In many respects it can be said that Žižek is a consummate ironist with all of the problems attendant to irony as a rhetorical strategy. In this respect, his rhetorical strategy is not unlike that of Socrates’, where he rhetorically strives to always turn the question back to the questioner, getting them to question their own assumptions behind the question, shifting the frame of the question (and therefore the possibilities following from the question) itself. Through this rhetorical maneuver Žižek strives to effect a sort of transcendence of reigning conditions and ideology, introducing new alternatives into the social system. In this respect, Žižek’s texts can be thought as not unlike Plato’s famous allegory of the cave (which Žižek often references), where the participants, the interlocutors, cease playing the ideological game (trying to name what image will appear on the wall next), and instead leap into an entirely different game. It was this that I tried to argue in my article “Symptomal Knots and Evental Ruptures” (warning pdf), where I attempted to argue that where Badiou’s political strategy consists in the affirmation of an undemonstrable event and the truth-procedures that follow from that declaration, Žižek’s political strategy consists in trying to force the event, to produce the event, or in opening a void space within the hegemony of the ideological structure where new alternatives become available.
As an ironist, just when you think you’ve pinned down his position, he reverses everything and articulates yet another position contradicting the first. Hence the sense that he never gets anywhere. The paradox is that the more Žižek tries to disavow and undermine this position of being the subject-supposed-to-know, the more he tends to provoke transference in his audience, convincing them that he must contain some secret (just as Socrates’ interlocutors invariably thought that he knew and was just withholding the answer).
I do think that while I do not agree with the notion of revolution as the only aim of politics (advocating a more classically Marxist position pertaining to tendencies populating the social field and their possibilities), and while I find Žižek’s references (and often celebration of) figures like Robespierre, Stalin, Mao, etc., as well as violence distasteful, this talk of revolution does serve a rhetorically important function within debates over political theory. In other words, in the absence of the belief that society can be fundamentally transformed and that we should commit ourselves to the project of transforming society– i.e., a desire for the real or impossible –we descend into a pacifying neo-pragmatism not unlike that of Critchly or Rorty, where we become apologists for liberal democracy and all of its attendant problems. Under this neo-pragmatic liberal democratism, any form of engagement envisioning an alternative form of society is excluded a priori as necessarily doomed to produce disaster and simultaneously as impossible. There is thus a closure of political possibility and the best we can hope for is a pacifying “communicative action” that dare not work for something else.
One of Žižek’s points is that liberal democracy is every bit as obscene and brutal as these other political systems so often denounced within western democracies as being “the worst”. The problem is that Žižek doesn’t do the necessary legwork in order to demonstrate this. Yes he shows the ideological mechanisms creating the straight-jacket of capitalism and liberal democracy as the only alternative, but he doesn’t do a very good job demonstrating just what is so obscene about liberal democracy and capitalism. To see this you need to read someone like Naomi Klein or other empirically oriented writers who document the actual effects of this system. It is disappointing that many of the theorists working in the post-Althusserian tradition of structuralist Marxism (and ultimately in the Gramscian tradition of Marxist thought where everything eventually came to be reduced to the cultural or semiotic register) look down on this sort of hard empirical and historical work practiced by people like David Harvey or Naomi Klein.
I do not think, however, that Žižek genuinely advocates the violence he often glorifies, or the totalitarianism he so often celebrates. What I think he’s doing is trying to make alternative possibilities available within political discourse. Proof of this, I think, can be seen in his recent article on Obama (here and here). A standard radical leftist stance, premised, as it so often is on a sense of cynicism and distrust of any establishment power, might be that we should reject Obama or should not have voted for him as he will simply be a continuation of the same. Badiou goes so far as to argue that we shouldn’t vote at all as this confuses the domain of the political with the state. A radical leftwing Žižekian political activist might argue that support for Obama amounts to giving way on one’s revolutionary desire, betraying that desire, and therefore betraying the cause (objet a). Yet surprisingly in his writings on Obama we find Žižek defending support for Obama as one avenue through which the coordinates of the symbolic can be changed even if, at the level of policy, these policies continue to support standard liberal democratic and capitalist platforms. This defense alone should give us significant pause in our interpretation of just what Žižek is up to.
Of course, the problem is, as Nathan asks, what happens when irony is not understood as irony?
UpdateBryan, over at Velvet Howler, presents an excellent response to my post on Žižek’s political strategy.
