'There is no Other of the Other' Symptoms of a Decline in Symbolic Faith, or, Zizek's Anti-capitalism

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Volumn 24, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 78-110

  Glynos, Jason ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ESSEX   (United Kingdom)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 46649111704     PISSN: 02648334     EISSN: 17500176     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3366/jsp.2001.24.2.78     Document Type: Article

References (80)

1. Slavoj Žižek, The Metastases of Enjoyment (London, Verso, 1994), p. ii. For useful critical comments on a draft version of this paper I thank Yannis Stavrakakis. For detailed and helpful editorial comments-not to mention patience-I thank Edmond Wright.
2. Several scholars have elaborated in detail the notion of the Lacanian subject. Within a clinical context, for example, Bruce Fink has fleshed this out in terms of a three-fold distinction between the subject of demand, the subject of desire, and the subject of drive: see Bruce Fink, A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Theory and Technique (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1997). Within philosophical ethics, Alenka Zupancic has linked these subjective stances with the corresponding philosophical ethics of the communitarian Good, Kant s purity of the moral law, and the psychoanalytic drive: see Alenka Zupancic, Ethics of the Real (London, Verso, 2000). Renata Salecl, for her part, has periodized each of these ethical modalities of the subject as a function of their relative predominance in any one historical epoch. Thus, for example, premodern subjectivity is seen as governed primarily by the demands made by an overarching common Good, whether in terms of an Aristotelian ethics of moderation or in terms of a utilitarian calculus of pleasures and pains. Likewise, postmodern subjectivity is construed as an intensification of the modern subject s paradoxical attempt to both avoid and cling to its objects of desire: see Renata Salecl, (Per)Versions of Love and Hate (London, Verso, 1998).
3. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party in Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx-Engels Reader (New York, W.W. Norton, 1972), p. 475.
4. ibid., p. 476.
5. ibid., p. 476.
6. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993), p. 209.
7. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London, Verso, 1999), pp. 358.
8. Review posted at barnesandnoble.com/ (accessed 25 August 2000).
9. Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London, Verso, 2000), p. 329, note 11.
10. Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000)
11. Marx, from Hardt and Negri, p. 222.
12. ibid., p. 222.
13. ibid., p. 224.
14. ibid., p. 227.
15. ibid., p. 227.
16. On this point, see, for example, George Ritzer, Obscene from any Angle: Fast Food, Credit Cards, Casinos and Consumers, Third Text 51 (2000), p. 17.
17. Hardt and Negri, p. 227.
18. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London, Verso, 1999), p. 356.
19. Ernesto Laclau, New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London, Verso, 1990), p. 45.
20. See, for example, Mark E. Warren, ed., Democracy and Trust (Cambridge, CUP, 1999); John Dunn, Trust in his The History of Political Theory and Other Essays (Cambridge: CUP, 1996); Barbara Misztal, Trust in Modern Societies (Cambridge, Polity Press, 1996). Related texts include Jeffrey Goldfarb, The Cynical Society: the Culture of Politics and the Politics of Culture in American Life (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991); Richard Stivers, The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Michael Lerner, The Politics of Meaning: Restoring Hope and Possibility in an Age of Cynicism (Reading, Mass: Addison-Wesley, 1996).
21. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London, Verso, 1999), p. 319. As he puts it, Descartes voluntarism (see his infamous statement that 2 C 2 would be 5 if such were God s Will . . .) is the necessary obverse of modern scientific knowledge .
22. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject (London, Verso, 1999), pp. 319-20.
23. ibid., pp. 332.
24. ibid., pp. 334.
25. ibid., pp. 336-7.
26. ibid., pp. 337. The freedom of decision enjoyed by the subject of the risk society is not the freedom of someone who can freely choose his destiny, but the anxiety-provoking freedom of someone who is constantly compelled to make decisions without being aware of their consequences, pp. 338.
27. ibid., pp. 360.
28. ibid., pp. 342.
29. ibid., pp. 342.
30. Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (New York, W.W. Norton, 1998), p. 99.
31. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993), p. 216.
32. Hardt and Negri, p. 138. Of course, highlighting this parallel between the discourses of anti-essentialism and corporate capital is not meant to belittle the valuable theoretical work underpinning the former. On the contrary, a Lacanian perspective puts the lie to such simplistic parallels by emphasizing that what is significant in the foregrounding of fluidity, uncertainty, and undecidability, is not the value they somehow inherently embody but rather the stance subjects adopt toward them. It suggests we investigate what array of subjective relations to uncertainty and undecidability are possible. How, for example, might we account for the reluctance of workers to question this call to the ideal of contingency?. Or how might we think the possibility that such a call might reinforce the kind of subjectivity characterised by an ethics of desire?. This already hints at the significance for Žižek of the category of fantasy which will be discussed shortly.
