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Interrogating the
Real
TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES
Slavoj Žižek
Edited by Rex Butler and Scott Stephens
www.bloomsbury.com
© Editorial material, selection and translation, Rex Butler and Scott Stephans
Acknowledgments ix
Editors’ Introduction xi
Author’s Preface xviii
3 ‘The
Most Sublime of Hysterics’: Hegel with
Lacan 19
4 C
onnections of the Freudian Field to Philosophy
and Popular Culture 39
5 Lacan Between Cultural Studies and Cognitivism 66
6 T
he Limits of the Semiotic Approach to
Psychoanalysis 97
viii Contents
8 H
egel, Lacan, Deleuze: Three Strange
Bedfellows 155
9 T
he Eclipse of Meaning: On Lacan and
Deconstruction 176
10 The Parallax View 200
11 B
etween Symbolic Fiction and Fantasmatic
Spectre: Toward a Lacanian Theory of Ideology 217
13 R
e-visioning ‘Lacanian’ Social Criticism: The Law
and Its Obscene Double 250
14 Why is Wagner Worth Saving? 271
The editors would like to thank Sarah Douglas and Hywel Evans for their
consistent enthusiasm and patience throughout the preparation of this
volume, and Tristan Palmer for first commissioning it.
In particular, Scott Stephens would like to acknowledge the support
of the Australian Research Theological Foundation, whose generosity
at the early stages of this project was vital for its completion. He is also
grateful to Stephen Morton for his assistance in locating and acquiring
certain hard-to-find references.
x
Editors’ Introduction
may only be attained through the detour of this method. Žižek goes
further than simply finding examples for philosophical concepts, or even
reducing those concepts to the level of examples. For what persists
in both of these cases is the assumption of some external Truth of
which these would be the examples. In fact, Žižek’s real point is that no
philosophical Truth can ever exist apart from its exemplification, that is,
its enunciation. In a kind of abyssal self-reflection – and here we return to
the origins of philosophy – Žižek’s work constitutes an endless enquiry
into its own discursive conditions. It takes up and makes something of
the ‘imbecilic’ medium that comprises its readers, the cultural context,
and even Žižek himself. It is in this way, finally, that his work is not to be
divided into its concepts and examples. The crucial point is not simply
that concepts can only be grasped through their examples, but that the
only proper philosophical concepts are those that take into account their
own conditions of transmissibility, the always transferential relations in
which thought finds itself.
These are the specific contours of Žižek’s work that we have
sought to demonstrate in this selection and arrangement of texts. The
book is divided into three sections corresponding to a progressive
‘concretization’ and specification of the material. In Section I, Lacanian
Orientations, we look at the origins of Žižek’s thought, both in terms of
his institutional location and those inaugural philosophical encounters
with Lacan and Hegel (including his extremely radical, but perhaps by
now comprehensible, gesture of equating them, bringing out the excess
of both). We also see in this section Žižek engaging most extensively
with the methodological questions raised by thinking Lacan and Hegel
in other contexts – those of the biological sciences and popular culture.
Žižek’s polemical proposal, however, is that it is not a matter of applying
Lacanian psychoanalysis or Hegelian idealism to these fields from a
position of conceptual superiority. Rather, genetics and popular culture
are themselves already Lacanian and Hegelian, and vice versa.
In Section II, Philosophy Traversed by Psychoanalysis, we have
selected five ‘works-in-progress’ that follow the chronology of Žižek’s
major books: ‘The Limits of the Semiotic Approach to Psychoanalysis’
consists of material from For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment
as a Political Factor (1991); ‘A Hair of the Dog that Bit You’ from Tarrying
with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (1993);
‘Hegel, Lacan, Deleuze: Three Strange Bedfellows’ from Metastases
Editors’ Introduction xv
The Inhuman
Slavoj Žižek
In the first half of 2003, I came across two remarkable stories that
were reported in the media. A Spanish art historian has uncovered
the first use of modern art as a deliberate form of torture. Kandinsky
and Klee, as well as Buñuel and Dalí, were the inspiration behind a
series of secret cells and torture chambers built in Barcelona in 1938;
these so-called ‘coloured cells’ were the work of the French anarchist
Alphonse LaurenČiČ (a Slovene family name!), whose ‘psychotechnic’
torture was his contribution to the fight against Franco’s forces.1 The
cells were as inspired by ideas of geometric abstraction and surrealism
as they were by avant-garde art theories on the psychological
properties of colours. Beds were placed at a 20-degree angle,
making them near impossible to sleep on, and the floors of the 6ft-
by-3ft cells were scattered with bricks and other geometric blocks to
prevent prisoners from walking backwards and forwards. The only
option left to prisoners was staring at the walls, which were curved
and covered with mind-altering patterns of cubes, squares, straight
lines and spirals, which utilized tricks of colour, perspective and scale
to cause mental confusion and distress. Lighting effects even gave
the impression that the dizzying patterns on the wall were moving.
Laurencic preferred to use the colour green because, according to
his theory of the psychological effects of various colours, it produced
melancholy and sadness in prisoners.
According to the second story, Walter Benjamin did not kill himself
in a village on the Spanish border in 1940 out of fear that he would be
Author’s Preface xix
returned to France and thus to Nazi agents – instead, he was killed there
by Stalinist agents.2 A few months before he died, Benjamin wrote his
‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, a short but devastating analysis
of the failure of Marxism; at this time many former Soviet loyalists were
becoming disillusioned with Moscow because of the Hitler–Stalin pact.
