The previous chapter conveyed a strong scepticism towards the prospects of transposing the principles of Lacanian ethics as a basis for shared social life. I had previously suggested that the contradictions of global capitalism demanded a Marxist response, yet Marxism has appeared largely impotent after the theoretical and political defeat of historical materialism. In attempting to revive Marxism, I had cause to turn to psychoanalysis as a lens through which to read the discursive turn, conceiving it as a bodily, rather than linguistic, cleavage. Nonetheless, despite restoring the cogency of a materialist reading of capitalism, I came to suggest that the primary psychoanalytic intervention into Marxist politics was as a rejection of its utopian sense of communism. As such, in the previous chapter I turned to Lacanian ethics to attempt to traverse this apparent normative-political deficit. Our progress thus far has brought us to the question at the core of this section of the thesis: Can psychoanalysis be translated into a form of political action?
Importantly, it must first be acknowledged that Lacan, like Freud before him, held no particular political stance, aside from cynicism. As such, there is no ‘natural’ Lacanian political position. This is a point noted by Stavrakakis – that the ‘Lacanian Left’ is an empty signifier – who then, paradoxically, goes on to establish the political reading of Lacan (2007). In large part the question has been troublesome since the foundation of psychoanalysis, or at least the latter stages of Freud’s work. Freud contended that the development of the individual and the community are not far divorced, although because civilisation exists at a “higher level of abstraction”, it is difficult to transpose analysis in concrete terms (1930: 98). Nonetheless, whilst Freud concluded that: “the processes are very similar in kind, if not one and the same” (ibid.), the minimal distance between them produced contradictions that Freud was unable to resolve. Thus, it is tempting to follow Freud’s contention that; “it is almost as though the creation of a great human community would be most successful if there were no need for concern with individual happiness” (1930: 99). This certainly seems to be the maxim of the great totalitarian empires of human history, those that took societal progress, rather than subjective happiness, to be the purpose of their presence.
Furthermore, Freud argued that the cultural influence of the super-ego and its associated maxims simply ask too much of civilisation, issuing commandments without consideration for whether they can be obeyed (ibid.: 103). Ultimately, Freud appeared to be cynically confounded over the prospects for civilisation, adding that; “I have no doubt, too, that a real change in peoples’ relations to property will be of more help here than any ethical commandment”, although, as he continued, “the recognition of this fact among socialists has been obscured and made impracticable by a new idealistic misreading of human nature” (ibid.: 104).
Likewise, Lacan, when considering the ‘moral goals of psychoanalysis’, stated that the universalisation of the ‘servicing of goods’[1]; “does not in itself resolve the problem of the present relationship of each individual man to his desire in the short period of time between his birth and death. The happiness of future generations is not at issue here” (Lacan, 1992: 303, emphasis added).
Ultimately, Freud’s suggested that individual therapy can achieve its goals by reference to a standard of normality established in the community; therapy can allow the subject to function ‘normally’. By contrast, civilisation itself is not subject to any such background. For this reason, Freud had no desire to evaluate the prospects of human civilisation. Certainly he is unwilling to posit any sense of a human ideal, contending that any argument can only be positioned by one’s relative relationship to happiness, or, as Lacan would come to suggest, one’s own jouissance. Thus, he ends Civilisation and its Discontents with a withdrawal:
I therefore dare not set myself up as a prophet vis-a-vis my fellow men, and I plead guilty to the reproach that I cannot bring them any consolation, which is fundamentally what they all demand, the wildest revolutionaries no less passionately than the most well-behaved and pious believers. (ibid.: 106)
His main concern, it seems, was a situated one (Freud was writing between the two World Wars): Will humanity be able to overcome the disturbance in the development of civilisation by the aggression and drive at the heart of humanity? To this question, he does not risk an answer.
It is not a matter, however, as Freud appears to resigningly suggest, of psychoanalysis simply helping the subject through their own tragi-comedic existence whilst politics aspires to loftier ambitious of human enlightenment. Psychoanalysis has more to say about politics and civilisation than a withdrawal to the clinicians couch. Most potently, from a Freudian perspective, an identification of the dialectic of Eros and Thanatos and the paradoxical interactions of the pleasure principle with the political community, gives a valuable insight into the operation of ideology and the manner in which the subject is able to be incorporated into and to relate to the Other.
Moreover, a tight bond exists between the subject and the political. In large part – not particularly acknowledged by Lacan himself – it is Lacan’s association of the individual and the unconscious with language which has identified this point. Lacan’s conception of psychoanalysis as a theory of intersubjectivity has allowed for different attempts to answer, or perhaps recast, Freud’s question – how the psyche can maintain itself in the face of the demands of civilisation – as a political one. Nonetheless, it is pertinent to note that Lacan firmly suggested that “the ethical limits of psychoanalysis coincide with the limits of its practice” (Lacan, 1992: 21-22). Thus, the question to be considered is whether the sphere of the political, or, in regards to this thesis, political economy, is outside of the limits of the practice of psychoanalysis.
Certainly, the ethical impulses discussed in the previous chapter provide food for thought, if not for bodies. Conversely, we must consider whether the ethical imperatives suggested in the previous chapter can be translated from the ‘private’ sphere of subjectivity to the collective of political community. The problem rests upon whether psychoanalysis can be translated from the problem of the body positioned within civilisation to the interactions of bodies which make up civilisation itself. This task will be primary in this chapter, which will begin by attempting to delineate the difference between ethics and politics before moving onto Stavrakakis’ efforts, following Laclau, to translate Lacanian ethics into a politics of radical democracy.
Stavrakakis’ attempt to supplement Laclau’s democratic ethos with a theory of jouissance provides a salient example of the limits of psychoanalysis and politics. His form of politics is not only based upon a misreading of Lacanian theory but also contradicts its fundamental ethos by attempting to institute an ethics that is developed against the symbolic law. The dialectical nature of Lacanian ethics is such that the process dissolves itself at the climax of its instantiation – the clinical subject at the end of analysis has no need for analysis itself – yet Stavrakakis seeks to institutionalise this process. Moreover, we see that Lacanian ethics reaches the limit of its practice in the collective materiality of the economy and democracy with the impossibility of class struggle. Ultimately, Stavrakakis places too much emphasis upon the content of Lacanian ethics rather than the formal shape of its dialectic.
By contrast, Žižek rejects the possibility that the content of Lacanian ethics – the politics of drive, for example – can become a direct form of politics. Instead, he does not withdraw from politics but, rather, – through a re-reading of Lacan via Hegel and reference to the Marxist tradition – considers the (impossible) political moment to be at the heart of psychoanalysis and the dialectical form of the Lacanian ethic. Most notably, for Žižek the failure of morality (or the supreme Good) does not result in a banishment to ethics but, rather, opens up the ground of the political and of the class struggle at the heart of political economy. This does not mean, however, that a ‘natural’ political discourse stems from Lacanian theory; instead any position must be an interpretation.
