Abstract
This article aims to outline the contours of a Žižekian field of critical enquiry where Žižek's own propositions are taken seriously through the unravelling of their least explicit consequences. We begin by looking at Žižek's notions of subjectivity and subjectivation in relation to Lacan's theory of desire and Hegel's theory of the subject. In the first part we delineate the impact that Žižek's two main theoretical sources have had on his formulation of subjectivity, focusing specifically on the question of negativity. From there, we discuss the political strategies that Žižek's conceptualisation of subjectivity might inspire, particularly in connection with his recent take on subtraction (‘Bartleby politics’). Does Žižek's theory of the subject allow us to imagine and put to work the transformative capacity of the subject, in turn triggering the transformative potential of the social? Finally, we propose a reading of the current economic crisis through the category of subtraction that demonstrates the political relevance and topicality of Žižek's approach.
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Notes
The big Other is defined by Lacan as ‘the locus in which everything that can be articulated on the basis of the signifier comes to be inscribed’ (Lacan, 1998, p. 81), or, more succinctly, as ‘the locus in which speech is constituted’ (Lacan, 2000, p. 274). In other words, the big Other is the invisible symbolic framework that needs to be presupposed if the subject is to engage in any communicative activity or social exchange.
Apropos Lacan's notion of subjective destitution, Žižek claims that ‘at the end of the psychoanalytic cure, the analysand has to suspend the urge to symbolize/internalize, to interpret, to search for a “deeper meaning”; he has to accept that the traumatic encounters which traced out the itinerary of his life were utterly contingent and indifferent, that they bear no “deeper message” ’ (Žižek, 2007, p. 94).
Which also means that through the process of subjectivation we set up the symbolic order, that is the self is what ‘plugs the holes’ in the big Other.
This also means that the field of meaning exists only insofar as we submit ourselves to the process of subjectivation. In other words, it becomes actual for us only if we assume it, as exemplified by Kafka's famous parable of the ‘Door of the Law’ in The Trial. Here, a man from the country seeks to enter the law through a doorway guarded by a gatekeeper who makes him wait for years. Eventually, the gatekeeper shouts in the ear of the dying man from the country that the door was there only for him. What the man from the country had failed to account for through his fascinated reverence to the law, which prevented him from daring to enter it, was precisely that his very being was always-already included in the law qua symbolic order.
In contemporary philosophy, Giorgio Agamben can be seen as the main champion of negative biopolitics, while Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri find in it a positive potential. We shall explore the connection between psychoanalysis and biopolitics in our next article.
In The Interpretation of Dreams, Freud tells about his 19-month-old daughter talking in her sleep about strawberries (as well as other types of food). Since she had been kept without food all day as a consequence of feeling sick, Freud argues that her dream expressed a clear case of wish-fulfilment. More precisely, Anna was taking revenge on the nurse who had sentenced that her sickness was because of her gorging on strawberries (Freud, 1997, p. 41).
We should remember here that the real libidinal aim of the drive as conceived by Lacan is to miss the imaginary object of desire. More precisely, while in desire we become aware that the object, insofar as it enjoys, is out of reach, in drive we realise that we are the locus of an excessive, unshakeable and unbearable jouissance that derails the ordinary run of things.
Žižek's main inspiration here is clearly Walter Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History and the notion of historical materialism there articulated, especially in relation to Benjamin's well-known approach to a given historical subject as ‘a revolutionary chance in the fight for the oppressed past’ (Benjamin, 1986, p. 263)
This is also the meaning of Žižek's claim that ‘those who think ontologically have to err ontically’ (Žižek, 2008b, p. 98): the unsurmountbable gap between theory and practice is also the gap between symbolic planning and the Real actualisation of the plan. This gap, he argues, can be defined by the word ‘trauma’: ‘a traumatic encounter entails a ‘loss of reality’, which has to be understood in the strong philosophical sense of the loss of ontological horizon – in trauma, we are momentarily exposed to the ‘raw’ ontic thing not yet covered/screened by the ontological horizon’ (Žižek, 2008b, p. 146).
We draw here on Daly (2007) and Kotsko (2008). On the origins and theoretical implications of Bartleby politics, Žižek's version of Badiou's politics of subtraction, see Žižek (2006, pp. 381–185, 2008a, pp. lxxii–lxxxi and 2008b, pp. 404–412).
See also Klein (2008b, 2008c) where she reinforces her argument, claiming that ‘[t]he Wall Street bailout looks a lot like Iraq – a “free-fraud zone” where private contractors cash in on the mess they helped create’. Klein's veto was echoed in various quarters, if for different reasons, making for strange bedfellows, as the initial reactions by several Democrats in the US Congress, the German government and the French President demonstrate.
The Economist (2009) and Hutton (2008, 2009). See also in this context Obama (2009), and Skidelsky (2009) who recommends that ‘we must find ways to rub the rough edges off globalisation’.
BBC business editor Robert Peston (2008) estimates that the support provided by taxpayers around the world now equals £9000 billion, the equivalent of more than 25 per cent of the global GDP, a figure that excludes the recent bailouts from January 2009.
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Vighi, F., Feldner, H. From subject to politics: The Žižekian field today. Subjectivity 3, 31–52 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.32
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sub.2009.32