Zizek and Us

One of my favorite books in political theory is Althusser's Machiavelli and Us. Althusser reads Machiavelli (with and through Gramsci) as particularly difficult insofar as Machiavelli presents himself as scientific and objective, yet somehow unsystematizable. Althusser writes:

...the central point where everything is tied up endlessly escapes detection. It is impossible to provide a systematic, non-contradictory and complete exposition of a theory presented strangely, in the form of fragments of a whole that has been deemed 'unfinished' (Croce), but instead seems absent--and fragments arranged in a strangely deformed space, constructed in such a fashion that it is not possible to encompass or hold them together in perfect unity.

To my mind, Althusser's point applies well to Zizek.

On the one hand, given that Zizek's upcoming book is titled The Parallax View, one might want to read this deformation (this ruptured, impossible, or forever incomplete unity) in terms of the displacement that arises when one observes an object from different positions. This reading accords nicely with Althusser's reading of Machiavelli and Gramsci insofar as Althusser emphasizes the way that the modern prince cannot be a fixed point, cannot be localized, but must be recast as mobile and in history.

On the other hand, we could also, as a start, draw from another of Althusser's points, namely, that Machiavelli is attempting to think in the conjuncture, to think in an uncertain place of contradiction wherein the meaning of any and all specific elements not only changes but can be thought in terms of relations of force and hence changed. Accordingly, as Althusser writes:

let us say that the present space of an analysis of the political conjuncture, in its very texture, comprising opposed and intermingled forces, makes sense only if it arranges or contains a certain place, a certain empty place: empty in order to be filled, empty so as to have inserted in it the action of the individual or group who will come and take a stand there, so as to rally, to constitute the forces capable of accomplishing the political task assigned by history--empty for the future.

What does this have to do with Zizek? My thesis is that Zizek should be read as thinking in the conjuncture. And, more specifically, this means that his theoretical work needs to be read in terms of this process of emptying. In his (and Hegel's) language, it means that we take seriously the work of the negative.

Such a thesis allows us to understand his key themes in terms of this emptying out in order to produce a political space that can be filled. Thus, the decline of symbolic efficiency or fact that the big Other doesn't exist reminds us that anything is possible. Similarly, Zizek's emphasis on subjective destitution, correlative to the non-existence of the big Other, eliminates any stake and/or stain that might attach a subject to existing relations or to a future already filled. At the same time, Zizek's emphasis on responsibility, on a willingness to go to the limit, indicates the political element of the action of taking a stand in an empty place, a radical and risky move insofar as it is not guaranteed in advance.

(Incidentally, this is precisely the location of John Holbo's misreading of Zizek on Brecht. Holbo thinks that Zizek replaces one ethical imperative with another. Zizek's point is that a revolutionary imperative is not ethical in the sense of being part of a general framework or worldview. Insofar as a revolution brings something new into being, radically changing the contours of what counts as right or wrong, one cannot equate the political situation of 'it is not permitted for us not to kill' as the same as an ethical duty which can deliver enjoyment (getting off on killing, say). Zizek's discussion of the Stalinist show trials also make clear that Holbo is wrong in equating killing for the sake of the revolution with utilitarian rationalism. The demand of the Party had nothing to do with reason--to say so is to posit a truth outside the Party, which itself is already to be an enemy of the Party. I should add that Holbo is also confused about the idea of a vanishing mediator, a concept Zizek takes from Jameson to refer to historical configurations that function in a specific way and then either wither away or have a change in function; the key examples are Calvinists and new social movements in the former Eastern Europe.)

That Zizek provides no guarantees does not mean that his "emptying out" is an emptying into nothing, an attempt to adopt some kind of pure or divine stance. His emptying out, then, is quite specific: an emptying out of enjoyment, the obscene enjoyment that continues to stain the law (as its hidden foundation, practical realization, or simply out of the perverse kick we get when doing our duty lets us really screw somebody else).

I say this because unlike, say, Agamben, Zizek does not abandon the law. He does not suggest or appeal to relations between people that could somehow be beyond the law. Instead, they are always within the law, necessarily so as long as we remain subjects in language, connected to others. What psychoanalysis lets him do, in other words, is refrain from idealizing relations to others in terms of animal bliss and to recognize that the universal dimension of law is what enables us to grasp the problems and deficiencies inhering in law.

To this extent, we should take Zizek's Kantianism absolutely seriously: what sort of a law can we imagine ourselves as bringing into being? As long as we imagine ourselves as concrete others, this law will be terrifying, potentially violent, a harsh enforcer at odds with our particularities. If we posit ourselves instead as symbolic others, the others of the norm, of toleration, neutrality, and fairness, our law will turn into its opposite--intolerant, partisan, cruel. Instead, we have to work through law as Real, as ourselves undignified, lacking, uncertain, incomplete, and given. We need law, but law is not everything (the Real is the symbolic in the form of non-all). With law understood as incomplete, as non-all, we have spaces for enjoyment outside the law. This is how I understand Zizek's emphasis on Christianity and the work of love: this love doesn't mean we don't need law; it means that law by itself is not enough.

