Table of Contents:
Psychoanalysis
Slavoj Zizek
This is where one should insist on reintroducing the Leninist opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom: in an act of actual freedom, one dares precisely to break this seductive power of symbolic efficacy. Therein resides the moment of truth of Lenin’s acerbic retort to his Menshevik critics: the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options within a pre-given set of coordinates; rather I choose to change this set of coordinates itself. The catch of ’transition’ from Really Existing Socialism to capitalism was that the Eastern Europeans never had the chance to choose the ad quem of this transition—all of a sudden, they were (almost literally) ’thrown’ into a new situation in which they were presented with a new set of given choices (pure liberalism, nationalist conservatism…). What this means is that ‘actual freedom’, as the act of consciously changing this set, occurs only when, in the situation of a forced choice, one acts as if the choice is not forced and ‘chooses the impossible’. This is what Lenin’s obsessive tirades against ‘formal’ freedom are all about, and therein lies the ‘rational kernel’ that is worth saving today: when he insists that there is no ‘pure’ democracy, that we should always ask apropos of any freedom, whom does it server, what is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true radical choice. This is what the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom ultimately amounts to: the former refers to freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while the latter designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s aim is not to limit freedom of choice but to maintain the fundamental Choice—when he asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: ‘Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?’
Slavoj Zizek, “Introduction: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” in Lenin 2017
The hysteric’s fear is that, in so far as she is the object of the Other’s enjoyment, she is reduced to an instrument of the Other, exploited, manipulated by him; on the other hand, there is nothing a true pervert enjoys more than being an instrument of the Other, of his jouissance. In a typical case of hysterical triangulation, while a wife can fully enjoy illicit sex only, her message to her lover is: if her husband learns of her affair and leaves her, she will also have to drop him… What we encounter here is the basic neurotic strategy of snatching back from the other part of the jouissance he has taken from us: by cheating her husband, she steak back from him part of the jouissance he ‘illegitimately’ stole from her. That is to say: a neurotic has made the sacrifice of jouissance (which is why she is not a psychotic), which enables her to enter the symbolic order, but she is obsessed with the notion that the sacrificed jouissance, the jouissance taken from her, is stored somewhere in the Other who is profiting from it ‘illegitimately’, enjoying in her place - so her strategy consists in getting at least part of it back by transgressing the Other’s norms (from masturbating and cheating, up to speeding without getting a ticket).
Slavoj Zizek, The Plague of Fantasies.
To put it in somewhat simplified terms: fantasy does not mean that when I desire to eat 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. This role of fantasy hinges on the fact that ’there is no sexual relationship’, no universal formula or matrix guaranteeing a harmonious sexual relationship with one’s partner: because of the lack of this universal formula, every subject has to invent a fantasy of his or her own, a ‘private’ formula for the sexual relationship—for a man, the relationship with a woman is possible only inasmuch as she fits his formula.
Slavoj Zizek, Seven Veils of Fantasy in The Plague of Fantasies, Verso.
What, then, is semblance? Imagine that a man is having an affair about which his wife doesn’t know, so that when he is meeting his lover, he pretends to be on a business trip, or something similar, after some time, he summons up his courage and tells his wife the truth: when he is away, he is in fact with his lover— at this point, however, when the semblance of a happy marriage falls apart, the mistress breaks down an, out of sympathy with the abandoned wife, starts to avoid her lover. What should the husband do now in order to give his wife the wrong signal—not to let her think that the fact that he is no longer on business trips so often means that he is coming back to her? He has to fake the affair, leave home for a couple of days, thus generating the mistaken impression that the affair is still on, while in reality he is just staying with a friend. This is semblance at its purest: it occurs not when we erect a deceptive screen to conceal our transgression, but when we pretend that there is a transgression to be concealed.
Foreword to Slavoj Zizek’s For They Know Not What They Do.
The same holds for capitalism: it’s dynamics of perpetual self-revolutionizing relies on the endless postponing of its point of impossibility (final crisis, collapse). What is for other, earlier modes of production a dangerous exception is for capitalism normality: crisis is in capitalism internalized, taken into account, as the point of impossibility which pushes it to continuous activity. Capitalism is structurally always in crisis–this is why it is expanding all the time: it can only reproduce itself by way of ‘borrowing from the future’; by way of escaping into the future. The final settling of accounts when all debts would be paid cannot ever arrive. Marx had a name for the social point of impossibility: ‘class struggle’.
Preface to the New Edition of The Plague of Fantasies, Slavoj Zizek.
In his “Kant with Sade,” Lacan demonstrates how Sade is the truth of Kant. The first association here is, of course: What’s all the fuss about? In our post-idealist, Freudian era, doesn’t everybody know what the point of the “with” is—the truth of Kant’s ethical rigorism is the sadism of the law, i.e. the Kantian law is a superego agency that sadistically enjoys the subject’s deadlock, his inability to meet its inexorable demands, like the proverbial teacher who tortures pupils with impossible tasks and secretly savors their failings? Lacan’s point, however, is the exact opposite of this first association: it is not Kant who was a closet sadist, it is Sade who is a closet Kantian. That is to say, what one should bear in mind is that the focus of Lacan is always Kant, not Sade: what he is interested in are the ultimate consequences and disavowed premises of the Kantian ethical revolution.
Slavoj Zizek, Sex and the Failed Absolute.
This is probably the fundamental dimension of ‘ideology’: ideology is not simply a ‘false consciousness’, an illusory representation of reality; it is, rather, this reality itself which is already to be conceived as ‘ideological’ – ‘ideological’ is a social reality whose very existence implies the non-knowledge of its participants as to its essence – that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals ‘do not know what they are doing’. ‘Ideological’ is not the false consciousness’ of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by false consciousness’. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be ‘a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non-knowledge on the part of the subject’: the subject can ‘enjoy his symptom’ only in so far as its logic escapes him – the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.
Slavoj Zizek, How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?
The place of fetishism has just shifted from intersubjective relations to relations ‘between things’: the crucial social relations, those of production, are no longer immediately transparent in the form of the interpersonal relations of domination and servitude (of the Lord and his serfs, and so on); they disguise themselves – to use Marx’s accurate formula – ‘under the shape of social relations between things, between theproducts of labour’.
This is why one has to look for the discovery of the symptom in the way Marx conceived the passage from feudalism to capitalism. With the establishment of bourgeois society, the relations of domination and servitude are repressed: formally, we are apparently concerned with free subjects whose interpersonal relations are discharged of all fetishism; the repressed truth – that of the persistence of domination and servitude – emerges in a symptom which subverts the ideological appearance of equality, freedom, and so on. This symptom, the point of emergence of the truth about social relations, is precisely the ‘social relations between things’. ‘Instead of appearing at all events as their own mutual relations, the social relations between individuals are disguised under the shape of social relations between things’ – here we have a precise definition of the hysterical symptom, of the ‘hysteria of conversion’ proper to capitalism.
Slavoj Zizek, How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?
“Western Buddhism” thus perfectly fits the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly “post-ideological” era, as opposed to its traditional symptomal mode, in which the ideological lie which structures our perception of reality is threatened by symptoms qua “returns of the repressed,” cracks in the fabric of the ideological lie. Fetish is effectively a kind of inverse of the symptom. That is to say, the symptom is the exception which disturbs the surface of the false appearance, the point at which the repressed Other Scene erupts, while fetish is the embodiment of the Lie which enables us to sustain the unbearable truth.
Slavoj Zizek, On Belief
So, when we are bombarded by claims that in our post-ideological cynical era nobody believes in the proclaimed ideals, when we encounter a person who claims he is cured of any beliefs, accepting social reality the way it really is, one should always counter such claims with question : OK, but where is the fetish which enables you to (pretend to) accept reality “the way it is”? “Western Buddhism” is such a fetish: it enables you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is–what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw…(In a further specification, one should note that fetish can function in two opposite ways: either its role remains unconscious–as in the case of Shute’s heroine who was unaware of the fetish-role of the dog–or you think that the fetish is that which really matters, as in the case of a Western Buddhist unaware that the “truth” of his existence is the social involvement which he tends to dismiss as a mere game.)
