Zizek on Philosophy
A series of three articles written by Zizek on philosophy, examining the relationship between Spinoza-Kant-Hegel, Deleuze-Derrida-Lacan and, lastly, Badiou. I thought this was especially well-put, as its an insight that many come to experience at a University, but never really consider as a problem outside of the way “Philosophy” departments are run:
This theory of the four “conditions” of philosophy allows us to approach in a new way the old problem of the “role” of philosophy. Often, other disciplines take over (at least part of) the “normal” role of philosophy… in US today - in the conditions of the predominance of cognitivism and brain studies in philosophy departments -, most of “Continental Philosophy” takes place in Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, English, French and German departments… What if, then, there is no “normal role”? What if it is exceptions themselves which retroactively create the illusion of the “norm” they allegedly violate? What if not only, in philosophy, exception is the rule, but also philosophy - the need for the authentic philosophical thought - arises precisely in those moments when (other) parts-constituents of the social edifice cannot play their “proper role”? What if the “proper” space for philosophy ARE these very gaps and interstices opened up by the “pathological” displacements in the social edifice? Along these lines, the first great merit of Badiou is that, for the first time, he systematically deployed the four modes of this reference of philosophy (to science, art, politics, and love).
(Via Naught Thought.)
No Shangri-La Part II
Awhile ago I posted a link to a letter written into the LRB by Slavoj Žižek entitled, “No Shangri-La,” in which Žižek criticizes the Western media and the Tibetan solidarity campaign for portraying a distorted and quixotic picture of pre-1949 Tibet, a vision Žižek argues is essentially libidinal (you can find his other Tibet-related pieces here and here). This caused something of an academic kerfuffle, with numerous scholars accusing Žižek of simply parroting the PRC’s propaganda (see Shego Jinpa, the University of Michigan’s Donald Lopez and Michel Thibaud, who somehow uses this as an opportunity to accuse Žižek of being a closet-Zionist).
To make what could otherwise be a long and somewhat unimportant story short, Žižek has written a short follow up letter to the LRB, available here. Needless to say, I’m sure the two Agent Coopers are very sad. (Via 3 Quarks Daily.)
Hillary the Populist
Posted at 2:40 PM
One question that has bugged me over the past few months is, who exactly are Hillary’s supporters? I am, of course, not talking about the stereotypical aging “die hard” feminists who refuse to give up on their support for the first woman president. If this were the case, one would suspect that such a group would be dismayed by Hillary’s “conservative” appeal, as well as the reprehensible attacks on Michelle Obama. If, on the other hand, Hillary’s supporters are simply so-called “Reagan Democrats,” that is, white working-class voters (petit bourgeoisie), why do they not support John McCain? He is, arguably, the most hawkish on foreign policy out of all of the presidential candidates1, as well as the most “free market” orientated.
Jodi Dean has perspicuously pointed out how the term “elitist” (in reference to Barack Obama) has come to be a coded racial buzzword for “uppity” throughout the campaign. Now, of course, one can simply dismiss the (mis-)use of this term, as Barack Obama is, objectively speaking, the least wealthy, least “elitist” of the candidates (in comparison to the Clinton’s hundreds of millions of dollars and the McCain’s eight houses, corporate jet and ownership of numerous large corporations). But, as Dean emphasizes, the point is not so much a condemnation of wealth as it is a racist supposition that Obama has “risen above himself.”
On the other hand, it seems to me too easy to entirely dismiss those who accuse Obama of being “elitist” as racists, although websites such as Hillary is 44 do little to assuage my doubts in this regard. This, in my opinion, adheres too well to the Obama party-line and does little to confront the Clintonite counter-argument that decries Obama’s campaign as being sexist. Here we can see, in concrete form, a significant abstract-political problem associated with “post-[whatever]” identity politics.
I think that this electoral mystery is elucidated within Zizek’s In Defense of Lost Causes, particularly in the paradoxically titled chapter, “Why Populism is Good Enough in Practice (But Not Good Enough in Theory),” in which Zizek critically negotiates with Ernesto Laclau’s recent change in theoretical position from radical democracy to populism. As I have yet to read any Laclau, I have to go entirely on Zizek’s account of his work, which is obviously a limitation, but one that I am not entirely concerned with in the scope of this post. According to Zizek, then, Laclau conceives of populism as
the Lacanian objet petit a of politics, the particular figure which stands for the universal dimension of the political, which is why it is “the royal road” to understanding the political… Populism is not a specific political movement, but the political at its purest: the “inflection” of the social space that can affect any political content.
