The Magician of Ljubljana

By Assaf Sagiv

The totalitarian dreams of Slavoj Žižek.

One of the most conspicuous problems with this kind of revolution, however, is the stupidity of the masses that have been brainwashed by ideology. Therefore, Žižek insists, the revolution demands leaders who can correctly identify potential opportunities and perform the authentic political act, with all that it entails. And if we need an example of such a leader, Žižek has one for us: Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, father of the Bolshevik revolution and institutor of Soviet despotism.

Žižek admires Lenin for understanding the true significance of the revolutionary act. This understanding, Žižek maintains, was the reason for his split with the Mensheviks on the eve of the October revolution: Lenin knew that there was no point in waiting until conditions were favorable. The act does not accommodate itself to circumstances; instead, it is directed at changing them. Moreover, Lenin provides the perfect proof that a revolutionary act is impossible without what Žižek terms “the terrorism that characterizes every authentic ethical stance.”⁸⁹

Žižek’s candid and ardent support for “revolutionary terror” of the Bolshevik or Jacobin kind proves that he is not a naïve idealist who categorically ignores bitter historical experience. On the contrary, he is quite familiar with the abuses of revolutionary tyrannies—he himself lived for some time under a communist regime, albeit a relatively moderate one—yet is nonetheless staunch in their defense. He is well aware that the regime he envisages depends on the violent suppression of resistance, but he has no intention of applying the brakes; if performing the revolutionary act means “the ruthless exercise of power,” and “if this radical choice is decried by some bleeding-heart liberals as Linksfaschismus [fascism of the Left]—so be it!”⁹⁰

Žižek does not appear particularly perturbed by the blind obedience revolutionary regimes demand from their subjects. In fact, he heartily endorses such demands. He cites approvingly the infamous Leninist distinction between “formal” freedom and “actual” freedom. He claims that citizens of democratic countries enjoy only the former: The dominant liberal ideology persuades them that they are free to choose according to their conscience and preferences, but in truth, theirs is a restricted choice, defined by a predetermined symbolic set of coordinates. Actual freedom, in contrast, is expressed in the radical act that alters the coordinates themselves—that is, in the act that determines the possibilities, rather than conforms to their framework.⁹¹ Since most people are incapable, Žižek believes, of taking this bold step on their own, they must be shown the way by leaders like Lenin, who can do it for them. In Žižek’s view, obedience to an authoritative leader of this kind does not mean relinquishing freedom, but rather taking a necessary step towards its full realization:

Liberal democracy tends towards “rational” decisions within the limits of (what is perceived as) the possible; for more radical gestures, proto-“totalitarian” charismatic structures, with a plebiscitarian logic where one “freely chooses the imposed solution,” are more effective… often, one does need a Leader in order to be able to “do the impossible.” The authentic Leader is literally the One who enables me actually to choose myself—subordination to him is the highest act of freedom.⁹²

This is typical totalitarian sophistry: The argument that obedience to the leader is “the highest act of freedom” could well be straight out of George Orwell’s 1984. Žižek even rejects the word “totalitarianism” as illegitimate, seeing it as a convenient pejorative with which to lump together and dismiss all the alternatives to liberal ideology.⁹³ He argues emphatically that there is a qualitative difference, for example, between communism, which, even in its Stalinist version, boasts a “liberatory potential,” and Nazism, which has no authentic “inner greatness.”⁹⁴ Either way, it is difficult to ignore the unmistakably despotic features of his political vision. “One should take the risk of radically questioning today’s predominant attitude of anti-authoritarian tolerance,” he declares, and in the same vein asserts that “the model of a free collective is not a group of libertines indulging their own pleasures, but an extremely disciplined revolutionary body.”⁹⁵ Similar formulae, used as the quasi-official platform of communist dictatorships, led to mass murder and the oppression of millions in countries like the ussr, China, Cambodia, and North Korea. Yet Žižek asks us to remain open-minded, and to adopt a comparative approach: “Since, today, capitalism defines and structures the totality of human civilization, every ‘Communist’ territory was and is—again, despite its horrors and failures—a kind of ‘liberated territory.’”⁹⁶