Slavoj Zizek, On Belief
However, linking psychoanalysis and anti-capitalism is discredited today. If one discards the two standard versions, the old topic of the infamous “anal character” as the libidinal foundation of capitalism (the exemplary case of psychological reduction-ism, if there ever was one), and its inversion, the no less old Freudo-Marxian simplifications (sexual repression is the result of social domination and exploitation, so that classless society will bring about sexual liberation, the full capacity to enjoy life), the reproach that pops up almost automatically against the notion of the inherently anti-capitalist nature of psychoanalysis is that the relationship between these two fields of knowledge is inherently antagonistic: from the standard Marxist point of view, psychoanalysis is unable to comprehend how the libidinal structure it portrays (the Oedipal constellation) is rooted in specific historical circumstances, which is why it elevates contingent historical obstacles into an a priori of the human condition, while for psychoanalysis, Marxism relies on a simplified, psychologically naive, notion of man, which is why it is unable to grasp why attempts at liberation necessarily give rise to new forms of domination.
Slavoj Zizek, On Belief
The….point to emphasize is that Lacan was well aware of the historical constellation within which psychoanalysis–not as a theory, but as a specific inter-subjective practice, a unique form of social link–could have emerged: the capitalist society in which intersubjective relations are mediated by money. Money–paying the analyst–is necessary in order to keep him out of circulation, to avoid getting him involved in the imbroglio of passions which generated the patient’s pathology. The psychoanalyst is thus effectively a kind of “prostitute of the mind,” having recourse to money for the same reason some prostitutes like to be paid so that they can get sex without personal involvement, maintaining their distance–here, we encounter the function of money at its purest.
Slavoj Zizek, On Belief
The same experience of ‘desublimation’ was already well known in the tradition of courtly love, in the guise of the figure of die Frau-Welt (the woman who stands for the world, terrestrial life): she looks beautiful from the proper distance, but the moment the poet or the knight serving her approaches her too closely (or when she beckons him to come nearer to her so that she can repay him for his faithful service), she turns her other, reverse side towards him, and what was previously the semblance of fascinating beauty is suddenly revealed as putrefied flesh, crawling or snakes and worms, the disgusting substance of life – as in the films of David Lynch, in which an object turns into the disgusting substance if life when the camera gets too close to it. The gap that separates beauty from ugliness is thus the very gap that separates reality from the Real: what constitutes reality is the minimum of idealization the subject needs in order to be able to sustain the horror of the Real.
Slavoj Zizek, Plague of Fantasies
Music turns into a sign of love when it no longer haunts the subject as the obscene jouissance, compelling it to surrender blindly to its disgusting rhythm, but when love transpires through its sounds – love as the acceptance of the Other in its radical otherness, a love which is, as Lacan put it in the very last page of his Seminar XI, beyond Law. But one should be very precise here: love beyond Law does not mean wild love outside all symbolic institutional co-ordinates (like Carmen’s ‘Love is a rebellious bird’); it means almost the exact opposite. The discerning feature of this love is indifference, not towards its object but towards the positive properties of the beloved object: to say ‘I love you because you have a nice nose/attractive legs,’ etc., is a priori false. With love it is the same as with religious belief: I do not love you because I find your positive features attractive, but, on the contrary, I find your positive features attractive because I love you and therefore observe you with a loving gaze.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept
On the other hand, there is a more psychological (or, rather, brainsciences) approach, combining cognitivist scientific research with occasional incursions into New Age meditation wisdom: the exact measuring of brain processes that accompany feelings of happiness and satisfaction, etc. The combination of cognitive science and Buddhism (which is not new — its last great proponent was Francisco Varela ) is here given an ethical twist: what is offered in the guise of scientific research is a new morality that one is tempted to call biomorality—the true counterpart to today’s biopolitics. And indeed, was it not the Dalai Lama himself who wrote: “The purpose of life is to be happy” —this is not true for psychoanalysis, one should add. In Kant’s description, ethical duty functions like a foreign traumatic intruder that from the outside disturbs the subject’s homeostatic balance, its unbearable pressure forcing the subject to act “beyond the pleasure principle,” ignoring the pursuit of pleasures. For Lacan, exactly the same description holds for desire, which is why enjoyment is not something that comes naturally to the subject, as a realization of her inner potential, but is the content of a traumatic superego injunction.
Slavoj Zizek, In Defense of Lost Causes
Although Gandhi was the first Hindu politician to advocate the full integration of the Untouchables, and called them “the children of god,” he perceived their exclusion as the result of the corruption of the original Hindu system. What Gandhi envisaged was rather a (formally) non-hierarchical order of castes within which each individual has his or her own allotted place; he emphasized the importance of scavenging and celebrated the Untouchables for performing this “sacred” mission. It is here that the Untouchables are exposed to the greatest ideological temptation: in a way which prefigures today’s “identity politics,” Gandhi allowed them to “fall in love with themselves” in their humiliating identity, to accept their degrading work as a noble and necessary social task, to see even the degrading nature of their work as a sign of their sacrifice, of their readiness to do a dirty job for the sake of society. Even his more “radical” injunction that everyone, Brahmins included, should clean up his or her own shit, obfuscates the true issue, which, rather than having to do with our individual attitude, is of a global social nature. (The same ideological trick is performed today when we are bombarded from all sides with injunctions to recycle personal waste, placing bottles, newspapers, etc., in the appropriate bins. In this way, guilt and responsibility are personalized—it is not the entire organization of the economy which is to blame, but our subjective attitude which needs to change.) The task is not to change our inner selves, but to abolish Untouchability as such, that is, not merely an element of the system, but the system itself which generates it.
In contrast […] Ambedkar saw clearly how the structure of four castes does not unite four elements belonging to the same order: while the first three castes (priests, warrior-kings, merchant producers) form a consistent All, an organic triad, the Untouchables are, like Marx’s “Asiatic mode of production,” the “part of no part,” the inconsistent element within the system which holds the place of what the system as such excludes—and as such, the Untouchables stand for universality. Or, as Ambedkar put it with his ingenious wordplay: “There will be outcasts as long as there are castes.” As long as there are castes, there will be an excessive excremental zero-value element which, while formally part of the system, has no proper place within it. Gandhi obfuscates this paradox, as if a harmonious caste structure were possible. The paradox of the Untouchables is that they are doubly marked by the excremental logic: they not only deal with impure excrements, their own formal status within the social body is that of excrement.
Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times (“No Castes Without Outcasts”)
“Happiness is thus in itself (in its very concept, as Hegel would have put it) confused, indeterminate, inconsistent. Recall the proverbial answer of a German immigrant to the US who, when asked. “Are you happy?”, answered: “Yes, yes, I am very happy, aber glücklich bin ich nicht…”. It is a pagan category: for pagans, the goal of life is to live a happy one (the idea to live “happily everafter” is already a Christianized version of paganism), and religious experience or political activity themselves are considered the higher form of happiness (see Aristotle). No wonder the Dalai Lama himself is having such a success recently preaching around the world the gospel of happiness, and no wonder he is finding the greatest response precisely in the US, this ultimate empire of the (pursuit of) happiness… Happines relies on the subject’s inability or unreadiness to fully confront the consequences of its desire: the price of happiness is that the subject remains stuck in the inconsistency of its desire. In our daily lives, we (pretend to) desire things which we do not really desire, so that, ultimately, the worst thing that can happen is for us to get what we ‘officially’ desire. Happiness is thus inherently hypocritical: it is the happiness of dreaming about things we really do not want.”
Slavoj Zizek, “Happiness? No Thanks!”