Two readings of Žižek’s work dominate in this regard. The first focuses on the interpretative plurality that emerges from his theory. Here there is a different Žižek that reads film theory from he who engages with politics or ideology: there is no essential Žižek but instead a range of contextual interpretations. Yet, despite the apparent range of his work, Žižek’s politics have an increasingly clear anti-capitalist, Marxist, and as I will shall soon develop, communist, positioning. It is these commitments that the second hegemonic interpretation focuses upon, attempting to nail down the essence of Žižek’s work. In this chapter, I shall develop a third reading, suggesting that Žižek’s work does revolve around a singular position. It is not, however, one that ‘exists’, so to speak. Here, Žižek is read as a philosopher of the Real; he holds a singular commitment but one that does not lead to a ‘natural’ political approach. It leads, instead, to a number of possible political strategies. These strategies correspond to the dialectic identified in the previous chapter, read through both Hegel and Marx. It produces a political approach based around universality, class struggle and the Real. egHHegegsdjhjdhf The question which accompanies this third reading relates to the relationship between these Lacanian strategies and Žižek’s (Marxist) political commitments. I seek to address this pivotal enquiry throughout the second half of this thesis.
This chapter commences by delineating a distinction between a Lacanian interpretation of morality, ethics, politics and the political, before considering the two most prominent readings of these positions: Stavrakakis’ attempt to translate Lacanian ethics to politics and Žižek’s ‘short-circuiting’ of the ethical and the political. I begin with a discussion of the difference between ethics and politics.
From Ethics to Politics
Having made a distinction in the previous chapter between morality – pre-destined senses of the Good – and ethics, how can politics be distinguished from ethics? Certainly, for many theorists there is little difference between the two fields. Eagleton, in an excellent discussion of the distinction between ethics and politics states:
Ethics and politics are distinct modes of investigation in the sense that each scrutinises social existence from a different angle – in the case of ethics, the values and qualities of human conduct and relationships; in the case of politics, public institutions and processes of power. Yet there is no clear ontological distinction at stake here. The difference is more methodological than real. (2009:306)
Yet, by the end of the discussion, Eagleton does end up giving priority to the ethical ahead of the political, suggesting that politics is a translation of established ethical principles. To this end, he considers the latter to be “a matter of how we may live with each other most rewardingly, while the political is a question of what institutions will best promote this end” (ibid.: 325). As shall be developed, the ethics are never able to be probably distinguished from the political horizon within which they are established, nor are politics ever without the ethical. Ethics, politics and the political thus have an extimate, dialectical relationship; one can never be solely in one and out of another. They are points on a Möbius strip; bearing points shift as soon as they are established. In this sense there can be an ethical approach to politics and a political approach to ethics as any instantiation of ethics or politics relies upon the ethical or political position from which we speak. Thus, the ethical itself is nothing but an empty signifier that houses the various readings of ethics.
As Žižek (1994a: 156) notes in regards to philosophy, there is no neutral or (abstract) universal conception of ethics. Instead, every particular notion of ethics installs itself as universal and in doing so encompasses all other particular understandings of ethics. Just as continental philosophy understands itself to be philosophy – analytic philosophy amongst others being reduced to a moment within philosophy itself – each particular conception of ethics redefines the category of the ethical in its universal form. Indeed, this reading of the ethical as an empty signifier implies both an ethical horizon and a political-historical positioning.
This psychoanalytic conception ethics, as has been discussed in the previous chapter, always entails a secondary judgement. Ethics is never simply ethics but an ethics of (…). If we ask the question ‘Is this behaviour ethical?’ a political horizon is always already assumed. Ethics here is a reaction to law and morality. For this reason, ethics can provide a guide as to how to act within a horizon but not of the horizon itself. Thus, Lacanian psychoanalysis has been able to provide an ethical interpretation of shared social life – what might be called politics – and a form of subjective ethics that almost becomes normative, if only by a rethinking of what it means to be normative.
There has not, however, been a hegemonic translation of the Lacanian theory of ethics to a sense of politics, although there have been a number of attempts, including the two that shall be the focus of this chapter, those of Stavrakakis and Žižek. The central question is whether the domain of ethics can be transposed onto the collective decision making that constitutes politics, as Stavrakakis argues, or whether the psychoanalytic approach to ethics suggests a different relationship to collective power, one that operates more on the political than politics.
At its heart, this question suggests two points. Firstly, is there a normative sense to psychoanalysis beyond the individual? In the previous chapter I came to argue that Lacanian ethics involved a recasting of the question of normativity in relation to the subject rather than a hedonistic nihilism. What remained unclear, however, was whether this sense of normativity moved beyond the individual. Secondly, can this dialectic process be formulated into the kind of systematic institution that would structure shared social life, or does it remain a formal response to these structuring institutions?
The difficulty in developing a psychoanalytic form of politics occurs because, thus far, Lacanian theory has only formed a reaction to an imaginary political horizon, rather than the horizon itself. Nonetheless, it is clear that beyond a critique of morality, Lacanian ethics provide at the very least a negative conception of normativity. This understanding certainly does not rely on a transcendental Good but, rather, in rejecting the suturing illusion of moral discourse because of the consequences both for the enjoyment of the subject and the ideological construction of civilisation, the foundations of a Lacanian theory of politics emerged. This theory relies upon a critique of utopian ideology and politics. It does not, however, suggest any form of institutions, procedures of power or economic organisation.
Indeed, Lacanian thought appears to have developed only as a reaction to institutionalisation, power and organisation. For this reason, as has been noted in Chapters Two and Three, psychoanalysis has largely been used as a reference point or a supplement to political ideology, rather than a direct contributor. Although psychoanalysis did enjoy a brief exposure as a hedonistic ideology in the latter half on the 20th century – Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilisation, (1956) along with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s critical psychoanalytic study, Anti-Oedipus (1977) being the prime examples – it was Laclau’s radical democracy that has provided the hegemonic reading of psychoanalytic politics.
Laclau, and most recently Stavrakakis, have drawn a direct parallel between the logic of democracy and that of psychoanalysis. Laclau – although often not directly referencing his work with a Lacanian vocabulary – considered psychoanalysis, along with forms of post-structuralism, to mirror the rejection of the determining status of the big Other and the necessity of contingency that was at the heart of the democratic structure. Stavrakakis has taken this further, suggesting that Lacan’s notion of feminine sexuation provides a form of jouissance or passionate attachment that mirrors what is required in democracy. I will now turn to Stavrakakis’ work before considering Žižek’s alternative conception of the role of psychoanalysis in politics.
Stavrakakis and Radical Democracy – A trans-fantasmatic politics?
