Zizek's Politics

Jodi Dean

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415951753
• eBook ISBN: 9781135431679
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria politica

A critical introduction to the political thought of one of the most important, original and enigmatic philosophers writing today. Zizek's Politics provides an original interpretation and defence of the Slovenian philosopher's radical critique of liberalism, democracy, and global capital.

1
ENJOYMENT AS A CATEGORY OF POLITICAL THEORY

Introduction

In an interview with Glyn Daly, Slavoj Žižek says that “all politics relies upon, and even manipulates, a certain economy of enjoyment.”¹ Throughout his work, not only For They Know Not What They Do, which is subtitled, Enjoyment as a Political Factor, Žižek draws out the workings of enjoyment (what Jacques Lacan calls jouissance) in racist and ethnic ideological fantasies, in socialism’s bureaucratic excesses, and in the cynicism of the narcissistic subjects of late capitalism. Žižek frequently invokes the seemingly nonsensical ceremonies and redundancies that accompany political institutions: extravagant pomp and rhetoric, advice from committees of experts on ethics, the officiousness of paperwork, and the sanctimonious righteousness of perpetually ineffectual radicals. As he writes in The Parallax View, “our politics is more and more directly the politics of jouissance, concerned with ways of soliciting, or controlling and regulating, jouissance.”² In this chapter, I introduce the category of enjoyment as the key to understanding Žižek’s political thought. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate as well the importance of enjoyment as a category of political theory.

The category is not a magic bullet or golden ticket. It is not a pill we can take or a practice we can adopt that will revolutionize current political action and thought. Nonetheless, it contributes to thinking about our attachment to and investment in violent, destructive, and authoritarian modes of being. Žižek’s use of the notion of enjoyment helps clarify how the accomplishments of new social movements associated with feminism, gay activism, and antiracism—their successes in challenging the patriarchal family and the disciplined society—have not ushered in a new world of freely self-creating identities, but rather interconnect with expansions and intensifications of global corporate capitalism to generate new forms of guilt, anxiety, and dependency.³ For political theorists, then, his work is indispensable to understanding the deep libidinal attraction of domination, that is, the passion of our attachments to the objects constitutive of our subjectivities, however contingent these objects may be, and hence to the challenge of freedom under communicative capitalism.⁴

I can approach these matters from a different direction. The present is marked by a bizarre opposition between speed and fixity. Everything in the global capitalist consumer-entertainment economy moves quickly (except, of course, those horrid computerized answering systems that entrap us when we call companies and offices), but little changes; or, better, the idea of effecting change—making a difference—seems extraordinarily difficult, even naïve. The truly committed appear as fanatics or fundamentalists, or, more mildly, as quaint throwbacks refusing to accept the fact that the sixties are over. Contributions to global financial and information spheres circulate rapidly, yet few think it possible to change the course and conditions of this circulation. The global capitalist economy presents itself as the only game in town, as the condition of politics, struggle, and action. So, there are swarms of activities, of interpretations, transgressions, and interventions, but with remarkably little impact; most fail to register at all.⁵ In this context, the contingencies of everyday life present themselves less as openings to immense possibility than they do as nuggets of fixity.

Pluralization, or the deterritorializing and reterritorializing force of capitalist intensification, generates leftovers and remainders. Even as migrations of people, capital, and information challenge and exceed previously congealed formations, they produce new sites and objects of attachment, new economies and arrangements of enjoyment. As William Connolly points out, the very push to pluralize can become marked by its own excessive demand to eliminate all attachment to fundamentals.⁶ Insofar as Žižek’s political theory posits enjoyment as an irreducible component of human being, as that which enables and ruptures the subject, it can contribute to our thinking about these nuggets of fixity and our deep attachment to them.

In considering enjoyment as a category of political theory, I begin with a general discussion of the concept in psychoanalysis. I then turn specifically to Žižek’s work, taking up the role of enjoyment and fantasy in his reworking of the theory of ideology. After attending to the place of enjoyment in ideological interpellation and addressing more specifically Žižek’s use of the concept for understanding racism and ethnic nationalism, I analyze some of the specific, formal features of the concept. Here I emphasize enjoyment as it fixes the place of the subject, enjoyment and our relation to others, and the superego support of enjoyment. With these elements in place, I argue for Žižek’s account of the challenges of freedom in communicative capitalism as a compelling alternative to current emphases on multiplicity and pluralization. Žižek’s emphasis on enjoyment enables us to confront the excesses generated by global capitalism as they fix and attach contemporary subjects into relations of domination and exploitation.

What Is Enjoyment?

