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To cite this article: Andrew Stein (2012) Event and Ideology, Culture, Theory and Critique, 53:3,
287-303, DOI: 10.1080/14735784.2012.721627
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14735784.2012.721627
Abstract This paper explores how Zizek uses the concepts of ideology and event
to explain what the revolutionary desires and how the revolutionary might
prepare for a revolutionary cut within Capitalism based on a Lacanian-Hegelian
discourse.
In this article, I explore how Zizek breathes new life into an old dialogue
between psychoanalysis and radical politics. Figures in this tradition have
included the idiosyncratic Wilhelm Reich, classical Freudians such as Otto
Fenichel, Marxist neo-Freudians like Erich Fromm, Frankfurt School figures
such as Herbert Marcuse, the French structuralist and Marxist Louis Althusser,
and more recently Alain Badiou and others. Zizek, of course, fits within this
lineage; although in the past he was more associated with Badiou and
J.-A. Miller. His particular expertise lies in Hegelian philosophy and Lacanian
psychoanalysis. His politics, though on the Left, remains idiosyncratic, and he
is difficult to place in any traditional political position. He is a radical whose
radicalism is not steeped in a particular utopian ideology, but in a HegelianLacanian discourse. An avowed Communist, he is an enemy of postmodern
and liberal cultural politics, which he finds complicit with the ideology of
global Capitalism, and he also is an enemy of the new East European Communists who have embraced ultra-nationalism. Although having a worldwide
following, Zizek has often been dismissed in academia as a showman
lacking substance. I suggest why this is not the case. After an initial section
exploring the link between Lacanian psychoanalysis and radical politics, I
izeks concepts of ideology and event. I discuss how ideology has a
examine Z
perverse structure for Zizek and why that structure maintains the consumer
within a deadlocked dialectic that is only overcome by the formation of revolutionary desire during an event.
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does the revolutionary desire? She desires to give to the world a signifier of
universal social justice. But this signifier of universal social justice is only a
possible reality that, like all possible past and future realities, has a symbolic fictional structure. It, therefore, is not equivalent to objective reality. Nevertheless, the revolutionary works to bring such a universal fictional structure
into the world even though she does not know where, when, and for how
long it may next appear. To prepare for its next appearance, however, is the
thing she desires more than life; it is her ethics and being.
Although this is a Lacanian position, Lacan actually said very little about
the desire of the revolutionary (Lacan 1990: 11728; Turkle 1990: 8; Roudinesco
1990: 34142). What he did say about the desire of the May 68ers, however,
izek would later say to the Occupy Wall
closely foreshadowed things Z
Street protesters in 2011. In essence, while Lacan sympathised with the
student and worker revolts against the institutions of power, work, and bourgeois morality, he also saw another side one that turned revolt into an
unconscious affirmation of the Others desire.
While rebelling against authority at the conscious level, Lacan suggested,
the protesters unconsciously turned their revolt against authority on its head,
so that it became a desire to go on affirming the Others desire. In this respect,
the insistence by the May 68ers on self-actualisation and enjoyment, in fact,
was a narcissistic and voyeuristic display, offered for the enjoyment of a symbolic-imaginary Other who perversely directed them not to work, but to
enjoy themselves in the act of transgressing the Law.
Thus, when the May 68ers proclaimed that the beach lay beneath the pavement, they often did so at the behest of a new symbolic Other (Capitalism)
which turned the object of the Other into an object of perverse jouissance
rather than an object of repression. The self-actualising playfulness of the
May 68ers, therefore, did more than just break with the old Law; it also was a
collective affirmation of the new face of the Law. Therefore, protesters who
believed that they were transgressing the Law in any sort of straightforward
way were fooling themselves. In fact, Lacan had shown that only psychotics
successfully disavow the Others symbolic function by foreclosing the symbolic
dimensions of reality, whereas the neurotic and the pervert each make the Faustian bargain by accepting the Others symbolic role (Lacan 1993: 32). Students
were presumably not all psychotics but they were people whose subject position in the social symbolic chain of meanings was being (or already had been)
radically rewritten, where the dilemma faced by the protesters was that their
revolt against inauthenticity was structurally compatible with an unconscious
desire to meet the new demands of the Other to produce (here by enjoying)
surplus enjoyment (plus-de jouir) for the Other. This was the pound of
flesh that the Other still demanded. Thus, Lacan saw the protestors as subjects
standing at a crossroads, unaware of the stakes involved in deciding to go in one
direction or another. And it was to convey some of the gravitas of the
moment that Lacan said of the May 68ers: Look at them enjoy! and, on
another occasion, Lacan said the aspirations to revolution has but one conceivable issue, always, the discourse of the master. That is what experience has
proved. What you, as revolutionaries, aspire to is a Master. You will have
one (Lacan 1990: 111, 124, 126).