Consequently he was assassinated by one of the ‘killerati’, Stalinist
agents recruited from socialist intellectuals. The ultimate cause of
his murder was probably the contents of the briefcase that Benjamin
clutched to his chest as he fled through the Pyrenees toward Spain:
the masterwork he had been working on in the Bibliothèque Nationale
in Paris, the elaboration of his ‘Theses’. The manuscript was then
entrusted to a fellow refugee who conveniently lost it on a train from
Barcelona to Madrid . . .
What these two stories have in common is not just the surprising
link between high culture (top art and theory) and the lowest level of
brutal politics (murder, torture). In one respect, this link is even not as
unexpected as it may appear: is not one of the most vulgar common-
sense opinions that viewing abstract art (like listening to atonal music)
is torture (one can easily imagine, along the same lines, a prison in
which the detainees are exposed constantly to atonal music)? On the
other hand, the ‘deeper’ judgment is that Schoenberg, in his music,
already rendered the horrors of Holocaust and mass bombings before
they effectively occurred . . . But the true connection between these
stories is far more radical and disturbing: what they establish is an
impossible short-circuit of levels which, for structural reasons, cannot
ever meet. (It is simply not possible, say, for what ‘Stalin’ stands for
to operate at the same level as ‘Benjamin’, i.e., to grasp the true
dimensions of Benjamin’s ‘Theses’ from the Stalinist perspective . . .)
The illusion on which both these stories rely – that of putting two
incompatible phenomena on the same level – is strictly homologous to
what Kant called a ‘transcendental illusion’, the fallacy of being able to
use the same language for phenomena that are mutually untranslatable
and can only be grasped by a kind of parallax view, constantly shifting
perspective between two points between which no synthesis or
mediation is possible. There is thus no rapport between the two levels,
no shared space – although connected, they are as it were on opposite
sides of a Möbius strip. The encounter between Leninist politics and
modernist art (exemplified in the fantasy of Lenin meeting Dadaists in a
xx Author’s Preface
***
The fate of an old Slovene Communist revolutionary stands out as
a perfect metaphor for the twists of Stalinism. In 1943, when Italy
capitulated, he led a rebellion of Yugoslav prisoners in a concentration
camp on the Adriatic island of Rab: under his leadership, 2000 starved
prisoners disarmed 2200 Italian soldiers. After the war, he was arrested
and put in a prison on a nearby small Goli otok [‘naked island’], a
notorious Communist concentration camp. While there, he was
mobilized in 1953, together with other prisoners, to build a monument
to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 1943 rebellion on Rab – in
short, as a prisoner of Communists, he was building a monument to
himself, to the rebellion led by him . . . If poetic (not justice, but rather)
injustice means anything, this was it: is the fate of this revolutionary
not the fate of the entire people under the Stalinist dictatorship, of
the millions who, first, heroically overthrew the ancien régime in the
revolution, and, then, enslaved to the new rules, were forced to build
monuments to their own revolutionary past? This revolutionary is thus
effectively a ‘universal singular’, an individual whose fate stands for the
fate of all.
My gratitude towards Rex Butler and Scott Stephens for their work
on this volume is boundless. But I would nonetheless like to dedicate it
to the old Slovene Communist.
Author’s Preface xxvii
Notes
1 See Giles Tremlett, ‘Anarchists and the fine art of torture’, Guardian, 27
January 2003.
2 See Stuart Jeffries, ‘Did Stalin’s killers liquidate Walter Benjamin?’,
Observer, 8 July 2001.
3 Perhaps the most succinct definition of a revolutionary utopia is this: a
social order in which this duality, this parallactic gap, would no longer be
operative – a space in which Lenin effectively could meet and debate the
Dadaists.
4 Upon a closer look, it becomes clear how the very relationship between
these two stories is that of a parallax: their symmetry is not pure, since the
LaurenČiČ anecdote is clearly about politics (political terror and torture),
using modernist art as a comical counterpoint, while the Benjamin
anecdote is about ‘high theory’, using, on the contrary, Stalin as its
comical counterpoint.
5 I should acknowledge here my fundamental indebtedness to Kojin
Karatani, Transcritique: On Kant and Marx, Cambridge MA, MIT Press,
2003.
6 Drive thus emerges as a strategy to gain profit from the very failure to
reach the goal of desire.
7 René Descartes, Discours de la méthode/Discourse on Method: Bilingual
Edition with an Interpretive Essay, trans. George Heffernan, Notre Dame,
University of Notre Dame Press, 1994, p. 33.
8 Karatani, Transcritique, p. 134.
9 Is, however, Hegelian totality such an ‘organic’ totality relying on the
Particular as mediating between the Universal and the Individual? Is, on
the contrary, the (in)famous ‘contradiction’ that propels the dialectical
movement not the very contradiction between the ‘organic’ Whole (the
structure of U-P-I) and the singularity that directly – without mediation –
stands for the Universal?
10 Bertolt Brecht, Prosa, Band 3, Frankfurt, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995, p. 18.
xxviii
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VII luku
Kunnon kepponen
Sävyni herättää tavallisesti kunnioitusta, ja kun isäntä
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