Most simply, enjoyment (jouissance) refers to an excessive pleasure and pain, to that something extra that twists pleasure into a fascinating, even unbearable intensity. We might think here of the difference between friendship and passionate love. Whereas spending time with friends may be pleasurable, falling in love can be agonizing. Yet it is a special kind of agony, an agony that makes us feel more alive, more fully present, more in tune with what makes life worth living, and dying for, than anything else. Enjoyment, then, is this extra, this excess beyond the given, measurable, rational, and useful.⁷ It cannot be reduced to the seemingly rational terms of a cost/benefit analysis. Nor can enjoyment be allocated through the weighing of pros and cons. Instead, enjoyment is that “something extra” for the sake of which we do what might otherwise seem irrational, counter productive, or even wrong.

The basic psychoanalytic account of enjoyment tells a story of the infant’s primary connection with its mother. This story begins by positing an ideal oneness that was never fully realized, but whose loss helps make sense of human psychic life.⁸ At one with the mother, the infant does not separate itself from her; her breast, her body, are the infant’s own. Once the infant can distinguish between itself and its mother, once the breast is something separate, that connection is lost forever. The child will of course try to regain or recover a sense of oneness. It will work to fill in the missing piece, typically by trying to please the mother, to be what she wants. The child will also attempt to overlap its desire with the mother’s desire. Her desire, something powerful, overwhelming, and mysterious, becomes the cause of the child’s desire. So not only will it try to be what she wants, but also it will try to want what she wants. Yet insofar as the mother, as desiring, is incomplete, the child has a kind of breathing room; it is not fully taken over into her as if she were closed, total. The child then has some sense that both it and its mother are lacking; they both desire. It covers over this lack with a fantasy that tells it what she wants, that tells it something about the mother’s desire, that gives the child a way to be what she wants or explains to it its failure. The fantasy is attached to a little nugget (what Lacan designates as objet petit a)—in Bruce Fink’s terms, a remainder and a reminder—of originary enjoyment.⁹

Another version of this story emphasizes our entry into the symbolic order of language. We are born into language, into its rules, into structures of meaning and expectation that precede us. As infants and young children, our pleasures and pains, wants and needs, are given to us, projected onto us as our parents try to figure out why we will not stop crying and settle down. Words are provided that distinguish us from our environment, from animals, from other people. Words break us into parts: nose, chin, ear, eye. We are taught to read faces for their moods: happy, sad, angry, surprised. Yet again, enjoyment is the price of our entry into language. We sacrifice primordial interconnectedness (something we imagine as direct, unmediated bodily communion with an other) when we enter the symbolic order of language. More precisely, the fantasy of this originary communion inhabits our experience of language, our sense of not being able to say it all as well as the enjoyment that provides our speaking with extra dimensions of which we may only be obliquely aware.¹⁰ Enjoyment cannot be signified directly. It exceeds symbolization and, indeed, can only be signified through inconsistencies, holes, and slippages in the symbolic order.¹¹

To be sure, in the same way that the mother is incomplete, so is the symbolic order of language. That is, we do not go into it fully. There is always a surplus or leftover that resists symbolic integration (Žižek follows Lacan in referring to this surplus as Real).¹² Not everything can be said. The very act of saying something opens up questions and effects irreducible to the content of what is said. Meanings escape words; intensities and excitements exceed meaning. Meaning itself comes not with a transcendental guarantee or referent but relies on some kind of contingent, inert signifier as a stand-in for the stupid fact that a name refers to an object simply because that is what we call it.¹³ Our bodily experiences, although inscribed by language, are irreducible to it. Nuggets of enjoyment remain.

These stories of the loss of something we never had are not hypotheses to be proven through extensive baby-watching. Rather, the story has the status of something that must be presupposed if we are to make sense of experiences of desire and longing, of drive and frustration, of our odd tendencies to persist in habits of being and interaction that are profoundly destructive to ourselves and others. Lacanian psychoanalysis thus takes the view that this story is Real in the sense that it informs psychoanalytic understanding of desire, drive, and the fundamental, traumatic separation constitutive of what it is to be human. For example, positing the loss of a primary connection or enjoyment accounts for the openness of desire, for the way we can desire something but upon getting it feel “that’s not it,” “that’s not what I really wanted.” When we introduce additional elements of the story, moreover, and emphasize the intrusion of the symbolic law that both bars access to enjoyment and frees the subject from enjoyment’s overwhelming proximity, we can better grasp the paradoxical functioning of prohibition, the way that prohibition can both incite desire and provide relief from the compulsion to enjoy.

Likewise, insofar as the Lacanian account of drive holds that drives are not to be understood in terms of direct bodily needs but rather as byproducts of the body’s ensnarement in the symbolic order, the very failure to satisfy desire can become itself a source of enjoyment.¹⁴ The circular movement of drive is enjoyable; enjoyment, in other words, is the pleasure provided by the painful experience of repeatedly missing one’s goal.¹⁵ With respect to drive, then, the nugget of enjoyment is not what one is trying to reach but cannot; rather, it is that little extra that adheres to the process of trying. To this extent, the inescapability of enjoyment equals drive. Enjoyment results when focus shifts from the end to the means, when processes and procedures themselves provide libidinal satisfaction.

