Zizek

A Reader's Guide

Kelsey Wood

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781118269800
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A comprehensive overview of Slavoj Zizek's thought, including all of his published works to date.

• Provides a solid basis in the work of an engaging thinker and teacher whose ideas will continue to inform philosophical, psychological, political, and cultural discourses well into the future
• Identifies the major currents in Zizek's thought, discussing all of his works and providing a background in continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory necessary to its understanding
• Explores Zizek's growing popularity through his engagement in current events, politics, and cultural studies
• Pertains to a variety of fields, including contemporary philosophy, psychology, cultural studies, sociology, political science, esthetics, literary theory, film theory, and theology

1

Introduction

Today, one often mentions how the reference to psychoanalysis in cultural studies and the psychoanalytic clinic supplement each other: cultural studies lack the real of clinical experience, while the clinic lacks the broader critico-historical perspective (say, of the historic specificity of the categories of psychoanalysis, Oedipal complex, castration, or paternal authority). The answer to this should be that each of the approaches should work on its limitation from within its horizon – not by relying on the other to fill up its lack. If cultural studies cannot account for the real of the clinical experience, this signals the insufficiency of its theoretical framework itself; if the clinic cannot reflect its historical presuppositions, it is a bad clinic.

—Slavoj Žižek, “Jacques Lacan’s Four Discourses”

Who is Slavoj Žižek?

Slavoj Žižek is widely regarded as the most significant and provocative thinker of our age. As the above quotation indicates, Žižek deploys concepts from the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan in order to reactualize a dialectical method in philosophy.¹ The result is a radically new vision of human nature and human society. In addition to Jacques Lacan, Žižek has been strongly influenced by the work of G. W. F. Hegel, F. W. J. Schelling, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, and Alain Badiou. In his public lectures, Žižek has concisely introduced his own thinking as Hegelian in philosophy, Lacanian in psychology, “Christian-materialist” in religion, and communist in politics.²

¹ Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) is the most important psychoanalytic theorist after Freud, and his ideas transformed psychoanalysis; however, his theories are notoriously difficult. Because Žižek’s remarks are often addressed to an audience that is already familiar with Lacanian psychoanalysis, the reader new to Lacanian theory may need to consult an introductory text as well. One of the best short introductions to Lacan is Sean Homer’s Jacques Lacan (London: Routledge, 2005). A more in-depth (but still non-philosophical) introduction to Lacan is The Lacanian Subject: Between Language and Jouissance by Bruce Fink (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). The best essays on Lacan and philosophy are Alenka Zupancic’s Ethics of the Real (London: Verso, 2000), and Joan Copjec’s Read My Desire (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994). For additional essays on Lacan and philosophy, see the website The International Journal of Žižek Studies, at http://www.zizekstudies.org/. Readers should regularly explore the wealth of resources available from the website lacan.com, run in New York by Josefina Ayerza. Newcomers to Lacanian theory might want to consult Dylan Evans’ An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996).

But why has Slavoj Žižek become so well known in the two decades since his first publications in English? What is so captivating and so revolutionary about his fusion of philosophy and psychoanalysis? Why is Professor Žižek widely regarded as one of the most important thinkers in the world today? A preliminary answer to these questions is that he is a charismatic speaker with an extraordinary ability to engage his audience. Žižek regularly draws large crowds and packs auditoriums across whatever continent he visits, and consistently fills lecture halls beyond their normal capacity. But anyone who has also sat in his classroom will be impressed by Žižek’s ability to make difficult ideas comprehensible; he is an extremely effective teacher. Moreover, a look into any of his books reveals immediately that Žižek is an enormously accomplished scholar. He is the sole author of more than 20 books in English (and counting), and these innovative and theoretically substantial works have established him as one of today’s preeminent thinkers.

Žižek has written – with humor, lucidity, and extraordinary erudition – on the philosophical problem of identity, ontology, globalization, postmodernism, political philosophy, literature, film, ecology, religion, the French Revolution, Lenin, the philosophy of language, the philosophy of mind, and numerous other topics. Without question the work of Slavoj Žižek will continue to inform philosophical, psychological, political, and cultural discourses well into the future. In an effort to explain the Žižek phenomenon, Ian Parker writes:

² For an online biography of Žižek, see the faculty page of the website for the European Graduate School at http://www.egs.edu/faculty/slavoj-zizek/biography/. Another online biography is available at http://www.notablebiographies.com/supp/Supplement-Sp-Z/Zizek-Slavoj.html.

