- The acrimonious dispute between Slavoj Zizek and Ernesto Laclau published
recently in three Critical Inquiry essays turns away from the key
question that it raises: Is there, today, any bond left between socialism
and psychoanalysis, politics and theory? Perhaps the authors, blinded by their
bitterness, cannot recognize the true subject of their contestation; or perhaps
they believe that the debate actually concerns populism, which in fact is merely
the skirmish's pretext. It is certain that in the book that prompted the
Critical Inquiry articles, On Populist Reason, Laclau
attempts both to redefine populism--he notes that the term, used to classify so
many different types of formations, has grown almost meaningless--and, through this
redefinition, to illustrate that populism names not a particular kind of politics,
but the political itself.[1] His central focus
thus falls not on regimes that have been labeled "populist," but on a general
structure that encompasses all political interventions, including these "populist"
ones. Laclau has a particular goal in offering such a thesis. He wants to show
that populism, when rigorously recast, offers great possibilities for a new leftism
in the wake of Marxism's decline.
- Zizek insists on the near opposite. Today, he argues, left-leaning populism
is the great temptation that must be resisted. Its most seductive promise, the
liberation of the poor from the clutches of neoliberalism, constitutes an appeal to
old-fashioned liberalism, feeding the capitalist system it claims to undermine. In
fact, Zizek is more intrigued by right-wing populisms than by their liberal
counterparts. The former, radical and antagonist, at least disclose the
objectionable elements of capitalism that the more "democratic" populisms both
conceal and render palatable. Yet these right-wing movements are hardly desirable.
Populism as a whole, then, is a political dead-end, a form within a contemporary
"postpolitical" (Zizek's term), neoliberal universe that threatens to render
politics itself superfluous.
- Is populism, in the current setting, a proper name for politics or the
means for its demise? There are few more pressing political questions. Hugo
Chávez's Bolivarian Revolution in Venezuela, so attractive to many on the
left, so abhorred by many on the right, yet also so typical, almost banal, within
a Latin American history that abounds in such populist regimes (Laclau, who cut
his intellectual teeth during the Peronist period in Argentina, is quite familiar
with the populist archetype), bears witness to the excitement and nervousness
that populism causes, within all political camps, today as much as ever.
- It should be noted that Zizek's and Laclau's opposing views on populism
stand in for other fields of contention. Will a leftist politics of the future
come in the form of a revamped democracy, as Laclau holds? Or, as Zizek maintains,
is democracy the very political form that must be overcome for such an advent to
take place? This particular, highly-intellectualized version of the argument
"against or for" democracy must be situated in its proper place. For Zizek's
position is not taken merely in response to the "spreading of democracy" qua
"spreading of the free market" rhetoric captained by politicians of nearly every
Western--and non-Western--state. Nor does it represent a simple objection to the
liberal so-called "political correctness" that today claims democracy with both
hands. The more direct target for "anti-democrats" such as Zizek or Alain Badiou
is a group of post-Marxist, post-Althusserian individuals: Laclau, Etienne Balibar,
and Jacques Rancière, to name three principals. These scholars labor to
rework or re-form democracy, casting the demos, the people, as the core of
a leftism-to-come. Rather than setting out novel political theories (all parties
agree that these are needed) that retain the basic assumptions of Marxism, namely,
the fundamental importance of class difference and economic exploitation, the
"democraticists" lend a hand to
the disregard of even those fundamentals by eschewing their own Marxist origins. As a
consequence, the question concerning democracy emerges as synonymous with another:
Are the grounds of Marxism so flawed or "out-of-date" that leftist theory demands
a total reworking of the very reason for Marxism? Or is Marxism and Marxist
history, albeit recast, called for now more than ever?
- In his 1933 essay "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" (which Laclau
briefly references), George Bataille opens a path for thinking through
these matters. The essay poses two main queries: How did fascism emerge
in Europe? And why did this popular revolt yield fascism rather than
socialism? Popular movements within capitalism, Bataille says, develop not in
response to a monolithic state homogeneity but precisely
in response to its breakdown. The homogeneity itself is sustained
through the development of productive citizens, each occupying a useful
place. Add up all individuals performing one useful and measurable task
within one contained site, and the sum is homogeneity. The actual
production is thus beneficial neither in itself nor for the citizen. It
is valuable for capitalism as a whole, which the production reproduces
and advances; and it is equally valuable for the state since production
generates and maintains the social order. It compels each person,
reduced to an occupant within the field of production, to inhabit a
proper place. Homogeneity, then, is the aggregate of calculable
elements, of disjointed individuals held together by an abstract common
denominator: money.
- Given the alienation of its constituents, state homogeneity can
nonetheless not evade unrest and must call upon, in Bataille's terms, "imperative
agencies." According to Bataille, the state as such is not a sovereign entity. It
does not possess the rights or power of an actual sovereign, e.g., the nation, the
king, or the army. The state is therefore dependent upon imperative agencies that,
borrowing their power from the sovereign bodies, preserve unity and order. (One might
think of a local police force.) As a consequence, the homogeneity constantly adapts to
restrain strife. On the one hand, it shifts in order to assimilate the novel alienated
constituents; on the other, it adjusts so as to incorporate the diverse--depending on
the circumstances--imperative agents upon which it calls. The latter, in fact,
eventually garner or are granted so much strength that they grow independent.
Independence, in this context, has a very specific meaning. It refers to an imperative
agent that emerges as useful to itself rather than to the homogeneity. For example, a
rookie cop in a rogue police force can come to believe that he is useful to the force
itself, and
to himself as an individual who ascends the ranks, but not to the town or state the
force is supposed to protect. Hence, the "independence" generates two distinct aims of
production: imperative agencies (individual powers) and the state. The homogeneity,
split in two, breaks down.
- Composed largely of the petty bourgeoisie, the agencies are now dissociated
from the homogeneity. They thus materialize, in Bataille's parlance, as
heterogeneous bodies. Another heterogeneity parallels them; it is
composed of those who never, as themselves (as human beings, not producers),
belonged to the homogeneity, namely, the proletariat. As heterogeneous or "other,"
both clusters are cast by the state as dangerous outsides, as taboo. One sits
above the state, as the untouchable; the other below it, as dirt. When the loftier
taboo, the dissociated--who reaped their original power from the sovereign--take on
a military or paramilitary presence in order to assert or maintain independence,
their leader or chief assumes the place of a sovereign (in fact, of the sovereign
of the sovereign--as taboo, this body is pure exteriority, without peer, indeed,
sacred and divine). The proletariat, no less heterogeneous, glimpses its own image
in this peerless outside, in another other (the leader). Donning the military gala
that symbolizes heroic inclusion within the reign of the new sovereign, the
proletariat finds its place in or through that chief. Of course, in return the
proletariat receives but more alienation. The uniformed men do not "become
themselves," neither workers nor men, through their identification. In fact, they
take their place in the new order as lowly, passive, subjugated soldiers.
Nonetheless, the bubbling "effervescence" (Bataille repeatedly deploys this term)
of the proletariat, the root of which is the perilous disintegration of the
original homogeneity, has served a purpose. It has generated the popular energy
that feeds the revolutionary authoritarianism and, in certain cases, fascism.
