For They Know not What They Do; Enjoyment as a Political Factor - Slavoj Žižek PDF

Preview

Summary

FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO E N J O Y M E N T AS A POLITICAL FACTOR Slavoj Zizek VERSO London . New York First published by Verso 1991 This edition published by Verso 2008 Copyright © Slavoj Zizek 2008 All rights reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso...

Description

Accelerat ing t he world's research.

For They Know not What They Do; Enjoyment as a Political Factor Slavoj Žižek Ananto Crust

Related papers

Download a PDF Pack of t he best relat ed papers 

Less t han not hing Alejandra Priet o Zizek. Hegel versus Heidegger Heidegger’s Crit ique of Hegel Ekat erina Naumova Jacques Lacan: T he Barred Subject , t he Subject Supposed-t o-Know and t he Connect ion bet ween Kn… Ian Delairre

FOR THEY KNOW NOT WHAT THEY DO E N J O Y M E N T

AS

A

POLITICAL

Slavoj Zizek

VERSO London . New York

FACTOR

First published by Verso 1991 This edition published by Verso 2008 Copyright © Slavoj Zizek 2008 All rights reserved The moral right of the author has been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Verso UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG USA: 180 Varick Street, New York, NY 10014-4606 www.versobooks.com Verso is rhe imprint of New Left Books ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-212-7 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress Printed and bound by ScandBook AB, Sweden

For Kostja, my son

Contents

Foreword t o the Second Edition: Enjoyment within the Limits of Reason Alone

xi

The Hard Road to Dialectical Materialism - From the Logic of the Signifier . . . . . . . to Hegelian Dialectics The Act - Zen at War - Religion - The Act, Again Ideology - Is There a Politics of Subtraction? - Lacan and Badiou - Surplus-Enjoyment Introduction: Destiny of a Joke PARTI 1

E Pluribus U n u m

O n the One I

1

7

T H E BIRTH OF A MASTER-SIGNIFIEH:- T h e n o n -

analysable Slovene - Let the Emperor have his clothes! The "quilting point" - "A signifier represents the subject for another signifier" - Why is morality the darkest of conspiracies? II H o w TO C O U N T ZERO FOR O N E ? : - Derrida is a reader

of Hegel - Identity as "reflective determination" — "God is. . ." - A "chiasmic exchange of properties" - The "logic of the signifier" - The subjectivized structure - The "metaphor of the subject" - The Hegelian "one O n e " 2

The Wanton Identity I IMPOSSIBILITY:- Hegel's monism - The "silent weaving of the Spirit" - "From nothingness through nothingness to nothingness" - The condition of (impossibility

61

viii

CONTENTS

II REFLECTION:- The logic of re-mark - The abyss remarked - From failed reflection to reflected failure - The tain of the mirror PART II Dialectics and its Discontents 3

Hegelian Llanguage I

W I T H AN EYE TO O U R GAZE:- H O W to do a totality

with failures - The speculative (lack of) identity Llanguage and its limit - The squabble about All II JUDGEMENT BY DEFAULT:- "The word is an elephant"

— The paradoxes of sexuation - H o w necessity arises out of contingency - "In father more than father himself' 4

O n the Other I

HYSTERIA, CERTAINTY AND D O U B T : - Wittgenstein as a

Hegelian - Hegel's hysterical theatre - Cogito and the forced choice - "Objective certainty" - From A to S II T H E "FORMAL ASPECT":- History of an apparition -

Saying and meaning-to-say - The Hegelian performative - "The cunning of Reason" revisited

P A R T III 5

C u m Grano Praxis

All's Well That Ends Well? I

W H Y SHOULD A DIALECTICIAN LEARN TO C O U N T TO

FOUR?:- The triad and its excess - Protestantism, Jacobinism . . . . . . . and other "vanishing mediators" "A beat of your finger . . . " - W h y is Truth always political? II T H E "MISSING L I N K " OF IDEOLOGY:- T h e self-referring

structure and its void - Narrating the origins - So-called "primitive accumulation" - The paradox of a finite totality - The Kantian Thing

