Artforum International

March 1993 v31 n7 p84(6)

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The sublime theorist of Slovenia.

by Peter Canning
Psychoanalyst Slavoj Zizek explains the theories of Jacques Lacan regarding political ideologies.
Zizek rejects the idea that the state is the source of all evil and suggests that the state is the
framework upon which liberal democracies and individual freedoms exist. Purifying desires would
lead to an increase in drive and perversion thorugh political fantasy derived from a condition of
impossibility. Communication between nations is necessary for cultural unity as individuals
cannot communicate with themselves because of an eternal internal split.
COPYRIGHT Artforum International Magazine Inc.
1993
Jacques Lacan is responsible for saying, "there is no
sexual relation." This should not make lovers too upset, for
in fact, Love is what we have to make up for the Relation
that is missing. Eros would be the potential of supreme
Good, for harmony uniting men and women, women and
women, men and men. But why did Sigmund Freud have
to ruin everything by saying, It is always possible to bond
together in love, as long as someone is left out to hate?
Lacan and Freud are pessimists, right? For Love is
all-inclusive--at least it cant depend on exclusion and
hatred for its condition! Or else, with a yawn and a wink,
we resign ourselves to taking advantage of whatever trust
remains in human nature.
When Slavoj Zizek says, "There is no social relation," we
react as cynics and Kantian fetishists: I know very well
there is no social Harmony prepared in heaven, but that is
why we must work it here on earth. But Zizek unveils a
new attitude. Social identity is constituted, not on the basis
of ideal communication or understanding, but on the
condition of persecutory and reactive formations that we all
claim the others embody. And they do. But which one of us
wants to embrace Jerry Falwell and Jesse Helms? The
feeling is mutual. Besides, You want to strangle them, you
have to get up close.
Antagonism is radical in human nature because we are the
self-conscious ones, and the self we are conscious of is
mortal, is death itself. To wipe out consciousness (and
whatever stands for it) is the purpose of repression,
redoubling death with its own negation, a "second
death"--erasure of the signifier in the place of
consciousness. Behind the signifier is the Thing, the
absolute core of the Other "between perception and
consciousness." Behind consciousness is its own
unconsciousness. (Who else is unconscious if not
consciousness?) To go unconscious is to jouir, thats the
Thing, to get off, to get out, to forget. Whoever holds the
place of consciousness must be eliminated--that is the
social-moral law; whoever plays with jouissance at the limit
of awareness had better watch his ass, because the sorry
truth is that anyone who seems to be having fun playing
with the Thing becomes the target of invidium and must be

excluded from the circle of self-identity. Repression is the

founding act of becoming human. It is the Thing itself,
jouissance. Oblivion, erasure, this is the function of the
law--of censorship. The Freudo-Lacanian Law (of which
Zizek, constructing a true Hegelian synthetic rhizome for
our time, exfoliates the political dimensions) cannot be
stated. but if it could, the Thing might say of itself:I do not
exist. Or rather, I would not exist. if the Signifier didnt
make me. The truth is that the supreme Good is an
illusion, "a fantasy filling out a void." But the belief in it is
real and effective as such. The best definition of love is
Wallace Stevens: "an illusion so desired/ That the green
leaves came." Love is the pure real, the Thing is a sublime
illusion, and if you believe in it, it becomes what you make
of it: human freedom, the unconditioned absolute for good
and evil. And if you dont believe? We are all circling
around a central void, a kind of vacuum core that acts as a
strange attractor for consciousness and desire. The Thing
is surrounded by a horizon of consciousness, an immanent
nonEuclidean rim, which yields its multiform topology to
the "late Lacan." We are implicated as subjects and
objects in this intensive space of mutual immersion
wherein desire is the only real thing. Zizek explores and
maps this milieu of libidinal politics, drawing us a series of
diagrams of "ideological fantasy." At the control chamber
of bureaucracy, the official Other ruled by knowledge and
perversion, its petty heart and massive "mind" (sublime
memory), is occupied by a subject-essence, objet a, petite
abyss wrapped in fantasy--the image. This substantial core
is that "being of semblance," the human agent, whose only
real consistency is jouissance. At the heart of the subject
is the "sublime object" sustained--beyond all need--by
desire and belief. Our symptom has no image or content
except what foolhardiness and creativity provide. For
anything new to come into being, it must break the law, but
in all innocence. If it aims to violate, it limits itself to
transgressing its limits. But whenever the sublime Thing
comes for real into the world, it appears necessarily in
error and goes against the rules, for with it, the rules
change.
There is no beyond aggression. To embody the antagonist
oneself is to initiate the movement of creation. So perhaps
this is our consubstantial Zizekian illumination: the only
Good Thing is the Law (the S1 canceling itself in favor of
the void--freedom); but the truly sublime Thing arrives, as

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The sublime theorist of Slovenia.