Along these lines, Zizek argues that populism can be conceived of as the “overlapping of the universal with part of its own particular content,” found within Hegel’s notion of “oppositional determination” (gegensätzliche Bestimmung). Zizek continues by stating that
populism occurs when a series of particular “democratic” demands (for better social security, health services, lower taxes, against war, and so on) is enchained in a series of equivalences, and this enchainment produces “the people” as the universal political subject… and all different particular struggles and antagonisms appear as parts of a global antagonistic struggle between “us” (the people) and “them.”
Thus, Zizek (and, ostensibly, Laclau) conceive of populism, at the most basic level, to be (1) transcendental-formal (as opposed to ontic) and (2) composed of a chain of equivalences that constitute a universal political dimension (“the people”). Finally, this avenue opens up a dichotomy between “us” and “them” (along Schmittian lines of public “friend” and “foe”). Yet, crucial here is that
The field of politics is thus caught in an irreducible tension between “empty” and “floating” signifiers: some particular signifiers start to function as “empty,” directly embodying the universal dimension, incorporating into the chain of equivalences which they totalize a large number of “floating” signifiers. Laclau mobilizes this gap between the “ontological” need for a populist protest vote (conditioned by the fact that the hegemonic power discourse cannot incorporate a series of popular demands) and the contingent ontic content to which this vote gets attached…
Perhaps, given this formula, one should do the unthinkable and take Hillary’s statements that she is the “populist candidate,” not as a cynical political ploy, but literally. Regardless of her objective status (in terms of wealth, class position, and numerous political positions), her “ontic content,” her status as a “populist candidate,” is purely contingent, the result of a formal necessity at the level of the direct expression of the chain of equivalences that constitute “the people.” Consequently, one should not read anything into her candidacy as such. Instead, one should concentrate on the problem at the theoretical level. As Zizek concludes, populism is limited by an ideological mystification, the attempt to suture the inherent antagonism (within society) by transubstantiating it into an external one (hence, “us” vs. “them”).
Yet Obama’s campaign is hardly without its own limitations. On the topic of Chantal Mouffe’s “democratic paradox,” Zizek notes that the “main threat to democracy in today’s democratic countries resides in… the death of the political through the ‘commodification’ of politics.
What is at stake here is not primarily the way politicians are packaged and sold as merchandise at elections; a much deeper problem is that elections themselves are conceived along the lines of buying a commodity (power, in this case): they involve a competition between different merchandise-parties, and our votes are like money which buys the government we want. What gets lost in such a view of politics as just another service we buy is politics as a shared public debate of issues and decisions that concern us all.
The reduction of politics to ontic commodities (the way a politician or party might be “branded” or commodified) and the ontological political-being-as-commodification (the function of the political relegated to that of the commodity-form) points to the vacuousness of contemporary so-called “post-ideological” politics that Obama (at least in part) exemplifies.2 It not only reduces “change” to a mere life-style commodity, but it also concedes to the economic-reductionist view of politics as “just another service” to be provided (hence the status of “change,” like that of money, as a pure “empty signifier”). This view thereby obscures the “real change” that politics, at its core, is able to achieve: that of making possible what, retroactively, seemed impossible; changing the entire coordinates of social reality.
Yet, in the opposition between the vacuous post-modern “commodification” of politics and populist ideological mystification, one should, perhaps unexpectedly, support the former. As one may notice, the above paragraph is incredibly cliché, a very stereotypical critique of the “commodification” of daily life, the reduction of things into brand names, etc. Hence, post-modern politics takes on the status of a fetishistic disavowal: “I know very well (that everything, including politics, is commodified), but nevertheless…” Thus, while populism obscures the objective status antagonism located within fetishistic disavowal through the reification of antagonism into an external Other (“them”), in contrast to “the people,” post-modern politics allows one to begin the project of genuine emancipatory politics by locating the fetishistic object, the object at the center of libidinal cathexis that allows for one to avoid subjectively assuming what one objectively knows.