- Bataille then asks under what conditions the two heterogeneous
groups might join forces in the reverse direction, through the
identification of the dissociated bourgeoisie with the excluded
proletariat, thereby forming a socialist revolution. In other words, why
is there fascism instead of socialism? Bataille demonstrates quite
convincingly that a response cannot be derived from an examination of
economic, cultural, or political factors. While these fields can account
for the emergence of both a homogeneous state and the double
heterogeneity that arises from the break-up of this homogeneity, they
cannot yield an explanation for the identification of the excluded
proletariat with the dissociated Head. That phenomenon is an issue for
psychology. Deeply loyal to the Marxist cause, Bataille nonetheless
intimates that no Marxist project can, of itself, demonstrate why
socialism (a leftist popular front) rather than fascism (right-wing
populism) should surface from either modern capitalism or democracies. In
fact, Bataille insists that the democracy that the bourgeoisie instated
by overcoming feudalism and absolutism, and that, in the classical
Marxist framework, represents the conditions by which the proletariat
will eventually overturn the bourgeoisie in the name of socialism, offers
few expectations: "In fact, it is evident that the situation of the major
democratic powers, where the fate of the Revolution is being played out,
does not warrant the slightest confidence: it is only the very nearly
indifferent attitude of the proletariat that has permitted these
countries to avoid fascist formations" (159). Indeed, socialism's
advent depends not on mere socioeconomic shifts but on "forms of
[psychological] attraction" that, rather than draw subordinates to
powerful images of a Leader, "differ from those already in existence, as
different from present or even past communism as fascism is from dynastic
claims . . . [a] system of knowledge that permits the anticipation of the
affective social reactions that traverse the superstructure and perhaps
even, to a certain extent, do away with it" (159). The condition of
leftist, popular revolt is a novel knowledge of "affect," one that
reveals how and why the human psyche will one day shift its direction
"down" (the taboo of dirt) rather than "up" (the taboo of the absolute).
Bataille thereby marks out a relation of knowledge and political
practice. A theory of a potential reorientation of affects
"anticipates," thus renders conceivable, a distinct society. Unveiling
alternative paths for the psyche, it produces realistic hope: the sheer
fact that socialism can be anticipated. Current
knowledge of political events, to the contrary, frustrates in
advance socialist efforts. The limited knowledge that we possess of
political processes and human behavior convinces us that socialism cannot
but fail, draining the energy even to commence an emancipatory process.
Of course, no form of knowledge can assure the socialist advent, the
empowerment of the heterogeneity "from below." Yet nor will the advent
happen without this collective expectation, that is, without the
knowledge that renders such prospects thinkable.
- The knowledge cannot be scientific. According to Bataille,
science operates only through the elimination of heterogeneity. Instead,
what is required is a "discipline" whose aim is heterogeneity itself.
Indeed, Bataille insists that heterogeneity is not a negative chaos (in the
Hegelian or phenomenological sense of the negative) but an affirmative
structure than can be outlined and understood: "social
heterogeneity does not exist in a formless and disoriented
state: on the contrary, it constantly tends to a split-off structure;
and when social elements pass over to the heterogeneous
side, their action still finds itself determined by the actual
structure of that side" (140). The real existing structure of
heterogeneity--this is what established intellectual systems cannot
grasp; these systems do not offer "even the simple revelation of its [the
heterogeneous side's] positive and clearly separate existence" (141).
However, a new discipline, still embryonic, is arising to accomplish the
feat: Freudian psychoanalysis. Freud introduces a domain that "must be
considered as one of the aspects of the heterogeneous," to wit,
the "unconscious" (141). In fact, political heterogeneity and the
unconscious enjoy "certain properties in common" (141). Although
Bataille is "unable to elaborate immediately upon this point," he manages
in "The Psychological Structure of Fascism" to present a notion that
theory, including that of Laclau and Zizek, will broach for years to
come: a Marxism supplemented by psychoanalysis opens the way for the
thought of real existing socialism (141).
- In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Bataille's friend
Jacques Lacan conducts precisely such an "elaboration." In the aftermath of May
1968, Lacan sets out to challenge the Parisian students who question the
legitimacy of his teaching and practice: "The revolutionary aspiration has only
a single possible outcome--of ending up as the master's discourse . . . . What you
aspire to as revolutionaries is a master. You will get one" (207). The inquiry
into Bataille's thesis actually begins, however, when Lacan posits the
unconscious as a heterogeneous structure in his famous declaration that
the unconscious is structured like a language. Most broadly, this signifies two
things. It means that language has a particular structure, one found in no other
domain, for language is the field of the other, a heterogeneous field; and it
means that analysis of this heterogeneous topos exposes the structure of another,
which is like it, namely, the unconscious. What structure or
structures, then, are specific to language?
- Lacan concentrates on two: rhetoric and grammar. Anyone who has
learned a foreign language knows that grammar is not, as one might
intuit, structured logically. That in a given idiom a
certain adjective should appear after rather than before a noun is an
effect unbound to any cause. The order of words is not "like" the order
of logic (an order that stipulates that for every effect there is a prior
cause). When one obeys or disobeys the rules of grammar, one engages
codes that are of grammar alone. To be sure, grammar, like signifiers,
makes possible the logical representation of phenomena--of things, ideas,
emotions, messages, and so on--but grammar is not itself the logic of
those representations. Indeed, grammar is not like, it does not
represent, anything. It refers to no phenomenon that lies
outside of it.[2] A father utters "dog"
to a child, referring and pointing to an animal with four legs. If he
points to the same creature and says "noun," he still refers to a dog,
not the grammatical unit, though dog may be a noun in this context. No
"dog" (or sign) represents the "phenomenon" of a noun. "Noun" does not
exist outside of language. Of course, a noun may be defined. It is a
person, place, or thing, a given structure in a sentence, a word that
patterns like a noun, and so on. In these definitions, however, the
grammatical principle refers just to more language, to itself as
language, not to a phenomenon.
- What holds for grammar holds for the structure of language in
general. Language is a schema that is certain to refer solely
to itself. If, as many believe, language or the logos is the
fundament of the being human, then such "being" necessarily follows the
inhuman rules of "another scene," the scene of language. Humans contain
properties that are not proper, but heterogeneous to them, and
heterogeneous to property itself. In other words, language installs in
human practices and communities a template for heterogeneity that human
beings cannot not follow; the schema forms an unavoidable, alien
directive that is a portion of that humanity. The unconscious marks
humanity in a similar fashion. It is a heterogeneous energy, whose
elements refer only to itself, according to its own rules. These
"guides" (mis)lead conscious activity without ever themselves becoming
conscious.
- The unconscious, then, is like language. The two domains
represent two distinctive figures of heterogeneity. Yet the unconscious and
language are not entirely "peerless" since they appear relative to each
other. A likeness between them exists. This likeness,
however, cannot be shared equally. "Likeness," after all, belongs to the field
of rhetoric, hence language. It is well known that for Freud and Lacan rhetoric
(such as figures of speech, slips of tongue, stuttering, metaphors) translates
the unconscious, primarily in the form of symptoms. One heterogeneous field,
language, recasts and miscasts the other heterogeneity, the unconscious, into its
own mold, into language. It is less emphasized that for Lacan the fact that the
unconscious is structured like a language signifies that
likeness--rhetoric as a scaffold of language that the unconscious is
like--is an imbedded configuration inside the unconscious.
Language is an internal part of the unconscious. To be sure, this language is
very peculiar. While it can be translated or mistranslated into symptoms, it can
translate or transform nothing but itself, into which it always already turns.
- We can thus sum up the meaning of the adage "the unconscious is structured
like a language" in two statements: 1) the understanding of the structure of one
heterogeneity (language) aids in the comprehension of its likeness, another
heterogeneity, the unconscious; and 2) when, in analysis, language is
experienced, so too is an imbedded "piece" of the unconscious, now a source for
the knowledge of the "other scene."
