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Zizek's Symptom
“The texture of Knowledge is, by definition, always total—that is, for Knowledge of Being, there is no excess; 
excess and lack of a situation are visible only from the standpoint of the Event, not from the standpoint of the knowing servants of the State. From within this standpoint, of course, one sees ‘problems,’ but they are automatically reduced to ‘local,’ marginal difficulties, to contingent errors—what Truth does is to reveal that (what Knowledge misperceives as) marginal malfunctionings and points of failure are a structural necessity. Crucial for the Event is thus the elevation of an empirical obstacle into a transcendental limitation. With regard to the ancien régime, what the Truth-Event reveals is how injustices are not marginal malfunctionings but pertain to the very structure of the system which is in its essence, as such, ‘corrupt.’ Such an entity—which, misperceived by the system as a local ‘abnormality,’ effectively condenses the global ‘abnormality’ of the system as such, in its entirety—is what, in the Freudo-Marxist tradition, is called the symptom…” The Ticklish Subject(Pg. 131)
Recently, Jodi has had a series of provocative posts about Zizek on a wide array of issues. So it got me to look back at the Ticklish Subject, particularly the discussion about Badiou's notion of the Truth Event. I am only beginning to look at Badiou's work so for now I am merely examining Zizek's appropriation of the idea.
Zizek goes through various examples provided by Badiou (Christ's death and resurrection, The French and October Revolutions) as well as some of his own (The end of the Death Penalty in France, the legalization of divorce in Italy). And we can see the various examples on a continuum - from the more radical to the less traumatic. But how do we relate these insights into Zizek's more "popular" writings, paticularly the most recent The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape? Is Zizek suggesting that Katrina and its affermath might be the beginings of a Truth Event? Are we witnessing a struggle between "Globalization as an Unfinished Project" and something more radical, like a revelation of Capital's Other?
For an interesting analysis and discussion of "The Subject Supposed to Loot and Rape," see Lenin's Tomb.
By Alain | October 21, 2005 in Badiou, Zizek | Permalink
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Alain, interesting. The way I would put them together is to say that 'tearing down the true wall' would be an Event. I actually don't see much 'struggle' in the In These Times piece, more Zizek's articulation of a series of occurrences so that their ideological contours (his new racism) are clear. Unless I missed it, Z doesn't seem to treat any of his series as symptoms.
Of course, he could--and that would be a more powerful analysis, in my view, particularly more powerful than the device of the 'subject supposed to loot and rape,' which I don't find convincing. To me, the formulation loses its analytic purchase when it can be endlessly extended.
Posted by: Jodi | Oct 21, 2005 11:59:52 AM
Jodi, thanks. I agree with your assessment of the piece, and I think it generally applies to his popular writings in general. But this is something I am trying to think about and this notion of an event, and a certain fidelity, seems to be useful. But I am not sure how far it can be taken in looking at contemporary circumstances.
Posted by: Alain | Oct 21, 2005 12:23:36 PM
Funny that Žižek compares Badiou's Event to the symptom. Because in his article Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism (taken from, or incorporated into (or both) The Sublime Object of Ideology, I think) he said the Event was the objet a. And Badiou (in the Theoretical Writings, chapter 8, Forcing and the Unnameable) has yet another psychoanalytical equivalent - according to him the Event is the primal scene...
Psychoanalysis in post-marxism: The case of Alain Badiou
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-psychoanalysis-in-post-marxism.html
Posted by: David | Oct 22, 2005 7:53:27 AM
No, Katrina was not an Event, no matter which psychoanalytic concept is supposed to be parallel to it.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 22, 2005 11:05:19 AM
The Sierra Club is closer to authentic progressive politics than is this cheap "psychoanalytic" folderol. The Sierra Club takes on corporate America, the oil biz, transportation nightmares; and it's also predicated on preserving quality of life and the natural environment. It fosters health and some sort of workable, not "theoretical," solutions. The Sierra Club, with flaws like any real political cadre, also does the dirty work--research, biology, gathering data--which the PoMo "left" refuses to acknowledge.
