Slavoj Žižek

Slavoj Žižek (born March 21, 1949) is a Slovenian sociologist, philosopher and cultural critic. He was born in Ljubljana, Slovenia (then part of Yugoslavia), and received a D.A. in Philosophy in Ljubljana and studied Psychoanalysis at the University of Paris. In 1990 he was a candidate with the party "Liberal Democracy of Slovenia" for president of the Republic of Slovenia.

Žižek is well known for his use of the works of Jacques Lacan in a new reading of popular culture. In addition to his work as an interpreter of Lacanian psychoanalysis, he writes on countless topics, such as fundamentalism, tolerance, political correctness, globalization, subjectivity, human rights, Lenin, myth, cyberspace, postmodernism, multiculturalism, David Lynch, and Alfred Hitchcock.

Life and work

Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He has been a visiting professor at the University of Chicago, Columbia, Princeton, New School for Social Research, New York, the European Graduate School, the University of Minnesota, the University of Michigan, etc. He is currently the International Director of the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Žižek's early career was hampered by the political environment of 1970s Yugoslavia. In 1975, he was prevented from gaining a post at the University of Ljubljana after his Master's thesis was deemed to be politically suspect. He spent the next few years undertaking national service in the Yugoslav army and eventually became involved with a group of Slovenian scholars whose theoretical focus was on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan.^*

It was not until the 1989 publication of his first book written in English, The Sublime Object of Ideology, that Žižek achieved international recognition as a major social theorist. Since then, he has continued to develop his status as an intellectual outsider and confrontational maverick. One of Žižek's most-widely discussed books, The Ticklish Subject (1999), explicitly positions itself against Deconstructionists, Heideggerians, Habermasians, cognitive scientists, feminists and what Žižek describes as New Age "obscurantists".

One of the problems in outlining Žižek's work and ideas is that he frequently changes his theoretical position (for instance, on the question of whether Lacan is a structuralist or poststructuralist) between books and sometimes even within the pages of one book. Because of this, some of his critics have accused him of inconsistency and lacking intellectual rigor. However, Ian Parker claims that there is no "Žižekian" system of philosophy because Žižek, with all his inconsistencies, is trying to make us think much harder about what we are willing to believe and accept from a single writer. (Parker, 2004)

Recently, Žižek caused a stir in the world of social theory by writing the text of a catalogue for Abercrombie & Fitch. He is widely regarded as a fiery and colorful lecturer who does not shy away from controversial remarks. His documentary 'The Pervert's Guide to Cinema' was shown as three-part series on the English TV channel More 4 from 3 to 5 July 2006.

Metaphysics

Some argue that Žižek's metaphysics belongs to an Idealist tradition that holds that reality is constructed in the mind (Canning, 1993, p. 89). Unlike postmodernist theorists he often criticizes, Žižek tries to sidestep charges of relativism by focusing on the relationship between the subject and the political State. Žižek often describes himself as an "old-fashioned dialectical materialist" or simply a materialist.

Throughout his work, Žižek borrows extensively from the explanation of identity formation offered by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. One major distinction in Lacan's account is between three concepts: the Symbolic, the Imaginary and the Real. Anxiety and desire—and similar processes in the realm of the invisible—generate meaning as well as guide action in constructing reality. The Symbolic (e.g., the social order as is constructed out of the signifying system) is also called the big Other by Lacan, in the sense that the big Other organizes and deploys the symbolic order while itself remaining excluded from it. The universal reveals itself in the particular, in the symptom, as for example the verbal slip for Freud reveals some actual truth.

Žižek re-reads German Idealism, particularly the work of Hegel and Schelling, through the Lacanian terminology. Although Lacan's own work was influenced by Hegel (via Alexandre Kojève), most commentators (e.g. Kay 2003; Parker 2004) note that Žižek focuses on Hegelian systems much more than did Lacan. Žižek justifies this move away from Lacan by noting that "unfortunately, Lacan too quickly identifies self-consciousness with self-transparency, and the very condition of the notion of self-consciousness in German Idealism is that you are inaccessible to yourself. It's a positive ontological condition" (interview with Canning, 1993, p. 89).