In sum, it seems to me that Althusser's Machiavelli gives us insight into Zizek as Zizek takes the position of the lacanian analyst (objet petit a, excremental remainder). The point is to clear away a space, to create an opening that can be occupied (never filled). And, the conditions of this occupation require not simply an Act, but responsibility, and collectivity thought through law and love. That Zizek doesn't tell us what to think is like both Machiavelli as he tries to think something new in the conjuncture and like the analyst who of course can't tell us--the very possibility that he could is a fantasy that he could deliver enjoyment.

Comments

[Jodi]

Peter--I don't think Zizek is antinomian; rather he adopts a view of law as non-all.

Nate--subjective destitution is getting rid of the core of one's self, shooting oneself in the foot, accepting the lack that is the subject, saying, ok well I am nothing.

[jholbo]

Jodi reads me as implying:

"any critique necessarily rests on a prior notion of something like justice, on some kind of an ideal."

She objects: "[But] Lacanian psychonalysis emphatically rejects the idea. Why? Perhaps the simplest way to put it is that an unhealthy or repressive society cannot produce healthy psyches."

But isn't producing healthy psyches 'some kind of ideal'? Healthy/unhealthy is a normative opposition, indeed an ethical one. (What is the good life? Well, a healthy one.) And so we are back to cryptonormativity No?

[Jodi]

Heathly psyches in the example is not an ideal that is motivating anything; it's one that has been eschewed as a possibility.

[jholbo]

Yes, but healthy/unhealthy is still like good/bad: a normative category. Whether you think the good is attainable or not is irrelevant. (And no, don't invoke 'ought implies can' to get out of this.) As to whether it is motivating anything: if it is not motivating ANYTHING why did you (Zizek) bring it up?

[jholbo]

Actually, here's a better way to put it.

Jodi writes:

"Lastly, as this gesture to a Marxist and post-Marxist tradition suggests, there are political commitments at stake: a planet or enviroment not overcome by ecological devastation, the possibility of a more just distribution of resources, and even the possibility for a different way of living and understanding freedom wherein freedom is not reduced to choice (so, something more Hegelian). On this last point, rests, I think, perhaps Zizek's most sustained critique of freedom today: all the achievements of new social movements, the struggles for rights, etc have brought with them new forms or versions of domination. Why is this and how might it be changed?"

Assuming this really does get at what Zizek is getting at, which I do believe, explain to me how NONE of it involves anything like a notion of justice, or anything like an ideal. You can't, obviously. Explaining the sense of the phrase 'more just distribution' without dragging in any notion of justice, let alone a (perhaps inchoate) theory of distributive justice, is impossible. So we might as well just be frank about our normative commitments rather than playing up-the-sleeve cryptonormative tricks. Such is the crux of the biscuit of my critique of Zizek.

[Jodi]

As I said, there are political commitments in the Marxist tradition. There is a critical impulse against domination, exploitation, and inequality; yet, in psychoanalysis there is an awareness of how easily it is for domination, exploitation, and inequality to accompany arrangements and intentions that strive for something like justice.

Zizek is hardly cryptonormative in the way that the Habermasians find Foucault to be--unlike Foucault's happy positivism, Zizek urges a partisan position.

[jholbo]

But 'how easy it is for domination, exploitation, and inequality to accompany arrangements and intentions that strive for something like justice' is also liberalism 101. This is the other half of my critique, of course. For rhetorical purposes, Z seems to need a liberal debating opponent who will be much more naive than any he is actually likely to find.

Also, the fact that Zizek is hiding different normative commitments up his sleeve than Foucault does not strike me as something in his favor. (And obviously accusing him of cryptonormativity was never meant to be an accusation that he is Foucault, exactly.) You may say that sometimes Zizek is quite clear about his partisanship, and this makes him different than Foucault. But since partisanship is normative ethics, when Z turns around and starts talking about 'suspending ethics' he is just explicitly, flatly contradicting himself, which perhaps Foucault never does. So maybe the proper conclusion is that at least Foucault has the polite decency to be discrete about his commitments. Because I don't see that Zizek's contradictions are deep or interestingly paradoxical. Zizek has just evolved a rhetorical device for making ethical claims without defending them. Eh, lots of people do that every day, albeit less elaborately.

Pardon me for belaboring a point but it does seem to me THE point concerning everything Zizek has to say about politics. So if Zizek is worth talking about at all, this point is worth belaboring.