33. On this, see also Zygmunt Bauman, Scene and Obscene: Another Hotly Contested Opposition, Third Text 51 (2000), p. 5; and Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character (New York, W.W. Norton, 1998), especially pp. 114-116.
34. On this see also, Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 350-358, 395-7.
35. Hardt and Negri p. 234.
36. Hardt and Negri p. 235.
37. Slavoj Žižek, Everything Provokes Fascism, Assemblage 33 (1997), p. 61.
38. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (London, Verso, 2000), pp. 23-4.
39. For a similar remark on the link between Marxism and psychoanalysis, see Ernesto Laclau, Psychoanalysis and Marxism in his New Reflections on the Revolution of Our Time (London, Verso, 1990), p. 96: This indicates the direction and the way in which a possible confluence of (post-) Marxism and psychoanalysis is conceivable, neither as the addition of a supplement to the former by the latter nor as the introduction of a new causal element-the unconscious instead of the economy-but as the coincidence of the two, around the logic of the signifier as a logic of unevenness and dislocation, a coincidence grounded on the fact that the latter is the logic which presides over the possibility/impossibility of the constitution of any identity .
40. On the notion of false acts, see Slavoj Žižek, Class Struggle or Postmodernism?. No Thanks! in Judith Butler et al., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality (London, Routledge, 2000), p. 126. For examples of authentic acts, see Žižek, ibid., p. 122.
41. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 341.
42. ibid., p. 355.
43. ibid., p. 355.
44. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 210-11. Here, perhaps, we could pose a research question based on the hypothesis that, insofar as the psychic structure predominant in women is shared by late capitalist discourse, the former would feel more at home with the latter-at least more so than their male partners. Would this not offer a plausible explanation for the much touted crisis that men currently face?.
45. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 346.
46. On the relation between contemporary advertising, capitalism, and the logic of desire, see Yannis Stavrakakis, On the Critique of Advertising Discourse: A Lacanian View, Third Text 51 (2000), p. 85.
47. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 362.
48. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 213-4.
49. Hardt and Negri, p. 149.
50. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983).
51. Hardt and Negri, p. 148.
52. Karen Armstrong, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (London, HarperCollins, 2000), p. x.
53. ibid., p. xi.
54. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative p. 220.
55. The subject of complaint effectively accuses the Other of its inefficiency and blames it for what has supposedly been stolen from him or her (on account of past injustices, etc.). Thus, Žižek asks, [i]s not the culture of complaint therefore today s version of hysteria, of the hysterical impossible demand addressed to the Other, a demand that actually wants to be rejected, since the subject grounds his/her existence in his/her complaint? Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 361.
56. See, for example, Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 372, 398. See also Renata Salecl, (Per)Versions of Love and Hate (London, Verso, 1998), Chapter 7.
57. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 362.
58. See also Jodi Dean, Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1998), Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1999), George Marcus, ed., Paranoia within Reason: A Casebook on Conspiracy as Explanation (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1999), Timothy Melly, Empire of Conspiracy. The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2000), Devon Jackson, Conspiranoia (New York, Plume, 2000), Patrick O Donnell, Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary US Narrative (Durham, Duke University Press, 2000), and the huge number of internet sites devoted to conspiracy theories.
59. Žižek summarizes the structural effects of the fall of the symbolic Other: This disintegration of paternal authority has two facets. On the one hand, symbolic prohibitive norms are increasingly replaced by imaginary ideals (of social success, of bodily fitness . . .); on the other, the lack of symbolic prohibition is supplemented by the re-emergence of ferocious superego figures. So we have a subject who is extremely narcissistic-who perceives everything as a potential threat to his precarious imaginary balance (take the universalization of the logic of victim; every contact with another human being is experienced as a potential threat: if the other person smokes, if he casts a covetous glance at me, he is already hurting me); far from allowing him to float freely in his undisturbed balance, however, this narcissistic selfenclosure leaves the subject to the (not so) tender mercies of the superego injunction to enjoy . ( Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 368.)
60. Here is how Žižek poses the problematic: The task of today s thought is thus double: on the one hand, how to repeat the Marxist critique of political economy without the utopian-ideological notion of Communism as its inherent standard; on the other, how to imagine actually breaking out of the capitalist horizon without falling into the trap of returning to the eminently premodern notion of a balanced, (self-)restrained society (the pre-Cartesian temptation which most of today s ecology succumbs) . (Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, pp. 19-20.)
61. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 60.
62. ibid., p. 60.
63. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, p. 205.
64. ibid., p. 220.