Following on from Laclau, Stavrakakis has sought to continue the radical democratic tradition, becoming the flag-bearer for the political institutionalisation of Lacanian psychoanalysis through the production of two influential texts; Lacan and the Political (1999) and The Lacanian Left (2007). In the earlier text, Stavrakakis begins with the assertion that modern politics is a response to the decline in the symbolic efficiency of the big Other. Today, Stavrakakis contends, politics is split between various attempts to restore the utopian fantasmatic dimension of the Other and what he labels a ‘politics of aporia’. The latter is an impotent form of politics without a motivating force, unwilling to reinstate the Other but unsure how to proceed (1999:99).
The problem Stavrakakis constructs is that which is addressed in the opening chapters of this thesis. In response, Stavrakakis asserts that the Left cannot resort to a ‘politics of reoccupation’ characterised by the fantasmatic hold of utopianism. Lacanian theory teaches that these fantasmatic attempts to restore the big Other can only be instituted upon the basis of the exclusion[2] of an element which is then posited as the enemy; that which is preventing the (impossible) realisation of Utopia (ibid.: 107). The question, according to Stavrakakis, is how the Left can maintain democratic practice whilst maintaining affective political engagement.
Moreover, Stavrakakis’ work is a response to the kind of pessimism around psychoanalysis displayed by the likes of Homer. According to Homer (1996: 109), psychoanalytic politics remains impotent because it does not positively enter into the ideology of the Other. He suggests that although psychoanalysis may make for good theory, it does not allow for an effective mode of politics. If Lacan insisted that the big Other must be resisted, there are plenty of (ultimately more powerful) ideological positions willing to take up this space.
In reply, Stavrakakis argues that Homer assumes that fantasy and the status of the big Other are entirely universal. Instead, in acknowledging that importance of the question; “How can we have passion in politics without the Holocaust?” (1999:111), Stavrakakis supports the “possibility of a post-fantasmatic or less fantasmatic politics” that rejects the necessity of restoring the Other whilst engaging in affective politics (ibid.: 120). This form of politics is made possible by an application of Lacanian ethics which reject the emphasis upon unity and harmony that has characterised modern democracy, in favour of a collective “traversal of the fantasy of utopia” (ibid.: 122-127).
In this form of (radical) democracy, Lacanian ethics is utilised to perform an “encircling of the Real” (ibid.:130) best achieved by an identification with the sinthome – defined by Stavrakakis as that which must be excluded in order to constitute a universal totality – in order to make visible the point of lack which would otherwise be excluded. This ‘ethics of the Real’ (which he attributes to Žižek (ibid.: 130)), needs to be institutionalised into the democratic order, allowing a form of society in which democracy does not have an ontic presence, yet is able to produce a better and more free society (ibid.: 140).Yet, in this first text Stavrakakis is unable to answer his two primary questions; How is a form of (democratic) enjoyment possible that does not require exclusion? And, how can this form of democracy be instituted?
At this stage in his theoretical development, Stavrakakis’ work reads very much like Žižek’s early texts. Indeed, much of the conclusion to Lacan and the Political is attributed to Žižek. Nonetheless, as we shall see from our latter discussion of the politics of Žižek’s work, Žižek does not believe that an order can be produced which is based upon the presence of its own exclusion, such that it becomes non-exclusive. It is this kind of positioning which leads the likes of Sharpe (2004: 248) to suggest that Žižek’s demand to identify with the abject leads only to permanent critique. This is exactly the kind of approach that Stavrakakis is seeking to avoid, so it is almost in response to Žižek, as well as the continual problem of the feasibility of the democratic project, that The Lacanian Left begins.
In this text, Stavrakakis seeks to create a “democratic ethos of the political” (2007: 254). Building from Lacan and the Political, he claims that contemporary politics has featured a rapid increase in democratic rhetoric, combined with a sustained erosion of liberty and equality. Although this has led some theorists – here Stavrakakis includes Žižek and Badiou – to abandon the horizon of democracy because it has become too imbued with the exigencies of capital and consumption, Stavrakakis refuses to do so, counting that democracy is the “most important invention of our political imagination and experimentation” (ibid.: 256). For Stavrakakis, democracy is the political horizon, both in the sense that in its very structure it replicates the Lacanian rejection of the big Other, and because it allows for a greater degree of human freedom than any other.
Radical democracy, Laclau’s original conception of democracy, provides the ultimate democratic ethos because it allows for conflict and an acknowledgement of the lack in the Other: for Stavrakakis, it is the natural translation of Lacanian ethics into politics. If the institutions of democracy – the empty place of power, the respect for conflicting conceptions of the polis – re-create the lack in the Other, what is required is a subjective ethos of democratic participation, one that celebrates lack and the unity of and acceptance of disharmony (ibid.: 257). This is a democracy founded on an ethical acknowledgment of self-institution, one that comes to recognise its own lack of foundations.
Stavrakakis cannot acknowledge, however, that this democratic ideal itself relies on the production of a big Other – that of Democracy itself. Democracy is not solely self-instituting and contingent; it requires at least a minimal demand that the institutions of democracy cannot be revoked (Žižek, 2008a: 412-415). Voting an anti-democratic party into power is not considered a democratic outcome. Moreover, Stavrakakis’ conception of democracy itself relies upon an exclusion; that of the economy and class struggle. The economy plays no role in Stavrakakis’ work except as a realm of consumptive enjoyment, which he suggests is one of three political responses to lack – the others being nationalism and religious fundamentalism (2007:260).
Thus, Stavrakakis seeks, particularly in The Lacanian Left, to go beyond the institutionalisation of lack in favour of a democratic ethics of enjoyment. Rejecting Žižek’s apparent conflation of radical democracy with the dry formalism of Habermas’ deliberative democracy[3] (a comparison Stavrakakis described as ‘astonishing’ (ibid.: 277)) Stavrakakis seeks to find “another jouissance, an ethos beyond the politics of fantasy … an enjoyable democratic ethics of the political” (ibid.: 268-269, original emphasis). This democratic enjoyment is the partial, or feminine, enjoyment which occurs after the subject has ‘traversed the fantasy’.
This enjoyment strays away from the convention notion of full jouissance that characterises Stavrakakis’ reading of utopia. Instead, the other jouissance to which Stavrakakis refers is a feminine enjoyment available to the subject after they have traversed the fantasy. By traversing the fantasy, Stavrakakis contends that the democratic subject is able to come to terms with the antagonistic demands of the Other, an acceptance required for the restoration of the democratic project. If the goal of clinical analysis is for the analysand to acknowledge that the Other does not exist (and thus stop relying upon it for enjoyment), Stavrakakis’ conception of a democratic ethic requires the same knowledge both in the subject and in the (democratic) structural practice which performs this knowledge for the subject.