As Dr. Sinthome goes on to explain, Žižek’s key rhetorical tactic used to subvert conformist liberal democratic discourse is irony. This involves something peculiarly Žižekian, something that is palpable in every book he has written and every article he has published. The first move involves a rejection of the (typically hegemonic) liberal response to a given issue. One might think that, given Žižek’s political commitments, the next move would be to assert the far Left/Marxist view to counter the liberal position. Instead, Žižek often takes a stance that is uncomfortably close to the right-wing position, but then argues that the right-wing position simply makes a much stronger case for the far Left position.
Read the rest here. The piece is very rich and contains far more than this brief passage.
Update 2:Mikhail of Perverse Egalitarianism adds his own scathing rejoinder in a style only Mikhail can pull off.
Larval Subjects . 
December 2, 2008 at 3:36 am
[…] Subjects has a great response to The New Republic hit-piece put out a few days ago, which I suggest reading in whole, but […]
December 2, 2008 at 4:36 am
On this:
One question might be what sorts of alternative possibilities are most likely to be activated by these sorts of interventions – and whether the goal of activating possibilities, by itself, without some sense of the kind of possibilities one might want to activate, is specifically valuable or desirable. Emancipatory impulses can require the shutting down and opposition of certain kinds of possibilities, as well as the opening up of others – the qualitative character of what is being opened and closed seems like something that should be at the centre of a critical intervention: it’s possible to reject the move through which the critique of liberalism is shut down by pointing to oppressive forms of anti-liberalism – but I would think that the way to reject this move, would be by putting on a the table a more nuanced critique of liberalism, pointing toward the sorts of alternatives we might want to realise, rather than flirting with alternatives that, if you’re correct in your reading, are not actually intended to be non-ironically endorsed…
I don’t know Žižek sufficiently to have a dog in the interpretive fight over his work – just expressing a general frustration and desire to move towards a sort of critique that is struggling on a more concrete level with the sort of possibilities for collective life it wants to open up.
(Good to see you posting regularly again, by the way…)
December 2, 2008 at 4:59 am
“A radical leftwing Žižekian political activist might argue that support for Obama amounts to giving way on one’s revolutionary desire, betraying that desire, and therefore betraying the cause (objet a). Yet surprisingly in his writings on Obama we find Žižek defending support for Obama as one avenue through which the coordinates of the symbolic can be changed even if, at the level of policy, these policies continue to support standard liberal democratic and capitalist platforms.”
I have to admit there is a huge problem with this, but the pause it brings me isn’t the kind I think it brings you. I have been saying for months now, long before the election, that we can take Zizek’s “forced choice” and apply it to the struggle the Left has made for and critiquing Obama—Your Vote or Your Critique, as I’ve put it. This forced choice is supported by a kind of false equivalence, in that case between Your Vote and Your Support.
I noticed this when I thought about how Obamabots demanded not just voting for Obama (all he needed to win), but “support,” which I came to take as ideological support or demand, or in Obama’s parlance “hope.” I think Zizek calling for us to support Obama is the very cynical move he’s been critiquing for almost 20 years. The thing is, it depends on this false equivalence between practical choice and ideological demand, on throwing one’s arm up because they feel every pragmatic step locks them in a world. The way out of it, I want to say, is to disentangle this equivalence.
December 2, 2008 at 5:12 am
I agree NP, and think that the post I link to at the end concerning what happens when ideas are taken seriously broaches this question nicely. In other words, there are a variety of ways to open holes in a field that looks complete and closed. Why this way? That said, nice to see you commenting! I hope all is well.
Joe, I understand your sentiment concerning Obama, but the point isn’t really about Obama and whatever one might think about Obama’s election, but rather is a question of just where Zizek discerns the sort of change he’s proposing taking place. What’s interesting about his discussions of Obama from the perspective of Zizek’s theoretical praxis isn’t the topic (other examples could be chosen), but that he seems focused primarily on how the symbolic is potentially changed and how new issues become available for public discourse that weren’t possible to broach at all before. As I’ve argued consistently on this blog over the years, this is one major element of effective political engagement.
December 2, 2008 at 5:14 am
Or rather, I would say that Zizek’s move with respect to Obama isn’t as cynical as it might at first appear. As Deleuze would say (in The Logic of Sense) Zizek’s focus here is on surface-effects or the domain of sense, not reference and objects. If openings are not made at the level of sense, at the level of how the symbolic is organized, it’s tremendously difficult to affect any change at the level of the machinic assemblage or the constellation of bodies and institutions in the social sphere.