Lacan’s thesis is that it is possible to sublimate this dangerous frenzy; this is what, ultimately, art and religion are about. Music turns into a sign of love when it no longer haunts the subject as the obscene jouissance, compelling it to surrender blindly to its disgusting rhythm, but when love transpires through its sounds – love as the acceptance of the Other in its radical otherness, a love which is, as Lacan put it in the very last page of his Seminar XI, beyond Law. But one should be very precise here: love beyond Law does not mean wild love outside all symbolic institutional co-ordinates (like Carmen’s ‘Love is a rebellious bird’); it means almost the exact opposite. The discerning feature of this love is indifference, not towards its object but towards the positive properties of the beloved object: to say ‘I love you because you have a nice nose/attractive legs,’ etc., is a priori false. With love it is the same as with religious belief: I do not love you because I find your positive features attractive, but, on the contrary, I find your positive features attractive because I love you and therefore observe you with a loving gaze.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept
The underlying insight is that, against all appearances, love and sex are not only distinct, but ultimately incompatible, that they operate at thoroughly different levels, like agape and eros: love is charitable, self-erasing, ashamed of itself, while sex is intense, self-assertive, possessing, inherently violent (or the opposite: possessive love versus generous indulging in sexual pleasures). However, the true miracle occurs when (exceptionally) these two series momentarily coincide, when sex is ‘transubstantiated’ into an act of love – an achievement which is real/ impossible in the precise Lacanian sense, and as such marked by an inherent rarity. Today, it is as if the knot of three levels which characterized traditional sexuality (reproduction, sexual pleasure, love) is gradually dissolving: reproduction is left to biogenetic procedures which are making sexual intercourse redundant; sex itself is turned into recreational fun; while love is reduced to the domain of ‘emotional fulfilment’. In such a situation, it is all the more precious to be reminded of those rare miraculous moments in which two of these three dimensions can still overlap, i.e., in which jouissance becomes a sign of love. It is only in these rare moments that sexual activity becomes an authentic Event.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept
Where is the sex? one may ask, and what’s so “absolute” about this foolish-seeming game? Why does Zizek conclude with “abstraction”?
I realised that the sex is to be found not in any transgressive excess of sexual passion, but in the modes of coping with the trauma, from closure and control under the conditions of exceptionality to openness and hope under the conditions of reflexivity.
The absoluteness is to be found in the passage from “faking” it to playing it through. The trauma of negativity is not something that we can talk through to resolve, as it resists full and convergent symbolisation. The abstraction lies in acknowledging that our attempts to patch up or to cover over the cracks are empty (formal) but necessary (ritual) gestures.
Terence Blake, Sex and the Failed Absolute : “The Waistcoat” and Absolute Knowing
What defines love is this basic discord or gap: the lover seeks in the beloved what he lacks, but, as Lacan puts it, “what the one lacks is not what is hidden within the other”—the only thing left to the beloved is thus to proceed to a kind of exchange of places, to change from the object into the subject of love, in short: to return love. Therein consists, according to Lacan, love’s most sublime moment: in this inversion when the beloved object endeavors to deliver himself from the impasse of his position, from the impossibility of complying with the lover’s demand, by assuming himself the position of the lover, by reaching his hand back to the lover and thus answering the lover’s lack/ desire with his own lack. Love is based upon the illusion that this encounter of the two lacks can succeed and beget a “new harmony.”
Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy Your Symptom!
It is only in this precise sense that the otherwise journalistic designation of our age as the “age of anxiety” is appropriate: what causes anxiety is the elevation of transgression into the norm,the lack of the prohibition that would sustain desire. This lack throws us into the suffocating proximity of the object-cause of desire: we lack the breathing space provided by the prohibition, since, even before we can assert our individuality through our resistance to the Norm, the Norm enjoins us in advance to resist,to violate,to go further and further.We should not confuse this Norm with regulation of our intersubjective contacts: perhaps there has been no period in the history of humankind, when interactions were so closely regulated; these regulations, however, no longer function as the symbolic prohibition—rather, they regulate modes of transgression themselves.
So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety. It is in this precise sense that—as Lacan put it, following Freud—anxiety is the only emotion that does not deceive: all other emotions,from sorrow to love, are based on deceit. Again, back to Chesterton: when he writes that “Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom,” this means that, precisely, this frame—the frame of prohibitions—is the only frame within which we can enjoy pagan pleasures: the feeling of guilt is a fake enabling us to give ourselves over to pleasures—when this frame falls away, anxiety arises.
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity
It is only in this precise sense that the otherwise journalistic designation of our age as the “age of anxiety” is appropriate: what causes anxiety is the elevation of transgression into the norm,the lack of the prohibition that would sustain desire. This lack throws us into the suffocating proximity of the object-cause of desire: we lack the breathing space provided by the prohibition, since, even before we can assert our individuality through our resistance to the Norm, the Norm enjoins us in advance to resist,to violate,to go further and further.We should not confuse this Norm with regulation of our intersubjective contacts: perhaps there has been no period in the history of humankind, when interactions were so closely regulated; these regulations, however, no longer function as the symbolic prohibition—rather, they regulate modes of transgression themselves.
So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety. It is in this precise sense that—as Lacan put it, following Freud—anxiety is the only emotion that does not deceive: all other emotions,from sorrow to love, are based on deceit. Again, back to Chesterton: when he writes that “Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom,” this means that, precisely, this frame—the frame of prohibitions—is the only frame within which we can enjoy pagan pleasures: the feeling of guilt is a fake enabling us to give ourselves over to pleasures—when this frame falls away, anxiety arises.
[…]
It is here that one should refer to the key distinction between the object of desire and its object-cause. What should the analyst do in the case of a promiscuous woman who has regular one-night stands, while complaining all the time how bad and miserable and guilty she feels about it? The thing not to do, of course, is to try to convince her that one-night stands are bad,the cause of her troubles, signs of some libidinal deadlock—in this way, one merely feeds her symptom, which is condensed in her (misleading) dissatisfaction with one-night stands. That is to say, it is obvious that what gives the woman true satisfaction is not promiscuity as such, but the very accompanying feeling of being miserable—that is the source of her “masochistic” enjoyment. The strategy should thus be, as a first step, not to convince her that her promiscuity is pathological, but, on the contrary, to convince her that there is nothing to feel bad or guilty about: if she really enjoys one-night stands, she should continue to have them without any negative feelings.
The trick is that, once she is confronted with one-night stands without what appears to be the obstacle preventing her from fully enjoying them, but is in reality the objet petit a, the feature that allows her to enjoy them,the feature through which she can only enjoy them, one-night stands will lose their attraction and become meaningless. (And if she still goes on with her one-night stands? Well, why not Psychoanalysis is not a moral catechism: if this is her path to enjoyment, why not?) It is this gap between object and object-cause that the subject has to confront when the prohibition falls away: is she ready to desire the obstacle directly as such?
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity
The properly philosophical dimension of the study of the post-traumatic subject resides in this recognition that what appears as the brutal destruction of the subject’s very (narrative) substantial identity is the moment of its birth. The post-traumatic autistic subject is ‘living proof’ that the subject cannot be identified (or does not fully overlap) with ‘stories it is telling itself about itself,’ with the narrative symbolic texture of its life: when we take all this away, something (or, rather, nothing, but a form of nothing) remains, and this something is the pure subject. We should thus also apply to the post-traumatic subject the Freudian notion that a violent intrusion of the real counts as trauma only insofar as a previous trauma resonates in it – in this case, the previous trauma is that of the birth of subjectivity itself: a subject emerges when a living individual is deprived of its substantial content, and this constitutive trauma is repeated in the present traumatic experience. This is what Lacan aims at with his claim that the Freudian subject is none other than the Cartesian cogito: the cogito is not an ‘abstraction’ from the reality of living, actual individuals with the wealth of their properties, emotions, abilities and relations; it is, on the contrary, this ‘wealth of personality’ which functions as Lacan’s imaginary ‘stuff of the I’; the cogito is, on the contrary, a very real ‘abstraction,’ an ‘abstraction’ which functions as a concrete subjective attitude. The post-traumatic subject, the subject reduced to a substance-less empty form of subjectivity, is the historical ‘realization’ of cogito – recall that, for Descartes, cogito is the zero-point of the overlapping of thinking and being at which the subject in a way neither ‘is’ (he is deprived of all positive substantial content) nor ‘thinks’ (his thinking is reduced to the empty tautology of thinking that it thinks).