Ultimately, for Stavrakakis, democratic enjoyment is an enjoyment of lack and its dialectical excess. Stavrakakis contends that this enjoyment can occur without the stabilising effects of the exception, conceived here as the Lacanian objet a, stating;
the central task in psychoanalysis – and politics – is to detach the objet a from the signifier of lack in the Other to detach (anti-democratic and post-democratic) fantasy from the democratic institutions of lack, making possible the access to a partial enjoyment beyond fantasy. (2007: 280)
Here, Stavrakakis is attempting to follow Fink’s argument from Lacan to the Letter (2004: 161), a re-reading of Lacan Ecrits. Stavrakakis (2007: 279) refers to Fink when he states, “Only the sacrifice of the fantasmatic objet petit a can make this other jouissance attainable”. The key to this statement rests upon the meaning of “the fantasmatic objet a”. Two distinct readings remain open. Stavrakakis could be suggesting that objet a is a fantasmatic object; when one lets go of fantasy, objet a, as the object of desire, is no longer required.
This reading of the status of objet a has been scornfully rebuked by Žižek. Rejecting the suggestion that society can operate without objet a, Žižek demands that a distinction be made between the status of objet a in desire and drive – a distinction between objet a as the cause of desire or object of desire (Žižek, 2008a: 327). Stavrakakis may be applauded in seeking to remove the illusionary utopian desire from politics but one cannot remove the excesses of objet a altogether. Instead, even in the trans-fantasmatic realm of drive, objet a still dominates subjectivity. It is just that for Lacan the movement from desire to drive is a movement from the object as loss (and thus a desire to recapture it) to loss as an object itself.
Additionally, Žižek contends that a traversal of the fantasy does not leave the subject without fantasy, as Stavrakakis advocates. To traverse the fantasy is not to confront reality and its antagonisms directly, as Stavrakakis’ post-fantasmatic democratic ethos suggests. Rather, traversing the fantasy involves coming to terms with the co-ordinates of fantasy itself, to be caught up in fantasy more than ever and fully identify with one’s subjective position in relation to fantasy (Žižek, 2008a: 324-331). In this sense, fantasy is flattened: fantasy exists but it no longer serves as a defence against the symptom. Thus, to traverse the fantasy is still to remain within fantasy and objet a. The traversal of the fantasy, however, is not a conservative movement. One does not simply enjoy the symptom, wallowing in the perversity of failure. Rather, failure loses the ‘depth’ that allowed the subject to enjoy the symptom; fantasy becomes two- dimensional, no longer mediating against the exclusions which constituted its former boundaries.
Moreover, Stavrakakis seems to have been seduced by the power of the feminine. As noted in Chapter Three, within Lacan’s work the feminine appears to have a strange mysterious quality, largely because it provides an alternative to the masculine; Lacan says very little about it, except to say that nothing more can be said. Indeed, as Žižek (1994a: 151) notes, Lacan appears to hint that he will say more about the feminine in The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire when he ends with “I won’t go any further there” (2006: 700) suggesting there is more to be said. Lacan, however, does not extend further on the feminine, which has left the feminine with a mysterious alternative status, suggesting that an alternative form of subjectivity is available – one that would avoid the pitfalls of contemporary subjectivity and structure.
This conception of the feminine is, however, a major misreading of Lacan. For Lacan the feminine was indeed mysterious but only because of its very impossibility. If the feminine has an existence, it is as a supplement to the masculine enjoyment of the phallus (Levy-Stokes, 2001b: 105). The feminine is a structural clinical possibility – the subject can experience feminine jouissance but not without the phallus – but not an ideological one in any singular sense. This ‘Other’ jouissance is, as Fink (1995: 122) states, ‘fundamentally incommensurate, unquantifiable, disproportionate, and indecent to ‘polite society’”. One cannot develop a political discourse of the feminine jouissance – this would be impossible in both the Lacanian and everyday sense of the term – and even if this was possible, there is nothing to suggest that this kind of enjoyment would have anything to say about democracy or indeed poverty and class struggle.
Following this critique, Žižek states that not only is his work a misreading of Lacan but “Stavrakakis’ political vision is vacuous” (Žižek, 2008a: 331). Contending that Stavrakakis remains a ‘Freudo-radical democrat’, seeking to supplement a political theory with an ethics of enjoyment rather than developing a politics directly from Lacanian theory as Stavrakakis contends, Žižek argues that we should not be looking for a democratic ethos of enjoyment but instead considering why there is no passion invested in our current forms of democracy. Žižek does not reject democracy outright – it is not that democracy is without value – but, rather, suggests that democracy is not the ultimate political horizon and holds no emancipatory potential at this stage of history.
As Žižek has stated, radical democracy, “comes all too close to merely ‘radicalizing’ this liberal democratic imaginary, while remaining within its horizon”(Žižek, 2000e: 325). In this case Stavrakakis’ reading of psychoanalysis remains an ethical one, transposed onto the field of existing political institutions. Under capitalism, democracy is nothing more than an empty political supplement to capital. Politics under capitalism is strictly post-politics, and it is on this point that Stavrakakis and Žižek are finally in agreement.
Nonetheless, Stavrakakis’ position may still be in some degree compatible with Žižek’s. Clearly, for Lacan objet a exists beyond fantasy. It is not only the object of desire but the cause of desire. If Stavrakakis comes to this reading – a fairly fundamental conception of Lacanian psychoanalysis – it could be that by ‘the fantasmatic objet a’, Stavrakakis has meant that the fantasmatic element of objet a, not objet a as cause or a remainder of the Real. This is perhaps a little generous. Nonetheless, we must proceed from this point, taking Stavrakakis at his best. If we propose what Žižek deems to be the correct reading of the Lacanian objet a, does Stavrakakis’ theory of radical democracy still hold?
Against the Democratic Hypothesis
In response this question, Žižek’s argues that Lacanian ethics simply cannot be institutionalised in any fashion. Returning back to the Kantian notion of the ethical, ethics is always in excess to the law. Thus, the ethical excess cannot be subsumed into law but must always remain outside of law. Moreover, Stavrakakis conflates the difference between the form and content of Lacan’s work, which has led to his attempts to transpose this clinical analysis to the political realm. In terms of politics, what must be taken from Lacan’s work is not so much the content of his analysis – although, as we have thus far suggested, it is a productive approach to political analysis – but, rather, the form of his dialectical approach. This approach is evident in each of his articulations of ethics, whether of desire, drive or the sinthome. Here, the focus is exposing that upon which being rests, yet cannot be acknowledged. It is this formal process of analysis – finding the point of exclusion, symptoms, or cause of desire, which dissolve through analysis – that can be transposed across contexts and beyond the limits of clinical practice.