- At the very least, this is the image that he has attempted to cultivate, although, as the L.A. Times has pointed out, his foreign policy record is, at best, mixed ↩
- As a caveat I will say that Obama’s rhetorical abilities and devotional fans are, in fact, a positive contradiction to this thesis. ↩
No Shangri-La
Zizek on the Tibet/China Question:
What if the promised second stage, the democracy that follows the authoritarian vale of tears, never arrives? This, perhaps, is what is so unsettling about China today: the suspicion that its authoritarian capitalism is not merely a reminder of our past – of the process of capitalist accumulation which, in Europe, took place from the 16th to the 18th century – but a sign of our future? What if the combination of the Asian knout and the European stock market proves economically more efficient than liberal capitalism? What if democracy, as we understand it, is no longer the condition and motor of economic development, but an obstacle to it?
I recommend reading the entire letter.
(Via The Weblog.)
Zizek on Democracy Now!
Slavoj Zizek:
This may amuse you. It’s going to—when I was asked by a academic journal to say if I were to hold the power for one day as president, what—and I would have kind of absolute power to introduce a law, what law that would have been? My immediate answer was not as some humanist suggested, since United States at least thinks they are a global empire, so let every adult in the world be allowed to vote; my advice would be the opposite one: let’s everybody in the world, except US citizens, be allowed to vote and elect the American government. I think it would have been much better for you, even, because we all outside the United States would project our desires into how you should be.
(Via I Cite.)
Bromatological Materialism and the Meals of Late Capitalism
Posted at 7:00 PM
In an article published today in The Times, Kim Severson claims that the “entree is dead.” From this statement, I think we can learn a lot about the ideology of late capitalism. In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek famously argued that it was perfectly embodied by a certain kind of Spinozism: to paraphrase K-Punk, Spinoza’s rejection of deontological ethics for an ethics based around the concept of health is perfectly embodied in his reading of the myth of the Fall and the foundation of Law. Spinoza argued that because the Jews were primitive at the time, it was necessary to formulate the commandment as “Thou shalt not…,” as a performative command, yet for any reasonable person it was necessary for it to be grasped as constructive. This of course simply refers to a scientific or objective statement, such as “Thou shalt not eat from the tree of life because the apple is poisonous and will harm you.” In Zizek’s view, Spinoza’s move both deprives the grounding of Law in a sadistic act of scission (the cruel cut of castration), at the same time as it denies the ungrounded positing of agency in an act of pure volition, in which the subject assumes responsibility for everything.
The collapse of the patriarchal big Other thus deprives a signifier of attaining the position of Master Signifier or S1. For instance, Spinoza does not posit, “Do not smoke!,” but rather, “Smoke, but…” The “but” that replaces the primitive “thou shalt not” is instead a prohibition masked as a universal objective statement. Why is this significant to late capitalism? The imaginary absence of the Nom du père (Name-of-the-Father) likewise results in the absence of the non du père (no-of-the-father). The disappearance of prohibitive castration at the symbolic level precludes the normal formation of the subject’s identity. What the subject loses with the absence of the Name-of-the-father is her or his relation to their jouissance and thereby the basis for a deontologized Kantian ethical system (see Zizek’s analysis of Lacan’s article “Kant avec Sade.”). Thus, rather than adhering to an ethics of jouissance or an “ethics of the Real” (see Alenka Zupancic), we have schizophrenic subjects who are unable to relate to their jouissance because of the hidden prohibition within Spinozism. Take for instance several fundamental aspects of Western culture under late capitalism: the obsession with fad diets, exercise and objects deprived of their malignant contents (such as decaffeinated coffee or war without casualties).
Here we can begin to see the constructive nature of our own dietary patterns that are the result of a certain kind of ideological construct. Rather than having an entree constitute the bromatological cathexis of our unfettered jouissance, operating as a kind of objective correlative to the Master-Signifier (S1), we’re left with a multitude of dishes, none of which directly register as the objects of our desire (object-little-a):
“I think the entree has been in trouble for a long time,” said the chef Tom Colicchio. “Eating an entree is too many bites of one thing, and it’s boring.”
And of course we should make the vulgar Marxist point that the collapse of the entree as big Other is typically associated with bourgeois dining in the West. Rather than siding with multiculturalists who view it as the perfect opportunity to enjoy the Other’s food, to pathetically attempt to directly enjoy the manifestation of the Other’s schematized jouissance, we should locate the point at which the multiculturalist radically breaks with the Other’s desire: for instance, cultures wherein the consumption of certain endangered species is considered a delicacy. Moreover, we should make the obvious point that we only enjoy the Other’s cuisine qua our own preparation of it, thereby reifying our own schematization of jouissance. Thus, the multiculturalist call for the world to enjoy each other’s cuisine is actually a call for the barrier between all culture’s schematization of jouissance, a delimiting point of intersecting jouissances that designates the injunction, “This is our space and that’s yours.”