December 2, 2008 at 3:01 pm
I actually do have serious qualms about Zizek’s romanticized view of political violence, and for his praise of Communist dictators (with the notable exception of Tito, about whom he remains silent). I think that, for all of Zizek’s irony and reflexive rationalizations, and for all he writes about leftists who are unwilling to take responsibility for the consequences of the revolutionary acts they praise rhetorically, it is really Zizek who is much more interested in being pure of heart, and ultra-radical in his unwavering commitment to the Act (in the manner of his imagined versions of Robespierre, Stalin, and Mao) than in actually building an improved social system to replace capitalism.
That said, however, I find the New Republic article entirely reprehensible from the get-go, because its smug tone is completely based on assuming as indisputable “common sense” the idea that of course communism is dead, capitalism is here to stay, and There Is No Alternative. This is far more offensive to me than anything Zizek says, precisely because it is representative of the mainstream consensus to make any sort of critical thought impossible.
December 2, 2008 at 8:36 pm
“The paradox is that the more Žižek tries to disavow and undermine this position of being the subject-supposed-to-know, the more he tends to provoke transference in his audience, convincing them that he must contain some secret…”
And what of the transference that theorizes Zizek as the subject-supposed-to-be-ironic, as the tactical master of “a rhetorical strategy not unlike that of Socrates” that consists of an effort to “rhetorically strive to always turn the question back to the questioner, getting them to question their own assumptions behind the question”? Is this not also a form of transference?
Furthermore, what of the transference that always looks to give Zizek the benefit of the doubt, no matter how stupid or craven he acts, by ordaining him our analyst-at-large, that is, our secular saint? What fantasies (of the engaged academic heroically battling the mainstream consensus with nothing except for his critical thought?) are involved in this transference? What unpleasant facts – that Zizek is a guy trying to get ahead in the world through various means like a lot of other people – some of whom are academics – are downplayed by this nomination?
Finally, what of the position that refuses to countenance the critical arguments of one’s antagonist when they don’t conform to one’s own self-regard, but instead looks to paint them into a political or ideological corner with a series of loaded terms (“entirely reprehensible” “smug tone”) based on “assuming the indisputable ‘common sense’ of these slights.”
Whatever problems the Kirsch article had, and there seemed to me a few, the continuing circle-jerk group-think of Zizek’s fans in the blogosphere (“An excellent response” “infinitely rich”) appear to an outside observer as much more problematic indeed. Where, in fact, is the critical thought not occurring? I think it is not occurring here.
December 2, 2008 at 8:54 pm
I suspect that Shaviro’s point, though I can’t speak for him, is precisely that the author of the article doesn’t provide arguments for the thesis that there is no alternative to capitalism. Pointing this out is a critical stance.
I don’t know that anyone is claiming that Zizek is “our analyst-at-large” or a “secular saint”. My thesis that he practices the rhetorical strategy of irony is based on numerous textual references where he discusses his own rhetorical strategies and the analysis of his shifts from one position to the other. At any rate, what’s your point? Are you asserting that because one disagrees with a thinker on some points, he should be rejected tout court? Zizek makes no valuable contributions to psychoanalytic thought or political thought whatsoever?
December 2, 2008 at 8:58 pm
All of this reminds of Derrida controversies, only back then it was fashionable to throw around words like “charlatan” or “abstruse” and now it’s “indecent” or “dangerous”… Have we learn nothing? No one really cares about what Zizek does or does not stand for, whether he is being ironic or truthful – can we at least delight in the fact that some abstract “general public” might get a whiff of some philosophical discussions taking place?
December 2, 2008 at 9:06 pm
Mikhail, from a psychoanalytic perspective I suppose that means he’s hitting a nerve. I’m just surprised to find out that I– and even more surprisingly Shaviro! –are a part of a Zizek cult, when the vast majority of posts on this blog revolve around Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, Marx, Badiou, Spinoza, Lucretius, etc. Apparently when you write a couple of articles that journals request because you have a background in such things it entails you’re a slavish devotee. Who knew?
December 2, 2008 at 9:14 pm
I believe to be initiated into the not-so-secretive cult of Zizek, all you have to do is to publicly pronounce his Zizek and, it seems to be going there, withhold some sort of accusatory follow-up comment. I feel as if I’ve been doing nothing but oddly “defending” Zizek in the last couple of days even though I really don’t care for much of what he has to say – I do feel however that if Kirsch can so easily get away with such a misinformed and openly dismissive piece in TNR, it won’t be long before anyone who writes anything even remotely controversial will be subjected to public flagellation…
Sorry for horrible grammatical errors in the previous comment.
