SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK (1949ā )
The Slovenian Lacanian Hegelian1 Slavoj Žižek is the contemporary dialectician par excellence; the mapping of his identity via the three descriptors that open this sentence, which can be variously positioned and re-positioned, is one way of temporarily locating him. Born in Ljubljana in the former Yugoslavia, during the period of Communist rule, Žižek studied for a degree in philosophy and sociology at the University of Ljubljana, which he was awarded in 1971, followed by postgraduate study in philosophy, and work as a translator. He gained his second doctorate from the UniversitĆ© de Paris, in 1985, writing on the philosopher Hegel and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Žižekās major foray into politics culminated in an unsuccessful attempt to become a pro-reform presidential candidate, on a shared platform, in the 1990 Slovenian elections. Žižek next concentrated on his academic research, with his post at the Institute for Social Studies at The University of Ljubljana and a number of visiting professorships at American universities. Žižek currently holds a post at Birkbeck, University of London, where he is the International Director of The Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities.
It was two books based upon his Paris doctorate and published in English translation, that first rudely awoke the world to Žižekian discourse: The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) and For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (1990). Another key early text in the English speaking world is The Žižek Reader (1999), edited by Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright. Turning to Žižekās exhilarating prose also leads to an associated problem for many beginning readers: the mĆ©lange therein of Lacanian discourse and Hegelian methodology ā which alternately are āilluminatedā by reference to popular culture, or āilluminateā popular culture by reference to psychoanalysis/ philosophy ā induces some anxiety and stress. The cure may be to not worry and to enjoy oneās symptom; this involves realizing two things: (1) that Žižek writes dialectically, which means that any particular point in one of his arguments is a temporary stage that will eventually be transformed via its opposing argument (proceeding therefore via Hegelian negation), and (2) that Žižek is part of the Slovene Lacanian School, which operates at a level of intellectual intensity rarely glimpsed in the West. But Žižekās work is not impenetrable, rather, one simply needs to learn a few key Lacanian terms, watch a few Hitchcock movies, and then sit back and enjoy the Hegelian ride. Perhaps the key term to approach the Žižekian rollercoaster equipped with, is the āRealā. This is a Lacanian term that the editors of The Žižek Reader describe as āthat which is both inside and outside the subject, resisting the Symbolicās endeavours to contain itā.2 This definition begs the question: what is the Symbolic? All Lacanian terms are understandable as part of a process of subject formation: sticking with simply the main coordinates, there are three relevant interrelated terms, the pre-linguistic Imaginary, the cultural and linguistic Symbolic, and the Real; the Imaginary is structured by needs and image-identifications; the Symbolic is structured by language and the law; the Real is that which can neither be pictured nor articulated through language. The Real is not reality, existing in opposition to it; it is that which is at the limits of language, and can only be partially and incompletely approached as, or via, trauma, lack or enjoyment.3 But the Real is constitutive and as such forms a āhard kernelā at the heart of existence. Much of Žižekās writing is an oblique approach to the Real.
Žižekās Hegelianism is highly self-reflexive and self-explanatory; in a chapter of The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (1999), Žižek asks āWhat Is āNegation of Negationā?ā. He answers via a range of examples: a āNew Age airport pocketbookā called From Atlantis to the Sphinx by Colin Wilson, an academic book called States of Injury by Wendy Brown, a brief reference to anthropology, then Marxās Capital, and finally the āexperienceā of the dissident struggle against Party rule in Slovenia. How does his argument proceed? First he notes the surprisingly Hegelian conclusion to From Atlantis to the Sphinx, where the historical transition from intuitive to logical types of knowledge, and the current phase of āreuniting the two halvesā, is resolved not via some bland and balanced New Age synthesis of intuition/logic, but through recognition that it has already happened; as Žižek says:
the unavoidable conclusion is that the moment of the Fall (the forgetting of the ancient wisdom) coincides with its exact opposite, with the longed-for next step in evolution. Here we have the properly Hegelian matrix of development: the Fall is already in itself its own self-sublation; the wound is already in itself its own healing, so that the perception that we are dealing with the Fall is ultimately a misperception, an effect of our skewed perspective ā all we have to do is accomplish the move from In-itself to For-Itself: to change our perspective and recognize how the longed-for reversal is already operative in what is going on.4
This is a slightly long-winded way of saying that the subject of āmisperceptionā is in need of Lacanian psychoanalysis. Except, of course, that Žižek does not say this; he instead gives the reader another example, that of a āmisperceivedā world devoid of oppressors, where such a perspective fails to realize that it is mediated by the oppressor in the first place. Žižek thus poses two answers to his question that structure this chapter: first, negation of negation is a two-stage process, the first negation leaving the subject inside the symbolic domain she is rejecting, the second negation being that of the symbolic domain itself; this is then recognized by Žižek to be a āpure repetitionā. What is the point of this chapter? First, it reveals that the Hegelian dialect can be exposed or learnt through examples that have a certain narrative form; second, that a really good way of moving from In-itself to For-itself is via psychoanalysis (moving from āmisperceptionā to recognition); third it reveals how applying Hegel allows a rapid and smooth traversal of anthropological, cultural, political, philosophical and sexual domains of experience and knowledge; and fourth, it enables us to admire Žižek himself, as the grand expositor of Hegel via unusual examples. Žižek himself gets even more unusual with his explication of Christianity, but this must be understood to be part of his wider engagement with important twentieth-century thinkers in the humanities, in this instance the philosopher Alain Badiou. Žižek is interested in Badiouās āpolitics of truthā or ātheory of subjectivity as fidelity to the Truth-Eventā.5 This theory is given full expression in Badiouās reading of St Paul, but Žižek also gives minor examples from moments of unexpected and unpredictable political change. In The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (2003), Žižekās own reading of St Paul hinges on the recognition of a shared question between St Paul and Lacan: is there love beyond law?6 The answer is that only in the incomplete, imperfectability of subjectivity can there be love, and this elevation of imperfection is the Real of Christianity. Žižek also engages extensively with the feminist and gender theorist Judith Butler. As Sarah Kay argues, in this engagement Žižekās fidelity to Lacan reveals a certain weakness in his earlier theorizing of āwomanā, a weakness that Butler is aware of; further, by charting Žižekās reading of a single film ā The Crying Game ā his movement through multiple perspectives is revealed, thus Žižek moves
from occupying a āheterosexist normativeā po...