CONTENTS

6

Much A d o about a Thing I

IX

229

T H E VARIANTS OF THE FETISHISM-TYPE:- Why is Sade

the truth of Kant? - The "totalitarian object" - " I know, but nevertheless..." - Traditional, manipulative, totalitarian power I I " T H E KING IS A T H I N G " : - T h e King's two bodies -

Lenin's two bodies - H o w to extract the People from within the people? - The "Hypothesis of the Master" The King is a place-holder of the void Index

279

Foreword to the Second Edition: Enjoyment within the Limits of Reason Alone

There are philosophical books, minor classics even, which are widely known and referred to, although practically no one has actually read them page by page (John Rawls's Theory ofJustice, for example, or Robert Brandom's Making It Explicit) - a nice example of interpassivity, where some figure of the Other is supposed to do the reading for us. I hope For they know not what they do avoided this fate by, at least, really being read. Although it was overshadowed by the more popular Sublime Object of Ideology, my first book in English published two years earlier, I always considered it a more substantial achievement: it is a book of theoretical work, in contrast to the succession of anecdotes and cinema references in The Sublime Object. For me, the reaction of individual readers to it was a kind of test: those who said: "I was disappointed by it, finding it a little bit boring after all the firecrackers of The Sublime Object," obviously missed the crucial argument of both books. Even today, my attitude is: those who do not want to talk about For they know not what they do should remain silent about The Sublime Object.

The Hard R o a d to Dialectical Materialism There is one additional feature which makes For they know not what they do crucial: it establishes a critical distance towards some of the key positions of The Sublime Object. Although I still stand by the basic insights of The Sublime Object, it is clear to me, with hindsight, that it contains a series of intertwined weaknesses. First, there is the

xii

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

philosophical weakness: it basically endorses a quasi-transcendental reading of Lacan, focused on the notion of the Real as the impossible Thing-in-itself; in so doing, it opens the way to the celebration of failure: to the idea that every act ultimately misfires, and that the proper ethical stance is heroically to accept this failure. The Sublime Object fails to deploy the complex interconnections within the triad Real-Imaginary-Symbolic: the entire triad is reflected within each of its three elements. There are three modalities of the Real: the "real Real" (the horrifying Thing, the primordial object, from Irma's throat to the Alien); the "symbolic Real" (the real as consistency: the signifier reduced to a senseless formula, like quantum physics formulas which can no longer be translated back into - or related to - the everyday experience of our life-world); and the "imaginary Real" (the mysterious je ne sais quoi, the unfathomable "something" on account of which the sublime dimension shines through an ordinary object). The Real is thus, in effect, all three dimensions at the same time: the abyssal vortex which ruins every consistent structure; the mathematized consistent structure of reality; the fragile pure appearance. And, in a stricdy homologous way, there are three modalities of the Symbolic (the real - the signifier reduced to a senseless formula; the imaginary - the Jungian "symbols"; and the symbolic - speech, meaningful language); and three modalities of the Imaginary (the real - fantasy, which is precisely an imaginary scenario occupying the place of the Real; the imaginary - image as such in its fundamental function of a decoy; and the symbolic - again, the Jungian "symbols" or N e w Age archetypes). 1

2

How, then, is the Real inscribed into language? Robert Brandom has elaborated the consequences of the fact that humans are normative beings: language is, at its most elementary, the medium of commitment — each statement, not only explicit performatives, commits me to give grounds for my actions and statements. People do not simply act in a certain way; they have to justify their acts. The Lacanian point to be made here is that there is something in between brute natural reality and the properly human symbolic universe of normative commitments: the abyss of freedom. As Lacan pointed out in the early 1950s, apropos of performative statements like "You are my teacher", we are obliged to commit ourselves because the direct causality is cancelled — one never really knows, one never direcdy sees into, the other's mind. N o wonder that 3