December 2, 2008 at 9:16 pm
I also find it interesting that somehow, in the case of Zizek, whenever someone defends him or suggests that a particular claim hasn’t been properly understood, the first reaction from the critic seems to be accusations of slavish (pardon the pun) adoration of the master and cult-like, uncritical acceptance. What is it about Zizek that seems to bring out this response? Why no arguments in response to the actual point? One can only imagine how the hostile critic would respond were someone to point out that Kirsch thoroughly misses the point concerning Zizek’s claim that anti-semitism would be no less true pathological were there to be instances of Jews that actually fit the descriptions hoisted upon them by anti-semites, as, just in the case of psychosis, the kernel of psychosis does not revolve around whether or not the delusion is true, but how it functions in the unconscious of the subject in question. A man’s partner might very well be cheating on him, but this is not the psychoanalytic question. The psychoanalytic question is that of why the subject’s desire has come to fixate on this possibility in the first place. Likewise, with respect to questions of racism, the issue isn’t whether or not the racist’s beliefs are true or false– this shouldn’t even be on the table for discussion –but rather what role the racist obsession serves in veiling the constitutive and real antagonisms of the social, while nonetheless maintaining the status quo of that social structure.
December 2, 2008 at 9:35 pm
To recapitulate other comments made, the idea that simply reading Zizek or writing Zizek constitutes a cult-like devotion to him is simply preposterous and not really worth responding to in any serious manner. It seems clear to me that the meaning of Zizek’s work is a pretty contentious issue amongst people who are actually familiar with his work, as opposed to people like Kirsch who are outside of this field of discussion.
December 2, 2008 at 9:36 pm
*writing about
December 2, 2008 at 9:41 pm
LS: The paradox is that the more Žižek tries to disavow and undermine this position of being the subject-supposed-to-know, the more he tends to provoke transference in his audience, convincing them that he must contain some secret (just as Socrates’ interlocutors invariably thought that he knew and was just withholding the answer).”
Kvond: The comparison to Socrates is interesting, but unfortunately Zizek spends very little time pretending not to know, and a great deal of time presenting definitive readings of both theoretical positions and media products. He presents these without irony at all, but rather with a very satisfying, self-closing suture, tying up the dialectic so to speak. It is this defintive voice, really like no other intellectual, especially in regard to his knowledge and survey of film, that gives the masses of students the impression that he “knows” something, for unlike an analyst, (or an Ancient Greek ironist) he is continually giving answers for how to interpret things.
His disavowal of the position of the subject-suppose-to-know, seems to be a personal disavowal, not a strategic one. He does not want personally to play the part he has constructed for himself. There is that fantastic scene in Zizek (the film), where he is looking at old footage of Lacan and speaking about how ridiculously affected he was. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RTtEXLh_hs
“What interests me are his propositions, not his style” etc., etc. etc.
What an odd, non-ironical mirror that was, him staring at Lacan, as his own arms wave all about. He loses all irony here.
I suppose that what one can say is ultimately ironic about Zizek, the master ironist, is that he believes his own ironical position. Believes, but will not avowal it. He refuses to occupy history. Rather being the master-analyst for the whole of the West, it seems more that the whole of the West has become analyst for Zizek, in a huge counter-transference. A transference that has yet taken its theraputic effect.
December 2, 2008 at 9:43 pm
p.s. I should have said, “rather THAN being the master-analyst for the West”…
December 2, 2008 at 10:25 pm
Kvond, I think you’re right on the mark here:
A while back I was asked to write an article for IJZS for the issue entitled Zizek avec Lacan. This issue will explore differences between Lacan and Zizek. Initially I was going to write about the issue of textual transference and the textual strategies certain thinkers develop for dealing with it. This line of thought was prompted by an odd moment in one of Lacan’s unpublished seminars. There (and unfortunately I can’t remember offhand which seminar it was, but it was a late one), Lacan begins the session by remarking that the night before he had dreamt that no one showed up and experienced a great delight at this. This got me thinking. Why would Lacan be delighted if no one showed up at his seminar?