Furthermore, beyond his critique of Stavrakakis’ reading of Lacan, Žižek’s central reproach is that Stavrakakis conflates the difference between ethics and politics. That is, although Stavrakakis is overtly attempting to transpose ethics to politics, no such translation occurs. Rather, Stavrakakis suspends the political moment – the assertion of radical inconsistency that haunts social life – in favour of the democratic hypothesis that he believes to stem directly from the content of Lacan’s work. His work then attempts to add an ethos to existing democratic institutions, based upon a Lacanian reading of jouissance. Yet, there is nothing inherently democratic about psychoanalysis, despite Stavrakakis’ demands. Instead any political demand must be inserted into the Lacanian dialectic, thus contradicting its process. Despite the problems with Laclau’s work, at very least he acknowledges that it is politics which dominates the human condition (Tie, 2009: 259).
Stavrakakis’ politics, despite his appeals to the contrary, are an ethics of the symbolic, not the Real. It is an ethics of the administration of affairs, not the radical repositioning of the Real. This may not be a harmful thing in itself – there is no reason to suggest, as Eagleton (2009: 301) argues in relation to Badiou, that “a just society must remain in perpetual thrall to its moment of foundation” – but it is certainly not a Lacanian thing. Given that Stavrakakis is seeking to provide a specifically Lacanian conception of democracy, it is unclear how much of his theory remains after this critique.
The Politics of the Political
The key distinction between Žižek’s and Stavrakakis’ theoretical practices lies in the distinction between politics and the political. Despite the title of his first text, in practice Stavrakakis attempts to read Lacan as a form of politics, whereas Žižek interprets Lacan as a theorist of the political. This distinction, as Daly (2009: 280) notes, is most often associated with Claude Lefort (1988), although it has become increasingly common in contemporary continental theory. Stavrakakis (1999: 71), for example, considers the distinction between politics and political to be equivalent to that between reality and the Real. We cannot push this comparison too far (largely because Stavrakakis often appears to take a pre-ontological conception of the Real, conceiving it as the bedrock of reality rather than as having been created by reality itself) but it remains an effective mechanism; politics is the ontic instantiation of the inexhaustible ontological horizon of the political. Politics is the particular to the universality of the political, a universality that exceeds the particular not through an over-riding hegemonic horizon but, rather, through the very failure of the political. The value of the psychoanalytic reading of the analogous relationship between the Real and reality is in providing an understanding of the extimate relationship between politics and the political, such that we are never in one without the other.
This understanding of the extimate relation between politics and the political is based upon the exclusion, or rather failure, of morality. Here, in the post-world after the turn to language, the political takes the place of morality; the transcendental horizon of judgement. This political dimension is not a judgement in itself but, rather, signals the impossibility of any final decision. The political moment is the end of all judgements, that dislocatory point which signals the foundational indeterminacy of being. For this reason, ideology acts to disavow the political moment, such that today, when ethics fails, the political dimension is not evoked but, rather, the moral. When an element exceeds the pre-conceived co-ordinates of the ethical, under liberal democracy we do not evoke the dimension of the political: we do not begin to question the manner in which we exist, or the exclusions which are necessary for this condition. Rather, we substitute in morality, looking for the big Other to fill the hole in our ethical administration. This is seen in the practice of the ‘conscience vote’ in parliamentary democracies. This vote, whereby representatives vote according to their ‘conscience’ rather than the party line, is an apparent attempt to get outside of politics for issues which are considered ‘moral’[4].
As an illustration, the 1980s and early 1990s in New Zealand were characterised by the sudden predominance of neo-liberal ideology. After its initial instantiation – which involved the evocation of a crisis and the (silent) dimension of the political – this discourse became private in the sense that the political horizon appeared inevitable. Government administration became a matter of ethics; debates were had over the best administrative means through which to install neo-liberal ethics.
One of these means was the creation of two pieces of legislation which sought to limit the practice of future governments. In a sense this legislation sought to use ethics to permanently exclude the political. These acts were the Fiscal Responsibility Act (1994) and the Reserve Bank Act (1989), both of which enshrined neo-liberal principles in the practice of government. As such, those behind neo-liberal ideology managed to expand the ethical horizon, rearticulating the very practice of government. With the disavowal of the political dimension – in this case legislation was developed to specifically prevent political interference – there exists not a politics of liberal democracy but, rather, an ethics of the administration of privatised political practice. When the political is suspended, politics becomes ethics and the moral substitutes for the political. These are the circumstances of ‘post-ideological’ liberal democracies in which politics has been reduced to an empty formalism. As such, politics disappears and debate becomes ethical; because there is no longer any debate over the Good (the discontented are marginalised or subjugated) the polis becomes a private community, unaware of the exclusions upon which it is founded.
As a further illustration, although the nation-state has come to be questioned in academic discourse and threatened by changes in global politics, few question the inherent good of the Nation. When the exclusions through which the concept of Nation from become apparent, they tend not to threaten the nation but, rather, enhance its identity. The treatment of refugees is an example of this process. In recent times numerous attempts have been made by ‘boat people’ to immigrant to Australia by illegal means. The Australian state, through both the Howard and Rudd governments, has failed to allow these people to arrive in Australia, forcing them to either turn around or land at pre-established detention centres in the Pacific. This policy, which has led to several ‘tragedies’, has not been case for any rumination about what it means to be Australian. This would be a political intervention, suggesting, for instance that all people have to the same right to citizenship, and their lives have a greater status than that of the Nation – a proper political moment which occurs when that which has been excluded is forced into being. Instead, the morality of the nation has been affirmed. At best separate ‘administrative’ solutions have been found, allowing the boatpeople the privilege of seeking asylum or transporting them safety back to their point of departure. Without the political, there is no politics, only administrative ethics.
We can perhaps best explain these tight conceptual distinctions – between morality, ethics, politics and the political, by reference to the economy. A moral understanding of the economy would make reference to a transcendental signifier which dictates the structure of the economy – it is the economy of those who take their orders from God, or a signifier thereof. For neo-conservatives, these orders can be taken from the Bible, or the doctrines of free-market economics, a difference which has somehow oft times become blurred. In terms of a solution to difficulties of the global economy, at its best this form of economy might entail acts of charity in attempting to plug the gap between the apparent benevolence of its doctrines and the unruliness of its discontents. Karl Anderson’s response to the 2008 financial crisis, Reset (2009), for instance, argues that it offers the opportunity not to rethink the American way of life but to “restore our values and renew America”. This is clearly a moral discourse which takes ‘America’ to be an axiomatic signifier beyond reproach
An ethical response to the economy already takes the economic horizon for granted, either by right or resignation. Those who are resigned to the structure of the economy seek ethical practices which do not fundamentally tackle this structure. As such, today the strongest sense of an ethical economy comes in the fair-trade/sustainability movement. The ethics of this form of economy takes the fundamentals of the economy for granted – markets, trade, poverty etc – but seek to modify them through a set of judgements upon existing conditions. This is largely the position taken by the Left today.
