THE

HERMENEUTIC
TEMPTATION

JULIAN DE MEDEIROS
 Volume 1

THE
HERMENEUTIC
TEMPTATION
JULIAN DE MEDEIROS
 © Julian de Medeiros

This book was made possible through the generous

contribution of a worldwide community of patrons. The book
is inspired by the lectures that were delivered between
August-October 2021.

Julian de Medeiros
& Jenaline Pyle
www.patreon.com/jenalineandjulian
God
Requiring a heaven and a hell, didn't need to
Plan two establishments but
Just the one: heaven. It
Serves the unprosperous, unsuccessful
As hell.

-Bertolt Brecht
CHAPTER 1 6

CHAPTER 2 26
CHAPTER 3 40

CHAPTER 4 54

CHAPTER 5 69

CHAPTER 6 81

CONCLUSION 97
 CHAPTER 1
THE MECHANICAL HAMSTER

“The temptation to form premature theories upon

insufficient data is the bane of our profession” -
Sherlock Holmes

I want to start with something very simple but quite

interesting about the commodity fetish, which is this. If you
read Marx's famous passage in ‘Das Capital’ on the
commodity fetish, Marx does something which is surprisingly
similar to what Sherlock Holmes does. If you take Marx and
Sherlock Holmes we have two sides of the same hermeneutic
approach. Marx has what Paul Ricour once called a
‘hermeneutic of suspicion’. Sherlock Holmes, on the other
hand, has what you might call a ‘suspicious hermeneutic’
where common sense and rational investigation prove
insufficiently suitable to solve the crime.

Sherlock Holmes is often characterized as being the ultimate

enlightenment man. The kind who uses his faculties for
reason as if they were a superpower. No clue escapes him,
and every occurrence, no matter how bizarre, can be
explained empirically. But this is precisely not how Sherlock
Holmes goes to work! In most cases he actually confounds
the empirical analysis of the police force, looking for clues
where there appear to be none, leading him to moments of
madness and drug-induced delirium. Moreover, isn’t it
Watson, the voice of common-sense, who usually prompts
Sherlock’s more fanciful insights? The crucial point here is
that Sherlock never contradicts common sense, he goes
beyond it. He is the only one who can see what common
sense obscures. The work of the detective is to resist the
hermeneutic temptation of seeing things as they appear, so as
to identify what they really are.

Now Marx does something quite similar. If you go to the

passage on the commodity fetish he literally starts by doing
what Sherlock Holmes does. He says that what appears to
you as objective reality, contains a whole world of
unacknowledged clues. In what sense? In that the commodity
fetish imbues ordinary objects with imaginary value based on
social relations. And so it's the opposite of the standard
enlightenment move. The enlightenment hermeneutic is
always to say: "here's something that is infused with
superstition and we have to see through it”. Marx says that
what appears as objective reality in capitalism is in fact
nothing but superstition. One could therefore say that this
makes Marx in fact someone who wants to rescue the
Enlightenment from itself. The ‘Hermeneutic of Suspicion’ is
not just to be suspicious, but to be suspicious of
Hermeneutics itself!

When Sherlock Holmes tells Watson that “the temptation to

form premature theories based upon insufficient data is the
bane of our profession”, he is not saying that the analysis
should be more fact-based or that misleading statements
should be ignored. He’s saying that such premature theories
are a necessary step in the process towards uncovering what
common sense obscures. This was already well known to
Plato, who pointed out that every truthful discovery starts on
the level of abstraction. In fact, the entire point of the
Platonic conception of the dialectic as dialogue is to go
through this necessary sequence of abstract reasoning. There
is no short-cut where the truth can be known without this
premature mis-recognition. In other words, the objective
truth is never just the opposite of subjective experience. The
truth can only be discovered by going through the subjective
appearance itself.

Another way to think of this is by looking at what Marx calls

‘fetish’. The fetish is always the thing that makes something
appear to us as hermeneutically sealed. In other words, what
obscures the tension between what something is and what it
means. The most common-sense example would be money.
Everyone agrees that money does not make us happy, and yet
we all know that having little or no money is the best way to
become unhappy. And so we pursue money not as a way to
make us happy, but so as to avoid being unhappy. This is also
why for Marx the commodity fetish is never just a form of
false idolatry. What makes it a fetish is precisely that we
know it’s not real and yet we continue to treat it as if it were.
The fetish is therefore the inverse of what Freud and Lacan
call the symptom. The fetish papers over this gap, but the
symptom forces you to either confront or disavow the
deadlock.

Zizek has a famous example of the return of the repressed.

where a man who has recently lost his wife fails to mourn her
yet becomes obsessively attached to a pet hamster. When the
hamster suddenly dies, the man goes into a fit of grief. His
attachment to the hamster was excessive, a fetishistic
disavowal to repress the original source of grief. The
breakdown presents the symptomatic release of that pain.

However, and this is crucial to emphasize if we want to

remain within the Marxist tradition, the fetishistic disavowal
(which takes on the form of attachment to the hamster) was
itself already symptomatic. The breakdown is simply the
revelation of its disavowed content due to the internal limit
of the repression, which was of course the fact that the
hamster would eventually die as well.

The symptom is the thing that emerges when you disavow

your fetishistic attachment. But what’s important to note is
that fetishistic attachment is itself already a form of
disavowal. This means that it is not enough to realize that the
fetish is in a sense ‘not real’. To change the fetish is not to see
through it, but to change the nature of the fetish. Now we
can see Marx in a whole new light. Because when he writes
that “the working class have nothing to lose but their chains”,
he means that this loss of attachment will itself create a kind
of positive content experienced as a loss of reality. To go back
to Hegel, alienation is not something you fight against,
alienation is something you go through.

It also helps us understand Lacan’s rebuttal to the student

protestors of 1968. When he said that they simply wanted a
new Master, he meant that the idea of being completely
detached from the fetish was itself a fetishistic attachment.
Hence the Marxist emphasis on class consciousness over class
struggle. The idea of a battle between classes is itself part of
bourgeois ideology.

Marx is here prefiguring what the existentialists would call

mauvaise foi or false consciousness. He has another famous
expression in the section on the commodity fetish, where he
says that nobody knows how it works and yet we continue to
go on as if we did. Fetishistic disavowal is what makes the
world feel real. Zizek often inverts this passage, arguing that
today’s world everyone knows how it really stands with
capitalism and yet we continue to act as if we didn’t know
any better. What he means is that rather than truly believing
in the merits of capitalism, we continue to participate in it
precisely because we don’t believe in it. This is what Lacan
means when he says that anxiety is usually the result of an
over-proximity to the object of our attachment. We become
anxious at the moment that we lose this psychological
distance. The irony is that this kind of distance is best
maintained not through ignorance, but by means of knowing
it and doing it anyway. Or, as Zizek often quotes: je sais bien
Mais quand meme. The logic of the commodity fetish
continues to dominate, despite the well-known
environmental and social costs. The scary thing is that our
knowledge of it doesn’t prevent us from continuing this
behavior, it only further enables it.

Imagine that you take a class about the commodity fetish.

You learn all of this and then a week later you go back to
your professor and you say: “I want my money back because
I've learned that the value of objects is based on a fetish, but
the problem is, the objects don’t seem to know that!” In other
words, your own subjective knowledge of the fact does not
have any impact on the thing itself. As long as other people
continue to treat the objects as if they had this kind of value,
well, then in a sense they really do. And so it doesn't matter
that you personally know it’s not real. Worse, you start to
realize that everybody has seen already seen through it.
Nobody really believes that a Balenciaga logo on a T-shirt
really makes it a hundred times more valuable than a regular
t-shirt. And yet people still desire it. They know it’s not real
and yet they continue to act as if it were. The crucial Marxist
insight is therefore no different from Keynes’s observation
that the stock market isn’t about who is subjectively the belle
of the ball, it’s about who the most people think is the belle
of the ball.

And so here we go from fetishism towards fetishistic

disavowal. And fetishistic disavowal is no longer to say “I
don't know how it works, therefore I continue to do it” but to
say “I know exactly how it works and yet I continue to do it.”
The added complication in capitalism is of course that on the
level of global exchanges of goods, the financial system, etc,
nobody knows how it really works, even the finance bankers
themselves, and so we tell ourselves that it must work
somehow, that billionaire philanthropists will come up with
market solutions to stave off global collapse.

Reflexive determination, vs. determinate reflection

How does this relate to Hegel's idea of reflexive

determination and Marx's inversion of that to determinate
reflection? Hegel's idea of reflexive determination is that
essence stems from a sort of fundamental void or empty
space. But Marx has a quite interesting take on this, when he
says that it's actually the other way around. We don't begin
with an essence which is abstracted through social relations,
it's that the essence comes from within differentiation itself.
When we say that Marx ‘materializes’ the Hegelian dialectic
the point isn’t that he brings Hegel down to earth, but that he
locates this ‘highest’ form of identity within the material
process of abstraction itself.

In other words Marx is not interested in the true value of the

commodity. Marx is not telling you that we need to dispel the
fetishistic attachment to the commodity in order to find its
true nature. This would itself be a fetish. This is also why it's
so important for Marx that money is the emergence of a
concrete entity that stitches together the abstraction of value.
One did not come before the other. Money is not an
abstraction from true value inasmuch as money is not a
concrete indicator of value. There is no positive content to
money as such. And this is precisely what makes it the thing
around which all other social relations are structured. There’s
a great scene in the Pirates of the Caribbean movie that
illustrates this perfectly. Elizebeth, the heroine, says to the
evil admiral, “I thought that honor was the currency of the
realm”. To which the admiral replies coldly: “Currency is the
currency of the realm”. This tautological deadlock is precisely
what Marx means when he says that “Capital is the inner
limit of Capitalism”.

In other words, what Hegel posits as reflexive determination

is in fact determinate reflection. The ontology of Marxism is
always to say that this ‘material’ relation, whilst abstract, is
what constitutes the ‘concrete; reality of the thing. Or, as
Zizek would put it, the fall generates the thing from which it
is falling. Another image, this time taken from a popular
meme. What happens when you strap a cat upside down to a
slice of peanut-butter toast and drop it? The answer is they
start rotating endlessly, creating an infinitely renewable
resource. Because the cat always lands on its feet and the
peanut-butter sandwich always lands on its face.

The classic image for Hegel of reflexive determination is the

figure of the king. The sort of obvious thing to say (a vulgar
version of the hermeneutics of suspicion) would be to say
that the king is a so-called social construct. He has no real
value in and of himself. There is nothing special about the
King other than the fact that he is King. But for Hegel this is
precisely what makes him King! So if you say, “there is no
such thing as a king, the king is a social construct”, that's all
fine and well but it doesn't really matter because everybody
knows that already, especially the King. As Lacan famously
said, the definition of a fool is a King who thinks he is King.

Hegel understood that what makes the King so powerful is

exactly the fact that his power derives from no source other
than what he represents. He is not King because he is the
most suitable candidate. He is King because he was born
King. Here we can see what Lacan means when he says that
the Big Other persists as long as we can say the word
“because” as an answer to something. Why is the King, King?
“Because he is”. The Big Other is always tautological. This
means that there is no emancipatory power in pointing out
that the king is illegitimate. If he were a legitimate ruler, then
he wouldn’t be King. Suffice to recall the famous remark by
St. Juste during the French revolution: We are not putting the
King on trial to determine whether he is a good King. We are
putting him on trial because he is King!

In the same way that the Freudian father loses his authority
when it has to be enforced, the King’s power rests on the
social hierarchies that ensue from this domination. This is
also why Lacan says that the Big Other persists even if we
don’t believe in him. Just because we know the King is ‘just
an ordinary man’ doesn’t mean he loses his power. Or, as
Lacan taunted the French existentialists with a tacit reference
to the Freudian dream of the father who does not know he is
dead: just because you have declared the death of God
doesn’t mean that God knows he is dead.

This means that the King is both the iconic figure of power
and at the same time a member of the living-dead. The only
other entities in which totem and taboo are so closely
connected are of course Catholicism and Capitalism. They
both connect the sacred and the profane. In ‘Totem and
Taboo’ Freud writes about the way in which the body of the
monarch is usually both an icon of worship and a fearsome
taboo across cultures. The function is strictly speaking
analogous. What is taboo exists outside the normal realm of
socio-symbolic signification and yet sustains it. The lowest is
therefore the same as the highest. It stands as the inner limit
of the social relation itself. Touching the monarch is
considered the ultimate taboo. The King is both excremental
and divine because he is the physical stand-in for this
indivisible remainder between the sacred and the profane.

Here we have an interesting leap that we can make to the

difference between Freud and Lacan’s theory of anxiety. For
Freud anxiety stems from a fear of loss. For Lacan anxiety is
when we get too close to something, which is also a kind of
loss. Get too close to the King and he is no longer really King.
That’s why people say that you meet your heroes at your own
peril. Even if they turn out to be perfectly nice people, they
will no longer be your hero. They’ll just be another
acquaintance.

For both of them fear is preferable to anxiety, because anxiety

is indeterminate. Anxiety is when you don’t know what you
should be afraid of. The most beautiful rendering this kind of
anxiety can be found in a scene from the film ‘The Death of
Stalin’ (2017) where Nikita Khrushchev comes home after
drinking with Stalin and other Soviet leaders. It’s very late,
but Krushchev’s wife is sitting at the table waiting for him.
Together they make a list with all the things Stalin laughed at
and what he didn’t laugh at. The goal is to stay ahead of
Stalin’s ever-changing whims. What is funny one day could
mean a death sentence the next. The meaning is constantly
changing. And this is exactly how anxiety functions. It’s not
simply, fear. Fear is “I'm afraid of you”. Anxiety is “I don't
know what I should be afraid of you for”. Anxiety is
ambiguity. It makes us distinctly uncomfortable. Most of us
would much rather live in fear than live in anxiety.

This is also why for example Freud says that fear can actually
be comforting. For example, we when you watch a very scary
movie you enjoy being afraid. Of course this is a simulation
of fear, and not the real thing. But what makes scary movies
particularly enjoyable is that they don’t really frighten you,
instead they offer you anxiety (ambiguity) and then resolve
that ambiguity by means of a release, the so-called ‘jump
scare’.

When Lacan says that anxiety is the only emotion that does
not deceive, he means that anxiety is not conditioned by
desire. Anxiety is the excessive thing, the surplus, that is
generated from the deadlock of desire’s true purpose: that it
wants to remain unfulfilled. Anxiety is therefore precisely the
short-circuit between the intended meaning of a thing and its
experience. In a horror movie we are anxious because we
want to hold off the ‘release’ of fear for as long as possible.
The truth of our anxiety is therefore that secretly we want to
stay afraid. Why? Because we enjoy it. And so anxiety is the
emotion that reveals the surplus emotion we experience in
fear. This is also the condition of the melancholic. A
melancholic becomes attached to his own suffering when he
loses something, for example a great love. Because what the
melancholic secretly fears is that he will recover from his
heartbreak. Whereas continuing to suffer will keep the love
alive. This is the deadlock of surplus enjoyment, where we
find pleasure in the thing that to all intents and purposes
should be the opposite of what gives us pleasure.

What all horror movies do, at least the ones that are
satisfying, is that they create a situation in which this surplus
is stretched out as long as possible. You watch someone
walking through a dark room, and what you’re enjoying is
the suspense itself, not the fear generated by the jump-scare.
This also helps explain why for Lacan anxiety is about over-
proximity to the object of desire. We secretly want to see the
monster lurking in the closet, but we also enjoy the anxiety of
waiting for it to jump out at us. Part of what makes a David
Lynch film anxiety-inducing to watch (like Twin Peaks) is that
you will go through entire episodes expecting there to be a
release of fear and it never happens.