Lacan said, "outside the limits of the Law, where alone it
can live." Not the love that binds in unity by exclusion of
the limiting exception, but an inconsistent elementary "love
without limit," an ethical, impure desire.
PETER CANNING: The basic question is, what drew you
to Lacan? I know that it was Althusser to some degree, but
how did Hegel and Lacan come together for you in your
personal history?
SLAVOJ ZIZEK: Perhaps the ultimate reason was the
specific mapping of intellectual life in Slovenia. In this
republic, there were two predominant philosophical
approaches: Frankfurt School Marxism and
Heideggerianism. Both were unacceptable to us
Lacanians, not only generally, but because in Slovenia the
Communist Party was intelligent enough to adopt Frankfurt
School Marxism as its official ideology. Heideggerianism
was from the beginning linked to a right-wing populism,
and in other parts of Yugoslavia--of what was once
Yugoslavia--to the darkest Stalinist forces. For us
Althusser was crucial, is still crucial. But if there is a lesson
to be learned from the recent political upheavals in Eastern
Europe its--Im more and more pro state. Lets praise the
state highly, to put it simply. I radically disagree with the
leftist position that identifies the state apparatus as the
source of all evil. If there is something that we are almost
physically experiencing in Eastern Europe, it is how all
freedoms and I dont mean freedoms on this abstract
ideological level, but very practical, everyday
freedoms--imply a functioning state apparatus. This is not
a paradoxical new thesis. Etienne Balibar even wrote a
nice article, Es gibt keinen Staat in Europa (There is no
state in Europe), in which he sees this search for a new
nationalism and a kind of inner collapse of state power as
strictly correlative phenomena. So this is why Althusser
was absolutely crucial for us from the very beginning, this
and his whole theory of theoretical state apparatuses,
even though in terms of his official ideology he might be on
the other side.
In Czechoslovakia the big opposition, for example, was
Milan Kundera versus Vaclav Havel. Kundera was
perceived as having this cynical antistate disposition--for
him, the privacy that was left you by the communist regime
was the basis for opposition. Havel, of course, was the
opposite. In one of his most famous stories, he takes a
very Althusserian example, that of a small-time boss who
owns a little grocery. Privately this character always
speaks against the regime, but on the 1st of May he
decorates his shop with the communist slogans. To put it
in Althusserian terms, he obeys the ritual, the practices.
Havels whole point was that private disobedience coupled
with public obedience is precisely the way the system
functioned--that there is not only nothing subversive in this

Kundera-like private space, but that the ideal subject of

real socialism was precisely the one who did not believe in
the system, who had this distance built in. So the truly
heroic thing to do was not to tell dirty stories, but to
publicly do some small thing that perturbed the ritual.
PC: But arent you confusing public space with the state?
Why do you insist on the state?
SZ: Maybe I am confusing them, but this confusion was
written into the way the East European communist state
worked; it was literally obsessed with maintaining the
public image, with controlling what could be said publicly
and what not. This obsession had nothing to do with real
state secrets; the supposed "secret" could actually be
known to everybody. In my own country, in the
northwestern part of Slovenia, there are some very nice
mountains. To do proper mountainclimbing you need
detailed maps. Now under the Yugoslav regime, the maps
were a state secret. It was only possible to buy maps that
not only were not very detailed, but--this was a very
mysterious thing--some roads were changed, some
villages were displaced, some sources of water were
simply not shown. You would say: Of course, this was
simply the communist obsession with secrecy. But this
explanation does not work. Why not? Because the borders
were absolutely open in Slovenia. What every Slovene
mountain climber did was to go 10 miles into Austria,
where it was possible to buy accurate maps. Now you will
say: Of course, those maps were done with spy satellite&
But no. Under international contracts, Yugoslavia had to
provide detailed maps to foreign agencies. So this is the
mystery: this secrecy was totally nonfunctional. At this
ridiculous level, you can see how public space functioned.
I think that it was precisely because of this that the
communist regime was so vulnerable. Im even changing
my mind retroactively and beginning, in a way, to
appreciate this obsession with public image. The
communist idea of public space, distorted as it may seem,
is a kind of paradoxical reminder of the Enlightenment
project, where privately you can think freely and question
all authority, but publicly you have to obey social rituals.
The Stalinist show trials are an example of this obsession.
What was the point of public confessions? Nobody
believed them--everybody knew, lets not kid ourselves (I
mean apart from some naive Western intellectuals).
Nobody believed it--so why were they necessary? Again, it
was this absolute obsession.
PC: Is it the public space, then, or is it the state--isnt it the
so-called big Other?
SZ: Yes, exactly.