[Adam Kotsko]

If one wants to get a picture of where Badiou's, and thus Zizek's, idea of Paul is coming from, I recommend Pasolini's screenplay for a movie about Paul -- it's not available in English to my knowledge, but there is a French translation that I didn't have much trouble finding (Amazon.ca is a good place to get French stuff), and probably into other European languages one might know, aside from its original Italian version.

Then we can get together and actually shoot the movie.

[Jodi]

Zizek's rhetorical opponents are primarily radical democrats and leftists that he finds to be unwilling to take responsibility for their critical positions, where responsibility means being willing to take power, to consider institutional programs such as a party, to acknowledge the work of bureaucracy, to accept the role of a state, etc.

Liberalism isn't that much in the picture because of the suppositions of capitalism that have accompanied liberalism historically. Zizek just doesn't need a liberal opponent because those with whom he is arguing have already dispensed with liberalism. After all, he is working out of a Marxist, post-Marxist tradition.

Similarly, his discussions of rights (where he echoes Ranciere) have little to do with liberalism, here because of the way that liberal rights have relied on notions of citizenship that are both of continued political importance (capital circulates even as people cannot) even as much of the intellectual debate is around ideas of cosmopolitanism. What both Ranciere and Zizek bring to the fore is the way that the rights theorized by liberalism are functioning to enable military intervention, to reduce their bearers to victimized life, to sustain a privileged culture that wants to avoid being made to feel uncomfortable by any other (or by the remainders of the costs at which their comfort is purchased).

Again, the point about the collapse of the ethical and the political is that are moments when the two collapse into each--Antigone, Sethe. The collapse is not simply a trumping of one view over another--if so, the agent would simply appeal to that norm and some kind of we could recognize that appeal. In the act, the possibility of a new framing, a fundamentally different way of thinking becomes possible. Furthermore, the act does not rest on its grounding in a norm--a norm doesn't get the actor off the hook for doing something done in its name.

Must critique proceed from a fully elaborated ethical position or can it proceed from within the tensions, violences, exclusions, and exploitations of a given horizon? A strong tradition in thought takes the latter view. Even more to Zizek's point, can't critique proceed from the remnant or remainder of a given universality, of that which sustains that universality? Proceeding from this excess is what Zizek's project shares with Badiou's.

[jholbo]

Well, I've more or less said my piece on the cryptonormativism point so, although I'm not in the least convinced, I'll drop it, or at least shift ground.

Jodi writes: "being willing to take power, to consider institutional programs such as a party, to acknowledge the work of bureaucracy, to accept the role of a state, etc."

I know that Zizek says this sort of thing, but I honestly don't see how he is entitled. This is the Keyser Soze problem again. It seems to me that Zizek's proposal are so gestural - and often, as in this case, just buffo literary/filmic/pop culture gestures - that he can hardly claim to have taken seriously the consequences of assuming bureaucratic/institutional power. Jodi writes, upstream of "his infatuation with St. Paul and Lenin as institutionalizers who really had no idea what they were building or making as they acted in keeping with fidelity to what they experienced as the event of truth." But I guess this doesn't sound very serious. 'I have no idea what I'm doing, but that's OK because I will do a sort of imitatio of two other guys who didn't know what they were doing.' This isn't being serious, it's making an elaborate yet lazy excuse for not trying to figure out what makes sense to do, near as I can figure.

Obviously we aren't going to bridge this gap between my incredulous dismissal and your feeling that it is a brilliant, courageous stance.

I do think you are probably right that I assume too easily that Zizek is actually interested in talking to people who favor some form of liberal democracy at all. Yes, he has probably written me off as a debating partner before p. 1. That is an important point. But it seems to me that not even to argue against liberalism - just to dismiss it - is sort of unserious. But then I would say that, wouldn't I?

[Jodi]

I don't think it is unserious to work in a tradition, so I don't see why not engaging liberalism directly is unserious. Zizek takes up democracy, elections, formal rights, the role of law, risk society theory, changes in the notion of property all important themes of contemporary political theory. He works quite diligently on Kant. I would think that if one wanted to spend the time on it, one could reconstruct an engagement with liberalism. He does say some quite specific things about Hobbes: for example, he points to the way that the sovereign is the direct corollary of the egoistic subject. So, a weird thing about Hobbes is that participants in the original contract can't just agree--they require an enforcer, someone who can make them obey; they require, then, a kind of mediator, not unlike the superego who mediates between the subject as author of the law and the subject who is subject to law.

When I read Lenin's and St. Paul's letters I get a sense of extraordinary seriousness and commitment. I get a sense of people who are living their commitments (practicing utopia) and doing this without a net, without something that tells them exactly what to do. Zizek is calling attention to this fact, He never claims to be Lenin or Paul, to be able to do what they do. But he lets us know that this sort of extraordinary agency is possible. Again, it's like he's trying to open up a space for thinking, for thinking about politics and change.

[Matt]

Relatedly: Adam R links to a recent piece by Z. on the show "24" published here.