Central to Žižek's Hegelian re-reading of Lacan is an emphasis on the role of the Imaginary. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the Imaginary is the mechanism of identification which begins with the visual relations established in infancy, between an infant and its mirror-image and between the infant's and the mother's gaze. This process results in the establishment of the ideal-ego (the person I imagine myself to be) and the ego-ideal (the imaginary outside gaze for whom I perform). The Imaginary in Lacan's work is an intersubjective concept. For Žižek, however, the Imaginary is aligned with the operation of the imagination, including the abstraction and synthesis of multitudes.

Žižek relates the multitude of sensory impressions to the multitude of society via the notion of violence. As the subject's imagination is confronted with the multitude of sensory impressions it receives, it has to both abstract individual features and fuse these features together. For Žižek, the fact that the imagination has no transcendental framework to regulate itself means that the noumenal thing-in-itself is nothing but the activity of the imagination run amok (The Ticklish Subject, p. 42). In order to break out of this chaos, the subject is founded in a moment of violence, a moment in which sense is violently imposed. Žižek compares this violent act to both God's act of creation and the creation of the State.

Sense, for Lacan, requires a pre-emptive act of subjectivization which borrows sense from the Symbolic. The attitude of the Lacanian subject is one of: 'I will proceed as if the world makes sense to me because, if stopped and asked for an account of my understanding, I assume that the Symbolic order will be able to provide one on my behalf.' Žižek compares this notion of sense to the logic of capitalism; so, for instance, the existence of the individual capitalist subject is predicated on the belief that they can withdraw their life's savings from their bank account at any time, yet they also know that if everyone decided to withdraw their life's savings on the same day, the entire capitalist system would collapse (Tarrying With The Negative, pp. 69-80). Lacan's Symbolic Order operates like this too: because a complete account of the Symbolic universe is impossible, there is an internal Real which threatens to destroy the Symbolic from within.

The formation of the subject

Since the unconscious is structured like a language (comme une langue), it will orient itself towards desire in two aspects: first, the objects of desire, which is called the "goal" of desire in Lacan's Seminar XI, and, the unconscious, or the mechanism of desire in itself, which is called the "aim" of desire and deemed the more important aspect in the process of desire by Lacan himself. Objects are mainly contingent, yet they are supposed to find their place inside the Symbolic realm to be desirable to us (and thus to make themselves "objects" to us). In other words, the Symbolic decides what is desirable and undesirable to us; while the desirable objects can provide us with temporary pleasure, the latter is both the remains and surplus of Symbolization, i.e., the realm of jouissance and of the Real.

These objects constitute the symptom of the human being; but they can also become the opposite: its fetish. Žižek writes of the fetish that it is effectively the counterpart to the symptom; operating as a kind of sham life, it structures our entire life in order to support it. The fetish is the embodiment of a lie that enables us to endure an unbearable truth (Slavoj Žižek 2000). This is the Real itself (in the Lacanian sense), an isolated object (the Lacanian objet petit a) whose fascinating and meaningful presence guarantees the structural real, the social order. This real enables one to gain a distance from everyday reality: one introduces an object that has no place inside it, that cannot be named or otherwise symbolized - the photo collage of the beloved in the film "The Truman Show," for example. What Žižek means is that every symbolic structure must contain an element that embodies the moment of its impossibility, around which it is organized. This is both impossible and real (in its effect) at the same time. The symptom on the other hand is the return of the repressed truth in a different form.

Žižek explains this objet petit a—the MacGuffin—in the following way: "MacGuffin is objet petit a pure and simple: the lack, the remainder of the real that sets in motion the symbolic movement of interpretation, a hole at the center of the symbolic order, the mere appearance of some secret to be explained, interpreted, etc." (Love thy symptom as thyself).