Posted by: 10,000' | Oct 22, 2005 12:22:41 PM
10,000 -- I have read comments like yours about the political ineffectuality of academic leftism, and even made a few myself, but the basic premise here is one I would have to challenge: that one achieves political success by predetermining an optimal course and then pursuing it without any hedging. I just don't think that this is true -- in fact, it is what leads activists to disaster. There is no reason that the liberals in an incredibly rich population -- and no population has ever been as rich as that in the U.S. and Europe right now -- shouldn't devote their progressive energies to a whole basket of pursuits. If this were the 30s, we were mired in Depression, and fascism was on the horizon, I'd say: go for optimal activism. Do the sit down strike in the Ford Plant. But, in fact, you can attend a Sierra Club meeting, you can chain oneself to a redwood, and you can write blog entries in a coffee shop afterwards (and impress the table over from you) if you want to. There is something comic about that, but -- living in the comic mode is not one of the great burdens of life. Why else would we try to accumulate wealth in the first place? Like the young Karl Marx said, socialism should allow you to fish in the morning and do literary criticism in the afternoon. He was only dead wrong about it being socialism that would do this -- rather, it was the prolonged threat of socialism on the capitalist system that gives us premonitions of that utopia.
Posted by: roger | Oct 22, 2005 2:18:57 PM
No, Katrina was not an event in Badiou's sense, but as usual Žižek is taking the concept and running away with it and who knows where he will take it; for example, I'm certain that Badiou would never count "the end of the Death Penalty in France, the legalization of divorce in Italy" as true Events, because they take place completely within the State. (I recently read a little book with discussions between Badiou and Žižek, and it ends with Ž. remarking that when he meets B. he always feels he is "among comrades - as Ribbentrop said to Molotov in 1939.")
Posted by: David | Oct 22, 2005 3:23:46 PM
The interview with Zizek in the Journal of Philosophy and Scripture a couple issues ago was probably the most revealing thing I've ever read on Zizek's relationship with Badiou. I never felt like Zizek was really swallowing Badiou whole by any means -- kind of taking some of his concepts and tinkering with them, deflating them almost.
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 22, 2005 4:06:55 PM
http://www.philosophyandscripture.org/Issue1-2/Slavoj_Zizek/slavoj_zizek.html
Posted by: Adam Kotsko | Oct 22, 2005 4:08:13 PM
Mr. Roger:
I agree that monomania is a typical problem with progressives and leftists, but more dangerous I think is this sort of postmodernist type of idolatry, which seems nearer to like a fashion-craze than to scholarship. It was Sartre in the 70s and 80s, then Derrida and PoMo; now Zizek. The assumption appears to be that Hume or Nietzsche or the sciences or analytical philosophy have been "done", and now with some guru like Zizek or Badiou the newest development is here.
Social problems are, I believe, far more tangible and empirical than theoretical. The problem is not finding the right psychoanalytic or neo-marxist theory: it's about fairly obvious things like raising taxes on the wealthy, controlling corp. America, and improving secular institutions before collapse ensues
--failing that, reforming democracy, alternatives to popular vote, education, etc. I don't see the need for the endless theoretical constructs, or, shall I say, there may be such a need, but PoMo is not prepared to offer them: real political reform (and political writing) might require working with scientific research (as Dennett does), with economists, with cognitivists. PoMo theory doesn't exist in a vacuum; there's little need for Hegels du jour who feel no need to confirm their theories or work without reference to facts and data. I mean if it's just for their literary careers or whatever, I can understand that (tho object to it), but the PoMo crowd seems to think they have a Weltanschauung to meet all the needs of a decaying neo-capitalist socoety and that is hardly the case.