- In The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan directly discloses
the political ramifications of these ideas. Addressing the context in which he
speaks, the Paris post-1968, Lacan lays out four discourses: of the university,
the master, the hysteric, and the analyst. The seminar, however, turns on and
around Hegel's Master/Slave dialectic. The slave possesses both know-how, the
skills that permit him to convert raw material into commodities, and
comprehension, understanding of the master's pleasure, without which he could not
satisfy the master. In his quest for Mastery, the master has no choice but to
appropriate this knowledge. He does so, stealing the slave's knowledge via the
medium within which it arrives at his doorstep, production. If the slave
produces "things" through knowledge, those things must be containers of the
knowledge. However, the appropriation (thievery) and conversion (knowledge to
product) machine translates the knowledge into something other than knowledge, to
wit, a series of equivalents and values, that is, into the commodity. In more
Lacanian language, knowledge is turned into a system of signifiers that are
"worth" something else. In other words, the master dispossesses the slave of his
knowledge by translating it into the Symbolic Order. As compensation, the slave
receives one of that order's signifiers: a proper name, a useful place in the
system, a value which relieves him of his slave status so as to handcuff him to
the new social order, now as wage earner. Once bonded to the sovereign, the
slave-slave reemerges as the worker-slave qua capitalist subject,
subjected to
the Symbolic Order. He moves from one master to another.
- However, the master, as thief, errs in his quest. As Lacan emphasizes, a
product, the result of knowledge, actually contains no knowledge within it (90).
It is a dumb object. When the bandit master turns the slave's production into a
social order that reproduces itself through the wage-worker that materializes in
the slave's place, knowledge drops out of the equation. The slave's knowledge
disappears with the slave himself. Or rather, as we will see, knowledge remains,
but outside, in excess of the capitalist conversion. Hence, the Symbolic Order
cannot yield knowledge but solely truth (the master's discourse, the University
discourse, or the hysteric's discourse), adequacy to a system. In fact, this is
why the slave, who never forfeits know-how throughout the process (else he cease to
serve the capitalist), does lose his knowledge. Over against the master's
discourse, which is that of truth, know-how ceases to stand as an alternative form
of knowledge, materializing as less than knowledge.
- Lacan is thereby able to define the master as the one who does not know,
who has truth but no knowledge; he does not know his own pleasure, the knowledge
that the slave once knew but that has been lost in translation (32). The
Other Side of Psychoanalysis tracks this lost knowledge through an
analysis of loss itself. When the slave is ripped off, he receives, in addition
to his alienation, further compensation about which the master remains unaware:
the dispossession itself, the loss. Indeed, in Lacan loss is a sort of object,
the objet petit a. In the present context, three definitions of this
object must be stressed: the object cause of desire, the object of
the drive, and/or surplus jouissance (plus-de-jouir).
- The objet petit a is often imagined as a substitute entity that,
via fantasy, restores a forfeited wholeness, replacing a loss. Yet this presumed
original loss, or former wholeness, is itself the fantasy, the fantasy of the
master. The master discourse, indeed, is masterful only through this
fantasy--not of the wholeness but of the wholeness' lack. The master
contains everything but one thing. In fact, the one thing may be
almost anything. It is any old common noun that is taken by the subject, within a
given context, as that subject's proper name: as a signifier without a signified
but endowed with a fixed, unyielding referent (for the adult, the proper name most
likely serves this purpose). The collection of signifiers that composes the
Symbolic Order is, by the very definition of that order, missing the one word, the
phallic signifier. The master discourse thus lacks, contains a gap, an empty lot.
Consequently, it is somewhat weak. The subject, taking advantage of the supposed
weakness, appropriates or takes over the vacancy, claiming his freedom. Being what
the master does not have, the subject (in many diverse manners, which we cannot
discuss here), now the master of the master, catches himself in the Master's
fantasy.
- For the joke is on this subject. The lack in the Other, which the subject
installed through his Imaginary, is but the lure of the Master, the bait by means
of which he establishes his mastery. The subject, seduced, has merely installed
himself willingly into the order of capitalism and homogeneity. By taking the empty
lot for himself, he finds his true place, his freedom in private property; and he
finds that same self in a proper name, the name of the father, the signifier of the
master. Identifying with the figure of alienation, the proper name, the I, takes a
slot in the banal string of signifiers, a proper social subject enslaved to others,
to society.[3] On this imaginary stage (of
Lacan's imaginary order), the objet petit a is never sufficient. It
always fails as an agent of liberty. Eroticized as "the fix" qua the desired
proper name, it emerges as only the object cause of desire rather than its
object of satisfaction. A mere common sign, the little a has
tricked the subject, raising false hopes. In Lacan, desire thus moves
metonymically from object cause to object cause--desire, in this sense, is too
"picky"--in search of the fulfillment it never gets.
- However, the objet petit a is irreducible to this imaginary view of it.
It is not a replacement for a loss but itself a lost object. An example of such an
object, extended by Laclau, permits us to grasp the point, though I read the example in
a manner that differs from Laclau's interpretation. After weaning, a baby grows
attached to milk in a nippled bottle, an erotic proxy for the mother's now missing
breast (On Populist Reason 114). The attachment has nothing to do with
the recovery of a supposed lost union with the mother, since there never was such a
union. The condition of the baby's subjectivity, the "reason" it can suck at all, can
function as the agent of that sucking, is an original separation, foundation of
Lacanian psychoanalysis. In fact, the breast itself is a objet petit a, a
partial object. It is suckled, treated as an erotic object, not as part of the whole
mother, but as its own autonomous thing. The point of an erotic object is that it
occupies the subject in itself, as detached, even or especially as partial. The nipple
of the milk bottle, replacing the breast, represents the displacement of one partial
object by another, one nipple for another.
- As object of the drive, the objet petit a opens onto an
entirely different scenario, one fundamental to The Other Side of
Psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic concept of "the transference" best reveals
the distinction. During the transference, the analysand restages a scene from his own
past, casting the analyst as erotic object. Rather than recounting a previous, painful
attachment, the analysand repeats the episode in the office, unable to remember the
prior event that is being repeated. Here, the analyst as object petit a
appears not as the cause or support of the drive, but as a real
object of that drive. The doctor is not a substitute or representative, but the thing
itself. After all, representation demands memory of the cultural conventions, the
history that arbitrarily but firmly binds representation to the object it represents,
the signifier to the signified, and in the transference the analysand repeats without
remembering (18-25).
- Any signifier is a coupling of forces. One is meaning. Every
sign recalls, to a given subject, a signified. Although this bond of
signifier and signified is not essential but conventional--the signified,
therefore, can always slide--there is, as already indicated, no signifier
without meaning. The second force is repetition. If meaning is habitual
rather than essential, repetition lies at its source. Repetition is the
key source of habit. Repetition, then, is internal to re-presentation,
but not represented by it. It cannot be (represented) since it is,
precisely, the other side of language. This side of language is
representation, the signifier; the other side, the underside, is
repetition. The word "dog" most often represents the animal in the
animal's absence, repeating the dog's presence in another place (such as
the mind). But this repetition does not appear in the signifier, in
either of the two appearances (the dog before the eyes, the
"dog" in the mind). Repetition, then, is a compelling component that
renders language, signification, even the signifier itself, possible, yet
that withdraws from signification.
- If repetition never comes into view as such, it is at times experienced.