Žižek appears to believe that the war against the hegemony of global capitalism not only justifies, but also necessitates, taking horrific action. He thus grants an intellectual and moral seal of approval to every tyrant or terrorist who has acted under the banner of a war against “the enemy”—namely, America and all it stands for. This struggle brooks no compromise, and winning requires a kind of determination that Žižek defines by way of two anecdotes:

There is a will to accomplish the “leap of faith” and step outside the global circuit at work here, a will which was expressed in an extreme and terrifying manner in a well-known incident from the Vietnam War: After the U.S. Army occupied a local village, their doctors vaccinated the children on the left arm in order to demonstrate their humanitarian care; when, the day after, the village was retaken by the Vietcong, they cut off the left arms of all the vaccinated children.... Although it is difficult to sustain as a literal model to follow, this complete rejection of the enemy precisely in its caring “humanitarian” aspect, no matter what the cost, has to be endorsed in its basic intention. In a similar way, when Sendero Luminoso took over a village, they did not focus on killing the soldiers or policemen stationed there, but more on the UN or U.S. agricultural consultants or health workers trying to help the local peasants—after lecturing them for hours, and then forcing them to confess their complicity with imperialism publicly, they shot them. Brutal as this procedure was, it was rooted in an acute insight: They, not the police or the army, were the true danger, the enemy at its most perfidious, since they were “lying in the guise of truth”—the more they were “innocent” (they “really” tried to help the peasants), the more they served as a tool of the U.S.A. It is only such a blow against the enemy at his best, at the point where the enemy “indeed helps us,” that displays true revolutionary autonomy and “sovereignty.”⁹⁷

This, then, is the sum total of “the ethics of the Real”: The murder of innocent civilians by virtue of their association with “the enemy”; the persecution of the regime’s opponents who have dared to reject “the actual freedom” its leader offers; and a willingness to sacrifice everything, even humanity itself, in the name of “the authentic act.”

It would certainly seem that Žižek is more concerned with destruction than with order. He is enamored of the call to revolution, but remains largely unconcerned with its long-term consequences. Indeed, Žižek appears uninterested in the possible outcome of breaking the rules, or in how the new reality, born from the ruins of the old hegemony, will look.⁹⁸ And so, if the means are indicative of the end, then Žižek’s vision will be, truly and simply, “the night of the world.”

VI

What are we to make of Žižek’s philosophy? We could view it as merely a thrilling intellectual challenge, and content ourselves with identifying those theoretical aspects that give rise to objectionable political views. We could also focus on Žižek’s demonstrable attraction to the dimension of the Real—his almost obsessive fascination with the obscene underbelly of human experience—and contrast it with his critical stance towards the symbolic order, and then point to the powerful nihilistic impulse that emanates from this approach. We could also give serious consideration to the implications of his notion of “empty universality,” showing that it places him squarely on the “dark side” of the Enlightenment project. Indeed, both common sense and historical precedent teach us that a desire for nothingness becomes a terrifying power when translated into political terms: Only tyrants and mass murderers thrive in a normative vacuum.

Obviously, Žižek is not the first intellectual to laud extreme, explosive, and unfettered political action. While it is true that he anchors his understanding of the “act” in Lacanian theory and in the ideas of the radical French philosopher Alain Badiou,⁹⁹ his praise of determination, violence, and self-sacrifice may remind us of other notable European intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century who lent their unflinching support to the darkest regimes known to man. Žižek himself recalls the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who believed for some time that the authentic political expression of the German nation was embodied in the Fuehrer’s vision.¹⁰⁰ It is also difficult not to sense an uncomfortable similarity of thought between Žižek and Carl Schmitt, the brilliant German thinker and “crown jurist” of the Third Reich, who extolled pure “decisionism,” a doctrine that advocates a sovereign act of violence that is grounded only in itself, and seeks no external legitimization.¹⁰¹ Clearly, both Schmitt and Žižek nurture—one in the notion of the act, and the other in the idea of decisionism—a form of political romanticism that “presents the demand, so to speak, for the son to create the mother and to call the father into being out of nothing,” as the theologian Paul Tillich remarked ironically.¹⁰²