A good example of the surplus enjoyment of anxiety cam be

found in the original ‘Grudge’ horror-movie (2002). There’s
an opening scene where a woman is walking up the stairs
and the camera drifts towards the window and we see the
face of a ghost-like child peering through the window. Very
spooky, but the woman doesn't see it. It’s like we want to yell
at the screen to alert her. She climbs into bed and we're still
uncertain what's going to happen. Where did the ghost go?
The scene stretches on and we become increasingly nervous.
Then as she's about to go to sleep she turns off the lights,
pulls up the covers and just as the scene is about to end it
turns out the dead child is already under the covers with her,
and the woman screams. And so we have this scary, yet very
satisfying release of all that tension. It's quite wonderful and
very scary. It’s also why ‘The Ring’ is ultimately more spooky
than ‘The Grudge’ because ‘The Ring’ introduced the idea that
when a television produces static it’s caused by a ghost. And,
even though this is hard to remember today, television sets
used to flicker like this sometimes. And so if you were alone
at home at night and your tv went static you almost wished
that a ghost would show up just to put you out of your
anxious misery.

Technically Freud refers to anxiety as a fear of separation or

fear of loss. Anxiety is the fear of losing your mother, or your
parent. And you're anxious at the idea of losing them; this is
classic Freud. Everything emanates from attachment to the
mother. However, Lacan goes a step further. Lacan says that
'yes anxiety is about fear of loss’, however anxiety is in its
most concrete form about over-proximity not distance. So
what Lacan says is that over-proximity to the traumatic
content of a thing is what you really are anxious about. What
is the traumatic content? It’s the fear that someday you may
end up being satisfied! For Lacan what we fear most is the
loss of desire itself. And so we desire a partial fulfillment of
desire that can be endlessly sustained. And what makes us
anxious is the feeling that maybe we are too close to filling
this gap. If we closed the gap of desire it would change our
relationship to reality itself. It would change your value
structures, your motivations, your purpose. And so anxiety is
precisely this kind of over-proximity to the object of desire
that could potentially unravel your entire being.

This means that Lacan does bring back a Hegelian and

Marxist element into the freudian edifice, which is to say:
your anxiety is not about a perceived loss. Your anxiety is
about coming close to the thing you’ve already lost but are
trying to obscure. In other words, your anxiety is provoked by
an encounter with the real. The real being that which we
fetishistically have to disavow, and yet cannot fully ignore.

Let me give you another example: there’s a certain type of

existential anxiety that we experience when we contemplate
objective reality. If you're anything like me, then visiting a
planetarium is worse than visiting a haunted house. At least
in a haunted house you know everything is fake. You know
that everybody is just dressed up and they're there to frighten
you. In fact you’ve paid them to do just that. But when you
go to a planetarium you realize that whether or not you are
in awe of the universe’s magnitude, it doesn’t matter in the
least to the universe. Your subjective experience of the
objective magnitude of the galaxy counts for nothing. The
universe simply doesn't care whether or not you exist. In a
haunted house everything exists for a reason, in the wider
universe there may be some ‘cause’ but it’s indiscernible to
us. It's hermeneutically sealed. The Universe defies meaning.
It almost seems to taunt us by saying: “what makes you so
small is precisely that you seek meaning here in this
unthinkably large expanse”. The hermeneutic temptation is
the ultimate form of desire. Secretly what we all want is for
things to mean something. And yet the most satisfying
experience of meaning occurs precisely in the things that are
artificial or illusionary. Whereas the ‘true’ meaning of
something so vast that it escapes our comprehension entices
us to feel the opposite: a loss of reality. In other words,
meaning is not something which exists behind the curtain
objective reality. Meaning is something we find in the curtain
itself, in all the things that make the world meaningful if not
intelligible.

And so the best way to stop feeling anxious about objective

reality is to imbue it with fetishistic attachment or subjective
meaning. You have to tell yourself a story about what it
means to be alive. We’re all narrative beings. We cannot
function otherwise. To engage with objective reality in its
most direct form is fundamentally impossible for us. And the
Hegelian argument is therefore always that objective reality
doesn’t exist, save through such subjective reality. In other
words, objective reality emerges through its perceived loss in
subjective experience. Hegel’s famously inscrutable aphorism
‘substance equals subject’ is a formulation of this kind of loss
which emerges retroactively. The Lacanian addition is that
this loss has to be mediated somehow, not through objective
experience, but through subjective fantasy. Which is why
Lacan argues that fantasy isn’t the opposite of reality. Fantasy
is that which sustains reality. It gives us access to it. Only if
we go through fantasy can we experience reality. And the
part of reality that is lost in the process is ‘the real’. The thing
cannot be accessed and yet through its inaccessibility
structures the entire regenerative sequence of being. It is only
by imbuing reality with fantastical attachment, or what Marx
would call fetishistic disavowal, that reality is formalized.
Hegel goes a step further and say that it is only in this failure
to experience objective reality that objective reality is
sustained. There is no objective reality behind-the-scenes,
inaccessible to us. It only emerges through its own loss.

Fake it ’til you make it

You probably know the expression “fake it till you make it”.
But ask yourself this: if you are faking it, then who are you
faking it for? Are you faking it for other people? Or are you
faking it for yourself? Or both? Are you performing as if you
were somebody else so that other people believe you are? Or
are you trying to convince yourself? The Hegelian answer
would be that you are doing both. You can only pretend to
yourself by pretending to others. This kind of pretending
contains a hysterical dimension, which is that you are already
wondering what the other thinks of you, and you are
connived that their opinion of you says something about who
you are. This is where we can go back to Marx's idea of
determinate reflection which is precisely that all being is
indeterminate. It's not that you are such a good faker that
people actually believe you are the thing. Nor is it that once
people believe you are the thing you actually believe it
yourself. Anybody who's experienced fraud syndrome will
know exactly how that works. Instead what happens is that
on the level of identification all identification is mediated.
Because there is no level at which you are ‘authentically’
interacting with the world “fake it till you make it” isn't
something that you move into, it’s something you've always
already done. The presupposition that there is a real you and
a fake you is already an illusion.

This is also why there is a disingenuous element in saying

“I'm going to pray for you.” All prayer is done on behalf of
the other. Even when we pray for ourselves we are not
praying because we believe we will directly communicate
with God. In a very Pascalian way, prayer is belief in belief
itself, because it's not that you're saying “I'm going to start
praying now because I'm going to speak directly with God”.
In fact, if you started praying and you heard a voice in your
head that said “shut up I don't have time now” you'd be
distinctly alarmed. That would be a psychotic experience.
Because the whole point of prayer is that it functions as a
hysterical exchange. The intended recipient of the prayer is
never just God, in a sense it’s yourself. The exchange only
succeeds because the message fails to deliver. If you knew
God were listening, you would be much less likely to pray,
moreover, it would no longer be a prayer, it would be a
petition.

There's a beautiful example of this in the ‘Watchmen’

televised series (2019) that came out on HBO last year. If
you're familiar with Alan Moore’s ‘Watchmen’ there's a
character known as Dr. Manhattan who becomes an
omnipotent being through some kind of nuclear experiment.
Essentially he's a God-like figure that exists outside of time
and space. He can go through multiple dimensions. The
dilemma of Dr. Manhattan is of course that as an eternal
creature, unbound by the laws of time and space, he has no
real subjective consciousness as we know it. It’s not that
things don’t mean anything to him, it’s that meaning itself
has no meaning to him. He has no access to it. Here we can
already see how human desire for meaning is itself
symptomatic of the fact that we cannot achieve this kind of
experience. Dr. Manhattan exists on the level of pure
substance, tapped in directly to the universe, without the
required alienation of subjective experience. And so in the
graphic novel that inspired the series Dr Manhattan leaves
Earth. He leaves us behind. “God is Dead”, God has
abandoned the world. He is somewhere out there in the
Galaxy, not paying attention anyone, because the very idea of
paying attention has no meaning for him.

The televised series takes place after this departure. One of

the things that has happened is that even though Dr.
Manhattan is gone, his presence remains in the public
consciousness. And so people put up what are essentially
telephone booths where they can record messages for Dr.
Manhattan that are broadcast into space on the off-chance
that he might hear them. It's like a confessional box. Even Dr.
Manhattan’s former lover routinely goes into these booths
because it gives her relief to send him messages. Of course
the whole point is that she can speak freely because she
knows he is not listening. And of course what sets off the
drama in the series is precisely that he does listen. And this is
not at all what she wants. She doesn’t actually want to speak
with him.

Something similar happens with prayer. The whole point of

prayer isn't to say, “I am sending a message to God”, but I am
communing with God. The difference can be explained
through the basic psychoanalytic concepts of psychosis and
hysteria. The psychotic believes that everything happens for a
reason, that every message sent to God is directly received.
Whereas the hysteric is the one who communes with God
precisely because God is not listening. This is also why the
elementary purpose of psychoanalytic analysis is induce
hysteria in the psychotic subject, to shatter the hermeneutic
completeness and reveal the hermeneutic temptation. Which
is why when someone says to you “I am praying for you”
they're actually doing the opposite, they’re praying for
themselves on your behalf, which is almost like dragging you
into their belief against your will.

On a related note, this is also why class struggle is not about

the relationship between classes. It's only the bourgeoisie who
would see class struggle as the process of climbing up the
ladder. Class struggle is precisely the recognition that what
appears as a ladder is a slide. There is no direct equivalence
between hard work and outcome. Class struggle is therefore
the name Marx gives to the re-emergence of a symptomatic
difference that was fetishistically disavowed within the
bourgeois conception of society. The process of releasing this
is therefore inherently hysterical. It consists in the
questioning of the very thing that you thought gave life
meaning.
In other words, the idea of class struggle is not simply that of
competition between classes, but the revelation that this
‘competition’ is the name of its opposite. When Nietzsche said
that the best way to keep a man enslaved is to convince him
he is free, he was making a similar argument. Class struggle
is precisely the awareness (Marx calls this class
‘consciousness’) that class is not a natural category, but an
artificial one. The idea of a competition between classes
masks the more important insight that the working class is
itself the product of there be no such equality of opportunity.
In other words, the only way for there to be equal
competition ‘between classes’ is to eliminate the class system
itself. The working class is therefore precisely the ‘truth’ of
capitalism, because it represents that which cannot be
symbolized by it. It’s a necessary exclusion, a ‘part of no part’.
The illusion of class struggle is therefore what obscures this
truth, and only class consciousness offers genuine resistance
against this very kind of ‘struggle’.

The important thing is that you cannot break through this on

an individual level. You can’t simply ‘see through it’ to make
it disappear. And so we’re back at the same principle
underlying the commodity fetish. Just because you know how
it works doesn’t mean that it loses its power. And so the only
way to actually change anything is to have that determinate
reflection inversed. Which means that we're back at Hegel
with reflexive determination. If everybody changes their
stance on reality, then reality itself changes. Which is to say, if
reality is determinately reflected, then the only way to
change reality is through reflexive determination, i.e. a shift
on the level of consciousness, not objective reality. This place
in which objective reality is determined on the level of
consciousness alone is what traditional leftists used to refer
to as utopia.

And the irony of course is that the only existing utopia today
is the utopia of pretending like we can continue to live the
way we do forever. As Fredric Jameson said, it’s easier for us
to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end
of capitalism. But of course this kind of disavowal, in which
we know that the world cannot continue the way it is, and
yet refuse to make the necessary changes to avert collapse, is
a utopian stance par excellence. And it's exactly when you
realize this, that the cost of sustaining our lifestyle (if that’s
even possible anymore) will be the end of the world as we
know it, even the end of our species. Then you realize that it
isn’t so much that we cannot imagine the end of capitalism,
it’s that we cannot imagine the world without capitalism.

In other words, we believe that when capitalism ends the

world will end. And in some sense this is true. Our fetishistic
attachment to capitalism is like that of the man to the
hamster. The problem is that like the hamster, capitalism as
we know it cannot survive. The question facing us now is
whether we will confront the original loss, or simply replace
the hamster with a mechanical one. One that can live forever
in a kind of half-life. This mechanical hamster is of course
called late-stage capitalism.
 CHAPTER 2
THE HERMENEUTIC TEMPTATION

“Death belongs to the realm of faith” -Jacques Lacan

Freud has a joke about religion, where he says that religion is

less extreme than psychoanalysis. Why? Because in religion
you're always held responsible for your actions and your
thoughts. But only in psychoanalysis are you also held
responsible for all the things you didn’t do, all the things you
didn’t think, etc.

What appears at first as a joke has a very serious meaning.

Psychoanalysis is not the process of unearthing trauma, or
the repressed experiences that can explain your symptoms.
No, the much darker truth of psychoanalytic analysis is that
you are nothing but your symptoms. There is nothing hiding
beneath the surface, nothing to exorcize from your being. On
a basic level, subjectivity is simply appearance, the grandest
illusion of them all.

This is why the Freudian unconscious is specifically not the

sub-conscious. For Freud there is never a repressed ‘dark side’
of your being that has to be held in check. On the contrary,
your very being, the ‘normal’ well-adjusted you is already in a
sense a fake, a double, suggesting to you that there was one
you to begin with. Subjectivity, in effect, is a form of mis-
recognition. This is what Lacan would later refer to as the
‘barred subject’.

Psychoanalysis is not intended to cure you of this.

It is not a battle between wills, where the ego has to choose
between the id and the super-ego like the classic image of the
two ‘others’, the angel and the demon sitting on your
shoulders. On the contrary, there is no ‘pure’ version of you
that can choose in the first place. Why? Because the ultimate
Other is (already) you. This is also why Lacan described the
unconscious as ‘the discourse of the Other’.

Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis share a common

feature with the Marxist critique of ideology. In both cases
one should resist the temptation to look for meaning in the
positive content of suffering as such. In other words, there is
no secret, repressed truth to the formal content of one’s
subjective experience of reality. Within Marxism this takes on
the form of the analysis of the disavowed content in the form
itself. In other words, to resist the hermeneutic temptation to
read meaning into events isolated from the structural
conditions of their occurrence.

Lacan illustrates this perfectly with his reading of the

Parrhasian veil. According to Greek mythology the painters
Parrhasius and Zeuxis staged a competition to determine who
could paint the most realistic painting. Both would paint a
bunch of grapes, and whoever would render them most
lifelike would be deemed the greater artist. Zeuxis painted a
a still-life so stunningly realistic that even the birds thought it
was real. Parrhssius, on the other hand, kept his painting
behind a curtain. When Zeuxis went to inspect what was
behind the curtain, he realized that the curtain was itself
painted onto the canvas.

Lacan insists that the classic divide between essence and

appearance should be inverted. Rather than being the
opposite of essence, appearance is the only true form in
which essence is realized. According to the Lacanian reading
of the myth of the Parrhasian veil, what appeared to be a
formal barrier to the painting contained the truth to the
painting. And therein lies the more truthful depiction of the
grape. In other words, not only does fantasy sustain reality,
fantasy contains the most truthful expression of reality. The
veil is not just that which prevents us from seeing, the veil
contains the truth of the situation itself. And once we realize
that the veil is fake, and that there is nothing behind the veil,
we realize that the veil contains the truth, the key, the secret.

