Slavoj Zizek

Tony Myers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134504312
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Slavoj Zizek is no ordinary philosopher. Approaching critical theory and psychoanalysis in a recklessly entertaining fashion, Zizek's critical eye alights upon a bewildering and exhilarating range of subjects, from the political apathy of contemporary life, to a joke about the man who thinks he's a chicken, from the ethicial heroism of Keanu Reeves in Speed, to what toilet designs reveal about the national psyche. Tony Myers provides a clear and engaging guide to Zizek's key ideas, explaining the main influences on Zizek's thought (most crucially his engagement with Lacanian psychoanalysis) using examples drawn from popular culture and everyday life. Myers outlines the key issues that Zizek's work has tackled, including:

• What is a Subject and why is it so important?
• The Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real
• What is so terrible about Postmodernity?
• How can we distinguish reality from ideology?
• What is the relationship between men and women?
• Why is Racism always a fantasy?

Slavoj Zizek is essential reading for anyone wanting to understand the thought of the critic whom Terry Eagleton has described as "the most formidably brilliant exponent of psychoanalysis, indeed of cultural theory in general, to have emerged in Europe for some decades.

Key Ideas

1 Who are Žižek's Influences and how do They Affect his Work?

DOI: 10.4324/9780203634400-2

Žižek's Influences: Philosophy, Politics and Psychoanalysis

Žižek's work draws on three main areas of influence — philosophy, politics and psychoanalysis. In each of these disciplines, Žižek finds the larger part of his inspiration in the writings of a single individual: Georg Hegel for philosophy, Karl Marx for politics, and Jacques Lacan for psychoanalysis. Although the ideas, methodologies and general effects of each of these thinkers overlap in Žižek's books, each can also broadly be said to have a specific influence on his thinking. Thus, Hegel's philosophy influences the type or method of thought that Žižek practises, Marx's work provides the motivation or reason behind his books, and Lacan's psychoanalysis furnishes the terminology and conceptual framework with which Žižek tackles the objects of his analysis. The aim of this chapter, then, is to outline some of the more pertinent ideas proposed by Hegel, Marx and Lacan, and to show how these ideas are employed by Žižek in his work.

Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) was a German philosopher whose work, for many commentators, represents the culmination of the tradition of Western Idealism. Idealism is a system of philosophy which seeks to examine the world in terms of ideas about it, rather than analysing the world as a thing or as a series of things. Broadly speaking, Idealist philosophers tend to argue that things, or the material world as it is more properly called, do not exist independently of the ideas the mind has about them. They believe that consciousness is the foundation for reality. One of Hegel's biggest contributions to this way of thinking was to propose that individual ideas could be joined together to form one Absolute Idea. In fact, he not only contended that this was possible, but that it was necessary too, because he thought we could only truly understand a bit of the world by understanding all of it, or what he termed the totality.

In order to reach a state in which it was possible to understand the totality, Hegel developed the notion of dialectical thinking, adapting it for use from the early Greek philosophers. The dialectic, as it was originally practised by Zeno (490–430 Bc) and Socrates (470–399 Bc), was no more than a method of seeking knowledge by a system of question and answer, a bit like the game ‘Twenty Questions’ where each question is refined by the previous answer. In Hegel's work, however, it became a method of divine interpretation, a cosmic law, and the secret motor of history all rolled into one. It is conventional to conceive of Hegel's dialectic in terms of a three-step process. You begin with a thesis, or an idea, you then counter that with an antithesis, or a qualification of that idea, and then you combine the two in a synthesis, or larger, more encompassing idea. So, for example, you might contend as your thesis that ‘all films are good’. As your antithesis you might then argue that ‘Titanic was actually a rather bad film’. Your synthesis would then be that ‘most films are good’. The synthesis would then become your new thesis and the process would start over again until you discover the whole truth of the matter — or the totality — which may well be that ‘only some films are good’.

This, then, is the conventional view of Hegel's dialectic, one in which different viewpoints can always be reconciled by a greater truth. However, it is not Žižek's understanding of Hegel, nor indeed is any of what I have written so far, apart from the dates of Hegel's birth and death. For Žižek, Hegel as a thinker is far more radical than that, and so is his dialectic. For, in Žižek's reading of Hegel, the dialectic does not produce a reconciliation or a synthesized viewpoint but, instead, an acknowledgement that, as he puts it, ‘contradiction [is] an internal condition of every identity’ (SOI: 6, emphasis added). By this he means that an idea about something is always disrupted by a discrepancy and that this discrepancy is necessary for the idea to exist in the first place. Which is to say, in a well-known phrase, that there is, and must always be, an exception which proves the rule.