Imagine an individual who, having not seen a hated ex-spouse for ten years, bumps
into this person--each time in an increasingly awkward fashion--four times in one
week. The individual feels like an automaton, a machine that, as if in the hands
of a master, "does" the same thing repeatedly, apparently possessing no control
over events. He or she, as would be natural, attempts to attribute a conscious
or hidden motif for the coincidences. Nothing emerges. Neither party in any way
intends that the encounters happen. They just keep happening. In fact,
Lacan has a
name for these coincidences: the "encounter with the Real." The "Real" is the
ceaseless return of a force that comes back for no good reason, from no possible
history to which we might trace it. It takes over the subject in a form other
than that of representation; without a history or a memory (even if unconscious),
representation is impossible. The individual who collides with the ex-spouse a
fifth time experiences the event as affect or mood, a sense of the weird, not as
a meaning.
- In fact, an encounter with the Real generates two fundamental
feelings. One is dread, the fear that comes from a sense of being
directed by an Other, a master over whom the subject enjoys no power, and
that never stops imposing itself. Perhaps the force will repeat its
reign of terror ad infinitum, a possibility that is itself the source of
terror. The other affect is pleasure, or rather, pleasure beyond
pleasure, the "beyond the pleasure principle" about which Freud speaks,
defining it as the reduction of all tension to zero (46-49). Indeed, one
can "get off" on the feeling of being in the hands of an unknown master,
as if one were a mechanical doll, a thing without tension; one can "get
off" on the nirvana of being driven while doing nothing at all, as a
machine or part of a machine, as a thing that offers or experiences no
resistance or tension, like a corpse--but that, unlike a corpse, is still
able to "get off," to feel a joy beyond mere pleasure.[4]
- The Real does not return; it is that returning, the uncanny
repetition. The Real, we therefore glean, is not an abstract Real. It is
the Real of language, the Real of the unconscious, and the Real of the
language within the unconscious. Commonly defined as that which
resists symbolization, the Real nonetheless does not dwell outside of
language. It is the experience of language as language, language
repeating language--akin to "grammar," as discussed above--repetition as
such as language as such. This is why, as with the hypothetical
encounters between ex-spouses, the Real can be "sensed" only as uncanny
affect, as the uncanny itself--not as a representation, but as an
unrepresentable director, agent of dread or pure joy.
- In sum, during the transference, language, as the language of the
unconscious, is experienced as jouissance. The object of the drive, as it
turns out, is not the analyst (who remains on the new stage, but as
object cause of desire rather than as object of the drive); it is the
machine-like repetition that the subject's encounter with the analyst
brings on the scene in the form of a "weird feeling." This is why for
Lacan any signifier may re-present the object of the desire. If desire
is too picky, and will accept no signifier as satisfactory, the drive is
indifferent to the signifier to which it attaches, for all signifiers
enclose the beat of repetition, the object of satisfaction.
- The entire process is bound to knowledge. The analysand, during
or in the transference, posits the analyst as the
subject-supposed-to-know. The analysand therefore wants to occupy the
analyst's seat, to take him over bodily, so as to acquire (reaquire) that
knowledge. In such a case, he would be able to allay the worst sort of
anxiety, the anxiety of not knowing whether the "things" that are
troubling him have a cause that can be diagnosed, this diagnosis being
the condition of a cure. Are my problems so profound that they lie
beyond analysis, beyond the good doctor, and hence will plague me
forever? Will this repetition never cease to repeat itself? In the
patient's eyes, only the analyst knows the answer, knows what is really
going on in the unconscious. Or rather, the analyst is supposed-to-know.
He is supposed-to-know the unconscious. We can now introduce another
term that is fundamental to Lacan's understanding of the drive: aim.
The dialectic of desire is between part and whole; the split of the drive
is between object and aim. And the aim is no whole. While repetition is
the object of the drive during transference--it is the force that drives
the drive--knowledge of the unconscious is the aim of that
drive. (The aim is also death, as in the death drive, but once more,
this matter must be left aside.) This knowledge is conceivable only via
analysis or reading: the reading of the language of the unconscious,
in the unconscious, that appears in analysis as affect, as
jouissance. The unconscious is "outed" during the transference in the
form of repetition, itself "outed" as affect. The translation of
representation, of the signifiers in the session that led to the
transference, into unconscious affect, must now be translated back into
representation or meaning if knowledge of the patient's unconscious, his
ills, is to be gathered, if "analysis" is to take place. Read my
enjoyment!
- This truth, however, cannot happen. The representation of the
affect, the conversion of repetition into meaning, the translation of the
other side of language into this side, is always
already the repression of the jouissance, which is thus present
solely under erasure. The mood has no conscious endurance. Alterity, the
weird, is repressed before it surfaces, shoved back into the unconscious
before it is read.
This does not mean that affect is atemporal or ahistorical. It is an
other time, the time of the other side. Heterogeneous time, it never
comes, for during analysis it is always on the brink of coming. It is a
future time or a time of the future--perhaps, as Bataille intimates,
affect even portends the time of socialism.
- In any case, the unconscious, disclosed for a viewing via the
repetition that is its language--a viewing that the transference
stages--closes down as soon as it opens. The event of the unconscious
comes without revelation. In fact, repetition opens and shuts the Real
of the unconscious largely because opening and shutting is the actual
act that repeats itself.[5]
Indeed, it is the erotic object, the object of the drive. The mouth is
erotic because it opens and closes. The baby that sucks on the nipple of
the milk bottle is attached to the rims around the pierced hole in that
nipple, to his own lips as similar (closing/shutting) rims, to the teeth
whose opening and shutting makes sounds comes out, to the starting
(opening) and ending (closing) of those same sounds. All rhythmically
repeat, opening and closing this releasing and shutting themselves.
- During the transference, the opening and closing of the unconscious
is the language (of the unconscious) as the Real object of the drive.
The analysand originally posits the analyst as subject-supposed-to-know, as
master. He then experiences this subject-supposed-to-know as the unconscious, as
unknown force. The true master that drives the subject's erotic and often
painful attachments is not the master, not the analyst, but this "unconscious
thing." Yet even this thing is no master, for it cannot "control" itself. It
cannot block from happening one of its own things, a thing beyond and inside it:
the jouissance to which it gives birth. Mastery itself, not any particular
master, is demastered by the taking place of jouissance, by that event. Thus,
the subject is freed from the master signifier. Demastery is the joy itself. It
is freedom from the tyrant that plagues, of the plague as tyrant, symptom, truth,
and signifier.
- The master, we noted, strips the slave of his knowledge, receiving in return
production and reproduction. Yet production, we also said, comes to the master
with a loss: the loss of knowledge, of knowledge as the master's lost object. Yet
for Lacan no object ever completely vanishes. It always only misplaced. The
capitalist-master, then, must possess his lost knowledge in another form, and
according to Lacan, he does: he holds his knowledge as a bonus, a surplus that was
thrown into the original bargain he struck with the slave. That extra, of course,
is loss itself: objet petit a now as surplus jouissance or
plus-de-jouir (107-08). Indeed, within that overall excess, the master
receives all the topoi mentioned above: repetition, language, and
pleasure beyond pleasure. In fact, these are alien to the master, just as
knowledge is alien to the master's discourse, which is a discourse of truth.
Therefore, the master is master, the subject is subject, only through "alienation"
as Lacan defines this term. To be, the subject/master must incorporate the
unmasterable alien into his own body. This is why the master is never a master or
whole unless imagined as such by another, unless imagined as the Other who lacks.
The Master is actually the Other who has too much, one thing too many. Lack is the
disavowal of the plus, unbearable to both master and slave.
