where commodities are produced by less developed countries and distributed among wealthier countries, such that the less developed countries gradually become more affluent, while the developed countries spiral into decline, thereby insuring the emergence of new zones of underdevelopment where cheap labor again becomes available for the newly developed markets. Second, the relationship between the worker ($) and know-how, technology, and science (S2) is characterized by impossibility insofar as it is plagued by inefficiency and waste. As Marx observed in Grundrisse, “[t]‌he act of production is … in all its moments also an act of consumption” (Marx 1973:  90). In the process of production, raw material is used up, energy is consumed, machines and tools are worn out, effectively consuming the means by which commodities are produced. Similarly, workers do not implement their labor with maximal efficiency, they get sick, they must take restroom and smoke breaks, they chat and gossip, they play computer games on company time, there is miscommunication between the various levels of the factory, and all the rest. It is for this reason that factories and businesses are constantly compelled to search for more efficient modes of production, either through constant job training—in “Postscript of the Society of Control” Deleuze will argue that today we are never “done” with anything, but must undergo endless training and modulation—or studies to determine how time wasted can be minimized and labor maximized. This is a pattern that has now even entered pedagogical theory and the organization of the curricula of secondary schools and universities in the “education” of students.

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The relationship between the owners of the means of production and surplus-value is similarly characterized by impotence for two reasons: On the one hand, as David Harvey somewhere observes, capitalists (S1) are not necessarily wicked people consciously bent on exploiting workers or divesting them of the value of their labor. The capitalist might very well wish to occupy the position of the master, simply enjoying the fruits of his business. However, the capitalist does not exist in a vacuum as a solitary individual, but rather exist in a market characterized by many other capitalists all in competition with one another. If we read the relationship between the capitalist (S1) and profit (a) on the lower level of Lacan’s formula as the desire to master profit, then this relation is characterized by impotence insofar as the capitalist must perpetually reinvest the capital his business produces so as to remain in business and be competitive with other businesses. In short, the capitalist never produces a sufficient amount of capital to halt this endless cycle or develop a stable system at equilibrium. The dynamics of reinvestment thus emerge immanently within the system of capital, and not as the result of the desire of any particular individual. On the other hand, the relationship between the capitalist (S1) and what is produced in this discourse (a) can be read not as profit or commodities, but rather in terms of waste or remainders. The capitalist seeks to master the market, but within the system of capitalism something always escapes either at the level of production, as we have already seen, or at the level of new groups and social formations with desires that fall outside of the current commodities being produced. Faced with these “deterritorializations” or “lines of flight,” the capitalist is perpetually compelled to produce new commodities so as to reintegrate these elements of the social field that have escaped the current system of distribution. This entails new modes of production, which, in turn, require the investment of additional capital. Here we again encounter the fundamental difference between what Deleuze and Guattari call the “capitalist machine,” and the savage and despotic social machines. The latter carefully police and destroy any deviation from the social codes (identities, social positions, practices) inhabiting the social territory. The aim is to insure the continuance of the machine according to the same code. By contrast, the capitalist machine embraces these deviations from existing social codes, turning them into new markets. It is not Hollywood or godless secular humanists that destroy traditional values, but the dynamics of capitalism itself that perpetually produces new markets and which reduces the sole value to the monetary value where all calculation becomes simply a question of whether or not a profit can be made. We shall see later how additional discourses or social relations emerge within the universe of capitalism to both create these new markets and manage waste and inefficiency that emerges within this system of

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production. This impotence and impossibility transforms the discourse of the capitalist into a perpetual motion machine, seeking to respond to these deadlocks that inhabit the machine, accounting for why capitalism repeats in the way that it does. This is both the success of capitalism and its perpetual failure. Or as Deleuze and Guattari constantly remind us, capitalism functions only by breaking down. It is this endless breakdown that constitutes the specifically Lacanian real of capitalism.

The Dynamics of Consumption Just as the discourse of the capitalist can be read in terms of the specificity of capitalist production, it can also be read in terms of distribution and consumption. However, here the signification of the variables populating the discourse of the capitalist—S1, S2, $, and a—take on a somewhat different meaning. A good deal of Žižek’s work has focused on precisely this aspect of the discourse of the capitalist. From the standpoint of consumption, it is now the desiring subject ($), the consumer, that appears in the position of the agent. One of the central claims of Lacanian psychoanalysis is that all subjects are characterized by insatiable desire, distinct from need and demand. Need is something that disappears when satisfied. Demand is a request addressed to another for a specific object. For example, the child cries for milk. However, because the demand is expressed to another, over the course of development the object demanded also gets bound up with love insofar as receiving the object from the other comes to be experienced as a sign of being loved or unloved. By contrast, desire, as understood by Lacan, is not a desire for a specific object, but is an insatiable desire that is not precisely sure of what it desires. It desires something for which there is no object. Lacan argues that desire is what remains when need is subtracted from demand. In short, it is the dimension of love in relation to the Other, where this love is not itself an object. As Lacan sometimes puts it, “desire desires to desire”, or “desire desires an unsatisfied desire,” or “desire is a desire for an impossible desire.” Indeed, one way of reading Lacan’s notorious aphorism that “desire is the desire of the Other” would be that desire always desires something other. If desire takes on this insatiable, endless quality in which it seeks only to perpetuate itself, then this is because, according to Lacan, an ineradicable lack is introduced into the biological individual once that individual is subjected to the signifier. Insofar as language introduces an a priori lack into our being (a), the subject is perpetually searching for this lost object without ever being able to find any actual or empirical object that would plug up the lack. Not

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only is there no object that would be capable of filling this lack, but, since the lack is a lack of something that never existed to begin with—it is a retroactive effect of our introduction into language—the subject characterized by this lack or desire never knows what, precisely, it is that he desires. As Žižek occasionally points out, the question of desire is not “what do I desire?” but rather the self-reflexive question of “what should I desire?” In other words, given the infinite plurality of objects that exist, how does the subject choose among this infinity of objects? In fact, contends Lacan, this question is not a question about objects, but a question of those conditions under which the subject might be desired by the Other (yet another way in which the aphorism “desire is the desire of the Other” can be understood). Thus we might, for example, take on the desires of our beloved, developing a taste for particular types of music, novels, texts of theory, activities, commodities, etc., not because we directly desire these things but because, in desiring these things, we capture the desire of the Other. Similarly, the young child is keenly attentive to its parents, noticing when they delight in its various activities, speculating that he captures the desire of the Other by enjoying the strawberries so much. In other words, we look to the Other to determine what it is that we should desire, which is precisely what Lacan understands by the fundamental fantasy. Fantasy is not so much the desire for a particular thing or scenario that one imagines, but rather is a frame through which we fill out the opaque and enigmatic desire of the Other, providing ourselves with a structure through which we might become desirable to the Other. Through fantasy the subject strives to convert the enigmatic desire of the Other into a determinate demand from the Other that can then be satisfied or thwarted. Traversing the fantasy lies in discovering that the Other itself is barred, desiring, castrated, divided. Or, in less dramatic terms, that the Other itself does not know what it desires. In the domain of consumption, the discourse of the capitalist takes advantage of this insatiable structure of desire, insuring that commodity consumption is an infinite domain that can never be fully satisfied. As Lacan remarks in “Radiophonie,” capitalism is “the extensive, hence insatiable, production of a lack of jouissance” (quoted in Leupin 2004: 74). In other words, in a manner not dissimilar to Baudrillard’s analysis of symbolic-value (in distinction from use-value, exchange-value, and surplus-value) in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, capitalism perpetually manufactures lack and therefore desire, thereby insuring that commodity consumption continues despite the satisfaction of essential needs.6 In early works like The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Marx had seemed to suggest that capitalism would eventually find itself exhausted by virtue of filling all the commodity

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niches defined by essential needs, such that its ability to produce profit and expand would stagnate. However, all of this changes with the addition of symbolic-values, where the object of desire no longer corresponds to the satisfaction of an essential need, but instead becomes a stake in social struggles for prestige and recognition. Later Marx in the unpublished Grundrisse and Capital clearly recognizes these forms of desire, while still maintaining an internal dynamic at work in capitalism between production and distribution that tends to point in the direction of implosion. When approached from the angle of consumption, the agent of the discourse of the capitalist is occupied by the desiring subject ($) that does not know what it is that she desires and who thereby addresses herself to “knowledge” (S2) in the form of advertising, media, experts, talk-shows, fashion shows, home decorating shows, etc., to learn what a proper subject ought to desire. Insofar as the constitutive desire characterizing the divided subject is an insatiable desire without any object, insofar as it is premised on an ineradicable lack, the product of this discourse is now a remainder haunting the consumption of any commodity, not unlike the disappointment experienced by the protagonist of Joyce’s story “Araby” in Dubliners upon finally visiting the bazaar to procure a gift for his love interest, only to discover that it is filled with cheap and gaudy baubles and trinkets. In short, the commodity never delivers the satisfaction or jouissance promised in the glossy pages of magazine advertisements where we are presented with a sexy and exciting world populated by fulfilling romantic and social relationships, but rather is always surrounded by a halo of disappointment in which unrequited desire painfully persists. In the position of truth we find the master-signifier (S1) as the motor behind the divided subject. However, here, the master-signifier is no longer to be understood as the capitalist who has bought the worker’s labor, but rather as the ferocious super-ego. As articulated by Lacan, the super-ego does not so much prohibit, as command us to Enjoy! On the one hand, this commandment to Enjoy! issues from the incompleteness of the Law or prohibition in telling us what it is we are to do. As such, the Law is always supplemented by a shadowy and obscene double of the Law characterized by the commandment to transgress. As Paul had already observed in Romans 7:7: “What shall we say, then? Is the law sin? Certainly not! Indeed, I would not have known what sin was except through the law. For I would not have known what coveting really was if the law had not said, ‘Do not covet.’ But sin, seizing the opportunity afforded by the commandment, produced in me every kind of covetous desire. For apart from law, sin is dead.” The point here is not that the relationship between Law and sin is like the relationship between the Yin and the

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Yang where you cannot have one without the other, but rather that the very prohibition creates or produces the desire for that which is prohibited. Here the Law is either experienced by the subject as a sadistic jouissance enjoyed by the dispenser of the Law in exacting his command, as in the case of Joseph K. in The Trial where he discovers pornographic pictures in the books of the law at the courthouse; or the subject experiences himself as compelled to procure jouissance through transgression. The point not to be missed is that the jouissance commanded by the superego is not necessarily the subject’s jouissance. For example, both the sadist and the masochist experience themselves as procuring jouissance for the Other, not for themselves. Likewise, the petty bureaucrat or subordinate soldier often seems to understand herself as a tool of the Other’s jouissance, committing the most horrific acts in the name of the Other’s jouissance (where the Other here might be History, the Movement, the Cause, the Organization, etc.). However, while Žižek often comments on this obscene shadow law that always accompanies the public law and sustains that law, he also suggests that today the superego commands us to directly enjoy in a way that is not simply a desire for transgression produced as a by-product of the law.7 To illustrate this point, Žižek often has recourse to the difference between the classical Oedipal father and the so-called “postmodern father.” In the case of the classical Oedipal father we are commanded to go to our grandmother’s whether we like it or not. No provision is made as to whether or not we are required to enjoy this visit, only that we are commanded to go. Here, should we wish to contest this claim, the target is clear. The subject can enter into the discourse of the hysteric and contest the totalitarian father, resisting his despotic command. By contrast, the postmodern father does not command us to visit our grandmother, but says “whether or not you go to your grandmother’s is entirely up to you, but if you do go, you must enjoy it!” In this scenario, the subject is directly commanded to enjoy. Moreover, this structure is far more insidious in that it is no longer clear how resistance is possible. If I choose not to go am I resisting my father? What is it that he desires? Does he desire me to go or not? If I do not go, have I disappointed my father? I do not really wish to go, so in going I am betraying my desire, giving way on my desire, and thereby must pretend to enjoy the visit. In short, any choice we make seems to generate guilt. Everywhere we look, commodity consumer society seems to command enjoyment, such that if we are not enjoying we are somehow falling short or failing. However, this is internal to the very nature of the superego. The paradox of the superego is that the more you obey the superego, the more anxiety and guilt you experience. This is clear in the case of the superego

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producing the desire for transgression for, even if it only occurs in thought, the very attempt to conform to the Law produces the shadow thought of the transgression violating the Law. In the case of a direct command to enjoy, guilt arises insofar as the subject betrays his desire in condescending to enjoyment (desire becomes entangled in specific objects). Additionally, the more the subject obeys the superegoic command to enjoy, the more ferocious and demanding the superego becomes, commanding more!, more!, more! Here, then, lies the compulsive character behind consumerism. Moreover, if the consumer capitalist superego commands enjoyment, and if obeying this command necessarily generates guilt, this might account for the comparative rise in depressive and anxiety disorders in recent history. In light of the foregoing, it now becomes possible to see how the discourse of the capitalist functions to (re)produce consumption within the system of capitalism. On the one hand, this discourse is characterized by impossibility on the upper level of the discourse or social relation insofar as the relationship between the desiring subject ($) and knowledge in the form of experts, advertising, home decorating and cooking shows, etc., is never able to successfully name the subject’s desire. This is due first to the fact that the command of the superego (S1) in the position of truth is insatiable, such that no commodity is equal to it, but also, second, it is due to the fact that the desire inhabiting the subject is a desire without an object, such that no commodity ever adequately responds to what is desired in desire. Indeed, the pursuit of commodities marks an increasing alienation and betrayal of desire. Perhaps this is one reason that many extremely wealthy people nonetheless seem so dissatisfied. On the other hand, this discourse is characterized by impotence on the lower level of the discourse insofar as the remainder (a) produced by the failure of the commodity to satisfy desire is never adequate to the ferocious command of the superego (S1), such that the more the subject tries to respond to the superegoic command to Enjoy!, the more demanding the superego becomes. In this way, the discourse of the capitalist when viewed from the angle of consumption functions as a perpetual motion machine insofar as the subject is led to endlessly pursue new and different commodities in the elusive quest to finally find that object of desire that would complete the subject, but also to quiet the insatiable and guilt producing commands of the superego. As a result, the subject endlessly pursues new commodities even when all the subject’s needs are satisfied. In this connection it could be said that one of the central problems of Žižek’s thought is that of how to disentangle desire from the superegoic command to enjoy. Insofar as commodity consumption is one of the central supports of the capitalist dynamic, no effective political engagement with the dynamics

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of capitalism is possible until the subject discovers that the solution to its constitutive lack does not reside in commodities.

Consequences and Symptoms of the Decline of the Master and the Rise of the Universe of Capitalism In Lacan Today, Alexandre Leupin observes that “the Master’s discourse is … the formalization of politics itself, to which philosophy serves as a help by giving it the ‘reason’ to justify totalization” (Leupin 2004, 71–2). In the discourse of the master, the master-signifier (S1) appears in the position of the agent, acting on or addressing knowledge (S2) (Figure 9.2). Here we should exercise caution with respect to Leupin’s universalizing statements and his suggestion that the discourse of the master is the only form that either politics or philosophy can take. One of the burning questions of Lacanian inflected political theory such as we find in thinkers like Žižek and Badiou would be that of whether or not it is possible to think a politics of the real or impossibility and constitutive incompleteness, rather than a politics premised on imaginary totalization. I will return to this question later when I address the discourse of critical theory. For the moment, if it is true that the discourse of the master is one formalization of politics, then certain consequences follow from the disappearance of the discourse of the master and its replacement by the discourse of the capitalist. Can we discern these consequences in Žižek’s analysis of our contemporary historic moment? To address this question it is first necessary to unfold just how the discourse of the master is a formalization of the imaginary politics of totalization. When the discourse of the master is thought as a formalization of politics, we are to understand the leader or ideology (S1) totalizing the disparate elements that make up the social totality (S2) in an attempt to form an organic social totality. For example, we have the master-signifier “United States” organizing the totality of people living in the United States into a totality, presenting the illusion of a unified group. Likewise, a charismatic Impossibility S1

S2

//

a

→

→

→

$

Impotence

Figure 9.2.  The Discourse of the Master.

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leader functions to surmount the differences between all of the followers, creating the illusion that all those following the leader or the movement are the same. In structuring social relations in this way, the master-signifier produces stability within the elements composing the social field (S2). Even though the social field is riddled with differences, antagonisms, and contradictions, the master-signifier provides the illusion, the semblance, that unanimity exists and that these antagonisms and contradictions are illusions. Thus, when the master-signifier is treated as a person’s proper name, the illusion is produced that the person is a man of his word and that all the utterances that person makes point back to an identical person defined by identical intentions. Likewise, when the master-signifier is treated as God, morality and Law are seen as firm and fixed, based on a solid foundation. Descartes and Einstein both have recourse to God in order to establish the orderliness of the laws of physics despite the appearance of perpetual anomalies (a) we encounter at the level of experience (in the case of Descartes, it is necessary to show that God is not a deceiver so that we might trust our clear and distinct ideas, while in the case of Einstein, he appeals to God as the divine orderer of the universe who does not play dice). Such would be true of Newton’s conception of God as well. Even Laplace evokes the idea of a perspective outside of the universe (S1) wherein all of the causal interactions might be observed with perfect knowledge from their initial state, when famously responding to Napoleon’s query as to where God falls in his mechanistic system. Likewise, when someone evokes the dictionary as an immutable authority on what words mean, the dictionary functions as a master-signifier, as an uncastrated authority, that can pin down the play of meaning despite the bewildering complexity and resourcefulness of language in creating meaning through context and surprising conjunctions of signifiers. Finally, in the Oedipal structure, the name-ofthe-father (S1), creates the illusion that the opaque desire of the mother or caregiver can be named and pinned down, giving it a determinate structure. It is, of course, true that despite the attempts of the discourse of the master to form a totality, a remainder (a) is always produced that eludes the structuration of that totality. Something always falls away and fails to fit within the totality. However, the crucial point is that in the discourse of the master, this remainder is not treated as something that necessarily fails to fit, but rather is treated as an accident disrupting the totality, coming from the outside, which can be eradicated. In other words, the totality is treated as sound and true, such that the anomaly is treated as an accident rather than a structural feature of any and all attempted totalities. What makes such an assertion of belief (in the essential goodness of mankind; in the truly human character of the Soviet regime) sublime is the very gap

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between it and the overwhelming factual evidence against it, that is, the active will to disavow the actual state of things. Perhaps therein lies the most elementary meta-physical gesture: in this refusal to accept the Real in its idiocy, to disavow it and to search for Another World behind it. (Žižek 1999, 323–4)

This other world, of course, is the world of logos, of the world as an orderly place despite appearances to the contrary. Thus the Nazi’s, for example, do not treat the remainder as a structural feature of their attempt to form an organic society, as a structural antagonism at the heart of any and every organized system, but as the accidental and disruptive figure of the Jew, such that once the Jew is eradicated, the totality aimed at will finally be formed. Likewise, the Newtonians do not treat the anomalies in the orbit of the planet Mercury as a failure of the totalization of Newton’s laws of motion, but instead work from the premise that there must be some hidden body that would account for these anomalies within the framework of Newtonian physics. The truth of the discourse of the master is, of course, that the relationship between the master-signifier and knowledge is always impossible—that it is structurally impossible to form a totality for the reasons outlined in the first section of this paper—and that the relationship between the divided subject and the remainder is impotent in that the subject is forever unable to surmount his own split ($). The object produced (a) by this discourse is never the object commanded due to the fact that all communication is miscommunication; or, alternatively, all discourse produces a remainder that cannot be integrated into the system. It is due to both this impossibility and this impotence that the discourse of the master perpetually repeats, always striving to attain totality or completeness and integrate the remainder in the subject so as to finally, at last, surmount the subject’s lack, without ever being able to accomplish this task. Nonetheless, as Jacques-Alain Miller observes, the fact that the Other does not exist—that the master-signifier cannot form a totality out of the battery of signifiers—does not prevent the Other from functioning (Miller 2008). That is, those within the universe of the master continue to believe that totality is the true nature of things despite appearances to the contrary. When, for example, a political party fails, the followers of that party do not explain this failure as a result of the fundamental bankruptcy of the party’s governing philosophy, but as an accident of the insufficiencies of those who happened to be in charge. If, then, the discourse of the master is in a state of decline and disappearance, we can expect to witness the disappearance of a certain type of politics as well as a crisis of a particular set of social relations insofar as the discourse of that master is that discourse that strives to produce totalization and insofar as this discourse is what establishes the illusion that these social relations are

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stable and grounded despite appearances. For example, it is only insofar as the name-of-the-father (S1) is “that signifier that represents the signifier for all the other signifiers” that language takes on the appearance of having fixed meanings. Should this signifier fail to be operative as in the case of psychosis, the battery of signifiers (S2) falls apart into a chaos where words are no longer distinguished from things and where meaning can no longer be pinned on a higher authority. Something similar happens in the domain of the political. On the one hand, we can expect a disappearance of grand totalizing political projects. On the other hand, we can expect the decline or disappearance of protest politics premised on the discourse of the hysteric, where the various figures occupying the position of the master-signifier are challenged by the divided subject ($). Finally, we can expect a crisis of the stability of social ties, such that these ties become precarious and are approached with cynicism. Closely related to this, if the decline of the discourse of the master is not simply a fall into social psychosis but the emergence of a new form of social relations, we can expect that other discourses, other social relations, will emerge to respond to the precariousness of the contemporary social structure. In one form or another, in places two numerous to cite, we witness Žižek both analyzing this historical situation and seeking to discern solutions to the problems resulting from this disappearance of the discourse of the master. At the center of this engagement is the question of how politics is possible in an age that appears “post-political.” Indeed, this is a question that preoccupies an entire range of thinkers from Badiou, to Ranciere, to Laclau and Mouffe, to Deleuze and Guattari. This anxiety appears to arise from inhabiting a set of social relations where it is no longer clear just where the enemy is and where the social field itself has come to appear de-politicized—the market, for example, is described in terms akin to meteorological phenomena rather than as a site of political struggle. The decline of the discourse of the master and the consequences of this decline have been a persistent theme throughout Žižek’s work, but these points are developed with particular clarity in “Wither Oedipus,” the concluding chapter of The Ticklish Subject. There Žižek notes that the Oedipus—one form the discourse of the master takes—is in a state of decline, and outlines a whole host of social symptoms that follow from this shift in social relations. It is worth noting that this decline is not restricted to the family structure, but can be discerned in a variety of structures organized around the function of the master, ranging from the declining efficiency (or trust) in political leaders, to Nietzsche’s famous death of God, to the manner in which grand ideological signifiers seem to have lost their efficiency. Setting aside Žižek’s own account of just why the Oedipus is in

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a state of decline, this collapse was already famously recognized by Marx in the Manifesto. The bourgeoisie, historically, has played the most revolutionary part. The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, then callous “cash payment.” It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervor, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom—Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political institutions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. (Marx and Engels 1998, 53)

Throughout this passage Marx outlines the manner in which capitalism has targeted all those elements of social formation premised on the discourse of the master (religion, patriarchy, idyllic relations or society as an organic totality, feudal ties, “natural superiors,” etc.). On the one hand, the discourse of the capitalist transforms agents into individuals rather than members of a social organism insofar as the subject no longer has a place in a “natural social order,” but is instead a subject that sells his labor as a commodity on the market, in competition with other workers. As a consequence, I no longer see myself as a part of the divine clockwork of the social order working alongside my fellows, but rather as an individual in competition with these others. Rather than seeking to promote shared social aims or working in a community in obedience to the will of God, I now pursue my own self-interest. On the other hand, the discourse of the capitalist introduces a universal value: the pursuit of profit. All things come to be measured in terms of this value, such that it becomes possible to relinquish traditional values when they do not accord with the pursuit of profit. For this reason, traditional forms of political organization premised on symbolic power as in the case of monarchy begin to collapse, for when measured against the profit motive they fail to hold up. As Marx puts it, “[a]‌ll that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life and his relations with his kind” (Ibid: 54). Where the aristocracy cannot keep up with the pursuit of capital, they stand in the way of other capitalists pursuing capital and are therefore quickly toppled due to both their dependence on the bourgeoisie and their growing irrelevance. The old supports of their authority or power premised on myths and narratives about

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divine right begin to fall one by one as they are measured against the new universal set of values: the pursuit of egoistic self-interest. Where before these myths held and were sufficient to explain why a king was a king, a peasant a peasant, psycho-social critiques of monarchial power begin to emerge such as we find in Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, Diderot, Voltaire, Nietzsche, etc., where myth comes to be seen as myth, and where these narratives are understood as cynical, self-interested mechanisms for maintaining power. Thrasymachus is redeemed. It is for this reason that the divided subject ($) comes to appear in the position of the agent, replacing the position formerly enjoyed by the master (S1); for this is the subject pursuing naked self-interest. Likewise, all of the old master-signifiers begin to topple one by one. Insofar as self-interest now becomes the universal motive, master-signifiers such as the Good, Nation, Justice, Freedom, etc., increasingly come to be viewed with suspicion as veiled rhetorical maneuvers for power and the interest of one group over another. As Deleuze and Guattari observe, premised on their thesis that the unconscious is social prior to being individual and familial, this shift comes to pervade all levels of the social sphere, including the family. From this historical shift, Žižek draws a number of consequences, two of which I shall focus on here. First, as a result of the decline of the discourse of the master, Žižek argues that we witness a decline of what he calls “symbolic efficiency.” As explained by Žižek, “ ‘[s]‌ymbolic efficiency’ thus concerns the point at which, when the Other of the symbolic institution confronts me with the choice of ‘Whom do you believe, my word or your eyes?’, I choose the Other’s word without hesitation, dismissing the factual testimony of my eyes” (Žižek 1999, 327). It will be recalled that the discourse of the master serves an ordering function for the multitude of floating signifiers (S2), creating the illusion that meaning has a fixed and solid foundation or that the State has a fixed and solid identity, or that the Leader is in control of the situation. Despite the vast evidence that contradicts this, this contradictory evidence is not treated as undermining the belief in an Order or logos behind the anomalous appearances. Rather, the appearances to the contrary are ignored in favor of the posited Order behind the appearances. The collapse of symbolic efficiency entails that the Other (S1) no longer exists as an authority that could ground or secure social relations as a third term between agents that could decide between disputes and ground identities. Put differently, where subjects existing in the “enchanted world” of feudal society could take it as a basic and unquestioned fact that Gods law and will governed all subjects and assigned every subject a natural place in the cosmos with a role to fulfill, the universe following the universe of mastery is one in which everything is reduced to relations between individuals without

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a third mediating and independent term such as God’s law that subjects share in common. Thus, on the one hand, there are profound consequences for ethical and political deliberation. As Žižek (1999, 332) observes, These reversals signal that today, the big Other’s nonexistence has attained a much more radical dimension:  what is increasingly undermined is precisely the symbolic trust which persists against all skeptical data. Perhaps the most eye-catching facet of this new status of the nonexistence of the big Other is the sprouting of “committees” destined to decide upon the so-called ethical dilemmas which crop up when technological developments ever-increasingly affect our lifeworld: not only cyberspace but also domains as diverse as medicine and biogenetics on the one hand, and the rules of sexual conduct and the protection of human rights on the other, confront us with the need to invent the basic rules of proper ethical conduct, since we lack any form of big Other, any symbolic point of reference that would serve as a safe and unproblematic moral anchor.

This trend can also be discerned in the domain of politics and attitudes towards news media. Everywhere, it seems, elections are in question, there is cynicism towards elected officials, and subjects profoundly doubt the truthfulness of news sources. This even bleeds into the sciences, where people regularly express doubts about global warming, for example, claiming that the scientists are motivated to claim certain things based on their desire to secure grant funding. As a consequence, individual agents begin to pick and choose their own news and science according to what accords with their beliefs and tastes. In short, science and the news are no longer experienced as an objective Third that is independent of the whim of individuals and that adjudicates disputes. Trust in these institutions and figures increasingly becomes overwhelmed by doubt. Similarly, the emergence of conspiracy theories ranging from those surrounding to 9–11 to alien abductions can be seen as attempts to make the Other exist, seeking some Other that both knows and is silently functioning behind the scenes orchestrating everything. On the other hand, it is not simply trust in authorities and stable codes that is undermined, but also the very identities of subjects themselves. As Lacan argues, the alienation of the subject in language renders identity precarious because there is no signifier that is capable of fixing the identity of the subject. Once again, the signifier cannot signify itself. The discourse of the master functions to artificially fix the identity of the subject and assign the subject a place within the symbolic order. Yet with the collapse of this discourse, all of this is once again called into question. As Žižek (1999, 330) remarks,  … the problem today is not that subjects are more dispersed than they were before, in the alleged good old days of the self-identical Ego; the fact that “the big Other no longer exists” implies, rather, that the symbolic fiction which

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confers a performative status on the level of my identity, determining which of my acts will display “symbolic efficiency” is no longer fully operative.

A number of social symptoms emerge in relation to this. For example, the rise of religious fundamentalisms and identity politics—rightwing and leftwing versions of the same phenomena—can be seen as desperate attempts to fix and establish identities where identities no longer seem to hold. So too in the case of virulent nationalisms. Conversely, the intensification of various racisms can be read as both a symptom of the manner in which the social tie has been reduced to the dimension of the imaginary as a tie between individuals without a mediating Third, and also as a by-product of the precariousness of symbolic identities, leading subjects to strike out at an “Other” as that which threatens identity and renders it precarious. Later I  shall attempt to show how a new discourse or social relation emerges to manage and respond to this collapse of symbolic efficiency. As we shall see, this discourse or form of social relation is one of the privileged targets of Žižek’s politico-theoretico praxis. As a second consequence of the decline of the discourse of the master, politics has increasingly disappeared from the social field. First, grand political causes (S1) seem to have progressively evacuated the social field insofar as all master-signifiers have been called into question by the decline of symbolic efficiency. As Žižek observes in the documentary Žižek!, sixty years ago there were passionate debates as to whether we should have a socialist, fascist, or liberal democratic form of government, yet today these debates have almost entirely disappeared, capitalism has come to be seen as an unsurpassable horizon, and we can only imagine the end of capitalism resulting from a major global catastrophe. Second, as a result of this, capitalism itself comes to be depoliticized, such that it comes to be treated as a natural phenomenon, independent of any human agency. For example, we speak of what the market does, how the market regulates itself, and how we should let the market decide. Third, in contrast to the imaginary politics of totalization, the protest politics of the discourse of the hysteric has also become ineffectual and has largely disappeared (see Boltanski and Chiapello 2007). Where the master-signifier disappears or goes underground, the politics of the hysteric disappears insofar as it loses its target and no longer knows where to turn. Finally, fourth, where politics does today appear, it takes the form of diffuse and competing struggles over identities, rather than a unified political project that is capable of surmounting difference. As Žižek puts it,  … “postmodern” political thought … [railing] … against the specter of the (transcendental) Subject, endeavor[s]‌to assert the liberating proliferation of

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multiple forms of subjectivity—feminine, gay, ethnic… . According to this orientation, one should abandon the impossible goal of global social transformation and, instead, focus attention on the diverse forms of asserting one’s particular subjectivity in our complex and dispersed postmodern universe, in which cultural recognition matters more than socioeconomic struggle—that is to say, in which cultural studies have replaced the critique of political economy. (Žižek 1999, 3)

In one respect this shift in the political mirrors the rise of the individual that emerged alongside capitalism. Where the pursuit of self-interest becomes the universal value, solidarity disappears and emancipatory political struggle takes the form of struggles over various particularities and their representation. In another respect, where economy becomes naturalized, the site of political contestation becomes semiotic, a struggle over cultural signifiers, rather than a struggle over material conditions. One of the burning questions of the entire body of Žižek’s work is that of how a politics of global social transformation is possible in the wake of the rise of the discourse of the capitalist. As I hope to show, capitalism is accompanied by the emergence of a new discourse, similar to the discourse of the analyst in the universe of mastery, that engages with precisely this problem.

Waste and the Discourse of Bio-Power As we saw in the case of the discourse of the capitalist when viewed through the lens of production, one of the central problems plaguing the discourse of the capitalist is that of waste and inefficiency in the production process. As I attempted to show, the relationship between the worker ($) and know-how (S2) is characterized by a structural impossibility, by a constitutive deadlock, that 1) is perpetually beset by waste and inefficiency, preventing maximal production of capital, and 2)  that competition among capitalists compels the constant revolutionizing of production so as to increase the production of capital and remain competitive. As Marx observes, The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. (Marx and Engels 1998, 54)

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If social conservatives wish to understand the decline of traditional values, they should not look to Hollywood or godless leftists, but rather to these dynamics internal to capitalism itself. This process is not the result of an intentional desire on the part of capitalists, but rather emerges out of the necessity of constantly expanding production in the face of competitors that are doing the same. The capitalist is faced with the alternative of either expanding or becoming antiquated and falling out of the game altogether. Consequently, faced with the problem of waste and the necessity of perpetually increasing and revolutionizing production, a new discourse emerges out of the discourse of the capitalist that targets the body of the worker with the aim of enhancing productivity and producing workers. This discourse is the discourse of bio-power. The discourse of bio-power is found by shifting the terms of the discourse of the capitalist one position clockwise so that the master-signifier (S1) now appears in the position of the agent, the divided subject ($) now appears in the position of the other, knowledge now appears in the position of production (S2), and objet a now appears in the position of truth (Figure 9.3). As described by Foucault, this social relation “… endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply [life], subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations” (Foucault 1990a, 137). Foucault himself associates bio-power with capitalism, arguing that, This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes. But this was not all it required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcement as well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern. (Foucault 1990a, 140–1)

Bio-power thus refers to a social relation in which an immense system of practices comes to act on the bodies and minds of subjects, giving them form Impossibility S1

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Figure 9.3.  The Discourse of Bio-Power.

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to optimize production. Such power is embodied in the schools, military, churches, prisons, mental institutions, continuous on the job training, the perpetual development of new workplace procedures and protocols, etc., all of which emerged around the time that capitalism itself came into being and which have continued to mutate and intensify ever since. It could be said that bio-power is a production of production, in the sense that bio-power is a body of knowledge and techniques that produce those who produce. If, then, the master-signifier (S1) now appears in the position of the agent in the discourse of bio-power, then this is because this social relation aims at mastery of the bodies it acts upon ($). The dream of bio-power is a completely regulated body that could function as a gear in the machine of production without friction, waste, or remainder. If the product of the discourse of bio-power is now the signifier for knowledge (S2), then this is because the discourse of bio-power both generates institutions and disciplines. Foucault describes the latter as “… an anatomo-politics of the human body” (Ibid, 139). This would be the various disciplines in the social and information sciences aimed at producing knowledge of the various techniques through which humans can be effectively regulated and controlled, thereby maximizing production and efficiency. This knowledge, in turn, is implemented in institutions such as schools that preside over the formation of bodies and minds so as to produce the appropriate types of workers for the form production takes at a particular point in the course of the development of capitalism.8 These institutions and services also serve as a relay for the continuous retraining of workers as the means of production become antiquated and change. The appearance of object a in the position of truth or that which drives this discourse can be taken in a variety of ways. On the one hand, it can be understood as the pursuit of surplus-value as the driving force behind this discourse. The schools, on the job training, and “apolitical” social sciences9 perpetually tell the subject that these technologies are for their own benefit. An employer might refer a worker to a cognitive-behavioral therapist or psychiatrist, for example, not because the worker’s passive resistance is inhibiting productivity, but for the worker’s own welfare (i.e., with the subtext that the worker is being told, “Get your act together or you will not be selling your labor commodity here any longer!”). However, what lies behind all of this is the aim of increasing productivity. On the other hand, the appearance of object a in the position of truth can also be understood as the reinvestment of capital in the means and forces of production so as to expand production as in the case of training in new techniques that enable the worker to produce twelve widgets an hour rather than ten for the same wage. Finally, the appearance of object a in the position of truth can be taken as the waste and resistance

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that inhabits all systems of production—so well chronicled by Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49—and the aim of capitalism to exclude this waste and silence or integrate resistance. If this discourse perpetually returns, if new techniques, knowledges, and regulatory mechanisms are forever being devised, then this is because the remainder and resistance always returns in a new form. There are advantages to a Lacanian formulation of bio-power in terms of discourse theory that surmount problems internal to Foucault’s understanding of power. As Foucault notoriously argued, It seems to me that power must be understood in the first instance as the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization; as the process which, through ceaseless struggles and confrontations, transforms, strengthens, or reverses them; as the support which these force relations find in one another, thus forming a chain or a system, or on the contrary, the disjunctions and contradictions which isolate them from one another; and lastly, as the strategies in which they take effect, whose general design or institutional crystallization is embodied in the state apparatus, in the formulation of the law, in various hegemonies. (Foucault 1990a, 92–3)

As a consequence, it appears that there is no outside to power, nor any point of purchase on power that would allow the agent to avoid reproducing the system of power relations. Indeed, this problem is only intensified in The Use of Pleasure, where we are presented with the internalization of power and the thesis that the subject itself is a product of these power relations (Foucault 1990b, 25–32). If an agent is itself a product of these power relations, how can the agent do anything but reproduce these power relations? As Foucault observes, “… there is no single locus of great Refusal, no soul of revolt, source of all rebellions, or pure law of the revolutionary” (Foucault 1990a, 95–6). The Lacanian formulation of the discourse of bio-power calls this thesis into question. On the one hand, the discourse of bio-power is constitutively incomplete due to the role truth or the unconscious plays in this discourse. On the other hand, the upper and lower levels of the formula are haunted by both an impossibility and an impotence. If the relationship between mastery and the divided subject is characterized by impossibility, then this is because the techniques devised by the discourse of bio-power are unable to completely gain purchase on the slippery divided subject upon which it acts. Insofar as the divided subject is a pure void, an emptiness without positive content, there is structurally a minimal gap or distance between the subject and the body10 which bio-power strives to target, and likewise a minimal distance or gap to all signifying formations that strive to represent the subject in a body of knowledge such as the DSM-IV. Since no signifier is ever adequate to the

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subject, any knowledge that strives to situate and fix the subject is doomed to fail. As a consequence, the knowledge and institutions produced in the discourse of bio-power always prove inadequate. Just as the hysteric always develops new tricks for challenging the master in the clinic, something about the subject perpetually escapes precisely because the subject is a failure of language. It is for this reason that the lower level of the discourse of bio-power is characterized by impotence. The knowledge and institutions produced in this discourse forever miss the remainder or surplus embodied in objet a which drives the subject. Put otherwise, the discourse of bio-power fails because the subject is already dead; which is to say that the subject is governed by the death drive, in excess of any homeostatic mechanisms characteristic of life.

