An engagement with the thought of Slavoj Zizek: Martin Wooster

Slavoj Zizek is without doubt the star philosopher and cultural critic hailing from Slovenia and the University of Ljubljana. His nervous mannerisms and sharp wit, allied to a prodigious grasp of contemporary culture, make him nothing less than compelling whether on the written page or in the lecture hall. However, he is not alone, the philosophical voices coming out of this small country and university, Miran Bozovic, Alenka Zupancic, Miladen Dolar to name just a few, have between them created a remarkable body of work. If Slovenia acquired independence for the first time with the fall of old Yugoslavia, it had, despite the long history of its colonization, managed to maintain its own language, and maybe as a consequence this has allowed it to nurture a considerable inner strength that today we can now find reflected in these voices. Perhaps it is also possible to make a direct claim between the strength of a voice and the power of resistance, a claim made more persuasive if we take into account the strength of Jewish thought that has often had to grow on fragile ground, within the margins of society. In the documentary film made with Derrida at the end of his life, he recounts a formative experience during his childhood in Algeria when the Jews, forced out of their schools had to set up their own. But for Derrida the over-riding experience was one of exile since the new schools were incapable in his eyes of giving him the sense of a new home, a sense of belonging. In Derrida’s mature thought, thinking becomes an activity of mourning, he mourns the lost home that has allowed Western thought the long error of its representational thinking and instead for Derrida thought becomes an activity that can only resonate as it disappears, a thought that conducts itself as a vanishing language. Have the Slovenians, by maintaining their language and the immemorial promise of its people that remains hidden there, the forgotten that ordinary memory, tied to perception, only succeeds in forgetting, not themselves been forced into their own writing of mourning? It is certainly the case that whilst Zizek’s thought conducts an ongoing criticism of Derrida it nevertheless would be hard to conceive of its arrival without him.

Zizek has on more than one occasion described himself as an old fashioned Marxist, he is a man of the left and he wears this fact as a fidelity to a life-long commitment, for him it is nothing less than a badge of honour. However, he is the first to recognize that today these views are in retreat throughout Europe, a fact that the present banking crisis and growing recession has it seems done little to change. For Zizek, Lenin’s strategic insight is crucial: ‘when an army is in retreat, a hundred times more discipline is required than when the army is advancing...’ It is this fact that has given Zizek the mantel of being the Slovenian Hamlet, a man who twists and turns whilst shedding the light of his brilliant, reflecting mind on cultural phenomena, caring little for its supposed status and intentions, but all the while his endeavours, it would seem, are those of a man who waits. Indeed for Zizek waiting is a serious act, to do nothing but wait is perhaps for him the only really radical act left open to us at this juncture in history. But this is a waiting with a serious intent in the impatience of its patience, a waiting that agitates for the instant, the contemporary moment, from which we may redefine the very contours of what is possible. Earlier this year, Zizek along with Badiou, was instrumental in setting up a conference over three days at Birkbeck college with an intention to explore the ‘idea of communism’ as it stands today. The conference passed by rather smoothly despite the obvious embarrassment for many that only one woman speaker had been invited, Judith Balso, who gave the last talk. However it was her intervention that was to cause the biggest rift in the ideas hitherto expressed when she argued that, if we are to really learn the lessons of Stalin and the Bolsheviks, communism as a political thought praxis must maintain its distance from the state. Somewhat dismissing any claims to legitimacy that the South American Leftist/Marxist governments might have, to the obvious displeasure of the Mexican speaker, Bruno Bosteels, it was immediately apparent that for Zizek such a position could only have a theoretical justification at best, and being the good Marxist that he is, thought must no longer just interpret the world, it must find ways to change it.

This resonated with an earlier argument Zizek had conducted with Simon Critchley, who in his book, ‘Infinitely Demanding’, defined politics as a dissensual praxis that works against the consensual horizon of the State. Reacting against the atomising force of capitalist globalisation Critchley picks up on Julia Kristeva’s interesting ideas on revolt. Kristeva locates a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, of change and the endless probing of appearances at the heart of the etymological and literary sense of the word ‘revolt’, and argues that this is precisely what is lost through the constant betrayal of revolt in actual historical revolutions. An emblematic figure in this regard is Oedipus, who in probing the codes of representation in his own time, opened up new fields of potential in desire and death to enact his own continuous process of self-examination. Thus, Kristeva comes to see revolt as not just about rejection and destruction but also as a privileged, open and undefined space where metaphor, metonymy and other rhetorical figures can create elements of thought leading to renewal and regeneration. For Critchley who takes up the idea of this space, which he calls the domain of ‘intimate revolt’, argues that instead of advocating direct opposition to the state we should meet the enemy not on their ground, but our own. He believes that it is only on the ground of our choosing that other political actions, prior to the aggregate demands of the state, can answer and formulate a new ethical demand that recognizes the reality of our present political aporia, of its own essential poverty. However this is a poverty differently conceived, an embodiment of pure potentiality in which other scenarios for political thought can take place, unbound to historical truth or knowledge.