4

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

xiii

when people are on the verge of making their marriage vows, the commitment par excellence, they are often seized by anxiety: am I really ready to assume this responsibility? The standard way out is simply (to pretend) not to take the commitment seriously: I do get married, but I continue to fantasize about being a "bachelor", and I also deceive my spouse. The mystery is that, somehow, the marital vow does none the less impose obligations on me: even when I indulge in transgressions, I do it in secret, away from the public gaze of the big Other - even if I secredy make light of my marriage, my entire life can collapse when I am compelled to confront its crisis publicly (the proverbial husband who promises his mistress to tell his wife that he will divorce her, but forever postpones this act, is not simply a hypocrite, but a living monument to the force of a symbolic obligation). It is precisely people who do take the marital vow seriously, as a full commitment, who are most anxious and reluctant to commit themselves. This dimension is missing in Brandom's work: this resistance to full commitment, this inability to assume it fully, which is not just an empirical psychological fact but a resistance inscribed into the most elementary relationship between the subject and its symbolic representation/identification. This gap is not simply external to language, it is not a relationship between language and a subject external to it; rather, it is inscribed into the very heart of language in the guise of its irreducible (self-) reflexivity. W h e n Lacan repeats that "there is no meta-language", this claim does not imply the impossibility of a reflexive distance towards some first-level language; on the contrary, "there is no meta-language" means, in fact, that there is no language - no seamless language whose enunciated is not broken by the reflexive inscription of the position of enunciation. Here, once again, we encounter the paradox of the non-All: there is no (meta-language) exception to language, it is not possible to talk about it from an external position, precisely because language is "not all", because its limit is inscribed into it in the guise of ruptures in which the process of enunciation intervenes in the enunciated. Language, in its very notion, involves a minimal distance towards its literal meaning - not in the sense of some irreducible ambiguity or multiple dispersion of meanings, but in the more precise sense of "he said X, but what if he really meant the opposite" - like the proverbial male-chauvinist notion of a woman who, when subjected to sexual advances, says " N o " , while her real message is "Yes".

xiv

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

The crucial point here is that Freud's famous ambivalence of libidinal stances has nothing whatsoever to do with some biological or psychological-affective oscillation, but refers stricdy to the radical gap between literal meaning and underlying intention. The minimal structure of this reflexivity is, of course, that of poetic repetition: if I say "window", it is just a simple designation; however, the moment I say "window . . . window", a gap separates the word from itself, and it is in this gap that the poetic "depth" resonates. And the truth of the old cliche about the "poetic origins of speech" is that there is no single occurrence of a word: repetition always-already resonates in it. It is crucial to perceive the link between this self-reflexivity and failure: the reflexive turn towards self-awareness occurs when there is a "malfunction", when things no longer run smoothly. The self-reflexivity of language, the fact that a speech act is always a reflexive comment on itself, its own qualification (in both main meanings of the term), bears witness to the impossibility inscribed into the very heart of language: its failure to grasp the Real. Apropos of an intense religious ritual, it is a commonplace to claim that we, outside observers, can never interpret it properly, since only those who are direcdy immersed in the life-world of which this ritual is a part can grasp its meaning (or, more accurately, they do not reflexively "understand" it, they direcdy "live" its meaning). From a Lacanian standpoint, one should take a step further here and claim that even the religious belief of those who participate in such a ritual is ultimately a "rationalization" of the uncanny libidinal impact of the ritual itself. The gap is not the gap between the participants direcdy involved with the thing and our external interpretative position — it is to be located in the thing itself, that is, it splits from within the participants themselves, who need a "rationalization" of meaning in order to be able to sustain the Real of the ritual itself. The same goes for the World Trade Centre attacks of I I September 2001: their key message is not some deeper ideological point, it is contained in their very first traumatic effect: terrorism works; we can do it. Along the same lines, the basic interpretative operation of psychoanalysis is not to go "deeper" than the superficial interpretation but, on the contrary, to be attentive to perplexing first impressions. It is usually said that the first reading is always deceptive, and that the meaning discloses itself only in a second reading - what, however, if the meaning which arises in the second reading is ultimately a

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

XV

defence formation against the shock of the first? The first impression of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land — the fragments from common daily occurrences, mixed with the impenetrable texture of references to an inconsistent multitude of artistic and religious phenomena - is the poem's "message". This direct short circuit between the fragments of "alienated" contemporary daily life and the confusing multitude of metaphysical references is in itself, for Eliot, the best diagnosis of where we stand today: lacking a firm religious-metaphysical foundation, our daily lives are reduced to fragments of empty and vulgar social rituals, if we go beyond this threshold and endeavour to discern a consistent spiritual edifice beneath the confusing multitude of references (is Eliot a Buddhist? does he propagate a pagan myth of resurrection?), we are already missing the crucial point. 5