How then should the Left struggle against the manifestation of tapas-style dinners as the essence of bourgeois decadence? Not by bringing back the purely “phallogocentric” concept of the patriarchal big Other, marking a return to post-Victorian style cuisine. Instead, the Left should question the restaurant that claims to be the harbinger of our enjoyment, yet instead of allowing us to retain fidelity to our desires, the restaurant acts as the object-instrument of our desires, delimiting the meals to what is only on the menu. In that sense, the restaurant owner is the totalitarian leader whose superego injunction to “enjoy” at the beginning of every meal is actually the functioning of a sadistic tormentor who, given our current sociopolitical predicament, knows that we never can.
China’s Valley of Tears
Slavoj Zizek writing for In These Times:
Last year, the Chinese government strengthened some of its oppressive apparatuses—including forming special units of riot police to crush popular unrest. These police are the actual social expression of what, in ideology, appears as a revival of Marxism. In 1905, Trotsky characterized tsarist Russia as “the vicious combination of the Asian knout [whip] and the European stock market.” Doesn’t this characterization still hold for modern-day China?
But what if the promised democratic second act that follows the authoritarian valley of tears never arrives? That is what is so unsettling about today’s China: Its authoritarian capitalism may not be merely a remainder of our past but a portent of our future.
The Gypsies’ Whorehouse
Posted at 3:40 PMI just obtained a full copy of Bob Dylan’s Renaldo and Clara so in celebration here is a short clip that I found on YouTube.
I also have a few other things of interest:
Lacan dot com has a Zizek lecture entitled “Love Without Mercy” that touches on the finer points of Hitchcock. I think this is a good addition to The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. If you’re curious about the connection between little chocolate eggs with plastic toys in the center and the phrase “I love you, but inexplicably I love something in you more than you, and therefore I destroy you,” then this video is perhaps right up your alley.
I also found the official homepage of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. I like this quote about it that I found: “North Korean homepage. A model of communist efficiency. This quality of website design cannot be bought!” Also, do please check out the forums. You’ll find even more amazing things like this:
HELLO COMRADES, I WAS VERY GLAD TO SEE MY ACCEPTANCE EMAIL THIS AFTERNOON AND HAPPY TOO SEE SO MANY PEOPLE SUPPORT THE D.P.R.K,,,,, ALSO I AM A MARXIST-LENINIST-MAOIST BUT I RECOGNIZE THE DPRK AS SOCIALIST AND RECOGNIZE ALSO THAT COMRADE KIM SUNG IL APPLIED MARXISM-LENINISM INTO THE CONCRETE CONDITONS OF NORTH KOREA….. ALSO I UPHOLD THE JUCHE IDEA AND SONGUN POLITICS BECAUSE IT IS A CORRECT APPLICATION TO MARXISM…..hOPEFULLY I WILL MEET PEOPLE AND TALK WITH THEM ABOUT THE DPRK….. LONG LIVE THE JUCHE IDEA AND SONGUN POLITICS. DEATH TO IMPERIALISM,,,,, LONG LIVE COMMUNISM
What’s even more bizarre is that it’s run by a 30-something Spanish IT consultant named Alejandro Cao de Benos de Les y Pérez, who’s apparently the head of the Korean Friendship Association (KFA). I wonder if one simply slides along an axis from IT consultant to DPRK thug? If so, I think this would explain a lot about office life.
Also, why is the DPRK’s logo a hydroelectric dam?
I also think the title “Democratic People’s Republic of Whatever” is very Advanced. I think it is constitutive of a kind of excessive libidinal force found within a lot of repressive regimes who claim to be Marxist-Leninist(-Whateverist). Like, “You may be democratic, but our republic is additionally run by the people!” Maybe there’s a connection between the symbolic functioning at the titular level and ridiculous symbolic acts like the Million Man March, which, rather than attesting to the regime’s potency, in fact serve to undermine it by actualizing what is otherwise just a “threatening gesture/gaze.” The gesticulations and pure folly of such acts can’t but appear as an attempt to “cover something up.” But of course it’s nevertheless obvious that the DPRK never really had any geopolitical power since the end of the Korean War (the one with America…).