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implies. Consequently, it is through the gaps that the subject eventually is confronted with the primary signifier, and the subject is, for the first time, in a
position to subject himself to it (Lacan 1977: loc. 4792 94).
But how a Lacanian passes from the field of desire to the field of politics
may seem baffling. For the political consequences of psychoanalysis are ones
that are not normally considered to be part of the classical realm of politics (yet
many analysts combine revolutionary desire with their analytic desire). A
Lacanian politics begins with helping analysands read the signifiers emerging
in their speech and dreams; doing so already places analysis beyond the conventional structures of modern science and Capitalism, which convert human
relations into commodity relations and forms of university discourse. Beyond
this, Lacan said that psychoanalysis safeguards the subject against its own
desire to sacrifice itself to the dark god of fascism (Lacan 1977) and other
paranoid desires that destroy the subjects ability to distinguish between signifiers (that is, to read desire).
Being a Lacanian and a revolutionary therefore only poses a problem for
those who see clinical work as the alpha and omega of psychoanalysis. Lacan
himself said as much in Television to Jacques Alain-Miller (Lacan 1990), so there
is no reason one cant derive both an analytic practice and a theory of revolutionary desire from his teachings, provided they do not confuse the one and
the other. Lacanian politics even extends into the most remote areas of Lacanian knots theory. Consider, for example, the uses of the Lacanian sinthome.
Sinthome is a neologism condensing the symptom with the name of Saint
Thomas Aquinas. The sinthome hooks or rings a broken Borromean knot,
holding the three rings together and keeping the subject (symptom) from
coming apart. By analogy, sinthomes hold the rings of the Borromean knot
together like Saint Thomas held Christian and Pagan thought together. But
there is a vital difference. Thomas could link Aristotle and Christianity
because both exist sub species aeternitas in Gods Absolute gaze: because God
knows how it all fits together. The sinthome, on the other hand, holds the individual subject (symptom) together in full knowledge that the gaze of the Other
no longer is Absolute; that it is full of holes. A sinthome then operates within a
structure where the Other lacks, where the Others gaze does not see and
know all, and where the Absolute exists only as a fantasy in the imaginary
register.
How ideology supports the desire of the Other and thwarts the desire
of the revolutionary
Fast forward to Zizeks speech on October 9, 2011 during an Occupy Wall
Street rally where he sounded a very Lacanian note by saying to the protesters
that he supported them but they should not love themselves too much that
is, that they should not get carried away by their imaginary, narcissistic fantasies of speaking truth to power and transgressing the Law, because to do so
would be to betray the revolutionary moment by turning their rebellion
against the egoism and greed of Wall Street and the financial institutions
back onto themselves. Do not, he implied, simply give the message of the
Other back to it in an inverted form. Instead, find your own desires and
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build new communal institutions that sustain them against the desire of the
Other of global consumer Capitalism.
What lies behind this warning is Zizeks concern that a perverse ideology
shapes these fantasies. This perverse ideology relies on a series of obscene contradictions, gaps, lapses, holes, and distortions of jouissance veiled by an
idealisation so that the subject is asked to assume with enjoyment the very
izek 2005: 206). In fact, for Zizek ideolinjustice of which they are horrified (Z
ogy resembles Kafkas lower and higher courts in The Trial, which are also
riddled by real and metaphorical holes, self-contradictions, and abject
objects. In both cases, desires circulate around abject objects that are
papered over by pompous, irrational, and often comically distorted,
obscene representatives of the superego Law, which can destroy anyone
unlucky enough to get caught in its web. The whole apparatus is deadly
despite its rather shoddy slapped-together appearance. Consequently, the perverse structure of ideology incites anxiety in people: for both the pervert and
ideology, anxiety is a necessary effect of the production of obscene superego
fantasies, barely veiled behind idealised objects, of the perverse structure.