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The sublime theorist of Slovenia.

PC: But then arent you making it exist? When you say that
it is a field or space or even an agency that must be
maintained, which must be there in order to maintain the
possibility of freedom....
SZ: Wait a minute. Now there are two issues: one is how
the connection between the big Other and public space,
the state, functions in communism. But this is another
point. I am not saving that precisely this kind of connection
must be maintained. PC: But even here in the United
States-SZ: To a far lesser degree here, I think. There is a whole
logic of secrets that are known by everybody but still must
not be publicly discussed. In Eastern Europe, the moment
that they were publicly pronounced, the whole system
experienced this as a total catastrophe. Western countries
are more cynical in this respect: the pronouncing of
something does not have this catastrophic effect. Nobody
cares, the whole system goes on. But regarding what I
said before, my solution is not a return to the state.
Nobody consciously believes in power, but what is
necessary for the social system to function is this
unconscious belief in the big Other, which sustains power.
We only need a couple of ecological catastrophes to
understand the utter, absolute impotence of power.
PC: But what would be the result of such a catastrophe?
SZ: Ah, this is what I fear; this is the true dilemma. When
the big Other in the form of the state collapses, what we
will have is a regression (this is not a good term; its a
naive, pre-Althusserian term) to some kind of far more
totalitarian (but, again, this is not the proper word, because
totalitarianism is a modern phenomenon), prestate,
communitarian form of the big Other. Or even to what is
usually referred to as New Age consciousness. There they
try to make the big Other exist, perhaps in the form of
natural balance--but its always the big Other, precisely in
the Lacanian sense of the eternal order that always returns
to itself and that we must rejoin. That is to say, the popular
perception of the ecological crisis is that the balance of the
big Other, defined as a kind of harmony between nature
and society, is upset. I think that there you potentially have
a far more totalitarian figure of the big Other.
PC: What is the role of racism? Or do you think thats only
a contingent factor in the ecological crisis?
SZ: My argument is that this new overidentification with the
nation is already a regressive answer to the collapse of the
big Other; in other words, that the community toward which
this new nationalism spontaneously tends is no longer the
modern state as we know it.

PC: Its a kind of organized racism.

SZ: Definitely. And what worries me is that, more and
more, and imperceptibly, its simply accepted as the field
of discussion. For example, its recently become clear
how, even with the Social Democrats in Germany, the
discourse is already ambiguous. On the one hand they
say, We of course deplore the violence, but on the other
hand they give ground to it by acknowledging the
"problem" posed by liberal immigration law. I count at least
partially on ecology, because I think that a consequence of
ecological problems will be to make these notions of
national, ethnic identity ridiculous
PC: But you know that Lacan, in his pessimism, predicted
that the future is racism.
SZ: Wait a minute. He said that almost 20 years ago.
PC: Maybe he was right. Is that why you say that the state
has a definite role--that it protects, at least to some
degree, against racism? Is this the universalist Hegelian
state?
SZ: Definitely. There are a lot of things to be said about it,
but, yes. Again I think that we are not spontaneously
aware of the degree to which the freedoms of the
individual against state power in so-called liberal
democracies are, in a way, guaranteed and can exist only
against the background of the state. But what I want to
point out is the following. When people speak about the
Soviet Union, they employ certain abstract notions about a
system in collapse, etc. But Ive talked with a lot of people
from the former Soviet Union and, recently, from Serbia,
and I think that the political processes at work in these two
countries are parallel. To put it very simply, there now
exists something that was unthinkable a couple of years
ago: a coalition of fascists and communists. This, I think, is
what we have to fear in the future. But what struck me was
that what these Russians and Serbs feared most was the
collapse of the state, of the basic things. Ill put it very
cynically. Its very easy to be a leftist and to say "Lets beat
the cops," but whats going on today in Serbia is the
opposite: you walk down the street, somebody beats you
and robs you. A policeman stands there watching. You go
to him and complain, and he beats you a little bit more.
PC: Why?
SZ: Why? Because they are usually corrupt, and they dont
even perceive their own corruption--but thats my point.
The whole idea of an absolute minimum of public order on
which you can rely is falling apart in Serbia, and, at a
different level, in the ex-Soviet Union. One of the things
that struck me in Moscow today is that the locals dont

