finitely demanding - zizek in the lrb

Really like this piece that everyone is linking to from Zizek in the LRB, except I don't really understand the last two paragraphs. Specifically, the relationship between the last two paragraphs:

It is striking that the course on which Hugo Chávez has embarked since 2006 is the exact opposite of the one chosen by the postmodern Left: far from resisting state power, he grabbed it (first by an attempted coup, then democratically), ruthlessly using the Venezuelan state apparatuses to promote his goals. Furthermore, he is militarising the barrios, and organising the training of armed units there. And, the ultimate scare: now that he is feeling the economic effects of capital’s ‘resistance’ to his rule (temporary shortages of some goods in the state-subsidised supermarkets), he has announced plans to consolidate the 24 parties that support him into a single party. Even some of his allies are sceptical about this move: will it come at the expense of the popular movements that have given the Venezuelan revolution its élan? However, this choice, though risky, should be fully endorsed: the task is to make the new party function not as a typical state socialist (or Peronist) party, but as a vehicle for the mobilisation of new forms of politics (like the grass roots slum committees). What should we say to someone like Chávez? ‘No, do not grab state power, just withdraw, leave the state and the current situation in place’? Chávez is often dismissed as a clown – but wouldn’t such a withdrawal just reduce him to a version of Subcomandante Marcos, whom many Mexican leftists now refer to as ‘Subcomediante Marcos’? Today, it is the great capitalists – Bill Gates, corporate polluters, fox hunters – who ‘resist’ the state.

The lesson here is that the truly subversive thing is not to insist on ‘infinite’ demands we know those in power cannot fulfil. Since they know that we know it, such an ‘infinitely demanding’ attitude presents no problem for those in power: ‘So wonderful that, with your critical demands, you remind us what kind of world we would all like to live in. Unfortunately, we live in the real world, where we have to make do with what is possible.’ The thing to do is, on the contrary, to bombard those in power with strategically well-selected, precise, finite demands, which can’t be met with the same excuse.

That last line doesn't seem to me to be in sync with the previous paragraph and its praise for Chavez's seizing and refitting of state power. Chavez doesn't seem to me to be issuing "demands," precise, finite, vague, or infinite. There is, I think, a huge gap between the two paragraphs, and the gap re instantiates the very problem of left posture (or, the problem of the postural left) that Zizek so artfully describes at the opening of the piece. The gap is the gap between the "he" of the first paragraph above and the "we" of the second. It is clear that Zizek wants us to think and act more pragmatically and less through the lens of utopia. But the big question - the only question - persists across this inconclusive finale: how are we to do that?

Zizek on psychoanalysis

At the risk of adding in a non-symposium related post, and in posting here what I would usually post at I Cite, I thought it worth introducing some of Zizek's remarks on psychoanalysis from Parallax View. (I'm rereading the book because I have to write a couple of reviews of it; I find it more interesting and compelling this time, perhaps now that I have more time to go through the details.) At any rate, Zizek argues that the focus of psychoanalysis is "the Social, the field of social practices and socially held beliefs." He points out, moreover, that this field

is not simply on a different level from individual experience, but something to which the individual himself has to relate, which the individual himself has to experience as an order which is minimally 'reified,' externalized.

This is important, I think, because it explains how psychoanalysis is not simply some kind of account of individual psyches, or individualized perceptions and patterns of thought, but an account of the the Social--of society in all its ruptures, tensions, ideologies, laws, desires, fantasies, and enjoyments--and how this Social level is inscribed within individuals. As Zizek writes,

this objective order of the social Substance exists only insofar as individuals treat it as such, relate to it as such.

In a way, for the version of lacanian theory that Zizek continues to develop (and not for the clinic), the individual is interesting only as a vehicle or host for larger social tensions, struggles, and formations. Psychoanalytic theory enables him to consider ideology, ethics, open secrets, and the like because these exist only insofar as they are materialized in the practices of subjects.

The Führerprinzip

Let not propositions and "ideas" be the rules of your Being.  The Fuhrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law.  Learn to know ever more deeply: from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility.  Heil Hitler!