So, to take our previous example, if the synthesis is that ‘all films are good’ and the antithesis is that ‘Titanic was actually rather a bad film’, then Žižek's synthesis would be that ‘all films are good because Titanic is actually rather a bad film’. Of course, initially this does not make sense, or, to put it another way, it is contradictory. But it is in this contradiction that the truth of the assertion lies: if there were no bad films then we would not know what a good film is because we would have nothing to compare it with. Therefore, for there to be good films there must be at least one bad film and, in this case, Titanic is literally the exception that proves the rule.

If you still feel nonplussed by this then I can sympathize with you. There is no doubt that Žižek's dialectic is a difficult concept to grasp the first time around. Our whole culture — everything from yin and yang to Tony Blair's ‘Third Way’ — is based on the notion that the truth is absolute, that if you see things one way and I see them another, then there is a middle way, a way of harmoniously reconciling our division, which can encompass both viewpoints. For Žižek, however, the truth is always to be found in contradiction rather than the smooth effacement of differences. It is what might be called an oxymoronic style of thought. An oxymoron is simply a phrase that employs contradictory terms, such as ‘dry rain’, ‘cold fever’, or, infamously, ‘military intelligence’. Hegel's, and subsequently Žižek's, work is full of oxymorons, like ‘the Spirit is a bone’ and ‘Wealth is the Self’. These are not just phrases, however; they are indicative of the whole approach to thinking that Žižek calls dialectical and which he employs when analysing everything from Hitchcock to European toilet designs. As such, this approach helps to account for the number of surprising statements which form the seductive headlines to Žižek's books, such as, for example, as we shall see later, that virtual reality is more real than reality itself, that the Christian tradition should be cherished by Marxism, or that the notoriously misogynist (woman-hating) work of the German philosopher Otto Weininger (1880–1903) will prove more instructive to feminism than most feminists.

Marx

Karl Marx (1818–1883) was a student of Hegel who went on to found modern communism. Broadly speaking, Marx was sharply critical of the way in which society was organized. He argued that capitalist or free-market economic production was riven by inequalities which allowed the minority to accumulate vast wealth at the cost of the oppression and wretched domination of the majority. The injustice of these divisions was, according to Marx, then disguised, promoted and ratified by the cultural, political and legal framework of society, or what he termed the superstructure. For Marx, the superstructure was, in large measure, determined by the very ruling classes who stood to benefit from maintaining inequality in the first place. With scant regard for detail, Marx proposed an alternative to capitalism — borrowing the term ‘communism’ to describe it — in which there would be no divisions or inequalities and in which each individual would be allowed to realize his or her creative potential.

By declaring himself to be ‘unabashedly Marxist’ (TZR: x), Žižek is admitting to a conviction in the truth and value of Marx's critique of capitalism and a belief in the possibility of a better, alternative method of organizing society. Indeed, while it would be fair to say that Žižek employs his interpretation of Hegel's dialectic as a tool in, for example, explaining how ideology works, Marx's critique of capitalism is the very reason why he writes at all. Which is to say that Žižek sees his work as contributing to that body of criticism which has attempted to alter the way we understand the world in order that we might wish finally to change that world for the better.

The influence of Marx can be detected in Žižek's work, then, as the motivation for a particular species of thought. Sometimes called praxis, this type of thought does not merely seek to categorize or reflect experience, but rather seeks to alter it. This may sound an ambitious project for a dozen books, but Žižek's battleground is the realm of ideas and culture, or the superstructure. For Marxists, the whole point of the superstructure — which includes the family, the education system, government, sport and the arts — is to secure the reproduction of the existing method of economic organization — what Marx called the base, which in the present instance is capitalism. If this seems a strange way to look at pop songs or the latest George Clooney film, then it is because, as Žižek would argue, you have been successfully inscribed within capitalist ideology, or the system of thought that glues or binds the superstructure together, making you think that it is the natural way of running society.

Ideology has many definitions in the Marxist tradition. A substantial number of these definitions centre around the proposition that ideology is simply an incorrect way of thinking about things. So, for example, while I might think that adverts are small, factual documentaries, you could reasonably point out the error in my thought here and show that they are actually a way for companies to manipulate my desires, alter my purchasing habits and persuade me to buy their products. As you can see here, such a view of ideology is not strictly a question of mistaking facts. If I think that a football is really a grenade, I am simply confused rather than ideologically misguided. What is ideological is the way we interpret facts. If I argue that football is simply a game, you might say that I am failing to interpret the way in which the game of football is inscribed within a whole series of social networks, providing a forum for nationalism, homo-erotic bonding, commercial exploitation of the working class, and so on. With this view, then, ideology is a kind of error in perception that can be corrected in a similar way to that by which you might change the lenses in your glasses if you cannot see properly.