Slavoj Zizek, Event : Journey Through a Philosophical Concept
How is this circle of changing the past possible without recourse to travel back in time? The solution was proposed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–1941): of course one cannot change the past reality/actuality, but what one can change is the virtual dimension of the past – when something radically New emerges, this New retroactively creates its own possibility, its own causes/ conditions. A potentiality can be inserted into (or withdrawn from) past reality. Falling in love changes the past: it is as if I always already loved you, our love was destined, the ‘answer of the real’. My present love causes the past which gave birth to it.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : Journey Through a Philosophical Concept
The properly philosophical dimension of the study of the post-traumatic subject resides in this recognition that what appears as the brutal destruction of the subject’s very (narrative) substantial identity is the moment of its birth. The post-traumatic autistic subject is ‘living proof’ that the subject cannot be identified (or does not fully overlap) with ‘stories it is telling itself about itself,’ with the narrative symbolic texture of its life: when we take all this away, something (or, rather, nothing, but a form of nothing) remains, and this something is the pure subject. We should thus also apply to the post-traumatic subject the Freudian notion that a violent intrusion of the real counts as trauma only insofar as a previous trauma resonates in it – in this case, the previous trauma is that of the birth of subjectivity itself: a subject emerges when a living individual is deprived of its substantial content, and this constitutive trauma is repeated in the present traumatic experience. This is what Lacan aims at with his claim that the Freudian subject is none other than the Cartesian cogito: the cogito is not an ‘abstraction’ from the reality of living, actual individuals with the wealth of their properties, emotions, abilities and relations; it is, on the contrary, this ‘wealth of personality’ which functions as Lacan’s imaginary ‘stuff of the I’; the cogito is, on the contrary, a very real ‘abstraction,’ an ‘abstraction’ which functions as a concrete subjective attitude. The post-traumatic subject, the subject reduced to a substance-less empty form of subjectivity, is the historical ‘realization’ of cogito – recall that, for Descartes, cogito is the zero-point of the overlapping of thinking and being at which the subject in a way neither ‘is’ (he is deprived of all positive substantial content) nor ‘thinks’ (his thinking is reduced to the empty tautology of thinking that it thinks).
Slavoj Zizek, Event : Journey Through a Philosophical Concept
There is no meta-language: no outside-position from which the agent can calculate how many ‘premature’ attempts are needed to get at the right moment. Why? Because this is a case of truth which arises out of misrecognition (la vérité surgit de la méprise, as Lacan put it), where the ‘premature’ attempts transform the very space/measure of temporality: the subject ‘jumps ahead’ and takes a risk in making a move before its conditions are fully met. The subject’s engagement in the symbolic order coils the linear flow of time in both directions: it involves precipitation as well as retroactivity (things retroactively become what they are; the identity of a thing only emerges when the thing is in delay with regard to itself) – in short, every act is by definition too early and, simultaneously, too late. One has to know to wait, not to lose one’s nerve: if one acts too fast, the act turns into a passage à l’acte, a violent forward-escape to avoid the deadlock. If one misses the moment and acts too late, the act loses its quality of an event, of a radical intervention as a consequence of which ‘nothing remains the way it was,’ and becomes just a local change within the order of being, part of the normal flow of things.
The problem is, of course, that an act always occurs simultaneously too fast (the conditions are never fully ripe, one has to succumb to the urgency to intervene, there is never enough time to wait, enough time for strategic calculations, the act has to anticipate its certainty and risk that it will retroactively establish its own conditions) and too late (the very urgency of the act signals that we come too late, that we always should have already acted; every act is a reaction to circumstances which arose because we were too late to act). In short, there is no right moment to act – if we wait for the right moment, the act is reduced to an occurrence in the order of being.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : Journey Through a Philosophical Concept
But can a love relationship be put on the same level as bringing together a kidney patient with a donor, or a job-seeker with a manager ready to hire? The problem is not the one of moral dignity, but of the immanent logic: when you fall in love, you don’t just know what you need/ want and look for the one who has it – the ‘miracle’ of love is that you learn what you need only when you find it.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : Journey Through a Philosophical Concept
In capitalism, where things have to change all the time to remain the same, the true Event would have been to transform the very principle of change. Such a notion of Event which cannot be reduced to simple change was recently developed by Alain Badiou: a contingency (contingent encounter or occurrence) which converts into necessity, i.e., it gives rise to a universal principle demanding fidelity and hard work for the new Order. An erotic encounter is the Event of love when it changes the lovers’ entire lives, organizing them around the construction of the shared life of a couple; in politics, a contingent upheaval (revolt) is an Event when it gives rise to a commitment of the collective subject to a new universal emancipatory project, and thereby sets in motion the patient work of restructuring society.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : Journey Through a Philosophical Concept
Only a lacking, vulnerable being is capable of love: the ultimate mystery of love, therefore, is that incompleteness is, in a way, higher than completion. On the one hand, only an imperfect, lacking being loves: we love because we do not know all. On the other hand, even if we were to know everything, love would, inexplicably, still be higher than completed knowledge. Perhaps the true achievement of Christianity is to elevate a loving (imperfect) Being to the place of God, that is, of ultimate perfection.That is the kernel of the Christian experience. In the previous pagan attitude, imperfect earthly phenomena can serve as signs of the unattainable divine perfection.
In Christianity, on the contrary, it is physical (or mental) perfection itself that is the sign of the imperfection (finitude, vulnerability, uncertainty) of you as the absolute person.Your physical beauty itself becomes a sign of this spiritual dimension—not the sign of your “higher” spiritual perfection, but the sign of you as a finite, vulnerable person. Only in this way do we really break out of idolatry. For this reason, the properly Christian relationship between sex and love is not the one between body and soul, but almost the opposite: in “pure” sex, the partner is reduced to a fantasy object, that is to say, pure sex is masturbation with a real partner who functions as a prop for our indulging in fantasies, while it is only through love that we can reach the Real (of the) Other.
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity
The impression that we do not have to pay the price is, of course, misleading here: in effect, the price we pay is desire itself—that is to say, in succumbing to this perverse call, we compromise our desire. We all know the feeling of tremendous relief when, after a long period of tension or abstention, we are finally allowed to “let go,” to indulge in hitherto forbidden pleasures—this relief, when one can finally “do what one wants,” is perhaps the very model (not of realizing, but) of compromising one’s desire.That is to say: for Lacan, the status of desire is inherently ethical: “not to compromise one’s desire” ultimately equals “do your duty.” And this is what the perverse version of Christianity entices us to do: betray your desire, compromise with regard to the essential, to what really matters, and you are welcome to have all the trivial pleasures you are dreaming about deep in your heart! Or, as they would put it today: renounce marriage, become a priest, and you can have all the little boys you want. . . . The fundamental structure here is not so much that of “Conditional Joy” (you can have “it”on condition of some “irrational” contingent exception/prohibition), but, rather, that of fake sacrifice, of pretending not to have “it,” to renounce “it,” in order to deceive the big Other, to conceal from it the fact that we do have it.