Martin Heidegger, 1933

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Schmitt and Mao

Spike Lee’s Inside Man is about a bank robbery, and one of the many twists in the film is that the chairman of the bank being robbed, Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer) derived his initial wealth from collaboration with the Nazis during the war. These tainted beginnings are ones which apparently continue to haunt him throughout his life—leading him, on the one hand, to devote himself to philanthropy and humanitarianism in an attempt to assuage his guilt and, on the other hand, to keep the physical evidence of his wartime complicity locked away in a secret safe deposit box in the main branch of the bank. The contents of that safe deposit box, in turn, become a crucial fulcrum point around which revolve questions of the legitimacy of each of the principle players in the drama—including not only bank chairman Case and the head robber (Clive Owen), but also the principle detective (Denzel Washington) assigned to negotiate with the bank robbers, as well as the mysterious power broker (Jodie Foster) hired by Case to try to protect his interests.

The central question posed by Spike Lee’s film, therefore, is an ethical one—in effect, the film asks whether there are situations in which the ethics of robbing a bank might supercede those of founding and running the bank in the first place. In framing in the film in this way, Lee (or script-writer Russell Gewirtz) may have been inspired by Brecht’s famous rhetorical question in The Three-Penny Opera: “What is the robbery of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?”

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Superego ego and the other

What follows is the sort of speculative, uncertain post I more typically place at I Cite. Yet, because I haven't posted anything for awhile, I decided to go ahead and introduce these questions, with their uncertainties and hesitations, here.

Under what circumstances, if any, is the call or demand of the other experienced as superego? Might consideration of these circumstances help account for the intransigence of hatreds of those deemed racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual others under contemporary conditions of global communicative capitalism?

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Zizek on Levinas

Over at I Cite I've posted a a preliminary sketch of my reading of Zizek's critique of Levinas. The post draws from Zizek's essay, "Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence," that appears in the book The Neighbor.

As I read him, Zizek's critique of Levinas has 3+1 elements, that is, three criticisms and a counter. The criticisms focus on: the big Other of the Symbolic order, the implicit privileging that results from the asymmetry of the call of the Other; and the Musselman. The counter involves Zizek's view that others are an ethically indifferent multitude.

Put in most general terms, the disagreements might be thought in terms of the ethics of the other. Zizek rejects this view, as he must with his basic assumptions of the subject as lack and of the symbolic other has lacking, incomplete. Any fundamental emphasis on the call of the other would involve filling in/covering over/denying the lack in the subject and hence eliminate the very space necessary for freedom. Additionally, we might say that unlike Deleuze (and Agamben?) Zizek does not equate ethics and ontology and unlike Levinas Zizek does not think of the ethical as pre-ontological/transcendental. Rather, for Zizek, ethics emerges in and as the gap within immanence, as the split or that cuts through our relations or interactions with all sorts of differentiated others. This split might be thought of as a no to these relations, as a calling into question their givenness, as a withdrawal from their everydayness.

The Kettle Logic of Islam

Much discussion has already taken place (here and here among others) regarding Zizek's recent Op-Ed piece in the NY Times.  And of course, as everyone suspected, the op ed is actually a cut and paste from a longer piece entitled The Antinomies of Tolerant Reason. What I think is striking is that it is one of few times Zizek succinctly (and somewhat persuasively) analyzes a current situation - in this case the violent Muslim response to the Danish cartoons.  What I found particularly convincing is his re-appropriation of the Freudian kettle logic, this time for the purpose of deconstructing Islamists denials of the holocaust:

1) [The] Holocaust did not happen. (2) It did happen, but the Jews deserved it. (3) The Jews did not deserve it, but they themselves lost the right to complain by doing to Palestinians what the Nazis did to them.

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What's missing?

The oddest element of The Parallax View is what's missing, namely, the film. What's up with that? Zizek talks ad nauseum about tons of films, but not this one. Why?

The obvious, boring answer is that his use of the term is drawn from Karatani and has nothing to do with the film. Well, that might work in your grad seminar, but that's not enough for LS. There has to be something more.

Could it be that the film is not very good? That is rarely enough for Zizek. His bread and butter is Soviet era melodramas, "Logan's Run," all the Alien and Matrix films.

Could it be that the film uses parallax primarily to designate the name of the shadowy big other, the bad guys, The Parallax Corporation? Zizek is moving ever further away from discussions of the Symbolic and toward the Real, so returning to that well-worked theme wouldn't take him very far.