If Critchley attempts the formulation of a new space for democracy defined by its distance from the State, Zizek responds by asking whether this merely abandons the field (of the State) all too easily to the enemy. Added to this, is the obvious problem of continually relying on State power as that which defines an understanding of one’s own position. The danger in this instance is that the force of one’s own actions become reactive instead of active, as in the Nietzschean sense of forces defined less by their own creativity than what they come to oppose. Indeed, Zizek proceeds to see in Critchley’s ethics, an ethics that flows from our constitutive powerlessness in the face of the State, a kind of ideal supplement to Blair’s Third Way because it only succeeds in reiterating the experience of injustice and the ethical unacceptability of the state of things. For Zizek it is better to do nothing than to contribute to the invention of formal ways of rendering visible the existing injustices that Empire (Hardt/Negri’s term for Global capitalism) already recognizes as existent. Here Zizek is mindful that the greater danger in a world that consumed its own criticism some time ago, and which endlessly engages us in its critical dialogue –  a convivial engagement for the most part and one arbitrated by the media – is the threat of our being drowned in pseudo-activities that do nothing but reflect the constant urge to be ‘active’, to ‘participate’, and which mask the Nothingness of what really goes on. For Zizek it is essential that thought abolish itself of the bourgeois myth that asks of writing to give testimony to a new humanism that completely integrates history into its image of man. The pathos of finitude that Critchley’s thought constructs is for Zizek just such an image. Here man is finally asked to acknowledge his own separateness and enter properly into the domain of inter-subjective relations, a community rooted in friendship that Critchley describes as a symphilosophy. However this is a thought that fails to understand the extent of Hamlet’s anguish, that declares time itself as ‘out-of-joint’. Hamlet should be interpreted as a thirsting for nothing less than a radically new criticism at work in a non-relation, a non-relation that quite literally explodes the constraints of our finitude by offering a material(ist) support of ‘positive infinity’ that touches upon the something in me that is always more than myself. Like the blind poets, Zizek asks that we seek to transpose things, and in the process transpose ourselves, in order that we may again find in them and ourselves a deeper truth.

The non-relation in Zizek’s thought is best understood if we take a closer look at how his Marxist thought has developed and unfolded in light of the conceptual tools he borrows from the Freudian/Lacanian notion of trauma.  Zizek makes a minimal distinction between historical materialism and a dialectical materialism whilst maintaining the importance that neither is abandoned, since both are needed to create a space of minimal difference. A space between, that is both open and undecidable, that offers and brings into presence, but at the same time holds back and suspends. This is a space whose gestures are always double and, precisely because it keeps the future inscribed in the present, it offers a different stage for a new thinking with new possibilities. Lacan will name this space the Real as opposed to the Symbolic or the Imaginary and whose extreme ambiguity comes about as the extreme/impossible point at which opposites coincide. Thus from one perspective Zizek will praise Georg Lukacs’s book, ‘History and Class Consciousness’ written at the beginning of the last century, for producing a thinking that follows how the emerging consciousness of one’s concrete social position, as in the case of transforming the passive (working class) into the an active revolutionary subject (proletariat) as formulated in historical materialism, can unfold a real revolutionary potential. Zizek understands that today the worker as embodied in the working class is a political naming of a revolutionary subject that has lost its centrality, doubtlessly the result of the changing nature of our economies, but regardless, the sense given to overcoming and the role consciousness can still play remains central. Historical materialism may conduct a political writing that knows itself to be separated from history but nevertheless it still dreams of one. Yet from another perspective, a perspective that does not have consciousness as its goal, Zizek will formulate various problems for the revolutionary subject. For instance, Zizek’s thought articulates how the true revolutionary quest as given in historical materialism has urgently to tackle the very serious problem of the fact that the revolutionary movement is never quite able to overcome its own parasitizing on the preceding social order. This is a problem that will go to the very heart of revolutionary politics today. An ethics detached from politics, or a politics detached from an ethics, can no longer be possible for both are essential to mobilize a complete revaluation of the value given to ‘genuine’ self-responsibility.