Overall, the two versions of the story that posits an impossible originary enjoyment set out an important underlying supposition of Žižek’s thought: neither the subject nor the structure of language and law in which it finds itself is complete; both are ruptured by a gap, by an excess and a lack. Žižek follows Lacan in thinking of this excess and lack in terms of enjoyment, an irrational remainder or reminder to which the subject is forever tied in a complex push–pull dynamic: in drive the subject pushes enjoyment away (but still gets it); in desire the subject pulls enjoyment toward (but continues to miss it).

As Žižek frequently observes, Lacan changes his account of enjoyment in the course of his teaching. What the earlier Lacan theorizes as an imaginary fullness becomes the mesmerizing, terrifying presence of the Real (the Thing, something Žižek compares to the alien in Ridley Scott’s Alien movie) and shifts yet again to become the multiplicity of nuggets of enjoyment (lichettes) through which late capitalism reproduces itself.¹⁶ Although Žižek draws most extensively from the later Lacan, he does not proceed as if the final account of enjoyment is necessarily the best or proper one. Instead, he treats the stages in Lacan’s teaching as ways of thinking about political order, resistance, revolt, and the recuperation of transgression in late capitalism. Thus, Žižek maps Lacan’s stages onto political–theoretical shifts from absolute authority, to the democratic invention, to the emergence of the totalitarian leader, to today’s generalized perversity (a mapping we encounter in subsequent chapters in the form of Žižek’s discussion of different ideological formations in terms of Lacan’s four discourses). Nevertheless, Žižek emphasizes that these shifts are not total: previous arrangements of enjoyment persist, adding to the challenge of theorizing the present. Today we encounter longings for fullness, fear of traumatic destruction, hatred of others who threaten our enjoyment, and the idiotic, momentary jouissance of popular culture. How a society arranges its enjoyment, in other words, is not uniform or singular. Differing economies of enjoyment—capitalist, socialist, nationalist, racist, sexist—can and do coexist. A key task for political theorists, then, is to discern how these differing arrangements of enjoyment reproduce contemporary arrangements of domination.

Enjoyment in Ideology

Žižek’s reworking of the category of ideology extends the notion of enjoyment into the political field. To this end, he concerns himself with the ways that ideological formations work as economies of enjoyment to forbid, permit, direct, and command enjoyment. Žižek argues that an ideological formation is more than a set of different elements constituted as a set by virtue of a certain nodal point (such as the “empty signifier” in Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s theory of hegemony).¹⁷ Likewise, ideology is more than a discursive formation that covers over the fundamental incompleteness and impossibility of society. Rather, what is crucial to an ideological formation is the fantasy that supports it, that is, the point of excessive, irrational enjoyment that accounts for the hold of an ideological edifice on the subject. Fantasy explains the incompleteness of society (that is, it accounts for the antagonism rupturing society) in a way that promises and produces enjoyment.¹⁸ Discourse analysis and ideology critique, then, can do little in and of themselves to change society. Real substantive change has to confront (Žižek uses the Lacanian term traverse) ideology’s underlying fantasy. To set out Žižek’s notion of ideology in more detail, I focus on (1) the role of enjoyment in ideological interpellation and (2) the way fantasy structures our enjoyment.

Among the many problems that have plagued the Marxist concept of ideology is its connotation of false consciousness.¹⁹ The very idea of ideology critique seems to place the scientific, intelligent, or enlightened critic on a plane high above the poor duped masses. Žižek’s account avoids this difficulty by shifting attention from what people know to what they do, that is, to the way people persist in actions despite what they know to be true.²⁰ For example, I know that tabloids are scandalous rags, delivering my attention to advertisers and the entertainment industry, feeding the celebrity–consumer machine, but I read them anyway. I may even read them critically, ironically, as if I were different from the typical tabloid reader, but I am still buying and reading them. For Žižek, this continued activity is a mark of belief, a belief that is exteriorized in a variety of institutionalized practices.

One might think that with this emphasis on practices, Žižek’s account resembles less a theory of ideology than it does Michel Foucault’s theory of the emergence of individuals out of normalizing practices. The difference between Žižek and Foucault is that Žižek is concerned with the way these practices are subjectivized, the way they are experienced by the subject, or, more precisely, the way the subject emerges as the failure of these practices to be subjectivized or internalized completely, without remainder.

Drawing from Louis Althusser’s theory of ideological interpellation, Žižek asks how the effect of belief in a cause arises—how, in other words, a subject comes to recognize himself as hailed by an ideological institution (such as the state in the form of the policeman saying, “Hey, you!” or God’s call as made m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Enjoyment as a Category of Political Theory
• 2. Fascism and Stalinism
• 3. Democratic Fundamentalism
• 4. Law: From Superego to Love
• Conclusion: Revolution Today
• Notes
• Index