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The sublime theorist of Slovenia.

refer to the different quartiers by their old historic names,
they identify them by the name of the mafia that occupies
them. This is the real power vacuum one should be
concerned about, instead of worrying about a power
vacuum in the case of Saddam Hussein.
The second point is that this is what is ahead for all of us,
even for the so-called developed Western countries. The
ridiculous mistake of the Western intellectuals was, first, to
mock this Eastern European nationalism as something
primitive, something out of the 19th century. Exactly the
opposite is true: we in ex-Yugoslavia can proudly say that
we are the 21st century, we are literally--with all the cynical
irony the statement implies--the most progressive country
in the world. We are your future. People laugh at us, but
look at whats happening in Germany, France, etc. Slowly,
the nationalist conflicts are spreading.
PC: But shouldnt we all be terrified by such a prospect?
SZ: Definitely.
PC: Then a conservative or a self-reflectively critical
conservative statement would say that capitalism mast
maintain the state as a front for dismantling traditional
structures, while protecting against reactionary ones.
SZ: Wait a minute: you automatically imply an elementary,
Marxist definition of the state as a tool of capitalism. No, I
think the role of the state is far more ambiguous today. Im
not saying anything original, Im only saying, Lets not
repeat the usual mistake of the left. The state should not
be simply abandoned to the enemy; rather, it should be
made into the terrain where we fight the battle. For
example, in Germany, I think it was a stupid mistake of the
entire left to leave the issue of reunification to the
conservatives, instead of trying to inscribe it in the lefts
own political discourse. The case of a unified Europe
presents a similar catastrophe. Tragically, the left is
against the unification of Europe. I think that, precisely as
leftists, we should support it. Why? Here I will repeat a
good oldfashioned Marxist argument: because European
capital is already unified. And it is precisely a unified
Europe that would be able, through some kind of
social-democratic majority, to ensure, in these times of
economic crisis, at least a minimum level of social security.
With the unification of Europe you would have a kind of
central power able to counteract capitalism.
As I said before, for me, the direct fascist-communist
coalition is the mystery of the last years. If you read
retroactively, you can see it was in preparation for a long
time. People ask, for example, with the Communist Party
losing two thirds of its vote in France--in a little over ten
years it slipped from 20 percent to around 7

percent--where did the votes go? The answer is: to Le

Pen. Dont misunderstand me; my point is not to repeat
that old center-right liberalist shit about totalitarianisms of
the left and right mirroring each other. No, its more tragic
than that: the whole structure of a certain type of European
left is extremely traditional, male chauvinist, etc. Its clear,
for example, that the miners strike that crippled England
eight or nine years ago wasnt just a question of a
thousand jobs, what they were defending was a "way of
life," and an old communitarian feeling. I think its the same
in France, which is why the French Communist Party is
very anti-European. And this is the paradox of the
Maastricht referendum in France--the only serious forces
opposing it were the Front National of Le Pen, that is to
say, the neofascist right, and the communists, the left.
PC: So whats your answer? What is the affinity between
communism and fascism? Or are you already explaining
that?
SZ: No, no. We are all looking for the answer. I dont have
a good theory. The only proper theory would be--but, again
its difficult to formulate it without falling into the trap of
these old totalitarian theories--to employ the Deleuzian
term of reterritorialization. What the communists and the
fascists share is a horror of a kind of "democratic" vacuum
of power.
The myth that should be dispelled is that East European
nationalism constitutes a naive regression to the
19th-century nation-state, that the ones who are taking
over are some kind of primitive, lower-class, noneducated
people. To the extent that all of these nationalist programs
are now realized--in the case of Serbia, for example--they
are far from amounting to a spontaneous mass movement.
Planned years ago; they are the product of nationalist
intellectuals. What we have really witnessed is a true
debacle, a total failure of the intellectuals in all these
cases. This is a very interesting lesson. Intellectuals
always try to play on this split: We dont really believe in
national identity, we must pretend for the sake of the
ordinary people, etc. But in this case the ordinary people
are purely imaginary points of reference. To use Lacanian
jargon: they are subjects supposed to believe. The only
ones who really believe in national identity, who
constructed and formed this myth, were the intellectuals.
PC: Returning to what drew you to Lacan. You know, it
wasnt obvious to Americans or to English-speaking
readers that there was a political dimension or value in
Lacan. It seems to me that you invented the notion of the
ideological fantasy--that in a way, this is your concept.
SZ: Up to a certain point. But you do find it already, at
least implicitly, in Alain Grosrichards Structure du serail