 Zizek writes,‘There is nothing ethically more disgusting than revolutionary Beautiful souls who refuse to recognize, in the cross of the post-revolutionary present, the truth of their own flowering dreams of freedom.’

George Friedmann writes,‘Many are those who are entirely absorbed in militant politics, in the preparation for the social revolution. Rare, very rare, are those who, in order to prepare for the revolution, wish to become worthy of it.’

Thus from this perspective Zizek argues that the revolutionary subject acquires the understanding that can only come as a result of the ‘practical’ aspect given in the very passivity of thought. An understanding that is only gained in the aspect of doing nothing as understood in the rehabilitation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism. It is precisely here that the installing of the non-act can become a most radical intervention into the state of things. For the revolutionary subject there will always exist a gap that separates thought from being and the point is not to overcome this gap but to conceive of it in its ‘becoming’, as the potential for something other and of course something that can never be pre-determined. For Zizek the space between is articulated from a Lacanian-Hegelian approach, in which his detailed readings of literature, cinema and music mixed with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes take this space as the core around which his thought revolves, and is given the name the ‘parallax gap’. This gap separates two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, and opens a space of trauma in which, through a certain violence undergone, the subject becomes internally divided. This uncovers an interiority that is radically non-self-coincidental but from which the presence of ‘ghosts’, all those muffled, barely audible demands that nevertheless insist on being heard and which convention has excluded, are given their space. The human face has for too long succeeded in masking this gap from which the sounds of human suffering, with their particular proximity to the precariousness of life, can be given their voice.  For Zizek it is precisely here, in what lies behind the face, the blank wall with its lack of depth, edge, limit or surface, where one encounters the other at its most traumatic, that a new ethical turn must enact itself. Here where nonsense is given a voice to say that which cannot be said. Here where passing through or across the theoretical and historical experience of trauma without end, opens a passage of subtraction to the immemorial, and where we can gain a new sense of the words ‘justice’, ‘community’ and ‘politics’.

Zizek will maintain that the crucial point for political thought today is that it does not waver from the quest of seeking an intense consciousness of freedom that has no content. Whether this can be found in the secrets of psychoanalysis (the death drive and the inhuman core of the human) or the wanderings of the Deleuzian schizophrenic, the quest is the same: to seek a different temporal dimension outside of the normal phenomenological time in which to allow the present in some way to become answerable to itself in the plenitude of its own differing temporalities. Every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time and no new culture is possible without an alteration in this experience. In this case, time opens itself to the event of our lives whose goal is not the distant future but already present, a present that has gained the proper potentiality afforded to that which has acquired its own self-sufficiency. This creates a halting in time’s chronology, a release from its uniform shackles that requires power as defined by negation, to acquire an innocence in which the future is affirmed simply for being unknown. Here, where memory reflects upon itself and becomes the site of a pure memory without recollection. If purged of all recollection memory becomes the enigmatic gaze that holds the fragments of an intelligent structure, a structure mingled with outlandish phenomena as if it were also in some way the product of an unhinged mind. Enacting an almost unbearable fascination coupled with an extreme poverty, this is a memory that has gained an eroticism bound up with flesh and death, but a death enveloped with life, perhaps, similar to the light of beauty caught within the dark and terrible tenderness of love. In such a light the story of Narcissus is not just a story of delusional self-admiration but shows how an enigma can captivate, can hold us in thrall to the peculiar potency of its self reflecting surface, much like the enigmatic, autistic lake in Stanislaw Lec’s science fiction novel, ‘Solaris’. That one loses a world in order to find it again in universal self-consciousness is one way to understand a dialectical materialism that is substantially the same as a historical materialism. However for Zizek the importance is always in the minimal shift in perspective, of one to the other, in order to open the gap between reality and appearance and between humanity and its ‘own’ inhuman excess.

