The supposed subjects of ideology

Critical Quarterly

Volumn 39, Issue 2, 1997, Pages 39-59

  Žižiek, Slavoj ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 61449369617     PISSN: 00111562     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1467-8705.00097     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. See Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital (London: New Left Books, 1970).
2. The actuality of the subject supposed to believe in the Stalinist 'totalitarianism' is perhaps best exemplified by the well-known incident with the 'Great Soviet Encyclopedia' in 1954, after the fall of Beria. When Soviet subscribers got the volume of the encyclopedia which contained the entries under letter B, there was, of course, a double-page article on Beria, praising him as the great hero of the Soviet Union; after his fall and denunciation as a traitor and spy, all subscribers got from the publishing house a letter asking them to cut out and return the page on Beria; in exchange they were promptly sent a double-page entry (with photos) on the Bering Strait, so that, when they inserted it into the volume, its wholeness was re-established, there was no blank to bear witness to the sudden rewriting of history. The mystery here is: for whom was this (semblance of) wholeness maintained, if every subscriber knew about the manipulation (since he had to perform it himself)? The only answer is, of course: for the nonexistent subject supposed to believe.
3. See Michel de Certeau, 'What We Do When We Believe', in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), p. 200
4. See also chapter 5 of Slavoj Zizek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989).
5. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), p. 35.
6. For that precise reason, Lacan speaks of the 'knowledge in the real', not of the belief in the real. Another way to put it is to say that belief and knowledge relate to each other as desire and drive: desire is also always reflective, a 'desire to desire', while drive is not 'drive to drive'.
7. The logic of 'subject supposed to know' is thus not 'authoritarian' (relying on another subject who knows on my behalf) but, on the contrary, productive of new knowledge: the hysterical subject who incessantly probes the Master's knowledge is the very model of the emergence of new knowledge. It is the logic of 'subject supposed to believe' which is effectively 'conservative' in its reliance on the structure of belief which must not be put in question by the subject ('whatever you think you know, retain your belief, act as if you believe').
8. A friend of mine from Paris who very much admired Fritz Lang's The Pirates of Moonfleet but was ashamed to admit his admiration directly, said to me 'I met some people who really know about it, and they told me The Pirates of Moonfleet is the most beautiful film ever made'.
9. A further interesting fact concerning the relationship between belief and knowledge is that attempts to 'demonstrate the existence of God' (that is, to confer to our assurance that 'God exists' the status of knowledge) as a rule emerge when nobody seems to doubt his existence (in short, when 'everybody believes'), not in the times of the rise of atheism and the crisis of religion (who is today still seriously engaged in 'proving the existence of God'?). One is thus tempted to claim that, paradoxically, the very endeavour to demonstrate the existence of God introduces doubt - in a way creates the problem it purports to solve. In clear contrast to the standard Hegelian notion according to which attempts to prove God's existence by reasoning bear witness to the fact that the Cause (our immediate faith in him) is already lost - that our relationship to him is no longer a 'substantial' faith but already a reflectively 'mediated' knowledge - reflective knowledge seems rather to have the status of an 'excess' we indulge in when we are sure of our Faith (like a person in an emotional relationship who can allow himself to mock gently his partner precisely when he is so sure of the depth of their relationship that he knows such superficial jokes cannot hurt it).
10. Before one gets used to 'canned laughter', there is nonetheless usually a brief period of uneasiness: the first reaction to it is one of shock, since it is difficult to accept that the machine out there can 'laugh for me', there is something inherently obscene in this phenomenon. However, with time, one gets used to it and the phenomenon is experienced as 'natural'.
11. A delicious personal experience renders perfectly the symbolic efficiency of this acting by a proxy. A couple of years ago, my good friend Mark Cousins tried to convince me that 1 stood no chance of an academic career in Oxbridge, since to achieve that, one should dress casually, but nonetheless with style, which I definitely do not. When I drew his attention to the fact that John Forrester, who is a Cambridge professor, also dresses rather negligently (which, incidentally, I mention as a commendation), Mark Cousins snapped back that with him this is not a problem, since his wife (Lisa Appignanesi) is always elegantly dressed and thus does it for him.