- Both like and unlike surplus value in Marx (which, in capitalism, usurps
the place of surplus jouissance), surplus jouissance in Lacan
spells, potentially, big trouble for the master since this bonus cannot be put into
circulation, gotten rid of, turned into production, reproduction, value,
and/or a signifier. Surplus jouissance can only accumulate; the master,
as master, cannot spend it, else he cease to be master. This is the
enjoyment he cannot know and cannot enjoy, the enjoyment of the other he
subjects, alien jouissance and the jouissance of the alien. It is the
joy of the proletarian who, far from having nothing but his chains to
lose, no more than his body to sell, possesses the very thing the master
cannot have, precisely because he (the worker) is just that
loss, that body, pure dispossession as erotic enjoyment.
- In the transference, the analyst, posited by the analysand as the
master or subject-supposed-to-know, returns to his patient the
plus-de-jouir that the patient always already had--not the
stolen knowledge but his loss qua jouissance. Enjoyment
liberates the subject from his subjectivity/subjection (one is never the
subject of joy; joy carries the I away), from the imagined master-subject
of an imaginary prisonhouse. The analysand now locates his liberty not
in the image of the chief, but in the actual sovereign, in the jouissance that comes outside of knowledge. This is the joy about which
Bataille never ceased to yell his head off. Indeed, Bataille does not
realize to what degree he is right in "The Psychological Structure of
Fascism." If for the "proper" proletarian, as for the good analyst, the
aim is heterogeneous knowledge, the object or objective of that aim is
not the post occupied by the "Head" or the Master but the enjoyment, the
effervescence that attracts the proletarian and that is the
proletarian's attraction. Bataille's proletarian does not reach his aim,
which is the knowledge of the other scene, heterogeneous knowledge. In
its stead, he "attains" jouissance, pure expenditure, as payment for the
quest. In the process, his psyche is turned away from a leader and
toward a sacred heterogeneity, toward joy-until-death--the knowledge that
leads to this rallying joy; and the crying out, for Bataille, is the
condition of socialism and freedom within or over against either
capitalism or its agent, the state.
- The construction of the conditions for this enjoyment is the ethical
responsibility of the analyst. If psychoanalysts play a role in the liberation of
the slave-worker, it is solely as analysts that they do so. The analyst meets the
obligation by attending to his duty, which is to be an analyst: a reader and
overwriter of the language of the other. Of course, no precise rules, no manual of
instruction, exist to guide the analyst in the right direction. Yet this does not
mean that the analyst must operate as a subject who finds "his own way" according
to the circumstances. The analyst is not a master or a subject. In fact, the
analyst follows a set of rules for which there is no booklet: the rules of
language. Of course, language makes itself available for following only in the
conscious signifiers that conceal it (conceal language as such). Thus the
signifier or stream of signifiers--though driven by language--set the agenda, the
course of analysis. The analyst and analysand follow the path of the signifier, a
direction without directions. The transference, consequently the liberating
jouissance, "happens" if and when this task of analysis--speaking, reading,
listening--is done within the sessions, most of which consist of idle chatter, but
which all the same set out the conduit of signifiers, preparing the way for the
event. While there is no correct time for the transference, no "objective
conditions" in the history of the analysand that might "tell" the analyst that "now
is the time" to coax the analysand toward the transference and action, nor will
"any old time" do. The event, the subject's liberating jouissance, occurs neither
by plan nor by accident, neither by design nor by chance, but under the condition
that the parties in play do their work, performing their duty, which is analysis.
- We noted that, in The Other Side of Psychoanalysis,
Lacan derides the Parisian students who believe that to act politically
one must go out of the classroom and "onto the street" (143-49,
197-208). Lacan--who in key moments of the seminar discusses these
matters after class outside on the "streets," in "public"
exchanges--suggests to the students the opposite. Students act
politically only insofar as they do their duty, which is to be students,
that is to say, readers and writers, analysts, whose aim is knowledge and
whose object is language--not masters, academics, or hysterics. If
bodies at a university, or in analysis, are to yield a politics, they can
do so solely by executing the freedom from mastery and master signifiers
that jouissance and knowledge grant, for that joy or "effervescence"
cannot be contained within the office/classroom. It sallies forth as
object of the drive and object of attraction, potentially gathering the
undefined masses. Out of these masses, the happening, if it is to happen
at all, occurs: the effervescence of the masses can indeed take any
direction, including the direction of politics or socialism. They do not
guarantee socialism, yet one can guarantee that there will be no
socialism without them. As defined by Lacan, then, analysis is not a
design for socialism; but absent the analytic design, no socialism has a
chance to come. Hence, the student who leaves behind his responsibility
as student, who abandons knowledge in favor of action, is not seeking the
student-freedom that he proclaims but precisely the master who
blocks that freedom--as
well as himself as that master. To the brash student Lacan replies: "the
revolutionary aspiration has only a single possible outcome--of ending up
as the master's discourse . . . . What you aspire to as revolutionaries is a
master. You will get one."
- Zizek and Laclau seem to have received this message in inverted form. They
therefore ignore the knowledge Lacan strives to pass on in the form of jouissance,
though their conflict is largely about knowledge of Lacan. On the basis of their
debate, one would be led to believe that for them politics is precisely the
avoidance of knowledge and thus of joy--indeed, that this avoidance is the
condition of both action and politics. Space will permit me to address only a few
key features of their dispute. At various moments, Zizek responds to Laclau's
attacks by defending the examples he (Zizek) offers of contemporary political
movements that--even if they are in an incipient phase--"square" with, and perhaps
validate, his political theory. To be sure, this is not any person extending or
speaking about examples. Zizek's brilliance lies in his capacity to tender
captivating, frequently hilarious examples to illustrate difficult theoretical
points. Zizek, one might complain, repeats examples, yet even this "annoying"
maneuver discloses his canniness about exemplarity. For Zizek does not just
proffer examples; he theorizes the concept of the example. In fact, he
argues that the key to an example lies in repetition, but as
with Freud's dream work, in the iteration and overexposure of the same narrative.
It is the repeated opening and closing of a single scene that discloses the "other
scene," the language of the unconscious, the erotic gap in representation or
exemplarity that, like overexposure as such, repetition marks ("Schalgend" 200).
- Zizek's first example concerns the Maoist Sendero Luminoso, the Peruvian
Shining Path. Zizek discusses events in the impoverished mountainous areas of
1990s Peru, where the Sendero often menaced campesinos, soldiers, and others.[6] More interesting, according to Zizek, is how the
Sendero would sometimes direct its most brutal actions not at these Peruvians--not
even at representatives of the Peruvian government, such as the army--but at U.N.
international health workers, whose task was to aid the peasants. Forcing these
individuals to confess their complicity with imperialism, the Sendero would then
(at times) shoot them. Zizek does not condone or advocate such measures. Though
such tactics are "sustained by the correct insight," they are "difficult to sustain
[as] a literal model to follow" ("From Politics" 512). Of course, the "correct
insight" is that the true danger in Peru is liberal democracy, not the Peruvian
military or government. The enemy is a false democracy "lying in the guise of
truth." It is the democratic capitalisms that created the horrible conditions in
which the peasants live in the first place. Zizek cites Badiou as a radical
scholar who backs this view on the matter: "Today, the enemy is not called Empire
or Capital. It's called Democracy" ("Schlagend" 193).[7] The more innocent the aid workers were, the more they served
as a tool of neoliberalism, since they made the democratic capitalist system "look
attractive" to the peasants, who were then more likely to endorse the very savage
powers that subjected them to their own dreadful circumstances.