But, it seems to me that parallax in Zizek's sense is present in the film in the gap between explanations that account for the immediacy of an event and explanations that account for the totality of forces behind them; or, perhaps, better, in the way that investigating a crime or matter shifts imperceptibly into becoming part of the very crime or matter. Beatty's character moves from being a reporter to being part of the situation, to being involved, hence suggesting the presence of the observer within the frame (our good old anamorphic stain from the early days, filled out better as the gaze, then the shift from desire to drive, really, the strings here are endless...).

So, why doesn't he talk about the movie?

Bartleby in power

At the end of The Parallax View, Zizek presents Bartleby's "I prefer not to" as the key figure of a new politics, a politics that moves past "the politics of 'resistance' or 'protestation,' which parasitizes upon what it negates, to a politics which opens up a new space outside the hegemonic position and its negation."

What is involved in this position?

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Solidarity, justice, and the Third

(Cross-posted at I Cite).

As with Habermas, one might see Zizek's discussion of justice and solidarity as two sides of the same coin. But, rather than reconciled within a communicative universality, Zizek's two sides are those of the law and the revolutionary collective, the impersonal, abstract law that must suspend imagination and focus on principle, on the one side, and the revolutionary violence and hatred in the service of the work of love, that is, in the service of revolutionary justice, on the other. Each side involves an abstraction, a subjective destitution, a resolve to escape the 'vicious cycle of understanding.'

How, then, do we understand solidarity?

Solidarity is the one virtue specific to the political. We don't use solidarity to describe relations between friends, family members, congregants in a church, or soldiers in an army. It is not a relation of consumer to consumed, capital to labor, professor to student. It is not even properly understood as a relation between governors and the governed. Rather, solidarity is a category of the political understood in Schmitt's terms as rooted in the distinction between friend and enemy. The relation between political friends is that of solidarity.

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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.

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Did Somebody Say Pop Culture?

As is well-known, Zizek delights in obscenities, in references to toilets, pubic hair, sexual acts, in dirty jokes and examples from popular culture. Nearly every commentator on his work emphasizes his combinations of high and low culture, of philosophical engagements with the German Enlightenment combined with observations on cartoons, Coke, the Gap, and Kinder-Eier. For some readers, this engagement with popular culture marks Zizek as necessarily unserious or not worth taking seriously.

Other readers of his work criticize less this engagement with popular culture than Zizek's own self-popularization. He seems not to take himself seriously, so why should we? So, he has all sorts of popular pieces in the London Review of Books and In These Times, not to mention a feature length documentary film all about him. The moves in the popular writing seem both too simple and too hard; too hard if to defend them requires references to twenty other books; too easy in their quick reductions and simple equations. Shouldn't serious philosophers do better? If they can't make the argument in a short space, then wouldn't seriousness require them not to make it at all?

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Otherness

In Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? (a question the answer to which seems to be yes, in fact, Zizek does in first few books), Zizek links together Habermas and Derrida. They both "presuppose an ethical demand or norm that precedes and sustains every concrete political intervention which is never able fully to live up to it". More specifically, "each articulates what the other has to presuppose and disavow to sustain his position." Derridean (and Levinasian) otherness is irrational without norms. That is, so long as it is unconstrained by norms or customs, the absoluteness of the Call of the Other becomes an irrational demand. Conversely, Habermasian normativity reduces the Otherness of the Other: the norms and suppositions of the communicative action constitutively exclude those who reject or fail to recognize them. In sum, each resists Otherness.

I think this is right as a reading of Habermas and Derrida. But, what sort of relation to Otherness is possible? Zizek's answer of course involves the Act: in the act I am the absolute Other, object. But, the Act is necessarily a disruptive internvention, a radical change. It's a relation to Otherness that completely, traumatically changes who I was and what we will be and become.

What seems clear, then, is that the relation to Otherness is not ongoing. In the aftermath of the Act, a new world or reality is installed. And, where is Otherness here?

If this line of inquiry has merit, then it might well be that Zizekian Otherness isn't exactly otherness: it functions more like negativity. If Otherness is conceived as negativity, are we in yet another Western, racist logic?

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)

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Not quite a universal exception

Adam Kotsko ruined my weekend when he sent me a link to the introduction to The Universal Exception, a new collection of Zizek's popular writings and opinion pieces. The introduction, by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, is called "Slavoj Zizek's Third Way." The authors' contend that Zizek 'is absolutely in agreement with the Third Way and its desire to institute progressive social programs in the face of conservative opposition." I think the authors badly misread Zizek. In addition to ignoring and distorting specific elements of Zizek's thought, they rely, in their presentation of his ideas, on an untenable form/content distinction. I take up these points in turn.