Political romanticism is indeed a dangerous game. Of course, it holds considerable allure. It is immeasurably more fascinating than the tedious and banal philosophy of liberal democracy, which is based on compromise, pragmatic solutions, and interminable litigation. For this reason, perhaps, it is a constant source of attraction for intellectuals with a radical worldview. It would be a grievous error to underestimate their clout; as guides for younger generations of thinkers and citizens, their influence on the future face of society is considerable.

In view of all this, it is disturbing to discover that Žižek was once involved in actual political activity: At the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties, members of the Slovenian Lacanian school were enlisted to help the Slovenian Liberal-Democrat Party. Although the party’s moderate reformist platform did not jibe with the Lacanians’ radical views, they nonetheless felt compelled to support it in order to block the rise of the nationalist Right. Žižek himself ran for a seat on the four-person Presidential committee in the 1990 elections. He came in fifth, with only a handful of votes separating him from the coveted seat of power. A few years later, the Slovenian prime minister approached him with the offer of a ministerial post. Žižek recalls the incident with hilarity:

The prime minister said: “Do you want Science? Culture?” I told him: “Are you crazy? Who wants that crap? I am only interested in two posts—either Minister of the Interior or the head of the Secret Police.”¹⁰³

This anecdote is far less amusing once the political credos of the speaker have been made clear. Žižek may be blessed with a scintillating intellect and a winning personality, but his theoretical positions place him beyond the pale of the democratic consensus. Thus it is particularly troubling that Žižek is considered the darling of the intellectual scene in the West. Whether this misplaced adulation stems from a lack of understanding or—even worse—a blunting of moral sensibilities, it would be a serious mistake to ignore it. It is worth understanding precisely what Slavoj Žižek expects of us, even if only to be able to place a warning sign in front of his words.

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Assaf Sagiv is Associate Editor of Azure. His last essay in Azure was “Globalization: Just Do It” (Azure 19, Winter 2005).

Notes

1. Shlomo Zand, The Intellectual, Truth, and Power: From the Dreyfus Case to the Gulf War (Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 2000), p. 19. [Hebrew] The term “symbolic capital” was coined by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard, 1984).

2. Rebecca Mead, “The Marx Brother,” The New Yorker, May 5, 2003.

3. Sarah Kay, Žižek: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity, 2003), p.1.

4. Glyn Daly and Slavoj Žižek, Conversations with Žižek (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), p. 1.

5. Scott McLemee, “Žižek Watch,” The Chronicle of Higher Education (February 6, 2004). This article was the first in a series of four on Žižek, all of which can be found at www.mclemee.com/id117.html.

6. Jean-Michel Rabaté, “Lacan’s Turn to Freud,” The Cambridge Companion to Lacan, ed. Jean-Michel Rabaté (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2003), pp. 1-24.

7. Lacan’s most important essays are contained in the anthology by Jacques Lacan, Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1977). Because of the book’s abstruse style, interested persons are advised to read Lacan’s lectures first, contained in the following selected volumes of the “Seminars”:The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I: Freud’s Papers on Technique, 1953-1954, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. J. Forrester (New York: Norton, 1988); The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1988); The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses, 1955-1956, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993); The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (New York: Norton, 1992); The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 1964, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Penguin, 1979). For a general review of Lacanian theories, see, for example: Alain Vanier, Lacan, trans. Susan Fairfield (New York: Other, 2000); Malcolm Bowie, Lacan (London: Fontana, 1991); Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996).

8. The theory of the “mirror stage” was first presented as an article in 1949, entitled “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience.” See Lacan, Écrits, pp. 1-7.