Simply put, there is nothing behind the curtain, other than

the secret of the curtain itself. The secret is precisely that
there is no secret. In a similar sense Marxism is referred to as
a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’ because it's a method that
critiques the way in which there is no secret ‘behind’ the
commodity fetish other than the commodity fetish itself. In
other words, that there is no formal content hidden from us
other than the repressed content of the form itself. For
example, the best way to keep people poor is to tell them that
the rich know something they don’t and that they too can
become rich if they learn what the rich know. The basic
Marxist response would be to say that be belief in a such a
secret kind of knowledge is itself what keeps the secret of
capitalism obscured, which is that the capitalist is only rich
because the poor remain so. Moreover, that the capitalist is
perfectly happy to see a small minority of people be lifted out
of poverty, so that they can then blame the majority of
laborers for not doing enough to pull themselves up out of
poverty.

Zizek makes the same argument with a Jewish joke about a

Polish man who encounters a Jew on a train. The man asks
whether he can pay the Jewish man to teach him the secret
of how to become wealthy. The Jewish man takes his money
and begins to speak, asking him to pay more as he goes on.
He does this repeatedly, until the Polish man launches into
anti-Semitic tirade. He accuses the Jewish man of deceiving
him and taking advantage of him, refusing to pay him
anymore. The Jewish man simply smiles, and says to the
Polish man: “then I have just given you what you paid for”.

This process of finding the content of the form is what Zizek

and others call the critique of ideology. When Zizek says that
we should resist the hermeneutic temptation, he's not saying
that we should resist hermeneutics. He means that we should
avoid looking for the hidden meaning of something. It’s like
when you go to see a movie and your friend’s first question is
“what was the message of the movie?”. This kind of formal
analysis is totally alien to the Marxist tradition.

Let me give you another example. When you visit an art

gallery there's often an option where you can have an audio
tour of the gallery, a narrated guide. And technically that
seems like a wonderful idea. I remember the first time I took
an audio tour I thought to myself “this is great, this is going
to be really interesting, I'm going to learn a lot of things
about the paintings”. Until I realized that a lot of the audio
tour wasn't actually analyzing the painting, it was just giving
me normative and contextual information. And so it dawned
on me that these audio tours are primarily meant to reassure
you that you’re not somehow missing some vital information
in order to enhance your ‘experience’ of the gallery.

And I think that many people enter into a gallery with a

sense of insecurity. They don’t really know what they’re
expected to feel or think, and worse yet, they feel like they're
missing something. But art isn’t a test that you have to pass
or a code that has to be broken, nor should it be about
discerning the artist’s true intent. Of course the flip side here
is this shouldn’t lead us to say that ‘art can mean anything’ or
that every experience of art is relative. Adorno once said that
every work of art is a crime not committed. And it is in this
precise sense that we have to ‘interpret’ art, as something
which is supposed to defy and expose the existing standards
of interpretation.

The point I’m trying to make is that we have here a form of

the hermeneutic temptation. We worry that we’ve missed a
deeper meaning. But secretly this desire to ‘know the true
meaning’ of the painting is a way to neutralize it, to prevent
it from really affecting you. Think about the way in which
you can make a horror movie less scary by reminding
yourself that it’s just a movie. You visualize the set, the
actors, the lighting. All of the distinctly contextual details
that take you out of the experience of the film.

And so here we have what presents itself as a hermeneutic

temptation, but the real desire is to neutralize the object.
That is, to rob it of whatever makes it jarring. To that extent,
the hermeneutic temptation is similar to wanting to put
everything in its right place, to make nothing stands out or
allow it to destabilize you. As long as something can be made
to make sense, we feel reassured. We fear what we cannot
understand, and we understand by trying to incorporate
things into our way of seeing things. When an event, or a
work of art escapes the norm, we try to make it fit to our
preconceived models of understanding. The same can be true
for world events. Whenever something happens that seems
excessive or unexpected, our immediate instinct is to try to
rationalize it. Most of what we see on the news isn’t just
informing us, it’s function is to reassure us. It’s the
reassurance that everything can be explained.

The satirical writer Terry Pratchett has a joke in one of his

‘Discworld’ novels, where he says that when we watch the
‘news’ we are really looking for a confirmation of ‘the olds’.
When you turn on the news, you’re not really seeing anything
new. It’s mostly the same, but in a new variations of a theme.
Age-old conflicts, injustices, crises, and natural catastrophes.
These things horrify us. And yet there is somehow in a very
twisted sense something reassuring about the fact that these
things are happening. Especially if they’re happening
somewhere else. Walter Benjamin has this beautiful
observation that in the deluge of World War 2, where nobody
really knew where the front line was, the people would go to
watch the news broadcasts as a way to reassure themselves
that the war was actually happening somewhere else.

Which isn’t to say that the news is false. Of course today we

are all very preoccupied with misinformation and so-called
‘fake news’, but it’s important to note that propaganda
doesn’t have to be untrue to be false. It’s a bit like when
Lacan says that just because it turns out that the wife truly is
cheating on the husband, it doesn’t mean that his jealousy
isn’t still pathological.

We equate propaganda with disinformation, however

propaganda is closer to misinformation. What is the
difference? The difference is that disinformation is when you
have created something that is non-factual, essentially a lie.
Misinformation is when you're performing a certain spin. And
here's the funny thing, to spin something doesn't mean that
you're just spinning an untruth. You usually tend to spin
something because it’s true. The whole point of spin is that
you are retroactively shaping that which took place
depending on how you're portraying it. And so one of the
things that people don't always realize about propaganda is
that we think of propaganda as being inherently false, but
that’s not the case. Technically propaganda can be true. It's
just about the way in which you are framing the supposedly
neutral information. And as many people have discovered
today, the best way to preform spin, is to frame the
information as being neutral. This would be much closer to
the Marxist critique of the news. Not “what is being hidden
from me”, but rather, how does the supposed neutrality of the
news contain its own subject framing?

The kind of thing that makes the news is usually visually

arresting. It can be a policeman beating a protestor or a
rocket hitting a building. This is what Zizek calls
‘subjectivized’ violence. And it always obscures the hidden
reality of structural, systemic violence. This means that the
hermeneutic temptation to explain such outbursts of
subjective violence is precisely what keeps the structural,
obscured, invisible violence, alive.

Which isn’t to say that we should look away, but rather to ask
the more important question of what kind of violence isn’t
making it into the news. And, more importantly, how
subjective outbursts of violence often obscure structural
forms of invisible violence. The classic instance being of
course domestic violence, but also the violence of poverty
generally; let alone the violence against people of color, all of
which is routinely obscured.

But here too we have to resist a simple hermeneutic

explanation, which would be to accuse newscasters of hostile
intent. There is no conspiracy to keep structural violence out
of the news. The more important critique is to determine how
the very visibility of such outbursts of violence themselves
contribute towards structural violence. Here we can see how
the liberal critique would be the exact opposite of the Marxist
interpretive method. Let’s say you see an instance of racial
police brutality in the news. The liberal would respond by
saying that this explosion of violence is simply the most
visible component of the violence committed against people
of color every day. The Marxist, on the other hand, would
point out that it’s because we have such graphic outbursts on
the news that the daily reality is repressed. In other words,
the liberal emphasizes the content hidden behind the
violence, whereas the Marxist analyzes the content of the
form itself.
And so whenever a public outburst of violence takes place,
whether a protest or a terrorist attack, the immediate
response is to ‘interpret’ the meaning of the act. Pundits,
journalists, theorists, the ‘vox populi’ try to ‘make meaning’ of
something which seems to defy meaning. In general, these
responses take two forms: liberal and conservative. Let us
take, for example, the Columbine High-School shooting,
during which a pair of teenagers massacred their fellow
students and teachers. The response took the following
forms: The conservative response blamed the act on the
degeneration of social norms, and cited the violence depicted
on television and video games as being the true culprit. They
singled out the shock-rocker Marilyn Manson, whose music
the culprits favored. Marilyn Manson, on the other hand,
epitomized the liberal response. Interviewed for Michael
Moore’s documentary ‘Bowling for Columbine’ he said that
instead of asking hm why the boys had done it, someone
should have asked the boys themselves what they thought
they were doing.

Here we have the classic hermeneutic divide between the

liberal and conservative worldview. The liberal points
towards the violence as a symptomatic expression of the
voiceless. The same explanation holds for riots and acts of
terror. Rioters are trying to be heard by a society that does’t
recognize their voice. Terrorists are disaffected youth who
only want to be loved. Of course what this accomplishes is
that it denies these groups precisely the ‘pure’ content of their
expression: the violence. It attempts to neuter the horrific
content by means of explaining it as an expression of
desperation. The liberal interprets the violence as a last
resort, a desperate plea for help. The second step is to
suggest common-sense solutions. More diplomacy with
foreign nations, better outreach programs for disaffected
youth policy solutions, etc.

The reactionary response to such interpretations usually

combines the liberal and the conservative interpretations.
“White people are the real victims in society whose voices
aren’t heard”, and this is a result of “societal decline brought
upon by immigrants”.

And so it is the temptation to look for a hidden message in

outbursts of violence that Zizek rejects. His most well-known
example is the London riots of 2011, when groups of mostly
Black Londoners went on a looting spree through central
London. The liberal interpretation was that these were
disaffected youth who had been denied societal integration.
The conservative interpretation argued that this was the
result of diminished police presence, lack of public order, and
greed. The reactionary interpretation combined the two into
a racist explanation: the rioters were clearly a sign of racially
determined aggression, which was the leading cause of
societal decline.

Instead of trying to interpret why these youths were

committing such heinous acts, Zizek argued that the best
thing we can do is to refuse all interpretation. To say that the
message of the violence was precisely that it resisted the
hermeneutic temptation. Which isn’t to say that there was no
message, but that the message was no message. In other
words, that the intended message was the content of the
form itself. There was no underlying reason, the violence
didn’t represent anything. The violence symbolized only a
deadlock, a positing of something uninterpretable. And this,
in an almost McLuhean fashion, is precisely the message. The
violence was not meant to mean anything, or to voice some
societal issue, but to stand as an uninterpretable outburst
itself. Any attempt to interpret it and find a hidden meaning
underneath would only be another way to neutralize it. To
return to Adorno: every work of art contains a crime not
committed.

Now what's interesting here is that we're very close to

understanding the important theoretical difference in
Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis between hysteria and
psychosis. Psychosis is when everything is meaningful,
everything is connected. Nothing sticks out and everything
can be accounted for. Hysteria, on the other hand, is the basic
awareness that meaning is always incomplete. For example
that you cannot control what somebody else thinks about
you. It’s an awareness of a fundamental gap between your
experience and the experience of the other.

Psychosis is in a sense almost blissful and comforting. It

means that you have no reason to doubt the completeness of
your experience.What’s important is that this completeness
can even incorporate the subject’s incompleteness. Sartre
argued as much when he told the anecdote about a woman
who believed she was receiving telephone calls from God.
When the psychotherapist told her that these calls were not
real, she replied: “Of I course I know they are not real, but
does He know that!?”

This means that even the subjective doubting can be

incorporated into the psychotic attachment. For example, the
conspiracy theorist finds meaning in everything precisely
because he cannot cease questioning. The important point is
that psychotic attachment is not because he finds supposedly
hidden meaning or messages in otherwise neutral events and
expressions. The psychotic attachment is that he believes that
all of these messages are being hidden from us. In other
words, the problem is not finding meaning in things that are
only tangentially related, but in the belief that everything is
connected by a hidden hand, a malicious purpose.

And here we are again back at the so-called ‘hermeneutic

temptation. The conspiracy theorist is precisely not the
hysteric, because his paranoia means that everything happens
for a reason. Every detail, no matter how small, has to mean
something. And what it means is always this: the meaning is
being obscured or hidden from us. In other words, the true
repressed content, and therefore the fetishistic attachment of
the paranoid subject, is always the belief that someone wants
him not to know. And therefore the pleasure derives from
obtaining this knowledge despite not being supposed to have
it. The conspiracy theorist is in that sense precisely someone
who cannot resist the hermeneutic temptation.
There’s a funny meme about vaccine hesitancy that made a
similar point. In the meme we see a man with a skeptical
look on his face thinking out loud: “Once the government
said that we had to take the vaccine, the only people getting
sick are those who refused to take it!”.

Hysteria does the exact opposite. What appears as perfectly

meaningful is questioned as being incomplete. The classic
hysterical question within a relationship is “do you love me ?”
There’s a popular Tiktok video that illustrates this perfectly.
In the video we see a relationship from the perspective of a
young woman. She’s in love and together with her partner
she’s had the most perfect day. They’re doing all the things
that you should do when you’re in love. Going out for ice-
cream, holding hands, reading books together.

But when he goes to sleep she lies awake next to him,

thinking to herself “does he really love me?”. This is how
hysteria works. It’s similar to Lacan’s theory of anxiety. You
are not questioning the other’s love because they treat you
poorly. You’re questioning it because they treat you so well!
In other words, the hysterical questioning is never about
interpreting the positive content of an experience, but the
excessive, non-symbolized something that resists this
interpretation. Everything is perfect, and yet…the hysterical
question remains. For Lacan, like with anxiety, there is more
truth to this hysteria, because it’s what Zizek would call the
indivisible remainder, the thing that is not structured by
anything other than itself. It’s also why Lacan always joked
that Hegel was the ‘Sublime Hysteric’, because he absolutized
that excessive hysterical substance into an entire
philosophical system of the Absolute.

And so within Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis the purpose

of analysis is not to cure you, and specifically not to make
you better adapted towards the world, but to provide a
disruption into what you perceive as being full of meaning.
For Lacan we cannot possibly engage with reality on the level
of objective experience. Moreover, our sense of reality
emerges only through its perceive fall into fantasy. This is
why Lacan says that death exists in the realm of faith. We
cannot know it, and yet it structures our entire experience of
being alive. And yet death cannot be known whilst we are
alive. The same holds true for our attachment to reality. It
can only be sustained because it cannot be know. It cannot be
fully inhabited. As soon as we submit to the hermeneutic
temptation and try to attribute objective content to the
subjective experience of reality, we are already lost.
 CHAPTER 3
EVERYTHING IS ABOUT SEX

“Everything is about sex, except sex. Sex is about

power” - Oscar Wilde

“Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about

power” is a quote commonly attributed to Oscar Wilde. But
the expression contains a distinctly Freudian/Lacanian
dilemma. Sex is that which resists symbolization, precisely
because it imbues everything else with meaning. Power, like
sex, has no formal content. It is empty in the sense that its
meaning is expressed only through the meaning it transfers.
And yet this hermeneutic emptiness, the lack of a positive,
unmediated content, is what makes sex and power the most
concrete instances of pure unmediated potential.

This suggests a new dimension for what I have been calling

‘the hermeneutic temptation’. One can also infer meaning
into something which has no formal meaning. In other
words, the temptation to create meaning can be precisely
that we read ‘nothing’ into something. In other words, to
interpret something as being empty, formally devoid of
content, is itself a hermeneutic claim. For example, when we
say that silence speaks louder than words, we are saying that
there is a positive content to be perceived absence of form. In
other words, that the form of such speech is itself the absence
of any communicative form. This is what Lacan refers to as
the anorexic’s dilemma. The anorexic is not simply depriving
himself of food. Strictly speaking, he is eating nothingness
itself.

Another example is less destructive, but follows the same

logic. Let’s say you go out into the woods to experience the
sensation of being alone in nature. Quickly you will start to
feel how small you are, and that the things that preoccupy
you in your ordinary life don’t really seem to matter. Maybe
you even start sensing that everything is connected, that
there is some higher agency or intelligence regulating things
for you. It is easy to feel this way when you are secluded in
the woods. But this is actually exactly where you have to be
very suspicious. This is the hermeneutic temptation par
excellence, when you are confronted with something that
defies meaning it creates a false sense of having some deeper
meaning.