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The sublime theorist of Slovenia.

(Structure of the Seraglio).
PC: Could you speak about the concept of ideological
fantasy and of political desire, of the desire of a political
subject, and address how it brings Lacan and Hegel
together--how it overcomes or takes a new step beyond
Althusserian interpellation and in the direction of some
kind of thinking of the Real, of jouissance?
SZ: The question is of such a fundamental nature that I am
writing a book to answer it. I can only give you a very
general, abstract answer, addressing this move from
Althusser to Lacan. Althusser was our origin historically,
and we still think that his notion of the ideological state
apparatus was extremely useful. Those who really brought
down the communists were practical Althusserians. The
basic move from Althusser to Lacan can be reduced to two
simple observations, I think. First, interpellation ultimately
always fails. There is something that resists it. And
interpellation fails necessarily, not empirically--that is, it
does not sometimes succeed and sometimes fail; rather,
failure is inscribed into the very concept. Second, this
failure is not something that blocks the normal functioning
of ideology, but rather, to use the reversal of Kantian terms
already practiced by Derrida, this condition of impossibility
is at the same time the condition of its possibility. That is to
say, the failure of interpellation is precisely what makes it
possible. It is in the place of this failed interpellation that
ideological fantasies emerge, to fill out this gap. And for
ideology to work, they are a necessary support.
PC: How does it fail? Could you just remind us?
SZ: Im thinking of interpellation in very concrete terms; I
can only give you a clinical example, which is nevertheless
very useful. This is my formula. What is the place of origin,
the original experience, of psychoanalysis? The complaint
of the hysteric. And hysteria is precisely resistance to
interpellation; that is its whole point. Lacan puts it very
nicely when he says,Why am I what you are saying that I
am? This is the hysterical question to the master. You are
interpellating me into this, but why am I what you are
saying that I am? So the hysterical question means the
failure of interpellation.
PC: Its: Why am I what youre telling me? But isnt it also
something else: Make me desire, make me jouir. I mean,
arent those demands equally fundamental for the
hysteric? You can determine my identity, but how do you
make me desire? And doesnt that also lead to the
question of the fantasy?
SZ: As Lacan says, this is the paradox of the hysterical
position: the hysteric articulates a certain demand, but his
true desire is for this demand to be refused. Yes, I would