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Unknown Knowns

"In February 2002, U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld engaged in a bit of amateur philosophizing about the relationship between the known and the unknown: "There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns-the ones we don't know we don't know." For Rumsfeld, these "unknown unknowns" represent the greatest threats facing the United States. But Rumsfeld forgot to add the crucial fourth term: the unknown knowns, things we don't know that we know-which is precisely the Freudian unconscious, the "knowledge which doesn't know itself," as the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan used to say. In many ways, these unknown knowns, the disavowed beliefs and suppositions we are not even aware of adhering to, may pose an even greater threat." Zizek, Iraq's False Promises

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Lenin Shot at Finland Station

Zizek has an interesting review of the latest "what if?" compilation: historians and theorists imagining different possible worlds in the event that certain things might have happened differently.  Noting that this seems to be a conservative revisionist trend, Zizek has this almost "messianic" thought:

"The ‘what if?’ dimension goes to the core of the Marxist revolutionary project. In his ironic comments on the French Revolution, Marx opposed revolutionary enthusiasm and the sobering ‘morning after’: the actual outcome of the sublime revolutionary explosion which promised liberté, égalité, fraternité is the miserable utilitarian/egotistical universe of market calculation. (This gap was even wider in the case of the October Revolution.) Marx’s point, however, is not the commonsensical one, that the vulgar reality of commerce turns out to be the ‘truth of the theatre of revolutionary enthusiasm’ – what all the fuss was about. In the revolutionary explosion, another utopian dimension shines through, that of universal emancipation, which is in fact the ‘excess’ betrayed by the market reality that takes over on the morning after. This excess is not simply abolished or dismissed as irrelevant, but is, as it were, transposed into the virtual state, as a dream waiting to be realised."

Also see Bat's great analysis of this review that compares Kripke's "possible worlds" to Lennin's "counterfactuals." 

Imagining Capital as Real (part I)

A couple of months ago I started working on a paper on the fantasy of neoliberalism. So, of course I turned to Alphonse for insight. Below, some of my initial reflections and Alphonse's insights. A longer, but still quite rough version of the paper is here:  Download enjoying_neoliberalism.doc .

Zizek argues that Capital is Real in several senses: it is the ‘positive condition of hegemonic struggle’ (Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, 319), it ‘sets a limit to resignification,’ and it determines “the structure of the material social processes themselves’ (Ticklish Subject 276).  But, to assert that Capital is Real is to embrace neoliberal ideology, to accept its premises without a struggle, without inquiry into how neoliberal faith in the market has come to produce a sense of its own inevitability. What is necessary, then, is an account of the neoliberal imaginary allied with the Real.

One might want to claim that Zizek’s elaboration of the Real in terms of an imaginary Real, a symbolic Real, and a real Real and his specification of capital as a symbolic Real (one that operates in terms of basic formulae or persists as an underlying structure) contributes to thinking about capitalism insofar as it points to a logic determining and distorting, that is, forming, the basic matrix of contemporary socio-political life. I disagree.  The specification of capital as formulae invests economics with a scientific status, with the ability to formulate laws or truths about the world that tell us how the world functions. Such an investment occludes and naturalizes the roles of governments, both as national states and as international organizations, in creating property rights, establishing corporations, producing a functioning tax system, and sustaining and militarily defending the very infrastructure necessary for business.

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Necessary Fictions?

From here (via PTDR):

Since ancient times, writers such as Desperate Housewives creator Marc Cherry have satirised hypocrisy, snobbery and pretension but they have never succeeded in eradicating these things, nor have they removed shame, guilt and derision from our emotional vocabulary. Instead they provide a kind of psychic safety valve for our own seemingly innate need for acceptance and respect.

According to the social theorist Slavo Zizek, being part of a civilised society necessarily involves deceiving others about your true self, or at least paying lip service to some higher ideal of human behaviour. The veneer of civilisation is just that, he argues, a convenient cover for our baser natures: "I'm sorry, but hypocrisy is the basis of civilisation. Rituals and appearances do matter.

If you drop the appearances and go to the thing itself, it's sometimes pretty horrible."

I'm no f&cking Buddhist, says Bjork & Zizek

Link: Revenge of Global Finance, by Slavoj Zizek.