This means that the Real is not the hard kernel of reality which resists virtualization. Hubert Dreyfus is right to identify the fundamental feature of today's virtualization of our life-experience as a reflective distance which prevents any full engagement: as in sexual games on the Internet, you are never fully committed since, as we usually put it, "if the thing doesn't work out, I can always leave!" If you reach an impasse, you can say: "OK, I'm leaving the game, I'm stepping out! Let's start again with a different game!" - but the very fact of this withdrawal implies that you were somehow aware from the very beginning that you could leave the game, which means that you were not fully committed. In this way, we can never get really burnt, fatally hurt, since a commitment can always be revoked; while in an existential commitment without reservations, if we make a mistake, we lose everything, there is no way out, no "OK, let's start the game again!" W e miss what Kierkegaard and others call a full existential engagement when we perceive it as a risky voluntarist jump into a dogmatic stance - as if, instead of persisting in fully justified scepticism, we lose our nerve, as it were, and fully commit ourselves; what Kierkegaard has in mind are precisely those situations when we are absolutely cornered and cannot step back to judge the situation from a distance - we do not have the chance to choose or not to choose, since withdrawal from choice is already a (bad) choice. 6

From the Freudian standpoint, however, the first thing to do is radically to question the opposition - on which Dreyfus relies here - between a human being as a fully embodied agent, thrown into his or her life-world, acting against the impenetrable background of

xvi

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

pre-understanding which can never be objectified/explicated into a set of rules, and the human being operating in an artificial digital universe which is thoroughly rule-regulated, and thus lacks the background density of the life-world. What if our location in a lifeworld is not the ultimate fact? The Freudian notion of "death-drive" points precisely towards a dimension of human subjectivity which resists its full immersion into its life-world: it designates a blind persistence which follows its path with utter disregard for the requirements of our concrete life-world. In Tarkovsky's Mirror, his father Arseny Tarkovsky recites his own lines: "A soul is sinful without a body, / like a body without clothes" - with no project, no aim; a riddle without an answer. "Deathdrive" is this dislocated soul without body, a pure insistence that ignores the constraints of reality. Gnosticism is thus simultaneously both right and wrong: right, in so far as it claims that the human subject is not truly "at home" in our reality; wrong, in so far as it draws the conclusion that there should therefore be another (astral, etheric . . .) universe which is our true home, from which we "fell" into this inert material reality. This is also where all the postmodemdeconstructionist-poststructuralist variations on how the subject is always-already displaced, decentred, pluralized . . . somehow miss the central point: that the subject "as such" is the name for a certain radical displacement, a certain wound, cut, in the texture of the universe, and all its identifications are ultimately just so many failed attempts to heal this wound. This displacement, which in itself portends entire universes, is best expressed by the first lines of Fernando Pessoa's "Tobacco Shop": "I am nothing. / I will never be anything. / I cannot desire to be nothing. / Moreover, I carry in me all the dreams of the world." Within the space of the opposition on which Dreyfus relies, the Real equals the inertia of material bodily reality which cannot be reduced to just another digital construct. Here, however, we should introduce the good old Lacanian distinction between reality and the Real: in the opposition between reality and spectral illusion, the Real appears precisely as "irreal", as a spectral illusion for which there is no room in our (symbolically constructed) reality. Therein, in this symbolic construction of (what we perceive as our social) reality, lies the catch: the inert remainder foreclosed from (what we experience as) reality returns precisely in the Real of spectral apparitions. 7

FOREWORD TO THE SECOND EDITION

xvii

Why is there something so uncanny about animals like shellfish, snails and tortoises? The true object of horror is not the shell without the slimy body in it, but the "naked" body without the shell. That is to say: do we not always tend to perceive the shell as too large, too heavy, too thick, in relation to the living body it houses? There is never a body which f...