The Decline of Symbolic Efficiency and the Discourse of Immaterial Labor All in all, Žižek has very little to say about the discourse of bio-power beyond what he draws from Agamben’s account of homo sacer, and the focus on reducing us to bare life, where the power of death perpetually hangs over us. Instead, the privileged site and focus of Žižek’s theoretico-politico engagement has been what I here have chosen to call the discourse of immaterial labor. It is within the field of immaterial labor that ideology proper is to be located. If, of the four discourses inhabiting the universe of capitalism, the discourse of immaterial labor is a privileged site of political engagement, then this is because the discourse of immaterial labor is today what maintains social relations after the decline of symbolic efficiency by continuously weaving and unweaving the social field, creating temporary fields of social ties and opening new commodity markets, while perpetually recapturing or reterritorializing new subjectivities that do not fit with existing social codes. Here the reader should note that I have skipped the discourse of critical theory, which follows as the next structural permutation from the discourse of bio-power. The discourse of social critique will be explored in the next section. As described by Negri and Hardt, immaterial labor has come to replace industrial labor, now dominating the social field. In the final decades of the twentieth century, industrial labor lost its hegemony and in its stead emerged “immaterial labor,” that is, labor that create immaterial products, such as knowledge, information, communication, a relationship, or an emotional response. Conventional terms such as service work, intellectual labor, and cognitive labor all refer to aspects of immaterial labor, but none of them captures its generality. As an initial approach, one can conceive immaterial labor in two principle forms. The first form refers to labor that is primarily intellectual

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or linguistic, such as problem solving, symbolic and analytic tasks, and linguistic expressions. This kind of immaterial labor produces ideas, symbols, codes, texts, linguistic figures, images, and other such products. We call the other principle form of immaterial labor “affective labor.” Unlike emotions, which are mental phenomena, affects refer equally to body and mind. In fact, affects, such as joy and sadness, reveal the present state of life in the entire organism, expressing a certain state of the body along with a certain mode of thinking. Affective labor, then, is labor that produces or manipulates affects such as a feeling of ease, wellbeing, satisfaction, excitement, or passion. (Negri and Hardt 2004, 108)

While not entirely sharing Negri and Hardt’s thesis that immaterial labor has come to replace industrial labor as the hegemonic mode of production, it is undeniable that immaterial labor is today ubiquitous in the most developed countries. Whether we are speaking of the work of advertising, political pundits and media, the production of jingoistic expressions or clichés in the world of politics, analysts providing standard narratives of what is going in the world, economy, country, with children, and all the rest, various service jobs, pollsters, self-help shows, the proliferation of self-help and how-to management books, fashion and home improvement shows, etc., everywhere we see forms of labor geared towards the production of codes, social identities, and affects. As Negri and Hardt are careful to note, this form of labor is directed at the production of social life. The labor involved in all immaterial production … remains material—it involves our bodies and brains as all labor does. What is immaterial is its product. We recognize that immaterial labor is a very ambiguous term in this regard. It might be better to understand the new hegemonic form as “biopolitical labor,” that is, labor that creates not only material goods but also relationships and ultimately social life itself. The term biopolitical thus indicates that the traditional distinctions between the economic, the political, the social and the cultural become increasingly blurred. (Negri and Hardt 2004, 109)

Immaterial labor is thus a complement of bio-power, functioning to shore up the functioning of capitalism. It serves this function in three ways. First, as we have already observed, the social relations or social life formed through immaterial labor come to supplement the declining symbolic efficiency, creating temporary relationships and identities to supplement the enduring relationships that had existed prior to the development of capitalist modes of production. These relationships are vital for the production of workers within the discourse of the capitalist. A whole fauna or ecosystem of various dispositions must be produced involving forms of affectivity, different social codes, and different social identities that assign bodies various positions in

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the overall system of production and promote social relationships among these subjects. Second, as we saw in the discourse of the capitalist, capitalism is a system premised on continuous expansion and accumulation. This expansion must not only occur at the level of production, but also at the level of distribution and consumption. Were the system of capitalism to simply remain at the level of producing goods that satisfy basic biological needs, its gears would very quickly grind to a halt, bringing the system to a state of static equilibrium. Thus, not only must the production of goods expand, but there must be a production of different types of commodities as well as a production of desires for these commodities. As Marx puts it, “[p]‌roduction … produces not only the object but also the manner of consumption, not only objectively but also subjectively” (Marx 1973, 92). Through the production of new desires, capitalism is able to insure that infinite expansion is possible. Finally, third, not only must social relations and desires be produced through immaterial labor, but it is also necessary to produce subjects that find their conditions of production and place in the social world tolerable, reasonable, and natural. As Marx puts it, “[p]‌roduction … creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object” (Ibid). As Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello note in The New Spirit of Capitalism, In many respects, capitalism is an absurd system:  in it, wage earners have lost ownership of the fruits of their labor and the possibility of pursuing a working life free of subordination. As for capitalists, they find themselves yoked to an interminable, insatiable process, which is utterly abstract and dissociated from the satisfaction of consumption needs, even of a luxury kind. For two such protagonists, integration into the capitalist process is singularly lacking in justifications. (Boltanski and Chiapello 2007, 7)

In such circumstances it is thus necessary to produce ideologies capable of rationalizing this system, explaining the subject’s place in this system, and above all providing justifications as to how the subject benefits from this system. Where such justifications are lacking, it then becomes necessary to direct discontent elsewhere, to some other entity like immigrants or Jews, so as to provide a rationale for discontent. Such a task requires a massive production of signifiers, narratives, and affective responses to serve these functions. How, then, is the discourse of immaterial labor structured? In the discourse of immaterial labor, the battery of signifiers, knowledge (S2), now appears in the position of agency, acting on or addressing objet a, producing master-signifiers (S1), with the divided subject ($)  in the position of truth (Figure 9.4).

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Figure 9.4.  The Discourse of Immaterial Production.

Unlike pre-capitalist social formations which rigorously enforce social codes and mercilessly defend against any deviation (a) from these codes, capitalism functions through the perpetual integration of that which escapes it. It is in this respect that we can understand the appearance of object a in the position of the other in the discourse of immaterial labor. Here a stands for that which is not yet named or integrated in the system of capital. Thus, following Paolo Virno, we can distinguish between the people and the multitude. According to Virno, “… the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One… . Multitude is the form of social and political existence for the many, seen as being many … ” (Virno 2004, 21). As Virno goes on to observe, Before the State, there were the many; after the establishment of the State, there is the One-people, endowed with a single will. The multitude … shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to the sovereign. The multitude inhibits this “transfer” by its very mode of being (through its plural character) and by its mode of behaving. (Virno 2004, 23)

On the one hand, then, there is the multitude, which is an excess or multiplicity without identity, a remainder (a) within capitalism that does not fit any established codes (S2) belonging to the existing social field. On the other hand, there is the People which is the unification of a multitude into a shared identity or will (S1). In this connection, Virno shows an astonishing proximity to Badiou. Modifying Virno’s understanding of the State as a governmental entity, the State can be understood as the operation by which inconsistent multiplicities, multiplicities without unifying identity, are transformed into consistent multiplicities or Ones.11 As Badiou puts it, “[t]‌he state of the situation is that by means of which the structure of a situation is, in turn, counted as one” (Badiou 2005, 522). It is precisely this operation that the discourse of immaterial labor strives to accomplish. Through the intervention of language,

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social sciences, images, etc., the State (S2) aims at the integration of that which fits no established place within the contemporary system of codes (a). As a consequence, the product of this discourse is a One (S1), or the master-signifier, that transforms the excess, multiplicity, or multitude into a unified identity that can be counted. This master-signifier functions as a point of identification for subjects populating the social system, builds social relations between the now counted-identity and other identities, and opens new markets within the system. To make these rather abstract points more concrete we might refer to the example of the punk movement in its early days. If we recall that objet a can also signify a remainder, resistance, or waste, we can read the discourse of the capitalist as producing a waste, resistance, or remainder alongside its functioning that is not integrated in the system. This, for example, might consist of various forms of worker sabotage (theft, loafing, cutting corners, not properly caring for the tools and technology used in production, etc.), not carried out in any directed way, but simply out of impotent frustration with their working conditions. The early days of punk emerged very much in this spirit. Punk began in London as a sort of protest against both reigning economic conditions and the alienating and hypocritical nature of the social system of codes that tolerated these conditions. In its beginnings it was not a self-conscious movement, in the sense that it did not identify itself as a set of principles, a defined aesthetic, and a politics, but rather was a sort of amorphous multiplicity (a) growing like some monstrous new creature alongside the existing social codes (S2). However, as time passed, punk came to be named (S1), giving it a countable identity (the “count as one”), and it congealed into a defined aesthetic, with certain moral and political codes defining a set of social relations. At this point, punk became a point of identification for other subjects within the social field, opening an entirely new market largely divorced from its social and political origins. For instance, today we find youth and musicians participating in the fundamentalist Christian rock movement wearing clothing and writing music very similar to original punk music, but without any of the protest against economic and social conditions that originally motivated the movement. In other words, the multitude becomes pacified and integrated, forming yet another marketable commodity. As Deleuze and Guattari observe, capitalism can always add a new axiom. In light of the foregoing, the rationale for the appearance of the divided subject ($)  in the position of truth now becomes clear. On the one hand, the discourse of immaterial labor functions to exclude or disavow the alienated subject of capitalism, masking it with a master-signifier that purports to provide the subject with an identity that would fix its place in the symbolic

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order. On the other hand, the divided subject is that which drives this discourse, endlessly pursuing some signifier that would be capable of naming it or assigning it a place within the symbolic order. Of course, this is structurally impossible insofar as the subject, to quote Lacan’s aphorism, “always is where it is not and is not where it is.” Every signifier that purports to name or fix the subject slides off of it like water on the back of a duck. It now becomes clear as to why the discourse of immaterial labor is haunted by both an impossibility and an impotence. On the one hand, because the discourse of immaterial labor is driven by the divided subject, by that which is always displaced in the symbolic, no knowledge (S2) can ever catch up with the loss (a) that plagues this subject as a result of its alienation in language. Endless signifiers proliferate attempting to catch up with objet a, only to see objet a displaced like an ever receding horizon. Consequently, the relationship between the divided subject ($) and the master-signifier that purports to name it (S1) is characterized by impotence. The naming always fails. As a result, the discourse of immaterial labor inevitably generates social symptoms structured around the bifurcated structure of fantasy described in the first section of this paper. The subject is forced to cast about for some reason for the failure of its identity to function properly. It is precisely here that we see the aim of Žižek’s critique of ideological formations. As Žižek writes in the introduction to The Sublime Object of Ideology, In contrast to [the] Althusserian ethics of alienation in the symbolic “process without a subject”, we may denote the ethics implied by Lacanian psychoanalysis as that of separation. The famous Lacanian motto not to give way on one’s desire [ne pas céder sur son desir]—is aimed at the fact that we must not obliterate the distance separating the real from its symbolization: it is this surplus of the Real over every symbolization that functions as the object-cause of desire. To come to terms with this surplus (or, more precisely, leftover) means to acknowledge the fundamental deadlock (“antagonism”), a kernel resisting symbolic integration-dissolution. (Žižek 1989, 3)

It is precisely at this point where the master-signifier strives to count the Real as one, where it tries to cover over constitutive antagonism, that Žižek’s theoretico-politico praxis intervenes. Yet here we encounter a new discourse, unlike the others that each support, in their own way, the discourse of the capitalist.

The Discourse of Critical Theory As I suggested at the beginning of this paper, Žižek’s characterization of his own engagement in terms of the discourse of the analyst fits uncomfortably.

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On the one hand, Žižek’s gloss on the discourse of the capitalist is curious. As Žižek remarks,  … the analyst’s discourse stands for the emergence of revolutionary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split of university and hysteria. In it, the revolutionary agent—a—addresses the subject from the position of knowledge that occupies the place of truth (i.e., which intervenes in at the “symptomal torsion” of the subject’s constellation), and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the master signifier that structured the subjects (ideologico-political unconscious). (Žižek 2006a)

Not only is this gloss on the discourse of the analyst inconsistent with his analysis of the other three discourses in the universe of mastery, this is not what takes place in the discourse of the analyst. The master-signifier (S1) is not excluded, but is the product of this discourse. Put otherwise, what emerges over the course of the analysis is the Oedipal determinants of the subject’s unconscious. Similarly, the analyst does not speak from the position of knowledge, but rather knowledge is what is excluded from the analytic setting. The analyst sets aside his knowledge so that the unconscious knowledge of the analysand might come to the fore through transference. The early Freud had attempted to occupy the position of the analyst as a master possessed of knowledge of the analysand’s symptoms. It was this that drove Dora away. It was not until Freud set aside his knowledge that progress could be made in the process of analysis. Aside from these issues of how Lacan’s discourse of the analyst is to be interpreted, a more serious concern arises with respect to the aims of the discourse of the analyst when situated in a political context. Are analysis and engaged political activity consistent with one another? As Lacan remarks at the end of The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, “[t]‌he analyst’s desire is not a pure desire. It is a desire to obtain absolute difference, a desire which intervenes when, confronted with the primary signifier, the subject is, for the first time, in a position to subject himself to it” (Lacan 1998, 276). The analysand begins analysis in the dimension of the imaginary, treating everything and everyone as the Same. Over the course of analysis what emerges is an absolutely singular constellation of signifiers, specific to this subject and this subject alone as determinants of his unconscious (hence Lacan’s reference to the subject being in a position to subject himself to this primary signifier). Lacan goes so far as to suggest that the primary signifiers uncovered in analysis are pure non-sense. “… [T]he effect of interpretation is to isolate in the subject a kernel, a kern, to use Freud’s own term, of non-sense … ” (Ibid, 250). If this primary signifier has the status of non-sense, then this is precisely because it is not common but particular to the subject and no other. It is thus

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difficult to see how it is possible to get a politics out of the discourse of the analyst, for the discourse of the analyst does not aim at collective engagement or the common—which is necessary for politics—but the precise opposite. Nonetheless, there is a kernel of truth in Žižek’s characterization of his own position in terms of the discourse of the analyst. Unlike the politics of the discourse of the master premised on the fantasy of imaginary organic totality, any revolutionary politics must speak not from the position of totality, but from the standpoint of the Real, of antagonism, of the remainder, or of that which the other social ties function to veil or hide from view. In other words, revolutionary political engagement differs from the politics of the State and master in that it approaches the social from the perspective of the Real, treating this as the truth of social formations. As Žižek remarks, All “culture” is in a way a reaction-formation, an attempt to limit, canalize—to cultivate this imbalance, this traumatic kernel, this radical antagonism through which man cuts his umbilical cord with nature, with animal homeostasis. It is not only that the aim is no longer to abolish this drive antagonism, but the aspiration to abolish it is precisely the source of totalitarian temptation: the greatest mass murders and holocausts have always been perpetrated in the name of man as harmonious being, of a New Man without antagonistic tension. (Žižek 1989, 5)

Where the politics of the master treats this imbalance or traumatic kernel of radical antagonism as an accident to be eradicated and overcome, the critical-revolutionary politics treats the tension as the truth that allows a whole set of social symptoms to be discerned and engaged. For example, Marx does not treat discontent among the proletariat as an anomalous deviation disrupting the social to be summarily dismissed, but rather as the key to the systematic organization of capitalism and the perspective from which capitalist production is to be understood, and as the potential for revolutionary transformation. The mark of any critical-revolutionary political theory will thus be that objet a, the remainder, the gap, the traumatic kernel, occupies the position of the agent in the social relation. However, while the discourse of critical theory resembles the discourse of the analyst in that object a occupies the position of the agent, the structure of this discourse is very different and has entirely different aims. The aim is no longer that of uncovering those nonsensical signifiers that function as determinants of the subject’s unconscious, but rather of producing a divided subject. In the discourse of the critical theory objet a now addresses the master-signifier (S1), producing a divided subject ($), with knowledge (S2) in the position of truth (Figure 9.5). The relation of objet a—the remainder, excluded, Real, or traumatic kernel—addressing the master-signifier (S1) comes as no surprise. Radical

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Figure 9.5.  The Discourse of Critical Theory.

engagement is precisely the praxis that challenges reigning master-signifiers, ideologies, masters, leaders, forms of hegemonic domination of one group by another, and all the rest. However, the appearance of the divided subject ($)  in the position of the product comes as a surprise. Is not the aim of a critical theory and praxis precisely that of emancipation? How can a discourse that produces a dominated or alienated subject possibly able to contribute to the aim of emancipation? If we are to understand the appearance of the divided subject in the position of the product it is necessary to raise the question of the conditions for the possibility of emancipation. Žižek relates a joke at the beginning of Welcome to the Desert of the Real that can help us to address this question. As Žižek remarks, In an old joke from the defunct German Democratic Republic, a German worker gets a job in Siberia; aware of how all mail will be read by the censors, he tells his friends: “Let’s establish a code: if a letter you get from me is written in ordinary blue ink, it’s true; if it’s written in red ink, it’s false.” After a month, his friends get the first letter, written in blue ink: “Everything is wonderful here: the shops are full, food is abundant, apartments are large and properly heated, cinemas show films from the West, there are many beautiful girls ready for an affair—the only thing you can’t get is red ink.” The structure here is more refined than it might appear: although the worker is unable to signal that what he is saying is a lie in the prearranged way, he none the less succeeds in getting his message across—how? By inscribing the very reference to the code in the encoded message, as one of its elements … . Is this not the matrix of an efficient critique of ideology—not only in “totalitarian” conditions of censorship but, perhaps even more, in the more refined conditions of liberal censorship? One starts by agreeing that one has all the freedoms one wants—then one merely adds that the only thing missing is the “red ink”: we “feel free” because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom. (Žižek 2002b, 1–2)

This joke perfectly illustrates why the divided subject appears in the position of the product in the discourse of critical theory. If we recall that the discourse of immaterial labor functioned by excluding the divided, alienated subject,

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by excluding antagonism and tension by integrating it into the existing social network, then it becomes clear that the first step in emancipatory practice lies in the articulation of our unfreedom. Put otherwise, the discourse of critical theory provides a language through which our unfreedom can be articulated, discerned, and therefore engaged. On the one hand, the production of a divided subject shifts the subject’s relation to the symbolic from one of identification where the social order appears natural and as things should be, to one where the subject discerns the manner in which she is alienated in the symbolic order. On the other hand, and more profoundly, the production of the subject opens the space of the void where alternative possibilities of social organization might emerge. As Žižek remarks, “[t]‌he subject is nothing but the gap in Substance, the inadequacy of the Substance to itself … ” (Žižek 2002a, 131). Here Substance should be understood as “social substance,” the State, or the body of codes that appear natural. If the subject is the gap in substance, then this is because it is in excess of any and all identifications, such that its status as a void opens a space where alternative possibilities of life might become possible. The reason for the appearance of knowledge (S2) in the position of truth now becomes clear. On the one hand, knowledge—ideology—is what is excluded by this discourse in order to function. The ideological justifications for the existing social order are placed in brackets, called into question, revealed as riddled with contradictions and antagonisms. On the other hand, the pursuit of a different form of knowledge and new institutions is now what drives this discourse. This would be revolutionary knowledge that analyzes and engages the social field from the standpoint of its constitutive antagonisms. Like the other discourses, the discourse of the critical theorist is characterized by both an impossibility and an impotence. On the one hand, the relationship between object a and the master-signifier is characterized by impossibility insofar as no master-signifier is ever adequate to naming objet a. A remainder always returns that exceeds the organizing aims of the master-signifier. Here it will be noted that this impossibility perfectly captures Žižek’s gloss on the discourse of the analyst, underlining the manner in which object a or the Real and the master-signifier are separated from one another. On the other hand, the lower level of the formula is characterized by impotence insofar as ideology (S2) perpetually fails in containing or mastering the divided subject, but also insofar as the pursuit of revolutionary knowledge aimed at by this discourse never completely responds to the subject’s lack. As a result, the discourse of the critical theorist endlessly repeats without limit. Paraphrasing Beckett, the discourse of critical theory is characterized by the impossibility of going on, the necessity of going on, and the will to go on.

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Conclusion Throughout this paper I have attempted to show that the difference between Žižek and Lacan is to be situated not at the level of content, but of form. Where Lacan’s thought engages the universe of mastery and the discourses that inhabit that universe, a structure can be discerned throughout Žižek’s thought that engages a very different universe of discourse. Although Žižek does not explore all dimensions of this universe in depth, his work can be seen as a cartography of this new universe, both uncovering the mechanisms by which it functions and devising strategies for engaging with this universe with the aim of promoting emancipation by providing us with a language through which we might become capable of articulating our unfreedom. The structure of the discourses that can be discerned at work in Žižek’s thought reveals a very precise analysis of the structural organization of our historical present. However, these discourses also go well beyond Žižek, revealing a common ground among many very different forms of critical engagement, while also allowing us to discern the role that the unconscious and the real play within this new universe of discourse.

Appendix: A Brief Summary of Lacan’s Structuralist Theory of Discourse Lacan developed his theory of discourse between the years of 1969 and 1973, between Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, and Seminar XX, Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge. Unlike other theories of discourse, the focus is not on the content of discourse, but rather on the structural relation between the speaker of the discourse and the addressee of the discourse, such that 1)  something is produced in the discourse, and 2) the discourse is always constitutively incomplete by virtue of the role that the unconscious plays in the discourse. As Alexandre Leupin nicely puts it, What is a discourse? It is a formalizable structure that positions itself in between language and speech. It can subsist without being spoken by an individual (as in the case of an institution), but it is not the whole of a language: it inscribes itself in language as a fundamental relationship. Located between the generality of a given language and the speech act of an individual or the extreme singularity of each human subject, discourses define social groups. (Leupin 2004, 68)

A discourse is thus not so much what a speech act is about, but is rather a particular form or structure taken by social relations, between institutions and other institutions, groups and other groups, institutions or groups and individuals, individuals and groups or institutions, and individuals and institutions. As a

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consequence, speech acts that are about very different things can embody one and the same structure of social relations. For example, workers might overturn the owners of the means of production, but institute a social order that has precisely the same structure, with masters commanding other workers so as to procure enjoyment. This seems to have occurred in Soviet socialism where the mode of production remained the same even though those in charge changed. The formal structure of discourse or social relations as understood by Lacan is represented as follows (Figure 9.6). In each discourse, an agent (individual, group, institution) acts upon or addresses an Other (individual, group, or institution). Lacan claims that the position of the agent is a position of semblance, as any agent is ultimately governed or made to act by the unconscious or what Lacan refers to as the “truth” of the discourse. The position of truth is thus the real agent of discourse. It is simultaneously what the discourse must veil or hide, what the discourse must exclude, in order to function, while also being that which drives the discourse or functions as the “engine” of the discourse. For example, in the discourse of the master belonging to the universe of mastery, the subject divided between consciousness and the unconscious ($)  appears in the position of truth, while the master-signifier (S1) appears in the position of semblance or agency. The master, leader, boss, or Oedipal father presents himself to the other—in this case (S2), standing for the servant, slave, worker, or child—as being complete and without any division by language. In order to function as the master, the agent of this discourse must veil or hide his division or lack. Yet it is the division or lack that drives this discourse. The master addresses the servant, commanding him to produce objects for his enjoyment. However, because the master, like any other subject, is divided by language, this command can never properly be transmitted, such that the object (a) produced in the discourse is never quite what the master asked for. As a result, the master continues to make commands, futilely attempting to surmount his division, becoming ever more alienated in language. Unlike theories of discourse premised on information theory where the focus is on Impossibility Agent

Other

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Figure 9.6.  The Formal Structure of Discourse.

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how it is possible to transmit a shared, identical message to a receiver, Lacan begins from the premise that all communication is miscommunication or that all communication ultimately fails. It is for this reason that we continue to endlessly talk. As a consequence, each discourse is designed to account for this failure and why this failure (impossibility and impotence) generates the repetition of the various structured social relations. Each discourse is thus determined by the position of one of four variables—S1, S2, $, and objet a—in relation to one another in the formal structure of discourse. S1 stands for the master-signifier and can be anything from the master, the Father, the leader, proper names, to key ideological signifiers like “freedom,” “democracy,” the “United States,” “environment,” etc. These signifiers function to form a totality by relating all the other signifiers back to this originary master-signifier. For example, a Marxist links all of the worlds social problems—unemployment, ethnic and nationalistic tensions, gender inequality, looming environmental catastrophe, energy shortages, etc.—back to “capitalism” functioning as S1. In and of itself, the signifier “capitalism” means nothing, but it serves an organizational role with regard to all the other signifiers in the social field. Likewise, feminism might see “gender inequality” as the master-signifier underlying all of the signifiers composing the social field, e.g., environmental problems emerge from masculine attitudes towards nature that perceive it as a female body to be exploited. The discourse of the master in the universe of mastery is also a highly schematized representation of the Oedipal structure, where the name-of-the-father names the opaque desire of the mother, instituting the Law, desire, and prohibition. S2 stands for knowledge, the battery of signifiers composing language, the servant or worker that possesses “know-how,” archives, bureaucracy, etc. $ stands for the subject divided between consciousness and the unconscious, alienated subjects, subjects subordinated to other subjects, etc. Finally, a stands for surplus-jouissance, the lost object, jouissance, commodities, and so on. Lacan employs algebraic symbols to emphasize structural relations, so that very different phenomena can be discerned as being organized by identical social relations. Consequently, the manner in which the variables are filled out by content will depend on the social formation being discussed. Sometimes S1 will be the name-of-the-father, at other times the proper name, at yet other times, the master or monarch, and yet other times a boss or signifier central to an ideological formation. The arrows on the left and right hand of each discourse indicate the direction in which the little machines work. The upward arrow on the left side of each discourse indicates the role that the unconscious plays in the discourse beneath the semblance defined by the position of the agent, while the downward arrow on the right side of each discourse indicates what is produced by the other in the discourse. Insofar as each discourse is constitutively

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incomplete due to possessing an unconscious element (the truth) that is veiled in the discourse, the relationship between the agent and other on the upper level of the discourse is characterized by “impossibility.” The agent of the discourse can never fully transmit his desire to the addressee of the discourse because, as Lacan liked to say, “truth can only be half-said.” Similarly, the relationship between the two terms of the lower level of each discourse is characterized by “impotence” (represented by the two diagonal slash marks), because the product of each discourse is never what was desired in the position of truth for each discourse. For example, the knowledge (S2) produced by the master (S1) in the discourse of the hysteric is never the sort of knowledge that would provide a knowledge of jouissance, loss, or lack that drives the hysteric. The relation between a and S2 is characterized by impotence. Thus, the doctor, political leader, therapist, father, scientist, etc., forever gives the wrong answer to the hysteric’s. If this is so, then it is so because the loss (a) driving the hysteric’s symptom ($) is something that forever falls outside of language. Here it should be recalled that objet a is the remainder or constitutive lack produced when the living body is alienated in language. The more signifiers the master produces, the more alienated the hysteric feels insofar as proliferating signifiers increase the division in the subject, pushing the subject further and further away from the lost object… . A paradox not unlike those described by Zeno. The subsequent discourses belonging to each universe of discourse are found by rotating the terms of the initial discourse clockwise one position. Thus, for example, the discourse of the hysteric is found by shifting the divided subject ($) from the position of truth in the discourse of the master to the position of the agent, shifting the master-signifier from the position of the agent to the position of the other, shifting the position of knowledge (S2) from the position of the other to the position of production, and shifting objet a from the position of production to the position of truth. For each universe of discourse there are exactly four discourses and no more. The relations between the four terms remain identical for each discourse in a universe of discourse. Between the four positions of the formal structure of discourse and the four variables that can occupy these positions, there are 24 possible discourse and 6 possible universes of discourse. The discourses are thus what the branch of mathematics known as “group theory” refers to as “permutation groups.” Lacan proposed five discourses, the four belonging to the universe of mastery and a fifth called the “discourse of the capitalist” that cannot be derived in the universe of mastery. The discourse of the capitalist thus suggests an entirely new universe of discourse populated by 3 additional discourses not discussed by Lacan. Below readers will find the six possible

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universes of discourse within Lacan’s matrix. The additional four universes of discourse have not been named as it has not yet been established whether or not they, in fact, exist in our social world. They are virtual without being actual (Figures 9.7 to 9.12). Discourse of the Master

Discourse of the Hysteric

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Figure 9.7.  The Universe of Mastery. Discourse of the Capitalist

Discourse of Bio-Power

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Figure 9.8.  The Universe of Capitalism.

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Figure 9.9.  The Third Universe of Discourse.

Discourse 1

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Figure 9.10.  The Fourth Universe of Discourse.

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Figure 9.11.  The Fifth Universe of Discourse.

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Figure 9.12.  The Sixth Universe of Discourse.

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Notes 1. As Žižek puts it, “Lacan’s formula of the four discourses thus enables us to deploy the two faces of modernity (total administration and capitalist-individualist dynamics) as two ways to undermine the master’s discourse: doubt about the efficiency of the master-figure (what Eric Santner calls the ‘crisis of investiture’) can be supplemented by the direct rule of the experts legitimized by their knowledge, or the excess of doubt, of permanent questioning, can be directly integrated into social reproduction. Finally, the analyst’s discourse stands for the emergence of revolution-ary-emancipatory subjectivity that resolves the split of university and hysteria. In it, the revolutionary agent—a—addresses the subject from the position of knowledge that occupies the place of truth (i.e., which intervenes at the ‘symptomal torsion’ of the subject’s constellation), and the goal is to isolate, get rid of, the master signifier that structured the subject’s (ideologico-political) unconscious” (Žižek 2006a, unpaginated). 2. In the documentary Žižek!, Žižek argues that the goal of philosophy is not to answer questions, but both to pose questions and reframe the very nature of the questions being asked. 3. As such, Plato is directly at odds with Freud’s account of social dissatisfaction and conflict in Civilization and Its Discontents. 4. Throughout this paper I distinguish between discourses and universes of discourse. A discourse is an individual structure such as the discourse of the master, the analyst, the hysteric, or the university. As Lacan attempts to demonstrate, the discourse of the hysteric, analyst, and university are permutations of the discourse master found by rotating the terms of this discourse clockwise one position forward. A universe of discourse, by contrast, is a set of structural permutations composed of four discourses taken together. Based on the four terms Lacan uses to represent the variables of any discourse, there are 24 possible discourses. However, these discourses form sets of permutations, such that there are only six possible universes of discourse. For a brief account of Lacan’s discourse theory and the six universes of discourses consult the appendix to this paper on page 53. 5. I name each of the six universes of discourse with reference to the first discourse from which the other three discourses are derived. The four discourses proposed by Lacan are named “the universe of mastery” because the initial discourse from which the discourse of the hysteric, the discourse of the analyst, and the discourse of the university are derived is the discourse of the master. Needless to say, not all of the discourses that populate this universe or group of permutations are themselves social relations that aim at mastery. 6. It is noteworthy that despite Baudrillard’s own claims here and elsewhere that symbolic-value spells the ruin of Marx’s analysis of capitalism, the addition of symbolic-value does not destroy Marx’s understanding of the commodity. Marx very clearly argues that “needs” are not simply biological needs, but are also socially and historically produced needs, i.e., needs that are produced or manufactured. As Marx observes on the very first page of Capital, “The commodity is, first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference” (Marx 1990, 125, my italics).

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7. For an excellent discussion of the role played by the super-ego and jouissance in contemporary capitalism, see McGowan 2003. 8. Here Bourdieu’s analysis of educational institutions, class, and habitus is of great significance (Bourdieu 1988). 9. By “apolitical social sciences”, I understand those social sciences that take themselves to be producing a neutral knowledge of human beings, social relations, and social dynamics that have no political stake in this knowledge. In other words, such social sciences ignore the dimension of reflexivity or their own role in this knowledge production. This would be yet another reason that the master-signifier (S1) appears in the position of agency in the discourse of bio-power, insofar as these forms of social science do not apply their own modes of analysis to their own position as observers in a sociological field. 10. For an excellent account of the (non)-relationship between the subject and the body, see Johnston 2008. 11. For a detailed treatment of this in formal terms, cf. Bryant 2007.

References Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. New York: Continuum. Boltanski, Luc and Eve Chiapello. 2007. The New Spirit of Capitalism. Verso: New York. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988. Homo Academicus. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bryant, Levi R. 2007. “Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures:  Žižek, Badiou, and Discerning the Indiscernible.” In International Journal of Zizek Studies 1 (2): 1–28. Bryant, Levi R. 2012. “The Other Face of God: Lacan, Theological Structure, and the Accursed Remainder.” In Speculations 3 (1): 69–98. Foucault, Michel. 1990a. The History of Sexuality: An Introduction (Volume 1). New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, Michel. 1990b. The Use of Pleasure:  The History of Sexuality (Volume 2). New York: Vintage Books. Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek’s Ontology:  A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1966. La Logique du Fantasme. Unpublished Transcript. Lacan, Jacques. 1972. “Discourse of Jacques Lacan at the University of Milan on May 12, 1972.” Translated by Jack W. Stone. http://web.missouri.edu/~stonej/Milan_ Discourse2.pdf. Lacan, Jacques. 1998. The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Lacan, Jacques. 2007. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis. New York: W.W. Norton & Co. Leupin, Alexandre.2004. Lacan Today: Psychoanalysis, Science, Religion. New York: Other Press, LLC. Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundrisse. London: Penguin Books. Marx, Karl. 1990. Capital (Volume I). London: Penguin Classics.

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Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. 1998. The Communist Manifesto. New  York:  Signet Classics. McGowan, Todd. 2003. The End of Dissatisfaction: Jacques Lacan and the Emerging Society of Enjoyment. New York: State University of New York Press. Miller, Jacques-Alain. 2008. “Suture.” Symptom Volume 8. http://www.lacan.com/symptom8_articles/miller8.html. Negri, Antonio and Michael Hardt. 2004. Multitudes: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press. Verhaeghe, Paul. 1999. Does the Woman Exist? From Freud’s Hysteric to Lacan’s Feminine. New York: Other Press, LLC. Virno, Paolo. 2004. A Grammar of the Multitude. New York: Semiotext(e). Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002a. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002b. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006a. Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses. http://www.lacan.com/zizfour.htm. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006b. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. Slavoj Žižek Presents Mao on Practice and Contradiction. New York: Verso.