Conversely, the Left does not have a monopoly on being economically ethical. For those on the political Right, ethics involve those institutions or decisions which keep capitalism ‘fair’ by resisting the urge to interfere with the market. Here, ethics entails a legislative approach to maintain the formal standards that maintain free-market competition. If capitalism itself has a moral status, then ethics is about maintaining the ethos of the moral. Both sides of the political equation are seeking to maintain the morality of capitalism, although this morality is more explicitly acknowledged by the Right.
The politics of economy has a similar structure to the ‘ethical economy’ but considers the institutional arrangements of the economy. Today’s Leftist politicians might, for example, agree that capitalism operates best with a thorough welfare state, whereas the Right maintains that welfare is an inefficient means of distributing wealth. In this sense we are returning to Eagleton’s topological distinction whereby ethics is a judgement of the Good instituted in a form of politics.
This kind of debate occurred in the 2008 US election campaign where both McCain and Obama postulated their differing conception of the manner in which the economy should be managed, without calling into question the economic horizon: when the banking crisis reached its peak, both candidates momentary ceased campaigning to reach a bi-partisan agreement to sure up the banking section. At this point, politics came to rest in the name of the moral imperative of maintaining the ‘American way of life’, which was called into question by the collapse. That the breakdown of the banking system was treated in much the same way as the declaration of war (both in Afghanistan and Iraq), is telling in regards to the moral status of capitalism. It was only after the crisis was considered over that politics resumed through debate over the institutional arrangements of the system.
By contrast, a political approach calls into question this very horizon, enforcing its own inherent lack rather than attempting to fill it. A properly political economy entails an attempt to evoke the impossibility of economy itself, calling into question the very ontic horizon of the economy. Today, to accomplish such a move would necessitate a critique of capitalism itself and class struggle. Moreover, it would require an evocation of the impossibility of the economy itself.
Of value in helping us to understand what his move towards an evocation of this impossibility of the economy itself is Daly’s sense that the distinction between politics and the political beyond Lefort’s work is not uniform, such that we can have a ‘politics of the political’: there exist different ways (politics) of conceiving of the inexhaustible horizon of the political (2009:280). Indeed, he argues that the major distinction between Laclau and Žižek – a distinction that largely defines the argumentation in this thesis, both in terms of reading Lacan and what it means to act politically – can be understood as the politics of the political. We could consider, as Daly (ibid.: 281) does, that the difference between Laclau’s (constitutive exception) and Žižek’s (concrete universal) understanding of the notion of outside is an example of the politics surrounding the conception of the political horizon.
Yet, if Žižek rejects Stavrakakis’, or indeed any, attempt to translate Lacanian ethics into an institutional form of politics, in what manner does Žižek articulate the relationship between psychoanalysis and politics? Before going on to discuss the difficulties with reading Žižek’s work, a preliminary answer can be suggested: Žižek does not use Lacanian ethics as a form of politics but, rather, as a sense of political practice that attempts to bring about a ‘short-circuit’ by which the ethos of Lacanian theory is used to evoke the foundations of the political order. It operates not so much from the content of the Lacanian approach to ethics but, rather, from the dialectics of its form. This approach does not seek reform or political protest but, rather, a wholesale questioning of the political order.
What is the Truth of Žižek?
Žižek’s location within the Left – as both saviour and disappointment – has meant that his work is the subject of much frustration, speculation and adulation, either being sought out as a mysterious messiah, misguided conservative or confused pluralist. Žižek is both none and all of these things, depending on our construction of his work. Given Žižek’s status as the embodiment of the difficulties of the Left, the construction of Žižek to be utilised in this thesis is of vital importance. Moreover, I will consider the consequences of speaking in this manner, given the particular materiality of the problematic to which this thesis speaks.
The question is whether there are various Žižek’s to be constructed, or rather a singular Truth of Žižek to be found, whereby a correct reading of his work that can be deployed. Certainly, the Truth of Žižek’s work does not lie within Žižek himself. We cannot consider Žižek to be somehow outside of language, a miraculous theoretical object of which direct consideration is possible. It is not possible to wholly represent Žižek’s work such that the Truth emerges as a coherent map. Instead, if there is a Truth of Žižek, it could only lie outside of him in the interpretations of his work and the interpretations his work produces.
As could be expected from a theorist who seeks to combine Lacan, Schelling and Marx, some have argued that Žižek’s work is without a core trajectory such that there is not a true Žižek but in an ironically postmodern analysis to which Žižek would stand in stanch disapproval, that there are multiple Žižek’s to be constructed. Sarah Kay, for example, states that, “As with Lacan, every reading of a Žižek text is only a possible trajectory” (2003: 16). Likewise Denise Gigante more harshly contends that Žižek:
is unique, and where he makes his radical break with other literary theorists who take up a position, any position at all that pretends to some notional content or critical truth, is in the fact that he fundamentally has no position. His recent outpouring of critical texts–ranging from ideologico-psychological film theory, such as Everything You Always Wanted to Know about Lacan (But Were Afraid to Ask Hitchcock), to the politico-philosophical Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (matters which include, and why not, quantum physics)–describes a hybridized critical identity that is almost impossible to pin down. Rather than importing interdisciplinary texts and events to his own theoretical perspective, he functions as a “vanishing mediator,” mediating between various theoretical points of view. (Gigante, 1998: 153)
Certainly, Žižek’s work displays a number of political stances, or perhaps strategies: from an initial implicit support of Laclau’s radical democratic project; calls to traverse the fantasy and repoliticise the economy; a controversial affair with the Lacanian act (one that still lingers today); a more recent move into ‘subtractive politics’; and a sure to be controversial support for the ‘communist hypothesis[5]. Under this interpretation, these strategic positions are not a chronological development, by rather evidence of the plurality – or the confused development – within Žižek’s work. More, Žižek does not appear to consider any subject outside of his discipline – if discipline is the correct term – and infamously moves between them at rapid pace. A joke by the Marx Brothers can appear to hold the same analytic value as a quote from the Communist Manifesto. In this sense, a different Žižek can be constructed in any number of discourses – Žižek could be film theorist, a reader of political or cultural enjoyment, a Marxist or a cantankerous communist with a nostalgic bent.
Despite the apparent plurality, however, these positions can be considered to be fundamentally a response to a singular ontological commitment in the Lacanian Real and politically to a form of anti-capitalism increasingly informed by Marxism. The former overwrites the latter such that against the pluralism noted above, we can consider Žižek to be a philosopher of the Real. Identifying Žižek as a philosopher of the Real appears to place this thesis in the second category, attempting to identify a Truth of Žižek. We must consider, however, what kind of Truth this would be.
If constructing Žižek as a philosopher of the Real appears to be singular representation of his work, it is not one that produces any firm political position or systematic philosophical coherence. Although Žižek’s continued reliance upon the Real can be identified – as has occurred throughout this thesis – this does not aid in the development of the Žižekian political position. The vital difference lies in the aforementioned distinction between the content of Žižek’s interventions and their form. The content may change across discursive context – Žižek’s reading of Marxism or anti-capitalism – but the formal dialectic remains constant. This form is reflected in the content of Žižek’s reflections but this link is not a necessary one.