definitely agree that it is precisely in the gaps of the

hysterical question that fantasy emerges.
PC: To organize desire and jouissance?
SZ: Yes, because, of course, the first point to be noted is
that the question "Why am I what you are saying that I
am?" implies that I am only what you are saying that I am,
that my symbolic identity depends upon the big Other.
PC: This is a difficult request, but could you relate desire
and jouissance within the theory of the ideological fantasy?
You did a beautiful reading of this in the third chapter of
The Sublime Object of Ideology. Does jouissance have
anything to do with this condition of failure? Does desire?
SZ: We have in Lacan two seemingly opposed ethics. One
would be the Brechtian ethics of desire versus enjoyment,
the idea being, to put it naively, that the ethical ideal of
psychoanalysis is pure desire. And for Lacan, pure desire
means something very precise--desire purified of all
enjoyment. He saw enjoyment as the inert part, identifying
with that which is inert; and for Lacan, the enemy is always
this kind of overidentification. In early Lacan, for example,
you have imaginary identification, and you have to
penetrate to the symbolic structure behind it. Even in the
Lacan of the late 50s and early 60s, where you have
fundamental identification with your fantasy, what you
have to do is to penetrate, to experience the void behind
fantasy. Although there are big shifts, the fundamental
move is that of assuming distance, this kind of Brechtian
Entfremdung (alienation).
PC: Purify your desires.
SZ: Yes, purify your desires, to put it simply. For Lacan,
the symptom is understood precisely as the way in which
you organize your enjoyment. The symptom means that
you betray your desire. So, for Lacan, dissolving
symptoms--inert jouissance--is, in this sense, a kind of
ethical gesture.
The film Zentropa (1991) is a case in point. If we accept
this Lacanian ethics of desire, then the myth of this film
can be understood as one of Europe as a kind of inert
jouissance, where even the innocent American is
swallowed up. The whole narrative is structured by the
hypnotic voice of Max von Sydow, by the idea that the
moment you touch Europe, you touch some mortal vicious
circle of enjoyment. Ultimately, however, I think that the
film is far more ambiguous than this may suggest, because
what it basically does is to fulfill the program of
Hans-Jurgen Syberberg, which is to reappropriate the Nazi
past as an esthetic experience. I am referring to what
Syberberg is doing in his last books, which have caused a

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The sublime theorist of Slovenia.

great scandal. He first accepts the standard
psychoanalytic, even Frankfurt School, accusation that the
Germans did not durcharbeiten, did not work through their
Nazi past, because they dont want to renounce it.
Because they didnt do their proper work of mourning, they
are still traumatically attached to the past. Now, Syberberg
reasons like this: yes, this is true, but the only way to
symbolize it at the collective level is through esthetic
appropriation. Now comes the dirty part. Who is
responsible for it? The Jews. Adorno said that there can
be no poetry after Auschwitz; so the Jews, by prohibiting
an esthetic relationship with the Nazi past, by painting
Nazism as something too horrible, too horrifying, to be
appropriated through esthetic experience--the Jews are
really to blame. Syberberg literally produces the formula
that the real catastrophe is not 1933 but 1945. This gap,
this rupture, after which esthetic reappropriation was
forbidden--we are all, he literally says this, under this
horrible Jewish interdiction; we cannot relate esthetically to
our past. For him the only solution is to-PC: Identify with the symptom.
SZ: Yes, precisely; but how? By getting rid of Jewish
influence. By throwing out the Jew.
PC: You see a parallel between this and Lacans theory, to
identify with the symptom?
SZ: No, its more complicated; I just wanted to use this to
elaborate a certain type of ethics for Zentropa. The Europe
Zentropa depicts is the immediately postcatastrophic
Europe. It is clear that the film also alludes to todays
Europe, the mess of unification. It changes the Nazi
experience into a mere part in the larger story of a
self-indulgent European decadence. The only thing to do,
then, is simply accept the vicious circle of this jouissance.
The Lacan of the "ethics of desire" would reject this
radically. He would say that this would mean precisely to
compromise your desire.
PC: Its a kind of perversion, right? In the sense of the
freedom of deciding ones presuppositions and their
retroactive positing; its a perverse decision or
identification. Youre actually eliminating your desire,
identifying with the will. Desire must remain impure,
unconscious. Thats the paradox.
SZ: Yes; between the seminar The Ethics of
Psychoanalysis, 1959 to 1960 and "Kant avec Sade," of
1962, Lacan shifts to this other logic, which is no longer
one of pure desire, where every identification with
jouissance means betraying desire. Now it is the opposite:
the only authentic thing to do is to identify with your
symptom. Desire as such means betraying your symptom,