Here I think Lacan is making a point about the nature of pedagogy and mastery. Throughout Lacan’s seminars he develops a theory of pedagogy that no one, to my knowledge, has systematically traced (Bracher’s Writing Cure aside). The question of pedagogy and psychoanalysis pertains to the position of the analyst which, as Lacan says in seminar 17, is the precise opposite of the discourse of the master (that discourse which claims to be whole and complete, without fissure or division). From a psychoanalytic standpoint, this generates a number of self-reflexive issues pertaining to pedagogy or a teaching. If we take seriously the claim that “the big Other does not exist”, then a psychoanalytic pedagogy cannot occupy the position of the mastery. Lacan’s dream that his students did not show up can be understood as a sort of wish that they traverse the fantasy and cease to believe that he contains objet a, the agalma, or the secret that would “tell the truth about truth”. In part Lacan’s rhetorical pyrotechnics can be understood as a strategy for promoting separation from the Other and traversing the fantasy. Moreover, Lacan’s elliptical and opaque style forces the listener and reader to take responsibility for the meaning they give to the text. Because, like late Joyce, Lacan’s teaching is highly polysemous, the reader takes an active role in giving it form (“in-form-ing” it in Simondon’s sense). Of course, like Socrates, this strategy seems to intensify transference rather than diminish it, so we can ask whether Lacan’s textual strategies are successful at working through the transference or the idea that there is an Oedipal master that knows.
This line of thought was all prompted by a sense that there’s a common performative contradiction at the heart of French thought and among enthusiasts of French thought. On the one hand, thinkers like Deleuze, Derrida, Lacan, Lyotard, Foucault, etc., all celebrate difference and the undoing of the one or identity in their own way. Yet on the other hand, there’s a curious way in which devotees of these thinkers endlessly privilege the one of the master-thinker, falling back into the logic of the same and identity. Rather than an affirmation of difference we get an affirmation of the same. Although I would disagree with you somewhat and suggest that Zizek does employ a number of rhetorical strategies that target the positioning of himself as a master, I would also say that he tone and style is predominantly that of mastery or the subject that does know, not the subject that a reader supposes knows. This is seen above all in his constant reference to phrases like “under the standard reading” and “of course”, etc., where the reader is subtly disciplined and made to feel guilt for advocating the facile “standard reading” that does not get at “the truth about truth”. Through the production of this guilt and this strategy of discipline, the reader is then step by step led to advocate the “esoteric reading” or the truth about truth. For example, the reader is at fault if they don’t see that the critiques of Cartesian subjectivity are really a defense against the real, rather than based on a series of theoretical problems that lie at the heart of this notion of the subject. Effective rhetorical strategy but certainly not one designed to work through transference.
As it happens, this article never got written. I instead used the piece to develop four new discourses following from the discourse of the capitalist, arguing that Zizek has effectively stepped outside of the universe of discourse Lacan’s thought inhabits, while nonetheless working within this field of concepts, i.e., that Lacanian and Zizekian thought are to be distinguished not at the level of content but rather the form of their discourse.
December 2, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Perhaps now the article can be written for another venue, as it seems you have more than a seed for it, and it certainly is germane, given that Zizek’s (in)famy should only increase.
I can only say that I agree that Zizek DOES employ strategies that undermine his place as the Master, but that these are secondary to his primary participation in, and personal disavowel of, “the subject-supposed-to-know”.
But perhaps this is what we really enjoy about him, that he thoroughly ENJOYS his place of ideas, an enjoyment that can only occur if he disavowals it. If pornography is the sense that “real sex is happening somewhere”, Zizek’s performances on stage and in text may be the sense that “real thinking his happening somewhere”.
December 2, 2008 at 11:01 pm
typos: …only if he disavows it. If pornography is the sense that “real sex is happening somewhere”, Zizek’s performance, on stage and in text, may be the sense that “REAL thinking is happening somewhere”
p.s. sorry to make a mess of your comment board.
December 2, 2008 at 11:01 pm
Lacan himself posits the analyst as a saint – so I think it is fair to say that by aligning Zizek with the position of the analyst in the wider psychoanalytic field, as you do above, you gift him with the same status. This is highly cultish.
Furthermore, there is a rather obvious legitimization strategy which Zizek defenders often adopt – which you can see in this thread – which consists of saying “critics don’t understood his points, they are outside the field of discussion, they are lazy, they haven’t read all his work.” What this boils down to is: “We are the experts, and custodians of the true meanings of Zizek.” Under what model of language does this claim make sense?