9. It should be noted that the Lacanian concept of the imaginary has had a profound influence on film studies. Jean-Louis Baudry, for example, wrote a well-known essay on the experience of watching films—and in particular on the identification of the viewer with the images and events shown on the screen, and even with the camera itself—based on the idea of the imaginary register and the “mirror stage.” See Jean-Louis Baudry, “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus,” in Gerald Mast, Marshal Cohen, and Leo Braudy, eds., Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings (New York: Oxford, 1992), pp. 302-312.

10. Lacan is referring at this point not to the flesh-and-blood father, but to a symbolic father that he calls Nom-du-Père. This symbolic father thwarts the consummation of the child’s Oedipal desires, representing the prohibition on incest, and thus rescues the child from the psychosis of imaginary identification with the mother.

11. Lacan distinguishes between the “little Other” (autre), which is the imaginary reflection of the other in the ego itself, and the “big Other,” which could be either the symbolic order itself, or a particular subject (such as a judge or police officer) who represents that order.

12. It is important to stress that, for Lacan, language does not totally coincide with the symbolic order; it appears to have some imaginary function, as well. Thus, the “I” that speaks a language can be the symbolic subject, but also the imaginary ego. Lacan distinguishes the “empty speech” of the ego, which expresses the self-deception characteristic of the imaginary, from “full” or symbolic speech: The latter is both “true” and laden with meaning, since it is by means of this that the subject recognizes its desire.

13. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Wade Baskin (Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1974).

14. It is important to stress that the signifier may also be something non-verbal, such as an object or a symptomatic action.

15. Lacan, Écrits, p. 153.

16. The fact that the symbolic order is based on an arbitrary and unstable relation between the signifiers and the signified provides it with a certain dynamism: No symbolic alignment can be considered permanent or inevitable, since it is not anchored in “true” objective reality.

17. Lacan distinguishes between “desire” (in French: désir), “need,” and “demand.” Need is a biological instinct, like hunger or thirst. Since the infant cannot supply its own needs, it articulates them through a demand from the Other. The appearance of the Other—in this case, probably the mother—in response to this demand is perceived by the infant as an expression of love. However, although the Other can satisfy the biological need, it has no way of providing the additional aspect of the demand—the expectation of unconditional love. This unsatisfied “leftover,” created in the gap between need and demand, is the desire.

18. One of Lacan’s main innovations stems from his assertion that the unconscious is not only the seat of the instincts, as some of Freud’s adherents claimed, but a symbolic system “structured like language.” For this reason, the unconscious, like language, is not an “internal” mental realm, but an inter-subjective phenomenon that also lies somewhere “outside.”

19. Jacques Lacan, “Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” trans. Jeffrey Mehlman, Yale French Studies, 1972, p. 55.

20. Lacan, Seminar XI, p. 167.

21. Lacan, Seminar II, p. 141.

22. Chris Oakley, “Basta Così!: Mikkel Borch-Jacobson on Psychoanalysis and Philosophy,” in Todd Dufresne, ed., Returns of the “French Freud”: Freud, Lacan, and Beyond (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 209.

23. A comprehensive description of the life and work of Lacan and the controversies surrounding both can be found in the extensive biography by Elizabeth Roudinesco: Jacques Lacan and Co.: A History of Psychoanalysis in France, 1925-1985, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (London: Free Association, 1990).

24. For a discussion of the Lacanian influence on literary studies, see, for example, the anthology of essays by Shoshana Felman, ed., Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of Reading: Otherwise (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982). Lacan also wields an enormous influence on gender theory, in particular on the philosophies of his students Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, feminist thinkers who were also sharply critical of their teacher’s arguments. Such criticism is evident, for instance, in the following books: Luce Irigaray, This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter (New York: Cornell, 1985); Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller (New York: Columbia, 1984).

25. Rex Butler, Slavoj Žižek: Live Theory (New York: Continuum, 2005), pp. 5-6.

26. Yitzhak Binyamini, one of the editors at the Resling publishing house, which has published a number of books (in Hebrew) dealing with Lacanian themes, brought my attention to the fact that Lacan himself was apparently inclined to political conservatism, although, as an adult, he was careful to distance himself from any involvement in public life.