Nothing works without it.
Ideology has the quality of being like the air we breathe. We both know
about it and take it for granted (dont think about it much). As such, it is
like a social phantasm that contains the logic of our relation to the Other
and the object a (the source of anxiety). The semblant par excellence of this
dialectic structure in the Western imagination is the Jew who, in the mind of
the anti-Semite, possesses this double structure of being an idealised and
abject other. For the Jew seems to have escaped castration and to have
access to some unfathomable je ne sais quoi, to forbidden enjoyments that
makes them not quite human (aliens in the precise sense this term
acquired in the science-fiction films of the 1950s) for the anti-Semite (Zizek
2005: 236). Because the Jew occupies the logical place of the object cause of
desire, the Jew appears to the anti-Semites gaze as a stain disturbing their
fantasm of an imaginary whole, harmonious world. The anti-Semite, therefore,
resents the Jew for having access to secret jouissance that the anti-Semite wants
for himself. As a result, the anti-Semite creates fantasies in which the Jew is
eliminated and the world is no longer uncanny, which the anti-Semite
blames on the proximity of the Jew. By erasing the stain caused by the Jew
(qua place holder of an enjoyment that is denied to the anti-Semite), the antiSemite also tries to satisfy its own Other and thereby gain access to a bit of
the secret treasure, the surplus jouissance, that the Jew is believed to possess.
Logically, however, the hatred of the Jew or any other group which
occupies this place in the matheme of the fantasm ($ , .a) is not limited
to the actual properties of the Jew but targets its real kernel, objet a, what
izek 2005: 236). What the anti-Semite ultiis in the object more than itself (Z
mately longs for and hates is not the empirical Jew, but an empty place of inaccessible surplus jouissance (death) that the Jew represents in the anti-Semites
fantasy. That is, the anti-Semite does not react to the real Jew. He reacts to his
own fantasms. Central to these fantasms is the subjects fascination with abjection (represented by the Jew). None of this makes much sense, however, unless
people see that ideology and here Zizek stretches the idea to include antiSemitism structurally depends on this dialectic combination of an ideal
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and abject object and that it works best when it puts people as close to the
object a as possible. The reverse side of the Others demand to enjoy, therefore, is anxiety about jouissance, both a performance anxiety am I enjoying
enough? and an anxiety that the other is enjoying more. Such anxiety breeds
addiction and depression, as the subject increasingly wants more and increasingly resents other people as well. But it also generates a fear of getting too
near the real.
This same fantasm, based on combining an ideal and abject (anxietyprovoking) object, also exists in the relation between the Law and crime. For
the Law, Zizek argues, does not squelch crime so much as it allows people
to satisfy partial drives (crimes and transgressions) in ways that have the sanction of the symbolic order. The Law, in other words, succeeds best when it
looks away and permits subjects not homo sacers to enjoy what is officially
unlawful. For Zizek, the beauty of Kafka lies in the way that his stories reveal
this obscene, superegoic side of the Law lurking behind the made in
izek writes, so
Germany stamp of approval. Kafka lets the screen drop, Z
that his readers see the fantasm working. That is, they are shown the Law
operating as an obscene object of desire (much as Freud did when he con izeks words, where
structed the myth of the primal father). Literally, in Z
God is too present, under the shape of course, which is not at all comforting
of obscene, disgusting phenomena (2005: 138). This materialisation of God
this image that brings God down to the level of the obscene object cause of
desire (A .a), may be the necessary step in the transformation from a Christian world, such as we had for two thousand years, into a more thoroughly
Capitalist one compatible with the fetish and with the perversion of finance,
as is seen, for example, in Capitalisms idealisation of individual greed and
acquisitiveness.