For whom, the being he pities, the poet Holderlin will write, ‘in the grip of that Nothing which rules over us, who are thoroughly aware that we are born for Nothing, believe in a Nothing, work ourselves to the bone for a Nothing, until we gradually dissolve into Nothing...’ The question posed of freedom for Zizek is, ‘at its most radical, the question of how this closed circle of fate can be broken’. The answer is always in the Nothing, a nothing that September 11 2001 all too obviously made actively manifest with the disappearance of the twin towers at ‘ground zero’, and to which Zizek responds with a short book entitled, ‘Welcome to the Desert of the Real’. If we actively rail against the nothing as in active nihilism, where too little passion has yielded ground to a monstrous excess of it, or shore up our defences to protect our hard won autonomous status and effectively become our own island, as in passive nihilism, then in both cases freedom will only vanish altogether, producing a kind of vacancy at its heart. Thus it is necessary that we pass through the Nothing. What is this relationship that comes with and out of the Nothing? How does the creative act emerge from the Nothing? What does it mean for our actions that they become one with their own necessity and contingency? Perhaps this is a thought that undergoes its own feeling of vertigo as in the manner of Bataille, where creation is enacted by means of loss, in order that we open ourselves to an unfathomable deathliness at the core of our own identity. Perhaps this is to first learn to listen with one’s eyes, to become attuned to a sound of silence, to think is ‘to become silent, to become slow’ (Nietzsche). Perhaps it also requires that we sensitize ourselves to something of the arbitrariness and fragility of a ‘materialist’ dimension held in the domain of creation, however traumatic this might be. But without trauma there can be no ethics. For Deleuze this is an encounter with the ‘event’ of our lives, an encounter that haunts each present moment by making it return to the materialist ‘ground’ of language, a pure heterogeneous dimension that is the matrix of all extensity, an intensity which can only be sensed and which is always singular, impersonal and pre-individual.  For Badiou this requires, ‘the invention of a language wherein folly, scandal and weakness supplant knowing, reason, order and power and wherein non-being is the only legitimisable affirmation of being’.

For Zizek the true revolutionary subject conducts a literary writing that simply cannot lie and instead comes to articulate itself in the affirmation of a creative principle rather than an object of knowing, a principle that runs through its infinite displacements. To find a will that wills itself. A will that rather than being ‘in-itself’ qualitatively shifts to a being ‘in-and-for-itself’. As in Nietzsche’s lion, whose will, still rooted in the same negative essence that devalues existence through its goals and subordinates life to reasons, is replaced by the innocence of the child with its spontaneous kind-heartedness and whose love is born as a direct response to its indifference to the future. This is a will that articulates itself, without prior reasons for doing so, in the thought that has weaned itself from its organic habitat and utters the phrase, ‘I cannot do otherwise’. This marks the very moment of Holderlin’s shift from desire to drive and its ‘eccentric path’ that whilst calling for the ‘letting of things be’ outside all frames of metaphysical justification, unleashes the force of negativity and shatters the force of our being. For Zizek, Kafka’s ‘Odradek’ is an exemplary creation in this instance. As the trans-generational, outside finitude and with no goal orientated activity, Odradek becomes human at the very point he no longer resembles a human being. No longer eternally searching for a lost whole, for he is lacking in nothing, he has become the ‘undead’ organ without an organized body, the revolutionary partial object that has emerged from the individual person. Odradek becomes this writing of the earth in the manner Deleuze gives to his notion of the philosopher, ‘philosophers are beings who have passed through a death, who are born from it and go towards another death’. Odradek has become the rapidly moving elusive object who moves very slowly, an occupant without a place.

An authentic act in its revolutionary capacity has nothing to do with what we ‘ought to do’, with those acts initiated from a pre-planned ideal for which we strive. There is a trap in presenting our duty as an excuse for our actions, to mistakenly believe that what we consider to be just can be reduced to fact. The circumstances of our lives are not completely inside the orbit of our control. Rather, it is we who are hostage to them. We are first obligated before being free, an obligation that marks our essential debt, one we must constantly acknowledge and which we will never definitively settle. For Zizek this is the necessity of our existence, and freedom is not a blissfully neutral state of harmony and balance ever longing to reconcile existence with a human essence that the symbolic order asks us to enjoy, but the very violent act which disturbs this balance. The authentic act is always in excess of what we take ourselves to be, it lifts us above our natural limitations, but it can only find its fullest expression from the exact place that shatters our being and its sentiments of compassion. If ultimately for Zizek this paradigmatic act is feminine it is because it can be found in the power of Antigone’s ‘No!’ to Creon, to State power, and the ‘Yes’ to her unconditional demand.  

Martin Wooster, September 2009