I like this article from Zizek. Watching the stupid film I turned after Yoda's 'let go of everything' speech to someone or rather, and said to a friend: "fucking Buddhist". I like the "fucking" here, for it in itself announces a passionate dislike - itself an attachment, and one I refuse to let go of despite seeing my amigos one by one succumbing to the true Dark side. In this very attachment I announce my desire for the Other, my desire to refuse this capitalist supplement of meditating after a hard day's work. Instead I have a Guinness and blog (pardon the self-referentiality at this exact moment).

But I'm a copycat here: Bjork said it first, no doubt because many confused her as such.
"I’m no fucking buddhist, but this is enlightenment" (from "Alarm Call").

Zizek's `most interesting' point, I think, is that the reason the Revenge of the Sith seemed so bland, so narratively inferior, is because Anakin's transformation into Darth Vader was not, as it should have been, because he became Evil precisely because of his zealousness to battle Evil, but simply because he was weak-willed. Boring, especially if Lucas really wanted to make a political point... (though I'd say Bush's handlers are Evil from the get-go, not that they are perverted in their very quest for `rooting out' Evil - or if so, they were perverted a long, long time ago...). Anyway, this explains why it lacked "the proper tragic grandeur... Anakin should have become a monster out of his very excessive attachment with seeing Evil everywhere and fighting it".

ADDENDUM (for those not familiar with Zizek's understanding of Christianity, i.e., for those who aren't aware that he is, in fact, an atheist):

Part of the logic in the background of this article is that to be an atheist (as Zizek is), one must pass through the Christian experience.

Christianity is the only religion where God dies. When Christ dies on the Cross, God dies too. God only remains, then, through the faith of Christians (in the Holy Spirit, the community of believers). Obviously, then, Christians are likely to waver in their faith. This can lead to extreme violence towards others in the desperate attempt to `shore up' one's wavering faith.

It can also lead to atheism. We can only be atheist because of Christianity. If we just reject the Christian legacy tout court, we are only presupposing a dumb pagan or Buddhist God from which we cannot find a path to atheism.

There is, then, nothing more regressive than denying `our' Christian legacy.

(Of course, if you get this confused with the neocon agenda, I shall have to bonk you over the head.)

Public? Yes, please!

What is a public?  Jodi Dean lucidly suggests that since calls for the 'public' are voiced, well, in a pre-existing public, such calls are mostly political interventions for a certain kind of public, i.e., one more amenable to one's own orientation.  We might say, then, that these calls for a public are disengenuous, not actually concerned with achieving a true public.  (One can obviously place in this context Republican calls for a less `liberal biased' PBS.)

What, then, is a true public?  Is it the pre-existing public that allows for various factions to fight within it for their particular definition of a public?  The set that exists before the battle to hegemonize its definition and practice?  Does a true public only pre-exist the hegemonizing of the set through the rise of the master-signifier?

Or can we say that, only with the right master-signifier, the right political order, the true public actually comes into being? 

A true public is one without pigeon-holing, where one doesn't automatically place oneself in five seconds of speech.  It's one where you don't know what I am going to say next.  It's where I am not merely offering pre-digested soundbites.  Most of the blogosphere then has nothing to do with this true public; partisan hackery is but more TV (which is precisely why the TV networks can so easily report on this sector of the blogosphere), as are the endless ruminations on what one fed one's cat today.

The true public goes beyond your surprise at my words, my positioning.  I must be surprised myself.  As in the decisive act that overwhelms you, that preempts one's understanding of one's own actions, here I must myself be surprised by what comes from my `pen'.  Only after the fact, upon the establishment of a new order, can I come to understand what I have done.

But then the question is: does the new order in fact get created here, in this part of the blogosphere?  What could that mean?  No, yes, maybe new orders are constantly being tested.  We're playing at being vanishing mediators.  But playing with an enormous sense of responsibility, for the Other.  So maybe, then, Long Sunday is both the `true public' before the hegemonization of the very term 'public', and the Just `public' after the right hegemonization. 

Having it both ways?  Ah, the life of a vanishing mediator...

Zizek writes, in a sort of parallel:

The "political" dimension is... doubly inscribed: it is a moment of the social Whole, one among its sub-systems, and the very terrain in which the fate of the Whole is decided - in which the new Pact is designed and concluded.  (For they know not what they do, 193)