Similarly, Zizek depicts the historic-figure Bligh, the captain of the Bounty,
as a character who does not know how the Law functions: Bligh, who occupies
the place of Law, metes out the Law as if it is a Kantian universal that must be
applied, without exception, to everyone in the same way (2005: 23134, 269
70). Bligh is so fair and upright that he runs afoul of all the unofficial rules that
allow more senior sailors to abuse their juniors, etc., and as such he earns the
universal hatred of everyone on board and is twice mutinied once aboard
the Bounty and again in the colonies. He thus repeats Joseph K.s mistake in
The Trial: standing before the court he cannot see that people cant disentangle
the Law from its obscene, erotic, farcical, and mean other side. In Zizeks
words (discussing Orson Wells film The Trial): The error of Joseph
K. consists in overlooking the solidarity between this obscene perturbation
and the court. He thinks that everybody would be anxious to have order
restored and the offending couple at least ejected from the meeting, but
when he tries to rush across the room the crowd obstructs him, someone
seizes him from behind by the collar (Zizek 2005: 258). Thus, neither Joseph
K. nor Bligh understands that what matters is not that the Law is followed
to the letter, but that it fails in a regulated way because it is only through
failing that the Law affirms the exception (the ideal-abject object a) that
izek 2010: loc. 653, loc. 1897). In other words,
defines the limits of legality (Z
they cannot understand that, in the perverse fantasm, eroticism and anxiety
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function as the glue that binds people to each other and that the Law demands
a pound of flesh from the subject for society to function.
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divided nature of the subject and the Other. In this sense, Capitalism is a bluff
that the subject can refuse.
Another way to imagine this problem is to say that Capitalism diverts the
subjects gaze onto a fantasy of a perverse broken master (the Other); this
Other requires the Capitalist to make it whole again by fulfilling their
natures as greedy acquisitive individuals. But this other version of the
Tikun olam (repairing the world) is nothing but a perverse imaginary fantasy
the subject posits to justify its own desires and whose main purpose is to
screen lack so we can act as if the place of the master (the One) in our
fantasy is occupied now by a totality of the greedy and acquisitive individuals
competing to satisfy their desires.
According to Jean-Michel Vappereau, in one of his final (still unpublished) seminars Lacan discussed how modern children learn to separate the
One and the many by observing their parents. Lacan thought, according to
Vappereau, that this posed a real paradox for children who wonder: who is
this being the parental couple, are they one or two? At times the parental
couple appears as one to the child, as what Lacan referred to (alluding to Aristophanes) as a double-backed being. At other times, the being separated into
two, especially during moments of passion (love making) and violence
(arguing). Eventually, Lacan taught according to Vappereau that the child
learns to decern a relation between One and the many which often is symptomatic leading the subject to react to truama by repositing a fictional (lost)
totality.
In these teachings by Lacan, the mystery of the One and the many begins
in violence and passion just like the image of a mugging in the example of
the forced choice. Both examples suggest the importance fantasms of violence,
terror, and being in a state of emergency (as well as enjoyment) play in the
history of the subject. This intimate connection between security, a state of
emergency, forced choices, lost jouissance, and global Consumer Capitalism
was recently explained to us by George W. Bush, when he told Americans
after 9/11 that it is their patriotic duty to go on consuming: to do otherwise,
he said, would be to concede defeat to the terrorists. The overt message
(go on enjoying like before while your government engages Terror for you),
however, hid a more truthful one. Namely, the terrorists are our benefactors
because consumerism works best when it is combined to an obscene state of
emergency. The real message was: make Terror work for Capitalism.
A related perverse fantasm, Zizek writes, appears when communities partition people into groups of whole and not-whole people. This notion that the
world can be partitioned into whole and partial beings broadens the class
concept found in classical Marxism into a vision of society riven by multiple,
competing apartheid communities in which each community maintains a safe
distance between whole and partial damaged others. The underlying injunction of liberal tolerance is (not) monocultural Be like us! Become British!