Part III  Popular Culture Anyone who has search the term “Žižek” will have discovered a curious but intriguing result. “Žižek” is not only the surname of that Slovenian philosopher who The Chronicle of Higher Education once called “the Elvis of cultural theory,” it is also the moniker of one of South America’s most popular venues for rap, hip-hop, and mashup dance music—Zizek Urban Beats Club located in Buenos Aires, Argentina. This nominal coincidence, however, is anything but coincidental. Word on the street is that the club did in fact title itself after the “Yugoslavian-born philosopher and cultural critic,” concocting its own recombination of Žižek, and everything that the name entails and encompasses, with the sounds, practices, and culture of contemporary dance music (Hernandez 2010, 136). What can be perceived in this unlikely combination of two apparently disparate and incompatible sources is something that exceeds the comprehension of both, opening each to previously unheard of opportunities. What Žižek (2006e) calls a “short circuit.” As Paul Taylor (2010, 7)  describes it, “Žižek recognizes the mutually constituting nature of the high and low, and his conceptual legerdemain shifts between high philosophical/psycho-analysis and low culture to create sparking contrasts illuminating our normally unexamined, everyday assumptions.” For this reason, Žižek cannot and should not be situated as a Kantian philosophical “genius” who produces brand new ideas that are unique and not derived through imitating or borrowing from the work of others (Kant 1987). Instead he occupies the position of philosophical DJ, an attentive reader/listener/viewer who samples and reworks the vast library of available texts—and the word “text” includes not just books and essays but also movies, television programs, jokes, advertisements, etc.—to create innovative insights and possibilities through surprising juxtapositions and the unexpected short circuiting these unlikely crossings produce. In The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) for instance, Žižek lays down a basic track derived from the driving dialectical rhythms of Hegel and various Hegelians, adds the heavy bass of Lacanian psychoanalysis, drops the needle on a few recognizable passages

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taken from the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Wagnerian opera, and other media sources, and then periodically punctuates the mix by introducing interesting effects in the form of “bad” jokes and comical anecdotes often derived from experiences on the former Soviet-side of the iron curtain. Responses to this effort typically pull in two different and seemingly opposite directions. On the one hand, there has been and continues to be a kind of ridicule and dismissal, where Žižek is regarded as nothing more than a “philosophical wanker” (Taylor 2010, 33) or, what Todd McGowan (2007b) calls, “a theoretical clown.” “Serious theory,” McGowan (2007b, 65) writes with reference to one of Žižek’s (in)famous examples, “involves thinking about the ideological ramifications of the structure of toilets, but such speculations do not earn one the reputation of being a serious philosopher.” This kind of playful toying with thought can be momentarily entertaining and even provocative, but it certainly will not be regarded as earnest philosophical inquiry. Or as McGowan (2007b, 65) cleverly describes it, “cleverness is not proper philosophy.” On the other hand, and often alongside or in opposition to this verdict, there are well-intended and even useful attempts to make this material work and to do some serious work. Toward this end, McGowan argues that Žižek, for all the bad jokes and puns and his own manic public persona, should in fact be taken seriously. “Though Žižek openly considers himself to be (in Badiou’s terms) an antiphilosopher,” McGowan (2007b, 59)  argues, “he resembles Badiou’s model of the philosopher through his serious foregrounding of the question of truth and asserting of truth-claims.” Following suit, Adrian Johnston (2008) has endeavored to perform for Žižek what Rodolphe Gasché (1986) had done for Jacques Derrida, translating Žižek’s often dismissed and misunderstood musings, his apparently “disorganized, hyperkinetic meditations on various and sundry popular cultural phenomena” (Johnston 2008, xvii), into serious philosophical work by making it do the heavy lifting of thought. What is interesting about these two responses is not what makes them different, but what they share and hold in common. Both, in fact, seek to preserve and protect the same thing—a certain understanding of and assumption concerning what comprises legitimate and serious philosophical work. The one seeks to protect these assets through exclusion and marginalization, while the other endeavors to do the same by including and accommodating Žižek’s efforts to the serious endeavors of philosophy. If, however, we approach things from the perspective made available by Žižek’s own practice, one can begin to see the way Žižek actualizes a kind of “remix thinking” that challenges this entire tradition. This alternative way of pursuing philosophy (which is something that would be considered “anti-philosophical,”

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if viewed through and understood according to the traditional paradigm) confronts and questions the “normal” way of writing theory and doing philosophy. Consequently, instead of simply excusing Žižek’s efforts as a kind of entertaining novelty or working to accommodate his “works” and put them into service for the serious labor of philosophy, we can perceive in them that burst of Nietzschean (1974) laughter and fröhliche Wissenschaft that disturbs and undermines this very expectation of and pretension to seriousness. What really matters, then—what can and should be heard over all the noise that is made about these efforts—is how that laughter causes us to laugh at ourselves, our traditions, and our supposedly serious endeavors and investments. The chapters contained in this section respond to and capitalize on this unique opportunity and challenge. We begin with two essays that reflect on Žižek as a thinker of popular culture, Todd McGowan’s “Enjoying the Cinema” and Graham Wolfe’s “Losing What We Never Had:  Žižek and Lacan Rock On with Bryan Adams.” The former was initially written for and used as the editor’s introduction to a special issue of IJŽS dedicated to the theme “Žižek and Cinema.” In this introductory text, McGowan takes up and responds to a criticism concerning the importance (or perceived lack thereof) of Žižek’s contributions to film theory and criticism. Although Žižek often writes about and utilizes examples derived from classic Hollywood cinema, his analyses do not fit the standard model of film theory. Instead of providing a probing analysis of the cinematic object, Žižek seems more interested in the enjoyment of the subject and the subject of enjoyment. But it is precisely this “distraction” with the wrong cinematic subjects that is, according to McGowan’s argument, the importance of Žižek’s contributions to cinema studies. The second chapter from Graham Wolfe adds to and complicates this interpretation by investigating an aspect of popular cultural that is conspicuously absent from but appears to be perfectly suited to Žižek’s writings—the rock anthem. In fact, Wolfe stages what could arguably be called “the return of the repressed” in Žižek’s own work. Despite his undisputed street cred with many facets of popular culture, Žižek has had little, if nothing, to say or do with this particular aspect of popular media and culture. He is involved with music no doubt, but more often than not it is the music of Wagner and other forms of what one might be tempted to call Adorno-certified European art music. Wolfe demonstrates how popular music—and the music of Bryan Adams, in particular—has been calling-out for a Žižek-inspired mode of analysis and how Žižek, whether he ever explicitly acknowledges it or not, has been haunted by and humming a tune that can be vaguely heard somewhere in the margins of his work.

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The three remaining chapters in this section do not so much comment on what Žižek does in his engagements with the subject (and subject matter) of popular culture as they borrow from and put into practice the mode of engagement that he exemplifies and makes available to us. Abigail Fagan’s “Interpellating Django:  The Functions of the Gaze in Tarantino’s Django Unchained” develops a critical reading of race and the ideology of racism in Quentin Tarantino’s film Django Unchained by way of the Lacanian concept of the “valences of the gaze” and Žižek’s reworking of this material in his book on Lacan and cinema, Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. Vlad Dima’s “You Only Die Thrice:  Zombies Revisited in The Walking Dead” takes up the subjectless subject of zombies. The discipline of philosophy—especially in its analytic form—has been thinking about and doing battle with zombies for decades. The mindless, walking dead provide philosophy with the perfect instance of a non-Cartesian subject ready to be used for countless thought experiments. Dima’s essay cuts across the grain of this tradition, pursuing the import and impact of this subject (a subject without subjectivity) in new directions. The final chapter, Luke Howie’s “They Were Created by Man … and They Have a Plan:  Subjective and Objective Violence in Battlestar Galactica and the War on Terror,” completes the section by applying Žižek to Žižek. In particular, Howie takes-up and mobilizes the television serial’s catch phrase “all this has happened before and it will happen again” as a kind of pop-culture hook—a remixed version of the Žižekian motto “first as tragedy, then as farce”—by which to illustrate and critically examine Žižek’s concepts of objective and subjective violence, especially as they apply to the operative conditions of/for terrorism at the turn of the century.

10.  Enjoying the Cinema Todd McGowan University of Vermont, Burlington, Vermont, USA

Most critics who find fault with Slavoj Žižek’s engagement with cinema object to his tendency to obliterate the specificity of the text he is interpreting in order to advance some aspect of his theoretical framework. According to this line of thinking, the filmic text for Žižek is merely exemplary and never acquires any significance outside of its utility as an explanatory mechanism. In an essay in a recent collection of critiques entitled The Truth of Žižek, Richard Stamp laments, “Žižek’s examples are, in fact, incidental illustrations of an already installed machine” (Bowman and Stamp 2007, 173).1 Unlike thinkers who explore different texts on their own terms—Derrida is, for Stamp, the model of this kind of thinking—Žižek always finds within the texts he analyzes the presuppositions of his own theory. The filmic text, according to this line of critique, fails to acquire the capacity to surprise Žižek or to shake the foundation of his theoretical underpinning. Like his intellectual forbearer Hegel, he is an abstract thinker with no regard for the particularities of the concrete.2 The abstract nature of Žižek’s approach to the filmic text results in analyses that do not engage films in their entirety. Even those sympathetic to Žižek must admit that at no point in his vast amount of interpretive work does Žižek provide a thorough and sustained interpretation of a single film. Even his one book completely devoted to a single film—The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s “Lost Highway”—fails to remark on many important aspects of the film. He consecrates much less than half of the short book to a discussion of Lost Highway (1997), and as a result, one could find more direct analysis of the film in a medium-length essay on it than in Žižek’s book. For his critics, this lack of thoroughness indicates not so much a methodological choice or an exigency of his theoretical approach as inattention to

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the text, a failure to take the time to look seriously at the filmic text in all its complexity. This failure suggests that Žižek does not adhere to the standards of scholarship that define the discipline. It is David Bordwell (perhaps Žižek’s fiercest critic) who lays out this accusation in its most complete form. According to Bordwell, Žižek is simply an irresponsible scholar. He wonders, “Are we wasting our time in expecting Žižek to offer reasonable arguments? Fundamental questions of responsibility arise here, especially in relation to a writer not hesitant to condemn the beliefs and actions of others” (2005). Žižek’s failure to be responsible is the product of his glibness, his proclivity for wild pronouncements instead of serious engagement. For Bordwell, Žižek’s work does not belong to the intellectual community that makes up the discipline of film studies—or to any intellectual community. He claims, “Whatever their personal motives, scholars are united in seeking logically sound theories that illuminate a range of phenomena. That’s what allows debate to flourish. When the community norms flag, debate withers and theory becomes a chorus of monologues. Arguably, though, Žižek fails to grasp the intersubjective dimension of theorizing because he doesn’t believe in theory as a conversation within a community, a process of question and answer and rebuttal. This construal of his attitude toward theory fits what we know of his intellectual demeanor” (2005). The absence of sustained engagement with any filmic texts in their specificity becomes in this analysis part of an overall monomania that characterizes Žižek’s character. In addition to obscuring the specificity of individual films, critics suggest that Žižek’s interpretations also downplay the significance of the filmic medium itself. In terms of his importance for film studies, this is an even more serious problem. Outside of The Fright of Real Tears (clearly his most filmic book), Žižek tends to treat films in the same way that he treats novels and short stories, with the exception of a few isolated comments about shot structure or the use of sound. As Stephen Heath puts it, “it is indicative that Žižek has, in fact, little to say about ‘institution,’ ‘apparatus,’ and so on, all the concerns of the immediately preceding attempts to think cinema and psychoanalysis (films and novels will thus mostly be referred to without any particular distinction between them as forms)” (1999, 44). Vicky Lebeau echoes this point, contending that “it is the specificity of cinema that seems to go missing in Žižek’s account—the connivance between spectacle and image, projection and narrative” (2001, 59). By failing to distinguish adequately between the interpretation of a film and that of a novel or to account for the particular way that the cinematic apparatus impacts film’s deployment of narrative, Žižek downplays the importance of form, and it is the distinctiveness of film as a

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formal structure that gives the discipline of film studies its existential justification. To refuse to respect the formal distinctiveness of film as a medium, this critique argues, is to eliminate the need to study film as an entity unto itself. Ironically, the sustained treatment of film form that Žižek undertakes in The Fright of Real Tears has had little impact on thinking about film. In that work, Žižek elaborates an entirely new conception of suture and invents his own supplementary concept of interface. Neither of these theoretical innovations specific to the filmic medium caught on in the world of film studies.3 But Žižek’s thought itself has managed to catch on. Given Žižek’s lack of attention to the specificity of filmic texts and of the filmic medium, it is difficult to understand his prominence in the film studies world, a prominence especially pronounced among young film theorists. It seems difficult to explain phenomena such as Angela Restivo’s panel devoted to Žižek’s thought at the 2007 Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Chicago or the recent spate of articles and books devoted to the kind of Lacanian analysis of cinema clearly inspired by Žižek. There have been more than can be mentioned, but the recent articles include Kirk Boyle’s “Reading the Dialectical Ontology of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Against the Ontological Monism of Adaptation” (2007, 1–32) in Film/Philosophy; Clifford Manlove’s “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative: Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey” (2007, 83-108) in Cinema Journal; and Hugh Manon’s “Some Like It Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity” (2005, 18–43) in Cinema Journal, along with all of the essays in Lacan and Contemporary Film (McGowan and Kunkle 2004). And some of the contributors to this special issue of The International Journal of Žižek Studies have written books indebted to Žižek’s thinking on psychoanalysis and cinema. These include Jennifer Friedlander’s forthcoming The Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion (2007) and Henry Krips’s Fetish:  An Erotics of Culture (1999). In addition, classes on film theory in almost every film program across the country now include a section on the new Lacanian film theory that Žižek’s thought has helped to spawn and generally include readings from Žižek’s work. Žižek has sparked a renewed interest in Lacan and psychoanalysis in the world of film studies because his thought opens up possibilities within the interpretation of cinema that that would otherwise not exist. It does so through the particular focus that runs through all of Žižek’s filmic analyses. Though Žižek does often ignore textual and medium specificity, what he doesn’t ignore is the way that films organize and deploy the spectator’s enjoyment. From The Sublime Object of Ideology in 1989 (his first book in English) to The Parallax View in 2006, Žižek has consistently foregrounded

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the question of enjoyment and the way in which texts structure it, which is a question that bears directly on the cinema. Spectators go the movies, first and foremost, because they enjoy doing so, and when they cease to enjoy it (or when another medium promises greater enjoyment), the cinema will effectively die out. And yet, the great theorists of the cinema have not made the category of enjoyment central to their speculation about the cinema’s significance as an art. A brief look at the major film theorists reveals a lacuna surrounding the enjoyment that film produces. Hugo Münsterberg locates the spectator’s interest in the cinema in the similarity between the structure of the film and the human mind. Sergei Eisenstein highlights the cinema’s ability to induce a revolution in the spectator’s consciousness through the experience of montage. André Bazin sees in devotion to the cinema a phenomenological yearning for the reality that lies obscured within our everyday experience. The psychoanalytic film theory of the 1970s and 1980s stresses the role of identification in the film’s mode of address toward the spectator. For each of these theories, the phenomenon of enjoyment is not the primary phenomenon in the cinema but at best the byproduct of some other appeal that the cinema makes. Spectators enjoy the cinema, if they do, because it mirrors their mental functioning, because it changes them, because it acquaints them with reality, or because it offers them a point of identification. By basing itself in the primacy of the filmic text’s organization of enjoyment, Žižek’s approach offers film theory grounding in the fundamental appeal of cinema. When Žižek focuses on just one scene from a film rather than analyzing the entire film, he does so because this individual scene encapsulates the way that the film organizes the spectator’s enjoyment. This is evident in Žižek’s analysis of the famous sexual assault scene in David Lynch’s Wild at Heart (1990). In this scene, Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe) comes into the motel room of Lula Fortune (Laura Dern) and coerces her into saying to him, “Fuck me.” Anyone who has read more than a couple of Žižek’s essays or books from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s will be acquainted with his affection for this scene. In fact, its recurrence in multiple works has led critics—and even some loyal supporters—to wish that Žižek’s computer was not equipped with a cut-and-paste function.4 Though he might have branched out from this scene to various other compelling and equally disturbing moments in the film—the account of the character Jingle Dell (Crispin Glover) placing cockroaches on his anus, for one—his analysis of this single scene serves to encapsulate an interpretation of the whole film in terms of the way that it mobilizes enjoyment.

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Despite how Žižek’s interpretation of this scene changes throughout his different works, what remains the same is an understanding of the scene’s depiction of the structuring role that fantasy has in acts of violence. Though Žižek does not go on to interpret Wild at Heart in its entirety, one can easily see the direction in which this interpretation might go. The film is an exploration of the causes and the nature of violence, and it depicts the role that fantasy has in triggering a violent outburst. Characters in the film act violently, as Sailor Ripley (Nicolas Cage) does in the film’s opening scene, because something or someone threatens their fantasy frame, and the violent act reinforces that frame. Violence assaults not simply the physical being of the other but, more importantly, the other’s fantasy frame. Žižek focuses on Bobby’s sexual assault of Lula because it brings the fundamental preoccupation of the film to light, and as such, it functions as a nodal point for the spectator’s enjoyment of the film. If one enjoys Wild at Heart, one’s enjoyment reaches its zenith during this sexual assault, not because spectators are sadists or would-be sexual assaulters but because it allows them to witness characters’ relationship to their own enjoyment become evident as their fantasies are laid bare. The interpretation of Wild at Heart that Žižek implicitly advances in his analysis of this one scene does not address directly any of the formal qualities of Lynch’s film. None of his books that mention this scene address the way that the scene has been edited, the use of sound, the lighting, or any aspect of the shot composition. And yet, despite this apparent oversight, the analysis does manage to capture the specific nature of the film’s relationship to the spectator. Wild at Heart is an effective film—and this is an especially effective scene—because all of its filmic aspects contribute to forcing the spectator to experience the violence of having one’s fantasy publicly exposed. As Žižek puts it, “What we have here is rape in fantasy which refuses its realization in reality and thus further humiliates its victim—the fantasy is forced out, aroused, and then abandoned, thrown upon the victim” (2006, 185). Only film can enact this violence in this way, and it can do so because of its ability to appeal to the spectator through editing, sound, lighting, and shot composition. Even when Žižek is not speaking directly about the film form, his analyses betray a concern with it. This concern becomes even more apparent in his influential interpretations of the films of Alfred Hitchcock, interpretations which, like his analysis of Wild at Heart, focus on making sense of crucial scenes rather than dissecting any film as a whole. Along with Joan Copjec’s path-breaking work on psychoanalysis and film in Read My Desire (1994) and Imagine There’s No Woman (2002), Žižek’s reflections on Hitchcock have played a central role in producing a new understanding on the gaze in film theory.5 For decades, the

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gaze was the central concept in psychoanalytic film theory, and it was identified with the camera’s and the spectator’s look of mastery—a look that could see without being seen and thus embodied the ultimate power. But Žižek and Copjec helped to usher in a concept of the gaze linked to desire rather than power, thereby opening up an avenue of theorizing about films in their formal complexity instead of condemning them for their ideological complicity. Through his analysis of the scene where Norman (Anthony Perkins) tries to sink the car belonging to the murdered Marion (Janet Leigh) in a swamp in Psycho (1960), Žižek identifies the gaze with the upsurge of the spectator’s desire and consequent loss of mastery. Again, Žižek does not describe this scene in filmic terms, but his interpretation owes its weight to a grasp of Hitchcock’s formal inventiveness in creating the scene. By depicting Marion’s car suddenly stop as it sinks into the swamp and then immediately cutting to Norman’s worried face, Hitchcock implicates the spectator on the level of desire itself with Norman’s project of covering up the murder. One cannot watch this scene without sharing in Norman’s anxiety that the car will not sink and that he will not be able to cover up the crime. As Žižek puts it, “when the car stops sinking for a moment, the anxiety that automatically arises in the viewer—a token of his/her solidarity with Norman—suddenly reminds him or her that his/her desire is identical with Norman’s: that his impartiality was always-already false” (1992, 223). The gaze, according to this analysis, occurs not when spectators or camera looks on from a safe distance and remains unaffected by what they see but when the structure of the film manages to make spectators aware of their libidinal investment in the film that exists despite their apparent aloofness. The gaze marks the point at which the spectator’s desire itself stains the filmic picture in a way that the film makes evident. Though Žižek doesn’t work through the new understanding of the gaze as it is deployed cinematically or theorize its role in film interpretation, his brief analyses of scenes like the one in which the car sinks into the swamp in Psycho help to open the door to the theoretical elaborations that have followed in the wake of these analyses. Given the predominance of the old concept of the gaze in the psychoanalytic film theory of the 1970s and 1980s, the theoretical transformation that Žižek has played the lead role in ushering in has been revolutionary. However brief or merely exemplary his filmic analyses have been, they have lead to the rebirth of psychoanalytic film theory.

Notes 1. What is perhaps most surprising about The Truth of Žižek is the near-total absence of substantive critiques of Žižek’s thought. The most common line of argument among

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the essays consists primarily in ruing the lacunae in his theorizing: he “very rarely takes cognizance of the institutional and commercial forces that act upon him and make his interventions possible” (Bowman and Stamp 2007, 6–7); he “rarely ventures into the political economy of Marx’s work” (La Berge 2007, 11); he “fails to give an adequate account of capital or of political economy” (Devenney 2007, 47); he doesn’t “shock his audience” in the way that he intends (Gilbert 2007, 70); and so on. 2. Walter Davis provides the most cogent version of this critique. He argues that Žižek’s method of interpretation obscures the necessarily subjective nature of trauma and thus strips it of its existential significance. According to Davis, Žižek finds in every cultural text and in every historical event the same form of trauma. It is always “The Trauma of the Real. Which is always the same it turns out” (2006, 90). 3. The perceived unimportance within the intellectual world of The Fright of Real Tears is evidenced by the fact that at this writing it is the only one of the many books that Žižek has authored in English that is no longer in print. 4. For just the books alone (ignoring the many essays) where an analysis of this scene occurs, see The Plague of Fantasies (1997), The Fright of Real Tears (2001), and The Parallax View (2006). 5. In The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan (McGowan 2007), I attempt to construct a universal film theory on the basis of the new understanding of the gaze.

References Bordwell, David. 2005. “Slavoj Žižek: Say Anything.” http://www.davidbordwell.net/ essays/zizek.php. Bowman, Paul and Richard Stamp. 2007. The Truth of Žižek. London: Continuum. Boyle, Kirk. 2007. “Reading the Dialectical Ontology of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou Against the Ontological Monism of Adaptation.” In Film/Philosophy, 11 (1): 1–32. Copjec, Joan. 1994. Read My Desire: Lacan Against the Historicists. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Copjec, Joan. 2002. Imagination There’s No Woman: Ethics and Sublimation. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. Davis, Walter A. 2006. Death’s Dream Kingdom: The American Psyche Since 9–11. London: Pluto Press. Devenney, Mark. 2007. “Žižek’s Passion for the Real:  The Real of Terror, The Terror of the Real.” In The Truth of Žižek. Edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp. London: Continuum. Friedlander, Jennifer. 2008. The Female Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Gilbert, Jeremy. 2007. “All the Right Questions, All the Wrong Answers.” In The Truth of Žižek, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, 61–81. London: Continuum. Heath, Stephen. 1999. “Cinema and Psychoanalysis: Parallel Histories.” In Endless Night: Cinema and Psychoanalysis, Parallel Histories, edited by Janet Bergstrom. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Krips, Henry. 1999. Fetish: An Erotics of Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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La Berge, Leigh C. 2007. “The Writing Cure:  Slavoj Žižek, Analysand of Modernity.” In The Truth of Žižek, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, 9–26. London: Continuum. Lebeau, Vicky. 2001. Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Play of Shadows. London: Wallflower Press. Manlove, Clifford T. 2007. “Visual ‘Drive’ and Cinematic Narrative:  Reading Gaze Theory in Lacan, Hitchcock, and Mulvey.” In Cinema Journal, 46 (3): 83–108. Manon, Hugh S. 2005. “Some Like It Cold: Fetishism in Billy Wilder’s Double Indemnity.” In Cinema Journal, 44 (4): 18–43. McGowan, Todd. 2007. The Real Gaze:  Film Theory After Lacan. Albany, NY:  State University of New York Press. McGowan, Todd, and Kunkle, Sheila, editors. 2004. Lacan and Contemporary Film. New York: The Other Press. Neroni, Hilary. 2005. The Violent Woman:  Femininity, Narrative, and Violence in Contemporary American Cinema. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. “ ‘In His Bold Gaze My Ruin Is Writ Large.’ ” In Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), edited by Slavoj Žižek. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2000. The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s “Lost Highway”. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001. The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieslowski Between Theory and PostTheory. London: BFI Publishing. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press.

11.  Losing What We Never Had: Žižek and Lacan Rock On with Bryan Adams Graham Wolfe National University of Singapore

We learned more from a 3-minute record, baby, than we ever learned in school.—Bruce Springsteen, “No Surrender”

Slavoj Žižek’s fascination with the “short circuits” between high theory and popular culture is well-known. His engagement with the densest and most challenging ideas of thinkers such as Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Lacan proceeds via an endless detour through science-fiction stories, Hollywood melodrama and “sentimental kitsch” (Žižek 1992, vii). No sooner do we feel that, in reading Žižek’s work, we have escaped into philosophical abstractions and psychoanalytic formulae than he compels us to revisit the novels of Stephen King or the films of Keanu Reeves. Even Shel Silverstein’s children’s books are revealed to “render in naked form the basic matrix of the Lacanian opposition of desire and drive” (Žižek 2001b, vii). As Noel Carroll observes, Žižek’s references to artefacts of popular culture are frequently “illustrative” (2004, 266)—he often draws on them to provide analogies for psychoanalytic philosophy. In Adrian Johnston’s words, the ideas of thinkers such as Lacan “are usually considered to be so ephemerally complex as to be almost unemployable with respect to the banal details of mundane, everyday existence,” and in this regard, Žižek’s engagement with popular culture reflects his commitment to “granting firmer access to truths typically exhibiting an elusive abstractness” (2008, xviii). But the aim of merging Lacan and popular culture is not just to make high theory accessible (“and thus to spare us the effort of effective thinking” [Žižek 1992, 3]). Far

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from “lowering” theory to the level of popular culture and thereby simplifying it, this procedure enables psychoanalytic philosophy (in Žižek’s Hegelian terms) to “actualize its notion”: “I am convinced of my proper grasp of some Lacanian concept only when I can translate it successfully into the inherent imbecility of popular culture” (2005, 175). Psychoanalytic thought remains limited until it short-circuits with popular culture, perhaps because, as Sarah Kay puts it, “each acts as an anamorphosis of the other” (2003, 50)—each provides a highly irregular perspective from which new and unexpected dimensions emerge in the other. Popular music is one of few entertainments that Žižek has little to say about. But during my first days of attempting to grasp his key thrusts, I frequently found myself seeking assistance from the rock stars I’d grown up with, discovering in lyrics I’d heard a thousand times the very paradoxes, dialectic reversals and “anamorphic shifts” that Žižek accentuates. No sooner does one balk at his insistence that daily experience is permeated with the “pleasure-in-pain” of what Lacan calls jouissance than John Mellencamp’s “Hurts So Good” or Bryan Adams’s “Cuts Like a Knife” (“but it feels so right!”) comes over the radio. Amidst our daily pursuit of pleasure, the supermarket stereo bespeaks “pain itself as the source of libidinal satisfaction” (Žižek 1999, 282). This article explores a particular type of rock anthem, positioning one of Adams’s biggest hits, “Summer of ‘69,” as what Lacan might call a point de capiton or “quilting point” (2006, 681). “Summer of ‘69” (co-written with Jim Vallance) is one of a number of mid-‘80s songs extolling the sublimity of summers gone by, looking back upon the glory of youth (“the best days of my life”) from the perspective of adulthood and its inexorable losses (“everything has come and gone”). My reasons for short-circuiting psychoanalytic theory with songs of this kind are twofold. Since its inception in Freud, psychoanalysis has been concerned with the sublimity of things irretrievably lost, with desire’s relation to states of perfection from which we are irrevocably separated. Žižek’s re-workings of these motifs can help to reveal the theoretical problems and paradoxes staged in songs like “Summer of ‘69,” which, if seemingly simple, have an uncanny resistance to death, hovering perpetually in the air. I  work with them, furthermore, because there seems to me something highly complex in their own functioning as objects of desire, and in the dynamics of fantasy and sublimity reflected in listeners’ relations to them over time. I am interested not simply in what we gain from these songs. To draw on Žižek’s (Biblically-inspired) terms, these songs make palpable in daily experience the paradoxical dynamic of “losing what we never had.”

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Those Were the Best Days of My Life Though Adams is Canadian, his 1984 hit begins with four lines which, according to an American magazine, “just about anyone currently between the ages of 18 and 48 could recite better than the Pledge of Allegiance” (Unterberger 2007). “I got my first real six-string,” sings Adams, “bought it at the fiveand-dime. Played it till my fingers bled, it was the summer of ‘69.” At this point the drums kick in as the singer ecstatically revisits the birth of his very first band (“me and some guys from school”). If we acknowledge that getting a guitar and forming a band can be memorable events, the song’s lyrics, when taken on their own, offer little to convince us that these bygone days were so sublime. The guitar was very cheap. The band, plagued by a lack of commitment (“Jimmy quit, Jody got married”), never really had what it takes (“Shoulda known we’d never get far”). In the video, directed by Steve Barron, Adams is living in a very small trailer home with nowhere to play but a dilapidated barn surrounded by trash. The singer will go on to tell of a presumably unglamorous summer job that he had no choice but to take (“no use in complaining”). And while the summer “seemed to last forever,” much of that time was spent “killing time,” restlessly. If the music were different, if Adams’s voice were not so passionate, and if he didn’t hammer the point home a few lines later, we might see little reason to regard these as the “best days of his life.” This (admittedly artificial) gesture of extracting the literal content of the lyrics from their framing in the song enables us to grasp the dynamic of what Lacan calls the objet petit a. One way to understand this term is that it pinpoints the spectral difference between “objectively” mundane events and these same events as sublime objects of desire. The objet a is the intimation of an enigmatic, unnameable “something more,” irreducible to an entity’s empirical features but on account of which it appears infinitely desirable. It designates the paradoxical presence of an entirely insubstantial “it,” a dimension arising only when we view an entity from a certain angle—“when one takes a direct look at it, one sees nothing at all” (Žižek 2001a, 151). Sublimity, for Lacan, resides in this “anamorphic” transformation of the empirically regular, of that which is “part of everyday reality” (Žižek 2005, 95). We could think of it as a psychical rock-‘n-rolling of an otherwise ordinary object. John Mellencamp’s celebratory “Small Town” offers a similar dynamic. Again, when looked upon directly the song’s lyrics give little cause to celebrate—they could easily have been set to despondent music and sung as a lamentation: “I was born in a small town, and I live in a small town, probably die in a small town … ” All of the singer’s friends are “so small town” and

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his job prospects are equally limited (“there’s little opportunity”). Most of the lines could theoretically be given as reasons for fleeing small towns. But Mellencamp’s song makes one feel as though small-town existence is a state of unsurpassable glory. The ecstatic tone of his singing and the driving power of the band combine, in Lacan’s terms, to raise these utterly mundane (if not depressing) features of small-town life “to the dignity of the Thing” (1992, 12). The song’s message, in this regard, is not simply that small towns are intrinsically great, but that their infinite desirability resides in an ultimately unnameable feature, a “something more” that reverberates through their ordinary components when perceived from a certain (Mellencampian) angle. In Adams’s case, the perspective from which he is “looking awry” upon those summer days is the future (“And now the times are changing”), and we might suspect that it is this perspective as such that endows the summer with such inexplicable wonder:  “Oh, and when I  look back now [the relatively mundane events of youth shine with sublime splendor].” The objet a, in this regard, presents the paradox of a quality which “overlaps with its loss, which emerges at the very moment of its loss” (Žižek 2006b, 61)—a retroactivity known only too well to listeners of ‘80s music. When Chicago and Cinderella lament (in ‘84 and ‘88) that “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone,” they are emphasizing the paradoxical way in which the objet a appears in hindsight, correlative to its status as lost. But if the aim of psychoanalytic theory were merely to expose the illusory status of sublime objects, it would be ill-suited to the passionate spirit of songs like these, and it would bypass Adams’s own more radical lessons on the nature of desire. His opening verses are about trying passionately to “get” somewhere or something; and if those summer days lack nameable advantages, what they resonate with is a potent yearning. What the song laments losing, we could say, is not primarily something Adams possessed during that summer but something which possessed him—something which made him play that cheap guitar so ardently that his fingers bled and he liked it. A surprising feature of many ‘80s songs about desire for past days is the way in which desire itself emerges as the past’s own defining feature. “When I turned seventeen,” sings Tom Cochrane in “Boy Inside the Man,” “we had passion, we had dreams”—the element of the past that most attracts him is desire itself (something tragically lost when he “turned much older”). Bruce Springsteen’s “No Surrender” is an even more direct analogy with “Summer of ’69.” From the vantage point of fading desire (“hearts of fire grow cold”), the singer rocks his way into a past whose glory and wonder reside in a passionate attachment to future glories, evoked by the playing of music: “maybe we could cut some place of our own with these drums and these guitars.”

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The “lost object” is thus strangely circuitous. The summer of ‘69 is intensely desirable because it was a time of intense desire. The singer seeks passionately to grasp a past defined by its passion for something beyond immediate grasp (escaping his fingers, leaving them raw). It is this variation on the motif of “losing what we never had” that qualifies Adams as a Lacanian—the song’s psychoanalytic “lesson” concerns not simply the retroactivity of sublimity (the summer becomes intensely desirable in hindsight) but the “self-reflexivity” at the heart of desire: “desire is always also a desire for desire itself” (Žižek 2002a, 144). Both Springsteen and Adams subject this circuitry to an additional twist, given our awareness that they do “get far,” do ultimately “cut someplace” of their own with those drums and guitars. The fact that we’re hearing their songs testifies to the fulfilment of their youthful dreams. Barron’s “Summer of ‘69” video renders this conspicuously. When we shift to the present (“Oh, and when I look back now … ”), Adams is lying in a hammock, casually telling the story of his life to a journalist who eagerly transcribes his every reflection. The obstacles were short-lived: no more tedious summer jobs, no more trailer. Nor is there a trace of those “deadlines and commitments” that Bob Seger laments in “Against the Wind,” no encroaching disillusionment with the music industry (“Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then”). It’s hard to resist the impression that these are the best days of Adams’s life. But this contradiction only accentuates the inherent “swerve” of Lacanian desire. What is potentially inaccessible to one who “has it made” is the very desire that so potently infused those summer days gone by, their pulsating yearning for something to come. As Steve Winwood’s “Back in the Highlife” makes clear, the most song-worthy state of affairs is not the highlife itself, but the acute feeling that one will be there, perhaps imminently.