“I suspect that Shaviro’s point, though I can’t speak for him, is precisely that the author of the article doesn’t provide arguments for the thesis that there is no alternative to capitalism. Pointing this out is a critical stance.”
Kirsch says nothing at all in his article about there being no alternative to capitalism – this is a pathological insert based on nothing whatsoever. And which you are now defending – as a critical stance – also, based on nothing at all. Which is quite interesting – no? I mean, that both you and he would be moved to reflexively do this. To put it in a nutshell:
“Likewise, with respect to questions of racism, the issue isn’t whether or not the racist’s beliefs are true or false– this shouldn’t even be on the table for discussion –but rather what role the racist obsession serves in veiling the constitutive and real antagonisms of the social, while nonetheless maintaining the status quo of that social structure.”
Let me try this one out:
“Likewise, with respect to question of whether or not there is an issue of an alternative to capitalism – this shouldn’t even be on the table for discussion – but rather what role the “alternative to capitalism” obsession serves in veiling the constitutive and real antagonisms of the social, while nonetheless maintaining the status quo of that social structure.”
That is to say, is it not worth considering the part that your own (plural) desire is playing here – in maintaining the status of quo of this social situation? Such as, in particular, your claims to interpretative mastery on the issue of the meaning of Zizek in particular, and the wider issues of the socio-political field more generally?
December 2, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Dissenting Voice,
Is there a text in this class?
December 2, 2008 at 11:11 pm
Kvond,
I guess the question would be what agency is doing that thinking. That is, is the impression created that Zizek is the one doing the thinking, or is the space opened where we encounter the truth that the unconscious is doing the thinking, or that there is a form of knowledge that works or operates without being known.
December 2, 2008 at 11:16 pm
“Is there a text in this class?”
Is this a class room?
December 2, 2008 at 11:36 pm
LS: “That is, is the impression created that Zizek is the one doing the thinking, or is the space opened where we encounter the truth that the unconscious is doing the thinking, or that there is a form of knowledge that works or operates without being known.”
Kvond: Well, if my analogy to pornography is to stand, and Zizek PERFORMS a kind of philosophical pornography, then it would have to be Zizek who is doing the thinking, just as the pornstar is doing the fucking. She, like he, is “not really doing this” but the effect is of an affected ENJOYMENT. Of course the pornstar is REALLY enjoying it (in a teeth-gritting, jouissance way), just as Zizek is.
I am quite interested in Zizek the performer, though his individual readings are very interesting, taken as they go.
December 2, 2008 at 11:42 pm
Alright, is there a text in this symposium? You seem to be suggesting that anything goes with the interpretation of texts with this question:
In other words, those who have worked long and hard on a series of texts are supposedly on equal footing with any other casual reader, and deep and intimate familiarity with a body of texts gives them no greater claim about the claims and arguments of these texts. This strikes me as corrosive to any discussion of texts as it follows that there is no way to arbitrate disputes about texts by reference to the texts themselves. Texts are, of course, polysemous and admit of multiple interpretations (hence the endless dissertations of Saint Thomas among those going for divinity degrees), but this doesn’t entail that none of those interpretations are superior to others.
Moreover, you are illicitly moving from the assertion that this critic doesn’t understand to the universal assertion that defenders of a particular thinker claims that critics don’t understand. Kirsh shows a broad textual familiarity with Zizek’s various remarks about violence and brutal dictators, but the review contains almost no reference to Zizek’s theoretical claims within which these remarks are to be situated. This is a bit like quoting the opening line of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus— “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.” –and then arguing that Deleuze and Guattari reject the id. Certainly when discussing Zizek’s remarks about Jews and anti-semitism it is relevant to discuss Zizek’s remarks about paranoid psychosis and the truth or falsity of delusional formations, no? Does the discussion of paranoid psychosis and the issue of truth and falsity change the sense of these remarks in any way? The author doesn’t discuss this at all. Likewise, shouldn’t the author discuss Zizek’s Benjaminian theory of the repetition of missed opportunities in the context of Zizek’s remarks on Mao, Stalin, Robespierre? Does this theory of repetition change the sense of these remarks at all?
And what of Zizek’s remark in the series forward in The Parallax View where he presents a metatextual remark on his own theoretical strategies?
Isn’t this exactly what Freud did by focusing on the detritus of our mental life in dreams, slips of the tongue, bungled actions, acts of forgetting, jokes, etc., treating the marginal as the providing the key to the major or the ego level discourse of the subject? Does this change the sense of what Zizek might be up to when he discusses loathsome figures such as Stalin or glorifies violence? Kirsch addresses none of this.