This absence of firm political positions of philosophical coherence can be illustrated through his political commitments. The over-riding political allegiance within Žižek’s work is to an anti-capitalism that relies on the Marxist tradition. As illustrated in the ‘surplus’ homology with which we finished Chapter Three, Žižek’s Marxism is determined by the formal logic of the Real which is indifferent to its political content. That is, no singular Marxist position emerges from his work but, rather, a plurality of often incommensurable readings or political strategies. These strategies do not hold a singular purpose but, rather, can be deployed depending of the political circumstances. Žižek does not, therefore, attempt to substitute in a new revolutionary agent or suggest a new form of communism that stems directly from this interpretation of the dialectic. Conversely, his refusal to do so by reference to the Real does suggest a firm commitment. It is a commitment, however, that is easily misread, leading to attempts to fill the ‘lack’ in Žižek’s work with an additional attachment.
Here we strike the alternative to the pluralist reading of Žižek, which attempts to identify a singular vision of Žižek’s work. Most often, as is the case with Homer (2001:7) who claims that Žižek’s Lacanianism rules out any possibility of being a Marxist, Žižek’s work is rejected because of a fundamental commitment to either Lacan or Marx, a commitment which distorts the influence of the other. By the same reasoning, Laclau claims that Žižek’s reliance upon Lacanian psychoanalysis prevents him from developing any sense of politics, stating; “Žižek’s thought is not organised around a truly political reflection but is, rather, a psychoanalytic discourse which draws its examples from the politico-ideological field” (Laclau, 2000a: 289)
An interesting split occurs within the essentialist reading of Žižek, between those who attempt to attach a signifier to Žižek’s fundamental attachment and those who go in search of a missing essence (as if Žižek is a mysterious Master hoping that his subjects will find the hidden truth before he has to spell it out to them). Yet, there is no hidden or disavowed truth to be found here; that Žižek does somehow hold a position to which he is unwilling to openly commit, although his recent work on the communist hypothesis[6] may have produced knowing smiles in some critics.
Certainly, Žižek’s early work features no firm commitment to any alternative position to capitalism, other than a purely formal reference to something other than capitalism. As Critchely (2007a: xvi) recalls, Žižek once commented to him at a conference, “I have a hat but I have no rabbit”. In this sense we should not consider Žižek’s support for the communist hypothesis to be a borrowed Rabbit but, rather, the shape of a new hat, a renewed epistemological approach.
Thus, there is nothing in Žižek’s work that would inspire policy wonks. Nor does there exist a singular reading of Marxism or psychoanalysis that would translate into a radical alternative to global capitalism. Nonetheless, few critics are prepared to accept the limits of Žižek’s work, rather searching through his work for a hidden essence. Too many theorists and critics look to Žižek as a distorted form of the master, constantly demanding answers from his work. Laclau, for example contends:
Žižek had told us he wants to overthrow capitalism; now we are served notice that he wants to do away with liberal democratic regimes – to be replaced, it is true, by a thoroughly different regime which he does not have the courtesy of letting us know anything about ….Only if that explanation is made available will we be able to start talking politics, and abandon the theological terrain. Before that, I cannot even know what Žižek is talking about – and the more this exchange progresses, the more suspicious I become that Žižek does not know either…I can discuss politics with Butler because she talks about the real world, about strategic problems people face in their actual struggles but with Žižek it is not possible to even start to do so. (Laclau, 2000a: 289-290,original emphasis)
Likewise, the title of Jeremy Gilbert’s contribution to the polemically critical text, The Truth of Žižek (Bowman & Stamp, 2007), All the Right Questions, All the Wrong Answers (2007), suggests the predominant political reading of Žižek’s work – that Žižek provides an interesting form of critique, provoking exciting questions but providing disappointing answers; the implication being that it is possible to provide the right answers to Žižek’s questions. Nonetheless, theorists looking for ‘the right answer’ within Žižek’s work will be sadly disappointed. Perhaps symptomatic of this demand to the master, is the tendency to allow Žižek some form of a ‘right of reply’ in publications critical of his work, including the International Journal for Žižek Studies, and a number of critical and introductory texts (Bowman & Stamp, 2007; Eagleton, 2009; Kay, 2003; Sharpe, 2004; Stavrakakis, 1999; Wright & Wright, 1999; Zupančič, 2000).
I have thus far established and rejected two possible readings of Žižek: Žižek as a pluralist and Žižek as a disavowed essentialist. The first rejected any sense of universality in Žižek’s work, missing his commitment to the Real and anti-capitalist politics. The other has over-read these positions, seeking to find and install a singular abstraction as the universal image of Žižek’s work. Both these interpretations of Žižek – the pluralism of his interventions and his fundamental commitments (if not his missing essence) – hold some value. Nonetheless, neither – or, more accurately, both – are the interpretation of Žižek to be taken in this thesis.
Following Sharpe (2004: 4) this interpretation holds that for Žižek there is a singular ‘Truth of Žižek’ provided by the Real but that this singularity – based upon the paradoxes of the Real identified in Chapter Three – has no necessary content. Rather it is an impossibility that pervades every theoretical concept or political position. As such, the Real may prevent the development of positivist positions but a plurality of positions exists in relation to the Real. It is only by conceiving of Žižek as an essentialist of the Real that we approach the dimension of universality. This identification produces a short circuit between the particular and the universal, such that the Real – one of the particular signifiers in Žižek’s work – becomes the universal image of his work through its very impossibility. That is, the Real becomes the point of failure to which every Žižekian position must respond but it does not produce a position in itself.
Here, Žižek can be consider to be a comedic philosopher. Žižek’s work is often supplemented by jokes which serve as illustrative examples, however, the comedic logic goes beyond these witticisms, pervading the deepest logic of his work. Žižek is a comedic philosopher because he is a meta-philosopher – a philosopher of everything – of the Real, which does not exist. Žižek work is not tragic in this regard in the sense that it points to the existence of something that was had, Marxism for example, and is now lost but, rather, comedic; the thing that we were looking for was never present to begin with.
This basic logic of humour – as ably illustrated by Zupančič (2006a, 2008) – marks the Hegelian logic of universality upon which much of Žižek’s work relies. The standard doxa of the discursive turn is that the universal is lost, an impossibility generated by humanity’s constitution in language. This tragic logic leads to many of the defeatist critiques of postmodernity. The same critique is thrown at Žižek’s work, and at psychoanalysis in general, but it misses a vital point; for Žižek the universal is impossible, but it was never possible to begin with. Human life is constituted as a search for a lost object that was never possessed. Moreover, Žižek suggests that because humanity continues to search for the universal – installing various signifiers in its image – it is this failure which constitutes the universal in what Žižek, following Hegel, labels the concrete universal.