Standing on Your Mamma’s Porch If this paradox of “losing what we never had” applies to the first part of Adams’s song, don’t the subsequent verses emphasize desire’s fulfilment? What made the summer of ‘69 so great, we learn in the middle, was the girl whom the singer met during his “evenings down at the drive-in.” Adams himself insists that the song is about sex, the 69 in its title referring to a sexual position rather than a specific year (Mersereau 2010, 26). It is hard to find a YouTube page or a blog on Adams that doesn’t take giddy delight in exposing the song’s “hidden reference,” fuelled by the revelation that Adams was only 10 in 1969. Interestingly, this game partakes of the very “sexual reductionism” for which psychoanalysis itself is so often attacked (Zupančič 2008,

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206), i.e., its predilection for translating everything into sexual references. But surprisingly, it is here that the insights of Lacan and Žižek encourage a twist: this direct translation of the song’s title into sexual meanings is what a psychoanalytic approach should seek to complicate. For a song supposedly about sex, “Summer of ‘69” evokes only a single, innocent image of contact: “Oh and when you held my hand.” No one here is making love in the green grass behind any stadiums. Even the hand-holding occurs while the girl is “standing on [her] momma’s porch,” inaccessible. In fact, the only thing she does in this song is proclaim she’ll “wait forever.” (For what? Why?) Again we encounter a strange circuit. The song returns to the past out of nostalgic yearning, but the defining feature of this past was a waiting for some future event; it recalls a moment in which they were passionately determined to wait interminably. Here we should subject the motif of “losing what we never had” to an additional twist. What is lost with the past is neither a positively-given entity, nor simply the desire for a specific entity (still-to-come). What Lacan and Žižek share with many rock anthems is their insistence on the ultimately unsymbolizable nature of desire’s object, its attachment to an unspecified, indescribable “something” toward which that six-string seems to gesture. “Born to Run”—where? “Never Surrender”—what? “Don’t Stop Believin’ ”—in what? We should resist the temptation to reduce the dynamic of these songs to a generality that enables listeners to “fill out” their lyrics with differing personal content (each listener can “identify” with the song because he or she has specific things to “keep believing” in). When Journey encourages us so passionately to “hold onto that feeling”—without offering a scrap of insight into what the feeling might be—they are not merely being vague. What they recognize, like Lacanian psychoanalysis, is that holdin’ on is often most intense when it doesn’t know what it’s holdin’ on to. As Bon Jovi puts it: Never say goodbye, never say goodbye, Holdin’ on, we’ve got to try, holdin’ on to never say goodbye.

Never say goodbye to what? To holdin’ on. What are we holdin’ on to? To never saying goodbye. ‘80s rock and Lacanian psychoanalysis are two domains where this tautological circuitry, this self-reflexivity of passionate emotion, makes perfect sense.1 But no one is less ambiguous than Adams about what he had in the past. Indeed, in insisting that his song revolves around a “blatantly obvious sexual reference” (in Mersereau 2010, 26), he prompts an almost comic inversion of psychoanalytic criticism’s “sexual reductionism.” In this case it is the artist himself who insistently “reads into” the song’s apparently innocent phrases. If

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the song is supposed to be about “sex in the summertime,” why does Adams give us nothing but mommas’ porches? In instances like these, Žižek is quick to emphasize the dynamic of Freudian dream interpretation. Freud posits not a simple opposition between “dream-text” (the surface-appearance of the dream) and “dream-thought” (the “unconscious” meaning it conveys): the “true core” of the dream is something that “inscribes itself only through and in this very process of masking, so the very moment we retranslate the dream-content back into the dream-thought expressed in it, we lose the ‘true motif force’ of the dream” (2008, 72). In this regard, the properly psychoanalytic gesture consists not in revealing “sex” as the true referent veiled behind the song’s deceptively innocent surface, but in revealing the desire that inscribes itself through this “masking” as such. If the song is about lost teenage years, we should recall that this game of hiding sexual references is a teenage occupation par excellence. Adults may play the game too, but they don’t really need to, at least not with each other. What is potentially lost to the singer in ‘84 is not the sexual 69 (surely this could still be attained?) but the days when such talk seemed transgressive, when one felt one had to hide it, veiling one’s true messages because momma was just inside the door. What is lost, and what the song celebrates, is not (only) 69 but the wonder of those days when mutual oral sex was something you felt too inhibited to talk about directly, when, like some sacred unspeakable Thing, it could only be intimated in roundabout locutions and hushed tones. Consider the contrast between Adams’s veiled references and Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane”:  “dribble off those Bobbie Brooks let me do what I  please.” Here, a vital dimension of youth has already been lost, not simply insofar as Jack and Diane have clearly lost their virginity, but insofar as they’ve lost any perceived necessity to veil their talk. Ironically, Jack and Diane are already talking like pragmatic adults, while the adult singer of “Summer of ‘69” enacts the trepidation of virginal adolescence. Adams has claimed that the final line of the song is simply too explicit to be misperceived: “Me and my baby in a 69.” But if this is really what he says, it’s hard to hear. The music conceals what’s going on—he gets away with it, sneaking in some sex without being heard. Of course, the adult Adams doesn’t need to sneak around like this anymore—and that, I’d suggest, is what the song most laments. Put differently, what we miss in going directly for the sexual reference is the vital Lacanian distinction between the object of desire and the “object-cause.” As Žižek explains, “while the object of desire is simply the desired object, the cause of desire is the feature on account of which we desire the desired object” (2001a, 147), a detail or circumstance which we often misperceive as a secondary obstacle preventing desire’s fulfilment.

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Mellencamp’s 1987 “Paper in Fire” commences with this dynamic—it describes a woman who chased a dream “with much desire”: But when she got too close to her expectations Well the dream burned up, like paper in fire.

The woman is not merely thwarted by obstacles that prevent her from actualizing her dreams. Rather, it is because she overcomes the obstacles and gets “too close” to her dreams that they burn up. Lacanian objects of desire are similarly combustible when deprived of their object-cause. Or as U2 puts it:  “I gave you everything you ever wanted. It wasn’t what you wanted” (“So Cruel”).2 Adams’s most ambiguous line is also the only one to describe physical contact: “Oh and when you held my hand, I knew that it was now or never.” Why on earth was it “now or never”? And what was “it”? Again, the unsymbolizable is the thing that’s lost. What adult sex is at risk of losing is precisely the sense of radical expectancy and indeterminacy that defined physical contact back then, the intense intimation that something was on the brink of happening, the sense of a fleeting, indescribable it that seemed urgently within grasp (making one “bleed” for it). What is Lacan’s objet a if not such an utterly indefinable “it” that marks the (very real) difference between sublime sexual contact and mundane repetition? As a brief mental experiment: do we know that the girl in Adams’s song is a “lost object,” gone forever with that distant summer? “Sometimes when I play that old six-string, think about you wonder what when wrong.” Could he not theoretically be singing to the girl—a girl whom he still has—and wondering what went wrong (with his desire), why he no longer feels the same quaking passion as when they stood on that porch? He has the object but has lost the it that made him desire it. To make no mistake:  if Žižekian psychoanalysis balks at Adams’s clearcut insistence that ‘69 means 69, it does so with an eminently sexual agenda. What is missed in going directly for the sexual reference is not simply the “non-sexual” aspects of the song, but the much more pervasive dynamic of sexuality that can pertain to a summer. We might recall the strange experience of being made aware, for the first time, that 69 is not just a number, of being alerted, through suggestive smiles and knowing winks—or fearful, guarded reactions—that there’s something more, something enigmatic and somehow “sexual” going on here, that we’ve trespassed on some unfathomable realm of mystery. To designate a summer as the “summer of 69” is (also) to suggest the way this dynamic applies to the whole of it, overflowing specific sexual encounters. Adams’s “sexual” title should thus be taken more seriously—it conveys how a time can itself be sexualized, resonating with a “something

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more” by virtue of which even the most mundane entities (numbers) are no longer simply themselves.

I Close My Eyes, and She Slips Away It is crucial, for Žižek, to be clear on the dynamic of this overflow. The “sexualisation” of reality is not a simple consequence of there being a lot of sex going on, or of sex’s experiential fullness permeating everything around it. Žižek is quick to emphasize that this “universal surplus—this capacity of sexuality to overflow the entire field of human experience” is not to be taken as a “sign of its preponderance” (2004, 89), i.e., of sex’s substantial density in relation to everything else. “Rather, it is the sign of a certain structural faultiness: sexuality strives outward and overflows the adjoining domains precisely because it cannot find satisfaction in itself, because it never attains its goal.” This brings us to a central contention of Lacan’s later work, his notorious (and often misunderstood) insistence that il n’y a pas de rapport sexuel (“there is no sexual relationship”). 69 is not just a particular attempt at sexual gratification—it serves as a metaphor for the unity of opposed entities, the dialectical synthesis of inversions, or as Adams puts it, the reconciliation of “the yin and yang” (in Mersereau 2010, 26). But for Lacan, il n’y a pas de 69—there is no “natural,” innate unity of biological beings in human sexuality, since no two partners are ever a 6 and a 9: “Lacan is as far as it is possible to be from the notion of sexual difference as the relationship of two opposite poles which supplement each other and together form the whole” (Žižek 2005, 159). He is much closer to U2’s 1991 assessment: “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” (“Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World”).3 That is, no matter how attractive a physical partner may be, there remains a fundamental (indeed absurd) incongruity between this partner in his or her empirical reality and the Thing, the sublime entity that could truly make a divided, finite individual into a Whole. It is for this reason that the human sexual relationship, in Bono’s terms, is like “tryin’ to throw your arms around the world,” defined by a fundamental impossibility which both condemns it to incompletion and simultaneously endows it with sublime scope. It is also in this respect that Bloodhound Gang gets it wrong in their 1999 hit “The Bad Touch”: “You and me baby we ain’t nothin’ but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.” Human sex, for psychoanalysis, is never strictly “natural,” never equivalent to a physical exchange between mammals. Indeed, the definitive incommensurability of animal and human sex is proven by the practice of 69 itself, something no animal would ever bother doing. As Alenka Zupančič notes, “the further

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sex departs from the ‘pure’ copulating movement (that is to say, the wider the range of elements it includes in its activity), the more sexual it becomes. Sexuality gets sexualized precisely in this constitutive interval that separates it from itself” (2008, 207). In Lacan, even the most “straightforward” human sex is “separated from itself” through a complex imbrication with fantasy supplements—a dynamic attested to by “The Bad Touch” itself. For all the animalistic directness of the song’s chorus, its verses embellish the “basic” sexual act with an endless array of metaphors and fantasmatic imagery (“I wanna be down in your South Seas … ”). We could thus paraphrase a central contention of Lacan’s later writings in saying that every empirical 69, in order to work, must be a 6 + 9 + a. Insofar as a fundamental deadlock or impossibility pertains to human sexuality per se, every sexual relationship needs to be supplemented with an a, a “something more” infusing the base components of reproduction, a fantasy-dimension exceeding the physical bodies in their “natural” operations. And here we encounter an even more radical variation on “losing what we never had”: conceiving the full sexual relationship as a fundamental impossibility helps explain the odd but eminently human tendency to set about losing it, casting it as lost—a prospect that might sound absurd if not for the fact that hit singles are doing it all the time. Boston’s 1976 “More Than a Feeling,” like “Summer of ‘69,” recalls a girl (“Mary Ann”) whom the singer “used to know” in a long-lost summer. What it stages, however, is by no means an imaginative return to Mary Ann but a strangely ecstatic re-enactment of her loss: “I dream of a girl I used to know, I close my eyes and she slips away … ” It is not simply that the singer’s dream-girl (tragically) slipped away from him, nor that the dream of her inevitably slips away (when he opens his eyes). He explicitly fantasizes about her slipping away—his fantasy orchestrates and captures the moment of her irretrievable loss—and strangely, this moment is rendered ecstatic, sublime, the singer’s voice soaring as the band explodes (“Away-ay-aaaaayyyyy!”). The song’s most awesome moment is the moment of irrevocable separation from the empirical girl—“when I see Mary Ann walk away.” Revealingly, the refusal of Adams’s lyrics to evoke a realm of empirical sexual activities is not only maintained but heightened by the song’s video, where one might expect a “fleshing out” of the words with images of passion. At the critical moment (“I knew that it was now or never”), Adams actively turns away from the girl and walks off (toward the camera), leaving her frozen, lingering forever on the brink of a cliff as he returns to the present. The video thus provides a supplementary answer to the question of what was “now or never.” It is as though the singer recognizes the precise moment at which he

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must lose the girl, eternally, in order to be able to preserve her as a sublime fantasy. It is thus that she becomes the signifier of 69—of a perfection (a full sexual relationship) that could have been attained if not for certain contingent obstacles. From a Žižekian-Lacanian angle there is a compelling “truth” to the ecstasy of Adams and Boston: we lose what we never had because doing so enables us most purely to gain it. These songs are not, of course, inventing something entirely new—their dynamic is clearly indebted to the tradition of romantic poet-heroes. As Žižek writes, “It is only when the poet loses his lady that he finally and truly acquires her, it is precisely through this loss that she gains her place in the fantasy space that regulates the subject’s desire” (1992, 86). But what distinguishes Adams’s rock song from these melancholy poets is the purity of his enjoyment in all this. Not only is the girl not dead—the song orchestrates her loss in the strict absence of any details that would vitiate her sublime image: annoying quarrels, tedious post-break-up phone calls, guilt. It is as though she mysteriously vanished, with none of the sadness (or finitude) accompanying death. The absolute ambiguity and abstractness of “what went wrong” permits her both to occupy the sublime position and to be something one can rock out to. The true fantasy, thus, is not simply the perfection of the past but the manner of its loss—what’s been lost are the empirical distortions that surround and vitiate any actual loss. In these senses, the song’s libidinal dynamic is diametrically opposed to Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer” (released the same year). For all its comparable talk of a lost summer (to which “you can never go back”) and an ideal Woman who inhabited it (her “brown skin shining in the sun”), what Henley’s song “gets off” on is not the irretrievably lost object but the determination to regain it: “Someday I’m gonna get you back, gonna show you what I’m made of.” The song’s desire is not, ultimately, a desire for that lost summer but a desire to outlast it, to keep proving desire long “after the boys of summer have gone.” By contrast, the singer of “Summer of ‘69” is one of Henley’s “boys of summer.” The song’s video reinforces this. Adams plucks a guitar out of the air, trampling a sign that reads “Positively No Admittance” as he fantasmatically returns to the site of his youthful summer—the girl nowhere to be seen. This “inaccessible” realm involves nothing other than the band and the dilapidated garage on a summer evening. In an eminent tautology, the adult Adams returns to the summer of ‘69 in order to play “Summer of ‘69.” But the crucial feature of the video is still to come. As he’s playing away with the boys, we shift to a distant, blurred, bumpy perspective-shot of the same event. The enigmatic viewpoint is eventually assigned to the dream-girl herself, gazing through the window of a passing car. She does

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return, but against expectation she is driving by with a new boyfriend. As they pass the place where Adams is playing: Boyfriend. Girl. Boyfriend. Girl.

Who was that? (secretively) Nobody …  I said, “Who was that”? (evasively) I said, “Nobody” … 

The video offers a clear demonstration of Žižek’s insistence that fantasy’s true dimension is the gaze:  “the proper object of fantasy is the fantasized gaze, not the fantastic scene itself” (2002b: 130). What the video stages here is not primarily Adams’s fantasy of the girl, but of her gaze upon him. The object of fantasy is her fantasy—the fantasy that he continues to exist for her on the level of fantasy, untarnished and inviolable, as part of a 69. As she drives away her smile and intense expression betray the sublime place that he inhabits within her, a domain that remains forever inaccessible to this masculine numbskull beside her, a domain to which there is “positively no admission.” It’s in this capacity that Adams emasculates her boyfriend, who can do nothing to uproot the (eternalized) memory of what could have occurred. An annoying fight breaks out in the car as the video ends—this is what Adams evades, preserving the fantasmatic status of his 69, free from the corrupting influence of empirical daily reality.

Long After the Thrill of Living Is Gone Perhaps the strangest paradox of these songs about past wonder and glory emerges when we consider listeners’ relation to them over time. Andrew Unterberger (2007) writes of Bob Seger’s “Night Moves”: Even when I was listening to the song back in my first years of high school, it made me feel like my best days were behind me, or at least that I better start living real good real quick, lest I not have anything to sing about with such passion when I reach my 30s.

Unterberger’s response pinpoints a paradox that many can recall in their own experience with songs like “Summer of ‘69”—a song I listened to repeatedly at the age of 11. Of course, even an 11-year-old can experience forms of nostalgia, “identifying” with the singer in recalling previous summers (a week at camp?), or fantasizing about future days as great as those extolled by Adams. But in singing and rocking along, the 11-year-old engages in the strange practice of lamenting the loss of days-to-come, fantasmatically inhabiting a future gaze for which the wonder of youth will appear as irretrievable. Songs

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like “Summer of ‘69” offer youthful listeners the strange pleasure of losing great summers they have not yet had, of rocking ecstatically to Mary Anns who will have slipped away. We should note that this futur antérieur was integral to “Summer of ‘69” from the beginning. Adams has described the hit as “a response to ‘Night Moves,’ one of his favorite songs” (Unterberger). In conceiving it, he was thus imitating the nostalgic gaze he’d observed in others long before he’d arrived at a place from which he could be properly nostalgic about teenage pasts. To explore these paradoxes—which, I’d argue, reflect much about the functioning of “normal” desire and enjoyment—I suggest a brief detour through Mellencamp’s “Jack and Diane” and its famous refrain: “Oh yeah, life goes on long after the thrill of living is gone.” Singing of teenage sex and summer days, Mellencamp instructs his listeners to “Hold onto sixteen as long as you can” since “changes come around real soon, make us women and men.” If the song was hugely popular with teenagers in 1982, a sixteen-year-old might easily (as I did) experience a degree of confusion if not anxiety in the face of its urgent injunction. Being sixteen, as any sixteen-year-old knows, is not always or often thrilling. What is this “thrill of living” that I’m supposed to be exhibiting? The anxiety here is correlative to what Lacan terms the Che Vuoi?—“what do you want?” (2006: 690). What is it about my sixteen-ness that appears so eminently desirable to the gaze of the Other? Once again, a close look reveals that the singer’s desire is directed toward desire and expectancy itself:  “Jackie’s gonna be a football star.” The glorious aspect of that youthful summer resides, for the adult gaze, in the intimation of things imminently to come. Yet perhaps the song’s key “psychoanalytic” lesson is to be found in the unexpected inversion accomplished by its chorus. What it stages is not just Mellencamp’s (adult) lament that the “thrill of living” embodied in sixteen-year-old Jack and Diane is gone for him. When we listen carefully, it’s clear that this line is Jackie’s (“and Jackie says … ”). Strangely, the song is about a sixteen-year-old who is already obsessed with the thrill-of-living’s imminent loss. The chorus is Jackie’s own mantra. If this attitude seems an irregular distortion of melancholy—normally understood as an attachment to things that one has lost—Jackie, who spends his sixteen-year-old summer days refraining about the brevity of youth, gives body to what Žižek terms melancholy at its purest. Žižek draws here on Agamben’s contention that “melancholy offers the paradox of an intention to mourn that precedes and anticipates the loss of the object” (2001a: 146). The “pure” melancholic treats an object as lost “before the object is actually lost” (Žižek 2001a: 147). But why? Jackie has the wonder

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of youth in his grasp, so why not “live in the moment” and fully enjoy it, rather than dwelling on its loss? The song suggests its own response to this question. Perhaps the “thrill of living” is a direct product of Jackie’s perception of the present as fleeting and behind him in the moment of its occurrence; perhaps Jackie renders sublime his youthful reality by casting it as something already lost. Notably, Jackie’s refrain (“Oh yeah, life goes on … ”) accompanies the teens’ sexual encounter; the chorus commences as they head off behind the shady trees. In this light, sex for Jackie involves an implicit self-division. He engages in sex with Diane as a sixteen-year-old, while simultaneously refraining about the irrevocable loss of such things. The encounter is thus a clear 6 + 9 + a. The a, in this case, is the additional (future) gaze that is carried into the act and upon whose presence its intensity depends (“the proper object of fantasy is the fantasized gaze”). Jackie performs sex with an eye to a future gaze for whom it will appear to encapsulate a lost “thrill of living,” for whom it will appear to contain the sublime “it.” Put differently, one way to make sex especially intense in ‘82 is to perceive it as something that one will look back upon with infinite longing in 2011—one “sublimates” the sexual encounter in performing it for one’s own future (thrill-less) self. Žižek has this kind of dynamic in mind when he insists that even private sexual encounters (behind shady trees) are “minimally ‘exhibitionist’ ” (1997: 179). Jackie’s melancholia, in this respect, is linked to his own encroaching awareness that il n’y a pas de 69. Only moments after the sexual encounter (“Jackie sits back … ”), he has already begun to express a restless discontent. He wants to “go off to the city,” failing to perceive (as Diane needs to inform him) that they “ain’t missing a thing.” The “thrill” of the experience seems already to be threatened, just as Jackie suspected it would. His melancholy, in this light, operates as a strategy to avert confronting the sublime object’s illusory nature. He is able to gain the thrill more purely by framing these moments as something he’ll later perceive as a lost perfection. As Žižek explains, “the only way to possess an object [or a perfection] which we never had, which was lost from the very outset, is to treat an object that we still fully possess as if this object is already lost” (2001a: 146).Youth’s intensity, the object of Mellencamp’s reflections, is here revealed as correlative to a type of temporal “short circuit,” and the song’s psychoanalytic “lesson” is to be found in the peculiar inversion it accomplishes: what we may overlook, in gazing nostalgically on past times, is the way in which this gaze was inscribed in the “lost” time from the very beginning. Perhaps Jackie is not so unusual here. A good part of one’s happiness “in the moment” can be related to the realization that what one is currently experiencing will later be perceived as something

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sublime; present happiness is generated with an eye to the future gaze observing it. Rock concerts are excellent examples. Much of one’s joy in seeing a rock star perform is linked to the knowledge that one will later be able to say that one was there, that one experienced it (regardless of how terrible the acoustics happen to be in the moment). Doesn’t this dynamic help account for the fact that a great many concert-goers spend a large portion of the concert looking at it through their camera-lens? In this way the future perspective is directly inscribed in the “present” experience.

Tonight, Let’s Enjoy Life Žižek’s work also encourages a supplementary inversion of the dynamic explored above. If enjoyment can arise from the way we live our present moments with an eye to their future re-telling, it may also be facilitated by the fantasy that we’ve already enjoyed, irrevocably—in the past. Simply put, why should the fundamental premise of these songs—i.e. that we enjoyed ourselves as youths but “now the times are changing” (and we’re thrill-less adults)—be correlative to an intensely rocking experience in the present (for which we may be willing to pay large sums of money)? A Žižekian response to this paradox compels an inversion of its basic terms: perhaps the issue is not simply that our present “adult” reality is deprived of enjoyment (which purely existed only in the past), but rather that this present reality is saturated with enjoyment, congested with it. This is the late-capitalist dynamic theorized in the later writings of Lacan and emphasized throughout Žižek: a shift from Symbolic Law as prohibitive agency (separating subjects from enjoyment) to the contemporary Superego as injunction to Enjoy, an injunction which follows us relentlessly and assumes innumerable forms. In the contemporary world we are “bombarded from all sides by different versions of the injunction ‘Enjoy!’, from direct enjoyment in sexual performance to enjoyment in professional achievement or in spiritual awakening” (2006a, 104). The paramount “ethical duty” imposed on us by contemporary capitalism is the duty to extract maximum enjoyment from all facets of existence, and to do so, as Van Halen and Nike insist, “Right Now.” “Tonight, let’s enjoy life,” suggests Pitbull in the 2011 hit “Give Me Everything”: “Let’s do it tonight” because “for all we know we might not get tomorrow.” One doesn’t have to be a psychoanalyst to recognize that this “it” refers to sex, and that the singer’s reference to finitude is a strategy of seduction. The “unconscious” of this song consists not in some veiled sexual reference but in its complicity with the dynamic of contemporary capitalism, which itself compels us to demand “everything tonight.” In

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this light, perhaps the enjoyment afforded by anthems like “Summer of ‘69” resides not primarily in a fantasized return to previous days of enjoyment, but rather in the fantasmatic release they offer from a stressful obligation to enjoy in the present. Amidst a realm saturated by enjoyment, the projection of enjoyment into the unattainable past functions ironically to open the space for enjoyment—the fantasy of having already fully enjoyed releases us from the (enjoyment-squelching) obligation to do so right now. Confronted with Pitbull’s urgent injunction to “do it tonight,” Adams can simply respond: “I don’t need to. I already did it back in the Summer of ‘69.” He can then relax, spend the evening jamming with the boys—and actually enjoy himself. If this dynamic of “enjoined enjoyment” seems counterintuitive, it is perhaps nowhere more apparent than at a rock concert. For many of us adults, though we may love a particular band’s music, the prospect of attending a concert can be tiring, and not simply due to the associated headaches (on-line ticket queues, traffic). The very thought of having to sufficiently enjoy, to rock out with sufficient abandon, can itself be a source of anxiety (“Am I enjoying every second enough to warrant the $300 I spent on the ticket?!”). At a Bon Jovi concert I recently attended, my friends and I were admonished by the sixteen-year-olds in the group beside us for not screaming with sufficient ecstasy every time Jon broke into another #1 hit. Ironically, these sixteenyear-olds spent most of the concert recording it (and themselves) through their cell phones, enjoying the experience by framing it as a purity of enjoyment to be later recalled.

Conclusion: Hold on to Sixteen as Long as You Can …  “Looking awry” from a final angle on the dynamic of enjoyment in these songs, I’ll turn briefly to a concept of increasing centrality in Lacan’s later work. Like many rock songs, “Summer of ‘69” concludes—or rather fails to conclude—with an endlessly protracted rocking out. The volume gradually fades on a band that refuses to stop and a singer who won’t relent reformulating his praise for that eternally lost summer. In the context established by the lyrics, this immortalized repetition creates a dynamic which Lacanian psychoanalysis seeks to capture with the term “drive,” best understood through its distinction between “goal” and “aim.” The explicit goal of Adams’s song may be to journey into the past, to reclaim it, to figure out “what went wrong,” but the journey toward this goal (facilitated by the six-string) starts to function as its own aim, that is, “as something that brings its own satisfaction” (Žižek 1999, 304). Adams never gets back to the past, never reaches the girl

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again nor discovers why things fell apart—the process, to use Žižekian terms, circulates around a “radically inaccessible X that forever eludes its grasp”; and in that respect, all this rocking is marked by a constitutive failure, a failure it endlessly repeats. But here, as in Lacanian drive, failure is transformed into a paradoxical success. In this riffing and repetition, we shift from a quest or lament for the lost, inaccessible object to an objet a that emerges in and through this endlessly repeated rocking, a by-product of the purported goal. By the end, the singer is no longer directly targeting what was lost, no longer wanting to be there, given the joy generated here, in the rocking itself. Put differently, if the song is about loss—about what the singer no longer has and can never regain—its result is a transfiguration of loss. The singer doesn’t really want to return to the summer of ‘69, because in the summer of ‘69, he didn’t have this song. We could hardly find a better demonstration of this “reflexive reversal-into-self constitutive of drive” (Žižek 1999, 304)  than Springsteen’s 1984 “Glory Days,” a song that I could hardly conclude without mentioning. For all its lyrical emphasis on finitude and inevitable loss (“Time slips away, leaves you with nothin’, mister”), what the song ultimately brings forward, and celebrates, is a strangely immortal dimension in human beings—the self-proliferating dynamic of talking about the past, the insatiable, relentless impulse to repeat such talk, and the enjoyment that eternalizes this repetition. Talking (and singing) of glory days circulates around a central impossibility, stretching toward something forever lost that can never be gotten back; but Springsteen’s song turns failure into success, rocking not to the inaccessible days themselves, but in the paradoxical enjoyment derived from an endless circulation around them. In these songs, as Žižek (2006b, 62) says of drive: “[W]‌e pass from the lost object to loss itself as an object. That is to say: the weird movement called ‘drive’ is not driven by the ‘impossible’ quest for the lost object; it is a push to enact ‘loss’—the gap, cut, distance—itself directly.” Nowhere is the paradoxical human enjoyment of “enacting loss” more apparent than in our incessant return to these songs. Properly seductive, they entice us to keep coming back, repeatedly granting us the exquisite pleasure of losing something that we never (fully) had. If a state of absolute unity and wholeness with an other—a metaphysical 69—is the ultimate “goal” of human beings (given their inherent division and separation), what these songs reflect is the upside of the fact that il n’y a pas de 69. Put another way, when Springsteen asserts, famously, that glory days will pass us by “in the wink of a young girl’s eye,” he gives voice to what the enduring popularity of these songs seems to prove—that there’s something seductive, indeed sexual, about losing sixteen, again and again.

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Notes 1. Tennessee Williams’s play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1986, 53) may be of some help here. Like a good ‘80s rock start, the character Brick spends his nights lamenting the loss of what he had when he was “still young an’ believing”:

BIG DADDY: BRICK: BIG DADDY: BRICK BIG DADDY:

Believing what? Believing …  Believing what? (stubbornly evasive): Believing …  I don’t know what the hell you mean by believing and I don’t think you know what you mean by believing … 

Big Daddy could be addressing the members of Journey here. But Brick is not being merely “evasive.” It was the very intransitivity of his youthful belief that makes its loss so traumatic. Simultaneously, it is the difficulty of specifying what one had there, in the past, that attaches one to it so forcefully. The melancholic, notes Žižek (2001a, 147), “is not aware of what he has lost in the lost object.” 2. Adams (1991) resurrects momma a few years later with the oddly-named hit, “Is Your Momma Gonna Miss Ya?” By now, the singer and the girl have succeeded in leaving the porch (“She’s going with me, momma”), but this accessibility of the love-object only inspires Adams to a full-blown fetishization of the object-cause. Now that he’s got the girl he can’t stop talking about momma— “Is your momma gonna miss her little rolling stone? Is your momma gonna cry now she’s alone? Cause momma’s little girl ain’t going home.” Finally free from restrictions, the singer insistently and repeatedly re-invokes the obstacle, revealing its constitutive relationship with desire. 3. This line, popularized by Gloria Steinem, originated with Irina Dunn.

References Adams, Bryan. 1983. Cuts Like a Knife. Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance. UMG Recordings. Adams, Bryan. 1984. Summer of ’69. Bryan Adams and Jim Vallance. A&M Records. Adams, Bryan. 1991. Is Your Mamma Gonna Miss Ya? Bryan Adams and Robert John Lange. A&M Records. Barron, Steve, dir. 1984. Summer of ’69. Limelight Productions. Bloodhound Gang. 1999. The Bad Touch. Jimmy Pop. Geffen Records. Bon Jovi. 1986. Never Say Goodbye. Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora. Vertigo Records. Boston. 1976. More Than a Feeling. Tom Scholtz. Epic Records. Carroll, Noel. 2004. “Afterword: Psychoanalysis and the Horror Film.” In Horror Film and Psychoanalysis, edited by Steven Schneider. New York: Cambridge University Press. Cochrane, Tom. 1986. Boy Inside the Man. Capitol Records. Henley, Don. 1984. Boys of Summer. Geffen Records. Johnston, Adrian. 2008. Žižek’s Ontology:  A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Journey. 1981. Don’t Stop Believin’. Jonathan Cain, Steve Perry, and Neal Schon. Columbia Records. Kay, Sarah. 2003. Žižek: A Critical Introduction. London: Polity Press. Lacan, Jacques. 1992. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. Translated by Dennis Porter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Lacan, Jacques. 2006. Ecrits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. Mellencamp, John. 1982. Jack & Diane. Riva Records. Mellencamp, John. 1985. Small Town. Riva Records. Mellencamp, John. 1987. Paper in Fire. Mercury. Mersereau, Bob. 2010. The Top 100 Canadian Singles. Goose Lane. Pitbull. 2011. Give Me Everything. Armando Perez, Nick van de Wall, and Shaffer Smith. Polo Grounds Music. Seger, Bob. 1980. Against the Wind. Capitol Records. Springsteen, Bruce. 1984a. Glory Days. Columbia Records. Springsteen, Bruce. 1984b. No Surrender. Columbia Records. U2. 1991a. So Cruel. Bono. Island Records. U2. 1991b. Tryin’ to Throw Your Arms Around the World. Bono. Island Records. Unterberger, Andrew. 2007. “Summer of ’69 vs. Night Moves.” Stylus. https://intensities.wordpress.com/2007/06/29/summer-of-69-vs-night-moves/ Williams, Tennessee. 1986. Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. New York: Dramatists Play Service. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999. The Ticklish Subject:  The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2001a. Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. (1992) 2001b. Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. Revised Edition. Reprint, New York/London: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002a. For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002b. Opera’s Second Death. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. 2004. Organs without Bodies:  On Deleuze and Consequences. New York: Routledge. Žižek, Slavoj. (1994) 2005. The Metastases of Enjoyment:  Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006a. How to Read Lacan. New York: W.H. Norton and Company Žižek, Slavoj. 2006b. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso. Zupančič, Alenka. 2008. The Odd One In. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

12.  Interpellating Django: The Functions of the Gaze in Tarantino’s Django Unchained Abigail Fagan University of Connecticut

Quentin Tarantino’s film, Django Unchained, was released in theaters in December 2012 to widely varied criticism. The film follows the unlikely pairing of a German bounty hunter and a slave as they journey to reclaim the token damsel in distress through the 19th-century American South, depicting the complicated American history of slavery in scintillating Tarantino fashion: augmented by lots of bloodshed, oftentimes slapstick violence, and the likely invented sport of “Mandingo” fighting, wherein enslaved people are forced to fight one another to the death. Tarantino’s treatment of American slavery history has been in question since the leaked release of the script early in 2012, not only in terms of his right to develop this story, given the tension between his authority as a white director and the significance of accurate representations of this history, but also due to his pairing of American slavery with the spaghetti western tradition evoked in his reappropriation of the 1966 white character of Django. Spike Lee reportedly refused to see the film at all, writing on Twitter, “American Slavery Was Not A Sergio Leone Spaghetti Western. It Was A  Holocaust. My Ancestors Are Slaves. Stolen From Africa. I Will Honor Them” (rollingstone.com 2012). Still, in February 2013, the Academy awarded Quentin Tarantino Best Screenplay for the film and Christoph Waltz Best Supporting Actor for his depiction of the German bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz. Despite this mixed criticism—and in spite of the significance of these reservations—Django Unchained is an engaging rendition of a history that Americans often fail to recreate without attempting to exonerate our heroes

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from complicity in the brutality of the period. Tarantino’s adoption of this history seems at once inevitable and counterintuitive given the hyperbolic violence of his filmography; while it is clear that Tarantino’s rendition of the 19th century in the USA would glorify rather than avoid the violence of slavery, the pizazz with which Tarantino violence is imbued certainly affects the message this violence conveys to the film’s audience. In this essay, I read Django Unchained in conjunction with Jacque Lacan’s discussion of the valences of the gaze in his Seminar XI and Slavoj Žižek’s application of these theories to the real, symbolic and imaginary in his 2008 Enjoy Your Symptom! in order to understand how Tarantino’s depiction of violence comments on the ideology that supported the institution of slavery and (supports) American racism.1 Throughout the film, Tarantino condemns Hollywood for exonerating our cinematic heroes of the period (such as Abraham Lincoln in Lincoln) by providing them with 21st-century understandings of what it means to be intersubjective. In contrast, in Django Unchained, everybody but the German character of Dr. King Schultz is interpellated in the racist ideology that supports the institution of slavery, and the characters of the film, black and white alike, go to great lengths to preserve the ideology that rests on the subjugation of black Americans. In order to deal with this problem of interpellation in the film, this essay begins with the definition of the spot and the stain and the location of these valences of the gaze on Django and Schultz respectively. I  then demonstrate how characters of the film routinely attempt to interpellate these disturbing embodiments of the gaze in order to protect their ideology from the challenge the gaze enacts upon the symbolic order. Finally I discuss these attempts at interpellation in terms of the violence of the film. In line with Žižek’s application of the stain to Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ ” in Enjoy Your Symptom!, reading the violence of Django Unchained through the symbolic, imaginary, and real results in a conclusion to the film that is curiously overdetermined. The film simultaneously appears to suggest that: first, as the film’s villain Calvin Candie asserts, 9,999 out of 10,000 black Americans are biologically servile; and second, both correlatively and oppositely, because one black American in this 10,000 will succeed in razing this system to the ground, the entire system is proved faulty. Lacan teaches us that human experience takes place in three orders, the real, the symbolic, and the imaginary. While the symbolic order is the primary focus and venue for Django Unchained, Django’s rise to the triumphant hero of the film is predicated on his internal—and therefore imaginary—images of himself, just as Schultz’s fall is predicated on his inability to symbolize his experience of the real. Indeed, it is Tarantino’s allowance for the real to destabilize the symbolic order or law that governs his film that makes the film

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so engaging. As Lacan asserts, the real order does not lay dormant, but rather manifests in images or feelings that we struggle to articulate. Lacan (1981, 72) writes that these manifestations develop visually as different valences of the “gaze,” the feeling that we are consistently under surveillance from an unascertainable point; although functioning within the symbolic order, we continue to recognize “the pre-existence of the gaze—I see only from one point, but in my existence I am looked at from all sides.” The three different valences of the gaze are the spot or stain, the screen, and the lure, and they each function in accordance with different feelings of anxiety or desire. Whereas the lure is that inarticulable thing about another person which makes me desire her or him, the stain and the screen represent something amiss with the symbolic order; they are images of things that do not jive with the background or that seem to catch my own desires or fears and reflect them back at me. In Žižekian (2008, 4) terms, these valences of the gaze are “the leftover, the remainder, the object-excrement that escapes” “symbolic identification.” In other words, the gaze is the manifestation of cracks in the dominant ideology, the appearance of the real in the symbolic order. In Django Unchained, both the spot and the stain are embodied in the film’s characters. Dr. King Schultz, for example, functions as the screen for the 21st century audience member, primarily in that, unlike every other character in the film, he believes that slaves and other black people are people, rather than commodities. Defining the screen, Lacan (1981, 96) writes, The correlative of the picture, to be situated in the same place as it, that is to say, outside, is the point of gaze, while that which forms the mediation from the one to the other, that which is between the two, is something of another nature than geometral, optical space, something that plays an exactly reverse role, which operates, not because it can be traversed, but on the contrary because it is opaque—I mean the screen.