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity
It is only in this precise sense that the otherwise journalistic designation of our age as the “age of anxiety” is appropriate: what causes anxiety is the elevation of transgression into the norm,the lack of the prohibition that would sustain desire. This lack throws us into the suffocating proximity of the object-cause of desire: we lack the breathing space provided by the prohibition, since, even before we can assert our individuality through our resistance to the Norm, the Norm enjoins us in advance to resist,to violate,to go further and further.We should not confuse this Norm with regulation of our intersubjective contacts: perhaps there has been no period in the history of humankind, when interactions were so closely regulated; these regulations, however, no longer function as the symbolic prohibition—rather, they regulate modes of transgression themselves.
So when the ruling ideology enjoins us to enjoy sex, not to feel guilty about it, since we are not bound by any prohibitions whose violations should make us feel guilty, the price we pay for this absence of guilt is anxiety. It is in this precise sense that—as Lacan put it, following Freud—anxiety is the only emotion that does not deceive: all other emotions,from sorrow to love, are based on deceit. Again, back to Chesterton: when he writes that “Christianity is the only frame for pagan freedom,” this means that, precisely, this frame—the frame of prohibitions—is the only frame within which we can enjoy pagan pleasures: the feeling of guilt is a fake enabling us to give ourselves over to pleasures—when this frame falls away, anxiety arises.
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity
It is here that one should refer to the key distinction between the object of desire and its object-cause. What should the analyst do in the case of a promiscuous woman who has regular one-night stands, while complaining all the time how bad and miserable and guilty she feels about it? The thing not to do, of course, is to try to convince her that one-night stands are bad,the cause of her troubles, signs of some libidinal deadlock—in this way, one merely feeds her symptom, which is condensed in her (misleading) dissatisfaction with one-night stands. That is to say, it is obvious that what gives the woman true satisfaction is not promiscuity as such, but the very accompanying feeling of being miserable—that is the source of her “masochistic” enjoyment. The strategy should thus be, as a first step, not to convince her that her promiscuity is pathological, but, on the contrary, to convince her that there is nothing to feel bad or guilty about: if she really enjoys one-night stands, she should continue to have them without any negative feelings.
The trick is that, once she is confronted with one-night stands without what appears to be the obstacle preventing her from fully enjoying them, but is in reality the objet petit a, the feature that allows her to enjoy them,the feature through which she can only enjoy them, one-night stands will lose their attraction and become meaningless. (And if she still goes on with her one-night stands? Well, why not Psychoanalysis is not a moral catechism: if this is her path to enjoyment, why not?) It is this gap between object and object-cause that the subject has to confront when the prohibition falls away: is she ready to desire the obstacle directly as such?
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity
The impression that we do not have to pay the price is, of course, misleading here: in effect, the price we pay is desire itself—that is to say, in succumbing to this perverse call, we compromise our desire. We all know the feeling of tremendous relief when, after a long period of tension or abstention, we are finally allowed to “let go,” to indulge in hitherto forbidden pleasures—this relief, when one can finally “do what one wants,” is perhaps the very model (not of realizing, but) of compromising one’s desire.That is to say: for Lacan, the status of desire is inherently ethical: “not to compromise one’s desire” ultimately equals “do your duty.” And this is what the perverse version of Christianity entices us to do: betray your desire, compromise with regard to the essential, to what really matters, and you are welcome to have all the trivial pleasures you are dreaming about deep in your heart! Or, as they would put it today: renounce marriage, become a priest, and you can have all the little boys you want. . . . The fundamental structure here is not so much that of “Conditional Joy”(you can have “it”on condition of some “irrational” contingent exception/prohibition), but, rather, that of fake sacrifice, of pretending not to have “it,” to renounce “it,” in order to deceive the big Other, to conceal from it the fact that we do have it.
Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf : The Perverse Core of Christianity
The Lacanian position on the oriental notion of nirvana is therefore clear and unequivocal: ultimate choice we, desiring humans, are facing is not the choice between desire (for something within false reality) and renunciation (extinction) of desire, not desiring, immersion in the Void; there is a third option: the desire for Nothingness itself, for an object which is a stand-in for this Nothingness. The Lacanian position is not that Buddhism is ’too strong’, that it is only for those who are able effectively to extinguish their desire; while for us Western subjects, caught in the dialectic of desire, psychoanalysis is as far as we can go - it is that the ‘desire for Nothingness itself is the ‘vanishing mediator’, the third, more primordial option, which becomes invisible once we formulate the opposition as that between desire for something and not desiring. The existence of this third option is discernible in the difficulty a Buddhist position has in explaining the emergence of desire: how is it that the primordial Void was disturbed, and that desire emerged; that living beings got caught up in the wheel of karma, of attachment to false reality? The only solution to this deadlock is to posit a kind of preontological perturbation/inversion/disturbance within nirvana irseffthat is to say, prior to the split between nirvana and false appearance - so that the Absolute itself(the cosmic Force, or whatever it is called) gets radically perverted. The traces of this inversion are discernible even in pop-cultural New Age icons like Darth Vader from Star War.r: in the idea that the truly evil people are those who have gained access to the Force that enables us to reach the true realm beyond false material reality, but then perverted/misused this Force, employing it for bad, evil ends. What, however, if this fall into perversion is originaL the original monstrous cut/excess, and the opposition between nirvana and desire for false appearances is there to conceal this monstrosity?
Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute : Or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
The paradox of the “pathological narcissist” is, however, that for him, language does indeed function according to the theory of descriptions: the meaning of words is reduced to the positive features of the denoted object, above all those that concern his narcissistic interests. Let us exemplify this apropos of the eternally tedious feminine question: “Why do you love me?” In love proper, this question is, of course, unanswerable (which is why women ask it in the first place), i.e., the only appropriate answer is “Because there is something in your more than yourself, some indefinite X that attracts me, but that cannot be pinned down to any positive quality.” In other words, if we answer it with a catalogue of positive properties (“I love you because of the shape of your breasts, because of the way you smile”), this is at best a mocking imitation of love proper. The “pathological narcissist” is, on the other hand, somebody who is able to answer such a question by enumerating a definite list of properties: for him, the idea that love is a commitment transcending an attachment to a series of qualities that could gratify his wishes is simply beyond comprehension. And the way to hystericize the “pathological narcissist” is precisely to force upon him some symbolic mandate that cannot be grounded in its properties.
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry : An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (1991)
Pornography thus misses, reduces the point of the object-gaze in the other. This miss has precisely the form of a missed, failed encounter. That is to say, in a “normal.” non pornographic film, a love scene is always built around a certain insurmountable limit; “all cannot be shown.” At a certain point the image is blurred, the camera moves off, the scene is interrupted, we never directly see “that” (the penetration of sexual organs, etc.). In contrast to this limit of representability defining the “normal” love story or melodrama, pornography goes beyond, it “shows everything.” The paradox is, however, that by trespassing the limit, it always goes too far, i.e., it misses what remains concealed in a “normal,” nonpornographic love scene. To refer again to the phrase from Brecht’s Threepenny Opera: if you run too fast after happiness, you may overtake it and happiness may stay behind. If we proceed to hastily “to the point,” if we show “the thing itself,” we necessarily lose what we were after. The effect is extremely vulgar and depressing (as can be confirmed by anyone who has watched any hard-core movies). Pornography is thus just another variation on the paradox of Achilles and the tortoise that, according to Lacan, defines the relation of the subject to the object of his desire. Naturally, Achilles can easily outdistance the tortoise and leave it behind, but the point is that he cannot come up alongside it, he cannot rejoin it. The subject is always too slow or too quick, it can never keep pace with the object of its desire. The unattainable/forbidden object approached but never reached by the “normal” love story—the sexual act—exists only as concealed, indicated, “faked.” As soon as we “show it,” its charm is dispelled, we have “gone too far.” Instead of the sublime Thing, we are stuck with vulgar, groaning fornication.
Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry : An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture (1991)
This is where one should insist on reintroducing the Leninist opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom: in an act of actual freedom, one dares precisely to break this seductive power of symbolic efficacy. Therein resides the moment of truth of Lenin’s acerbic retort to his Menshevik critics: the truly free choice is a choice in which I do not merely choose between two or more options within a pre-given set of coordinates; rather I choose to change this set of coordinates itself. The catch of ’transition’ from Really Existing Socialism to capitalism was that the Eastern Europeans never had the chance to choose the ad quem of this transition—all of a sudden, they were (almost literally) ’thrown’ into a new situation in which they were presented with a new set of given choices (pure liberalism, nationalist conservatism…). What this means is that ‘actual freedom’, as the act of consciously changing this set, occurs only when, in the situation of a forced choice, one acts as if the choice is not forced and ‘chooses the impossible’. This is what Lenin’s obsessive tirades against ‘formal’ freedom are all about, and therein lies the ‘rational kernel’ that is worth saving today: when he insists that there is no ‘pure’ democracy, that we should always ask apropos of any freedom, whom does it server, what is its role in the class struggle, his point is precisely to maintain the possibility of a true radical choice. This is what the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom ultimately amounts to: the former refers to freedom of choice within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while the latter designates the site of an intervention that undermines these very coordinates. In short, Lenin’s aim is not to limit freedom of choice but to maintain the fundamental Choice—when he asks about the role of a freedom within the class struggle, what he is asking is precisely: ‘Does this freedom contribute to or constrain the fundamental revolutionary Choice?’
Slavoj Zizek, “Introduction: Remembering, Repeating and Working Through” in Lenin 2017
Here we are at the very nerve center of the liberal ideology: freedom of choice, grounded in the notion of the “psychological” subject endowed with propensities he or she strives to realize. This especially holds today, in the era of what sociologists like Ulrich Beck call “risk society,” when the ruling ideology endeavors to sell us the insecurity caused by the dismantling of the Welfare State as the opportunity for new freedoms: you have to change jobs every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment. Why not see it as the liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and realize hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard health insurance and retirement plan, so that you have to opt for additional coverage for which you have to pay. Why not perceive it as an additional opportunity to choose: either better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, the postmodern or “second modernity” ideologist will immediately accuse you of being unable to assume full freedom, of the “escape from freedom,” of the immature sticking to old stable forms … Even better, when this is inscribed into the ideology of the subject as the psychological individual pregnant with natural abilities and tendencies, then I as it were automatically interpret all these changes as the results of my personality, not as the result of me being thrown around by market forces.
Phenomena like these make it all the more necessary today to REASSERT the opposition of “formal” and “actual” freedom in a new, more precise, sense. What we need today, in the era of liberal hegemony, is a “Leninist” traité de la servitude libérale, a new version of la Boétie’s Traiti de la servitude volontaire that would fully justify the apparent oxymoron “liberal totalitarianism.” In experimental psychology, Jean-Léon Beauvois took the first step in this direction with his precise exploration of the paradoxes of conferring on the subject the freedom to choose. Repeated experiments established the following paradox: if, AFTER getting from two groups of volunteers the agreement to participate in an experiment, one informs them that the experiment will involve something unpleasant, against their ethics even, and if, at this point, one reminds the first group that they have the free choice to say no, and says nothing to the other group, in BOTH groups, the SAME (very high) percentage will agree to continue their participation in the experiment.
What this means is that conferring the formal freedom of choice does not make any difference: those given the freedom will do the same thing as those (implicitly) denied it. This, however, does not mean that the reminder/bestowal of the freedom of choice does not make any difference: those given the freedom to choose will not only tend to choose the same as those denied it; they will tend to “rationalize” their “free” decision to continue to participate in the experiment — unable to endure the so-called cognitive dissonance (their awareness that they FREELY acted against their interests, propensities, tastes or norms), they will tend to change their opinion about the act they were asked to accomplish.
Slavoj Zizek, “Leninist Freedom”" in On Belief (2001)
I cannot say that I believe in Christ because I was convinced by the reasons for belief. The same circular relation holds for love: I do not fall in love for precise reasons (her lips, her smile…) it is because I already love her that her lips, etc. attract me. This is why love, too,is evental. It is a manifestation of a circular structure in which the evental effect retroactively determines its causes or reasons.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : Journey Through a Philosophical Concept
Buddhism is concerned with solving the problem of suffering, so its first axiom is: we don’t want to suffer. (For a Freudian, this already is problematic and far from self-evident—not only on account of some obscure masochism, but on account of the deep satisfaction brought by a passionate attachment. I am ready to suffer for a political cause; when I am passionately in love, I am ready to submit myself to passion even if I know in advance that it will probably end in catastrophe and that I will suffer when the affair is over. But even at this point of misery, if I am asked, ‘Was it worth it? You are a ruin now!’ the answer is unconditional ‘Yes! Every inch of it was worth it! I am ready to go through it again!’) The source of suffering resides in the unquenchable desire of people for things which, even if they get them, will never satisfy them.
Slavoj Zizek, Event : Journey Through a Philosophical Concept
This is the gesture of subtraction at its purest, the reduction of all qualitative differences to a purely formal minimal difference which opens up the space for the New. Thereis a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—not about what we do not want, but about what we do want. What form of social organizations can replace the actually existing capitalism? What type of new leaders do we need? And what organs, including those of control and depression? The twentieth-century alternatives obviously did not work. While it is thrilling to enjoy the pleasures of “horizontal organization,” of protesting crowds with their egalitarian solidarity and free open-ended debates, these debates will have to coalesce not only around some new Master-Signifiers, but also concrete answers to the old Leninist question “What is to be done?” Reacting to the Paris protests of 1968, Lacan said: “What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one.” Although this diagnostic/prognostic should be rejected as a universal statement about every revolutionary upheaval, it contains a grain of truth: insofar as the protest remains at the level of a hysterical provocation of the Master, without a positive program for the new order to replace the old one, it effectively functions as a (disavowed, of course) call for a new Master.
Slavoj Zizek, Less than Nothing : Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
In classical logic, the negation of P excludes not only P itself, but any other possibility concerning the contents of the proposition P. In intuitionist logic, the negation of P excludes P itself, but not some other possibilities which are somewhere between P and non-P. In paraconsistent logic, the negation of P excludes that sort of space between P and non-P, but not P itself—P is not really suppressed by its negation (no wonder Badiou links this negation in which “P lies inside the negation of P” to Hegel’s dialectic). For example, in classical ethico-legal domain, someone is either guilty or innocent, with no zone in between; in the intuitionist space, we always have intermediate values, like “guilty with attenuating circumstances,: “innocent because, while certainly guilty, there is insufficient proof,” etc. In the paraconsistent space (not unfamiliar to certain theologies), one can be both at the same time, although there is no third option: my deep awareness of my guilt is the only proof I can have of my innocent, and so on.
[…]
The communist revolution is classical, a radical confrontation with no third option, either us or them: the poor worker who before the revolution appears as nothing in the political field, becomes the new hero of this field. In the intuitionist space of social-democratic reformism, the poor worker appears in the political field, but is in no way its new hero: the idea is to reach a compromise, to find a way, to maintain capitalism, but with more social responsibility, and so forth. In the third case of paraconsistent space, we get a sort of undecidability between event and non-event: something happens, but, from the point of view of the world, everything is identical, so we have event and non-event simultaneously—a false event, a simulacrum, as in the fascist “revolution” which denounces “plutocratic exploitation” and maintains capitalism. As Badiou concludes: “The lesson is that, when the world is intuitionistic, a true change must be classical, and a false change paraconsistent.”
Slavoj Zizek, Less than Nothing : Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
The millionaire’s position is in fact even more complex. That is to say, when a woman says to a man, “I don’t love you for your millions [or your power…] but for what you really are!” what does this amount to? The more she “means it sincerely” the more she is the victim of a kind of perspectival illusion, failing to notice how the very fact that (people know that ) I am a millionaire (or a man of power) affects people’s perception of what I am “in myself,” irrespective of this property of mine. As long as I remain rich, people perceive me as a strong, independent personality, whereas the moment I lose my millions, they all of a sudden see in me a dull weakling (or vice versa). In short, the paradox lies in the fact that only a woman who (knows that she) loves me for my millions is able to see me the way I truly am, since my wealth no longer distorts her perception.