The point isn’t that all criticism amounts to misinterpretation. Poke around this blog and you’ll find a number of criticisms of Zizek, among others. The point is that there is a right way and a wrong way of going about criticism. The problem with Kirsch’s piece is that it is a drive-by hit job. It’s perfectly legitimate to have problems with Zizek’s politics– I do –but he certainly does not develop his criticisms in an informed or textually adequate way.
December 2, 2008 at 11:43 pm
What is it about Zizek that seems to bring out this response? Why no arguments in response to the actual point?
Dr. Sinthome you repeated your point about Socratian provocation around 13 times in this thread and the one before, but failed to notice my hero and cyberpunk icon’s Shaviro simple point that you know perhaps we should take Zizek’s Romanticization of the Revolutinaries on face value, without necessarily resorting to Socratean provocation. I think the cultification of the Zizek’s phenomenon is an example of the general craving for media spectacle and not much else, which the slovenly doctor exploits cleverly although in increasingly tired fashion as even the movies have changed in the meantime and moved beyond Hitchcockian double entendrees.
December 2, 2008 at 11:47 pm
Well, Dejan, I’m prone to classical comparisons. I have compared you, after all, to a version of Diogenes the Cynic on an occasion or two. I agree about the repetitiveness of his discourse going through variations of the same. I also think there’s a worthwhile question about the nature of his psychoanalytic practice. In other words, is Zizek practicing applied psychoanalysis, where he’s simply taking psychoanalytic concepts and applying them to any and all cultural artifacts (which, not incidentally, can’t respond unlike an analysand), such that he only ends up finding what he already expected to find (i.e., there’s no risk to such a practice unlike an analytic intervention in the clinic)?
December 2, 2008 at 11:51 pm
p.s. I might add (this may be out of place in the order of comments, as I post it late) that this pornographic quality to his thought I think accounts for a serious portion of the objection to his theorizing…it perversely enjoys what should be a normative relationship, just as the pornographer does…hence the inherent problem with his celebrity, pornstar-like, status.
December 3, 2008 at 12:01 am
Kvond, totally random association in response to your remarks, but what you’re describe is a good example of phallic jouissance that accompanies the structure of masculine sexuation, i.e., the fantasy of the possibility of complete or total satisfaction that exists somewhere and is had by someone. The pornography example is apropos in this connection, as you can see how it works in terms of internet porn addiction in terms of surplus-jouissance. That is, the typical online porn connoisseur endlessly clicks from page to page, clip to clip, because that picture is never it. In short, the elusive object is ever displaced like Carroll’s snipe or like sense in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. So I think the sort of knowledge you’re describing could be called the phallic fantasy of knowledge, rather than the acephalous knowledge that characterizes the unconscious.
December 3, 2008 at 12:06 am
I have always found it odd that when introduced, either in person or in writing, Zizek is often referred to as a psychoanalyst.
December 3, 2008 at 12:11 am
Me too. Zizek’s time in the clinic was extremely limited… As I recall, there was a Lingua Franca interview with him about eight years ago where he said that it literally only lasted a couple of months. Hints of what this analysis was like can be found in Bruce Fink’s Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Perhaps this view is problematic, but I do think it’s extremely difficult to understand a number of aspects of Lacanian theory without the experience of analysis.
December 3, 2008 at 12:16 am
Dr Sinthome, I am Diogenes, Satyr, and Pryapus; I am an obsessive, and a diva; I am the world’s only stalker of the continental blawgosphere, a subjective destituter of the subjectively destitute; I’m ALL these things.
My loathing for dr. Zizek is not personal; I do have a personal loathing for e.g. the Serbian ex-president Slobodan Milosevic who didn’t decide to bomb Slovenia before dr. Zizek even sold his first book. I loathe the whole CROWD of Western progressive intellectuals who like Zizek are starting to accept repulsive double binds and absurdities like ”a Marxist revolutionary who agreed with the dismantling of Marxist Yugoslavia so that neoliberal capitalism may be installed”.
I loathe them even more when I hear news such as that a few of my pals from the 1990s, in their fifties by now, developed three forms of cancer in what the local doctors are saying is a direct consequence of increased radiation caused by the Western bombing in 1999.
I loathe this cowardice, and immorality, above anything.