12. The logic of fetishism in these 'primitive' religions is more ambiguous than it may appear. According to the standard notion, these religions confuse the material symbol of the spiritual dimension with the spiritual Thing itself: for a primitive fetishist, the fetishised object - a sacred stone, tree, forest - is 'sacred' in itself, in its very material presence, not merely as a symbol of another spiritual dimension. Does, however, the true 'fetishist illusion' not reside in the very idea that there is a (spiritual) Beyond occluded by the presence of fetish? Is not the ultimate sleight of hand of the fetish to give rise to the illusion that there is something beyond it, the invisible domain of Spirits?
13. rely here on Robert Pfaller's intervention at the symposium Die Dinge lachen an unsere Stelle, Linz (Austria), 8-10 October 1996.
14. Exemplary here is the case of Peter Handke who for long years interpassively lived his authentic life, delivered from the corruption of the Western con- sumerist capitalism, through Slovenes (his mother was Slovene): for him, Slovenia was a country in which words directly relate to objects (in stores, milk was called directly 'milk', avoiding the pitfall of commercialised brand- names and so on) - in short, a pure phantasmatic formatic. Now, the Slovene independence and the willingness to join the European Union has unleashed in him a violent aggressivity: in his recent writings, he dismisses Slovenes as slaves of Austrian and German capital, selling their legacy to the West... all this because his interpassive game was disturbed - because Slovenes no longer behave in the way for him to be authentic through Slovenes. No wonder, then, that he has now turned to Serbia as the last vestige of authenticity in Europe, comparing Bosnian Serbs laying siege to Sarajevo with native Americans laying siege to a camp of white colonisers.
15. rely here again on Robert Pfaller, op. cit.
16. It would be interesting to approach, from this paradox of interpassivity, Schelling's notion of the highest freedom as the state in which activity and passivity, being-active and being-acted-upon, harmoniously overlap: man reaches his acme when he turns his very subjectivity into the Predicate of an ever higher Power (in the mathematical sense of the term), when he, as it were, yields to the Other, 'depersonalises' his most intense activity and performs it as if some other, higher Power was acting through him, using him as its medium - like the mystical experience of Love, or like an artist who, in the highest frenzy of creativity, experiences himself as a medium through which some more substantial, impersonal Power expresses itself. (See chapter 1 of Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder London: Verso, 1996.) Schelling's notion of the highest freedom is the impossible point of perfect overlapping between passivity and activity in which the gap of inter-(activity or passivity) is abolished: when 1 am active, 1 no longer need another to be passive for me, in my place, since my very activity is already in itself the highest form of passivity; and, vice versa, when, in an authentic mystical experience, I entirely let myself go, adopt the passive attitude of Gelassenheit, this passivity is in itself the highest form of activity, since in it, the big Other itself (God) acts through me.
17. See Darian Leader, Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post? (London: Faber and Faber, 1966).
18. When applied to our everyday ideological perceptions of the relationship between women and men, the term 'cliche' is theoretically wrong. That is to say, when one denounces these perceptions as 'clichés', this is as a rule said in such a way that it dispenses with the need for a close analysis of what, precisely, these 'cliches' are. Within the social space, everything is ultimately a 'cliche' (i.e. a contingent symbolic formation not grounded in the immediate 'nature of things'). 'Cliches' are thus a thing which is to be taken extremely seriously, and the problem with the term 'cliche' is that it is misleading insofar as one can always hear in front of it an imperceptible 'mere' ('cliche' equals 'a mere cliché').
19. In the case of men, the presupposed other's enjoyment is rather the source of obsessive anxiety: the ultimate goal of compulsive rituals is precisely to maintain the other mortified, that is, to prevent him from enjoying . . .
20. 1 (the master-signifier), is one possible way to read this substitution not to put Woman under Man; that is, to conceive man as woman's metaphoric substitute, as her proxy? (The opposite substitution, $ under objet a, would be, of course, woman as man's substitute.)
21. Daniel C. Dennett, Consciousness Explained (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1991), p. 132. (Dennett, of course, evokes this concept in a purely negative way, as a nonsensical contradictio in adjecto.)
22. See Sigmund Freud, 'A Child Is Being Beaten', in The Penguin Freud Library, vol. 10, On Psychopathology (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979).