- This assertion must be read over against Zizek's claim that the
"objective conditions" for a revolutionary politics are never given
("Schlagend" 189). Referring to Lacan's "passage à l'acte," key
to the enjoyment highlighted above, Zizek emphasizes that one cannot wait
for the correct moment, the perfect "setting" for the act. Such a time
never comes, for the "times" never license or authorize the truly radical
act, which is unprecedented, hence without "father" or authority.
Because no prior examples exist, neither does the possibility of
knowing precisely what to do or whether "now" is the time to do
it. The radical subject acts without assurances, relatively blindly.
Bravery, conviction, frustration, anger and/or charisma are the
conditions of the politics that ensues. However, Lacan, who regards the
transference as this sort of "act" (to reiterate, Zizek's notion of
"act" is taken from Lacan), views matters a bit differently.[8] For Lacan, the "what to do" and the
"when to act" are very clear. The analyst and analysand, right now, must
conduct the work of analysis. Out of that labor, the event will or will
not occur--not because the conditions are or are not ripe--but because
preparation (the empty chit-chat) and duty (responding), and the passage
á l'acte pertain to a single movement within analysis. The
"groundwork" of analysis, the laying out of stupid signifiers, is neither
the act itself, nor its conditions; it is the act's responsibility and
responsibility to the act.
- What is the equivalent within Zizek's analysis--or politics? We just indicated
that Zizek argues that liberal democracy is not the solution to our consensual
"postpolitics." In Latin America, this "postpolitics" is usually dubbed the
"neoliberal consensus," and in fact, it is especially devastating in a nation such as
Peru. However, Zizek tells us, killing or harming these workers is not a "literal
model to follow." Zizek need not make this last point, for one can never
literally follow an example. An example is a figure. One can only
follow it figuratively, by doing something like it. Zizek's wavering
("difficult to sustain [as] a literal model to follow"), if read literally, could be
translated as follows: in practice, one should not assassinate liberal democrats, and
one should not conduct actions that are like these assassinations either.
- The latter is a bit surprising, for one can certainly imagine a
"like" action that is very much along the idea of Zizek's remarks, the
idea that Zizek literally means to convey with his overstated example.
Imagine that instead of making the liberal gesture of rallying against a
University administration that is utterly resistant to multiculturalism,
one rallies against multiculturalism itself, which is nothing if not
symbolic tolerance, false democracy "lying in the guise of truth." Zizek
advises us, repeatedly, that we should not take such positions
in our actual lives. Though in the end multiculturalism serves the worst
of ideologies, if compelled to choose on campus, one ought to select the
multiculturalist over the racist cause: "Although, of course, as to the
positive content of most of the debated issues, a radical leftist should
support the liberal stance (for abortion, against racism and homophobia,
and so forth), one should never forget that it is the populist
fundamentalist, not the liberal, who is, in the long term, our
ally" ("Schlagend" 194; emphasis added). What, then, is to be
done? Zizek cannot extend a picture of a hypothetical example of a
political act that corresponds to his theory. Neither in practice nor in
theory can Zizek show us or offer us an example of what to do in theory.
I just painted a nice--not too politically correct but not terribly
violent--picture, in theory, of what to do if liberalism is in fact our
enemy. Yet Zizek's writings reject such solutions to the problem, and
any solution like them. Even if in practice one has the
opportunity to perform a peaceful but antagonistic act against democracy
(demonstrating against multiculturalism), or even if, like the
Sendero's actions, one can do something that, "sustained by the correct
insight," would in theory be proper, in both cases one should not. One
must not forget to theorize about doing them, but actually doing
so is another matter. In the long term, then, this is not the
time for any politics but liberalism. This may not be what Zizek means to
say, but it is what he says, literally. In fact, nearly all the examples
found in Zizek's work, which number in the hundreds, represent negations,
however
comical they may be. Most often, they display the absurdity that lies at
the heart of racism, capitalism, sexism, nationalism, classism, and
anti-Semitism. They also negate the common liberal, "politically
correct" analysis of why these attitudes are insidious. Yet when it
comes to offering an example, a picture displaying how one might
affirm (à la Bataille), even if only in theory, another
politics, a path toward a politics of heterogeneity, or even a path toward
heterogeneous knowledge, Zizek seems lost for images and jokes.
- We said that in general Zizek presents examples to facilitate the
understanding of theory, usually psychoanalysis. Yet both the statement on the
Sendero and the idea the statement is meant to reveal (that the person who owns a
bank is far worse than the person who robs one--as if this were being noted for
the first time!), are not theoretical, intellectual, or even
psychological. Zizek's example is
literally thoughtless, for it is neither a thought nor an analysis, but
a subject position that praises subjects who take positions as
subjects. That is the general example that the Sendero example, perhaps not
the best of examples, sets perfectly. Lacan, on the steps of the
Pantheon, extends free of charge to the students a model and theory of analysis,
a theory of theory that, were the students to attend to it and to analysis
itself, would or could open to a student political practice. In
Lacan's name, Zizek does the opposite. He presents non-theory, non-knowledge, and non-preparation as the
prerequisite for a statement on politics, and for politics itself. Indeed, this
is what his example of the Sendero Luminoso really insists upon, namely, that the
discard of analysis, that is, the taking of a position is the condition of
even a thought (the Sendero's "correct insight") of politics, to
say nothing of political action.
- At another moment, Zizek turns to the favelas of Rio de Janeiro,
in the context of a discussion of another Brazilian issue, the famous
nineteenth-century Canudos uprising ("From Politics" 511-13).
Recognizing these miserable sites as effects of capitalism's worst
violence, Zizek describes how new sorts of organization, such as
community kitchens and illegal electrical networks, are nonetheless
emerging within and from the devastation. In this wasteland of
capitalism, movements that have the potential of leading to novel
political formations are happening. Laclau is especially incensed by
these comments ("Why Constructing" 680). He accuses Zizek of delirium,
pointing out the sheer devastation of the favelas, devastation that
includes the devastating communities that are developing therein: gangs,
groups of drug dealers, and so forth. In fact, Laclau attributes Zizek's
avowal of the favelas' promise not just to insanity, but to ignorance,
advising Zizek to "go and do [his] homework" (680). Zizek responds
accordingly: "Well, I did my homework" ("Schlagend" 191). Against
what
he regards as Laclau's misreading of his argument, he then goes on to
justify his take on the favelas.
- As readers, we do not receive a detailed account of the precise "homework"
that Zizek completes. He may have visited the favelas, read first-hand reports,
viewed documentaries, or talked with individuals familiar with the issues. In any
of these cases, it is through empiricism that Zizek licenses himself to
speak of the Brazilian situation. It is by gathering empirical evidence that he
"does his assignment." A theory of the favelas--Zizek admits that he is
speculating on these zones, presenting an hypothesis about what could take place in
the margins of capital, not despite but because of this marginalization--has
political mettle, for Laclau no less than for Zizek, when grounded in observations
that are pre-analytical. Thus, they are not theoretical at all, but entirely
speculative. In fact, as with the hacker communities on the Internet that Zizek
also affirms, one needs no knowledge whatsoever to take a position "for or against"
the potential for communities situated in the margins of global capital ("From
Politics" 514). One can do so just as well with or without knowledge. The hacker
associations, for example, clearly exploit the networks that capitalism builds but
that fall outside the control of both state and market, thereby forging
unprecedented models of community-building, "real existing" virtual cooperatives.