Žižek burst onto the world academic stage with commentaries and interventions in politics and psychoanalysis, with powerful examples of the way an understanding of these two domains could be dialectically intertwined and powered through a close reading of German philosophy. Žižek’s academic performance has also drawn attention from a wider intellectual audience, and this has given him the opportunity to elaborate some complex conceptual machinery that can be applied to music, theology, virtual reality, and, it would seem, virtually any other cultural phenomenon. His writing appeared at an opportune moment, offering a new vocabulary for thinking through how ideology grips its subjects.³

But Ian Parker’s remarks do not indicate the fundamental reasons why Žižek’s work has become so prominent (and so controversial) since the publication in 1989 of The Sublime Object of Ideology. Žižek is not only a charismatic speaker and a brilliant cultural theorist who, at an opportune moment, captivated the public with elaborate and innovative theories. Significantly, Parker (who is a practicing psychoanalyst) neglects the philosophical implications of Žižek’s work. According to Marek Wieczorek, “The originality of Žižek’s contribution to Western intellectual history lies in his extraordinary fusion of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory, continental philosophy (in particular his anti-essentialist readings of Hegel), and Marxist political theory.”⁴ Žižek utilizes Lacanian psychoanalytic concepts in order to reinvent Hegelian dialectics; he puts Lacanian theory to work in order to reactualize German Idealism for the twenty-first century.

³ Ian Parker, Slavoj Žižek: A Critical Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2004), pp. 2–3. Parker’s interpretation of Žižek’s work lapses repeatedly into circumstantial ad hominem fallacies. For example, in an attempt to formulate a critique of Žižek’s politics, Parker offers a lengthy digression intended to demonstrate Žižek’s alleged “over-identification” with his Slovenian origins and affiliations. In fact, Parker’s entire chapter 1 is devoted to the formation, operation, and decomposition of the Yugoslav state. Parker rehashes this caricature of Žižek in his contribution to the stunningly misnamed book, The Truth of Žižek, edited by Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp (London: Continuum, 2007). Significantly, Žižek’s afterward to The Truth of Žižek is titled “With Defenders like These, Who Needs Attackers.” This afterward is by far the most valuable contribution to the work. Žižek responds to Parker’s efforts to discredit him on pages 231–2 of The Truth of Žižek, and succinctly refutes Parker’s claims.

⁴ See Marek Wieczorek, “Introduction,” in Žižek, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway (Seattle: The Walter Chapin Simpson Center for the Humanities, University of Washington, 2000), p. viii.

This being said, it must be added that Žižek is also a psychoanalyst, and it is thus no accident that his discourse provokes what Lacanian psychoanalysts call jouissance. As students of the history of philosophy know, many philosophers lack a sense of humor. The prime example of this is Martin Heidegger, whose only documented joke was a jibe directed at Lacan: “Significantly, the ONLY joke – or, if not joke then, at least, moment of irony – in Heidegger occurs in his rather bad taste quip about Lacan as ‘that psychiatrist who is himself in the need of a psychiatrist’ (in a letter to Medard Boss).”⁵ Žižek is one of the few philosophers since Socrates who is able to inspire the love of learning and also to make his students and interlocutors laugh. And like Socrates Žižek continuously engages in self-critique, usually by ironically indicating the obscene underside of acceptable liberal-tolerant discourse. Žižek’s students immediately recognize when he ironically criticizes himself. If, for example, Žižek jokingly calls himself a racist, it is in the context of his criticism of those who indulge in obscene racist fantasies. But his endearing and self-deprecating sense of humor is another fundamental reason for Žižek’s success. In fact, many of his fans find his books and his lectures so enjoyable as to be almost addictive, and enjoyment is at the origin of the Žižek phenomenon.

“Enjoyment” is the accepted translation of the Lacanian term jouissance, and in his work, Žižek reveals the vital role of enjoyment in social life. But in order to understand Žižek, it is necessary to keep in mind that enjoyment is not pleasure: jouissance is surplus enjoyment that manifests as a strange fascination accompanied by uneasiness or discomfort (e.g., gawking at a car crash). Enjoyment is a kind of excessive stimulation, an unbearable pleasure in pain, an incalculable “something more” that can induce human beings to act against their own self-interest. Žižek shows that even though subjects are not usually aware of jouissance, all politics relies upon and manipulates an economy of enjoyment. However it is not merely Žižek’s understanding of enjoyment, but more importantly, his ability to produce enjoyment that has led to his large following. The jouissance engendered by his discourse is one of the primary reasons why Žižek has been the eye of a storm of cultural, political, and philosophical controversy for decades.⁶

⁵ Slavoj Žižek, “Religion between Knowledge and Jouissance,” available online at http://www.lacan.com/zizsmokeonthewater.html#_ftn8.