27. “The core of my entire work,” writes Žižek, “is the endeavor to use Lacan as a privileged intellectual tool to reactualize German Idealism.” Slavoj Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” in The Žižek Reader, eds. Elizabeth Wright and Edmond Wright (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), p. ix.

28. Victor E. Taylor and Charles E. Winquist, eds. Encyclopedia of Postmodernism (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 382.

29. Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, N.C.: Duke, 1993), pp. 13-18. See also the relevant discussion in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (London: Macmillan, 1992), pp. 152-169.

30. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 135.

31. Slavoj Žižek and F.W.J. von Schelling, The Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Michigan: University of Michigan, 1997), p. 14.

32. Žižek, The Abyss of Freedom, p. 11.

33. This quotation is taken from Hegel’s “Jenaer Realphilosophie.” See Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection (Albany: suny, 1985), pp. 7-8. The same section also appears in Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 29-30.

34. The price, explains Žižek, is a deepening of the split between us and the Real, the living entity from which we sprang, because of a contraction of “the organic whole of experience” to “appendix to the ‘dead’ symbolic classification.” Through his use of language, man engages in a kind of violence against nature; when he calls things by their names, he strips them of their vitality and reduces them to signifiers, which are nothing more than culture-dependent, fictitious categories. Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! (New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 51.

35. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! p. 186.

36. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! p. 186.

37. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), pp. 174-175.

38. Žižek, Tarrying with the Negative, pp. 9-12, 39-42.

39. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 2.

40. The eminent neo-Marxist philosopher Ernesto Laclau points out that “if Descartes had come to terms with the obverse side to which Žižek refers, he would have considered that his intellectual project had utterly failed. And it is also clear to me that one cannot relate Lacan to philosophers such as Hegel or Descartes, in the way Žižek wants, without emptying them of what constitutes the kernel of their theoretical projects.” See Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left (London: Verso, 1999), p. 73.

41. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” Kant’s Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1970), p. 54.

42. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 34.

43. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! p. 136.

44. In the Marxist sense of the word, “ideology” is not exactly “false consciousness.” According to Marx, it may well have been a distortion of reality, but it was no lie. It always contains a grain of truth, which it bends to its needs.

45. On this subject, Žižek quotes a book by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, published in Germany in 1983. By “cynical reason,” Sloterdijk means the prevalent approach that avoids translating critical beliefs into deeds, and prefers to remain, at least formally, loyal to the status quo. This is rather like the behavior of the priest who sleeps with a girl and then explains to her that he is all for preserving the moral norms he has just broken as a basis for social order. See Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, trans. Michael Eldred (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1987).

46. Žižek, The Sublime Object, p. 29.

47. Žižek, The Sublime Object, p. 33.

48. Louis Althusser, Essays on Ideology (London: Verso, 1984), p. 42.

49. Slavoj Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” pp. 65-66. It is superfluous to point out that this argument is not unknown in Jewish tradition: The popular Book of Education (Sefer Hahinuch), written in the thirteenth century, highlights the positive effect of observing the commandments, even on the soul of unmitigated evil, for “hearts are drawn after actions.” See The Book of Education, commandment 16. See also in this context Pesahim 50b; Sota 22b; Sota 47a; Sanhedrin 25b.

50. Žižek uses the word “antagonism” with the meaning given to it by the neo-Marxist philosophers Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. See Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards Radical Democratic Politics (London, Verso, 1994).

51. Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” pp. 73-74. See also Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real! (London: Verso, 2002), p. 19.