If, in this definition of ideology, thought is either right or wrong, one of the other main definitions of ideology holds that ideology is actually a means of describing the very horizon of thought itself. In this sense it would, for example, be impossible for me to conceive of adverts as anything other than small, factual documentaries. However much you tried to reason or argue with me, however much you pulled my ears or threatened to cut the bristles off my toothbrush, it would be unthinkable for me to consider adverts in any other way. In a similar, but far less benign respect, many Marxists argue that capitalism now represents the horizon of our thought and that, as such, we are, at a practical level, unable to conceive of an alternative way of organizing society. In this sense, ideology is not something that you can think your way out of, as it represents the actual limit of thought in the same way that blindness represents the limit of sight. Given these widely differing views, it is perhaps unsurprising that it has become something of an honourable pastime in Marxist circles to propose a new theory of ideology every decade or so and then, just as routinely, to have that theory criticized, vilified and ultimately forgotten.

Clearly, this is a problem for Marxists, because it means that, without an acceptable theory of ideology they are unable to explain precisely how, in crude terms, the superstructure ensures the perpetuity of the base. This, then, is where Žižek makes his most telling contribution to the Marxist tradition. Loosely defining ideology as the way in which individuals understand their relationship to society, Žižek identified that while Marxism was able to furnish this definition with a solid grasp of the mechanics of society, it had very little to offer in the way of understanding the workings of individuals. As the instinctive and psychological processes of individuals are the very stuff on which ideology goes to work, it seemed essential to find a theory of these processes. The place where Žižek found such a theory was in the work of Jacques Lacan.

Lacan

Jacques Lacan (1901–1981) was a French psychoanalyst who controversially rewrote the ideas of the founder of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). Part ofthat controversy stems from the fact that Lacan's work is a notoriously tortuous read, full of mind-bending puns, obscure allusion and slippery conceptual interplay. Indeed, it is often said, that you have to understand Lacan before you read his books. As this is just the kind of paradoxical challenge that Žižek likes, he has taken it upon himself to provide that understanding to Lacanian novices. Part of the remit for many of Žižek's books is, therefore, to explain Lacan's theories. In doing so, Žižek has done much to popularize the particular brand of psychoanalysis practised by Lacan. I emphasize this because psychoanalysis is usually narrowly conceived as a field of knowledge, one that comprises a method for treating neurotic patients and a set of theories about mental processes. In the hands of Lacan, however, psychoanalysis assumes cosmic ambitions, vaulting over the boundaries of its own discipline and engaging with politics, philosophy, literature, science, religion and almost every other field of learning to form a vast theory that has a hand in analysing every arena of endeavour in which human beings take part. The foundations Lacan laid for this hubristic enterprise are the three ‘Orders’ by which all mental functioning can be classified: the Imaginary Order, the Symbolic Order and the Order of the Real.

The Imaginary, Symbolic and Real Orders

It is perhaps easiest to think of these three Orders as force-fields which permeate every mental act, each one bringing to bear its own particular type of influence on an individual's well-being. Each of the three — the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real — can be used as nouns, naming a specific Order, as well as being used as adjectives, describing a particular thing or experience in terms of that Order. Furthermore, as the expression ‘Order’ suggests, not only are these Orders part of a system of classifying mental experience, they are also a means of ranking that experience in terms of a quasi-morality. Indeed, there are times in Lacan's work when the adjective ‘Imaginary’ can seem like a form of abuse, and the term ‘Symbolic’ can seem like the conferral of a blessing. Nevertheless, it is the Real that tops the pecking Order and it is almost always spoken of by Lacan in a tone of veneration and esteem.

In order to avoid confusing the Lacanian term with the everyday word, I will always write the former with a capital letter (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real), and the latter in the lower case (imaginary, symbolic, real). You should be aware, however, that Žižek does not always follow this practice himself.

The Imaginary

At one level, the Imaginary designates the process by which the ego is conceived and born. This process is commonly called ‘the mirror stage’. It begins when human beings are still infants of about six months old. As Lacan reminds us, human beings are born prematurely in the sense that they are unable to co-ordinate their movements until they are several years old. Infants overcome this by identifying with an image of themselves in a mirror (whether that is an actual mirror or the ‘mirror’ of another human being). Compared to the awkward, almost drunken sensations of dislocation they feel within their own bodies, this image offers the infant a sober picture of itself as a fully synchronized and united body. In doing so, it anticipates the child's future development and affords it a pleasing sense of coherency, or, in other words, an ego.

However, while seeming a stabilizing fiction, this process of identification actually resides within the child as a desperately capricious force, constantly undermining the very rectitude and unity it seeks to impart. This is because the discrepancy remains between the child's sensation of itself and the image of wholeness with which it identifies. As the ego is formed by this identification, an identification that assumes powers the child does not yet have, the ego is constitutionally sundered, riven by the division between itself and the image of itself. It is thus left forever trying to reconcile the other to its same.

I write ‘forever’ here because the ego does not change its character once we have become adults. It remains that part of you which is always questing for wholeness and unity, trying to overcome the division which created it in the first place. In its wider application, then, the Imaginary designates a restless seeking after ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series editor's preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• WHY ŽIŽEK?
• KEY IDEAS
• FURTHER READING
• Works cited
• Index