On the contrary, . . . the injunction is one of cultural apartheid: others should
izek 2010:
not come too close to us, we should protect our way of life (Z
loc. 122325). The State of Israel is one example Zizek often cites about a
society that has adopted this apartheid logic in its policies towards the Palestinians on the West Bank and Gaza, not only by erecting the Wall but also by
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beautiful soul is the subject who raises himself up out of the corruption of the
world, which he always attributes to others. Lacan famously called the beautiful soul the only truly mad person today because such a subject cant read his
own divided subject. In opposition to the beautiful soul, Lacan affirmed that
we all are monsters we are abject beings who, having been born prematurely,
begin life defective. That makes everyone damaged goods. But like all defective organisms, we still want to live. We are monsters, said Lacan, according to
Vappereau in a recent seminar, not machines. Machines break down and do
not work while humans seek to live, despite being defective. In this respect,
we resemble the Monster in Frankenstein. We are monsters who speak
language being the iron lungs that surround us and keep us going. But
these iron lungs are also a poultice of shit surrounding us, wrote Lacan: abjection being what ultimately keeps us going.
To explain more about this deadlock requires an excursion into the logic of
structures because Zizek says that the ideologically-driven subject is caught in
the logic of disavowal or verleugnung, or one of the logical forms of negation
discussed by Freud and Lacan the others being repression or unterdruckung
and foreclosure or verwerfung (Lacan 2006: 31833; Freud 1964, 1991). For
Lacan, each of these three forms of negation also corresponds to a structure
of the unconscious signifying chain: namely, repression appears with the neuroses, foreclosure with the psychoses, and disavowal with the perversions.
What Zizek adds is that, no matter which structure and logic of negation
this or that subject may have, ideology today is structured like a perversion,
and consequently the typical form of negation within it is disavowal: I
myself do not believe but nevertheless I should act as if I do, so as not to offend
someone who may believe; or, although its true that I do not believe, I will act as if
I do on behalf of someone else.
Thus, in a Pascalian style, the subject disavows belief while continuing to
act as if he believes. For example, while modern subjects claim to no longer
believe in God, they still behave as if there is one (as if a master existed
behind the master discourse). Zizek relates this to the old joke about a man
who enters a hospital because he believes there is a big chicken who thinks
he is bird seed and wants to consume him; after being cured of this delusion,
the man returns in terror to the hospital because, although he knows he is not
bird seed, he still is afraid the big chicken does not. Zizeks point here is that
today ideology takes up this position towards disavowal of the Other. Even
though a person knows there is no Other, he still behaves as if there is an
Other or he still believes unconsciously because he is under the sway of
his identification. The difference with Pascal is that he subverts disbelief: if
I do not believe, I still act as if I do (and soon I will start believing) while
the deluded man in Zizeks joke uses a different logic: namely, if I consciously
profess to disbelieve that there is an Other, it is because I unconsciously go on
believing sub rosa: thus, if I pretend not to believe, I can go believing just the
same. Once again, A and not-A are the same disbelieve so that I can
believe.
It is Kafka who exposes the nature of the deadlock in works like The Trial
and Metamorphosis. For even as Kafkas texts illuminate the fusion of abjection
and ideal (and belief and disbelief) in the fantasm, he offers no way through its
logic (at least not in these texts). At the end of The Trial, for instance, Joseph
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as to be able to act like a Lacanian Leninist (Zizek 2011b: 78) and break with
the seductiveness of the symbolic efficiency by no longer being satisfied by
producing surplus jouissance for the Other. Rather, the revolutionary takes
up a collective desire for social justice.
The desire of the revolutionary is also connected to a desire for an event.
The event, Zizek says, occurs when a signifying chain no longer repeats the
same signifiers in the same order as before. The event therefore is linked to
the structures of human language and human history since it is only into
izek and Milibank
such a distorted animal that an Event can inscribe itself (Z
2009: 93). It names the coming into the world of a new signifier (S1).
A subject in the midst of an event lives in a state of emergency, living in a
kind of permanent end times such as occurred in 1789, 1848, 1871, 1917,
May 68, and perhaps in the Occupy Wall Street movement when the old
reality is suspended for some who are in the grip of a concrete universal
desire for justice. Moments like these, Zizek insists, cannot be scientifically
planned and prepared for. This is why Zizek insists that revolutionary
change is never finished; nor is it inevitable; attempts to create a revolutionary
society by fiat or rational planning like Stalinism are especially ill-conceived.
