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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
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:
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.
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
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.
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...