Darwin would have immediately seen the problem. Isn’t his

evolutionary theory precisely a way to resist the hermeneutic
temptation? Darwin was not arguing that the natural order
had a teleological purpose, no matter what the social
darwinists make of it. Nature is not the survival of the fittest.
It is the exact other way around. Whoever survives is
retroactively the fittest. Fitness, in other words, is not a
precondition of success but a necessary appearance of what is
an otherwise contingent process. The survival of the fittest is
not the success of the formal characteristics of fitness, but the
process by which in hindsight the characteristics that become
dominant are considered fit.
What seems at first like a simply inversion contains a much
more radical insight. If nature has a purpose, or a hidden
meaning, it’s precisely this process by which the contingent
becomes retroactively imbued with necessity.

So when Zizek characterizes Darwin’s evolutionary theory as

one of the great humiliations of mankind, he means that
man’s purpose is therefore in a sense a retroactive illusion.
The humiliation resides in the fact that we cannot go beyond
this illusion. Even the tendency to reject such an illusion in a
nihilistic fashion necessarily fails. Because what evolution
teaches us is that this lack of direction, this necessary
contingency, is the formal structure of becoming itself. And
yet to seek to embrace this as a kind of anarchy or chaos is
itself an illusion. Why? Because the meaning of life,
according to evolutionary theory, is precisely that it is a
structured as pure form. Or what Hegel would call the
positing of its own presuppositions. One can imagine Darwin
reading the Kantian imperative and finding the same
evolutionary drive reflected in nature: “Du Kannst denn du
sollst!” You can because you must.

And so the Darwinian ‘humiliation’ that Zizek speaks of is in a

sense also the end of the ideal of a self-transparent subject. A
subject that fully inhabits itself. For Darwin our existence is
not based on anything natural, but is strictly speaking the
result of contingent biological circumstances. Necessity and
contingency are here revealed to be two sides of the same
coin. What is necessary is actualized through a contingent
sequence of evolving circumstances, and evolution reflects
this contingency through the appearance of necessity. Nature
is in this sense not just ‘a historical category’ as Lukacs
famously put it, but a category of history. In other words, life
can be measured against everything except life itself. And
what is life? Life is evolution. We cannot experience nature as
anything but a historicization of ourselves as this inner limit,
the empty space of nature itself.

Aristotle was possibly the first to formalize this dilemma with

his idea of the political animal. Man is at his most natural
precisely when he exits nature, when he leaves it behind and
forms a community. And man is most alienated when he
returns to a state of nature. So man is the only species whose
very substance is predicated on this kind of ‘natural’
alienation.

There's a beautiful passage in Alexandre Dumas’ ‘The Count

of Monte Cristo’ where two men who are being brought to
the gallows to be hanged. They have basically resigned
themselves to their fate and face their death without
resistance. Until at the very last moment one of the two men
is pardoned. It's at that moment that the other man
completely freaks out and goes into a frenzy of resistance.

This is the human condition. The reason we rage against the

void isn’t out of self-preservation, but because we know that
others will live when we no longer do. To put it differently,
we are most human not when we see our own condition
reflected in others, but when we see others who have it
better than us. Or at least we think they do. For Lacan desire
is the desire of the Other because we believe the Other has
something that we are lacking. However, this object of desire,
the object a, doesn’t have to be a thing. The object a is
therefore never the cause of our desire but the object-cause of
desire. The Lacanian radicalization of Freud is precisely that
the loss, or the lack, is itself counted as a thing. What we
desire is desire itself.

Another word for this experience is of course, society. We

behave naturally when we are in society and not when we act
out of pure instinct. This is also why for Freud the idea of
drive is never the same as instinct. Drive comes as a result of
subjectivity and our awareness that we exist to the other.
What makes us human is the capacity to withstand instinct
on behalf of desire. To totally dehumanize someone is to
reduce them to the level of pure instinct, the will to survival.

This is also what happens when you look at younger people.

Younger people will not only outlast you, they will most likely
forget you. This is why it is so tempting to fantasize about the
end of the world coinciding with your own death. The
greatest insult to life isn’t that we cease to exist, it’s that we
cease to exist for others. And this is why drive forces us to
close this gap. We want to do things that will make us be
remembered after we are gone. Having children is one of
those things. We want to pass something on to future
generations, etc. But now we are doing something on behalf
of an imagined future that we will not experience. Once
again, reality is sustained by fantasy.

In Douglas Adams’ novel ‘The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’

there is a famous scene where a race of immortal humanoids
creates a supercomputer to calculate the answer as to the
meaning of life. The computer tells them that it will take at
least a thousand years to calculate the answer. Finally, the
computer announces that it’ ready to provide the answer. The
computer warns them “you probably won’t like the answer”.
The answer is the number ’42’. The eternal beings are
stunned. 42 doesn’t mean anything to them. At first they are
confused, then they are angry. And so the supercomputer
suggests that since they don’t understand the answer, perhaps
they need to first know the question. And how do you
calculate the question of the meaning of life? You have to be
alive. In other words, you cannot be an immortal being. And
so the computer creates a massive simulation of life on Earth
in order to calculate the question to which the answer is
already known, namely 42.

A couple of things are important here. First, the immortal

beings cannot properly conceive of the meaning of life
because they don’t know what life is. After all, the experience
of life is overdetermined by the sense of an ending. And vice,
versa, they cannot have meaning without having a simulation
of life. Which means that life is itself the answer inasmuch as
it is the question. This is not just a pseudo-philosophical
truism. Instead, the more Hegelian point is that life presents
an existential question, “what does it mean?”, which can only
be answered when we see the question itself in a new light.
This is why one cannot simply skip forward towards the
answer, without first living the impossibility of the question.
However, and here we should make the final Escher-like
inversion, the truth is of course that it is precisely human
beings who need the idea of a fictionalized immortal race, to
think about life. In other words, in order to determine the
meaning of life, we imagine asking a super-computer to write
a book called ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ for us.
Once again the old dictum “fiction is the lie that tells the
truth” is more accurate than we could have realized. And
now we can see Darwin’s theory in a similar light. The
meaning of life is simply the lie that tells the truth of
evolution.

The temptation to read meaning into something precisely

because it appears meaningless, can be contradicted through
the counting of something as nothing. The former is
essentially conservative and the latter has a revolutionary
core. A good way to exemplify this is with the difference
between the Netflix tv-series ‘The Crown’ (2016) and a less
well known Zizek joke.

‘The Crown’ is a fictionalized historical drama based loosely

on the rule of Elizabeth II. A common thread throughout the
series is the conservative adage that sometimes the hardest
thing to do is to do nothing at all. This is of course the
particular predicament of being a monarch. Being the figure-
head of power means that you are in an immediate sense
powerless. Any action you take undermines your authority,
and therefore the best way to increase your power is to
refrain from using it. On the level of individual agency the
monarch is the empty site of power, the monarchy’s own
internal limit.

The reverse of this can be found in a Zizek joke. He describes

a man who puts two glasses of water on his bedstead every
night. One of them is a full glass of water, and the other one
is empty. Asked why he does this, the man says that he never
knows whether he’ll be thirsty at night or not. So the full
glass is for when he’s thirsty and the empty glass is for when
he’s not. The point here is that the empty glasses represents a
nothing counted as something, or in more technical terms, a
lack made positive. As Nietzsche put it, it’s one thing to want
for nothing, and another to want nothingness itself.

The figure of the monarch and the empty glass of water can
be seen as two sides of the same coin. The empty glass is the
formal content of a ‘nothing’, whereas the monarch is the
formal content of a something. To put it in Oscar Wilde’s
formula, if everything is about the monarch, then what is the
monarch about? Power. Whereas with the empty glass we
have a short circuit. If everything is about thirst, then what is
the empty glass about? About choosing the formal content of
no-thirst.

This is exactly how we should approach the question of the

meaning of life. Which is that the emptiness of being has to
be posited as a substantial entity as such. In a Lacanian sense,
the word for this emptiness is nothing other than subjectivity
itself. Remember, for Lacan we never just want to fulfill a
need, we want to sustain it. The central hole we experience
at the core of our being is what fills itself in. We are not
simply without, we are with without. The same is true for
Zizek’s famous joke (taken from an Ernst Lubitsch film) about
a customer at a café who asks the waiter for a coffee without
milk. The waiter replies: “I am sorry sir. I am afraid we don’t
have any milk. But I can offer you a coffee without cream
instead”. The crucial difference is that in both cases the
coffee is not just black. The thing it is lacking can be filled in
through two distinct entities. The way in which we count an
absence has itself a formal positive content. In this way coffee
without cream is completely different from coffee without
milk.
For Freud and Lacan the condition of human experience as
such is predicated on this constitutive negativity, experienced
through the separation from the mother, which occurs
already when we recognize the Mother as other. However
this othering is not strictly speaking a gap between the
Mother and the child, but is transposed into the child itself.

In other words, the so-called ‘subject’ is this barred subject,

the nothing counted as something, the empty glass of water.
What’s important here is that the void does not simply ‘come
first’, but the void is retroactively created and sustained by
the very drive which seeks to fill it in. No wonder that the
möbius strip is an image Zizek commonly uses to illustrate
this process. For Hegel this is the famous negation of
negation, which moves not just in a forward temporal
direction, but is always already pre-mediated. There is no
‘neutral’ starting point that hasn’t already been the subject of
said mediation. Once again, the ‘link’ to Darwin should be
clear here. Darwin’s famous missing link is not just missing, it
is precisely there in its very absence. Darwin’s theory of
evolution is often presented as the antithesis to the Catholic
faith. But here we can detect the unacknowledged Catholic
dimension in the Darwinian edifice. The dialectic of presence
and absence dictates that the missing link is the constitutive
factor for all becoming, which the structuralists would call a
vanishing mediator. It exists only to the extent that it serves a
transitional purpose. Its true purpose is fulfilled in the exact
moment it becomes obsolete. This is the final and most
comedic humiliation of Darwin’s theory of evolution. It
presents a perfect naturalization of the Christian dialectic of
presence as absence.
There’s a Marlene Dietrich joke that only makes sense in
German. She once said “as I get older, I’ve come to realize
that when it comes to men, one can do without’” In German
the final part of the expression is “Mann Kann auch Ohne”,
which when taken literally translates into English as “Men
can do without”. As with any good joke, it has multiple layers
of meaning. As she ages, she doesn’t just realize that she can
do without men, she realizes that men can do without her.
And the formal realization of the latter is retroactively the
realization of the former. It’s a very clever dialectical joke.
And to my mind much more feminist than some of the stuff
we see today.

The classic remark that ‘everything is about sex, except sex

itself, should therefore also be applied to what some people
see today as the stereotypical feminist hermeneutic
operation; i.e. to identify existing objects as being secretly, or
not so secretly, phallic symbols of the patriarchy. According to
this argument neckties are phallic icons, Jeff Bezo’s rocket is
a phallic colossus, skyscrapers are totemic phalluses, etc. It’s
fairly easy to play this game where we point towards icons of
dominance and associate them with phallic imagery. But it
doesn’t really tell us anything. It’s similar to how for Freud
the point of dream analysis was never just to decode the
supposed symbolism of the dream. There’s nothing really
meaningful in what he called the latent content of the dream.
You dream of falling off a cliff , so you’re afraid of the future,
well, who isn’t? The goal is not to look behind the latent
dream content, but to inquire into what he called the dream-
work. In other words how something became repressed into
the latent dream content.
We should keep this in mind when it comes to decoding
phallic imagery. First of all, it’s not very remarkable to point
out that a rocket looks like a penis. And second of all, it
seems to achieve the opposite result, which is to suggest vice
versa that there are supposedly inherently female symbols,
like round objects, that can be contrasted with the rigidness
of masculine icons. We soon end up in a very regressive
critique where masculine and feminine exist almost as
different archetypes. This kind of analysis, whilst
entertaining, leads to a formalization that doesn’t serve any
critical, let alone emancipatory purpose. To go back to Freud,
this is why the purpose of the dream analysis should never be
to inquire only into the symbolism of the dream, but to
investigate what he calls the dream-work, i.e. the reason why
something was repressed to the point where it needed
symbolization in another form.

Strictly speaking we are therefore no longer looking for the

hidden secret of the dream, but inquiring into the content
hidden in the form itself, in other words, instead of a secret
content we want to discover the secret that there was no such
content. This secret of trying to suggest there is something to
be kept secret, is what Lacan calls ‘appearance’. And so
feminism, to resist the hermeneutic temptation, has to look
for appearance, not just semblance. In other words, it’s not
enough to simply identify the semblance between male
power and phallic objects, but to inquire why and how such
symbols become part of the social order in the first place. In
other words, the question isn’t just why does a rocket look
phallic, but what makes a penis look phallic? The Freudian/
Lacanian answer to this should be evident: it’s because
everything is about sex, except the sex organ itself.
We can see a surprisingly similar argument in Hegel’s cryptic
remark that the secrets of the Egyptians were secrets to the
Egyptians themselves. What this means that there are no
secret clues that we can discover to uncover the secrets kept
from us both by time and intent, but that the very things that
would puzzle us today would not have puzzled the Egyptians
whatsoever. Likewise, we cannot know what it is about our
lives today that will puzzle historians of the future. Most
likely what will be lost to time will be the things that were so
unremarkable to us that they weren’t even worth recording.
The secrets of our time are secrets to us as well.

Something similar happens with the castration complex. For

both Freud and Lacan the castration complex is specifically
not that you have lost the penis. It is not that you have
physically been castrated, but the other way around. I like to
think of it as being the opposite of what clinical psychologists
call the phantom limb syndrome. The phantom limb
syndrome is when someone loses a limb and yet experiences
it as if it were still there. Whereas the castration complex is
when the penis is still there, but it feels like it has
disappeared. This ‘missing’ penis is the phallus. Or, to use our
previous image, the empty glass of water. Something counted
as nothing.

The castration complex means that you still have the penis,
but you experience it as missing. The paradox is that it
appears to have more positive content precisely in this
symbolic absence. Of course this does not, and cannot occur
on the level of actual physical castration, and so it always
takes place on the level of losing some other level of
signifying authority. The angry father is therefore impotent
precisely in his rage. If he was truly powerful he wouldn’t
even have to be angry. The bitter irony is that there is no
authentic content to the phallus as such. Now we can see
why it is not enough to label the rocket as ‘phallic’. Because
phallus is already this constitutive negativity, the something
counted as nothing. The rocket, rather than revealing the
hidden content of the penis, hides the fact that the penis was
already missing, that there was nothing to be hidden. This is
what we mean by the content of the form.

From this we can take an even more radical step, which is to

say that power only exists on the level of this impotence.
There is no positive content to power as such, except the very
act of papering over this empty space. All power is
illegitimate in this precise sense. It cannot be grounded in its
own being, it emerges only retroactively through the
perceived positive content of something which was already
lost. Power retroactively generates the very thing it falls from.

And so to go back to the idea that everything is about sex,

except sex itself. Then the answer to the question “what is sex
about” has to be ‘power’. Precisely because power always
exists as an attempt to mask this short-circuit, the empty
space. And what is the perfect icon of this kind of empty
power? Of course it is the phallus. So if we go back to Zizek’s
idea of counting something as nothing, which he already
identifies in the pre-Socratic idea of ‘den’ vs. ‘ou-den’,
(nothing vs. o-thing) the phallus is that thing which is
something counted as nothing, and the name for this
counting is the castration complex. A complex that gives rise
to a seemingly endless chain of signification and
formalization of said power in the symbolic order. This gives
a completely different meaning to the idea of ‘compensating’.