As Goya understood already during the Napoleonic wars, imposing revolutionary justice through force and reason breeds monsters; it is, strictly speaking, a perversion of the ideal. Real eruptions of revolutionary desire arent
rationally planned; they happen in unexpected places and times, when the
deadlock is suspended and overturned without warning, or at least in a
izek 2005: 259). But while every event is surform no one quite anticipated (Z
prising and unlike what existed before it, each event is also a new answer to
the fundamental social antagonisms and self-contradictions upon which all
societies rest. In this respect, it is similar to the moment of affirmation in an
analysis when there is an upsurge of unconscious desire (more like a vast
sociological slip or passage to the act) than a perfectly planned action. A
subject captured by an event, then, is possessed by a violent passion to introduce difference, a gap in the order of being, in order to elevate some object a
izek 2010: loc. 2486).
at the expense of an other (Z
But the really startling news is that Zizek thinks that today people in
Western civilisation (whatever that is) are living out the consequences of an
event associated with the teaching of Paul/Jesus.1 For Zizek, Paul/Jesus
marks a world historical event in Western civilisation, such that after its
inception the owl of Minerva has flown. People are now living in the aftermath, in the end times, drawing out the (Hegelian and Lacanian) consequence
of that event it is just that ideology makes difficult work of actualizing it
izek 2003: 137).
(Z
I refer to Paul/Jesus, rather than to Paul and Jesus, because we know little about
the historic Jesus that is not filtered through the writings of the Gospels and the
various interpretations and collations of the Gospels by the Church Fathers and by
others. Zizek, in any case, is interested in proclaiming, against the canonical readings
of the Crucifixion and Resurrection, that Paul/Jesus announced a cut in the divine and,
as a consequence, in messianic time.
299
This dialectical response of Paul/Jesus also reversed the proposition that the
messiah by himself will heal the wound in the world and make it whole (One)
again with the proposition that the coming of the messiah revealed that existence is
not-All.
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then they have to create it themselves, and only to uncertain and incomplete
ends.
izek asserts that the failure of the divine to only be One did
Elsewhere, Z
appear in Jewish texts. For example, this failure appeared in the strangest
book of the Hebrew Bible, the Book of Job, wherein Job realised that God
(qua universal justice) did not know why he was suffering (Zizek 2008: 179
80). In other words, Job stumbled against the paradox that God is a mystery
to himself, and therefore that God, too, suffers from his own lack of self-completion and self-understanding. Zizek locates other Hebrew stories that he
claims allude to the same doctrine of Gods impotence, arguing for instance
that the murder of Moses presented by Freud in Moses and Monotheism
really repeats and distorts a traumatic recollection of the humiliation of
the Pharaoh by Moses, thereby pushing back the rock to reveal that that
the crypt is empty (Freud 1964). For Zizek, although Judaism prefigures the
notion of a paradoxical impossible mystery, only Christianity moves the
enigma in God himself. . . That is to say: it is precisely because God is an
enigma also in and for himself, because he has an unfathomable Otherness in
himself, that Christ had to emerge (Zizek and Milibank 2009: 80 82). Therefore only Christianity reveals the Others impotence. It is in this spirit that
izek claims that Christianity is the first (and only) religion radically to
Z
izek and Milibank
leave behind the split between subject and the Other (Z
2009: 8082). And this, Zizek concludes, has transformed the subjects relation
to knowledge (including self-knowledge and knowledge of the Other) and
truth in ways that, at least potentially, liberates the subject from its dependency on the Other. After the Paul/Jesus event the subject has to accept
izek 2010: loc. 3190).
that there is no Other to believe for me, in my place (Z
Hence, to still believe in an Other that is only One after the Paul/Jesus
event is to remain the agent of the ego and some Other, as it were, that
izek 2005: 79). In essence, Z
izek turns the Pauline
speaks through you (Z
message of the crucified Jesus codified by the early Church Fathers on its
head to reveal that the supreme triumph of the Cross in fact exposes a cut
in the divine that forever makes God All and not-All. The good news proclaimed by Paul/Jesus is a Lacanian message: that the (Name of the) Father,
or the place where the master signifier God had appeared, is now empty.