betraying your drive. In other words, the only true desire is

the death drive, the death drive precisely as accepting
your symptom, circulating around your symptom.
PC: Versus the death drive of The Ethics, the "second
death," erasing all memory. But we come to an impasse.
Doesnt this justify Syberbergs move, saying: We
Germans have to identify with our symptom, this is the
only way for us. We have to locate failure somewhere,
within the symptom, because otherwise-SZ: At the abstract level it would be very easy to squeeze
out of this. The thing to do is simply introduce the
distinction between symptom and fantasy. I think that what
is at work in Zentropa is not so much symptom as fantasy.
When Lacan says to identify with your symptom, he means
precisely-PC: The traumatic symptom, but "elaborated," analyzed.
SZ: The traumatic symptom that is not concealed through
the structure of fantasy.
This shift can be detected, for example, in the reading of
Antigone in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. For the Lacan
of the identification with the symptom, desire as such is a
compromise. The logic of desire is that you desire in order
to avoid your symptom. In "The Subversion of the Subject
and the Dialectic of Desire in the Freudian Unconscious,"
1960, Lacan says as much. Its the crucial formula of the
text, and its a radical reversal of what he was saying a few
months before. He says desire is a defense against
jouissance. He says it literally. Its not that jouissance is a
regression or a kind of coagulation that hinders or blocks
the dialectic of desire, its that desire as such is a defense
against jouissance. Ill put it this way. What does Antigone
do? In The Ethics Antigone is still basically pure desire. By
accomplishing the terrible step beyond, into the void, into
Ate (divine blindness), she becomes pure desire. But for
the later Lacan, she is not desire--she accepts the death
drive, understood precisely as the identification with your
symptom, opposed to desire.
Its the ambiguity of the relation to the big Other that is in
play here. Why? One way to read Antigone is to see her
as suspending the big Other as embodied in social power.
On the other hand, she can also be read, and this is how
Lacan still reads her in The Ethics, as identifying her
desire with the desire of the big Other. What Antigone
basically does is to insist upon the ritual. Why does she
sacrifice her life? Because she basically says: my desire,
my only desire, is that the ritual must be performed. That is
to say, the desire of symbolic integration, of the big Other.
Again, I think Lacan himself is deeply ambiguous here.

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The sublime theorist of Slovenia.

There are four or five features like this, which I have tried
to explain in forthcoming articles, For example, who is the
objet a in The Ethics? Lacan still claims that, in the
perverse scenario, the victim is the objet a. When he
speaks of the "between the two deaths," he uses the
miracle of Sadean victims as his example. You can torture
them but they always remain beautiful. Then, suddenly, in
"Kant avec Sade," its the executioner who takes the place
of the object. The victim is the S barre, the subject. He
totally shifts the formula.
PC: Can we say, then, that what he discovered is the
impossibility of purification? At some point in this transition,
he discovered the impossibility of pure desire, and the only
thing, as he says (in Encore,) is to pass through your
division into jouissance and become an object. But at that
point you merge with the drive.
SZ: I totally agree with your formulation. This is what
people usually overlook when they concentrate only on
generalities. Lacan discusses this in the mysterious final
pages of The Four Fundamental Concepts of
Psychoanalysis, 1964; he says that when you go through
fantasy, la traversee du fantasme, you lose desire, you
become pure drive. Again, when people talk about the
truth of desire, they simply overlook that. In The Four
Fundamental Concepts, Lacan defines the final,
concluding moment of analysis as the one when you step
out, when you dont have desire any more, in this sense.
You become the being of the drive; you pass from the side
of the divided subject to the side of the object. Which is
why the analyst is an object in this sense. I also agree with
you if your point is that this is in a way extremely close,
almost imperceptibly close, to the perverse position.
Although the gap is there--absolute but almost
imperceptible.
PC: Its interesting that weve reached this point, but what
is the role of self-consciousness at this divide? Could you
say that the analyst sustains something unconscious,
whether you call it listening with the third ear, the ear as
the receptacle of the unconscious--that the pervert
serf-consciously identifies, as you correctly say, not with
the symptom but with the fantasy us a program, and
thereby fills out the objet a, whereas the Lacanian analyst
holds it empty and receptive in some way to the future?
SZ: The parallel is clear. The basic structure of perversion
is that you perceive yourself as the instrument of others
jouissance. This is why, for example, Don Giovanni is a
pervert. What is his big trick? His gift is not that he is
beautiful, but that he can guess or discern the fantasy of
each woman, and he tries to stage that fantasy. Which is
why Lacan says une par une--une pour une; for each her
own specific fantasy. For the pervert is totally void, he is