Consequently, they can be subversive or enjoy great subversive potential. These
communities, however, are open only to those who own computers, enjoy access to the
Internet, possess money for the service (which is astonishingly expensive outside
"the West"), and have time to hack. This includes a very small percentage of the
world's inhabitants. As much as they undermine them, hackers reproduce capitalist
structures of class difference. There is no basis for claiming that their
communities offer more or less potential than any other community. However, we can
always take a position that they do. Likewise, the favela inhabitants are as much
alienated capitalists as they are defiant to that system. Both Laclau and Zizek
know this and say so. Moreover, the favelas' illegal networks, such as pirated
electrical grids, are so common in Latin America's urban villas miserias
that they draw no attention, neither from within nor from without the community;
more, they are not the result of planned communal efforts (for more on this point,
see Aira 29-30). The message is clear: the political thinker, like the political
actor, takes a subject position, makes a choice that demands no necessary
engagement with either theory or knowledge. Take your pick, but please pick. It
would seem that the political theorist not only need not theorize. He must not
theorize.
- It is thus not terribly surprising that Zizek eventually affirms
the very populism that his replies to Laclau are meant to rebuff. Why
not? As Bataille makes clear, when it comes to taking a useful position
within the homogeneity of subjects, one position is as good as another.
In fact, Zizek praises the now signature event of the Bolivarian
Revolution, which exemplified populism in its purest sense, when "the
poor came down from the hills" of Caracas in 2004. In the wake of a
right-wing, U.S.-condoned overthrow, Venezuelans descended from the most
destitute margins of the city onto the grounds of the presidential palace
in order to restore Chávez to his post. One could just as well
speculate that it was the army that restored Chávez, but that is a
side matter. The key issue is that when one alludes to the Venezuelan
poor that "came down from the hills," one must put the statement in
quotation marks, because the 2004 descent repeats the disastrous Caracazo
episode of 1989, when "the poor came down from the hills" the first time.
Elsewhere, Zizek suggests that Chávez's populist regime is rather
prosaic, both because it is sponsored by huge oil money, and because
these sorts of populisms are common--and, in the end, not very good for
"the people." Zizek's inconsistency is not a concern. The problem is
that at the precise instant he has the chance to prod Laclau on Laclau's
grounds and home turf, in the very heart of real existing populism, Zizek
misses the encounter. If populisms such as Chávez's enjoy
political potential, it is not as new movements, but as the repetition of
the same movement, of the same example, hence as the overexposure of a
political death drive. The thesis is not mine; it is literally
Zizek's theory, which I outline above. Yet precisely because further
discussion of such a thesis would demand theory, Zizek does not "go
there." In theory, he has nothing to say about Chávez, or about
contemporary politics in general. These are not topics for theory; they
are affairs of the subject, the charismatic subject assuming a strong,
attractive post in a public forum.
- In his response to Zizek in Critical Inquiry, as well as in
On Populist Reason (whose theses the journal article upholds), Laclau
defends a theory of popular-democratic interventions. Laclau outlines the democratic
nature of such interventions by challenging the Marxist narrative that, as noted,
Bataille too extends. Modern democracy, Laclau argues, appears as feudalism and
absolutism are defeated by the bourgeois revolution. The bourgeoisie, then, is both an
agent of democracy and a precursor to the proletariat, which arrives on the scene
later, as the world subject of socialism. Yet, as Laclau points out, the bourgeoisie
never vanquished feudalism in "underdeveloped" nations. Thus, no bourgeois subject
emerged to
forge the democracy. The space for that subject was left open, and the people or
demos had and still has the opportunity to fill it. The demos
remains capable of constructing the democracy that the bourgeoisie failed to
accomplish--a thesis that Laclau, drawing on the history of "underdeveloped" sites,
translates into a general theory of political participation in our time.
- "The people," Laclau further contends, designates both the whole
(the nation) and a part of that whole (the non-elite, the poor), the
unrepresented part. "The people," the whole, thus fails to represent the
people, one of its parts. It is an "all" that falls short of itself, of
"all." "The people" serves as a marker of an empty wholeness,
that is, of an incomplete, ruined, or cracked democracy (a whole with a
hole is as good as empty); it is also the force that, in the wake of our
failed democracies, now enjoys the space, at least potentially, to
produce a more radical politics.
- At this juncture, one should recall the goal of Laclau's general
project. Laclau seeks to establish new grounds for leftist politics
given that the classical Marxist foundation, class difference, cannot
ground itself, much less a politics in general. The worker is never a
worker as such but a straight or gay worker, a female or male worker, a
black or white worker, and so on. The real existing worker is the worker
plus
these constitutive outsides, which thereby pertain to the "being-worker."
If, as Laclau suggests, all politics is initiated by a demand to an
authority, the demand of the worker, when made in the name of the working
class as political subject, misses the real worker for it bypasses the
racial, sexual, religious (etc.) elements that are "built into" the
worker's being. In contrast, a popular-democratic demand articulates the
relation among the multiple interests of the worker (or of any other
subject)--straight, gay, women, black, socialist; gay rights, women's
rights, black rights, worker rights--while reflecting none of the
particular interests, i.e., no position that precedes the demand.
Indeed, were such reflection the goal, one subject (such as the classed
subject) would stand as the ground of all the others, rendering these
others, as well as their interests, epiphenomenal, inessential,
"discardable" in the name of the "greater good." In other words, the
popular demand performs-into-existence, gathers into a single political
body, subjects that do not preexist this demand, a manifold that, without
the demand, would not form a coherent group nor have a coherent cause.
- For Laclau, this demand or set of signifiers, if
popular-democratic, disrupts the Symbolic Order or the order of
patriarchy, whose structure is analogous to that of contemporary global
institutions and the neoliberal state. The Symbolic Order, as I indicated
above, is always missing the pure or phallic signifier. This is the
proper name, the signifier without signified but with a fixed referent
(such as the name "Brett Levinson," which does not mean anything
but which refers unfailingly to me whenever I encounter it). This is a
signifier, accordingly, that refers to the subject regardless of
context or surrounding signifiers. The pure signifier is not bound or
enslaved to the system in which it appears--appears, precisely,
as freedom. The democratic-popular demand, because it represents no
subject--the gay-feminist-worker is neither gay nor feminist nor a worker
but a subject-to-come at the moment of its articulation--materializes
similarly, as a signifier without a signified. Diverse
associations, which are not distinct since each overlaps the other (the
women's association and the worker association share the woman-worker as
a constituent), join forces in order to produce the signifiers/demands
that take into account the multiplicity of causes. The ensuing community
or subject results for the first time, therefore as an event or
an intervention.
- The intervention dislocates the social order, generating popular
leftist movements, for at least three reasons. First, efforts to
generate the signifier create upheaval within the established social
order--one in which each identity is separated from another, each
occupying its proper place--and hence call for political negotiations
that are both horizontal (across the contending subjects) and vertical
(up against the authorial order). Second, the signifier is antagonistic
by its very structure; it generates, from out of the popular sector
itself, a novel element within the Symbolic Order that--at the instant of
its emergence--this order cannot ignore or include, incorporate or
control. Finally, not unlike the chief in Bataille's paradigm, the
demand thus articulated forms the Head (Laclau uses the Lacanian term
point de caption) of a manifold, which gathers a maximum of
popular identification. The signifier attracts; it leads the movement.