The Real

Here the Real is a rather enigmatic term, and it is not to be equated with reality. For our reality is symbolically constructed; the real, however, is a hard kernel, the trauma that cannot be symbolized i.e. expressed in words. The real has no positive existence; it exists only as barred. "Place the cover on top of the ark and put in the ark the Testimony that I will give you." (Exodus 25:21)

Not everything in reality can be unmasked as fiction; only the many things - indeterminate points - that have to do with social antagonism, life, death, and sexuality. These we have to endure if we are to symbolize them. The real is not a sort of reality behind reality, but rather the void or empty places that render reality incomplete and inconsistent. It is the screen of the phantasm, the very screen itself that distorts our perception of reality. "And he made a screen for the door of the Tent, of blue, and purple, and scarlet, and fine twined linen, the work of the embroiderer;" The triad of the symbolic/imaginary/real reproduces itself within each individual part of the subdivision. There are also three modalities of the real:

The symbolic real : the signifier reduced to a meaningless formula (as in quantum physics, which like every science grasps at the real but only produces barely comprehensible concepts)
The real real: a horrific thing, that which conveys the sense of horror in horror films
The imaginary real: an unfathomable something that permeates things as a trace of the sublime. This form of the real becomes perceptible in the film The Full Monty, for instance, in the fact that in stripping the unemployed protagonists disrobe completely; in other words, through this extra gesture of voluntary degradation something else, of the order of the sublime, becomes visible.

Psychoanalysis teaches that (postmodern) reality is precisely not to be seen as just a narrative, but rather that the client must recognize, endure, and fictionalize the hard kernel of the real in his own fiction.

The symbolic

The Symbolic is inaugurated with the acquisition of language; it is mutually relational. Thus it is that only he is a king towards whom others behave as underlings. At the same time, there always remains a certain distance towards the real (except in paranoia): not only is the beggar who thinks he is a king a madman, but so is the king who really believes he is a king. For effectively the latter has only the symbolic mandate of a king.

The real symbolic is the signifier reduced to a meaningless formula
The symbolic symbolic qua speech and meaningful language itself.

The (monitor-) screen as a means of communication in cyberspace: as an interface it refers us to a symbolic mediation of communication, to a chasm between whoever speaks and the "position of speaking" itself (i.e. the nickname, the email address). I never in fact coincide exactly with the signifier, I do not invent myself; rather my virtual existence was in a certain respect already co-founded with the advent of cyberspace. Here one must come to terms with a certain insecurity, but one which cannot be resolved in postmodern, contingent simulacra. Here too, as in social life, symbolic networks circulate around kernels of the real. This is one answer to Žižek's (oft-practiced inversion of the) question: It is not "What can we learn from life about cyberspace, but rather what can we learn from cyberspace about life?" These inversions serve theoretical psychoanalysis: i.e. contrary to applied psychoanalysis, it does not merely seek to analyze works of art and make what is threatening comprehensible, but rather to create a new perspective on the ordinary, to renew a sense of the strangeness of everyday life, and by way of the object to further develop the theory.

Symbolic networks are our (social) reality.

The imaginary

The imaginary is located at the level of the subject's relation to itself. It is the gaze of the Other in the mirror stage, the illusory mis-recognition, as Lacan concludes citing Arthur Rimbaud: I is an other (Je est un autre). The imaginary is the fundamental fantasy that is inaccessible to our psychological experience and raises up the phantasmal screen in which we find objects of desire. Here we can also divide the imaginary into a real (the phantasm that assumes the place of the real), an imaginary (the image/screen itself that serves as a lure), and a symbolic imaginary thinking. The imaginary can never be definitively grasped, since any discourse on it will always already be located in the symbolic.

All the levels are interconnected, according to Lacan (from the Seminar XX on), in a kind of Borromean link, i.e. as three rings are linked together such that should any one of these be disconnected all the remaining ones would also come apart.

Postmodernism

One theme in particular that Žižek addresses is postmodernism, which confronts psychoanalysis with new questions. By virtue of the demise of a patriarchally structured society and firmly established, authoritarian models of order, the Oedipus complex—one of the cornerstones of psychoanalysis—begins to falter.

Ideology constitutes itself, so to speak, from both sides of the coin: both from the values openly proclaimed by a political system and also its so-called hidden underside or dirty secret - that is, an ideology's implicitly deployed values and premises, which however must remain unspoken in order for an ideology to function and reproduce itself. To all these ideologically determined, phantasmal forms of lying or evasion, Žižek opposes the goal of psychoanalysis, which consists of traversing the fantasy, passing through the field of the deceptive image whose symptomatic formation brings about the construction of the subject, and to forge ahead to the kernel of enjoyment. A so-called authentic act destroys the phantasm.