Posted by: Jason | Oct 22, 2005 6:03:51 PM
This passage rather strikes me as a bit of sleight of hand. The symptom is just the distraction as cover for the ideological production happening under the tablecloth while the symptom is being put through its paces in the spotlight. The symptom doesn't matter. You can like the metaphor or not; it doesn't entail any consequences. What Zizek is doing here is actually focussed on the thing, the abstraction, that is posited - vaguely and obliquely only - as the subject generating the symptom. What he is doing is manufacturing an illusion of solidity and coherence and a certain fraudulent image for an abstraction which misrepresents human affairs by granting it the capacity to generate a symptom. It would be impossible, laughable, to try to +argue+ - to propose and then go through the steps of demonstration - that this socio-historical process he is treating as a metaphor for subjectivity was at all like a psyche or capable of generating a symptom. So how to persuade you this atrociously bad analogy, this deformation of the historical process in question, is actually useful and rational without exposing that proposition to your scrutiny, without attracting your attention? How do make sure you don't ask "wait, whose symptom exactly is this? How many people are in this room?" Instead the eye is directed elsewhere, while that proposition is simply assumed. It appears by Fiat. The abstraction's possession of something resembling human subjectivity is insinuated, and accepted, as a given, even though its silly, because the lights and the smoke are happening over on the other end of the stage, and our own desire to understand prose, to have prose be intelligible, makes us supply this analogy. Because we want to get the joke, we have to produce a false idea in our heads, and we do, and the production of that false idea is what the passage accomplishes. It is not that which Zizek purports to establish and demonstrate that is what counts here; it is what he slips into your ear when you aren't looking - a "system" which has one set of perceptive faculties feeding one single "intellect," an abstraction that has usurped human subjectivity - that's the significance of the routine.
Then you can reject this reading of the symptom if you like and still be in step with Zizek, so long as you retain this model of conflicting and human-produced social relations as a fairy possessing a psyche or something very like it you hardly felt being planted in your head.
I know I'm a party pooper but I had to say.
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | Oct 22, 2005 7:26:39 PM
I think in general the most powerful ideological production is that which works this way, which relies on you the reader to produce assumptions in order to relieve the anxiety we all feel when faced with nonsense. Zizek never says: Socio-economic relations are like a human psyche. He would be bombarded with rotting tomatoes. Everyone would cackle. Instead, his prose forces you to assume exactly this in order to avoid the agony of a confrontation with unintelligibility, which we all are trained to repair instinctively.
It's how comedy works. You know the "in my pajamas" in "I shot an elephant in my pajamas" is actually different from the one in "how he got in my pajamas I'll never know." But to laugh, you conflate them. Your intellect relieves your anxiety about this nonsense you would be otherwise confronted with. And to understand Zizek, to laugh with him, also requires conflating things which are not related or similar, except not in a self-consciously humorous way, but a more dangerous one involving the manufacture of erroneous "common sense," of genuinely forgetting the difference between being "in my pajamas" and shooting an elephant which is in my pajamas.
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | Oct 22, 2005 7:43:08 PM
Notice there is actually visible the shadow of the implied audience for the spectacle of history which is standing in for history:
"what Truth does is to reveal that"
"what the Truth-Event reveals is how"
Reveal to whom? Not the protagonists of the history in question, who experience events in question not as mass ideological earthquakes or these dramas Zizek portrays but as victories in material struggles resulting from shifts in the forces of antagonistic interests, etc.. As in other words history not theatre. So the subject to whom the revealing is occuring, this implied but discreetly unnamed presence, can be identified as spectators, which in turn implies the spectacle; they are those watching the pantomime of history, belatedly. Their presence and position demands an explanation, if this is serious, but gets none. They're just planted there, on the sidelines, you assume them and are not meant to question where they came from and what acquaintance they might have, if any, with the subject producing the symptom or the protagonists of the Event.
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | Oct 22, 2005 8:49:27 PM
I'm not very familiar with Zizek's writings, and would appreciate someone perhaps elucidating what he is getting at with the two texts linked to above by Alain and David. I have to admit that my first reading left me kind of amazed, and I'm not referring to the fabled thaumezein. If he is trying to be popular, polemical, or provocative (which after all is not merely Zizek's prob, for every writer -- even everyone who tries to "communicate" -- struggles with this) that can hardly account for what amounts to stunningly summary analogies. Alphonse refers to a particularly problematic one.
Perhaps Zizek, per the text David links to, would say that I am referring to a "complexity" he seems to dismiss. And yet, I cannot help but "inhabit" plus d'une langue, and cannot help but hear/sense in the word "simple" and "complex" a pli, a fold which I would rather try and (un)fold rather than efface -- and doesn't Zizek seem inclined to the latter? I dare say, it is not just me, there are others whose plus d'une langue requires (un)folding, a listening to, which I thought psychoanalysis was supposedly attentive to.