Because the screen is that which stands between myself as the viewer and that at which I  intend to look, it simultaneously screens from view that which I wish to see and catches my own perspective, reflecting it back to me. Schultz becomes the screen of Django Unchained by acting according to 21st century definitions of what it means to be human and treat other humans around him, in “play[ing] an exactly reverse role” to the symbolic order of the film and catching the responses of the 21st century audience in his image, ultimately providing within the film a venue for our—the viewers’—response. In order to play this role, however, Schultz cannot simply reject the governing law of the film—the institution of slavery—out of hand. Instead, he mimics others who function within the symbolic order; as a bounty hunter, Schultz capitalizes on slavery, earning his livelihood through the legitimized

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murder of a series of white men who have broken the law. After all, as Lacan (1981, 99) writes, mimicry does not require absolute adherence to that which one is mimicking: “Mimicry reveals something in so far as it is distinct from what might be called an itself that is behind. The effect of mimicry is camouflage, in the strictly technical sense. It is not a question of harmonizing with the background but, against a mottled background, of becoming mottled.” As the screen for the audience, Schultz mimics other characters of this time period, but his mimicry is necessarily faulty; he, uninterpellated, cannot intuitively follow the symbolic order, thus demonstrating to viewers the cracks in the ideology of the time period. Although today’s audience of the film does not immediately know it, Schultz’s first failure to mimic adequately the symbolic order in the film takes place within the first ten minutes, when he tells the enslaved man, Django, played by Jamie Foxx, to mount a horse. Indeed, within these first ten minutes, Schultz’s instructions appear to be the most normal of a series of abnormal activities, during which Schultz attempts to buy Django, kills one of the slave traders who refuses the sale, hands his rifle to an enslaved man, asking him to hold it, so that he can write out the bill of sale, and then rides off in his dentist’s wagon, the sculpture of a tooth atop his wagon comically wagging back and forth on its long spring. It is not until Django and Schultz enter Daughtrey, Texas 13 minutes into the film that we audience members realize that Schultz’s action of putting Django on a horse signifies his mere mimicry of the symbolic order of the American South in the 19th century, as well as his function as the screen for this current audience, which also presumes that a black man on a horse is nothing unnatural. As the inhabitants of Daughtrey, Texas come to their windows or look up in shock at the image of Django riding into town alongside Schultz on his cart, they point in awe: “It’s a nigger on a horse” (Tarantino 2012). In this moment, Tarantino forces his audience to reconcile this surprising cognitive dissonance by inhabiting the point of view of racist white people who signify black people as commodities. As the film proceeds, it becomes still clearer that every character in the film other than Schultz—even Django himself—accepts the symbolic order that signifies black people as slaves. Schultz’s position as the only character in the film who is not interpellated by the ideology of slavery serves to dispel a myth of films that portray heroes of the time period as imbued with 21st century conceptions of intersubjectivity. Films such as the recently released Lincoln, for example, suggest that our heroes of the past somehow performed above and beyond the symbolic order of their period, recognizing that enslaved people were people despite the common belief that they were commodities. Tarantino’s film suggests instead

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that only characters who grew up outside this specific ideology are capable of recognizing the fallacies of this order without experiencing a traumatic break of some kind. Indeed, the peripheral conflict of the film is the reinterpellation of Django from horse rider to nondescript black slave. Interestingly, then, the character that functions as the screen in Django Unchained is responsible for turning Django into a Lacanian stain. Like the screen, the stain nerve-rackingly demonstrates the gaps in the law we accept as our symbolic order. The stain is “that which always escapes from the grasp of that form of vision that is satisfied with itself in imagining itself as consciousness” (Lacan 1981, 74), an oftentimes anamorphic image that appears impossible to symbolize—and when recognized, challenges the symbolic order by presenting a glimpse of the real. Žižek (2008, 5)  elaborates that the “stain disturbs ‘direct’ communication between the gaze and its ‘proper’ object, leading the straight gaze astray, changing it into a kind of squint.” Django on a horse represents just this, and the other characters of the film struggle throughout to take in this image of the stain in two ways—to allow themselves “to squint,” as Žižek writes, or to attempt “to get rid of [the stain] as quickly as possible” (Žižek 2008, 5). These two methods of dealing with the stain—or interpellating Django— are enacted by two slave-owners in the film, Big Daddy and Calvin Candie. To these men, whose wealth, well-being, and meaningful existence are built on their use of slave labor, the appearance of Django on a horse forces them to confront a truth they must deny in order to support the institution of slavery: that if a black man can ride a horse, he must be a man as well as black. In order to prevent the dissolution of their ideology, both Big Daddy and Candie attempt to interpellate Django; they seek to signify the appearance of a black man on a horse in order to reduce his destructive capability of bringing the real into the symbolic order. In order to do so, both Big Daddy and Candie first articulate their ideology and then find a space in that ideology for the image of Django on a horse to inhabit. Žižek (2008, 6–7) explains the psychological process these men must undergo in order to bring Django as the stain into their symbolic order: “In the network of intersubjective relations, every one of us is identified with, pinned down to, a certain fantasy place in the other’s symbolic structure… . We can relate to these ‘people of flesh and blood’ only insofar as we are able to identify them with a certain place in our symbolic fantasy space, or, to put it in a more pathetic way, only insofar as they fill out a place pre-established in our dream.” Big Daddy articulates this process when Schultz pushes him to allow Django the freedom to move around his plantation without being treated like a slave; in order for his enslaved people to understand how to

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treat Django, he verbally creates for Django a place that means something on a plantation inhabited by enslaved black people and free white people. Big Daddy says, “Bettina, sugar, Django isn’t a slave. Django is a free man, you understand? You can’t treat him like any of the other niggers around here, because he ain’t like any of the other niggers around here. You got it?” “You want I should treat him like white folks?” “No. That’s not what I said.” “Then I don’t know what you want, Big Daddy.” …  “You just treat him like you would Jerry.” (Tarantino 2012)

While this explanation suffices for Bettina, it does not appease the film’s audience:  thus far, we have only experienced the deep-seated binary of white:  black/subject:  object, and introducing a third character with whom to identify Django only continues to leave him outside of this binary construction. We don’t know if Jerry is white or black, subject or object, and this lack of context does not assist the problematization of these binaries. In other words, although Big Daddy appears to have interpellated Django, for the audience of the film he absolutely fails to, and Big Daddy’s ultimate attempt to kill Django and Schultz suggests that he is not comfortable with this analogy either. In failing to interpellate Django, Big Daddy performs as Žižek anticipates and instead “tries to get rid of [him] as quickly as possible.” Calvin Candie, alternatively, “squints.” The primary slave owner and antagonist of the film played by Leonardo DiCaprio, Candie begins interpellating Django by articulating his ideology as does Big Daddy. He says, Where I  part company from many of my phrenologist colleagues is I  believe there is a level above bright, above talented, above loyal that a nigger can aspire to. Say, one nigger that just pops up in 10,000. The exceptional nigger… . But I do believe that given time, exceptional niggers like Bright Boy [Django] here, become if not frequent, more frequent. Bright Boy, you are that one in 10,000. (Tarantino 2012)

While this statement also fails immediately to interpellate Django, Candie responds to this failure by remaining fascinated by Django for the bulk of the film, scrutinizing him in order to see whether or not his internal image of Django is appropriate. Django, putting on a stony act in order to achieve his goal, does not outrightly accept this interpellative gesture either, and neither do Candie’s black enslaved people or white servants. Indeed, Candie must consistently bring his enslaved people and servants to order, as they repeatedly attempt to destroy Django in order to prevent his appearance as stain from upsetting their ideology.

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Django’s appearance as stain at this point in the film is also far more complicated than it is at the beginning; in Candie’s company Django has begun to represent two imaginary characters in order to rescue his wife, Broomhilda, from her station as a house slave at Calvin Candie’s plantation, Candyland. The first character Django represents at this point in the film is Siegfried of Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen. It is Schultz who designates Django as Siegfried. Having discovered that Django’s wife, who was sold to Candie after she and Django attempted to escape their previous owner together, is called Broomhilda, Schultz tells Django a brief version of the Siegfried and Brünhilde myth. At Django’s behest, Schultz says, Broomhilda shall remain [imprisoned on top of a mountain] unless a hero arises brave enough to save her… . A  fella named Siegfried … scales the mountain, because he’s not afraid of it. He slays a dragon, because he’s not afraid of him. And he walks through hellfire, because Broomhilda is worth it… . When a German meets a real life Siegfried, that’s kind of a big deal. As a German I am obliged to help you on your quest to rescue your beloved Broomhilda. (Tarantino 2012)

The rest of the film follows the format Schultz here invents for himself and Django; after spending the winter earning a substantial amount of cash as a team of bounty hunters, Schultz and Django formulate a plan to rescue Broomhilda from Candie—the dragon of the myth, perhaps. However, because Candie would likely refuse to sell a “nothing” slave like Broomhilda, who is worth no more than $300 and lives far away from town on Candie’s plantation, Schultz and Django invent the second imaginary character which Django begins to represent: a back slaver. In order to dupe Candie into selling Broomhilda, Schultz suggests that he and Django masquerade as buyers of a “Mandingo” fighter, a title Tarantino attributed to a sport of two enslaved men fighting to the death, following the 1975 film Mandingo. In order to do so, Django must act as though he too is employed in the procurement of slaves. Django hesitatingly describes the imaginary character he is to become, explaining to Schultz, “Ain’t nothing lower than a black slaver” (Tarantino 2012). Thus, Schultz complicates Django’s image twice over, moving Django’s self-image into the imaginary order by first conflating Django’s pursuit of Broomhilda with Siegfried’s and then demonstrating that in order to sufficiently become Siegfried, Django must first act the role with which Django is more familiar, the black slaver. For the length of the film during which Candie believes Django’s black slaver act, he is fascinated by Django, but as soon as he discovers Django’s original intentions, Candie offers Django a binary ultimatum. After a long speech, in which Candie articulates his phrenological beliefs that the black man’s skull naturally leads to biological servility, he says, “Now Bright Boy,

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I’ll admit you are pretty clever. But if I took this hammer here and I bashed in your skull with it, you would have the same three dimples in the same place as Old Ben” (Tarantino 2012). In other words, if Django is not the one in 10,000 black men that Candie originally believed him to be, he is a creature biologically designed for slavery. Just like every other character in the film, with the exception of our screen, Schultz, Django accepts this binary upon which the symbolic order of slavery exists, and when he returns to the Candie plantation to save Broomhilda at the end of the film, he also verbally accepts interpellation in Candie’s ideology. As he slowly kills Stephen, the house slave who ruined his and Schultz’s elaborate plan to rescue Broomhilda, he says, “Every single word that came out of Calvin Candie’s mouth was nothin’ but horseshit. But he was right about one thing:  I am that one nigger in 10,000” (Tarantino 2012). Despite the brutalities that have been inflicted upon Django and his wife Broomhilda, Django is not capable of rejecting the symbolic out of hand, but rather accepts it. This, as both Lacan and Žižek describe, is an example of the letter that inevitably arrives. In his analysis of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” Lacan describes why the letter always arrives to its recipient and how the recipient becomes the recipient due to the letter’s delivery. In his discussion of this analysis, Žižek likens the arrival of this letter—or the signification of the signifier—to Louis Althusser’s description of interpellation: this is the same “logic by means of which one (mis)recognizes oneself as the addressee of ideological interpellation” (Žižek 2008,12); in answering the call, one suddenly signifies within this new symbolic order. However, Žižek continues to demonstrate that this first definition of the letter arriving is simply how this interpellation takes place in the imaginary order:  Django imagines he, like Siegfried, is simply one in 10,000—a hero—and he strives to fulfill the actions of how he expects that internal image of himself to perform. The arrival of the letter also functions in the symbolic and the real orders, suggesting that interpellation of this kind is inevitable, that Django indeed has no choice whatsoever in accepting Candie’s designation of “one in 10,000.” However, Dr. King Schultz does eventually reject the symbolic order of slavery, demonstrating the only kind of action that Lacan termed a “successful act:” an absolute rejection of the symbolic order and the resultant move into the real (Žižek 2008, 37). To Lacan, the act was best demonstrated by Antigone, who criticized the symbolic order, knowing that it would result in her death; her rejection of the symbolic resulted in the loss of her life and signification within the symbolic order and was thus a very real suicide. Schultz’s decision to make a similar act begins as he, Django, and Candie’s slaves and servants caravan to Candyland. Along their way, they come across

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one of Candie’s fighting enslaved men, D’Artagnan, escaping up a tree to avoid the dogs that Candie’s white servants have unleashed on him. Schultz, recognizing the precarious situation this enslaved man is in, offers to pay for him in order to save his life, but Django rejects this offer in order to prevent Candie from suspecting that Schultz is too soft to actually be in the Mandingo business. Django interrupts and tells Candie he can do what he likes with D’Artagnan: “He’s your nigger” (Tarantino 2012). Unlike the bulk of the violence in the film, when the dogs rip D’Artagnan apart, the camera angle serves to shield the audience from the extent of the violence, either moving so close to the dogs that their actions are almost indistinguishable or moving to view this violence from behind the bodies of Candie’s men. This occlusion of the violence only serves to make it more brutal. Like the audience of the film, Schultz is moved to look away, and after witnessing the violent temper of Candie when he discovers that Schultz’s and Django’s proposition to buy a black fighter has been a ruse, Schultz begins to experience flashbacks to the dogs’ violence; Schultz’s inability to reconcile this violence demonstrates that while Candie and Django have seen dogs rip men apart before—often enough that they can symbolize this violence, that this brutality has a meaningful place in the symbolic order—Schultz cannot; he has experienced the trauma of the real. Moreover, in these flashbacks, Schultz and the audience of the film witness a more brutal depiction of D’Artagnan’s death, accompanied both by D’Artagnan’s screams and face contorted in pain and by a harpist playing Beethoven’s “Für Elise.” The dissonance of these two sounds demonstrate Schultz’s inability to symbolize the trauma of watching a man being ripped apart by dogs and moreover his inability to condone a symbolic order that legalizes and legitimizes Candie’s treatment of black people. Although it appears that Schultz will be able to accept the events up until this point without rejecting the symbolic order out of hand, when Candie persists that a handshake is necessary to seal the deal, Schultz throws off the symbolic order entirely, and in a room full of armed men, shoots Candie through the pretty white flower he wears over his heart. In the silent moment before he is thrown off his feet by a barrage of gunfire, Schultz turns to Django and demonstrates his full awareness that in rejecting the symbolic order, he is also committing suicide: “I’m sorry,” he says. “I couldn’t resist” (Tarantino 2012). Schultz’s apology here is necessary in considering his suicide the act. As Žižek (2008, 68) writes, This “withdrawal” of the subject from the Other is what Lacan calls “subjective destitution”:  not an act of sacrifice (which always implies the Other as its addressee) but an act of abandonment which sacrifices the very sacrifice. The freedom thus attained is a point at which we find ourselves not only without the

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other qua our neighbor, but without support in the Other itself—as such, it is unbearably suffocating, the very opposite of relief, of “liberation.”

Therefore, both Schultz’s knowledge of his imminent death and his recognition that this act will likely result in his and Django’s failure to save Broomhilda are necessary tenets of this act. Schultz does not allow himself to be killed in an attempt to recognize the Other, but rather rejects the existence of the Other altogether and succumbs to the real, wherein neither Other nor Ego exist. Despite the veracity of Schultz’s act, however, his death does not have much effect on the symbolic order of the film as the characters within the film view it. Django’s situation becomes dire for a few scenes, but none of Candie’s family nor staff question the rightness of the events; they simply express the desire to punish Django as brutally as possible. Žižek’s (2008, 52) analysis of Tito’s rejection of communism and Stalin in 1948 provides us a possible reason for the ultimate flatness of Schultz’s act: With their “No!” to Stalin, Tito and his companions crossed their Rubicon without being sure of what awaited them on the other bank, of what would become symbolic order: the greatness of an act depends strictly on the place from which it was accomplished. In other words … Tito’s “No!” had such a subversive impact only because it was pronounced by a Communist, only because he resisted Stalin as a communist.

Alternatively, Schultz is a European rejecting the American institution of slavery, a distinction that Django makes very clear when Schultz attempts to prevent the slave D’Artagnan’s death. Thus, just as Tarantino questions the message promoted by other films about the period which attempt to exonerate their heroes from the atrocities of slavery, Schutlz’s act suggests that protest by outsiders—by 21st century viewers, for example—has little to no impact on the events of the past. Following Schultz’s act, moreover, we 21st century audience members lose our screen, and the violence escalates accordingly to an almost comic pitch. The firefight that follows Schultz’s death results in blood literally coating the walls of the plantation house. After capturing Django at the end of this fight, Candie’s family and servants threaten to castrate Django, a classic Tarantino move, and they nearly do so before selling him to the most brutal slavers they can think of. He then returns, triumphant, laden with two guns and a pile of dynamite; he enacts his revenge with spectacular and comic violence. Mimicking Siegfried walking through hellfire to save Broomhilda, Django kills all the white people in the plantation house, as well as Stephen, the head house slave, without a problem. Indeed, his bullets are so powerful,

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that when he shoots Lara, Calvin Candie’s sister, she is whisked from the room, swept off her feet as though Django had fired a cannonball into her midriff. Without Schultz functioning as screen, today’s audience is provided no signal that communicates how we ought to understand these final scenes, and it appears that without this screen, the violence of the film moves firmly into the imaginary order. Django kills everybody involved in Broomhilda’s ownership and Schultz’s death, not because their actions were wrong or because he is rejecting the symbolic order of slavery, but because, as Siegfried did, he must overcome the worst in order to win his bride. Moreover, in accepting Candie’s letter—in saying to Steven before he kills him, “I am that one in 10,000”—Django moves into the imaginary order by accepting a role that ought not to exist. As Žižek (2008, 14) writes of the letter that always arrives in the imaginary, “when this call ‘arrives at its destination’ in me, I  automatically misrecognize that it is this very act of recognition which makes me what I  have recognized myself as—I don’t recognize myself in it because I’m its addressee, I become its addressee the moment I recognize myself in it.” Thus, Django is more right than he knows when he says that Candie spoke nothing but “horseshit.” The position of one in 10,000 would not exist without Candie’s articulation that it does, but very problematically, when Django accepts the call of one in 10,000 he legitimizes Candie’s symbolic order. In saying that he is one in 10,000, he tacitly agrees that the other 9,999 are just human commodities. However, Žižek’s reading of the letter arriving in the symbolic order complicates this simple reading of the end of the film as racist, just as the very different audience response does. While some audience members laugh at the wild violence of the end of the film, many are also silenced by it. As Žižek (2008, 10) writes, When the letter arrives at its destination, the stain spoiling the picture is not abolished, effaced: what we are forced to grasp is, on the contrary, the fact that the real “message,” the real letter awaiting us is the stain itself. We should perhaps reread Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter’ ” from this aspect: is not the letter itself ultimately such a stain—not a signifier but rather an object resisting symbolization, a surplus, a material leftover circulating among the subjects and staining its momentary possessor?

Thus, Django as the stain of the film does not simply reify racist ideology by accepting Candie’s letter at the end of the film. Instead he demonstrates that a symbolic order that predicates its law on the repression of half of its citizens also welcomes its own downfall. Although the violence at the end of the film is ridiculous in its cinematic portrayal, it through no ridiculous means results in complete destruction of

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Candyland. Using the weapons available to him at the time and firing on mostly unarmed people, Django successfully kills each of the slavers in the house, and proceeds to raze the house to the ground, leaving a wasteland behind him. Although this absolute destruction is predicated on Django’s conflation of himself with Siegfried, this rewriting of the Siegfried myth suggests that real violence, real destruction, accompanies any hero’s actions. More importantly, Django’s acceptance of the call to be one in 10,000 suggests that while 9,999 oppressed people operate within the system, one is equipped to truly promote destruction of the system itself. Although Django does all of this in triumphant cinematic fashion with which the 21st century audience is all too familiar, an element of the real remains in his complete destruction of Candyland: “What ultimately interrupts the continuous flow of words, what hinders the smooth running of the symbolic circuit, is the traumatic presence of the Real: when the words suddenly stay out, we have to look not for imaginary resistances but for the object that came too close” (Žižek 2008, 27). Within the violence that appears so comic at the end of the film remains enough of the real violence Schultz witnessed before his death. Although the film suggests that everybody but Schultz is able to bring the trauma of violence into the symbolic order, the film ends with the real deaths of every character we have come to know, except for the hero, Django, and his damsel, ultimately suggesting that the entire symbolic order is faulty and can result only in utter destruction. Still, although Django accepts the station of one in 10,000 at the end of the film, it is our 21st century screen, Schultz, who turns Django into the stain in the first place, suggesting—contrary to many of the events of the film—that a third party is necessary in order to raze any ideology from the inside after all. What does this mean for us, the audience to the film? Perhaps that, as Žižek and Althusser insist, short of dying, ideology is not something we escape. Although viewing history from new and alternative perspectives is an important project, seeking to rescue our heroes from the past and suggesting that they were not interpellated in the dominant, brutal ideology of the period allows Americans to sugarcoat a history we would rather avoid. However, another reading is possible. Perhaps instead the film is saying, take heart; we do not operate in a closed system, but instead meet Germans, from time to time, who put us up on a horse and ask us questions we hadn’t considered. Regardless of our reading of these encounters, the ending of Django Unchained remains overdetermined. While I favor the latter reading of the conclusion to the film, the reading that suggests that the entire system was faulty and could only result in the complete destruction of Candyland, there

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is no doubt that the ending of this film is problematic. It is too easy to leave the theater with the first impression, that while Django was a phenomenal character, in the end, according to the statistics of the film, there are 9,999 black people in the world who are biologically servile. Many critics and audience members have been asking whether Django Unchained is a racist film since the script leaked online early in 2012, and while the answer is naturally more complicated than the question, I suspect the conclusion to the film too easily answers the question both ways.

Note 1. Although there’s certainly a wealth of Žižekian commentary on the gaze and its valences in other of his texts, the thematic development of Enjoy Your Symptom! is key to my argument here, especially in terms of Žižek’s application of the stain to Lacan’s “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ” and I have chosen therefore to put the three texts of Seminar XI, Django Unchained, and Enjoy Your Symptom! in isolated conversation.

References Lacan, Jacques. 1981. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XI:  The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Translated by A. Sheridan. New  York:  W.W. Norton & Company. Spike Lee Calls Django Unchained Disrespectful. 2007. https://www.rollingstone.com/ music/music-news/spike-lee-calls-django-unchained-disrespectful-99480/ Tarantino, Quentin, dir. 2012. Django Unchained. The Weinstein Company. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out. New York: Routledge.

13.  You Only Die Thrice: Zombies Revisited in The Walking Dead Vlad Dima Department of African Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin, Madison

AMC’s ongoing series The Walking Dead (2010–) bring back to life a subgenre that—like many of its characters—cannot seem to die, the zombie narrative. The TV show is based on the eponymous comic book series written by Robert Kirkman and illustrated by Charlie Aldard.1 Rick Grimes, the show’s protagonist, is a small town police deputy who goes into a coma after being shot on the job. He awakens post-outbreak in an abandoned hospital, and sets out to find his wife and son, Lori and Carl. He eventually finds them, forms an eclectic group, and together they must fight to stay alive. The focus of this article will not be primarily on the human characters, but rather on their presupposed counterparts, the walkers and their bodies. Conceptually, the walker provides us with numerous hypotheses concerning its ontology, raison d’être, and semiotic and ideological relevance. Through an exploration of the zombie as a concept, first as we have come to know them throughout the history of the sub-genre and secondly as we see them in The Walking Dead, we propose an update to the Lacan/Žižek psychoanalytical models for death and subjectivity. Furthermore, the body of the walker/zombie—presumably capable of limitless consumption without expulsion—elicits intriguing speculations. For example, in its death, the body of the zombie lingers in the small gap or the overlapping wedge between the grotesque and the sublime, although it clearly leans toward the former. Therefore, the essay also explores the connections of this hollow body to the grotesque,2 to the inhuman, to the Muselmann of the concentration camps, and ultimately proposes that it could be construed as an Anti-(Nietzschean)-Overman.

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The Zombie Sub-genre3 It would be a massive undertaking to establish properly the historical context of the sub-genre of the horror, so we will limit ourselves to a few references. Steve Neale tracks the sub-genre back to the early 40s (2000, 95), but it was Night of the Living Dead (George A.  Romero, 1968)  that had the biggest impact, and became the grandfather of all subsequent zombie movies. The original zombie from this film (referred to as a “ghoul”) was radically different from the one in our show. It was afraid of fire, and it also exhibited traces of a thought process (grabbing tools, rocks etc.). Importantly, Romero’s film offers an explanation for the plague that beseeches humanity: the explosion of a satellite returning from Venus,4 and the radiation that ensued. This explanation is not always offered in the sub-genre (or in The Walking Dead), but we will return to that lack of agency later. Another example that explains the plague comes from the popular British film, 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle 2002): it is chimpanzees infected by a virus5 that cause the rage and eventual destruction of London, and the world. The main character, Jim, like Rick, wakes up alone in a hospital. The relevance of the satellite (Sputnik!) in the original Romero comes from a political subtext. The film was made during a time of great political unrest, during the cold war and the not so hidden competition between the US and the USSR over the “control” of outer space. Partially because of this historical context, the zombie movie during this period could easily be read as an ideological and propagandist commentary that speculated on the connections between the mindless wondering ghouls and the communists.6 Genre, as a rule, serves an ideological function as Rick Altman notes (1999, 26–8) and zombies have made a similar ideological return in the recent Cuban movie, Juan de los Muertos (Alejandro Brugués 2011). In it, the hero takes advantage of the situation and opens up a business for killing zombies or more exactly what he calls “dissidents.” We can see here not only the references to Castro’s brand of communism, but intriguingly, a not so subtle suggestion about the powerful reach of capitalism in a communist environment (in which the former must fail).7 The failures of capitalism are also hinted at in Dawn of the Dead (George A. Romero 1978) and its remake Dawn of the Dead (Zack Snyder 2004). In both versions, the survivors gather in a mall—the symbol of capitalism par excellence—which now becomes the place where capitalism and consumerism have gone to die. Building on the reductive Marxian model of capitalism (the limit of capital is capital itself), Slavoj Žižek describes capitalism as capable of changing its limits, expanding them as needed into permanent development, because it is driven by

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an internal contradiction, a conflict between the relations of production and productive forces (Žižek 1989, 50–2). This is but one way of understanding capitalism; Capital, according to Marx, is also a kind of fantasmagoria (e.g. a vampire, a werewolf, or in our case, a zombie), an entity that eats sources of value (e.g. the Common—Labor and Nature) alive. It is fitting then that capitalism should come to a stop in a mall in these two versions. In other words, there are no more relations or forces at work, just consumerism; the survivors can use the resources of the mall to exhaustion and then there would be nothing, which uncovers the metaphor of zombie capitalism:8 consuming is both the end point and origin of capitalism. The subtext here is, of course, wage repression, and the emergence of credit mechanisms for the average American consumer; we may also speculate on the possibility that once capitalism does reach its limit and tipping point, it finally fulfills Marx’s prerequisite for the creation of communist societies (i.e. one must go through capitalism to enter the “final” stage of communism). Furthermore, it is quite fitting that the act of eating or consuming should point to the end of capitalism, and of humanity, when it is exactly what happens with the bodies of the living—they are eaten. In order to increase spectatorship consumption, Hollywood has also turned to comedy, which in essence covers up the already-existing apocalyptic fantasy with a secondary Žižekian veil, humor or “ironic distance” (Žižek 1989, 24). Oddly, this forced distance in fact brings the dead and the living closer together. In Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer 2009), one of the main characters, Columbus, philosophizes, “I used to avoid people like they were zombies before they were zombies. Now that they are all zombies, I kinda miss people.” This is an important quote for us because it signals quite clearly that the death of humanity comes from within (i.e. people have always been zombielike), and that the line between the living and the walking dead is not that wide. The only change that occurs in the current scenario is a physical one, meaning we can recognize the death of humanity more easily. Tallahassee, the tough guy in Zombieland, is not too concerned about the end of the world. Instead, he is on a constant quest for a Twinkie, which here represents the quintessential Lacanian objet petit a, the object-desire. Famously, the Twinkie is a food that never disintegrates, never disappears, just like the objet petit a. Similarly, the characters of Shaun of the Dead (Edgar Wright 2004) are sidetracked easily from dealing with the impending death of humanity. For long periods, the characters do not even notice the zombies. At the end of this movie, the zombies are turned into slaves, which represents an important departure (and yet a return to the classic symbolic value of the Haitian zombie) from the Romero film, to which Shaun of the Dead harbors many

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inter-textual references. Shaun repeats ad nauseam, in the first part of the movie, that “Ed, this is serious,” as his friends still resist the change. The fantasy has to be forced upon the diegetic characters! However, the exact opposite occurs in the recent Warm Bodies (Jonathan Levine 2013): it is the spectators that (should) resist the fantasy. In this case, we have an “emancipated” walker who can speak, “feel,” and who goes through an existential crisis (he admits to being conflicted about eating people and declares that “At some point you lose hope”). This version of the zombie, along with the sappy “love conquers all” message of the film, miss the entire point of the walker, and the film falls flat on its narrative face.9 However, the idea that zombies can evolve is not new. In Land of the Dead (George A. Romero 2005), which is not a comedy, zombies actually communicate, protect each other, and seem to have rational thoughts. This type of evolution changes the complexity of the zombie, and renders it more “human,” more acceptable, and therefore less frightening. Similarly aware, but yet quite different from zombies, are the vampiric creatures of I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence 2007). Regardless, the introduction of awareness misses out on the essence of the zombie. We, as an audience have certain expectations built into our system. For example, Steve Neale’s study of genre elicits the following statement: “Genres do not consist solely of films. They consist also of specific systems of expectation and hypothesis [ … ] these systems provide spectators with means of recognition and understanding” (2000, 31). We recognize the zombies in all of these versions, because ultimately the system does not allow for wild variations. There is a sense of repetition at work in all these films, and that is also at the core of Steve Neale’s argument about genre, which to him takes shape through “repetition and difference” (2000, 48). For example, the texts in the media (film or television) have to be similar enough in order for the public to recognize them, but different enough so that they become more interesting than others. It is important to note that The Walking Dead is a television series and thus some of the narrative elements are drastically altered from the medium of cinema. Among these we can note the longer exposition, the repetition of themes at diegetic level (not simply as a genre), or the invasion of the private space of one’s home (rendering thus perhaps more effective in its affect toward the viewer). The show began very strongly, and one of the differences, as meant by Neale above, that it included in the first two seasons was that it killed off several seemingly important characters. This choice helped the show become much more intense and “realistic,” in spite of its unrealistic setting. However, during Season 3, and since the audience had already built strong identifications with the main characters, the killings tempered off, and during

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Season 4 there is only one death of a major character, Hershel. Throughout all these changes and repetitions, one thing has remained constant, though: the depiction of the walker, and its gruesome, dead body that appears to have no limits. This last observation prompts us to situate the walker in the middle of an old debate between the grotesque and the sublime.