there only to serve the other, to be the slave of the others

fantasy. This is very nicely expressed by Lacan: the
formula of perversion is the simple reversal of the formula
of fantasy. This is precisely what happens in
psychoanalysis.
PC: Right.
SZ: The psychoanalyst is a passive blank, an empty
screen onto which the analysand projects his or her own
fantasies. Of course, as we all know, here is where the
difference begins: rather than serving the fantasy, the
analyst undermines it. But its absolutely true that there is
a basic homology, which, again, is not sufficiently noted.
Now, as to this problem of self-consciousness, I think that
here problems begin for Lacan, and we can now approach
the second part of your opening question: why Hegel?
Unfortunately, Lacan too quickly identifies
self-consciousness with self-transparency, and the very
condition of the notion of self-consciousness in German
Idealism is that you are inaccessible to yourself. Its a
positive ontological condition. To be self-conscious, you
must be void, you must not be accessible to yourself as
what you are. So we have a certain radical gap defining
self-consciousness. The subject of self-consciousness is
literally S barre. Lacans idea is that self-consciousness is
an object. The point is not that you cannot arrive at
self-consciousness; you can arrive at self-consciousness,
but it is outside of you, external to you as an object. As a
symptom, for example. You are always split between what
you are as subject--empty and decentered--and the
external place where the truth about you is inscribed. The
crucial misunderstanding to be dispelled is this quick
identification of self-consciousness with self-transparency.
The whole point of Lacan, and of Hegel, is that
self-consciousness means precisely splitting, means
precisely what Lacan means when he says that your
desire is always the desire of desire. That is, that you have
to choose your desire. This is the reflexivity of
self-consciousness; it has nothing to do with
consciousness in the sense that you are aware of it. Quite
the contrary, self-consciousness means, already in
German Idealism, that you are not aware of what is going
on within you.
PC: So in this sense perversion short-circuits the process,
the Bewegung !movement and becoming^ of
consciousness.
SZ: Thats the very definition of it.
PC: One thing to wrap up the political fantasy question
quickly. The political abject implies a collective subject; but
how do you move from a psychoanalysis of an individual
subject to a collective subject?

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The sublime theorist of Slovenia.

SZ: Lacan said that the individual is never individuum,
indivisible. The individual is split, and it is this very split
that connects him with society. Ill put it this way: the
individual is always already social precisely because he or
she is always split. Usually the social connection is
considered at the level of identity, not as split. You are
social in so far as you identify with certain social values,
etc. For Lacan it is the exact opposite. Society is inscribed
into you through a cut, not through some kind of
identification. How can we be sure that we can speak with
the other, how is communication possible? This can be put
in interpersonal terms or, more fashionably, in terms of an
ethnic community. How can we be sure what a Chinese
speaker means? Are we not, each of us, prisoners of our
own ethnic, ideological universes? How can we even say
that we participate in the same field of meaning?

Your Symptom! (Routledge); and most recently, he edited

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan, but
were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock (Verso).
Peter Canning teaches Comparative Literature and theory
at the University Of Minnesota. He is currently completing
a book on image and event centered on the work of
Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze.

Lacans answer here is paradoxical and deeply Hegelian.

The mistake of this solipsistic view, that we can never be
sure that we communicate with the other, is that we
presuppose that we can communicate with ourselves.
Lacans answer is that we communicate with the others
precisely because we cannot communicate with ourselves,
precisely because we are always split. The way we are
split connects us with others; we look for the missing part
in the other. The other fills our own gap. This also answers
the question of how communication is possible. This is the
Lacanian wager: is not our culture, the way we structure
the symbolic edifice of our culture, only an attempt to come
to terms with some kind of traumatic impossibility? If we
recognize our culture as an ultimately failed attempt to
symbolize some antagonism, some real deadlock, this
allows us to read the others culture as an attempt to
symbolize the same deadlock. What unites cultures is not
the neutral, universal set of meanings that Chomskyan
linguists are trying to establish; you dont find it at that
level. You find it at the level of an impasse. All cultures are
different answers to the same question, arising from the
same deadlock; it is precisely the deadlock, the
antagonism, that unites us. The problem is to recognize in
a foreign culture a different attempt to avoid the same
deadlock that we tried to avoid. That we can identify with
the other at this point of failure is an almost hysterical
paradox. This is the basic Lacanian answer to the question
of how can we be sure that we communicate with the
other: we dont communicate with ourselves. The other is
already in our own split; because we are split, our
discourse is already, as Lacan would say, the discourse of
the other.
Slavoj Zizek researches at the Institute for Sociology at the
University of Ljubljana. His books include The Sublime
Object Of Ideology (Verso), For They Know Not What
They Do (Verso), Looking Awry: An Introduction to
Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (MIT), and Enjoy

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