This understanding of Žižek can be best illustrated by a regularly cited example within his own work, that of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss’ interpretation of a tribal village (see Žižek, 1994b: 25; 2008a: 287). Here the villagers were asked to draw ground map of their village. Two groups emerged – one that represented the village as two concentric circles, the other separated by an invisible linear frontier. The question Žižek asks, following Levi-Strauss, is how to interpret this discrepancy. Within contemporary social science, two positions emerge which can be broadly identified as modernist and postmodernist. The postmodernist position conceives that there is no true village layout – reality exists only in the manner in which it is constructed by the villagers – there is no truth to be told about any social construction. By contrast the modernist perspective takes an opposite – scientific – approach to truth. Here there is a truth to be had and it is one that can be discovered empirically, perhaps by obtaining some aerial photographs of the village.
The same division can be seen in interpretations of Žižek’s work, split between attempts to map his work or constructions of particular positions that emerge. What both these positions miss, however, is the antagonism which is causing the division in representation. Žižek suggests that it is this antagonism which holds the Truth in any given situation and provides the dislocating force to which discourse is a response. This antagonism is nothing but the Real, which provokes both singular attempts to label that ‘thing’ that Žižek’s work is doing, and the plurality of positions which emerge from the failure of these attempts.
There is not, however, any necessary translation of this understanding into politics – Žižek does not produce a ‘Politics of the Real’. Although Žižek is committed to this ontological reading, what emerges is a number of different relationships with the impossibility of the Real. Žižek’s work, therefore, produces a short-circuit between ethics and the political, using the formal foundations of Lacan’s dialectical understanding of ethics to bring into play the indeterminacy of political being. Žižek’s politics, therefore, are constituted by different strategic interpretations of the political. These different relationships might productively be interpreted as strategies that can be deployed depending on the political circumstances.
These strategies – including, as we shall detail in Chapter Seven, the act, subtractive politics, and the practice of concrete universality – could mobilise Žižek’s ontology as a political strategy in support of some conservative ideological position. Indeed some would suggest that Žižek’s disdain for multi-culturalist identify politics does exactly that. In this thesis, however, as is congruent with Žižek’s political ambitions but also in relation to the contradictions of the global economy, we shall attempt to understand how Žižek’s universal understanding of the Real relates to the question of economy, of capitalism, and of Marxism.
The emblematic question for this thesis relates to the consequences of this particular interpretation of Žižek against the specificity of the economic problematic around which this thesis is based. If we have initially rejected the ‘Scientific Hypothesis’ of Jeffery Sachs’ understanding of the economy, and subsequently shown how both unreconstructed Marxist-communism and the psychoanalytically informed ‘Democratic Hypothesis’ of Laclau and Stavrakakis is unable to contend with both the economy and the global dominance of capitalism, what are the possibilities for political action?
The foremost consequence of this interpretation of Žižek is that his work does not produce a singular political vision – we cannot reply to Stavrakakis’ work with a simple formulaic approach – nor a series of approaches but, rather, both. That is, as has been noted, the effect of the Real upon which Žižek’s relies means that his work produces a plurality of political strategies that can be reproduced depending on the structure of the particular political circumstances. Conversely, these strategies are based upon a singular perspective – the Real and Marxism – with reference to ontology and politics respectively.
Moreover, Žižek has begun to identify these approaches with a single signifier: class struggle as a modality of the Real and the ‘communist hypothesis’ as the political horizon. As shall be developed in the following chapters, however, neither of these points provides any positive sense of coherence. Žižek’s understanding, however, of comedy, concrete universality, class struggle and the concrete universal does aid the rethinking of some of the issues of Marxism after the discursive turn. In particular, they speak to the question of how to renew Marxist political practice at this point of history, given both the theoretical failure of scientific Marxism and the revolutionary subject, as well as the meta-hegemonic dominance of capitalism.
As noted in Chapter Three, Žižek’s reading of Marxism through Lacan and Hegel allows for a return to materiality and the question of economy. Conversely, Žižek has decisively displayed the failure of Marxist politics and communism as resulting from an inability to consider the impossible dialectic of lack and excess that is the basis of the psychoanalytic intervention. Moreover, in the past two chapters – on ethics and politics respectively – I have contended that psychoanalysis alone is unable to provide the resources for a feasible alternative modality of shared social life, particularly in terms of the materiality of the economy. What psychoanalysis does suggest is a dialectical approach for understanding shared social life and deconstructing ideological formations.
This interpretation of Žižek’s work becomes a strategic one: how to mobilise his theoretical work on universality, class struggle, and on the Real against the contradictions and deprivations of the global economy in the 21st century in a manner which provides hope of a better future. It is to this point that I shall now turn in the next section of this thesis. Here, having constructed the problems of global sustainability, Marxism after the signifier and the Lacanian reading of politics, I will construct a Žižek response – and beyond – to these dilemmas.
This response shall proceed in three stages. The first consists of a reading of Žižek’s work on the economy. This move is necessary because so much of the critique of Žižek’s politics is based upon either a lack of understanding of his reading of capitalism and the ontic status of the economy, or a blatant disavowal of the consequences of this move. Much of the positioning of Žižek as ‘good theory, poor politics’ is based around a refusal to acknowledge how his ‘theoretical’ construction of capital and global capitalism cannot be divided from his politics.
In particular, Žižek’s use of class struggle and capitalism as a modality of the Real, suggests crucial limitations in the range of political action available in response to the meta-hegemony of global capitalism. It is in light of these limitations, along with those established in this chapter in relation to Lacanian politics, that I will begin to construct a Žižekian political approach to politics in general and global capitalism specifically.
Here, I shall consider the range of strategic alternatives which emerge from Žižek’s work in relation to the contradictions of the global economy, specifically the surplus of labour which emerges with Žižek’s reading of global capitalism. Finally, in the penultimate chapter of the thesis, I shall turn to Žižek’s recent reference to the communist hypothesis and consider how it is that Žižek is able to hold on to what might be deemed a ‘Big Idea’ given the difficulties with such positions already established thus far.
The task in the next chapter, however, is to consider Žižek’s (Marxist) construction of the economy. This move has three points, taking into account the meta-hegemonic dominance of capitalism, Žižek’s reliance upon class struggle, and the political alternatives that have emerged in relation to class struggle.
[1] By the servicing of goods Lacan is referring to the support for ideological notions of the Good.
[2] Stavrakakis uses exclusion in terms of constitutive outside rather than concrete universal.
[3] Daly (2009: 286) notes that Aletta Norval (2004), from the same Essex School as Laclau, also draws a similar comparison between Laclau and Habermas’ conception of democracy.
[4] Interestingly, conscience votes are considered the norm under the American to the extent that the term is rarely used.
[5] These strategies shall be the focus of Chapter Seven.
[6] The communist hypothesis shall be the focus of Chapter Eight.