Potentially, it turns the association of multiple groups into a mass of
energy composed of cathexes, one whose political direction, while
initiated by the signifier/demand, will not (as mass) necessarily answer
to the demand itself. The energy can "get out of hand," possibly
yielding not reform but revolt. If Bataille's Head is a fixed subject,
Laclau's is a signifier that displaces the stagnant Master. (In
populism, Laclau insists, the name of the populist leader is more
powerful than the leader himself; the name does not stand in for the
cause but is the cause.)[9]
Moreover,
the signifier itself cannot be mastered; it floats as new groups attach
to, alter, and rework it, inducing still different cathexes.
- This signifier that would head popular democratic movements has
only one problem: it does not exist. As Laclau argues, there is
no signifier without a signified (On Populist Reason 105).
In fact, desire can only generate an object petit a, as object
cause and signifier, that is not sufficiently strong, not enough of a
signifier, to attract subjects in the manner outlined by Lacan. This
partial object or sign represents the empty wholeness; yet,
precisely as mere representative, it fails to offer the promise
of fulfillment that would lure the popular subjects. Subjects of desire
move metonymically from object cause to object cause, in search of the
wholeness they do not receive via the partial object. They are not held
or captivated by the signifier, which thus fails to gather the manifold.
For Laclau's politics, the demand that emits from desire is literally
unsatisfactory.
- Laclau, then, needs a signifier that does not represent
that whole but that is the whole, i.e., a part that is the
whole. His ideal signifier, while necessarily a partial object, must be
a full performance of democracy. A proper name, as indicated above, could perhaps accomplish this feat--if only it existed.
The object of the drive, Laclau decides, is the next best option
(On Populist Reason 119-20). After
all, the drive attaches to a circumscribed object that, for the "aroused"
subject, is as good as any whole. The bottle is as good as the breast, which is as good as the complete mother, which in turn is as good
as completeness itself. All are equally partial over against their
aim, which is knowledge (or death). The object of the drive,
then, is not partial relative to a whole. A missing or completed
wholeness has nothing to do with the drive's direction or
aim--the aim that splits the drive, which in turn splits off,
endlessly driving past its aim, while never falling short of it.
- On the one hand, Laclau's theory of populism requires an
object petit a qua signifier that fills the empty
fullness of our modern democracies-to-come. In Lacan, this signifier is
the desired signifier, the signifier of desire that marks the dialectic
between part and whole. The people--for Laclau, both a part within and
the full body of the democratic state--thus names this name for Laclau.
On the other hand, Laclau's theory calls for an object petit a
qua signifier that is the thing as such, not its mere cause or
representation; it calls thus for the object of the drive,
sufficient unto itself. In other words, for Laclau popular politics
demands a signifier derived from a smooth blend of desire and drive. It
hinges on neither the object cause of desire nor on the object
of the drive, but on the object petit a as object of
desire. There is only one problem with such a thing: it does not
and cannot exist.
- It is telling that Laclau derives his notion of the drive from a
secondary source, not from Lacan's actual writings (On Populist
Reason 119). At the key moment when he must make Lacan work for a
theory of popular democracy, Laclau has to remove Lacan's texts from the
picture. The aim of the drive is knowledge. Laclau evades that aim,
evades that knowledge--which is the knowledge of Lacan--in order to cast
his political net in the name of that very knowledge. It is not that
Laclau's practice abandons theory so that it can operate, potentially,
"in the real world." In bypassing theory, the practice skirts practice
too. In fact, within Lacanian theory an object of desire that acts as
the thing itself, as the whole, cannot be imagined, not even if
that thought is utopian. It can exist neither in theory nor in practice,
neither in the mind nor materially. Laclau, by offering not only a
theory that is missing its theory, calls for--because it is
missing its theory--a practice that cannot be practiced. Lacan holds
that the division of knowledge and practice precludes both, since
psychoanalysis is a practice of knowledge. Conversely, Laclau
marshals this very division by throwing the Lacanian principles
(the fundamental difference between drive and desire) upon which his
(Laclau's) theory of politics counts outside of that very theory. The
theory of politics is a performance of the resistance to theory.
- For Lacan, psychoanalysis is psychoanalytic, just as theory is
theoretical. A psychoanalyst is a psychoanalyst; a theorist is a
theorist. In their debate Laclau and Zizek, in fact, are theorists.
That is their post, task, and work. Yet it is a task that they cannot
cast or imagine as political. That is why they step out of theory "in
the final analysis" to get to their politics. However, they end up in
neither politics nor theory but dogmatism. Lacan has let us know that
the analyst and theorist are obliged to and responsible for their aim,
which is knowledge. That analysis or theory could one day turn into
politics is certain. Yet theory cannot "be" political. That is, it cannot
make itself political. For at the instant it performs this
gesture, theory ceases to be theory. Precisely such a cessation is
the main event of the Laclau/Zizek boxing match, a bout that exemplifies
the fact that politics, for theory, is now the absence of
theory. If we cannot lay this fact at the doorstep of Laclau or Zizek,
it is a fact nonetheless. When it gets down and dirty, to the
real, politics must do without theory, making do instead with
subject positions. For better or worse,
Lacanian psychoanalysis may be too formalized to continue fighting against
these postures. Either theory will be done, will respond to
itself, to its duty
as theory, in which case a politics in theory, a theoretical act, can be
anticipated; or else theory will become the absolute property of Masters,
hysterics, and University dogma. In the latter case, theory's aim cannot
but be capitalist reproduction, in theory as well as in practice. Theory
capitalizes on itself in an effort to rid the master of his
plus-de-jouir (surplus jouissance) so that we, theory's analysts
and analysands, inherit but a stifling plus-de-jouir! (no more
jouissance!) as our working conditions.
Department of Comparative Literature
State University of New York at Binghamton
blevins@binghamton.edu
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Notes
1. Laclau's critique of Zizek is
found on 232-39. The debate, as well as the
acrimony, actually begins in an earlier work in which both
Laclau and Zizek participate, Contingency, Hegemony,
Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left.
2. For a more detailed exploration of
this matter, see Warminski.
3. The signifier, like the self,
means only through its relation or enchainment to other signifiers.
Meaning is a result of context, consequently, of the relation of a given
signifier or set of signifiers to others. Likewise the subject: a
subject is itself only through its differentiation from other subjects,
subjects to which it is therefore bound.
4. I mention corpses because the
death drive is also in play here; space does not permit me to tackle this
important fundamental of both the transference and the drive. See Lacan,
Four Fundamental Concepts 203-06.
5. For a very fine analysis of this
Lacanian thesis concerning opening and shutting, see Harari 230-31.
6. Zizek presents his
thoughts on the Sendero and the favelas in an essay unrelated to his
debate with Laclau. See "From Politics" 512-14. In his refutation of
Zizek, however, Laclau cites these passages almost in their entirety,
thus pulling them into the center of his dismissal of Zizek ("Why
Constructing a People" 678-80).
7. I cannot here discuss the irony,
if irony it is, of Zizek's decision to cite a Maoist in order to affirm
an affirmation, however couched, of the Maoist Sendero's
brutality. Badiou, while now obviously critical of the Maoism he once
espoused vigorously, remains even today faithful to the ideals or high
moment of Maoism.
8. The transference is an example of
the more general process of "traversing the fantasy" that the "passage
à l'acte" directly references. See Harari 150-51.
9. In Argentina, the Peronists did
not espouse socialism or communism but Peronism. That, for Laclau, is
why Peronism is an exemplary populism.
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Butler, Judith, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek. Contingency,
Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left.
London: Verso, 2000.
Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Trans.
James Strachey. New York: Norton, 1961.
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Lacan, Jacques. The Four Fundamental Concepts of
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---. The Other Side of Psychoanalysis.
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Warminski, Andrzej. "Introduction: Allegories of Reference."
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