⁶ In an interview in 2007, Paul A. Taylor described how Žižek constantly questions further and revises his own thinking. Taylor points out that the uncategorizable aspect of Žižek’s writing is indicated by the geographical and disciplinary spread of his readers. But perhaps the primary feature of all his work is its ethical quality: such as his exposure of hypocrisy and lazy thinking. Another appeal of Žižek’s theorizing is its practical usefulness; his unabashed speculative approach nevertheless uncovers the issues behind actual events better than so-called “pragmatic” works. The full interview is online at http://zizekstudies.org/index.php/ijzs/article/viewFile/3/9.

Along these lines, because Žižek is a psychoanalyst, it is no coincidence that he is so successful at engendering transference. Although transference may manifest as hate, it more often manifests as love.⁷ And moreover – as Lacan showed – transference is primarily related to knowledge and the love of learning. Žižek’s depth of psychoanalytic insight makes him one of those rare philosophers who very effectively engender transference as the love of truth. He thrives on this transference relationship with his audience and, because of his own love of learning, he pushes himself to the limit in testing and revising his analyses, and induces his readers to actively engage in this struggle for truth. Žižek’s aim is always the further development of previous analyses.

Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, Žižek’s major work on Hegel is not yet available. This book does not pretend to be a comprehensive study; it merely provides an introductory-level focus for the approach to 24 of Žižek’s monographs.⁸ What follows is not intended as an encyclopedic synopsis of the meaning of Žižek’s work, much less as a narrative account of Žižek’s development and significance. This guide simply attempts to facilitate – for general readers – the engagement in Žižek’s philosophical struggle for the truth. The following essays simply try to let Žižek speak for himself (as much as possible) about certain fundamental problems of philosophy. Along the way, we hope to indicate why philosophy after Žižek, if it is not to regress, must build on his methodology. What follows is intended as an aid for readers who are simultaneously reading the texts that are being discussed.

⁷ Žižek sometimes discusses love with reference to the song “In Praise of the Third Thing” (Lob der dritten Sache) from Brecht’s Mother: “The mother keeps (or rather, regains) her son in the very act of losing him ‘through the third thing’; they are close to each other by way of being close to the third thing (in this case, of course, their common struggle for communism).” See Slavoj Žižek, Opera’s Second Death (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 195.

⁸ The following essays are arranged in (approximately) the order in which Žižek published the books, but have been written in such a way that they may be read either sequentially or individually (i.e. in any order). There are some minor inconsistencies, due to the fact that Žižek himself is inconsistent. For example, in some texts, he uses the term “non-all,” whereas in other texts he uses “not-All.” In the following commentary, I have tried to preserve Žižek’s variants. This explains why certain terms are capitalized or spelt differently depending on which book is under discussion. In addition, the chapter titles (except for this “Introduction” and also my “Conclusion”) correspond exactly to Žižek’s book titles, except for standardizing Žižek’s idiosyncratic capitalization.

What Does Žižek Mean by “Dialectic”?

In addition to the jouissance he provokes, and in addition to his ability to engender transference as the love of knowledge, there is another reason for Žižek’s profound impact. He is not just a theori...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Epigraphs
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The Sublime Object of Ideology
• 3 For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor
• 4 Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture
• 5 Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out
• 6 Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology
• 7 The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causality
• 8 The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters
• 9 The Plague of Fantasies
• 10 The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology
• 11 The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch’s Lost Highway
• 12 The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?
• 13 On Belief
• 14 The Fright of Real Tears: Krzysztof Kieślowski between Theory and Post-Theory
• 15 Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion
• 16 Welcome to the Desert of the Real
• 17 The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity
• 18 Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences
• 19 Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle
• 20 How to Read Lacan
• 21 The Parallax View
• 22 In Defense of Lost Causes
• 23 Violence
• 24 First as Tragedy, then as Farce
• 25 Living in the End Times
• 26 Conclusion
• Further Reading
• Index