Slavoj Zizek in one of the footnotes to Less than Nothing : Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
The sinthome should be opposed to the matheme: although they both belong to the enigmatic space “between nature and culture,” between senseless data and meaning—they are both pre-semantic, outside the domain of meaning, and yet nonetheless are signifiers and as such irreducible to the meaningless texture of positive data—“sinthome” is a name for the minimal formula which fixates/registers what Eric Santner called the “too-muchness of life.” A sinthome is a formula which condenses the excess of jouissance, and this dimension is clearly missing in the matheme, whose exemplary cases are mathematically formalized scientific statements—mathemes do not imply any libidinal investment, they are neutral, desubjectivized.
Slavoj Zizek, Less than Nothing : Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism
The Idea of communism, as elaborated by Badiou, remains a Kantian regulative idea lacking any mediation with historical reality. Badiou emphatically rejects any such mediation as a regression to an historicist evolutionism which betrays the purity of the Idea, reducing it to a positive order of Being (the Revolution conceived as a moment of the positive historical process). This Kantian mode of reference effectively allows us to characterize Badiou’s deployment of the “communist hypothesis” as a Kritik der reinen Kommunismus. As such, it invites us to repeat the passage from Kant to Hegel—to re-conceive the Idea of communism as an Idea in the Hegelian sense, that is, as an Idea which is in the process of its own actualization. The Idea that “makes itself what it is” is thus no longer a concept opposed to reality as its lifeless shadow, but one which gives reality and existence to itself. Recall Hegel’s infamous “idealist” formula according to which Spirit is its own result, the product of itself. Such statements usually provoke sarcastic “materialist” comments (“so it is not actual people who think and realize ideas, but Spirit itself, which, like Baron Munchhausen, pulls itself up by its own hair . . .”). But consider, for example, a religious Idea which catches the spirit of the masses and becomes a major historical force? In a way, is this not a case of an Idea actualizing itself, becoming a “product of itself”? Does it not, in a kind of closed loop, motivate people to fight for it and to realize it? What the notion of the Idea as a product of itself makes visible is thus not a process of idealist self-engendering, but the materialist fact that an Idea exists only in and through the activity of the individuals engaged with it and motivated by it. What we have here is emphatically not the kind of historicist/evolutionist position that Badiou rejects, but something much more radical: an insight into how historical reality itself is not a positive order, but a “not-all” which points towards its own future. It is this inclusion of the future as the gap in the present order that renders the latter “not- all,” ontologically incomplete, and thus explodes the self-enclosure of the historicist/evolutionary process. In short, it is this gap which enables us to distinguish historicity proper from historicism.
Slavoj Zizek, Why the Idea and Why Communism?
Why, then, the Idea of communism? For three reasons, which echo the Lacanian triad of the I-S-R: at the Imaginary level, because it is necessary to maintain continuity with the long tradition of radical millenarian and egalitarian rebellions; at the Symbolic level, because we need to determine the precise conditions under which, in each historical epoch, the space for communism may be opened up; finally, at the level of the Real, because we must assume the harshness of what Badiou calls the eternal communist invariants (egalitarian justice, voluntarism, terror, “trust in the people”). Such an Idea of communism is clearly opposed to socialism, which is precisely not an Idea, but a vague communitarian notion applicable to all kinds of organic social bonds, from spiritualized ideas of solidarity (“we are all part of the same body”) right up to fascist corporatism. The Really Existing Socialist states were precisely that: positively existing states, whereas communism is in its very notion anti-statist.
Slavoj Zizek, Why the Idea and Why Communism?
This brings us back to perversion: for Lacan, a pervert is not defined by the content of what he is doing (his weird sexual practices, etc.). Perversion, at its most fundamental, resides in the formal structure of how the subject relates to truth and speech. The pervert claims direct access to some figure of the big Other (from God or history to the desire of his partner), so that, dispelling all the ambiguity of language, he is able to act directly as the instrument of the big Other’s will. In this sense, both Osama bin Laden and President Bush, although politically opponents, share a pervert structure: they both act upon the presupposition that their acts are directly ordered and guided by the divine will.
Slavoj Zizek, “The Fundamental Perversion…” in lacanian ink, Vol.27. Ed. Josefina Ayerza. 2006
We find the same reduction of belief to knowledge in today’s Islam where hundreds of books by scientists abound which “demonstrate” how knowledge of Koran: the divine prohibition of incest is confirmed by recent genetic knowledge about the defective children born of incestuous copulation, etc. (Some even go so fat as to claim that what Koran offers as an article of faith to be accepted because of its divine origin is not finally demonstrated as scientific truth, thereby reducing Koran itself to an inferior mythic version of what acquired its appropriate formulation in today’s science.) The same goes also for Buddhism, where many scientists vary the motif of the “Tao of modern physics,” i.e., of how the contemporary scientific vision of reality as substanceless flux of oscillating events finally confirmed the ancient Buddhist ontology. One is compelled to draw the paradoxical conclusion: in the opposition between traditional secular humanists and religious fundamentalists who stand for belief, while fundamentalists stand for knowledge. This is what we can learn from Lacan with regard to the ongoing rise of religious fundamentalism: its true danger does not reside in the fact that it poses a threat to secular scientific knowledge, but in the fact that it poses a threat to authentic belief itself.
Slavoj Zizek, “The Fundamental Perversion…” in lacanian ink, Vol.27. Ed. Josefina Ayerza. 2006
Some of us remember the infamous old Communist tirades against merely “formal” bourgeois freedom—absurd as they were, there is a pinch of truth in the distinction between “formal” and “actual” freedom: “formal” freedom is that freedom to choose within the coordinates of the existing power relations, while “actual” freedom grows when we can change the very coordinates of our choices. A manager of a company in crisis has the “freedom” to fire workers A or B, etc.,but not the freedom to change the situation which has imposed this choice on him. The moment we approach the healthcare debate in this way, the “freedom to choose” appears in a different light. True, a large part of the population will be effectively delivered of the dubious “freedom” to find their way through the intricate network of financial and other decisions. Being able to take basic healthcare for granted—to count on it like one counts on the water or electricity supply without worrying about choosing a water or electricity company—they will simply gain more time and energy to dedicate their lives to other things. An imposed additional choice can affect the background set which forms the condition-base of freedom and can thus diminish our actual freedom of choice. Freedom and regulations are not opposites: we are effectively able to make free choices only because a thick background of regulations sustains this freedom, because we can rely on the fact that there is some kind of rule of law to appeal to if we are attacked or robbed, because we can expect with reasonable certainty a minimum of civility when we interact with others, etc. And also because we can rely on guaranteed healthcare and thus do not have to worry all the time about illness…The lesson learned is thus that freedom of choice operates only when a complex network of legal, educational, ethical, economic, and other conditions form an invisible thick background to the exercise of our freedom. This is why, as a counter-position to the ideology of choice, countries like Norway should be held up as models: although all the main agents respect a basic agreement and ambitious social projects are acted in a spirit of solidarity, productivity and dynamism remain at extraordinarily high levels, flatly denying the common wisdom that such a society ought to be stagnating.
Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times
The extreme ideological manipulation of the idea of “freedom of choice” can be linked to the way popular anti-consumerist ideology has recently been dealing with the topic of poverty, effectively presenting it as a matter of personal choice. There are plenty of books and articles in lifestyle journals advising us on how to “step out of consumerism” and adopt a way of life free of the compulsion to possess the latest products. The ideological bias here is obvious: by presenting poverty as a (free) choice, it psychologizes an objective social predicament. Former Slovene President Janez Drnovšek, a cold technocrat turned foolish self-taught New Ager, used to answer ordinary people’s letters in a popular weekly magazine. In one letter, an old lady complained that due to her tiny pension she was not able to eat meat or to travel; the president’s answer was that she should be glad about her situation—simple food without meat is healthier, and, instead of indulging in tourist travel, she could embark on a spiritually much more satisfying inner journey, the exploration of her own true Self.
Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times
If we consider our predicament from the perspective of ’68, the analysis should be guided by the prospect of a radical alternative to parliamentary-democratic capitalism: are we constrained to withdraw and act from different “sites of resistance,” or can we still imagine a more radical political intervention? This is the true legacy of ’68, at the core of which was a rejection of the liberal-capitalist system, a no to the totality of it, best encapsulated in the formula Soyons réalistes, demandons l’impossible! The true utopia is the belief that the existing global system can reproduce itself indefinitely; the only way to be truly “realistic” is to think what, within the coordinates of this system, cannot but appear as impossible. How are we to prepare for this radical change, to lay the foundations for it? The least we can do is to look for traces of the new communist collective in already existing social or even artistic movements. What is therefore needed today is a refined search for “signs coming from the future,” for indications of this new radical questioning of the system.
Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times
Badiou has reflected on the fact that we live in a social space which is progressively experienced as “worldless.” Within such a space, “meaningless” violence is the only form protest can take. Even Nazi anti-Semitism, however ghastly it was, opened up a world: it described its critical situation by positing an enemy in the form of “the Jewish conspiracy”; it named a goal and the means of achieving it. Nazism disclosed reality in a way which allowed its subjects to acquire a global cognitive map, and which included a space for their meaningful engagement. Capitalism, however, is the first socio-economic order which detotalizes meaning: there is no global “capitalist worldview,” no “capitalist civilization” proper: the fundamental lesson of globalization is precisely that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilizations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East. Capitalism’s global dimension can only be formulated at the level of truth-without-meaning, as the “real” of the global market mechanism. This is why the famous Porto Alegre motto “Another world is possible!” is too simplistic; it fails to register that right now we already live less and less within what can be called a world, so that the task is no longer just to replace the old one with a new one, but . . . what? The first indications are given in art.
Slavoj Zizek, Living in the End Times
Habit is conceived by Hegel as unexpectedly close to the logic of what Derrida called pharmakon, the ambiguous supplement which is simultaneously a force of death and a force of life. Habit is, on the one hand, the dulling of life, its mechanization (Hegel characterizes it as a “mechanism of self-feeling”): [3] when something turns into a habit, it means that its vitality is lost, we just mechanically repeat it without being aware of it. Habit thus appears to be the very opposite of freedom: freedom means creative choice, inventing something new, in short, precisely breaking with (old) habits. Think about language, whose “habitual” aspect is best emphasized by standard ritualized greetings: “Hello, how are you? Nice to see you!” – we don’t really mean it when say it, there is no living intention in it, it is just a “habit”…
On the other hand, Hegel emphasizes again and again that there is no freedom without habit: habit provides the background and foundation for every exercise of freedom. Let us, again, take language: in order for us to exercise the freedom in using language, we have to get fully accustomed to it, habituated (in)to it, i.e., we have to learn to practice it, to apply its rules “blindly,” mechanically, as a habit: only when a subject externalizes what he learns into mechanized habits, he is “open to be otherwise occupied and engaged.” Not only language, a much more complex set of spiritual and bodily activities have to be turned into a habit in order for a human subject to be able to exert his “higher” functions of creative thinking and working – all the operations we are performing all the time mindlessly, walking, eating, holding things, etc.etc., have to be learned and turned into a mindless habit.
Slavoj Zizek, Madness and Habit in German Idealism : Discipline between the Two Freedoms (I)
And the same goes for my emotions: their display is not purely natural or spontaneous, we learn to cry or laugh at appropriate moments (recall how, for the Japanese, laughter functions in a different way than for us in the West: a smile can also be a sign of embarrassment and shame). The external mechanization of emotions from the ancient Tibetan praying wheel which prays for me to today’s “canned laughter” where the TV set laughs for me, turning my emotional display quite literally into a mechanic display of the machine) is thus based in the fact that emotional displays, including the most “sincere” ones, are already in themselves “mechanized.” - However, the highest level (and, already, self-sublation) of a habit is language as the medium of thought – in it, the couple of possession and withdrawal is brought to extreme. The point is not only that, in order to “fluently” speak a language, we have to master its rules mechanically, without thinking about it; much more radically, the co-dependence of insight and blindness determines the very act of understanding: when I hear a word, not only do I immediately abstract from its sound and “see through it” to its meaning (recall the weird experience of becoming aware of the non-transparent vocal stuff of a word – it appears as intrusive and obscene…), but I have to do it if I am to experience meaning.
If, for Hegel, man is fundamentally a being of habits; if habits actualize itself when they are adopted as automatic reactions which occur without subject’s conscious participation; and, finally, if we locate the core of subjectivity in its ability to perform intentional acts, to realize conscious goals; then, paradoxically, the human subject is at its most fundamental a “disappearing subject”.
Slavoj Zizek, Madness and Habit in German Idealism : Discipline between the Two Freedoms (I)
This is the crucial feature: possibility itself has to actualize itself, to become a fact, or, the form needs to become part of its own content (or, to add a further variation on the same motif, the frame itself has to become part of the enframed content). The subject is the frame/form/horizon of his world AND part of the enframed content (of the reality he observes), and the problem is that he cannot see/locate himself within his own frame: since all there is is already within the frame, the frame as such is invisible – or, as the early Wittgenstein put it: “Our life has no end in just the way in which our visual field has no limits."(Tractatus 6.4311) Like the field of vision, life is finite, and, for that very reason, we cannot ever see its limit – in this precise sense, “eternal life belongs to those who live in the present” (ibid.): precisely because we are WITHIN our finitude, we cannot step out of it and perceive its limitation. The possibility to locate oneself within one’s reality has to remain a possibility – however, and therein resides the crucial point, this possibility itself has to actualize itself qua possibility, to be active, to exert influence, qua possibility.
There is a link to Kant here, to the old enigma of what, exactly, Kant had in mind with his notion of “transcendental apperception,” of self-consciousness accompanying every act of my consciousness (when I am conscious of something, I am thereby always also conscious of the fact that I am conscious of this)? Is it not an obvious fact that this is empirically not true, that I am not always reflexively aware of my awareness itself? The way interpreters try to resolve this deadlock is by way of claiming that every conscious act of mine can be potentially rendered self-conscious: if I want, I always can turn my attention to what I am doing. This, however, is not strong enough: the transcendental apperception cannot be an act that never effectively happens, that just could have happened at any point. The solution of this dilemma is precisely the notion of virtuality in the strict Deleuzian sense, as the actuality of the possible, as a paradoxical entity the very possibility of which already produces/has actual effects. One should oppose this oppose Deleuze’s notion of the Virtual to the all-pervasive topic of virtual reality: what matters to Deleuze is not virtual reality, but the reality of the virtual (which, in Lacanian terms, is the Real). Virtual Reality in itself is a rather miserable idea: that of imitating reality, of reproducing its experience in an artificial medium. The reality of the Virtual, on the other hand, stands for the reality of the Virtual as such, for its real effects and consequences. Let us take an attractor in mathematics: all positive lines or points in its sphere of attraction only approach it in an endless fashion, never reaching its form - the existence of this form is purely virtual, being nothing more than the shape towards which lines and points tend. However, precisely as such, the virtual is the Real of this field: the immovable focal point around which all elements circulate. Is not this Virtual ultimately the Symbolic as such? Let us take symbolic authority: in order to function as an effective authority, it has to remain not-fully-actualized, an eternal threat.
This, then, is the status of Self: its self-awareness is as it were the actuality of its own possibility.
Slavoj Zizek, Madness and Habit in German Idealism : Discipline between the Two Freedoms (I)