Grotesque Zombie Sublime Wolfgang Kayser, the highly insightful theorist of the grotesque, credits Victor Hugo as one of the first authors to begin the discussion on the grotesque/ sublime contiguous relationship, and he also commends him for describing Shakespeare as the only writer to successfully blend the sublime and the grotesque (1981, 58). He builds on this observation by declaring, “The true depth of the grotesque is revealed only by its confrontation with its opposite, the sublime. For just as the sublime (in contrast with the beautiful) guides our view toward a loftier, supernatural world, the ridiculously distorted and monstrously horrible ingredients of the grotesque point to an inhuman, nocturnal, and abysmal realm” (Kayser 1981, 58). In the world of the zombie, we have both the elements of a supernatural world and the grotesque distortion of the human body that heads toward the inhuman—that which threatens to engulf and consume the subject. Let us attempt to explain better the two opposing, or compatible terms, the grotesque and the sublime. Wolfang Kayser defines the grotesque as “a mixture of heterogeneous elements, the confusion, the fantastic quality, and even a kind of alienation of the world” (1981, 51). The alienation of and from the world is most evident in the TV series when the survivors retreat to the inside of a prison. In fact their odyssey appears to take them to places that are less and less open. They move from a camp outside of Atlanta to a farm, only to eventually realize that their best option for survival is behind the walls of a prison.10 Their world is shrinking, almost as if trying to suffocate them. In such a world, the sublime is increasingly more difficult to encounter, and when it does, horrible things happen. At the beginning of Season 2, Rick allows his son Carl to approach a deer in the woods. It is a tender moment of unification between human and nature, something rare, unlikely, and incomprehensible in this particular context. Right on cue, a bullet meant for the deer injures Carl in a traumatic event reminiscent of the death of Bambi’s mother. Richard Corliss of Time Magazine ranks Bambi (1942) as one of the top 25 horror films of all time, and it is widely considered to be a film that has traumatized several generations. The Walking Dead returns to this original traumatic scene to revise the presence of the human element, Carl, who would normally be the

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traumatized boy in front of the television. However, in this case, he is twice traumatized, once by the death of the deer, and a second time by his own injury. In one swoop, both man and nature are shot down, and we turn again toward the grotesque. The balancing study on the grotesque (to Kayser’s) is Mikhail Bakhtin’s study of Rabelais’ writings. His treatment of the grotesque takes the form of the “carnivalesque,” which is an inversion of reality, of the social order, that in itself is, grotesque. He defines the grotesque as having the following important characteristics: exaggeration, hyperbole, abundance, and excess (Bahktin 1970, 302). What interests me the most from Bakhtin’s research on Rabelais is the association of the grotesque with the body and with the latter’s physical limits. According to Bakhtin these classical limits are transgressed by the grotesque image. As a result the grotesque body is always in a state of change, it constructs itself constantly, and in doing so, it challenges not just its own sense of spatiality, but that of the world itself (Bakhtin 1970, 314–6). From an old body, a new one emerges. In the case of the zombie, the body goes through one radical change, but the new body is not an upgrade. Instead it is a regression toward the inhuman. The inhuman aspect of the zombie is most clear in its mouth. In Bakhtin’s reading of Rabelais, “The mouth is the open door that leads to the bottom, to the hell of the body. The image of absorption and of swallowing, a very ambivalent, old image of death and destruction, is connected to the wide open mouth” (Bakhtin 1970, 323).11 Not only is the zombie’s mouth usually open, it swallows real life, the living humans. Interestingly, in their death by mastication and through the zombie’s wideopen mouth, the humans are sent into a black hole of sorts—we do not have any supporting evidence that the zombie has bowel movements—into hell. The lack of bowel movement is the characteristic that separates the zombie most clearly from other carnivores, from other “mouths.” They erase humans but their consumption is for naught; they continue to consume without “producing,” which, through a return to the zombie capitalism reference from above, underlines the fact that the death of capitalism is fast approaching. So how can we shrink the distance between these grotesque images and the idea of the sublime? Sublimity concerns terrifying phenomena that have no boundaries, so we can already begin to see its connection to the limitless and ever-expanding grotesque. Mary Russo actually understands the grotesque as an essential part of the sublime (1994, 33). Kant’s sublime is both a feeling of displeasure and of pleasure (Kant 1987), and in Žižek’s interpretation “it is a paradoxical pleasure procured by displeasure itself,” which happens to be Lacan’s definition of jouissance (1989, 229). Isn’t the sanctioned, brutal killing of zombies a close approximation of this paradoxical pleasure,

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a pleasure that explains the commercial and cultural durability of the zombie narrative in films, television, video games etc.? The confusing mixture of pleasure and displeasure may come from our awareness that we are physically dwarfed and thus powerless in the front of nature’s potency. Sublimity thus can also carry a factor of incomprehensibility. Initially, Rick on The Walking Dead goes through a denial phase—he simply cannot wrap his mind around the concept of the dead returning. However, quite soon, he does. His hesitation is so short-lived that it almost eliminates sublimity, and instead leaves us only with the option of equating the apocalyptic world with the grotesque. The grotesque can also rely on an ambivalence spawning from a conflict between the tragic and the comedic. A  situation may appear as tragic and funny simultaneously, as in all the examples from the zombie-comedies. There are not many amusing moments in the TV show, although an occasional character will provide the survivors and us with some comedic relief (like Axel, the prisoner, who hits on Carol the moment he figures out she is not a lesbian). Kayser’s connection between terror and humor may find its best embodiment in this type of scene. According to him, “In the genuine grotesque the spectator becomes directly involved at some point where a specific meaning is attached to the events. In the humorous context, on the other hand, a certain distance is maintained throughout and, with it, a feeling of security and indifference” (1981, 118). Later in his study, though, Kayser aligns terror and humor to provide us with yet another contradicting, and somehow congruent pair (1981, 139). If humor can indeed emerge from terror, then this new opposing pair constitutes another embodiment of the grotesque/sublime relationship. It is philosopher Edmund Burke who sheds more light on all these connections: “Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible things, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (2008, 36). Yet, Burke sees plenty of ambivalence, too, and the sublime that emerges from terror can be a possible producer of pleasure. Still according to Burke, it is in this oxymoronic12 alliance between terror and pleasure that we find “the most genuine effect and truest test of the sublime” (2008, 123). We encounter in terror and violence a similar distance between spectators and the events of the film, as the one created by humor or ironic distance. In other words, the violence too can have a distancing effect of the viewers who might refuse to be placed in a masochistic or sadistic position of identification. This viewing distance would once again link terror and violence with humor. The interpretation of the distance also returns us to Kayser’s thoughts on the ambivalence of the grotesque, which can generate a divergent feeling,

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a liberation from the emotional hold of regular horror images, or films: “In spite of all the helplessness and horror inspired by the dark forces which lurk in and behind our world and have power to estrange it, the truly artistic portrayal effects a secret liberation” (1981, 188). The estranged world of the grotesque is relentless in The Walking Dead (a feeling exacerbated by the length and cycle-quality of the multiple episodes and seasons) and that leaves very little room for the spectators’ hesitation between the real and the imagined. Because of this hesitation we can eliminate Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic genre from the equation (“the Fantastic occupies the duration of this uncertainty,” 1975, 25). But, we cannot ignore one of its closely related aesthetics, the uncanny, which represents a new (Freudian) direction. The uncanny is born out of fear, so it is closely linked to feelings or sensations and it triggers an emotional response. In Freud’s explanation the uncanny is a return to something strangely familiar that was repressed, because it was a frightening experience (2003, 147–53), which, yet again, brings us back to the idea of the grotesque and the sublime. This return to (or of) something repressed represents our best option to explain the existence of the zombies. It means that there is something within ourselves, an inherent grotesque, that comes back to life in the form of a dead living. While death and dead bodies might be placed in the realm of the grotesque, the several deaths endured by the body of the zombie borders on the definition of the sublime. In its death, the zombie brings us also to Kayser’s last interpretation of the grotesque: “an attempt to invoke and subdue the demonic aspects of the world” (1981, 188). The zombie sub-genre certainly invokes the demonic aspects of the world, but it can never fully subdue them. Like death and the Twinkie, they must always be present (through absence).

Death ad nauseam To Žižek, the return of the dead represents the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture (1992, 22). However, he does not explain why our contemporaries have chosen this specific fantasy over another. In a later study, You Only Die Twice, and once again via Lacan and the idea of an indestructible body, Žižek hypothesizes that the subject incurs two separate deaths: one real (biological), and one that comes from the symbolization of death. Between the two, a gap is formed: “This gap can be filled in various ways; it can contain either sublime beauty or fearsome monsters,” which essentially means that the two deaths can occur in two distinct orders (i.e. physically die and then appear as a ghost, like Hamlet’s father, or first reach sublime beauty, and then

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die like Antigone, Žižek 1989, 15013). This does not happen in the case of the zombie that must actually go through three different deaths because it comes back to life following the first two deaths marked by Žižek. But how does one explain the return of the dead? Žižek offers the following explanation: “The return of the dead is a sign of a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization; the dead return as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debts [ … ] persisting beyond physical expiration” (199b, 23). Moreover, “the return of the dead is” [ … ] the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the latter implies a certain reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition. The two great traumatic events of the holocaust and the gulag are, of course, exemplary cases of the return of the dead in the twentieth century. The shadows of their victims will continue to chase us as “living dead” until we give them a decent burial, until we integrate the trauma of their death into our historical memory. (1992, 23)

We will return to this alternate14 historical explanation for the fundamental fantasy of our current mass culture in the last part of the essay, but for now it suffices to reiterate that Žižek suggests the fantasy is born out of the traumatic event of the Holocaust. We dare not revisit the Holocaust, the place of the Real, and instead we provide ourselves with a protective screen, a fantasy. However, in a Žižekian twist, this fantasy meant to protect us also makes us aware of the real kernel at the core of the Real. The trauma of the camp deaths will not go away, and we can easily see the parallels here with the zombie that must die three times over before it quiets forever.15 The zombie goes through three different levels of death regardless of how one becomes a zombie. There are indeed two venues:  to be bit by a zombie and then slowly turn into one, or to die and then return to life as a zombie. In the former case, the moment when one is bit becomes the first realization of death, the symbolic one. Then there is a progression of events that leads to the person actually dying, physically. A few moments later, the zombie emerges, and eventually it will die a third death through trauma to the head. In the other case it is a little more complicated, because the symbolic death is not quite as obvious. However, in the case of our show, the characters are told by Rick (who had found out about it at a CDC facility) that the virus, the incurable disease, lives within them. This is the moment when death takes place symbolically. Their (first) physical death then is to be followed by a third, final death. But what to call this death? The zombie “wakes up” in a reality of which it is not conscious. It awakes to drive, rather than desire, which is perhaps why language is missing.

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Essentially, the zombie comes to life in an inexistent domain, which is exactly the reason we must call it the Real in the Lacanian sense. Naturally, it is the Real only from its perspective, which, of course, is no perspective at all. When the people who are still “alive” fight the zombies, they do not do it just to stay alive, but also to avoid accessing the Real. The presence in the Real for the zombie is only in physical terms, though. In terms of subjectivity, the zombie finds itself actually in between the Real and the Imaginary—it could be on its way back to a pre-Imaginary state, but it is stuck, and it cannot proceed toward the Imaginary. If we take Žižek’s triangle that explains the Lacanian logic of subject formation, Imaginary → Symbolic → Real → (back to) Imaginary, then the Zombie sits just outside the axis Real → Imaginary, and certainly in between the two states. It cannot be on the actual vector of the triangle because that would imply progression toward the Imaginary. The reason for this odd, out of place, positioning comes from its relationship with language. One of the many definitions or examples rather of the Real is the interruptive: it is the residue of nonsense in the most rudimentary sense within our language systems. It then seems rather relevant on this level that the zombies have no language, but are actually on the side of what falls into the Real, into the ontic (e.g. grunts, groans, mastication, sucking, crunching, etc.). They blunder about in uncannily human ways, but do not speak, which is important because it will help us transition shortly into Primo Levi’s descriptions of der Muselmann in the Nazi camps. The zombies are at once in a pre-Imaginary, non-language state, and within the Real. Their last death, the third one puts an end to this state of limbo. To answer my earlier question, it is a benevolent death, in the Real. The blundering, awkward and yet “driven” movement of zombies can first be read metaphorically as pure trauma or a repetition-compulsion of one traumatic, quintessentially grotesque, event—death. Žižek’s distinction between drive and desire is explained through one radical difference. Desire implies an ulterior motive—I want this, but to what end, what do I  really want?—“Drive, on the contrary, persists in a certain demand, it is a ‘mechanical’ insistence that cannot be caught up in dialectical trickery:  I demand something and I  persist in it to the end” (Žižek 1992, 21). For the zombies, Lacanian/Žižekian desire is impossible, but drive remains. They are pure Freudian Id, but further reduced to one component only:  hunger. In the space created in between the two/three deaths from above, there is no desire, and that space is constructed only by drive. The zombies cannot remember anything from the previous life because then they would gradually shift into

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beings of desire. This brings us back to the order of discourse in some way, to the degree that in the Lacanian account the Real is the “primordial gash” from which we are torn loose from nature. From this gash (after all, the word “trauma” comes from Greek and it means “wound”) we ooze out of the primal, fusional paradise of the Real and we descend into the decentering (and yet identity-conferring) order of the symbolic. In the case of the zombies, in spite of the several gory wounds, cuts, scratches, gashes, and other splits, they cannot go anywhere else. They are stuck and they must die three times. The three deaths represent the new order of the world and when someone is not allowed for this “natural” progression, things can go horribly wrong. This is the case for Lori, Rick’s wife who must give birth by cesarean in the episode titled aptly, “Killer Within.” She dies following the trauma of birth, and her son, Carl, shoots16 her in the head so to avoid her transformation. In the following episode, Rick searches for her body, only to find her eaten by a walker. In a gruesome scene, Rick “unearths” her from the stomach of the zombie—he administers his own C-section as it were. So, the killer from the ambiguous title could refer to the baby, to Lori, or to the zombie, in a moment when the human and the inhuman are perfectly overlapped. Also, could we possibly talk here about a “further” death by mastication?17 Or about Rick forcing an expulsion, defecation (and in this case, a perfect example of Kristeva’s abject)? This scene perversely blurs the lines between three Subjects. Rick is the possessor of agency, but it is slipping away from him. Lori is the mother reduced to the abject as punishment for her transgression with Rick’s best friend Shane when she thought her husband dead. The mother-abject is born out of the zombie “chora,” which means that the Zombie in fact manages to be “more” than Lori, more than the abject—a grotesque manifestation of a new subjectivity. From these complicated relations, it results that Lori should be allowed to fully go through the cycle of three deaths. She is brought back to life physically as the abject and she also re-appears as a ghost in Rick’s imagination. Rick first imagines talking to her on the phone and then he sees her, dressed in white, in the fields across from the prison. In the last two episodes of Season 3 he sees her again. It is Rick’s all-consuming guilt (oddly, then, guilt is “zombified”) that makes her linger in his memory and that keeps her alive. However, like Hamlet’s father, Lori may have a score to settle herself and it is uncertain whether she will be able to do so. More importantly, though, the score we have to settle, as humanity, returns us to Žižek’s observation from above about the Holocaust and the lack of integration of that trauma in our historical memory.

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Holocaust Shades It is Žižek once again who provides us with the necessary and problematic transition to the Holocaust. Through Lacan, Žižek comes up with the term over-rapid historicization, which in short, attempts to conceal ideological apparatuses by rendering them in fact even larger. Concerning the concentration camps, he wonders rhetorically, “all the different attempts to attach this phenomenon to a concrete image (‘Holocaust’, ‘Gulag’ … ), to reduce it to a product of a concrete social order (Fascism, Stalinism … )—what are they if not so many attempts to elude the fact that we are dealing here with the ‘real’ of our civilization which returns as the same traumatic kernel in all social systems?” (1989, 51). As already suggested, perhaps the explanation behind the pervasiveness of the sub-genre in popular culture comes exactly from this point—that it is an unconscious decision to make ourselves face over and over again one of the most gruesome and cancerous events of our entire historical existence. We return to the original site of this particular trauma of humanity repeatedly. As we do that, though, we also create a fantasy (in this case, the apocalyptic zombie world), a veil, as Žižek would call it (1997, 1), meant to shield us from the horrors of our historical Real. For a fantasy to remain just that, pure fantasy, it is not supposed to happen in “reality,” to come to life. On the contrary, it must remain unsatisfied. Naturally, we are not trying to equate the concept of the zombie with the survivors of concentration camps at a simplistic comparative level (i.e. one is like the other). Instead, we will offer some parallels meant to solidify Žižek’s observation about the return of the dead, both as a fantasy and as part of our collective memory. These parallels should also strengthen the idea that our current mass culture fantasy stems from an inherent fear about the Holocaust that still chases our collective subjectivity. One of the primary texts about the Holocaust experience from the perspective of the prisoner comes from Robert Antelme’s L’espèce humaine (1947). We will not dwell on the vast conversations surrounding this text, the Nazi agency, the power and the dialectics of gaze, and Blanchot’s and Duras’ written reactions and subsequent debates. Instead, we will use the text as a springboard into a conversation about the eradication of the human, or the erasure of the human that leads to the metamorphosis into the inhuman. There are several passages worth noting, but we will content ourselves with creating a progression toward the aforementioned eradication of man. We begin with the universalization of the prisoners’ bodies, as they all slowly head toward the same awful conclusion: “Bientôt je serai comme lui” (soon I will be like him,18 Antelme 1957, 71). They are all becoming similar and unified

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as their bodies can no longer be recognizable. The individual traits disappear as to make room for a common (un)face of suffering. The lack of food and the terrors of the camp make Antelme notice the following: “Son corps commence à se manger” (his body begins to eat itself, 1957, 96), which eventually leads to “Le corps est vide” (the body is empty, 1957, 97). Most Holocaust testimonies mention the lack of food and the hunger—a hunger that never stops. As they are dying, the prisoners are reduced to one desire, similar to that of the zombies: the desire to eat something, anything.19 The slow process of dying while still alive culminates with, “J’oublie, j’oublie tous les jours un peu plus. On s’éloigne, on dérive” (I forget, I forget every day a little more. We stray, we drift, 1957, 119). The camp prisoners waste away and they disappear physically, reduced to skin and bones. The zombie does not offer us the same dimension of pain and suffering, but in its physical incarnation we can see similar traits of the camp prisoner: the drifting and the eradication of their bodies as they are reduced to one recognizable common aspect (always thin!) that is essentially the same for everyone. Another very important connecting aspect comes from the references to the face in Antelme’s testimony. The face, like the body, is disappearing, as it moves back toward the inside of the head. Bruno Chaouat argues, “in ‘disturbing the logic of the face,’ in disfiguring the human face or in de-humanizing it, the experience of extreme suffering as witnessed by Robert Antelme has altogether shattered the certainties of a humanism grounded upon human likeness and the stability of the human face” (2000, 94). The extreme manifestation of this is, of course, the destruction of the face and/or head of the zombie. The zombies from The Walking Dead have a similar fate and we can also see the erasure of the human in the blank looks and the emotionless faces. However, if there were an emotion attached to these faces, it would be sadness. Žižek observed that in the original Romero film, the undead are portrayed as “sufferers, pursuing their victims with an awkward persistence, colored by a kind of infinite sadness” (1992, 22). It is also this sadness that further cements the connections between camp prisoners and zombies. Sadness and suffering are also central to Primo Levi’s description of der Muselmann. Chaouat describes the nickname in this manner: “According to concordant testimonies of survivors, der Muselmann, in camp slang, was the name given to inmates who had reached a stage of complete passivity and who, in a state of absolute resignation, awaited their death” (2000, 94). The image of the Muselmann brings to light the closeness between the human and the inhuman in the concentration camps. However, the transformation is never complete, as there is always a remnant, as Giorgio Agamben notices (2005, 134)—the witness. Agamben also declares, “the place of the human is

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divided because human being exists in the fracture between the living being and the speaking being, the inhuman and the human” (2005, 134). The zombie can only exist on the side of the inhuman, though. In The Infinite Conversation, Blanchot’s reaction to Antelme’s book, the former declares, “man is the indestructible that can be infinitely destroyed” (1993, 130). This would suggest a power that transcends the human. But Agamben does not look at the Muselmann as an example of someone or something beyond the human. Instead, his persona and that of the camp prisoner’s existence in general is reduced to almost a kind of death (44, 48), but not quite the literal death. Theorist Malcolm Bull takes Agamben’s observations about the infinitely awaiting death and the inability of the Muselmann to speak and he proposes that the latter is characterized in fact by “an inability to die” (2014, 121). So, the Muselmann hovers in a gray area where it is impossible to distinguish between life and death. Agamben returns to the same image in Homo Sacer, in which he describes the Muselmann as “apathetic,” and “nothing ‘natural’ or ‘common,’ however, is left in him: nothing animal or instinctual remains in his life. All his instincts are cancelled along with his reason” (1998, 185). This harsher definition and the inability to speak or die push the image of the Muselmann even closer to that of the zombie. One last citation from Antelme gives us an important link to the zombies of The Walking Dead: “To have eyes is for each one of us to be in danger” (1957, 231). The episode “Seed,” the first one of Season 3, begins in the literal eye of the walker. The camera rotates and, as it tracks back, it reveals the face of the walker. The shot comes from nothingness, from an eye that does not move. This is almost the very same shot from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), a film influential in shaping the horror genre. Steven Neale actually refers to Psycho as a “turning point” in his study of the horror genre (2000, 96). After Marion is stabbed in the shower, she falls and is sprawled on the bathroom floor. The camera transitions from a close-up of the bathroom drain (blood, water, and life draining away) to a close-up of Marion’s still eye and then it tracks back. The importance of the eye becomes even more evident because the same shot is repeated in the beginning of the Season 3 finale, thus beautifully closing down the narrative cycle of the season. This once, the camera backtracks away from the Governor’s eye, which equates him to the dead eye of the zombie from “Seed”: we have been moving from human to inhuman, but in this instance it is the opposite. We go from the eye of the zombie to that of the Governor, although cinematic distance (this is an exceptionally delayed shot-reverse shot) is shortened by the Governor’s inhuman qualities. In all three cases from above, the separation between the camera and its subject suggests more than a simple physical distance. It is also

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the necessary distance that we must take from a diseased body (zombie), dead body (Marion and the living who have not turned yet), or the body of the negative character (Governor). The necessary distance from the bodies of the zombies is further emphasized in the episode entitled “Prey,” Season 3. The site where the Governor’s people normally catch zombies for games is burned down. The shots of the burned zombies, all in a common, grave-like hole, is reminiscent of the wall mural photograph from the Ohrdruf camp that begins the tour of the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. The photo, which shows the grotesque burned bodies of several prisoners in the foreground, is subtitled, “Americans view cremation pyre at Ohrdruf on April 13, 1945.” The lines between the human and the inhuman are once more blurred. The bodies of the zombies are indeed connected to a diseased type of space—this might be a social commentary about the downward direction of humanity in the last century, which brought upon us all kinds of ailments notably HIV, as we noted above. The implication is that we, as humanity, slowly move toward the eradication of our kind. The zombie represents just a shortcut, a faster way to arrive to our doomed destination. This view of the zombie constitutes an opposing figure to Nietzsche’s concept of the superman/overman, a being in becoming, a superior version of man capable to overcome and self-overcome in the face of the meaninglessness of life and to provide the world ultimately with a master race.20 To Nietzsche, man is an in-between entity “stretched between the animal and the Superman” (1999, 5); he should aim to transform into an Overman because the latter will become to man, what man is to animal: “a painful embarrassment” (1999, 6). Malcolm Bull proposes the opposite, because moving toward this superior version of ourselves brings about fear and dread, which in turn leads to positioning ourselves “outside the human species altogether” (2000, 133). Bull’s original argument, which he develops in The Anti-Nietzsche (2014), is to suggest that the solution is to attempt to become less than human, to associate ourselves with the herd animal (as opposed to the Nietzschean birds of prey), and to arrive at what he calls the subhuman.21 This process is exactly what seems to be happening in the apocalyptic world of the zombie, in which the man is pulled strongly toward the animal side, the herd (or horde!), toward the inhuman and the grotesque. Opposing Nietzsche’s vision of the Overman, Michel Foucault celebrates the man’s death and famously wagers in the conclusion to The Order of Things that the ideal man would be effaced: “one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea” (1994, 387). We have already witnessed the effects of the effacement of the human face during the Holocaust. Now, we are moving into universalizing that fate.

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Bruno Chaouat also proceeds from focusing on the individual to proposing a defacing of the whole of humanity: “During the suspension between life and death, during the endless interval of undecidability between being still alive and being already dead, the face is defaced or even effaced and becomes no one’s face, pointing to the hidden, unknowable side of human life” (2000, 92). However, all these attempts at erasure may prove still futile in the face of the Real of the Holocaust. That Real will not go away. The third death, the death in the Real, cannot happen to all zombies. As evident from most zombie films, the task of the living to kill off all zombies is never finalized. As such, the eradication of the Real cannot occur. Only under those circumstances (killing off every single last bit that reminds us of the Holocaust) could we have “forgotten” about the camps. But that is impossible. The only solution is to make a better effort to appropriate it; or in the current analysis, what is at stake in our series is not survival, or escape, but internal healing. To that end, the conclusion of Season 3 offers a hint of optimism (Rick’s people withstand the Governor’s attack and retain control of the prison) unlike the previous two finales and in spite of the imminent threat to the human kind.22 The erasure of the human is also evident in the living characters of The Walking Dead. So it is not just the body of the deceased that is decomposing. The living are slowly disintegrating, too: Merle loses a hand, Hershel loses a leg, the Governor an eye etc. They are all lumped in together in a world headed toward eradication. Nowhere is that clearer than at the end of Season 4 and the beginning of Season 5 that focus on Rick’s group getting to a place pertinently called Terminus where they are almost eaten by other survivors. Cannibalism completely erases whatever fine lines separated the living and the dead. On several occasions, the characters of the series (and those from the comic) rhetorically wonder about being like zombies and can no longer see the separating lines. But, while the living are increasingly aware of their demise, for the zombies it is quite the contrary. They can get shot and they still keep going, interrupted only briefly by the whiplash of the bullet. They can lose an arm and they keep going. Often, the following occurs: an arm comes off, the zombie pauses and looks down, and then, unaffected, it keeps going. This is a very close approximation of Žižek’s famous cartoon example. Žižek reminds us of the cartoon character (often a cat) that runs off a cliff but does not fall until it has realized that it is indeed off the cliff. In Žižek’s words, “The point of this nonsense accident is that when the cat is walking slowly in the air, it is as if the Real has for a moment forgotten its knowledge”23 (1989, 148). I have already posited that the zombies “awake” into the Real, but they cannot possibly recognize it or be aware of it. This

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version of the Real is relentless and has forever forgotten its knowledge. We cannot afford the same luxury with our historical knowledge and The Walking Dead will not let us.

Notes 1. In spite of several similarities, during its four completed seasons (at the time this essay was written) the series has moved away from the comic books, but this essay is not concerned with the differences between the two. One note of interest that concerns both, though, is their continuing, relentless production. David Peisner’s 2013 article for the Rolling Stone, “The Rise of the ‘Walking Dead’ ” (http://www. rollingstone.com/movies/news/the-rise-of-the-walking-dead-http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/the-rise-of-the-walking-dead-2013103120131031) documents Kirkman’s displeasure with the typical ending of zombie films and indicates the creator’s intent to keep the show and comic series going indefinitely: “What if one of those stories continued indefinitely?” Now in its fifth season, the show is already upped for a sixth year; the comic has run for over ten years—this truly may be the story that never dies. 2. I prefer the grotesque to perhaps the more obvious link with Kristeva’s abject, because the former brings the zombie closer to an animal form essential to the oscillation between the human and the inhuman. 3. Parts of this section have been expanded from a short essay published in Bright Lights Film Journal, issue 81, August 2013:  “The Lore of the Running Undead (How World War Z Was Lost and Won).” 4. It is from the word “Venus” that we get “venereal,” which would explain further the spreading of the zombie virus/disease: the zombie then becomes a critique of the free love concept of the 60s. 5. We can speculate that the virus is akin to the spreading of HIV given its original source from apes. 6. A very good, similar example in literature is Eugène Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, whose herd of animals is a metaphor for the Fascist movement. 7. Juan, the main character, does say at one point that “In the end capitalism is going to take its toll on us,” but in the actual end of the film he chooses to stay on the infested island and not leave for Miami. He chooses to fight the dissidents, who are now the oppressors, and fulfills the central message of Castro’s (misguided) version of Marxism that we see summarized on a huge billboard earlier in the film: Revolution or Death. 8. For more on the economic effects of the dead on the living, see Chris Harman’s Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (2009). 9. It was interesting to see how well World War Z (2013), based on Max Brooks’ novel, performed at the box office in spite of the negative reviews and disjointed narrative. This is another example of a movie that attempts to change the zombie lore by making them move really fast and by reducing drastically the transformation period (i.e. it will take twelve seconds for the full transformation). I guess, in the end, the drive and desire for zombie films, any zombie films, won over even the purists. 10. They bypass a sort of in-between space during the trip: the jammed highway is outside and yet it is quite limiting because of the abandoned car piles. There is also an

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interesting reversal at work here from the highways of Jean-Luc Godard’s Week-end (1967) and Jacques Tati’s Trafic (1971), which assault the spectator with obnoxious, Brechtian noise. In The Walking Dead complete silence is required so not to attract the attention of the zombies and that reduces space even further. 11. My translation of: “la bouche est la porte ouverte qui conduit au bas, aux enfers corporels. L’image de l’absorption et de la deglutition, image ambivalente très ancienne de la mort et de la destruction, est liée à la bouche grande ouverte.” Given the fact that Rabelais wrote in French, it seemed appropriate to use the French translation of Bakhtin’s text. 12. The oxymoron is the trope of the grotesque par excellence. 13. To Žižek’s examples, we add Eurydice’s double death. In this case, the second death is both symbolic and physical once more (Orpheus had managed to extricate her from the hells of Hades, physically). 14. I employ “alternate” here because the traditional, historical perspective should follow the slave routes from West Africa to the Caribbean and Haiti in particular where zombies and the fear of turning into a zombie have shaped the socio-cultural space. It is in this area of the world that the zombie begins to be associated with slavery. For more, see Wade Davis, Passage to Darkness (1988). 15. This interpretation may be problematic for two reasons. First, the dead return only to be brutally killed again, which poses a problem of repetition or reenactment of the Holocaust. Secondly, there are several other historical traumas to be considered as potential creators of this fundamental fantasy: slavery, the genocide of aboriginal peoples, Vietnam (a key reference in Night of the Living Dead), current wars etc. A possible explanation for Žižek ‘s focus here is his natural connection to European theory. 16. Given the context of gun violence in the American culture, the show clearly fuels the current gun debate raging on in this country. 17. No punishment appeared to suffice for Lori. In the Internet world she quickly became public enemy number one. For more on this and further proof that zombies have permeated deeply into our contemporary society’s fabric (the show has been spoofed on Saturday Night Live, too) see Bill Simmons’ column (ESPN and Grantland), “The Walking Dead Gives ‘Em What They Want” (March 25, 2013). 18. All translations are mine. 19. The key difference is the evacuation (urine and faeces) that Antelme refers to constantly. 20. This term is one of the primary reasons for Nietzsche’s “enthusiastic adoption by the Nazis” (Bull 2000, 121), which provides us with another connection to the concentration camps. 21. This downward trajectory echoes Vanessa Lemm’s work on the civilization/culture split and the resulting antagonism between human life and animal life:  “becoming overhuman is dependent upon one’s openness to the animality of the human being. Animality is not overcome and sublimated, but resists in humans as much as in the overhumans. Indeed, one can understand what Nietzsche means by overhuman only as a function of such animal resistance” (2009, 5). 22. Season 4 erases much of that optimism. 23. Žižek explains ‘Knowledge in the Real’ as “nature knows its own laws and behaves accordingly” (1989, 148).

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References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Home Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, Giorgio. 2005. Remnants of Auschwitz:  The Witness and the Archive. New York: Zone Books. Altman, Robert. 1999. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute. Antelme, Robert. 1957. L’espèce humaine. Paris: Gallimard. Bakhtine, Mikhail. 1970. L’oeuvre de François Rabelais et la culture populaire au Moyen Age et sous la Renaissance. Paris: Gallimard. Blanchot, Maurice. 1993. The Infinite Conversation. Minneapolis, MN:  University of Minnesota Press. Bull, Malcolm. 2000. “Where is The Anti-Nietzsche.” In New Left Review 3: 121–45.https:// newleftreview.org/issues/II3/articles/malcolm-bull-where-is-the-anti-nietzsche Bull, Malcolm. 2014. The Anti-Nietzsche. London: Verso. Burke, Edmund. 2008. A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chaouat, Bruno. 2000. “’La mort de recèle pas tant de mystère:’ ” Robert Antelme’s Defaced Humanism”. In L’Esprit Créateur, 40 (1): 88–99. Foucault, Michel. 1994. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Freud, Sigmund. 2003. The Uncanny. London: Penguin Books. Kant, Immanuel. 1987. Critique of Judgment. Translated by Werner S. Pluhar. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Kayser, Wolfgang. 1981. The Grotesque in Art and Literature. New  York:  Columbia University Press. Lemm, Vanessa. 2009. Nietzsche’s Animal Philosophy: Culture, Politics, and the Animality of the Human Being. New York: Fordham University Press. Neale, Stephen. 2000. Genre and Hollywood. London: Routledge. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1999. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Dover Publications. Russo, Mary, 1994. The Female Grotesque, Risk, Excess, and Modernity. London: Routledge. Todorov, Tzvetan. 1975. The Fantastic. A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1989. The Sublime Object of Ideology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1992. Looking Awry. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 1997. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso.

14.  They Were Created by Man … and They Have a Plan: Subjective and Objective Violence in Battlestar Galactica and the War on Terror Luke Howie Monash University, Australia

Since tragedy, comedy, and light comedy fail to please him precisely because of their perfection, he turns to farce. The same phenomenon is repeated in other spheres. (Kierkegaard 1983, 158) All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again. (The Book of Pythia in Johnson 2008, 181)

Repetition and Farce in the “War on Terror” Tele-visual cultures have played a significant role in representing the meanings and consequences of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (BSG) television series has been particularly influential in articulating a critical account of 9/11 and the so-called “War on Terror”. The re-imagined BSG regularly attracted over two million viewers each week when it was first aired (Gorman 2009) and it has been the impetus for a body of scholarly thought that should perhaps be described as Battlestar Galactica studies. More than anything, the re-imagined BSG is about 9/11. It is the story of the human race attempting to avoid an apocalypse at the hands of a race of robots called Cylons. Humans created Cylons to be a race of slaves, but they were self-aware and rebelled against their human masters. But this is only part of the story. There is a broader story with broader implications that belies both BSG and the “War on Terror”. To understand the significance

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of this broader story I analyze in this paper the re-imagined BSG with the aid of Žižek’s theoretical accounts of “subjective” and “objective” violence. When BSG and the “War on Terror” are viewed through this theoretical lens we can better understand the significance and meanings of terrorist violence and maybe even provide a space from which to predict where the next 9/11 will come from. The enduring catch phrase from BSG “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again” should be understood alongside Žižek’s work on violence. In doing so we may also come to understand that when terrorist violence is allowed to “happen again”, it does so first as tragedy, then as farce. The most important thing about the next 9/11 will be that it could have been prevented. This paper is ordered in the following way:  first, I  outline the theoretical distinctions between subjective and objective violence as found in Žižek’s work. Second, I  offer an account of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television series emphasizing representations of subjective and objective violence. Following this I explore the ways these representations interact with a world that can be indefinitely described as post-9/11. I  conclude by arguing that BSG plays an important role in articulating the post-9/11 world. It is a world where the response to 9/11 is making another 9/11 more likely—the first 9/11 was a tragedy, but the second one will be a farce. As we wait and worry about the next terrorist disaster, BSG in a post-9/11 world reminds us that the next generation of terrorists will likely emerge from some familiar places and for some clear reasons. When this happens it will be a farce of repetition of the highest order. There is always hope of preventing terrorism but in the “War on Terror” we are bound to cycles of violence that ensure that the next catastrophic act of terrorism is not only a possibility, but a certainty.

Subjective and Objective Violence Žižek’s descriptions of the distinction between “subjective” and “objective” violence is prologued with a joke about a worker who was suspected by managers in his company of stealing from the factory where he worked (Žižek 2008, 1–13). Each night as the worker left the factory his wheelbarrow was carefully searched for any evidence that he was stealing. In turned out, however, that what the worker was stealing was wheelbarrows. Žižek uses this joke to redirect our attention away from the most visible forms of violence that we encounter in contemporary society through the global media and in the everydayness of life. As witnesses of violence we—for very good reasons—focus on the most visible, brutal and vulgar acts. Murders, assaults, rapes, terrorism and war fill media spaces and induce deep

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anxieties. These, for Žižek, are moments of “subjective” violence. But, as witnesses to subjective violence, we must “learn to step back” and witness the systemic and symbolic “contours” (Žižek 2008, 1) of the contemporary world, contours that sustain and organize visible and brutal acts of violence. We should learn to … disentangle ourselves from the fascinating lure of this directly visible ‘subjective’ violence, violence performed by a clearly identifiable agent. We need to perceive the contours of the background which generates such outbursts. A step back enables us to identify a violence that sustains our very efforts to fight violence and to promote tolerance. (Žižek 2008, 1) This background violence—or “objective” violence—has two forms. The first is “Symbolic” violence which takes shape through speech acts and forms.1 The other is “systemic” violence which Žižek (2008, 1) describes as the “the often catastrophic consequences of the smooth functioning of our economic and political systems”. The distinction between subjective and objective violence underpins some of Žižek’s earlier theorizing on violence. Of particular note is his description of repressive desublimation (Žižek [1994] 2005, 16–7). Through such “desublimation” the mediating force of the ego is stripped of its autonomy leaving the human actor prone to outbursts of aggression and violence. In Žižek’s ([1994] 2005, 16) view, whilst it may appear that when this desublimation descends into acts of subjective violence it is doing so at the command of id’s impulses, impulses deprived of the mediations of the ego, a closer look reveals that the active force is not the id, but the societal commands of the superego. Stated differently, repressive desublimation is the pathway through which outbursts of subjective violence are revealed to be grounded in the societal conditions that make such outbursts possible. Repressive desublimation is a liberation of sorts, but one forged through a short circuit between the id and the superego that permits surrender to aggressive and violent impulses and temptations (Žižek 1999a, 3–6, [1994] 2005, 18). Perhaps the most relevant articulation of the distinction between subjective and objective violence is offered by Žižek in The Parallax View where he draws attention away from the subjective violence of the “War on Terror” towards the background that made this violence inevitable. Žižek (2006, 368–9) argues in a section exploring the meanings of the torture perpetrated by American soldiers in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq: recording the humiliation with a camera, with the perpetrators included in the picture, their faces stupidly smiling alongside the naked and twisted bodies of the prisoners, is an integral part of the process, in stark contrast to the secrecy of Saddam’s tortures … to anyone acquainted with the reality of the US way

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of life, the photos immediately brought to mind the obscene underside of US popular culture… . The Abu Ghraib tortures are thus to be located in the series of obscene underground practices that sustain an ideological edifice. (emphasis in original)

Žižek reflects on how the torture at Abu Ghraib so resembles the initiation ceremonies that take place across education, military and sporting institutions, and in gangs and secret societies throughout the US. These frat-house initiations too take on perverse sexual dimensions. In short, the subjective violence at Abu Ghraib reflects inherent desires and behaviors exhibited in day-to-day US life—the “theatre of cruelty” played out in US pop-culture and everyday life (Žižek 2006, 367). In the post-9/11 world, the distinction between subjective and objective violence can have significant consequences. 9/11 made it possible for the US government and its military allies to launch wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; locate, torture and charge suspected terrorists;2 and carry out retributions against those deemed responsible for harboring and aiding terrorism. These are the consequences of identifying subjective violence. Identifying objective violence often means something quite different. These same governments and militaries have little interest in identifying the objective contours of subjective violence. To do so would leave them vulnerable to the same charges that they have leveled at those they deem “terrorists”, a phenomenon that Chomsky once described as a “Culture of Terrorism” (Chomsky 1988, 5–7; 11–24). Those who have pointed out that subjective violence does not take place in a vacuum, that there are systemic conditions that form the basis of oppression and exploitation without which subjective violence would not be possible, leave themselves open to charges of being “pro-terrorist”, “unpatriotic” and perhaps even “loony leftist”, to borrow a few that are thrown around talkback radio and the Fox News channel. In short, identifying objective violence can have consequences. Yet, identifying objective violence may also play an important role in preventing terrorism. The differences between subjective and objective violence can be accounted for in many ways. For the purposes of this paper, I am most interested in how subjective and objective violence appear as organizing principles for the “War on Terror” and the post-9/11 television series Battlestar Galactica. The subjective and objective violence represented in BSG mirrors the subjective and objective violence of the “War on Terror”. This is not a coincidence. As Dudley (2009) argues: What a shock it was … to see the new series [of BSG] emerge as a deliberate and uncompromising attempt to confront the aftermath of the September 11th attacks and the “war on terror”. From its inception as a mini-series in which

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humanity is all but wiped out in a sneak attack by a seemingly inhuman enemy, to its almost unrelievedly bleak portrait of a civilization trying to retain its fundamental values in the face of an ongoing threat—and often failing spectacularly—“Battlestar Galactica” has acted as nothing less than a kind of immersion therapy for post-9/11 America.