The phallic icon, be it a rocket or a skyscraper is therefore not

just ‘compensating’ for a perceived absence of virility of
masculinity, but is precisely the potent symbol generated by
the empty place of power itself. Seen in this light it should
also become apparent why Augustine dedicated such
seemingly inappropriate attention to the idea that the phallus
is the only ‘spontaneous’ or ‘natural’ part of man, because an
erection (or loss thereof) cannot be controlled. The
involuntary chaotic nature of the penis is contrasted in the
structure provided by the symbolic (phallic) order. To go back
to Aristotle, man is at his most natural when he turns away
from nature and meets himself in the human community. The
ironic twist, which we can now see through the lens of
Freudian/Lacanian psychoanalysis, is that the social relations
are themselves structured according to this symbolic absence
of man’s connection to his most natural part: man is not just
zoon politikon, but zoon phallikon.
 CHAPTER 4
HEAVEN & HELL

“Better to reign in Hell, than to serve in heaven” -John

Milton, Paradise Lost

There’s an interesting observation from Thomas of Aquinas

where he talks about heaven and hell. He says that if
knowledge in heaven is absolute, if part of being in heaven is
that you are all-knowing, then this presents a real ethical
problem. Because it means that people in heaven know that
other people are in hell. And so what do you do with your
knowledge of hell, and what does it do to the idea of heaven?
The crucial question for Aquinas is therefore: does the
knowledge of other people’s suffering ruin the tranquility of
those who are in heaven?

He has a very slippery way of getting out of this problem. He

says that yes people in heaven know about hell, but it
satisfies them to know that divine justice exists. So part of the
happiness of being in heaven is that you know that only the
deserving are in heaven and the wicked are doomed. The fact
that sinners are being punished is only a sign that all is as it
should be, everything is in its right place. Earth is that chaotic
place where nobody gets what they deserve, but heaven
settles all scores.

Zizek reads this passage and makes the entirely appropriate

Lacanian remark, which is that what makes heaven so
enjoyable is precisely this knowledge. The only way to really
enjoy heaven is to be aware of how much worse it could have
been. Moreover, that in a sadistic sense, we cannot enjoy our
own pleasure without knowing about the suffering of others.

Eternal life in heaven is therefore linked to the eternal

damnation of those who didn’t make it in. Heaven wouldn’t
be heaven without hell. Maybe we could even imagine a
giant monitor where those in heaven can watch in real-time
all the tortures taking place in hell. This is the perfect
illustration of the Brechtian joke about Hollywood, where he
says that when God was making heaven and hell he decided
that rather than building two realms from scratch, he could
create one realm and make it heaven for the rich and hell for
the poor. And he called that place the United States of
America.

What’s important about Zizek’s reading of Aquinas is that

there is no distinct separation between joy and suffering. The
Lacanian influence should be immediately apparent. We are
talking here about surplus enjoyment. Part of what makes
heaven pleasurable is the knowledge of hell, and vice versa
part of what makes hell so painful is precisely the knowledge
that up there, life is perfect bliss. This ‘extra’ satisfaction that
is not innate to the content of either heaven or hell is what
Lacan would have called surplus enjoyment. The surplus is
not just the possibility of enjoying your own suffering, but
enjoying the suffering of others. The properly Sadean
conclusion would be to argue that the only ‘real’ heaven is
precisely hell. Because only hell provides the obscene
enjoyment of rejecting the normative divide itself. This is also
what makes Milton’s Paradise Lost so romantic. Isn’t Satan
really just the first anti-hero, cast out of heaven because he
sees through this obscene enjoyment? “Better to reign in hell
than to serve in heaven.” What Master does one serve in
heaven? It’s the master of jouissance. One can imagine a
version of heaven in which the pleasure-principle is so
strongly enforced that it is forbidden not to enjoy oneself.
And isn’t this precisely the ‘heaven’ of today’s capitalist
society, in which the main ethical prerogative is to always be
happy and enjoy life?

Lacan refers to surplus value as ‘plus de jouir’, so it’s not just

‘more enjoyment’ but specifically an almost uncanny,
excessive enjoyment, an enjoyment that doesn’t simply derive
from the formal contents of the thing intended to give us joy,
but emerges through its perceived negation. We can relate
this to another important Lacanian idea, which implicitly also
recalls the Hegelian inversion of abstract and concrete. When
Lacan says that all knowledge is private, and all belief is
public, he is inverting the traditional idea that what we do in
public is sustained by know-how and what we do in private is
sustained by belief. For example, as Zizek has often pointed
out, it used to be that we thought that people had to be
devout believers in public but could basically be Satanists in
private. Zizek argues that today it is the exact other way
around. In public we pretend to be good secular atheists, but
privately we believe in all kinds of things. There’s a Tiktok
video that is a perfect illustration of this. In the video we see
a young man on an airplane, fervently praying to God. And
the caption reads “All the Atheism leaving my body when the
turbulence hits.”

And so when Lacan says that belief is public and knowledge

is private, what he means is that our engagement with reality
is sustained by fantasy, whereas on the level of our own
private fantasies we deal with them in a more or less rational
way. Remember when Marx famously writes that people
don’t know what they do, and therefore they continue to do
it? For Lacan it is always the other way around. We know
perfectly well what we are doing, and it is precisely this
knowledge that sustains our doing it nevertheless. Or, as
Zizek has often joked, it’s like the rational man who has a
horseshoe for good luck. Asked why he believes in such
superstitions, he says: “I’ve been told that it works even if I
don’t believe in it”. On a certain level all belief functions this
way. We don’t fully inhabit the belief, we do it on behalf of
the Other, and thereby sustain it for ourselves. We know it
doesn’t work and yet as soon as we need it, we feel the
atheism leaving our body. In other words, faith doesn’t
necessarily function on the level of belief, it can function on
the level of disavowal. Chesterton has a similar argument
when he says that when you pray, you don’t pray because you
believe in God, you pray because you want to act as if you
believe in God.

The crucial part the argument is this: belief cannot simply be

separated into ‘real’ or ‘false’ belief. All faith is in a sense
‘empty’. If it were based on knowledge it would no longer be
faith. Something similar is true for trust. Strictly speaking,
trust can only be trust when there is no discernible reason
why you should trust someone. It has to occur as a leap of
faith. As soon as you ‘know’ you can trust someone it is no
longer trust, it has transformed into experience.

What is the link here to the Lacanian idea of surplus

enjoyment? The point is that enjoyment is never the direct
experience of the positive content of something. Enjoyment
emerges retroactively through its perceived negation. In other
words, the ‘surplus’ in surplus enjoyment is never just ‘extra’.
The surplus is that which goes beyond pleasure, that which
emerges at what should appear as the limit of pleasure. This
is surplus enjoyment in its purest form. Even when we
renounce our enjoyment we can secretly derive pleasure from
this very renunciation.

Let me give you an example: Lacan says that we should

always be suspicious of sacrifice.Why? Because sacrifice
always contains a form of unacknowledged pleasure for the
person who is doing the sacrificing. Sacrifice is always done
on behalf of the other, and therefore always contains a form
of excessive enjoyment. For example, a parent will sacrifice
their own happiness for their child. But of course this is
because once they have children they realize that nothing
makes them happy, except giving their child happiness. In its
most manipulative mode, this can mean that the parent
wants the child to take over their dream, for example, to
become an athlete. The parent is secretly relieved that they
can pass on the burden of the dream to their child. The
parent can enjoy being relieved of the burden of having to
live up to the dream, and so it is passed on. Meanwhile, the
child wants to please the parent, and therefore the child
becomes unhappy. It’s a paradox that many of you may have
experienced in your own life.

The same is true when we try to kick a bad habit. Sometimes

it’s more pleasurable to quit something than to continue it.
Moreover, you might realize that the very act of believing you
can quit anytime sustains the habit. Or even worse, the
process of kicking the habit becomes the habit! For example,
the final cigarette is always more enjoyable than the regular
cigarette. You quickly realize that the only way to derive
more pleasure from smoking is to go through this constant
repetitive act of quitting and then starting again. This is also
why Freud’s death-drive has nothing to do with a desire for
self-destruction, and has much more to do with this kind of
repetitive paralysis where we ‘stop’ something only so as to
sustain it. After all the easiest way to finish a whole bar of
chocolate or an entire bag of chips is to keep telling yourself
that you’re just taking ‘one last bite’. On the level of surplus
enjoyment this is why we choose foods and drinks that give
us this sense of constantly eating nothing. For example pop-
corn or celery. I remember when celery was advertised as the
ultimate food, because it supposedly burns more calories to
eat it than is in the food. This kind of short-circuit, where you
enjoy the seeming opposite of the thing is the perfect
illustration of surplus enjoyment.

The important insight here is that we don’t want the direct

enjoyment of the thing itself. We enjoy the excessive
enjoyment, the surplus enjoyment, that which resists
symbolization. And for Lacan this is precisely what he calls
‘the real’. The real is the kernel of ‘empty’ enjoyment which is
forever outside our grasp and yet sustains it. What we cannot
face is an end to this cycle. This is also part of why many
people who successfully quit one addiction supplement it
with another more acceptable addiction, whether it’s
excessive exercise or shopping.

Let’s take online shopping. Note how online shopping isn’t

the same thing as making a purchase. You can enjoy online
shopping without actually having to make a purchase. This is
also why companies are so keen to send you reminders about
what’s in your shopping basket, because they realize the
danger of online shopping is that you get free enjoyment
simply by putting things in the basket. Zizek has an
anecdotal example of this where he says that he realized
there were a lot of abandoned shopping carts in his local
supermarket. He asked someone who worked there about it,
and he was told that some people go through the entire store
just to put things in the shopping cart and then they don't
buy it, so they just leave the full cart lying around.

This is also what Freud calls Lustgewinn. Basically it means

that you are making a surplus, or a profit on your own
pleasure. You’re enhancing your enjoyment whilst devaluing
the original content of the pleasure. In this case you don’t
actually buy anything. To go back to the image from the
previous chapter, we have here another way of choosing to
drink the empty glass. Note that this is still totally different
from delayed gratification. You are not suffering in order to
have pleasure at the end. No, you are enjoying the process of
not reaching the end. It’s a little bit like Mozart’s Don
Giovanni and his famous list of sexual conquests. He doesn’t
care about the pleasure of sleeping with women, in fact he
sleeps with practically anyone, even if he is repulsed by them.
His real attachment is to the list. He is a slave to the list
because he derives more pleasure from his collection than
from the conquest. And the list can only be sustained by
depriving the sexual conquest of enjoyment. In other words,
the surplus enjoyment provided by the list overdetermines
the actual enjoyment of his sexual gratification. Don
Giovanni is therefore barred from the properly human
dimension of enjoying the sexual act. Instead he engages in a
kind of narcissistic attachment to the thing which symbolizes
his own potency. The paradox is of course that this very
attachment deprives him of sexual pleasure. And so here we
have the uncanny dimension of surplus enjoyment. It
retroactively robs the ‘pleasurable’ thing of its original value
and content. No wonder then that Don Giovanni is dragged
into hell. His existence was already a kind of living death.

The secret object of desire, the object-cause (objet a) of

desire is therefore to remain unsatisfied. What you desire is
desire itself. The next logical step is of course to outsource
this process altogether. Instead of shopping, we can watch
other people shop. Instead of receiving gifts we can watch
somebody else unbox them. Countless hours of videos are
dedicated to watching other people eat, other people argue,
and of course, other people have sex.

This is also why Zizek has argued that Westernized Buddhism

is the perfect supplement to capitalist consumption. When we
have fully exhausted the joy of being a consumer we can
always enjoy the process of slowly ridding ourselves of all of
our earthly possessions. Once again, we can see why Lacan is
suspicious of sacrifice, because it contains its own sort of
selfish enjoyment. And the same is true with contemporary
fads like minimalism or Marie Kondo’s clean-up regiment.
They’re designed to give you the kind of surplus enjoyment
that comes from getting rid of the things that you hoped
would make you happy. And in a sense it’s perfect, because
once you get rid of all that stuff you can start buying things
again. Similar to the pleasure provided by the final cigarette,
the act of disposing of your possessions is the perfect
accompaniment to the commodity fetish. The mistake people
make is that they fail to realize how minimalism and other
sorts of supposedly anti-consumerist projects are in fact what
sustains the drive to consume. Minimalism is simply the
internal limit of the commodity fetish. You don’t dust enjoy
the process of investing in commodities, you enjoy the
process of disinvesting yourself from them. And of course
there is an entire industry that sells you products, software,
courses, etc, to help you clean up your life. The consumptive
drive is sustained through its perceived opposite.

The most iconic image of Marilyn Monroe is not any one of

the hundreds of pin-ups that she posed for. The most famous
photo is one where she walks over an air vent and holds
down her skirt to prevent it from blowing up. What makes
the image so arresting is the very fact that she’s resisting
exposure. She’s play-acting modesty, which is itself a kind of
sexual gesture. What makes the image sexual is that it
simulates a seemingly ‘authentic’ reaction, where the ‘true’
Marilyn Monroe doesn’t want to be involuntarily exposed.
What’s creepy about the image is that it betrays the secret of
desire. You don’t want to see what’s underneath the skirt, you
enjoy watching the resistance to the exposure. But before we
simply dismiss this as a kind of rape-fantasy and condemn
the male gaze as being that which objectifies the woman,
shouldn’t we be able to see that it is the other way around?
The scene is distinctly not real, it’s staged. It’s that blurring
between what’s real and what’s fake that we find enjoyable to
watch. We want something that is a little bit real and a little
bit fake because that's what we find stimulating. We enjoy the
simulation of something and we enjoy knowing that it is
being simulated. And so what gives us satisfaction is not just
Marilyn Monroe’s surprise, but the fact that we ‘know’ the
resistance isn’t real. In other words, what she is exposing is
the one thing she hasn’t exposed: non-exposure itself.

Again, to return to Lacan’s take on Marx’ famous axiom. We

know perfectly well that it isn’t real, and yet we keep on
acting as if it were. Our knowledge and awareness of the
simulation makes it more enjoyable. Moreover you don’t
want the sexual stimulation seeing Marilyn Monroe’s
underthings, you want the enjoyment of not seeing them.

The Marilyn Monroe picture presents a kind of Freudian slip.

The Freudian slip is symptomatic not because it reveals our
true thoughts, but because it reveals something new and
excessive, something accidental that emerges from the desire
to not articulate something. The same holds true in the
Marilyn Monroe picture. What makes it sexual isn’t the
revelation of any kind of hidden sexual content, what makes
it sexual is the very fact that the sexual content is being
repressed. This creates its own kind of surplus enjoyment,
which is part of why the image is so iconic. We aren’t satisfied
with Marilyn Monroe as a pin-up model, nor do we want
someone to be a pin-up model agains their will. We want the
uncanny third option: a pin-up model pretending to be
someone who doesn’t want to be an object of our desire.
If we were to relate this to form and content, we can see here
how there is a content of the form itself, which is predicated
on the supposed denial of the form’s original content. The
content of the form is therefore strictly speaking excessive
but not supplementary. It contains the truth of the form, not
because the ‘original’ meaning comes out, but because the
truth of the repressed content can emerge only through this
disavowal. What this means is that surplus enjoyment
contains the truth of desire itself. It sustains the pleasure
principle by means of what appears to be its formal opposite.