According to Zizek, The symbolic is above all a place, a place that was originally empty and subsequently filled with the bric-a-brac of the symbolic
order. The crucial dimension of the Lacanian concept of the symbolic is this
logical priority, the precedence of the (empty) place with respect to the
elements that fill it (2005: 45). However, things are not so simple. Lacan also
emphasized that the other side of the signifier is the drive and therefore that
lack is only a phenomenological lack. On the other side of a signifier is a
partial drive (jouissance), so that the signifier (be it S1 or S2) dialectically functions as the other side of enjoyment (jouissance and death). Not surprisingly,
izeks description of Christian love or agape resembles the Lacanian
Z
formula that love is giving what you do not have, because there is no sexual
relation. That is to say: there will be no harmonious rectification in the end
of time, no possibility that universal justice will usher in a world of absolute
harmony and fairness. All that exists is the little justice gained by the fruits
of political struggle. There is no ideal Other that will be fulfilled in the
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that Paul/Jesus were waiting for someone to come along and unearth the
hidden pre-Lacanian treasure buried in their teachings. If in alienation, the
subject is confronted with a full and substantial Other, supposedly hiding in
its depths some secret, its inaccessible treasure, Zizek writes, de- alienation has nothing to do with an attainment of this secret: far from managing
to penetrate right into the Others hidden kernel, the subject simply experiences this hidden treasure (algama, the object- cause of desire) as already
izek argues that there is no
missing from the Other itself (2005: 40). Indeed, Z
there to be unearthed, because strictly speaking there is no hidden untold
story in it (2003: 127). A signifier is only a subject for another signifier.
Thus, you have universals that only acquire meaning for those who believe
in the universal and who strive to live their life by it. But today, the Paul/
Jesus event heralds a revolutionary state of emergency: the other side of the
state of emergency created by global consumer Capitalism and the new security-military complex. Today, a libidinal Holy Spirit calls for people with revolutionary subjectivities to come together, to unplug from the community in
the same way that the early Christians left their families in order to enter
into a new community held together by a new desire (in the form of Christian
love) and the impossible Cause of realising universal justice in a concrete universal form, that of a fighting collective grounded in the reference to an
izek claims
unconditional universalism (Zizek 2006: loc. 2615 17). Thus Z
that Party activists today should do what Christianity did with regard to
the Roman Empire, that global multiculturalist polity. Namely, they should
create a new collective held together not by a Master-Signifier, but by fidelity
to a Cause no longer restrained by the logic of deadlock (Zizek 2011: 130;
izek 2003: 3).
Z
In sum, the revolutionary desires to serve the Cause totally: The only
thing that really exists are these individuals and their activity (Zizek and Milibank 2009: 60). Absolutely committed, the revolutionary is a subject living in a
state of emergency, in the time of an event that opens her to new possibilities.
She becomes the agent of the event, working and waiting for the return of the
universal (the desire for justice) as a concrete, partial, historical moment of
rupture and change. This longing to actualise a concrete universal desire for
justice, in all its impossible, messianic, time-bound, and secular dimensions,
izeks
calls Walter Benjamin to mind (someone surprisingly absent in Z
303
introduced by the Popular Front, during a time of great social unrest when the
Third Republic was deeply unsettled by economic crisis, a resurgent Nazi
Germany, and home grown French fascisms. Fascist and proto-fascist organisations, like the veterans group Croix de Feu and the PPF, were clashing in the
streets of Paris with defenders of the Popular Front when Blum published
his memories. The memoirs included these recollections of the Dreyfus
Affair (18941906): Life for me, wrote Blum, and for my friends, no longer
counted. All that mattered was Justice (Rose 2011: 92).This simple sentiment,
izeks entire conception of the event and the desire of the
I believe, sums up Z
revolutionary, a sentiment he finds expressed in the teachings of Paul/Jesus,
Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Lacan, and a few others: a spirit he tried to summon
when he spoke to the Occupy Wall Street protesters in 2011.
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