BSG is viewing for the post-9/11 consumer. Perhaps the creators of the show even assume that their audience also witnessed the 9/11 terror attacks live on television. In the next section, I provide a brief and partial outline of BSG’s storyline and offer a narrative of violence—a narrative that incorporates representations of subjective and objective violence.

Subjective and Objective Violence in BSG, or, You Can’t Love a Skin-Job The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica television series occupies an important space in post-9/11 tele-visual culture. BSG is the story of the human race on the verge of extinction hurtling through space whilst being pursued by a race of human-created machines called Cylons. The Galactica—initially believed to be the only surviving “battlestar” class starship3—leads the civilian fleet of ships towards the mythical human colony called Earth. This program provides the viewer with a rich variety of post-9/11 storylines and metaphors as it “aggressively” engages with “post-9/11 American politics” (Marshall and Potter 2008, 1). The series began with the ultimate moment of subjective violence—the attempted annihilation of the human species. The human cities—spread across twelve planets, or “twelve colonies”—were destroyed with nuclear weaponry; a realization of the paranoid, Cold War fantasy. The storyline of the first episodes of BSG were focused on the destruction of the wealthiest human city—Caprica City, on the Caprica colony. This annihilation was depicted with pristine imagery of the glamorous city being reduced to rubble in moments. In the first movie length episode—often referred to as the mini-series since this was the style in which it was initially aired—BSG delivered plenty of images reminiscent of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing “War on Terror” that has seen the United States military and the militaries of “willing” allies pursue apparent terrorists to some distant corners of the globe. Viewers of BSG witnessed the destruction of human civilization with blows of spectacular violence. The depictions of the tumbling cityscapes should be familiar to global witnesses of 9/11 and terrorism. These images show the viewer that remembering 9/11 is an important context for watching BSG.

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Fear and Racism in the Human Fleet Much has been documented of the post-9/11 political tactic of manipulating fears of terrorism or, perhaps more precisely, fears of another 9/11 (see Jhally and Earps 2004; Miller 2007; Faludi 2008). In their fearful responses to 9/11 some witnesses—whether they witnessed 9/11 via the news media or on the streets of New York City or Washington DC, or perhaps in a field in Pennsylvania—became “Stricken with fear and panic” and some “began to limit their travel, … distrust others, and … surrender their freedoms willingly” (Ott 2008, 13). In many respects, this was not particularly surprising. Terrorism is designed to spread fear and anxiety in a targeted audience. It is designed to have a lot of people watching, not just a lot of people dead (Jenkins 1987, 581–9). Ott believes that BSG provides witnesses with some of the “symbolic resources” necessary to come to terms with the coordinates of the post-9/11 world through the deliberate evocation of the “Sept. 11 horrors” (Martel 2003; Ott 2008, 14). In this way, the dramatization of terror themes in BSG—and other post-9/11 screen culture—provides a way of coming to terms with the horror of witnessing terrorism and of being a terrorists’ target audience. As Ott (2008, 17) argues: To understand the unique symbolic equipment that BSG affords for living in a post-9/11 world, it is vital first to establish the allegorical nature of the show. BSG begins with a surprise Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies, which catches the Colonial government and fleet flatfooted. Like the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Cylon attack … is organized by a group of “monotheistic religious zealots” (read:  Islamic fundamentalists) and executed with the aid of “sleeper agents inside human society” (read: terrorists inside the U.S.).

Ott adds that BSG provides viewers with a “vivid depiction” of 9/11 and helps witnesses understand a society at war. What is clear in Ott’s account is that the allegory of 9/11 in BSG represents something significant about the American capacity for symbolic efficiency and for fetishizing their disavowals (see Žižek 1999b, 322–3; Andrejevic, no date; Howie 2009a). This capacity for symbolic efficiency and the associated capacity for disavowal are well illustrated through the idea seemingly adopted by several authors in the BSG studies canon that fear of 9/11 somehow equates with fear of a human apocalypse (Johnson-Lewis 2008; Ott 2008; Pinedo 2008). This equating should make most people cringe. This dilemma of 9/11’s equivalency to other disasters sometimes plays itself out in counterterrorism forums and conferences as well. I  have had many discussions with people who claim that 9/11 is the worst terrorist attack of all time. I do not necessarily dispute such a claim, but I often remind these people that in terms of

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casualties, destruction and long-term potential for annihilation of a group of people 9/11 pales in comparison to the victimization of Jews by the Nazis before and during World War II, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, atrocities in Northern Africa, and the decimation of East Timor to name a horrendous few. Indeed, it should be considered a deep insult (to the victims of all terror and war) to equate 9/11 with these scandalous genocides. In symbolic terms however, this equivalence relies on something other than a numbers game. Importantly, 9/11 was viewed live and direct from NYC and Washington DC. In this way, it shares more with the initial scenes of devastation in BSG than other more devastating acts of war or terror. BSG may be a kind of symbolic manifestation of what was witnessed on 9/11—this might be how some, if not many, people in the US understood 9/11’s violence; as a catastrophe, as a cataclysmic event, as an apocalypse. I must confess to also being prone to hyperbole on the night of 9/11. I remember running to my parents’ bedroom (I was 21, an undergraduate student, and lived in the family home at the time) and declaring in my most dramatic prose that America was under attack, live on television; do you want to see? These exaggerations represent a deep malaise that is present in terrorism and 9/11 research and theory. When terrorism occurs in the global south, the third world, and the underprivileged world it is viewed by Western governments, the media, policing organizations and academics as routine and a matter of course. But when it occurs in the global north, in wealthy metropoles such as New York, London and Madrid, the violence is treated as deeply abhorrent, as though all people must observe the sanctity of the violent act. This represents something close to what Žižek has described as “divine violence” (Žižek 2008, 151–2). But in this instance, Žižek’s description should be inverted, for it is not the divinity of the terrorists’ violence that should be at stake, but the divinity of the supposedly holy and just reprisals that the US and its willing allies have carried out in 9/11’s name. But here also lies the absurdity of the “War on Terror”. Attacking the emotion “terror” with guns and bombs is something bordering on pathological. 9/11 sparked hyperbolic reactions in many witnesses. This reaction combined shock and horror with a certain compulsion to watch, even with a sick kind of excitement that was akin to rubber-necking at a car accident or stopping to capture a street fight with a mobile phone camera. This rubber-necking took on a global dimension courtesy of the global news media, and hyperbole was perhaps ensured. This is, at least partly, what Žižek was describing when he argued that 9/11 was “jouissance at its purest” (Žižek 2002, 12). In a way, we enjoyed witnessing the destruction of a power that had reached an obscene level. We enjoyed seeing the bully get their comeuppance.

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This idea is powerfully dramatized in the recent reality television program Bully Beatdown where bullies are identified and offered money to step into a ring with a professional fighter. Their resulting demise at the hands of a superior fighter is praised as a type of natural justice.4 This hyperbole should not, however, undermine the ability of BSG to shed light on some of the darker aspects of the response to 9/11. Among the post9/11 fears that BSG reanimates is the fear of an enemy that looks like us, an enemy that hides in plain sight. As Melançon explains (2008, 211), “Shortly after the initial Cylon attack, the Fleet leadership learns that certain Cylon models look like humans. Five words are uttered in horror: “They look like us now””. The following dialogue is from episode two of season one. The dialogue is between two lovers, colonial fleet pilot “Boomer” and crew chief “Tyrol”. Boomer discovers that several bombs have been removed from the armory. She finds one in her duffel bag but she does not remember how it got there and she fears that others will assume that she is a Cylon sleeper agent if she reports it: Boomer: Tyrol:

Boomer: Tyrol: Boomer:

I took the one detonator from the duffel, replaced it, and then went back to my quarters. Well, ah … you know what? You know what? It’s not your fault. Someone’s obviously setting you up to take the fall for something, that’s what it is. I mean, you wake up somewhere, you don’t know how you got there or anything. You’re drugged or manipulated. Or who knows what, something. What do we do? ’Cause if I report what’s happened, they’re gonna think I’m a Cylon agent. No, they’re not; no, they’re not. No, no, no, why would they think that? That’s crazy. People are getting crazy, okay? You’ve heard the rumors: Cylons who look like humans, sleeper agents hiding in the fleet. (Grabiak and Moore 2004)

There are three issues that I want to highlight from this dialogue. The first is that Boomer did turn out to be a sleeper agent, but she did not know it in this scene. Viewers later learn that it was part of her programming to awaken at designated times to unconsciously attempt acts of terror and espionage. She ultimately uses the bombs to tear open a section of Galactica’s hull and releases most of the fleet’s water supply into space. The second issue is that the fact she is a Cylon was not the security flaw in the human fleet that allowed Boomer to succeed in her unconscious plan. The security flaw rested in the fear and intolerance of the human fleet. Boomer had lived and loved amongst humans, and this was where her conscious allegiances lay, even if her programming made her, from time to time, act out against this allegiance.

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Boomer wanted to report the missing bombs, but her fear of racial categorization and persecution prevented this. Lastly, much can be learned from Tyrol’s response to her fears—you’re not the Cylon agent. You have been set up. Someone else is the Cylon agent! For Tyrol, a Cylon agent must exist (and he was right), but it must be someone other than his lover (on this point he was wrong).5 Some hidden foreign agent must be to blame, but surely not someone I love and trust despite the evidence to the contrary! Fears such as these could be witnessed throughout the human fleet despite no official acknowledgements from the government and the military that humanoid Cylons existed. Eventually Boomer’s programming once again kicked in and she unconsciously attempted, but failed, to murder Commander Adama, the much-loved human military leader. Boomer was later murdered whilst in custody for this crime by Tyrol’s flight-deck assistant, Cally. In a twist of fate (and of course, screen writing), Cally and Tyrol fell in love, were married and had a child. When Tyrol also became aware that he was unconsciously a Cylon, he feared greatly for his relationship with Cally and their child. He was fairly certain that she would not understand that he was not an evil and mindless machine. Moreover, viewers come to learn that Tyrol, unlike Boomer, was not a dangerous sleeper agent waiting to be awakened to carry out acts of terror against the human fleet. He was, rather, one of the mysterious “final five” who wanted little more than peace with humanity. Tyrol’s fears of being categorized and persecuted by Cally were realized in episode three of season four, “The Ties That Bind”. In scenes from this episode viewers witness Cally learn that her husband is a Cylon and that their child, Nicky, is half-Cylon. Cally encountered her husband in the quarters they shared soon after learning he was a Cylon: Tyrol: Cally: Tyrol:



I know it’s been a rough couple of weeks. I  know what you’re thinking. It’s not true. It isn’t? [As he speaks, Cally sees flashbacks of their life together] No. I’m not having an affair. I  figured it out. I  know what’s important. You’re important. Nicky’s important. We’re important. Us. That’s really what it’s all about, isn’t it? Family, a future. Building that future together. I promise you from now on I will be here for us. The three of us. Maybe the four of us. You know, maybe someday we, we’ll have another baby. What do you think? Another baby? A brother, a sister for little Nick? What do you think, buddy? Hey? Would you like a little brother or sister? [Cally, armed with a large wrench, beats Tyrol mercilessly, grabs Nicky, and leaves her husband for dead]. (Taylor and Nankin 2008)

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Here we witness the problem at the heart of the Cylon dilemma. Through the terror that the humans experience, many become unable to fathom the idea of a Cylon that might be their husband or wife, their son or daughter, their friends and family. Cally’s terror becomes a metaphor for the dilemma of post-9/11 racism and discrimination as it is represented in BSG. She is the embodiment of the inevitable and often nonsensical manifestations of post-terror fear. The object of her fear was forced into stability. She doubted her love for her husband. She did not doubt her belief that all Cylons were evil. When Cally learned that her husband and child were Cylons, she did not become aware that some Cylons were not monsters. She forced herself to become aware of something quite different—that she must change how she feels about her husband and child to accommodate her beliefs that every Cylon is a monster. This is something akin to a fundamental attribution error as it is sometimes called in psychological studies. When this error is made it is assumed that somebody exhibiting a negative trait is characterized by that trait. But if we were to ourselves exhibit that trait, we would assume that it was an uncharacteristic aberration and not indicative of our character. In short, we assume the worst of others, but the best of ourselves. As such, Cally readjusted her perspective—instead of remembering all of those loving moments she spent with her family, she chose to re-remember—re-imagine—those moments and re-interpret their meaning. These loving moments became part of a large-scale Cylon plot to annihilate humanity. Cally’s shifting perspective is not unlike the shift that occurred after 9/11 when racism and discrimination directed against people perceived to be Muslims was common. Post-9/11 racism and discrimination may be viewed as a type of impotent acting out in search of the security that can be found in uniting against a universally feared and hated enemy. The Cylons play the rhetorical role of Muslims post-9/11. I do not mean to equate Muslims with a race of robots—I hope my words have not been taken on such a vulgar level. Rather I suggest that Muslims, like Cylons, are convenient scapegoats for other malaise within some societies. When the leadership of the Colonial Fleet finally discloses that there are Cylons that look human there was a predictable outcry:  “Why were we not told” immediately? (Melançon 2008, 215). The reason for this should be fairly clear in the post-9/11 world: “The stated justification of the Fleet leadership for classifying the fact that some Cylons now look like humans is that they do not want to see neighbor turn against neighbor, create witch hunts, and see the social fabric ripped apart by paranoia … the Fleet must be protected from itself” (Melançon 2008, 215– 16; emphasis in original).

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This is a familiar tale. According to Freyd (2002, 5–8), anger directed at people perceived to be Muslim has been demonstrated on many occasions following 9/11. A Lebanese man who had run the arts center at the World Trade Center was heckled as he was searching for survivors. A  Wyoming mother and her children were chased from a Wal-Mart because they appeared Muslim. A  mosque in Texas was firebombed. An Egyptian worker won a payout for discrimination after being fired from a restaurant because his manager believed that having someone who appeared Muslim as a staff member would be bad for business (Freyd 2002, 5; Sixel 2004). In research that I conducted in organizations in Melbourne, Australia discrimination, racism and anti-Muslim sentiments had arisen as a result of 9/11 and the ongoing terror war (Howie 2009b). I could go on and on but my point is clear—9/11 cleared a path for racism and discrimination to be directed against groups of people that were deemed to be responsible. This is also an account of repressive desublimation at work. In the face of trauma, some witnesses of terror found themselves unable to mediate their aggressive impulses. The post-9/11 world was a liberated space where some chose to indulge their racist desires in a more socially permissible atmosphere. In this atmosphere the idea of a Muslim who was not a monster became problematic for some people (see also Pipes 2009). A significant feature of post-terrorism discrimination and racism is the connections between language, aggression and violence. This is acknowledged in Ott’s (2008) and Johnson-Lewis’ (2008) analyses of BSG. As Ott argues, many despicable acts begin with the naming of the “Other” and the dehumanization that forges the Others’ Otherness: if one does not see an enemy as human, then one does not feel compelled to treat “it” humanely… . The repeated references to Cylons as “machines”, as well as the more derogatory use of the terms “toasters” and “skin jobs” function rhetorically to justify violence against all Cylons. In addition to degrading the Cylons, such language homogenizes them, reinforcing the prevailing perception that they are all the same and can thus be treated as one, nameless, faceless enemy. (Ott 2008, 17)

Ott argues that terms such as “extremists”, “fundamentalists”, “terrorists”, and the “Axis of Evil” all perform a similar rhetorical role in the demonizing of Muslims after 9/11. The context of these words and phrases is George W.  Bush’s unfortunate post-9/11 declaration that you are either with us, or you are with the terrorists. Johnson-Lewis (2008, 30) argues that Bush’s words forge “terrorists” as an “undifferentiated mass” and that “It helps if terrorists are not actually people; it makes them much easier to kill”. I  am sure what Johnson-Lewis means is “not actually people” like us; people in the

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same way that we are people. This de-humanization was again demonstrated by Cally. The following dialogue takes place immediately after she mercilessly beat her husband and fled with their child. She ran into a spacecraft launching bay pursued by another humanoid Cylon, Tory: Tory: Cally: Tory: Cally: Tory: Cally:

Tory: Cally: Tory: Cally: Tory: Cally: Tory:

Cally: Tory:

Cally! Stay the frak away from me! I know what you are. I know what all of you are. How could you? We don’t even know what we are. I heard you. You’re Cylons! A bunch of frakkin’ skinjobs! I wish it were that simple. turning the key and closing the airlock behind Tory:  I told you to stay away from me. Guess you better hope there’s a spare body waiting for you! holding her arms open wide: You want to kill me? Go ahead. Don’t do this to yourself or to your child, to Nicky. Get the frak away! You’re not getting your hands on my son! Not you, not Galen [Tyrol]! He frakkin’ used me! He didn’t know [he was a Cylon]! None of us did! We didn’t find out until we entered that Nebula. Oh, shut the frak up, traitor! Frak! All we know is that we’re Cylons. But in every other way, we’re still the same people. You’re frakkin’ machines! looking at her hands: I don’t know. But I do know that we’re not evil. We’re not inhuman. And we’re just as scared and confused as you are. I can’t live like this! It’s a frakkin’ nightmare! nearly weeping: You don’t want to do this, Cally. He’s your son! (Taylor and Nankin 2008)

Again, viewers witness Cally’s racist attitudes at work as she considers whether she should kill herself and her child. This is also another example of repressive desublimation at work. Cally believed that Cylons had no right to live—for Cally, killing Boomer was not killing at all. Cally was charged for her crime and received a few weeks’ imprisonment. In this instance Cally was considering whether infanticide was a legitimate course of action—the fact that her child was half human was seemingly irrelevant since Nicky was also half Cylon. Quite literally her hatred for Cylons outweighed her love of humanity. Her child’s humanity is re-imagined as a non-humanity and she was willing to engage in suicidal violence if it meant ridding the world of another

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Cylon. In the figure of Cally, we see the ultimate mindless racism—a racism that would see her condemn herself to death as punishment for her love of a Cylon. Cally’s repressive desublimation is reminiscent of a skit performed by American comedian Dave Chappelle in which viewers see and hear the cautionary tale of a blind African-American man who was raised as a white supremacist. Upon learning that he was black he promptly left his wife because she was a “nigger lover” (Norman 2004, unpaginated).

The Background What is partially hidden amongst the accounts I have provided of outbursts of subjective violence in both BSG and the “War on Terror”—outbursts that have resulted in racial discrimination and fear of the Other—is the contours that sustain this violence. For Žižek, objective violence is the symbolic and systemic violence that forms the background for spectacular and dramatic outbursts of subjective violence like terrorism, war and violent crime (Žižek 2006, 364–75; 2008, 1). Analysis of violence in tele-visual culture has, perhaps for very good reasons, focused on representations of subjective violence and the subjective consequences of that violence for audiences of witnesses. Here I want to buck this trend and reflexively explore BSG with a focus on the backgrounded, objective and visually benign systemic violence. If viewers of BSG were to focus on the background story they would witness Caprica City before it was destroyed—a decadent city characterized by ridiculous wealth, a wealth viewers come to learn is forged at the expense of cultural citizens that occupy working class roles, largely with multi-ethnic backgrounds.6 The correlations with New  York City should be obvious. NYC is a city of the elite and was the first target on 9/11. It is an epicenter for wealth and affluence, culture and hegemony. Much like Caprica City, it is home to the affluent and worker, but also the poor, the unemployed, the drug addict, and the terrorist. Caprica City seems to have been modeled on New York City. Viewers of BSG are provided with many opportunities to admire Caprica City in the opening credits as the camera moves over the waters of a sun-kissed bay to capture a huge city littered with skyscrapers that seem to be erected directly on the coast line. The glamorous penthouse offices above, the sprawling masses below. One is struck by how reminiscent these scenes are of the morning of 9/11—the sparkling sunlight and glistening water broken first by the cityscape on land, and then the smoke in the sky as it billowed from the Twin Towers. This similarity was also observed by Greene (2006, 8): The Battlestar series … never lets us forget the context of that devastation—the first shot in the credits every week is from the mini-series: an aerial shot flying

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into the Caprica skyline, much like the view that the terrorists would have had flying into lower Manhattan on 9/11. Whatever they may have meant before, after 9/11 images that simulate flying towards skyscrapers now connect us to that lonesome day.

When Caprica City is reduced to rubble, the human denizens fled into space, a territory that they had no claim to. They were forced to shed their elite status and become members of the cultural underclass and what Georgio Agamben has described as homo sacer—people without a place or society, people who are not truly people (Agamben 1998). It is homo sacer’s place to toil and do little more than survive. With this shift the humans turned on each other and used violence whenever possible. On the fleeing human ships, societal structures re-established the comforting social norms of elitism and the underprivileged. Prostitution became common place and thugs and gangsters took control in some unpoliced segments of the fleet. This is the context in which we should also understand another enduring slogan from BSG—“All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again”. The importance of this phrase in BSG has been explored by several authors in the Battlestar Galactica studies canon (Casey 2008; Johnson 2008; Pinedo 2008). As Casey (2008) points out, BSG has literally happened before. The original BSG “happened” in 1978 and was quickly followed by the rather lame Galactica 1980 (Casey 2008, 237)  that deployed a storyline that is considered by some fans to be non-canonical. It has since happened again in a post-9/11 world. In this world it has taken on different meanings, dimensions and consequences. But the phrase “All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again” has a far more important purpose in BSG. This purpose speaks to an inevitability that is inherent in the show’s storyline and the storyline of the “War on Terror”. It is an inevitability that does not fully play itself out until the re-imagined series concludes (sort of) after four seasons. This inevitability involves cycles of violence. These cycles of violence recreate past sins and past errors and ensure that the next moment of spectacular blowback is never far away (Pinedo 2008). The inevitability and predictability of these cycles of violence ensures that when violence and horror occurs it will repeat the first time as a tragedy, but the second time as farce (Žižek 2009). This was the impetus behind the speech made by Commander Adama at the decommissioning ceremony for the Galactica shortly before the Cylons commenced the human apocalypse. This speech is one of the first scenes in the re-imagined BSG: The cost of wearing the uniform can be high, but [long pause]. Sometimes it’s too high. You know, when we fought the Cylons we did it to save ourselves

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from extinction. But we never answered the question “Why?” Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, jealousy. And we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept responsibility for anything we have done. Like we did with the Cylons. We decided to play God. Create life. When that life turned against us we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn’t our fault. Not really. You cannot play God then wash your hands of the things that you’ve created. Sooner or later the day comes when you can’t hide from the things than you’ve done anymore. (my emphasis. Moore and James 2004) This is a particularly suggestive speech and one that has clear links to the post-9/11 world. Chomsky (2001) was quick to point out in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 that the hijackers and architects of 9/11 were products of training programs run by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other allied intelligence agencies in the 1980s. The CIA is said to have played a significant role in “recruiting, training, and arming the most extreme Islamic fundamentalists it could find to fight a ‘Holy War’ against the Russian invaders of Afghanistan” (Chomsky 2001, 18). The Afghan war against the Soviets fostered and hardened a fighting force from which it is generally believed Al-Qaeda emerged. This force then went looking for other fights and found them in Chechnya, Bosnia and Western China and later in Northern Africa, Washington DC and New York City. Chomsky argues that the CIA’s support of Islamic fundamentalism was played down and in some cases totally denied after 9/11. Indeed, I have heard Bill O’Reilly suggest that no support was ever provided, accusing the son of a 9/11 victim of engaging in radical leftwing rhetoric when he suggested that the 9/11 hijackers were products of US support of Islamic fundamentalism (O’Reilly in Greenwald 2004). In fact, it is a matter of public record that the US government was still contributing funds to the Taliban regime throughout 2001 up until at least August 2 in part as reward for the “elimination of opium” cultivation in Afghanistan (Sheer 2008, 12–3). Yet, all one has to do is invoke pre-9/11 tele-visual culture to shed light on the American attitude towards the Afghan Mujahideen in the 1980s. Some are quick to forget that in the 1988 film Rambo III the US are actively supporting Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan in their war against the Russian invaders. One impassioned speech by the American Colonel Trautman, Rambo’s commander from an earlier film, reminds his Russian captors that the Mujahideen are “freedom fighters” who would “rather die than be slaves to an invading army. You can’t defeat a people like that” (Stallone and Lettich 1988). If only the US government had heeded Trautman’s warning.

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First as Tragedy … The debate over whether the US did or did not support Islamic extremism in the 1980s, a debate that could sometimes be heard on post-9/11 talk-back radio (in Australia and the US) and on some television news networks, misses the point. At that time, supporting the Mujahideen was likely the correct strategic decision. Surely we are sophisticated enough to know that 9/11 does not automatically make every decision made before 9/11 an error? Regardless, the US support of Islamic fundamentalism in the 1980s is surely an example of visiting all of our sins upon our children. Stated differently 9/11 did not happen in an ahistorical vacuum. There were systematic and structural forces—a particular brand of US democracy, the fighting of a proxy war against the other Cold War superpower, a militarized everyday culture, Reganomics, a particular attitude towards the world, and a host of other objectively violent features—that formed the background for the subjectivity of US and Soviet led violence in many parts of the world. These conditions, along with many others, contributed to the hypersubjective violence that the world witnessed in real-time on 9/11. Or, as Žižek (in Trotsky 2007, xvi) puts it, “while democracy can more or less eliminate constituted violence, it still has to rely continuously on constitutive violence”. The phrase “All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again” becomes a little clearer. The violence perpetrated by the US and its willing allies may break up terrorist strong holds and places where terrorists move freely but the side-effect is that bombed foreign cities become the next breeding grounds and training camps for generations of terrorism to come. In short, fighting the “War on Terror”—which has regularly involved fighting terror with terror7—may do plenty to ensure that another 9/11 will occur. Žižek (2008, 20–1; 2009, 4)  believes that it is fear that keeps humanity grounded in perpetual repetitions of trauma and tragedy. Žižek (2009, 3) reminds us that “Twelve years prior to 9/11 … the Berlin Wall fell” and that this fall was supposed to usher in a new era of prosperity and human unity. 9/11 has ushered in a new era of walls, but not only walls that are erected around large geographical regions. Rather, post-9/11 walls also surround gated communities and provide an illusory security to the planet’s wealthiest inhabitants. Within these communities, a new class is emerging of people who “dine privately, shop privately, view art privately, everything is private, private, private” (Vencat and Brownell in Žižek 2009, 4). But what links this new class is fear; “fear of external social life itself” (my emphasis) (Žižek 2009, 4). Ironically, the acts of terror on 9/11 have imposed a terror from within, a terror that the wealthiest endure as a form of blowback for their affluence, as

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though they secretly agree with Ward Churchill’s assessment of the wealthy professionals and business people who perished in the Twin Towers as “little Eichmanns” (Churchill 2003, 19). These gated classes were perhaps equally “too busy braying, incessantly and self-importantly, into their cell phones, arranging power lunches and stock transactions, each of which translated, conveniently out of sight, mind and smelling distance, into the starved and rotting flesh of infants” as they too hide out in the “sterile sanctuary” of the high-rises of the world’s major cities (Churchill 2001). This class distinction is most apparent for Žižek (2009, 5) in São Paulo, Brazil—a city with “250 heliports” and some of the most dangerous city streets in the world. The farcical responses to 9/11 involved the erecting of walls wherever they would stand. These walls work to reinforce the inequality, hegemony and cultural domination that were the seeds of 9/11. The reproduction of this same inequality in Iraq and Afghanistan—or in the human fleet—will likely see history repeat. Whilst I cannot tell you where the next 9/11 will occur I can tell you that the next generation of terrorists will likely emerge in response to the protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that have defined the first decade of the 21st century.

Conclusion: Should We Care About the Tyrant’s Bloody Robes? I want to conclude with somewhat of a non-sequitur and a thought about The Bourne Trilogy films that star Matt Damon as a CIA trained killing machine, and how the films fit with what is at stake in this paper (Liman and Greengrass 2002–2007). The Bourne films tap into something dramatic about American culture—the capacity of the liberal-left to dwell in conspiratorial fantasies. The stories of Jason Bourne depict a patriot, a man wanting only to make his beloved country safe and secure. But his desire is made impossible by the systemic conditions inherent in the US spy services, conditions that do little other than turn this patriot into an assassin who would kill anyone who does not share the CIA’s limited worldview. For the leftist-liberal, these films represent moments of jouissance. Do you think the CIA does not wield this kind of power? Are you so naïve as to believe that this does not really happen? Of course it does. It must, given the America that Jason Bourne serves. The impact of these films is two-fold. First the viewer is reminded of the obscene subjective violence that the US wages around the globe in its theatres of the “War on Terror”. Second, viewers are told to believe that there is a horrendous systemic, structural and objective violence that underpins this subjective violence and that this objective violence goes to the heart of what it means to be an American—only a true patriot is willing to sacrifice

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what is needed. Or, as the movies’ crescendo reminds us, “Look what they make you give”. For the oppressed and the victims of US-led wars the propaganda is doubled. The subjective violence of US war efforts is combined with Hollywood depictions of objective violence (depicted in many other films such as A Few Good Men, Enemy of the State, and particularly the X Files television series and movies) to depict the US as the ultimate global evil. Can there be any doubt that would-be terrorists are being forged every day, some in the theatres of the US “War on Terror”, but perhaps also many others who are in the theatres of post-9/11 screen culture? The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica seems designed to make the post9/11 viewer consider when we should cry for the “tyrant’s bloody robe” (Žižek 2008, 3). This was the function of the post-9/11 cry, why do people hate America? But one does not need to hate America to understand the violent contours that made 9/11 possible. Indeed, the connections between the US funding and training of people who would later turn the gun on their trainers are fairly clear—and the US trained these people well in the tactics of terror. The 9/11 terrorists targeted sites of financial and military hegemony. The success of these attacks was terror at its purest. It is here that the suggestion of some canonical terror studies scholars that terrorism is random and arbitrary violence is revealed for its absurdity. The economic nerve-center and the military brain are hardly random or incidental targets. Moreover, the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania was thought in some circles to be heading to the White House. The 9/11 attacks were far more precise than some of the US smart bombs deployed during post-9/11 wars (Jenkins 2009, unpaginated). In both the short and long term it seems that fighting terror with terror is likely to create more terror. The recent attempt to detonate an underwear bomb on a flight between Amsterdam and Detroit is significant evidence of that. It is incredible that whilst fighting terror with bombs and guns in Afghanistan and Iraq is showing some results (see Kilcullen 2009), security at Western airports remains so vulnerable to innovative individuals determined to carry out an act of terrorism (Associated Press 2009). More incredibly, this attempted attack has led to cries for the profiling of potential terrorists—a further escalation of the systemic, objective violence, a violence that forms the contours of outbursts of subjective violence. Subjective and objective violence seem to feed on each other and the phrase “All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again” is perhaps the best explanation of “progress” in the “war on terror”—it is a progress towards repetition. If true progress is to be made then a “fully co-opted acting out” will not suffice (Žižek 2010, 327). What is needed is a “passage à l’acte”—a way of thinking that deletes

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the symbolic link, suspends symbolic efficiency and allows for a new symbolic agreement, one that will not ensure cycles of violence (emphasis in original. Žižek 2010, 326). Yet, the passage à l’acte brings irony since “Our predicament is that the only alternatives appear to be violent outbursts”. Terror to fight terror. Perhaps the US government does not get the credit it deserves.

Notes 1. Interestingly, Žižek further distinguishes symbolic violence along the lines of the subjective/objective distinction. There are language acts that are direct violent outburst such as discrimination and verbal abuse, but there are also structural features of language that impose subtler, objective language violence. A word like “terrorism” is a particularly tendentious example of this. The word “terrorism” has a meaning buried deep behind its negative connotations and its elitist assumptions (i.e.: the US State Department describes those who oppose the USA as “terrorists”, but when the US military drops bombs on Baghdad in an operation called “Shock and Awe” it is, somehow, not “officially” terrorism). 2. Despite the perpetrators of suicide terrorism dying in the act, the shock of this type of subjective violence somehow provides a license to blame someone else. 3. It is later revealed that another battlestar has survived—the Pegasus—commanded by the ruthless Admiral Cain. 4. See http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1405819/, retrieved on December 11, 2009. 5. In a final irony, Tyrol also turns out to be a Cylon sleeper agent. But, like Boomer, he identifies with his humanity and indeed, as the viewer later learns, Tyrol is one of the “Final Five”—an original model of humanoid Cylons that had long desired lasting peace between Cylons and humans. 6. A fact not fully accounted for until the release of the Caprica (2009) mini-series. 7. This was dramatically depicted in season three of BSG when the human fleet finds home on a planet that they dub New Caprica. It is a desolate place that can, nonetheless, sustain human life. However, the Cylons discover their location and the humans are forced to live under their occupation in a tense Faustian Pact entered into by the new human president Gaius Baltar. With a strong sense of irony, the writers and producers depict this occupation of New Caprica complete with human terrorists and heart-wrenching tales of their suffering that work to legitimize their otherwise abhorrent violence. See Pinedo 2008; Dinello 2008 and Peters, 2008 and their discussions of “Battlestar Iraqtica.”

References Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Home Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Andrejevic, Mark. 2009. “The Body, Torture, and the Decline of Symbolic Efficience.” Politics and Culture 1. https://politicsandculture.org/2009/10/02/mark-andrejevicon-symbolic-efficiency/

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Associated Press. 2009. “Official:  U.S. Air Security System Failed in Detroit Attempted Bombing”. News One. http://newsone.com/nation/associated-press/ official-u-s-air-security-system-failed-in-detroit-attempted-bombing/. Casey, Jim. 2008. “ ‘All This Has Happened Before’:  Repetition, Reimagination, and Eternal Return”. In Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Churchill, Ward (2001). “ ‘Some People Push Back’: On the Justice of Roosting Chickens.” https://cryptome.org/ward-churchill.htm Churchill, Ward. 2003. On the Justice of Roosting Chickens: Reflections on the Consequences of U.S. Imperial Arrogance and Criminality. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Chomsky, Noam. 1988. The Culture of Terrorism. Boston, MA: South End Press. Chomsky, Noam. 2001. September 11. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen and Unwin. Dinello, Dan. 2008. “The Wretched of New Caprica”. In Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished Or Mission Frakked Up?, edited by Josef Steiff and Tristan Tamplin. Chicago: Open Court. Dudley, Michael. 2009. Battlestar Galactica:  Immersion Therapy for Post 9/11 World. https://www.alternet.org/2009/03/battlestar_galactica:_immersion_therapy_for_ post_ 9_11_world/. Faludi, Susan. 2008. The Terror Dream:  Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America. Melbourne: Scribe. Freyd, Jennifer. 2002. “In the Wake of Terrorist Attack, Hatred May Mask Fear.” In Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy, 2 (1): 5–8. Gorman, Bill. 2009. Battlestar Galactica Finale Blasts Away the Competition. http:// tvbythenumbers.com/2009/03/24/battlestar-galactica-finale-blasts-away-thecompetition/15054. Grabiak, Marita and Ronald Moore. 2004. “Water”. Battlestar Galactica, 2 (1). Hollywood, CA: Universal Studios. Greene, Eric. 2006. “The Mirror Frakked: Reflections on Battlestar Galactica”. In So Say We All: An Unauthorized Collection of Thoughts and Opinions on Battlestar Galactica, edited by Richard Hatch. Dallas, TX: Benbella Books. Greenwald, Robert, dir. 2004. Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism. London: The Disinformation Company. Howie, Luke. 2009a. “Representing Terrorism: Reanimating Post-9/11 New York City”. In International Journal of Žižek Studies, 3 (3): 1–23. Howie, Luke. 2009b. Terrorism, the Worker and the City: Simulations and Security in a Time of Terror. Surrey: Gower/Ashgate. Jenkins, Brian. 1987. “The Future Course of International Terrorism”. In Contemporary Research on Terrorism, edited by Paul Wilkinson and A. Stewart. Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press. Jenkins, Simon. 2009. “Indiscriminate Slaughter from the Air is a Barbarism That Must Be Abolished”. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/ jan/16/gaza-aerial-bombing-david-miliband/print.