Sorry for a long and probably unclear comment. But, thanks Alphonse for clarifying a problem I had with the Zizek analogies. Since he also referrs to Jews, permit me to link to a text which is somewhat less fast and loose with psychoanlaysis and analogies
http://www.psychomedia.it/jep/number17/labarte-nancy.htm
Posted by: Amie | Oct 22, 2005 10:14:29 PM
Alphonse, you can poop our party anytime! And I apologize to those who took the time to engage in discussion in my absence.
It seems that the discussion has largely picked up on the post by Jodi so I do not have much to add.
But, as usual, Alphonse has raised several serious questions as to the usefulness of Zizek's form of analysis. I wish to focus on one issue- that of the spectator and the spectacle of history as theatre. Surely events (with a big or small "e") are viewed differently depending upon one's position - either as actor, spectator, or any combination. I see Zizek's point as being very close to one that Arendt makes - that there are fleeting moments in history when something like "Freedom" is realized - they are experienced briefly, rupturing the very fabric of time, and disappear leaving only traces for those who come after. Those of us who look to the past, at these moments, are spectators attempting to redeem these lost pearls, to seek insight that can be brought to bare on contemporary events. Of course this is looking at history in term of rupture and displacement, something that many do not find useful or even empirically accurate. But it seems to me this is the terrain for a larger debate.
Whether Zizek is looking at it this way is uncertain but it appears not all that different. Even the superficial discussions in the media brought up the racial make up and economic condition of those "left behind" in New Orleans - the question that I think Zizek correctly raises is whether this group of people, (living, breathing real life people), is systematically excluded (as I believe they are) or merely part of the never ending "incomplete project" of American democracy? Clearly Katrina was not an event on the level of the French Revolution, but the point is that moments like Katrina can reveal something essential about the United States - something that many non-academics, and non-post modernists, can recognize.
But of course this tells us nothing about what is to be done.
Posted by: Alain | Oct 24, 2005 3:12:09 PM
Alain, I like very much your comparison with Arendt. I think it works quite well. As an aside, there was a fairly long period in academic political theory when Arendt wasn't taken very seriously. She wasn't writing like the liberals, wasn't systematic like the Germans, and wasn't trendy like the French. A few scholars (George Kateb was one), dealt with her work properly, but it was later, in the eighties, that there became an Arendt boom and she got the respect and consideration she deserved. I say this because I wonder if the same could occur with Zizek, that is, that he might be more appreciated later. One might recall here that Eichmann in Jerusalem began as a long piece for The New Yorker (I think this is the right magazine).
Posted by: Jodi | Oct 24, 2005 5:56:43 PM
Thanks Alain...for the reply and for your hospitality!
What is to be done?
"As little as possible." - Jake, in Chinatown, by Robert Towne
There's a very visual joke I loved as a kid - this poacher has his dead doe slung over one shoulder and his gun on the other and he's walking to his truck when the RCMP guy rides up and says "Hey, buddy, what's that on your shoulder?"
(joke teller with innocent face looks left) "That's my gun."
"No, no, the other shoulder."
Joke teller looks right, is shocked, screams, jumps, cries out "ich!"
This is Zizek's truth event; the moment when we scream and pretend we just learned what we've always known; the moment which establishes our innocence.
It is in the service of establishing the numbskill innocent state prior to the "revealing" spectacle that the spectacle is interpreted as revelatory.
The spectacle of Katrina revealed nothing people didn't already know, indeed nothing on the knowledge of which we didn't all daily act to our advantage, while pretending perhaps not to know. But it challenged the discourse-production apparatus to manage it. Positioning it as a "truth event" is one way of helping to manage its starkness. Because if it is such an event;, that means yesterday, before the hurricane, we were innocent. That's all the system needs to confirm. "Now, we know!" (yesterday we were innocent), is a posture the discourse-production system can maintain in perpetuity. Yesterday's innocence, its perpetual renewal and loss and renewal, is the central gear of the operation.
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | Oct 24, 2005 7:02:44 PM
Zizek doesn't position Katrina as a truth event or an event at all. He agrees that 'everyone was guilty' before the hurricane.
Posted by: Jodi | Oct 24, 2005 7:54:29 PM
Oh agonies. I was really proud of that - took me half an hour! - and I thought it was a pretty perfectly Zizekian answer to the question in Alain's post. Notice:
step 1) Movie Reference
step 2) Old Joke
step 3)Analogy implied
step 4) Paradox.