Something similar happens within Marx’ critique of

capitalism.The Marxist hermeneutic is always looking into an
analogous dynamic. The process by which the profit motive
generates surplus value that sustains the profit beyond the
original value of the commodity. Crucially for Marx there is
no ‘true’ value hidden behind the commodity as such. The
commodity exists only to the extent that it contributes
towards surplus value.

Here one should take a step back and point towards the fact
that Marx believed money had the potential to be a great
social equalizer. Within a feudal society the hierarchy was
based on a system of domination. You were either the one
with power or the one who was dominated by that power.
Everything was more or less predetermined by the group you
were born into. Of course strictly speaking this is not yet a
‘class’. The idea of class only emerges within the capitalist
framework, when this very dynamic of social domination
becomes repressed. In other words, Marx believed that the
social relations of domination of oppression remained intact,
but under Capitalism they were disavowed. The working
class was therefore not a group of people with a distinct
identity, but a class who’s very existence was predicated by
the fact that there was nothing natural about ‘being’ working
class as such. And therefore the Marxist idea of class
consciousness as class struggle is precisely to realize that the
working class has no identitarian content as such, but is the
class which only exists so as to ensure the continuation of the
social principle of domination under another name. The
‘other’ name of this disavowed social relation being of course
the formal idea of the supposed freedom to participate
equally in the market-economy. This is also why
contemporary leftists have argued agains the idea that in
today’s economy there is no more working class in the
traditional sense, but have instead highlighted how the
working class is not fixed to any particular identity, but to
this principle of disavowal as to the repressed content of
capitalism as such.

To go back to money, Marx argued that money de-fetishizes

social relations. But the paradox that emerges is that this
creates the society of the commodity fetish. In other words,
the society that de-fetishizes the preceding hierarchy creates
the conditions for a materialistic hierarchy which obscures
the continued existence of the hierarchical social relations
through the commodity fetish. The way to maintain this
illusion is through what leftists used to call ‘bourgeois
ideology’. It’s the ideology of hard work, having a positive
mindset, being the first to arrive at the office and the last to
leave, etc. Instead of focusing on the structural conditions of
participation, and the way I which the preceding hierarchies
of social domination persist through other means, they are
glossed over. Or, in psychoanalytic terms, they are repressed.
And so the ideal of the liberal-humanist, democratic, and free
State and all the bourgeois moralizing that goes with it, is
intended to cover up that secretly the social relations were
never properly de-fetishized. They were simply transposed
onto commodities. In other words, the commodity fetish
emerges as the transposition of the continues existence of
social oppression, repressing the content of the disavowed
social antagonisms that continue to persist.

This is why I actually have a soft spot for a lot of the self-help
gurus on the internet, the ones who say something like
“unless you're waking up at 4am in the morning you're gonna
be a sucker.” Of course this is total bourgeois ideology. But
secretly there is a Marxist gesture here as well. Everybody
tells you that society is equal, everybody tells you that you
should just do your thing and be happy and follow your
dream, but secretly society is ruthless and there's a class
hierarchy that has always existed. And unless you’re willing
to face this reality you’ll be one of the losers. From a basic
hermeneutic approach it appears similar to the Marxist
hermeneutic, which is to say that it points out the false
universalizing gesture within the idea of a liberal economy
itself. But the conclusion it takes from this is totally different.
It tells you that this realization is a secret that the rich keep
from the poor, and that once you realize it you can become
rich yourself. But of course nobody really believes that society
is equal or that equality of opportunity exists. And so what
sustains capitalism is precisely that everyone thinks they’re
the ones who have seen through it. And that’s why bourgeois
ideology persists even as its supposed opposite. The Self-Help
gurus who are telling you that you’re going to get ahead of
everybody else don’t realize or don’t acknowledge that this is
exactly what sustains the entire system. Everyone thinks
they’re the one who has seen through the system and are
going to get ahead. The secret, which I think Marx already
realized, and Lacan certainly was aware of, is that there is no
positive content behind this screen. There is no pure
capitalism that functions on behalf of the profit motive.
Capitalism is a system of cynics. Nobody truly believes it
works, and yet everyone thinks that because they realize this
they have figured out the secret of how to get ahead of
everybody else.

Marx has another idea about capitalism which is quite

interesting but also cryptic. He says that capital is the inner
limit of capitalism. What he means by this is that capitalism is
not just the process of taking money and turning it into more
money. Instead, capital is precisely that uncanny substance,
that element of surplus, that emerges in the negative space of
value itself. It’s the surplus that is generated when the
capitalist goes beyond the value of the labor and the product,
and finds surplus in the commodity fetish itself. In other
words, value that was not originally in either the labor or the
product. It's the generation of value that seemingly exists
magically in and of itself, and which benefits the capitalist
and not the laborer. Capital is in this sense the internal limit
of capitalism because it emerges as the perceived opposite of
the concrete value of the exchange of goods. However, the
properly Marxist insight is that there is no true value hiding
behind the surplus. Surplus is what keeps the valuation
process alive. This is why money isn’t the internal limit of
capitalism, capital is. We are back in the tautological and
uncanny realm of that which persists on nothing but its own
constitutive negativity. The abstraction from value is at the
same the origin of surplus value.

Bourgeois ideology steps in to create a kind of fetishistic

attachment that disavows this empty space of the capitalist
dynamic. Once again fantasy sustains reality. Legitimization
occurs as bourgeois ideology. For example, the owner of the
factory or venture capitalist is praised as ‘generating wealth’
and ‘creating jobs’. Vice versa, bourgeois ideology is
presented as being in fact a form of working-class identity,
with the product beings sold on be the basis of ‘proud
manufacturing’, ‘authentic craftsmanship’ etc. The process by
which you sell such goods, where you aren’t just purchasing
the product but the fantasy of ‘American-made’ is precisely
surplus enjoyment. But, crucially, the same holds true for the
perceived opposite. The next step is to commodify the
perceived resistance to capitalism. As Zizek has often pointed
out, when you buy fair-trade chocolate, or organic food, you
are buying into the surplus enjoyment of something which
presents itself as a more authentic and sustainable alternative
to the destructive drive of the commodity fetish. And so
capitalism sustains itself through the commodification of its
perceived opposite. This two-step process by which surplus
enjoyment sustains the commodity fetish by means of
commodifying the resistance to capitalism, is what Zizek calls
’pure ideology’.
 CHAPTER 5
SQUID GAME

“I'm good at everything, except the things I can’t do”

-Han Mi-Nyeo in Squid Game

In 2021 the Korean drama Squid Game became one of the

most talked about show in the world. The series spawned
countless think pieces, with people reading completely
different things into the show. Some, including the director,
called it a critique of capitalism; others recognized in it a
critique of communism. And these interpretations were
themselves subject to further interpretations. Was the show
really critical of capitalism, or just another way in which
capitalism commodifies anti-capitalism?

The series depicts individuals who for various reasons are

financially destitute. An unknown organization offers them
the opportunity to participate in a competition called ‘squid
game’. In this competition they compete in life-or-death
versions of various children's games, such as ‘green light/red
light’. Losers are executed by armed guards, while winners
progress to the next round. Each round features different
games and every time a contestant dies the prize-money
increases. This means that the players are incentivized to
compete not only for their life, but to sabotage the others.
On a basic level we can see here how a lottery is always a
tax-on-poverty itself. The game the candidates play is itself
televised for a rich group of clients - VIPs. Some of the money
is promised to the players and the surplus belongs to the
game master.

One of the principles of ‘Squid Game’ is that the characters all

participate freely. They choose to partake of their own
volition. In fact, the one rule that supposedly cannot be
broken, the ideological principle of the game, is that is should
uphold fairness and equality.

But is the choice to participate really a free one? Lacan,

building upon the Sadean notion of the ‘two-deaths' would
argue that everyone dies twice. First there is the material,
physical expiration of the body, followed by the symbolic
death of the person when they are no longer remembered.
Zizek takes this idea and argues that the symbolic death
occurs precisely when we are living, and that the physical
death is a formalization of this death which has already
occurred. However, for Zizek this ‘un-death’ is strictly
speaking indeterminate, it can be both the place of
emancipation or the place of uncanny death-in-life. Within
capitalism, this kind of symbolic death occurs when we are
denied the basic formal requirements to compete. The
revolutionary ‘symbolic death’ is precisely when we refuse to
compete so as to expose that the idea of free competition is
itself a false universal. In fact, the properly radical argument
is always to say that it is precisely the attachment to this kind
of ‘freedom’ that predetermines the symbolic death of
capitalist surplus enjoyment.
In ‘Squid Game’ all the characters are symbolically dead to
begin with. Their choice to participate in the games is not a
free one. They are all desperate to return to ‘life’, sustained
by winnings from the game. And so they choose the symbolic
death in the game as a supposed way to regain their
standing in society. This means that the games stand as a
kind of third-death - reducing human agency to a life-and-
death competition for money, to sustain their symbolic
standing in the ‘real-world’.

From a Lacanian perspective the material death and the

symbolic death can never be fully separated. This is
analogous to the way in which one cannot access ‘pure’ life
without the symbolic order. There is no true life behind the
symbolic curtain. Life in its most authentic form emerges in
the symbolic order. Something similar is true for the symbolic
death. You don’t just have a real death versus a symbolic
death. All death is in a sense symbolic, it emerges as the
internal limit of life itself.

In a different yet related way, Zizek has characterized the two

deaths by comparing them to a video game. In most video
games there are at least two ways that you can die. In the
course of the game you can lose a life, or, when you have lost
all your lives, you lose the game. So here we have in a sense
the two deaths forming part of the same game. In fact, the
game only works on the level of this formal relationship
between the death as the continuation of the game (losing a
life) and the death that ends the game (starting over).
However, the uncanny dimension by which life persists
beyond symbolic death should be immediately apparent.
When you lose your final life and the screen reads “Game
Over”, you’re immediately prompted to re-start the game.
There is no effective way to end this game except to reject
the entire cycle and turn off the console. The important point
here is that the sense of an ending is itself what sustains the
perpetual continuity of the game itself.

And so Symbolic death doesn't have to lead to physical death

but can actually sustain a form of living death, or death-like
living. Symbolic death can be sustained when it becomes an
un-death, a zombie-like state in which you are neither fully
alive and neither fully dead. You can inhabit that uncanny
liminal space between what feels like a real life and not a real
life. And so a symbolic death is something that can be
imposed upon you by the State or by others. Or a symbolic
death can also be something that you do to yourself. It's a
way in which you marginalize yourself increasingly within
the parameters of your own life. And this process is how we
access the supposedly ‘free’ and ‘equal’ participation of the
capitalist exchange and competition.

Sartre said that freedom is what you do with what others

have done to you. And here we have an interesting question,
which is how do you act ‘freely’ when you are symbolically
dead? In what sense can you have meaningful agency within
symbolic death? This is where the show ‘Squid Game’
becomes a critique of our society and the way in which many
people make supposedly free choices precisely in that state of
symbolic death. In a very existentialist way I think we could
say so that one of the key aspects of the show is about
whether or nor we can act or choose freely under such
conditions.
The initial episodes of Squid Game contain two exemplary
sequences that help us understand Zizek’s Lacanian critique
of ideology.

The first is that ‘Squid Game’ essentially revolves around a

false choice presented as two choices, whether or not to
participate in the game. This is not a double choice in the
sense of choosing either yes or no. It is double in the sense
that it does not matter whether the characters choose to
participate or not. In fact, participants are encouraged to
leave the game and then subjectively choose to re-join. After
all, most of those who elect to leave the game promptly
choose to return when faced with the harsh reality on the
margins of life in the real world. This ‘second’ choice is the
formalization of the first one. When they first choose to
participate in the game they feel like they’ve been coerced
into it, whereas when they opt out and then choose to rejoin
the game, their participation has been formally ratified.

This same process of the double-choice occurs within

contemporary society. We all, in some sense, choose to opt
out of fully buying into the capitalist dream. This is why
capitalism sells us commodities that symbolize our resistance,
such as Che Guevara T-Shirts or electric vehicles. But it’s
precisely this kind of symbolic gesture of resistance that
ensures our continued participation in the game. The same
occurs in Squid Game. The players are offered the choice to
leave, precisely as a way to ensure their continued
participation. Now they believe they have actively chosen
their own oppression. As Zizek has argued many times, only
in a capitalist society are people expected to enjoy the
conditions of their own oppression.

Secondly, Squid Game presents itself as a form of

majoritarian democratic participation. The players can at any
point choose to halt the games, as long as a majority chooses
to do so. This means that the ‘individual’ decision to
participate is mediated through this secondary level of
democratic choice.

Lacan says that democracy is a social system in which the

people don't exist. When you first hear that, it may seem like
a very counterintuitive and provocative thing to say because
we tend to think of democracy as being defined by the fact
that it represents ‘the people’? So why would Lacan say that
it's the exact opposite? Again we have to go back to how
power exists as a place which is formally devoid of content.

The main difference between authoritarian power and

totalitarian power is the position of the subject in relation to
his own submission. In an authoritarian system the leader
dominates by sheer force; whereas in a totalitarian system
the leader rules on behalf of the popular will. The crucial
difference is that where the authoritarian leader tries to
legitimize his power by claiming to be the representative of a
higher authority, the totalitarian leader claims that the higher
authority is the people itself. But this creates a kind of
deadlock, where the formal place of power is empty. If you
decide not to submit to the totalitarian leader, then you are
simply branded as someone who is not ‘of the people’
And so here we have a clever inversion of the authoritarian
system. Instead of simply stating that the rule is legitimate
because of the power you wield, now the power is legitimized
as a guarantor on behalf of ‘popular will’. The totalitarian
leader thereby traps you in a system of coercion, by which
you are supposed to experience your oppression as the
highest expression of your own popular belonging. This
short-circuit is more powerful than dominance by sheer force.

This is also why Zizek claims that every democracy has a

totalitarian kernel. Here we can see one of the key
developments in Zizek’s thought. In his earlier work he
argues in favor of the emancipatory core of liberal democracy.
He argues that the gap between political power and popular
will, in other words, the formal incompleteness of the
democratic process itself, is what makes liberal democracy
worth fighting for. Or, as Churchill once put it, democracy is
the worst system of governance, except for all the others
which have been tried.

The later Zizek becomes a staunch critic of liberal democracy

and more outspokenly communist. In order to see the change
he undergoes, one simply has to change the frame within
which one views the gap between popular will and popular
representation. To argue in favor of liberal democracy is to
argue that this gap keeps it from becoming totalitarian. After
all, the totalitarian leader is the one who directly identifies
with the popular will. To be against the leader is to be against
the popular will itself. However, in Zizek’s later works, he
comes to see the sustaining of this gas as precisely the
totalitarian kernel. And here’s how it works.
The paradox of the democratic experience is that you put
aside your own individual agency on behalf of the democratic
vote. In this sense you never vote directly, you always vote on
behalf of the idea of voting itself. This is similar to the classic
Marxist critique of liberal democracy, where your vote is
simply a formalization of the pre-existing power structures.
Rather than adapt this cynical position, Zizek argues that it is
precisely the fact that we believe we are free to choose in a
democratic society that bars us from being able to actually
induce any kind of societal change. This isn’t to say that he
wants more political engagement on a local level, but that he
came to believe that nothing changes, precisely because we
think it can be electorally changed. In other words, liberal
democracy sells the universal possibility of change as the
exact condition by which fundamentally nothing changes at
all. This is also how one should view Zizek’s provocative
statement that he would have voted for Trump over Hillary.