65. ibid., p. 213.
66. Žižek, The Fragile Absolute, p. 33, 19-20.
67. ibid., p. 19.
68. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 352.
69. ibid., p. 356.
70. Here we must assume-for purposes of consistency-that Žižek s call to a return to the primacy of the economy is different in kind from the types of return advocated by third way theorists, environmentalists, etc. Of central importance, perhaps, is not so much a return per se as it is the way this return is characterized.
71. As to the nature of this act, Žižek notes that the authentic act that I accomplish is always by definition a foreign body, an intruder which simultaneously attracts/fascinates and repels me, so that if and when I come too close to it, this leads to my aphanisis, self-erasure. If there is a subject to the act, it is not the subject of subjectivization, of integrating the act into the universe of symbolic integration and recognition, of assuming the act as my own , but, rather, an uncanny acephalous subject through which the act takes place as that which is in him more than himself (. . .)-in the act, the subject, as Lacan puts it, posits himself as his own cause, and is no longer determined by the decentred object-cause. (. . .)-this act is precisely something which unexpectedly just occurs , it is an occurrence which also (and even most) surprises its agent itself (after an authentic act, my reaction is always Even I don t know how I was able to do that, it just happened! ) (. . .) (. . .) The paradox of the act thus lies in the fact that although it is not intentional in the usual sense of the term of consciously willing it, it is nevertheless accepted as something for which its agent is fully responsible- I cannot do otherwise, yet I am none the less fully free in doing it (. . .) (. . .) Within the horizon of what precedes the act, the act always and by definition appears as a change from Bad to Worse (the usual criticism of conservatives against revolutionaries: yes, the situation is bad, but your solution is even worse). The proper heroism of the act is fully to assume this Worse. This means that there is none the less something inherently terroristic in every authentic act, in its gesture of thoroughly redefining the rules of the game , inclusive of the very basic self-identity of its perpetrator-a proper political act unleashes the force of negativity that shatters the very foundations of our being [as a subject of desire]. . . . [T]he horrible experience of the Stalinist political terror should not lead us into abandoning the principle of terror itself-one should search even more stringently for the good terror : Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 374-8. See also pp. 391-2. For a contemporary example of someone making an authentic political act, see Žižek s analysis of the Mary Kay Letourneau case at pp. 381-8.
72. And here it is important to note that when Žižek talks of the inefficiency or the collapse of the big Other through today s universalized reflexivization of society, this does not necessarily translate into a change in the dominant terms of contemporary political debate. The big Other does not vanish. We simply relate to it in a different way. In this view, the intimations of the lack in the big Other have resulted not in an ethical confrontation with it, but rather in a desperate attempt to escape it by appealing to underlying social fantasies that fill it in. In other words, while it may be true that the typical subject is a cynical subject who comes to rely less on the symbolic order and more on the fantasies that support it, the crucial point is that the big Other itself remains intact, thereby continuing to regulate our public life without putting into question its injustices and inequalities. As Žižek puts it, [w]hat I am running away from when I voluntarily take refuge in servitude is thus the traumatic confrontation with the big Other s ultimate impotence and imposture : Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993), p. 235.
73. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, Verso, 1989), p. 126.
74. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 220-1.
75. On this, see Dany Nobus s perspicacious analysis in his Arresting Innocence: On the Social Symptom of Child Abuse (unpublished, 2000). Of course this strategy (regarding both the Jew and the Paedophile) does not mean that their offences should go unpunished. The point, however, is that without intervening with an eye on the fantasy structuring the social symptoms, not only do we miss an opportunity to sap the jouissance invested in them, we often in fact simply reinforce it.
76. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 235-6.
77. ibid., p. 237.
78. Perhaps we could say that, paralleling this historical account of subjectivity, is a corresponding account of responsibility, especially in relation to the notion of Evil. In this view, for premodern subjects, Evil was seen as out there and thus external to them. Though, for example, Adam and Eve were responsible for succumbing to the temptations proffered by the Devil, the Devil himself was seen as separate and distinct from them, as having nothing to do with them. This can be contrasted with the typical modern subject, for whom Evil is invariably regarded as its own creation, and for which she/he is ultimately responsible (as in the Evil of Frankenstein s monster, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, of environmental destruction, of computers causing havoc, etc.).
79. See, for example, Slavoj Žižek, Plague of Fantasies (London, Verso, 1997), pp. 54-64; Žižek Class Struggle or Postmodernism?No Thanks!, pp. 124-6 (see note 40); and Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative (Durham, Duke University Press, 1993), Chapter 6.
80. Witness his frequent references to Antigone, Sygne de Coufontaine andMary Kay Letourneau.