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Jhally, Sut and Jeremy Earps (ed.). 2004. Hijacking Catastrophe: 9/11, Fear and the Selling of American Empire. Northampton: Olive Branch Press. Johnson, David. 2008. “ ‘A Story that is Told Again and Again, and Again’: Recurrence, Providence and Freedom”. In Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy:  Knowledge Here Begins Out There, edited by Jason T. Eberl. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Johnson-Lewis, Erika. 2008. “Torture, Terrorism, and Other Aspects of Human Nature”. In Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1983. Fear and Trembling/Repetition:  Kierkegaard’s Writings, VI. Translated by H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kilcullen, David. 2009. The Accidental Guerilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One. Melbourne: Scribe. Liman, Dough and Paul Greengrass. 2002–2007. The Bourne Trilogy: The Bourne Identity, The Bourne Supremacy, The Bourne Ultimatum. Hollywood, CA: Universal Studios. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/one-dimensional-man/ch01.htmman/ch01.html Marshall, C. W. and Tiffany Potter. 2008. “ ‘I See Patterns’: Battlestar Galactica and the Things That Matter”. In Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Martel, Ned. 2003. Television Review; The Cylons are Back and Humanity is in Deep Trouble. New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/08/arts/televisionreview-the-cylons-are-back-and-humanity-is-in-deep-trouble.html. Melançon, Louis. 2008. “Secrets and Lies:  Balancing Security and Democracy in the Colonial Fleet”. In Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy:  Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?, edited by Josef Steiff and and Tristan Tamplin. Chicago: Open Court. Miller, Toby. 2007. Cultural Citizenship: Cosmopolitanism, Consumerism, and Television in A Neoliberal Age. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Moore, Ronald and James Callis, writers. 2004. Battlestar Galactica. Hollywood, CA: Universal Studios. Norman, Tony. 2004. “The Hilarious Dangerous World of Dave Chappelle.” Post-Gazette. http://www.post-gazette.com/columnists/20040127normanp5.asp. Ott, Brian. 2008. “(Re)Framing Fear: Equipment for Living in a Post-9/11 World”. In Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica, edited by Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall. New York: Continuum. Peters, Ian. 2008. “Choosing Sides:  Occupation or Resistance?”. In Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished Or Mission Frakked Up?, edited by Josef Steiff and Tristan Tamplin. Chicago: Open Court. Pinedo, Isabel. 2008. “Playing With Fire Without Getting Burned: Blowback Re-imagined”. In Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished Or Mission Frakked Up?, edited by Josef Steiff and Tristan Tamplin. Chicago: Open Court. Pipes, Daniel. 2009. Sheik Obama and His Two Wars. http://www.danielpipes.org/.

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Sheer, Robert. 2008. The Pornography of Power:  Why Defense Spending Must be Cut. New York: Twelve. Sixel, L. M. 2004. “EEOC Suit Claims Firing Prompted by Terrorism Fear”. Houston Chronicle. Stallone, Sylvester and Sheldon Lettich, writers. 1988. Rambo III. Culver City, CA: Tri Star Pictures. Taylor, Michael, writer and Michael Nankin, dir. 2008. “The Ties That Bind”. Battlestar Galactica, 4 (3). Hollywood, CA: Universal Studios. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999b. The Ticklish Subject:  The Absent Centre of Political Ontology. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 1999a. “You May!”. In London Review of Books, 21 (6): 3–6. http://www. lrb.co.uk/v21/n06/slavoj-zizek/you-may. Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real. New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. (1994) 2005. The Metastases of Enjoyment:  Six Essays on Women and Causality. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2006. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA/London: The MIT Press. Žižek, Slavoj. 2007. “Foreword:  Trotsky’s Terrorism and Communism, or, Despair and Utopia in the Turbulent Year of 1920.” In Leon Trotsky Terrorism and Communism: A Reply to Karl Kautsky. London: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2008. Violence: Six Sideways Reflections. London: Profile Books. Žižek, Slavoj. 2009. First as Tragedy, Then as Farce. London/New York: Verso. Žižek, Slavoj. 2010. Living in the End Time. London/New York: Verso.

Notes on Contributors

Peter Bloom is a Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of People and Organisations at the Open University, Co-Founder of the research group REEF (Research into Employment, Empowerment, and Futures). His research focuses on critically reimagining contemporary power, politics and economics—specifically related to themes of democracy, capitalism, and technology. His books include Authoritarian Capitalism in the Age of Globalization (Edward Elgar Press), Beyond Power and Resistance: Politics at the Radical Limits (Rowman and Littlefield International, November 2016), The Ethics of Neoliberalism:  The Business of Making Capitalism Moral (Routledge, 2017), The Bad Faith in the Free Market: The Radical Promise of Existential Freedom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), and The CEO Society: How the Cult of Corporate Leadership Transform Our World co-written Carl Rhodes (Zed Books). Levi R. Bryant is a Professor of Philosophy at Collin College, outside of Dallas, Texas. He is the author of Difference and Givenness:  Deleuze’s Transcendental Empiricism and the Ontology of Objects (Northwestern University Press, 2004), The Democracy of Objects (Open Humanities Press, 2011), and Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Edinburgh University Press, 2014). He has written widely on Lacan, Deleuze, Badiou, Speculative Realism, Object-Oriented Ontology, and New Materialism. Vlad Dima is an Associate Professor of African Cultural Studies and French at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He has published numerous articles, mainly on French and francophone cinemas, but also on Francophone literature, comics, American cinema, and television. He is the author of Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety’s Films (Indiana University Press 2017). He is currently working on a second book project titled, The Beautiful Skin: Fantasy, Football, and Body in African cinema.

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Abigail Fagan is a PhD candidate at the University of Connecticut and a research fellow at the Leibniz Universität in Hanover, Germany. Her dissertation, Bloated: Power and the Body in American Temperance Literature, tracks the figure of the white, male drunkard through one hundred years of temperance propaganda. Bloated demonstrates that white women and authors of color used temperance discourse as an intersectional critique of American social hierarchies. Abigail’s next project will be a de-colonial feminist critique of the university in Germany and the United States. She has published numerous translations from the German, including a translation of Shane Denson and Ruth Mayer’s essay “Border Crossings” (NECSUS) and Carmen-Francesca Banciu’s semiautobiographical novel Berlin is My Paris (PalmArtPress). David J.  Gunkel is an award-winning educator and scholar, specializing in the philosophy of emerging technology. He is the author of over 75 scholarly articles and has published twelve books, including Thinking Otherwise:  Philosophy, Communication, Technology (Purdue University Press 2007), The Machine Question: Critical Perspectives on AI, Robots, and Ethics (MIT Press 2012), Of Remixology: Ethics and Aesthetics After Remix (MIT Press 2016) and Robot Rights (MIT Press 2018). He currently holds the position of Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University (USA) and is the founding co-editor of the International Journal of Žižek Studies. More info at http:// gunkelweb.com Luke Howie is in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University in Melbourne and Deputy Director of the Global Terrorism Research Centre. He is also an affiliated scholar in the Institute for the Study of Societal Issues at the University of California at Berkeley where he spends as much time as possible. Howie is the author of many books and articles, most of which are about the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Žižek’s works in the 21st century, social theory and social change, television and popular culture, and neoliberalism’s war on young people. He lives near the beach in Australia on Victoria’s West Coast. Olivier Jutel is a lecturer at The University of Otago, Media, Film and Communication department in New Zealand. A former journalist and media worker his research has been concerned with the role of social and affective media in the rise of American right-wing populism. His published work has looked at Fox News, the alt-right, the Tea Party, Cyber-Libertarianism, Donald Trump and Barack Obama. His forthcoming work is concerned with “post-truth” politics and the fetishitic investment of the technocracy in a post-political universal truth. The crisis of Trump has seen the construction

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of an enemy who is stealing social jouissance (Truth). American liberals have come to “enjoy” Trump in deriding him as the servile sexual subject of Putin. Jutel’s political essays can be read at literary journals Overland and Springerin. Todd McGowan teaches theory and film at the University of Vermont. He is the author of Emancipation After Hegel:  Achieving a Contradictory Revolution (2019), Only a Joke Can Save Us:  A Theory of Comedy (2017), Capitalism and Desire: The Psychic Cost of Free Markets (2016), Rupture: On the Emergence of the Political (with Paul Eisenstein 2012), and other works. He is the editor of the book series Film Theory in Practice at Bloomsbury and co-editor, with Slavoj Žižek and Adrian Johnston, of the Diaeresis book series at Northwestern University Press. Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy and psychoanalysis at Deakin. He is the coauthor of Žižek and Politics:  A Critical Introduction, with Geoff Boucher (2010), and Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the Real (2004), as well as articles on Lacan, philosophy and literature. He has written extensively on critical theory, philosophy, and the history of ideas. His work explores different conceptions of the intersections between theory and practice, and increasingly engages with the early modern and enlightenment traditions and counter-traditions. Ola Sigurdson is professor of systematic theology at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. A  prolific writer, he has published more than twenty books and numerous articles, mainly on the intersection between systematic theology and phenomenology, on political philosophy and theology, and on culture and health. Sigurdson has been a guest researcher and guest professor at Cambridge University, Center for Theological Inquiry in Princeton, Nanzan University, Stellenbosch University, and most recently at the Institute for Sino-Christian Studies in Hong Kong. His most recent English books are Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope (2012) and Heavenly Bodies:  Incarnation, the Gaze, and Embodiment in Christian Theology (2016). Currently, he is concluding a three-volume work on humour, subjectivity and transcendence. Robert Sinnerbrink is Associate Professor in Philosophy and former Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Terrence Malick: Filmmaker and Philosopher (Bloomsbury 2019), Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (Routledge 2016), New Philosophies of Film:  Thinking Images (Bloomsbury 2011), Understanding Hegelianism (Acumen 2007/Routledge 2014), and editor of Critique Today (Brill 2006). He has published articles on contemporary European philosophy, social philosophy, critical theory, and phenomenology

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on

Contributors

in many journals including Constellations, Critical Horizons and Philosophy and Social Criticism. His current research interests include philosophy of film, critical theory, phenomenology, theories of emotion, and the relationship between film ethics and aesthetics. Paul A.  Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Communications Theory at the University of Leeds. His abiding interest is Critical Theory in an increasingly forlorn attempt to find intellectual antidotes to the corporate banality of the UK University sector. He is the author and co-author of a number of books including Žižek and the Media, Heidegger and the Media (with David Gunkel), and Critical Theories of Mass Media: Then And Now (with Jan Harris). Along with David Gunkel, Paul was a founding Editor of the International Journal of Žižek Studies. Outside of academia, Paul’s main interests are the fortunes of Liverpool Football Club and the truly Sisyphean task of trying to keep his Staffordshire Bull Terrier “Jurgen” out of trouble. Japhy Wilson is Lecturer in International Political Economy at the University of Manchester. His work explores the entanglement of space, power and ideology in the transformation of social reality under conditions of global capitalism. He is the author of Jeffrey Sachs:  The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid (Verso 2014), and co-editor (with Erik Swyngedouw) of The Post-Political and Its Discontents: Spaces of Depoliticization, Spectres of Radical Politics (Edinburgh University Press 2014). Graham Wolfe is an Associate Professor in Theatre Studies at the National University of Singapore. His articles on Žižek, theatre, and popular culture have appeared in journals including Modern Drama, Mosaic, and Performance Research. His monograph, Theatre-Fiction in Britain from Henry James to Doris Lessing: Writing in the Wings, was published by Routledge in 2019.

Index

A A Few Good Men 330 Absolute Freedom  92–93 Abu Ghraib 65, 315–16   Abyss of Freedom 82, 84, 86 Academy of Ideas  xvi ACORN 137, 137n.9 Adams, Bryan 249, 259, 260,  276 Adorno, Theodor 6, 58, 68, 73, 74,  249 Afghan Mujahideen 327–28 African AIDS 188, 189, 191 Agamben, Giorgio 91, 227, 272, 306, 311, 326, 331 Agape  113 Alcoholics Anonymous  70 Aldard, Charlie  293 Ali G  67 Alinsky, Saul  137 Allais, Alphonse  71 Allison, Henry 34, 37, 40,  54 Allegory of the Cave 24,  25 Alterity 106, 108,  109 Althusserian 168,  232 Altman, Rick  295 American Dialect Society 21n.10 Analytic of Concepts  36 Analytic of Principles 46,  48 Anderson, Hans Christian  59 Andrejevic, Mark 72, 318,  331 Antelme, Robert 305, 305n.19, 306, 311 The Anti-Nietzsche (2014) 307

Anti-Oedipus 207 Antigone 287,  301 Apartheid South Africa  151 The Apocalypse 106 Appearance of knowledge (S2) 236 Arab Spring 119–20 Arctic National Wildlife Refuge  137 Arditi, Benjamin 128,  141 Arendt, Hannah xviii, 60, 73, 74 Aristotle  24 Article Processing Fee (APF) xiv Austin, James 149, 152 Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980) 11n.6, 30

B Back in the Highlife  263 Badiou, Alain 92, 93n.7, 204, 215, 218, 231, 245, 248 Bakhtin, Mikhail 298, 298n.11,  311 Bambi (1942) 298 Bank of America  179 Barclays Capital  179 Barron, Steve 261, 263,  276 Barthes, Roland 18, 19, 30, 64, 99 Bataille, Georges  26 Battlestar Galactica 250, 313, 314, 316–17, 317n.3, 326, 330, 331 Baudrillard, Jean xiv, xix, 64, 212, 212n.6 Bauman, Zygmunt 11n.6

340 Bazin, André 254 Beckett, Samuel 103,  236 Beethoven, Ludwig von 20n.9,  287 Being and Time 24n.11, 30, 35, 54, 81 Berlusconi, Silvio 61,  74 Bernays, Edward 177n.3 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure 20n.9 Birth of Biopolitics 128,  141 Blanchot 305, 307,  311 Bloodhound Gang 268,  276 Bloom, Peter 102,  145 Boltanski, Luc 126, 131, 132–33, 141, 222, 229,  245 Bon Jovi 264, 274,  276 Bonaparte, Napoleon 20n.9,  216 Bono 188,  267 Book of Revelation  106 Bordwell, David 252–54,  112 The Bourne Trilogy 329 Boy Inside the Man 262,  276 Boyle, Danny  294 Boyle, Frankie  59 Boyle, Kirk 253,  257 Brand, Russell 57, 59–61, 67–69, 72, 74 Brando, Marlon  187 Brandom, Robert 36n.4,   Brazil 181, 181n.16 Brecht, Bertolt  100 Breger, Claudia 26n.13, 30 Brexit xvi, 100, 101 Bright Lights Film Journal 294n.3 Brooks, Max 296n.9 Brugués, Alejandro  295 Bryant, Levi R.103, 199, 204, 231n.11, 245 Bull, Malcolm 307, 307n.20,  311 Bully Beatdown 320 Burke, Edmund 299,  311 Bush, George W. 125, 130–31, 324 Bush Malaise 129 Butler, Judith 54, 78, 86,  97

C Cage, Nicolas (Sailor Ripley)  255 Capital 212 Capitalism Management  147 Capitalism Regulation  159

Index Caprica (2009) 317, 325n.6,  325 Carlisle, Kitty  8 Carroll, Noel 260,  276 Catch-22 74 Caterpillar  179 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)  327 Chang, Briankle 23, 30 Chaouat, Bruno 305–6, 305n.24, 308, 311 Chappelle, Dave  325 Character and Anal Eroticism 183n.20 Chiapello, Eve 126, 131, 132–33, 141, 222, 229 Chomsky, Noam 62–63, 64, 74, 316, 327 The Chronicle of Higher Education 247 Churchill, Ward 329,  331 Cinema Journal 253 Civilization and Its Discontents 202n.3 Cleese, John  67 Clinton, Hilary 100,  101 Cloward, Richard 137, 137n.10 Coca Cola  179 Cochrane, Tom 262,  276 Cohen, Baron 67, 135,  141 Colbert Report 21n.10 Colbert, Stephen 21n.10 Comay, Rebecca 92,  97 Comedy Central 21n.10 Common Power  163 Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 137 Coogan, Steve 59,  74 Copernican Revolution 3,  38n.7 Copjec, Joan 251,  257 Corliss, Richard  298 Correspondence Theory of Truth 24n.11 Coulter, Gerry  xi Crapper, Thomas 185, 185n.24 Creative Commons License  xii Crisis in Culture  xix Critchley, Simon 67, 77n.1, 87, 92, 92n.7,  97 The Critique of Judgment 34, 38, 40,  43 The Critique of Pure Reason 3, 12–13, 24n.11, 30, 35, 36, 38, 40, 45–46, 46n.14, 47, 49, 54 Cromwell, Oliver  57 Crossfire  59 Crow Nation 109, 116, 110,  117

341

Index The Crying of Lot 49 226 Cynical Totalitarianism 102, 146, 149, 158,  159 Cynicism 70, 72, 102–3, 110, 145, 146–47, 149, 150, 152, 155–56, 158–59, 162, 166, 167, 168, 169–70, 172, 218,  221

D Dafoe, Willem (Bobby Peru)  254 The Daily Show 59 Dali, Salvador  8n.2 Damon, Matt  329 The Dark Knight 66 Davis, Wade 301n.14 Davis, Walter 252n.2,  257 Dawn of the Dead 295 The Deadly Jester  65–66 De Interpretatione 24n.11 Deleuze, Gilles 6, 201, 26, 26n.12, 30, 86, 201, 207, 208–10, 218, 220,  231 Democratic National Committee (DNC)  135 Der Ring des Nibelungen 285 Dern, Laura (Lula Fortune)  254 Derrida, Jacques 6, 6n.1, 26, 30, 34, 36, 38, 45, 47, 51, 54, 248,  251 Descartes, René 12n.5, 24n.11, 30, 35, 36,  216 Dews, Peter 6,  30 Diderot, Denis  220 Dima, Vlad 250,  293 Discovery Channel  268 Django Unchained 250, 279–80, 280n.1, 280–81,  283 Don Henley 270,  276 DSM-IV  227 Dubliners  212 Dunn, Irina 267n.3 Duras  305

E Eagleton, Terry 118,  123 Eckhart, Meister  19

Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 207,  212 Eisenstein, Sergei  254 Elsevier  xiii Emerald  xiii The Emperor’s New Clothes 59 Empire 131 Encore: On Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge 237 The End of History and the Last Man 93 Enemy of the State 330 Enjoy Your Symptom!: Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out 82, 250, 280 Enjoying the Cinema 249,  251 Eschatology  105 ESPN 303n.17 Essex  74 The Ethic of Psychoanalysis 71 Ethiopian Dorzé 70 Extreme Makeover  72 Eyes Wide Open  66 Eyes Wide Shut  66

F Fagan, Abigail 250,  279 Fake News xvii, 100,  101 Falk, Hjalmar 106n.1 Fast Company 134 Father Christmas  70 Federal Reserve  137 The Feminine Look: Sexuation, Spectatorship, Subversion 253 Ferrara, America  70 Fetish: An Erotics of Culture (1999)  253 Fiennes, Ralph  12n.7 Film/Philosophy 253 First as Tragedy, then as Farce 112, 250,  314 Fleischer, Ruben  295 Fleming, Peter 146, 148, 149, 152, 156, 168,  172 For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign 212,  223 Foucault, Michel 5, 57, 77, 125, 199,  293 Foucaultian-Agambenian  91

342 The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis 234 Fox News 59,  316 Freud, Sigmund 57, 77, 102, 175, 199, 259,  293 Friedlander, Jennifer 253,  257 The Fright of Real Tears 253, 253n.3, 254n.4 Fukuyamaian 4, 78,   94 Fundamentalist 5, 57, 77, 105, 125, 199,  313

G Gasché, Rodolphe 6n.1, 30, 248, 249 The Gay Science xvii Geist  84 The German Ideology 110 Gilliam, Terry 66, 74,  181 Global Fund  188 Glover, Crispin (Jingle Dell)  254 Godard, Jean-Luc 298n.10 Gold Open Access  xiv Goldman Sachs  179 Goodman, Mike  191 Goodson, Mark 8, 10,  16 Gramsci, Antonio  103 Grand Theft Auto  67 Grantland 303n.17 Gray, John 63,  74 Greatest Hits ix, xii, xix Greene, Brian 11,  30 Greene, Eric 325,  331 Greenspan, Allan  125 Grundrisse 208,  212 Guattari, Felix 201, 207, 210, 218, 220,  231 Gunkel, David J. xii,  3,  5

H Hacked Off 59 Haraway, Donna 26,  30 Hardt, Michael 131,  199 Harman, Chris 295n.8 Harvey, David 132, 141,  210 Hawhee, Debra 9n.3,  30

Index Hayles, N. Katherine 12n.6,  30 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich xii, xv, 1, 5, 33, 57, 77, 105, 199, 247, 251,  259 Hegelo-Kojevian  38 Hegemonies  145 Hegemony and Socialist Strategy 150 Hegemony 57, 77, 99, 125, 155, 199,  313 Heidegger, Martin 5, 33, 57, 77,  99 Hitchcock, Alfred 248, 251,  307 Hitler, Adolf  65 Hobbes, Thomas 145,  220 Hoffmann, E. T. A.  59 Hölderlin  80 Horkheimer, Max 58, 68,  74 Horwitz, Noah 6,  30 House of Commons  57 Howarth, David 151,  172 Howie, Luke 250, 313, 318, 323,  331 Huffington Post 71 Hugo, Victor  297 Hume, David  220 Hurricane Katrina  65

I I Am Legend 296 Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA)  60 Imagine There’s No Woman (2002)  256 In Defense of Lost Causes 77 The Indivisible Remainder 44, 66,  86 The Infinite Conversation 307 Institute of Art and Ideas xv Intellectual Property (IP) xii, xiv,  94 International Journal of Baudrillard Studies (IJBS) xi, xii, xiii,  xv International Journal of Žižek Studies (IJŽS) xi, xii,  253 International Monetary Fund  179 Ionesco, Eugène 294n.6

J Jackson, Andrew  128 Jefferson, Thomas 126, 126nn.1–2, 128,  141

343

Index Jenaer Realphilosophie 77,  80 Joachim of Fiore 108,  114 Johnson-Lewis, Erika 319, 323, 324,  331 Johnson, Simon 139,  141 Johnston, Adrian 15, 248,  260 The Joker 66,  66 Joseph K.  213 Jouissance 68, 102, 145, 175, 199, 260, 299, 320,  329 Juan de los Muertos 295 Jutel, Olivier 101,  125

K Kafka, Franz  xx Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics 44 Kant with Marx  50 Kant, Immanuel 3, 5,  259 Kanten 44n.13 Kantian 3, 5, 33, 77,  154 Kapoor, Ilan 178, 191,  195 Karamazov, Ivan  26 Kay, Sarah  260 Kayser, Wolfgang 297–98, 299–300, 311 Kentucky Fried Chicken KFC  102 Kierkegaard, Søren 259, 313,  331 King, Martin Luther  115 King, Stephen  259 Kirkman, Robert  293 Kirsch, Adam 65,  74 Knights 146, 147, 148–49, 152,  172 Knox, T. M. 7, 18, 21,  30 Kojève, Alexandre 18, 43, 85n.5, 94,  97 Kracauer, Siegfried xv,  xxi Krips, Henry 253,  257 Krugman, Paul 129, 135n.6,  141

L L’espèce humaine (1947)  305 Lacan and Contemporary Film 253 Lacan Today 215 Lacan, Jacques 15, 152, 176, 199–200, 245, 250, 259, 276,  291

Lacanian 3, 5, 33, 57, 77, 145, 175, 199, 247, 251, 259, 283,  293 Lacanian Real 15, 18,  210 Laclau, Ernesto 68, 78, 125, 145,  199 Land of the Dead 296 Law of Nature  171 Lawrence, Francis  296 Lay, Ken  170 Lear, Jonathan 106,  109 Lebeau, Vicky 253,  257 Lee, Spike 279,  291 Leigh, Janet (Marion)  256 Lemm, Vanessa 307n.21,  311 Less Than Nothing 69 Lettvin, Jerry  12n.6 Leupin, Alexandre 212, 215, 237, 245 Levi, Primo 302,  306 Leviathan 99,  145 Levinas, Emmanuel  51 Levine, Jonathan  296 Levy, Bernard Henri  xviii Living in the End Times 112, 114, 119–20 Lost Highway 252 Louie 60,   71 Louis C. K.   71 Lynch, David 80, 252, 254,  255

M Mac, Freddie  137 Madison, James 129,  141 Mae, Fannie  137 Main Street 128,  130 Making It Explicit 36n.4 Mandingo 279,  285 Manifesto 219 Manlove, Clifford 253,  257 Manon, Hugh 253,  257 Marcuse, Herbert 7, 21, 59,  74 Marx, Karl xviii, 33, 57, 77, 105, 125, 175, 199, 251,  293 Maturana, Humberto 12n.6,  30 Mbembe, Achille 189,  195 McCabe, Darren 148–49,  152 McCain, John 137,  141

344 McCulloch, Warren  12n.6 McGinn, Bernard 114,  123 McGowan, Todd xvii, 213n.7, 245, 248, 249, 251, 253, 256n.5,  257 Meditations on First Philosophy (1988)  12n.5 Mellencamp, John 260, 262, 265–66, 271, 273,  276 Merriam-Webster Dictionary 21n.10 The Metastases of Enjoyment 82 Miller, A. V. 89n.6 Miller, Jacques-Alain 172, 217,  245 Mills, C. Wright 61,  74 Mitchell, David  59 Moral Law 34, 34n.1, 41,  43 Mouffe, Chantal 125, 145,  218 Münsterberg, Hugo  254 Myers, Tony 7,  30

N Naked Attraction xvii National Geographic 184n.22 Native American Hopi  135 Nazi 217, 302, 305, 307n.20,  319 Nazism 138n.11 Neale, Steven 294, 296–97,  307 Negri, Antonio 131, 227–28 NeoKantian 3, 33, 33,  34 The New Deal 131n.3,  139 New Jerusalem 106–7, 108, 118,  122 New Republic 65 The New Spirit of Capitalism 125, 126, 131, 132, 136, 138, 139,  229 The New Statesman 59 New York Times 11n.4,  63 Newsnight  59 Nietzsche, Friedrich xvii, 19, 22, 37, 80, 102, 145, 199, 247,  293 Nietzschean 37, 249, 293,  307 Night Moves 270,  271 Night of the Living Dead 294, 301n.15 Night of the World 4,  77 Nike  273 No Surrender 259,  262 Norval  151

Index

O O’Reilly, Bill  327 Obama, Barack 101,  125 Objet a 199,  259 Occupy Wall Street in 2011 119–20 Oedipal 213, 216, 233,   239 Of Grammatology 36 Old Jerusalem 118,  122 Organs without Bodies 6,  7 The Other Side of Psychoanalysis 201, 205, 237 Ott, Brian 318–19, 323,  331 Owl of Minerva 6,  74

P Palin, Sarah 137, 137n.10 Panasonic  179 The Parallax View 78, 92, 202, 254, 254n.4,  315 Parker, Ian 6,  30 Pascal’s Wager  61 Passage to Darkness (1988) 301n.14 Paxman, Jeremy 59, 69,  74 Peabody’s Improbable History (1959)  20n.9 Pease, David  134 Peisner, David  293n.1 Perkins, Anthony (Norman)  256 Persona Non Grata xvii PETA  185 Phaedrus 10,  18 Phenomenology of Spirit (1969) 18, 25, 43, 83, 85n.5, 85 Philosophical Buggery 26n.12 The Philosophy of Nature 89n.6 The Philosophy of Right 74 The Piano Teacher 64 Pinkard, Terry  7 Pitbull 273,  276 Pitts, Walter  12n.6 Piven, Francis Fox  137 The Plague of Fantasies (1997) 254n.4 Plato’s Doctrine of Truth 24n.11 Platonism 9, 11,  18

345

Index Plenty Coups 109, 110,  117 Poe, Edgar Allen  286 Pol Pot  65 Politicizing the Transcendental Turn 3,  33 Politico-Theoretico Praxis 204, 205, 222,  232 Pollak, Oskar  xx Populist Party  128 Poster, Mark 72–73,  74 Premier League  67 Product (RED) 188,   189 Psycho (1960) 256,  307 The Purloined Letter 280n.1, 280, 286, 289 Pynchon, Thomas  226

Q Quiz Show (1994)  12n.7

R Rabelais, François 298, 298n.11 Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation 109 Rambo III 1988 327 Rancière, Jacques 1, 204,  218 Raphael, Freddy  66 Rayburn, Gene  8 Read My Desire (1994)  256 The Real Gaze: Film Theory After Lacan 256n.5 Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory 7 Redford, Robert  12n.7 Reeves, Keanu  259 Reichers, Arnon 149,  152 Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason 34n.2 Restivo, Angela  253 Rhinoceros 294n.6 Rogozinski, Jacob 44, 44n.13,  54 Rolling Stone  293n.1 Romero, George A. 294–95, 296,  305

Routledge   xiii Rove, Karl  137 Russell, Nipsey 8,  203 Russo, Mary 299,  311

S Sage   xiii Santner, Eric 200n.1 Sartre, Jean-Paul 38,  43 Saturday Night Live 303n.17 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 33, 80, 80n.2, 82, 85,  93 Schindler’s List  66 Screening Thought xvii,  xix Seger, Bob 263, 270,  276 Seminar XVII 205,  237 Seminar XX  237 Shakespeare, William  297 Sharpe, Matthew 3, 33, 39n.11, 54, 78, 97, 178,  195 Shaun of the Dead 296 Silverstein, Shel  259 Sigurdson, Ola 100, 105, 113n.3, 122,  123 Simmons, Bill 303 Sinnerbrink, Robert 4,  77 Sioh, Maureen  191 Sir Richard’s Condoms  175 Six Sideways Reflections 66 Smolen, Lee 11,  30 Snyder, Zack  295 Social Text 11n.4 Socrates 2, 9–10, 19, 20n.9,  90 Sokal hoax 11,  11n.4 Sokal, Alan  11n.4 Soros, George 137–38 Sosteric 148, 149,  172 Sovereign 34, 132, 145,  230 Sovereign Power  171 Soweto crisis  151 Sperber, Dan  70 Spicer, André 146, 148, 149, 152, 156,  168 Spielberg   66 Spinoza  220

346 Springer xiii,  xiv Springsteen, Bruce 259, 262, 263, 275,  276 Stalin, Josef 63, 65,   288 Stamp, Richard  251 Starbucks  133 Steinem, Gloria 267n.3 Stewart, Bob  8 Stewart, Jon 59,  74 Stiegler, Bernard  47 String Theory 11, 15,  18 Sturdy, Andrew  148 The Sublime Object of Ideology 15, 50, 232, 248,  254 Summer of ’69  259 Summers  132 Surplus-Jouissance (a)  239 Sustainability and the Celebrity-BusinessDevelopment Nexus  191 Svenungsson, Jayne 108, 114, 121,  123 The Swan 60,   72 Swyngedouw, Erik  191

T Table for Two International 176, 178, 179, 179n.8, 181, 181n.15, 189,  195 Tantanasi, Ioanna  191 Tarantino, Quentin 250, 279–89, 291 Tarrying with the Negative 15, 16, 35, 37, 38, 48, 82, 83, 84,  91 Tati, Jacques 298n.10 Taylor, Paul A. ix, xi, 4, 57, 74, 102,  247 Tea Party 126, 128, 129, 132, 136, 137, 138–39 Tennessee Williams 264n.1,  276 Terror, Jacobin  87 Third Way 125–39 The Ticklish Subject 44, 78–79, 81, 87,  219 Time Magazine 298 To Tell the Truth 5 Todman, Bill 8, 10,  16 Todorov, Tzvetan 300, 309 Toilet Twinning  175

Index Totalitarian xx, 5, 77, 102, 145,  199 Toyota  179 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 35, 41n.12 Trafic (1971) 298n.10 Transcendental Deduction(s) 36, 43, 46n.14 Transcendental Dialectic 3, 35, 36, 38, 40–41,  45 Transgressing the Boundaries: Toward a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity  11n.4 The Trial 213 Trouble in Paradise 113, 116,  120 Trump, Donald xvi, 100,  101 The Truth of Žižek 73, 251, 251n.1 Tsars  66 Twin Towers 325,  329

U U2 266, 267,  276 Ugly Betty 60, 70,  71 Umwelt  82 Unheimlich  48 Universality  88 Unterberger, Andrew 261, 270, 271,  276 The Use of Pleasure 226

V Varela, Francisco 12n.6,  30 Van Halen  273 Veyne, Paul 70,  74 Virno, Paolo 230, 231,  245 Voltaire  220

W Wagner, Richard 249,  285 Wagnerian opera  248 The Walking Dead 250 Wall Street 119–20, 128, 129, 130–31,  138 Waltz, Christoph  279

347

Index Wanous, John 149,  152 Ward, Jay  20n.9 Warm Bodies 296 Week-end (1967) 298n.10 Weininger, Otto 82, 82n.4 Welcome to the Desert of the Real 235 What’s My Line 5 White, Betty  8 Wild at Heart 254–56 Wilmont, Henery 146, 147,  172 Wilmont, Hugh 147,  172 Wilson, Japhy 102, 175,  195 Winwood, Steve  263 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 3, 35, 41n.12, 43,  43 Woit, Peter 11,  30 Wolfe, Graham 249 Work! Consume! Die! 59 Working at a Cynical Distance  149 World Bank  179 World Economic Forum  179 World Trade Center  323 World War Z (2013) 300, 296n.9 Wright, Edgar  296

X X Files 330

Y The Year of Dreaming Dangerously 119

Z Zeiher, Cindy 106n.1 Zeno  240 Žižek and the Media 102 Zizek Urban Beats Club  247 Žižek, Slavoj 1, 5, 33, 57, 77, 99, 105, 125, 145, 175, 199, 247, 251, 259, 279, 293,  313 Žižek’s Jokes 4 Žižek’s Kant 3,  33 Zombie Capitalism: Global Crisis and the Relevance of Marx (2009) 295n.8 Zombieland 295 Zupančič, Alenka 264, 268,  276

Žižek Studies: The Greatest Hits (So Far) assembles and presents the best work published in the field of Žižek Studies over the last ten years, providing teachers, students, and researchers with a carefully curated volume of leading-edge scholarship addressing the unique and sometimes eclectic work of Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek. The chapters included in this collection have been rigorously tested in and culled from the (virtual) pages of the International Journal of Žižek

Studies, a leading open access journal that began publication in 2007. The book is organized into three sections or subject areas where Žižek and his seemingly indefatigable efforts have had significant impact: philosophy, politics, and popular culture. As a “greatest hits,” the book offers the longtime fan and uninitiated newcomer alike a comprehensive overview of the wide range of opportunity in the field of Žižek studies and a remarkable collection of truly interdisciplinary “hits” from a diverse set of innovative and accomplished writers.

David J. Gunkel is Distinguished Teaching Professor in the Department of Communication at Northern Illinois University, USA. He is a founding editor of the International Journal of Žižek Studies. Paul A. Taylor is Senior Lecturer in Communications Theory at the University of Leeds, UK. He is a founding editor of the International Journal of Žižek Studies.

ŽIŽEK STUDIES www.peterlang.com

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