For Zizek, liberal democracy is therefore strictly speaking an

ideological supplement to ensure the continued functioning
of capitalism. As long as we tell ourselves that it was our
choice, we have no real reason to imagine a world in which
things could be different. This is why there's a totalitarian
kernel within the emancipatory potential of liberal
democracy itself, which is precisely the momentary
suspension of your individual agency on behalf of the big
other or ‘the people’. To illustrate this Zizek uses a joke
(which he usually fails to attribute to Simone Weil). She says
that whilst Marx considered religion to be the opium of the
people, in today’s world the opium of the people is the idea
of ‘the people’ itself. It’s a beautiful illustration of what Lacan
means that democracy is a system in which the people don’t
exist, because ‘the people’ exists as the symbol fo the empty
space of power.

Now we can return to Zizek’s critique of liberal democracy.

He says that only in a capitalist society are people supposed
to enjoy their own oppression. Because capitalism gives you
the illusion of choice through participation in the electoral
process, that your own impotence is sustained. Moreover it is
much easier to resist the authoritarian society than the
totalitarian society, because only in the totalitarian society is
your own resistance integrated into the system’s continued
functioning. He likens this also to the conservative father
versus the liberal parent. The conservative father says, “you
must do as I say, no matter whether you like it”. It is the
liberal parent who says: “Not only do you have to follow my
orders, you have to like following them”. Note the key
difference: in the authoritarian society you can at least have
the private pleasure (the surplus enjoyment) of secretly
hating the father’s order. Whereas only in the liberal society
do you have to fully ‘enjoy’ following the orders. In other
words, where the authoritarian leader gives you the privilege
of hating his authority, only the totalitarian leader wants you
to hate yourself if you don’t follow him. This is why for Zizek
liberalism and totalitarianism function according to the same
underlying coercive logic.

And so one of the sneaky things that happens in a

contemporary society is that we undergo a symbolic death by
which we are not only the agents of our own oppression, we
are then told that we should enjoy the process of being our
own boss or being an entrepreneur, or anything we want.
Another interesting aspect of’ Squid Game’ is that it contains
a literal reference to Lacan’s theory of desire. In a pivotal
sequence early in the series we see his book lying on the
table. Lacan argues that desire is never the desire for a thing,
but is always the desire for desire itself. Famously, the so-
called ‘objet a’ is therefore not the object of our desire, but
the object-cause of desire. In other words, to go back to the
Marxist hermeneutic, it’s not about the formal content of
what we desire, but the content hidden in the form of how
we do the wanting.

Desire is something you can't escape. In this sense Lacan is

not very Buddhist. He doesn't actually believe you can escape
earthly desires. Because desire has nothing to do with
material possessions, and everything to do with what he calls
‘lack’. In other words, we don’t think we’re missing something
that can make us complete again. What we are missing is this
very sense of incompleteness itself. In other words we have
the distinctly paradoxical situation by which we are made
whole through lack, and made incomplete through this very
completeness of lack itself. To put it more directly. Lack is
what retroactively sustains our illusion of self, inasmuch as
selfhood is a form of constitutive negativity, something
counted as nothing, but also nothing counted as something.

This helps us understand the complexity of his remark that

‘desire is the desire of the other’. Strictly speaking, we
thinking that the other has what we are lacking. However,
what we are lacking is the desire for a sustained lack. And so
we see the lack in the other as a sign of their completeness.
And this mis-recognition in turn retroactively gives substance
(lack of lack) to our own being, which was always already
lacking. This is directly related to Lacan’s statement that love
is wanting the lack of the other. We don’t want what they
have, we want what they don’t have. In other words, you love
someone when you don’t love the thing you think they have
that you need to be complete, it’s when they themselves are
the thing you think you need in order to be complete. In
other words, you no longer desire the thing you think they
have, you desire them, their lack, itself.

And so in a sense desire is constantly a retrofitting of an

emptiness that we perceive, and yet this emptiness is the only
thing which formally creates the experience of completeness.
The same is therefore true for power. Power has no positive
formal content as such. The Lacanian ‘real’ is therefore this
thing which cannot ever be grasped, the immediacy of
positive content in a form that isn’t already the result of its
own loss.

Lacan once compared ‘the real’ to a piece of gum stuck to

your shoe. You can’t see it, and yet it sticks to you. Zizek’s
critique of ideology is therefore best characterized as the
process of trying to unstick this ‘gum’ of life in a capitalist
society. The part that of living that remains not only
disavowed, but barred. For example, not only how liberal
democracy disavows the continued existence of social
domination (which would be Marxist hermeneutical
approach) but a psychoanalytic hermeneutic, which points
towards the underlying, properly traumatic content of the
fact that power and sexuality are therefore precisely empty of
any formal content as such.
To return to the idea of the two deaths, now we can
understand why Zizek sees the symbolic death both as a
monstrous and a sublime entity. Monstrous because we can
experience symbolic death under the auspices of being free
and alive; sublime, because when we go through the painful
realization of the former, we create a kind of positive void, a
place of pure potential in which power has not yet been
formalized into a supposedly concrete entity. And this
process, by which the formally empty place of power can be
either oppressive or emancipatory, is what he seeks to
champion with his psychoanalytic ‘rehabilitation’ of
dialectical materialism or the philosophy of Marxism.
 CHAPTER 6
SHIBBOLETH

“Say now Shibboleth: and he said Sibboleth: for he

could not frame to pronounce it right” - Book of
Judges (124-6)

Audiences in the United States enjoy giving standing

ovations. In fact, most performances I have attended here
tend to end with a standing ovation. Unlike their European
counterparts, who rarely do so, American audiences tend to
stand up when they clap. This is not intended to be a
snobbish comment about the supposed inferiority of
American cultural mores. What interests me about the
standing ovation is its relationship to what might be called
the ‘seated ovation’, which, in most cultures, is the norm.

To stand up is usually seen as an additional gesture of

enthusiasm, as a way of signifying that a concert was not
only good, but great. Of course, the problem that presents
itself if you give standing ovations to every performance, you
lose this additional quality. The standing ovation becomes the
norm. And so the dilemma presents itself as to how you can
signify this additional level of enthusiasm if standing is the
norm. Ironically, it may be precisely to remain seated, as if
one didn’t want the performance to end. The formal
relationship between the standing ovation and the seated
ovation would thereby be reversed. In other words, there is
no inherently laudatory quality to the content of the clap,
other than the way in which its form expresses its own
additional content.

When we clap for a performance we are doing something

totally bizarre, and yet integral to the performance. Think of
how during the early months of the pandemic, televised
sports would feature the pre-recorded sounds of audiences
clapping and cheering. In a sense it wouldn’t be a
performance without this sonic layer of appreciation. What
this means is that the form of clapping has its own content,
which is of course the fact that clapping is an otherwise
inexplicable, pointless gesture. The manner in which we clap
may have slight variations, for example in Russia audiences
perform a kind of synchronized clap that sounds distinctly
unnerving to Western audiences. But by and large to clap
means to signal approval, even if this approval can be subject
to irony, as is the case in a slow-clap. But a standing ovation
presents an attempt to provide a non-symbolizable ‘plus one’
to the act of clapping. The standing ovation is a kind of
‘bonus' that functions as a kind of excess, but that
retroactively also makes a seated ovation seem somehow less
enthusiastic.

Another example in which the ‘plus one’ more radically

changes the formal structure of the thing it’s adding to. I saw
an advertisement for a hotel that claimed to have received
the world’s first ‘six star’ rating. We’ve all heard of five-star
hotels, and the sixth star was meant to suggest that they had
added a Covid safety-protocol.

But you can’t simply add a sixth star in this way, because the
content of the star retroactively changes the entire content of
the previous form. In a five star system each star represents
an additional standard of excellence. However, if the sixth
star is specifically related to having a Covid-protocol then the
implied message is this: unless you have a sixth star, you
might as well have zero stars. And so you've actually, by
means of making what appears to be a simple formal
addition, retroactively changed the entire formal structure
itself. The Marxist observation here would be to point out
that all change occurs on this level; not of adding to an
already existing formal content, but making a ‘addition’ that
retroactively changes the nature of the formal content itself.
This starts by realizing the content in the form.

Zizek argues that something similar happens with today’s

LGBTQ+ community. The ‘plus’ stands as non-formalizable
substance, the radical opening that is sustained within the
formal structure itself. The ‘plus’ is therefore the most
important part of the sequence, because it changes the formal
structure from being a simply additive process into a system
characterized by its own openness. The plus isn't just another
letter, the plus encapsulates the full multitude of other letters
that could be included in the sequence.

Another example of the form over-determining the content

can be found in the well-known idea of the shibboleth.
Shibboleth is a biblical term from Book of Judges which tells
the story of the Ephraimite people who tried to sneak across
the Jordan River after their enemy the Galieadites had routed
them. The Gileadites, in turn, tried to prevent the
Ephraimites from crossing by imposing a simple test:
pronounce the word ‘shibboleth’. Depending on your
pronunciation of the word you would be killed or allowed to
cross.

What’s immediately interesting about the practice of

shibboleth is that the formal content of the word is
meaningless. While the word literally means ‘ear of grain’,
what matters is not the content of the word, but the content
of the form, in other words, how it is pronounced.

So in these two examples the standing ovation and the

shibboleth we have the form containing its own content: we
have standing up indicating that you are appreciating the
show more than if you were clapping whilst seated, or you
have the shibboleth which says: “I’m not just saying a word,
I'm expressing to you an underlying content which is that I
know how to pronounce this word.” In both cases, the
secondary content can only emerge as a seeming excess.
Something which was not originally part of the meaning of
the expression.

Whether it's with the shibboleth, the standing ovation, with

the sixth star, or LGBTQ ‘plus’, the ‘true’ meaning lies not in
the content but in the form. To be precise, in the content
contained in the form itself.

In each case the formal expression contains a content that is

distinctly detached from the form of its enunciation. A
standing ovation has nothing to do with standing, but with
differentiating itself from a seated ovation. The capacity to
say Shibboleth has nothing to do with grain, but says
everything about your ethnic belonging. The sixth star is not
about the resort’s standard of excellence, but about signaling
a safe environment to visit during a pandemic. And the ‘plus’
in LGBTQ+ is not about adding another identity, but
formalizing the non-formalizable nature of sexual identity
itself.

In each case something is being expressed that cannot be

properly formalized save through an expression of a non-
formalizable substance. The most literal illustration of this
process can be found in the so-called ‘Charismatic’ faith; that
is, through speaking in tongues. The Ancient Greek word
charisma means ‘divine gift’. You either have it or you don’t.
Similarly, the ‘charismatic’ group within the Christian faith
holds that certain people possess a divine gift that can be
symbolized in two ways.

Either one receives the gift of prophecy, the gift of being able
to speak the future. Or one receives the gift of being able to
speak in tongues. Isn’t this the Christian equivalent of J.K.
Rowling called ‘parseltongue’? Recall how in the ‘Harry
Potter’ books, both these gifts are combined. Instead of being
either a child of prophecy or a child of tongues, the boy-
wizard Harry Potter is precisely the child of prophecy because
he speaks in tongues.

The irony of course is that to speak in tongues is usually

interpreted, at least by secular people, as a sign of demonic
possession. The idea that speaking in tongues is a sign of
individual merit is hard to stomach. But, it’s a surprisingly
common practice within certain circles. For example Justin
Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, claims to speak in
tongues every morning. When he said this in an interview it
sparked a certain amount of public alarm and
incomprehension. After all, we commonly associated
incomprehensible babble with mental illness, not with being
the leader of the Anglican Church.

But to speak in tongues is also an attempt to solve a formal

dilemma particular to the Church. Which is, how do you
speak to God in a way that isn’t reduced to the level of
human speech. After all, if God is a divine being, then
shouldn’t our language be to him somewhat like animal
sounds are like to us? The challenge, therefore, is to speak in
a manner that is for God’s ear only, and not tainted by the
human urge to communicate through what we consider
formal language. Or as Paul puts it in Corinthians 14, to
speak in tongues is to commune directly with God and not
with people. So here we have an interesting distinction,
which is that it's not just that you are in a sense saying: “I
have this special gift to communicate with God.” It's
specifically that you're communicating with God in a way
that is incommunicable to other people. In other words the
form doesn’t only contain its own content. The form is in a
sense contentless, and this is its content.

To speak in tongues, which is specifically to speak in a way

that has no earthly meaning is to communicate the absence
of expression itself. Imagine if you walked up to somebody in
the street and you started speaking in tongues to them. You’d
likely to be considered a raving madman. But to speak like a
loony to God is apparently totally acceptable. Why is this?
The idea here is that you are speaking to God, not with God
and the only way to speak to God is specifically not to speak
human language. The impossibility of communing with God
in a way is here turned into its own solution: one communes
with God precisely by not attempting to communicate at all.
It’s almost as if God doesn't want your language, instead He
wants your speech. And speech in this case is not speech as in
symbolic utterances, but speech boiled down to its purest
form, sounds devoid of signs. However, as Lacan would
surely have reminded us, we cannot forego symbolization.
Even in the attempt not to communicate, we communicate at
least one thing, which is the desire to symbolize the absence
of communication itself. In this sense perhaps the old
conservative adage is true, the only way to speak with a
higher authority is to remain silent.

To speak in tongues is a kind of spontaneous eruption of non-

communication. It’s the same with Lacan’s dilemma of the
ascetic. You can deny the body, but at a certain point you
become denial embodied. And so the ascetic is essentially
someone who becomes a symbol of that which he is
renouncing. This also why the pleasure principle persists
beyond its own limit, which is what Lacan calls surplus
enjoyment. Meaning persists. It's uncanny, even when you
try to get rid of all meaning you end up finding meaning in
the lack of meaning. It’s the one thing you can't escape.
You're doomed to it. Even speaking in tongues is not so much
an absence of speech, but the speech of absence itself. In
other words, to deny meaning is itself a form of meaning.
Any person who has studied a little bit of psychoanalysis will
see a certain irony in the idea of speaking to God by speaking
in tongues. In fact, some Christians even refer to this mode of
communication as a ‘faith cure’. The obvious connection
would be to Freud’s so-called ‘talking cure.’ Except for Freud
the higher authority that guarantees no riposte is the
therapist, not the Almighty. The point is that even though we
cannot escape meaning, we can escape the attempt to make
meaning. In other words, the Freudian idea of the therapist is
the ultimate dead-end of signification, the person who reads
nothing into what we are saying except the formal structure
of the saying itself. Hence, also, why Lacan sometimes
referred to the therapist as a living corpse. God is dead in the
same way that the therapist is; dead to the symbolic
exchange of the repartee. And only within this momentary
short-circuit can the content of the form be made apparent.

As Hegel knew all too well, all speech is already a sign of

failure, quite literally, since it requires signification and can
therefore never be a direct expression of that which you wish
to communicate. Of course the more radical move here is to
suggest that this ‘content’ does not exist in the first place.
Speech is not a failure to express the pure content of thought.
There is no pure thought behind the failure of speech. The
appearance of such original content emerges only
retroactively through the failure itself. To go back to Lacan’s
idea of appearance, there is no secret being kept from you,
other than the secret that there is no secret. This ‘secret that
there is no secret’ is the content of the form.
We can relate this to Zizek’s analysis of ‘The Book of Job’.
Zizek argues that Job presents the first modern critique of
ideology. The book is usually interpreted as being about the
problem of theodicy, or the question why Evil exists in the
world. The stereotypical depiction of Job presents him as a
kind of stoic, impervious to the suffering he is made to face.
And yet, as Zizek points out, nothing could be less true. Job
complains all the time. However, Job refuses one
fundamental gesture. He refuses the hermeneutic temptation,
which is to say, he refuses to infer meaning in his suffering.