Ideology is the distortion of non-ideology, the utopian moment (Fredric Jameson). This non-ideological component of our longing should be fully respected. In other words, the longing for community itself should not be regarded as proto-fascistic, or even its root - it becomes that only in its fascistic articulation.

In our current post-ideological times, ideology functions on the basis of an inner distance, where the symbolic mandate is not taken seriously; e.g., a father today is often one who ironically denigrates himself, together with the absurd fact itself of being a father today.

Žižek follows Louis Althusser (among others) in jettisoning the Marxist equation: "ideology=false consciousness." Ideology, to all intents and purposes, is consciousness. Ideology does not "mask" the real—one cannot achieve true consciousness. This being the case, post-ideological postmodern "knowingness"—the wink wink nudge nudge cynicism and irony of postmodern cultural production—does not reveal the truth, the real, the hard kernel. Knowing that we are being "lied" to is hardly the stuff of revolution when ideology isn't, and never has been, simply a matter of consciousness (cynicism, irony, and so on), of subject positions, but is the very stuff of everyday praxis itself. The cynics and ironists, not to mention the deconstructionists et. al., may KNOW that reality is an "ideological construction"—some have even read their Lacan and Derrida—but in their daily practice, caught up in an apparently unalterable world of exchange-values (capital), they do their part to sustain that construction in any case. As Marx would say, it is their very life process that is ideological, what they know, or what they think they know, being neither here nor there. The postmodern cultural artifact—the "critique," the "incredulity"—is itself merely a symptom/commodity/fetish. Thus has capital commodified even the cynicism that purports to unmask its "reality," to "emancipate."

Politicization

Today, in the aftermath of the end of ideology, Žižek is critical of the way political decisions are justified; the way, for example, reductions in social programs are sometimes presented as an apparently 'objective' necessity, though this is no longer a valid basis for political discourse. He sees the current talk about greater citizen involvement or political goals circumscribed within the rubric of the cultural as having little effectiveness as long as no substantial measures are devised for the long run. But measures such as the limitation of the freedom of capital and the subordination of the manufacturing processes to a mechanism of social control—these Žižek calls a radical re-politicization of the economy (A Plea for Intolerance).

So at present Slavoj Žižek is arguing for a politicization of the economy. For indeed the "tolerant" multicultural impulse, as the dogma of today's liberal society, suppresses the crucial question: How can we reintroduce into the current conditions of globalization the genuine space of the political? He also argues in favor of a politicization of politics as a counter balance to post-politics. In the area of political decision making in a democratic context he criticizes the two-party system that is dominant in some countries as a political form of a post-political era, as a manifestation of a possibility of choice that in reality does not exist.

Politicization is thus for him present whenever a particular demand begins to function as a representative of the impossible universal. Žižek sees class struggle not as localized objective determinations, as a social position vis-à-vis capital but rather as lying in a radically subjective position: the proletariat is the living, embodied contradiction. Only through particularism in the political struggle can any universalism emerge. Fighting for workers interests often appears discredited today (indeed in this domain the workers themselves only wish to implement their own interests, they fight only for themselves and not for the whole). The problem is how to foster a politicizing politics in the age of post-politics. Particular demands, acting as a metaphorical condensation, would thus aim at something transcendent, a genuine reconstruction of the social framework. Žižek sees the real political conflict as being that between an ordered structure of society and those without a place in it, the part that has no part in anything yet causes the structure to falter, because it refers to i.e. embodies an empty principle of the universal.

The very fact that a society is not easily divided into classes, that there is no simple structural trait for it, that for instance the middle class is also intensely fought over by a populism of the right, is a sign of this struggle otherwise class antagonism would be completely symbolized and no longer both impossible and real at the same time (impossible/real).

Critiques of Žižek

Žižek's notoriety in academic circles has increased rapidly, especially since he began publishing widely in English. Many hundreds of academics have addressed aspects of Žižek's work in professional papers.^* Inevitably, in the course of such scholarly discussion, many other thinkers differ with aspects of Žižek's conceptual approach or specific arguments.