Plus tick: '"Now we know!" (yesterday we were innocent).'
And it's true, in a way, and the sequence logical if you grant me my shell game.
Ah well.
;^(
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | Oct 25, 2005 6:08:53 AM
Alphonse, I absolutely love your formula regarding Zizek - I can imagine Zizek asking a crowded lecture hall "how did the elephant get into my pajamas? Badiou will never know!" There is a great deal of "truth" in your outline on how he formulates arguments. I think that is part of what troubles so many people as they read him - there is something formulaic (and as Jodi points out theatrical) in his performance.
But in the case of Katrina, he is definitely not saying we were innocent and now, voila, we are guilty. Perhaps the simplest way to look at it is that Zizek is suggesting moments like Katrina reveal certain "unkown knowns" as Philosophe Rumsfeld would put it. These are truths and assumptions that we do not know that we know, they are denied or disavowed, but yet are always already present for those willing to see them.
And I concede that this may sound like hokey Heideggerian babble but at least it makes sense of what Zizek is suggesting.
Posted by: Alain | Oct 25, 2005 9:57:19 AM
Jodi, thank you for the comments. I believe you are correct regarding the New Yorker. Its interesting you bring up Arendt's experience as a "journalist" because I have often thought it would be very productive if philosophers or political theorists were involved in analyzing and covering current events. What comes to mind is that the news hour on PBS will have historians on during Presidential elections and perhaps major events (like Clinton's impeachment). They really add great historical background to what is happening but I think a philosopher or political theorist brings another point of view and depth that would be very insightful.
Regarding the background of Arendt's reception, I appreciate the background. Coming of age in philosophy, Arendt was always a respected but background figure until about the same period you mention. Perhaps you are right regarding Zizek.
Posted by: Alain | Oct 25, 2005 10:14:41 AM
I rather thought he emphasized the prior innocence, not for the first time, in positing, again, "the belief" - the implication is near universal adherence, esp. including policy makers and Fukuyama himself - that globalization would lead to prosperity rather than to dispossession, poverty and catastrophe, and in implying an audience still so innocent it needs to be corrected on the question of globalization (,no, he says, the problem isn't that globalization is unfinished. to whom is this addressed? A bumpkin who believed and still believes in what nobody ever believed really. A phantom bumpkin standing next to you as you read; the rest of the audience.)
Of course this is not moral innocence, has no bearing on the responsibility , etc etc, in psychoanalytic terms the belief is neither here nor there and innocence is not a useful category. But it's the only innocence - good faith, political innocence and legal innocence - needed for the apology to grind on undisturbed.
I also think he does credit Katrina with a revelatory aspect while constructing it as the spectacle consumed by "we" who "fantasize" an other who is excluded here with a remarkably cavalier gesture since this other is actually the US television audience; the revelatory aspect is making the invisible wall visible to a "we" who didn't see it before presumed to be a kind of large "we", to have a monopoly on consumption of "the Katrina show", when of course the protagonists of the history from which the show is derived have always been aware of the wall; Z.'s point needs to other and exclude them as much as the Katrina show requires this operation.
The invisible wall is made by the Katrina show to become visible in a place where it isn't usually - within the imperial center.
Then he seems to become confused about his own argument at the end, because its not clear how persuading people not to flee "their own world" applies to the objects of our fantasy he's just identified, and in fact he seemed just a moment before to be making the point that "their own world" doesn't really exist in space, is not geographical, the territorial pens are a belated diversion and reaction, etc etc..
Probably goes without saying in general I thought it was a good piece, making an important point, though marred by that reintroduction of the assumed other world in the conclusion and the habitual sloppiness regarding the implied subjects of sentences, especially that perniciously vague, presumptuous and protean "we." A lot is concealed by it, above all the central, private control of the construction of the fantasy of the subject who loots and rapes. A lot of technique went into the manufacture of it, against a strong public response of identification with people trapped in New Orleans. Z. implies a spontaneous group fantasy; it really was a triumph of the propaganda apparatus working with stunning efficiency despite a kind of low level revolt of personnel in journalism.
Posted by: alphonsevanworden | Oct 25, 2005 10:29:22 AM
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