This is the true nature of Job’s piety. He does not attribute to

God either a divine plan or an evil intent. Faced with
inexplicable bad fortune, he does not seek to explain his
suffering as a kind of punishment. Nor, for that matter, does
he attribute to God a kind of divine agency. Instead, Job
resists the hermeneutic temptation. Recall that in the ‘Book of
Job’ God has struck a deal with the Devil to test Job. The test
consists not in whether or not Job will question God. The test
consists in whether Job will be bold enough to attribute
meaning to what he perceives as God’s punishment.

At first glance Zizek’s analysis appears anathema to the

Marxist analysis. Isn’t the Marxist hermeneutic of suspicion
precisely to question the ‘hidden’ nature, the secret power
structures that dictate our fate? In this sense, Job would be
the ultimate victim of abuse, the innocent man who is made
to suffer on behalf of a stupid bet between God and Satan.

Zizek argues instead that the Book of Job presents the only
possible critique of ideology. When we are faced with
violence and suffering we should always resist the temptation
to read meaning into it. Rather than falling in love with our
own suffering, we can defy it by insisting that it remain
meaningless. Of course the worst form of punishment is
precisely when you cannot properly formalize what you are
being punished for. In this sense, the temptation to read
meaning into your suffering is secretly a way to enjoy the
suffering, to find some subjective substance in it. At this point
we inflict violence upon ourselves and those around us.

The perfect example of this is the South Korean film ‘Old Boy’
(2003). The plot of ‘Old Boy’ is a variation on the Oedipal
myth. A young man called Oh-Dae-su, wakes up in a hotel
room where he finds himself imprisoned for what seem to be
many years. No-one tells him why he's being held there
against his will. His only connection to the world is a
television, which gives him a daily awareness of all that he is
missing in life. Until one day he wakes up, after 15 years of
imprisonment, and finds himself freed from captivity, or so he
thinks. He's suddenly out in the open, and he starts
interacting with the world. He even meets a young woman
and appears to adapt well to the real world. However, he
slowly comes to realize that being freed is itself part of the
punishment. His ‘freedom’ and ‘return to life’ is itself the
secondary stage of his punishment. His punisher, a wealthy
Korean man gives him an ultimatum. He says that if Oh-Dae-
sun can figure out why he is being punished, the punisher
will commit suicide. Otherwise, he will kill his new girlfriend.

When Oh-Dae-su figures it out, it is already too late. As a

young student he had witnessed a friend committing incest
with his sister. He told someone about it and a rumor spread,
leading the sister of the friend to commit suicide. The friend
is of course the wealthy man who is now punishing him. And
as part of the punishment, he has hypnotized the protagonist
and made him commit incest with his own daughter. In other
words, the girlfriend he was trying to rescue turns out to be
his own daughter. In penance, Oh-Dae-su cuts out his own
tongue, rendering himself incapable of speech. His friend
commits suicide. In the final scene, the lovers reunite and he
looks away in pain. He has chosen to keep her in ignorance
and to feign romantic love for her.

Here we have the ultimate form of punishment. The

hermeneutic temptation reveals itself to be part of the
unfolding of the punishment. Only when Oh-Da-su realizes
that the very things he thinks he is fighting for are already
part of his punishment, is the punishment complete. In other
words, his punishment consists in the fact that he himself is
the active agent of it. Or, as Zizek emphasizes, only in a
totalitarian system are we asked to enjoy our own suffering.
The reverse is equally true, the most complete form of
punishment is the realization that what we think liberates us
is already the condition of our doom.

Zizek relates Job to the critique of ideology because he sees

Job as analogous to the figure of Christ. When Job resists the
hermeneutic temptation, he is undermining the traditional
religious experience, in which God acts as a higher authority,
meting out punishment to ignorant mortals. Job resists the
hermeneutic temptation by refusing to look fo a hidden
content in his punishment. He refuses to attribute his
suffering to the kind of divine justice Aquinas speaks of, in
which the sinful are punished and the good rewarded. In
refusing to interpret his fate as punishment for his sins, he
retroactively changes and reveals the nature of the structural
logic itself. In other words, Job transposes the seemingly
immutable gap between God and Man back into man. The
same thing occurs in the crucifixion. Christ on the cross
represents the sixth star or the ‘plus’. The crucifixion
retroactively changes the structure of the form itself.

The Mockery of Christ

In the passion of the Christ, Jesus is mocked three times. First

following his trial, secondly in his condemnation, and finally
when he is crucified. All instances of mocking are distinctly
ironic. First, Jesus is mocked for being a prophet, when he
has already prophesied that he will be mocked. The second
mockery is symbolic. Jesus is made to wear a crown of
thorns. The lead-up to the crucifixion is staged as a mock-
coronation. And finally, while on the cross, he is mocked for
not being able to save himself. Importantly, the first stage of
mockery is Jewish (he is not a prophet), the second one is
gentile, (he is not a king), and the final mockery unites them.
“He is not a prophet, since he cannot resist the force of the
state.”

In each case, the mockery of Christ rests on the formal gap

between the impotence Christ as a man and the fact that a
supposedly omnipotent God can do nothing to save him.
However, it is precisely in this perceived ‘failure’ of Christ
that the formal structure of the Old Testament is retroactively
changed. Rather than being about the insurmountable gap
between God as a higher authority and Man as a lost soul,
the gap is transposed back into the figure of Christ himself. In
other words, it is only because Christ fails to be the savior in
the logic of the Old Testament that he can become the
transitional figure for the logic of the New testament. What is
this logic? It is the theology of the trinity, of the Eucharist,
and of the community of the faithful on Earth.

This is why for Hegel the crucifixion is the Event within

Christianity. It heralds a radically new formal structure
detached from the pre-existing logic of a God almighty in the
heavens and a human consciousness barred from divine
wisdom. In a distinctly Hegelian reversal, the moment of
Christ’s absolute failure to ‘prove’ that he is the son of God
becomes the very condition for a perspectival shift by which
the formal structure of the religious experience is itself
changed. In other words, the problem becomes its own
solution. Christ’s very failure to demonstrate that he is the
savior within the formal structure of the Judean logic
retroactively changes that formal structure itself. Here we can
see again how in the Hegelian edifice the oppositions
between concrete and abstract (or for Lacan between essence
and appearance) are not strictly speaking separate but
always-already mediated. The crucifixion is the non-
symbolizable ‘excess’ of the Old Testament form, which
reveals itself as its own internal limit, thereby generating
something new. New, and yet emerging only from within this
internal limit. To adapt Hegel’s famous aphorism, the Holy
Spirit takes flight only at the dusk of Christ’s cry to God:
“Father, why have you forsaken me?”.

What is crucial, is that this New Testament logic cannot

simply be an addition to the old Testament, but stands as a
seeming refutation to it. In a sense the Gospel of Jesus can
only every take place within the internal limit generated by
the formal structure of the Old Testament. In other words the
New Testament is not so much a sequel as the emergence of
something new from within disavowed internal limit of the
Old Testament itself. The continued presence of God emerges
retroactively through its own perceived loss, or in Hegelese, it
is sublated. As Zizek has argued, in the crucifixion, God
becomes Other to himself. And this othering cancels out the
formal content of the Old Testament logic, in which there
existed an immutable gap between the divine and the mortal.
The point is that there is no way to breach the Gap between
Man and God other than to transpose the formal gap back
into Man himself.

What is quite interesting in this context is that the original

Greek term for the Eucharist is ‘anaphora’, which can mean
both ‘carrying back’ and ‘carrying up’. The term is distinctly
chiastic in that it suggests a simultaneous movement in both
directions, not unlike the famous Hegelian image of Baron
von Munchhausen, who pulls himself out of a swamp by his
own hair. In this exact sense the Event of the crucifixion is
also anaphoric. Christ’s rise is specifically not a rising up, but
a re-surrection, a renewal of vigor to something which was
perceived to be dead. Christ dies and rises twice. He dies first
symbolically (the three humiliations), then physically, which
leads to the symbolic rise of Christ (the Eucharist) and the
physical resurrection (the human community of the faithful).
What is important to point out here is that the resurrection is
therefore not about the triumph of Christ, but the folly of
Christ. Or, in a distantly Hegelian fashion, how what at first
appears to be the formal content of Christ’s folly is the
precondition for the perspectival shift in the content of the
form itself.
In other words, Erasmus was right, but for the wrong
reasons, when he wrote: ‘Given the choice between a folly
and a Sacrament, one should always choose the folly -
because we know a sacrament will not bring us closer to god
and there’s aways a chance that a folly will.”

What he fails to recognize is that the sacrament is precisely a

divine folly. The secret of the Christian sacrament is not that
there is some hidden meaning behind it, some truth to be
unearthed, but that the sacrament is itself the secret. Or, as
Lacan would have put it, the truth of the Christian Event lies
entirely in its appearance. The secret core of Christianity is
precisely that there is no secret. Only once one realizes this is
the secret of the faith revealed. Or, as Christ told his grieving
friends, wherever there is love, I am already with you.

This is how the rhetorical function of ‘anaphora’ should be

understood. Rather than the traditional interpretation, where
‘anaphora’ simply implies a repetition of a word for dramatic
emphasis (“this is boring, boring, boring), the repetition is
the revelation itself. In other words, the form contains the
content. The trinity is anaphoric: God is one God, and exists
in three co-eternal entities, the Father, the Son, and the Holy
Spirit. In this precise sense we can see an analogous sequence
in Marxism. If history repeats itself first as farce, then as
tragedy, it reveals itself also as salvation. This kind of
salvation is what Zizek would call communism. This is the
emancipatory kernel that can be discovered only through the
analysis of the content of the form, the part-of-no-part that
resists symbolization. Call it the Lacanian Real, the Christian
Sacrament, Zizek’s critique of ideology, or the Marxist idea of
revolution.

Only if we learn to resist the hermeneutic temptation can we

see that there is nothing ‘behind’ the curtain except the
curtain itself. Therein lies the opportunity to imagine an
entirely new world.
 CONCLUSION
THE USELESS PRECAUTION

“I will explain myself; but this will be to take the most

useless precaution” - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Whenever I talk about societal or even philosophical

problems, people tend to ask me whether I can offer a
solution. In some cases I’m told that if I don’t have a solution
I shouldn’t be talking about the problem. But philosophy is
the process of reformulating problems, not proposing
solutions. The reformulation of a problem usually starts with
the analysis of the disavowed content in the proposed
solution itself. So what does that mean? It means that
sometimes the way in which we define a problem contains a
problem in itself.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say we diagnose

discrimination as being the main social ill today. And so we
think to ourselves “what is a solution for discrimination?”
And then we say: “well, what is the opposite of
discrimination?”. The answer might be ‘tolerance’. And so we
make tolerance into the supposed solution for discrimination.
And what the philosopher will have to do, and this is the key
hermeneutic approach, is reflect on how the problem takes
on a new form in the solution. My argument has been that
we cannot do this on the level of analyzing the formal
content of social ills. Instead we have to inquire into the
(repressed) content of the form itself. This is the task of the
philosopher.

In other words, what is the presupposition you are making

that you are ignoring when you propose tolerance as the
antidote to discrimination? The presupposition that you are
making in this case is that tolerance doesn’t contain its own
form of discrimination.There is the problem embedded into
the solution in another form. Or, how tolerance becomes
itself a means of discrimination. The philosopher must
therefore not prescribe a solution, but ask “who tolerates
whom? And what does such tolerance tells us about the
undisclosed power structures it perpetuates? How does the
solution contain its own problem?

Usually it is at this point that those people who benefit from

this form of ‘tolerance’ (even if it means discrimination under
another name) will then point towards the philosopher and
say {oh this is sophism, you're twisting the meaning, and now
nothing means anything anymore, even tolerance, you've
somehow corrupted tolerance”.

But the philosopher will hold fast and insist that the way in
which we diagnose a societal ill contains itself a disavowed
problem. In this case how tolerance contains within itself a
form of discrimination.

Let me give you a real-life example of how this works.

I spent my teenage years living in the Netherlands. The Dutch
celebrate tolerance as a key civic virtue. So much so that
most Dutch people consider tolerance to be a national trait.
However, in an ironic twist, it is this very principle of
tolerance that is used as away to justify discrimination
against the non-Dutch population. The idea being that if
you're not Dutch you don't truly know what tolerance means
and since you yourself are from an intolerant culture, we
have no duty to tolerate you. Let’s say you're a Muslim
immigrant, then you’re supposedly intolerant of Dutch liberal
secular values, which means you should not be tolerated
precisely so as to safeguard the principle of tolerance. And so
the principle of tolerance becomes itself the mechanism by
which its supposed opposite, which is discrimination, persists.
This is why Zizek always attributes to Hegel the idea that evil
resides in the gaze that sees evil everywhere. In a similar way,
the most dangerous form of discrimination is the kind that
acts on behalf of safeguarding tolerance.

It's like the surplus of discrimination in its supposedly

disavowed opposite content. It’s no longer considered
discrimination, it’s considered upholding the principle of
tolerance. Our discrimination against your culture serves to
prove to you how serious we take tolerance. It is because of
our tolerance that we no longer have to tolerate you. It
would be almost comical if it weren’t so sad.

This means that the critique of ideology is never just to

critique the positive content of tolerance or discrimination,
nor for that matter to discern the supposedly objective
content of someone’s religion or culture. Instead, the critique
of ideology is to point out this disavowal, in other words, to
analyze the disavowed form of the content itself. The
Hegelian insight, which should also be found within any
Marxist critique, is that the solution usually transposes the
problem instead of solving it. For example, where the free
exchange of money and goods provided the opportunity to
de-fetishize social relations, the commodity fetish re-
fetishized them. That means the original structure of
domination between lord and serf was not simply solved, but
merely transposed. Ideology therefore appears as the false
universal which papers over this gap, which disavows the fact
that the formal content of the social relation has not been
changed but transposed. That the domination still persist, but
is not transposed onto the individual.

The only way to resist the hermeneutic temptation is to

rehabilitate the Hegelian dimension in the Marxist critique of
ideology. Which is a long way of saying that if we simply
analyze the many societal injustices of the world and
attribute various forms of meaning to them, we cannot truly
change anything. The temptation is always to collect more
data, to hear more voices, to diversify our experience of the
world. And this is a good thing, but by itself it is not enough.
The crucial methodological and philosophical insight of the
Marxist critique is to insist that the formal content of the
world’s injustices are less important than structural inequities
that allow such injustice to persist.

However, the key Hegelian insight is that these two levels of

interpretation are not distinct from each other. For Hegel the
only way to change the formal content of something is to
change the way in which the insight into the content of the
form already retroactively changes said content. Or, as the
generation of ’68 already knew: “Be realistic demand the
impossible!” And yet in today’s world, in which we demand
that corporations solve climate change for us, and we ask
corrupt politicians to make our nations great again, we are
living the reverse-side of this slogan: Be fantasists, demand
the possible!

When Marx famously said that, “the philosophers have only

interpreted the world. The point is to change it.” he did not
mean that philosophers should stop thinking and start acting.
He meant that the only way to act is to think. From a strictly
Hegelian perspective the two cannot be separated. The goal
is not to do that which can be bought, but to demand that
which is as of yet unthinkable. To that end we should resist
the hermeneutic temptation so as to revive the properly
Hegelian dimension, as seen through the lens of
psychoanalysis, and return to what was once referred to as
the hermeneutics of suspicion.