52. Žižek identifies this surplus with the Lacanian term objet (petit) a, the object of fantasy, the embodiment of the leftover of the Real—or the emptiness prevailing in its place—in the symbolic order (see Žižek, The Sublime Object, p. 163). This object is unattainable and therefore cannot satisfy the desire (unrealizable by its very nature)—but relentlessly arouses and provokes it. In this context, Žižek offers an amusing analogy: “Kinder Surprise, one of the most popular confectionary products on sale in Europe, are empty chocolate eggshells wrapped in brightly colored paper; when you unwrap the egg and crack the chocolate shell open, you find inside a small plastic toy (or small parts from which a toy can be put together). A child who buys this chocolate egg often unwraps it nervously and just breaks the chocolate, not bothering to eat it, worrying only about the toy in the center—is not such a chocolate-lover a perfect case of Lacan’s motto ‘I love you but, inexplicably, I love something in you more than yourself, and, therefore, I destroy you’? And, in effect, is this toy not l’objet petit a at its purest, the small object filling in the central void of our desire, the hidden treasure, agalma, at the center of the thing we desire? This material (“real”) void at the center, of course, stands for the structural (“formal”) gap on account of which no product is ‘really that,’ no product lives up to its expectations.” Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT, 2003), p. 145.

53. Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” p. 74.

54. In his ingenious way, Žižek also argues that the Lacanian Real is not only the referent that the screen of fantasy covers, but the screen itself, an obstruction that distorts the way in which we perceive the referent. See Slavoj Žižek, “The Matrix, Or, The Two Sides of Perversion,” at www.lacan.com/zizek-matrix.htm. The essay also appears in the book by William Irwin, ed. The Matrix and Philosophy (Chicago: Open Court, 2002).

55. Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 1997), pp. 183-184.

56. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! p. 89.

57. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! p. 90.

58. Žižek, Welcome, pp. 78-79.

59. www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-human-rights-and-its-discontents.html.

60. See, for example, Ernesto Laclau, ed., The Making of Political Identities (London: Verso, 1994), p. 1; Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (Cambridge: Cambridge, 1998), vol. iii, p. 229.

61. Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” p. 69.

62. Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” p. 60.

63. Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” p. 70.

64. Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” p. 70.

65. Žižek stresses that by “the class struggle” he does not mean the concrete historical quarrel between two specific classes, but rather a more basic confrontation between those who answer the call to social revolution and those who ignore it. The particular identities—bourgeoisie, proletariat, aristocracy, etc.—are only poured into that universal mold. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 227.

66. Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” pp. 74-75. It is no coincidence that ignoring this radical antagonism is one of the most outstanding characteristics of the “post-ideological” order, which is the most ideological of all. Žižek writes: “One of the commonplaces of the contemporary ‘post-ideological’ attitude is that today, we have more or less outgrown divisive political fictions (of class struggle, etc.) and reached political maturity, which enables us to focus on real problems (ecology, economic growth…) relieved of their ideological ballast… (but) One could thus claim that what the ‘post-ideological’ attitude of the sober pragmatic approach to reality excludes as ‘old-ideological fictions’ of class antagonism, as the domain of ‘political passions’ which no longer have any place in today’s rational social administration, is the historical Real itself.” See Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies, p. 163.

67. And what about science? Žižek insists that “Lacan is… far from relativizing science into just one of the arbitrary narratives, ultimately on equal footing with Politically Correct myths, etc.: Science does ‘touch the Real,’ its knowledge IS ‘knowledge in the Real’—the deadlock resides simply in the fact that scientific knowledge cannot serve as the symbolic ‘big Other.’” Žižek, The Matrix. This is a problematic conclusion that does not tally with other claims Žižek makes—claims that pull the rug out from under science’s attempts to arrive at positive truth about the world. It should also be remembered that for Lacan, scientific knowledge is not necessarily empirical, but principally by mathematical formulization—an approach according to which science really belongs, so it would seem, to the symbolic discourse. This opinion is also reflected in Lacan’s attempt to formulate his psychoanalytic theory in algebraic terms.

68. Žižek, “The Specter of Ideology,” p. 75.

69. Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality, p. 101.

70. From the lecture “The Superego and the Act” that Žižek delivered in 1999. The lecture is presented as an article at www.egs.edu/faculty/zizek/zizek-superego-and-the-act-1999.html.

71. See, for example, Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 342.

72. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 344-345.

73. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 362.

74. In this context, Žižek remarks on the phenomenon of the “cutters,” people with an ungovernable urge to cut themselves. Žižek sees this as “a desperate strategy to return to the Real of the body,” and contrasts it with the custom of tattooing, which expresses, in his opinion, the subject’s desire to be integrated into the symbolic order. Žižek, Welcome, p. 10.