December 3, 2008 at 12:47 am
This, you know dr. Sinthome, blood, guts, disease, pain… THIS is the endlessly deferred ”lost cause”, the ”petit objet a”, that the Zizek of Oz has hid behind the curtain…COMPLICITY and COLLABORATION with fascist violence. Lies, on top of lies, on top of lies, on top of more lies. But you don’t have to consider ethics, if you don’t want to. You can just execute these liars; and you’ll see, the tables will turn after this global crisis, and the liars will pay for their crimes.
December 3, 2008 at 1:17 am
C’mon Dejan, you know I’m sympathetic with all of this, don’t you? But don’t you also understand that I can draw certain concepts from Heidegger without advocating his politics, I can benefit from Zizek’s elaborations of Lacan and some of the concepts he develops without advocating his politics or political “answers”? Certainly you’ve read enough on my blog to know that in many respects my Marxism and politics is starkly different from anything Zizek advocates, no?
December 3, 2008 at 1:36 am
If one were to read Zizek and only take away from it the mere content of what he is saying, as opposed to the form of how he says it, then I think that reader has made a terrible error. Certainly Zizek doesn’t help. As Dr. Sinthome points out above, he’s often prone to treating his conclusions as definitive, obvious in retrospect, and against “stupid” “standard readings.” But on the other hand, he’s also often prone to change his mind about his opinions, and they even undergo constant change not only between, but within, his works.
So, perhaps more than anything, something that I’ve taken away from reading Zizek is that there is a certain restlessness to thought. Instead of settling for a conclusion, one can take it a step further by pointing out the contradictions involved in one’s claims, provoking one to go beyond the limits of some established trajectory of an argument.
This kind of thinking, whether it be considered dialectical or not, seems to be highly effective in my experience, not only academically but also psychoanalytically, by constantly questioning the presuppositions of an argument or an action.
December 3, 2008 at 2:47 am
That is, the typical online porn connoisseur endlessly clicks from page to page, clip to clip, because that picture is never it.
Sorry, but I did find IT, and I know longer have to click except when the screen decides it needs saving. Such remarks about elusive porn are surely provincial and statistics arising out of a miniscule survey.
You’ve also compared us to Aristophanes last year at the Sewers, as I remember, when people thought we were just fluff and not on their high level. We are delighted that you wish to be all things to all wimming.
December 3, 2008 at 3:51 am
LS, I largely agree with your responses to my thoughts here. But when it comes to the circulation of jouissance and disavowed enjoyment, it may be hard to discern just where the head and the tail end.
December 3, 2008 at 7:57 am
“You seem to be suggesting that anything goes with the interpretation of texts”
No – what a strange leap – but I am suggesting that Kirsch supplies arguments for his points – not all of which I agree with – that you are refusing to consider based on a highly convenient rhetorical strategy of positing yourself as more qualified (“we’ve worked long and hard”) to divine the meaning of Zizek than he is.
It does seem to me very clearly that is for you a question of superior readings – and superior readers. And I wonder if Zizek, with his magical theoretical x-ray specs – does not enable this fantasy for you?
“The problem with Kirsch’s piece is that it is a drive-by hit job. It’s perfectly legitimate to have problems with Zizek’s politics– I do –but he certainly does not develop his criticisms in an informed or textually adequate way.”
So you say – but you have not responded in any informed or textually adequate way to his piece, so how are we to know? Instead, you (and allies) have recited canards that have no relation to anything – like the fantasy “No alternative to capitalism” line which you have quickly skipped over.
You do indeed seem quite unwilling to consider the question of your own desires and transferrences, which is quite cynical from the psychoanalytic premises that you say you are working from.
For my part, I am ultimately much less interested in Zizek than in the desire named Zizek – which many people in this thread quite plainly harbour!
December 3, 2008 at 3:22 pm
[…] November 30, 2008 by Mikhail Emelianov UPDATE: Larval Subjects has an interesting discussion of the matter here and here. […]
December 3, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Ah, the “desire named Zizek” – clearly to dismiss a rather poorly put together critique that ends up labeling someone a fascist is to throw all of one’s support behind the attacked party, to show a hidden desire to love and admire Zizek… We are all admirers of Zizek, all part of the cult, secret lovers of fascism longing for the leader – oh when will he finally reveal himself and call upon us to serve him?
January 19, 2009 at 10:27 pm
[…] apparent romantic adoration for totalitarian violence. The second, exemplified by Larval Subjects here, defends Zizek against this criticism, claiming that he is thoroughly an ironist, opting to defend […]