75. Žižek, Welcome, pp. 5-6.

76. Žižek, Welcome, pp. 11-12.

77. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 134.

78. Žižek explains that the main feature of “post-modern” nationalism, which he identifies with the brutal manifestations of ethno-centrism and racism in the Balkans and other places, is the suspension of moral prohibitions and the casting off of the yoke of liberal “political normality.” “The cliché according to which in a confused, secular, global society, passionate ethnic identification restores a firm set of values should be turned upside down: nationalist fundamentalism works as a barely concealed ‘you may.’ Our post-modern reflexive society which seems hedonistic and permissive is actually saturated with rules and regulations which are intended to serve our well-being (restrictions on smoking and eating, rules against sexual harassment). A passionate ethnic identification, far from further restraining us, is a liberating call of ‘you may’: you may violate (not the Decalogue, but) the stiff regulations of peaceful coexistence in a liberal tolerant society; you may drink and eat whatever you want, say things prohibited by political correctness, even hate, fight, kill and rape.” Slavoj Žižek, “You May!” London Review of Books, March 18, 1999.

79. Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality, p. 127; see also Žižek, Welcome, pp. 151-152.

80. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 354.

81. Daly, Conversations, p. 163. The ethics of the Real is obviously connected with the “Ethics of Psychoanalysis” that Lacan dealt with at length in his seminar of 1959-1960. Lacan distinguished between those ethics, which are articulated “from the point of view of the location of man in relation to the Real.” and the moral philosophy of Aristotle, Kant, and others. Psychoanalytical ethics are based, for example, on encouraging the authentic expression of the desire, an approach that runs counter to moral ethics because it occasionally entails “a radical repudiation of a certain ideal of the good.” Lacan, Seminar VII, p. 11. One of the outstanding essays on “the ethics of the Real” is the book by Alenka Zupani, one of Žižek’s colleagues: Alenka Zupani, Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan (New York: Verso, 2000).

82. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! p. 44.

83. Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! p. 44.

84. Žižek’s “act” relies to a great extent on the Lacanian concept of passage à l’acte (passage to the act). The passage to the act is an impulsive action, usually violent, whose significance is an escape from the big Other, a departure from the symbolic register, and a return to the Real, involving the disintegration—albeit temporary—of the subject.

85. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 386.

86. Žižek, “The Superego and the Act.”

87. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 377.

88. Žižek, Welcome, p. 79.

89. Slavoj Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions on the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso, 2001), p. 91.

90. Butler, Laclau, and Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality, p. 326.

91. Slavoj Žižek, “Can Lenin Tell Us About Freedom Today?” Rethinking Marxism, vol. 13, no. 2 (Summer 2001). The article can be found at www.egs.edu/faculty/žižek/žižek-can-lenin-tell-us-about-freedom-today.html.

92. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? pp. 246-247.

93. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? p. 3.

94. Žižek, On Belief, p. 39.

95. Slavoj Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle (London: Verso, 2004), pp. 117-119.

96. Žižek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? pp. 130-131.

97. Žižek, Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle, pp. 83-84.

98. For criticism of this kind, see, for instance, Tony Myers, Slavoj Žižek (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 122.

99. On the connection between Žižek’s idea of the “act” and Badiou’s idea of the “event,” see the witty discussion in the chapter “The Politics of Truth” in Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, pp. 127-170. See also Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003).

100. According to Žižek, Heidegger was “the philosopher who provided the definitive description of an authentic political act.” See Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, p. 143.

101. See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge: MIT, 1998). Žižek devotes at least one article to Schmitt, which obviously focuses on the concept of decisionism and its place in today’s post-political era: Slavoj Žižek, “Carl Schmitt in the Age of Post-Politics,” in Chantal Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt (London: Verso, 1999), pp. 18-37.

102. Paul Tillich, The Socialist Decision, trans. Franklin Sherman (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), p. 32.

103. Mead, “The Marx Brother.”